Women Having It All

At 50, a woman who is a college president, former powerhouse on Wall Street, wife and mother has written a new book, "Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection," to complain that members of her gender are “really shackled by expectations, rather than liberated.”

Duh. As an editor of women’s magazines during the 1960s who employed both Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan without always agreeing with them, I am taken aback by such ingratitude from a generation that benefited from those Feminist pioneers and now kvetches that their efforts did not free them from the human condition.

I have news for President Spar: Nobody has it all, women or men. There is a simple law of physics that applies: You can’t be in two places at once, in a boardroom and soccer game, making business decisions and dinner, nurturing profit margins and kids.

This year Barack Obama is awarding Gloria Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a life “dedicated to advancing civil rights” for women. Civil rights offer the oppressed an equal chance at the pursuit of happiness, not a guarantee. President Obama himself can explain all about that.

Ironically, just before Debora Spar is interviewed about her book, the PBS NewsHour has a segment about how young girls in India are sold into virtual slavery by their impoverished families to older men who treat them like domestic animals.

No sentient human being who lived through the twentieth century would deny that most American women back then did not have full freedom to fulfill their potential. In some ways, some still don’t and Ms. Spar’s complaints will resonate with them.

"Women of my generation,” she writes, “got feminism wrong, seeing it as a route to personal perfection and a promise of all that we were now expected to be. Because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything."

In an imperfect world, nobody reaches perfection and those who get close might want think twice before grousing about it.

Obamacare Blowback Begins

On its first day, millions of Americans flood web sites and phone lines to ask about health coverage the Tea Party has shut down the government to destroy.

Technical glitches aside, have Boehner’s bullies been hoisted by their own petard or, to be less Shakespearian, shot themselves in the foot?

The Affordable Care Act, with all its imperfections, looks less like tyranny to those millions than an opportunity to get health insurance for themselves and their families at reasonable rates. Messy as the process may be, they seem eager to embrace what the GOP radicals promise to oppose with their dying breaths.

As ugly as the shutdown is, it will be seen more as farce than tragedy if voters start enrolling in large numbers for Obamacare. Or is that what its Tea Party would-be destroyers have secretly been fearing all along?

As Ted Cruz apologizes to Filipino veterans for comparing the Act to the Bataan Death March in his pseudo-filibuster last week, negotiations go on for a face-saving exit from the Congressional impasse.

But Democrats may not be eager to cooperate as Sen. Dianne Feinstein sees her party gaining more leverage in the debt-limit fight as the  shutdown lengthens. Of the GOP buffoons, she observes, “They are effectively hurting themselves big time.”

Meanwhile, the surge of eager applicants for Cruz’s Death March goes on not only at the federal level but in states that have not hobbled the new law.

At the end of the day, the funeral is much more likely to be for the Tea Party than Obamacare.

World War II Vets Crash the Shutdown

One thing about the Greatest Generation: When we needed to overrun an enemy position, we seldom hesitated. Remnants of our troops did it again in Washington today, crashing barricades set up by the government shutdown and occupying the position.

The image tickles me. As all national parks remain closed by Tea Party insurgents in the House of Representatives, 91 octogenarians storm the World War II Memorial and take it.

True, guards stood aside while the vets, some in wheelchairs, crashed through, but the symbolism is inescapable: A generation that put its lives on the line when the country was under siege was not going to be deterred from a mission by today’s pissants on Capitol Hill.

While the old-timers did their stuff, the other bit of good news in DC was the delight of some government workers at being declared essential while the madness prevails. “Good for the resume,” says one.

And, as Walter Cronkite used to sign off the news, “That’s the way it is” in our world today.

Notes from a "Breaking Bad" Laggard

Thanks to one son and two grandsons, I was whizzing through seasons of “Breaking Bad” on Netflix as millions savored the finale last weekend and now carry on a philosophical debate over its power and meaning.

Partial ignorance may not be bliss, but still under the spell of multiple episodes, I venture to join the discussion.

Is Walter White more than a logical successor to Tony Soprano and Don Draper, anti-heroes who fascinated us with an unexpressed dark side of our own natures from a safe distance?  

Yes, maybe but, as White progresses from doomed good to demonic, our sympathies move with him by increments from compassion for his original plight to condoning behavior we deplore. His first intentional killing is justified by the victim having a concealed shard of plate with which to attack him, but from then on, we are off to the bloody races.

Just as White is freed from constraint by sure knowledge of his own mortality, viewers are liberated to make the journey with him while, for relief along the way, being invited to scoff at brilliantly satirical scenes of PTA meetings, baby showers and boring family dinners—-the dull flotsam and jetsam of dailyness that fills most lives.

At advanced age, I am fascinated by how new generations in real life are lulled into feeling immortal and acting with a selfishness that justifies cruelty while scoffing at empathy as sentimental weakness. Being in the know, like Walter White, trumps all other values.

The political world reminds us daily of that. How badly do we need the fantasy release from all of it of feeling all-powerful and enjoying evil while reassuring ourselves it’s only entertainment after all?

Even before cancer struck, Walter White was not going to live forever. Neither will the politicians in today’s headlines. Nor any of us.

“Breaking Bad” was great commercial art, larded with ads all the way, but as I continue to enjoy it without them on Netflix, part of me is saddened while fascinated.

But true fans need fear not. It may be gone but “Homeland” is back just in time to mesmerize us with more of the worst of humanity.

Will we ever see as well-done a series as either on the subject of “Breaking Good?”

The World Ends Tomorrow

Civilization as we know it has only 24 hours left. Those who doubt that can cling to a faint hope offered by Barack Obama’s favorite physician/writer.

During the health care debate in 2009, the President made his staff read a New Yorker article by Dr. Atul Gawande dramatizing the borderline thievery sanctioned by America’s fee-for-service system: about two communities in Texas, one with the second-highest per-capita Medicare costs in the country, twice those of a neighboring city with no discernible health benefits as a result of doctor-owned hospitals, surgery centers and diagnostic-test facilities.

Now Dr. Gawande reports that “as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.”

As the Tea Party fights to shut down the government over such infamy, whether or not the new law of the land will help the catastrophically sick and uninsured depends on where they live, with some states (California, New York, Minnesota, Maryland) complying and others (Indiana, Texas, Utah, South Carolina) doing everything they can to obstruct implementation.

Now the critical moment is at hand in a clash between John Boehner, who interned sweeping out his father’s saloon, and such as Dr. Gawande, a Harvard professor who directs the World Health Organization's effort to reduce surgical deaths.

As Republicans keep pointing out, it’s still a free country. Choose your own care giver and hope for the best.

Update: In one respect, GOP no-nothings have succeeded: Polls show most Americans know little about the Affordable Care Act, and much of that is wrong.

Less than half of the uninsured plan to get coverage through a state or federal exchange, a low number that may result from lack of knowledge about them, since 7 in 10 say they are “not too or not at all familiar” with these health insurance exchanges.

Those for whom Obamacare could mean life or death have been brought into suicidal confusion by vicious Tea Party lies.

Wake Me When It's Over

While tired Americans hide under the covers, Congress goes to work every day to haggle over going to work.

Why bother? Wouldn’t the country be better off if lawmakers stayed in bed too?

Capitol Hill’s Sleeping Beauty, Michele Bachmann, arises from a two-year stupor to proclaim, "This isn't load limits on turnip trucks that we're talking about. This is...a consequential bill that will impact every American, and that's why you have such passionate opinions. And we're not giving up and we're not caving in that easily."

Unwittingly as always, the former GOP Presidential frontrunner puts her finger on the Tea Party problem. Don’t like a law Congress passed? Filibuster its implementation two years later. Feel oppressed by the White House, Supreme Court, Senate and your own House? Defund everything.

If all else fails, what next? Just wait for the debt-limit debate and start all over again. As Mike Nichols and Elaine May used to say about pretentious poseurs in their act, “It’s really a moral problem, and they’re so much more interesting than real problems.”

Even Nancy Pelosi may be getting tired of the charade, missing one key vote to celebrate her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Why not? They will still be stalling when she gets back.

Meanwhile, real problems will have to wait. All this is a moral dilemma, and politicians can’t be bothered by trivia.

Wake me when it’s over. If they haven’t settled it by then, there will be the World Series to watch. Those games always start on time. 

Cruz/Boehner Timetables Out of Whack

The Speaker is being treated like just another illegal by the now-ubiquitous Texan. If John Boehner can’t keep Ted Cruz’s hands off his caucus, members will be pushed across the border of sanity and Boehner will be out of a job next year.

Cruz himself has a different timetable. Secure in a Senate seat for six years, he can aim his efforts at 2016, which have already borne fruit in early polling of GOP zealots.

Boehner, weirdly tan as ever, is not visibly blanching at the prospect, but his two-year struggle to straddle the Tea Party and sane GOP horses riding off in different directions has been upset by an interloper from the other House.

“The Republican Party right now,” says New York Magazine, “most closely resembles a Weatherman gathering from about 1969, with various factions debating the feasibility of immediate Communist revolution versus building a working-class movement as a prelude to smashing the state...

“The agenda has largely been driven by the ‘Defund Obamacare’ faction, led by Ted Cruz, which proposes to shut down the federal government until such time as President Obama agrees to abolish his health-care plan, which would of course be never.”

The irony is that his own chamber has rebuffed Cruz with a vote in which 23 Republicans joined all the Democrat by opting for reality, a commodity in short supply in the House of Representatives.

As Boehner’s buffoons respond with a ransom note demanding a one-year delay in funding Obamacare, the standoff continues. Even after this skirmish is resolved, the unprecedented crisis of American self-governing will go on.

“We’ve had enough of the disunity in our party,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Boehner’s Iago and panting-to-be successor, tells colleagues. “The headlines are Republicans fighting Republicans.”

As usual, Cantor has it wrong. What we are seeing is Republicans fighting over two centuries of American history. They had better take a second look at that span as they try to extricate themselves from the conflicts in the Cruz-Boehner timetables.

Trayvon Martin's Forebears

Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman... On a suburban library screen, those faces impress two dozen residents of mixed races yesterday with the Mississippi martyrdom of young men 50 years ago.

In a showing and discussion of PBS’ “Eyes on the Prize,” there is a sense of wonder and disbelief at the organized cruelty and mendacity of that time but, for one who lived through it, the pain remains.

News of George Zimmerman, his continuing erratic behavior and wife’s doubts about his innocence, brings up the face of Trayvon Martin, another young man dead before his time in the South.

In Maryland, a University officer bitterly tells honors students that "it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida," resulting in outrage not about what happened there but against the official for saying it.

The election and reelection of Barack Obama reassure America that things have changed. They surely have, but will the second African-American president still have to bear the open and disguised racial hatred that has surrounded the first?

Just yesterday, Arizona’s National Committeeman Bruce Ash confided on Facebook that the President on Obamacare is “shucking and jiving,” echoing Rush Limbaugh who last month called Obama’s Syria policy “Operation Shuck and Jive,” a phrase that dates back to the era when slaves were stereotyped as foot-shuffling simpletons.

The arc of the universe may bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King believed, but it is long indeed.

Popping Pills in a Double Depression

Mental health is keeping statistical pace with the economy. As jobless figures and GNP paint a sickly picture, record numbers of Americans are on antidepressants.

Is there a connection? Or perhaps the better question is: How could there not be?

Just as national leaders stumble around in Washington in a vain attempt to appear rational, individuals doubt their own sanity and doctors around the country, often wrongly, prescribe tons of medication to mask every symptom of unease.

Government is more art than science and so is psychiatry. Both require at minimum the ability to grasp reality and deal with it in a humanly imperfect way, to face painful tradeoffs in life, accept responsibility and get on with it.

Yet on both levels, Americans live in denial. Congress and the White House parry and posture to avoid rational decisions that would keep the economy from falling out of bed while equally bumbling doctors prescribe pills for patients, nearly two-thirds of whom do “not meet the criteria for major depressive episode as described by the psychiatrists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” according to a new Johns Hopkins study.

“It’s not only that physicians are prescribing more, the population is demanding more,” the lead researcher explains. “Feelings of sadness, the stresses of daily life and relationship problems can all cause feelings of upset or sadness that may be passing and not last long. But Americans have become more and more willing to use medication to address them.”

As fights over health care and government shutdown go on in Washington, the President and Congress would do well to stop talking about panaceas and help Americans who are being hurt by economic depression stop masking their reactions with pills that numb them into bearing up under the resulting reality—-or at least in the case of the Tea Party, take some of them themselves.

Right now, the only ones feeling no pain in this American Double Depression are the pharmaceutical companies.

Cruz Carnival, Heading Aground

After nine months in office, Texas’ junior Senator has seized the GOP stage, a perhaps unspectacular feat in light of the party’s leadership vacuum.

What his colleagues have to decide now is whether Ted Cruz is anything more than a loudmouth Pied Piper leading them off the edge of rationality to political irrelevance, a Sarah Palin in pants spouting absurdities, a potentially imminent beneficiary of Congress’ excellent health coverage, physical and mental, like Michele Bachmann.

Is his vowing to speak against Obamacare “until I’m no longer able to stand” a parliamentary move or the work of a premier performance artist?

In these disturbing days, as we all try to navigate our private worlds as best we can, it’s unnerving to be awash in shameless madness to the point of doubting our own sanity in a real world. Why has Ted Cruz been visited on us?

Did we miss Glenn Beck so much that we needed a clone on the Senate floor to compare his doubters to appeasers of Nazi Germany in the 1940s?

At the moment that Cruz is seizing the attention of 24/7 media with all this, Barack Obama is at the United Nations, demonstrating once again America’s good fortune in having a President who, for all his shortcomings, is still learning from experience and trying to keep the nation sane.

GOP “leaders” like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are hiding in the deep Capitol weeds, hoping against hope the Cruz storm will blow over without wrecking their chances to hold on to their pitifully powerless jobs.

Voters can only feel as if they have booked one of those touted luxury liners with a mad captain running it aground while the Wall Street Journal is on the Tea Party intercom reassuring passengers everything is under “Cruz control.”

Maybe so, but not everybody has a first-class cabin like Rupert Murdoch.

Mariano the Matador

At my first and only bullfight eons ago, I was surprised by an inner surge rising in my blood at the matadors’ movements, an unconscious response to pure grace and courage.

In baseball, opposing batters pose no physical threat but, in the years between, Mariano Rivera has brought back that sensation by his demeanor on the mound and the sureness of his mastery over the fears that envelop us all as we move through life.

As Rivera ascends into myth, it is not the remarkable statistics we will remember but the man himself, embodiment of all those virtues Hemingway wrote about but in a figure devoid of the bullfighter’s self-important preening.

In his farewell tour, the tributes by those who opposed him were remarkably heartfelt. They were not only honoring his numbers and broken bats but something more, the essence of what competition should be—-clean, honorable and self-deprecating.

We will miss him, but what he leaves behind will remain.

  

Can the GOP Pick Up Their Pieces?

They are looking like the last scene in “Bridge on the River Kwai:” devastation everywhere, dazed survivors mumbling “Madness, madness.”

With only a week to go before another disastrous government shutdown, the Disloyal Opposition is splintering into fragments, turning on one another in hitherto unforeseen ways.

Fox’s Chris Wallace is amazed to get “unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats but from top Republicans, to hammer [Ted] Cruz” while Karl Rove pontificates:

“You cannot build a Congressional majority in either party...unless you are treating your colleagues with some certain amount of respect, and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think of my idea?’ Instead they have dictated to their colleagues through the media, and through public statements, and not consulted them about this strategy at all.”

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill opines: “I don’t think in America we should throw tantrums when we lose elections and threaten to shut down the government and refuse to pay the bills. The American people had a choice last November.”

What we may see in coming weeks is the Tea Party’s big blowout, the final test of whether a movement that at heart hates all government can exist within a traditional political party dedicated to controlling, not destroying it.

When it’s all over, Republicans will be unable to abolish Obamacare or defund it. The law they helped pass in 2010, with all its imperfections, will stand. Neither will they be able to use the debt ceiling debate to lower the nation’s credit rating again.

What they may accomplish is fragmenting themselves so badly that a majority of voters next year and in 2016 will no longer be able to see the GOP as a coherent whole.

That would be the saddest outcome of all. America needs two rational parties.  

The Emmys: A Sour Grapes Prequel

After watching last night's Emmys, I am moved to re-post this from July 20, 2013:

Talk about voter fraud, consider this: The brain-damaged “House of Cards” gets nine Emmy nominations this year while Aaron Sorkin’s brilliantly flawed “Newsroom” is barely cited.

The hyped-up news is that “the online streaming network Netflix, best known until recently for rerunning other companies’ old shows and films, officially joined its cable and broadcast counterparts in the race for television’s most prestigious prizes, picking up more than a dozen nominations, including a best drama nod for its political thriller ‘House of Cards.’”

Turn the deck face up and you can see the truth. “Cards,” a bad re-do of a sly 1990 British series of the same name, is rated by Netflix viewers at two stars (“didn’t like”) while its predecessor gets three (“liked”).

If Netflix’s Emmy coup represents anything deeper than a change in content providers, it is the McDonaldization of TV drama, an instant delivery of 13 slabs of fatty spiced-up stuff for those who might mistake it for filet mignon.

Chalk it all up to Netflix’s wooing of Academy voters, along with their possible discomfort over the openly liberal political tone of “Newsroom.” Corporate show biz is still the scared-rabbit venue it was back in the Joe McCarthy days of blacklisting. So it’s safer to cite Jane Fonda and Jeff Daniels rather than the series itself.

“House of Cards” will win its share of Emmys but the public knows better.

A New Mission for Mike Bloomberg

The billionaire who will soon be New York’s former mayor has a post-retirement vocation ready and waiting for him: making real progress in getting rid of America’s guns.

Seven years ago, Mike Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which grew from 15 to 1,000 mayors in 46 states, including Republicans, Democrats, and Independents around the country.

When he completes a dozen admirable years of managing the nation’s largest unruly city, Bloomberg at 71, the seventh richest American, can cap his business and political career by not only pursuing that political and public-relations fight against deadly weapons but opening a second front against gun madness by funding and fronting an effort to reverse perversion of the Second Amendment by George W. Bush’s Supreme Court.

In the face of NRA insanity, Congress and the public forget it was only five years ago in 2008 that Antonin Scalia’s deciding vote turned the Second Amendment on its head, ending almost a century of legal interpretation that the “right to bear arms” was not meant for individuals.

Since then, no one has challenged that radical revision of the Constitution. Even Barack Obama, in feeble and futile efforts to limit rampant gun ownership, has accepted that view.

Why should a bleeding nation wait for more changes in the Court to keep challenging that decision and the helplessness it has produced to stem the damage?

Even in 2008, Scalia himself showed some restraint: “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Bloomberg is no lawyer but, with the means and determination to make a real change, he can fund a constant stream of cases aimed at forcing the Court to rethink and either reaffirm or revise that five-year old catastrophe.

This is one overriding issue on which not to “kill all the lawyers” but use them to stop all the killing.

Is the GOP Driving Us Crazy?

If McCain, Graham, Boehner, Cruz, Rand Paul et al shut up, would our mental health be better? Without such nasty sounds in our heads 24/7, would there be less violence in America?

A proposed GOP filibuster on defunding Obamacare raises such questions in the light of a provocative essay about the angrier voices schizophrenics hear in America as opposed to India and elsewhere in the world.

A Stanford anthropologist suggests that “the greater violence in the voices of Americans with schizophrenia may have something to do with those of us without schizophrenia. I suspect that the root of the differences may be related to the greater sense of assault that people who hear voices feel in a social world where minds are so private and (for the most part) spirits do not speak.

“We Americans live in a society in which, when people feel threatened, they think about guns. The same cultural patterns that make it difficult to get gun violence under control may also be responsible for making these terrible auditory commands that much harsher.”

Such speculation may be academic, but wouldn’t we all benefit from a lowering of the endless screaming of TV talking heads, tweeters and bloggers that assaults us?

A century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt, a warrior by nature, recommended that America “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Three years after his White House tenure, T.R. left the Republicans and ran for the Presidency again, forming the Bull Moose Party “to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics."

When the GOP comes to its senses again in this century, it may result in breaking that alliance, speaking more softly and removing those angry voices that constantly keep assaulting our heads today.

At the very least, it could stop driving us crazy.

The Pope Makes Republicans Look Medieval

Primal prejudices are intractable, but American liberals of my era are put to the test with a new Pope professing a large-hearted vision of the Catholic faith even as the Tea Party hunkers down in Washington to defend to the death its deep belief that the poor and the sick are unlovable and evil.

Religion and politics collide in a spiritual train wreck. Those of rational bent are hard-pressed to sort out where America is going.

In his first authorized interview, Francis I says, “The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives, adding that the Church “is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people...We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

Here, in the so-called New World, a GOP group YouTubes an ad showing a young woman in hospital gown, feet in stirrups for a gynecological exam, when an Uncle Sam caricature pops up and the messages, “Don’t let government play doctor” and “Opt out of Obamacare” flash on the screen.

At the same time, House Republicans slash billions from food stamp programs, a move described as “the most heartless bill I have seen” by a long-time Democratic Congressman but justified by Speaker John Boehner, captive of his mindless Kamikaze caucus, as “getting Americans back to work a priority again for our nation’s welfare programs.”

Just as burning at the stake was a way of clearing the minds of heretics in the good old medieval days.

In his interview, the Pope recalls, “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person.”

Someone should tell that to Tea Party here and, in next year’s election, take away their matches.

Obama, McCain and Their New Pen Pals

In the age of sound bites, the President and his 2008 opponent are reviving an ancient art, lobbing letters at foreign adversaries rather than missiles, an improvement no doubt but neither quite has the hang of it.

John McCain, in his usual retro style, sends Putin an old-fashioned “Dear Sir, You Cur” missive, telling his constituents, “I am pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today. They punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media.”

Speaking of which, McCain sends his screed to the wrong Pravda (don’t ask, it’s complicated) but Putin surely gets the message. Will they exchange seconds to arrange for an old-fashioned shootout on some neutral ground, say an OK Corral in Turkey?

Obama, on the other hand, finds a new pen pal by passing notes in the international schoolyard with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, who sees in the exchange “subtle and tiny steps for a very important future.”

A welcome change in tone from that of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was prone to offhand remarks such as that about Israel: “The regime that occupies Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.”

Still and all, President Obama, who has accumulated painful experience in trying to find common ground with adversaries at home and abroad, is chastened enough to say only that Rouhani “is somebody who is looking to open dialogue with the West and with the United States, in a way that we haven’t seen in the past. And so we should test it.”

By all means, he and McCain should keep expressing themselves on paper rather than with tons of hardware, but be sure to use enough postage and double-check the addressee’s residence.

In doing so, they may want to keep in mind the strategy of statesman-author Winston Churchill: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

No News on "Newsroom"

Waiting this long to watch your recorded season finale doesn’t even earn you a “spoiler alert.” The question hanging in the air for those who enjoy Aaron Sorkin’s HBO media circus is whether or not the show will be back for a third season.

As the season ender ties up so many plot knots, it’s natural to wonder if the fast-talking characters have finally run out of steam. And it doesn’t help to learn that ratings were down for the sendoff installment.

The official position is that everybody wants a Season 3 but (harrumph) scheduling issues need to be worked out. Don’t hold your breath.

The main problem may be that events keep overtaking the show, i.e., how do you build a whole season around the question of one use of poison gas, when such toxic weapons have been preoccupying the real world for weeks—-and with much more complexity?

Internally, if “Newsroom” does come back, it will require a major retooling of the MacKenzie-Will relationship. Those who remember when the sexual tension went out of the Diane-Sam duet on “Cheers,” the chemistry went away and never came back.

But fans can hope. After two seasons of juggling two men, Maggie Jordan is the only main character left unmated and with ugly short red hair to boot.

If Sorkin and HBO work out their “scheduling” problems, we may get to see it grow back and revert to its normal color and length. That would be nice for her and the rest of us.

One thing is sure: There won’t be any shortage of new political and media issues to bounce off, as those who witnessed last night’s Daily Show takedown of CNN’s coverage of the DC shootings will attest. 

"Let 'Em Eat Cake," Says the Tea Party

If watchers saw “The Hunger Games” as fantasy, Washington politicians are working hard to turn it into a reality show.

Tom Colicchio, head judge of TV’s “Top Chef,” notes that “if Congress manages to cut $20 to $40 billion” from food stamps, “there’s no way charity can make that up. All the fund-raisers in the world are not going to get back to that number. Are we O.K. with people starving in the streets?”

He is a board member of Food Policy Action, a group to “support healthy diets, reduce hunger at home and abroad, improve food access and affordability,” among other goals, that now rates members of Congress on how they vote on such issues.

Not surprisingly, members of the Tea Party fill the ranks of those who agree with Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution that, if people have no bread, “Let 'em eat cake.” If voters are paying attention, they may want to sharpen guillotines for the November 2014 balloting.

Nobody’s perfect, but Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers managed to score zero on averting starvation, while Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt and Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo were in single digits.

Not only are Americans going hungry in the richest country history has ever known but cheap nutrition among the poorest is contributing to bad health for the future, with rising numbers of elementary school children suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, even gallstones.

So we have the spectacle of feckless politicians devouring the welfare of future generations in every way possible. Only the Obamas are lobbying for their health.

Can we really stomach that?

Gun-Loving Congress Flinches

When the shooting started in Washington today, there was no hesitation in the Capitol two miles away: Both houses shut down with no debate about Second Amendment rights. In the face of possibly imminent danger to themselves, gung-ho NRA-loving lawmakers did the equivalent of hiding under their desks.

Now we face the usual ritual that follows random gun massacres: counting the dead and wounded, listening to the pointless bleating of “security” analysts, searching for “motives” to explain madness that is by definition unfathomable, wallowing in grief for victims and families and, after a few days, retreating into that cosmic shrug that always follows.

If today’s shooter had somehow breached not a Navy facility but the Capitol itself, randomly butchering everyone in sight, would it have made any difference?  

The President, in the White House only four miles from the shootings, cancels a speech and shakes his head over “men and women who were going to work, doing their job protecting all of us” who “know the dangers of serving abroad, but today they faced the unimaginable violence that they wouldn’t have expected here at home.”

As we move through the desolation we now know so well, won’t those with political power in Washington pause long enough to consider what all of us, they themselves included, at every moment face from a madman’s finger on the trigger of a semi-automatic weapon?

Is this the world they want to bequeath their children and grandchildren?  They should come out from under their desks and tell us.