In a New York Times opinion piece, former CBS News anchor woman Katie Couric is lamenting the departure of current anchor Norah O’Donnell from the anchor chair after the November election. CBS News has announced she will be replaced by two men, John Dickerson a long time CBS News correspondent and analyst who has worked for 60 Minutes and WCBS-TV anchor Maurice DuBois. Dickerson is white. DuBois is black. Three top executives on the program will be men with Bill Owens, the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, having overall responsibility for the newscast. CBS says it’s planning to make the newscast different. It will cover stories with a 60 Minutes feel with regular correspondents. It will use WCBS-TV meteorologist Lonnie Quinn to do weather stories. It sounds to me like it will look more like a local TV newscast.
Sixty Years Later
In the summer of 1964, I was getting ready for my first year of high school. It’s a significant event in every kid’s life. New school. New building to navigate. New friends to make. Nervous about being accepted. Teachers who are going to be tougher than those you left behind in elementary school. I walked to elementary school. I had to take a city bus to high school. I was entering maybe the toughest phase of life, teenage years. Now, our oldest granddaughter is getting ready for high school next month. Her first fourteen years now seem to have gone by in flash. We tried to be as big a part of her life as possible, even though she spent eight years living in Texas. Visits back and forth and FaceTime were a big help. Now she lives close by, but I fear she will be moving away.
Dereliction and Humiliation
I’m staying in, I’m staying in, I’m staying in, I’m out. The crisis the Democratic Party and Joe Biden created going into this critical election was a mistake of historical propositions. It’s never happened before and was entirely preventable. When Lyndon Johnson dropped his possible re-election bid in March 1968, he could see the crush of the Vietnam war was too much to overcome and it wasn’t one month before the Democratic convention. Simple math told Biden and party leaders he would be eighty-two years old at the start of his second term and eighty-six if he survived it. Biden could have gone out a hero after the 2022 elections when Democrats did much better than expected. Biden did accomplish a great deal in undoing Trump’s mess and getting significant legislation passed. He could have come out and said it was time to pass the torch to a younger generation of candidates and may the best candidate win.
Gunfire in Butler
As shocking as the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is, the violent images of his political discourse raised over the years have burst into flames. We will soon find out what the motives were of the twenty-year old with the high power rifle. He most likely should never have been able to get his hands on that gun. But this is the America we live in. Guns inspire some of us and terrify most of us. We’ve allowed them to become ingrained in our culture. No one should ever justify violence, political or otherwise. But Trump has used violent images over the years to arouse his followers and built a personality cult that many ordinary citizens and the leaders of the Republican Party have embraced like moths to a flame.
Two Men, One Future
The debate has shaken America. People were stunned from the moment Joe Biden opened mouth and his voice was raspy and halting. We all know he struggled through and looked like a confused old man. He was perfect prey for one of the all time political bullies. Biden couldn’t come back fast and clearly enough. The lies and delusions that Trump spewed out were as troubling as Biden’s performance. Trump told a bizarre story of doctors putting a nine month fetus “aside” during an abortion. He said fifty-one experts thought Roe v. Wade should be overturned. On immigration, he said immigrants are coming in illegally and taking jobs from black people which black leaders, of course, took as racist. Biden or the moderators didn’t challenge him on any of these ridiculous claims as he painted this dark picture of America. It reminded me of the “America Carnage” inaugural speech in 2016.
Fear of Change
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry just signed a bill to require a poster sized display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state. He proudly says, “I can’t wait to be sued.” And he will be. The ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation have promised to sue over this obvious unconstitutional law that violates the separation of church and state. Landry’s reasoning, “If you want to respect the rule of law you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses”. He does have a history of making things up. In a June 2012 radio interview he claimed the Obama administration told the TSA to allow Muslims to pass through security. TSA said this was not true. Landry and state legislature are operating out of fear.
Court of Fools
June is Supreme Court season, and we should be very worried. All the big case decisions come at the end of June when the term ends and the justices get three month off and we have to live with what they’ve done. So far, we’ve gotten the ridiculous bump stock decision. You’ll recall the concert massacre in Las Vegas in 2018 when a gunman, using a bump stock on his rifle, fired hundreds of rounds down from a hotel window on an outdoor concert killing sixty people and wounding hundreds more. Even Trump thought this was madness and issued a ban on bump stocks. A gun dealer in Austin, Texas, not a surprise, went to court after the ATF confiscated two bump stocks from his store. Machines gun were outlawed in 1934. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas the court ruled that bump stocks are not included in the machine gun ban and could only be banned if congress passed a specific law banning them. Tell that to the people who were at that Vegas concert.
Suddenly
I found it odd that former colleague and friend Rob Feldman didn’t respond to an invitation to lunch. We had started having occasional lunches with our friend Tom Kranz. We all worked together at WCAU-TV back in the eighties. Tom had reconnected with Rob. I hadn’t seen Rob in forty years. After no response for over a week, Tom got a text from another friend who was also having trouble reaching Rob. We were now starting to think something may really be wrong. Tom said he was going to call the police in Ottsville, Pennsylvania in Bucks County and ask them to do a well check on Rob who lived alone in an apartment. The police officer who answered the phone said he knew Rob and that Rob suffered a stroke while out of the country. He was back in the country but the officer didn’t know where he was.
Decade of Destiny
They have been called “the Golden Years”. They even made a successful TV show about them. A new version is coming back by the way. Let’s talk about the seventies. They come after the sixties when many of us are finishing up our careers and looking forward to retirement, travel, grandkids, no money worries, if we thought about saving for retirement in our twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, and for some us, golf. This is followed by the eighties…maybe. While many good things happen in the seventies, our bodies and minds start tell us, “Hey, you’re not as young as you used to be.” You will find yourself talking to friends about heath issues, your latest doctors visit, and what medication you’re taking. There is nothing like old people sitting around comparing ailments. In your seventies, you will have friends who have joint replacements, heart issues, like afib, cataracts, memory loss and more serious conditions that start to put a timetable on your life.
Blind Justice
One of the most important and consequential trials in American history is now under way in New York City. A former president is on trial for making payments to a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair and then falsifying business records to cover it up. The general pubic will not be allowed to see any of it. It will be followed by three more even more important trails. The general public will be allowed to see the one in Georgia state court where Donald Trump is being tried for trying to overturn election results including a threatening phone call to the state’s Secretary of State. Federal courts do not allow cameras. So we will not see the case in Florida federal court where Trump is accused of stuffing secret government documents all over his estate in Florida, including piling them up in a bathroom. And finally, the most serious case of all in WashingtonDC federal court where Trump is accused of trying to over turn to 2020 election results that led to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.
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