"Opening Day"= Hope Springs Eternal

Thu. April 5, 2012:


Today, pessimism would be excusable for MLB fans in, say, the Chicago Cubs or Minnesota Twins, where they have absolutely no chance to win the World Series in October 2012.
Nevertheless, let us salute optimism about what transpires by the end of the 2012 baseball season, in the spirit of Opening Day:

1.  Maybe by World Series time, the National Rifle Association and politicians will develop the courage to take licensed & legal guns out of the hands of disgruntled students, terminated employees, neighborhood watch patrollers.

2.  Maybe we'll realize that General Sherman was right, that War Is [in fact] Hell, that even good American soldiers go berserk & perpetrate shooting slaughters of innocents.  And maybe our armchair warriors will come to realize that it should be a lot harder for the USA to enter a war:
Bring back Congress's power to say yes or no to war?  Bring back the draft, so we feel war's sacrifice much more poignantly?  Read the new book Drift?

3.  Maybe the "lame stream" media will stop earning Sarah Palin's label for them -- first by ignoring  Palin herself & other fearmongers on both sides of the aisle; and second, by performing one [just one!] decent article explaining how the Affordable Care Act's "mandate" evolved in Congress from a conservative Heritage Foundation idea into the conservative bete noire it has become today, in order to avoid a Single Payer system which conservatives hate even more.
How about it, Free Press in the world's last best hope for democracy?


4.  Maybe the Supreme Court -- and recently President Obama too -- will remember their Constitutional obligations to respect James Madison's 1787 "separation of powers" principle.   The Roberts Court's 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling is a model of jurisprudence compared to what we're likely to see this June.
The current Roberts Court is just 2 months away from casting itself into its most disrespected, infamous shadow since the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857.  The High Court's 1857 decision was so widely reviled that it helped spark the Civil War.
One need only google Maureen Dowd's "Men In Black" [NYT, April 4, 2012] to understand how low Justice Clarence Thomas has fallen in our nation's esteem -- not to mention how polarizing has become the "judgments" of Thomas's knee-jerk conservative colleagues Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, and Scalia.
Almost as bad, President Obama is diminishing the presidency to the same partisan level -- first by gratuitously [no matter how correctly] attacking the Justices for their Citizens United abomination, as they sat in front of his podium at the January 2010 State of the Union address; and now by his April 2012 remarks trying to intimidate them into changing their mind from what will almost certainly be another 5-4 Roberts Court decision favoring the right-wing agenda [with Clarence Thomas refusing to recuse himself despite Mrs. Thomas's zealous work against the same healthcare law].
Back in 1857, President James Buchanan, himself a Northerner who owned slaves in the South, fanagled an advance leak of Dred Scott's pro-slavery ruling, and ingenuously urged his countrymen to honor the decision "whatever it might be."
And every schoolchild knows how FDR vented his frustration with the "horse & buggy" rulings of the anti-New Deal Justices, by trying to pack the Supremes in 1937.
Does Chief Justice Roberts want to go down in history as another Chief Justice Taney?
Is Obama trying to re-channel James Buchanan, and FDR's worst political miscalculation ever?

5.  Maybe U.S. politicians of both parties will bother to read Chinese leadership's belief that its
number one reason for surpassing USA by 2023 is the latter's "dysfunctional politicians."
Does Mitt Romney embody a realistic hope for change from dysfunctional politics?
Early returns are not encouraging:  Bigger tsunamis of expensive negative ads; more xenophobic claims of "socialism."