Hard to imagine much going on over the next two or three news cycles save for post-mortems on the Redskins central role in ending the 19-game losing streak of the Detroit Lions. I suppose ending that terrible run of fecklessness has to fall to one team or another. But the fact that it was the once-proud Redskins does indeed chalk up another mark of ignominy for the reign of Daniel Snyder. So add an historically bad performance on the field to the Frerotte wall head-butting to the ripoff parking schemes to the club-seat fleecing to the ripoff parking schemes to the ruinous free agent acquisitions to the ripoff parking schemes to the filing of lawsuits against lifelong fans to the ripoff parking schemes to the commercial exploitation of 9/11 to the ripoff parking schemes to Deion Sanders to the ripoff parking schemes. There’s just something wrong with the way a professional sports franchise is most commonly owned—-a private corporation, unaccountable as it is, is just a terrible way to run something with so much public interest and participation.
Postie Brigid Schulte writes in Outlook on a problem that I’ve read about nine million times: Lack of afterschool opportunities for latchkey kids. Of course, that doesn’t make the problem any less pressing. The author nails a problem that, as she points out, just doesn’t seem to ever get resolved:
Lynne Casper, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California who studies the phenomenon of latchkey kids, remembers attending a congressional briefing on workplace issues.
“We were talking about the need for society to start addressing workplace flexibility and work and family balance, and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said: ‘We’ve been talking about this for 20 years. Why doesn’t it ever get any better?’ ” Casper recalled. “Most of the structure of our workplace in this country has been in place since the Fair Labor Standards Act of the 1930s. But we’ve shifted from single-earner to dual-earner families. We’ve shifted from a manufacturing to a 24/7 service economy. As we’ve shifted, the things that were set up no longer work.”
The Great Lanny Davis on health-care reform in the Washington Times. Here’s the critical part of this piece: “This week, as promised, I will explain briefly how this bill works to achieve these goals. And next week I will explain how this act will be paid for…” Don’t you just want to dig in?
Darrow Montgomery, going really big-time photographically on Fiesta DC!