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Give Yourself a Present, America
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A lightness of countenance has fallen on Washington. I kid you not. Strangers were talking to each other in elevators, smiles in the street made walking a pleasure.
Even President Obama lightened up. At his midweek press conference, the president seemed in an unusually good mood: helping NBC’s Chuck Todd sort out his questions, referring cheerfully to the work ethics of his daughters (and his own), and lampooning the corporate jet set.
Had peace broken out somewhere? On Capitol Hill, in Libya or Afghanistan, between Los Angeles Superior Court judge Stephanie Sautner and Lindsay Lohan — her honor dropping by for a few belts?
No. It all comes down to the prospect of a four-day weekend. It should be three days, but many are able to stretch it to four. Heapings of happiness!
By the joy this little perturbation in routine has wrought, it’s clear that Americans are overstretched, overworked, overstressed and badly in need of R&R — even just a syllable of it — over the Fourth of July weekend.
Also it’s a birthday bash. Uncle Sam has made it through another year and the dollar is still worth having; the barbecue worth lighting; and the hamburger, America’s great contribution to cuisine, worth eating. Even though Budweiser — like so much else nowadays — belongs to a foreign company, millions of us still find it worth drinking.
Hooray! Happy Birthday! For he’s a jolly good fellow! (Uncle Sam, that is).
Unlike many others of the British persuasion, as I once was, I agree with my colleague Martin Walker that Brits shouldn’t feel loss on the Fourth of July, but should be leading the celebration.
Walker, who knows a thing or two about celebrating, says: “I’m not downcast by the victory of honest British colonial farmers over a German king and his German mercenaries.”
That’s right, Americans love the Brits. Otherwise, why would a country that threw off the imperial yoke on July 4, 1776, go bats for the wedding of Prince Harry, heir to the despised throne once occupied by George III?
One thing the Brits do have over us: their vacations. A worker averages about a month a year of vacation.
Of course, it would never work here — especially not in Washington. Think of the anxiety. Oh the fear of being left out, losing your job or just being bored. Americans on long vacations get surly, marriages creak and desperate couples hunch over lunch in faraway places, trying to decide where to have dinner.
No. No. No. Our special genius has been the creation of the long weekend. We have more of them than most countries; they are envied even by the French who talk about — I kid you not again — le long weekend.
We have something here. Instead of pining for more vacation , we should build on the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Memorial Day by working only a four-day week.
I don’t like to point fingers, but there are those in the bureaucracy who are pioneering the new order for us. Around Washington, in the aisles of the supermarket and the sporting-goods emporium, you can hear it every Friday: Some person of impeccable rectitude about other things, declaring, “I’m working from my home office today.”
At the commuter rail station I use, parking is a big problem every day of the week except Fridays, when more than half the spaces are open. Well, not casting aspersions, I have to advise that 80 percent of the riders are government employees. Ah, the lure of the “home office” on Friday.
Here’s my proposal: Increase the workday to 10 hours and have three-day weekends every week. Once again America will be the envy of the world, even if we have to prohibit home-office work by civil servants on Thursdays. This way we’ll be a happier people. We’ll have given ourselves a present that keeps on giving.
Happy Birthday, America. And spare a kind thought for the Brits, who lost the best piece of real estate on Earth. Poor dears. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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That’s the Spirit!
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Llewellyn King, the British-born host of “White House Chronicle,” stands on a sidewalk in Georgetown, a green and pleasant neighborhood located in northwest Washington, D.C., along the Potomac River waterfront. On Thursday, Georgetown was festooned with flags and filled with pre-Fourth of July revelers.
Georgetown was founded in 1751, well before the establishment of the city of Washington and the District of Columbia, when the Maryland legislature purchased 60 acres of land for the town from George Gordon and George Beall at the price of 280 pounds.
Some believe that Georgetown was named after those two wealthy landowners. Others believe that its name has royal origins, since it was founded during the reign of George II of Great Britain.
Certainly, it wasn’t named after the Father of Our Country. But George Washington frequented Georgetown, including a long-gone watering hole, Suter’s Tavern, which was the site of land deals involved in establishing Washington as the “Federal City.”
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In Nuclear, U.S. Is Still the Gold Standard
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In nuclear industry parlance the “gold standard” has special significance and there is real concern the world may slip below that standard as the U.S. industry falters.
Gold standard is the term applied globally to the U.S. regulation and licensing of nuclear power plants. It is a term of respect for American standards of excellence. It was widely used at a meeting of the Nuclear Infrastructure Council in Washington Tuesday and Wednesday; and surprisingly, coming from French and Chinese lips, was an affirmation of the whole licensing and regulatory apparatus that exists in the United States.
The fear is that as the United States lags in the construction of reactors and while it continues to eschew fuel reprocessing, the gold standard will lose its luster to a world that is building new nuclear at breakneck speed and is, or plans, to reprocess the used fuel.
Most of today’s concern is about China, now committed to the fastest growth in nuclear. But India is also building and others like the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Brazil and Argentina are thinking about it.
Will a deterioration in the quality of construction, regulation and operation occur? Not if the gold standard continues to be respected and reflects the latest innovations, according to industry sources in Europe and America. Otherwise, a slew of new reactors could be less safe than they might be.
At present, according to the companies involved in China including Westinghouse Electric, the Shaw Group, a U.S. construction firm and the French giant Areva, they are maintaining the gold standard. The term embraces total quality assurance from licensing integrity to concrete and steel specifications, to analysis of components and certification of welds.
What is surprising about the idea of the gold standard is how long it has endured. It goes back to the Eisenhower administration and the Atoms for Peace program. This was an ambitious idea that the civilian benefits of atomic power would be spread across the world. Implicit in the program was the assumption that the U.S. nuclear industry would control world nuclear commerce and, as a result, safety standards would be the highest. Proliferation and accidents would be guarded against by the gold standard, exercised through the dominance of the U.S. industry.
The world’s fledgling nuclear industry accepted this U.S. technological hegemony happily. No one wanted a nuclear accident; and those who wanted to build a weapon would do so clandestinely, as Saddam Hussein tried to do in Iraq.
The gold standard regime was first challenged when President Jimmy Carter — a nuclear engineer who was ambivalent about nuclear — yielded to the left wing of the Democratic Party and decided that the United States would unilaterally not process used nuclear fuel. Carter’s point man in this folly was Joseph Nye of Harvard. The industry and those interested in maintaining the gold standard were appalled.
I crossed swords with Nye, highly regarded as an academic and intellectual, at the Uranium Institute (now the World Nuclear Association) annual meeting in London in September 1977. So heated was our discussion that Nye followed me out of the hall into the street, urging me to accept his point of view.
Although that was decades ago, it was the first blow to the gold standard. Other countries proceeded with reprocessing: Areva and British Nuclear Fuels claim it is a very profitable business, as well as greatly reducing waste volumes.
Despite this insult to nuclear, the gold standard held — possibly at 18 carats rather than 24 carats.
But the Obama administration is doing what Carter did all over again.
Carter tepidly endorsed nuclear, while opposing reprocessing and a demonstration fast breeder reactor authorized by Congress. Obama has been less severe, but he has nixed the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada — and $15 billion spent there — and set back a waste-storage solution by as much as 50 years.
Now the world will store and reprocess waste without a gold standard to guide it.
It matters because slipping standards — anywhere from China to Jordan — endanger all nuclear power and a lot of people. A meltdown in Japan has battered nuclear acceptance and that was because of a once-in-history natural event. The next one could be because of lower licensing standards, bad concrete, fake parts or a bribed inspector. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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John Bryson, the Right Man for Commerce
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John E. Bryson, who is President Obama's nominee to be Secretary of Commerce, has a soft heart and a hard head; an admirable duopoly, one might think. Ideal, really.
But not in the United States Senate. Not these days.
The fight over the Bryson nomination, like so much else in Washington, is a fight among pit bulls: a fight for the sake of fighting, a fight without purpose. Dogs fight over bitches, over food, over defensiveness toward their owners and over territory. Pit bulls just fight. Proximity is casus belli.
In today's Senate, an administration nominee is casus belli.
It causes one to wonder why a man like Bryson would shatter the tranquility of his retirement years to endure besmerchment in Washington. He does not need the job or indignity of the process, but we need him or people like him. As the confirmation process has grown uglier and uglier, they have become fewer and fewer,
If I were a senator questioning Bryson, or some similar nominee, the one question I would ask is: “Why in God's name would you submit yourself to this?”
It is as though people of otherwise sound mind voluntarily placed their heads and hands in the stocks and allowed a howling mob of self-righteous idiots to pelt them with rotten vegetables and invective. Minus the vegetables, that is what the procedure of “advise and consent” has now come down to. It is a travesty of the Founders' purpose. It has become an opportunity for the talentless and graceless to abuse the talented and accomplished.
Accomplishment is the rub. If you have left an edifice in print, in business, in public works, stay away from the U.S. Senate. Senate pit bulls will sink their teeth into any record of accomplishment.
Among Bryson's sins, enumerated in an editorial in The Washington Times, is that he and other Yale graduates founded the Natural Resources Defense Council. Bryson did not author any of the council's more controversial excursions. Instead he was part of its idealistic founding; at a time when environmental abuse was a national reality that had been exposed eight years earlier by Rachel Carson in her seminal book, “Silent Spring.”
Despite the wishing of an editorial writer at The Washington Times, Bryson was a free-market innovator.
When Bryson was chairman of the California Public Utilities Commission, he asked me to speak at a conference he was convening at Stanford on regulating electric generation. We were both talking about deregulation a decade ahead of time. And Bryson was talking about it when it had no political traction.
From state service, Bryson went on to run Edison International, parent of Southern California Edison Company, for 18 years.
He has served on the boards of some of the country's largest companies including Boeing and Disney. He has also been a trustee of Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology.
Yet his detractors, the sum of all their ignorance and folly neatly assembled in The Washington Times' editorial, accuse him of destroying jobs. The evidence for this: he supported cap-and-trade legislation as a free-market solution to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. That support was shared by many electric utilities (including Exelon) and oil companies (ConocoPhillips among them).
If these are institutions of the Left, then lead on.
Like all men who get things done, some of Bryson's endeavors have been less successful than others: Remember, Ben Franklin's stove was not a success. But Bryson's record is the record of a man of his times, prepared to instigate and manage change.
As the commerce secretary job involves managing the changes that come with globalization, a nimble man like Bryson, who has served capitalism and idealism, should be just the ticket. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers