The geography of Congress’s so-called suicide caucus. Click to expand.
On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina. He’s been in Congress for eight months. Boehner, who has served in Congress for twenty-two years, is the Speaker of the House and second in the line of succession if anything happened to the President.
Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out.
The pretense that the so-called Syrian opposition-in-exile speaks for those inside the country, never firm to begin with, was further exposed late on Tuesday, in a two-minute video statement called “Communiqué No. 1,” which was issued by eleven armed rebel groups that are influential in northern Syria. Their message was simple: the Western-backed hotel revolutionaries jetting from capital to capital, claiming leadership in the political National Coalition and an interim government-to-be, don’t speak for them—and they won’t listen to them. The new coalition, which has yet to announce its name, also said it wants Islamic Sharia law to be the basis of any future government, and that the various opposition parties should unite within “an Islamic framework.”
In Sunday’s German election, Angela Merkel and the conjoined conservative parties she heads—the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union—won big. Very big: no one has won bigger since East and West Germany were reunified almost a quarter century ago. Just about every newspaper and broadcaster this side of North Korea used the same word: TRIUMPH.
At a time when, thanks to Edward Snowden, government snooping on American citizens is a hot topic, there was an interesting bit of news yesterday that you might have missed. For some reason, the Times ignored it in today’s print edition, and so did many other reputable media outlets. Here it is: the authorities have confirmed that the National Security Agency spied on Art Buchwald.
Yes, that Art Buchwald. The old guy with the glasses who concocted humorous columns for the Washington Post, published more than thirty books, including “I Am Not a Crook” (about you-know-who) and “While Reagan Slept,” and spent his summers palling around Martha’s Vineyard with William Styron.
Is four dollars too high a price to get a key copied? Phil Mortillaro doesn’t think so. For thirty years, he has been making keys, installing locks, and cracking the occasional safe from his tiny storefront on Seventh Avenue South, in the West Village.
The place is hard to miss. The exterior shimmers with thousands of keys that Mortillaro has welded into concentric patterns and shapes. Inside, thousands more keys hang on the walls, rattling as the 1 train passes underground. There’s room for only one customer at a time, and that seems just right to Mortillaro.
On Saturday mornings in North Philadelphia, hundreds of people can be found lining up along the sidewalks of West LeHigh Avenue and Sixth Street, near the basement entrance of a local public library. They aren’t looking for books, they are looking to be fed, by a large community food center housed in the library’s basement. Until recently, the fire-gutted, stone-and-brick shell of a huge high school down the street from the center dominated the landscape, looking more like a ruined medieval monastery than a modern-day American urban academy. The school ruins have now been torn down, but the side streets are still lined with boarded-up houses.
As Larry Ellison, the C.E.O. of Oracle and the world’s fifth-richest man, watched his team win the thirty-fourth America’s Cup, the Internet was far more interested in his decision, on Tuesday, to skip his own keynote address at Oracle’s annual conference for customers so that he could hang out in San Francisco Bay to cheer on Oracle Team USA. As he watched the team’s seventy-two-foot catamaran glide across the bay, a product-development executive was dispatched to speak to the conference crowd.
I had an awfully good time this summer following Edith Windsor around. For my Profile of her in this week’s issue, I was forced to visit her in Southampton, in late July, at the house she bought as a birthday present for her late spouse, Thea Spyer, in 1968. As you can see in our slide show, they were both inordinately glamorous, and Edie remains so.
Edith Windsor with a photograph of Thea Spyer taken during their first trip together, to Suriname, in the nineteen-sixties. Photograph by Max Vadukul.
Windsor and Spyer at the beach in 1969. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer outside their house in the Hamptons, 1969. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer in 1969, two years after they got engaged. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor on vacation in 1972. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer on vacation in 1972. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer and Windsor in 1974. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
The couple shares a kiss, date unknown. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer on Halloween, 1981. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer at a party, date unknown. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer and Windsor in 1979. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer were partners for more than forty years. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Yesterday, I wrote about Janis Shinwari, an Afghan who served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army for seven years, bravely and honorably, saving the lives of several American soldiers, including Lieutenant (now Captain) Matt Zeller. I heard about Shinwari and Zeller through Becca Heller of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project. There are thousands of cases of Iraqis and Afghans who risked their lives for the U.S., only to have their chance at an American visa endlessly delayed or denied. Shinwari’s story struck me as particularly unjust, because of his extraordinary record of service, and because he had actually received his visa a few weeks ago, only to have it revoked on Saturday, just after he had quit his job, sold all his possessions, and was preparing his family to start a new life in Virginia.
By the time I checked in with C-SPAN on Wednesday morning, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, was into the twenty-first hour of his effort to prevent the Senate from funding Obamacare and keeping the government operational. Frankly, he was looking surprisingly good for it. His hair was still in place; his dark suit didn’t appear wrinkled. The only visible sign that he’d been up all night was that his top shirt button was open, and his blue necktie loose around his neck. And he was still going at it, riffing up a lengthy metaphor about how members of Congress, with their supposed exemption from the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, would be sitting in the first class of Obamacare whilst millions of Americans were loaded into coach, or even the baggage compartment.
On occasions like these, the long-windedness in which almost all senators specialize comes in handy, and not just for the primary speaker. During the night, Cruz received the assistance of some of his Republican colleagues, who asked lengthy questions in order to let him take a breather. When I went to bed, at about the ten-hour mark, he was busy regaling a largely empty chamber with tales of people losing their health coverage, or their jobs, because of the socialistic disaster that is about to befall the nation. Amid all the doomsaying, selective storytelling, and outright time-fillers, there were some bizarre moments. At about eight o’clock Tuesday night, he read a bedtime story to his young daughters from Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham,” repeating with evident enjoyment the lines, “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam-I-am.” At breakfast time Wednesday morning, he impersonated Darth Vader. At another point, he chided some of his colleagues for having bad haircuts. (He can talk!)
Edith Windsor with a photograph of Thea Spyer taken during their first trip together, to Suriname, in the nineteen-sixties. Photograph by Max Vadukul.
Windsor and Spyer at the beach in 1969. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer outside their house in the Hamptons, 1969. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer in 1969, two years after they got engaged. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor on vacation in 1972. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer on vacation in 1972. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer and Windsor in 1974. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
The couple shares a kiss, date unknown. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer on Halloween, 1981. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer at a party, date unknown. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Spyer and Windsor in 1979. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Windsor and Spyer were partners for more than forty years. Photograph from Edith Windsor’s personal collection.
Portrait of Edith Windsor by Max Vadukul.
