PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

This department, one of two I direct (the second is the Department of Pet Peeves), is open again for business. It has been closed for several weeks as I waited for my laptop to be released from the repair shop.

Operating these days without a laptop? Tough.

So, these quotes, with my comments:

From the WSJ editorial page:  “The Little Sisters still need relief in court, which the new rule should make easier, but the regulatory change will launch a crush of new lawsuits from groups like the ACLU. That so many resources in government and so much litigation are necessary to allow nuns to practice their faith is a testament to the toxic identity politics that corrodes American life.”

Comment: Protecting religious freedom should be a priority for Congress and the Presidential Administration. But, when Democrats were in charge, they did not fear to infringe on that freedom. Now, it appears those now in charge are returning to a more balanced regulatory approach.

And, know this, which I report based on my 25 years as a lobbyist representing, among others, Providence Health System, a health care company, including an insurance arm, with a dotted-line affiliation with the Catholic Church. That insurer and all others domiciled in Oregon cover contraception, not because some in the State House thought it was a good political idea, so passed a law, but, rather, because it was good health care business.

From the WSJ letter to the editor column:  “Instead of paying players, take away the bloated college recruiting budgets and the labyrinthine recruiting rules for those sports. Players who want to earn an education and play sports will find the right school as they used to without the lure and corruption caused by the interface with big-time sports. Those who really don’t want to go to college should go to the new minor leagues and get paid. The colleges and the players will be the better for it.”

Comment: Though I am a sports fan, this letter writer makes a few good points about the excesses of college sports. One wonders when reason will return.

From the WSJ editorial page:  “…repealing the regulatory overreach of the Obama Administration is the first crucial step that is already paying dividends in less economic uncertainty and more confidence in the reliability of the future electric grid.”

Comment: This quote relates to the plan by Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt to do away with an Obama Administration excess, imposing a so-called “clean power plan,” without both-sides processes to produce a reasonable plan. I say it’s about time reason and balanced prevailed in environmental law and regulation – and Pruitt is making a decent start on the goal.

From my friend on the golf course over the weekend:  “How do you feel about getting rid of Citizen’s United, the ruling in the case that gives one person the ability to buy a result in the political process?”

Comment: This friend was serious in his question, and so was I in my response. From my view, Citizens’ United could go away (it protects the right of businesses to invest in politics) IF unions, especially public employee unions, were also barred from making huge political contributions. Again, balance should be the goal.

From former U.S Senator Phil Gramm, now with the American Enterprise Institute:  “Given that the top 10 per cent of income earners in America pay more than 71 per cent of federal income taxes and do most of the saving, investing and innovating that fuel America’s economic growth, it’s hardly surprising that a tax reform proposal to stimulate growth would reduce the marginal tax rates of high-income Americans. What is astonishing, however, is the difficulty advocates of tax reform seem to have in defending their proposal against the attack that it benefits the rich.”

Comment: Gramm was a solid senator who practiced his politics from the middle. In this piece, he makes good points about the reality of tax reform and fallacy of just taxing the so-called “rich,” which is what Democrats want. I wish for the good old days of Ronald Reagan when tax cuts fueled economic growth, thus money for the U.S. Treasury.

From Michael Gerson writing in the Washington Post:  “All of us who interpret events for a living look into the abyss of tragedy and tend to see reasons for what brings us comfort. For some, it is passage of a law. For others, support for a religious or philosophic belief. The alternative, after all, is impotent silence. Some of these insights from the abyss may be profoundly true. But they are mainly about us.

“What matters more is the grief and loss of families, and the defiant remembering of each life. This will be the proper focus of the next few days.  That said, I do come at these events from a religious perspective, as some of the victims surely did, and as some of their loved ones surely do. The Christian faith involves a whisper from beyond time that death, while horrible, is not final — that the affirmations of the creeds and the inscriptions on tombstones are not lies. And for many, this hope is a barrier against despair.

“Yet faith also encompasses something deeper and more difficult — what theologian Jurgen Moltmann has called “God’s terrible silence.” In that silence, only the scarred God, the weak and victimized God, the God of the cross seems to communicate. Not in words, but in a shocking example of lonely suffering. Christians turn to a God who once felt godforsaken, as all of us may feel in the nightmare of loss.”

Comment: No more needs to be said or written.

From Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald: “Donald John Trump is a man whose cognitive and moral deficits would, in a sane country, render him unfit to clean toilets at a reasonably respectable strip club. But he became president. And as Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in the new issue of The Atlantic, he was elected largely because of his racism – not despite it – having run on an implicit promise to restore white primacy after eight years of the black interloper Obama.”

Comment: Again, no more needs to be said or written.