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 to 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 press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as 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.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Both readers of my personal blog probably thought the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering was no longer open.

While its doors mostly have been closed during the pandemic, it still is one three departments I run with full and complete authority to decide how each operates.

The others are the Department of Pet Peeves and the Department of “Just Saying.”

Today, without fanfare, I open the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering.

FROM A COLUMN BY EUGENE ROBINSON IN THE WASHINGTON POST

Kyrie Irving is a thrillingly talented basketball player, a former Rookie of the Year, a seven-time All-Star and a gold medalist for Team USA. But I look forward to not watching him work his magic this season — as long as he refuses to do the right thing and get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

This isn’t the first time Irving has courted controversy. But the skepticism he and other holdouts have propagated and the wishy-washy stances even some of their vaccinated colleagues have taken, are worth addressing seriously — and not just for what they say about the fight against the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The best way to show respect for athletes as political actors and philanthropists is to push back when they’re wrong — especially when the stakes are this high.

Irving plays for the Brooklyn Nets, and the city of New York mandates that Nets players be vaccinated before they can play in their home arenas. Irving is the only stubbornly unvaccinated Net. Since he would have to sit out roughly half the team’s schedule, Nets management has wisely decided it’s best he not play at all.

Cue the violins.

I don’t respect his “choice” at all. As for why we’re “putting it on” him, we are battling together to defeat a highly infectious virus that has killed more than 720,000 Americans. We have a trio of safe and effective vaccines that slow the spread of the virus and confer miraculous protection against serious illness and death. Irving’s choice threatens not just his own health but also, should he be infected, that of his fellow players, his coaches and trainers, the referees who call the games, and the fans who come to see the Nets play.”

Comment:  Yes, Irvin’s stance deserves ridicule and derision, not applause.  The example he is setting – if it is, actually, an example – indicates the right decision has been made by his employers.  He should not be allowed on the basketball court.

FROM A COLUMN BY MICHAEL GERSON, ALSO IN THE WASHINGTON POST

“Poor is the nation that has no heroes,” Cicero said. But poorer still is a nation with the kind of heroes celebrated on Fox News.

The nation’s leading purveyor of lethal medical advice during a pandemic (trademark pending) has recently elevated the resisters against coronavirus vaccines — an airline pilot here, a nurse there — as models of citizenship. These abstainers are risking their livelihoods in the cause of … what? Well, that depends on your view of the vaccines themselves.

For generations we’ve had vaccine mandates, particularly for childhood diseases, in every state plus D.C. Few thought to call this tyranny because communities have a duty to maintain public health, and individuals have a duty to reasonably accommodate the common good — even if this means allowing your child to be injected with a substance carrying a minuscule risk of harm.

So there can be no objection rooted in principle to vaccine mandates, unless you want to question them all the way down to measles, mumps and rubella. The problem must be covid-19 in particular.

Comment:  Gerson is right to contend that anti-vaxxers – including Fox News — deserve no credit.  They risk their own lives, and, what’s worse, they risk infecting others, all in the name of what they believe is personal freedom.

FROM ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

The United States was unprepared for the scope of President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election. By Election Day, Trump had spent months calling the election “rigged,” and historians and democracy experts warned of the damage that these false claims could make.

But when the president stepped to a lectern in the White House late on Election Night and insisted he’d won, many Americans were taken aback. Much worse was still to come: Trump calling Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to find 11,000 votes; attempting to weaponize the Justice Department; and instigating the failed January 6 insurrection.

Americans are ready now. If anything, they’re overprepared. Many members of the uneasy coalition of Democrats and former Republicans who oppose Trump are frantically focused on the danger of Trump and his GOP allies trying to steal the 2022 and especially 2024 elections.

This is not without justification; many of Trump’s henchmen, meanwhile, are frantically focused on stealing it. But these watchdogs risk missing the graver danger: Trump could win this fair and square.

Trump winning in 2016 was a serious wound to the American experiment. His clinging to power in 2020 poured salt in that wound. Trump losing in 2024 and trying to steal the election would be even more catastrophic. But a straightforward victory—a very real possibility—could be a mortal injury.

Comment:  I cannot think of a result worse for this country than that the  epitome of a narcissist, Donald Trump, rises again.