Week beginning 20 September 2023

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the subject of this week’s review. Do All the Good You Can, How Faith Shaped Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Politics by Gary Scott Smith, University of Illinois Press, 2023 will be published in October.

Gary Scott Smith provides a rather different perspective on Hillary Rodham Clinton, or so it seems to me. My response may not be significant, after all, I am not an American political commentator, voter, or resident.  However, I was strongly interested in the 2016 American election, and of all the many aspects of Hillary Rodham Clinton that became apparent throughout that period, advertisements, speeches, commentary and the debates, religion and Clinton’s commitment were not some. Scott Smith writes movingly of the role of religion in Hillary’s life and suggests that, if her campaign had addressed her commitment, it is possible that the 2016 run for President might have had a different result. Although I am not always impressed with his case for this, the discussion of religion in Clinton’s life makes valuable reading, showing as it does, the role of religion in American politics which is so different from that in Australian politics, and as Scott Smith demonstrates, from many other countries.

The book makes thorough use of quotes from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speeches, the bible, and religious sources admired and referred to by Clinton. The chapter headings follow this pattern, with titles such as “Stay in Love with God”; “I Felt My Heart Strangely Warmed”: Clinton’s Spiritual Roots; “Let your Light Shine to All”: From Wellesley to the White House; “Be Rigorous in Judging Ourselves and Gracious in Judging Others”: New York Senator and 2008 Presidential Candidate; “I look Upon All the World as My Parish”: Secretary of State and Seeking the Oval office; “Be Not Weary of Well Doing”: The 2016 Presidential Campaign; and “God Grant That I May Never Live to Be Useless!”.

Scott Smith’s addition of the quotes to the basic information about the progress of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s life through childhood, Wellesley, First Lady, Senator, Presidential Candidate 2008 and Secretary of State, and during the 2016 Presidential Campaign and its aftermath highlight the flavour of this biography. It is aimed at being markedly different from others in giving Clinton’s religious commitment an enduring and empowering role. Scott Smith argues comprehensively for a woman known for a host of other virtues (and shortcomings) to be known for her sincerity and commitment to her religion, and its essential role in her life. In taking up the cudgels for the possibility that a greater public commitment to religious thought and teachings by Clinton during the 2016 Presidential Campaign may have achieved a different result he also moves into different ground. See Books: Reviews for the complete review (to be finished).

After the Covid update: Cindy Lou reviews; trip to Portugal; Heather cox Richardson.

Posted Fri 15 Sep 2023 at 3:38pm ABC

Australian Capital Territory

There were 169 new COVID-19 cases in the ACT last week. The territory has four people in hospital with COVID-19, and none in intensive care. There were three new deaths recorded. Source: ACT Health

New South Wales

The state has recorded 2,020 new COVID-19 cases, up from last week’s total of 1,919. There are 606 cases in hospital with the virus, 10 of those in intensive care. There were 20 new deaths recorded. Source: NSW Health

Northern Territory

The territory updates its COVID-19 data fortnightly, there have been 130 new cases between September 1 and September 15. The Northern Territory currently has four patients in hospital. No new deaths were recorded. Source: NT Health

Queensland

Queensland’s new COVID-19 reporting process now works on a seven-day rolling average system, as per the federal government’s national reporting site. The state recorded 64 average daily cases as of September 13, down from an average of 91 the previous week. There is a seven-day rolling average of one death as of September 12, with 949 patients in hospital with the virus, and 25 in intensive care. Source: Federal Department of Health and Aged Care

South Australia

The state has recorded 625 new COVID-19 cases the past week, as of September 13. South Australia currently has 41 patients in hospital and none in intensive care, as of September 12. There were no new deaths recorded. Source: SA Health

Tasmania

We are still waiting on an update from the state’s health department. Please check back for the statistics or scroll down to find the national data.

Victoria

Victoria recorded 746 cases in the week from September 8 to September 14, a 28 per cent increase from the week before. There were three deaths on average each day over the week. The state also recorded a seven-day rolling average of 133 patients in hospital with the virus, and nine people in intensive care. Source: Victoria Department of Health

Western Australia

We are still waiting on an update from the state’s health department. Please check back for the statistics or scroll down to find the national data.

Cindy Lou eats out in Checkendon near Wallingford

Dogs allowed inside – a delightful welcome to The Highwayman Inn. Another dog appeared later and in the course of conversation her owners described their links to Australian cities, Melbourne and Brisbane where close relatives live.

The Highway man has a good menu, with gluten free options. However, it was odd not to be offered a wine list. Fortunately, the wait person recalled that there was a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc by the glass. Although not as stunning in appearance as the gin and two tonics, the Kakako was pleasant.

Desserts were an apple and rhubarb crumble with custard, pronounced a good crumble; a luscious rice pudding with a plum compote; and two scoops of Purbeck ice-cream – honey comb and raspberry ripple from a fine range of flavours. Purbeck ice-cream from Dorset is indeed special, and I shall look for it on other English menus.

From the delicious range of mains, birds won the evening with duck and guinea fowl chosen. Master Chef would probably have agreed that the duck was cooked well, and I enjoyed the guinea fowl.

Apart from the wine menu not being brought to the table, the service was pleasant and reasonably efficient. Perhaps the first course could have come a little more quickly, but the atmosphere was comfortable and the dinner table discussion excellent.

Breakfast on the Waterside Cafe narrow boat on the Regents Canal

This is an all-time favourite – a visit to Paddington usually includes a meal at the Waterside Cafe with its cream teas, omelettes and paninis. All of the latter have generous and interesting fillings and are served with salad or crusty bread. The bread needs to be mentioned, as so often it is not crusty, but thin white sliced. The latter is not a usual feature of Australian breakfasts in my experience. The scrambled eggs served with generously buttered crusty loaf made a lovely breakfast in the glorious setting.

Drinks at the 146 Bar The Hilton, Paddington

This is a pleasant bar, with friendly and competent service, a good drinks list, and attractive accompaniments served with the drinks.

Pearl Liang Sheldon Square Paddington

Pearl Liang is a really appealing Chinese restaurant that we have been going to for years. On several New Years Eves, a concert at Wigmore Hall was followed by a splendid meal at Pearl Liang, before watching the fireworks in Hyde Park from the windows of our flat. Returning, even without the concert, is always fun. This time we had old favourites and the wait person was keen to have us try something different on the next occasion.

Sheldon Square, in which the restaurant is located, has been beautified, with water and plants replacing the concrete tiers.

Trip to Portugal

After a successful trip to Lisbon several years ago we were interested in returning. This time, instead of booking a hotel in the city centre I chose a Secret Escapes offer of a hotel in the historic district, Alfama, close to the Castile de S. Jorge. Secret Escapes provided us with a different experience – a marvellous breakfast, port in the bedroom, and free entrance to several cultural exhibitions. We enjoyed the breakfast, had a glass of port, and decided to wander around the area, with a quick trip into the city centre to reprise our past experience. No cultural visits this time. But the bus ride into the city centre provided plenty of colour as the driver deftly avoided pedestrians, buildings and other vehicles on the steep narrow streets down the hill – and up again on return.

The hotel, Solar Do Costelo, was delightful. Although there were some stairs to climb it was probably just as well, as the breakfast was tempting and copious. The ocean could be viewed from one window, and a small section of the castle wall from the other.

The hot selection included broccoli one morning, which created some confusion to some guests. However, I found it a wonderful accompaniment to my smoked salmon. There was a variety of cakes as well, and these remained throughout the day together with tea and coffee for guest to have when they chose. For the healthier guests a large basket of apples was also available at reception.

After two nights in Lisbon, we boarded the train to Porto. This was easy to do without booking in advance. We had allocated seats, alas on the slower train, but as we boarded at S. Apolonia where the train started there was little difficulty in storing luggage and finding our seats. When the train filled up, at subsequent stations it appeared to be more difficult but somehow everyone found a seat and a place for their luggage. Most of the journey was uneventful, but some of the stations were highly decorative, we passed olive trees and some beautiful homes, interspersed with the usual downbeat sights familiar along most rail routes.

We ate in a street cafe familiar from our last visit in Lisbon city centre, and at a cafe near the hotel. The latter was wonderful, with its friendly staff, cooking seemingly accomplished in various buildings in the vicinity, and laundry hanging above (a familiar sight in all the streets). The Portuguese food will feature next week.

Flowering tree outside the Castile De S. Jorge

Heather Cox Richardson letter from America

18 September 2023.

Headlines this morning said that “Congress” is in crisis. But that construction obscures the true story: the Republicans are in crisis, and they are taking the country down with them.

The most immediate issue is that funding for the government ends on September 30. The Senate, controlled by Democrats, is moving forward on a strongly bipartisan basis with 12 appropriations bills that reflect the deal President Biden hammered out with Speaker Kevin McCarthy in May to get House Republicans to agree not to default on the United States debt. That deal, the Washington Post editorial board pointed out today, was a comprehensive compromise that should have been a blueprint for the budget.

But extremist House Republicans reject it, and there is no sign that House Republicans can even agree among themselves on a replacement, let alone on one that can make it through the Senate and past the president’s desk. Extremists in the Freedom Caucus insist they will not agree to any budget that accepts the deal McCarthy cut with Biden. In addition, although appropriations bills are traditionally kept clean of volatile issues, the extremists have loaded up this year’s appropriations bills with so-called poison pills: rules that advance their attempt to impose their ideology on the country but are unacceptable to Democrats. McCarthy had to pull back the Pentagon spending bill on Thursday before the House went home for the weekend, leaving without any plan in place for funding the government.

Over the weekend, six Republicans from five different party factions offered a plan for a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. Designed to appeal to the extremists, the plan goes back on the deal McCarthy struck with Biden. It proposes a 1% cut to the federal budget, but that 1% is not applied evenly: the defense budget and the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs would not take any cuts—Republicans have learned how voters react to hurting veterans—requiring an 8% cut to everything else. It includes the border measures the extremists want, and provides no money either for Ukraine or for disaster assistance. 

It’s not clear that Republican House members will vote for the bill, and if they do, the bill is unlikely, encumbered as it is, to make it through the Senate. 

What the House Republicans have managed to do recently is to try to appease the extremists by launching an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, claiming that he enriched himself through his son Hunter’s business dealings when he was vice president. McCarthy had to open the inquiry himself, without a House vote, because lacking any evidence, he didn’t have the votes to set such an inquiry in motion. On the Fox News Channel on Sunday, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said McCarthy has given him the role of assisting in the inquiry, but admitted: “We don’t have the evidence now, but we may find it later.”

To try to get at the president, the Republicans have hammered at his son Hunter, who has begun to push back, today filing a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for failing to keep his tax information private as the law requires. He is referring to the two men who testified before House committees trying to find dirt on Hunter Biden and who made the rounds of reporters with their allegations that the IRS did not adequately pursue charges against him. 

Meanwhile, video has emerged of the conditions under which extremist Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was kicked out of a kid-friendly Beetlejuice concert last weekend. Boebert has repeatedly accused those protecting LGBTQ civil rights of “grooming” children for sexual activity. Not only was she vaping, she and her date were groping each other quite intensely. Boebert is in the process of getting a divorce, and her date, it turns out, is co-owner of a gay-friendly bar that has hosted drag shows. 

Things are not all ducky with Republicans in the Senate, either. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) refuses to lift his hold on more than 300 military promotions until the Pentagon changes its policy of allowing service members leave time and travel expenses to obtain abortion care. While he insists he is doing no damage to the military, actual military officers, as well as members of his own party, disagree. They say the holds are hollowing out our military leadership and that the damage will take years to repair, since the promotion holds also stop junior officers from moving up. Those holds mean lower pay and retirement, tempting junior officers to move out of the military to higher-paying private sector jobs. 

The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) today wrote a public letter to Tuberville asking him to remove his hold and warning that “harming American service members as leverage in Washington political battles” set a “very dangerous precedent.” They also noted that in a survey of VFW members, including those in Alabama, “VFW members strongly conveyed that politicians should not be able to harm the troops over political disputes and that political decisions that harm the troops would affect the way they would vote in upcoming elections.”

And now Trump, who leads the extremists, has suddenly changed course on abortion, the leading issue for most of his base, in order to weaken his rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. After packing the Supreme Court with three extremists who helped to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by which the Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to an abortion, Trump yesterday said the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed, which would ban abortion before most women know they’re pregnant, was “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” although he also appeared to endorse abortion bans in general. Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, in contrast, is calling for a federal ban on abortion.  

Republicans have finally recognized that about 63% of Americans think abortion should be legal in “all or most circumstances,” according to a new poll by 19th News jand SurveyMonkey. But only 9% believe it should be illegal in all cases, although 14 states have enacted such extensive bans. The survey also found that support for abortion rights has increased since the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. [These figures are interesting in relation to one of the arguments made by Gary Scott Smith – see book review above].

Trump has suddenly also become more problematic for the Republicans. On Sunday night,  Trump doubled down on his past antisemitism by sharing a Rosh Hashanah message that celebrated the Jewish New Year by accusing “liberal Jews” of voting to “destroy” America and Israel. 

Then, ​​today, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported that long-time Trump assistant Molly Michael told agents investigating Trump’s mishandling of classified documents that he wrote to-do lists for her on the back of documents with classified markings. 

Meanwhile, the administration continues to go about the daily work of governance. 

On Sunday, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan met in Malta with China’s top diplomat to keep communications between the two countries open. Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Vice President Han Zheng of China on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. “The world expects us to responsibly manage our relationship,” Blinken said. “The United States is committed to doing just that.” 

Also on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly today, 32 coastal Atlantic countries from Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean launched the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation. This new multilateral forum echoes regional organizations the administration has backed elsewhere and seeks to establish a mechanism for implementing “a set of shared principles for the Atlantic region, such as a commitment to an open Atlantic free from interference, coercion, or aggressive action,” as well as coordinated plans for addressing issues including climate change. 

Finally, five Americans who have been imprisoned in Iran are home tonight, along with two of their spouses. In exchange, the U.S. freed five Iranian citizens who were imprisoned or were about to stand trial, although three of them declined to return to Iran (two have chosen to stay in the U.S., and another went to a third country). The Republic of Korea has released $6 billion of Iran’s money to Qatar for use for humanitarian aid to Iranian citizens suffering under the sanctions that prevent medicines and food from coming into the country. 

Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, told the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian that the funds had not previously been frozen; they were held up in South Korea because of that country’s own regulations. Under Trump, Iran spent heavily from similar accounts in China, Turkey, and India. Now that they are released, the funds will have more legal restrictions than they did when they were in South Korea. 

The Biden administration has prioritized bringing home wrongfully detained Americans. Today’s events bring the number of those the administration has brought home to 35.

Environmental effort