Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post just reported that the House of Representatives passed $9.7 billion in aid for Hurricane Sandy victims by a 354-67 vote.  All the no votes came from Republicans. The Senate is expected to pass the measure later today and send it to President Barack Obama for his signature.  The remaining $50.3 billion of the original $60 billion aid bill will be debated and brought to a vote later this month.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading David Nasaw’s The Patriarch:  The Remarkable and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.  David has deservedly received accolades for this work from the New York Times and other publications.  David gets well into “the weeds” as one reviewer stated in this excellent piece of biography and history.

It provides important background and meaning for those of us baby boomers who remember John F. Kennedy’s presidency and assassination.  I learned for instance, that aside from vacations at Hyannis on Cape Cod, the Kennedy family did not spend much time in Massachusetts and for a good deal of the 1930s and 1940s lived in New York and Bronxville.  The positions of appeasement and pacifism that Joe Kennedy had prior to and during World War II as ambassador to the United Kingdom are enlightening.  Although they had nine children, the relationship between Joe Kennedy and his wife Rose, allowed each to pretty much go their separate ways.  The details of daughter Rosemary’s illness and botched operation are heartfelt.  I also enjoyed the chapters on John F. Kennedy’s political rise to the presidency.  They are an excellent complement to Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power, that has material that covers the same ground but from another perspective.

I could go on but you get the drift.  A great read!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, members of the new U.S. Congress were sworn in during ceremonies in the nation’s Capitol.    Of the nearly 2,000 senators in the history of Congress, only 44 have been female. The first woman (Rebecca Felton – Georgia) in the Senate served for only 24 hours in November of 1922, and no woman was elected to the body until a decade later, when Hattie Caraway was chosen by Arkansas voters. Now, there are 20 women senators in the 113th Congress. Ten of those women were sworn in yesterday, four of them for the first time.  The four new women senators (Elizabeth Warren – Massachusetts; Deb Fischer – Nebraska; Heidi Heitkamp – North Dakota; and Tammy Baldwin – Wisconsin) are all Democrats.  Tammy Baldwin also has the distinction of being the first openly-gay senator. After she was sworn in for her second term, Senator Claire McCaskill (Missouri) said women were making progress in the Senate. “I don’t think we should be satisfied until we have the same number of women in the Senate that represent the percentage of the population that are women, so we still have a long way to go,” she said.

Tony