Walt Shotwell Commentary
Meet a marvelous Muslim
I admit it: One of my best friends is a Muslim, and Muslims have been very much in the news lately. Several crackpots say President Barack Obama, an avowed Christian, is a secret Muslim, as though that’s some kind of threat. Muslims are accused of all sorts of evils, the worst being potential terrorists.
This would surely puzzle my dear friend Neelum Chaudhry.
She was born to Muslim parents in Pakistan, but when she was 10 the family moved to Kuwait, where her father worked for the United Nations. She and her brothers, Saleem and Jamil, attended the American School of Kuwait, so Neelum was exposed to American culture at an early age. She attended college in Beirut, Lebanon, but when the civil war started there in 1975 she returned to Kuwait.
The family, however, wanted Neelum to have a good education, so she applied to several Big Ten schools and was accepted by all of them. But if Neelum had to be far away in the United States, her folks wanted her to be with someone they knew. Luckily, Neelum’s English teachers in Kuwait were going to the University of Iowa for graduate school. Perfect: Neelum could go along.
She became a Hawkeye in the fall of 1975, receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1978. She then taught school at Washington, Iowa, while earning a master’s degree in journalism in 1980. Neelum became a United State citizen in 1985.
In 1984 Neelum got a teaching job at Ames High School. After three years, however, seeing little possibility for advancement, she gave up teaching and went into book publishing. That’s when she and I connected.
I did a book on Bill Knapp, the real estate tycoon. My friend and former colleague Chuck Offenburger had worked with Neelum on his books, so he gave me her name and she published three of my books. We became friends.
After bouncing around in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, Neelum wound up in metro Washington D.C., with her two kids and her husband, Mark Waterman, an accountant.
Neelum’s still a Muslim, within striking distance of the White House but certainly not a threat. CV
Walt Shotwell is a former Des Moines Register reporter and columnist who writes occasional commentaries for Cityview.
Lee Hamilton Commentary
Why so much money gets spent on lobbying
Recently, The New York Times noted that starting salaries for lobbyists in demand in Washington now begin at $300,000 and can go as high as $1 million. This might seem like an outlandish amount of money to pay people even if they are unusually persuasive.
Why does so much money get spent on lobbying? The short answer is that it pays off — often quite handsomely — for the people footing the bill.
When I first went to Washington in the 1960s, the refrain I heard most often from various businesses and organizations was, “Get government off my back.” Today it’s the opposite: “Put government on my side.”
Lobbying is hard work, and the people who do it are very good at what they do, but there’s no question that lobbyists get access most of us don’t enjoy.
So how do we amplify the voice of ordinary Americans? Voters need to be able to know who is lobbying for what, how much they’re spending, and who’s funding them. It’s time to insist on total disclosure about all aspects of lobbying, and perhaps even to enact public funding of congressional campaigns. CV
Lee Hamilton is Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years and offers occasional columns for Cityview.
