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Show Washington Comment ! Time was when the only nights I Washington residents , remained 1 glued to their radio were cham-' cham-' pionship "fight nights" and the 'November elections, particularly j presidential elections. But nowa-! nowa-! days, despite the torrid weather, with parks and rivers calling, open i air band concerts and silvery moon, we stick around the loud speaker to hear the results of nve re state "primaries". Outside rf the European crisis, the "purge" is the sole topic of interest, j Everybody Was fairly avid with curiosity to see how Mr. Roosevelt .would react to the triumph of (Continued on last page) i o- Washington Comment (Continued from first page) Senator Smith and the defeat of Senator McAdoo. As usual, he took the wind out of our sails by producing a sealed envelope enclosing en-closing his prediction of a victory for Senator Smith and later at his j press conference by announcing j that he would have no objection to the election of a Republican if he ; were a good liberal. One must, of course, speculate on whethea- or not Mr. Roosevelt means this sincerely, sin-cerely, or is merely making the gesture of being a good loser. Certainly at his press conference the general impression was that he was a bit irritated, but it could I not be directly attributed to the way the "purge" seems to be turning turn-ing out. The opinion of some observers ob-servers is that Mr. Roosevelt is not discouraged hy its seeming failure, that he didn't expect it p succeed anyway, and that he merely mere-ly launched it to throw fear into Democratic ranks and thus be able to control the next session in congress, con-gress, particularly if the Republicans Republi-cans make such gains that the overwhelming Democratic majority majori-ty is tnreatened. Be that as it may, Mr. Roosevelt, who is responsible respon-sible for a whole lexicon of pithy phrases which have become as current cur-rent as modern slang, has added a new one, as a result of his comment com-ment on the Smith victory: "It takes a long, long time sometimes to bring the past up to the present". pre-sent". Tha;t, and the Duke of Windsor's famous "at long last" will, we predict, go down in history his-tory as the two most-quoted phrases of 1938. The flow of German political refugees into the United States-under States-under this country's policy of aiding aid-ing refugees has now begun at the rate of nearly 100 a day. The American embassy in Berlin has announced that it has enough applications ap-plications on hand to fill the available quota for almost two years and that it is not accepting any more at present. The first groups to come over are arriving almost penniless, but Jewish associations as-sociations and families are assuming assum-ing responsibility' for them in order to meet the legal stipulation that they shall not become public charges. The law limits the num-"ber num-"ber of German Jews admitted to the United States to an annual quota of 27,370. Not more than ten percent of the total can be admitted ad-mitted in any one month, but the ten per cent is already filled. Apropos of the American ambassy in Berlin, the state department here announces that it intends to furbish up the Bluecher palace in Berlin for which it paid $1,750,000 in 1931, as an embassy site, and use it for the embassy offices "at ' long last". Seems it was partially destroyed by fire in 1931 shortly after its purchase, and the state department has never been able to provide funds for making it habitable.' habit-able.' For several years a caretaker care-taker kept a cow and chickens in the courtyard, and all the while the American government has been paying rent for three residences to house the embassy offices. All of which does not seem a particularly parti-cularly excellent example of our celebrated Yankee thrift. Just to demonstrate that we are European-conscious anyway, no matter what . we may actually think about the imminence of a world war, the state department has laid plans for a new regulation imposed for the first time in the nation's history, under which every agent of a foreign country must register his name and state his (business in this country. Under the definition of "agent" is included includ-ed the word "servant"; thus, embassy em-bassy charwomen, butlers, and maids will likely come under the ruling as well as attorneys for foreign corporations. |