Prof Newt, educator-in-chief

Bonus! If elected president, Newt Gingrich will teach an on-line course from the White House!

"The idea would be, why wouldn't you want a president in the age of social media to methodically in an organized way share with you what they're going to accomplish so that those people who really won't understand it can understand it," Gingrich said.

Number 1: Who are you calling "those people"?


Number 2: Newt, how would you find the time to design a "social media" course when there would so many staffers to fornicate with in the White House?  


How much raging narcissism does Newt  have coursing through his veins to think that the American people would  benefit from , as Miranda Celeste says, the "Sleazy, ethically bankrupt, thuggish, pompous, painfully unlikable Newt Gingrich" as president?

Religion changes its “morality” based on secular considerations

From Jerry Coyne:

Religious morality appears to change under only two conditions: either secular morality moves ahead of religious morality, causing it to change... or scientific advances show that the scriptural basis of religious morality is simply wrong (e.g., there’s no Adam and Eve and hence no Original Sin).

If a religion’s moral dictates remain fixed in stone for centuries, even under the press of secular advances, then that religion loses adherents.  This, of course, is what is happening to Catholicism in so many places.

My comment: I agree.  Consider that the vast majority of nominal Catholics do not adhere to the fundamental behavioral teachings of the Church: 98% use artificial birth control and abortion rates among Catholics are the same as society in general. Church leaders seem to look the other way in order to keep the “faithful” in the flock, although this remains a sore point among conservative, ie, orthodox, Catholics whose numbers are dwindling.

Believers, of course, will maintain that any changes in morality are "inspired" by divinity while all the observable evidence is otherwise-- that moral behavior is determined by very human desires and secular considerations.

World's Largest Model Train Set

The World's Largest Model Train Set - Watch MoreFunny Videos

Fight The Power

Music by the Isley Brothers, used without permission.




 

A nation of victims

Susan Jacoby has an excellent piece in the WaPo about the Republican's recent Iowa Thanksgiving Family Forum in which she notes the tendency for politicians nowadays to call attention to their hardships as a simplistic means test for the office of president.  A family member's affliction or a personal trauma can be presented as a totem that qualifies one for president, and of course, there is a heavy dose of hardly believable religiosity.


Jacoby points out that both Democratic (John Edwards) and Republican candidates do this, in sharp contrast to, say, FDR, who went to great lengths to downplay his disability in public appearances, yet he championed the cause of the less fortunate in public policy.  Jacoby: 

The Iowa forum was a triumph of the union of psychobabble and public religiosity that has come to dominate American politics. President Obama’s refusal to engage in this kind of faith-infused psychological exhibitionism is one of the main reasons why the media (and not only conservative media) have tagged him as a cool professorial type who does not know how to make a connection with ordinary people. Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, who were not present at the faith-and-suffering group therapy session, are also bad at exploiting whatever sorrows lie in their past to advance their candidacies. That’s probably one of the reasons Republican voters aren’t enamored of Romney and barely register Huntsman in their polls.

To really get the full flavor of the Iowa Family Forum, you have to watch the video, complete with 36 minute introduction containing religious and patriotic claptrap.  Then the candidates-- Perry, Gingrich, Paul, Santorum and Bachmann-- amble onstage to bare their souls of their deepest, most meaningful personal traumas, failures and triumphs.  I cried...I almost cried...I DID cry!  Read Jerry Coyne's site (contains embedded video) for another excellent review.  I got through the video of the freak show but not without some personal trauma myself...I'll have to tell Frank Luntz about it the next time we're both in front of a camera.

Nothing new was learned.  These people are not like me; they are so unlike anything that would appeal to me that I don't know that I would hire them to change a furnace filter let alone run my country.  Such histrionic appeal to the lowest common denominator, simplifying complex coping skills, and belief in supernatural bogeymen and saviors, all seem counterproductive to tackling any remotely involved job, especially that of president of the United States, which is, as Rick Perry says, "the most difficult job in the whirl."

I don't have a problem with individuals trying to sort out their problems, but is it necessary to do it with Frank Luntz in front of millions of onlookers? 

UC Davis: Assault and battery?

I'm no lawyer, but this looks like a felony.



via KagroX:  "UC Berkeley's policy on tear gas & pepper spray says: Use of tear gas or a tear gas weapon, EXCEPT in self-defense, can be a felony."

Barry's righteous rant

From Barry Ritholtz' Big Picture, an excerpt

In America, we are too busy dropping the kids off at soccer, running around looking for sales and bargains, racing to keep our heads above water. We seem to forget to get outraged. Our control over our once Democracy — the one we had a revolution against a monarchy dictating decisions from afar — slips away from us. Not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a 1000s acts of gradual ceding of power to the new Monarch. We have given up hard won rights to a coordinated attack from all three branches of government; Our Congress has become the legislative branch of eBay — Congressmen are auctioned off to the highest bidder; they even have a Buy It Now button to get specific legislation passed. The executive branch has fallen under the sunk cost fallacy, afraid to prosecute banks because we spent so many billions bailing them out. It turns out that even our once venerable Supreme Court is just as corrupted, with lobbyists partying with Justices and backdooring ethics by hiring their wives.

In short, our new overlords are enormously well funded, well connected, relentless and perhaps most of all, patient. This new King was not appointed by primogeniture, or even Divine Right, but by acquiring enough profits in the free market that they can buy control over society, even as they thwart that free market ideal for their own ends. We have become, in short, a Corporate Monarchy.

The right question isn’t why am I angry, sad and outraged. The proper question is, why aren’t you?

Go read the whole thing, and the comments, too.  And for the full discussion, read his excellent book Bailout Nation.

QOTD

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." 

--- Mahatma Gandhi

Occupy Wall Street:

Evolutionary Tree of Life

For a larger gif, go here.

Newsflash: You are ALREADY mandated to buy health insurance

From the NYT:

But not only is there a precedent for this, there is also clear support for it in the Constitution. For decades, Americans have been subject to a mandate to buy a health insurance plan — Medicare. 

  
Except that this health insurance is for other people, and the 65 y/o version of yourself.  So it is the hallmark of insanity to buy this necessary product for other people but not for yourself.  Would you buy an iPad for every senior citizen but not for yourself?

Links to Drink By: Wednesday AM

I know this is the lazy man's way to blog, but this is what I'm reading:

Newt Gingrich took $1.6 million from Fannie and Freddie.  What, you mean it's not Barney Frank's fault!!?

Six reasons why young people leave Christianity, especially in Ireland...

God's power presented graphically.

Businessweek: Americans won't do dirty jobs.

"Fathoming Amazon"

Charles P. Pierce: 2012 election field is an embarrassment to democracy

Jimmy Fallon as Jim Morrison

Links to Drink By

Irish billionaire goes bust: the biggest individual loser of the current financial meltdown.  Why didn't he just buy bonds and retire 20 years ago?

John Corzine is another case for the rich just buying municipal bonds and retiring: now Corzine's fortune is up for grabs.

John Feinstein: Paterno is not the victim, and...

Jeffrey Pollard: What Paterno could do now to promote healing

Former Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder: The Folly of the Flat Tax

WE ARE: PENN STATE!

Um, no, we aren't.

I've read a lot of opinions on this scandal but none is more chilling than Christopher's at the conservative Catholic website Christopher's Apologies.  He made a video drawing the accurate analogy between this child abuse scandal and the Catholic Church's priest abuse scandal, and he makes a mild leap to the Gosnell case where a doctor was killing newborn infants and calling it abortion.  Okay, a gratuitous, albeit obtuse and inaccurate, jab at abortion, but I'd agree that Gosnell's office was also a similar hierarchy that eschewed outside oversight and covered up crimes.  Fine.

Christopher, for some unknown reason, goes on to draw a direct line from anal intercourse with a 10 year-old  to consensual sex between adults, as in the Tiger Woods and... wait for it... the Bill Clinton peccadilloes.  Bill Clinton analogies never get old for conservatives.  But Christopher gets whacky when he equates failing to report child sex abuse to keeping an extra hamburger that was mistakenly placed in your McDonalds bag.  Is this what goes for Catholic morality these days?

If Christopher is to be believed, we are all Penn State, we are all lax in our duties as citizens and human beings.  Not!!!  I was trying to imagine how graphic the image would be of witnessing an adult male raping a 10 yr-old in a shower, especially witnessed during an otherwise ordinary day at work.  The graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, had seen such a thing in 2002 when he was 28 years-old, certainly an age of knowing right from wrong.  Is it really within reason to merely report such an occurrence to Joe Paterno and then go about your career within the coaching hierarchy of a university for another nine years, never questioning why the cretin Sandusky is not just out of prison, but still working at the university!?

McQueary's grand jury testimony says that he told Joe Paterno the graphic details of the incident and then went about his career.  Paterno, for his part, told the athletic director but found nothing untoward about Sandusky, his long time former assistant, continuing to work at the university.

There are surely enough WTF moments in this saga to boggle the mind.  At no time did any member of the Penn State University athletic department or administration have empathy for the victims and future victims of this pedophile.  Does this sound familiar?  Is the Catholic Church's priest abuse scandal analogous?  You bet it is.

Nittany Lion

And the common denominator is that both institutions are examples of top-down hierarchies with little or no outside oversight.  One law enforcement officer in Pennsylvania remarked that nobody from the coaches to the athletic director to the university president himself-- nobody-- ever thought to notify the police of the crimes that were being witnessed and discussed.  Protection of the university and Coach Sandusky's reputation became paramount, with no apparent consideration for the victims.  Even JoePa's final statement "I wish I had done more" seemed more a plea for his own personal reputation than for any justice or empathy, echoing similar sentiments from various bishops.

Anyone who could for a minute analogize child abuse to keeping an extra nickel of change from a restaurant, as ersatz Catholic moralists seem to be doing, needs to do some re-evaluation.

QOTD

Ridicule is the only weapon that can be used against unintelligible propositions.
Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.
– Thomas Jefferson

Your health care dollars hard at work

I'm sure this guy is worth it.  Not.

Fortune magazine lists the highest paid executives under 40 years-old, and there are the expected wunderkinds of the tech world, or communications or entertainment, but then there are the guys (and almost all are guys) in the insurance business, and specifically the health insurance industry. What possibly can a 39 yr-old, or anyone really for that matter, do in health insurance to earn $6.5 million per year? Did he invent a magic weight loss pill or figure out how to cure cerebral palsy? No. More likely he came up with some novel foolproof approach for denying claims on necessary medical care.

I can truly understand paying individuals who add value to a product or create wealth within society or can play shortstop, but health insurance executives do none of this. They are useless middlemen who shuffle money around and take a huge cut. I know of no highly trained physician who comes close to making a tenth of this Howdy Doody look-a-like's salary.  Atrocious.

Catholic theologian relents and allows release of video [UPDATE]

[UPDATE]: The video is up at the Gaines Center site.  I guess I don't really see the point of Dr. Haught's drama.  Dr. Coyne was vociferous, but polite and on point.  He makes the case that Christianity and science are not compatible and having read one of Haught's book (The New Atheists), I can say that his talk was similar in style, obtuse and without any substantive claims.  His Christianity is emotional, ie, an emergent phenomenon of his material being. Coyne's site has some comments to read as well.

----------------------------------------------------------------


Under pressure from the blogoshpere, John Haught has agreed to the release of the video of his recent debate with evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.  The kerfuffle ensued when the sponsor of the event, the University of Kentucky, announced that it would honor Haught's unilateral request to nix the release of the video.  Coyne's website has been abuzz with comments which have boiled over to reddit and other sites, and even an on-line petition. Haught himself has provided a comment as to why he initially vetoed the video's release.

My own personal experience is consistent with this high sensitivity of the faithful when their beliefs are challenged.  I agree with Coyne's approach that our society-wide deference given to religion should be challenged with facts and reason at every turn.  Now, we must wait and see if the video really is released.

We should vote on what's true, it's the American way

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Panel recommends HPV vaccine for boys

From the NYT:

Boys and young men should be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV, to protect against anal and throat cancers that can result from sexual activity, a federal advisory committee said Tuesday.
[snip]
Parents of boys face some uncomfortable realities when choosing whether to have their child vaccinated. The burden of disease in males results mostly from oral or anal sex, but vaccinating boys will also benefit female partners since cervical cancer in women results mostly from vaginal sex with infected males.

For the record, The Kalamazoo Post made a similar proposal in 2007:

My modest proposal is to make the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine mandatory for boys and optional for girls. Frankly, I'm hesitant to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for anyone, especially for the first five years of use until unforeseen problems can be studied. My bias is to keep such things optional for all, but if mandatory vaccination is to be instituted, I would argue that boys should be required before girls.

Newer data on the increase in males acquiring HPV related anal and head/neck cancers makes the recommendation more compelling.

Did WikiLeaks end the Iraq war?

From Glenn Greenwald:

From a CNN report on why the Iraqi Government rejected the Obama administration’s conditions for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline: 

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top brass have repeatedly said any deal to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the withdrawal deadline would require a guarantee of legal protection for American soldiers.
But the Iraqis refused to agree to that, opening up the prospect of Americans being tried in Iraqi courts and subjected to Iraqi punishment.
The negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks’ release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported. 

That description from CNN of the cable’s contents is, unsurprisingly, diluted to the point of obfuscation. That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, “provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.” The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.

This is in contradistinction to the run up to the war in 2002-03 when the news establishment-- and especially the NYT's Judith MIller-- were abetting the Bush administration's case for war with obfuscations and outright lies.  

Greenwald continues:

History is filled with examples of those who most bravely challenged and subverted corrupted power and who sought reforms being rewarded with prison or worse, at the hands of those whose bad actions they exposed. If Bradley Manning did leak these cables, his imprisonment is a prime example of that inverted justice.

Links to drink by

David Foster Wallace was a dick...or had a very dry sense of humor.

112,000 owners make the Packers unique.

The illusion of skill, read Kahneman's entire piece.

Qadaffi, just another dead asshole who spent his nation's wealth.  Take my word for it, don't even bother with the link...it's too depressing.

No due process for American citizen Awlaki, or his 16-year-old son.

Spain's stolen babies.

Did alternative medicine kill Steve Jobs?

Short answer: we'll never know. Orac has the best discussion.

Dunkashein

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Why is this so damn hard to understand?

...and why is she the only one saying it?

The evolution of self-deception

British evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has a forthcoming book entitled The Folly of Fools (US) in which he calls for a "new science" dealing with the how and why of self-deception, mainly because it's so prevalent and psychology has not come up with a theory.  From an interview in the New Scientist: 

You argue that we deceive ourselves all the time, but why do we do it? 

One reason is to better deceive others. Deceiving consciously is cognitively demanding. I've got to invent a false story while being aware of the truth, it's got to be plausible, it cannot contradict anything you already know or are going to find out and I've got to be able to remember it so that I don't contradict myself.

This takes concentration and I may give off cues that I'm lying. If I try to slip something by you I may not be able to meet your gaze. For linguistic cues, there are more pauses and fillers while I try to come up with my story. I'll choose simple action words and avoid qualifiers. Another thing that gives us away us is the effort to control ourselves. Let's say I'm coming to a key word in a lie. I tense up, but tensing up automatically raises my voice. That's a very hard thing to fight.

So believing the lie yourself can help with this cognitive burden? 

Yes. If I can render all or part of the lie unconscious I can remove the cues that I'm deceiving you. So that's one kind of general reason to practice self-deception: to render the lie unconscious, the better to hide it.

Trivers says that such self-deception can lead to better social success and thus more offspring, the hallmark of any genetic benefit.  Of course there are costs as well, but the overall effect must be that self-deception has net benefit. 

In your new book you get into some quite serious stuff about how self-deception fuels warfare and other evils...

Regarding warfare, if you can get the group believing the same deception, you have a powerful force to impose group unity. And if you've sold the population a false historical narrative, say "the German people need room in which to live", then it's relatively easy to couple marching orders to the delusion.

Tell me about the relationship between self-deception and religion.

It's complex. At one extreme you could say religion is complete nonsense, so the whole thing is an exercise in self-deception. I was raised as a Presbyterian and I occasionally attend. I stand back and I read the creed that I was taught as a child and it's utter, utter nonsense. But could it have spread so far by self-deception alone? Religion has been selected for. It has given many benefits to people - health benefits, cooperative benefits. So I take an intermediate position.

Again, my bete noir... he does not define religion!  But I'll assume he means the organization of communities around sacred ideas.  Trivers is a quirky, eccentric scientist but this latest is sure to promote some thought.  My question is how we come up with more universal ideas of what is sacred that all human communities can agree upon and leave out the supernatural mumbo jumbo, ie, a secular religion.  I realize Trivers probably will not delve into this topic but the first step is certainly realizing that humans are masters of self-deception and religion-- the prototype of human self-deception-- is certainly part of our biology.

Should Romney embrace his Mormonism?

An interesting "Open Letter to Mitt" from the WaPo Faith section, an excerpt:

The Mormon story is a quintessentially American tale. Joseph Smith, the prophet of the Mormon Church, was a farmer’s son, persecuted for his interpretation of the Christian story and assassinated in 1844. After his death, 70,000 of his followers eventually took a grueling overland trek from the Midwest to Utah’s Salt Lake Valley. The faithful undertook this six-month journey, often in covered wagons, at great personal risk of injury, illness and death. Proud of their pioneering ancestors, Mormons tend to value self-reliance, grit, optimism, hard work. Your faith may be the source of your most defining personality traits.

Leave out the magic underwear and it's not much different than other faith communities.

Aaron Task defends Occupy Wall Street

Well done.

Bruce Bartlett: "CEO's are full of crap"

Former Reagan administration official on the demand destruction of a deflationary cycle:




Okay, it's a bit long but well worth it to hear someone who really understands the economic problems we are enduring, and how to fix them.  I'll make a few points:

1.  It's the demand, stupid.  D'uh.

2.  I love how Kernin carries the water for CEO's who are whining about regulation.  Newsflash: everyone complains about regulations in whatever field they are in, and the complaints ALWAYS become louder when demand falters and businesses suffer.  If demand is good, then regulations actually benefit the better-run entities.

3.  Bartlett calls out Paul Ryan and GWB for their promotion of Medicare part D-- always a favorite topic of mine because 1) Part D is emblematic of the hypocrisy of the GOP on their budget, 2) Part D has literally gutted Medicare and is the major, if not sole, cause that it's in ruinous financial shape.

4.  As an aside, Bartlett has said elsewhere that the annual doc-fix on Medicare should be eliminated, and as destructive as I think it would be to physician pay, I cannot disagree--- as long as it is accompanied with other reforms of Medicare.  Reducing health care costs cannot be accomplished solely by reducing physicians' reimbursement.  Eliminating the doc-fix would effectively throw a boulder in the pond and, yes, doctors en masse would immediately stop seeing Medicare patients... then the REAL conversation would start about where all this f**king Medicare money is going.  Trust me, Big Pharma and Big Insurance don't want that conversation.

Memo To The Media: It’s Not ‘Anti-Capitalist’ To Protest An Industry That Was Saved By Trillions Of Taxpayer Dollars

Offered without comment, because none is necessary.

Erin Burnett enters the media elite

I had high hopes for Erin Burnett, after all she was mentored by my favorite curmudgeon, the late Mark Haines at CNBC.  So when her new show on CNN debuted last night, I had my bowl of popcorn ready for some righteous indignation and some calling bullshit on the Masters of the Universe.  Result: disappointment.

 


Seriously?  No mention of AIG and the massive counter-party risk that was covered by taxpayers that 1) saved the biggest banks at the expense of the smaller ones, and 2) will never be paid back?  Erin knows this argument but chose instead to ignore it while bullying some 20-something with her supposed airtight argument about "who made money on the bailouts".  Burnett also failed to mention that more wealth is now concentrated in fewer banks than before the crash, leaving us more vulnerable than ever.  No mention of the lack of regulation to prevent another disaster.  Burnett gave no voice to the angst of people who lost their homes, their jobs, their pensions while the assholes running Wall Street firms-- the guys who caused the crisis-- are still there.  Only one bank CEO from the major institutions was fired, and he was replaced by his next-in-command.

Do the hipsters have reasons to brood?  Sure.  Does Burnett have a responsibility to understand those reasons?  I suppose not (and feel free, Erin, to giggle; it gives you that much more journalistic credibility.)  Are the hipsters required to have a developed agenda for fixing a completely fucked up system?  No.

I also like her quip at the end of the segment about the protesters wearing Lululemon clothing and using Apple products, implying some evidence of hypocrisy because these companies trade on the NASDAQ.  Since when does Wall Street claim credit for the creativity of Apple, based in Cupertino, CA?

Protesters don't have a valid reason to be angry?  Seriously?  Mark Haines would be ashamed.

Obama's lost opportunity

Printed in it's entirety, from Walker Todd:

Obama’s First 100 DaysWalker ToddOctober 3, 2011

The first 100 days of the Obama Administration were a golden opportunity wasted for ending the financial crisis and laying a base for sustainable growth with less governmental subsidy than we actually experienced. 

First should have been a thoroughgoing stress test of the banks on a mark-to-market basis, excluding derivatives (which should not have been spared a full test in the bankruptcy courts), followed by a recapitalization of banks (but not bank holding companies) proven solvent or nearly solvent on a basis analogous to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s. Deposit insurance should have been limited to protecting the payments system and depositors, not large creditors or bank holding companies. The limited recapitalization under TARP was a weak imitation of 1930s policies. 

Next should have been the stabilization of household finances, with across-the-board, fixed-rate refinancing of borrowers as much as 25 percent below zero equity as long as they could prove capacity to maintain debt service on the new basis. The analogy here is the Home Owners Loan Corporation of the 1930s. Elizabeth Warren's consumer protection agency should have been created on a stand-alone basis and given a two-year emergency powers warrant to restructure all credit terms, other than principal owed, for household and consumer credit. 

Finally, a public works program to create jobs after 13 weeks of unemployment would have been preferable to providing nearly two years of unemployment assistance. Between TARP and the first stimulus bill, nearly $1.5 trillion was appropriated. In addition, the Federal Reserve created nearly $1.2 trillion out of thin air to bail out the banking system, much of it for foreign banks, and about one-half of that assistance was issued after Election Day. 

The agenda described here could have been accomplished for probably not more than one-half of the $2.7 trillion marshaled for the policies actually followed. 
We’re not in the end of the world camp quite yet...

The Obama presidency has shown us more than anything the important leadership of FDR in the last century.  We lived under the protection of Depression-era regulations and programs that have been slowly whittled away over the last two decades.  


The other lesson is that we obviously need more pain.  

My White Sox fantasy: Pete Mackanin

This has been a brutal year as a White Sox for no other reason than the immense expectations that greeted the season a few months ago. NOw the team is in tatters with Ozzie Guillen gone and the payroll full of mediocre performers locked into top salaries. What the Sox need is a total management overhaul. Yes, Ozzie needed to go, but so does Kenny Williams and from interviews it seems apparent that Williams will not be GM next year and likely will get bumped up the role of President of the organization. Fine, he may be an excellent businessman but his hand a picking talent has gone cold-- if ever it was hot in the first place.

Ozzie roaming SS in the 80's

 The emotions of seeing Ozzie go are decidedly mixed. His history with the White Sox is full of positives: a long career, beginning with Rookie of the Year (at left) and peaking with the only World Series win in Chicago for a century. But his demeanor grew as tiresome as was his handling of pitching staff puzzling.  In Ozzie's defense, was he responsible for trading Daniel Hudson and JJ Putz away for Edwin Jackson? Did Ozzie sign huge contracts for struggling Jake Peavey and the incomparably bad Adam Dunn? No and no. And I'll just mention briefly the brainstorm of releasing Aaron Rowand in favor of Brian Anderson in centerfield, and then doubling down by taking on Alex Rios' heavy contract as yet another questionable centerfielder. Maybe none of these transactions could have been foreseen to be miserable, but certainly at some point a GM needs to be held accountable for lack of results. Williams needs to do something else in or out of baseball. Booking National Anthem singers might be more within his skill set.

Pete Mackanin, Brother Rice HS alumnus

Here's my fantasy: The White Sox hire Terry Francona, not as field boss, but as General Manager. Nobody knows the talent around the league better than Tito and he might benefit from one layer of management away from the day-to-day machinations. And the new manager would be current Phillies bench coach Pete Mackanin who has been tutored by greats such as Charlie Manuel and Joe Maddon. The former has been in baseball forever managing dozens of Hall of Famers and the latter has done nothing but bring some of the lowest payrolls of young players into the playoffs year and year. Mackanin is a Southside native who would be a solid addition and supplement Francona's stature. The White Sox ownership is dedicated to winning as evidenced by the consistently high payrolls, and Reinsdorf needs to put better management in place to make it all happen. Who knows, miracles could happen...maybe Dunn can hit .200 next year.

A War Criminal Writes a Book

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What happened to Obama?

One of the most erudite appraisals of the past couple years. From the NYT (read the whole thing, but I'll borrow liberally):

... Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.” A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.

What happened in 2008 was clear evidence to anyone paying attention that Bush de-regulation and Laffer economics was a complete failure. Despite ultra-low taxes and deficit spending we never really recovered from the 2000-01 recession. Job growth sucked, wages stagnated, deficits soared. The fall of 2008 was the crowning blow to allowing markets to self- govern. The election of 2008, IMO, represented the starkest differences in worldviews of any elction in my memory, yet now I cannot imagine how a McCain presidency would be substantively different than the one we have now. Wars, tax cuts, anemic stimulus, lack of accountability for the banksters, even more wealth concentration... this is an effectively Republican administration.

In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

The Democrats tell us that government can solve our problems, yet our current president signs on to defeatist appeasement from the GOP, a party that has always rejoiced in the failure of government. WTF? To paraphrase the Rude Pundit, Obama could never have been elected as a Republican, so if he is a Democrat, if he believes in government, he should start acting like it.

When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.

Maybe it's because Obama is not a child of the civil rights movement, is not progeny of slaves, but if blasted with a firehose or chased by a K-9 force, I could only imagine Obama apologizing for not getting out of the way fast enough. Maybe unfair, but my truthful thought.

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts.) But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling.

[snip]

Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

Double ouch. I'll refrain from psycho-analysis, but... ya.

The average voter is far more worried about jobs than about the deficit, which few were talking about while Bush and the Republican Congress were running it up. The conventional wisdom is that Americans hate government, and if you ask the question in the abstract, people will certainly give you an earful about what government does wrong. But if you give them the choice between cutting the deficit and putting Americans back to work, it isn’t even close.

And I'll add that the average borrower of US debt is little worried about our deficit-- given the record lows in US Treasury interest rates. If our lenders are concerned, as S&P ratings would have us believe, then why do they keep buying our debt?

But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.

And then we get true class war. I'll add that FDR's New deal likely saved us from bloodshed and eventual communism, ala a Bolshevik-type revolution in 1930's America. This next collapse in the US economy is occurring in a nation angry and fully armed. read the whole NYT piece, or better yet, forward it to the President.

FDR: "I welcome their hatred"

No compromises, no "hoping that they'll do the right thing." No 12-dimensional chess.

When presidents were presidents and not faux Jedi Masters.

Stockman: The case against the bank bailouts