it’s fun, when you get cynical about politics, to hear someone like Ron Paul speaking. I don’t agree with him 100%, but he’s been more right than another Republican.
Even better that the Rominator gets annoyed.
All posts by Mike
The Problem
NYT has a great article on infrastructure problems. This isn’t just a Republican thing and it’s not a spending thing:
Despite historic highs in transportation spending, the political muscle of lawmakers, rather than dire need, has typically driven where much of the money goes. That has often meant construction of new, politically popular roads and transit projects rather than the mundane work of maintaining the worn-out ones.
Further, transportation and engineering experts said, lawmakers have financed a boom in rail construction that, while politically popular, has resulted in expensive transit systems that are not used by a vast majority of American commuters.
….
Of the $12 million secured for the state, $10 million is slated for a new 40-mile commuter rail line to Minneapolis, called the Northstar. The remaining $2 million is divided among a new bike and walking path and a few other projects, including highway work and interchange reconstruction.
The $286 billion federal transportation legislation passed by Congress in 2005 included more than 6,000 earmarks, which amounted to blatant gifts to chosen districts, including the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in rural Alaska (that earmark was later removed after a political uproar).
I would also point out that if the government weren’t spending its time running (and ruining) health care. managing charities, engaging in corporate welfare and bossing us around about what’s on TV, they might have more time and money to focus on infrastructure.
It’s not just road either.
This is Reform?
Paul Jacob has the lowdown on the landmark earmark reform bill.
Do the media ever call the politicians on their lies? Could they just once question what they’re told instead of parroting it?
Etho-Scamed
Rolling Stone — yes, Rolling Stone — has the goods on the scam job that is ethanol.
Read the whole thing. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that corn ethanol is a disaster waiting to happen. It wouldn’t be there first time we’d have a disaster because our government thought it could solve problems better than the marketplace.
Sunday Sunday SUNDAY Linkorama
of where all the highway money in Minnesota has gone. People are blaming the Governnor for not raising taxes. In the meantime, the state spent $1.5 billion on bailing out the Teachers’ Retirement Fund and building a stadium for the Twins.
Oh, that liberal media! You know things are bad when the NYT’s reporting looks like a position paper from the Democratic party.
Bonds on Bonds
Congratulations to Bonds on passing Henry Aaron. And good on the fans of San Diego for not getting swallowed in the controversy. And shame on the commissioner for putting his hands in his pockets and issuing a press release that focused on steroids. Selig needs to make up his mind – is the steroid testing working or not?
The press should be ashamed of themselves too. ESPN is running an article about how Bonds’ teammates are alleging steroid use (actually, they’ve now changed it to “teammate” singular since it’s only one guy).
They guy in question is Brian Johnson, who was a teammate of Bonds’ in 1997-1998. Of course, “Game of Shadows” claims Bonds started using steroids in 1999. And Johnson doesn’t say anything substantive, just makes vauge references to “cloak-and-dagger” societies.
But since he was a teammate of Bonds and says something about steroids, we can conclude that Bonds’ teammates are accusing him of steroid use.
No matter what, Bonds is one of the greatest players in baseball history and it’s been a privelege to wach him. He is now the first man to hold the single-season and career homerun mark since Babe Ruth. I have no idea what kind of person he is. And I’m unwilling to judge him based on the word of a bunch of SMTs.
In the meantime, Diamond Mind does a fascinating projection of what Aaron would have done today and conclude he would have hit about 11 more homers. Money quote:
Perhaps the most significant feature of these results is that, halfway into his “sim” career, Aaron was 50 home runs behind his actual career pace. The reason is that the 1950s, when Aaron began his career, actually were more offensively-oriented than the 1980s, when Bonds began playing. Aaron begins making up the home run difference when his seasons from the 1960s, at which time pitching was more dominant, are shifted to the homer-happy 1990s. He finally passes his actual career total when his twilight 1970s seasons are shifted to the new millennium.
…
Aaron’s best real-life single-season HR total was 47 in 1971, which was replayed as 2001 in our simulations. It so happens that 2001 also was the season when Bonds broke the single-season record with 73 homers.
Of course, they don’t realize that Bonds is evil and so anything they say is going to be denigrate and ignored. Why if Aaron played today, he’d have hit 2000 home runs!
Negativism
A friend who rarely visits the blog did so yesterday to see what my take was on the Minnesota disaster since we both used to live there. She commented that my posting these days seems angry, almost to the point of tinfoil hattery.
Fair enough. I guess when it comes to politics, I am a bit on the angry side. The last six years have been a revelation. I wish I could be like a Democrat and just be happy that the man in the White House has my favorite letter after his name, no matter what policies he engages in. But I just can’t.
It’s a simple fact that I, like most conservative libertarians, am a man without a party. The two parties are fighting over whether we will have big government or really big government. I give you the SCHIP Helen Lovejoy program expansion.
But I’m not an angry person. Most people who know me and talk to me on a daily basis would probably describe me as easy-going. The reason is that politics, while a large part of my blogging, is a very tiny part of my life. So for Friday, I’ll go through seven things that occupy lots of my time about which I am not angry at all.
And football, college and pro, is just a month away, which means Sue will become a football widow on weekends (as well as baseball playoff widow on weekdays). I can’t wait
We often don’t see this. Progress is invisible; problems looms large. We always see the present through blood-colored glasses. But just to focus on one issue, look at the environment. Yes, global warming is a concern. But when I was born, you couldn’t breath the air of LA, Lake Erie was dead, acid rain was growing and cars and industry were spewing filth. Today, lead is banned, rivers are cleaner, Lake Erie is palatable, the population bomb failed to explode, food is so plentiful obesity is becoming a global problem, cars run clean, trees are more numerous in America than in recorded history, acid rain has declined.
Global warming is just about the only environmental concern left. Well, there are worries about overfishing and rain forests. But a lot of these are overblown or will be handled.
I have immense faith in humanity. I know that we will solve the problems that are presented to us and move forward. Obstructive, interfering, ideology-addled government can only slow things down. Human progress is a force far too powerful for the idiots to hold back. Even if our civilization were to collapse, we would pick up the pieces and be back on our feet in a scant few centuries.
I know that humans will ony day stretch out to the stars (notice, I didn’t say Americans), that AIDS will be cured, disease conquered, poverty eradicated. We’ve already come so far – the lifestyle we enjoy is something that could not have been imagined 100 years ago. And a hundred years from now people will forget about the problems we solved and get bent out of shape because nuclear fusion is making all our voices squeak and those aliens from Alpha Centauri are taking our jobs.
So there it is, my Friday dose of optimism. Tomorrow I’ll be back to my comfortable curmudgeonly ways.
WWII. NO!
Another shitwit conservative tries to tell us Iraq=WWII because apparently they haven’t gotten the memo that we’re dealing with an internecine guerilla war, not a conventional one. But their comparison unintentionally makes the case against the President:
But during those months Churchill had been busy firing or re-assigning the generals who were not bringing victories: including Gens. Wavell, Dill, Auchinleck, Ritchie, Norrie, Brooke-Popham, Messervy and Corbett — among others.
Finally he found a general who could win — Bernard Law Montgomery.
Funny how Churchill (and Lincoln) didn’t need to wait until they lost an election to realize they had the wrong guys in charge.
I wonder whether, perhaps, in Gen. Petraeus President Bush has finally found his Gen. Montgomery. And whether Petraeus’s new strategy and success at beating al Qaeda in Iraq and growing success against the Mahdi Army — may be his El Alamein.
Look, Petraeus is fantastic. If we’d had him in charge earlier, things might have gone differently. But I’m becoming concerned about the messianic attitude the Right has adopted toward him. He is not a miracle worker; he’s a good general. He and Gates are a vast improvement over the last pair of buffoons. But the surgery may be coming too late to save the patient.
To build on Blankley’s anology, this would be like Churchill switching to Montgomery after the Nazis were in London – after insisting for years that all was well. But now I’m buying into this Iraq=WW2 bullshit.
Of course, there are vast differences between WWII and the current Iraq Theatre of the War on Terror (ITWOT).
Gee, ya think?
For one thing, in 1942, the British Parliamentarians were not proposing bringing the British troops home and surrendering to Hitler and the Japanese. They merely thought another leader (perhaps Sir Stafford Cripps) might better lead Britain to victory.
Yes. This is the only difference. Iraq is a globe-spanning superpower with massive industrial might fighting a conventional war. If we leave now, Iraqi troops will be in Cleveland by 2009.
Were they more patriotic than the current defeatists in Washington? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was just that they understood (at least by that terrible summer of 1942) that for England, it was victory or death — while for many of the Washington defeatists in this dismal summer of ’07 they are under the delusion that America in all its might and glory can simply surrender to al Qaeda without potentially mortal consequences.
To quote Robert, jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, is this guy serious?! Is he mental? Does he not realize that Al Quaeda is only one of the factions in Iraq — one that didn’t exist until we went there? Does he really think Iraq sliding into chaos is going to be the same as Nazi marching in Trafalgar Square? Or that our getting out of a civil war is the equivalent of “surrender”?
Look, you can make the argument we need to win Iraq. You can make the argument that we can win in Iraq. But you need to lay the World War II comparisons aside. History did not begin in 1939 and end in 1945. There are thousands of historical comparisons that are better here. Just off the top of my head, I could say better comparisons might be Vietnam or Korea; the Occupation of Haiti; numerous British occupations including Afghanistan; our recent experience in the Balkans; various Roman occupations; maybe even the Greek invasion of Sicily.
None of these comparisons are very good, but they are far more accurate than World War II. The problem is that the “conservatives” see everything in terms of World War II. Good vs. evil instead of good vs. evil vs. evil vs. evil. A straight-forward conflict instead of a non-linear ethnic strife. A villain with distinct facial hair instead of many villains with different agendas. And, to be honest, they’re mostly thinking in terms of movies and TV shows instead of history. (Remember the “lessons” of 24?)
And if we are going to go with the World War II analogy, Bush is closer to Chamberlain than to Churchill. Churchill said he had nothing to offer but blood toil tears and sweat; Bush tells us all is well and offers us tax breaks. Churchill changed commanders when they lost; Bush stuck with Rummy until he lost an election. Churchill knew he needed to get the hell out of Dunkirk; Bush would say this was surrendering to the enemy. Churchill acknowledged bad news and was honest with the British public, whose resolved he trust; Bush thinks Americans are a bunch of weak-kneed morons and constantly insists that the only thing going wrong in Iraq is that we have Democrats and a media at home.
Bush isn’t even in the same league as Churchill. He’s not even in the same God-damn sport. I’m not even certain he’s the same species.
Again, there are some Dems who would love for us to lose in Iraq for political reasons, sure. But most of the people opposing our continuing presence are genuinely concerned that we are throwing lives and treasure into an unwinnable situation. Fuck the historical analogies – let’s deal with the situation we have in the present.
Cherry Picking
That’s what it’s called when you take one fact or a few facts in isolation and attempt to prove something. Fred Thompson was doing it below with global warming; and the entire the Right Wing Echosphere is doing it with the death toll in Iraq, which was at an eight month low in July. Rush Limbaugh was going on about this non-stop yesterday.
Of course, no word on if Iraqi sectarian violence declined as well.
The problem that many people — left and right — seem unable to grasp is that one data point does not create a trend. Trends are trends, i.e., more than one data point. The violence in Iraq has been trending up for years. A one-month pause does not mean anything, especially since past Julys have also been relatively calm.
I hope they are right and things are getting better. But this could just be a blip. Let’s not go around screaming success because Iraq is “only” as bloody as it was in November, when it was so bad President Bush decided to call for the surge in the first place. Oh wait, that was the bloodshed at the ballot box.
If the trend continues in August, then we have progress. But if the violence ratchets back up, as it has every August, I hope the RWE will acknowledge it.
Fat chance.
There are some encouraging signs in Iraq. Let’s hope they continue. But let’s also remember that it didn’t have to be this way. And that the surge was only supported after the GOP lost an election.
Collapse!
Two thoughts on yesterday’s bridge collapse.
I lived in Minnesota for four years and took 35W back and forth to school. I know the Minnesotans. They’ll mourn, buckle down, rebuild the damn bridge and move forward. They won’t get into the morass of, say, Ground Zero and never rebuild anything.
Fred vs. The Facts
Fred Thompson gets smarmy on global warming. For the record, not all of the planets in the solar system are warming. And the idea that global warming is caused by the Sun has been recently disproved.
Next!
Artsy Fartsy Deadsy
Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni both die in a week? Man, somewhere a lot of film critics are weeping. Now is as good a time as any to remember my Ingmar Bergman Rule — a critic’s review of an Ingmar Bergman film typically tells you more about the critic than it does about the film.
Bonded
I’m not sure what to think about Barry Bonds breaking the home run record. I realize that 90% of America has decided he is a cheating scumbag who should be shot. But I’ve learned to be leery when everyone is agreeing on something. I think Joe Sheehan has the best perspective:
While it’s an unpopular viewpoint, I stand by my argument that Barry Bonds has not failed a test for PEDs in the four years that MLB has had a program. His testimony before a grand jury—subsequently leaked illegally, and to his detriment—was that he did take substances that were identified later as steroids, but he was told at the time that they were not. His testimony has been interpreted as parsing by some, perjury by others, although statements before the same grand jury by others have been granted full faith and credit. That grand jury inspired two reporters to write a book about Bonds, sourced largely by the illegally-obtained testimony, as well as the accounts of people around Bonds, at least one of whom, ex-mistress Kimberly Bell, can comfortably be described as “scorned.”
Baseball now has a small underclass of players—real players, not anonymous minor leaguers or fringe guys—who have tested positive for performance-enhancing substances, been suspended for that use, and returned to play. In virtually every case, those players go about their business without anyone caring. They’re cheered at home for their good deeds, and ignored on the road. The Indians benefit from the bullpen work of Rafael Betancourt, by far their best reliever this season, and a big reason for their contending status. He’s not reviled in Detroit or Minnesota as a steroid user, not booed and forced to endure the taunts of “Cheater!” or worse. No one cares. The same can be said for Juan Rincon, who is essentially the Twins’ version of Betancourt.
Need more evidence that the game is more than willing to forgive and forget? Ryan Franklin tested positive in 2005, serving a 10-game suspension for his guilt. Last month, the Cardinals signed him to a two-year contract worth $5 million. Last winter, the Mets’ Guillermo Mota was suspended for the first 50 games of 2007 off a positive test; a month later, the Mets signed him to a two-year contract for, again, $5 million.
Add it up, and baseball has lavished more than $30 million on players who have been found guilty of steroid use after their use has come to light. These players don’t occupy some gray area, don’t inspire “did he or didn’t he?” discussions on sports radio or the talking-head TV shows. They cheated, they got caught, served their penalties, and went on to earn millions playing baseball without being held up as examples of all that is wrong with America.
The central truth about the “steroid issue” is this: average people don’t care about PED use. They care about tearing down those who they do not like, protecting those they do, and making themselves feel superior in the process.
I’d also add that Jason Giambi has apparently recovered his image.
I agree with Joe 100%. Read the whole thing — it’s not behind the BP firewall. The baseball ownership were happy to ignore the steroid issue when they thought it was doing the game good. Once the fans cottoned on, they threw one of the best players in history to the wolves.
There has been some chatter about the stark racial difference in the perception of Bonds. Blacks are a lot less judgemental than white and a lot more supportive. Not being black, I can’t speak for them. But the imputation that white fans don’t like Bonds because he’s “an angry black man” is frivolous and ignorant.
Fans have never liked angry players. Ty Cobb was extremely unpopular. Ted Williams — when he as a player — was on the most disliked men in baseball history. Rogers Hornsby was unpopular. Richie Allen, Hal Chase and pretty much the entire lineup of the 1890’s Orioles were unpopular. Pete Rose has become steadily more and more unpopular as his scumbaggery and bitterness come to the fore.
I’ll agree that Bonds has a worse reputation than he deserves. The media hate him and have made the fans do likewise. But he hasn’t exactly been helping himself.
In the meantime, this weekend saw the induction into the Hall of Fame of two of the most popular players in baseball history – Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken. And their popularity had a lot to do with their attitudes.
Personally, I always thought Bonds had a chance at Aaron’s record — even before 2003. I know there is little to no evidence that steroids actually help someone hit for more power. I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. And I’m willing to acknowledge that he will be the first man to hold both single-season and career HR records since in 47 years.
Henry Aaron was one of the great players in baseball history and a great man. The fact that Bonds will have hit more career home runs will not change that.
Miscarriage of Justice
I don’t know where the time goes. I have a long post on healthcare — two actually — that I’ve been meaning to write for a week. Oh well. I got a great comment today on Bush’s death penalty record. I tend to be a law and order type guy. I think law and order is where civlization starts. If government can not establish it, what’s the point of having free speech?
But that doesn’t mean I can sit around when gross miscarriages of justice – mostly in pursuit of the War on Drugs – go on. To wit:
A Justice Department lawyer had argued that federal authorities couldn’t be held responsible for the results of a state prosecution and had no duty to share information with the officials who prosecuted Limone, Salvati, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco.
He’s a Justice Department lawyer so he has to take the position of his client. But would it have been that hard, maybe after the first twenty years to break their cover?
Don’t we have something better to do? We have limited resources for law enforcement. Can’t we spend them finding murderers, thieves and rapists instead of jailing pot growers, innocent men and pill poppers?