Fox News Outrage

I screwed up the DVR last night, and didn't record the Daily Show as I usually do to watch while on the elliptical in the AM, so I was watching morning cable news.  I flipped over to Fox, which I rarely can stand for more than a few minutes, but I try to view what the wingnuts are saying until I break out in hives.

This morning, though, I tuned in just as a panel of 3 men and 1 woman were talking about Libya.  The woman made a statement in support of Obama's policy, and then one of the men said something like "You have to stop listening to everything a good-looking man says to you" (ha ha).  The woman panelist replied "really, you're getting sexist at 6:30 in the morning?" or something of that nature. 

My response was more like "F--- you!" and I changed the channel.  I wonder what the guy's point was going to be.  Guess I'll never know.

It reminds me of the motto of a website that criticizes Fox News (I can't remember which it is): We watch Fox News, so you don't have to

Austerity Budgets & the Confidence Fairy

Paul Krugman's op-ed today is a good read.  Among other points:

Just ask the Irish, whose government — having taken on an unsustainable debt burden by trying to bail out runaway banks — tried to reassure markets by imposing savage austerity measures on ordinary citizens. The same people urging spending cuts on America cheered. “Ireland offers an admirable lesson in fiscal responsibility,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, who said that the spending cuts had removed fears over Irish solvency and predicted rapid economic recovery.

That was in June 2009. Since then, the interest rate on Irish debt has doubled; Ireland’s unemployment rate now stands at 13.5 percent.
And then there’s the British experience. Like America, Britain is still perceived as solvent by financial markets, giving it room to pursue a strategy of jobs first, deficits later. But the government of Prime Minister David Cameron chose instead to move to immediate, unforced austerity, in the belief that private spending would more than make up for the government’s pullback. As I like to put it, the Cameron plan was based on belief that the confidence fairy would make everything all right.
But she hasn’t: British growth has stalled, and the government has marked up its deficit projections as a result.

A quite conservative friend asked me a couple of years ago "what would it take for you to give up your belief in Keynesian economics?".  I responded that we were getting a little test case at that time: the US was doing signficant (though still not enough according to economists) stimulus spending, while much of Europe was pulling back and trying to balance their budgets.  Now of course everything is multi-factorial, and this doesn't constitute ironclad proof, but it's a data point anyway, and one I identified years ago. 

Current trends are pretty clear.  Ireland is a disaster, the UK isn't doing very well, and Germany hasn't recovered as much as we have.  It's not going great in the US, but it's going better than in places where there was less stimulus.

So until I see some pretty good evidence, I'm still a Keynesian.

Hemming and Hawing on Libya

Wow, I'm having a tough time with the Libya attack.  I read about how great it is that we're going in like we are.  Then I read about how disastrously this is all going to end.  It seems increasingly like we've got a choice between bad and worse.

First of all, not that this is a surprise, but President Obama is acting unconstitutionally by launching military action without a congressional vote.  Of course presidents do this all the time now, and there's no reason to believe a liberal president will be any different from a conservative one in holding on to increases in his power established by his predecessors.  Of course congress is free to take up the issue and either declare war, support the action, or even withdraw funding.  They won't do any of those things, of course, ceding this ground to this president.  Can't see how this will change.

But that aside, is it the right policy?  I think it's clear that we've forestalled the massacre of hundreds or thousands of protesters along with lots of innocent bystanders.  That's certainly a good thing. 

But Qadafi doesn't appear to be going anywhere.  The rebels are completely disorganized, fractured, leaderless, and untrained.  If this is a civil war, I don't see how the rebels win unless the army defects, and there's no sign of that happening.  Qadafi is willing to do what some other leaders in the Arab Spring were not- get really brutal.  So that's why I used the word "forestalled" in the paragraph above- I don't think we've secured the populace from a massacre that's still in their future.  How do we do that?  I don't see any way other than conquest.  And when western countries conquer Muslim ones, the inevitable result is that they hate us eventually.  It's a quagmire we're not going to get out of.

Now I thought at the time that Clinton's failure to intervene in Rwanda in the 1990s was a terrible abdication of basic human values.  But in that case we wouldn't have had to worry about the reaction of the whole Arab world.  They don't want our troops around. 
So here I am.  The No-Fly Zone in and of itself is OK, but soon we're going to have two choices:

1. Escalate our involvement and eventually occupy a 3rd Muslim country
2. Leave the country after inadequately downgrading Qadafi's forces, and then watch him brutally retake the country

It's no good.  We have to disengage.  It's going to be horrible, and many will accuse the US of failing to do enough to promote Democracy.  The problem is that the alternative is even worse.  I'll take #2.

I really hope I'm wrong about this one.

Justifications of a Youth Sports Politician

Following up on my recent post on youth sports, I want to tackle the issue of politics in local youth sports organizations.

I've been involved on the Boards of two youth sports organizations in my town, and I've coached both sports for almost ten years.  I constantly hear about people in town pulling their children from various sports due to the "politics" of the Board.  I don't know how often I've heard someone pontificating about the outrageous unfairness of his/her child being blackballed from the travel team due to a political decision, while a gaggle of other parents nods in understanding, often contributing their own unjustices to a sympathetic audience.

And it's often quite true!  So as I entered leadership roles, I was determined to use objective decision-making processes in choosing travel teams.  I was also determined to make sure coaches were chosen based on one criteria only: Who will provide the best experience for the kids.  Nobody "deserves" a coaching position based on what he's done for the organization or (obviously) based on his relationship with the leadership, or because he's coached that team in past years.

So that's what I did.  On more than one occasion I replaced an incumbent head coach with someone who hadn't done it before, in response to complaints from families of kids on the team, or because a better candidate presented himself.  Each time the incumbent coach has gone completely ballistic, accusing me of destroying him for some nefarious purpose.  Sometimes "politics" is thrown out as the reason for my transgression.  But of course what's really happening is that the incumbent coach is requesting that politics be used to tip the scales, in his favor.

And just the fact that the coach gets so outraged about the stealing of his birthright is itself confirmation that he's in it for the wrong reasons.  He may say he wants to be part of his kid's experience, etc, etc.  But I've rarely told a coach he couldn't assist on the team- there's plenty of opportunity for him to be involved just as much- he just wouldn't be in control, which is what it's really about.

When a father (or mother- in my town it's virtually all fathers) commits to coach a team sport, he agrees to coach and provide a positive experience to all the kids on his team, not just his own. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it's a sacred trust.  I want coaches to bend over backwards to make sure they're not favoring their own, whether their own is the best or worst player on the team (when the best player on the team is coached by his father, by the way, I think it's bad for the kid- he's better off being pushed by someone else).

I mentioned in my last post on this topic that I'm more of a fit for coaching Rec level sports.  But I have kids who are travel-level players.  Fortunately, there are a number of great coaches in town who provide excellent competitive experiences to my kids, much better than I could provide.  Why wouldn't I want them doing the coaching?  For some of these experiences I've helped out, been involved with my children. learned a lot about the sport, and watched my kid grow athletically and socially.  I'm really glad I never named myself to coach one of these teams.
Stay tuned for my next youth sports post, about "politics" in the choosing of players for travel teams.

Random Youth Sports Post

I am involved in youth sports in my town, as those of you who know me are well aware.  I pontificate often in person about this, but since this is my blog I thought I'd put this down on the intertubes.

Youth sports has two major purposes:

1. Provide recreational fun for all children regardless of ability.  Teach kids healthy living through good exercise, the importance of teamwork, the value of hard work and pushing through adversity.  Make friends.  Create a tighter community. 
2. Develop the top players to be the best that they can be.  Build the high school varsity teams of the future.

The tough part is that these two purposes are sometimes in conflict.  They require very different programming and ethoses.  Specifically, the coaching requires very different approaches.  A "Recreational" coach is focused on the fun; winning isn't a big deal, everyone gets to play plenty, and the tone is relaxed.  A "Travel" coach is tougher, more of a disciplinarian, has to know the game well and be able to teach at a high level.  The Travel coach can and should use playing time as a motivator, and should be focused on winning to a degree.

I'm more of a Rec coach by nature- I think I'm pretty good at setting up the right atmosphere for a Rec team. But that doesn't mean that I think the atmosphere I set up is right for higher level players.  I have children who can play some sports at a high level, and I'm glad they have coaches for their travel teams who are more intense than I am.  That's what they need to grow both as athletes in their sports and as people striving to reach their maximum potential.

One problem in youth sports is when a guy (at least in my town they're always male) displays the attitude and intensity of a Travel Coach while working at the Rec level.  This is exacerbated when the coach doesn't know much about his sport, so his intensity is often misdirected and he blames the wrong people for mistakes.  [To be clear, it's totally fine for a coach to be relatively ignorant of the intricacies of the game at the Rec level, as long as he is self-aware enough to understand this and coach accordingly.]

Another problem in youth sports is that many organizations get too focused on the Travel players and give Rec players the message that they're not welcome in the organization.  I'm proud that the organization I'm most heavily involved with keeps many of its Rec players playing up through middle school, while surrounding towns seem to have similar players drop out early.  On the other hand, those towns have strong Travel programs, stronger than ours.  I'd like to think we can do both well, but lately that hasn't been the case.

We'll keep trying though.  Since this is a politics blog, maybe next time I'll post about the issue of "politics" in youth sports.

What Shared Sacrifice Means to Conservatives

Depressing stuff from ThinkProgress here about how many states with conservative leaders are now combinging corporate and upper income tax cuts with slashed spending on things like Medicaid and education.  If I keep hearing these folks talk about the need for "shared sacrifice" while the rich get richer I may go on a shooting spree.

I guess the theory is that upper income tax cuts will be so successful in boosting the economy out of the doldrums that we'll create millions of jobs that will totally make up for all these cuts.  And if that really worked, and the Laffer Curve was real, I'd be thrilled with such a cost-free way to make everything better.  Unfortunately, we have to live in the Real World, where tax cuts are good for the rich in the short-term and terrible for everybody else in every term.

Stay tuned though- let's try to track how those states do in the coming years compared to those that rely on more traditional models.

More on Bradley Manning

I work in a psychiatric hospital, in which we regularly treat people who are truly suicidal.  But listening to the conditions under which Bradley Manning is being confined smacks not of protection from self-harm, but of cruel and unusual punishment.  He spent numerous nights completely naked, allegedly for fear that he would harm himself with his clothing, before eventually being given a smock of some kind.  He's being awakened regularly, he is in his cell for 23 hours a day with nobody to talk to, and his reading glasses have been confiscated.  And remember, he has not been convicted of any crime (not that that even matters- we don't do this to convicted people either).

If my hospital did any of this stuff to our suicidal patients, the state regulatory agency would sanction us severely and people would be fired.  And Manning hasn't made any suicidal threats.

The military is literally trying to drive Manning insane.  It's obscene.  And it's completely on Obama.

Libyan Indecision

I'm finding myself in the same frame of mind that I was in sometime in 2002 during the runup to the Iraq War. I find it hard to take a strong stand on these types of foreign intervention.

On one hand, we have a humanitarian crisis brewing, with Qadafi using American-made weapons to kill his own people who are making legitimate democratic claims.  On top of that, the guy is a certified nut-case, responsible for a great deal of terrorism back in the day including the downing of Pan AM 103 over Lockerbie.  Although he has come back to the community of nations a bit since then, he's obviously not one of the Good Guys.

On the other hand, bringing ground troops into Muslim countries hasn't been going so well lately, and it's really not clear what sort of strategy we'd have.  We could just do the No-Fly Zone, but Qadafi could still defeat the rebels with ground troops.  Or there could be a stalemate and long civil war.  If we put boots on the ground in a really big country, I don't see how we get out.

On the other other hand, the Arab League has asked the UN to do something, so there's much more legitimacy this time than there was in Iraq.

On the othe other other hand, there's no guarantee that Qadafi's replacement will be any less crazy than he is.

I'm out of hands, and I still don't know what to do.  I guess this is why governments tend to dither sometimes- none of the options look appealing.

Sickening

I'm going to second the thoughts of Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks leaker.  The Obama administration is acting exactly as badly as the Bush adminstration did on civil liberties.

Bradley Manning is an American citizen who has not been convicted of a crime.  He is being held in solitary confinement in a cell 23 hours a day, stripped naked every night "for his protection". 

Now let me be clear: if Manning indeed leaked classified government information to WikiLeaks, he deserves to be prosecuted, sentenced, and jailed for his crime.  I don't want our soldiers dumping information to foreign sources (or anyone else), and I'm all for throwing the book at this guy.

But when Amnesty International is calling for protests over the treatment of a US citizen being held awaiting trial by the US government, something is really wrong.  I guess it's now a bipartisan consensus that inhumane treatment of prisoners is just fine since we're under attack by Islamic fundamentalists.

Sickening.  I think what's most sickening is that there's hardly a peep out there from anyone in the maintream press about this issue.

Labor Strife in the NFL

I'm a pretty big sports fan, though politics has stolen some of that energy in recent years, but of course labor strife is where politics meets sports today.

It's tough to feel sorry for professional athletes in the 21st century- everyone in the NFL makes more money than I'll ever dream of- but the NFL have managed to make me do it.  I guess football is like any other business in one way: no matter how much money you're making, it's never enough.  So football owners are making truckloads of money, but many of them used that to invest in ancillary businesses that didn't do too well in the recession (my hometown Patriots built a very ambitious shopping center next to the stadium, which is like a ghost town most of the time).  It seems like players would be willing to make concessions if they can have proof that owners are really losing the money they say they're losing, but of course the owners won't let the players see the books.  What else do we need to know about their teams' profitability?

Football players have short careers, and many of them have broken bodies when it's over.  They had a labor contract that allowed everyone to make plenty of money.  For the owners that's not enough.

I have something good to say about George W Bush

Here it is:

In light of Peter King's apparent desire to make sure American Muslims know how much the rest of us hate and fear them, I can see now that President Bush's 2001 insistence on blaming terrorists, but not Islam, for the events of 9/11, was courageous.  Maybe couragous isn't quite the right word- he was universally praised for taking this stand at that time, and didn't have to pay a political price the way a liberal might have paid, as the liberal would have been attacked from the Right by bigots.

Why do I say that?  Well, look at our American polity now.  Liberals are in charge, assiduously trying to differentiate between Islamic extremists and the Muslim religion, demonstrating that American is an inclusive place- in other words, the exact same thing the Bush administration did.  But now you have Peter King and others on the Right warning that the liberals are too soft on Islam.

With all that said, however, GWB deserves credit for this particular gut-level decision.  He apparently doesn't carry the kind of hatred in his heart that we see from many on the Right today.

Wisconsin- Republicans Win

I have to agree with Ezra Klein on this: Republicans appear to have won (assuming it was legal to vote so quickly on the bill, but in that case they could presumably just wait a few days and do it right).  They figured out a legal loophole that allows them to pass the union-busting bill without a quorum.

In my quest to be consistent on this blog and in my thinking, I want to go on record saying that Democrats did something legal, leaving town to deny the quorum, and Republicans found a way around the problem, also legally.  All's fair in love and war- and politics.  Next step is for Democrats to successfully recall a bunch of politicians in the aftermath and gain control of the state.  Not sure how realistic that is, but recalls are legal too.

Over the Cliff Politics

I was thinking today about our current political climate and trying to think back to 2008 and what I thought then about the Republican party.  After McCain's defeat, it seemed that the GOP was going completely crazy in a hard turn to the Right.  Many of us on the Left were gloating about how the next decade would belong to us because independents couldn't possibly follow the Republican party over the cliff into total Supply Side economics, neocon foreign policy, extremist anti-abortion and anti-gay policies, etc.

Wrong again I guess.  It seems that the Right turn has worked out pretty well for them (I try not to stab myself in the eye while thinking about how the Republicans can create the worst recession in recent history, get voted out of office for it, and then come back only two years later to clean up the mess, but I digress).  So I have to change my position- the Republican party is going to be in full power again some day, perhaps as soon as 2012, even though their policy positions would make Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman turn over (to the Left) in their graves.

So what next?  I believe that a few years of bringing the Full Crazy to the economy ought to make things bad enough in a hurry and bring the Left back around to victory.  That's a pretty hollow win, though- they get to screw everything up, and we have to clean up the mess, which they somehow get to keep blaming on us.  And around we go.....

Morning TV Pundits Driving Me Crazy

Watching Morning Joe today as I get dressed, listening to Pat Buchanan and crew talk about the deficit, and I just keep wanting to throw something through the television as hear all the misinformation:

• Yes, it's a good point that non-defense discretionary spending is only 12% of the budget and can't be used solely to solve the budget deficit.  I'm glad that point is now made all the time.  And then pundits rightfully point out that Defense spending has to be confronted.  But then we hear about "entitlements"- we have to "do something about Medicare and Social Security".  Actually, Medicare and Social Security are very different issues and need to be discussed separately.  Social Security is a simple program with a simple funding scheme- all we have to do raise revenues (in some way) or cut benefits (in some way) moderately and the problem will be easily solved.  Medicare is the real problem in the long term, which is why it's really about health care.  So I'd like to see pundits hold the budget hawks' feet to the fire on their plans for health care spending, because that's where the real challenge is.
• Nobody talks about tax increases as part of the solution to the budget problem, except when trying to draw a false equivalency.  Here's Joe Scarborough in Politico today:

There are elements of the GOP spending plan that cause me great concern. The belief of some on the right that America can balance the budget by cutting education, infrastructure, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and home heating assistance to the poor is tantamount to budgetary witchcraft. Also, enough with the argument that eliminating earmarks will balance the budget. That is as ignorant as liberals believing that all problems will be solved if we raise taxes and cut defense. Those left-wing “cure-all’s” won’t solve our structural debt problem any more than some Republicans’ plan to simply slash domestic spending.

Yeah, that causes me concern too, but look at how he characterizes liberals: they think you can balance the budget by raising taxes and cutting spending!  Whereas conservatives believe we can balance it by cutting just discretionary spending.  One side is pretty close to accurate, the other side is living in Wonderland.

Alright, got that off my chest, off to work now.

A little Health Care reminder

An email correspondent wrote me:

You still believe that ACE [sic- he means ACA] is going to rein in health care costs??? Knowing that one can make numbers do anything one wants them to, and that all the ACE calculations are based on hypothesis and not fact, I find it unbelievable that you keep espousing the party line. Granted ACE will be affordable for those who don’t pay taxes and who don’t have healthcare, but for those of who do and have to pay for those who don’t????

Here's my response:

I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of any numbers, but just because a study (or, studies) by the CBO supports a liberal position doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong either.


Here's what is indisputably true: the ACA does something to slow the growth of health costs in Medicare. It may not be enough. It may be overturned by a future congress. It may be swamped by unrelated increases from a now-unthought of corner. But it will definitely introduce cost controls that would not be there without it. That's why the Republicans were able to gin up senior citizens with misleading stories about how their Medicare would be cut- because there actually are Medicare cuts.

I'm continually frustrated by the Right's refusal to understand something: they reason that because the ACA raises health care spending by extending it to the uninsured, it can't possibly reduce the deficit. But for those of us who took 1st grade Math, I would point out that spending can be offset by increases in revenue- the ACA raises revenues through various taxes that pay for the increased benefits. So to criticize the ACA for raising our taxes is perfectly legit- it does. To criticize it for increasing the deficit is just wrong- it doesn't.

It's like conservatives have decided that spending and deficits are the same thing. Similarly, they scream about out of control spending even though the current deficits were largely caused by the Bush tax cuts, not spending.

The Return of Depression Economics

That's the title of Paul Krugman's book that I just read (thanks bro!).  Obviously, I'm a huge Krugman fan, in good measure because he writes about economics in a way that's very accessible to the Great Unwashed like me.  His blog is an important daily read.

 

And the book is great.  Some important points from it (and from his blog's regular reading- I can't separate them):

• Many of us want to see bank runs, currency messes, and sinking economies as a morality lesson every time it happens.  And sometimes that's justified- it's pretty clear that Greece's mess was largely created by politicians' refusal there to make any hard choices.  But in other places the lesson just doesn't fit.  The Asian financial crisis of the 1990s started because of a currency run in Thailand, and then jumped from country to country there for no good reason other than they were all in the same geographic region.  Indonesia and South Korea did nothing wrong in their planning, but they were hammered by a contagious run on Asian currency and experienced bad recessions as a result. 
• All data points to the fact that the current worldwide recession was set off by the US real estate bubble, and has resulted in the freezing of credit markets as panic spread.  The problem now is that there's not enough demand for goods, so companies aren't hiring.  Government needs to step in to start spending during such times.  While excessive government borrowing in normal times hurts the economy by driving up interest rates, that's sort of a ridiculous problem to think about now, with interest rates extraordinarily low.  It's just not crowding out private borrowing.
• Other countries have it really bad when their currencies come under pressure.  Speculation in the currencies markets cause perceptions of problems to become self-fulfilling.  Figuring out when to devalue, when to peg currencies to the dollar or euro, or when to allow currency to float without intervention is really hard to figure out, and sometimes there is just no solution to the problem.  We're lucky in the US not to have this problem, anyway.
• It seems like the same movie plays over and over again when it comes to the banking sector: 
• Banks fail because they're leveraged too riskily
• Government has to bail them out to stop the economy from going into Depression
• Regulations are passed to force banks to leverage less so it won't happen again
• New institutions arise that perform similar functions, but aren't technically the same, so they're not under the same rules as the old banks
• The new institutions start leveraging more, resulting in fabulous profits when times are good.
• Wall Street assures us that it's a New Age, we've finally figured this out, and big profits are here to stay
• Something goes wrong, because ultimately if you leverage a lot and something happens, your bank fails.  And something always happens at some point.
• The new, bank-like institutions fail, and the cycle starts again

Anyway, I highly recommend the book.