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.