Category: Issues of the Day

In defense of Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, jaywalkers, and all the other scofflaws that make America great

Bill James begins:

First of all, I have absolutely no doubt that, had steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs existed during Babe Ruth’s career, Babe Ruth would not only have used them, he would have used more of them than Barry Bonds. I don’t understand how anyone can be confused about this. The central theme of Babe Ruth’s life, which is the fulcrum of virtually every anecdote and every event of his career, is that Babe Ruth firmly believed that the rules did not apply to Babe Ruth.

It’s a provocative essay really more about crime and America than it is about baseball.

Highly recommended.

What he said

Matt Taibbi

An excerpt:

Forget about people actually supporting unions in a labor disagreement: they apparently don’t even want to see them, not if it’s going to delay a football game by three whole seconds. There were actually arguments across the media landscape to the effect that NFL players were out of line bringing their labor disagreement into our living rooms, the implication being that any display of union activity is somehow unseemly or ( I love this) selfish. We have a whole reality-show culture celebrating the cause of people eating centipedes and stabbing each other in the back for cash prizes and fame, but football players quietly showing union solidarity is tasteless. If you can explain that one to me, please don’t hesitate to write in.

Redux post of the day

From two years ago. Figures may need slight updating, but basics remain.

Primer on deficit and debt

What’s the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt?

The federal deficit is the amount the federal government goes in the red during each fiscal year (October 1 through September 30). This fiscal year it is expected to be around $407,000,000,000 (that’s $407 billion).

The federal debt is the total amount from all the deficits (and surpluses, such as FY 2000) over the years. It gets higher most years because the deficit is greater than the amount of debt that is paid off during the year. The debt at present is about $9,650,000,000,000 (that’s $9.65 trillion).

To whom is the debt owed?

About half is owed to the government itself. The Social Security Trust Funds, for example, hold about $2.24 trillion (23%) of the federal debt.

About a quarter of the federal debt is owed to foreign governments and institutions, foremost Britain ($280B), Japan ($584B) and China ($504B). And we owe Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria about $170B combined. (Guess where they got that money to invest in our Treasury securities.)

The remaining quarter is owed to the American public through mutual funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, etc., in the form of treasury securities — treasury bills, bonds, notes. If you are in a money market mutual fund or have savings bonds, you are carrying part of the federal debt.

Interest paid all those creditors this fiscal year is about $455 billion.

The line of the day

“[F]rom 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent.”

Timothy Noah, beginning a series at Slate Magazine on The Great Divergence:  Trying to understand income inequality, the most profound change in American society in your lifetime. To elaborate:

. . . Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill” was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.

All my life I’ve heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. . . .

Yeah, but . . .

“I can understand why the people who persuaded Obama to go for the capillaries might still be claiming that they have the right strategy; but I don’t understand why Obama is still listening to them.”

Paul Krugman

“But Obama’s instinctive caution has steered him away from casting these questions as moral or civil rights issues. On none of them has he shown anything resembling courage.”

Jacob Weisberg

Line of the day

“These opinions have an agenda. They seek to demonize the Obama Presidency and mainstream liberal politics in general. The conservatism they prefer is not the traditional conservatism of such figures as Taft, Nixon, Reagan, Buckley or Goldwater. It is a frightening new radical fringe movement, financed by such as the newly notorious billionaire Koch brothers, whose hatred of government extends even to opposition to tax funding for public schools.”

Roger Ebert

Ghost Wars

At Live From Silver City Avelino takes a look at Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. One-third of the way through, and Avelino is already recommending the book.

“I’m incredibly impressed with Ghost Wars. It’s an elaborate, if chilling, history of the events leading up to some of the most important events in our lifetimes.”

He also recommends Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, the story of Pat Tillman and the coverup.

“Like other Krakauer books, the text is engaging and (at least to me) moving.”

Follow the link above and read more of what Avelino has to say about these two books. He got me interested.

Katrina

Katrina made landfall five years ago this morning. The first levee at New Orleans was breached at 8:14 am. By the next day, 80% of the city was underwater.

Spike Lee’s documentaries When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, David Simon’s Treme, and Dave Eggers’s excellent book Zeitoun all deserve your attention.

What you heard and saw on TV during the actual event was mostly bull shit.

Best line of the day

“We’re The Greatest Nation In The History Of The Universe

“But some things are just too expensive.”

Eschaton linking to this news item:

“Fire departments around the nation are cutting jobs, closing firehouses and increasingly resorting to “rolling brownouts” in which they shut different fire companies on different days as the economic downturn forces many cities and towns to make deep cuts that are slowing their responses to fires and other emergencies.”

Line of the day

“In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts ‘warning’ Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in ‘self-defense.’ ”

Matt Taibbi

He has examples of their inflammatory talk.

And this:

“There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.”

You should read Taibbi’s whole post.

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings

From another good column by Timothy Egan:

… It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. …

We are all descended from immigrants

If you know Americans of Chinese, Canadian, Brazilian, Mexican, Eastern European, Italian, Greek, or Irish ancestry, or any other, for that matter, ask around. You may be surprised at how many descendants of unauthorized immigrants turn up, people who seem indistinguishable from any other doctor or student, mechanic or professor. Hispanic immigrants are following the same pattern as other immigrant groups of increasing English speaking ability and family income as generations pass.

In the past, America has come to regret policies denying citizenship to particular groups, policies like Dred Scott, and the racial tests for naturalized citizenship in force from 1790 to 1952. These policies always rested on the idea that some immigrants — almost always non-white — would not make good citizens. Doubt about the ability of the United States to take in and benefit from every branch of the human family has always been proved wrong, and, we have no doubt, will be here as well.

From Parents, Children, and Citizenship by Birth, a must-read on immigration, the 14th Amendment and citizenship.

I wonder how my own French Canadian ancestors came across the border.

Best analogy of the day

I’ll be watching the Little League World Series over the next week (it’s on ESPN), which might be an odd place to look for perspective on all this. But here’s some: in 1955, sixty-two local Little Leagues in the state of South Carolina entered the tournament that leads to the Little League World Series. For the first time, one of them consisted of black players—the Cannon Street YMCA All Stars. None of the sixty-one other teams had a single black player, and every one of them refused to play Cannon Street. They wanted them out of the tournament. Instead, the Little League head office disqualified the sixty-one white teams.

Amy Davidson : The New Yorker writing in the context of the Burlington Coat Factory mosque. Read the rest of her story.

Time marches on

Argentina early this morning became the tenth nation to make same-sex marriage legal.

Argentina
Belgium
Canada
Iceland
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
South Africa
Spain
Sweden

Same-sex marriages are also performed in Mexico City and in Connecticut, D.C., Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Civil unions and registered partnerships are recognized in:

Andorra
Austria
Colombia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Ecuador
Finland
France
Germany
Greenland
Hungary
Luxembourg
New Caledonia
New Zealand
Slovenia
Switzerland
Wallis and Futuna
United Kingdom
Uruguay

And parts of Australia and Mexico, and the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin.

Maryland, New York and Rhode Island recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states (as the Constitution requires).

Does it matter?

Andrew Sullivan has been, somewhat singlehandedly, pursuing the Trig Palin birth story. He simply does not believe Sarah Palin’s undocumented tale. Sullivan posts a lot on his blog (even by my standards) and I’ve learned to skim and skip, and I skim and skip the Trig business because I just don’t care.

But this week Sullivan is on vacation and one of his guest bloggers, Dave Weigel, put up a post about Believing Sarah Palin. Weigel took Sullivan to task for continuing to pursue this matter — “People want him to take a deep breath and stop obsessing over this conspiracy theory. Count me among those people.”

Well don’t count litbrit among those people. She has Some serious questions for Dave Weigel re: his decidedly unserious and woefully uninformed Sarah Palin assertions.

So, to rephrase my intial question, as pertains to the first of these big lies about Trig: If a male candidate for high office described an act of bravery in war that never happened, complete with details about leaking body fluids, and he were elected president, and then it was proven that said story was just that–pure fabrication–is it your contention, Dave, that it wouldn’t matter at all?

Litbrit makes an interesting case, whatever you believe, and whether you think this matters or not. She surely takes Weigel apart.

Often wrong, never in doubt

Mr. Franks’ latest comment is so erroneous I could not in good faith post it without correcting much of his misinformation. And I wasn’t comfortable just discarding it.

So here it is, in its entirety, in italics, with my response. It’s here for my readers edification; I see no point in continuing the discussion with Mr. Franks, though I wrote this as if he were a reasonable man.

Well, I do not see the relevance in the fourteenth amendment in the “right” of marriage. No place in the Constitution or Bill of Bights specifically or precisely states that Marriage of any kind is a Right granted to anyone.

So, My comment was entirely correct.

No, you are mistaken. First, I did not claim a right to marriage. (One does seem inherent in the “pursuit of happiness” doctrine of the Declaration of Independence though, doesn’t it?)

But more on point, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically says, “No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” That means, for example, that no state can enable Ford owners to register their trucks but deny Chevrolet owners the same privilege. The due process clause will soon come to mean also that no state can enable some persons to choose their spouse but deny others the same privilege. That is inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.

To deny equal protection, the state must have an over-ridding public purpose. Denying same sex marriage is no more of an over-ridding public purpose than denying inter-racial marriage was. And the court ended state bans on inter-racial marriage 43 years ago.

If I recall correctly:
The fourteenth was specifically written for black people allowing them to be recognized as legal American Citizens. Giving them the Right to be Americans.
It has little if anything to do with anything else. It was never intended to do anything else. This Applies to LIFE, LIBERTY and PROPERTY. Apply it how you wish but the facts are the facts Sir.

No, you are mistaken. Whatever its origins, whatever the intentions, the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been applied to many issues beyond race. In addition to Brown (school segregation), the 14th amendment due process clause has been used in Gideon (right to counsel), Miranda (right to be advised of your rights), Griswold (right to contraceptive devices) and Roe (right to abortion), among others.

You may not like these rights, but that doesn’t mean the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t applied in winning them.

“nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;” This means each state has the right to legislate marriage ie. due process of law. Which in fact most do.

The language you quote does not grant the states any rights. It limits the states. But, in any case, I am not saying states cannot legislate marriage statutes. I am saying the Constitution requires that the states provide equal protection when they do.

It is highly unlikely that the amendment will be applied to Marriage Gay or any other kind.

No, you are mistaken. The due process clause was key to the argument to overturn California’s Proposition 8 in the recent trial. My point yesterday was that “ultimately” the courts and legislators will apply the Fourteenth Amendment to state marriage laws.

As far as I am aware there is no Federal Law against it now.

But hey that’s just me I suppose.

Once again you are mistaken. There is a federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) 1 U.S.C. § 7 and 28 U.S.C. § 1738C. DOMA says no state has to recognize marriage of same sex partners in another state, and defines marriage for the federal government as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman.

The first portion is clearly unconstitutional under Article IV, Section 1: “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” The second part is unconstitutional under the federal due process clause in the Fifth Amendment.

The courts will get there. One federal court (Reagan appointee) ruled DOMA unconstitutional last week.

Great point though.

Indeed. For those tired of waiting I am sorry, but you can feel better I think knowing that, as the Rolling Stones sang, “time is on my side.”