Swimming with Sharks

I haven't seen the news yet tonight, so I don't know if the Senate has passed the stimulus package. I did read earlier that the House did. I have to say, I'm not all that excited. I think Obama has settled for a halfway measure in his misguided attempt to be a nice guy and play bipartisanship with a bunch of vicious sharks. I certainly agree with Frank Scheaeffer, a former card-carrying, breast-beating Republican who told the president:

"[I]f you think that the Republicans in Congress and the Senate are going to do [less] than their utmost to obstruct everything you are and what you stand for you're dreaming."

Why? Because the other side, all ideologues, have nothing but contempt for the president and his party.

"What those senators and congressmen are telling you is not what their rabid core constituents are telling them. Their loyalty is to a fundamentalist Christian ideology on the one hand and American exceptionalism of perpetual warfare and hatred and fear of the 'other' on the other hand. Between the neoconservatives and evangelical Religious Right Republicans you have no friends."

The three forlorn Republicans that Obama paid through the nose to get signed on to the stimulus, are about the last three of the breed that can be called moderate. All the rest take their direction from Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, two truly repulsive people, hate-mongers.

Moreover, Paul Krugman and other economists are convinced that the package that's going to be signed into law shortly will not do the job. He, too, is disgusted with the politics, the way the president has been abused by virtually every Republican in the Congress, but he's even more concerned that the so-called fix is not even close to being adequate to the size of the problem, which, as Rachel Maddow would say is "ginormous." Call me a Mr. Sourpuss, but I think things are really bad, and I don't think a lot of people realize it yet.

Young & Stupid Defense is . . . Well, Dumb

It's been a few days now since the major flap about Olympic god Michael Phelps and the bong pipe and picture of him doing the pipe justice that went public and impelled Kellogg's, the maker of corn flakes, to drop Phelps as a corporate sponsor. (A whole bunch of other companies also sponsoring the swimmer and apparently unconcerned about being represented by a dope fiend declined to fire him.) Regular readers here, all six or seven of them, know how I feel about pot (also here and here). So you can probably imagine I don't have any particular heartburn with Phelps engaging in an activity that almost half of all Americans have engaged or are engaged in. The honor roll of famous people who have toked up is long and impressive, and includes such brain-damaged potheads as the current president of the US (and at least seven other US presidents), NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, an articulate champion for pot legalization.

The point here is not to defend Phelps or the use of recreational hemp--although both are eminently defensable--but to notice a piece by Timothy Egan in todays NY Times. He scoffs at Alex Rodrieguez's explanation for shooting up with sterioids, i.e., "I was young . . . stupid . . . naive." This explanation, Egan says correctly, doesn't work for a person who was 27-29 years old when he was doing steroids. And it doesn't work for other luminaries who have used the "I was young and stupid" excuse. People like our late-lamented president George W. Bush--worthless cocaine-snorting and drunk driving rascal he was for at least half his life before being rescued by Jesus. And the late, ever pious Henry Hyde, the darling of the anti-abortion and flag-hugger crowds. Hyde favored a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning and who led the House impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton for adultery and lying to Congress. That Henry Hyde, the one who carried on an eight-year affair with a beauty stylist, while he was married, of course. (And lied about its duration.) He was 41 years old, almost 50 when this affair ended, and he blamed "youthful indiscretion" for his sins.

If anybody's got an excuse for being young and stupid, Egan says, it's Phelps. But the whole argument is nonsense. Especially when guys like A-Rod (and anybody else who's got money) are going to escape any legal consequences of their actions, while society continues to incarcerate tens of thousands of people who are actually young and stupid for marijuana offenses. The young-and-stupid argument doesn't work for them, does it? Hear! Hear!

Juice III

Just one more post on this steroid thing and baseball. Alex Rodriguez, the focus of a piece a few days ago, publicly confessed in an interview on ESPN with Peter Gammons, that, yep, he did use a "banned substance" during his time with the Texas Rangers, 2001-2003. I've been discussing the matter via email with my son, a Ranger fan. (I brought 'em up right. Or conversely, I laid a horrible lifetime curse on them.) Here's an excerpt (my comments in blue):

I watched the interview too. He went from 'no comment' over the course of the weekend, received legal advice, along with some reflection on what happened with Barry by not admitting, and decided to do the interview. The court of public opinion is what matters here, since baseball isn't going to do anything about. The guys who've come forward, Giambi and Petit, are forgiven for the most part by fans by admitting to using steroids. A-rod is following their lead.

Well, Giambi was honest; he said that he used the damn things. I think Pettitte lied through his teeth. Used them to recover from an injury. Yeah, right. A-Rod, of course, as you point out was following the lead of lawyers and PR guys. I don't think he is smart enough to think up this course by himself.

This still bothers me to no end. A-rod was supposed to be our savior. He was the clean guy who could break the tarnished records Bond's set and make baseball right again.

Yep. That was the hype.

The whole situation disgusts me. I'm beginning to become totally numb to the whole thing. Really, is it a surprise though? And looking back on it, how could he not be juiced? Come on, a shortstop averages 52 hr over the course of those 3 years, and he averaged 39 the stretch before and after '00-03.

I don't think I can ever be numb. I love the game too much. I just hate what these guys have done to the game. This blotch can never be erased. None of them. None should ever be elected the HOF. Ever. And liars like Bonds and Tejada and Palmeiro should do some jail time. Just as an example for American youth of what happens if you cheat. Of course, that's an old guy's dream.

What truly angers me is that baseball's management and owners looked the other way while the game was being trashed. Greed. Greed. Bud Selig needs to have his privates slammed in a car door several times, as my friend Cecil would say. And then his ass ought to be kicked out of his job, and somebody who's not a feeble-minded tool of the owners should be installed as commissioner to kick ass and take names. The baseball commissioner should be a person who protects the GAME. That would be his only job. I'd like to think that this steroid crisis would be like the Black Sox scandal (which brought Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the first, and still the most powerful commissioner), and cause the owners to go after a savior for the game. But that's not going to happen either.

I must say, as a fan, I selfishly wanted to witness the greatest hitters of all time in Bonds, and then A-rod during an era I lived. I must confess, I wanted to believe he was clean. Now, the era of baseball I'm living through is dubbed the steroid era. Nothing is sacred anymore.

You're so representative of your generation. All of your big guys, all the big boppers, and not a few pitchers, too, turn out to have been juiced. It's all false. It's really a shame that baseball heroes have been taken away from your generation. I've read several commentators who are opining that this latest drug flap in baseball may finally put an end to it. I guess we'll have to see. I think the game's been cleaned up since the institution of tough testing in 2004. But the '90s and early 2000s were juiced up. That's why we need all the other cheaters' names out there. So we can know whose numbers during this era can be trusted.

However, without A-rod, we wouldn't have the latest top from Letterman. Some of these are really funny.

They are!

"Top Ten Messages Left on Alex Rodriguez's Answering Machine."

10. "Hey, it's Mark McGwire. Want to get together this week and not talk about the past?"

9. "Joe Torre here -- thanks for helping book sales"

8. "Could you find a steroid that keeps you from choking in the playoffs?"

7. "Are you worried this will taint all the championships you didn't win?"

6. "It's Bernie Madoff. Nice try but I'm still the most hated man in New York"

5. "Michael Phelps here. Got any snacks?"

4. "This is Sammy Sosa. Just pretend you don't speak English"

3. "Michael Phelps again. Did I call you or did you call me?"

2. "Hey, it's Rod Blagojevich -- I'll say you're innocent, if you say I am"

1. "It's Madonna. You got a phone number for Jeter?"

Son of a Beach!

People are stealing sand off beaches in the Caribbean. SAND. It's happening all over: Puerto Rico, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Vincent, Antigua, Barbuda . . . At night. With bulldozers. Ecological disasters looming.

Phrases of surprised reaction to news of what humans are doing, at least in my own mind, are trite. Mainly because I use one of the following phrases all too frequently ruminating on the latest bit of news I've encountered about human behavior on this planet. The phrases, in order of intensity, are the following:

1. I thought I had heard everything.
2. Now I've heard everything.
3. Nothing surprises me anymore. [in a resigned tone]
   
4. What!!??
   
5. Ya gotta be shitting me!
   

You have to admit, there's a shade of variation among these expressions of disbelief, and if one is careful about nuances, as I like to tell myself I am, one must chose carefully among them to convey just the right degree of astonishment. In this particular case, I think option 5 is appropriate. (I have to admit that the occasions anymore of late for the use of 1. and 2. are limited.)

Can I Have Some More, Please?

The Obama administration is slowly clunking towards passage of a clunker of a so-called stimulus bill. Why? Because it surrenders the high ground to the enemy. Krugman's take on the emerging "solution" resonates: "[T]o appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts." It's reported today that the Democrats have managed to corral three Republican votes in the Senate to ensure a filibuster-proof 60 votes. (And even those three aren't in the bag. They are tenuous and totally dependent on the Administration stepping up the line they drew in the sand.)

But at what cost? Well, basically, at the price dictated by the party that got their asses thoroughly kicked and then handed to them in the recent election. That's right, brothers and sisters. Last time I checked, the Republican party and all of its economic nostrums about tax cuts and trust-the-market and no-government-spending-except-for-war were completely repudiated by the voters in November when they elected a person who promised them change, real change. And yet, we're looking at a so-called stimulus package that's composed of at least 42 percent tax cuts, as well as one the Republicans have also dictated that billions of dollars destined for beleaguered, broke states be stripped from. Mind you, all this is to get a measly two or three Republican votes. The rest of the Senate Republicans are simply going to give the Democrats and the country a great big finger, just like they did in the House.

So what in the hell is going on here? Let me be blunt: I don't know if the stimulus package the Administration (originally) proposed is the answer to the frightful economic woes we're facing as a country. Actually, I fear that the bill is way too small. But I can say with almost complete assurance that the Republican demands for more tax cuts and less spending on this and that in the bill are guaranteed to be worthless. It seems to be patently clear that these miserable policies have failed. So what is the point of handing over Democratic aims, Democratic solutions, Democratic policy to the Republicans so they can gut them like a strung-up hog and dance gleefully around their campfire with the entrails of the bill draped over them?

I'm sorry. But if the best thing the legislative process can produce in the face of the worst disaster this country has faced since the 1930s is the same old partisan posturing we've all gotten so sick of, then screw both these parties and the horses they rode in on. At a time that calls for drastic action, for a whole new way of operating, what we're getting is the same old crap. Politicians bloviating while millions of regular people bleed. It just really chaps me that what the people said in November--change things!--is simply being ignored while the same cast of insiders plays its same old game. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Obama is so desperate to appease his, our, political enemies. These people have already ruined us. Why are we coming back for a second helping?

A-Rod Spiked Up Too (Juice cont'd)

Odd how these things happen. I do a little piece yesterday on steroid users in baseball, and this morning Sports Illustrated breaks the news that Alex Rodriguez ("A-Rod"), who owns the most lucrative contract in major league baseball--the Yankees are paying him something like $300 million for the next ten years--tested positive for steroids in a 2003 drug test. That's the year he won the first of his three most valuable player awards and hit a league-leading 47 home runs. For none other than my very own Texas Rangers. (Who traded him to New York in 2004.)

Update: Although I'm loathe to say it, the Rangers have had a whole slew of steroid cheaters over the years. Several of them were apparently introduced (if that's the right word) to this brand of cheating by Jose Canseco, a fairly despicable human being, who nonetheless has till now proven truthful in his revelations about steroid use in baseball. Another USA Today article about the Rangers and steroids is here.

What can one say about this? I agree with commentators who have pointed out something obvious that I thought immediately when I read the news. Every achievement by this guy--and he's had many--is now tainted. Doubly tainted, maybe, because after it was disclosed how pervasive steroid and HGH use was among ballplayers, Rodriguez, who had not (yet) been fingered by any tests and who several times flatly denied using the drugs, appeared to be the straight-arrow player who would rescue all the tainted power records from discredited players like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa. He was hailed by many as the greatest player in the game today. And now? Rodriguez is just another ballplayer who cheated and whose numbers are dirty because of it. The only upside to this sorry news is that A-Rod is only 32. This means he'll be around to embarrass the Yankees for quite a few more years.

And, more's the pity to notice that he's now joined the ranks of other over-achieving cheaters and probably jeopardized his election to the Hall of Fame--at least until this generation of baseball writers has died, and the future forgets what a great wound these dopers have inflicted on baseball. And that's a long way off.

The Wages of Juice (Are Handsome)

Here's a prototypical American tale. Barry Bonds, who along with Roger Clemens, is one the most notorious juicers in baseball--steroid and HGH users, cheaters, who boosted their already astonishing statistics with dope, went to court yesterday. With a bevy of six doubtless very-high-priced lawyers. He didn't say anything. His lawyers plead "not guilty" for him to multiple counts of perjury and obstructing justice.

Today the judge announces she will not be accepting three key pieces of evidence--urine test results--that prove Bonds was using illegal substances to extend his career, puff up his performance, and set ridiculously high home run records. All of this beginning after he was 35 years old and continuing for several years after. Anybody who knows baseball, knows that the peak years for players are 28-32. After that, only the great players continue to produce handsomely, but none in the whole history of baseball anywhere near the level Bonds did.

Bonds would have been easily been a Hall of Famer without cheating, but, as a new book coming out, will show, he had a burning, corrosive jealousy for the fame and attention another record-breaking slugger was receiving. (Mark McGwire, yet another user of performance enhancing drugs who was passed over for election to the HOF despite prodigious numbers, and who will continue to be spurned.) It turns out Bonds was simply petulant child millionaire who wasn't getting the attention he thought he deserved. My heart bleeds really for this guy.

The case against him pretty much goes to hell without this evidence, so in all likelihood Bonds will walk. He probably would have anyway, but now it's just about certain. It would have been nice to see him spend some time in jail. So what's the result of this Bonds business, which has been dragging on for three or four years? Baseball wears yet another huge black eye. Its all time hit leader, Pete Rose, is barred from the Hall of Fame for gambling on baseball. Bonds, the all time home run leader, and Clemens, who is arguably one of the five greatest pitchers ever to play the game, will not be elected to the HOF because they cheated and the baseball writers don't reward cheaters.

But Bonds and the rest? They've all got their millions. And no worries about their kids or grandkids or their kids. Just like Wall Street CEOs. Crime pays.

What's That on My Shoe?

Today's entry for a blog that I follow expresses mock incredulity at the notion that $500,000 is considered by some as "not a lot of money." I don't have incredulity, but I do have contempt for this line of thinking. In all of my life, I could not imagine having even half that much every year, yea, even one-fifth that much seemed more than ample. So like everybody else who doesn't live in the dream world where half a million dollars is not a lot of money, I was glad to hear that Obama demanded stringent salary conditions for executives of the companies we poor slobs down here were bailing out with our money. That decision plucked millions of populist strings.

It's about time! Last week the president called the continued Wall Street profligacy with bailout money shameful. This week he's giving these plutocrats of Wall Street the cuffing they deserve. I'll bet I'm not alone in wishing I could personally piss on their $1,300 shoes. These executives need to be shamed. The country, in a fit of real bipartisanship, agrees.

All of this brings up that dirty little secret that the over-stuffed middle class, aspiring (at least until recently) with all their might to become plutocrats themselves--because, after all, this is AMERICA, where anybody can get rich (a fiction that an amazingly large number of people still believe)--chooses to deny. That secret, of course, is that class conflict exists in the US, and it has existed from the beginning. The word is conflict. It doesn't mean vague dissatisfaction, mildly irritated, or just a little bit angry. It can mean murderous.

All I can tell you is that from a historian's perspective, the chief one I bring to these matters, when the gap between the moneyed class and the rest gets noticeably huge and the rich seem noticeably unaffected by the sufferings of the others . . . well, then blood gets spilled and fires break out. We haven't seen the worst of the current economic woes. We don't even know what the worst looks like or feels like.* And violence is second nature to all of us in America, richest to poorest across the spectrum.

Take that for what it's worth. Perhaps, or very likely even, the feverish hallucinations of an old man. Just don't tell me it can't happen here.

*"What we are now seeing is the beginning of an inevitable downward adjustment in American living standards to conform with our actual place in the world. As a nation of consumers, and not producers, with little to offer to the rest of the world except raw materials, food crops, military hardware and bad films (none of which industries employ many people), we are headed to a recovery that will not feel like a recovery at all." Dave Lindorf

Sinful

Allow me to quote myself. This is from a recent email to one of my conservative retired military friends. Sorry to stereotype, but you can safely do it with just about every retired military person I know. Anyway I got wound up about the prospect of Obama's pouring thousands more American troops into Afghanistan:

Let's face it. Constant war has become necessary to the US to feed the Pentagon's insatiable appetite. The frigging country is going down the drain, and we're spending a $1 trillion a year in welfare for the military and the passel of greedy defense contractors . . . hell, their lying, cheating, and stealing makes the Wall Street boys look like the choir.

After 7 years, you're still entertaining the notion that we're going to bring bin Laden to justice? And that even if we did, it would actually mean a reduction in terrorism? And you all think we liberals are unrealistic dreamers! Fight them there or endure attacks here?? For pity's sake, Bob, this is a mindless slogan. The whole war on terrorism is like the war on drugs--another financial bonanza for the extended family of beneficiaries that this slogan feeds. What could be better for our legion of war profiteers than not one, but two, so-called wars that will never end?

I'm really get sick of it, Bob. The US is an empire, and it acts exactly like all empires did. We can always find money for war, more paramilitary police, more bombs. We're never too poor for that. All these justifications for war are hollow and shameful. Because war never solved a single problem. All war does is beget the next war. Humanity doesn't have the sense God gave a billy goat, as my mom used to say.

And then today, I read that Obama's Pentagon FY-2010 budget contains a $40 billion increase--that's an 8 percent hike over the previous fiscal year. And wouldn't you know it, the conservative flacks like are moaning and whining (and lying) that Obama is cutting defense spending. You have to digest Glenn Greenwald's piece to understand how this is. But I'm convinced. Greenwald's pissed off at Robert Kagan's assertion in the Washington Post that Obama is cutting defense spending.

Of course, you can expect prevarication from the neocons, but what you don't expect is Obama throwing more billions into the slavering maw of the Pentagon. It just makes me sick. Over the past decade, this country has spent over $4.5 trillion on the military. The US spends almost as much on its military as everybody else in the world combined, seven times more than the next highest spender, China.

It's just sinful, and there's no end to it.

Romancing the Stone Brains

Several events connected with the death my friend Jim have occupied much of my time the past few days. Consequently, no blogging and even little attention to the news other than a quick scan of headlines. Thank goodness for Google News that lets me do this. Not that there's much to excite me. I see that Eric Holder has finally been confirmed as Attorney General. Now I ask you . . . why the delay here? Wasn't it just political spite? Obama's nominee for secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, is still not confirmed because the Republicans don't like that she's a friend of labor. Duh. This is a Democratic administration and this is the secretary of labor we're talking about. What do these people expect? a right to work advocate? No, it's just another sign that this whole bipartisanship thing is, to say the least, disappointing, as in are you kidding me? Obama, even as we speak, is nominating yet another Republican for his cabinet. Reaching out again to a bunch of people who have done nothing but kick him in the teeth, as far as I can tell. I wonder how long this kissing of Republican butt is going to continue? These people have ossified brains. They wouldn't have a new idea if it came up and kissed them on the lips.

I know the president said that Washington as usual is not what it's going to take to address the serious, not to say catastrophic, problems confronting us, but I've seen no indication that the Republicans are willing to give an inch. FDR ushered in the New Deal without Republican help; LBJ, the Great Society. Obama would do well, I think, to remember this.