"Racism"

Can we just agree that “racist” is an adjective that has evolved to describe a whole lot of things that aren’t actually racist?

The more that I grow up and step into my own understandings of politics and the broader societal landscape around me, the more that I find myself thinking that we are about two generations away from any real chance at a “post-racial” reality. My generation is absolutely ready for it, but those before us are not. The generation of our grandparents is one of actual racism and bigotry; the kind that segregates schools and sits in the back of a bus. The generation of our parents may have broken color barriers and desegregated school systems, but the process of it all was painful. Our nation’s history of interracial animosity may have been greatly rewritten and redirected during their lifetimes, but the reach of its former ugliness seems difficult to forget, and even more difficult to prevent from defining their continued path forward. They laid a foundation on which they will never truly walk.

Our grandparents did not vote for Obama because he was black. Our parents voted for Obama because he was black. My friends and I voted for Obama with a relative indifference to the color of his skin.

I am not trying to say that racism doesn’t exist in my generation, because it definitely does. Despite all attempts by the African American community to reclaim ownership, the N-word still belongs equally to mouths black and white. However, I think that growing cultural overlays have lessened the deep-rootedness of racism in American society, making it somehow less visceral. Rap/hip-hop culture is nearly as much suburban as it is ghetto, and the most socially relevant and accurate television series on inner-city drug culture (The Wire) was written by a couple of white guys. Media has in many ways leant a certain understanding to cross-cultural differences that removes the “us versus them” and the “they’re different from us” from our personal frames of reference.

In time, I think that this mutual connectedness will serve as a foundation for a truly post-racial society. Much the same way that when I met a college student in Xian, China two years ago whose favorite band was Linkin Park and his favorite show Prison Break, I found myself thinking that the music and movie industries will have as much to do with the eventual downfall of communism as governments will. But, until then, we are left with the Jesse Jacksons and the NAACPs of the world.

Not only do I not agree that Dan Gilbert’s comments regarding Lebron James reflected the mentality of a slave master, I can honestly say that the notion of race did not even cross my mind until Jackson venomously injected it into the conversation. Lebron will be hated in Cleveland the same way that Art Model is- as someone who left a city without hope, not a cotton gin without cloth; his departure televised in primetime for a nation to see, not covered up and hidden along an underground railroad.

Similarly, the NAACP’s labeling of the Tea Party as a racist political faction is ridiculous. Agreed, there are fringe elements of the movement who are racists and bigots. But there are crazy radicals on the fringe of any movement, group, or idea. Some Muslims are terrorists, some Christians are skinheads, some blacks are drug dealers, and some extreme liberals are self-identified anti-Americans. We can no more define the Tea Party by its fringe element than we could Obama by the comments of Reverend Wright, or the Democratic Party by those who held signs of President Bush with a Hitler mustache during his presidency. Disagreeing with a President’s policies is not the same as disparaging his ethnicity.

Pulling the word racism into every single situation involving race does not enlighten our society to its presence, but instead desensitizes us to its evocation. It lessens our individual capacity to differentiate real racism from the nonexistent, and it lessens the power of the term. Racism becomes a card that is pulled whenever the going gets tough, or someone says something we don’t like. The more worn the word becomes, the more we lose the sense that there is a categorical understanding of its definition.

A post-racial society will require restraint and responsibility from both sides of the racial divide. Defining our world through the lens of black and white is lazy. It oversimplifies our problems into too easy of a construct. It’s too confined a perspective, and racism is too important a concept to make so trivial.

The Big Short On Trial

April 18, 2010

Read the Fed’s case against Goldman Sachs, or read any article describing the case against Goldman Sachs, and it sound a little bit like Michael Lewis’ new book The Big Short. Actually, it sounds a lot of bit like The Big Short. More or less, it’s a replication of it.

Lewis’ book, which I would argue is the single best and most easily accessible narrative of the subprime mortgage meltdown, explains the “Great Recession” from the perspective of those who saw it and profited from it. He follows the handful of investors and hedge fund managers who used complex credit default SWAPs to place bets against specific tranches of subprime mortgages that they identified as extremely likely to go into default. Inevitably, in order to profit on these side bets, there had to be a losing side to the wager. In this case, that loser was AIG, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and an assorted list of other Wall Street firms and foreign investors. Apparently, the market for suckers was far and wide, and well-lubricated by middle-men such as Goldman Sachs who were more than happy to match supply with demand (for a fee of course).

Where things begin to dip into a bit of an ethical quagmire (and where the Feds have now focused their criminal investigations) is with the advent of CDOs (i.e. Collateralized Debt Obligations). For purposes of an over-simplified explanation, think of CDOs as combined pools of several different groups of low-grade subprime mortgages. By pooling the different groups together, investment banks argued that they had created diversified portfolios and mitigated risk, which in turn allowed ratings agencies to grade the new CDOs significantly higher than they would have rated any of the independent groups of mortgages that comprised the CDO. The end result was to disguise risk, increase marketability of the debt instrument to potential buyers (i.e. the eventual losers of the whole subprime bet), and in the process to generate more transactional fees for the investment banks that served as middle-men in the game.

At the center of the case against Goldman Sachs is whether or not these CDOs were actually intentionally designed to fail. The charges allege that the mortgages within the CDOs were specifically selected as the most likely to default (a point proven in Lewis’ book), the new debt instrument was designed to disguise its real risk (a point discussed above and in Lewis’ book), and that the firm lured investors into the CDOs in order to generate revenues through transactional fees (also a point that Lewis makes).

If you want to know how the whole “subprime doomsday machine” worked, it’s written all through Lewis’ book and the pages of the charges against Goldman…in pretty much the exact same way. Almost as if some Federal prosecutor finished reading it and decided: “Hey- that’s pretty messed up, and I should maybe do something about it”.

If you ask me, that’s probably exactly what happened.

I think we sometimes assign some super-human understanding to agencies of power that, more often than not, does not exist. In the same way that we used to think our Parents knew everything about anything, we think that the government is always there watching and protecting us from every imaginable danger out there. But the fact of the matter is that they aren’t. Analysts in Wall Street firms are smarter than the analysts watching them in governmental oversight agencies, just as myself and my colleagues are probably smarter than the IRS agents reviewing our work. Talent follows money and firms that are willing to dole out a bunch of it; so while Fred from the Fed is packing up at 4:45 to leave exactly at 5, the guy from Goldman and I are getting a second Starbucks and getting ready for the late night push.

The government doesn’t know anything near everything, just the same way that your Mom can’t walk you through a Calculus II equation and your Dad probably can’t show you how to perform brain surgery. Their just a bunch of guys with slightly more access to information than you or I. That, or maybe just guys privy to advance copies of Michael Lewis books from Barnes and Noble.

So, the Feds can go and have fun touting their own horns about this whole case, calling it a prime example of the need for effective federal intervention into free markets. I think it’s more like an example of what you can do with a library card and a badge. But I guess showing up late to a party is better than never.

MLB Week 1

April 11, 2010

The first week of the new MLB season has come and gone. If you missed it, it was probably for one of the following reasons:

1. You were busy watching Duke crush little David, or 14 NBA teams shift and settle into their respective playoff positions (only to be bricks on the path to a Cavaliers-Lakers final), or Tiger Woods-palooza at the Masters, or the final week of foreplay before Lord Stanley’s Cup
2. You figured you would have about 150+ more chances to see your team play this season
3. You’re waiting for Stephen Strasburg to cure the sick and lead the people of D.C. to a promised holy-land of baseball greatness (not to mention throw a fastball into outer-space)
4. Or…you just weren’t able to see the parts of the first week that you wanted to

Me, I fall into that fourth category (and the part of the first that was about hockey).

Outside of the fact that the Dodgers almost got swept by the Pirates and their $27.50 payroll, I hear that the first week was a pretty good one. Yankees-Red Sox, Cardinals are really good, Phillies are really good, and there is the whole Jason Heyward thing in Atlanta…but again, these are only things that I hear.

For those that don’t know, Jayson Heyward is more or less the next coming of Babe Ruth, but infinitely cooler. In baseball circles people throw out names like Hank Aaron, Frank Thomas, and Ken Griffey Junior. Rarified air.

So, with all of these expectations, and against the backdrop of a standing ovation before he had actually done anything in a major league uniform, Heyward…well…did a whole lot of something. In his first at bat, and with two teammates out on the bags, Heyward cranked a 414-foot gem over the fences. From what I’m told, it was something pretty cool. The fans went crazy, Heyward’s already great expectations became God-like, and he went 3-3 for the game.

I went to Youtube to try to watch it, but only got this instead: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by MLB Advanced Media”. To its credit, society at large tried its best to fill the void by posting a series of camera-phone-recorded versions of the event, and even one surprisingly entertaining virtual recreation (see here). Additionally, I probably could have found the video on MLB.com, or something authorized affiliate’s website; but I just didn’t have that much sustained interest or time at work.

I still haven’t seen the video- but again, I hear that it was really a neat scene.

To be honest, the fact that I couldn’t search “Heyward Home Run” on Youtube and find twenty recordings of the live gamecast blows my mind. Why wouldn’t major league baseball want me to watch that? On their website or somebody else’s website, why wouldn’t they want me to watch it as many times as possible? Sure, I understand copyright law, and I don’t have any misconception in terms of whether or not they are entitled to block their media from being shown through non-authorized outlets. They have every right. The problem is just that they were stupid to enforce it this particular time, because their interests (both short and long term) are much better served by allowing the internet to do what it does best: create buzz.

The people that are going to go to MLB.com to find Heyward’s home run are the ones that already watch baseball. Half of them probably own some sort of league-pass and have the game recorded on their TIVO. In order to grow the sport, you need to appeal to the person that doesn’t currently care enough to go searching for something like that. In order to do that, you need to make your product available to all sorts of different demographics, and in all sorts of mediums (internet, television, newspaper, etc.). Any exposure is good exposure. That’s marketing 101.

The idea that restricting internet content is profitable in the long term exists in the past. It exists before things like Napster and Youtube proved that whole mentality completely and utterly hopeless. The internet is entirely too big and too quickly evolving to contain with a copyright suit, or with a never-ending string of copyright suits for that matter. Bud Selig and the MLB brain trust can either spend millions on lawyers in some futile effort to control the masses, or it can just loosen the chain and reap the kind of PR-benefit that comes with two million-plus views of the Heyward video.

People in positions of power hold the end of the chain more often than not, but they are prone to complete misunderstandings of when to swing the ball at the either end. They swing it to their benefit and to their detriment with the same enjoyment. Baseball has become a sport of old guys recalling games they saw in some distant childhood and players from a card collection that their mother threw out when they left for college thirty or forty years ago.

The league has an entire generation of new talent on the field that they want to translate into a new generation of fans off of it; but they are doing everything in their power to stop us from watching it.

The Goldfish Theory

April 6, 2010

Step back for a second, set aside political preferences, paradigms, and understandings, and consider something from the perspective of a parent (whether you are one or aren’t). You have a twelve year old kid, and their birthday list this year has one thing: a dog. Do you just run out to the pet store and get them one? Of course not. You buy them a goldfish, or a hamster, and you tell them that if they take really good care of it, show some level of responsibility, then you can talk about getting the dog later.

You spend twenty bucks on the fish bowl, ten-a-month on fish pellets for it to eat, and five on some sort of decoration that sits at the middle of the bowl. You hope your kid learns something about maturity and ownership before you take the plunge into the kind of real, life-altering commitment that a dog entails.

With kids and in our own immediate lives, we take baby steps when it comes to big decisions. We rent an apartment before we buy a house, learn to cook plain penne before baked ziti, have permits before full driver’s licenses, and learn geometry before trigonometry. By and large, kids don’t go to high school before graduating the third grade.

So then why is it that we don’t apply the same basic principles of earned trust to our governments?

There are a number of reasons why I’m opposed to the newly passed healthcare legislation, but most of all I’m against it because it entails a level of governmental accountability and management that I think is largely unearned. I’ve explained my theory to numerous people, and I ask each of them the following question: What has been the government’s goldfish?

What large program has the government been an effective steward of? Social security is a front-loaded Ponzi-scheme whose current debts exceed any projected receivables in the near future (I’ve already come to terms with the fact that I’m paying into a system that I’ll never receive any benefit from). Medicare is fraught with fraud, underfunded, and far exceeds its initial cost estimates. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac helped to securitize home-loans and spur the growth of additional capital markets, which would in turn expand the pool of loans available to potential homeowners…which only led to one of the greatest real estate crashes in our history, and forced the government to place Fannie and Freddie into a controlled conservatorship (on the taxpayer’s dime). Oh, and not to mention the fact that I still haven’t received my first-time homebuyer’s credit refund, even though I mailed my amended return five months ago.

The temptation to allocate responsibility to the federal government exists because of the notion that its depth of resources lends it some increased capacity for impact. But what has proven to be undeniable is that fact that the depth of resources of the federal government has created a general disinterest in creating change in an efficient manner. While social security, Medicare, and Medicaid arguably do provide some social utility, they are run in a way that isn’t economically sustainable or smart.

For a fiscal conservative like myself, sweeping legislation such as the current healthcare reform isn’t necessarily an issue from the standpoint of substance, so much so as it’s an issue from the standpoint of efficiency. I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe that governmental intrusion into the healthcare market is going to decrease overall costs when I haven’t seen a single example to point to where this is the case in the past. They’ve killed every goldfish and hamster they’ve been given, and now they want me to buy them a dog through increased taxes.

I wouldn’t have any problem paying my current level of taxes if that money was managed and used well, but the fact of the matter is that it isn’t.

Rather than undertake new programs and inherit new responsibilities, I would much rather see the government take the time to improve those that they already have. Then we can talk about all that other stuff.

Option #1 vs. Option #2

March 2, 2010

In the face of a shift by the District to legalize same-sex marriages, Catholic Charities, a large, Catholic non-profit organization based in D.C., has informed its employees that, effective Tuesday (today), “Catholic Charities will not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees who are not already enrolled in the plan”. According to Edward J. Orzechowski, the charity’s president, the policy change “allows (Catholic Charities) to continue providing services, comply with the city’s new requirements and remain faithful to the church’s teaching”. According to my own opinion, the change harms charity employees for the sake of a largely discriminatory ideology.

There is an interesting human phenomenon at play here, and it reminds me of a discussion that I had during a freshman year philosophy course. Our class was discussing the idea of maximizing societal benefits. Objectively, you would think that our goal would be to allocate societal benefits (i.e. money, or food, or happiness) in a way in which either an individual or a society as a whole achieves the greatest possible benefit. Theoretically, me having $10 is better than me having $5, and us all having 30lbs of food is better than us all having 20lbs of food. But, study after study shows that we, more often than not, prefer to weigh and judge our benefit accumulation in contrast to those around us.

For example, let’s assume that there are two people: Person A and Person B. Which of the following scenarios is better for A?

#1: A receives $20
#2: A receives $10

Clearly, $20 is more than $10, and therefore there is a greater benefit to A under scenario #1. But what about the following:

#1: A receives $20. B receives $25.
#2: A receives $10. B receives $10.

Viewed in isolation, one would think that A would still choose option #1, which is superior in nearly all respects. Under option #1, person A receives a greater benefit, and both A and B receive a much larger benefit in aggregate. However, in most studies, participants prefer option #2, where their benefit is greater in relation to the other participant. They forego a larger personal benefit for the sake of ensuring that person B doesn’t get “the better of the deal”.

Catholic Charities has, in essence, chosen option #2. Sure, they’ll limit the ability of same-gender couples to receive spousal benefits, but they also limit ALL new employees, gay or not, from receiving them. In the course of ensuring the reduction of benefit to one group, they accept an alternative that reduces the aggregate benefit to everyone.

Personally, I have no problem with same-gender marriage. “The institution of marriage” has tough enough issues with infidelity, domestic-abuse, divorce, and a general nonchalance about its significance, that I’m all in favor of any two people of any background that want to be committed to something or someone. Also, I don’t share a philosophical or ideological paradigm that restricts or limits the rights of others, and that places those restrictions above and before more practical concerns (i.e. what decisions achieve the most good all-around). I’m a Christian, and my own belief is that our role as individuals is to treat others as we would want to be treated, and to leave this world as a net-positive (It’s kind of a fourth-grader “playground mentality”…share with people, be nice if you want other kids to be nice, and just be good in class). I have enough of my own flaws and areas for improvement that I just don’t have the time or the right to sit in judgment of others.

And so it disappoints me to see that the Catholic Church has slowly moved its way towards exclusion rather than inclusion, judgment rather than introspection, and stubbornness rather than fluidity and progressiveness. These aren’t frameworks that I think align with most people of my age group, and they aren’t really values that build a foundation for doing good in the world abroad. The actions of Catholic Charities may be, in many ways, independent and apart from the Church itself, but it reflects the overwhelming sentiment that is projected by the Church on this issue.

I think it’s sad, because religion should stand at the forefront in terms of issues such as civil liberties, personal freedom, and societal equality and advancement. It should be helping to build-up third world countries, provide relief from disasters, and seek common ground between differing perspectives and rival factions. Instead, I think that the issue of same-sex marriage has been used by religion to further divide us all from one another. I think that’s unfortunate. Whether religious communities condone it or not, society generally trends towards acceptance, and there will eventually be much greater rights provided to same-gender couples. I would like to be able to say that Christianity was a supporter of those rights, rather than a detractor.

Personally, I wouldn’t work for an employer who decided to, without warning, restrict and remove family benefits. I also wouldn’t attend a church that portrayed such changes as being in-line with the will of God. Sorry, I guess I just look around and don’t seem to find it worth my while to hate gay people that much. I would like to think that I’m an option #1 kind of guy, and I would like to think that getting into heaven doesn’t require choosing option #2.

The Fake Losses We Mourn The Most

February 28, 2010
A few weeks past my initial viewing of “the incident”, I’m still reeling from the loss of Rita. Immediately following watching the final episode of the fourth season of Dexter, I walked downstairs donning a look that suggested I had either a) seen a ghost, b) lost my first child in a severe accident, c) been fired from work, or d) had been the victim of some sort of self-tragedy. Given that I am not prone to believing in ghosts, don’t have a child, and remain firmly secure in my job, it had to be option d.

In her wake, Rita left behind a husband, three children, and me- who had dubbed her my pho-girlfriend and approved member of the “if I actually ever could swing it, her and I would be allowed” list with my actual girlfriend. Damn that trinity killer!

But now I’ve been far enough removed from the born-of-blood plot twist that I can add some perspective to the whole ordeal. I can dissect and appreciate just how fricking awkward and funny it is that we all get emotionally consumed by the loss of people and things that aren’t actually real. Add that observation to the fact that, when I came up with this idea, I had been snowed-in by about 18-20 inches of fresh powder (with more falling), and what you end up with is the following: a top five list of the fictitious people/things that I mourned the loss of the most.

#5: Rita from Dexter



The official formula for determining the impact of the loss of Rita is as follows:
Death

• Plus: Complete unexpectedness
• Plus: Loss of amazingly hot, fictitious girlfriend
• Plus: Image of Dexter running out of the bathroom holding his bloodied baby Dexter stained onto my emotional retina
• Plus: Remembrance of scene where Trinity kills woman in bathtub in first episode
• Plus: Projection of Trinity in bathtub with Rita
• Less: Point deduction due to close proximity of event and inability to determine lasting impact

= Me resorting to having to call my younger sister for emotional support in relation to the death of fictitious Rita.

This one may climb the list over time.

#4: Bambi’s Mom



Bambi’s Mom’s death gains immediate credibility due to the fact that its typically introduced to children during a critical developmental phase of their life (aka when the death of your Mom is more or less the worst thing that you can imagine while you’re sitting at home, bottle in hand, blanket on lap, and waiting for that wonderful woman to come change your diaper while you watch the movie). Also, it’s part of a Disney classic film, which means that it is as likely as any other death on the list to stand the test of time (and be re-mastered and resold for a ridiculously raked-up price at every ten year anniversary).

Personally, I took this one hard. Evenings in our household involved me pretending to be Bambi, fighting off the competing bull elk (aka my father, after a 10-12 hour day of tax work) while my female (aka my actual Mom) played dead on the floor. I can’t definitively prove-out the connection, but I would have to suspect that the full-throttle thorn stab to my Dad’s chest had something to do with working out the parental-abandonment issues that Bambi (aka myself during the late night reenactment) was suffering from.

I also don’t think it helps to know, now as a mature adult, that every time a mother animal dies in a documentary, the first thing the commentator says is “Uh oh…the baby stands very little chance now”. Or, in other words, real life Bambi dies.

#3: William Wallace from Braveheart
I may very well be doing a disservice by only ranking this number three. It has all of the requirements:

• Loveable character
• Deceit
• Phenomenal, academy-award winning movie
• Torture
• Attractive female crying during death
• Epic, lasting last line (“FREEDOM!”)

But I can’t add it to the true upper-echelon because of just how good a part of the movie it is. On a boring, rainy Saturday afternoon, I’ll actually watch three hours worth of lead-up, plus one hour worth of commercials, just to listen and hear “FREEEEDOOOOM!! (gurgle, gurgle)”.
If you want to make the top of my list, you can’t be a death that I’ll skip watching live sporting events to watch.

#2: The Ant from Honey I Shrunk the Kids



Building on the logic from above, the death of the Ant from Honey I Shrunk the Kids is definitely worthy of top-tier death recognition. In fact, my reactions to the Ant dying were so overly-emotional and absurd that my Mom would fast-forward through that part of the movie in order to salvage the rest of the day. Truth be told, I think that the last time that I saw the movie in its entirety I was about six years old, and wouldn’t watch it today even under the banner of bribery.

This one only loses points because a) The Ant isn’t attractive, b) It’s not a person, c) Honey I Shrunk the Kids has oddly enough drifted out of the mainstream of popular kid-culture. (Not sure what the contemporary equivalent would be today: One of the Wiggles taking a bullet during a dance and sing-along?)

#1: The American Soldier that gets stabbed by the German soldier while the other American sits downstairs crying and doing nothing to help in Saving Private Ryan

This one takes the cake by virtue of the fact that there’s absolutely no silver-lining to hang your hat on here. The form of death is an absolute fear of mine (knife in the chest), the sound effects are gruesome, the plea to the German soldier right before getting stabbed makes the hair on your arm stand up, and the fact that his fellow soldier could stop it at any moment but doesn’t is infuriating. Add to that, it’s a great movie, you’re forced to watch the scene over and over because it’s on TNT every other Saturday afternoon (i.e. any time that they aren’t playing the Lord of the Rings trilogy), and it’s one of the few deaths that actually makes you audibly yell at the screen the first, second, third, and fourth time you see it.

So, in closing, here’s to hoping that Rita’s death moves down, and not up this list over time. Hoping that Dexter and baby Dexter find a way to cope, and that Trinity burns in eternal, fake-hell!

A Quarterback Wishlist

February 28, 2010
It’s open season for picking the next quarterback of the Buffalo Bills. Draft day is right around the corner, and I’m spending the five to ten minutes going to sleep picturing a new franchise starter lifting the Lombardi trophy over his head while wearing that iconic powder blue and red Bills jersey (I dream in 1998 Bill’s jerseys).
So, I figured that I would make public my general wish list and anti-wish list for quarterbacks. The way I see it, they can be broken into five clearly distinguishable buckets: Quarterbacks I have no interest in, quarterbacks whose jersey I would buy on draft day if we got them, quarterbacks who intrigue me, the forgottens, and the truly horrible quarterbacks.
So, here it goes:
#1 Quarterbacks that I have absolutely no interest in:
Sam Bradford: I have absolutely no use for an immobile, injury-prone quarterback, no matter how good an arm he has. I lived through the Drew Bledsoe era in Buffalo, and it wasn’t by any means a good period in my life.
We have an atrocious offensive line that isn’t going to rebuild itself overnight. Being quarterback for the Buffalo Bills over the next few years is going to mean taking a good share of licks, and having to help yourself out by dodging some of the blows; two things that Bradford has not shown a real propensity for. I don’t doubt that he has the passing ability, but the bottom line is that he is going to get killed back there.
Aside from the poor fit, there’s the fact that drafting Bradford would mean using our first round pick, and would likely mean that Bradford would be the first quarterback taken, which means a significant long-term financial commitment of anywhere from forty to fifty million over five or six years. Trust me, we have enough problems without tying our future to a guy that doesn’t fit our system, and likely won’t be healthy enough to stay on the field.
Tony Pike: Pike has all of the symptoms of a college quarterback who gets ridiculous stats in a pass-happy, run and gun offense, only to get to the pros and find that he can’t just sling the ball around everywhere against athletically overmatched defensive backs. I’m also not crazy about the fact that Pike missed a handful of games and his replacement, Zach Collaros had arguably superior statistics during his time at the helm, while continuing to lead the team to wins. In my opinion, that brings into question Pike’s relative importance to his team’s success, while furthering my belief that much of his numbers have been system driven.
Darryl Clark: Hey Darryl: Beat Iowa.
Ryan Perrilloux: I don’t typically think that it’s smart to invest your future in a guy who didn’t have his act together enough…you know what? I actually think so little of Ryan Perrilloux that I’m not even going to write the rest of that thought.
#2 Quarterbacks whose jerseys I would purchase the day of the draft:
Jimmy Clausen: He’s just a big-gamer. I hate Notre Dame, and watched almost all of their games this season, rooting for them to lose and for Charlie Weiss to get sent packing (sorry…still have a little post-Willingham spite). Every game, if Clausen got the ball in his hands at the end with a chance to win, myself and my girlfriend both would have the exact same reaction: “Damn, Clausen is going to win it”. And he did just that. I challenge anyone to point to a game where Jimmy Clausen blew it at the end.
I don’t know about his measurables, or about his arm-strength, but I know that there are only a handful of guys out there who have that sense of inevitability about them; that aura of “Damn, he’s gonna win this thing” when they get a ball at the end of a game. That’s enough for me. If the Bills take Clausen, order me two jerseys, a rookie card, and a signed poster. I have my quarterback for the next ten years.
(Side note: if we draft Clausen, our quarterbacks will be from the following Universities: Harvard, Stanford, and Notre Dame. NFL all-academic honors?)
Tim Tebow: I completely understand all of the detractors: horrible throwing motion, tendency to run, lack of reps under center, and all the rest. Every single objective bone in my body tells me that drafting Tebow would be a mistake, but that same biological, male-gene that forces me to instinctually love and laugh at everything that Bill Simmons writes or podcasts about draws me to Timmy boy. His intangibles are just so good. I want to believe that it could work, and even if it didn’t, I would at least feel good about rooting for it to happen.
I think Tebow has the work ethic, the character, and the determination to at least make success plausible, even if not probable. He would provide revenue boosts from merchandising, inject leadership into the team, and fit with the blue-collar ethic that defines Buffalo, New York. Additionally, you probably get Tebow in either the late second or early third-round, which means a significantly reduced price-tag in comparison to the “top quarterbacks” like Clausen and Bradford. Even if the football realities don’t make complete sense, the economics just might.
#3 Quarterbacks that somehow intrigue me:
Colt McCoy: I don’t have a lot of faith in the fact that McCoy is a great pro-style fit, but I have a lot of faith in the fact that he flat-out wins games. How much of that was him, and how much of that was the team around him? I’m not sure exactly, but losing him in the national championship hurt bad. He’s a little bit too mobile for my liking, but he has a 100% certified, manly, football starting-quarterback-ready name (Colt).
Dan Lefevour: Lefevour is the mysterious import from the north. The central Michigan Sasquatch who has been playing in the NCAA for about 27 years according to my count (didn’t they put a giant billboard up of him in Detroit in 1996?). He may be the quarterback that has been on the most televised, ESPN2 games without people really being able to recall anything about his game. I know that he’s tall, and a lot of league insiders think he might be the third best quarterback in the draft. The mysteriousness means that there’s potential upside, which I think makes him a better choice than a lot of the big-name guys who might have more limited ceilings.
Jevan Snead: Being named first team all-SEC over Tim Tebow (whether by accident or not) is a definite eye-catcher, and some analysts thought that he had mid-first round potential as recently as last year. He did himself no good by coming out after his Junior year, and I’ll admit that I’m only remotely intrigued, and wouldn’t love him to be the Bill’s pick. But there is this lingering possibility that he could be a pick I dislike upfront, and come to like in a few years.
#4 The Forgottens:

• Zac Robinson
• Tim Hiller
• Max Hall
• Todd Reesing
• Juice Williams

#5 Horrible:
Chris Turner: Just one more horrible, horrible quarterback legacy left at the University of Maryland. I take solace in the fact that nobody would ever draft and/or sign him. Not even in the Canadian league.

The Meaning of USA vs. Canada

February 25, 2010

USA’s win over Canada in the men’s Olympic hockey prelims this week was a great, great win. It wasn’t on par with the Miracle on Ice, but probably in about the same realm as USA soccer’s win over Spain this past summer in the Confederations Cup (and maybe even slightly more meaningful, since this happened in an Olympic forum). But it wasn’t the jolt of life that is going to give hockey a rebirth as one of the top-tier professional sports in the United States.

The mistake that hockey and soccer fans (of which I am definitely one) continuously make is to pay too much credence to the post-Olympic or post-World Cup bump in enthusiasm. Every four years these events come about, and every four years they promote each of the two sports to increased public notoriety for a brief period of time. Sports talk radio talks about whether or not this is “the time” for a breakthrough of the sport in American culture, they get pushed to the headline section of PTI, and Sportscenter or Outside the Lines does a piece that makes you think hockey/soccer is ready for a renaissance of sorts in the states. But, inevitably the boom is temporary and the fan base for each returns, by and large, to its previous size.

The ebbs and flows tell the story. Basically, neither hockey nor soccer are ingrained into the fabric of American sports fandom. What the booms tell us is that each sport, when placed under the national spotlight, is really fun to watch. The product is a good one, but it doesn’t stick.

For Hockey, the issue is one of understanding and ability to relate. Due to financial constraints and access to the sport, most Americans have never and will never play hockey. As a result, they can’t relate to the sport. They don’t grow up aspiring to be the next Wayne Gretzky, and they don’t remember their past playing days while they watch Jerome Iginla or Sidney Crosby. A lot don’t even know the basic rules. Personally, I watch Soccer because I played it, Hockey because I currently play it, and when the summer Olympics come around I watch the track and field events because I used to do that also. The NHL needs to find ways to improve its outreach and accessibility to youth. This means lowering the overhead and variable costs associated with the sport (i.e. reduce equipment costs, youth-league fees, and find ways to create cheap, readily-available ice time). Unfortunately, the economic realities of the situation dictate that real cost decreases at any sort of macro-level are unlikely. And so long as hockey is a niche-sport in terms of the volume of participants, it’s going to be a niche-sport in terms of the volume of fans.

With respect to Soccer, the problem that permeates the sport is really one of American excellence. We’ve all grown up in a sports-centric society in which the United States is home to nearly all of the world’s premier professional leagues, as well as the bulk of the its premier athletes. In baseball, basketball, and football, we produce and retain the top athletes in our domestic leagues. In soccer, we do neither. To be a soccer fan, you are relegated to watching a mediocre professional product, and to the notion that we just can’t compete against the top international competition. None of this meshes very well with an American mentality that demands being and seeing the best.

TV contracts also play a major role in why these sports aren’t in the national spotlight. Outside of one weekly game on NBC, the only nationally-televised hockey games are on Versus, which precludes non-cable viewers and DirecTv subscribers from watching (DirecTv doesn’t carry Versus, due to a contractual dispute with Comcast, who maintains the channel’s ownership rights). Soccer does little better. It has a once weekly game shown on ESPN, but is only shown locally outside of that.

The lack of major TV contracts means that following a soccer or hockey league is hard-work. More or less, you need to subscribe to expensive season packages in order to get the bulk of the games, and most casual fans just won’t do that (especially when an economic downturn is pushing many families to eliminate unnecessary household expenses).

Like I said before, the problem generally isn’t the on-field or on-ice product. Every four years sports fans reinforce the notion that these sports are actually quality entertainment. They pass the sporting taste test. But that fact doesn’t create widespread fandom, which is driven as much by off-the-field influences as it is by on-the-field performance. Self-identification, accessibility, TV contracts, and cost are all the contextual frameworks for broad-based fan acceptance. And these things don’t change because of a two or three week event.

Ironically, the “boom” that Hockey needs (and maybe soccer too) is really a bust, and it’s the same bust that helped to push hockey out of the upper-tier of American sports in the first place. The prospect of both NFL and NBA lock-outs in 2011 is exactly what the leagues need.

A year without either football or basketball won’t help to fix many of the fundamental issues related to either sport, but it means a return to national programming (how else are the networks going to fill their sports programming slots in the interim?) and an opportunity to make a reintroduction to the mass-public. For hockey, this means showcasing how the introduction of the salary cap has created real competition and league-wide parity, and how rules and equipment changes have created a faster, more offensively-based brand of hockey. It means a whole season of Ovechkin, Crosby, Kane, and the rest of the youth-movement in primetime.

If the league can couple that kind of exposure with youth-league development and expansion, as well as affordable arena tickets and family-friendly game packages, hockey can maybe regain some sort of a foothold in the sporting landscape.

Football will always be king once it returns, but basketball may find itself in a more tenuous situation. The disconnect between players and fans (or the perception thereof) would only be further exasperated by a sustained lockout. Disinterested fan-bases in cities such as Memphis, New Orleans, and Atlanta would have a year to find other activities and past-times to replace basketball with, and the league would return, although financially-leaner and sounder, as a much less centralized player in America’s downtime. A lockout would hurt bad. Just ask Hockey.

The realist in me understands that USA’s win over Canada doesn’t mean a lot in terms of the growth of hockey. Americans are busy, and market-share is dictated by the portion of the market that is up for grabs. In order to take steps forward, somebody else has to take steps backwards. The optimist in me (or maybe it’s the cynic) realizes that the NBA may very well be dumb enough to give hockey that very opportunity. And yet, all this said, there is a part of me that thinks it really doesn’t matter whether or not hockey or soccer ever become mainstays in popular-media. I love the World Cup, enjoy the MLS, think nothing is better than playoff NHL hockey, and have had a blast playing both sports. I think that may be enough, and realize that there is always a place for niche companies.

Guns and Money

January 31, 2010

Gilbert Arenas has some serious problems. Fifty-plus games suspended, eighty million dollars at risk, and a future playing career that suddenly seems murkily uncertain in terms of whether or not he will ever again be “the guy” for another franchise. And yet, while at the middle of this whole mess, Arenas himself remains only a side story to the numerous undertones and plotlines that accompany the ordeal.

In newspapers, podcasts, talk radio and the like, Arenas’ story draws intrigue from the perspectives of racial stereotypes, gun rights, and societal double-standards between athletes and the average working individual. It evokes emotions from across the spectrum, but none of that emotion has anything at all to do specifically with Gilbert Arenas. His story is driven by parallel plotlines, and his punishment dictated by the same motivating factor that more and more permeates the American sports landscape: money.
Sure, what Arenas did, turning the Wizards’ locker room into some recreation of the O.K. Corral, was illegal and reprehensible. Add to that his idiotic response to the whole thing, and it’s clear that there was a real need for punishment. But those rules and realities don’t often apply to elite athletes. Especially not franchise players. These are the ones who sell tickets, merchandise, and commercials on the major networks. Everyone profits when they are on the court, and so that’s where they typically stay. But in Arenas’ case, the economic equation that should have proved his saving grace instead arose as the catalyst for his swift and stern punishment.
Exhibit 1: David Stern. Stern is not a former athlete or a current athlete-sympathizer. He’s an attorney employed by league owners. What he saw in Arenas’ act was an image problem for the league: a reaffirmation of the stereotype that pro-basketball players are thugs and gangsters. That doesn’t sell to a middle-class, middle-American consumer base, which means that it doesn’t sell commercials and other advertisements. Translation: Arenas had a commissioner-and-judge looking to make a point.
Exhibit 2: The players. What was really astonishing to most fans and league insiders was just how little support Gilbert got from other players around the league. They were quick to publicly criticize his offense. Why? Because if advertisers don’t like thugs and gangsters, then neither do sponsors. Translation: Athletes don’t like other athletes that cost them sponsorships (i.e. Gilbert isn’t winning with a jury of his peers either).
Exhibit 3: The Wizards. In most cases, it’s the team that rallies behind its top player. I know from living in LA during the Kobe Bryant ordeal that even while the media was murdering him, Jerry Buss and the Lakers stood hard and strong behind their cornerstone franchise piece. They weathered the storm with him, nursing his public persona back to some semblance of respectability. But for Arenas, the relationship between him and his front office isn’t the same. He may be their franchise guy, but the fact is that they, by all accounts, regret making him that guy. He hasn’t shown that he can be the best player on a championship-caliber team, or that he can remain healthy or focused. Add to that the financial realities of his contract. Five or six years and a hundred million dollars binds his team’s ability to bring in adequate supporting talent, and handcuffs its future for several years to come, which is a bad thing when ownership is looking to sell (and the Wizards’ ownership currently is). Translation: No help here.
Exhibit 4: The fans. In a year where D.C. fans have had to watch the Deadskins debacle and the Nationals’ utterly flawed and pathetic attempt at being a major league baseball franchise, all that they want are wins. When Gilbert can’t provide them, and sports experts start saying that the team would be better off by voiding his contract, the overwhelming fan sentiment becomes easy to read. Translation: Gilbert is screwed.
We all constantly criticize how athletes, owners, and league officials care more about their own bottom-line nowadays than anything else. But, what seems poetically fitting to me, is how these financial motivations that often disconnect and elevate elite sports stars from the average fan, can quickly morph into the very reason that they are brought back down to reality (or at least some version of it). While how much money we earn separates us all into varying socio-economic pools and statures, the loss of it is in many ways a great equalizer.
Athletes are no strangers to scandals and misdeeds. Maybe it’s just the advent of the twenty-four hour news cycle that has enlightened us to this fact, but whatever the case there are innumerable examples: Vick (dog killer), Burress (idiot and illegal firearms), Woods (adultery), Bryant (adultery), and so on and on. In each of these cases, it’s not some deeply-rooted act of introspection and regret that promotes change and humbleness; its money.
Michael Vick, less a hundred million dollars and plus the potential to regain at least some portion of that if he walks the “right path”, equals a leading advocate against dog fighting.
Kobe Bryant, less several key sponsorships and plus the ability to regain some of them if he redeems his image, equals a team leader and reinvested father of two.
For Burress and Woods, their future paths remain unclear, but I suppose that each of their respective check books will be likely to be to thank for how they handle their situations. And that is why I expect that Burress will walk the straightened path; and Woods (as he has already shown) will continue to remain far less apologetic while concurrently maintaining far more prior affluence.
Back to our friend Gilbert.
Sure, the fact of the matter is that money has thus far not been a friend to Mr. Arenas. However, with a sudden foray into the free agency market looming, and his own financial motivations to be considered, money will in the end do more to force contrition than any probation or suspended sentence ever could.

Massachusetts Kills

January 20, 2010

Scott Brown’s victory last night in Massachusetts was a lethal blow- but I don’t necessarily think that its clear yet what it was a lethal blow to. That part is up to President Obama.
The most obvious choice is that Brown will have killed healthcare reform. Despite all of the criticism befalling Martha Coakley, it takes a lot more than a crappy democratic candidate (which is exactly what Coakley proved to be) to lose a Senate runoff election to a Republican in Massachusetts. In order for that to happen, you have to have a force of momentum and anger. And in this case that is exactly what this whole healthcare mess has amounted too.
Who Brown beat was Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid (have fun in your own coming election Harry), public options, back-door deals, out-of-control spending, and two thousand page legislation. Any of those people/things could have served as perfect substitutes for Martha Coakley on yesterday’s ballot.
What happened last night does not at all portend well for Democrats into this coming November’s election cycle, and so moderates, and even many liberals, of the Democratic Party should rightfully be nervous. If ever there was a public referendum on a specific piece of legislation, this might very well have been it. Democrats can and should let their series of uncoordinated and un-reconciled bills crawl away and quietly die out.
Obama’s public opinion polls have suffered as a result of this whole ordeal, but they have not yet fallen down into unmanageable levels. The last president to have public opinion polls hovering at these levels early into his second year? Ronald Reagan- and that turned out just fine. Furthermore, in Obama’s case, while his public job approval ratings (According to the Rasmussen Daily Presidential tracking poll) have fallen below fifty percent, and his “strongly disapprove” numbers are on a sharp rise, those same polls indicate that he still enjoys a “Personal Favorability” rating of well over sixty percent, and favorability ratings of his family are just over seventy percent. All in all, he’s still a pretty likeable guy, which means that most Americans want this particular President to succeed.
If Obama puts healthcare aside and focuses on those areas of his agenda that are more favorable in the public eye, such as job creation, tougher sanctions against Iran and its nuclear program, and financial reform legislation, then he is likely to see his job approval ratings be pulled up by his favorability numbers.
The second option is the one that you have to believe Pelosi and Reid are advising him to follow, which is to ram healthcare down the shoot and get it passed in political-shotgun-wedding-style. Doing this is much more complicated now that Brown has won in Massachusetts, but it’s not impossible. In order to get this done, Democrats would likely have to speed through the process, prior to Brown being sworn-in, using one of the following frameworks:

1. The House approves the legislation as confirmed in the Senate (an unlikely choice, given that many house moderates already have had concerns about key points in the senate legislation; concerns that are no doubt only magnified with what has happened in Massachusetts)
2. The house could pass the Senate version of the bill, and then use “reconciliation” procedures to modify the bill. However, this would allow for only minute adjustments of the specific details, which may not provide enough change to bring moderates on board
3. Try to push the process back to the drawing board in the Senate, in order to pass a watered-down version of the currently proposed legislation prior to Brown being sworn-in (but there are real legal questions here)

Any of those options would be incredibly difficult to succeed in, and would require intensive support and leadership on the issue from the White House, which would give Obama even more ownership over healthcare than he already has.
If Obama goes down that road, Democrats will get slaughtered in November (a fact that may be inevitable regardless of how he handles the situation), and he will have angered enough independents with what will be viewed as an underhanded and ugly process that his own Presidential prospects for 2012 may be seriously crippled.
As we near the period in which opposition party candidates begin to materialize, a gaping hole in independent support (a base Obama overwhelmingly controlled in his first election) would alter the political landscape from one in which running against Obama would be extremely difficult and an uphill battle, to one in which the odds were a lot more even than originally thought they would be. Suddenly, the Republican nomination becomes a much more desirable job than it was even three or four months ago.
This White House now needs to do what it had done during the campaign when issues like race, Reverend Wright, and Chicago cronies bubbled to the surface- and that is damage control.
Scott Brown killed something last night. Whether that thing was healthcare, the Democratic momentum and majorities, or President Obama’s presidency is entirely up to the Commander in Chief himself.

Regime Change Doctrine

September 6, 2009

Conceptually, war is never a good thing. It is a de-evolution of mankind. A reminder of our inherent imperfection, the inability of governments to truly protect us, and of the fact that Sir Thomas More’s Utopia remains unachieved and still nothing more than an abstract ideal. Yet, history shows us that while war may be bad, “good wars” still exist.

Case and point: World War II. In the course of pulling our country out of a Great Depression, we restored stability to Europe, overthrew a fascist dictator, and ended a widespread “Final Solution” that had taken the lives of millions of minorities. Lives were lost, both deservedly and undeservedly so, but it taught us an important fact: that in the face of unrelenting and unmitigated evil, democracies must sometimes resort to armed conflict. In the end, we managed to make the world a better place.

Other examples exist as well, such as the crisis in Kosovo (ending a mass genocide against the minority Muslim population) and the first Gulf War (expelling Iraqi forces from a largely defenseless Kuwait). These are instances in which the international community collectively and cooperatively reached a consensus agreement and brought about similarly positive global change. There are also instances, such as the Rwandan genocide, in which the international community failed on its obligation to protect innocent populations, and the result was catastrophic.

These failures also teach us lessons. In a one hundred day period between April 6 and July 16, 2004, somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million minority Tutsis were killed in Rwanda. Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped, 67% of whom were infected with HIV and aids. 75,000 children were orphaned, and over half of the children in the country were forced to discontinue schooling. The “teachable moment” behind these statistics? When the international community fails to combat evil, the impact of that failure is truly mind-blowing.

So how do civilized societies and governments combat evil?

A central component of former President George W. Bush’s foreign policy was the concept of regime change. And now, while Bush should by no means be considered a great source of effective foreign policy inspiration, I look around at the world and wonder whether or not regime change isn’t a legitimate solution to be considered within the current geo-political landscape. Or, in other words, can regime change be an element of fighting a “good war”?

To argue that the need for good wars does not exist today is non-sensible, or naïve. I suppose you can pick between the alternatives. Just consider some of the leading candidates. As many as 7.8 million people have been killed as either a direct or indirect result of a multitude of different wars in the Eastern Congo since 1998. Couldn’t we bring some stability to this region? Or consider North Korea, where as many as 200,000 political prisoners are held in Nazi-style hard-labor camps, where they work 12 to 15 hour days until they are brutally executed. How do we tout our past dismantling of Hitler’s death camps, but turn a blind eye to their modern evolution?

The Achilles heel to the Bush doctrine was largely a public relations problem. The former President simply couldn’t sell the concept. His administration didn’t have the necessary brand name to get international cooperation. Also, and maybe more problematic, Bush may have not picked the best case study to test his doctrine.

I would argue that there are broad criteria that might indicate those instances in which regime change would be an effective course of action.

First, regime change can only be applicable if a “good war” potential exists. In order for this to be possible, there must be a general crime against humanity that is either state-sponsored or state-condoned. Also, while parallel national interests may be taken into consideration, they cannot be the generally accepted motivating factor (This does not mean that they are or are not the true underlying motivation, but they cannot be publicly seen as such).

This was one of the central problems in the most recent Iraq war. We lost the image battle. Saddam Hussein was one of the most brutal dictators alive, and his fall from power should have been internationally celebrated. But, from the onset of the war, the Bush administration’s underlying intentions were viewed through the prism of skepticism. Some pointed to oil revenues, others to finishing what his father had started, but no one pointed to either the reason provided by the administration (weapons of mass destruction) or the humanitarian crises brought about by Saddam’s brutality. That forever clouded and complicated any advances made in Iraq, much the way that Vietnam suffered from a lack of broad-base public support as a result of questionable driving forces (i.e. how real the red scare really was).

Second, regime changes require follow-through. In order to be successful, there needs to be economic, educational, ideological, and regional support to help restore stability. The extent to which any of these four pillars are already existent, or have the potential to be improved upon, largely dictates how feasible a government rebuilding effort might be. To the extent that these factors are either nonexistent or difficult to create, you face real barriers in that rebuilding process.

Regime change has been difficult in sub-Saharan Africa because the citizenry is largely uneducated, and there is no economic foundation to drive capitalism and therefore business development, which in turn leads to an increased quality of life. The Middle East presents problems with ideology. Deeply rooted hatred towards Western nations and the indoctrination of large swaths of society by radicalized interpretations of Islam make the entire concept of democracy so foreign that it just doesn’t sink in.

This is why authoritarian regimes attack these foundations. They destroy academic independence and align school curriculums to mirror political platforms. They centralize and nationalize large corporations in order to take power away from the private sector and increase dependence on the central government. They dig a ditch that necessitates time, funding, and prolonged commitment in order to climb back out.

Nations should only engage in regime change when there is a prolonged commitment, unilateral international support, and resources available to develop each of the pillars necessary to rebuild a country. Absent these things, then what does regime-change really accomplish? It only creates further instability, which drives a country deeper into poverty, makes it more susceptible to civil war, and ends up only worsening the lives of its inhabitants. Change without persistence is counter-productive.

The third factor that needs to be considered is the ripple effect. What are the regional and global impacts of regime change? In order to do this, you need to evaluate the current impact of the regime in question. Is the regime a stabilizing or destabilizing force with respect to its surrounding neighbors? Iraq is a prime example of a country that, although internally corrupt and unstable, provided a relatively stabilizing influence through the region.

As we have had to learn the hard way in retrospect, Saddam’s Sunni government provided the perfect counterweight to the neighboring Shiah government in Iran. So long as both existed, neither would ever be able to achieve enough stand-alone power and influence to become a global threat. This is a point that we were well aware of when we supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, when we saw an increasingly radicalized Iranian state and foresaw the benefit of bolstering an anti-Iranian neighbor that could put political, military, and economic pressure on leaders in Tehran. Our plan worked. We stalled the spread of the Islamic state, and create balance within the region. Take Iraq out of the equation? Now we have an empowered Iranian government making real strides towards nuclear weaponry, exerting real influence within the region, and increasingly growing as a threat to the security interests of us and our allies.

Other regimes, such as Kim Jung Il in North Korea, are regional de-stabilizers. The North Korean state is surrounded by South Korea, China, and Japan, all of whom are fairly modernized countries with whom we have alliances and strong economic interdependencies. Removing Kim Jung Il from power would not shift the tied of regional power, but would instead alleviate regional tensions, bring an end to an ongoing conflict (FYI: the Korean war technically has never ended) and create another potential trading partner with the outside world.

The fourth factor is fairly self-explanatory: feasibility of military success. Essentially, it is inadvisable to attempt to topple a regime if you can’t actually push them out of power.

The threats that we face do not allow for absolute pacifism. We instead must, as is the case with nearly all issues, accept that there are vast areas of indeterminable grey. As Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel suggests, there exists both War AND Peace. And each, I would argue, serves a role in maintaining a semblance of balance.

To precisely define what constitutes a “good war” is an imperfect science, and it is likely best left for a future post that focuses exclusively on that issue. But even absent a definitive definition, common sense tells me that some of the regimes that exist need to be altered, one way or another.

Fighting Furloughs

There is a real difference, sometimes, between what is philosophically correct and what is feasible. At its foundation, the United States is a political phenomenon built predominately on ideas. Our government is largely fueled by the propellants of theory, philosophy, and principles. But, amidst all of the intangible that guides our thought process and our governmental direction, it is important that we also maintain a grip on the real-world limitations to this approach.

In a Washington Post article by Jonathan Mummolo and Maria Glod this past week, they reported that “A federal judge ruled…that Prince George’s County violated the U.S. Constitution when it furloughed 5,900 workers in the last fiscal year, a decision that could force the county to repay millions in wages in the midst of a crippling economic downturn”. The ruling argues that Prince George’s County (a Maryland suburb just outside of Washington D.C.) violated collective bargaining agreements with its employees when it instituted furloughs as a means of reducing costs in the current recessionary environment. The ruling reinforces the basic principles of contract law (i.e. what is put in pen is generally set in stone), but it’s a ruling that, while likely “correct” in the eyes of our judicial system, doesn’t reflect the contextual realities of the environment in which the furloughs were instituted.

Faced with falling sources of revenues, municipal governments must meet their budgets through broad cost reductions. This means choosing between the best of many unfavorable alternatives: reduced funding for existing programs and initiatives, the elimination of programs and initiatives, reductions in spending on core social services such as education, health services, and emergency personnel, or widespread layoffs. Or, another potential option is furloughs.

Furloughs allow the opportunity to reduce the days worked by governmental employees (typically one or two weeks), which then reduces that employee’s salary by a proportional amount. It is an alternative that has been widely criticized by many governmental agencies and employees, but it is one that provides the very real benefit of avoiding the much worse secondary options.

Now, inevitably, this past week’s ruling will mean the following:

The inability to use furloughs will mean that local governments are instead forced to permanently lay-off workers.

Furthermore, if local governments are forced to repay salaries from past furloughs, it will force them to pay for this cost, at least in the short-term, by immediately reducing cash outflows to activities such as law enforcement, education, and infrastructure-related projects. This means restrictions on overtime for police officers (translation: fewer units on the streets and a higher crime rate), hiring freezes for new teachers (translation: no new influx of teaching talent, and reduced teacher-to-student ratios that further worsen the academic environment), and the halt of infrastructure projects means a loss of construction jobs.

Furloughs are not a permanent solution to the problem of growing governmental deficits. In the long-run, a sustainable balance needs to be achieved between spending and revenues, with my preference being a sizeable reduction on the spending side. Furthermore, I am not even saying that furloughs are a good thing at all. Reductions in wages are never preferable. For existing employees they can seem unfair, unwanted, and create a legitimate burden (lets not forget that families, much like governments, are facing budgetary crises of their own). However, in the midst of a recession, furloughs are a tool that should be at the disposal of legislatures.

Objectively, furloughs are a manageable short-term solution, and a much preferable alternative to the other potential outcomes discussed above. That is the unfortunate truth. And while I don’t expect the employees involved the be able to remove subjectivity from the situation and to understand that, it is supposed to be the role of our judicial system to provide a broader perspective and understanding to the situation. But, what was provided this past week was not perspective or reason, but a decision made within a legal vacuum. A decision absent of contextual understanding and entrenched in the particulars of legal precedent and conceptual thinking. “What would a ruling condoning the breach of a bargaining contract now mean for the future of such contracts?”

Despite our history of precedents and our inclination towards theoretical analysis, our legal system requires a renewed sense of direct consequences as opposed to indirect ripple effect. There needs to be some element (and if that element does already exist in some small modicum, then it should be far larger in proportion) of recognition that, at the end of the day, a case is meant to adjudicate a specific set of circumstances; to address an individual compilation of facts.

Logic, rather than legal theory, tells me that last week’s decision was a mistake. It tells me that more harm than good was done, and it tells me that a truly objective adjudicator would have realized the same.

For all of their flaws, furloughs represent an ability to save millions of dollars in spending while not having to reduce core governmental services, and without having to eliminate jobs. In an economy with nearly ten percent unemployment, that’s not such a bad thing. What Prince George’s County will have to do instead of furloughs? That, unfortunately, may be a little bit more of one.

A Quick Vent

This is my third attempt to write a new post about Obama’s Health Care proposal (fourth if you count a version that was unwritten, but composed inside of my own head). First, I wrote about hypocrisy, about how “what goes around comes around”, and how the recent town hall meeting outbursts have been a conservative spin on traditionally liberal protest-tactics. My second attempt drew a comparison between Democrats and Ostriches, arguing that ignoring the legitimacy of town hall participants’ rage was like shoving their head into the ground in response to a threat. But, neither of these felt right. Each approach too greatly confined the direction of my message, leaving too little room to address the myriad of issues that I have with the current discourse over health care.

So, this is more of a free wheeling vent session.

My problems with the health care debate are as follows:

Democrats have attacked town hall outbursts as being organized.

Of course they are organized! They’re unruly, contentious, defiant, and organized, organized, organized. But aren’t nearly all demonstrations organized? Protests against the Vietnam War were organized. The civil rights movement was organized. And the vast majority of the public demonstrations against former President George W Bush were, yes, organized.

Organization is not an impediment to democracy, it’s a symptom of it. Grass roots campaigns, either liberal or conservative, are a cornerstone of our political system. Just ask President Obama. He was just elected by one.

Opponents to health care are un-American.

This point is probably best addressed towards Nancy Pelosi: Shut up.

Disagreement and debate, much like organization and assembly, are also prominent elements of a democracy. Like eyes, a nose, and a mouth come together to form the human face, our disagreements and our discourse form a recognizable portrait of what America is supposed to represent. To call those who disagree with you un-American is, well, simply un-American. Or worse. It is despicable.

Obama’s “Death Panel”.

Democrats are not alone in distorting the debate over health care. The blame is shared by conservatives and Republicans who flood the marketplace of ideas and beliefs with false truths. Those who engage in fear mongering and who try to defeat legislation by creating fictitious claims of “death panels”, or by labeling their opponents as socialists and Nazis are doing a disservice to their own cause.

What’s the point? Obamacare is a horrendously constructed, over one thousand page piece of legislation that is scary enough without the assistance of false claims. The current proposals do NOT include any mention of death panels. But a government-provided health care WILL drive our deficit to unimaginable levels, force employees out of employer-provided health care, and create more bureaucracy in a society best described by Ronald Reagan when he argued that “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”

We can win the debate over healthcare on fair and honest terms. There is absolutely no need to mislead anybody.

The evolution of anger.

I see the town hall forums and the outbursts and I recognize them as a true expression of animosity and anger towards the entire package being presented. Anger towards costly and misguided healthcare reform. Spite towards a government that has not earned any trust. Resentment against government intrusion into the economy. Fear of a growing deficit that is unsustainable. I identify and agree with all of these concerns. But, I also recognize that there will come a time, and it is soon, that this anger has to evolve into something productive.

We can’t degrade and shout down elected officials forever. These groups need to recognize that healthcare reform, in some form and of some kind, is going to have to happen. Change, like it or not, is coming down the pipeline. There is a dialogue that is happening, and we must choose whether or not we want to participate in that dialogue. We need to promote real alternatives to what is currently being proposed, and we need to agree upon commonplace and commonsensical principles of reform to our established system.

Anger is important. Anger serves a purpose. But anger, like all things in our natural world, must evolve.

Inputs vs. Outputs

Dick Morris (former Clinton Aide and author of “Catastrophe”) made the comment this morning that “There are only two ways to cut costs in the medical care system: you either reduce doctors’ salaries or you reduce the amount of medical care that patients receive.” In other words, Morris presents us with a fairly basic economic reality regarding cost control: it must take the form of either reducing the cost of inputs, or the cost of outputs. In Morris’ argument, doctors’ salaries represent the inputs, or the cost of goods sold, that force up the price of the final product , in this case healthcare. By reducing these salaries, and by therefore reducing the cost of producing healthcare, it would be possible to sustain our nation’s current level of aggregate output and still reduce the overall cost associated with those output levels.

But wage reductions simply are not feasible. As is, there is an insufficient supply of doctors, and specifically primary physicians, within the system. A reduction in salaries would only further push down the supply of health care providers, creating further market inefficiencies and a raise in the price of healthcare in order to bring the market back into relative equilibrium (i.e. as the supply of doctors reduces and the demand for their services remains constant or increases, the end result is an increase in price).

The other option, according to Morris, is the aggregate cost of the system is reduced by reducing aggregate output. Or, in other words, we reduce the total amount of healthcare being provided in order to reduce the overall cost of the system. This process, referred to by critics as “healthcare rationing”, would have a very real and direct impact on the doctor-patient relationship. It would dictate what and how many tests and procedures could be performed. The system would look to reduce overly expensive or excessive procedures, which, as Morris points out, would translate into a reduction in the level of healthcare provided to seniors, who contribute to nearly eighty percent of the total cost of healthcare.

In Morris’ opinion, the concept of healthcare rationing to seniors is the underlying reason why Obama’s plan wont work. Despite a sixty-vote majority in the senate, Morris argues that the disparate impact of Obama’s legislation on seniors will erode a significant base of political support for many congressional representatives, and therefore prevent the kind of widespread consensus necessary to pass healthcare reform.

For his part, President Obama has attempted to extend the possible sources of cost control outside of the aforementioned areas. He has argued that cost savings are imbedded within moving medical records to an online database (which has unfairly been characterized by some conservatives as a violation of privacy…which it really would not be), and he has hinted to other potential savings, although he has chosen not to specifically define those potential savings.

In the end, Morris’ definition of cost savings has been too limited, and the President’s too undefined. Although, and understandably so, any and everything that was attempted by former President George W. Bush has become political taboo, Bush had a take on healthcare related cost control that lacks the proper attention from both Morris and Obama. Medical liability reform offers a real potential to decrease the inputs associated with healthcare, and it should be a minimum pre-requisite before a broader debate of healthcare reform.

In the hyper-litigation society in which we live, medical malpractice suits have come to represent a significant challenge for the medical industry. According to the New York Time’s bestselling book “Better” by Atul Gawande, on average, a medical practitioner in a high-risk field of practice (such as obstetrics or oncology) is sued once every six years. Seventy percent of the time, the suit is dropped or the doctor wins in court, but the cost associated with the shear amount and size of these suits is significant. Depending upon their field of practice, surgeons pay anywhere from “thirty thousand to three hundred thousand dollars a year in malpractice-insurance premiums…neurosurgeons and obstetricians pay upward of fifty percent more”. With many of these suits requesting six-figure sum payouts, they represent real deterrents for doctors to enter the field. The costs must either be passed on to patients (raising the cost of healthcare), or most eat into the profit margins of the doctors (making the field less attractive, reducing the amount of practitioners, and inevitably raising the price of healthcare).

The system makes little sense. And what makes it worse? Some studies show that the likelihood of a doctor being sued has very little to do with fault or with medical knowledge.

Researcher Wendy Levinson reviewed several hundred conversations between physicians and their patients. Half of the physicians selected had never been sued, while the other half had been sued at least twice. What she found was that there was no disparity between the two groups in terms of medical knowledge or the level of care provided (i.e. tests requested, proper diagnoses made, etc.). What she did find was that the group that had not been sued, on average, spent three minutes more with their patients (18.3 minutes versus 15 minutes for those who had been sued). Second, she found that those who had not been sued were more likely to make orienting comments such as “First I’ll examine you, and then we will talk the problem over” or “I will leave time for your questions”.

Psychologist Nalini Ambady took Levinson’s study a step further and found that you could almost perfectly predict which surgeons would be sued based solely on analyzing the doctor’s tone over a forty second period of time. Ambady took their conversations and stripped the actual words being used, reducing them solely to a mumble that conveyed nothing beyond the doctor’s tone towards the patient. If the surgeon’s tone was dominant, then they almost always were in the group that had been sued, while those who had not been nearly always had a less-dominant and more concerned tone.

The Ambady and Levinson studies show us that our system of medical malpractice does not serve to punish bad doctors, but rather to provide an outlet against doctors with poor inter-personal skills. It raises the cost of care provided, reduces the amount of doctors available, and isn’t even effective in doing what it was designed to do, which is to protect patients.

Creating caps on punitive punishments (or even altogether eliminating them, absent an accompanying criminal conviction) against doctors would provide real cost savings, and it should be a precursor to any additional healthcare reform. It is a real and glaring problem within our system, and needs to be addressed because it is unfair, makes no sense, and is easily remedied.

Sarah Palin Is Ryan Leaf

Sarah Palin is officially Ryan Leaf.

The more and more I think about this whole Sarah Palin thing, that's the idea that I keep returning to. My opinion? I think that Palin is the political equivalent of a top prospect athlete who makes some ESPN Sportscenter Top-10 list for draft picks that never panned out. She's Ryan Leaf, Akili Smith, or Robert "Tractor" Traylor. Take your pick of player, but the metaphor remains sound.

For those of you who know me, you know that I was never a Palin-fanatic. I ascribe more to the George Will or Peggy Noonan element of the Republic party, which never wholly accepted Palin as a viable national figurehead for the Republican brand. But that said, while I don't know that I would vote for Palin any time soon, I do agree with her supporters when they note her political talents and potential. She inarguably has a good feel for a crowd, the ability to draw one, and has all of the core ideological beliefs (fiscal constraint, small government, strong defense) that lend themselves towards becoming a prominent voice within the Republican Party. Much like scouts used to tout about Ryan Leaf, she might look as good on the practice field and on paper as anyone out there. But, also like Leaf, there is something that just hasn't translated into success on the field. Or, in Palin's case, hasn't translated into real national acceptance.

There are a lot of reasons why this might be the case. Maybe it's that she got drafted into the wrong circumstance. How much success can you really expect Matthew Stafford to have on the Detroit Lions? No talent around him and a coaching staff that’s a far cry from the Belichek's and Holmgren's of the world. Much of the same could be said about Palin. In getting drafted onto team McCain, she was placed within a political organization that just didn't provide much support. She was thrown into the game without enough practice, asked to understand political complexities that she had never seen before on the smaller stage of Anchorage, Alaska, and she was asked to help carry a team without a consensus leader and without a fan base that could afford to be very patient. In many ways, the Republican Party may have jumped the gun and pulled Palin up into a situation that she was neither ready for or able to win in.

In the aftermath of her first gig in the majors, Palin is now asked to rally herself, learn from mistakes, and find a way to get back to the top. But, whether in sports or politics, such reintroductions of a player are both difficult and rare to accomplish. First impressions are rather lasting, and the book out around the league on Palin is not met with uniformed favor or enthusiasm. These comeback stories are not altogether impossible, but they involve solid coaching, dedication, and discipline. None of which are necessarily components of the Palin repertoire.

What Palin needed to do was to bide her time as Governor. Sit in the minor leagues and build on the fundamentals. She needed to deepen her resume by engaging as part of international envoys, achieve gains on key domestic issues such as energy independence and deficit reductions (issues she could easily push for in a state such as Alaska, which plays a key role in the national energy debate and that is condensed enough in terms of population size to allow for scaled reductions in state spending and cost structure). If experience was the single most viable complaint put forth by Palin detractors, then she needed to focus on gaining more. And this would have been entirely possible as a sitting governor. If not by 2012 (which I would argue will be a difficult election again for Republicans in the face of Obama Part II…but that’s a different post altogether), then by 2016 Palin could have almost wholly erased any concerns about her readiness for national office. But now? George Will may have said it best when he pointed out that, “the biggest argument against Palin was that she was only a first term governor from Alaska, and now she’s not even that”.

What Palin now lacks is an easily identifiable path to the Presidency, or some similarly significant national post. She has become a quasi-Brandon Jennings, a basketball prospect who chose to forego a year of collegiate basketball in order to play in Italy instead and then declare for the draft. Sure, Jennings’ story resulted in him remaining a lottery pick in this year’s draft, but he did so mostly on previously built-up capital. The lasting image for league executives and general managers, before leaving for the obscurity of Italian pro basketball, was one in which he was a McDonald’s All-American and the top high school point guard in the country. By contrast, what is the lasting image for Palin? One that raised questions, concerns, and ample animosity. If obscurity strengthened the former memory of Jennings, then it might very well serve to vilify the former governor.

There are always exceptions to any rule. There is a reason why most leagues have a “return player of the year” award. But these stories are few and far between, and they are not stories applicable to Ryan Leaf, who more or less fell off of the face of the world. I doubt that Palin will silently fall out of the public eye, but like Leaf, I don’t expect to see her end her career in Canton, Ohio. Or, as a political equivalent, to end up in the White House.