CHANNEL SURFING

Bay deal looks logical

2010-01-05T14:51:00.003-05:00

If this nugget from today's NY Post piece on the Jason Bay signing is accurate, the contract actually looks pretty good.

Bay's deal includes a full no-trade clause and an $8.5 million signing bonus, according to The Associated Press. He will make $6.5 million in salary this year and $16 million for each of the ensuing three seasons. His option would become guaranteed if he reaches 600 plate appearances in 2013 or 500 plate appearances in both the 2012 and '13 seasons. The contract's total value could reach $80 million.

I'm not crazy about full no-trades, but the vesting clause sets the bar high enough that this deal can only go to five years if Bay remains productive. If not, there is little chance that he will hit the plate appearance marks needed.

So we shall see.

At the moment, I'm cautiously optimistic.

Time to vote or get off the pot on marriage equality

2010-01-05T14:35:00.002-05:00

This is how democracy is supposed to work, right? Post the bill, debate it and vote on it so everyone in the state of New Jersey can see where each of our 40 state Senators stand on the marriage equality issue. There is a good chance, unfortunately, that it will fail, but it will "out" those who refuse to see this as an issue of civil rights.

Don't buy war bonds

2010-01-05T13:29:00.002-05:00

Sen. Ben Nelson, the conservative Democrat from Nebraska, is pushing the idea of funding the war in Afghanistan by selling government bonds -- borrowing an idea that worked well during World War II.

But as this piece points out, the economy has changed, making the bond sale problematic.

More importantly, the Afghan and Iraq wars are not very popular; any funding mechanism based on a voluntary contribution is going to fail.

If we believe these wars are necessary -- they aren't, but if we want to fool ourselves into believing they are -- we should be honest and pay for them out of our budget the way we pay for everything else.

Illustrating history

2010-01-05T13:25:00.002-05:00

I found this piece on the late, great David Levine interesting, if only because the illustrators/cartoonists mentioned -- his peers and followers -- are the great left-liberal illustrators of our day, drawing for The Village Voice, The Nation, etc.

Levine was a great illustrator with a keen eye and his impact on the somewhat staid New York Review of Books cannot be underestimated. He will be missed.

Runner's diary, Tuesday

2010-01-05T13:15:00.002-05:00

As I wrote last week, I am not a big believer in new year's resolutions. If you want to make a change or set a goal, there is no reason you cannot do it on May 2 or Sept. 14. The fact that so many of us opt to focus on Jan. 1 -- and then abandon the goals almost as fast as they are set -- seems a bit dopey.

In any case, here we are in a new year and I'm back at the running game. My goal is to run a half marathon at Rutgers in May, which means I must get my fat and sorry tuchus in gear. So far, I've hit the treadmill twice, running three yesterday and two today. My goal for the week is 10 miles, with two miles added every week for the next month or so. We'll see.

Class begins again on Jan. 25 -- I'm teaching at Middlesex County College twice a week -- which tosses my running schedule into the air, but I have to make that commitment to get back to the kind of aggressive training I had been doing until the last year or so.

Time to get serious.

Optimism at the Garden: The Knicks turn a corner

2010-01-03T21:20:00.003-05:00

A 43-point win for the Knicks is unfathomable. I caught a few minutes of the game, while cleaning up and cooking, and it is clear that a) the Pacers are an awful team and b) the Knicks have turned some sort of corner. After 1-9 and 3-14 starts, the team has gone 11-6 and has positioned itself to be in the playoff hunt (it is ninth in the conference at the moment).

Part of it appears to be a willingness to play defense, and the sudden coming together of a new core -- Wilson Chandler, Dano Gallinari and David Lee, along with veterans Chris Duhan and Al Harrington. Today, for instance, each member of the new core dropped 20-plus, Duhon had 18 and seven assists and Harrington, who played just 17 minutes, popped for 15.

If they can keep this up, can drive into the playoffs and make a showing there -- stretching the first round to the limit -- the team might be able to lure one or two of the prime free agents out there. They have the cash and if they can show that Gallo and Chandler are for real and they can wrap up Lee at a reasonable price, anything is possible. This team remains far from real contention, lacking a real center or a point guard who can take them deep into the playoffs. Duhon is a solid playmaker, but would be better suited to coming off the bench or playing BJ Armstrong's old role with the Bulls.

For the first time since the end of the Patrick Ewing era, Knick fans have a right to be modestly optimistic.

Correction: Brilliant Disguise? What was I thinking?

2010-01-01T00:28:00.002-05:00

I have to correct myself. Somehow, I misnamed a Springsteen album -- me! -- calling it by the first single released in today's year-end music post. The disc in question should have been Tunnel of Love. What exactly happened?

Blackwater gets away with murder

2009-12-31T16:37:00.001-05:00

Why am I not surprised by this? Blackwater five gets off in Baghdad shooting. Just great.

Dispatches: A question of priorities

2009-12-31T16:25:00.002-05:00

Dispatches is available -- wondering what Chris Christie's priorities are going to be.

Empowering the grassroots

2009-12-31T15:43:00.002-05:00

This is an interesting proposal, long overdue and in keeping with the democratic reforms made by the party in its candidate selection process over the years. The superdelegates have been defended as a way of resolving close races, but they really are nothing more than a hedge for the party insiders to ensure that the party's grassroots cannot take over the process.

The fear is that the Democrats could have a repeat of the 1972 primaries, the first in which the primaries actually mattered, and nominate a new George McGovern. That fear, of course, is overblown and ignores the historical record -- as I wrote in 2004 and David Sirota wrote in his book Uprising. Nixon won that election for a lot of reasons, but not because McGovern was some kind of crazed lefty. He won because he was an incumbent that ran a smart race against a fractured Democratic Party and a candidate that made more than his share of mistakes. The Democratic establishment was as much to blame for what happened as the McGovern campaign.

The Democrats, as the 2008 election showed, are at their strongest when the grassroots is empowered and engaged. Altering the rules makes sense for the party.

The year in music 2009, A to Z

2009-12-31T15:32:00.003-05:00

Once again, I offer my review of the year in music, alphabetically:

A: Art Brut releases a great third disc (Art Brut v. Satan); Arctic Monkeys misfire a bit (with Humbug).

B: Another Beatles resurgence – as if they ever went away- driven by Rock Band and the release of the American version of their catalogue.

C: Elvis Costello goes folk/country on his latest (Secret, Profane and Sugarcane) and turns talk-show host for the cooler-than-cool "Spectacle."

D: Disappointment, as in “Bruce Springsteen releases a disappointing disc” – and so do Pearl Jam, Neil Young, Jay-Z, the Monsters of Folk, Weezer, the Flaming Lips among the many.

E: Easy listening tops the charts (Susan Boyle?!?!?) – and nauseates me in the process.

F: Franz Ferdinand has an excellent disco adventure on Tonight.

G: Girl power – Ida Maria and the Screaming Females (from New Brunswick) were among the female punkers and hardrockers to issue outstanding discs.

H: The Heavy’s The House that Dirt Built, is edgy, fuzz-drenched and, well, heavy.

I: “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black-Eyed Peas ranks as one of their best singles – even if the use of “Mazel tov” seems, well, a bit odd.

J: David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain lead a reconstituted New York Dolls through a continued resurgence with Cause I Said So.

K: Kings of Leon’s Only By the Night is better than its hype, even if Art Brut has a little fun during their shows at the band’s expense. (The disc came out in 2008, but bumrushed the charts in 2009.)

L: Lily Allen’s It’s Not Me, It’s You is one of the best things to cross the Atlantic.

M: The Millers, Buddy and Judy, put out the year’s best county disc, Written in Chalk.

N: Nellie McKay shows off her infatuation with Doris Day on Normal as Blueberry Pie.

O: Offspring – as in Roseanne Cash (great disc of covers, The List), Justin Townes Earle and Dhani Harrison (Thenewno2).

P: P!nk releases the best divorce album (Funhouse) since Springsteen’s Brilliant Disguise (another 2008 disc that got most of its play in 2009).

Q: Alicia Keys proves she’s the queen of modern R&B – apologies to Mary J. Blige – with another fabulous disc (The Element of Freedom), perhaps her most consistent.

R: Rihanna surprises with an album (Rated R) of depth and emotion, nothing like the light weight dance/pop she’s known for.

S: Michael Franti and Spearhead release All Rebel Rockers, among the best albums of the year.

T: 21st Century Breakdown proves that Green Day’s expansive view of pop-punk first demonstrated on American Idiot (one of the decade’s best) was no fluke.

U: U2’s No Line on the Horizon is better than its predecessor, the exceptional How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

V: Townes Van Zandt returns with Steve Earle’s impressive reinterpretation of his catalogue, Townes.

W: What was Bob Dylan thinking? A Christmas disc? With strings and a choir? In all seriousness? At least it was for charity.

X: Ex-members of Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar – Tweedy (Wilco’s Wilco (The Album)) puts out maybe the best album of the year, while Farrar (Son Volt’s American Central Dust) easily makes the top 10.

Y: Yeah Yeah Yeahs join Franz Ferdinand on the disco dance floor to great results on It’s Blitz!

Z: The soundtrack to the History Channel’s program, “The People Speak,” a dramatization of Howard Zinn’s important “A People’s History of the United States,” is political and poetic and powerful.

Out of the bubble

2009-12-30T23:04:00.002-05:00

I've spent the last few days in a self-imposed bubble, taking advantage of some days off to work on some poetry, watch some movies (I recommend Syriana, which I watched on DVR today, and Sherlock Holmes, which is a real thrill ride -- though Holmes purists might disagree), and play with the dogs.

I also have studiously avoided the news because too much of it is focused on year-end wrap ups that do little more than regurgitate stories that we've read before.

I'll hit the blog with some thoughts tomorrow -- my annual musical wrap (what was it I was saying?), some thoughts on health care and more.

Right now, however, I'm going to bed.

Time for Senate reform

2009-12-26T23:34:00.001-05:00

This piece by Ezra Klein is spot on -- and very eloquently says what I've been saying for a half dozen years: Reform the Senate.

Loose lips and hyperbole

2009-12-26T15:45:00.003-05:00

I missed this story on Thursday, but it is worth posting today because it shows the dangers the healthcare reform bill poses in its current form.

If, as the Times reports, the impact will be limited, leaving the vast majority of people to deal with an only modestly changed market:

Now that the Senate has caught up with the House by passing a sweeping health care bill, lawmakers are on the verge of extending coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance.

But what about the roughly 160 million workers and their dependents who already have health insurance through an employer? For many people, the result of the long, angry health care debate in Washington may be little more than more of the same.

As President Obama once promised, “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.”

That may be true even if you don’t like your health plan. And no one seems to agree on whether the legislation will do much to reduce workers’ continually rising out-of-pocket costs.

Again, I am not arguing that the bill should be killed -- I remain ambivalent, convinced that a better bill could have been crafted had progressive Senators and the president stood up to Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and the moderates and stopped reifying them, but also concerned with the political damage defeating the bill could cause.

What I think needs to happen is that bill supporters need to be honest. Stop painting the bill with such overheated language and just tell the public what it likely will do and how that is good for all. There is too great a danger that the hyperbole will backfire, that the millions who are unaffected by reforms, who find themselves at the mercy of the industry, will turn their back or worse -- buy into the BS arguments coming from the GOP.

Long pacts could mean long regrets

2009-12-25T23:13:00.004-05:00

Omar Minaya should read this story before lengthening his rumored four-year offer to Jason Bay or two-year to Bengie Molina. Both are good players who may not pay off for that long -- Bay is a not particularly athletic outfielder who strikes out a lot and was in the midst of an extended stretch of mediocrity with Pittsburgh before being traded to Boston last year.

(By the way, I predicted the Soriano deal would prove a bad one longterm for Chicago back in 2006 right after it was inked. Do I get points for that?)

Head fake on health care

2009-12-25T21:26:00.004-05:00

The health insurance reform plan approved by the Senate the other day can best be likened to a misdirection play in football, where all the action seems to be going in one direction while the real play is heading in another. In this case, we a plan being called "once-in-a-generation reform" -- a bit of overstatement, really -- when what we have is relatively modest insurance reform that expands coverage by mandating consumers buy plans from an a cartel-like industry that holds all the cards.

The misdirection here is the opportunity the bill gives the White House and the Democrats to claim a victory even if it is rather hollow -- no public option (let alone any thought of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all approach) to create competition to keep costs down, no expansion of Medicare, no changed incentives, no alternatives for businesses stretched to their limits, but millions of new customers for the insurance companies.

So, is it worth passing? That's a difficult question. There are good things in this bill and there is the possibility that it can be used as a foundation on which to build real reform. The problem is the discourse surrounding the bill. If it were being described by the press and the president as what it is -- something short of reform -- that would be OK. But it's not. It is being described as once-in-a-generation reform and that creates the danger that this bill has become a once-in-a-generation chance to fix our broken system. If the House cannot fix it, cannot toughen this bill up, progressives need to walk away from it.

The ugliness of high school sports

2009-12-25T11:42:00.002-05:00

I played a year of football in high school and I can remember an incident after a game at New Brunswick in which fans of the hometeam got a bit unruly after the game, making for a tense situation and a great deal of fear. The team was on the bus when the fans acted up -- I think we probably won that game, but our main running back was hurt badly and there were probably some words during the contest.

The fans rocked the bus some, and it was just an ugly and potentially dangerous moment.

I was reminded of this because of a story we reported in The Cranbury Press this week about a melee at a Colonia basketball game after Monroe staged a furious comeback to win. The Colonia fans assaulted Monroe's fans, sending on to the hospital -- a fact that should have administrators at all high schools concerned.

The fight took place on Dec. 18, a week ago, but got little press until we reported on it. Then, on Tuesday, a fight broke out in Allentown after a game, demonstrating that there is something very wrong with American society.

Look, the New Brunswick incident, which took place in 1978, shows that this kind of behavior is nothing new. But the fights at the high schools are part of a larger trend that includes brutality at youth league games, professional contests (fans taunting and players going into the stands) that is starting to make our sports culture resemble South American soccer.

Monroe Coach Bob Turco put the entire thing in perspective, calling it a "sign of the times."

He used a Monroe student as an example, saying the girl had told him she wouldn’t wear her Monroe colors or jacket to away games for fear of retaliation from opposing fans.

"The sad part is this has become something to expect,” he said. “It used to be about school spirit and supporting your team.”

Sadly, it no longer is.

Doggie diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie New toys for Christmas

2009-12-24T21:21:00.001-05:00

I hope we're not pushing things, but Rosie and Sohie are chewing on their new toys next to each other. This has been a recipe for disaster in the past, which is why we've only allowed supervised play and only rarely. But it is Christmas and they have been bored. And so far, they're doing OK.

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Too loud to be proud

2009-12-23T16:31:00.001-05:00

This is absurd -- and makes me a little queasy. New Jersey has enough problems, most of them self-induced, but do we really need the stereotype proven on national television by shows of dubious quality? Do we?

Dispatches: Extension act a bad bargain

2009-12-22T20:40:00.001-05:00

Here's my Dispatches column on the Permit Extension Act -- redux.

A worldwide blame game

2009-12-22T20:33:00.001-05:00

Apparently, the failure of the Copenhagen talks on climate change are no one's fault. Or everyone's. Or, more accurately, everyone else's.

Money where your mouth is

2009-12-22T17:29:00.003-05:00

I want to go back to something that former Gov. Christie Todd Whitman said early in her first term. Budgets, she said, are where politicians prove their priorities, where they back up their talk with cash.

The history of Trenton, of course, is that politics has been the priority, with legislators of both parties larding on the spending and using an array of gimmicks to both win votes and avoid angering the natives. Cut the income tax, as Whitman did, but pay for it with fancy accounting tricks. Sell state roads to the Turnpike, as Florio did. Borrow, borrow, borrow, as McGreevey did.

Chris Christie, who replaces Gov. Jon Corzine next month, is promising not to play these games. Like Corzine, he is promising to return the state's finances to a level of sanity that no one can actually remember. Corzine -- as I think history will show -- did some good, even if his tenure in office ultimately has to be viewed as a failure.

Christie has laid the gauntlet down, ordering severe cuts in state spending targeted toward eliminating programs that do not meet the mission of individual departments and consolidating duplicated services. This comes from a memo obtained by The Star-Ledger and shows that, just maybe, the new governor plans to play hardball.

The question, of course, is what he views as necessary programs. When Whitman was governor, she slashed the budget of the Department of Environmental Protection and eliminated the public advocate -- moves that saved some money but made it far too easy for the business community to escape scrutiny.

She balanced the budget and cut the state income tax rate, but left the state in a far worse position than when she took office as future governors were left to rebuild the regulatory apparatus and plug the massive hole she blew in the state's pension accounts.

Christie may succeed in slashing state spending, but how and who will pay the price? Will it be towns or schools in the form of state aid? Or the state's healthcare or prescription assistance programs? Or the DEP? Or the arts community? Some of these groups already are hurting, thanks to Corzine's budget cutting, and can only be further damaged by additional cuts.

It is not just about cutting spending. It is about priorities. Christie didn't outline those for us during his campaign -- even as he sung the zero-based budgeting song. (What is the Ledger talking about, by the way, in this story? How does this memo tie back to the zero-based nonsense all politicians spout?) He has until his first budget address to do so. Let's hope his priorities are the same as the bulk of the state's residents.

Environmental giveaways

2009-12-22T17:11:00.003-05:00

Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club offers a pretty sharp -- and warranted -- attack on a couple of bills that essentially are nothing more than Christmas presents to the building community. Read it here.

(My Dispatches column, which should be up later today, is on one of the bills -- the Permit Extension Act Part II.)

Grassroots: Climate security

2009-12-19T10:09:00.002-05:00

My Progressive Populist column is available here, on climate change, poor nations and the need to do something to protect them.

World leaders spent two weeks in Copenhagen and all we got was this?

2009-12-19T09:55:00.002-05:00

It took two weeks of talks in Copenhagen, after two years of preliminary talks and in the end, to much fanfare we got....

A big, fat nothing.

Here is how The New York Times describes the so-called Copenhagen Accord:

The plan does not firmly commit the industrialized nations or the developing nations to firm targets for midterm or long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The accord is nonetheless significant in that it codifies the commitments of individual nations to act on their own to tackle global warming.

The accord provides a system for monitoring and reporting progress toward those national pollution-reduction goals, a compromise on an issue over which China bargained hard. It calls for hundreds of billions of dollars to flow from wealthy nations to those countries most vulnerable to a changing climate. And it sets a goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050, implying deep cuts in climate-altering emissions over the next four decades.

But it was an equivocal agreement that was, to many, a disappointing conclusion to a two-year process that had the goal of producing a comprehensive and enforceable action plan for addressing dangerous changes to the global climate. The messy compromise mirrored the chaotic nature of the conference, which virtually all participants said had been badly organized and run.

The accord sets no goal for concluding a binding international treaty, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. It is likely to undergo many months, perhaps years, of additional negotiations before it emerges in any internationally enforceable form.

Goal-setting is nice, but we have moved well beyond the time when we can just set some goals and hope for the best. We still use too much oil, still burn too much carbon and we have done nothing to protect the poor, low-lying nations who will bear the brunt of the bad stuff -- and there remain few if any incentives to keep developing nations from doing what we did to build our economies.

Why should China and India make serious efforts to address the issue, when we have shown an unwillingness to do the same?

The cautious optimism proffered by some environmental groups is really nothing more than face-saving given that, in reality, we are in no better of a position on climate change than we were before these talks began.