Once upon a time, in a gentler age, the International Herald Tribune published its late sports editor Dick Roraback’s ode to baseball’s opening day each year.
Under the fold, a little bit of nostalgia, The Crack of the Bat:
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Tag Archives: Not Europe
In Memoriam
National Gonzo Press Club Vows To Carry On Hunter S. Thompson’s Work
Even gonzo journalists who have disagreed with Thompson in the past, such as award-winning New York Times columnist Heck Murdo, count him as a freak comrade. “We did have sharp differences in opinion,” Murdo said. “He thought Richard Nixon should have had his intestines slowly unwound onto a giant cable spool. I thought he should have been lashed to an oceanside cliff near San Clemente, so that ospreys could feast on his eyes. We feuded for years, at one point conducting a bourbon- and mescaline-fueled motorized-cart demolition derby on a Lake Tahoe golf course. But we patched things up when Dubya was elected, agreeing?to our mutual horror?that Nixon far outclassed that Jesus-loving pinheaded man-child.”
From the Onion, of course.
When words are not enough
Like most other bloggers, there’s really not much one can say about the Asian earthquake that’s not already echoing through the heads of our readers. The latest estimate I’ve heard is of at least 57,000 people dead, a number that’s getting too large to contemplate.
It may not feel like much, but we can all do something to help – the UN has already said that it will need the biggest aid operation the world has ever seen, and you can help by donating to one of the organisations that willo be working with the affected, like the Red Cross/Red Crescent. Please feel free to suggest any other ways of helping in the comments.
Irrelevance.
I suppose Yasir Arafat’s death and the reaction on “the Palestinian street” will give rise to a few discussions about the concept of political “irrelevance”. Benny Morris starts.
Writing in the New York Times, the recently turned hawkish Israeli historian and author of “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem“, is already missing the man, in spite of his past.
Mr. Arafat’s death most certainly will result in a succession struggle, between the generations inside the Fatah and between the Fatah and the Islamic fundamentalist parties (which may lead to complete anarchy in the Hamas stronghold of Gaza). But it is unclear whether it will bring the Middle East any closer to peace. His disappearance removes a major rejectionist obstacle from the scene.
But it also leaves us with a paradox. For Mr. Arafat was probably the only Palestinian of our time, given his historical and political stature, capable of persuading the Palestinians, or most of them, to accept the concessions necessary to achieve a two-state solution. On the other hand, his successors – Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qurei and some of the younger Fatah leaders – may be more amenable to a territorial compromise but they lack the stature to intimidate or persuade their people to accept a two-state settlement or to crush their terror-minded colleagues. So Yasir Arafat’s death may have done us no good at all.
Another Tale of Two Americas.
Certainly, I would have preferred John Kerry as President, but, quite frankly, I believe his concession is better than a lenghty recount and a mud fight in the courts. I’m sure there were irrgularities. But not to the extent that they would make a difference given the results we now know. I suppose the Democrats are, above all, perplexed by Bush winning the popular vote with a margin of almost 4 million. Sure it’s close. But it’s hardly as close as many wanted to believe it would be.
We will hear a lot of technical post-game analysis in the coming days. But I think Eric Alterman comes pretty close to the gist of it all with his initial thoughts…
Kerry has conceded.
Some kind of collision
Excerpt from Kevin Drum’s 2003 interview with Paul Krugman.
Train wreck is a way overused metaphor, but we’re headed for some kind of collision, and there are three things that can happen. Just by the arithmetic, you can either have big tax increases, roll back the whole Bush program plus some; or you can sharply cut Medicare and Social Security, because that’s where the money is; or the U.S. just tootles along until we actually have a financial crisis where the marginal buyer of U.S. treasury bills, which is actually the Reserve Bank of China, says, we don’t trust these guys anymore ? and we turn into Argentina. All three of those are clearly impossible, and yet one of them has to happen, so, your choice. Which one?
Well, how about your choice? What’s your best guess?
I think financial crisis, and then how it falls out is 50-50, either New New Deal or back to McKinley, and I think it’s anybody’s guess which one of those it is. It’s crazy stuff, but think about where I am on this. My take on the numbers is no different from Brad DeLong’s, it’s no different from CBO’s now, and we all look at this and we all see this curve that marches steadily upwards and then heads for the sky after the baby boomers start retiring. I don’t know what Brad thinks, I think he’s open-minded [actually, it turns out he’s optimistic that voters will eventually come to their senses and raise taxes on the rich. ?ed.], but the general view is: yes, but this is America, it can’t happen, so something will come up. And I’m just willing to say I don’t see any noncatastrophic solution to this, I don’t see an incremental stepwise resolution. I think something drastic is really going to happen.
How does all this feed in to the current account deficit? Will China keep financing that forever?
They’re financing both the current account deficit, and, as it turns out, directly financing the government deficit. We were running a big current account deficit that accelerated through the late 90s, but there you could say that it was due to the strength of the U.S. economy, it was all this investment demand, technological revolution, and after all, the government was in surplus.
Now, we’re back in twin deficits territory, and there are two related issues, the solvency of the federal government and the solvency of the United States per se, and both of them are now somewhat in question.
Maybe I’m a captive of my own model, but I think that what happens when the world loses faith in the U.S. as a place to invest is that the dollar plunges, but that in itself is not so bad because the lucky thing is our foreign debts are in dollars, so we don’t do an Indonesia or an Argentina. But the federal government’s solvency is a much more critical thing because it needs to keep on borrowing more and more just to pay its bills.
What happens if these foreign countries do stop buying U.S. bonds? Is this a real concern, or a tinfoil hat kind of thing?
Oh, I don’t think China is going to do it to pressure us. You can just barely conceive of a situation where they’re mad at us because we’re keeping them from invading Taiwan or something, but more likely they just start to wonder if this is really a good place to be putting their money.
So what happens is a plunge in the dollar when they decide to stop buying and start cashing in, and a spike in U.S. interest rates. But you might also get in a situation where the interest rates the government has to pay to roll over its debt become so high that you get an accelerating problem, which is what happened in Argentina. What happened was that suddenly no one would buy Argentine debt unless they paid a twenty something percent interest rate, and everybody says, but if they have to roll over their debt at a twenty percent interest rate, there’s no way they can pay that back. So the whole thing grinds to a halt and the cash flow just dries up.
And do you think that’s a serious possibility for the United States?
Yeah, just take the numbers as they now look, and that’s where it heads. And you might say, OK, we can easily handle it. U.S. taxes are 26 percent of GDP in the U.S., in Canada they’re 38 percent of GDP. If you raise U.S. taxes to Canadian levels there’s plenty of money to cope with all of this. But politically we’ve got a deadlock, and it’s hard to imagine that happening.
So you say, but this can’t happen, this is America, and I guess my answer is, is it? Is this the same country that we had in 1970? I think we have a much more polarized political system, a much more polarized social climate. We certainly aren’t the country of Franklin Roosevelt, and we’re probably not the country of Richard Nixon either, so I think we have to take seriously the possibility that things won’t work out this time.
Tough Call in Ohio.
James Carville just called the election for the President because of pessimistic Democrats on the ground in Ohio. This may be a little premature. But even though, I think it is fair to say that President Bush did fare better – certainly in the popular vote – than expected by many who bet on a higher – Kerry voting – turnout among younger voters. Now it appears that the queues were a little too long for them, as Josh Marshall opines.
I think it is not unreasonable to call Florida for Bush even pending the lawsuits, provisional and absentee ballots. But I’m much less sure about Ohio, particularly given the legal challenges, and about 200,000 provisional ballots. Either way, it looks like the next president will be crowned in Ohio – and that may take some time.
In other news, Tom Daschle is not having a good time in South Dakota tonight, and the Republicans will retain the majority in both Congressional chambers. Should President Bush actually be reelected, this would be a decisive Conservative victory that would significantly boost their political and social agenda.
It’s difficult to predict to which extent the ideological cleavages within the Republican party would begin to show in such a situation. But Hillary 2008 would probably become even more of a clash of civilisations than the Kerry campaign has been.
Warten aufs Christkind.
While we are waiting, why not have a look at some quotes from the WorldPressReview about the world’s fears regarding an American election disaster. Robert Leicht said in Die Zeit –
“Let there be no misunderstanding: America is truly a free country and, for Germany in particular, a role model of democracy. … For that very reason, it is all the more grotesque that the ground rules of democracy in the ‘mother of all democracies’ can not be convincingly enforced but, rather, are sinking beneath an embarrassing debacle.”
Bad Manners, Bad Grammar
The margin of litigation grows by the hour. It is leaflets like the one below from Ohio that make me rather certain that the US elections will not be over when the polls close tonight.
