Walking Backwards

President Obama's policies have not revived the economy for the same reason that you cannot move forward by walking backwards.

Romney’s Sword

Gov. Romney's single term in Massachusetts is a sword he will either be able to wield against his opponents (Rick Perry) or one that will be wielded against him.

If he can leverage the issue in his favor, that quadrennial will be a time when he made as good as he possibly could to instill conservative governance in perhaps the single-most hostile environment for conservatism.

Gov. Perry will spin it a different way, contending that Gov. Romney was not making good so much as accommodating himself to the predominant liberal ethos. That, he will add, is the last thing we need from someone going to Washington at a time when the republic is in dire need of inherent institutional reform.

No significant conservative achievement from Gov. Romney's time in Massachusetts comes to mind, so if he tries to emphasize that as an issue he will be playing right into Gov. Perry's hands. Any mention of Massachusetts is only an invitation to mention Romneycare, perhaps the single largest obstacle to Gov. Romney winning the nomination.

Gov. Romney's strongest card is his tenure in the private sector, the means by which he can say that he has experience turning around failing businesses (and the Salt Lake Olympics) that he will apply towards turning the federal government around. A business, bottom-line approach towards government is music to many conservative voters' ears, so that is the note he should play on his political violin.

Progressive Taxation

It is one thing to say, as most progressives do, that the wealthy should pay an increased proportion of income in taxes.

The problem most Americans have with this, wealthy or not, is that such a progressive taxation scheme entails the always revenue-hungry federal government deciding who is wealthy and who is not.

To most, this is an entirely discomfiting notion, and it should be.

Qadaffi's Impending Fall

If Qadaffi and his regime are indeed about to collapse, we will be exchanging a bastard we know for bastards we don't. It is dubious whether Libya can do worse, but it is uncertain (at best) whether they can do much better.

RE: ‘Corporations are People’

Mitt Romney arguing as he did that "corporations are people too" is as true as it is politically tone-deaf. The best argument against over-taxation of corporate America is not a kind of sympathetic declaration you'd expect to hear from Barney the Dinosaur – I seriously doubt "corporations are people too" will make the hearts of that many Americans bleed.

This is a bread-and-butter issue and should be presented as such. The dispositive argument is that whatever taxes you levy on corporations, they are not the ones that will ultimately pay them: individual Americans will. A greater tax burden will cause businesses to cover that cost by passing it on to the consumer in the prices they charge for their goods and services. Higher corporate taxes mean one thing and one thing only: higher prices on American consumers. Taxing corporate American only hurts Middle-America.

If Governor Romney wants to marshal public opinion against taxing corporations more than we do already (as he should), he should make this simple point, emphasizing that taxing corporate America more only makes corporate America the federal government's tax collector.

35 Yard-line Abomination

The most obnoxious aspect of the NFL's decision to move kickoffs from the thirty to the thirty-five yard-line is that, not only is it logically conflicting, but it fails to reach the natural conclusion of that logic.

The Competition Committee enacted this alteration to "improve" player safety. By moving the kicker five yards closer to the opponent's endzone, scintillating touchbacks will increase exponentially. Fewer kickoff returns means fewer returners being targeted for annihilation by coverage teams, who are usually comprised of back-end-of-the-roster types looking to earn their way up the depth chart through dogged pursuit and earth-shaking hits.

Setting aside the issue of whether the reduced risk of injury is worth drastically detracting from the game of football, this move fails to realize its own logic. If you are going to enact a rule that aims to take away kick returns why not do just that and take away kick returns? As it stands now, kickoffs will be pointless plays that will achieve nothing but an inevitable result: the offense starting their drive from the twenty. It's a charade that allows the Shield to continue its obnoxious practice of commercial break, followed by kickoff, followed by commercial break.

This failure to reach a logical endpoint only ends up confounding all logic -- indeed human reason altogether. By removing kickoff returns without removing kickoffs, the coverage team will be made to run down the field for a full-speed collision with the blocking team for no reason.

That's right: a "player safety" rule is going to make players run into other players – an obvious injury risk – only to watch the returner take a knee six or seven yards deep in the endzone. So concerned is the NFL with the physical well-being of its players that it is now asking them to risk injury for no reason whatsoever.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Roger Goddell's NFL.

Iowa

It is a curious system whereby the one who would be president of the United States must first campaign to be the mayor of Des Moines.

Unemployment

Liberals preoccupation with extending and extending unemployment is really the least they can do -- the only consolation they can offer to the millions of Americans out of work and unable to find any. It is, after all, their prescribed policies of spending, taxing and regulating that has preserved the current economic climate of stagnant growth and job creation.

Any plausible standard of decency dictates that a federal government that prevents the citizens it serves from finding work must make some kind of restitution.

Of course, to make that restitution it must take from the pockets of those with jobs...

What -- and with what -- restitution is to be made to them?

Immigration?

At a time when growth is stagnant, unemployment is  high, and every level of government is insolvent; the president is trying to resurrect the dead horse that is comprehensive immigration reform? He's really drawing attention to ANOTHER task the federal government is failing to perform and, what's more, inexplicably trying to persuade the polity to set that fact aside and add even more burdens to an overwhelmed and desperately over-stretched state?

Game 25: Bedard, Finally

Erik Bedard garners his first win in about two years and looks efficient for the first time...well, ever.  7 innings, 89 pitches.  Not 5 innings, 101 pitches.  Amazing.

What's more, instead of the litany of fly balls that he has been getting so far (half of which seem to have flown over the fence), he had a 52.4 GB%.

Bedard threw strikes early and often.  Bedard got outs early and often.

How much of this was Bedard and how much was the Tigers' lineup being surprisingly aggressive towards Bedard is an open question.  After the 4th inning (up until which Tigers batters had swung and put the ball in play within the first two pitches in a majority of their at-bats) they seemed to notice that they weren't following the tried-true-strategy of allowing Bedard to slowly asphyxiate himself and they started taking more pitches.

By then it was too late.  Bedard had made it through Four with a stunningly low pitch count and was within the first groove we've seen from him in quite some time.

* Miguel Olivo is really stinging the ball.  His LD% is above his career average so far and at long last he is finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield.  There is hope yet that he will elevate the Mariners offensive standards at catcher back to mediocrity.

Swept in TEX

The M's were simply out-classed. In each of the three ballgames they managed to come back from early deficits (the first and third the fruits of poor fielding) only to come up short late.

The pattern was evident. When the M's would get a runner or two on base they would do just enough to get one of those runners home. When the Rangers were in the same situation they would put the ball in the gap and drive home two or three. They are an elite offense with ability to turn any base-runner or two into a big inning – a competency the Mariners simply do not have.

Couple that with elite fielding and most days the M's are not going to be able to do more than simply stay competitive with the Rangers.

Fortunately, we do not see them again for another month.

For his part, Felix was much the same today as he was in his first start. Lack of command in the first two innings (3 bases on balls) plus Wilson's foibles at second led to elevated pitch-counts early on. After that though, he was able to buckle down and make it through another five innings while giving up only one run.

Pineda Tonight & Going Forward

What we saw from Pineda tonight is what we can reasonably expect to see from him for the next few months.

Right-handed batters are not an issue. His plus fastball and slider coupled with the command he has of them are more than enough to keep them off balance. Texas right-handed batters managed just two hits in fifteen at bats (.133). Ian Kinsler's lead-off at bat in the first (fastball up and in followed by a slider away; weak groundball to short) and Adrian Beltre's swinging strikeout in the fourth (slider low and away) are microcosms of the hell Pineda is to righties.

Pineda's problem in the spring was lefties, allowing them to hit .292 as opposed to the .179 right-handers batted.

That problem manifested itself again tonight. The three lefties in Texas' lineup went 3-7 (.429), with the largely pedestrian Mitch Moreland managing two hits (including an RBI triple) and Josh Hamilton leading off a two-run sixth with a double.

The problem, as has been oft-discussed, is inconsistent command of his changeup. Its potential is obvious (the strikeout of Josh Hamilton in the first), but until he develops the command of it he now enjoys with his other two pitches, lefties will cause him fits.

Accordingly, Mariners fans should prepare themselves for periods of dominance checkered by the kind of struggles we witnessed tonight.

Opening Day 2011

Felix was not dominating tonight – not in the overwhelming, I'm-just-plain-better-than-you manner that we are used to at least. Instead he was remorselessly effective; getting contact early in the count (after the first two innings, before which he averaged 5.14 pitches per batter faced, 3.18 after), allowing his defense to get outs, walking no one, not relying on pitch count-busting strike outs.

In exhibition was the superlative pitcher Felix has become: in his first start of the season, following a spring where he was deliberately given a diminished workload, he economized his approach in a manner that allowed him to pitch a complete game without going much above a hundred pitches against a team built to get on base. A month from now, when he is stretched out, he can pitch against the A's again and strike out ten in the dominating, perennial Cy-Young contending manner we are accustomed to.

Felix has matured to the point that he can basically choose how he wants to beat you.

Offensively, the six runs look nice but are qualified by a hot-potato A's defense that committed five errors.

With that said, they did the best with what they have, which is not much. Ichiro and Figgins wracked up their hits at the top of the order and everyone after them took pitches.

That's all they did – they took pitches.

As a result, Mariner batters earned a lot of walks and a lot of strike outs, many of them backward K's. (M's batters walked seven times, struck-out looking eight.) Both results compelled Cahill to run his pitch count up and give the ball away before he could complete five innings (105 pitches in 4.2 innings, 4.38 pitches per batter faced). After that the Mariners were able to exploit porous defense and A's middle relief. They won, in other words, by not swinging, flailing, failing and losing. They did not make outs, they got on base (.349 team OBP), put pressure on the Athletics, and earned some runs.

This might be the only approach offensively that has any hope of success this year. They may not be able to punch much themselves, but at the very least M's hitters can make their opponent's pitching and defense work harder than they would like to and (hopefully) buckle against the extra leverage.

The high-strain innings force the starter out and the soft-belly of Major League middle relief in. The extra base-runners that come with the bases-on-balls enervate the pitching even more and place more pressure on the defense. Couple that with some timely hitting here and there and you have the seeds of a team that will exact a degree of attrition on their opponents and thus be able to compete most nights. A team that approaches the game this way is a very obnoxious opponent for the usually superior teams they play.

At the very least this approach worked for one night and hope for a competitive, entertaining, near-.500 season lives on.

Notes:

• Miguel Olivo will probably never walk this season. He might not ever see a ball.
  
• Other than being superlative defensively, Brendan Ryan might be the perfect bottom-of-the-order hitter. Picking his punches and wreaking havoc when he gets on base, he will at least provide a level of pugnacity to the bottom three that Jack Wilson, Josh Wilson, Rob Johnson and whoever else we had there last year never provided.
  
• There was a swagger about Figgins tonight I do not remember seeing at any point last year.
  
• Dave Niehaus had been visibly and, as he was a broadcaster, audibly aging the past few seasons. But by-God was it unnatural to watch an entire game and not hear his voice. You are missed, Dave. My, oh my, are you missed.

DOMA

Revulsion to the cynicism of President Obama's announcement that his administration will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the federal courts is entirely appropriate. He is trying to have it both ways: registering approval with his base – the preponderance of which supports gay marriage – without alienating the majority of Americans who still oppose it.

(A man whose self-regard is such that he fancies himself on par with the Wisdom of Solomon has nonetheless elected to split the baby.)

Politics aside, there are constitutional concerns with DOMA that bring its validity into question – not that these played any role at all in the president's decision. These concerns are found in the Full Faith & Credit Clause of the US Constitution (Article IV, Section 1), which mandates that "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."

At first glance, the legal import of DOMA runs directly counter to this, immunizing the states from having to recognize a gay marriage – something that is a public act, record, and judicial proceeding – legally created and recognized in another.

This is a credible argument at least – one to which there are certainly credible rebuttals.

If, for example, a state does not recognize the institution itself – marriage between individuals of the same sex – can the relevant constitutional text be understood to compel it to recognize and make provision for it in the same way it would have to a driver's license issued in another state, an institution which every single state in the Union makes provision for?

Without question there are other arguments beyond this – arguments that will be fleshed out and deployed in the inevitable legal challenges to come.

The President & Libya

Republican leadership has universally criticized the president for tardiness in his decision to intervene in Libya and in his subsequent inability to define America's specific mission.

Both failures (they are certainly failures) go hand-in-hand and find their genesis in a single cause: the president does not want to do this.

To describe him as passive before his decision would be technically true (and characteristic of him as chief executive), but only thus.  He was active -- actively going out of his way to wrap his arms around American power and death-grip it from ever being used to influence the course of events.  It was only after lesser powers such as the French and British, followed by the Arab League, had called for intervention before America stood to be the only relevant actor refusing to act.

The president's continued distaste for American participation is manifesting itself still.  Ostentatiously unwilling to do what he has finally done, the president has done the bare minimum a commander-in-chief authorizing the use of force can do.  Orders were given, a statement was made to the American people -- and then nothing.  No subsequent declarations of the ultimate mission or, more specifically, whether coalition forces are simply trying to hem Qaddafi in or actually influence his ouster.

All anyone has really been given are assertions that America is going to "shape the battlefield" and then step back and let other components of the coalition take the lead.

President Obama did not want to be here in the first place and now that he is here he is leaving the impression that he is looking to get America out just as soon as it was in.

The Best of Styles, the Worst of Styles

Dickens' Tale of Two Cities is renowned most for its beginning dichotomy ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"). Fortuitously enough, a similar device can be used to evaluate Dickens' manner of prose.

Indeed, it is the best of forms; it is the worst of forms.

Beneficially, his sentences are layered dissections of his subject. Foreign to the present Twitter generation that demands its literary material (and everything else) condensed and microwaveable, the bard of the Victorian Age slow-roasts his prose, dedicating time and ink to every nuance of the matter at hand. Take for example his description of the French peasantry at the time of the Revolution's outbreak, ground into misery and want by the aristocracy. Dickens portrays these poor masses as a

people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill… The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off… (Two Cities, 64, NOOKbook)

Dickens goes for sentences, paragraphs and pages more on the same train. The peasants of France were poor and miserable and he does not move on from this point until he has described each and every detail that makes it so.

This advantageously illuminates his subject for the reader in its complete totality while also penetrating it with a microscopic lens, revealing to them every nook and nuance therein. He does everything for the reader. The flow and course of events of the plot are given a firm foundation because he takes the time to illuminate the salient details that cause them. In Two Cities nothing can explain the extremely arbitrary and wanton brutality of the Revolution as well as the meticulous portrait Dickens paints of the equally extreme hunger, oppression and misery that precursors it.

Indeed, Dickens portrays the victims of revolutionary-French society in terms equally as pathetic as he portrays those of pre-revolutionary society. Witness his tragic description of the prisoners of La Force and the contrast between their present (low) and past (high) state:

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! the ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming there. (282)

The mill that had ground the French peasantry into squalor and death had been given new grist, achieving the same result. Extreme circumstances bred extreme circumstances; Dickens masterfully depicts both.

There is a Paris to this London though. In dedicating such copious amounts of prose to totality and dissection, Dickens commits the occasional folly of dedicating copious amounts of prose to minimal expanses of plot. For this I have in mind the third chapter of Book the First in which Dickens digresses into philosophical ruminations about the secrets and mystery that each human life represents to each other. After this he moves on to the Tellson's messenger and his journey after he delivers his message to Mr. Lorry – the relation between the two being that since each human life is a mystery to each other "the messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London" (47).

This is all well and good but non- germane to the plot of Two Cities. To travel so deeply down this dead-end, and away from the central flow of Dickens' scintillating plot, is as frustrating as it would have been had Shakespeare followed the soothsayer after Caesar's boast that "The Ides of March are come" (Act 3, Scene 1) and not followed Caesar himself, directly documenting the fate that awaited him.

At the very least such lateral movement is ungenerous to all but the most patient, devoted reader who is willing to indulge Dickens' in his reflective flights of fancy.

If he is to be credited for doing everything for his reader, as he must be, Dickens must also then be debited for perhaps doing too much.

No ‘Unity’

In response to President Laurent Gbagbo's refusal to cede power after losing elections in the Ivory Coast, the editors of the Economist warn against the African Union trying to foster a "unity" government to diffuse the crisis. "It is essential that Africa as a whole gets used to the idea that ruling parties bow out when they are rejected at the ballot box. So-called unity governments, installed with the apparently good intention of preventing further chaos after blood has already been shed, are as likely to lead to paralysis and patronage as to creative compromise."

Correct as far as this analysis goes, condoning such government "compromises" proliferates pernicious fruits. Praying on the naiveté and good-intentions of external influences, despots booted from power by the vox populii can cling to that power through the effusion of blood in the full expectation that it will make those influences so desperate to end the carnage that they will permit them to retain at least some semblance of the place in government they have lost any rightful claim to.

The upshot is bad precedent and the inception of a vicious cycle. Seeing that one entity booted from power by plebiscite was able to retain that power through this method, other entities are all the more likely to employ the same method – shedding the blood of their people – when placed in the same predicament.

Additionally, as the Economist begins to hint at, "unity" governments confound representative government in the sense that they terminate in utero the development of the norms and habits an organic society needs to internalize to ultimately become both ordered and free. Giving thugs like Gbagbo a free pass to disregard election results only makes the people of the Ivory Coast and Africa at large accustomed to government by those willing and able to utilize power in the bloody suppression of the masses.

The Wages of Self-Immolating Pretence

The atrocities transpiring in Libya have been permitted to do so through the Obama Administration's pretence that the United States is just another member of the society of nations; no more special or important than any other.

Quite contrary to this affectation, America is and has long been – if not the only, then certainly the major – bulwark of international security. In scores of examples since the end of World War II, America's global reach has been dispositive in influencing events away from economic, social and/or political catastrophe and towards human liberty.

Such a catastrophe is presently escalating in Libya, and despite the unique power to serve the role America has traditionally fulfilled, the administration has instead elected to do nothing. Libyans standing up to the despotism of an insane autocrat are thus subject to the airborne slaughter of his warplanes.

In moments such as these the notion that America is a destabilizing force in the world is demonstrated to be the utter nonsense it always has been.

The United States is the world's lone superpower. Not only is it almost exclusively responsible for underwriting the security of the free world, but it is (still) the last and only hope for mankind's eternal quest for freedom. People already free can rest secure in the preservation of that happy state only in the global involvement of the United States – people yearning for freedom must place their aspirations in the same thing.

As more of these oppressed multitudes fall beneath the sword of Muammar Gadaffi this truth becomes increasingly evident. When the United States shrinks from its role in the world not only does the world become less safe, but the shining flame of liberty becomes dimmer to every desperate life seeking to grasp it.

If the United States has the ability to preserve human life and further its quest for freedom it cannot stand down because of some pathetic and misplaced humility. It must act.

A Future of Growth or Government?

The Left snickers now that while the public favors spending restraint in the abstract it abhors (and will abhor Republican) reductions in the specific. President Obama is staking his re-election on this – that voters will recoil from the GOP and turn back towards him when Congress tries to do something it has not done in generations: pass a budget smaller than the previous one.

That may be. Existential spending cuts may very well cost Republicans (and the republic) another long term of Obama, possibly their House majority.

But that does not change the substantive reality that the ruinous course for us and especially the next generation of Americans is to do what President Obama and the Left propose: nothing. For decades we have indulged ourselves not with our own money but with that of our children and grandchildren. Now we face the upshot of that irresponsibility, that generational theft.

It presents us with a choice. One is to select a future of growth and prosperity, a choice that entails the shared sacrifice of spending cuts and entitlement reform that will permit tax levels to remain low, alter the incentives in the health-care industry to improve its pricing and provision, and free future Americans from what Jefferson once called "the dead hand of the past."

The other is to do nothing, to sullenly limp towards a future suffocated by a ubiquity of red. Debt levels approaching GDP will necessitate even more exponential growth in government as Uncle Sam has no other recourse but to completely grab onto the billfolds and checkbooks of Americans. The need for such an overweening state will choke out even the faintest hope of economic growth and bring us closer, if not in lockstep, with the stifled economies of Europe. Having stuck our children with the tab, we will have also ungraciously denied them the means to pick it up.

Hoping only for political gains in the next election, this is the option President Obama and his party of unions and special interest payouts have selected. For those who seek another course, "have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Stasis in Wisconsin

Those forces in Wisconsin opposing the governor's budget reducing proposals ought to answer a simple question: why is compensation greater than what those with comparable employment in the private sector receive sancrosanct when the state cannot afford that excessive compensation and it is paid on the backs of Wisconsin taxpayers?

This is simply an exercise in an entitled class of people fighting to preserve their preferential, market-immune sinecures.