It was a chilly 52 this morning here in central Florida so I'm following LeBron to Miami, if only for a few days. Just in case you have nothing else to occupy you, here are a couple links sent to me this morning:From Deuce Bruce, today's Paul Krugman column which highlights the evidence of President Obama's dwindling backbone. Isn't it a little early for osteoporosis? Why haven't more people compared him to Adlai
Stevenson, Illinois' last presidential pretender?
From Buzzard, Michael Rosenberg on SI.com. Don't let the title fool you; the article isn't really about LeBron, it's about the soul of Cleveland.
From me: David Brooks, to remind us that if just a little collective sanity emerged there is hope.
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6 comments:
While Paul Krugman is one of my heroes, and I agree with most of this article, there is a fundamental problem with his initial premise. He's not the only one to say that a particular money saving measure is just too small to affect the deficit. You hear it about all kinds of things.
But they do all add up! We have to start somewhere. And speaking as someone who (until Monday) has been working in a place where not only have we not had a raise in 3 years, we have had non-paid furlough days for the second year in a row, the people that I pay (government workers) can share our pain for a couple of years, too.
Michael Rosenberg is correct. LeBron will never find what he had in Cleveland in Miami. In Cleveland he was part of the city. In Miami he is a hired gun with one purpose, to deliver another championship. You have to have grown up in northeastern Ohio to appreciate that observation. Cleveland sports fans are intensely loyal to the players that are loyal to the city. Brian Sipe, Clay Matthews, Jim Brown, Bernie Kosar, Otto Graham, Hanford Dixon, Herb Score, Bob Feller, Rocky Colavito, Charles Nagy, Len Barker, Sandy Alomar, Rick Manning, Jim Cleamons, Bingo Smith, Austin Carr, Mark Price and dozens of others were canonized by the fans years ago and are still revered.
LeBron chose to leave Cleveland and rub the fans' faces in it. Whatever legacy he had was destroyed in a 60 minute self aggrandizing farce on ESPN. Cleveland fans are very forgiving. After some of the characters they have lived through like Ted Stepien, Vernon Stouffer, Nick Mileti and the various teams associated with them, they are capable of forgiving alot.
Cleveland may not win many championships, but long after LeBron will have faded from memory for lack of a legacy, Cleveland will still be a great town with great sports fans. LeBron grew up in Akron. He should have known that.
It's not surprising that an Ivy League professor like Krugman actually believes that government "creates" jobs, and that we can spend our way to recovery. This country is in for a very hard lesson - - unsustainable debt is a harsh taskmaster. And public employee unions cannot protect you from those consequences.
I think the point of Krugman's column is that it was a weak and transparent act by the President to curry favor with people who will never favor him, rather than an argument about the value of the act itself.
Agree with Dennis about the feckless attempt of Obama to curry favor with people who will never, ever give him credit or any semblance of victory. They're never going to cooperate on anything. Just ignore them and pick fights you can win and makes them look like duplicitous hypocrits they are.
Yes, governments do not create enough jobs to sustain an economy. But governments are suppose to protect the "commons," regions of common good, be it parks, the environment, the food supply, security, and collapse of institutions, which we all depend upon. Banks are sitting on vast amounts of money but they deem it not in their interest to spend it. Should unemployment get to the point where there is revolution in the streets, I'd like to see the libertarians and laissez-faire capitalists tell us they would prefer the private sector to handle things.
Obama might have been tipping his hat to the working class concern that the private sector has been taking it on the chin while many government jobs have been protected.
How can anyone be optimistic about the future of the economy knowing that when it was thriving before the crash it was built upon malfeasance, dishonesty and greed by members of the whole system. We are hoping to be delivered by an act of god, who Christopher Hitchens was said to describe as " a kind of benign North Korea," in Timothy Egan's column in today's Times. Just look at Groupon's refusal of a couple of billion by Google. Talk about 2 bald men fighting over a comb... As if getting 50% for selling charity tickets is the life raft for our economic mess. And the morality of it!
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