GOODBYE, AMERICA! IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
February 11, 2009


It's bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions of dollars because they don't grasp the difference between a million and a billion. Now it turns out the Democrats don't know the difference between a million and a trillion.

Why not make the "stimulus bill" a kazillion dollars?

All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call it, a trillion dollars and change.

The stimulus bill isn't as bad as we had expected -- it's much worse. Instead of merely creating useless, make-work jobs digging ditches -- or "shovel-ready," in the Democrats' felicitous phrase -- the "stimulus" bill will create an endless army of government bureaucrats aggressively intervening in our lives. Instead of digging ditches, American taxpayers will be digging our own graves.

There are hundreds of examples in the 800-page "stimulus" bill, but here are just two.

First, the welfare bureaucrats are coming back.

For half a century, the welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out of wedlock. Following the iron laws of economics -- subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it -- the number of children being born out of wedlock skyrocketed.

The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government entitlement had ever been rolled back. Despite liberal howling and foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to less illegitimacy.

Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away from their TV sets and into the workforce. For the first time in decades, the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward.

As proof that that welfare reform was a smashing success, a few years later, Bill Clinton started claiming full credit for the bill.

Well, that's over. The stimulus bill goes a long way toward repealing the work requirement of the 1996 Republican Welfare Reform bill and rewards states that increase their welfare caseloads by paying unwed mothers to sit home doing nothing.

Second, bureaucrats at Health and Human Services will electronically collect every citizen's complete medical records and determine appropriate medical care.

Judging by the care that the State Department took with private visa records last year, that the Ohio government took with Joe the Plumber's government records, that the Pentagon took with Linda Tripp's employment records in 1998, and that the FBI took with thousands of top secret "raw" background files in President Clinton's first term, the bright side is: We'll finally be able to find out if Bill Clinton has syphilis -- all thanks to the stimulus bill!

HHS bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor. Doctors who don't comply with the government's treatment protocols will be fined. That's right: Instead of your treatment being determined by your doctor, it will be settled on by some narcoleptic half-wit in Washington who couldn't get a job in the private sector.

And a brand-new set of bureaucrats in the newly created office of "National Coordinator of Health Information Technology" will be empowered to cut off treatments that merely prolong life. Sorry, Mom and Pop, Big Brother said it's time to go.

At every other workplace in the nation -- even Wal-Mart! -- workers are being laid off. But no one at any of the bloated government bureaucracies ever need fear receiving a pink slip. All 64,750 employees at the department of Health and Human Services are apparently absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the department.

With the stimulus bill, liberals plan to move unfirable government workers into every activity in America, where they will superintend all aspects of our lives.

Also, thanks to the stimulus bill, the private sector will gradually shrivel and die. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of servicing the bill's nearly trillion-dollar debt will shrink the economy within a decade.

Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

The new liberal version is: There are those who look at things and ask, "Why on earth should the government be paying for that?" I dream of things that never were funded by the government and ask, "Why not?"

Today's Tune: Elvis Costello - Pump It Up

Book Review: "Signs and Mysteries"

Reading the Signs

by David Mills
http://insidecatholic.com/
1/30/09

Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols
Mike Aquilina, Our Sunday Visitor, 192 pages, $15.95


We see a lot of symbols every day, but most just tell the world how much something costs. They mark brand and status, not meaning. The famous Nike "swoosh" just means "expensive shoe." A little horse on the pocket of a shirt just means "shirt trying to look expensive."

No one has warm feelings for the swoosh (though he may have warm feelings for the status it brings in his circle), but the early Christians seem to have loved their symbols, and with reason. They saw in a cross, a vine, a lamb, an anchor, a dolphin, in milk and Moses, in the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet (the Alpha and Omega), and a host of other symbols memorials of the cost of their redemption and their new place in the world, not public displays of their success.

They saw reminders of who they were and how they ought to live. These symbols could convict and challenge as well as encourage. They were a sort of brand and status marker, but one that marked your subordination, not your success.

These symbols were somewhat like the old coin that reminds you of the beloved grandfather who gave it to you, or a signed photo of your hero, or the flag soldiers carry into battle. They were also a bit like the Steelers logo (I write from Pittsburgh, with long observation of the natives) a fan might plaster on his briefcase when leaving for a business trip to Cleveland, home of the arch-rival Browns.

In Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols, Mike Aquilina explains 25 symbols we've inherited from our fathers in the early Church, which meant everything -- even life and death -- to the people who painted them on the walls of their churches, inscribed them on tombs, even scratched them on the walls of public buildings and underground tombs. The symbols they put on lamps and rings and bottles and jugs reminded them of a counter-cultural, life-changing -- at times life-endangering -- commitment.

Aquilina, vice-president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and a regular on EWTN, has written many books on the early Church, including The Fathers of the Church and The Mass of the Early Christians. Lea Marie Ravotti, who grew up an atheist in former Czechoslovakia and became a Catholic after moving to this country to teach art, has illustrated more than a hundred of the original works.

The early Christians took their symbols from the Old Testament (like the lamb and the plow), the New Testament (the fish, the anchor, and of course the cross), or both (the good shepherd, the banquet, and the vine). They even borrowed some from the pagan culture around them (the ankh, the orant, and the philosopher) and made up their own (the dolphin, the peacock, and the lighthouse). In every case, they drew wider and deeper meaning from the symbolthey adopted.

Take, for example, the fish, a symbol taken from both the Old and New Testaments and from nature. It was the most common symbol in the early Church, as far as we can tell from archaeology. Everyone knows that the first letters of the words "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior" made up the Greek word ichthys, or fish. But Aquilina argues that the fish was a visual symbol before someone thought of using the word as a way of memorizing Jesus' titles.

Jewish Christians, for example, would remember the use of fish to symbolize God's people in the prophets Ezekiel and Habakkuk. Ezekiel talks of "very many fish" of "many kinds" in a river, with fisherman standing on the banks. These Christians saw themselves as the fish and the Church as the river. The fishermen symbolized the apostles and their successors the bishops, who were, as Jesus said, "fishers of men."

Some saw themselves as fish because fish are born in water, as we are reborn in baptism, and fish die when taken from the water, as we die outside the Church. People who regularly saw fish suffocating on the dock would know what life outside the Church would mean.

It was a symbol capable of elaboration. In the fourth century, St. Ambrose of Milan urged Christians to imitate the fish because even when "the storm rages, the winds howl, the fish swims, it does not sink, because it is wont to swim." The world "has many billows, heavy waves, fierce storms," he says. "Be a fish, so that the waves of the world do not sink you." Faithfulness, courage, obedience, perseverance ought to be as natural to us as swimming is to the fish, because unless we live like that, we will drown.

The fish was also a useful symbol at a time when marking yourself as a Christian could get you fed to the lions. For a time, it was one of the key words in the Christians' secret code. One tombstone Aquilina mentions called the Christians the "divine race of the heavenly fish," a name that would mean nothing to the outsider.

But for the early Christians, the fish was even more important as a symbol of the Eucharist. In the sixth chapter of his Gospel, John tells how Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes before giving His Bread of Life discourse, and then at the end of the Gospel tells how the resurrected Jesus prepared the same meal for His disciples.

The early Christians naturally saw Jesus' miraculous provision of food to hungry men, and indeed more food than anyone could eat, as a symbol of the Eucharist. Some early pictures of the Last Supper actually show a fish meal instead of the Passover supper. The fish declared the radical claim that, by participating in this ceremony, they were actually receiving the Son of God.
All that is part of what the first generations of Christians (the alert ones, anyway) saw when they saw a fish, even if the fish was only a few lines scratched onto a wall. They were, Aquilina writes, "more than prayer: they were a proclamation, a telling of the good news in symbols that would speak to many people" who came from different nations and races, who spoke different languages, who had converted from different religions. The pagan convert might not yet know the Old Testament, but he would know about fish -- and about good shepherds and vines and banquets -- and through such symbols learn something important about his Savior and himself.

And the symbols were meant to last. They used all these symbols "because they wanted them to stand forever as a perpetual prayer, for remembrance of the dead, for the perseverance of the living, and for deliverance in times of trial."

These symbols offer modern Christians "an urgent message . . . from a distant family member." It's as if our first brothers and sisters, knowing that most of us suffer from spiritual attention deficit disorder, had plastered our homes and churches with Post-it notes reminding us of what Jesus has done and is doing for us.

Unfortunately, few of us know enough to read the notes. I will admit to looking at them with the same inattention with which I viewed the swoosh. When, driving down the road, I saw a cross on a steeple I hadn't seen before, I thought, "Oh, there’s a church there." I did not think of Jesus and His sacrifice. Signs and Mysteries is an excellent aid in learning to see and to read our ancestors' messages and learn to think of the gospel to which they point us.

David Mills is the former editor of Touchstone magazine and is now writing a book on Mary. He and his family were received into the Church in 2001. An interview with Lea Marie Ravotti can be read here.

The Hell with Our Constitution

by Walter E. Williams
http://www.humanevents.com/
02/11/2009

Dr. Robert Higgs, senior fellow at the Oakland-based Independent Institute, penned an article in The Christian Science Monitor (2/9/2009) that suggests the most intelligent recommendation that I've read to fix our current economic mess. The title of his article gives his recommendation away: "Instead of stimulus, do nothing -- seriously."

Stimulus package debate is over how much money should be spent, whether some should given to the National Endowment for the Arts, research sexually transmitted diseases or bail out Amtrak, our failing railroad system. Dr. Higgs says, "Hardly anyone, however, is asking the most important question: Should the federal government be doing any of this?" He adds, "Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government's powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget."

By bringing up the idea of constitutional restraints on Washington, I'd say Dr. Higgs is whistling Dixie. Americans have long ago abandoned respect for the constitutional limitations placed on the federal government. Our elected representatives represent that disrespect. After all I'd ask Higgs: Isn't it unreasonable to expect a politician to do what he considers to be political suicide, namely conduct himself according to the letter and spirit of the Constitution?

While Americans, through ignorance or purpose, show contempt for our Constitution, I doubt whether they are indifferent between a growing or stagnating economy. Dr. Higgs tells us some of the economic history of the U.S. In 1893, there was a depression; we got out of it without a stimulus package. There was a major recession of 1920-21; though sharp, it quickly reversed itself into what has been call the "Roaring Twenties." In 1929, there was an economic downturn, most notably featured by the stock market collapse, after which came massive government intervention -- you might call it the nation's first stimulus package. President Hoover and Congress responded to what might have been a two - or three - year sharp downturn with many of the policies President Obama and Congress are urging today. They raised tariffs, propped up wage rates, bailed out farmers, banks and other businesses, and financed state relief efforts. When Roosevelt came to office, he became even more interventionist than Hoover and presided over protracted depression where the economy didn't fully recover until 1946.

Roosevelt didn't have an easy time with his agenda; he had to first emasculate the U.S. Supreme Court. Higgs points out that federal courts had respect for the Constitution as late as the 1930s. They issued some 1,600 injunctions to restrain officials from carrying out acts of Congress. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned as unconstitutional the New Deal's centerpieces such as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act and other parts of Roosevelt's "stimulus package." An outraged Roosevelt threatened to pack the Court, and the Court capitulated to where it is today giving Congress virtually unlimited powers to tax, spend and regulate. My question to my fellow Americans is: Do we want a repeat of measures that failed dismally during the 1930s?

A more fundamental question is: Should Washington be guided by the Constitution? In explaining the Constitution, James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce." Has the Constitution been amended to permit Congress to tax, spend and regulate as it pleases or have Americans said, "To hell with the Constitution"?


- Dr. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist, former chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, and author of More Liberty Means Less Government.

The Shrine of FDR

Why the Left worships there.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 10, 2009, 0:00 p.m.

Editor’s Note: A version of this article appeared in the January 26, 2009 issue of National Review.

Last night, in his first prime time press conference, President Barack Obama repeatedly asserted that opponents of the stimulus bill want to “do nothing” and that they are married to outdated ideas and ideologies. He then went on to say:

Some of the criticisms really are with the basic idea that government should intervene at all in this moment of crisis. Now, you have some people, very sincere, who philosophically just think the government has no business interfering in the marketplace. And, in fact, there are several who’ve suggested that FDR [President Roosevelt] was wrong to interfere back in the New Deal. They’re fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago.

This is just the latest example of liberal consternation with the fact that conservatives are unwilling to let the New Deal stand as the useful myth of liberalism during the current economic crisis.

“A normal person,” the liberal economist Brad DeLong recently pronounced, “would not argue that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression.” New York Times financial columnist and Newsweek contributing editor Daniel Gross is even more emphatic. “One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian—I mean a serious historian, not a think-tank wanker, not an economist, not a journalist—who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression.” David Sirota, an activist-journalist, writes on the Huffington Post: “Every high school civics class teaches the broad truth about Roosevelt, the New Deal and how it helped end the Great Depression, and if the conservative movement has gone so off the deep end that they want to make crazy-sounding arguments that even high schoolers know are silly, then the progressive movement is in an even better position than we may have thought.” And in his syndicated column, he adds that any argument otherwise is “abject insanity.”

Sirota’s point about high-school civics classes helps explain the vitriol. The glory of the New Deal is, for liberals, settled dogma. To question it is akin to casting doubt on geocentrism in the 14th century. Worse, it is an attempt to erase liberalism’s most usable past.

Significantly, FDR has recently become more relevant and popular among “progressives” than he’s been for a generation. In 2006, Nancy Pelosi reportedly said that three words prove the Democrats aren’t out of ideas: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” This revival has many causes. One is surely the rise of the “netroots” and their renewed emphasis on reviving the Democratic party as a vehicle of progress. Since the Democratic party is still for all intents and purposes a Roosevelt cargo cult, any Democratic “comeback” would be a comeback for New Dealism as well.

Another part of the explanation is surely that the New Deal has been assaulted from all sides over the last decade. Bill Clinton proclaimed that the “era of big government is over,” which many took to mean the New Deal era was over. Some of the New Deal’s policies—such as the Glass-Steagall Act, which regulated banking—were dramatically overhauled. And, more recently, President Bush led an effort to renegotiate the terms of Social Security that was, according to liberals at the time, tantamount to destroying FDR’s “legacy.” At the same time, a number of books have taken dead aim at that legacy. Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly, Amity Shlaes’s justly acclaimed The Forgotten Man, and most recently Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal? are just a few of the revisionist works intended to peel back some of the mythology of the New Deal (my own book, Liberal Fascism, might be included in that list as well). Such sustained attacks on an argument liberals believed they had won in the 1950s were bound to trigger a sharp counterattack from progressive antibodies.

But the most relevant and recent reason for the New Deal’s resurgent popularity is that many people believe—and a dismaying number of progressives seem to hope—that we are on the verge of another Great Depression, and that therefore the times require another New Deal. Calls for a “new New Deal” are nothing new. Leading liberal intellectuals and politicians have called for one in response to, among other things, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and, of course, global warming. By contrast, most Americans, thanks to those very same civics classes, think New Deals are for combating economic crises, and nothing else. But the financial crisis seems finally to offer an excuse voters will accept for a massive new expansion of government. In interviews, Barack Obama has made no secret that he sees himself as picking up FDR’s torch, and the press has offered nothing but encouragement on that score. Shortly after the election, Time magazine blazoned on its cover a doctored photo of Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt, complete with cigarette holder pinched in his mouth, riding around in an open-air 1930s convertible. The headline? “The New New Deal.”

Hence the passion about the efficacy of the New Deal. If, as Shlaes and the other revisionists argue, the New Deal didn’t help end the Great Depression, then why do the time warp? Indeed, if the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression, then why believe in big-government liberalism in the first place? After all, the New Deal is the creation myth of liberalism for a reason (the actual creation comes a bit earlier). FDR gathered the smartest statists in the country, and then he—and the voters—gave his Brain Trust unprecedented power to do whatever was required to crush the Great Depression. If it was all just a big, Oz-like light show with FDR behind the curtain fumbling at the controls, then the claims of liberalism itself are deeply suspect.

In fairness to Sirota, DeLong, and Gross, their argument is more empirical. They rebut the charge that the New Deal “prolonged” the Great Depression by pointing to FDR’s efforts to stabilize the banking system. And they’re right to make that argument. Many of those efforts did help end the Depression, as even Milton Friedman and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke have argued. But some of those efforts didn’t help. For example, it’s doubtful Gross et al. would defend FDR’s embarrassingly erratic and ultimately destructive behavior during the ill-fated London Economic Conference in 1933. Few would dispute that his decision to blow up the conference as a sop to protectionist Democrats helped prolong the Great Depression, at home and abroad. More generally, the apologists protest too much. Plenty of “normal” and sane people believe the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. In 1995 a survey by Robert Whaples, published in the Journal of Economic History, showed that half of economists and one-third of historians agreed somewhat or entirely with the proposition that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression.

A second point made by James Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and others is to dispute the assertion that employment didn’t improve much during the New Deal. One part of this debate hinges on what years you choose as bookends. Another depends on what you mean by “employment.” Amity Shlaes, using the widely adopted Lebergott–Bureau of Labor Statistics data series, does not include “make work” government jobs. The progressive economists say those jobs should count. In many respects that is a philosophical debate about the proper role of government. Certainly FDR eventually believed that everyone had a fundamental right to a job, and that there was nothing wrong with the government’s creating—and the taxpayer’s paying for—a job for anybody who needed one. No doubt many progressives today see little wrong with making government the employer of last resort, but this is a thorny proposition to put before voters. Barack Obama seems to understand this. In a recent video address—delivered from the “Office of the President-Elect”—Obama promised to create 3 million new jobs, “more than 80 percent of them in the private sector.” (That, by the way, is up to 600,000 new government jobs.) Well, if there’s nothing wrong with government jobs, why stop there?

Both these defenses are representative of the general approach of New Deal apologists: Whenever challenged, they simply change the terms of the argument. While it’s certainly true that there is no consensus that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression, there is a sweeping consensus that the New Deal didn’t end it. The vast majority of historians and economists—including Paul Krugman—will concede that the Great Depression didn’t end until either World War II or the post-war economic boom (that’s a whole other argument). In other words, only after FDR himself admitted he was no longer going to play the role of “Dr. New Deal” and instead became “Dr. Win-the-War” was there any real chance of ending the Great Depression. If a golfer can’t hit the ball to save his life with a five-iron, but smacks the dickens out of it with a seven-iron, it’s hard to see how his improved score demonstrates the effectiveness of five-irons.

Ultimately, the question of whether the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression depends almost entirely on what you mean by “the New Deal.” When Social Security was in Republican crosshairs, liberals insisted that it was at the heart of the New Deal. Well, whatever Social Security’s merits, it had nothing to do with ending the Great Depression. When partisan divisions prove inconvenient to liberals, they lament the absence of the unity and common purpose we allegedly enjoyed during the New Deal (though the 1930s were actually a chaotic and deeply divided time). When certain favored industries suffer from international competition, the New Dealers’ supposed genius at economic planning is invoked; the problem there is that much of their effort on this front was a disaster. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and National Recovery Administration, for example, were economic and moral disgraces. One would think—or at least hope—that today’s progressives don’t believe small businessmen should be prosecuted or jailed for trying to under-price their big-name competitors, or schoolchildren should be forced to conduct militaristic pageants in support of the government’s agenda.

In fairness, people who say, categorically, that the New Deal didn’t prolong the Great Depression make the same mistake as those who say it did: They assume that it’s possible to determine the “natural” lifespan of the Great Depression. It isn’t. Still, we can draw inferences from useful comparisons. In the U.S., the Great Depression was deeper, and the recovery from it slower, than in most industrial nations. Why did employment recover more quickly in Canada and the United Kingdom? Indeed, why was the American effort to end the Depression among the least successful of the industrialized nations? Some progressives might argue that it was because the government wasn’t interventionist enough. Fine, let them argue that. But it is a very different argument from the one we usually hear about the purported success of the New Deal.

In any case, no matter how you slice it, the notion that the New Deal was a single, consistent program is nonsense. “To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of the New Deal, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” In 1940, when Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked whether “the basic principle of the New Deal” was “economically sound,” he responded, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”

In fact, when it’s convenient, liberals usually brag about the fact that it wasn’t a coherent plan at all. They praise FDR’s “bold experimentation” and “pragmatic trial and error” on a colossal scale. In his famous Oglethorpe University commencement speech in May 1932, FDR himself said some of his proposed program wouldn’t work—and he was right. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Obama echoed this argument. “What you see in FDR that I hope my team can emulate is not always getting it right, but projecting a sense of confidence and a willingness to try things and experiment in order to get people working again.”

On this point Amity Shlaes is surely onto something when she argues that bold experimentation fosters an atmosphere of uncertainty—“What’s FDR going to try next?!”; “What’s Obama up to now?!”—and uncertainty is not necessarily good for economic growth or employment.

Yet, again, from the liberal perspective, this misses the point entirely. Some of the New Deal surely helped, and much of it definitely hurt, they might grudgingly concede; but to get mired in such questions is to overlook the true meaning and majesty of it all. This was the first time while the country was not at war that the American people gave war powers to liberals to do whatever they thought best. That’s what liberals love about the New Deal, and that’s the real reason they want to bring it back.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

A-Rod doesn't seem to know what he took, but he's sure of when he took it

By Mike Lupica
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
February 10, 2009


Alex Rodriguez gave us more than you thought he would when he admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs, a lot more than any big baseball star ever has. Rodriguez gave us his version of the truth. But that's all it was, his version, and one only provided because he finally got caught.

Rodriguez says he was only dirty when he played in Texas but cleaner than corners on a hospital bed when he was in Seattle before that, and later when he got to New York.

We are supposed to accept all that as gospel because he has made this kind of television confession now. Or maybe he just expects us to believe him because he has always been such a good scout.

Roger Clemens gave us one kind of show when he was accused of being a steroids user. Rodriguez saw how well that has worked out for Clemens. So this was a different kind of show, Rodriguez almost begging people to feel sorry for him and like him even while admitting to doing something - using steroids - that most baseball fans hate.

And while he couldn't tell you what drugs he took, he sure was clear on when he took them.

"I was young, I was stupid, I was naive," Rodriguez said to Peter Gammons on ESPN. "I wanted to prove to everybody that I was worthy of being one of the greatest players of all time."

He says he was young, stupid, naive. The fact of the matter is that he took the drugs for the same reason they all took them - to get bigger and stronger and better. In that way he is no better than Barry Bonds or any other drug cheat.

"I felt a tremendous need to keep up," he says, explaining why he first started using these drugs, even though he was coming off a career in Seattle that had earned him an insane $252million contract in Texas.

Bonds still maintains he thought he was using flaxseed oil. At least Rodriguez, who still thinks he can hit more home runs than anybody, said he did it Monday. And you have to give him that.

But on a day he kept talking about honesty again and again and about the truth setting him free, he also kept acting as if the hard-core, injectable steroids he is accused of taking were something that you could run down to the health-food store and buy over the counter.

He kept talking about GNC as if that's where you could pick up testosterone and Primobolan along with Vitamin C. That version of things wouldn't fly on "Judge Judy."

And on a day when he tried to get as much sympathy for himself, he veered off into an attack on the Sports Illustrated writer, Selena Roberts, who broke the story and made her out to be some kind of sick, twisted stalker instead of a reporter doing her job.

To the end, you have to shake your head with this guy. Because only A-Rod, on a day when he made this kind of confession, could also try to sell you this:

I took the drugs to make myself even better than I already was ... and then discovered that I am even greater without them!

"I've played the best baseball of my career since," he said.

When Gammons asked him exactly what he was taking, Rodriguez wasn't entirely sure. He wants us to believe that nobody ever told him he had tested positive for two different steroids in 2003. And if you believe somebody from the players' union didn't mention that to Rodriguez, you believe water really isn't wet.

But this is A-Rod, after all. Naturally you come away with more questions than the ones he answered. And as for lying to Katie Couric when she asked him on "60 Minutes" about using steroids, he gave an answer right out of crisis management school, one about how if he couldn't tell the truth to himself, how could he tell the truth to Couric?

This was just the latest example of the old dodge from the fight promoter Bob Arum, the one about how Monday he was lying and today he's telling the truth.

Just because Rodriguez copped to just enough - the way Andy Pettitte did one year ago - does that mean he told us everything? Or did Rodriguez do just enough to get people to feel sorry for him, the way Pettitte did when spring training '08 started? They tell you what they did was wrong, wrong, wrong and then act as if we're supposed to carry them around the room on our shoulders.

We are all supposed to believe Rodriguez when he says he stopped cold turkey in 2003, that he hasn't just replaced steroids with human growth hormone.

We are really supposed to believe he was using these drugs and got tested along with everybody else six years ago and never wondered whether there was a dirty test on him.

Rodriguez stepped to the plate Monday in a way a lot of us thought he never would. Bonds never admitted to knowingly using baseball drugs, Roger Clemens hasn't, Mark McGwire wouldn't, even in front of Congress. A-Rod did. It was some show. But as always with him, you wonder how much of it was real.

And knowing what's still real in baseball - isn't that what this is supposed to be all about?



Jeter forced to start A-new following A-Rod's admission

By Filip Bondy
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
February 10, 2009


Egan-Chin/News

Derek Jeter speaks in Tampa on Monday.


Derek Jeter was in Tampa on Monday working out, getting ready for baseball. You remember baseball: Small, white spheroid. Leather gloves. Flimsy wooden bats.

It is a sport that Jeter still loves, that makes him smile in the dugout whenever a teammate smacks a double in the gap or Chien-Ming Wang says something wacky. You ask Jeter a question about real life, you'll likely get one curt, evasive sentence. You ask him about baseball, his face lights up and he'll talk both your ears off. Have you ever noticed how Jeter looks back, tracking a taken pitch all the way into the catcher's mitt? He milks every second from this game.

Nobody was going to ask Jeter about taking pitches Monday, however, because Alex Rodriguez had already stolen early spring, bundling it up in giant steroid headlines. Reporters wanted to know about A-Rod. They always want to know about A-Rod.

"My initial reaction is to wait until Alex talks," Jeter said before Rodriguez pleaded guilty on ESPN, with an explanation (things were "loosey-goosey"). "Give him the benefit of the doubt. Give him that respect."

Well of course that was what he was going to say. Jeter is the last of the great Yankees, at least the way we wish to envision and mythologize our Yankees. In reality, great Yankees have often been boozers (Ruth and Mantle) or egomaniacs (Reggie and A-Rod). Now it turns out a couple of them also have been drug cheats, which is not a phrase we'll ever hear during broadcasts on "Yankee Classics."

But Jeter is Jeter, the embodiment of those selfless championship years of the late 1990s. If we were to find out something bad about Derek, something about drugs, baseball would be done around here. They could stick a fork in it.

It's not done yet, because Rodriguez was on that 2003 steroid list, not Jeter. Nothing that Rodriguez says or does surprises anybody. He could be dating Britney Spears, or be point man for Bernie Madoff. We would just shake our heads and say, "That's A-Rod." He's a lot like Clemens in that way, only with more self-doubt and less mania.

We think of A-Rod, we think of Madonna, failed Octobers and now steroids. We hear Jeter's name, we think of a shovel pass at home plate to nail Jeremy Giambi, or a diving, horizontal catch into the stands in foul territory. We think about line-drive singles and four titles.

Reporters in Tampa had to ask him, though. They had to ask Jeter if he was concerned that his own name might be among the 104 who tested positive in 2003.

"Why would I worry about me being on that list?" he said Monday.

That was the answer we wanted to hear. Jeter is the guy who stays out of trouble, doesn't go trawling for it. He remains single, so his romantic dalliances amuse instead of disgust us. He keeps quiet about the contract that expires in 2010, about his place in the lineup, about the pitchers and teammates and coaches who have failed him in recent seasons.

There is no reason to suspect Jeter did steroids. His stats are in order. He never hit more than 24 homers in a season. In recent years, as he has aged, Jeter's home run totals have slowly decreased from 23 to 19 to 14 to 12 and then to 11. When analysts grump about his power numbers, they probably should be celebrating the natural erosion of muscle.

Sometimes, in the past, the silent treatment Jeter gave Rodriguez seemed almost harsh and hurtful. But then the more we get to know Rodriguez, the more we understand Jeter's cold shoulder. It isn't jealousy. It's self-preservation. He has to play shortstop next to this walking disaster area, and then he is expected to answer those endless questions.

Will Jeter stand up for Rodriguez, now that A-Rod admits to using the stuff? Jeter was the good teammate for Andy Pettitte. It will be harder to play that role with Rodriguez, for both personal and professional reasons.

It was during those years of A-Rod's admitted use, from 2001-2003, when he surpassed Jeter in the public's eye as the No. 1 shortstop in baseball. Now it turns out Jeter was surpassed not by a man, but by a drug.

"It would be nice to talk about baseball," Jeter said Monday.

He picked the wrong team for that, and then the team picked the wrong teammate.

fjbondy@netscape.net

Last Gasp for Limited Government?

Obama charts a socialized course.

By Rich Lowry
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 10, 1009


Republicans fought an inspired battle against the stimulus bill, holding all but three of their 219 senators and congressmen. They still lost.

Barring a last-minute House-Senate blowup, President Obama will sign a bill spending at least $475 billion (that figure doesn't count the tax cuts) in the first major substantive victory of his presidency. Some of that spending will enter the permanent "baseline" of the federal budget, the starting point for all future budgets that, in the immutable law of Washington, always grow and never shrink.

Obama has had a tougher time getting the bill passed than he expected, and had to try to boost it last night at his first prime-time press conference, a forceful, at times hard-edged performance making the case that the bill stands between the economy and "catastrophe."

Whatever turbulence the bill has encountered, the trajectory toward ever-higher spending is clear. Even pruning the House version of the bill - that is, paring back spending that hadn't yet taken place - was painted as tightfisted and cruel. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the "cuts" in proposed spending "very damaging." Just wait 'til the spending is actually in the budget.

Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich intent on limiting government during the past 25 years only succeeded in a limited way: From 1983 to 2000, the federal government's size relative to GDP fell from 23.5 percent to 18.4 percent. Spending didn't shrink, but it grew at a slower rate than the economy, providing more breathing room for the private sector.

Yet it had bounced back to 20.9 percent last year, and could go as high as 28 percent this year. Newsweek reports that total federal government spending in 2010 will be 39.9 percent of GDP, only about 8 percentage points less than the average in the socialistic "eurozone" countries. Is American exceptionalism about to be bundled off on a long trip to the Continent, never to return?

That's the momentous question posed by Obama's presidency. Those who favor socialism of the creeping variety are feasting on a collapse of Wall Street's reputation as complete as that of the early 1930s, when it was said of disgraced banker Charles E. Mitchell, "If you steal $25, you're a thief. If you steal $250,000, you're an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you're a financier."

The lost moral authority of the financial sector - and the market generally - has accrued to government, now on the hook for $9.7 trillion worth of interventions in the economy.

Whether this program is perceived to work, whether Obama further nationalizes health care and how much of our wealth is claimed by looming entitlements will determine the country's future, and its nature.

The backdrop to the debate over these questions is a roiling, up-for-grabs populism.

The ascendant left-leaning populism feeds off anger at the new "malefactors of great wealth." But a right-leaning populism is building. It takes the same anger, but lumps government in with the malefactors, via its bailout of failed industries and its self-serving irresponsibility symbolized by silly pet projects in the stimulus bill and burgeoning deficits (which Republicans are newly outraged about).

Obama can't get on the wrong side of this populist sentiment. That's why he won't yet ask for more spending as part of the latest bailout.

If Obama manages to cement an aggrandized government, his domestic political accomplishment will equal Reagan's - although in reverse.

The late sociologist Seymour Lipset wrote a brilliant book on why the United States didn't embrace socialism, called "It Didn't Happen Here." In a few years, its conclusion might look premature.

Today's Tune: The Flairz - Rock And Roll Ain't Evil

(Click on title to play video)

The Search for Truth

By Thomas Boswell
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Monday, February 9, 2009; E01


Now that the witches with the longest broomsticks have been burned, can we please call off the rest of the hunt?

Or do we need to expose the other 103 baseball players, in addition to Alex Rodriguez, who allegedly failed steroid tests -- six years ago?

Until we hang every investment banker, until we unseat everybody who pimped for sub-prime loans, until we force into the street every citizen who lied on a mortgage application, I say we've pilloried enough ballplayers to make the point that, when a sport says, "This is cheating," you shouldn't do it.


Alex Rodriguez connects for a home run in the eighth inning against the Chicago White Sox on September 17, 2008 at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees defeated the White Sox 5-1. (Getty Images)


Underneath the big contracts and a defaced Hall of Fame and a record book that will forever be a bowl of stat spaghetti, that's what this was about: Just don't cheat.

But if you do, and get caught, don't lie. And if you do cheat and you do lie, then at some point tell the truth. Then, if you're lucky, you may get a semi-fresh start, like Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte. Confession may or may not be good for the soul. But it is definitely good career strategy.
Is there a cutoff point for outrage over pro games? Is there a moment when we say, "That's enough." Maybe not. But turning Alex Rodriguez into A-R*d seems sufficient.

The report by SI.com that Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in '03, while playing for the Texas Rangers, feels like the beginning of a final act, the culmination of more than 20 years of baseball dirt.

It's been an interminably long road. In '88, Fenway Park fans chanted "steroids, steroids" at Jose Canseco, an embarrassment baseball chose to ignore for more than a decade. Steroids? No steroids here. So, the epidemic metastasized until the greatest stars became toxic assets.

Now, 21 years later, the last of the superstars that Canseco claims to have taught how to juice or, in A-Rod's case, introduced to a trainer/steroid-supplier, has been tarnished beyond recognition. "A-Fraud," the term former manager Joe Torre says Yankees teammates use to describe Rodriguez, now has a whole new spin. With the last of Jose's chemistry class unmasked, are we entering the last chapter?

Sometimes, we need to step back and apply common sense. In three weeks, Barry Bonds goes on trial for perjury. Roger Clemens is being investigated by a federal grand jury. And Rodriguez now faces nine more years in a contract that may make the new Yankee Stadium feel more like Rikers Island. With good behavior, he's out in '18.

And spring training starts Saturday. Yes, perfect baseball timing. We get it. The game was very, very bad. For many years nobody in the sport cared who cheated. So, many did. For deals of up to $250 million, would any group of humans in history stay totally clean, just to play a game by its stated, but completely unenforced, rules? Of course not.

Even for those of us who thought the steroid era was terrible for the long-term health of players, unfair to those like Hank Aaron who set records within the rules and an awful example of public hypocrisy, enough is enough. Baseball should continue to push for the toughest possible drug testing rules. Catch all you can. Leave the rest alone.

That's as good as the real world gets. Every sport's first responsibility is to the athletes who don't want to endanger their health or lives with methenolone or HGH. No playing field is ever entirely level. But any pro sport, and any credible union, must work toward that goal. MLB and its obstructionist union didn't even try.

If, someday, the consensus within medicine is that steroids, in astronomical dosages, aren't harmful, then allow them in sports. But that's certainly not the consensus now. Just the opposite. So keep them out of games. And don't apologize for it. If for no other reason, plenty of kids do imitate star athletes. Maybe they shouldn't. But it's fact.

However, we've reached the point, and probably passed it, when everybody, including prosecutors, needs to get a new hobby. There's a point where the punishment no longer fits the crime. If Bonds or Clemens or both end up in jail, if the lives of many of the 104 -- who were told they were in an anonymous "survey" testing program with no punishments -- end up torn to shreds, who is well served?

Of all the famous names who have ended up in the steroid net, none is a more fascinating case than A-Rod. He's a narcissist, but also, in Reggie Jackson's words, "too nice." He craves attention, yet fears criticism. And, in the contradiction that may have caused him the most torment since he crossed paths with Canseco in Texas in the late '90s, he wants to be seen by the world as the perfect idealized person and player -- whether he is or not.

"So marvelous is the power of conscience. It makes us betray, accuse, and fight ourselves, and, in the absence of outside witness, it brings us forward against ourselves," wrote Montaigne four centuries ago. "Whoever expects punishment already suffers it; and whoever has deserved it expects it. Wickedness forges torments against itself."


In this April 2, 2003 file photo, Texas Rangers' Alex Rodriguez heads for first base after hitting his 300th career home run in the fifth inning against the Anaheim Angels at Edison Field in Anaheim, Calif. (AP)


For the past decade, Rodriguez has lived a life that, in retrospect, feels like a campaign of self-sabotage. Held up as a paragon of "clean" record setting, he has increasingly been booed, especially in his home Yankee Stadium. He's the superstar with the gift for getting hated. Has A-Rod been betraying, accusing and fighting himself?

After all, what hasn't he done -- to damage himself? He upstaged the last game of the 2007 World Series with a contract negotiation stunt; then, mortified, he apologized. He ruined his marriage with a public sex scandal. Then he made a fool of himself as Madonna's boy toy.

Any Yankee fan, hair half pulled out, can quadruple that list. And all will mention his spectacular and inexplicable failures in October as a Yankee. Since choking in the final four games of the Yankees' collapse to the Red Sox in the '04 ALCS, he has hit .114 with one RBI in his three subsequent Octobers in New York. That's .114, one RBI.

The common complaint about Rodriguez is that, though he is a student of the game, he has little conscience as a player, no true team feeling, but is driven by statistics, by fame, by hooking up with the famous.

The best, perhaps, that can be said of him in this dark hour is that he may have more conscience than he thinks. "Wickedness forges torments against itself."

Who surrounds A-Rod now, planning what to do next, but the baseball players' union and agent Scott Boras.

At the moment when Rodriguez must define how he will be seen for the rest of his life, the devil himself could hardly have surrounded him with advisers more suited to stonewalling and counterattack but less inclined to the simplest and best strategy.

Tell the truth and live with it.

DER SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH BISHOP RICHARD WILLIAMSON

http://www.spiegel.de/international/
2/09/2009

'I Will Not Travel to Auschwitz'

Bishop Richard Williamson's denial of the Holocaust has done serious damage to the Catholic Church. In an e-mail and fax exchange with SPIEGEL, the ultra-conservative bishop says that he is willing to "review the historical evidence."


SPIEGEL: The Vatican is demanding that you retract your denial of the Holocaust, and it is threatening to not allow you to resume your activities as a bishop. How will you react?

Williamson: Throughout my life, I have always sought the truth. That is why I converted to Catholicism and became a priest. And now I can only say something, the truth of which I am convinced. Because I realize that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must now review the historical evidence once again. I said the same thing in my interview with Swedish television: Historical evidence is at issue, not emotions. And if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

SPIEGEL: How can an educated Catholic deny the Holocaust?

Williamson: I addressed the subject in the 1980s. I had read various writings at the time. I cited the Leuchter report (eds. note: a debunked theory produced in the 1980s claiming erroneously that the Nazi gas chambers were technically impractical) in the interview, and it seemed plausible to me. Now I am told that it has been scientifically refuted. I plan now to look into it.

SPIEGEL: You could travel to Auschwitz yourself.

Williamson: No, I will not travel to Auschwitz. I've ordered the book by Jean-Claude Pressac. It's called "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers." A printout is now being sent to me, and I will read it and study it.

SPIEGEL: The Society of Saint Pius X has set an ultimatum for the end of February. Are you not risking a break with the group?

Williamson: In the Old Testament, the Prophet Jonah tells the sailors when their ship is in distress: " Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you." The Society has a religious mission that is suffering because of me. I will now examine the historic evidence. If I do not find it convincing, I will do everything in my power to avoid inflicting any further harm on the Church and the Society.

SPIEGEL: What does the repeal of the excommunication by Pope Benedict XVI mean to you?

Williamson: We just want to be Catholic, nothing else. We have not developed our own teachings, but are merely preserving the things that the Church has always taught and practiced. And in the sixties and seventies, when everything was changed in the name of this Council (eds. note: the Second Vatican Council), it was suddenly a scandal. As a result, we were forced to the margins of the church, and now that empty churches and an aging clergy make it clear that these changes were a failure, we are returning to the center. That's the way it is for us conservatives: we are proved right, as long as we wait long enough.

SPIEGEL: People at the Vatican claimed that they didn't know you. Is that true?

Williamson: Most contacts pass through Bishop Fellay and the General Council, of which I am not a member. But three of us four bishops attended a private dinner with Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos in 2000. It was more about getting to know each other, but we certainly talked about theological issues and even a bit of philosophy. The cardinal was very friendly.

SPIEGEL: The Second Vatican Council counts as one of the great achievements of the Catholic Church. Why do you not fully recognize it?

Williamson: It is absolutely unclear what we are supposed to recognize. An important document is called "Gaudium et spes," or Joy and Hope. In it, the writers rhapsodize about the ability of mass tourism to bring people together. But one can hardly expect a conservative society to embrace package tours. It discusses fears and hardships. And then a nuclear war between the superpowers is mentioned. You see, much of this is already outdated. These Council documents are always ambiguous. Because no one knew what exactly this was supposed to mean, everyone started doing as he wished shortly after the Council. This has resulted in this theological chaos we have today. What are we supposed to recognize, the ambiguity or the chaos?

SPIEGEL: Are you actually aware that you are dividing the Church with your extreme views?

Williamson: Only violation of the dogmas, that is, the infallible principles, destroys faith. The Second Vatican Council declared that it would proclaim no new dogmas. Today the liberal bishops act as though it were some sort of all-encompassing super-dogma, and they use it as justification for a dictatorship of relativism. This contradicts the texts of the Council.

SPIEGEL: Your position on Judaism is consistently anti-Semitic.

Williamson: St. Paul put it this way: The Jews are beloved for the sake of Our Father, but our enemies for the sake of the gospel.

SPIEGEL: Do you seriously intend to use Catholic tradition and the Bible to justify your anti-Semitism?

Williamson: Anti-Semitism means many things today, for instance, when one criticizes the Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip. The Church has always understood the definition of anti-Semitism to be the rejection of Jews because of their Jewish roots. This is condemned by the Church. Incidentally, this is self-evident in a religion whose founders and all important individuals in its early history were Jews. But it was also clear, because of the large number of Jewish Christians in early Christianity, that all men need Christ for their salvation -- all men, including the Jews.

SPIEGEL: The pope will travel to Israel soon, where he plans to visit the Holocaust Memorial. Are you also opposed to this?

Williamson: Making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a great joy for Christians. I wish the Holy Father all the best on his journey. What troubles me about Yad Vashem is that Pope Pius XII is attacked there, even though no one saved more Jews during the Nazi period than he did. For instance, he had baptismal certificates issued for persecuted Jews to protect them against arrest. These facts have been distorted to mean exactly the opposite. Otherwise, I hope that the pope will also have an eye and a heart for the women and children who were injured in the Gaza Strip, and that he will speak out in support of the Christian population in Bethlehem, which is now walled in.

SPIEGEL: Your statements have caused great injury and outrage in the Jewish world. Why don't you apologize?

Williamson: If I realize that I have made an error, I will apologize. I ask every human being to believe me when I say that I did not deliberately say anything untrue. I was convinced that my comments were accurate, based on my research in the 1980s. Now I must review everything again and look at the evidence.

SPIEGEL: Do you at least recognize universal human rights?

Williamson: When human rights were declared in France, hundreds of thousands were killed throughout France. Where human rights are considered an objective order for the state to implement, there are constantly anti-Christian policies. When it comes to preserving the individual's freedom of conscience against the democratic state, then human rights perform an important function. The individual needs these rights against a country that behaves like a Leviathan. But the Christian concept of the state is a different one, so that the Christian theories of human rights emphasize that freedom is not an end in itself. The point is not freedom from something, but freedom for something. For good.

SPIEGEL: Your statements and the lifting of your excommunication have triggered protests worldwide. Can you understand this?

Williamson: A single interview on Swedish television has dominated the news for weeks in Germany. Yes, it does surprise me. Is this the case with all violations of the law in Germany? Hardly. No, I am only the tool here, so that action can be taken against the SSPX and the pope. Apparently Germany's leftist Catholicism has not yet forgiven Ratzinger for becoming pope.


Interview conducted by Peter Wensierski and Steffen Winter

Interview conducted in German and translated into English by Christopher Sultan

RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS

Pope on the Defensive: The Intractable Brothers from SSPX (02/06/2009)
Debate over Holocaust Denial: Vatican 'Horrified' by Criticism from Germany (02/05/2009)
Opinion: The Pope Has Lost His Magic (02/04/2009)
Losing Touch: A German Pope Disgraces the Catholic Church (02/04/2009)

Bishop Richard Williamson is a member of the ultra- conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). In late January, Pope Benedict XVI decided to lift the excommunications of four members of the SSPX, Bishop Williamson among them. Just days prior to the retraction of his excommunication, Bishop Williamson said on Swedish television that he didn't believe the Holocaust took place and said that between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps instead of the commonly accepted 6 million. The resulting scandal has led to doubts about Benedict's leadership of the Catholic Church, though Benedict last week demanded that Williamson recant his statements.

IT'S RAINING MONEY

By Mark Steyn
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/
http://www.marksteyn.com/
Tuesday, 03 February 2009


For Britons of a certain age, the defining moment of the pre-Thatcher years came in 1976 when the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, was forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund and seek a loan—just like any old president-for-life of one of those bankrupt banana republics dear old Bono is always urging debt relief for. But I wonder how many Brits remember the precise figure of the humungous wad of dosh Chancellor Healey so desperately needed to rescue his flailing nation?

Four billion dollars.

Bailing out a G7 economy has gotten a little pricier since those days. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking chump change. “Anything much less than $1 trillion,” explained Rep. Lynn Woolsey the other day, “would be like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.” A giant forest fire is ravaging the U.S. economy, and you’re standing there waggling your $700 billion squirt gun and doing nothing but watering your toecaps. As for poor Lord Healey’s $4 billion, that wouldn’t cover your squirt gun’s shipping and handling.

President-elect Obama is being wafted into office not so much on a tide of cash or even credit but on a spectacular reconfiguration of the bounds of language. In the old days, when a currency’s value was eroded and the number of zeroes required for routine transactions risked making the regime look ridiculous, governments would revalue the monetary unit—as the French did in 1960, introducing a new franc worth 100 of the old inflation-racked ones. In America, as far as I can tell, most of us are still spending and earning the old Yankee dollar—you know, the one that just about covers the cost of a newspaper and a small cup of coffee at my town’s general store. But in Washington, for the purposes of public discourse, some strange new Zimbabwean unit seems to have been introduced between the election and the inauguration: No matter how many zeroes you stick on the end, the next guy will always add a couple more.

For the redistributive class, a trillion was a psychological Rubicon: It sounds odd the first time you say it. What does it mean in the real world? The cost of everything in West Virginia named after Robert C. Byrd plus the vibrating Shiatsu massage lounger and five-foot steel sculpture of migrating salmon illegally installed in Ted Stevens’s Alaskan chalet? But deploy the word hither and yon, to Wolf Blitzer and Katie Couric, and after a while “trillion” trips trillingly off the tongue. So now no politician demanding immediate government action wants to come off like Doctor Evil and invite instant derision by urging some nickel ’n’ dime billion-dollar boondoggle. In the bright new dawn, “ONE! TRILLION!! DOLLARS!!!” is the kind of price tag that commands respect. Congress is planning, at the time of writing, to double domestic discretionary spending. At the time of reading, I’m confident they’ll have quadrupled it. The Khmer Rouge proclaimed Year Zero; for the incoming Obama administration it’s the Year of Twelve Zeroes.

What is a trillion dollars? Well, it’s too many numerals to fit on your pocket calculator. But, given the accelerating obesity crisis in the United States, it’s clear that many American pants could use far larger pockets. So the Obama administration will be offering tax credits to families who participate in the large-pocket impact study commissioned by the Pocket-Size Regulatory Authority. That should stimulate the economy sufficiently to stimulate someone into inventing the four-foot-wide pocket calculator that shows enough zeroes to calculate the size of the bailout. Alternatively, we could put up one of those constantly whirring electronic scoreboard thingies in Times Square. Well, okay, not Times Square. But Central Park would probably be wide enough.

And why stop there? Barry Ritholz, author of the forthcoming book Bailout Nation, calculated—gosh, was it only six weeks ago?—that the tab for the bailout by November 24 was already $4.6165 trillion, which looks much more convincing because it’s big but not round. It’s specific to four decimal points, which sounds like they’ve got way down in the weeds of taxi receipts and lunch money. The media coo over Obama’s “new New Deal,” but, as Mr. Ritholz pointed out, if you adjust for inflation, the combined costs of the old New Deal plus the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Plan, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars, and every NASA project in history—oh, and the S&L crisis—add up to a mere $3.92 trillion. Even as he was totting up his numbers, the Bloomberg news service estimated that, factoring in Citibank and a couple of other Johnny-come-latelys, the bailout bill was in fact up to $7.76 trillion—which is the combined cost of all that other stuff (Louisiana Purchase, etc.) plus the $3.6 trillion of the Second World War. John Kerry famously denounced the Republicans for “opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States,” but not anymore: After opening firehouses in Baghdad, Saigon, Seoul, Tokyo, Western Europe, and the moon, we’re now opening even more over here, to house the new fire trucks with all those trillion-dollar hoses for the raging conflagration. Obama isn’t the new New Deal. He’s the new everything. It seems safe to say that, adjusted for the usual government underestimates, by, oh, mid-2010 the bailout will have cost more than all of American history combined.

And by then we’ll probably need a new round number. What’s the name for the avalanche of dough that comes after a trillion? I asked Senator-designate Caroline Kennedy, and she said: “Cotillion?” Close enough. By 2011, we’ll need a cotillion-dollar stimulus package to . . . um, “create jobs” and, er, “help middle-class families.”

That’s the funny thing. The price tag may be unprecedented but the products are distressingly precedented. “The administration’s number-one goal,” said the new president, “is to create 3 million new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector.” And that sounds kind of impressive—unless, that is, you’re one of those capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw types who wonder what kind of functioning polity is so structurally decayed that it’s supposed to be good news that a mere 20 percent of new jobs will be government work. Are 600,000 new government workers really necessary to stimulate the U.S. economy? And, come to that, will a $3,000 tax credit really persuade a private company to take on a new employee it wouldn’t otherwise have hired, or will the bulk of the dough just go to companies that would have hired the extra workers anyway?

Then there’s infrastructure. “Infrastructure,” says James Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, “is going to be the cornerstone of this stimulus initiative.” Representative Oberstar has a fairly expansive definition of “infrastructure investment”—it includes remodeling the National Zoo in Washington—but one assumes at least a portion of the outlay would do some good. After all, freight trains that take two days to get from the Port of Los Angeles to the outskirts of Chicago currently spend another 48 hours crawling across the congested rail lines of the Windy City.

But it’s not lack of money that’s responsible for America’s sclerotic infrastructure, it’s the inability to make things happen on an expeditious timeframe. You think that Chicago bottleneck’s bad? If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the golden spike to celebrate the point at which the feasibility commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the zoning board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor. If 9/11 was (as they used to say) “the day everything changed,” that seven-year hole in the ground in the heart of Lower Manhattan is a monument to how hard it is to get anything changed in today’s America. So good luck “stimulating” the economy with infrastructure. One reason Google and Apple and other American success stories started in somebody’s garage is that that’s the one place where innovation isn’t immediately buried by bureaucracy. As to Representative Woolsey’s rampaging forest fires, these days they’re caused mostly by federal eco-regulation preventing traditional prudent stewardship such as basic brush-cutting.

So much for “job creation” and “infrastructure.” What else is there? Well, it’s amazing with a trillion-dollar barrel how quickly you wind up scraping the bottom of it. In Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” two of the five objectives are to “computerize the health-care system” and “modernize classrooms.” That sound you hear is the computerized eye-rolling with which every modernized NR column now comes equipped. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, on the other hand, wants “green jobs creation” and “construction of libraries in rural communities to expand broadband access.” And in a postmodern touch, Mark Pinsky at The New Republic makes the pitch for a new Federal Writers’ Project in which writers laid off by America’s collapsing newspaper industry would be hired by the government to go around the country “documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession.” As FDR would have said, we have nothing to fear but running out of ideas to blow the trillion bazillion dollars on. America has a money-no-object government with a lot of money but no great objects.

And nobody cares. In the final triumph of liberalism, the fact that incomprehensible sums are being allocated to no particular purpose is taken as evidence of the adminstration’s virtue and determination. If you’re at a New Hampshire town meeting and the board of selectmen proposes a $3,000 fence for the local dump, some old coot in plaid will stand up and demand to know why the fence costs three grand. But if you announce that you’ll need $12.3 trillion for a stimulus package, everyone says: Well, sure, that shows how serious things must be. “This isn’t about big government or small government,” says President-elect Obama. “It’s about building a smarter government.” “Smart government” seems best understood as the stage that’s even bigger than big government. It’s like Starbucks: tall, grande, and then smartie.

And, whether or not we get a massive federal program of rural library construction, we seem certain to get an acceleration of the grim leftward ratchet effect:

a) more subordination of the dynamic part of the economy to arthritic government regulation;

b) more of the remorseless annexation of health care by government, until eventually the point about whether to move to a socialized system will be entirely moot;

c) more so-called tax cuts, a term the Democrats have successfully usurped to apply to nanny-state “credits” the government condescends to allow you in return for living your life the way they want you to;

d) federally funded preschool and a few other entitlements that will metastasize way beyond any attempted constraints and further deform the relationship between the citizen and the state;

e) continued incremental removal of more and more citizens from the federal tax rolls, until round about 2012 a majority of American adults are paying no federal tax at all but are able to vote themselves more and more lollipops from the minority who do;

f) a few small nothing peripheral Community Reinvestment Act–sized programs that nobody notices until, a decade or two and a couple of reforms later, they’ve mutated into a hideous wart-encrusted tail wagging an ever more tumor-ridden and cadaverous old pooch.

The skids that greased the good ship Lollipop were put in place by the hysteria of last September when the supposed crisis broke and the experts began running around saying, “Don’t just stand there, spend something.” As readers will recall, it was Polonius who advised, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” and in America we are approaching that blessed state. A man who borrows $400,000 for a house he cannot afford isn’t really a “borrower,” is he? After all, every politician agrees that the priority is to keep people in “their” homes, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus is calling for a “moratorium on foreclosures,” which is a polysyllabic way of saying there’s no need to make your monthly payments. In what sense then is he “borrowing”?

And the banker who loaned the 400 grand isn’t a “lender” of anything terribly real, is he? Not in the Age of Leverage—of derivatives, of credit-default swaps, and of other artful packaging. “We refused to touch credit-default swaps,” the author and investment adviser Nassim Taleb said. “It would be like buying insurance on the Titanic from someone on the Titanic.” But a lot of people did just that. The Canadian commentator Jay Currie, waxing lyrical, put it this way: “If two people make a bet on the fall of a raindrop and each puts up, say, their shoes, the bet is a real bet. If they put up cash it is very close to a real bet. IOUs are not much of a bet. Someone else’s IOUs? Still less of a bet. A good deal of imaginary money is going to money heaven, which is sort of like saying that your stuffed animal is dead.”

Except when the administration steps in to replace the dead imaginary money with real (or realish) money. Having, in effect, colluded in the destruction of meaningful risk-evaluation, the government decided it was obliged to act not to prevent a Thirties-style “credit crunch” but to prop up an unsustainable form of pseudo-credit.

“Borrowing,” continues Polonius, “dulls the edge of husbandry”—and that goes double for government, whose husbandry is dulled in the best of times. Whatever it does for subprime homeowners, the principal beneficiaries of the bailout are the incoming president and his Democratic Congress, licensed by the outgoing treasury secretary as arbiters of unlimited federal largesse. Banks, homeowners, auto makers, formerly golden states . . . the line stretches around the block, and why not? “Bailout” is to “earmark” as “undocumented worker” is to “illegal immigrant”—an invitation to come out of the shadows and claim your benefits.

Does Congress have trillions of dollars to create all those government jobs on study groups of the environmental sustainability of infrastructure projects? No. As the cliché goes, we’re accumulating debts our grandchildren will have to pay off. Which admittedly is a better situation to be in than the one in Europe, which demographically speaking has no grandchildren to stick it to. But, as I always say, it’s not the cost of these programs. They would be wrong if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them every month. They’re wrong because they represent a transfer from the citizen to the state not of money but of power. And over time, as we see in the urge to expunge words like “default” and “foreclosure” and indeed any form of moral hazard from life, they have a debilitating effect. A society can cope with corroded infrastructure more easily than a corroded citizenry.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” says Rahm Emanuel. Is it really a “serious crisis”? Three decades after Britain’s humiliating grovel to the International Monetary Fund, Denis Healey’s position today is that it was all a silly bookkeeping error by government civil servants: It turns out they didn’t need the cash infusion after all. He only found out too late.

Hmm.


From the January 26, 2009 issue of National Review

Driven to Be the Best, but Ending Up His Own Worst Enemy

By TYLER KEPNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
February 8, 2009


Ray Stubblebine/Reuters

Alex Rodriguez, playing for the Rangers, hits a home run in a game against the Yankees on Aug. 6, 2003.


The essence of Alex Rodriguez is a consuming desire to achieve. He craves the best statistics, the biggest contract, the most attention. He is a friend of the career hits leader in baseball, the man who may be the richest in the world and the most enduring pop celebrity of the last two decades.

But beyond the text messages from Pete Rose, the financial advice from Warren E. Buffett and the headlines from his connection to Madonna, Rodriguez is a baseball savant. When he strips away his corporate sheen, he reveals a deep and abiding baseball intellect. Those rare moments are when a player sometimes called A-Fraud seems most genuine.

A few years ago, I casually mentioned to Rodriguez that his knowledge of the game could make him a good television analyst, if he ever wanted the job. He startled me with his response, saying bitterly that when he retires, nobody in baseball will see him again.

That may happen in a way he never intended. With the news Saturday that Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003, he could end up like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro — shunned from the game and taking denials into a lonely retirement.

“His legacy, now, is gone,” one Yankees official said of Rodriguez, speaking on condition of anonymity because the organization had no public comment. “He’ll just play it out. Now he’s a worker. Do your job, collect your paycheck and when you’re finished playing, go away. That’s what it is.”
Several other front-office officials declined to comment Saturday, but the Yankees were clearly blindsided. Just like that, the questions about Joe Torre’s book do not seem so distracting anymore.

“If he did it, he’s got to flat-out admit it, like Giambi,” the Yankees official said. “Just come out and say, ‘I did it. I’m sorry. I lied.’”

Rodriguez has been hardened by the waves of criticism that have come over him steadily since December 2000, when he left Seattle for a two-fisted grab of Tom Hicks’s cash to play for the Texas Rangers. But he still reads his news clippings, internalizing slights and thickening the wall around him. It is harder than ever to tell who he really is.

He has a streak of self-pity that did not exist in Seattle, where Rodriguez made his debut at 18 and shared a spotlight with veteran stars. By the time he was 30 — in spring training of 2006 — he was all but whining about the scrutiny he lived under.

“My whole life is about getting crushed,” he said.

Until Saturday, though, Rodriguez had never been directly linked to steroid use, and that will change his carefully crafted image forever.

There had been inferences from José Canseco, but nothing like the revelations first reported on SI.com, the Web site of Sports Illustrated.

The general assumption was that Rodriguez was clean. When the Mariners scouted him before picking him first in the 1993 draft, they were struck not just by his talent, but by his diet. While teammates scarfed down pizza, Rodriguez chose chicken and vegetables.

Five years later, Rodriguez joined Canseco and Bonds as the only players to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season. After his 40th homer, Rodriguez found a bottle of Champagne waiting for him at his locker. It was a gift from his friend and teammate David Segui, who has since gained infamy for his steroid use.

In 2000, Segui told ESPN the Magazine his nicknames for Rodriguez: Mr. Milk and Cookies, and Mr. Clean. That article, by Dan Le Batard, was a glowing recitation of Rodriguez facts that made him seem almost saintly. Rodriguez often steers his personal story line to his work ethic, a tactic Clemens used for years.

“Michael Jordan told me the way he kept the crown was by always outworking everyone else because he knew everyone was always coming after him,” Rodriguez told Le Batard. “You can sneak up on people when you are 18, 19, 20. It’s tougher when you’re established.”

Rodriguez was well established by 2003, and when he joined the Yankees the next season, he was widely considered the best player in baseball. He has continued to pile up stats, build his fortune and advance his celebrity, but the Yankees have not won a pennant with him.

For all of his regular-season success, Rodriguez’s October failures have reinforced the sense that he lacks an intangible. Now, even the tangibles — his power to all fields, his unmatched infield arm — are in doubt.

Rodriguez has always wanted it all, and now he has another distinction.

No player will enter spring training with more hostility and negativity hovering over him. His legacy, if not his whole life, is getting crushed.


Nine More Years of a Marriage Not Made in Heaven

By HARVEY ARATON
Sports of The Times
February 8, 2009

Nine more years. Nine long, bold-headlined years. That is how much longer the Yankees are contractually obligated to put up with always-something Alex Rodriguez. With his celebrity distractions, his need to be noticed, his clubhouse-integration issues, his Derek Jeter envy and, yes, his prime-time failures.

Nine years, and now, it appears, without the authentic historic payoff that Hank Steinbrenner and the Yankees were so seduced by, they couldn’t wait to sign A-Rod to a deal that would carry him well past his 40th birthday and could cost them $300 million.

Even after Rodriguez’s agent Scott Boras pulled his shameless 2007 World Series stunt — claiming his man wanted out of New York before the Red Sox could pop a Champagne cork in Denver — the Yankees were ready to retie the knot the minute A-Rod picked up the telephone to say, Just kidding. He had Hank at hello, and soon after, it was till 2018 do they part because somewhere along the way, the Yankees would dress the next great baseball moment in pinstripes, delivering a clean-as-a-whistle home run champ.

A Yankee would be the one to strike Barry Bonds from the record book, wash away the testimonies and memories of Mark McGwire and all the other sultans of steroids.

And now, in the aftermath of the A-Fraud uproar from Joe Torre’s book, on the eve of spring training, they have on their hands a report that originated Saturday morning on the Web site of Sports Illustrated linking A-Rod to a positive test for anabolic steroids in 2003, a 47-home run M.V.P. season. That was when baseball granted players immunity while it conducted survey testing with the hope that the number of cheats would be infinitesimal and that the whole sordid performance-enhancement problem would go away.

Instead, there was a list of 104 players who were sloppy enough to be caught or who didn’t care enough if they were because the union geniuses guaranteed them that the results would be confidential forever, if not destroyed. Then came José Canseco’s second book, the Balco revelations, a Congressional backlash and big-name hunting via government raids.

Based on the report, add another. Add A-Rod, who was held up as the hope and the heir 20 minutes after belief in Bonds was something that only partisans and the pathetically naïve could sustain.

A good number of baseball people, including a fair amount in the news media, apparently do not learn from experience. Whatever his personality flaws, A-Rod was different, you kept hearing, because he is possibly the most naturally gifted player ever to step onto a major league field. And his work ethic is off the charts. How many times have we heard that one? How many times did we hear it about Roger Clemens? How many times did Clemens credit his trusty winter training program for those extra miles that suddenly appeared on Andy Pettitte’s fastball?

The Yankees were the most ardent admirers of Rodriguez and are also positioned to be the biggest suckers, given the contract they gave him, along with promises of bonuses for every home-run hero he passes. They convinced themselves that A-Rod was the man for the 21st-century reclamation of baseball’s tarnished record book — except they conveniently forget he was taking major league swings as early as 1994.

As much as anyone, he is a product of a decade in which the sport took a pharmaceutical path that, for too many reputations, has become the road to ruin.

Rodriguez, according to the Sports Illustrated report, tested positive for Primobolan and testosterone while playing for the Texas Rangers, but does it really matter where it was or when, or for how long? Unless he or baseball, or both, can effectively counter another damaging blow, Rodriguez takes his place in the ever-expanding enhancement holding pen, a shadow cast across his career.

Unlike McGwire, Bonds and Clemens, he isn’t going away anytime soon. A-Rod will play on, the way Jason Giambi did after it was leaked that he had come clean about steroids to a federal grand jury, the way Pettitte did after telling a Congressional investigation that he had used human growth hormone. It will be fascinating to see what strategy A-Rod embraces: silence, denial, attack or a Pettitte-like confessional.

Of course, Yankee fans will forget, as much as they can for a player they seem to love only when he hits the ball 450 feet. The Yankees will forgive because given the terms of the marriage, what else can they do except hope that A-Rod’s skills don’t erode at the chronological rate more common for ballplayers before they began spiking their spinach.

Even if he doesn’t slow perceptibly as he advances deeper into his 30s, if he continues to hit home runs at the same pace, it will all lead to another shallow celebration if it is true that he wasn’t always clean, if he really was A-Fraud.

You have to wonder: is that why his teammates and coaches called him that? Because they always knew he was too good to be true?

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com