Sunday Grab Bag

I may have to cave and become a Yankees' fan. A lifelong Dodger fan, I got a kick out of the World Series and seeing the Yankees this past year at Camden Yards. But now that Nick Johnson is going to be the DH, I may have to go all in. For years, I always picked an obscure player to root for. When I was a kid, this person was Ron Fairly, the short first baseman for the Dodgers. A fairly solid hitter, my bet was always on whether Ron would bat .300. I think he did once. I have been following Nick Johnson since his days as an Expo and then when he was here in D.C. with the Senators. The interest has always been that Johnson has never played a whole season while healthy. A natural .300 hitter and potential gold glover, I've always wanted to see him play a whole season to see what his real numbers would look like. Whenever I've watched him, he always has gotten a hit and made great plays. So now with Nick and my hero Mariano Rivera, the Yankees may be my team. It also looks like the Yankees have about two years before they will have to clean house again.

Will I have to invoke the Doug Payne principle now with Henning Mankell? This principle affects all cutting-edge writers when they finally get reviewed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. I remember Doug would turn off on a series of writers we both loved--J.G. Ballard, Tom McQuane, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy. Once they were accepted by the Times their day was done as far as Doug was concerned. I thought this was a mistake. As a consequence, he missed out on DeLillo's Underworld and James Ellroy's political trilogy. J.G. Ballard retained his glory but his later novels went unread. Now with Henning Mankell I may be forced with the same dilemma. People are now supposed to "talk" about The Man From Beijing. I hoped to keep him as my own secret. I feel the same thing is happening with Ian Rankin.

Yesterday Barack Obama adopted the McColm solution to Social Security--tax higher levels of income. In his remarks, he said Social Security has only 20 years left at the current expenditures. That means that the Bush Adminisration actually ran through 17 years in the last year and a half to cover the deficit.

At least we are now free of the CPAC madness. Christopher Buckley ,writing in the Daily Beast, slams his first cousin Brent Bozell for a lackluster job on the Mount Vernon Declaration,comparing the prose of the Sharon Statement written by Bill Buckley and Brent's father with the boilerplate drudge of the contemporary conservatives. Conservative Mickey Edwards wrote that not only would he not go to CPAC but neither would Ronald Reagan--ouch. But at least we have a new form of conservativism--Conservative Constitutionalism. After the last administration shredded the constitution, conservatives have rediscovered the document now that a black man is President.

One of the interesting sidebars to CPAC was the the issue of gays. Liberty University threatened to boycott the conference if a gay GOP group attended. The group did and Liberty University pulled out. The one speaker who went gay-bashing was booed from the floor. Liz Cheney after a stint cheerleading for torture voiced support for dropping Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I found this all somewhat puzzling but understandable. Libertarians dominated the conference as Ron Paul's triumph in the straw vote showed and the younger generation of conservatives like their liberal counterparts could care less about gays. But it also marked the diminished power of social conservatives, a subject I will get to in another post.

Tim Pawlenty introduced a series of new principles for conservatives. The only one I remember is that God is in charge. Over the last two years, Pawlenty has increasingly been courting the fundamentalist vote. He now is a creationist, while in his entire previous life he wasn't. Perhaps he picked this up hanging around John McCain, who blurted out in the 2008 campaign that America was "a Christian nation", even though John never believed that either his entire life. With Glenn Beck about to resurrect the Christian revisionists, we should hear more about this. One question I would have for Tim is that if all our civil liberties come from God,what does the recent Supreme Court case on corporate donations to campaigns say about God's views about corporations?

For the record, the last real Christian Republican I knew was former Senator Danforth of Missouri. But that didn't do us much good since we got Clarence Thomas from him.

This week is the Health Care Summit--which should be a non-starter. Republicans have virtually no interest in health care reform or anything else the President wants. If some form of health care passes in the next two months, look to the 2010 elections being less of a Republican victory as has been advertised by our corporate media.

Looking at the ballot for the CPAC presidential preferences I noticed a lot of House members and a couple Senators on the ballot. You can forget anyone like Mike Pence or John Thune. No Republican member of Congress has a chance in 2012. First, because they will have virtually no record of achievement since they are the Party of "No" and you can't very well argue how good your ideas are if you never offer them up as legislation. The other reason is that 2008 was as rare an election as 1960 when a sitting Senator or member of Congress was elected. It won't happen again for quite sometime.