Not So Sure About This Place

A new beauty salon opened up next to my apartment complex recently. I'm not sure they're going to stay in business, though, with the kind of... unconventional... services they advertise:

That was too good to not share.

Can Bud Selig Get Kicked Out of Office Already?

Bud Selig sucks. I mean, how can he always act so surprised about steroids in baseball when it is so obvious that he and the owners were complicit in all of this? If baseball really wants to move on past the steroid era, Selig has to go. And while we're at it, Don Fehr, the player's union chief, is a weasel, too.

These guys clearly don't really care about the integrity of the game, or the bad example they set by turning a blind eye to this cheating. Their reactions to the pressures from the media in dealing with this are blatantly just affectations, and are nothing short of nauseous. Today he announced that he was considering punishing A-Rod for his failed drug test six years ago. This is the wrong move for two reasons: 1) it was not against the rules to use PEDs when A-Rod failed the test; 2) there are 103 others who failed that year and evidently will not be punished.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the magnitude of the game's biggest star being nailed for this. He plays for my team, so it hits especially close to home. But it's incredibly unfair and unproductive to turn him into a scapegoat.

If they really want to send a message, they should release the other names and start making the rules prohibiting PEDs stricter. The costs of using PEDs has to outweigh the benefits of using them, and "the good of the game" is unfortunately not enough to stop players from juicing; the humiliation and official consequences of being caught need to be more intense to create such disincentive.

Baseball also has to expand the scope of these consequences. Players alone should not be punished. Coaches and owners should be punished, too. Even if they aren't aware that a player is cheating, if the consequences affect more than just the individual, he might think twice about acting inappropriately. Not only that, but baseball should make it a requirement that any player with paid endorsements must have in his contract a clause saying that being caught juicing will lead to an automatic termination of that contract. Again, it's all about taking away the incentive for these guys to cheat.

None of this will happen, though, as long as Bud Selig is in charge because he has no spine for it. He knows exactly how much he gained thanks to players using PEDs and is too reluctant to see it go. This is supposed to be a new era of change upon we as a nation have embarked. And as the American pastime (screw you, football), baseball needs a change in leadership.

Economics is the Dismal Science; Politics is Where it Gets Stimulating

Something I don't care for: frivolous government spending. Something I care for even less than that: politicians who act like it's a harbinger of the the apocalypse. Yes, folks, this is about the stimulus. And I'm not going to talk about the economics of it, really. It's borderline hackneyed to point out that tax cuts aren't particularly effective (and certainly not in this climate) or that the package probably isn't big enough. I'm fascinated by the political debate.

I just came across an awesome map of America over at msnbc.com. ("Interactive Timeline...") Take a look- I promise you'll feel blindsided, too. I usually read two newspapers a day, not to mention pickings from an assortment of other periodicals and blogs, and so it's not like I didn't know that unemployment was very high. But seeing it there colorcoded really hit me in the gut. Did you notice that the states with the senators complaining the loudest about proposed solutions seemed to have the lowest unemployment? (I'm looking at you, Nebraska) No wonder they seem so oblivious the urgency of this problem.

If people are complaining that Democrats are going falling back into their old ways instead of adopting a transformational approach in line with the style of the Obama movement, the same can be said for the cut and paste response from Republicans. Did you see the new RNC head on Fox saying that "government has never created a single job"? Never? How about my father's job? How about my great-grandfather's work a WPA mason during the Great Depression? The religious devotion to tax cuts among these people is truly ridiculous. Don't they realize they lost on that platform?

Sure, the stimulus bill probably does spend some money in the wrong places. But can we really say definitively what will and what won't help the economy? We call economics a science, but the practical application of it is nothing close. Moreover, most of this so-called wasteful spending doesn't seem very wasteful to me. In today's WaPo, columnist Steve Pearlstein notes:

[WSJ Columnist Daniel] Henninger weighed in with his own list of horror stories from the stimulus bill, including $325 million for trail repair and remediation of abandoned mines on federal lands, $6 billion to reduce the carbon footprint of federal buildings and -- get this! -- $462 million to equip, construct and repair labs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"What is most striking is how much 'stimulus' money is being spent on the government's own infrastructure," wrote Henninger. "This bill isn't economic stimulus. It's self-stimulus."

Actually, what's striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient. ("Wanted...")

I think he's right on target. Even if the spending itself doesn't save America (and I can assure you, it won't), what it will do is rebuild the fabric of our society. The New Deal didn't save us from the Depression, but it did give us modern American society- everything from bridges to libraries to parks to schools and beyond. It gave us the paradigm through which everything else has developed, and yes, that involves quite a few civil servants. So what?

If Republicans want something to worry about, I've got a suggestion. Did you know that construction is the least efficient industry in America? Okay, that one isn't surprising, either. Once again, though, the numbers behind it are pretty astonishing:

Every other industry has gotten more productive in the past half century – by about 22 percent on average. Construction has seen productivity fall by 25 percent. ("Trillion Dollar Barry...")

If we're really going to be spending so much money on infrastructure, then pols worried about spending should focus on making sure these projects finish on budget and finish on time. I guess they'd still be tilting at windmills, but since the election proved tax cuts are out of fashion, at least they'd be trying out something new.