Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Nuclear negotiations

It has been so long since an American president has negotiated an arms-control agreement that I am honestly not sure what to make of yesterday’s announcement from Moscow.

MOSCOW — President Obama signed an agreement on Monday to cut American and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals by at least one-quarter, a first step in a broader effort intended to reduce the threat of such weapons drastically and to prevent their further spread to unstable regions.

Mr. Obama, on his first visit to Russia since taking office, and President Dmitri A. Medvedev agreed on the basic terms of a treaty to reduce the number of warheads and missiles to the lowest levels since the early years of the cold war.

The new treaty, to be finished by December, would be subject to ratification by the Senate and could then lead to talks next year on more substantial reductions.

Here are the outlines of the agreement:

Under Monday’s agreement, the Start successor treaty would reduce the ceiling on strategic warheads to somewhere between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads within seven years, down from the current ceiling of 2,200 warheads by 2012. The limit on delivery vehicles — land-based intercontinental missiles, submarines-based missiles and bombers — would be somewhere from 500 to 1,100, down from the 1,600 currently allowed.

On the surface, this is a huge change in approach — after eight years in which President Bush angered nearly every world leader. The question is whether the plan on the table is a strong enough first step toward what must be the ultimate goal — not just disarmament, but abolition of nuclear weapons.

Daryl G. Kimball, of the Arms Control Association, told The New York Times that the agreement was “an overdue if very modest step toward ridding each side of obsolete and expensive cold war legacy weapons.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, sees the announcment as positive — a “cautious optimism” — though she thinks a lot more need to be addressed.

In their first face-to-face meeting, Presidents Obama and Medvedev agreed they were “ready to move beyond Cold War mentalities,” and launch a “fresh start” in what has been an increasingly strained relationship. There was agreement to cooperate on stabilizing Afghanistan and reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But the most substantive part of the meeting is the decision to develop a new arms control framework to replace the one dismantled by Bush and his team (who considered virtually any treaty a subversive document). Obama and Medvedev agreed to launch negotiations to draft a new arms control treaty that could slash US-Russian strategic nuclear arsenals by a third.

More can be done, but you have to start somewhere and this is a lot more than we’ve gotten in a long time.

Manuel laboring

The Mets have moved from being a scrappy, injury-depleted team to being perhaps the worst baseball team around — a team that lacks fire and does not seem to understand the basics of the baseball.

Players constantly flub pops because they’re making one-handed catches, regularly throw to the wrong base of past cut-off men, find themselves out of position and lose focus. This is not the way a team many expected to contend in the East (let alone possibly win it all) is supposed to play.

The question is, then, whose fault is it? Certainly the players bear responsibility, but the problems the team has been experiencing are ones that must be addressed by the manager. And that brings us to the point of this post: Should Jerry Manuel be fired? I’m not willing to say yes, at the moment, but we are fast approaching the time when the front office will have to answer that question.

Manuel seems well-suited to New York, has that easy-going manner and can handle the pressures of the media. But he has run this team for just over a year, presided over a season-ending collapse and is now toiling at three games below .500. The team is badly schooled and — this may be key — has suffered from some odd managerial decisions this year. Why pinch-hit for Daniel Murphy with Fernando Tatis? Why the attraction to Tatis at this point, given that he has become an automatic double-play?

I know you have to play the cards you’ve been dealt — Alex Cora has been in the league a long time but is not an everyday shortstop — but you still don’t bet the house when you have two of a kind.

Omar Minaya will make the decision — and also sits on the hot seat. There are some who view his tenure as a failure, his good moves marked only by the Mets having more money than most, but I disagree. He’s made some interesting pickups that have panned out and others that have not, but he needs to go out and get someone that can help address the team’s woeful lack of offense. It would be foolish to wait for players to return from the DL — that didn’t work last year with Pedro — because there are no guarantees.

Minaya, however, should not be the issue — at least not until the end of the season. The issue is Manuel and whether he can get this team to start using its head. If he can’t, they need to bring in someone else who can.

Too much time on their hands

At a time when we remain mired in two unnecessary wars, when our military budget consumes enough of our resources to provide healthcare for all, when our economy is cratering and Americans are facing unemployment and economic ruin, we have a Senate committee ready to take on one of the more important issues of the day: the college bowl system.

You’re kidding me, right?

Care for some tea?

I think Mark Di Ionno is overplaying the meaning of the tea-party movement — saying the seeds of a new American revolution can be found in it — but I do think these little protests present a challenge to government.

As with the Goldwater campaign of the early 1960s, which essentially was a fringe movement of libertarian conservatives that took over the Republican Party, the tea-partiers appear at first blush to be curiosities. Their calls to arms are taxes, government spending and a visceral dislike of socialism and their early protests have featured some rhetoric that came as close as you can get to crossing the line into xenophobia and racism.

But they are plugging into something bubbling up from the depths of the American psyche, the discontent that has been festering since the economic crash and that has not been adequately addressed by the federal government. (State governments are not equipped, because of their balanced-budget requirements, to deal with much of this mess.)

As much as we on the left like to make fun of the so-called tea-baggers, we have to acknowledge their potential power. Consider the Goldwater campaign. Barry Goldwater lost his presidential race in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Within two years, Ronald Reagan would rise from the ash heaps of the Goldwater movement, using much of his rhetoric to charge into the California state house; Richard Nixon would build his 1968 presidential campaign on the same lingering resentments and the conservative movement would make steady inroads into government, eventually taking it over.

There was a political tone-deafness among liberals at the time, due in part to LBJ’s success. LBJ, however, knew that the liberal moment was passing — he famously predicted the Republican takeover of the South after he signed the Civil Rights Act.

Fast forward to today and we have to ask whether liberals already have grown comfortable with their newfound power, whether they are misreading the election of Barack Obama as something more than a complete disenchantment with the last eight years. Obama made his campaign about change, but what we’ve been witnessing during his first six months in office has been a timid incrementalism, one that has left much of the bankrupt power structure in place.

This is not the kind of change that was envisioned.

There always will be a fringe element on the right, a Goldwater/Reagan faction that views any government action as anti-American. Its power will wax and wane.

If liberals do not act more aggressively, if they cannot explain their approach clearly and transparently, if they do not demonstrate to the disenchanted and discontented middle that they are moving the country in the right direction, then this supposed liberal moment will be a short one and the Goldwater/Reagan trajectory of the second half of the 1960s could play out once more.

Doggie diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie Sleepless in suburbia

This diary has less to do with the dogs than with their sleep habits — and their effects on Annie’s and mine.

I failed to post to the blog yesterday, a rarity for a weekday, because I was dead on my feet. The reason? The pups have started waking up in the middle of the night to go out. This morning it was 4, Monday it was about 3 and we’re now going on about six days of this.

I’m bushed.

Annie’s sister Susan suggested ignoring them so that they don’t develop this as a long-term habit, and there is some logic in that. The problem is that they make it impossible to ignore — scratching the gate we use to keep them penned in our room at night, crying and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

So, I get out of bed and let them out and walk around during the day like a zombie.

Of course, they get to lie around all day — ah, the dogs’ life.