With basketball season looking unlikely, I just might have to follow football

Kevin Durante said this weekend that the players are not giving in to the owners during negotiations, which means both aide have dug in and the lockout now in effect may just be a long one.

So, what’s a Knicks fan like me to when the weather turns cold? Well, the Jets, my boyhood team, won again today, and after last week’s stunning win (a blocked punt for a touchdown is one of sport’s truly great plays) I may have to start paying attention to football for the first time in 20 years.

I lost interest in football back then because I just didn’t have time to follow two sports and football was never in the same class for me as basketball and baseball.

But I do remember Namath throwing long distance to Richard Caster and, later, great receivers like Wesley Walker and Al Toon and if Mark Sanchez and company can make a run, I could be persuaded to care again.

So, with baseball ending for the season and basketball may never start this year, it’s time for the cheer: J-E-T-S, Jets. Jets, Jets!

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Changing the conversation

John Nichols offers the most considered response to Barack Obama’s job speech on The Nation website, pointing out the president’s attempt to alter the terms of debate.

The rhetoric, he points out, was powerful, even if the plan was only functional in typical half-loaf Obama fashion.

The $253 billion in tax cuts he wants go mainly to working folks. The $194 billion in new spending is aimed at hiring incentives, infrastructure projects and other job-creating and retaining programs that the moment demands and that polls suggest Americans are more than willing to fund.

These might seem like rather large numbers in the current political climate, but they really aren’t. The $450 billion now on the table is only a little more than half the size of the original Obama stimulus, which was probably about half the size of what we needed. So $450 billion is a plus, but we have to face the troubling reality that it’s impact is likely to be small.

But, as Nichols points out, this speech shifts the terms of debate and puts the GOP in the position of defending a cut-our-way-out approach that most Americans understand is pure folly.

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A shift in focus on the economy?

President Barack Obama may be taking his economic team in a different direction.

Alan Krueger, the Princeton University economist who is viewed as having a pro-labor focus, is expected to be named chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, replacing the more conservative, corporate-friendly Austan Goolsbee.

Such an appointment would be good news, but cannot undo the damage caused by the president’s early ties to the Lawrence Summers crowd. Summers, Goolsbee, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the rest of the crowd he assembled have been far too committed to the financial system and maintaining the status quo. Krueger alters that mix, but may not have enough juice to offset the Ben Bernanke/Geithner axis.

What we need is an economic team comprised of Krueger, Dean Baker, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz — which would move the president in a more progressive, pro-labor direction.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Callous Cantor and the soul(lessness) of the GOP

Virginia gets hit with an earthquake and its most prominent national poltician — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor — questions the federal government’s role in aiding the state in the aftermath.

While touring the damage in his district, Cantor surmised, “Obviously, the problem is that people in Virginia don’t have earthquake insurance.” As the Insurance Information Institute notes, “earthquakes are not covered under standard U.S. homeowners or business insurance policies, although supplemental coverage is usually available.” So, for Cantor, the problem here is that Virginians didn’t have the foresight to predict an exceedingly rare natural disaster and pay out of their own pocket in advance.

If absolutely nothing else, Cantor is at least consistent in his callous attitude. When Americans were struggling to recover from the deadly tornado that tore through south in May, Cantor also demanded that any disaster relief be offset with cuts. Apparently, to Cantor, the “appropriate role” for public servants is to completely fail the public they serve.

Cantor, of course, is not some outlier Republican. He’s one of the voices of the party,part of its brain trust. What he says represents what the party believes.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.