Dave Zirin reminds us that there are some courageous celebrities — and a lot of xenophobic fans.
The Mets are not a great ball club. But aside from the Phillies — flawed in their own right — there are no great clubs in the National League. So that means the Mets have a shot — not a great shot, but a shot — at the wild card.
Consider: We are now a quarter of the way through the season and the only team to get their record above .600 is the Phillies. The Marlins, at .590, are next, but no one should expect that to continue, given an uneven lineup and mediocre back-end pitching. (With Josh Johnson, however, they have one of the five best starters in the National League at the top of the rotation.)
This is what the Mets have going for them, if they can avoid a prolonged losing streak and find a way to stay close in the wild card through the trading deadline (if they fall back, look for Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and possibly Francisco Rodriguez to be dealt).
1. Reyes and Beltran are performing better than they have in at least three years and right now are among the league’s better hitters.
2. Ike Davis was off to a massive start.
3. Rodriguez is pitching great and is getting 8th-inning help from Jason Isringhausen, the first time he has had this kind of setup work since he got here.
4. Chris Capuano has looked good in the rotation and Mike Pelfrey may be turning it around after a bad start.
Those are the early positives. Add to it: Johann Santana is expected to return in July. It is hard to make any assumptions about what he’ll bring to the table, but his presence will make the team better.
The team cannot expect David Wright and Jason Bay to both continue slumping. One and hopefully both will start hitting, which will deepen the lineup.
Since Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner began sharing second, the position has stabilized.
And both Angel Pagan and Davis will be back soon.
Over all, I like the length of this lineup, providing everyone lives up to his potential.
Can they win the wild card? Yes. Will they? Unlikely, but if they can make a run it will be worth keeping their soon-to-be free agents.
Too bad, President Barack Obama is only offering the former. He announced today that he would make it easier to drill for oil on public lands, particularly in Alaska, a sop to both his GOP critics and selfish drivers who refuse to alter their own habits to address falling supply.
There are a lot of reasons that U.S. gas prices are high — Middle East instability, demand that has been growing without thought of supply, greed in the executive suites, unnecessary federal subsidies and, yes, federal and state regulations.
Some of these causes need to be addressed and can be — reducing demand by changing our driving habits and land-use patterns is imperative and should top the list along with finding alternative fuel sources.
Giving in to the drill-baby-drill crowd, however, is not something that makes sense on any level — the supply would be a short-term boost that would do little for several years, which is both useless in terms of prices at the pump and counterproductive as a long-term strategy.
That hasn’t stopped some environmental groups from signing on — even though, you know they would screaming bloody murder had this been ordered by the Bush administration.
The reality is this would have been bad policy under Bush and it is bad policy under Obama.
The New Jersey School Boards Association is asking the state to give voters a say in the development and budgeting for charter schools.
The organization “overwhelmingly” backed a resolution from Princeton that ask that the state change rules governing charter schools so that the schools would need the same kind of voter backing that new public schools require. Princeton already is home to one charter school and a second one has been approved that will draw from Princeton, South Brunswick and West Windsor-Plainsboro.
The vote is the first major challenge to the charter school movement and could give supporters of proposed charter reform legislation the boost they need to get their bill to the governor’s desk. While there is little chance that charter-backer Gov Chris Christie would sign the legislation, it would make public the basic issues at play in the debate over charters.
The fact is that local tax money is used to fund charters, but the entity elected to manage the public’s money — the school board — has been forced to sit on the sidelines as charter schools have popped up around the state. Some survive and thrive, others muddle along and many fail, but no one other than the state Department of Education has any say over whether they are needed.
The legislation proposed by state Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex) would change that. Before the NJSBA vote, it seemed unlikely the bill would go anywhere, even though Buono is the chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee. Maybe this will alter the balance.
Gov. Chris Christie’s slash-and-burn budgeting appears to be having little impact at the local level — or at least not the impact promised.
South Brunswick, for instance, is expected to raise its municipal tax rate almost 10 percent, on top of a big increase in school taxes that will cost taxpayers a combined $400 a year (the owner of a house assessed at $200,000).
And South Brunswick is not the only community looking at a tax increase. East Brunswick, despite reducing spending, is looking at a tax hike, as are numerous towns throughout the region — the Princetons, Lawrence, East Windsor — and the state.
The governor says the property tax hikes are the fault of local officials, but when so many towns are cutting spending and still ending up with tax hikes one has to wonder if there isn’t some larger issue at play.
My sense is that the system has collapsed. I’ve been complaining that the state’s government structure was unsustainable and broken, but it has been functioning. That seems no longer to be the case. The governor is proposing a tool kit that contains some nominally useful tools but still leaves the basic set of problems in place. A more comprehensive structural change is needed that includes a review of the corporate and income tax rates, the inefficiency of having 566 towns, nearly 600 school districts and more than 1,400 total taxing districts, and a frank discussion about priorities.
New Jersey continues to provide some useful and necessary services. We could save money if we were willing to further gut our social safety net, but then we would put our residents in the same position as my friend Lynn, who moved to North Carolina and has now been kicked off the unemployment insurance roll because the governor down there views unemployment insurance as an incentive to laziness. That seems a dubious tradeoff.
