Mark Byron

Ghosts of Weimar

The European Central Bank, the Eurozone's analogue to the Fed, is raising interest rates, trying to tighten things up to get ahead of inflation. This Reuters piece tries to make hay out of the Europeans turning their backs on Fed leadership, but this is nothing new.

In the second screen of the piece, they get around to this paragraph-

Historically the Fed, which does not have a formal, explicit inflation target, has been somewhat happier to accept higher inflation than the 12-year-old ECB and Germany's Bundesbank before it.

Although the euro zone and the United States face similar external inflation pressures, their central banks take a different view of their economies. The Fed's mandate requires it to promote full employment in addition to keeping inflation in check; the ECB's focus is delivering price stability -- a reflection of its mandate, but also the legacy of the hawkish Bundesbank, which the ECB carries in its DNA.

The German bankers make up the spiritual core of the ECB, and German economic history is tragically marked by hyperinflation. Between the World Wars, Germany had a nasty bout of inflation, where the mark's value went down a million-fold and more. The financial chaos that that 1920s hyperinflation caused helped bring the Nazis to power in the early 30s; the harsh financial reparations that the WWI victors placed on Germany helped cause the problem, as paying back the tab in hard foreign currency put inflationary pressure on the mark. That helped give the Nazis a boogieman in foreign bankers with a large Jewish presence to play into their mythology.

Post WWII, German central bankers have been inflation hawks, making sure that doesn't happen again. The Eurozone has kept a lot of that attitude, so being quick to bail out of an expansionary cycle is within their character.

In the US, it's the Great Depression and deflation that is the bugbear; we've had bad inflation in the late 70s-early 80s, but a stalled-out economy is a bigger fear to US bankers. Thus, we have a Fed-ECB mild disconnect, as the Fed worries about a double-dip recession and the ECB worries about runaway inflation.

Out of the Pocket

When I was watching Fox News earlier in the week (Sunday morning, if memory serves), they had a retired general, "Spider" Marks on talking about Libya. The phrase that struck me at the time from Gen. Marks' commentary was that "hope is not a methodology"; a lot of what we're presently doing is degrading the Libyan military and hoping the opposition can take advantage of the help. Marks, a Romney-backing conservative last go-round, wasn't been too critical of the operation, but that things are rather open-ended and fuzzy.

[Update 9PM-Poor memory-it looks like it was CNN and not Fox; they had Marks on in that 11AM window that I recall. However, the transcript doesn't have that line in it. It's a good line, but it doesn't look like Marks said it. Either my memory is making things up or CNN decided to edit the transcript.]

Donald Sensing has a comparable quote from his military days-

When I was assigned to the Army Operations Center in the early 1990s at HQDA, the chief of staff was Gen. Carl Vuono. He sometimes found occasion during our briefings to him about current and planned operations to hammer home a point: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans."

Don't tell me what you hope will happen, don't tell me what you wish you could do, he repeated. "Give me a plan that makes it happen."

Sensing and others on the right don't see such a plan. They're likely right, but that might not be as much of a negative as you'd think.

Do we want a war-plan that schedules when the 102nd Airborne takes over Tripoli, secures the airport and TV stations, and serves us Gadaffi's properly chilled head on a platter? Such a plan probably exists in the Pentagon, but we'd rather have the locals do that if we can swing it.

If we were actively working with the opposition and had large numbers of Special Ops folks seeded in to give tactical support, the resulting government will look like a manufactured US lackey, which will make it easier for either Gadaffi holdouts or al Qaeda to do battle with the next government that emerges. It might be best to be making it up as we go.

Yes, we're scrambling at present, but think Michael Vick. No, not the dog-butcher side, the mobile QB side. His strong suit is to create on the move and get out of the pocket; chaotic but effective. You can't script that, not easily at least, which gives more conservative coaches fits.

Or conservative military analysts, for that matter.

Part of it is that we have a liberal, pacifist-leaning POTUS, and conservatives won't give him the benefit of the doubt. Were President McCain or Romney overseeing this operation, you'd not see that degree of skepticism.

We still have some good folks in the military and the Commander in Chief isn't dancing cheek to cheek with Dennis the Menace. The President has a large degree of smarts and quite a bit of common sense, albeit usually deployed in questionable directions. He also has some level-headed foreign leaders on board as well; this is one case where having the US listen to our European allies like Cameron or Sarkozy might help matters for once.

Plan B for Madam Tea

It seems that Michelle Bachmann is testing the waters for a Presidential run, but filing paperwork to run for reelection to the House as well. She's not going to be everyone's cup of Tea Party, but she does have a niche in the race were Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee not run.

Can she win the presidential nomination? Probably not. However, in the absence of someone running that resonates with the TPers, Bachmann can be a 15% or so candidate and at least be in the conversation in Iowa; she sends the people who can't stand Palin into an even higher ballistic trajectory, but her 180-proof conservatism will have its share of fans at the caucuses. She has next to zero political ecology to work in were Sarah or Huck to make the race, but in their absence, only Ron Paul has the ability to get the Tea Party wing of the party hot and bothered, and Paul's paleolibertarian streak on foreign policy is a tough sell to a conservative audience with a jingoistic streak.

The Politico piece notes that "The move allows Bachmann to raise funds for a reelection campaign, should she decide to forego a White House run." That's not quite true. A quick trip to the Minnesota Sec-of-State site shows that the filing deadline for the August 14th primary is June 6th. Chances are that she'll either have the nomination sewn up or (more likely) be an also-ran well before you can get your shorts out of cold storage in Minnesota next spring. She then can change gears in March or April and work towards keeping her house seat.

Ron Paul managed to run for reelection to his House seat and still be part of the 2008 mix; some states even let you run for President or VP while running for a House or Senate seat, since it's the various Electoral College slates that are technically on the ballot, not the tickets proper. Connecticut, Texas and Delaware have those rules in place so that Benson, Lieberman and Biden all managed to run for VP and the Senate at the same time.

How's Your Bracket Monkey Doing?

Here's an interesting thought. There are 83232 different Final Four permutations if you picked the brackets at random. Given the odd layout of this year, we had one 18-team region, two 17s and a 16, so the math is 18*17*17*16.

Thus, if you borrowed a platoon of monkeys and let them do 6 million brackets at random not unlike the famous Wall Street Journal stock monkey, they'd get about 75 that had Kentucky, UConn, Butler and Virginia Commonwealth. Only two humans managed that over in ESPN's contest.

Three of those four were feasible. UK has at least four future NBA players on the roster; the trio of one-and-done baits in Lamb, Jones and Knight will be likely needing an agent within the next 13 months if not next month and Josh Harrellson may have played his way into at least an NBA training camp if not a late-first, early-second round pick with his NCAA play. Liggins and Miller might make the next level as well.

UConn has a good lineage and got hot at the right time, winning their last nine games, an unprecedented five games in the Big East tourney and then four more in the Big Dance.

Butler did this last year, so even though they seemed generously seeded at 8, they had the Underdog thing down so cold, you swear they stole Simon Bar-Sinister's freeze-ray.

The bracket Kryptonite was VCU. An 11 seed in a play-in game? Even a VCU alum would be hard-pressed to dream that big. However, in this someone crazy season where no team really stands out, a top-60 team (the 11 seed would suggest low-40s, but the computers didn't like VCU) can get hot and rattle off five straight. If UConn can do it in the Big East, VCU can do it in the NCAAs.

I'll miss the first half of the first game teaching on Saturday (yea!) but this will be an interesting weekend.

The Writ Hits the Fan...Again

May 2nd. Two days before Star Wars Day (May the 4^th be with you) and three days before Cinco de Mayo. That's the date of the next Canadian election. The opposition parties brought down the Conservative government yesterday, finally banding together to do a vote of no-confidence yesterday. PM Harper made the formal visit to the Governor General's home of Rideau Hall this morning and asked for an election, which new GG David Johnston granted.

The GG would have had the option of asking Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff to form a government, but a coalition of Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc-heads would have been unwieldy and bad PR for the Liberals. Had Ignatieff wanted to do that, it would have been done a while back when such a coalition was proposed by his predecessor.

What is interesting is the initial gambit for Ignatieff

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff launched his campaign for the May 2 election Saturday by ruling out forming a coalition government – an issue that had threatened to dog him during the campaign – and by attacking Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's approach to governing.

The party that wins the most seats on election day will form the government, Mr. Ignatieff said in a statement issued just minutes before the election date was announced.

Pre-writ of election polls had Conservatives up by a comfortable margin (Ipsos-Reid had 19 and Ekos 7, pick your poison), which would bring us right back to the status quo, albeit with an enlarged plurality for the Tories if the numbers hold up somewhere in the middle of that range. That would mean that one of the parties that voted the Tories in contempt of Parliament would have to vote Harper and company back in when the new parliament convenes this spring.

Canada doesn't have a political culture that knows how to deal with a minority government and has never had a peacetime coalition government that I know of. A plurality government like the current one operates something like a American presidency when the opposition is in power; the separation of the government from a clear majority makes parliamentary politics rather novel. The idea of a government being voted in contempt of Parliament would be nearly impossible in a conventional setting, but the friction of parliamentary committees doing oversight of a government not interested in opposition oversight just doesn't happen outside of a minority government setting.

Until the BQ fades into the woodwork, it will be hard for a federalist majority to develop on either the right or left. A Conservative majority seems a bit out of reach and a Liberal majority seems even farther. A Liberal-NDP coalition could get to a majority if both the Conservatives and the Blocists are off their game, but both are relatively on going into this election; the provincial Liberal government is on its heels in Quebec, leading the BQ into a good position to pick up seats, and the current Harper administration isn't particularly incompetent or off into Tea Party land.

Canada may need to figure out how to handle cooperative politics, where two factions that add up to a majority can pass a budget and agree on a big-picture way forward. They seem stuck in a patch where no one can command a majority and cooperation needs to happen. That's hard when you're always a vote away from a new election and the party leaders are in permanent campaign mode.

 

Planning a Scramble

Things seem to be improving in Libya, if you count having Gaddafi's forces having less territory being an improvement. This seems to be playing out a bit like Afghanistan a decade ago, where a combination of US-led air power and anti-government troops on the ground pushed back the Taliban.

The two differences from that experiences are (1) there were some special forces on the ground to give specialized support and (2) a Northern Alliance grouping of anti-Taliban folks were already running part of the country and gave the US someone organized to work with.

Is there a fear that al Qaeda will fill this vacuum? Yes, but it shouldn't stop folks from getting rid of Gaddafi, who isn't exactly the good cop of the area. Does Lockerbee come to mind? If not, look that up and weigh that against 9/11. He had been on a peace offensive in the 00s, trying to look like just another Arab Big Man, but that's now well out the window.

The al Qaeda line reminds me a bit of the tarring of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s with a communist brush, since the US commies were backing it. In that case, the help of the hard left was secondary to the cause and the commies were actually on the side of the angels. I think the same is true here in Libya; al Qaeda help is tertiary and they're actually fighting for the good guys in this one.

The potential fear to deal with down the line is if al Qaeda tries to carve out fiefdoms in the more secluded parts of the country, especially in the desert south, turning southern Libya into a staging area much like NW Pakistan. However, we need to deal with that down-the-line.

This is a messy undertaking and the president is going to get some flak; he gets it from the left since he isn't a pure pacifist and doesn't keep the other 535 secretaries of state happy with constant briefings, and he gets it from the right who nit-picks for the sake of nit-picking.

I made the mistake of surfing into Hannity on Friday; he questioned whether Obama's up to the job in Iraq. The US is, and one can only hope Obama is as well. It beats the heck out of assuming Obama isn't up to it, in which case the best we can hope for is a slaughter of innocents and a few guilty ones. He might not be my first choice, but he's the POTUS for another two years; unlike Canada, we don't have the option of having a new election when we "need" one.

Pearls of Lesser Price

When Michigan was mopping the floor with Tennessee (75-45) this weekend, I was mentioning to Eileen that this would likely be the last game Bruce Pearl would get with the Vols; a series of NCAA violations on top of the worst thumping seen in an 8-9 seed matchup put Pearl in roughly the same spot that Rich Rodriguez was after laying an egg in the Gator Bowl along with bringing sanctions upon the Michigan football program for the first time in memory.

Had RichRod won the bowl game, the powers that be in Ann Arbor might have been more willing to give him another year; that didn't happen and Brady Hoke is now the big man at the Big House. Likewise, a run to at least the second weekend of the NCAAs might have bought Pearl some time, but the first-round stinker was the last straw.

Pearl seemed to be a good guy, at least before all the news came out. A lot of the rule violations weren't exactly corrupt and evil; having a recruit over to a cookout at the coach's house and talking to a recruit in passing out of season were against the rules, but not exactly capital offenses. Lying about them is another matter, and that is likely what got the plugged pulled on Pearl. News out of Knoxville has him on the way out.

Jim Tressel is another seemingly good guy who's darker side got seen; he fibbed about when he knew about his star players' transgressions and was given a two-game sit-down by OSU. To Tressell's credit, he personally extended the suspension to five games to match the punishment the NCAA gave the players involved.

Tressel made OSU a school that was hard to dislike, even for a Michigan kid raised on the Bo and Woody wars. This will knock the cache of OSU down a notch, for the football program has had had a near-pristine record with the NCAA. Tressel himself carried the kind of choir-boy facade that made him on a par with folks like Joe Paterno or Coack K as ambassadors for college sports; not so much now.

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On an encouraging note, Billy Gillespie has landed on his feet after two years in limbo, getting a coaching gig at Texas Tech after Bobby Knight's son Pat got the ax. 2009 was his annus horribilis, getting fired from UK after failing to get them into the Big Dance and then getting into a DUI. He isn't a bad coach, just one that wasn't quite up to either the pressure or the PR requirements of being the Grand Poobah of the Bluegrass.

Billy Clyde had a good run at Texas A&M before getting the UK gig, so Texas Tech would be a good fit. He can focus on being a good ballcoach and not have to be the face of the school and the state. The Peter Principle doesn't always have to apply, letting people take downward moves after hitting jobs where they're overmatched.

Coming Soon, the Triad Sterling?

A North Carolina state rep is looking to create a gold-and-silver based state currency to operate along side the US dollar. That has a retro feel, more retro that the dismissive take on Austrian econ presented in the article. What it reminds me of is the various bank currencies that circulated in the 1800s, but this would have the backing of a state and backed (in theory) in actual hard metal like US currency was until the early 1970s.

Since then, the dollar-gold ratio has increased about 40 fold, from the $35/ounce that was the official rate back in the Bretton Woods era to $1427 an ounce as we go to press. Given the Fed's gung-ho expansionist policies as of late, a bout of bad inflation is likely to be around the corner. You don't have to be a libertarian gold bug to see that coming or see the allure of a gold-backed regional currency.

It doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of US fiscal and monetary policy, so more mainstream heads in NC will shy away from that move in fear of looking too radical.

Such a move is a bit.... out there... for a fairly mainstream state like NC to make, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the more conservative western states might buy into such a plan. I'm still waiting for the South African Nightmare on Elm Street gold coins, the Freddie Krugerrands.

Neoconlibs

If the Kristolian wag that neocons are liberals mugged by reality, reality must have been on the warpath in Washington this week in the form of action against Libya. A near Desert Storm-level coalition of NATO and Arab countries (the latter mostly for diplomatic cover) have cast their lot against Gaddafi and the UN has signed off on action to cripple the regime's ability to attack its own people; the Security Council vote was 10-0-5, with Russia and China opting to abstain rather than shoot down the action via a veto.

The administration seems to have its own clash between idealists and pragmatists, but a do-something camp emerged this week if this Politico piece is legit, with an interventionist camp wanting to use military power for a good cause carrying the day. Interestingly, the interventionists tended to be assistant-level female staffers winning over their more status-quoian male bosses.

Of course, reality didn't manage to apply the board of education to the seat of knowledge to everyone; a rather consistent Dennis Kuchinich is looking to impeach Obama for this. He might be a three-sigma outlier on the left, but he's consistent, the anti-Ron Paul (although Paul might agree with him on the less-than-constitutional nature of the attack). Other Democrats aren't looking to go that far, but a combination of old-school pacifism and the disappointment of 535 commanders-in-chief left out of the loop lead to a decent quota of grumbles from the left.

The right is largely silent so far; they grumbled about Obama not doing something sooner, but the main question from both right and left is "What is the goal?" Getting rid of Gaddafi is the first order of business, but are we up to a multi-year run of nation-building a la Iraq once we get the old strongman out? The ethnic divisions in Libya seem much less toxic than in Iraq, but Gaddafi's tribe got special treatment and paybacks are going to be the order of the day lest calmer heads prevail.

There is going to be some interesting payback opportunities on the right to see how Obama handles this situation and whether some of the liberal digs at Bush over the klutzy transfer of authority in Iraq get echoed back by conservatives in this case. An operative rule for commentary is if you wouldn't have liked it aimed at Bush, don't aim it at Obama.

Obama is sure not to say "Mission Accomplished." What else he gets to say will be interesting.

Boycott Hell... in the Long Term

Rob Bell is an interesting thinker. I was exposed to him via his Nooma videos at one of the churches I went to in Lexington. He seemed to be a bit of a free-thinker, but grounded in biblical history, bringing quite a bit of knowledge of first-century historical background to bear on the Gospels.

Thus, his move towards an universalist take on salvation in his new book Love Wins comes as a bit of a head-scratcher; here's a good Timothy Dalrymple piece on "Hellgate."

Good theology starts with what we call exegesis, what the writer or speaker was trying to say at the time; that goes beyond the direct quote and tries to get at what the readers/listeners of the day would have read into it and what was likely intended. Since Bell seems to have some solid exegetical chops, it's surprising that he falls flat here.

As I understand the debate, Bell's main issue is whether Hell is truly eternal or just long-term. The Greek word in question can be used in both ways, but since the "eternal life" in John 3:16 uses that word (as Tim Challies points out), using an eternal eternal for Heaven and a merely long-term "eternal" for Hell seems to be a bit off.

Translation can cause theology to go off the rails; TD Jakes' take on the Trinity as three manifestations (rather than persons) seems to flow from the King James Bible's use of the word. By questioning the translation of "eternal", Bell alters basic orthodox theology by bringing a small-u universalist desired hermeneutic and warping the exegesis.

It is the Reformed Blogosphere that lit up first, since universalism throws TULIP out the window; or at least ULIP, since we can be Totally Depraved all we want in a universalist worldview, given that God's going to save us no matter what. The more Arminian side of the aisle were as inclined to criticize the Reformers than to defend Bell.

One of the harder points of Reformed theology to swallow is the idea that some folks aren't going to be saved no matter what. That leads a lot of folks into the Arminian camp, even if they won't call themselves that; for one example, Baptists often are leery of "Calvinism" on the grounds of wanting a fighting shot at saving everyone they can and don't want Limited Atonement to dampen their evangelism. Save that, there would be a lot more common ground between the neuvo-Reformed and other conservative evangelicals.

Once you open up the prospect of saving everyone, it's not a big jump to question why a good God will let some folks roast in Hell and some not; that might explain the lack of fire coming from non-Reformed circles. Once Heaven becomes an open set, what is there to keep it from become the entirity other than harsh theology?

An emphasis on free will might be one. If God prizes a free choice from His people rather than a forced response to follow Him in Reformed thought, might an Arminian God opt to accept the decision to turn one's back on Him? Or does He drag Christopher Hitchens kicking and screaming into Heaven?

Rob Bell seems to think so. Interesting. Likely wrong, but interesting.

One of the downsides of being a free-thinker is that you tend to ignore traditional viewpoints. If tradition seems off, you go your own way, not thinking that it might well be that you're the one that is off.

Traditionally, eternity means eternity, not a 99-year-lease that rounds to eternity in financial math but will expire someday. Ignore that idea at your own peril.

Tuesday Musings

The Japan tsunami looks to be a once-a-millennia event; the nearest beast of this size to have hit the area dates back to 869AD. One can only hope that's correct, since we can often see "hundred-year storms" come back again next year. Given that the 9.0 earthquake is close to the worst we've seen since we've had seismographs to check them, that seems to be a fair assumption.

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GE is taking some heat for the reactors in question. They're merely venting a bit of radioactive steam at this point, but the contained meltdown gets ranked between Three Mile Island and Chernobyl at this point.

I was surprised to see that there are some reactors that were brought on-line post-TMI. The graphic on the CNN piece has about 10 reactors dating to the 1990s, including four in Texas. Since TMI was 32 years ago, the anti-nuke chill that happened after that means that our current nuclear plant inventory largely dates before that, since few reactors were started in that regulatory and political environment.

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Up in Canada, Stockwell Day is packing it in, lame ducking himself. He had headed up the small-c conservative Alliance Party in the early 00s prior to merging back in with the Conservative Party, largely on Alliance terms, and had been in a variety of cabinet posts in the current Conservative plurality government.

As a Pentecostal, he got roughed up by the political process for his faith when he ran as Alliance leader, causing future "SoCon" Tories such as current PM Harper to downplay social issues. It will be interesting to see what he does in his post-MP life.

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Speaking of Pentecostals rough up by the political process, we have Judd Gregg, a Romney backer, acknowledging that Sarah Palin "just might have a clearer path to the Republican presidential nomination next year than commonly understood." That's an observation, not a warning, CNN headline writers.

Bill Schneider has a good Politico piece looking at the Tea Party and who their favorite daughter or son might be. Ms. Palin is the leading candidate that resonates with that faction, with other favorite children such as Michelle Bachmann being even harder sells with the general electorate.

Schneider has a good paragraph here that establishment conservatives would do well to remember-

The tea party is really a populist expression of country-club conservatism. They share the same fixation on spending, taxes and deficits. But the tea party has a moralistic approach to politics that refuses to play by the rules of the political establishment. No deal-making, no compromises.

The difference between the TPers and the establishment GOP is more a matter of praxis than ideology, if I can borrow from theology. The ideas are the same, but the TPers want to "actually run as Goldwater", as the old '64 joke went. Now, they are trying to govern as Goldwater, much to the consternation of establishmentarians on both sides of the aisle.

 

One and Underdone?

Michael Wilbon's waxing about basketball's good ol' days when players had to stay in school longer and gets Jay Bilas in for backup-

"Now, it doesn't mean we're not going to have a great tournament; I think it could be an even better tournament than we normally have because it'll be volatile and it'll be fun to watch. The competition still is going to be great. But the quality of play is not what it has been. We've still got outstanding players; we don't have the tremendous superstars that are older that we used to have."

Bilas continued, "This is something the basketball community, the NBA included, is going to have to put its arms around because it's not just hurting the college game; it's hurting the NBA, too ... and the NBA product could be even better than it is, and right now I think it's outstanding."

As one who caught the UK bug while living in Lexington, it would have been nice to see the cadre that Calipari brought in last season get a second shot at the title after laying an egg in the regionals. However, John Wall is learning more basketball playing an 82 game NBA season with Washington than he would have playing a 30ish-game season at Kentucky. Likewise, Demarcus Cousins is getting a better basketball education at Sacremento.

Would the NBA be better if those two were forced to spend a second year (or more) playing college ball? If that were the case, why were teams hot to draft them back in June? If the NBA were better without them, the team formerly known as the Bullets would have sent Wall to the D-League like Houston did with Wall's UK running mate Patrick Paterson for a time earlier in the year.

If you made the current one-and-done rule requiring players to be a year out of high school before going to the NBA a three-and-done like the NFL does, you would have a crop of sophmores and juniors playing college ball. Brandon Knight would be coming off the bench for UK (or play for another school in the market for a starting point gaurd since Wall and Eric Bledsoe would be hogging the starting backcourt spots for two more years) and create a deeper UK team.

However, would the NBA be better with four guys off of D-league rosters than the four UK underclassmen who went pro this year? I think not.

It is nice to see players develop in college, to mature in their game and to see them develop a legacy at the school other than one fleeting season of promise like the UK bunch did last year. However, keeping folks who are ready for the next level in an extended period of indentured servitude (yes, tuition and room and board at a good school is nothing to sneeze at, but it's a fraction of the millions they make at the next level) doesn't help the game that much.

Bilas makes his living covering college basketball, so he has a vested interest in seeing that brand strengthened. Seeing folks like Grant Hill or Kalin Lucas stay for four years is better for fans of their schools than the one-and-dones that litter the modern landscape, but college is supposed to be preparing folks for life.

If one of my undergrad finance students had a million dollar offer from an investment banking firm, I'm not going to tell him to stay in school and finish his BBA; he can do that part-time while making the bongo bucks. That won't happen too often, but old-school folks would like to do just that with basketball stars.

Does the one-and-dones level the playing field? Yes, the more mature teams from mid-pack power conference schools and mid-majors can use age and treachery against youth and inexperience, so we see more parity in college ball and more teams with barely-above .500 records make the field, even adjusting for the extra three teams in this year's field.

However, that is just a side-effect of a somewhat free market in basketball talent. Shumpeter's creative destruction winds up doing a number on college dynasties, since if a team is good enough to win a title, it usually has an underclassman or two who will move on to the next level; the Florida team of a few years back who came back for a second title rather than go pro is the exception to the rule.

You Say "Populist" Like There's Something Wrong With It

We're continuing to see the pile-on of conservative pundits and thinkers uneasy over Sarah Palin's populist appeal. Here's an interesting quote from Palin critic Heather MacDonald-

The public should stop wanting to see itself reflected in a leader. There is something narcissistic about that. It’s really irrelevant if a political leader has any affinity with my life. The only thing that should matter are ideas, experience and executive ability.

That's not nearly true. If a leader doesn't have a clue what your life is like, how are they going to make good decisions on how laws might affect you?

One of the problems with the current NPR brouhaha is that the average newsroom has little affinity for conservatives or people of an orthodox faith. A good secular-leaning reporter may have ideas, experience and reporting ability, but applies it using a paradigm that sees a good hunk of America as foreign to their experiences.

Secondly, such wonks are generally losers at the ballot box. How many presidents were less down to earth than their presidential rivals? Obama, Nixon, and .......[crickets chirping despite the freezing Michigan cold]..... that's about it in my lifetime. The blue-blooded Bush pere was blessed by a wonkier-than-thou Mike Dukakis as his foe, only to get his head handed to him by the burger-chomping Bill Clinton in his reelection bid. Carter might have been wonkier than Ford behind the scenes, but his peanut-farmer, Sunday School teaching shtick worked well in a post-Watergate milieu.

If you want to send Obama packing for the Windy City next November, Mitt Romney or Mitch Daniels isn't the answer. They might win by default, but you need something of a common touch to get to the White House.

Palin has that by the truckload. And she's actually not that bad on the ideas front. A well-spoken handle on basic policy concepts presented winsomely is going to carry more weight with the voters than a ten-page white paper. It's isn't as intellectually robust, but that's life in American politics.

Adlai Stevenson was supposed to have the vote of every thinking person in America, but he knew he needed a majority. Note that he went 0-2 against Ike despite having the better intellect.

Goodwill Hunting Season

Here's some news of media bias...no, I'm not talking about NPR; we're talking ESPN. When they cover the leagues they broadcast, they will tend to have a bias to be pro-management. The NFL is a business partner, not the NFLPA.

Thus, it's a bit too easy to see ESPN.com taking the league side on a NFLPA-plugged draft show boycott. Would such a move "squander NFL fan's goodwill"? That's par for the coarse (typo intended) with a work stoppage, as both sides are dug in.

All the NFL has is goodwill. People don't come for the owners or the stadiums or the cheerleaders; they come to see world-class (odd phrase for a sport that is North America-centric) football. Outside of that, all they have are the tradition of a near-century of pro football from Jim Thorpe and Red Grange to N. Suh and Tom Brady.

If the players walk, they may have Butkus but they have bupkis to put on the field. The financial goodwill that is on the books, the difference between their physical assets and what was paid for the team, is dependent on the goodwill of the fans; they won't pay full NFL retail to see Jerry Jones own the Cowboys if America's Team is fielding AFL2 refugees.

That tradition won't feed the bulldog when the college games on Saturday have better talent than lockout-busters on Sunday; it will be even less valuable if there is nothing going on in NFL stadia this fall. In fact, if there is a lockout that kills the 2011 season, you can expect to see a few college games migrate to Sundays to fill the void.

The draft boycott is a bit tacky, but the owners are almost as tacky here. The NFLPA is the one union that conservatives might actually root for.

Tort Center

The fecal matter hit the fan in the NFL last week, as the negotiating extention failed to bear fruit. The old contract expired, the NFL shut down operations until a new agreement is reached and the player's union decertified themselves, officially becoming just a trade organization and not an official bargaining unit.

That's not to say that the NFLPA has no voice (public worker unions in Wisconsin and Ohio might take note in a post-negotiating millieu); the NFLPA will use antitrust law to bar a lockout. They'll be in court on April 6th.

In a intreaging PR move, the NFLPA has asked prospective draftees to boycott the draft festivities this year. That might actually improve the show, as everyone's pleased to be going to Timbuktu and help make the Three-Toed Sloths reach the playoffs for the first time in a generation.

 

Goin' Fission

I've yet to blog on the Japanese situation; I'm a bit stunned and short on words.

I was watching the tsunami come ashore in real time during the wee hours of Friday morning Eastern time; I was coming off a on-line tutoring shift at 1AM and channel-surfed into the news channels as the waves were hitting the Sendai area. It was surreal, watching both Fox News and CNN carry the same helicopter footage of the wave hitting; things were too long-range to see any people, but there was an eerie sense of watching a live snuff film.

Japan is in better position to handle such things; we borrowed their term of Harbor-Wave for what we used to call tidal waves, after all. Even for them, dealing with a 9.0 earthquake close to shore created a no-win situation, killing thousands and likely tens of thousands.

Unlike the Haitians or South Asians hit by major earthquakes in the recent past, the Japanese don't need too much financial or logistical help. However, the scale of the damage may have long-term effects on the global economy, as the Japanese might wind up cashing in a lot of their foreign investments in order to import goods for rebuilding; along side that, we'll see a large disruption of their economy. This is Katrina on steroids, without the advance warning that you get for a hurricane.

The current crisis revolves around a nuclear plant in Fukushima, where three reactors have partly melted down. So far, the damage has been largely contained, with some modestly radioactive discharges used to vent the containment buildings.

This seems both discouraging and encouraging at the same time for the future of nuclear power. It's discouraging in that we have three reactors on the verge of a meltdown, but encouraging that they took the worst Mother Nature can throw at it and not go China Syndrome on us... so far. If this holds up, fears of another Chernobyl should be tamped down, although you will still have some folks worried no matter what.

Nuclear power is fairly non-polluting as long as you avoid meltdowns and major releases and figure out what to do with the plants once they are deactivated; that last part is a major work in progress, as NIMBY-itis plagues any plan to store waste long-term.

Southern Exposure

I'm going to be back in the teaching business at the end of the month; I'm working for South University, which is very reminiscent of Sullivan U as a for-profit southern business-centric college that grew from being a junior college into a full-function university. Both South and Sullivan have open up pharmacy schools in the late '00s. Interesting, South is named after a Mr. South who bought the school decades ago, not unlike the Sullivan family who still runs their namesake school.

The classes I'll be teaching are in their Accelerated MBA program, which meet for two all-day sessions on Saturdays while doing the rest on-line; it's a bit like the hybrid EMBA program at Sullivan where they met once a month in person and did the rest on-line, except with twice the face time and doing a class a month rather than three classes a quarter. I'll be teaching an introductory accounting-stats-finance class in April and a quant-methods class in May; more may well be coming if things work right.

I'll still be in Michigan; they're flying me into Atlanta for the Saturday classes. I've been through Atlanta any number of times, especially when we were living in Florida; we either drove through town or flew through Hartsfield, but I've never been to Atlanta. Not that I'll see too much, putting in a 10-hour day in the classroom and flying back to Midland on Sunday.

Dr. Byron is back in the saddle; I've tweaked the course syllabus and am working on an accounting 101 podcast, so I'm getting my professor sea legs back after a five-quarter absence.

Raising Cain

A church in metro Des Moines is having five prospective GOP nominees give ten minute speechs tonight. Most of the poll heavyweights (Palin, Huck and Romney) are passing, but there are a few plausible candidates among the largely B-list quintet-

• "Radio personality and former pizza mogul Herman Cain"-He seems to be a favorite of the Tea Party crowd for his straight-forward 160-proof conservatism. No problem seeing Cain bumper stickers among the Red State cognoscenti, but getting that to translate into enough voters to crack double digits would be the trick. If there is no Tea Party-friendly politician with appeal to a broader conservative audience (that includes DeMint and Palin, but not Ron Paul{see second part of qualification}, Cain might wind up getting some traction
• "former House Speaker Newt Gingrich"-Cabinet secretary in the next GOP administration-yes. President-no. Too much baggage to win swing voters and too much establishment thinking (see NY-23) to appeal beyond a cadre of fellow policy wonks.
• "former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer-". I know Bobby Jindal; he's a political friend of mine. Buddy, you're no Bobby Jindal. You're not even a Haley Barbour. Enjoy the 10 minutes of fame tonight; you've got five to go.
• "former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty"-He looks good to establishment Republicans, has enough evangelical street cred to keep that wing of the party content, but lacks a good reason for conservative activists and Tea Party types to come on board. Lamar Alexander visits Lake Wobegon, but without the plaid charm; flunks the bumper sticker test.
• "former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum"- Good guy; I had him as my running mate in a mythical 2004 campaign. He takes Sam Brownback 2007 role as the thinking-man's theocon. However, that and $1 gets you a cup of coffee at the Iowa caucuses.

Newt and Pawlenty have a shot at breaking 10% each, but are going to be hard pressed to win too many primaries. Roemer has no shot, period, and Santorum lacks a solid base to work with.

Somehow, Cain seems to be someone to keep an eye on. You have to go back to Eisenhower to find a nominee who never held elective office, but he could patch together the Paulistas, the Tea Partiers and traditional conservatives if there aren't anyone playing to the the right wing of the party in a winsome manner.

The big kids in the race might change things; Palin, if she runs, would sap a big hunk of his niche and Ron Paul will continue to be a complicating factor on the right. However, if Palin opts to stay in her social-media-political-celebrity niche, someone is going to get that vote, and Cain may well be the person to do that.

I was an early Huckabee adopter last go-round and would like to see him make another shot, but he has some problems with economic conservatives that make him a hard sell in this environment. There is a large hole in the race that Cain could wind up filling if Palin passes on a run.

Midday Musings

Here's an interesting post-Indy combine piece on Cam Newton, comparing him with Ben Roethlisberger. We've come a long way to where a big, athletic black QB gets compared to a big, athletic white QB, focusing on the big-athletic part and avoiding going with a Daunte Cullpepper four-fold force-fit.

However, it might be a while before we see that. Today is D-Day for the labor contract, and the path of least resistance for the players is to decertify the union and then bring up anti-trust action against the NFL.

__________

You can officially declare the Pistons dead after two ugly losses against Milwaukee and Minnesota. We've got March Madness coming up to tide us over until baseball starts up.

___________

Does being in a majority-minority state mean that "It's basically over for Anglos"? I think not, especially if we do a solid job of bringing second-generation Latinos into good jobs. Texas will likely be a bit less economically conservative but may become more culturally conservatives, as there are few mainline Protestant Latinos and fewer theologically liberal Catholic Latinos. Bad for the country club Anglos, maybe. Not so bad for the chicken-fried-steak crowd.

_________

Libya is getting very messy. A Dutch marine unit trying a helicopter rescue of its nationals was captured by government forces.

What Have You Done for Him Lately

It's interesting that the shooter in Frankfurt yesterday was a guy from Kosovo. One would think that he would have a soft spot for the US Air Force for their ousting of the Serbs from his country over a decade ago.

However, that is sooooo 90s, and we're in the 10s. Also, infidels are still infidels, even if they are former allies. Osama was happy to take US help in ousting the Russians from Afghanistan, then turned around and aimed at the less-egregious infidels.

Be thankful that modern Christian history is short on jihad-style thought; otherwise, we'd have the Westboro folks shooting at mourners rather than damning them loudly. Unfortunately, they're allowed to do that thanks to the First Amendment. They're allowed to question one's eternal destination as long as they don't try to expedite one's trip to eternity.