Friday, November 12, 2004
"BENNIE" DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. Things look grim for employees of United Airlines, whose post-bankruptcy plans include this:United has stated previously that it would most likely be forced to terminate and replace its employee pension plans to obtain the financing needed to exit bankruptcy. United has about USD$4.1 billion in pension funding due over the next five years. If you feel bad for them, and wish they had the kind of protections workers had in the good old days, readjust your thinking. The Wall Street Journal (the esteemed news-gathering organization, not the froth factory) reports that companies have found a way to retract benefits promised to current retirees years ago:Many companies have already cut back company-paid health-care coverage for retirees from their salaried staffs. But until recently, employers generally were barred from touching unionized retirees' benefits because they are spelled out in labor contracts. Now, some are taking aggressive steps to pare those benefits as well, including going to court.
In the past two years, employers have sued union retirees across the country. In the suits, they ask judges to rule that no matter what labor contracts say, they have a right to change the benefits. Some companies also argue that contract references to "lifetime" coverage don't mean the lifetime of the retirees, but the life of the labor contract. Since the contracts expired many years ago, the promises, they say, have expired too. Once the lawsuits are up and running, it only remains for the corporation lawyers (who for some reason have a better reputation these days than trahhhhhl lawyers) to wait for the retirees to give up, run out of money to fight with, or die.
Many of these retirees are skilled, middle-class laborers of the sort that once comprised much of the "Reagan Democrat" bloc. But there is little consolation to be gleaned from the fact that most of those who have cooperated with the dismantling of workers' protections will, eventually, get stung themselves. Because if guys like these aren't protected, even with a contract, eventually none of us will be.
9:41 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, November 11, 2004
BASEBALL LIKE IT OUGHTA BE. Hell no to video review for baseball.
For one thing, the game's gotten too damn slow already. Bad enough we got guys stepping out of the batter's box and fiddling with their gloves between every pitch. Add two or three breaks per game for umps to watch TV, and ballparks will have to start serving breakfast during the 7th-inning stretch.
Second, umpires are God (or at least Supreme Court justices) or they are nothing. You got to believe that they are standing tall on every call, even when they're wrong (unless one of the associate justices -- I mean line judges -- sets them straight). I don't want to see an umpire sheepishly trudging from the video booth to the first-base line to mumble "Upon further review..." Might as well let the players take swings at them, then.
And there are a dozen other reasons, all boiling down to I'm an old crank and I want players to wear baggy pants and have names like "Cap." Well, not really. But too much tech is too much tech, and baseball's threshold of too-much is lower than that of most other endeavors. Within a few years of this innovation, they'll be playing the game on a giant air-table and hitting the ball with their minds.
Bad enough we got this newfangled designated hitter foolishness.
4:55 PM by roy edroso
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THEY WILL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR LOVE. From alleged mail to the National Review Online:I agree that Arafat was a bad man, and when I heard he was dying, I was glad. But that fact in itself causes grief: that there would be someone so bad that I would wish him dead. I'm a Christian, and I believe Arafat's in hell right now, and that also makes me sad. He could have chosen differently and he and the world would have
been better off. I can understand why this guy prefers Arafat dead to Arafat alive. But what's interesting is that he describes himself as a Christian.
Having been raised Catholic, I recall -- and still try to observe, as it makes good moral sense -- the eminently Christian principle that we should not judge any former humans to be in hell, or in heaven for that matter (excepting the saints and the beatified), because to presume to know the mind of God, whose judgement alone settles the matter, challenges our humility before him. (Initial caps on pronouns deleted due to apostasy.)
I realize that Catholicism is the Tiffany of Jesus cults, and that the downmarket variants based in our nation's backwaters may have sloppier standards. Still, how strange that a professed follower of the Prince of Peace would so cravenly offload the responsibilities implicit in an imitation of Christ! Instead, he just feels "sad" that he feels "glad" about the death of a man that was "bad." No idea there that cheering a man's death is something in itself to repent. Did it never occur to him to pray for Arafat's soul?
Even the old National Review, before its thorough debasement in recent years, would put "R.I.P." next to their death notices for people whom they clearly despised. Christian hypocracy? Well, yes, but of the nobler sort. Now they can't even muster that.
There's another little insight into the Values Voters.
9:32 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, November 10, 2004
THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL, RIGHT-WING VERSION #34,711. Some guy responding to some other guy:Of all the people I know who support this war, most of us have conversations like this with each other all the time:
"Why are the anti-war people so vicious and nasty?"
"Why are the anti-war people so irrational and hateful and smug?"
"How do we get through to them? They just won't listen!"
"Don't you get tired of being called a liar and a fascist? I sure do."
It reached a point for a lot of us that on election day, we were doing more than just saying "We want to re-elect George Bush." When we pulled that lever for Bush, we were also just plain saying "FUCK YOU!" Guy also says he takes drugs. Man, I can't wait for the Sixties to be over.
1:51 AM by roy edroso
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I AM OUT OF TOUCH WITH AMERICA. This is Rene Zellweger after she "packed on the pounds" for the new Bridget Jones movie:
Packed on the pounds? She's fucking adorable.
But what do I know? I like Kim Novak too.
1:05 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, November 09, 2004
THE WOUND AND THE BALL. The most important high-level appointment of the month is Willie Randolph's. He has solid baseball (and New York baseball) cred, and he's smart, at least in interviews, and God knows all Mets fan welcome him and wish him well. But I can't help but think what might have been.
Former Met Wally Backman was in the hunt, at least fleetingly, and I was really hoping he'd get the job. When he went to the Diamondbacks instead, I was very interested to see what he'd do with them. He'd done well managing in the minors, and came into Arizona announcing that he would not rebuild the fallen D'backs, but win with them. This was classic Backman. He was the sort of player one expected to come into first spikes up: tightly-wound and no backing down. He wasn't generally a great batter or base-stealer, but in the Mets' championship year he hit .320 and he made pitchers nervous with his nervy, glaring, stretch-legged leads. I think he smelled victory and went after it like a hungry tiger. He was 5'9" and skinny and with his mustache and bellicose swagger reminded me of Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail.
Recently the Diamondbacks fired Backman after learning of his trailer-park history: domestic violence, drunk driving, bankruptcy. It may seem odd that his financial problems -- not a crime, at least not yet -- are in that mix until you recall how often the words "role model" come up in professional sports. I doubt very much anyone in the Arizona organization cares very much about Backman's character as such, but they seem to have serious concerns, as everyone seems to these days, about the appearance of impropriety. And so he was let go.
Do I care about his character? The question gives me pause. New York loved Billy Martin, by all accounts a seriously messed up guy -- but one who channeled his demons into baseball (when he was not sending them into his fists and drinking elbow) and won ballgames. Let us not forget that these are jocks we're talking about, and that those guys don't usually draw their inspiration from the same source as lyric poets. When most people do acid and smoke pot, they rhapsodize about trees; Bill "Spaceman" Lee mowed down batters and got into fistfights.
I never wondered before the revelations if Backman went home and belted his wife, and of course I don't approve and hope the anger management classes he had to take made him a less combative helpmeet, not to mention a more careful drinker/driver. But whether or not he's achieved a Phil Jackson sort of Zen enlightenment, I assume he'd still have something left over for baseball, and that in a tight game he'd run out and rip into an umpire over some stupid play in hopes of riling his team to victory. It's worked before, hasn't it?
This, I acknowledge, is a failing in my character. I should be wishing Backman a mellow old age, not casting him as Philoctetes. Baseball does that to me. Politics, too. I'm down for whatever it takes to get my team out the cellar.
8:57 PM by roy edroso
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GRACIOUS WINNERS DEPT. The Ole Perfesser observes that Maureen Dowd looks "like she's aged ten years" and "bitter." Must be a men's lib thing.
Speaking of chest-beaters, Matt Welch offers a sampling of recent winger hubris. (I suppose he left out some of the more imbecilic ones because, after all, he used to work the same room with the same "anti-idiotarian" schtick. But there'll be a lot of "I was in Switzerland at the time" over the next few years, so I figure why not forget and forgive.)
The baying of the Bushies is mildly amusing, but I'm still more interested in the glib rationalizations of the useful idiots. Michael Totten is still making "The Liberal Case for Bush." I absolutely cannot wait for his "The Liberal Case for Chief Justice Thomas."
Michele Catalano, meanwhile, momentarily turns her considerable nervous energy upon censorship. Her essay includes this nostalgic trope:And it's not just ultra conservatives who want to shove their values down your throat. It comes from both sides. The PC left wants to obliterate passages from textbooks... Just as the sight of a Coupe de Ville or a Model T fills my heart with warmth, it's reassuring to know that some simple souls are still fretting about Political Correctness in the Age of Jesusland. Republicans run everything, the MSM is discredited, the blogosphere is triumphant, but somewhere a Marxist is trying to replace "the Founding Fathers" with "the Framers" (and doing it for yucky women's-lib reasons, not good ones like when Robert Bork does it) -- we must be on guard!
Next week: how the atheists are trying to put a giant rock sculpture of "Tropic of Cancer" in the Kings County Courthouse.
9:51 AM by roy edroso
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