Ring My Bell

I’m sure there’s plenty of whacky political news to harp on about this week.  Like Alaska Republican senatorial hopeful Joe Miller having a reporter handcuffed and arrested by private security at a political rally for attempting to ask him some questions.  Or Kentucky Democratic senatorial hopeful Jack Conway insinuating that only Christians are fit to hold public office.  Or maybe Delaware Republican senatorial hopeful Christine O’Donnell apparently being unaware that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution explicitly prohibits Congress from making any laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof - in precisely those words.  Or even the circus of absurdity that is the New York gubernatorial race.  (We might actually touch on that one later.)  But I don’t want to talk about any of those.  Instead, I want to talk about football.  I don’t want to talk about scores or which teams are good and which would be better off playing in the CFL (I’m looking at you, Cowboys.)  I want to talk about America’s pastime, in terms of life and death.

This past weekend was a bad weekend to be a brain.  On Saturday afternoon, Rutgers defensive lineman Eric LeGrand was attempting a tackle on a kickoff return when his head impacted another player at an awkward angle.  LeGrand tumbled to the ground, awkward and stiff, his neck broken.  The latest word is that he is paralyzed from the neck down.  On Sunday, Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison twice, in the span of about ten minutes, slammed head first into the helmet of the ball carrier, resulting in both offensive players being removed from the game with concussions.  Minutes later at the other end of Pennsylvania, Atlanta Falcons cornerback Dunta Robinson speared Eagles receiver DeSean Jackson in the chin with his helmet, resulting in concussions for both men.  Jackson’s was so severe he will not be able to return to the field this coming Sunday.  Later on in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Patriots safety Brandon Merriweather left his feet and fired the top of his helmet into Ravens’ tight end Todd Heap’s face, knocking him out of the game.  And in the night game between the Colts and Redskins, Washington tight end Chris Cooley left the game after another helmet to helmet collision.  Penalties were only called on two of those hits.

I know people assume that football is a violent sport, and that things like this happen all the time..  And to a certain extent that is true.  But even in a sport were violent collisions are routine, last Sunday was particularly gruesome.  Even former Patriots safety turned NBC analyst Rodney Harrison, voted “dirtiest player in the game” by his peers during his playing days, went on air during halftime Sunday night and called for the league to start suspending players for the type of hits that had been dished out all day long.  If Rodney Harrison thinks you’ve gone too far, it’s time to pay attention.

We are a violent nation.  We live for conflict and we love to fight.  We were born of war, we came of age in war, and we couldn’t survive barely more than a decade of the 20th century without engaging in one - hot or cold.  We glorify battle and lionize soldiers, irrespective of their conduct, choosing to believe that whatever actions they take on the battlefield must be justified because they because they are risking their lives so the rest of us don’t have to.  We prefer to have a select group of people fight our wars for us, and agree it would be a nice bonus if none of our guys were killed in the process.  

Sports are war games for civilized people.  Two opposing sides, risking their health and safety in combat until one defeats the other.  And no American sport is more analogous to combat than football.  Even the terminology is barbaric.  The offensive and defensive lines are said to “battle in the trenches,” quarterbacks are “gunslingers,” throwing “bombs” from “shotgun” formations.  Defensive players patrol the field like “heat-seeing missiles,” “blowing up” receivers who venture into their territory.  And it is this mentality that has lead to the current situation.

I typically avoid qualifying my statements, but in this case I feel I have to.  I love NFL football.  I own six jerseys, primarily of defensive players.  I have two fantasy football teams, one chock full of defensive players.  I pay a ridiculous amount of money for NFL Sunday Ticket so I can spend ten solid hours every Sunday watching every single game played between September and February.  I accept that it is a violent game, that it is inherently dangerous, and that sometimes really bad things happen to the people who play it.  But this business of hitting people in the head to knock them out of games has got to stop.  And if the players aren’t interested in stopping it, the league has to step in and do it for them.

Defensive players are going to complain - they’ve already started.  Steelers assassin James Harrison - guilty of knocking out two Cleveland Browns last Sunday - admitted in an interview Monday morning that he is indeed “out to hurt people.”  In reference to the hit that briefly knocked Joshua Cribbs unconscious, Harrison said, “I thought Cribbs was asleep... he’s knocked out, but he’s going to be okay.”  He has already announced - through his agent - that he plans to appeal the $75,000 fine levied against him, claiming he is now “confused about how to play football.”

James Harrison is not the sharpest pencil in the box.  This is the genius whom, when invited to the White House two years ago as part of the Super Bowl winning Pittsburgh Steelers (as every president invites the winners of every major sports championship to visit every year), refused to attend because, “if the President wanted to meet the Pittsburgh Steelers, he should have invited us before we won the Super Bowl.”  Perhaps he doesn’t understand that people who are knocked unconscious are not just “asleep,” that an impact hard enough to bounce the brain off the side of the skull is infinitely more hazardous to one’s health than the act of taking a nap.  Perhaps he doesn’t know that science now confirms that repeated blows to the head can lead to loss of motor function, dementia, Alzheimer's or worse, and do so much more quickly that previously thought.  Perhaps he doesn’t care.  Perhaps he’s not interested in being able to remember the name of his wife, or where his kids go to school, or how to put on his socks before tying his shoes.

But I do.  I care.  I think that even the remains of James Harrison’s questionable intellect deserve to be protected from idiots like him.  People watch football games to see incredible athletes do incredible things; a sixty-yard tackle-breaking touchdown run, a forty-yard toe-tapping sideline reception in double coverage, an interception returned for a touchdown against Peyton Manning in the Super Bowl.  But incredible players can’t do incredible things sitting on the bench for weeks on end after being hit in the head by some jackass trying to make an ESPN highlight reel.  This nonsense has got to stop.  The head is not a battering ram, and the helmet is not a weapon.

I’m not sure what the solution is.  The league has decided that effective immediately, helmet-to-helmet hits will result in suspensions - for multiple games if necessary.  That’s probably a good place to start.  Obviously fines weren’t working.  What’s five or ten thousand dollars to guy making ten million a years?  But taking them off the field for a game or two, that means something.  If you are a great player, and you have to sit because you cracked someone in the head with your helmet, you’ve not only forfeited your game check, you’ve let your teammates down by not being there for them when they need you.  In the culture of football, that means more than a couple grand.  And if that doesn’t work, maybe we go back to playing the game without helmets altogether.  I guarantee that the first time a linebacker leaves his feet and slams his skull into the head of an opposing running back will also be the last time.

And now for something completely different.  Where the primary season gave us gems like Basil Marceaux Dot Com, the general election has gifted us Jimmy McMillan, of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party, candidate for governor of the great state of New York.  Where Basil Marceaux Dot Com’s platform was, let’s say, complicated, and loosely federated (“ending the slavery of traffic stops”, planting “vegetation on vacant land and selling it for gas”, investigating “why democracy invaded the U.S State on July 16, 1866, and so on), Jimmy McMillan’s message is plain and simple.  Yup, you guessed it.  The rent is too damn high.

A roof over your head, food on the table and money in your pocket.  The rest will take care of itself.  You gotta love an honest politician.  The manicured mutton chops don’t hurt either.

Housekeeping

Usually I try to update this blog once a week, on Tuesday or Wednesday night.  For the next several weeks that will shift to Wednesday or Thursday night, to accommodate the schedule of my paying job.  That being said, the paying job is siphoning additional time this week, and as such, I will forego an update this week.  Check back next week.

Promises to Keep

Is it Friday yet?  It’s not?  Really?  Sigh.

I checked the opinion polls today.  Apparently my previous post had absolutely no impact on Democratic voter enthusiasm.  In fact, if Gallup’s latest voter tracking polls are to be believed, I may have consigned the Party to an 87-seat loss in the House of Representatives.  Now I know things aren’t great out there, but 87 seats?  Come on.

But that was last week.  This is a whole new seven-day period.  As such, I would like to mention something that failed to get the attention it deserved during my fruitless search for rainbow-crapping unicorns.  About two weeks ago, Republicans released something they called a “Pledge to America.”  Standing in front of a palate of pressure-treated lumber at a hardware store just outside of D.C., House Minority Leader John Boehner declared this pledge to be a blueprint for Republican fiscal responsibility should they take over Congress in November.  I would like to take this opportunity to call shenanigans on John Boehner.  What he calls a “blueprint to restore America,” I might call, quite generously, intellectually dishonest.

In short, the Republican “plan” aims to reduce the deficit by repealing any unused TARP funds, trimming 100 billion dollars of discretionary spending, de-funding healthcare reform, and, or course, cutting taxes.  The idea is that “…with common sense exceptions for seniors, veterans and defense…” these steps will set the United States back on sound fiscal footing and reverse the march toward socialism we’ve apparently been on since January of 2009.  If you are partial to that worldview I suppose all that sounds pretty good.  But even a cursory evaluation of the details reveals the absolute fiscal fraud the self-proclaimed party of fiscal responsibility has become.

First, as we discovered late last week, funds expended under the TARP program have been almost completely repaid.  The amount currently outstanding totals approximately $50 billion, and by the time the Republicans retake the House, the taxpayers may even have turned a profit on their investment.  There isn’t going to be any unused TARP money to repeal.  Strike one.

Second, I know it sounds like a lot of money, but $100 billion worth of discretionary spending amounts to virtually nothing in a 3.5 trillion dollar budget.  It is, in fact, less than 3% of the annual budget.  No Republican seriously believes that cutting 3% from the budget will set America’s fiscal house in order.  But the reason they can get away with it is because so few people actually understand where their tax dollars actually go.  There is a common misconception that if we simply trim a little from the welfare budget and reduce the amount we spend on foreign aid; we wouldn’t need to borrow money from anybody.  Sadly, like so many other things about politics, it isn’t that simple.  Below is a pie chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, quantifying what tax dollars actually pay for.

Taken together, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Defense/Security (including veterans benefits) total nearly 70% of Federal spending.  If Boehner’s statement regarding “common sense exceptions for seniors, defense and veterans” implies that the programs making up more than two-thirds of the budget are off limits to anything but token reduction, (and that certainly is what it implies), it’s pretty easy to determine how less-than-serious he is about deficit reduction.  Add that to his comment to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday two weeks ago about not wanting to talk about solutions, and this “pledge” becomes comical.  Strike two.

Finally, Republicans propose to cut costs by de-funding healthcare initiatives and lowering taxes.  The healthcare initiatives they propose to cut have yet to be funded.  Pretty easy to take back something you haven’t yet delivered.  But refusing to fund healthcare changes would leave Republicans with no way to address the current almost (and in some cases actual) double-digit growth in healthcare expenditures.  Add to that the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for all income earners (about 750 billion dollars), and the continuation of at least one foreign military conflict and we could likely have a budget deficit under a Republican House that was larger than it was under Democratic control.  Strike Three.

The truth about the “Pledge to America” is that it isn’t.  There is only one fiscally honest Republican in the House of Representatives and his name is Paul Ryan.  Ryan’s solutions for reducing deficit and debt are not my solutions, but at least he understands that in order for anything to be accomplished without any sort of tax increase (if that is even possible), Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Defense must all endure dramatic cuts, all of which would be deeply unpopular.  And it is telling that not a single other Republican on Capitol Hill has signed on to Ryan’s proposal.

It would be nice if Americans could talk about these things like adults, instead of fourth graders throwing rocks at each other on the playground.  If your family was to encounter financial hardship and needed to take additional steps to make ends meet, you could either reduce your expenses, increase your income, or some combination of both.  I would suggest that reducing expenses AND pursuing employment offering higher levels of compensation might be the best course of action to take.  A similar approach of decreased expenses and increased revenues would probably be beneficial to America’s current fiscal situation.  But the further down the road of nonsensical pledges we travel, the harder it is going to be to return to any semblance of fiscal sanity.