A Thought About WAR

This is not related to the debt ceiling deal, but since it's the Trading Deadline today (five+ hours ago) I thought I'd mention this little thought I have about baseball statistics. The formula for Wins Above Replacement for position players is that you take the runs above average that this player contributes from various components of the game, like hitting, fielding, and baserunning. To that you add a number of runs that represents, more or less, how grateful the team is that they had this player playing for them instead of the random AAAA-level player they would have to call up instead, and then, and this is my point, an adjustment for the player's position. As I understand it the point of the positional replacement is to make it so that an everyday starter who is league-average at his position will have the same WAR regardless of which position they play. There are several points to this proposal, one of which is that it makes it easier to compare different players across positions fairly, which I think are important. But I want to point out one little flaw in that analysis:

For a team as a whole, both the "runs from replacement" and the positional-adjustment runs are fixed over the whole year. That is to say, in any given league in any given year you get x runs per game for not being a replacement player, and y runs per game for playing your position. But the team has someone who counts as not being a replacement player playing every position every day. For instance: in 1986 the New York Mets won 108 games, while the Pittsburgh Pirates won just 64. The Mets, as a team, had 39 runs from positional adjustment, and 196 runs from replacement level. The Pirates had 39 runs from positional adjustment, and 191 runs from replacement level. The difference in replacement level runs is probably due to the slight difference in team plate appearances ('cause the Mets were a better offensive team, I assume); the Mets had 3% more plate appearances than the Pirates, and about 3% more runs from replacement level. So, the same.

In other words, a team does not need to worry about how many runs it gets from these two categories overall. It just needs to think about how many runs above average it gets from hitting, fielding, and baserunning. So when someone says something like, "Michael Bourn (CF) has more fWAR than Prince Fielder (1B), wouldn't people go crazy if the Braves acquired Prince?", that's not quite the right way to look at things. The Braves already have somebody playing center field. They already have someone playing first base. That doesn't change. The question is whether Bourn is an upgrade to the team compared to their very specific replacement center fielder (he is), and whether Prince Fielder would be an upgrade to the team compared to their very specific current first baseman (he would be). I like the positional adjustment for comparing different players to one another for many purposes, but I think it can kind of obscure things when it comes to things like trades.

The Lesson of the Debt Ceiling Debacle

If you elect bad people, bad things happen. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't fundamentally blame Barack Obama for this, though I kind of wish that he would've used some creative executive power to sidestep any of these problems. I don't blame him because the American people, including a whole bunch of staggeringly stupid Democrats who failed to vote, managed to elect a House of Representatives controlled by crazy people last November. That puts a rather low ceiling on the possible outcomes he can achieve. This one doesn't sound very good, because the result of these two years of divided government is not going to be very good. From what I understand part of the rationale for making this deal is that it will weaken the impact of a later manufactured crisis, and not being a member of the Obama Administration I'm not sure I can be certain that isn't rather sound logicking on their part. But fundamentally the lesson that we all ought to draw from this is stop electing crazy people to positions of power!!!!! Seriously, please stop doing that. It's hurting us all, and things won't get better until it stops.

Oh, and anyone who considers themself a liberal or a Democrat and who doesn't like this deal who did not vote in the 2010 midterm elections has quite literally zero right to complain, and ought to refrain from commenting on the whole situation. It's y'all's fault, guys.

This is Not the End Game

One argument, I think, in favor of not reaching any sort of legislative agreement on raising the debt limit in the next few days is that once we've set the precedent of using this sort of manufactured, idiotic crisis as a forum for hostage-style leveraging and concession-extracting, there will come a time when agreement cannot be reached. It is impossible that playing a game of iterated chicken over the debt ceiling will not end in a failure to agree, eventually. So eventually we're going to have to hit the real End Game of that time-lapse battle, which as I see it ends in one of only a handful of ways:

1. Congress abolishes the debt ceiling.
2. The prior tradition of not using debt ceiling votes to extract policy concessions is re-established.
3. We hit the debt ceiling hard, and assorted economic calamities ensue.
4. Some kind of creative use of executive power effectively nullifies the debt ceiling.

That one of these four options is the necessary end result of this game is not something we can change in the next week. We can change whether the time at which we hit the end game is right now or not, and right now it looks like it won't be right now. But we're going to hit one of those four possible results sooner or later. I'm not sure I can see any particular reason to favor doing so later.

Super Congress: Still Not Super, Still Not a Congress

Apparently some sort of "super Congress" will be involved in this debt ceiling deal. Eh. It's still not super, and oh boy is it ever still not a congress. It sounds kind of like the same thing as the Bowles-Simpson committee, a bipartisan commission tasked with creating a deficit-reduction plan that would receive an automatic vote in Congress. How'd that work out? Oh yeah, didn't think so...

More broadly, from what I'm hearing from Obama this deal doesn't sound as awful as I had thought it might be. I'm not sure I'll stick by that assessment as I hear more of what's actually in it, but that's my current impression. Especially if he can use it to pivot back to boosting the economy, or something, as he said in the last line of his press conference.

Yes, It Is That Easy

I just saw a video of Dennis Kucinich on the floor of the House what I assume was today or yesterday, with the following quote excerpted from his speech and a little bit of commentary:

"We are the United States of America, the greatest country on Earth. We envision wealth, we don’t default. We create wealth, we don’t default. We build wealth, we don’t default."

Dennis Kucinich solves like, all our problems in like, one minute and 14 seconds. THAT WAS EASY.

Yes. It is that easy. That's the thing about this whole "crisis": it doesn't exist! There is no problem here. Maybe you think America's debt burden is a crisis, in which case we should talk about that; as it happens, you would be wrong on just about any standard economic measure. But this specific debt limit crisis is 100% manufactured B.S. If everyone on Capital Hill really means what they say about agreeing that the debt ceiling should/must be raised but that they just want to have an honest conversation about our national debt, which they absolutely all say they do, then they could just a) raise/abolish the debt limit, and b) have a serious debate about debt and deficits. The fact that they have not done this means that the Republicans actually don't believe that the debt limit "must" be raised; to them, or to many of them at least, it is much more important to create a fake crisis that they can try to leverage into gigantic policy concessions than to be certain of avoiding the economic catastrophe that begins, oh say 38 hours from now if nobody does anything. Nothing is forcing us to have ticking-time-bomb negotiations right now, not the market, not the economy, nothing. Except, that is, one of our two major political parties. But if you're looking for "the right solution" to the current "crisis," yes, it is that easy: raise the effing debt ceiling, and do it now.

The Mets have a *Lot* of Young Pitching

The Mets just acquired Zack Wheeler from the Giants minor-league system. He is considered to be someone whose "upside" is that of a #1 Major League starter. He is 21 years old, and is projected to be Major League-ready sometime very late next year or, more likely, in 2013. Matt Harvey, the ace of the Mets' AA-level affiliate, is 22, projects to be ready about the same time as Wheeler, and also looks like a potential #1 starter. 21-year-old Jeurys Familia, also at the AA-level, has had success this year though he is in the midst of getting over a minor injury. Jenrry Mejia, also 21 years old, is already at the AAA level, though he is currently recovering from Tommy John surgery; however, given the nature of that surgery, there's no real reason not to expect him to still be good when he gets back to pitching.

Add that to Jonathan Niese and Dillon Gee, 24 and 25 years old respectively, who both have 10 wins for the Mets already this year with potentially ten more starts to go. That's six good young pitchers in the Mets' system at some level. I've heard people suggest that Familia is more of a closer type than a starter anyway, which is convenient since somebody from that list has to end up not being in the Mets' rotation. Assuming we don't trade Johan Santana, which I really hope we don't, only four of these guys can be in the rotation prior to 2014. But that's okay, it never hurts not to rush pitching prospects, and the fact remains that the Mets are loaded with outstanding pitching prospects. It strikes me that this team might be kinda good over the next few years.

The Republican Obsession with Money

In a previous post, I argued that conservatives have a highly materialistic view of life, that in shaping public policy at least they tend to simply overlook personal, psychological, or spiritual needs like esteem or belonging. In this post I want to argue that the conservative outlook is highly materialistic using the overall approach to budgetary issues that Republicans have (extremely successfully) championed of late. Yes, drawing overarching conclusions about political philosophy from budgeting styles. Anyway, I'll begin by outlining how I think a rational country should approach the whole question of the budget, government spending, and taxation. Here's how it goes:

The Crazy Scheme to Save America

There is a rumor that John Boehner would kind of like to get this debt ceiling debacle over with. It's making him look bad, it risks making him and every other Republican look awful, and he himself is much more of a business type than a Tea Party type, making him not particularly inclined to, you know, destroy the economy. But, the rumors continue, he cannot just announce his support for something like the McConnell plan, which would allow Obama to implement a series of clean debt ceiling increases while simultaneously letting Congress impotently voice its disapproval, and try to whip up a coalition in support of that plan between all the Democrats and a handful of Republicans. Why? Because he would lose his gavel, in an instant. The House Republicans would probably elect Eric Cantor Speaker before the McConnell plan even came up for a vote, and a few days thereafter at the very latest. And John Boehner likes being Speaker of the House; indeed, it is really the only thing he aspires to.

So here's the crazy scheme: all of the people who would vote in favor of the McConnell plan, were Boehner to throw his support behind it, form a caucus to keep electing John Boehner Speaker of the House through the end of this Congress. That way, we get to pass the plan and Boehner gets to keep his gavel. Everyone's happy, right? Well, not the Tea Party types, but they're never happy. And sure, a lot of the Republicans who went along with this scheme would lose their jobs, but if we hit default and the economy gets destroyed I think they'll be in pretty grave danger anyway. This way they get to be the people who bravely sacrificed their political careers to protect the nation's economy, and I'm sure there would be plenty of cushy corporate lobbying gigs waiting for them down the road. As for the Democrats, sure it wouldn't be a lot of fun voting for Boehner as Speaker, but it's a lot better than the alternatives, and they obviously wouldn't be agreeing to support him on anything except the debt ceiling and keeping the gavel in his hands.

Now sure, this is the kind of thing that will never happen, at least not since approximately the 1880s, but I think it would work pretty well, and it would certainly be fun.

Don't Trade Beltran

The current rumor going around the internet is that the Mets are not likely to get a top prospect in return for Carlos Beltran. There are various reasons why this is so; I'm not interested in them. What I am interested in is what it means: that, if no one will give them anything particularly enticing in return for Carlos, they should keep him for the rest of the year. The standard argument you hear against this is that the Mets will get nothing from Beltran if they don't trade him: he will depart at the end of the year, and since he cannot be offered arbitration the Mets won't even get compensatory draft picks for him. There is one slight hole in this argument, which any advocate of trading Beltran would gladly acknowledge: what you get from Carlos Beltran for the rest of the season is wins. According to Fangraphs, Beltran has been worth 3.9 wins above replacement through the first 102 games of the season; extrapolating for the remaining 60 games, we project Beltran as being worth a further 2.3 wins for the rest of the season. Drop Beltran and the Mets might as well be 10 games behind the Braves, rather than 7.5. Trade him to the Braves and it might as well be a 12.5-game deficit. So trading Beltran will make the Mets a worse team for the rest of the year; this will reduce their odds of making the playoffs, etc. etc.

Reyes Contract Proposal

Mike Francesca says, apparently, that he thinks he's heard that Jose Reyes would take something along the lines of 6 years, $120 million from the Mets, and that the Mets might make such an offer. The concern that people have about such a deal is that at the end of it Reyes would be 34. To my mind that's not a big deal: the traditional prime is 28-32, which suggests that the first approximately four years of that deal ought to be great for Reyes, and even if he trails off in the last two years of the deal it's plenty of production over those years. But, of course, the main reason people are concerned about committing to Reyes until that kind of age is that they view him as injury-prone. So here's my proposal: why not use some vesting options? They have a bad rep with Mets fans right now due to K-Rod's rather absurd one, but it strikes me that this is exactly the situation vests are designed for.

Let's say we make the contract like this: five guaranteed years at $20 million/year. For the sixth year, also at $20 million, there would be a very reasonable threshold in terms of games played, either over the length of the contract or in the last few years of it. Maybe something like 130 games per year, something that Reyes will easily meet if he is generally healthy but that he might miss if he has another couple of injuries like what he had in '09. If he misses those targets then it would become, let's say, a mutual option. Then, because we're asking Reyes to accept a somewhat less guaranteed situation for the sixth year of the deal, there would be something similar for the seventh year of the deal. Maybe it would be a mutual option, maybe it would be a vesting option with a threshold around 140-150 games in 2017. Either way, unlike the K-Rod option it wouldn't be for an outlandish amount of money. That way, the point really would be that if Reyes demonstrated that he was healthy (which is of course the main concern people have with giving him a long-term deal) then he would get a longer-term deal, but if he wasn't healthy the team wouldn't be on the hook for someone who wouldn't be able to play much. So Reyes has an opportunity for a contract worth nearly $140 million, while the Mets protect themselves from being stuck with an old and decrepit player. Sounds like a win-win, doesn't it?

Yu Darvish: Wait, Do I Actually Have To Root *For* The Yankees?

So, it continues to look like Yu Darvish, who is en route to posting his fifth consecutive full season in the Japanese baseball leagues with an ERA under 2, wishes to play in America next year. That probably means that he'll get his current team in the Japan Leagues to "post" him. At that point, MLB teams who are interested get to submit sealed, secret bids to that team, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, for the right to negotiate with Darvish, and the team with the highest bid wins those rights. They then get 30 days to negotiate a contract with him, and if no deal is signed he goes back to the Fighters (who could in theory post him again, if there's still time). Now, since I've heard of Darvish-san I've been rooting pretty damn hard for the Mets to get him, and with various of the Wilpons' legal troubles looking like they're being resolved in a positive way (for the Wilpons) that rooting is getting even stronger. But there is, as always, one major problem in such a plan: the Yankees.


The Mets are a reasonably big-market team, and if the legal troubles are resolved then they have about as much money as anyone. That means that, if they openly assess what the maximum amount they'd be willing to pay for the opportunity to talk to Darvish, the number they come up with has a decent chance of being high enough to win. Except, that is, for the fact that if the Yankees ever want to, they can just blow everyone else out of the water. So the question is, will the Yankees want him?

Stop Calling It The Constitutional Option

I keep seeing people writing things like, "at this point I'm just hoping the lawyers at Treasury discover that the 14th Amendment option is viable." While I completely endorse the sentiment, and the scenario in which the Administration declares, screw the debt limit, we're gonna keep issuing debt to finance the government, strikes me as pretty clearly the best end result for this debacle, I really do wish people would stop calling it the constitutional/14th Amendment option. It isn't. In fact, the 14th Amendment plays only the a minor supporting role in the logic, as I see it, of unilaterally disregarding the debt limit. Here's the argument as I see it:

"Super Congress"

There isn't very much to say about this proposal for a "super Congress." Congress can set its own rules; if each House of Congress wants to make it such that certain bills cannot be amended or filibustered, I don't see why they can't do that. But what's obvious about the super Congress is that it is neither super nor a Congress. That is to say, it is a body constructed without any direct democratic input and, fittingly for such an institution, it lacks any legislative power. It has recommendation power, in that it can recommend legislation to the actual, legislatively-empowered Congress which the latter will deem itself unusually eager to consider. But no actual legislative power: its proposals still could not become law without, you know, the usual mechanism of being passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President. A better proposal than this would probably be to just abolish the filibuster and, perhaps, tighten the rules surrounding amendments. Of course, no one would think that those reforms would make unpopular deficit-reduction bills more likely to pass, 'cause if there aren't 50 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House none of it matters. I can't see why the same complaint wouldn't apply to the "super" "Congress" either.

Misuse of Language Alert: "Deficit"

The word "deficit" is defined, in political/budgetary terms, as the difference between a government's revenues and that government's outlays. That's what it means. Except that isn't how it gets used in American politics these days, especially not by Republicans but also not by the various portions of the mainstream media that like to pretend that Republicans care about cutting deficits while liberal Democrats don't. Because here's the thing: if you put Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, Barney Frank, and Bernie Sanders in a room together, they could zero out the deficit in, say, 2018 or 2021, and they could probably get the basic framework of the plan to do so figured out in an hour or so. Maybe less. You'd have a carbon tax, you'd have cuts in defense spending, you'd have the closing of assorted loopholes that favor large corporate interests, and then you'd have some amount of progressive tax increases on top of that, however much was still needed. Maybe you'd throw in something like a public option on health care, depending on how non-budgetary they felt they could get. And voila, the deficit would be gone.

The Reality-Based Community

The Republican Party has declared, rather proudly, that it does not have any philosophical commitment to grounding itself in reality. That was very, very true during the Bush Administration, it was very, very true during the first two years of the Obama Administration, and it is very, very true now. But I think it is most worrisome in the current dynamic, for the following reason: during the first part of the Obama Administration the Republicans had barely any power, whereas during the Bush Administration they had both power and responsibility. My hypothesis is that, while having a party that has power without accountability is bad and having a party utterly divorced from reality is bad, having a party divorced from reality that has power without accountability is more than doubly bad. Why? Well, obviously if a party is out of power you don't care too much what it's like. But if a party is in power in a way that makes voters inclined to hold it accountable for things in general, then it has an automatic incentive to do things that produce beneficial real-world short-term results. Thus, even if they don't care philosophically about aligning policy with reality, as long as they want to hang on to power they'll try to make macro conditions good in the real world. So you never saw the Bush Administration messing with the debt limit, and you did see them try to rescue the economy during the '08 crash. Likewise, the opposition Democrats in '07-'08 were sufficiently grounded in reality that they never did anything as grossly irresponsible as what the Republicans are doing now, even though they benefited from the same strange power/responsibility dynamic. But now we have a party completely irresponsible and psychotic (in the technical sense) that can push public policy in as nonsensical directions as it pleases, and that has the power to do so, but can at least plausibly believe that it will never be punished for doing so. That's dangerous.

Why Jose Reyes Should Want to Stay With the Mets

Here's a thought experiment: let's assume that Jose Reyes plays the rest of his home games at Citi Field. And let's assume that his performance both on the road and at Citi Field stays constant for the rest of his career. Now let's assume he plays, on average, 150 games split evenly between home and road games for the rest of his career. What would his career stats look like in 2020?

Maybe He Isn't "Just Figuring This Out"

Jonathan Chait has what I generally think is a good piece of analysis about Obama's press conference, but at the end there was a line that I found interesting:

But it was a fascinating glimpse of the Trumanesque figure liberals have long waited to see emerge -- an Obama-ized Truman, castigating republicans for refusing to move to the center, but a Trumanesque figure all the same. Perhaps he is figuring out that a political and policy strategy based on the getting Republicans to meet him halfway isn't likely to work very well.

I know that I'm kind of a broken record when it comes to interpreting Obama's actions optimistically and/or charitably, but I would just like to dispute the "perhaps he is figuring out that..." interpretation. As I mentioned recently, I wrote quite a few months ago that in the wake of a legislative shellacking Obama needed to first sound like Clinton and then pivot to Truman. In other words, at the time I believed it would be a good overall strategy for Obama to spend quite a while giving every impression of wanting to make big, centrist, Grand Bargain compromises, even while he knew Republicans would never play along. Then, once the Republicans inevitably refused to meet him even one-hundredth part of the way, he could change his tone, and start reaming them out for their intransigence. A la Truman. Which is what he's done. Why is it that, if a twenty-year-old amateur like myself conceived of this strategy months ago, and it's exactly what the Administration did, that the professional political strategists in the Administration might not have been thinking this way from the beginning? Speaking as someone (who is a genuine left-winger) who suggested right after the Republican midterm victories that Obama take the strategy he has ultimately appeared to take, I think we should be a little less quick to assume that the Administration never understood that Republicans would never agree to anything one-tenth reasonable, etc. etc.? Isn't it just possible that they picked the same strategy I outlined for them, and that it's worked more or less perfectly? (Okay, that's unless we do end up hitting massive default and/or slashing spending the way the Tea Partyites seem to want, but still...)

Obama's Press Conference

I liked what I heard. Obviously it is very true that Obama's been proposing lots of center-right deals, and only Republican insanity has been keeping us liberals from having to watch such a deal become law, but I continue to be suspicious that Obama's known this would happen all along. Anyway, now he's at the point where he is saying, look, get y'all's act together, feel free to just let me do it and then criticize me for it, I really don't care, just get this done. Here's hoping something gets done.

On That Subject...

I think one big, important thing to remember about Obama in the context of these debt ceiling negotiations is that he does not want to be here. Whatever he ultimately ends up agreeing to will be something he does not like, and which he is only agreeing to in the context of a hostage dynamic. If there's a report that he has "offered" cuts in Medicare, or whatever, that means he has offered them as an alternative to the complete destruction of the global financial system. We might or might not approve of that maneuver, we might wish he were holding out a harder line or trying to pressure the Republicans into caving more forcefully (though I doubt that would work, since they're crazy and all), but we shouldn't frame it as "Obama wants to cut Medicare!" At most, it means that Obama thinks (reasonably) that cutting Medicare a little bit is much better than sending the country, and much of the rest of the world, into a depression. And just as people are warning Obama not to trust Republicans to stick to the terms of a Grand Bargain if they get the Presidency and the Senate next year, we should remember that Obama has no particular reason to stick to the terms of said Bargain if he keeps those two Houses and picks up a third. All of which is to say, yes, what's going on right now is damned unpleasant, and will probably result in a lot of legislation passing that is hideous policy. But the people to blame for that are the Republicans.

Lessons from Serena Southerlyn

In a highly memorable episode of Law & Order, Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn finds herself tricking a hostage-taker into thinking that she is his lawyer. She then gets hauled before the disciplinary committee, which reprimands but does not disbar her. Why do I mention this? Because when you're dealing with a hostage situation, you say whatever you have to in order to get the hostage released. Then you don't keep your promises. If, while actually being an A.D.A., you suggest that you'll represent the guy with the knife and tell his side of the story, etc., you do not then actually become his lawyer. And I think that it would be kind of nice if the Democrats would follow that strategy, too.

The structure of these debt limit negotiations is that, because the Republicans control the House of Representatives, they have the power to destroy the U.S. economy. Moreover, they have decided to leverage that power and attempt to get concessions from the Democrats, in return for refraining from using their power. Because of this, the Democrats, including Obama, are in talks to pass policies that they do not like and would never ever agree to without a knife to the throat of the nation's, nay, the world's economy. It's quite possible that the spending cuts in such an agreement will be backloaded into the later end of the upcoming decade, since in the near future we're dealing with an economic slowdown. So here's the lesson of Serena Southerlyn's hostage adventures for Obama and the Democrats: if you agree to lots of long-term spending cuts in this debt ceiling deal, and then in the 2012 elections you happen to take back control of the House while getting Obama re-elected, please do not hesitate to undo those spending cuts. There's no reason not to: avowedly the only reason you're agreeing to them now is this hostage dynamic. Once that's gone, if you have the power to, you might as well undo that damage. Obviously one of the keys to this strategy is not to let on that you're doing it (and some Republicans have already said they're suspicious that long-term spending cuts won't actually materialize), but it would be really nice if Obama and his team have this option in the back of their minds going forward.

2016 Prospect Scouting, Governors Edition

People often talk about parties having "prospects" to run for President, and having or not having a "deep bench" for a given race; both are more or less baseball terms. In that spirit, if we view the Presidency and Presidential elections as the equivalent of the Major Leagues of American politics, then the AAA level would be top statewide elected offices: Governors and Senators. AA would be, let's say, Congressmen and lower-ranking state offices like Attorney General, and perhaps the Mayors of certain prominent cities. Single-A would be state legislators, and rookie ball, well, let's say city councils? I dunno, it's probably not important; maybe you can throw mayors of random towns in there as well. In any event, the AAA level is where a team's best prospects are located, and that's true for the Presidency as well. There have been nineteen men (hey, they've all been men) elected to the Presidency who had not previously been part of the federal executive branch, either as Vice-President, a Secretary of something, or a military general. Of those nineteen, two (Lincoln and Garfield) had only ever been a Representative, while ten were Governors and seven were Senators. So the AAA-level really is where most of the prospects come from.

Who are the big prospects at that level right now? Nate Silver's recent post about Republican governors gives us an idea. What I think you look for in a governor are for them to be popular in their home state and for that home state to be large. Of the ten Presidents whose primary credential at their election were a governorship, two each governed New York and Ohio, while the other six came from Tennessee, New Jersey, Georgia, California, Arkansas, and Texas. Of those, only Arkansas was a small state at the time in question, and Bill Clinton was so popular he was elected about six different times (and was a dark horse for the nomination to boot!). So to launch a Presidency from a Governor's Mansion, you want to be either really, really popular or the governor of a big state, and preferably both. Who meets these criteria?

Well, once again we have Andrew Cuomo at the head of the pack. Obviously, Cuomo is the governor of the third-largest state in the nation, and the largest in terms of media share. He also has a 69/18 average favorability rating, which is insanely popular. There's a reason why Cuomo is the early favorite to be President in 2017. No one else jumps out at me on the Democratic side: Steve Beshear of Kentucky is popular, but I don't see Kentucky as a good launching state for a Democratic contender; Lynch (NH), Tomblin (WV), Abercrombie (HI), Schweitzer (MT), and Kitzhaber (OR) are from reasonably strong states; Jerry Brown is ancient and only mildly popular in deep-blue California; Mark Dayton (MN) has a long history of wackiness; and I don't see Deval Patrick (MA) being very successful immediately after his known pal Barack Obama. Also, he was down in the low 20's a few months ago, and it's tough to bet on that kind of turn-around.

On the Republican side, the name that jumps out is Bob McDonnell, who sports a net +33 approval rating in deep-purple Virginia, a big, important state. He didn't impress me at his answer to Obama in early '10, but whatever, he's looking good right now. The only other current Republican governors with appreciably positive  approvals are Haslam (TN) and Susana Martinez (NM), neither of which is a very big state. I've speculated about Susana Martinez, since she is a) female, b) Hispanic, and c) popular in a Democratic state, but my guess from the Clinton model is that she would need a kind of weak field and have to sneak in as a dark-horse. But the Republican bench doesn't look very deep at the AAA level, probably because they elected a whole host of new governors in big swing states (MI, NJ, IA, PA, WI, OH, FL) and they're a combined 65 points below water on their approval ratings. That ain't a good start.

Sometime soon I'll take a look at the prospects on the Senate side, though lacking such a nifty chart of approval ratings I'm not sure that it can be quite as objective.

The Mets' Payroll

So, apparently the lawsuit which might've resulted in the Wilpons needing to pay $1 billion in damages has been dropped. I don't think that it makes much difference to the long-term health of the Mets one way or the other: if the Wilpons had lost, they'd've just had to sell the team, and the new owners presumably wouldn't need to keep its payroll gutted. But now that they've won, doesn't it look like there's no particular reason why they should need to gut the payroll now, anyway? The Mets are still a big, New York City team, and the Wilpons have a history as big spenders. What exactly is the current source of "money trouble" supposed to be, if they still want to get down to around $100 million for next year? Why not stay around $150 million? With a whole bunch of bad contracts coming off the books, why not use some of that money not just to resign Reyes but to go after Yu Darvish and maybe get a better catcher and, perhaps, eat a large portion of Jason Bay's contract to get a better left fielder?

I have no idea whether the outcome of this court case will, in fact, alter the short-term course of the franchise, but from everything I've heard it sure sounds like it ought to.

Funny Headlines

Perusing the Huffington Post, I just saw the following headline of an opinion column posted there, along with the following excerpt from the article itself:

Wanted: Multimillionaire With Conscience to Launch Third Party

It is time to launch a new political party, one with a very simply stated but enormous task, to get the special interest money and lobbying out of our government.

Does this guy not get that it kind of doesn't add up to ask for a "multimillionaire" to launch your anti-money-in-politics party? Seriously?

 

Millionaires

Somebody has a piece arguing that having a higher percentage of Americans be millionaires would have beneficial effects on our political culture. Those "beneficial effects" are mainly in the form of promoting government policies more friendly to reasonably rich people, so obviously I don't necessarily endorse them. But there's also just an idea of trying to have a more "broadly prosperous" society, in the sense of having more people about the million-dollar mark in total wealth. A call to have, say, 15% of society be millionaires, when there aren't currently 15% millionaires, necessarily means we need to increase the wealth of the 85th-percentile rich person, as well as all the people between 85th percentile and wherever millionaires currently rank. That wealth has to come from somewhere, in the context of arguments about distributive schemes. The place that the person writing this piece probably wants it to come from (and you can see this in the policies he proposes to achieve this goal) is everyone below 85th percentile, a.k.a. the little people. That's bad, and in no way constitutes broad prosperity. But it could also come from the people at, say, 99th percentile in wealth getting a wee bit less wealthy. Making the top of the income distribution flatter would also be a way to, well, spread the wealth around, which could make more somewhat-rich people as well as making fewer very-poor people. Just a thought.

A New Round of Institutional Spring Cleaning

Matt Yglesias has a post noting how the debt ceiling was not designed to give Congress leverage over the executive, but rather to decrease Congressional control over the Treasury Department. It's a point I've made before: the debt "ceiling" is just the maximum amount of aggregate debt that Congress has authorized. Prior to having a debt "ceiling" we had specific, individual authorization of each issuance of debt. So it's not really a ceiling, not originally. But Congress still only authorizes some finite amount of debt, instead of authorizing an indefinite amount of debt as necessary to fulfill the government's obligations as all other governments do. But now, as we've gone quite a few decades without restructuring this institution, what used to be increased flexibility for Treasury is now a potential serial hostage situation.

Likewise, it used to be that any given Senator could talk forever if they wanted to, and no one and nothing could stop from doing so. This gave any individual Senator the power to be a jerk and derail any given piece of legislation, but there was a very strong custom of not doing so. Eventually they figured out that this was a really bad idea, so they set it up so that a two-thirds vote of the Senate would be enough to stop debate. Eventually it became more plausible for one-third of the whole Senate to be brazen enough to use this power to stop things, so they changed it to a three-fifths requirement. Unfortunately, at this point they also changed from "present and voting" to "duly chosen and sworn," which means that, unlike in the past, the majority cannot just out-will the minority; over thirty subsequent years, that's allowed aggressive minorities (read: Mitch McConnell's Republicans) to use the cloture rules, which have only ever been liberalized, to impose a 60-vote threshold on all Senate business.

In both cases we have a situation where the government originally just did things one way. Each individual debt issue needed authorization, and each individual Senator could talk forever. Eventually these institutions were reformed in a modernizing fashion, twice. Then a few decades went by, and now we're in 2011, and both the filibuster and the debt limit are broken and breaking our government. It strikes me that, at some point in the near future, we're going to need to clean out a bunch of these outdated, often unintentional structural features of our government. The U.S. Constitution outlines a process that makes it damn hard to get anything done: you need the Senate, the House, and the President to all agree on the exact same thing. There are a lot of features of the way we run our policy-making branches that either make it even harder to get things done or make it a serious problem to not get things done. Filibusters, the committee structure, the debt ceiling, temporary appropriations, etc. etc. There are just a lot of impediments to competent, good government, at the federal level but also at state and local levels, and it's high time we cleaned them up. It probably can't happen while the current crop of Republicans are running things, but it has to be coming. That, or our government gets so arthritic that we hit a genuine constitutional crisis for only the second time in our nation's history.

Governors Blog

So, as part of my work with the Eagleton Institute's Center on the American Governor I have a new blog about, well, governors. It's here, and there are a couple of posts on it already. One is about the wacky stuff Oregon does about gubernatorial lines of succession, and another is about state-to-state variations in the percentage of governors who were born in a given state. Check 'em out; we want to get lots of traffic so that we start getting even more traffic. Also, currently I haven't really done anything to the layout or anything else, I've just made a couple of posts; that should change later.

What the Tea Party Is About

I'm watching some conservatives, quoted on Rachel Maddow's show, talk about how the Tea Party isn't about the social issues, it's just about limited government and economic and fiscal conservativism and Madisonian restraint and libertarianism, blah blah blah. Rachel, being her usual awesome self, is demonstrating how flagrantly wrong that is. It's true: there's a whole frickin' lot of evidence that Tea Partiers are, if anything, more socially conservative and hawkish on foreign issues than Republicans as a whole. But I thought I'd take a moment to reiterate my own personal conviction about what the Tea Party is about. Here's the thesis: it has nothing, exactly and identically nothing, to do with the issues, or matters of public policy at all.

Before I go on, I should note that there is one exception to this theory, which is the social stuff. The Tea Partiers are, by and large, a genuinely socially conservative bunch, anti-abortion, anti-non-mainstream-Christianity, anti-being-nice-to-the-rest-of-the-world, blah blah blah. I don't really know why people think the Tea Party is distinct from the evangelical movement that's been brewing in the Republican Party for decades. I recently read a few very interesting posts about how Michele Bachmann kind of represents the growing lack of separation between those social conservative evangelical types and the rest of the Republican Party. But anyway, with that caveat out of the way, let's get on to the main course:

The Tea Party has nothing to do with issues or public policy! This, of course, goes rather aggressively against everything you hear about them, which is that they're about opposition to some kind of giant economic government overreach, and they just want to limit the government's intrusions into the economy. Rubbish, I say. Why do I say that? Because the positions the Tea Party takes on various issues, especially economic ones, are incoherent. What I mean by this is basically that, speaking as a proud resident of the reality-based community, nothing adds up about the policies they favor (or mostly oppose) and the reasons they give for their positions. Anti-tax fervor drove opposition to the largest tax cut of all time. Opposition to government intrusion into the private sector drove opposition to a health-care reform bill that was clearly bending over backwards to avoid imperiling private insurers. Opposition to debt drives a current desire to do something that will definitely increase our debt long-term, namely raising the effing debt ceiling. I could go on.

The point is, these aren't just "opinions" I disagree with. They're opinions that simply don't fit the actual realities of public policy. Some Tea Party positions, like opposing Medicare cuts, can be explained as pure power politics: the Tea Party is largely elderly, Medicare gives them money, they don't want to cut it. But then, why the fuss about debt? After all, the elderly will be dead by the time any long-term debt problems materialize, so a pro-elderly platform ought to say "spend like a drunken sailor giving our old people health care!" Do they understand that there literally aren't options other than a) continue a policy of bailing out failing banks, b) regulating the banking industry to prevent excessive risk-taking, and c) allowing the economy to implode at some point in the medium-term future? Evidently not. They fulminate about the government takeover of everything, despite the fact that taxes are at historic lows, aggregate government spending is only very slightly up if at all, and the public sector is shedding jobs. The market-based approach to global warming is a gigantic government takeover of everything.

Now, one can concede that much or all of this is driven by misinformation, much of it driven by Fox "News." But the point is, if these people really cared about policy and the issues, they would find this stuff out. There is no impulse among the Tea Party, as a group institution at the very least, to figure out the details of how public policy works and how it could work to advance goals. People who care about policy make at least a mild effort to have the things they say line up with the realities of policy. That doesn't describe the Tea Party.

What I believe motivates the Tea Party is, at bedrock, vehement personal opposition to Barack Obama. Some of that is racially or quasi-racially motivated. Some of it is derived from John Boehner's comment about how the world he grew up in is disappearing. A lot of types of people did very, very well in the 1950s, but a lot of other types of people did very very poorly. The types that were winning aren't worse off today than they were then, because the world as a whole is a lot better than it used to be, but they aren't winning, at least not as much as they were then, because the people who were losing the '50s are not losing, now, at least not as much. And some of the people in those groups that won the 1950s and aren't winning as much now don't like this trend. I think Obama embodies this phenomenon rather powerfully, and that drives some of the opposition to him. Some of it might just be the same old thing that happened to Clinton, namely that he was a Democrat who won, and therefore Republicans hated his guts.

The point is, though, that however we want to explain the personal opposition to Obama, once we notice it as a motivating factor all of the Tea Party's positions become rather obvious. Anything Obama proposes is the evilest, most despicable socialist communist Islamofascist plot ever. Since there's no particular reason why a set of positions diametrically opposed to everything in a coherent policy platform should be a coherent policy platform itself, the Tea Party's "positions on the issues" look kind of, well, incoherent and uninformed. That's because they are! They aren't positions on issues, they're just reflexive opposition to Obama and all things associated with him. It isn't about policy, it's never been about policy. They just hate the guts of the black man in the White House. It's that simple.

Yankee Arrogance, Part N

Eighty-four players were selected for the 2011 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Including those players who are, because of injury or because of having started a game this past Sunday, ineligible to play in the game, seventy-nine of those eighty-four are in attendance. Two of the five who are not there, Chipper Jones of the Braves and Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees, recently had major surgery. The other three are C.C. Sabathia, Mariano Rivera, and Derek Jeter. Those three have something in common: they are all New York Yankees. This is not a coincidence.

Among other things the Yankees like to say about themselves, I think there's an idea that being a Yankee is the only honor one needs. Sure, they'll go play in the All-Star game: I've never ever heard of someone just saying, nah, I don't feel like doing that, except due to an injury.* But if they can't play anyway, why bother showing up? Who cares about the praise and acclamation of the country's baseball fans?* They're Yankees, so they don't need any of that. All they need is wins and rings, blah blah blah. Being who I am, I can't help but compare that attitude to Jose Reyes, who has (strangely) been injured at the time of three of the four All-Star games he's been selected to in his career. But he's shown up every time, because it's a tremendous experience and a great honor and, hell, he's just plain excited and enthusiastic about playing baseball. Even if he can't play, he wants to show up and support his (temporary) team. But for a Yankee, that's beneath you. Show up just to support a bunch of people who aren't trying to help you win the World Series this year? Eh.

I think it's interesting to look at what two of the American League All-Stars said in the little montage on the subject of what it means to be an All-Star. Curtis Granderson said that it's about "repping these pinstripes on the big stage." David Ortiz, speaking immediately after him, said it was about "being teammates, if just for one day, with guys wearing pinstripes. Ughhhh." I think that's kind of emblematic of the Yankees' view of this game: it's about being a Yankee. It's about representing the Yankees, and demonstrating how amazing the Yankees are. If you can't play, if you can't go out and demonstrate your superiority, why bother?

*Derek Jeter is not injured. I seem to recall he played rather well in a game just recently, something like 5-5 with a home run, and he's planning on playing the first game back from the All-Star Break. No, he's not injured, he's just worried he might get injured if he played the All-Star Game. Likewise, I think Rivera's not properly injured either, as he pitched on Saturday, though I'm not as certain of that. Now, personally I think it's a perfectly reasonable decision to beg out of an exhibition contest to avoid the possibility of re-aggravating an injury, but still, let's not pretend that Jeter (or possibly also Rivera) are missing this game due to injury. They're missing this game due to caution.
*Okay, so it's also true that about two-thirds of the country's baseball fans hate the Yankees, and they would probably hear more boos than cheers. But I think Chase Utley has a word or two for the Yankees about how to handle the prospect of being booed, ne?

Debt Ceiling Cop-Out

Mitch McConnell had a plan to punt on the debt ceiling. Basically, Congress would cede its authority to raise the debt ceiling to the Executive Branch for the remainder of Obama's term in office, retaining only the right to block such an increase by an affirmative two-third supermajority vote which, obviously, would never happen. Three main thoughts about that:

1. Yippee! Substantively, it would be amazing if they would just agree to raise the debt limit, or even better, scrap the concept for the time being, and just let this whole effing debt negotiation stop.
2. Once upon a time, a wise Congress ditched the debt ceiling altogether, just authorizing an unlimited amount of debt in perpetuity. Unfortunately a foolish Congress later re-instated the limit, but there's no reason why this Congress couldn't destroy the limit as well.
3. The specific mechanics of this plan strike me as really weird. It's phrased as "giving the executive the power to raise the debt limit," but since the debt limit is really just the maximum amount of debt that Congress has authorized (as it must do under the Constitution), that's a strange way to put it. Ultimately what's going on here is that Congress authorizes the executive to issue an unlimited amount of debt, and claims to restrict itself from revoking that authorization for a few years except by a two-thirds vote. That last bit is clearly impossible, or it would be if the maxim that a legislature cannot bind its future self still held true. The specific device of an executive request followed by a potential Congressional veto is also, I think, the kind of thing the Supreme Court has frowned upon.

But first and foremost, this does seem to suggest that McConnell's corporate overlords really, really want this limit raised. Maybe the wealthy/business community would like a "deficit reduction" deal best of all, but if the deal looks impossible then they clearly prefer not tanking the world economy. One almost wonders, in fact, if Obama knows that, and is trying to make his final offer that Republicans end up rejecting, and then settling for a clean debt increase in lieu of, as "reasonable" (which is to say right-wing) as possible, so that he ends up looking that much better. That's the optimistic interpretation, anyway.

UPDATE: Apparently the plan is even crazier than I thought. I think I take back the "Yippee!" part, though I still hope they end up raising the limit and/or scraping it somehow without making any big ol' spending cuts.

DJ3K!!!!1!!1!!!

My dad and I just went to Modell's Sporting Goods store to purchase some extra-long golf tees, and on our way through the front door we were bombarded by signs imploring us to "celebrate" Derek Jeter's 3000th hit by purchasing commemorative bracelets. Uh, no. But it did kind of drive home for me how big a deal people are making of this: a really big deal. And I think that's very telling. In 2009, Jeter played in 153 games, posting a .334 batting average while notching 212 base hits and finishing third in the MVP voting, behind Joe Mauer and Mark Teixeira. That was, obviously, a really great season. And I remember that at the time people were talking about the possibility that he would break the all-time hits record. That had been his age-35 season, and he had 2747 hits through that point; to get the 1509 hits he would need to match Pete rose, he would've needed just 7.5 more seasons of the caliber of his '09 showing. Unlikely? Sure. But not impossible, if he played at a very high level on a good offensive team until he was 45 or so.

Now people aren't talking about Jeter setting the all-time hits record. Now people are making a big effing deal out of his getting to 3000. This is not being treated as one more step in the long march of his career, this is being treated as the summation of his career, the valediction. What people will say of Derek Jeter decades from now is that he was a member of the 3000-hits club. That's it. And I think the fact that people are making such a fuss about this number demonstrates that people understand that now, after a year and a half of pure mediocrity from him.

Two quick asides: he went 5-5 today, with the second hit (a home run) being the 3000th. Whatever, good for him, it's his day, he might as well go crazy. Also, yes, those posters used the phrase "DJ3K" to denote this occurrence. I kid you not...

What Can We Wish Away?

Lawrence Tribe has an article in the New York times titled, "A Debt Ceiling We Can't Wish Away" in which he argues against the theory that the 14th Amendment negates the debt ceiling. First he refers to a 1935 Supreme Court case that declared that the Public Debt Clause of that Amendment only means that Congress cannot "alter or destroy" existing debts. Then he considers and rejects the argument that this means that all actions which make a default more likely are unconstitutional, finding it untenably broad. Then he gets to the meat of the argument: he concedes that while the Public Debt Clause might well mean that an actual default on an actual debt is unconstitutional, this doesn't mean the President has the authority to do whatever it takes to avoid such a default. If he could, Tribe argues, why couldn't he choose to levy a new tax to fund debt obligations, instead of issuing more debt? Or print a bunch more money? The rest of the article is devoted to claiming that using the constitutional option would be a bad thing, and that the Constitution doesn't and shouldn't solve all of our problems.

But there's a problem for all of these arguments that he makes: what on earth is Obama supposed to do?

Not-Catch-Up Growth

Catch-up growth, also apparently known as compensatory growth, is when something grows especially quickly after a period of slowed growth. This is an idea in biology, but also in economics, which is where I encountered the term. The idea is that, heading into a recession, an economy might be growing at a certain fairly predictable linear trend. The recession then causes the economy to shrink, falling well behind its previous trend. In these situations, it is supposed to be possible for the economy to go through a brief period of extreme growth that would be unsustainable normally. What this does is get the economy back on its pre-recession trend, so that (in terms of GDP at the very least) the recession might as well never have happened. This is what isn't happening in the American economy right now: we're growing, but not fast enough to undo any of the damage from the recession.

I can think of a couple of examples of catch-up growth in baseball. Entering the 2008 season, Carlos Delgado had a .280/.386/.549 career batting line while averaging 38 home runs and 121 RBI's per 162 games. But through June 25th of that year, he was hitting just .229/.306/.396 with 11 home runs and 35 runs driven in over 75 games. Then, in a memorable game at Yankee Stadium as part of a cross-town double-header, he hit a two-run double, a three-run bomb, and a grand slam, tying the Mets club record for runs driven in in a single nine-inning game. Beginning with that game, he hit .308/.392/.626 with 27 home runs and 80 runs driven in over the season's last 84 games. Yeah, 80 RBI's in 84 games. He ended up with a .271/.353/.518 slash line in 2008, with 38 home runs and 115 RBI's in 159 games, in line with his career averages. But he wouldn't've gotten there without his amazing second-half run.

Likewise, entering the 2010 season Jose Reyes had a career .286/.337/.435 line, but through May 22nd, he was hitting just .211/.258/.277. But from that point until he got injured playing on a hideous astroturf field in Puerto Rico (and no, I still haven't forgiven Major League Baseball for that), he hit .354/.394/.583. After that, he was at .277/.321/.419, and he ended the season at .282/.321/.428, very much in line with his career averages. But he needed that month of amazing catch-up growth in order to get there.

Here's one subtle story of the Mets' recent offensive success this year that's gone kind of unnoticed. Well, mainly it's the story of why it's gone unnoticed. Entering this year, Josh Thole had a career .286/.357/.373 line; Angel Pagan had a career .285/.335/.435 line; and Jason Bay had a career .278/.374/.508 line. Through his injury that kept him out until late May, Pagan was hitting .159/.259/.246. Through May 21st Thole was hitting .205/.281/.241. And through June 13th, Bay was hitting just .207/.303/.273. But since those various points, Pagan's been hitting .305/.377/.418, Thole's hitting .329/.430/.438, and Bay's hitting .347/.405/.542. All of those are slightly better than their career lines, or what you might hope to get out of those players over a full season. But they're also not as ridiculous as what Delgado or Reyes did in their runs of catch-up growth. All three of these players still look like they're having a very disappointing year, and in a sense they are. For that reason, it doesn't really look like Bay, Pagan, or Thole are 'surging.' (Slightly different in Bay's case, since there's been so much attention on his struggles and any sign of his breaking out of this slump.)

But it's still a huge deal for the team. Sure, it'd be nice if one of them would decide to carry the team the way Delgado did after the break in '08, or Reyes did in June of '10. But hey, Reyes is kind of carrying the team already. What Pagan, Thole, and Bay have done is stopped being automatic outs. They're no longer black holes in the lineup. They are, more or less, themselves. And that is all they need to be. Remember, the point of the Mets entering this year was that Thole/Davis/Murphy/Reyes/Wright/Bay/Pagan/Beltran was, on paper, a very good offense. The problem was that all of them had question-marks. There were reasons to doubt all of them, although Wright and Davis perhaps less than the others. And those doubts were well-founded early in the season, as Thole, Wright, Bay, and Pagan all sucked. But it's still true that, on paper, that's a great offense. So if Thole, Bay, and Pagan can stop sucking, and just start being themselves anymore, that's plenty. It'll make the Mets a good team going forward, especially if Wright and/or Davis come back and play like themselves as well. Catch-up growth is very nice, it's flashy, and it gets attention. But unlike in the American economy as a whole, it's not what the Mets need. They just need nice, normal growth. Pagan, Thole, Bay, and, eventually, Wright don't need to play like people making up for a slump, they just need to play like people playing their normal games.

On the Minimum Wage

This past semester, I took a class in microeconomics. The information I learned in this class has proved tremendously useful in finding ways to criticize the rightwards-leaning conclusions people often draw from economics. So, just for fun, in this post I'm going to be critiquing the notion that minimum wages are a bad idea, an idea which I've critiqued before for various reasons but have figured out a new way to critique, using fancy microeconomical diagrams.

On Independence

In and around the year 1776, many people living in the American colonies decided they wanted to get out from under the rule of the British Empire and form their own independent nation. Now, not all of them wanted this; from what I remember of AP U.S. History, it was about 40% "patriot," 20% "loyalist," and 40% neutral. Ultimately the pro-independence faction convinced the neutrals to more or less support them, and most of the loyalists fled to Canada, and the movement for independence was born. One military victory later, you had the United States of America.

In and around the year 1860, many people living in the American South decided they wanted to get out from under the U.S. federal government and form their own independent nation. Not all of them wanted this, but ultimately the forces supporting independence prevailed and the movement for independence was born. One military defeat later, and you still had the United States of America.

For most of the nation's entire history, many of the people of Canada who live in Quebec have felt that they don't like being under the rule of the Anglophone Canadian government. From time to time they try to get up a movement in favor of independence. So far it hasn't gotten very far, and we still have this thing called Canada.

Thoughts on All-Star Voting Results

First of all, JOSE!!!!!

Second of all, I think almost all of these elections are correct. On the A.L. side of things, Alex Avila, Adrian Gonzalez, Alex Rodriguez, Jose Bautista, Curtis Granderson, and David Ortiz are rather clearly the best at their positions. Josh Hamilton's spent a lot of time injured this year, which means there are a bunch of outfielders who've compiled better seasons, but he was last year's MVP and when he's played this year he's been great. I think that's a completely reasonable pick. On the N.L. side, Brian McCann, Rickie Weeks, Jose Reyes (!!!), and Matt Kemp are pretty clearly the best people out there.

But let's be honest, the Derek Jeter thing is absurd. His on-base percentage and slugging percentage this year are both .324, and his defense, as usual, sucks. Asdrubal Cabrera is slugging .502, and Jhonny Peralta's hitting .311/.359/.538 with good defense. Hell, there are dozens of A.L. shortstops having better years than Jeter. And I understand career numbers making something of a difference, but Jeter hasn't even been okay this year, he's been awful. Meanwhile, Robinson Cano doesn't really deserve this, but in his case I think the career accomplishment thing is more understandable. Ben Zobrist, Dustin Pedroia, Howie Kendrick, and Ian Kinsler all appear to be comparable at hitting, but doing a better job fielding; that's probably enough of a judgment call that you can't really fault anyone either way.

For the N.L., Rickie Weeks is more or less comparable to Danny Espinosa at second, and probably a little bit better than his voting rival Brandon Phillips; you can't fault the voters here, though there were other picks they could've made that would've been fine as well. Placido Polanco is probably the only hitter in the entire All-Star game who's a below-average hitter this year, though no other third basemen have distinguished themselves that much (with the exception of Pablo Sandoval, who's played about half the games). I don't think you can really complain about anything at such a weak position. As for the outfield, Andrew McCutchen is clearly the best out there, and it's a bit of a travesty that he's not even on the roster. And there are perhaps half a dozen other outfielders who arguably deserve to be there in lieu of Lance Berkman. But at the same time, I think that's kind of a reasonable pick.

As for the lineups, here's what I'd do based on these rosters. For the American League, Granderson, Cano, Gonzalez, Bautista, Ortiz, Rodriguez, Hamilton, Avila, and Jeter. (Yeah, ninth, that's right. If he's even there.) For the National League, Reyes, Braun, Kemp, Fielder, Votto (as DH), Berkman, McCann, Polanco, and Weeks.

Bad Faith, Free Trade Style

The economic argument for free trade involves making a bunch of supply-demand diagrams and noticing that, if you expand trade to include the entire world, it can't help but increase overall surplus. That is, if the country becomes an exporter and the price of the good in that country increases, the gains for producers will outweigh the losses for consumers, and if the country becomes an importer and the price of the good drops, the gains for consumers will outweigh the damage to producers. This means that, in theory, one could then re-allocate some portion of the gains that the winners from trade accrue to the losers, allowing everyone to come out ahead as a net matter. If you do it right, free trade can be pareto efficient.

Mitch McConnell, a "supporter" of free trade, is planning to vote against various free-trade agreements the Administration wants if they don't drop their insistence on including Trade Adjustment Assistance in the pacts. TAA is a program aimed at helping workers displaced by the effects of free trade find new jobs. It constitutes, in other words, the exact kind of redistributive scheme that the standard economics argument in favor of free trade calls for to make everyone better off. And McConnell opposes it. This is a tell; he's tipping his hand that he doesn't really care about free trade. He doesn't want a Pareto improvement in the well-being of Americans; he wants a really, really big improvement in the well-being of large American companies that stand to profit from free trade done badly. This is the kind of thing to look for from a politician, because when they take a stance like this it means they are not playing the game in good faith.

The War Powers Act

I just read a post by Eric Posner, son of the conservative jurist Richard Posner and author of a book called The Executive Unbound, arguing that criticizing Harold Koh and John Yoo for advocating narrow interpretations of statutes to give the executive broader latitude in conducting foreign policy really amounts to criticizing the entire way American executives have handled foreign policy throughout history. I'm not sure I find his particular argument convincing, but I honestly don't really have a very easy time getting worked up about the War Powers Act. As I see it, basically, the Constitution prescribes a particular division of war-making powers: Congress is responsible for providing the military and for declaring war, and the executive is responsible for managing war. Maybe the practice in the post-WWII world of not really declaring war is unconstitutional. Maybe the executive really can just bomb some random country without asking Congress. Maybe NATO and the UN really are constitutional commitments of support for international military undertakings that change the prior balance of power among the branches of the U.S. government. But whatever the truth is about all of those issues, they are issues that Congress cannot change by simple statute. If Congress must declare all wars, and that includes everything from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya, then Congress can't give the President a 60-day window to conduct undeclared wars. Likewise, if these types of conflict can be legitimately begun by the President, I don't see that Congress can say that 60 days later the Commander-in-Chief needs to ask for authorization. Now, of course, Congress can always defund anything it wants, but in terms of formal war-making powers I just don't think that the process can be changed by a simple law. Whether you favor executive power or congressional power over war, the War Powers Act just isn't of a high enough constitutional stature to change what really ought to be going on. So yeah, Obama's violating the War Powers Act. But so what?