Disorder in the House

Disorder in the house
There's a flaw in the system
And the fly in the ointment's gonna bring the whole thing down

The floodgates are open
We've let the demons loose
The big guns have spoken
And we've fallen for the ruse

Disorder in the house
It's a fate worse than fame
Even the Lhasa Apso seems to be ashamed....

Disorder in the house
All bets are off
I'm sprawled across the davenport of despair

Disorder in the house
I'll live with the tosses
And watch the sundown through the portiere

--Written by Warren Zevon and Jorge Calderon, 2003:  "The Wind"

I downloaded this picture from the right-wing news service Newsmax (I like to keep tabs from time to time on what is getting them all excited).  I like the wit of the reference to Julius Caesar; there was something Roman in Boehner's sacrifice, and something very civic and honorable in fixing the looming budget dilemma with the deal--which will be highly unpopular with the Tea Party membership, to which he was more than willing to offer the back of his hand.  There will be more here about analogies between ancient Rome and the US; I will just say that in the arc of the Romans' history, we are well past the fall of their Republic.

The rallying of the Republicans around Paul Ryan was predictable.  He wanted a less-than-fulltime Speakership role, and the caucus' inclination was for weakening the position of the leadership, so there was grounds for agreement.

Speaking of prediction, I caught Ryan's probability of being Speaker at a pretty good timing on predictit.org, buying shares at 34% (they're now at 95%).   I ended up on the wrong side of the Will Biden Run? teeter-totter; my last trade was for Yes; however, I was always on the No side for his winning the nomination and the Presidency, which more than made up for the loss on the speculative market of his announcement.  And, my investment in shares on positive outcomes for Hillary in 2016 (in Iowa, for the nomination, for the Presidency, and for a woman being elected President) have all appreciated nicely in recent weeks.  Finally, I got shares on Justin Trudeau becoming the next Prime Minister of Canada when they were at 20% and the race was a virtual three-way tie.  I wasn't sure then who would win, but I was fairly certain that the incumbent, Stephen Harper, would not.

No Labels!
My good friend and radio talk-show host Norm Goldman should get on the docket for this group, which seeks to bridge the partisan chasm.  It's not that he is non-partisan, but that he eschews labels like "liberal" and "conservative" (and I agree they have become totally distorted to the point of being meaningless).  We differ on "progressive", though; I think he and I both are of that persuasion, while he insists it is not a meaningful one.

Anyway, this No Labels group had its caucus in New Hampshire recently (of course; for a few months it is the center of the US political universe).  Its favorable location and opportunity to showcase one's pragmatic line-crossing (if that was the posture deemed advantageous) allowed it to get the attendance of a number of Presidential candidates:  Christie, Pataki, Graham, O'Malley (by phone), Sanders, Trump, Kasich and Webb.

A couple more interesting notes:  The co-chairs are Jon Huntsman and Joe Lieberman--showing that the group's core is among those rejected by, or running away from, their party's base--while the agenda also showed  participation from Kelly Ayotte, Evan Bayh, and Bill Nelson.  Ayotte is running for re-election in New Hampshire, and will need crossover votes from Indpendents and/or Democrats to win a tough battle, so she had two reasons to show up.  Nelson I can't quite figure--he is not running until 2018, but in Florida it is usually best to have crossover appeal.

The most interesting case is Bayh:  one of Indiana's Senate seats is opening in 2016 (Dan Coats is retiring), and Bayh is sitting on $10 million of campaign funds from previous elections, but his office has stated clearly that Bayh is not running for it.   My guess is that he is in touch with the Clintonistas, and they have told him he will be in consideration for the Vice Presidential nomination, to keep himself available and burnish his credentials with moderates (which have always been good). If Bayh can give Hillary a fighting chance in Indiana (which Obama won narrowly in 2008, and lost in 2012), that makes the Republicans' Electoral College map even more difficult.

I will not be watching the CNBC debate tomorrow (the World Series holds more interest for me); though some different moderators from a less-friendly network might ask questions outside of the usual Republican primary comfort zone, I'm not too interested in Trump bashing his latest straw dog. This time I imagine he will come out looking for a reason to attack Ben Carson, who will try the rope-a-dope strategy.  Whatever.

Fall Sports Preview

The baseball postseason starts tonight with the AL Wild Card game, and I have to say I am looking forward to postseason games, but without much of a dog in the hunt (due to the predictably bad season for the Cincinnati Reds).  In a season of insurgents, my spring predictions were quite bad:  by my count, I had about 3 1/2 of the 10 teams into the postseason correct (Cards, Dodgers, Pirates, and Royals, sort of).  I did spot rising tidings for the Cubs, Rangers, and Astros, all of which made the postseason, but didn't expect them to have quite so much success as to make the playoffs this year. The moves of the Mets, Yankees, and Blue Jays, I missed entirely, and I was like most in picking the favored Washington Nationals to do a lot more than they did.

In recent years, I have looked for the teams that were hot going into the postseason to do well--this year, there aren't any, really.  None of the postseason teams have better than a 6-4 record in their last 10 games (KC, Toronto, and Houston).  The AL teams that have done particularly well in the second half of the season are Texas and Toronto, so I would pick the winner of their series to win the league's Championship Series.

Wednesday's NL Wild Card game shapes up as one of the highlights, a do-or-die showdown of  two top starting pitchers, the Cubs' Jake Arrieta and the Pirates' Gerrit Cole, and the teams with the second- and third-best records in the major leagues.  I pick the winner of that game to defeat their divisional series opponent, the team with the best regular-season record, their divisional rival the Cards, who have struggled late in the season.  The Mets have a great young rotation, but their pitching cannot match the Dodgers' supreme 1-2 punch of Zach Greinke and Clayton Kershaw.  I expect the key will be Game 4, in New York, when the Mets will either have to go to a rookie with a bad back (Stephen Matz) or the ancient guile of Bartolo Colon, probably to save their series, and possibly against Greinke going on short rest.

My sentimental pick is the Cubs, but they are no better than 50-50 to get past their first game.  I will go with the Blue Jays vs. Dodgers in the Series, but will drop in a comment if these choices are obviated in the first round.

Basketball
The surprises of the 2014-15 regular season were the conference-topping performances of the Golden State Warriors in the West and the Atlanta Hawks in the East.  The Hawks flamed out rather badly in the playoffs, but the Warriors confirmed their status in the top flight by cruising through to the championship with surprisingly little difficulty.

Still, league watchers doing previews of this upcoming season are having trouble recognizing or accepting the Warriors' pre-eminence.  One very good reason is the restructuring of the lineup of the San Antonio Spurs, who return their veterans and their rising star Kawhi Leonard, but have also added a major piece, through the free agent signing of LaMarcus Aldridge.  In the West, there are two or three other teams with all the pieces to make a possible run, including Houston, the LA Clippers, and Oklahoma City (assuming Kevin Durant stays healthy this year).

The East race is considered to be no contest, with the Cleveland Cavaliers far in front and several possible contenders, including the Hawks, for the moderately prestigious #2 slot.  As a Chicago resident, it will be interesting to see if the Bulls can return to their previous Conference Finals form; in particular, whether Derrick Rose still has it, similarly whether Pau Gasol and rising star Jimmy Butler can meet prior standards of performance, and whether the departure of coach Thibodeau, who to my view always got overachievement from the team, though perhaps at the cost of exhaustion, will hurt them.  My former favorite team (from the '90's, basically), the New York Knicks, will remain the target of jokes and their GM Phil Jackson the subject of endless speculation, but their selection, at the #4 draft pick, of a 20-year-old 7-foot Latvian work-in-progress (Kristaps Porzingis) suggests to me that they are playing the long game, and that achieving mediocrity this year will have been a successful campaign.

I will make some NBA predictions in a follow-on comment when I have seen a bit more.

In college hoops I have to be even more reticent as the season approaches.  My co-favored team (U. of Kentucky) had an undefeated regular season, but lost in the NCAA semifinals, with their six or seven top players going pro.  Fear not, coach John Calipari and the Wildcats return with a fresh crop of prospective one-and-dones, but I will have to watch some games before I know whether they have actual possibilities to compete at the top level or are more likely (as happened one recent year) to lose in the first round of the loser tournament, the NIT.   As for the other co-favored, U. of Louisville, Rick Pitino's organization just got rocked with the disclosure that one of his assistants has been accused of pimping ho's for prospects.  I kid you not; the consequences could be very heavy.

U. of North Carolina is the preseason favorite--I would be happy with anything non-Carolinian winning the championship in my preliminary assessment.  The college regular season has become a four-month learning exercise for talented freshmen, as their coaches seek to develop the chemistry needed for a tournament run, and the players prove their professional mettle or decide to return for further schooling.

Soccer
My principal preoccupation early in the international season (the US season is in midcourse, but I don't follow it much) is the disastrously bad performance of my favorite English team.  Something is rotten in the Borough of Chelsea (leaving aside that the stadium is in Fulham and the practice grounds in the fashionable western suburb of Cobham), and the Blues got'em in a serious way so far.

Despite his leading the team to a very successful 2014-15 season (above all, Premier League champions, but also League Cup winners who had respectable F.A. Cup and Champions League seasons), the start of this season is so bad that head coach Jose Mourinho has already been targeted for a quick hook, which Chelsea in its 21st-Century supersized version has readily employed. So far, though, he has received a vote of confidence from the Board of the club--which is fine, as long as it lasts--and Mourinho has stated he will not quit, they will have to fire him.

Really, though, the team is in 16th place (out of 20) in the league, and the start of their Champions League group has not been auspicious, either.  Mourinho relied heavily--perhaps excessively--on a consistent selection of his top 11 last year (as long as they were healthy), and the team has not changed much, but all of the returnees are playing noticeably worse, so far, than they did last year. So, there is a possible charge of overuse, and I would add another, of being profligate with the talent acquired.  It is possible one could construct a team of just the players Mourinho has discarded in the two years he's been there--names such as Mata, DeBruyne, Lukaku, Cole, Schurrle, Cech, Salah, Cuadrado...--that would be better than the ones he's got; they didn't fit into his scheme of team defense.  Yet it is exactly that defense which is the problem so far; with defensemen he has been less wasteful, but his returning defenders are the ones who seem tired and slow.  To be fair, though, in today's game and in Chelsea a lot of the strategy is about the midfield maintaining control or blunting the counterattacks of the opponents, and that seems also to have been lacking.   I'd say Mourinho has until February--there will be an opportunity to fill gaps during the transfer window in January, and if he can plug holes he might be able to survive even a subpar season; if, however, they come out of that period still looking like this, it will be time for a total rethink and yet another team manager.

On the positive side, my Italian side Fiorentina is a surprise leader in Serie A.  I have followed them, somewhat inconsistently I admit, for longer than Chelsea, some thirty years, and their performance is usually like Chelsea's used to be, pre-Roman Abramovich unlimited budget days:  middle of the pack, occasionally better, generally hanging on in the top level.   Their team this year is fairly anonymous, filled with Slavs and Hispanics, but they are playing well and playing together.  The teams of the larger markets--based in Rome, Milan, Naples, and Torino--are playing quite badly so far.  I doubt this will last.

One thing to watch is the qualification for the 2016 Olympics in Rio, a contest of national teams that has gradually risen in significance.  It has some peculiar specifications, with three players allowed over the age of 25, but that is less of an impediment than it seems with the strong youth development in many nations.  The US has important games toward its qualifications coming up .

Football (The Other Kinds) 
I have seen one college game so far this year, an inspired bid by the usually-lowly Indiana Hoosiers to defeat #1-ranked Ohio State (last year's national champion).  I should root for Ohio St., which has broken the stranglehold the SEC teams have had on the top spots, but I feel the Buckeyes have just cloned the SEC formula for success.  Anyway, OSU won by holding Indiana on a series of downs inside its 10-yard line in the last minute.  Questionable but acceptable result for the #1 ranked team (the commentators were suggesting down the stretch that one loss may not disqualify OSU for the national championship playoffs, which will be four teams this year); and a moral victory for IU, which has been getting wiped out by Ohio St. in its Big 10 games as long as I can remember.

The NFL is gradually assuming the character of the WWE (pro wrestling): highly entertaining, but results without much credibility.  Cheating is rising, as are players' misdeeds, lawsuits, and, unfortunately, permanently disabling injuries, with sportsmanship totally evaporating; now we know not even the playoffs are immune. ("Deflategate")

There is also a form of football known as rugby (union, or league, I don't know which, and does it matter?) that is holding its world championship tournament now.  I know the US made the field but probably is already eliminated; I think England is out, too.  The big news was a huge upset by Japan of South Africa in the first game they played in the tourney, but I don't think they could sustain the momentum.  That about covers my knowledge of the event.

Of the Recent Moment

Papalmania
It's not hard to guess who will be Man of the Year and the US' Most Admired Person for 2015.  For six days, Pope Francis took over America; the question now will be to what extent we take what he says to our hearts.  And our heads.

He had never been to the US before, but for the most part  he had prepared well, understood his audience and the messages he wanted to deliver.  For just about anyone, Francis brought both some comfort and some challenge.  Even for the senior US Catholic clergy:  while his speeches and commentary generally followed the church's teachings, with regard to the history of pedophilia in several Catholic dioceses and the cover-ups that followed, he began by lamenting the suffering of the priesthood (!) but changed his tune and offered solace to its victims and promised resolution.

For the rest of us, those of the left got condemnations of inequality and the death penalty, and the culture of war and death and guns, along with acceptance of alternate lifestyles.  The right got firm opposition to abortion.  Everyone got encouragement to aid the refugees, to save the planet from environmental devastation, and the proposition that there is a higher calling than capitalism.  The event suggested in my mind a hypothetical visit to Rome by Jesus; hit hard and fast, but don't stick around long enough for the counterforce to catch up.

Politically, he would be something extremely rare in American politics:  someone who is truly pro-life, across the board (though I am waiting to hear about his approach to overpopulation, or whether he thinks the planet can stand another 100 years of the traditional five-children Catholic families). No one here wishes him ill, at least not yet; but he better watch out for those back home in the Vatican whom he has been dispossessing with his reforms.

Yogi Berra
The passing of Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra, baseball Hall of Fame catcher and one of the most beloved heroes of the sport, came somewhat quietly at the age of 90.  He was the top everyday player on the Yankee team that set the all-time record for the sport with five consecutive World Series championships, and he held the major league record for homeruns by a catcher until broken by Johnny Bench.

It seemed as though Berra was characterized as some of baseball idiot savant, an impression reinforced by his tendency to provide bizarre quotes to the press.  His nickname, "Yogi", was sort of a mocking description of him as being a guru, something he seemed to accept with his characteristic good humor.  I think this was an unfair treatment, one which underrated his intelligence and overweighted his relatively uneducated skill level with the English language (he was the son of Italian immigrants).

The catcher is normally the on-field director for the defense, helping to set the positioning and signaling to the pitcher the type of pitch and location.  Later, he was the manager, and a fairly successful one, for the Yankees and the Mets. But beyond clearly having a high baseball IQ, he had also the emotional one, and, sometimes, an offbeat wisdom. From this list of 50 Berra  quotes, many of which just reveal idiomatic confusion, I selected these three which make a lot of sense to me:

30. I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.

44. Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.

17. The future ain’t what it used to be.

Berra was at the very end of his playing career when I became a baseball fan, and my lifelong aversion to the Yankees might have played out differently if I had seen him in his prime. Since then, I have developed a more nuanced view of the teams that derive their entitlement to success from having the deepest pockets, but in Berra's case, it was superior scouting which won him to the team in the first place. I do remember being offended on his behalf when he was fired as Yankee manager in 1964 after leading them to the pennant (but not winning the Series), and I think it was the Yankees' shabby treatment of him in his second round as their manager in the '80's which eventually turned him off to the club (and particularly, to George Steinbrenner).

Near-Death Experiences:  VW, Boehner, Blatter, Walker
"Defeat device"--what an ironically accurate name for the gadget which is now on the verge of destroying Volkswagen's reputation and economic future. Faced with a difficult engineering challenge for their highly-promoted "clean diesel" technology, when it was failing tests for emissions of dangerous nitrogen dioxide, it figured out how to detect the presence of a testing device and change the emission level, just for the test.  Fiendishly clever, except that it was not hidden sufficiently well, and the software driving the cheat was discovered (credit to West Virginia University).

Nothing but losers as it turns out, except possibly for VW's competitors (if it turns out that they are not also guilty of this kind of fraud).  The owners of the affected cars (11 million of them, across several brands, if we can trust VW's numbers) don't know whether they will end up with a car with diminished emissions and output or some sort of compromise, though VW alleges that they can fix the problem (apart from just removing the defeat device, which will not do the trick).  The public has been subjected to dangerous and illegal emissions, health effects unknown (but possibly litigable). The employees, the German economy and the reputation of German export products and regulators are all negatively affected, but the ones who will be hurt worst (apart from those in the management who will be revealed to be culpable, penalties for which could be major in both civil and criminal courts, in several jurisdictions) will be the shareholders.  I was astounded to see the stock rebound a couple days after the disclosure--I am guessing it was the evidence of effort by the company to support the share prices from total collapse.  To date, they have dropped about 40%, a BP-oil-spill kind of effect, but I suspect there is going to be a steady flow of new indictments, new lawsuits, that will weigh them down for several years.  

At some point, I would expect the company to recover, as this was not a pervasive problem, but one presumably limited to a team of engineers and programmers and a few management types that winked at the scam, and there will be strong support for VW regaining its feet from the German state (the local region of Lower Saxony is one of the leading shareholders).  That being said, my advice to potential investors is to wait 3-4 years, not to buy into the story too soon.  And there is a chance that VW, which spent 70 years successfully rehabilitating its image from its Nazi-era origins as a consumer-friendly, efficient mass market car producer (with significant upscale flavor through its ownership of Audi and Porsche), may end up in a negative downdraft which is permanent.  It's going to be a rough ride, for those shareholders who choose to ride it out. 

Next up, John Boehner, who chose to fall on the political sword rather than endure yet another government shutdown crisis over the question of de-funding Planned Parenthood.  I think it was just fatigue and frustration for him, and not some more complex strategy:  he had enough of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus (or whatever name they call themselves), their indiscipline and lack of realism or effectiveness.  Boehner leaves a legacy of some five years of legislative impotence for his side that so far has not been punished by the voters, and the zealots want more of the same, only somehow better.  Kevin McCarthy, the Majority Leader, is the obvious frontrunner to take the Speaker's position; he immediately put his foot in it, bragging about how the House's Benghazi hearings, prolonged endlessly and so far unrevealing, had brought down Hillary's approval ratings. To be fair, they did produce one result, the disclosure of Hillary's secret email servers, which, though little more substantial, has proven much more damaging than the Benghazi case or the hearings themselves.  The problem with his comment is that McCarthy had strayed from the approved talking points, that the hearings were an objective, non-partisan inquiry into a tragic foreign policy security failure, so a bad omen for his potential Speakership. Personally, I think the timing is perfect for a takeover by the extremists and a spectacular fiasco, a fact of which the Republican establishment figures are fully aware and will try desperately to avoid.  Meanwhile, I celebrate the fall of the House of Orange and note that the new claimant to prominence with the color, Donald Trump, is timed in synch with the seasonal change of leaf pigmentation. 

I was amazed to see that Seth Blatter is still in charge of FIFA, the international association of professional soccer.  His name reappeared amidst all the other news because of his criminal indictment, now going to trial in Switzerland, and the question of the moment is whether legendary French football hero and top FIFA official Michel Platini will be dragged into the mud with his friend Blatter.  So far, FIFA has not stepped away from their catastrophically bad decisions to award the next two World Cup tournaments to Russia and to Qatar.  Both were possibly the result of corruption: the first was defensible, but has turned out to have been poor timing; the second totally inexcusable and doomed to disastrous outcome if not unwound. 

Finally, we need to celebrate the collapse of the candidacy of Scott Walker, the Republican candidate whom we singled out for our strongest opposition some time ago.  I am grateful that the polled primary-probable electorate recognized fairly readily what I called out:  that his is a small mind, with small accomplishments and small ideas, and that no amount of politically pandering positioning could hide those facts.  My next prime target is a tougher one, a canny, unctuous and unscrupulous opportunist, Ted Cruz.  He hasn't done particularly well in the polling so far, but he has positioned himself well to suck up support for the failing Rand Paul campaign and for the leavings from Trump's eventual abandonment of his campaign cruise ship when it finally runs aground (see Schettino, Francesco).  It is important to realize that, while nothing has been won so far, neither has anything been lost, unless it is the hopes, dreams, and dollars of campaign contributors.  So if Cruz still has his, we still have him to worry about; he will be one of the last to leave the stage, I suspect.  

You may notice that I save myself from invective about the current front-runners, Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina.  My feelings about them is that they pose little threat:  they will fade, and if they shouldn't, if somehow one of them gets the nomination, the Republicans will get the comprehensive general election thrashing they will deserve.