Monday punditizing. But first...
NY Times:
Bob Sheppard, whose elegant intonation as the public-address announcer at Yankee Stadium for more than half a century personified the image of Yankee grandeur, died Sunday at his home in Baldwin, on Long Island. He was 99.
Sheppard was the abiding link between DiMaggio,Mantle, Maris, Murcer, Munson, Catfish Hunter, Mickey Rivers and the current group of all stars.
The first Yankee lineup Sheppard announced contained eight future Hall of Famers, five on the New York squad alone: Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Johnny Mize, Yogi Berra, and Phil Rizzuto. Their opponents, the Boston Red Sox, featured Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, and Lou Boudreau. The first player he introduced was Dominic DiMaggio.[3] He was initially paid $15 per game or $17 for a doubleheader.
Condolences. And, of course, the Yanks have the best record in baseball going into the All-Star break (and a 5 game lead on 3rd place Boston.) But speaking of baseball:
Wade Henderson and Janet Murguia:
Major League Baseball is scheduled to play its 2011 All-Star Game in Phoenix, where discrimination and racial profiling will effectively be sanctioned by SB1070, Arizona's controversial new immigration law. Unless the league acts, next year our favorite all-stars could enter a hostile environment, and the families, friends and fans of a third of the players could be treated as second-class citizens because of their skin color or the way they speak.
This law isn't about solving the immigration issue; it's about scapegoating, an established practice in Arizona.
Paul Krugman:
Back in 2002, a professor turned Federal Reserve official by the name of Ben Bernanke gave a widely quoted speech titled "Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here." Like other economists, myself included, Mr. Bernanke was deeply disturbed by Japan’s stubborn, seemingly incurable deflation, which in turn was "associated with years of painfully slow growth, rising joblessness, and apparently intractable financial problems." This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to an advanced nation with sophisticated policy makers. Could something similar happen to the United States?
Ross Douthat:
Still, watching the Giudices sashay through their onyx-encrusted mansion, and knowing that thousands of similarly profligate homeowners are simply walking away from their debts, it’s easy to succumb to a little class-warrior fantasizing. (Pitchforks, tar, feathers ... that sort of thing.)
The trick is to channel those impulses in a constructive direction. The left-wing instinct, when faced with high-rolling irresponsibility, is usually to call for tax increases on the rich. But the problem, here and elsewhere, isn’t exactly that we tax high rollers’ incomes too lightly. It’s that we subsidize their irresponsibility too heavily — underwriting their bad bets and bailing out their follies. The class warfare we need is a conservative class warfare, which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out.
Solutions are no good: it must be a conservative solution! The inability of conservative columnists to see the obvious is not a simple thing. It takes work and training. We assuredly tax high rollers too lightly, but Douthat wants to make it a middle class problem and spare the rich (who vote Republican, and contribute mightily to conservative causes.) But don't weep for the rich. Good times are already here:
NY Times:
Many Americans are still waiting for an economic recovery. But for corporate America, a recovery of sorts is already at hand.
The corporate earnings season, that quarterly rite of Wall Street, begins in earnest on Monday, and investors are hoping for some good news. Major corporations are expected to report some of their strongest profits in years.
CBS:
BP's now saying by Wednesday, its new cap will stop the spill, a seal so tight not one drop of oil escape. For now, every drop is gushing into the Gulf.
BP's gusher - its cap torn off - hemorrhaged oil for a second day and won't stop until engineers bolt on a new 75 ton cap to seal the broken well.
"We should anticipate that this whole process should take another five to six days," said BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells...
By switching caps BP's gambling: more oil now, less oil soon. But for now, this spill is worse.
There's some light at the end of this tunnel, finally. But we're all from Missouri: show us. Then we can talk about the incredible engineering feat, and not until then.