It could be worse.

No, I’m not kidding.  Focusing on Derek Jeter’s broken ankle is missing the other problems that need to be addressed if the Yankees are to advance to the World Series this year.

First, about Jeter.  He’s about as well as can be expected when you break your ankle like that, it’s not a career ending injury, the 3 month rehab time frame puts him back at Legends field at the start of spring training just as if nothing had happened except another one of those years as Emily puts it.

And everyone likes and admires the Captain, especially his clubhouse leadership which is undiminished.

But, it’s not as if he was making Tiger pitching quake in their boots either.

The reason the Yankees are not dominating is because they’re a very ordinary team with some notable flaws.  They are not hitting.  ARod isn’t the only one, just the most over rated and expensive.  They have no pitching outside of Sabbathia and Kuroda and their bull pen is suspect at best without Rivera.

It would be a mistake to think that last night’s game turned on the events of the Top of the 12th, it was decided in the Top of the 6th when Andy Pettitte put them in a 2 – 0 hole.

It’s easy to get discouraged at this point.  Listening to the New York media you’d think it was the end of the world, but there are hopeful signs.  They have only lost 1 game in a 7 game series and have identified several weaknesses which they might be able to correct.  Kuroda (16 – 11, 3.32 ERA) is a good pitcher, the second best they have and on paper much better than the Tigers’ Sanchez (9 – 13, 3.86 ERA).  The Tigers are not hitting well either and they are especially not setting the table for Cabrera.

Believe me, if in 3 days the Yankees have split at the Stadium and taken 1 at Comerica to lead the ALCS 2 – 1 you’ll be hearing all about the inspiring ‘comeback’ and the same ‘team of destiny’ crap you heard before.

And it won’t be any truer.

• ESPN Radio
• The New York Times Live Scoreboard

Junior League Games will be carried on TBS, Senior on Faux.

You should never take psychological tests as a parlor game.  I was with some friends and when they got to the analysis of my answers the scoring guide said- “How does it feel to live in a world full of idiots?”

Smuggish Thoughts (Self-indulgent)

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

October 12, 2012, 1:40 pm

It is a truth not universally acknowledged that it’s possible to be a highly successful academic and still have a somewhat fragile sense of self-worth. You get your papers published, you get tenure, maybe you win some prizes; all this says that your colleagues believe that your stuff is right, that you really do know something about your subject. But do you really? Or are you just good at self-marketing?

Some, maybe many, academics don’t care; they’ve carved out a nice career and life, so it’s all good. But if you are truly serious about your work as opposed to your career, the question of whether your knowledge is real is always with you.

…

‘ve had a wonderful career, getting all the major gongs, yet as late as 2008 it was still possible for that small self-doubting voice in my head to whisper that being a facile modeler and a pretty good writer might not mean that I really knew how the world works.

…

Well, events provided an acid test. If you believed in the little models I and others were using, you made some very striking predictions about how the world would work post-crisis – predictions that were very much at odds with what other people were saying. You predicted that trillion-dollar deficits would not drive up interest rates; that tripling the monetary base would not be inflationary; that cuts in government spending, rather than helping the economy by increasing confidence, would hurt by depressing demand, with bigger effects than in normal, non-liquidity trap times.

And the people on the other side of these issues weren’t just academics, they were major-league policy makers and famous investors.

And guess what: the models seem to work. It appears that I wasn’t just a successful self-marketer, that I really did and do know something.

So that’s great – except that it turns out that one form of anxiety has just been replaced with another. It’s great to have confirmation that you weren’t just playing career games; it is, however, not just frustrating but terrifying to watch decision-makers ignore all the hard-won evidence and knowledge, and repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. The good news is that I’m not Sammy Glick; the bad news is that I’m Cassandra.

Triumph of the Wrong?

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: October 11, 2012

The latest devastating demonstration of that wrongness comes from the International Monetary Fund, which has just released its World Economic Outlook, a report combining short-term prediction with insightful economic analysis. This report is a grim and disturbing document, telling us that the world economy is doing significantly worse than expected, with rising risks of global recession. But the report isn’t just downbeat; it contains a careful analysis of the reasons things are going so badly. And what this analysis concludes is that a disproportionate share of the bad news is coming from countries pursuing the kind of austerity policies Republicans want to impose on America.

O.K., it doesn’t say that in so many words. What the report actually says is: “Activity over the past few years has disappointed more in economies with more aggressive fiscal consolidation plans.” But that amounts to the same thing.

For leading Republicans have very much tied themselves to the view that slashing spending in a depressed economy – “fiscal consolidation,” in I.M.F.-speak – is good, not bad, for job creation. Soon after the midterm elections, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives issued a manifesto on economic policy – titled, “Spend less, owe less, grow the economy” – that called for deep spending cuts right away and pooh-poohed the whole notion that fiscal consolidation (yes, it used the same term) might deepen the economy’s slump. “Non-Keynesian effects,” the manifesto declared, would make everything all right.

Well, that turns out not to be remotely true. What the monetary fund shows is that the countries pursing the biggest spending cuts are also the countries that have experienced the deepest economic slumps. Indeed, the evidence suggests that in brushing aside the standard view that spending cuts hurt the economy in the short run, the G.O.P. got it exactly wrong. Recent spending cuts appear to have done even more harm than most analysts – including those at the I.M.F. itself – expected.

Which brings us to the question of what form economic policies will take after the election.

…

Republicans, however, are committed to an economic doctrine that has proved false, indeed disastrous, in other countries. Nor are they likely to change their views in the light of experience. After all, facts haven’t gotten in the way of Republican orthodoxy on any other aspect of economic policy. The party remains opposed to effective financial regulation despite the catastrophe of 2008; it remains obsessed with the dangers of inflation despite years of false alarms. So it’s not likely to give up its politically convenient views about job creation.

And here is where Herr Doktor Professor makes what lambert strether calls a “category error”.  Everything he says about Republicans is equally true of Barack Obama and the Democrats.

It seems the story of this and the last 4 races are going to be the Drivers and (possibly) Constructors Championships and if I say that with a sigh I’d much rather see some exciting racing.  Yeongam is fast enough, but like so many of the newer tracks with the current cars lead changes will only happen at the start, through accidents and mechanical failures, and through tire strategies.

Softs and Super Softs are on offer, most teams blew away 2 sets of the Super Softs during Qualifying (Ferrari saved a set) and all of the first five rows are on the Supers BUT…  depending on how used up they are it’s just barely possible that some drivers will try and stretch them out long enough before the first pit to run a one stop.  They will be aided by the fact that the track is so new and smooth.  Will this make much of a difference?  There is about 0.2 to 0.6 seconds lap time difference between the two compounds.

On the start everyone, particularly the even gridders will be looking for a fast one to keep Vettel from running away in the distance.  Look for any Team Order strategies at Red Bull to be designed around getting him in front of Webber in the first lap.

As far as mechanical failure goes, Pic had to accept a 10 Grid penalty for exceeding his engine allotment for the season and almost every team is on their last new one.

Schumacher can’t stay away from trouble.  After being reprimanded for impeding HRT (HRT!) in practice Mercedes will have to pay a 10,000 euro fine for unsafe release in front of Hamilton during Qualifying.

Interactive Track

• Formula One Official Site Yeongam
• Guardian Interactive Track

Yeongam

• New York Times History
• Yeongam
• Korean Grand Prix
• Qualifying

Official Sites

• Formula One Official Website
• Speed Racecast

Pretty tables below.

My stellar predictions have led some of my associates to suggest a career in sports futures, but for now I’m content to have my vast fortune safely invested in shows so off Broadway that even New Jersey is closer.

With the Yankees, Tigers, Cardinals, and Giants the contenders for the League Championships I could just take a nap until the 24th and wake up with a team worth rooting for in the World Series, but as you know I have this thing about completeness.

The Championships are the first four of seven and follow the traditional 2-3-2 format which means the Tigers will be starting off in the Stadium tonight.  Personally I think crowd participation is over rated but home field advantage does manifest itself in other ways, particularly batting second in each inning.

Tonight the Yankees will be sending Andy Pettitte (5 – 4 2.87 ERA) against Doug Fister (10 – 10, 3.45 ERA).  The New York media rate Pettitte’s performance in Game 2 as brilliant, I call it barely adequate in a game that everyone forgets the Yankees lost 3 – 2.  Fister on the other hand pitched better than expected in the Tigers 5 – 4 victory.  The Tigers are better rested, finishing their Division Series on Thursday, not barely 18 hours ago.  The Tigers have Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera who isn’t as dominant as his stats would suggest (though in fairness they haven’t been setting the table for him the way they should).  The Yankees have…

ARod, who bats 6th tonight.

As I said, it wouldn’t disappoint me to see any of the remaining teams victorious, I’m not a Yankee hater and I think any Mets fan who indulges in that pointless rivalry is wasting the energy that could be much better directed to contemplating the misery of our own situation.

But realistically I expect the Tigers to advance.  Their bats are not nearly as somnolent and Verlander is an unstoppable winning machine, better than Sabathia.

Richard will be happy, Emily not so much.

• ESPN Radio
• The New York Times Live Scoreboard

Junior League Games will be carried on TBS, Senior on Faux.

Governing without Consent of the Governed

By: masaccio, Firedog Lake

Friday October 12, 2012 11:09 am

The only reason to vote is that from the outset we agreed that consent of the governed is the essence of democracy. It was a long time ago indeed, before the Republicans made the filibuster an instrument of minority rule. The Democrats decided that they could safely be move right, just like the Republicans only less crazy, and began voting for just about anything their rich patrons wanted, from deregulation of the financial system to tax cuts for those who don’t need them to ending welfare as we know it.

Now we have the leader of the Democrats, Barack Obama, running on a platform just like the moderate version of Mitt Romney. For example, Obama says if elected, he’ll only tinker with Social Security, just like the moderate Mitt, instead of slashing it like the Tea Party Mitt. Tea Party Mitt wants to invade Syria and Iran. Moderate Mitt, like Obama, is apparently content to kill people with drones.

Moderate Mitt assumes that the Tea Party fanatics will vote for him even if he isn’t crazy enough for them, because he and his party have spent the last five years ferociously lying about Obama. So he panders to the low information voters and tribal Republicans with his version of Compassionate Conservatism. Maybe he’ll win with that combination. Are they really consenting to be governed by the insane economic policies both versions of Mitt Romney promise? Or are they just afraid of Obama?

Possibly enough low-information voters and moderate Republicans will vote for Obama because they are worried about the Tea Party Mitt, or they think Romney is a liar and an unprincipled selfish prig and that he despises them from the bottom of his plutocratic heart. Maybe that’s enough to get Obama re-elected. What kind of government are those people consenting to? For them, Obama’s the lesser of two evils. Maybe they’ll be happy to see his proposals defeated by divided government suffering from minority rule so that nothing gets done. Maybe they don’t know what else to do. That doesn’t sound like consent.

And what about the tribal democrats who are going to vote for Obama? There is no constituency in the Democratic party to cut Social Security. The vast majority of traditional Democrats realize that Social Security is the basis for their retirement and that of their parents. They want to preserve it for their children. Certainly no liberal is in favor of cutting Social Security or Medicare, and precious few are in favor of killing people with drones or locking up pot smokers or turning police departments into paramilitary operations, but tribal Democrats don’t seem interested in that kind of issue, let alone punishing Wall Street criminals. Obama just needs to top off with some of those low-information voters. He figures he’ll get their votes, and maybe he will.

…

Obama assumes lefties will vote for him because he isn’t a soulless plutocrat who thinks half of the population is out to get his money. That’s the Democratic Party’s version of the crazies saying that Obama is an Islamo-Communist from Kenya. Obama doesn’t care how close the election is, and he doesn’t care if he has majorities in Congress. He just wants to squeak through. If we vote for him, what are we consenting to? He’ll see it as approval of his program of governing from the center-right.

This isn’t about consent at all. It sucks. It’s hard to work up the energy to curse, let alone to go to the trouble of voting.

The Vice Presidential Debate: Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

October 12, 10:45 AM ET

Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms.

But he should have! He was absolutely right to be doing it. We all should be doing it. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called “objective” news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, “Come back when you’re serious.”

The load of balls that both Romney and Ryan have been pushing out there for this whole election season is simply not intellectually serious. Most of their platform isn’t even a real platform, it’s a fourth-rate parlor trick designed to paper over the real agenda – cutting taxes even more for super-rich dickheads like Mitt Romney, and getting everyone else to pay the bill.

…

Sometimes in journalism I think we take the objectivity thing too far. We think being fair means giving equal weight to both sides of every argument. But sometimes in the zeal to be objective, reporters get confused. You can’t report the Obama tax plan and the Romney tax plan in the same way, because only one of them is really a plan, while the other is actually not a plan at all, but an electoral gambit.

The Romney/Ryan ticket decided, with incredible cynicism, that that they were going to promise this massive tax break, not explain how to pay for it, and then just hang on until election day, knowing that most of the political press would let it skate, or at least not take a dump all over it when explaining it to the public. Unchallenged, and treated in print and on the air as though it were the same thing as a real plan, a 20 percent tax cut sounds pretty good to most Americans. Hell, it sounds good to me.

The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. We in the press should be offended by what Romney and Ryan are doing – we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences, and we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.

I’ve never been a Joe Biden fan. After four years, I’m not the biggest Barack Obama fan, either (and I’ll get into why on that score later). But they’re at least credible as big-league politicians. So much of the Romney/Ryan plan is so absurdly junior league, it’s so far off-Broadway, it’s practically in New Jersey.

Paul Ryan, a leader in the most aggressively and mindlessly partisan Congress in history, preaching bipartisanship? A private-equity parasite, Mitt Romney, who wants to enact a massive tax cut and pay for it without touching his own personal fortune-guaranteeing deduction, the carried-interest tax break – which keeps his own taxes below 15 percent despite incomes above $20 million?

The Romney/Ryan platform makes sense, and is not laughable, in only one context: if you’re a multi-millionaire and you recognize that this is the only way to sell your agenda to mass audiences. But if you’re not one of those rooting gazillionaires, you should laugh, you should roll your eyes, and it doesn’t matter if you’re the Vice President or an ABC reporter or a toll operator. You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn’t take it seriously.

Biden Leaves Door Open for Cutting Social Security and Medicare

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Friday October 12, 2012 8:28 am

One of the remarkable things about the first presidential debate and the VP debate last night is how much rhetorical effort the Obama team has put into leaving open the possibility of cutting Social Security and Medicare.

…

The language continues to be weaselly but the implication is clear. The Obama team is open to cuts, like reduced benefits and raising the retirement age. Their only red line is privatization.

Democrats had the option to make this election a clear choice between them pledging to fully protecting these very popular programs and the Republican plan to voucherize them. Democrats have not done that.

Instead, they have made it a choice between a Democratic candidate who is very open to “modestly” cutting these programs and a Republican candidate who wants to privatize them. The Obama team seems to be banking on the fact that merely being less terrible on Social Security will be good enough.

In the middle of a very tight election the Obama team is refusing to do something that would be very popular and could easily move voters, making an unequivocal promise not to cut benefits. Obama has chosen not to use this proven political weapon.

Effectively, Obama has decided he would rather lose the election with his vague message on entitlements than win the election, if it means using tactics that would significantly restrict his ability to cut Social Security in his second term. This should make any actual liberal very nervous.

Heart Shaped Box

Hah.  The hottest band in the world at the peak of my DJ career.  Did anybody dance?  No!

Rock hates Republicans.

Did Paul Ryan “borrow” story about his daughter from Kurt Cobain?

by John Aravosis, Americablog

10/12/2012 12:08pm

Ryan is reportedly a Nirvana fan, the band that Kurt Cobain started and starred in. We’re to believe this is just a coincidence? Maybe.  Or maybe Paul Ryan plagiarized the story about his daughter?

What’s more likely is that Ryan named his daughter Bean because Cobain named his daughter Bean. But that wouldn’t have made a very good right-wingy story, for Ryan to explain that he named his kid after a grunge rock star who killed himself. Or even to say that the name was inspired by Cobain. So, better to borrow Cobain’s story and not even mention it.

Keep in mind that while it’s entirely possible that Paul Ryan had his “Bean” experience without knowing of Cobain’s, Ryan has a history of making up personal stories to embellish his image.  There was the time he claimed he climbed 40 of the Rocky Mountains.  Or the time he claimed to have run a marathon under three minutes.

…

And who can forget Ryan’s claim to have 6% body fat.  When you consider the source, it’s a valid question to ask.

So, even Paul Ryan’s most intimate part of the debate, talking about his Catholicism and abortion beliefs, might be phony.

At least we have something to talk about other than Baseball, Politics, and Lewis Hamilton.

One thing that is interesting about Yeongam is they don’t use the track for anything except Formula One which means it’s dusty and slick until about halfway through the race.

But wait!  Don’t they sweep it and wash it?

Sure they do, but that’s part of the problem.

You see, heated race tires are like big gummy lint rollers and suck stuff up from the crevices of the asphalt that brooms and water can’t reach.  Also they lay down a sticky Rubber Cement-like layer in the racing line that’s similar to the floor in the first row of your neighborhood Bijou.

During what little I was able to see of Practice there was this constant back and forth of drivers wanting more downforce and engineers saying- try and make it work, you’ll change your tune on Sunday.

Speaking of tires, it’s Softs and Super Softs this week which means probably a 3 stop race and marginal lap time differential between the two, depending on fuel load.

But here’s the BIG news-

Formula One’s 17-year run with Speed channel ending after this season

Associated Press

Published October 12, 2012

Fox Sports Media Group, which owns Speed, confirmed Friday that the partnership will end after this season. The network indicated it was outbid for the U.S. broadcast rights by a “different media partner.”

Two people familiar with the negotiations tell The Associated Press that F1 was in talks with NBC for U.S. broadcast rights.

So that means a move to Vs. (now NBC Sports).  Is this a good thing?

Hard to tell.  It means some of the tools I rely on, like the Speed Racecast will be at best unfamiliar and at worst may omit essential elements.  Will there be conflicts during Le Tour?  What about America’s Cup?

Have I mentioned I hate change?

I need less drama in my life.

All 4 series have gone the full five games which with Suzuka (Yeongam Qualifying tonight at 1 am) and America’s Cup San Francisco Regatta and a debate have made for quite a busy week.

Only one game tomorrow, Opening Game of the AL Championship Series at 8 pm on TBS and I’ll bet that the Yankees or Orioles would much prefer a travel day before facing the Tigers.

Tonight it’s Cards/Nats for their Game 5 in a series that shouldn’t have gone nearly this far.  What’s particularly galling is all the vacuous Villagers are proclaiming their Nats love as an inside baseball suck up to the other execrable members of their tribe of sychophants and bootlickers.

I actually like the Cardinals because of their gritty ‘come from behind’ play (they’ve faced elimination 6 times in the last 2 years) but it’s all about who you hate and I can’t wait to wipe the Washington elite’s smug smirks off their faces.

And so, The Rally Squirrel.

The Cards will start Wainwright  (14 – 13, 3.94 ERA) who’s not as good on paper as Gonzalez  (21 – 8, 2.89 ERA), but they have out scored the Nats 23 – 9.  I hope they saved some for tonight.