The View from Right Field

My Favorite Cubs’ No-Hitter Was One I Didn’t See

Jake Arrieta’s no-hitter last night brings back memories of past Cubs no-hitters.  There have been six I remember.  (I don’t remember Sam Jones’s in 1955.)  I didn’t hear much of Kenny Holtzman’s first no-hitter.  I got out of work (making truck bumpers in the summer is a good incentive to get through college) about 3:30 pm.  I turned on the radio in my car.  I didn’t know what was happening for sure (it was the top of the ninth), but from Vince and Lou’s voices, I could tell it was something big.  Obviously, it was.

I think perhaps the no-hitter I remember the most, though, was the one I didn’t hear any of.  In 1972, I was living in Connecticut.  It was the first time I wasn’t in Illinois for the beginning of the season.  Sunday, April 16, 1972, was the second day of the season (the season was starting late because of a players’ strike), and I was trying to find out how to find out how the Cubs had done.  (If we had only had the Internet back then – or ESPN.)  I turned on the national news on TV to see if they would have sports.  They didn’t – except this day they did.

Burt Hooton had started for us that day.  He was a rookie, and he had a special pitch, a knuckle curve.  He had pitched three games in 1971, one a three-hitter and one a two-hitter.  But what he did that cold spring Sunday went beyond that.

V-J Day, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki

I originally posted this article under the title "V-J Day, Hiroshima, and Nagaski"; i.e., I misspelled Nagasaki.  I have since corrected the spelling of Nagasaki in the original post, but my understanding is that changing the spelling in the title of the original post causes some issues.  Therefore, I am posting this link to the original (now corrected) post in this post with a correctly spelled title. 

Why Is President Obama Still Blaming George W. Bush?

While President Obama was in New Orleans yesterday for the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the President couldn’t resist yet another chance to blame George W. Bush:

"We came to realize that what started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster, a failure of government to look after its own citizens." 

What a sad thing to say.  Is President Obama really so desperate to prove his presidency a success that he has to keep attacking his predecessor seven years after he beat him?

Should a president whose administration:

• Couldn’t build a proper healthcare website in 3½ years
• Turned the Animas River yellow
• Appears to be blocking an investigation by one of its own Inspector Generals into a security breach involving records of almost 22 million current and federal workers
• Doesn’t seem to be properly screening the people into whose custody it is placing thousands of illegal immigrant children
• Whose VA was, and may still be, doing a worse job in caring for our veterans than its predecessor
• And more and more

really be criticizing his predecessor for failures of government?  Maybe instead of worrying about what his predecessor did wrong, he should be spending more time getting his administration to do things right.

Should the Fed Raise Interest Rates – Or Is It “One More Bubble” Again?

The stock market turmoil of this week and last has led some to believe/argue that the Federal Reserve will/should not increase short term interest rates at its September meeting.  In The Wall Street Journal this week, Martin Feldstein said this:

“Mr. Bernanke explained [in 2009] that the Fed’s [unconventional monetary] policy [i.e., of holding short-term interest rates near zero] was designed to drive down long-term interest rates, inducing portfolio investors to shift from bonds to stocks.  This ‘portfolio substitution’ strategy, as he labeled it, would increase share prices, raising household wealth and therefore consumer spending. …

With virtually no yield available on government bonds and other low-risk fixed-income securities, investors were tempted to climb on the bandwagon of rising share prices.  Some sophisticated investors realized that the rapid increase of share prices was a bubble that would end when interest rates returned to normal.  They invested on the mistaken theory that they would know when to pull out. …

Much of this mispricing will likely unwind in the months ahead. …

John Kasich on Conservatism. He Gets It Right.

Peggy Noonan, in today’s Wall Street Journal, had a quote from John Kasich that may be one of the best descriptions of conservatism, and the proper role of government, I have seen in a long time:

“My mother used to say it’s a sin not to help people who need help but equally a sin to continue to help people who need to learn how to help themselves.”

I think that is it.  Too many Democrats miss the second part, resulting in people who just take the money and never learn what they need to do to help themselves.  Some Republicans, in trying to keep government small, miss the good that government can do to help people who need help, as long as it done right.

Some Thoughts on the Nuclear Agreement With Iran – And What We Do Next

While we were on vacation, the debate on the nuclear agreement with Iran picked up steam.  Therefore, in one sense, this post is a little late.  However, since any vote in Congress will not come until September, it is still timely.  So, here are my thoughts on the agreement with Iran – and the debate about it.

1.  President Obama’s argument that it is either his agreement or “some sort of war” is just not true.  There are other options, and there might have been even more if the Administration had done a better job of negotiating, both with the Iranians and with the other parties to the agreement.  Trying to sell the agreement on the basis of this document or “some sort of war” is more an indication of the difficulty the President has in trying to convince people who disagree with him than the reality of the situation.

2.  “Some sort of war”?  What is the President talking about?  What does this even mean?  For somebody who is said to be a great speechmaker, “some sort of war” is really inarticulate.

3.  Saying that a more stringent agreement could not have been negotiated because (i) Iran would not have agreed and (ii) the international sanctions would not have held for much longer is an interesting argument for somebody who has based his career on opposing the use of force against Iraq and, at least implicitly, continuing the sanctions against Iraq.  Why would we have been able to maintain the sanctions against Iraq in 2003, when we couldn’t maintain them against Iran today?

Contaminating the Animas River: No Big Deal As Long As the EPA Does It

A couple of weeks ago we were in Durango, Colorado.  We were there to ride the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.  (It’s a great trip; I recommend it.)  While we were on the train, and while we were driving in the area, we passed the Animas River numerous times.  We saw lots of kayakers and others enjoying the river.  Because of that, I have been particularly interested in the story of the EPA’s screw-up of last week which spilled I don’t know how much contaminated sludge into the Animas River, turning it orange and putting it off-limits for recreational use for maybe the rest of the summer.

What is most interesting about the story, though, is not that the government messed up.  Mistakes happen, even in government (sarcasm intended).  But what isn’t okay is how the EPA failed to immediately notify other government agencies, and the public, of the accident.  The Secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department said that they were not told of the incident until 24 hours after it happened.  Media reports are that local officials only learned about the leak when they saw their river change color.  And this is for sludge that has showed “scary” levels of toxicity, in the words of an EPA toxicologist.

What is also fascinating is the relative lack of outrage from so many people.  Can you imagine the responses if a private company had done this – and then failed to report it for 24 hours?  The fact is a private company or individual can’t do that.  If you cause an environmental emergency like this, you have to report it – NOW.  For causing it, there are penalties.  For not reporting it on a timely basis, there are even bigger penalties.

But if you’re government, apparently, it’s no big deal – at least for those who would be calling for penalties and sanctions, if not more, if a private individual did it.

V-J Day, Hiroshima, and Nagaski

[See UPDATE below.]

Two months ago, we celebrated the 70th anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe.  I wrote a post, then, about V-E Day from the view of a wife whose husband was fighting in the Pacific.  We are now reaching the 70th anniversary of V-J Day, i.e., victory over Japan on August 15*.  We will see what is said about that.

Before that, however, we have the 70th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).  I have written about this subject before (here and here), so I will keep my comments short.

First, one of the better articles I have read about President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan was in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.  You can, hopefully, find it here.  If that link does not work, try searching on the complete title of the article: “Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a POW Near Nagasaki”.