September 16, 2022

Major League Baseball is trying to speed up the game. You know you have a problem when a baseball game takes almost as long as a round of golf. Two golfers can actually play around in less time. It has proposed a pitch clock, which should help. I have some other ideas.

Ban batting gloves. I am tired of watching hitters constantly stepping out of the batters box in order to readjust their batting gloves. Are you listening, Dustin?

Once a batter is in the batters box, lock the door. He should be able to escape only if he has to go to the men’s room.

The number of times batters strike out these days has gone up dramatically. There are many reasons. Batters swinging for the fences, and six foot eight pitchers throwing downhill at 100 miles per hour are just a couple. Strikeouts typically take longer than other at bats. Baseball did speed up the game a little bit by allowing batters to take first without the agony of having to watch four intentional balls lobbed up by the pitcher. Many batters have no chance against the likes of a Justin Verlander. Why not give batters the option of taking an automatic strikeout, and taking a seat in the dugout?

No one likes seeing the manager or pitching coach walk to the mound. It just means another delay, and a commercial timeout. Let’s have the dugout text a message to the pitcher, the catcher, and the bullpen when it is time to move on. The physical taking of the ball from the pitcher is always awkward, and often causes animosity and controversy. In lieu of texting, the dugout could bang on a trash can when it was time.

While we are on relief pitchers, can’t we just put the relief pitcher on a Segway to get him to the mound faster?

Do players really need to round the bases after hitting a home run? I know it’s fun and a part of baseball, but it takes time as the player slow walks around the infield, preening, and fist bumping the first and third base coaches. The ball is out of the park. The play is over. Move on.

September 15, 2022

E. J. Dionne recently had an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about “Why Politicians Shouldn’t Be Stock Traders.” Americans distrust their government officials more than ever, and officials benefiting in the stock market from decisions they are making just adds to the frustration. There is a proposal to ban all members of Congress and related persons from owning securities directly. The thinking is that Congressman should not benefit from trading on inside information, which the rest of us have to abide by. As an aside, they have better things to do than trading their portfolios.

This solution may be overly restrictive. Wall St. figured this out a long time ago, and instituted procedures to prevent employees from engaging in insider trading, and trading ahead of customers. First off, Congress needs to have a dedicated “brokerage firm” handling all of its transactions. Congressmen should not be able to have their own brokers. Secondly, all transactions, both buys and sells, would have to be pre-cleared. A compliance professional would have to vet each transaction against established criteria. Third, each security would have to be held for at least one year. Finally, I personally would not want my representatives trading on margin i.e. borrowing money to invest and creating leverage.

Congressmen and their families would be free to invest in whatever securities they chose as long as those securities and transactions met the above guidelines.

September 15, 2022

Like everyone else, I read today about Florida Governor Ron DiSantis’ cynical attempt to play with the lives of immigrants. He paid for three unannounced flights to Martha’s Vineyard carrying illegal immigrants from Texas. For the record, I don’t have a home on Martha’s Vineyard, but certainly know people who do. What I find aggravating about this story is that while Florida is sending immigrants to us, we are sending money to Florida. Many of our residents retire every year, and take their hard earned savings to Florida. Florida is dependent on states like Massachusetts to keep its growth going.

Also, Florida takes more than it gives. For every dollar it sends to the federal government, it gets $1.15 back. On the other hand, Massachusetts gets only $.88 back. In other words, we are supporting and subsidizing the wasteful habits of the state of Florida. DiSantis is a Trump wannabe, and he has learned from the master as to how to operate in debt. I would suggest to DiSantis that he should be thankful to Massachusetts rather than trying to troll it.

September 9, 2022

The handcuffed Steve Brannon has maybe the best quote from the Trump years, which he is still using. When confronted with uncomfortable, maybe even treasonous, information regarding Trump, he said “flood the zone with sh*t” to defer and deflect the media. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not. It was never true. It only mattered that it came quickly and in volume. You can see the strategy at work today as Republicans come up with the reason du jour to excuse Trump’s stealing of highly classified materials, some revealing our most sensitive nuclear secrets.

Maybe the Democrats should take a page from Bannon as we approach the mid-year elections? Maybe they should flood the zone with fa*cts. Abortion kills women. Republicans deny climate change, and vote against actions to mitigate it. Republicans favor guns over children. January 6 was an insurrection. Republicans want to repeal health care, and raise taxes on middle America. Republicans want to sunset Social Security and Medicare. Trump is a guilty of fomenting the insurrection and profiting from it. Trump is the subject of numerous criminal investigations. Trump cut taxes on the rich and corporations, exacerbating the national debt. Mitch McConnell delegitimized the Supreme Court. Trump did untold damage to the institutions of government that keep us safe like the DoJ, the FBI and the CIA. Trump lied about and totally mismanaged the pandemic. The Republican Party traffics with white supremacists. Republicans voted against reducing the prices of critical drugs. Republicans have no agenda.

Republicans need to be careful about shoveling sh*t into the wind because the winds are changing.

September 1, 2022

The eighth commandment is “thou shalt not steal.” Stealing is to take or appropriate without right, and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully.” So, stealing is wrong, and we should do everything in our power to stop anyone who steals. You might say we need to “stop the steal.” Donald Trump seems to think that the 2020 presidential election rightfully belongs to him. It was stolen so to speak, and he is looking to stop it.

The ninth commandment is “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” or, in other words, “thou shalt not lie.” Trump is clearly violating the ninth commandment as he falsely claims that others have violated the eight commandment. And now, to square the circle, Trump has been caught violating the eighth, which will require him to probably take the fifth. He literally stole classified documents that belong to the United States of America, and lied about it. Hopefully, we will find out why he did what he did, and what he planned on doing with documents. My guess is he was planning on using them to either sell to the highest bidder, or use them as a “get out of jail free” card. Maybe he just wanted to ingratiate himself to his bromance buddy, Putin.

I have no idea where this is all going to lead. My hope is that Trump settles, which is what he always does, and part of the settlement is that we will never have to deal with him again before we run out of commandments.

August 8, 2022

I love AAA. It is the one bill I don’t mind paying. I can’t count the number of times I have had to call them to charge my battery, repair a tire, give me a tow, or something else. They always respond, and respond quickly. The Democratic Party needs to take its cue from AAA. It needs to respond quickly and effectively before the mid-terms to counter Republican attempts to deflect voters from its non-agenda. Democrats Ned to focus on AAA for the mid-terms…Abortion, Arms and Air. Democrats are energized by Republican attempts to curtail a women’s right to control her own body, their attempts to limit safe and sane gun restrictions on weapons of war, and their abject refusal to deal with and vote for legislation to deal with a warming climate.

President Biden can list a number of substantive achievements in his first two years…the Inflation Reduction Act, the Recovery Relief Act, student loan forgiveness, meaningful gun legislation, reenergizing the NATO coalition in support of Ukraine, the distribution of COVID vaccines, the CHIPS legislation, the naming of a Supreme Court Justice, and the prosecution of hundreds of January 6th insurrectionists. In almost every case, the only thing that Republicans have offered is crickets.

This is an enviable and sellable record, which will motivate some voters, but it will be AAA that drives them to the polls. Women are scared to death by the Hobbs Supreme Court decision. Parents are scared to death sending their children to school. And young people are scared to death about the planet they will be inheriting. These are powerful motivators, and that is a powerful coalition.

August 25, 2022

 ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Investors are increasingly applying these non-financial factors as part of their analytical process to identify material risks and growth opportunities. Professionally managed assets with ESG mandates swelled to $46 trillion globally in 2021, representing nearly 40% of all assets under management, according to Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida passed a resolution directing the state of Florida’s fund managers to invest state funds in a manner that prioritizes the highest return on investment for Florida’s taxpayers and retirees without considering the ideological agenda of the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) movement. Likely Presidential candidate DiSantis is saying that he knows more about investing than companies like Citi, Fidelity, Vanguard and many others as well as the pension funds and individuals that choose these investment options in the form of mutual funds, ETF’s and other, professionally managed accounts.

President DeSantis wants to tell companies how to invest. He wants to tell teachers what books the can use, and what can’t be in those books. He wants Florida’s schools to stop teaching stuff they are not actually teaching. He wants to punish companies like Disney who don’t tow the line. He is a bully with an ideological agenda. He may be right for Florida, but he is far too Right for the rest of us.

August 26, 2022

I think it is absolutely disgraceful that we are allowing people who earn below $125,000 a year to walk away from $10,000 of debt they incurred by attending college. This is patently unfair to all of the students who had their parents pay for the educations. This is obviously unfair to the students, who had their fathers buy their way into Ivy League schools like Penn and Harvard. Before you know it, we will be allowing billionaires to declare bankruptcy multiple times over in order to skate on the debts they incurred.

I am also concerned about the added inflationary pressures that this policy will create. The government will no longer be collecting principal and interest payments on $10,000 per person. That’s about $100 per month. This is roughly equivalent to cutting taxes by a trillion dollars for the top 1% of earners and corporations. I am sure these people are going to go out, and buy themselves an EV with their new found liquidity, driving up the price of EV’s for the rest of us.

This is unfair to those tax payers who decided to not seek higher education because they couldn’t afford it. In order to level the playing field for all, the federal government needs to do away with all of the job training programs that it administers like Job Corps for younger workers. The government needs to get out of the education business like offering GI loans to veterans and Federal Pell Grants for students who demonstrate real financial need. These programs are not fair to those of us who are unable to use them.

Finally, the federal government needs to turn the job of higher education over to reputable educators like the now defunct Trump University. Trump demonstrated that private citizens who know nothing about education can provide an educational experience like the much maligned Ivies. For example, students who go to the Trump U.’s of the world will get a crash course in Latin, and will learn phrases like “caveat emptor.” They should be saddled with debt like a Trump casino.

August 11, 2022

The conservative, right wing of the United States likes to beat up on universities in the same way that it beats up on the media, the deep state, the FBI, Democrats, and anyone else that it doesn’t agree with it. They say that higher education is infused with liberal ideologies. Most universities are probably left leaning to a point, but there is a reason the curriculum is referred to as liberal arts. Students are not indoctrinated. They are educated on how to distinguish fact from fiction, and how to draw their own conclusions. For some reason, the Conservative establishment finds this to be dangerous and subversive. So how is it that we are in the grips of a conservative revolution if all the universities are turning out are Commie Socialist Democrats?

The Supreme Court is filled with graduates of elite universities, who somehow avoided or resisted the brainwashing that they were subjected to. Eight of the nine Justices went to either Harvard or Yale law schools. As undergraduates, only Thomas and Barrett were not Ivy Leaguers. Clearly, the Ivies are not doing a very good job of turning their students to the dark side.

The Republican political establishment is rife with Ivy League graduates, who are anything but liberal. In recent memory, both Bush’s went to Yale even though they found this to be politically inconvenient. Today, we have radical Righties like Cruz, Hawley, Cotton and Stefanik, all of whom attended Ivy League institutions. I won’t even mention the person who shall go nameless.

The reality is universities are complicated places, and complications don’t fit conveniently into the Conservative narrative. Ironically, it is the Right that has colleges and universities like Oral Roberts and Hillsdale, whose mission it is to teach conservative dogma. There are many, great Catholic schools in the country that no one would be accused of being liberal. Higher education is not monolithic. Conservatives graduate from good schools because of the schools, and not despite the schools.

August 8, 2022

The state of Indiana just passed a bill to ban abortion in the state. It is the first of its kind and probably not the last. Major companies in the state have already announced their intentions to investigate relocating elsewhere or, at a minimum, not expanding their operations within the state. There will be numerous opportunities for western Massachusetts to cherry pick companies from Indiana and elsewhere.

Eric Lesser, hopefully our next Lieutenant Governor, needs to be on the next plane to Indiana with a group of civic leaders to pitch these companies on coming here. Our state supports women. Our state supports education and healthcare. In western Massachusetts, we have a great, year-round climate, a reasonable cost of living, an educated workforce, great schools, and great hospitals. Hopefully, we will have high speed train service to Boston soon. Recreational opportunities abound with quick access to the ocean, mountains, lakes, and rivers.

Indiana shot itself in the foot with an AR-15. Rather than offer them our thoughts and prayers, let’s offer them a better place to do business.