Politics: It's all Bud Selig's Fault

TORONTO, ONTARIO - As some people search for the correct place to put the blame for the economic crisis gripping the world, there's a pretty good explanation going around. I first heard it on the Brian Copeland Program, and its origins seem to date back at least to a Gail Sheehy column in Vanity Fair in 2000. The thesis? It's all Bud Selig's fault.

Back in 1994, Bud Selig, then owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, was the acting commissioner of Major League Baseball after the owners had ousted Fay Vincent in 1992. It was thought that the owners were going to find a permanent commissioner and George W. Bush, then an owner of the Texas Rangers, was a potential candidate. As reported in Sheehy's column, Bush wanted to be the commissioner of baseball more than anything else in his life, and when he was approached by Texas Republicans about running for governor, he initially put them off, thinking that he was in line to become the commissioner.

Bud Selig had other ideas--he wanted the permanent position for himself. The temporary commissioner held on to his post during the 1994 strike, had himself elected permanent commissioner in 1998, and now will apparently serve until 2012--if he even steps down then, since he had previously agreed to step down in 2008.

As revealed in Vincent's 2002 autobiography, it was only after former commissioner Vincent told Bush that Selig had no plan to propose Bush as commissioner that the future president took the governor's race seriously. Bush defeated Ann Richards in the Texas governor's race in 1994, went on to run for president in 2000, and we all know what happened from there.

Had Bud Selig stepped aside to let George W. Bush take the job he had always wanted, that of commissioner of Major League Baseball, he would not have run for governor of Texas. He would not have been in a position to run for president in 2000. World history would have been different in the ensuing eight years.

So, need someone to blame for the economy? Try Bud Selig.

Margin Notes: Cold, Missions, Delays

A duck sat on the ice covering the Humber River near Dundas Street in Toronto, Ontario on 9-January-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Yes, it's been quite cold around here. On Wednesday, the arctic air moved in, and highs didn't exceed -10 C and lows didn't exceed -18 C again until today; the wind chill was -30 C or below twice when I woke up this week. It's pretty bad when it's so cold outside that even in a properly-heated apartment moisturizer is required because the air is so dry. On Saturday, I talked to people that were driving one block to avoid having to walk outside--I'm sure people out in the prairies, where -20 C would have been an improvement on their high temperatures for much of the week, are laughing at us right now.

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No laughing matter was the power outage that affected 22,000 households in Toronto at the height of the cold weather late Thursday, with some customers out of power for a full day. A sprinkler malfunction at a Hydro One substation near Bloor and Dufferin is being blamed for the outage. Interestingly, in this week's Bloor West Villager newspaper, Hydro One ran an advertisement essentially apologizing for how long they had taken to restore power following the storm on 28-December-2008. "We regret the inconvenience the storm-related outages caused our customers. We thank them for their patience and resilience." I wonder what they will say next week?

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One thing I'm really looking forward to in the next week is the end of retrospectives on the George W. Bush presidency. The only thing I found amusing in any of the coverage this week was Republican strategist Ed Rollins making what may have been a Freudian slip in referring to the famous 2003 sign on an aircraft carrier, referring to it as the "Mission Impossible" sign instead of "Mission Accomplished." Clearly, that's what the sign should have said.

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An appropriate GO Transit car to see this week was the one with the Maple Leafs wrap ad, noted at Willowbrook Yard in Toronto on 17-January-2009

A moving sign caught my eye this week. While out watching trains in the cold, GO Transit commuter equipment passed in front of me including the car decorated with a wrap ad for the Toronto Maple Leafs. In a white environment with the next snow storm already approaching on the horizon, seeing a car advertising hockey seemed entirely appropriate.

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Commuter trains were about the only form of transportation I used on my winter vacation trip this year that operated on time, other than local city buses. Not one of my airline flights went off as scheduled, but clearly the worst was my return trip to Toronto. I've been relatively kind to US Airways in the past on this blog, but they've made my do-not-fly list now (along with United and Alaska). For my red-eye flight from Seattle to Philadelphia while Seattle was receiving yet another snow shower on 4-January-2009, we could not leave Seattle because US Airways didn't have de-icing equipment available. We had to wait until Southwest Airlines was done with their flights for the day, then their contractor's equipment was "borrowed" and literally sat next to our plane for about half an hour before they found someone to operate it and de-ice our wings. The flight finally took off nearly three hours late, and one of the few things the airline did right the whole experience is that they had a new boarding pass waiting for me upon arrival since I had missed my connecting flight. The only problem is that the flight was soon canceled, and no further flights were available until the next day. The only thing I could get a phone agent to do was book me on a United itinerary via Washington DC--the only airline actually worse than US Airways that could have been accessed. Amazingly, those flights actually got me to Toronto close to their schedules, but my checked luggage that I had paid an extra $15 for did not arrive for another two days because United failed to transfer it in Washington DC. What really amazed me is that the only airline employee that smiled at me the entire trip was one flight attendant on the Washington-Toronto flight. That's it. Both US Airways and United need some serious help, and Air Canada needs to join a different alliance.

Politics: The Actual First Blog Post

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Officially, this blog started on Monday, 8-September-2008. However, it wasn't actually my first personal blog entry. Long before the term "blog" existed in the fall of 1999, I posted to my personal web site a piece of political commentary questioning the beliefs of then-presidential candidate George W. Bush with respect to the "ideal family."

The piece is presented as it appeared on 21-November-1999, nine years ago today:

SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS - This morning on the NBC Program "Meet the Press," Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush made a point of declaring that he stands for "the ideals in American society." To Bush, these ideals mean such things as the nuclear family and equality in selecting contractors. As a leader, he feels that he needs to oppose alternatives to these ideals, placing him in opposition to adoption by gay couples and quotas for minority-owned contractors.

Bush surprised interviewer Tim Russert on this latter point by not coming out against rules in place since 1983 that set a goal for Federal contractors of 10% minority ownership. In fact, Bush said that "10% seems rather low." While going on to state that he sees a problem in the same minority contractors repeatedly getting the same kinds of contracts over and over again, to the detriment of startup minority-owned businesses, he made a point of not ruling out considering the race and gender of an owner in selecting Federal contractors. In order to reach his implied ideal of selecting contractors by merit and having a reflective number of minority-owned contractors be selected without considering their minority-owned status, he is willing to continue to consider that status in the interim. It seems that rather than standing for an ideal, Bush is standing for freedom and fairness.

In contrast, Bush sees no compromise on the family ideal. He is adamantly opposed to gay marriage, saying that marriage is "for a man and woman, period." He gives no ear to the argument that allowing some kind of recognized partnership for same-sex couples might encourage gays and lesbians to live the kind of monogamous, stable lifestyle that he claims to encourage. He is adamantly opposed to gay adoption, giving no ear to studies that show that children are more likely to grow up mentally healthy when they have two supportive parents, no matter whether their parents are gay or straight.

While few would argue with Bush's implied ideal of ownership-blind contractor selection, many would argue with his ideal family. The new Chief Justice of Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court, Margaret Marshall, wrote in an earlier ruling that the societal definition of family appears to have changed to a broader one than the traditional nuclear family, incorporating a number of alternatives. So, who gets to set the ideal?

Perhaps nobody should get to make that judgment. This nation was founded on the concept of freedom, not any specific ideals. Existing laws allowing gay adoption have been passed in part in recognition that freedoms should not be denied to a portion of the population. On the other hand, going to the extreme freedom of allowing anyone to adopt a child is clearly even more dangerous than enforcing Bush's ideal, since that would allow pedophiles to do so.

The ultimate goal of the ideal family would seem to be to allow children the opportunity to grow up with the emotional and financial support to pursue their own happiness and contribute to society. If that is indeed the goal, it would seem that Bush's ideal family is not a prerequisite.

Perhaps Bush will review his position, much as he wants to review the minority contractor rules, and realize that what he is aiming for is freedom and fairness, not an ideal. Freedom and fairness applied to the goal of raising a healthy next generation of Americans does not necessarily require an ideal, nuclear family.

That was certainly optimistic. Bush would become the President of course, and to the best of my knowledge has never had a second thought about his vision of the ideal family.

At the time I wrote that commentary, I was intending to write a similar piece weekly through the 2000 election, but after one week I decided I had better things to do and removed even that first post from my web site. Rather than being one of the many proto-bloggers, I kept my views off the Internet until this year, when everyone and their dog had a blog.

Expect my next post to show up in something a lot less than nine years this time.