With taxpayer money, we built them a new $611 million dollar hitter’s ballpark with short porches (335 feet) down the right field and left field lines. They sold off our speedy, powerful left fielder Alphonso Soriano to get some cash together. Then they traded away our good-speed, fair-hit center fielder Ryan Church, our fleet leadoff man Nook Logan (OK, not so good a hitter) and our terrific defensive catcher Brian Schnieder and brought in a bunch of big lunky guys who could hit a ton. Trouble is we’re a month and a half into the season and the short-fences strategy isn’t working. Most of the lunks aren’t producing. They’re hitting like Gnats instead of Nats. (More)

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Nick Taylor’s new book, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA (When FDR Put the Nation to Work), has a bit of a run-on title, a threatening thickness (520 pages), and an intimidating agenda as the first-ever solo history of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). (You know, the Depression era federal job creation agency which kept millions of American workers from becoming so many Tom Joads by putting them to work writing, painting, performing, and building hundreds, maybe thousands of schools, libraries, swimming pools, golf courses and, of course, the Staten Island Zoo.) But it turns out the WPA is just the glue that holds together a tale of political and economic conflict that reads more like an apocalyptic-cum-redemptive novel than a history book. And the parallels between Herbert Hoover with his cohort of conservative crackpots and the Bush Leaguers of today are verrrry scary. Read on for my review; visit Nick himself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phlsuT7AUfA. (More)

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 Okay, okay, okay. It’s time for another confession: My son-in-law Dick is a Republican. No really, a Republican. My lefty middle daughter married him for a bunch of goofy reasons — handsome, hard-working, trustworthy, loving, wanted a lot of kids. Now he has three of them and that makes him an expert on everything. So we argue sometimes. Then last weekend, even after the Rev. Wright thing, he says if he gets the chance he’s voting for Obama. (More)

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 After a brief hiatus, FLBP is back with a new look, a new hook and a new book (Here and There, Now and Then: Short Stories by J. Ray Abernathy). But it’s the same old, same old story from Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson and GOP gonnabe-nominee John McCain: One wants to continue George Bush’s fealty to the failed trade policies of the last 30 years, the other wants to escalate Bush’s tax giveaways to Big Corpora and the upper class.  (More)

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They say hindsight is always 20-20, so let’s take a trip into the future and look in the rear view mirror at what’s happening right now in America. It is 2083, and a writer named Nick Taylor is examining the causes of the Crash of 2008 and the decade-long economic depression that followed. Observing that by the time Hillary Obama took office as President of the United States, a quarter of the nation’s workforce had “no jobs, and no hopes,” Taylor writes in what will become an all-time bestseller in apocalyptic non-fiction: (More)

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Now that we’re sure that either Hillary or Barack will go into the Democratic convention in August with a slim lead and a big need for solidarity, one would hope the leader would consider asking the loser to become his or her vice presidential running mate (Hillary already having hinted approval of such an arrangement). The rationale is part analytical and part intuitive. The analytical argument is that combining their demographic strengths would yield a uniquely powerful ticket, Obama bringing younger and African-American voters, Hillary older folks, Hispanics and women. And why take a chance on a VP candidate who hasn’t been tested or vetted? But the intuitive trumps the analytical, because there’s something special going on here. It’s the turnout thing. (More)

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Earlier this week, President Bush gave an all-too-familiar thumbs down to an appeal by a bi-partisan delegation of the nation’s governors to “increase spending on roads, bridges and other public works” as an economic stimulus. www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/26govs.html Just a week ago in an address to a national “Pathway to Prosperity” conference on infrastructure at Iona College in New York, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney dramatized how badly seven years of such rejections from Bush have damaged the backbone of our country. (More)

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What a week of surprises! First, Castro resigns after 50 years. Then Obama wins his tenth primary in a row. Oil tops $100 a barrel. And Egypt turns out the be a land of milk and honey, rather than the depressed, decrepit dictatorship we all thought it was. (More)

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