Cheap Shot time: she’s ugly and stupid, too!!!

(I know, I know. I’ll do proper pennance later. Or not.)

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Political Robotics

(with apologies to Dr. Asimov)

I’ve seen some liberals, online and off, acting with incredulity at the ongoing tax-cut fetish afflicting conservatives today. “Surely,” the liberals will say, “they remember the explosive deficits after the 1981 Reagan tax cuts. Surely they know that the tax cuts will not increase revenue and that the budget will not balance by virtue of taxes having been cut.”

I was considering such a question the other day – – I can’t recall which blog or news article I read it in; it doesn’t really matter because it’s quite common – – and I recall some nameless conservative I saw once on Bill Maher’s old show. This person was railing against Bill Clinton, claiming that in eight years Clinton did not accomplish a single positive thing. Not one. Maher, of course, pointed out the balanced budget and the long economic boom, and asked, “If it wasn’t Clinton, then who got those things done?”

The response? Ronald Reagan. This conservative (who I only saw on the show once, because I was a sporadic viewer, and have never seen again) actually claimed that it was Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 that eventually led to the economy of the 1990s and the budget surpluses and all the rest of it.

This led me to formulate the following calculus to which all conservatives seem to adhere:

One: Anything that has happened since 1981, that we like, is to be credited to President Reagan.

Two: Anything that has happened since 1993, that we dislike, is to be blamed on President Clinton.

Three: If necessary, we must define what we like and what we dislike so as to conform to the first two Rules.

The left has its share of robotic shibboleths too. We saw this during the recent blackout in the northeast. When I turned on my computer the next morning and started checking the news and blogs (even though I had not lost power at any point, I had turned the computer off), it didn’t take long to see deregulation blamed for the blackout, even though the authorities still aren’t entirely clear on why the blackout happened, as of this writing. Now, I’m pretty firm in my liberal beliefs; I’ve long since abandoned the idea that the free market is the solution to all problems (or, failing that, preferable even to solving any particular problem). But it seemed to me that perhaps we might, you know, wait a while before we started judging to what degree deregulation played a part in the blackout.

Clearly, I haven’t spent nearly as much time identifying the “Liberal Laws of Robotics” as I have the conservatives, because, you know, who wants to sit around identifying the faults of those with whom he agrees? Not me! But one that I have seen is this:

Anything good that has transpired since January, 2001 is the result of Clinton policies that President Bush hasn’t mucked with yet.

This, of course, is pretty similar to the “Three Laws” as formulated above.

The existence of these shibboleths, on both sides, is probably unavoidable. But it also tends to facilitate the reduction of political discourse to a kind of shorthand where ideas are never exchanged or evaluated. Be careful about such things.

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Casinos in Buffalo, update:

The Seneca Nation of Indians recently made a decision about where they were going to put their second casino in Western New York. They’re going to build it in Cheektowaga, which is one of Buffalo’s biggest suburbs (and second to Amherst in terms of economic power). Cheektowaga happens to be where the Buffalo Niagara Internation Airport is located, and if the reports are correct, the casino will be built a few miles right down the road from the airport itself. Residents in that area, of course, are not entirely thrilled, mainly because the Genesee Street/Transit Road corridor happens to be a very heavily traveled road in these parts already, and would presumably become even moreso if a casino were in the offing.

Now, I’m not wild about casinos in general, because I don’t think they generate much economic activity beyond the actual jobs within the casino itself. I refuse to believe that a casino will spark the building of a whole bunch of restaurants and whatnot nearby, since casinos are specifically designed to lure people indoors and keep them there. That’s why they never have windows and why you have to negotiate a maze between entering the front doors and actually coming out onto the gaming floor. And in the case of the Seneca casinos, the vastly greater portion of the profits will go to the Senecas themselves, so it’s not like this is some great tax-revenue cash cow. The state and the county get a small cut, but that’s about it.

However, casinos are a done deal, pretty much. They’re coming, and the powers-that-be around here wanted to put on in downtown Buffalo, which struck me as a terrible idea. Doing so would not spur new development downtown, and even worse, it would take a building or set of buildings off the city’s tax rolls entirely, which is not what you need in a city where the budget gaps are a constant scene of disaster.

Besides, Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde recently made an interesting point: putting the casino near the airport might strengthen the need for a new mass-transit connection between downtown and the airport area, perhaps even by adding a new Metro-rail line. Metrorail is Buffalo’s subway/light-rail system, which runs along Main Street only and stops right at the city limits, as opposed to logically going into Amherst and all the way to UB’s North Campus. (This is due to resistance by Amherst, Buffalo’s richest suburb. I suspect they don’t want to make it too easy for them downtown criminal-types to come out to their fair city. A great example of regional thinking, that.)

If we gotta have this thing in our neighborhood, Cheektowaga makes a lot more sense than downtown Buffalo. And who knows, maybe when they build it I’ll get a job dealing cards there.

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A Theory.

A little while back, in the course of announcing his new AOL journal (to provide AOL’s new blogging service a big-gun introduction), John Scalzi discussed the September effect. This was back in the days before the Web took off – – pre-NCSA Mosaic era, when Gopher and Usenet were the main Net tools. What would happen is that each September, when thousands of freshmen arrived at colleges and universities and thus got what was then their first whiff of connectivity, these new Netizens would plunge into Usenet newsgroups and generally pay little attention to things like learning Netiquette and reading FAQs and getting the lay of the land. For example, on the Star Wars newsgroup I read at the time, one could count on messages like this every September:

“Hey, I really like Satr Wars! Do you think Lucass will make anymore? It would be cool if he’d make Timothy Zhan’s books into movies! And in RETURN OF THE JEDI there’s a scene where Han grabs Leigha’s boob!” (Not an exact quote of any one post, but many of them really did scan like this, typos and all.)

Many a flame war started because of newbies rushing in where angels feared to tread back then, because of the “September effect”. Later on, the effect died away as home Net access became more and more common, although I often wondered if the September effect might have been replaced by a similar December effect, as all those new Christmas gift home computers were plugged in for the first time. And now, I see a new kind of September effect possibly emerging, although it’s not as annoying as the old flood of Usenet newbies could be. (And I never participated on the really high-traffic newsgroups where the September Effect earned its place in Net lore.) In fact, since it impacts blog traffic, it’s actually a bit endearing.

What’s happening now is the sudden uptick in Google hits on blogs. Alexandra commented the other day that she’s seeing a ton of Google hits to her site based on the search term “Lascaux”, which happens to be one of the words in her blog’s title, Out of Lascaux. I suspect that college kids enrolled in Arts 101 classes are being instructed to write two-page papers or some such thing on the cave-paintings of Lascaux, which is a logical starting point for an introductory arts class. So the tykes are rushing to Google, plugging in “Lascaux”, and arriving at Alexandra’s blog.

This happens a lot here, as well. Just in the last week or two, coincident with the beginning of the new college school year, I’m seeing a lot more Google hits for the poems listed under “Poetical Excursions” in the sidebar. (ASIDE: I need to do more of those…I always enjoyed writing them.) Sometimes I can even glean a bit about the student’s assignment just from their search terms, because in addition to the title they’ll include a term like “allegory”, which leads me to believe they are under instruction to “Describe how Rosetti’s poem ‘Uphill’ is an allegory.” And then there are the ones like this, in which the student has apparently plugged their entire homework question right into Google. These folks are probably under the impression that Google uses a natural language interface, kind of like AskJeeves.

I wonder how many students are instructed, in a Freshman Comp class, to write a brief position paper on, say, Iraq…and how many end up handing in something that sounds quite a bit like SDB. Probably a lot. I have to admit, though — if there’s a college student who’s ripping off my defense of Attack of the Clones for a class, I’m only half-angry about it.

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I wasn’t going to write anything yesterday about the Bills’ signing of former Patriots safety Lawyer Milloy until he was, you know, actually signed. Now that he is, my reaction is:

YES yes yes yes boo-yeah that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Milloy might be on a bit of a decline – – his stats last year were off – – but even so, he’ll provide veteran leadership in the Bills’ secondary, which is talented, athletic, and very young. And he was a team leader for the hated Patriots, so anything that hurts them is good news for the Bills.

And speaking of the Patriots, this provides yet more evidence that Bill Belichick just isn’t the wonder-genius that everybody thinks he is. That’s twice in two years he’s allowed an upper-echalon player to go to a division foe. In a Buffalo News article today, writer Jerry Sullivan — never one of my favorites — blathers on a bit about Belichick’s “legend”, presumably because he often seems to have the Bills’ number. Fair enough, but the guy’s just not that impressive on the whole, as far as I can see.

Look at his lifetime stats as a head coach: In eight total years, he’s still under .500 (61-67). He’s had only two postseason appearances. He’s had only three winning seasons. His best regular season record, done twice, is 11-5. Belichick’s reputation as a head coach is over-inflated, I think, by his improbable Super Bowl season two years ago. And his “dominance” of the Bills is understandable given how bad the Bills were two years ago, and how they were still a young team on the rebuilding path last year.

Let’s not use words like “legend” to describe Bill Belichick, OK? One year does not a career make. He’s got a long way to go before he’s a legend. Right now, Jon Gruden and Dick Vermeil have far better claim to that title.

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Words fail me.

What really terrifies me is that I did in fact read that comic for a time. This was during the 1980s, when every Marvel title had some group of aliens or supervillains or somebody who was the Greatest Threat to All Life On Earth Possible, and yet, only that book’s title character ever really went up against them. Weird.

Anyway….

(link via Paul Riddell.)

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Scott comments on my post below about Tulsa, Buffalo, and urban-renewal pitfalls.

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A maintenance note: It appears that my commenting system of choice, YACCS, is having severe server problems which will likely not be resolved for another week yet. This is not acceptable to me — I love comments, even if I don’t get all that many of them — so I’ve instituted a stop-gap measure for the interim period, a message-board system. You’ll find the link after each post, in the usual spot. One proviso, though: it’s all one big message board, as opposed to a separate comment thread for each post. So, when you comment, make sure you at least reference the post you’re commenting on so I know what’s going on. I also ask for civility and all the rest of that, but I don’t tend to inspire a lot of raging comment (except from certain quarters, and I have other ways of dealing with the nefarious Mr. Jones….heh heh heh….) so I doubt that will be an issue. I’m also not sure how the new board handles user IDs and links to personal homepages or blogs or whatnot, so keep that in mind. You might need to physically sign and leave your URL within the comment itself. Or maybe not; I haven’t investigated that much.

I could have gone with one of the other commenting systems out there, like BlogBack or BackBlog or HardTack or FatBack, but I figured the message-board thing might be different, and if I like it, I may just keep it as a general board connected to the blog after YACCS returns to full service. I do plan to continue using YACCS; I think it’s been a pretty good system despite more frequent outages than I like. But that’s a clear case of “Ya gets what ya pays for,” isn’t it?

So, enjoy. Comment away…and don’t forget to mention which post you comment on.

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Matthew Yglesias‘s political content will, apparently, no longer be appearing on his own blog, but on TAPped (the online presence of The American Prospect, where Mr. Yglesias now works). The bummer part of this is that TAPped is a group-blog but does not attribute its posts, so one won’t know who wrote what. Bummer.

Oh, well. Anyone wishing to remove Mr. Yglesias from his or her blogroll is invited to replace him with….

(Shame? What’s that?)

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According to Lynn Sislo, the city of Tulsa is considering building a stadium downtown that would have a seating capacity of about 20,000. She’s wondering about a number of issues involved, like parking, traffic, and the constant in urban politics that money spent on big-ticket items like sports-venues is very likely money that could be better spent on sewer maintenance, police precincts, schools, arts programs, and the like.

I found this story interesting because Buffalo has twice in the last two decades built new sports venues downtown. First, there’s the baseball stadium. Its current name is Dunn Tire Park, but many Buffalonians (like myself) still think of it by its original moniker, Pilot Field. (It also spent a few years as North AmeriCare Park, a wonderful bit of HMO-love there.) The park was built in the late 1980s and opened (I think) in 1989. It used to see a lot heavier attendance for ballgames than it does now; I attended several games that were actually sell-outs. Parking didn’t seem to be much of an issue, but my memory could be faulty. The park is just a block away from the nearest Metro-Rail stop, so a lot of folks park a ways away and ride the train to the stadium, for example.

Of course, it’s one of the never-dying lies in America that sports venues spur economic development. “Restaurateurs will be champing at the bit to open near the park,” we are told. “Think of the building that will go on around the new arena,” we constantly hear. Of course, this is all nonsense. The area surrounding Pilot Field is no more hopping than it was in the early 1990s, when Buffalo’s population was something like 30,000 people greater than it is now. Ditto HSBC Arena, the venue built for the Sabres in the mid-1990s. And it’s like this everywhere: just read through the current tour of all thirty Major League ballparks on ESPN.com, and note how few of those articles describe a hotbed of activity beyond the ballpark walls. Sports arenas don’t generate economic activity by themselves. They can help attract tourist attention if they’re used for lots of other uses, but even those types of tourist-attraction events tend to attract insular fans who don’t exactly spend lots of time touring the cities themselves.

Another thing worth remembering about Buffalo’s ballpark is the climate in which it was built. Fourteen years seems like an incredibly long time ago now, but in the late 1980s, Major League Baseball’s giant problems with competitive balance between large-market and small-market teams was only beginning to emerge into consciousness. Thus, Buffalo built Pilot Field with the dreams of one day soon being granted a big-league franchise. In fact, Buffalo was one of the finalists for the 1993 round of MLB expansion — when, ultimately, the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies were created — largely on the strength of Buffalo’s growing rep as a sports town (the Bills were just beginning their Golden Age of AFC dominance) and the beauty of the ballpark Buffalo had built. The park was actually designed so that, even though it seats about 20,000 people, it could fairly easily be expanded to the 40,000-capacity it would need as a MLB park. It’s interesting to me to note that Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards is always mentioned as the starting point to baseball’s return to the traditional type of stadiums (baseball-use only, open outfields to overlook the cityscape, brick architecture, etc). But the trend actually started earlier than that, in the minor leagues. Buffalo was a part of that trend.

Nowadays, though, Dunn Tire Park Pilot Field is looking a bit worn at the edges. The stands are never packed anymore, though the place does do pretty good business during the summer. A lot of that is due to the fact that the Bisons are a minor league team, and thus their fortunes are pretty closely tied to that of the Cleveland Indians, their MLB parent club. The Indians are rebuilding right now, which makes the Buffalo team something of a pit-stop for talented players on the way up. And with the final burial of Buffalo’s onetime hopes of joining the Majors with a franchise of its own, the stadium has never been upgraded. It’s still a nice place to catch a game in summer, and the drum-and-bugle-corps shows they have there are a lot of fun, but the ballpark is no longer the place to be in downtown Buffalo, as it once was.

As for HSBC Arena, there’s another sore spot. Built for the Sabres at a time when Adelphia Cable was on the rise and Buffalo was eagerly hitching its fortunes to Adelphia’s star, the Arena is a beautiful venue indeed. But all the usual arguments were trotted out: without the added revenue of luxury boxes, the Sabres would lose money and then leave town. It would spur development in Buffalo’s Cobblestone District. (Nope.) It would be used for all manner of special conventions and out-of-town events. (Not really. Part of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament was held here a few years back, but that was that. This is a constant point of annoyance with me. Why can’t Buffalo host a Final Four? or the Nationals or World Figure Skating Championships? No reason that I can see, except we never seem to try to get those events. As Toby Ziegler once said on The West Wing: “It’s not the ones we lose that bother me, it’s the ones we don’t suit up for.”)

And of course, Adelphia’s fortunes dried up spectacularly in yet another of those “Big company cooking the books” scandals. The Sabres were sold, and for a time it appeared that they might be sold to someone willing to move them elsewhere. I was prepared to simply say, “Fine, let ’em go,” until I learned that the Arena’s operations are so expensive to the City and the County that without the revenue the Sabres bring into the place, the Arena would likely be shut down entirely. Talk about putting the horse in front of the cart, eh?

I don’t know how this all reflects on Tulsa, a town with which I am totally unfamiliar. I know that Tulsa’s population is bigger than Buffalo’s, but I don’t know if that reflects the metro area or if Tulsa is one of those towns that thwarted suburban outflight by annexing the suburbs, which Buffalo can’t do. I also don’t know if Tulsa has any major league dreams of its own (the Tulsa Sabres, perhaps?). I’m always of mixed-mind on these kinds of things. I do think that big-league sports events can enhance a city’s image, but only if they’re done right. And it’s not even always necessary. New Orleans has plenty of cache, despite the fact that the Saints always stink. Austin, Texas seems to be doing just fine these days.

So, on the basis of Buffalo’s experience, I would say to Tulsa: Be careful. If you do it, do it right, and for the right reasons. Don’t delude yourselves into thinking that downtown will become like Times Square by virtue of a big arena or ballpark. And if the choice is having an arena or having schools and arts, choose schools and arts. Please oh please.

(Hey, Sean and Scott: You fellows have Tulsa connections. What do you think of this? Care to weigh in?)

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