Jonathan's blog

Congratulations to Carpenter Street School’s Boomslang and their coaches!  Out of the 70 teams that participated in Battle of the Books, Boomslang was one of 16 to qualify for the oral battles.  In this morning’s session, they competed against 7 other teams to earn a slot in the championship battle.  Boomslang won 3 out of their 4 oral battles and finished 3rd out of 8…only 2 points behind the team that earned a spot in the championship (the top 4 scores were 25, 24.5, Boomslang’s 23, and 17).  Not a bad showing for a team of 4th graders participating for the first time!  We were quite proud!

Greg Sargent makes an interesting point (link):

What if the American people declared that they think the best way to fix the deficit is to cut defense spending and hike taxes on the rich, and no high level politician in either party cared?

Dan Froomkin argues (link):

While the details vary, the White House and Republican leaders both basically want to reduce the deficit by cutting social programs, preserving defense spending and raising taxes relatively little or not at all.

As Matt Miller points out, "deficit hawk" Paul Ryan's plan, for example, doesn't balance the budget until the 2060s and adds tens of trillions of dollars to the debt between now and then (link).  Why?  Because he wants to make spending cuts while keeping taxes at a historically-low percentage of GDP while the boomers are turning into geezers.

It's going to take a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to take care of the deficit.  Tea Partyers can recite their "The government doesn't have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem." mantra ad nauseum, but it's not reality.  Sooner or later we have to face reality.

We went to the Nouvel basketball game tonight for a couple of reasons: 1) they were playing Midland (we saw Nouvel defeat Midland earlier in the season, but it didn’t go that way tonight) and 2) it was Blair White night.  White was a student at Nouvel before playing football at Michigan State and this past season with Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts.

Here are photos of the boys with Blair and then the flyer he signed for them:

I wrote a little about the first few games of the boys’ football seasons (here and here) but not the second half of the season.  I’ll get around to that sometime soon, but here is Elliot’s photo:

I found the photos from when I played (3rd and 5th grade).  There’s a photo from 4th grade too, but I quit before the season started (because I wanted to play with my buddy after school instead of going to football practice and because the coaches were stressing me out by threatening to make us run extra laps around the field if we ran the first one too slowly).  The first year I was 3rd string offensive line.  I remember one game they put me in on defensive line, and I was shooting the gap into the backfield and tackling the quarterback almost every play…but unfortunately it was a fraction of a second after he would hand the ball off.  By the second year I played, I was one of the bigger players on the team.  Because I had an August birthday (shortly after the cut-off), most of the kids on the team were at least a grade below me.  That year the coaches wanted to play me at tight end (hence my # 40 jersey), but after the first few practices moved me to offensive tackle to replace someone who wasn’t getting the job done.  I also played defensive end and had a couple tackles for safeties that were the highlight of my year.  I didn’t play organized football again after that, sticking with basketball instead.  Here are my photos: