God in the huddle
The athletic director and the newly-hired football coach at my alma mater, Iowa State University, have been pushing to add a team chaplain to the athletic department payroll for the 2007-08 sports year. The proposal involves paying for the position with private contributions so the pair might potentially skirt that tiny deterrent called the Separation of Church and State. One hundred and twelve members of the university faculty have signed a petition opposing the plan, and the issue will now
go before an entity called the ISU Athletic Council, a rung or two beneath the United States Supreme Court in final judgment.
Faculty members such as Hector Avalos [Disclaimer: a terrific friend to a spirited little show on campus television called "Wake Up ISU" (1995-1998)] contend that the so-called "spiritual guidance" position to be created is nothing more than the latest attempt by fundamentalists to force religious indoctrination into public institutions.
If their skepticism is misplaced, as supporters claim, the simple solution would be to fill the position with a Muslim cleric. No Christian would oppose that.
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Last week, the father of the late Cardinals' pitcher Josh Hancock, killed in a car accident April 29th, filed a wrongful death suit against Mike Shannon's Steaks and Seafood, the restaurant in downtown St. Louis that served his son the night of his crash. I'll say only this about Shannon's: they refused to serve me even an O'Doul's non-alcoholic brew when I was 18 years old.
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Spring is the time of year in which we typically get a 100 movie list from the American Film Institute-- a la "100 years, 100 laughs," or "100 years, 100 thrills." I haven't seen any thing on the horizon yet this year, but man named Chuck Tryon, through YouTube, has gone perhaps one better-- 100 numeric quotes, featuring everyone from Philip Marlowe to Han Solo to Roy Hobbs to Navin R. Johnson. It's
9 and a half minutes well spent.
Greetings from sunny Coralville
I'll be blogging for the rest of this week from Coralville, IA, where I'm helping my brother dog-sit the parents' pooch. "Arbat," named for an artists' neighborhood in Moscow, is a 6-year-old golden retriever who enjoys begging for food, barking at wildlife, playing "Dean Martin" to my 3-year-old sister's "Jerry Lewis," and giving me the finger every time my back is turned.
I've taken the week off from work, but will return on June 5th, the same day Paris Hilton reports to prison.
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Forty-thousand fans attended the
"Star Wars" Celebration IV fan convention in Los Angeles this weekend. Click on the photo gallery at the link.
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Barry Bonds should
hold on to all of his memorabilia until the day he's inducted, and Pete Rose would be wise to ask for his items back.
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If there's a modern indifference to the Memorial Day observance in America, I suspect it has less to do with an ungrateful public than with the battle fatigue of a nation that has witnessed war after war of decreasing national interest, and that has distaste for the hollow statements that emanate from the mouths of our elected officials this time of year.
Bring the troops home already. 980 American servicemen and women have died in Iraq since Memorial Day last year.
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Remember when the Cardinals won the World Series last year. That was great.
Baseball's blackest mark
Jason Giambi is neither hero nor villain. The New York Yankees slugger, linked with the BALCO steroids investigation a couple years ago, has never explicitly admitted using steroids (except perhaps in confidential testimony,) but a week ago, he made a tacit public apology. "What we should have done a long time ago," he said, "was stand up-- players, ownership, everybody-- and said, 'We made a mistake.' We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward. Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic everyone wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it."
For whatever scandal even exists here, in this relatively small subculture of sport within our larger drug-crazed country, I think Giambi is being particularly unfair to himself and his fellow players, as the responsibility for any mistakes should fall squarely upon the shoulders of the rulemakers-- that is, the club owners, their league commissioner, Bud Selig, and his predecessors. The players, after all, are only employees, very-well-compensated to do
everything within the dictated rules to win games, and doing so under a powerful public microscope.
I heard it said once, in reference to the Americans who were coerced to "name names" during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, that it was wrong to divide them between "heroes" and "villains," between those who named and those who didn't. They were
all "victims." Such as it is with ballplayers like Giambi.
Baseball's leaders know they layed a giant egg in setting guidelines and getting ahead of the science of steroids and their availability. In an attempt to deflect accountability much later, they selected Selig pal and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to flush out and excoriate the steroid abusers in the league-- those players who broke the rules that didn't exist. The league office set the dogs loose on Giambi this week.
Though the slugger's comments struck most Americans as refreshing, and long-overdue, he dared to pin part of the blame on his employers. Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman responded to the corporate whistleblower in that All-American way-- he told a whopper-- "There's an implication that there was a lot of people that were involved that would know... what was going on, and I can tell you that was false. We've spoken to that in the past, so I do have a problem with that, without a doubt, because I can tell you-- I can speak from being right there, too-- that whatever goes on individually with these guys, is really on them."
Commissioner Selig followed suit by announcing an investigation into whether Major League Baseball had the legal right to punish Giambi for what might be deemed a personal admission, while the Yankees called in their attorneys to once more attempt to void the big firstbaseman's contract. By mid-week, the latest in a long line of front office "leaks" reached the news media-- reports that Giambi had tested positive for amphetamines during the last year, although sportswriter Peter Gammons reports that Giambi has not been asked to take any kind of follow-up test, which would have been the next stage in protocol if a test had indeed been failed.
The feudal lords of baseball have never been profiles in courage. They could dedicate a new building in Cooperstown as a Hypocrisy Hall of Fame, and enshrine their own with about four dozen plaques. Shoeless Joe Jackson won't be made eligible for the Baseball Hall, but Black Sox club owner Charles Comiskey, whose financial treatment of his players left them ripe for the plucking by gamblers, was inducted. One of the game's greatest competitors on the field, Pete Rose, received a lifetime ban for placing bets on his team to win, and Mark McGwire faced rejection in his first year of Hall eligibility in 2007 because of
unproven assertions that he used steroids, but baseball's writers, always at the beck and call of the club owners, have forever ignored the most scandalous and long-lasting black mark in history against the competitive integrity of the game.
I speak of the business-related scandal known today simply as "collusion." There is general consensus in 21st century America that Major League Baseball behaved abominably by severely limiting and then completely denying African-Americans a place on their playing fields from the time of origin of the National and American Leagues until Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn debut in 1947, but there's never been movement to remove from the Hall those who instituted and perpetuated that unholy "gentlemen's agreement"-- commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Comiskey, Cap Anson, William Hulbert, Ban Johnson, Tom Yawkey, Clark Griffith, Will Harridge, Warren Giles, Ed Barrow, Larry McPhail, and many others. Less focused upon, I believe, is how this all-too-common history of not signing the best players available for your baseball team has made such a frequent and tremendous travesty of the competition.
Understand this, gang-- collusion wasn't limited to the exclusion of African-American ballplayers, and it didn't come to an end in 1947. It's reared its ugly head again even since the steroid issue hit front and center in 2003. After the 1918 season, in a sharp run-up to the Black Sox scandal, the owners terminated all non-guaranteed contracts for the purpose of driving down salaries. The move came complete with an agreement not to sign one another's players. Before the 1966 season, as another example, the two star pitchers of the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, decided to negotiate jointly with their club, and quite curiously, during the 32 days of spring training negotiations, not one single outside offer was made on what was indisputably the best pitching tamden in the game. This means there were no such offers from clubs such as the Chicago Cubs, whose fans by this point, had waited 58 years for a World Championship, or the St. Louis Cardinals, who already claimed Bob Gibson as moundsman and might have been able to boast the greatest pitching rotation in history if able to sign the talented duo.
After the courts were forced into action, and a collective bargaining agreement was in place, collusion still continued, but in a more secretive, insidious manner. The original-- and all subsequent-- agreements with the players' union specifically stated that
"players shall not act in concert with other players and clubs shall not act in concert with other clubs" in negotiations, but since the 1968 inception of that deal, only the players have stayed true to those guidelines. In January 1988, in response to grievance, a judge awarded $10.5 million to players that had been frozen out of fair market dealings from 1985 to 1987. Only four players had switched teams in free agency between the '86 and '87 seasons.
In a
Sports Illustrated profile of pitcher Jack Morris in 2003, Tom Verducci chronicled a verbal exchange, shared by Morris, that took place between the free agent hurler of 1986 and George Steinbrenner, owner of the Yankees, baseball's then-as-now wealthiest team:
"You're my kind of guy. You're just the kind of guy I need." Steinbrenner began.
(Morris agent Dick) Moss seized the opportunity, and threw out numbers for a three year deal. Suddenly Steinbrenner turned cool, saying that he needed to sign his own free agents, but Moss and Morris knew what was happening. "George," Moss said, "you wouldn't be the kind of person to have anybody tell you what to do, would you?"Steinbrenner replied, "I swear on my mother's grave nobody's telling me what to do."Morris looked Steinbrenner square in the eyes and said to him, slowly and firmly, "Do not do that to your mom. She hears what you're saying."Steinbrenner, Morris says, "lied to his face."Steinbrenner will one day be voted, without debate or controversy, into the Hall-of-Fame, but it was the Minnesota Twins who took the pennant in 1987 with Morris forced to return to the Detroit Tigers. Morris would bring the Twins another championship as a free agent signing in 1991, capping the World Series with a 10-inning shutout in Game 7. Yankees fans would wait another decade, an 18 year drought in total, before raising another World Championship flag.
The players collected $280 million in owner fines during the 1980s because of collusion, then claimed wrongdoing by the owners again in 2002 and 2003. As part of the new bargaining agreement last year, owners agreed to pay the players $12 million from "luxury tax" revenues, without an admission of guilt for the latest offense.
Major League Baseball's henchmen will attempt to take down Jason Giambi over the coming weeks. Selig and Co. know Americans and their news media love a good villain, and as usual, they know where to go in their sport to dig one up. He's wearing a uniform.
A stab in the back
Forget every cautiously optimistic thing I've written this year about the new Democratic-controlled Congress. Push came to shove today, and it turns out we're still dealing with the same bunch of spineless cowards that have been in Washington all along.
In direct opposition with the voter mandate in November, a Senate-House conference committee acquiesced to the President today,
dropping demands for a timetable on Iraq withdrawal while simultaneously approving a $120 billion supplemental war spending bill.
Instead, the committee has forced the president to accept only benchmarks for progress from the wobbly Iraqi government, and even failures on that front would not legally tie the Bush Administration's purse strings. "I view this as the beginning of the end of the president's policy on Iraq," said Democratic Rep. Rahm Emmanuel of Illinois, and truer words may have never been spoken. It's the Democrats' policy now. It's their war. They just purchased it.
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Update 5/25/07 pm: The final
House and
Senate tallies are in. Make a note of it. This is why Boswell and Harkin have stopped getting my vote.
Fish don't fry in the kitchen; Beans don't burn on the grill
The ink may still be wet on a purchase agreement I signed late this afternoon to acquire a condominium unit in Des Moines. An earnest deposit was placed, as well, for a top floor (penthouse?) two-bedroom property across from Iowa Methodist Hospital in the shadow of downtown. It's parcel of a brick building originally constructed in 1900 and currently undergoing a complete renovation. There are hardwood floors, a marble countertop to come in the kitchen, a caste-iron bathtub (to truly pamper oneself,) and a partial view of the city's downtown-- a very good view, perhaps, when the trees out front become dormant.
I chose the property last weekend following a leisurely stroll around my Sherman Hill neighborhood. This journey also included a stop at the new Gateway Market, about five blocks away. Gateway is one of those high-end groceries specializing in organic products, smelly cheeses, and preppy beers. I finally determined that I could afford to purchase this particular condominium provided that I never shopped at the Gateway Market.
This change has been some time in coming as my financial prospects have greatly improved since
that fateful day a year and a half ago. I know the tension surrounding my financial status has probably been about as thick for you people as has the final season of "The Sopranos," and such as in that series, blood may yet be spilled. As the property will not be available for occupancy until probably September 1st, my pal Rob Semelroth (who has been getting an undue amount of positive ink lately,) has graciously agreed to take me in as boarder for part of the summer. Rob stayed with me for a couple weeks in transition a few years ago and has been sponging off my HBO for nearly a decade. During negotiations, I talked him down on the rent from "paying the cable/internet" to "taking one of the ladies off his hands on one of those embarrassing evenings when he has mistakenly lined up a pair."
Saving a month or two on housing should help me budget for all the crap I'll need to buy. Topping the list of necessities is a couch, a couple of good-size rugs, a kitchen table and chairs, and some wind chimes for the screened-in porch. For the first couple of months, at least, the whole place might just be one giant dance floor. Which gives me an idea for a mortgage party...
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One of my broadcast and writing heroes, Studs Terkel of Chicago, turned 95 last week. Roger Ebert, in the pink and back at his keyboard,
commemorates the special day.
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This exercise might be somewhat enjoyable for you baseball fans. Gene Wojciechowski put it together-- match the baseball superstar to some of his early scouting reports.
My Mascara Runs Faster Than You - by Aaron Moeller
The 2007 Marion Arts Festival 5K is history and I’m proud to say I walked away from the wreckage unscathed.
It was a cool morning – perfect for running, really – with 700-plus runners in attendance. Unfortunately, I was exhausted before the race even started because I waited until last night to start my training. I was up until 3 a.m. reading back issues of Runner’s World magazine, which in retrospect was poor strategy. Then again, I hadn’t run in a race since the tenth grade and having fallen behind in my subscription, I wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed any groundbreaking running strategies that have come about in the intervening sixteen years. Turns out I did: A person really should do
some running in the three weeks leading up to a race.
Before the race, I picked out some competitors with particularly shiny shoes and told myself I would try to keep pace with them. I didn’t want to go toe-to-toe with anyone who has worn out their shoes, like Mr. Big Shot Running Star and long-time pal Rob Semelroth, who runs these damn 5K races like they’re sprints. I wasn’t exactly nervous – it’s normal to piss yourself before a race, right? – but I did feel a twinge of "what the hell did I get myself into" as a lady sang the National Anthem and everyone faced a different direction in search of a flag.
At the starting line, Rob takes a spot at the front of the pack. And stays there throughout the competition. I began the race about 15 feet behind him, still pretty close to the front of the group. In retrospect, it messed heavily with my competitive edge in the first mile of the race, as probably about 200 people passed me in the first five minutes alone. Still, I felt pretty good through the first stretch.
I hit the first mile marker at about eight minutes, a decent pace which would have left me just a couple minutes off some of my high school cross country times. At this point, I wondered if Rob was already finishing the race, which immediately depressed me. For the sake of my psyche I put Rob out of my mind. He’s the wrong guy to be comparing yourself with.
Then I settled into a steady pace. The course was ideal, comprised of basically two straightaways, plus it was nice and flat. I tried to push myself a little faster than my usual workout pace, thinking if I started to enjoy the race that probably meant I wasn’t going fast enough. I felt pretty good, even as I got passed by a couple of fifty-year-old women and even a few ten-year-old kids and people running with their dogs. About the only thing that depressed me is when a young mother passed me while pushing a three-year-old in a stroller. At the two-mile marker, a college-aged girl passed me wearing a pink t-shirt. The back of her t-shirt contained the phrase "My mascara runs faster than you." Until being distracted by her ass, this taunting message bothered me too.
Entering the final half-mile, I saw Rob on the sidelines, walking back, cooling down. (He placed fourth.) This was a revelation because at this point it was nice to be assured there
was a finish line. I lengthened my stride and surprised myself by having a little kick in the final 100 yards. For the first time in the race I found myself passing more than one person at a time. I crossed the finish line at just over 27 minutes, about dead center in the middle of the pack, but a full six minutes off my best high school times.
Overall, I was pleased and my various personal accomplishments were many: I finished only ten minutes behind Rob. I ran a consistent race, with pretty even splits. I was exhausted at the end, knowing I left nothing out on the track. Plus: I took a nap afterward and awoke to no soreness or stiffness. I
didn’t vomit at the finish line, unlike the guy who finished just ahead of me. And I still maintained all my dignity because I didn’t race in those tiny, slit-at-the-side shorts – like all the guys who were in the top twenty.
Surely he's not serious
A former Iowa State basketball player is making headway in his writing career. Paul Shirley, four years behind me in the Class of 2001, has blogged about the NBA on ESPN.com, and
his first published book recounts his professional roundball career. It's called "Can I Keep My Jersey? 11 Years, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond."
The always-engaging and self-effacing, and sometimes-deliciously tart Shirley is participating in an ongoing conversation about the NBA Playoffs over on
Slate.com.
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Wowza-- speaking truth to power during a Fox News GOP Presidential debate, of all places. Libertarian-bred Republican Ron Paul has been subsequently savaged by
right-wing types for suggesting Tuesday night that American foreign policy, and our military presence in the Middle East, has helped to foster the kind of attack we endured on 9-11. I suspect that very soon Rep. Paul will stop getting invitations to these debates.
The Race is On - by Aaron Moeller
Tonight, Wheaties and Gatorade are on my training table – replacing the usual SweetTarts and Sunkist – as I begin my lead-up to the Big Race.
The Big Race is the Marion Arts Festival 5K on Saturday morning. Last year, I was a mere spectator as CM Blog comment box contributor Rob Semelroth competed. Semelroth, a marathon-running big shot and a ranking veteran of the Boston, New York and Austin Marathons, is probably one of the top 10 marathoners in his (our) age group in the country. Rob regularly finishes a marathon in close to two and a half hours, but was upset last year in this (by his standards) short race and came in second place. (To any Americans who may be reading this, 5 kilometers is about 3 miles. A marathon is 26+ miles, and therefore a longer distance.) My goal this year is to avenge Rob’s defeat for him.
Actually, Rob will be back to race again, and I’ll be finishing a good mile and a half behind him. Still, my presence will be felt, I assure you. Understand that Rob knows all about my four-year gym membership and likes to joke that my usual workout consists of sitting in a hot tub for an hour. First of all, the hot tub is underrated as a workout tool – I’ve always been able to do a lot more laps in a spa than the swimmers in those ridiculous, lukewarm Olympic-size pools – but that’s not the point.
The point is this: I’m in pretty good shape. It’s true that I haven’t competed in a race since the cross-country season of my sophomore year of high school. That was seventeen years ago, but I still weigh essentially the same as I did back then. I still wear the same pants size. I haven’t begun to lose my hair. And I’m stronger in one area: I can now grow facial hair, which will allow me to intimidate my opponents in ways I was never able to in those heady days of the early '90s. (Anyone who’s ever seen Rob’s occasional beard knows that’s
not his secret to success.)
After a consistent training regiment in March and April, I’ve had a lazy May. I was waylaid by some dental work that has left me tired and popping painkillers all week instead of the
methandrostenolone that Rob turned me on to last winter. I
have been playing some basketball lately though so I’ll be ready to go. Rob knows I’m not going to beat him, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be pushing him from the starting gun. I could tell from his voice on the phone yesterday that I’m already in his head. I have a goal and it’s my mission to achieve it. I feel more than confident that for my three-mile trek, my journey of self-discovery on Saturday, I will blow away Rob’s 2 ½ hour marathon time.
Happy wiretap day
I hope you got all of the filthy internet surfing out of your system this weekend because today is
the official deadline for most internet providers to plug in their new FBI-friendly surveillance equipment, as mandated by the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). Was CALEA a by-product of the Patriot Act and/or the Bush Administration's systematic overreach into civil liberties during this decade? Not at all. It was passed and signed into law in 1994 by a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President.
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I've never linked author Howard Zinn before-- a terrible oversight. In the May issue of
The Progressive, he was
terrific advice for liberals-- or citizens of any political stripe-- who feel the temptation to wade into the arena of politicians and forget the importance of being a true citizen activist.
Money quote:
We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed everything in sight, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite-- provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence-- they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home.---
Sopranos-safe reading: I won't reveal plot-points, but for all of you "Sopranos" fans who follow the series on a weekly, monthly, or yearly delay, you won't be disappointed with the season's final arc. David Chase and Co. continue to top themselves week after week, with just three episodes now remaining. But there's a percentage of the weekly media conversation that rubs me the wrong way. I ask the question-- Does a television audience truly have cause to feel
cheated by anything that ultimately does or doesn't happen from a plot standpoint to the show's characters? Should Tony live or die? Should he find a certain level of redemption or punishment? Until it's all over, it's enormously fun to speculate, of course, and the most extraordinary aspect of the show, other than the acting, has always been the writers' ability to build the tension and play so coyly with our expectations. Chase has earned carte blanche from me, I've decided. The product is so extraordinary that it's beyond my ability to adequately critique, and I'll accept the final decisions of the show's creator, whatever they might be. That's easy for me to say, though, this afternoon-- I got a lot of closure from last night's episode. They could have ended it all right there.
Moeller TV Listings 5/13/07
A very underrated television show wraps Monday Night. "The King of Queens" airs its final episode on CBS at 8pm central after nine seasons of laughs. If you haven't watched in a while, or only see the program in syndication after your late local news, it seems Doug and Carrie Heffernan (Kevin James, Leah Remini) are pursuing the adoption of a child, and Arthur (Jerry Stiller) just might be headed down that matrimonial aisle. The finale is one hour in duration so it will be best to get it watched tonight. In re-runs, they'll have to air the episode over back-to-back nights, and you'll have to schedule around it.
A drinking town with a hockey problem
Des Moines, Iowa has two professional hockey teams-- two more than it needs. The Iowa Stars are the premier squad in town, the top minor league club of the NHL's Dallas Stars. They've been in town for two seasons at the luxurious new Wells Fargo Arena downtown, and tonight play Game 6 in the American Hockey League's division finals at Chicago's Allstate Arena, in the larger pursuit of something called "the Calder Cup." The Des Moines Buccaneers play in the United States Hockey League, which includes teams from other area cities such as Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, and Omaha. The Buccaneers have been in town much longer, play in the much older 95KGGO Arena located in the suburbs, charge about half as much for tickets as the Stars ($14 and $12 for adults, compared to $26 and $16), and hope to handle something called "the
Clark Cup" if they can push through the USHL Final Four this month.
Meanwhile, it's 74 degrees today under mostly sunny skies in Des Moines, with an east-southeast breeze blowing at 9mph. Why some idiot would want to put on his or her fall jacket and go sit in a darkened ice box is beyond my realm of understanding. As it turns out, however, very few idiots do. On Thursday night, 1,822 fans packed the 15,000 seat Wells Fargo Arena for Game 5 of the Stars' series. Bucs fans, who fancy themselves the "rowdier," blue-collar variety, show up in numbers, on average, of about 2,500 per game.
The Iowa Cubs, our minor league baseball team, conversely, drew 12,101 fans last night for their game against Fresno downtown.
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Hear, hear. The phrases "baseball players" and "privacy" in the same
news story.
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Baseball writers have grown so accustomed to passing moral judgment on the sport's premier personalities that a few now feel emboldened enough to assign culpability for one of the game's tragic deaths. CBS'
Gregg Doyel is furious about this. As I see it, LaRussa is guilty of just two major crimes-- combining drinking and driving one night in Florida two months ago, and beating the Mets in last year's National League Championship Series.
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Finally,
equal time for Ida Mae Dobbs.
God save us the queen
Can we stop sucking up to the Queen of England now? Once again, our yokel president was beneath the diplomatic challenge of reading from a prepared speech, but Bush has been guilty of far greater offenses than simply inferring that Elizabeth II is 230 years old. He showed much worse manners, for example, towards Virginia Senator
Jim Webb.
Nobody on this planet has to walk on eggshells around the Queen of England. Just because she wears a fancy hat? She came packed on this trip with 15 "protocol consultants" from Buckingham Palace. Are we supposed to bow or curtsy? Can we speak if not spoken to? We fought a revolution to rid ourselves of this garbage. Has she come to apologize? The Brits may throw away 37.4 million pounds a year on the Queen and her inbred clan, but American commoners don't owe her squat. In the United States, the phrase "your majesty" doesn't roll off a tongue unless it's drenched in sarcasm, and with the Bushes and the Clintons, we know enough to
alternate between
our royal families!
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Here's one more notice: check out Slate.com for their
ongoing discussion of "The Sopranos" final season. NBC news anchor Brian Williams (?) joined the conversation this week. He's hilarious.
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I had another great idea-- this one for a killer radio program--
Fever and Flytrap at Five: "Five o'clock drivetime hour every evening: the best of WKRP's music catalogue-- the music you
won't hear on the brand new WKRP DVD."
Actually, I'm really enjoying the DVD about two-thirds through the season. The editing was more meticulous than I expected. If you haven't seen the show in a while, and you never memorized the music, you won't hardly know what you're missing. Seasons 2 through 4 could still be very different, however. The best episodes are still to come. The stakes are rising.
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What a shocker! Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani became the first mayor in history to collect a World Series ring-- four of them, to be exact, valued now at a collective worth of at least $200,000, and all the New York Yankees got in return from Rudy were a brand-new stadium on the city's west side, another $71 million ballpark for their low level minor league club on Staten Island, half-owned by George Steinbrenner's son, a legal maneuver that stopped a referendum opposing a new Yankee Stadium, and five lease amendments on their current venue that reduced the team's annual rent owed to the city to a meager $100,000.
The
Village Voice investigation linked above estimates that Giuliani's box tickets and "Legends" seats, at an average of eight guests a game, a minimum of 20 games a year, plus the more expensive post-season games Giuliani "never missed" would have cost others an estimated $120,000 a year. For a public servant making $150,000 annually. Corruption at the highest level.
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At the end of
this news feature, actors James Gandolfini and Tony Sirico reveal how "The Sopranos" series will conclude. Read at your own peril.
Uncovering Clinton
It's not a recent release, but I just completed,thanks to my public-funded library, Michael Isikoff's 1999 volume "Uncovering Clinton" about the investigation and cover-up of the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair. Isikoff's reportage for the
Washington Post and later,
Newsweek, led him from Paula Jones's sexual harassment claims to Kathleen Willey to Linda Tripp over a period of about four years. Isikoff was martyred by the nation's right-wing, and pilloried by many on the left, after Clinton's attorneys effectively convinced the public that the charges against the president were "politically-motivated." And while Isikoff's book reveals many lunatic elements on the right, to be sure, it also reveals a man in reckless occupation of the Oval Office, an emotionally-ill individual with an uncontrollable libido, who confessed privately to Lewinsky literally "hundreds of affairs," going so far at one point as to circle the days on his office calendar when he, in his words,"had been good."
Paula Jones, one of multiple women to claim sexual harassment by Clinton throughout his political career, comes off as particularly believable and sympathetic in Isikoff's narrative. It's easy to conclude, in retrospect, that she was failed miserably by feminist political groups, arguably because she didn't share Anita Hill's high economic and social status in our government's hierarchy, but
certainly because the leaders of those organizations saw the president as a political ally.
The Clinton/Lewinsky affair may have been unveiled publicly by political enemies who held a frighteningly-personal hatred for the president, but that fact should do nothing to forgive Clinton for what was, very plausibly, much more than just the breaking of the marital vows with his wife, it was a pattern of lecherous and treacherous behavior on the job, causing him
and his underlings to lie and break the law to protect his secrets.
The scandal may pale, by comparison, to the lies and distortions from the Oval Office that led to our military's imperial invasion of Iraq, but it's part of the same frightening narrative of the last half-century, one that includes the secret escalation of the war in Vietnam, Watergate, the secret sale of arms to Iran, the Iraq debacle, and warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency-- that is, the systematic destruction of our government's balance of power through institutional bullying by the executive branch. "Uncovering Clinton" chronicles compelling examples of the like, and as his wife and his one-time political team campaign for a return to power, his behavior, and theirs, deserve an immediate re-evaluation.
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Presidential candidate Mike Gravel (Grah-VELL') is starting to garner some positive ink.
This is Salon's profile, posted this morning. Perhaps the United States would be better off if we started electing the candidate with the lowest financial net worth.
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Thursday's GOP presidential debate was hilarious. No candidate wanted to mention George W. Bush's name-- it came up twice, but they all tried to piggy-back on Ronald Reagan's so-called "legacy. " Here's some news, though, for the ten Angry White Males on the GOP stump: Reagan' may be the primary man to blame for the dire straits we're in today. He preached the revolutionary message of a powerful executive branch, outrageous military expenditures, privatization, more privatization, and even more privatization. The result is perpetual war, the degradation of civil liberties, the greatest budget deficit in history, and the destruction of the city of New Orleans.
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The Des Moines Register's humor columnist, Ken Fuson, printed
a list of memorable "epitaphs" in his Friday column. I always liked the idea of the tombstone engraving, "
I expected this. Just not so soon."---
The rain hasn't let up in central Iowa for weeks, and lowland flooding is starting to become a serious issue. I drove to and from Iowa City the past two weekends, and the South Skunk River near mile marker 159 is out of its banks, and the water stretching the width across several hundred yards of farm fields. You might know this area by one of its most recognizable attractions-- the "Adult Video" store just north of Interstate 80. Last weekend, the water had encroached all the way to the business' parking lot. I had to buy an inflatable doll just for use as a flotation device.
A flotation device! But seriously...
After the veto
Feingold's nailed it -- Congressional Democrats have been bullied long enough by George Bush on the Iraq War. The president is behaving like a petulant child, continuing to send our soldiers to die in Iraq, against the collective will of the America people, the Congress, and the freedom-loving world, and for no other reason than that he can't take the political heat of admitting a failed policy.
The money paragraph from the Wisconsin Senator:
I won't support a supplemental spending bill that doesn't have binding language to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq. There's a lot of talk right now about Democrats getting the President to sign a bill that only has benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet. But we're long past the point when just setting benchmarks was enough. Even if funding for the Iraq government is conditioned on it meeting those benchmarks, that misses the main point -- which is that, whether or not the Iraqis meet their benchmarks, we need to get out of Iraq so that we can focus on the national security threats we face around the world. And if those benchmarks aren't binding, then they are nothing more than suggestions. The American people aren't asking us to offer suggestions to the Iraqis -- they are asking us to bring our troops out of Iraq.There must be no war funding bill sent to the president that does establish a firm redeployment date for our military, and that redeployment date should be damn near immediate.
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No more "free labor" in college sports, demands U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush of Chicago.
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Add Cardinals Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda to the list. He was
arrested Tuesday after being stopped for speeding, and an officer allegedly found drugs in his car-- marijuana and perhaps methamphetamine or cocaine as well. The arrest comes two days after 29-year-old pitcher Josh Hancock was killed in a car accident, quite possibly as an inebriated driver, and pot was also found in his vehicle. Hancock's death comes less than five years after 33-year-old pitcher Darryl Kile died of coronary disease in a Chicago hotel room. At what point did the Cardinals become "the Kennedy family" of professional sports teams?
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The world has lost two terrific "wing men." Actor/comedian
Tom Poston died Monday at the age of 85. He was best loved by everyone for his role as handyman "George Utley" on the popular television series "Newhart" from 1982 to 1990, alongside Bob Newhart and the late Mary Frann. The befuddled "George" was played to deadpan perfection by Poston, and the actor had a hilarious turn on "Just Shoot Me" in recent years as well, as the former business partner of George Segal's character. Poston leaves behind three children and his wife of 6 years, another Newhart collaborator, the lovely Suzanne Pleshette.
Johnny Carson's "Mr. Excitement,"
Tommy Newsom, has died also. The former "Tonight Show" saxophonist and sometime-band leader, and one-time member of the Benny Goodman Orchestra, was 78. Newsom was Carson's comic foil for three decades-- perhaps more deadpan than Poston, adopting the persona of the man without a personality. Carson announced Newsom's death years ago-- "He died of natural dullness," and once quipped that "As a child, Tommy got lost, and his parents couldn't describe him to police." Upon Carson's death in 2005, Newsom performed the classic tune "Here's That Rainy Day" with "Tonight Show" alums Doc Severinson and Ed Shaughnessy on "The Late Show with David Letterman." The episode was featured at last year's Moeller Television Festival in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He's survived by his wife of 50 years and their daughter.
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Happy birthday to my baby sis. She's three-years-old today. Doesn't look a day over two-and-three-quarters.
Return to Haymarket Square
May 1st marks International Workers Day across the globe, excepting the United States, Canada, and South Africa. It's a day for remembering the heroic struggles of working men and women the world over, with
its roots tracing back to Midwestern America, specifically Chicago, in 1886 and the bloody battle there for an eight-hour work day.
In the U.S., the government quickly transformed May 1st into the conformist-honoring "Law Day," and later, the non-descript "May Day," while "Labor Day" became a holiday in September completely devoid of any historical significance, or
modern significance, for that matter. As Americans, we should be terribly proud however, of our defiant ancestors who planted the seeds of change along Lake Michigan and inspired a planet. Their actions have tremendous resonance today for the millions who struggle and strive for a better life, within our borders and without.
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Other topics:
Finally, we have
a vague timeline in place for the final two "Deadwood" movies on HBO. Pre-production is expected to begin late next month in the show's hometown of Newhall, California, with the coupled two-hour features expected to air on the network sometime in 2008.
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The Cardinals could use a five-day rainout right about now.
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I might be the only person that finds this interesting:
it's the list of U.S. House members who representative districts with Major League Baseball stadiums. Located as most are in the urban jungle, only two ballparks can be found in GOP districts-- The Ballpark at Arlington, Texas, and Cincinnati's Great American Ballpark.
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Ben Tiedemann speaks for all of us.
