The Chris Moeller Archives: June 2008

Thursday, June 26, 2008

"Arrested" to return

Stars Jason Bateman and David Cross tell Keith Olbermann there will be an "Arrested Development" movie.
The video.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Talking white

Considering that Ralph Nader is "irrelevant" and has "almost zero influence" in Democratic, so-called "left-wing" circles," the circle-dwellers sure spend a lot of time talking about him. Today, we've got Salon's Joan Walsh, on-line attackers named Craig Crawford and RJ Eskow, a whole host of anonymous commenters on story threads, even an Obama advisor.

For the record, here's the text of Nader's race-related comments to The Rocky Mountain News earlier in the week, criticized as "reprehensible," "delusional," even "racist" by Democratic party loyalists:

"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.

"He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up."

I would add to Nader's list Obama's failure to tackle other would-be African-American priorities such as voter protection, income disparity and regressive taxation, workers' rights to unionize, public education, universal health care, Katrina, the disastrous "war on drugs," and the reform of our criminal justice and prison systems-- unless by reform, we're talking about an unprecedented expansion of the death penalty, as Obama was today, concurring with a Supreme Court dissent by Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts.

Go ahead and dispute Nader's contention all you want, but it was Obama's team that pitched a fit when Bill Clinton compared their candidate to Jesse Jackson. We're now to believe that whole dustup wasn't about Obama's fear of being cast as "a politically threatening African-American?"

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In case you missed this in a linked story above, Obama just choked on the FISA bill.

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Roseanne Arnold is promoting Cynthia McKinney for president.

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Happy Belated Summer Solstice. Sixty-two-year-old Bill "Spaceman" Lee was mowing them down at the annual Midnight Sun ballgame on Sunday.

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Why is Tony LaRussa taunting me as though I was Scott Rolen?

Monday, June 23, 2008

George Carlin

Like all comedians, George Carlin was a truth-teller, but Carlin dealt in the most unpopular truths there are. His style didn't lead to giant paychecks in movies or on TV sitcoms. Nobody in prime-time takes on religion and white middle-class conventions the way Carlin did. That's biting the hand that feeds you. But Carlin never bowed, never compromised. His thankful audience recognized this, and that's why he was still filling concert halls up to the very end.

Carlin was one of the first of the Lenny Bruce acolytes, a direct artistic descendant of the notorious Jewish comic who reinvented the profession in the '50s and '60s and wrestled it away from its old bortsch belt conventions. Bruce "democratized" comedy with his unfiltered style, and with that as his inspiration, Carlin was able to discover the personal "truth-telling" voice inside of himself, shifting on-stage during the 1960s from a more buttoned-down joke teller to the pony-tailed bomb-thrower he would remain for his final three decades on the stage.

He tackled America's preoccupation with "profanity" and censorship with a routine entitled the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television"-- highlighting (at that time) shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. The list-- and routine-- welcomed controversy, obviously, and its recitation got Carlin arrested at an outdoor performance in Milwaukee in 1972. When a New York City radio station played a recorded performance over the air in '73, the FCC intervened and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, leading to the creation of television's "family hour" broadcast requirement.

The 7 dirty words got America's attention, but Carlin became a stage crusader in the '90s and throughout this decade taking on religion (Carlin was a long-avowed atheist), the war culture, and human injustice. The comedy grew dark, and Carlin admitted in an interview in 2005 that his split from humanity as a whole was irrevocable. "I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago," he said, "Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. I think they lost their way, and I really have no sympathy for that. And I don't think it's fixable."

In his new book "Comedy on the Edge," author Richard Zoglin writes that Carlin, during his long career, had a hand in the creation of almost every comedy form we witness today,

"Carlin's impact was broad and deep. He carried on Bruce's crusade against hypocrisy, cant, and social injustice-- for a generation that was more receptive to it and willing to turn it into action. His early takeoffs of DJs and TV commercials set a gold standard for scores of media satirists to follow, and his jokey newscasts provided the template for news parodies from Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update to Jon Stewart's Daily Show. His riffs on schoolroom pranks and bodily functions and the little absurdities of language showed the next crop of "observational" comics that nothing was too trivial or mundane-- or tasteless-- to become fodder for smart comedy.

Just as important, he showed that stand-up comedy could be a noble calling, one that required courage and commitment and that could have an impact outside of its own little world. And you could make a lifetime career of it, without burning out or self-destructing."

A guy I used to work with in radio had a first career as a limousine driver, and his favorite story involved driving Carlin once from the Des Moines airport. From the backseat, Carlin asked him, "What do you think all the poor people are doing today?" and the guy responded, "They're driving limos." He was so proud of his line, but I like the story because it's so particularly believable. That strikes me as exactly the way Carlin would talk when he was off-stage-- still committed to the performance and always searching for a fresh angle on the world.

There will be no sappy stuff in this obit upon the death yesterday of Mr. Carlin. It wasn't his style, and since he didn't believe in a heaven, I'm not going to be the one to conjure an image of Carlin floating amid the clouds with the other revolutionaries-- Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Sam Kinison. To do so would be a profanity.

Moeller TV Listings 6/23/08

Joe Buck, former Cardinals radio/TV broadcaster, will be a guest tonight for the first time ever on "The Late Show with David Letterman." The lead MLB and NFL announcer on FOX Television, Buck has guested previously on Leno, Conan, and even guest-hosted "The Late Late Show" prior to Craig Ferguson's appointment, but this will be the first time with King Dave on CBS. Joe's father, Jack, a Cards' broadcasting legend from 1954 until his death in 2002, was CBS Radio's lead man for two decades on Monday Night Football and broadcast nationally 11 World Series and 17 Super Bowls.

I've often wondered if the elder Buck, who was no stranger to plaid sport coats and square politics, knew what he was doing in 1969 when he gave his newborn son the same name as the lead character, a male hustler, in that year's Academy Award-winning film, "Midnight Cowboy."

Friday, June 20, 2008

The Great Oil Caper

The U.S. invastion of Iraq did not take place because Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. It was not because their government possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was not because the dictator, Hussein, had murdered many of his own people, or because he was harboring al-Qaeda and other terrorists, or for the cause of western democracy and international peace. These were merely selling points.

It was because of oil. Iraq had it and America wanted it. Now we're taking it.

On June 30th, Iraq's Oil Ministry, led by their American advisors, will formally announce that no-bid contracts have been settled with four multi-national oil companies of the West-- ExxonMobil, Shell, Total, and BP-- to service the country's oil fields. The move comes 36 years after this oil was lost to these companies as Saddam Hussein rose to power in the region and nationalized the industry. After the deaths of more than a million Iraqis, severe damage to the strength and standing of the U.S. Armed Forces, and the obliteration of the cause of peace, the war profiteers are now getting down to the serious business.

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Why do Democrats lose elections? Here's the latest illustration:

Campaigning in the rust-belt states of Pennsylvania and Ohio this spring, Barack Obama accurately described Bill Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement as "devastating" and "a big mistake" and suggested that he would use the U.S.'s opt-out clause "as a hammer" to demand a better deal for workers and farmers in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. But this week, he's telling Fortune magazine that he doesn't believe in unilaterally re-opening NAFTA or any other so-called "free trade" agreements.

Says Obama: "Sometimes during campaigns, rhetoric gets overheated and amplified... Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself." This craven back-pedaling reinforces the Democrats' reputation for pandering and puts the Electoral College tallies for Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back into play for John McCain, but I'm sure it will still be Ralph Nader's fault if they lose.

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A Cedar Rapids Gazette videographer, Elizabeth Hladky, has gathered footage of some of the flood destruction in downtown Cedar Rapids, including a peek inside both the Paramount Theater and the bus depot. They are some pretty harrowing images.

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In Gloucester, Massachusetts, a group of high-school girls reportedly entered into a teenage "pregnancy pact", and at least 17 of them are expecting babies. When I was in high school, my buddies and I entered into a pact to finish an 80-game season with a baseball board game.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Interleague mayhem

Tonight, the Cardinals return to their interleague schedule with the beginning of a three-game set against the American League Royals. It's another chance for an exciting (yawn)..um... where did I put those pills?

Can't we put an end to this hideous interleague experiment once and for all? The Royals and Cardinals are supposed to be regional rivals, but nobody cares. The two teams haven't played a meaningful contest against one another in almost 23 years. The 1985 World Series was tightly-fought, the Royals dubiously crowned, but now who gives a flying fig? The Cards won the 2006 World Series and we have nine others to boast. I concern myself with the Royals about as much as I concern myself with how Kevin Federline spent his Father's Day.

And this is considered one of the premiere matchups in the majors' heavily-promoted interleague schedule. It must be-- we play them every year, usually on a home-and-home basis. There is nothing interesting left to these interleague competitions. The novelty has worn, and baseball is best when it's played between teams that know each other well and the teams that win the most can then be trusted to be the best. In baseball, where constant adjustments are necessary, familiarity breeds quality. That's how it was set up in a sporting universe that allowed for a minimum of 18 head-to-head games between league or division rivals for more than a century.

Any Triple-A-caliber pitcher can be "lights out" for one ballgame if he's never been seen before, but this type of baseball truism is supposed to be balanced out by a long and grueling schedule in which you see the same opponents multiple times. When the Tampa Bay Rays came to St. Louis last month for only the second time ever, I recognized many of the players' names, but I wouldn't have been able to match names to faces. I didn't even know they were no longer called the Devil Rays. These were like exhibition games in the middle of the season-- all scouting reports and no rivalry. Can you imagine an on-the-field brawl breaking out between the Cardinals and the Rays? It's a laughable idea. The games require trainers on the field just to measure a given player's pulse.

Everyone seems to enjoy a Cubs/White Sox interleague matchup or a Mets/Yankees, but no one seems to notice that these contests are robbing us of extra Cubs/Cardinals and Yankees/Red Sox games. It's almost half-way through the season and the Cubs and Cards have only met thus far for a single three-game set. The Cardinals go to Wrigley Field this year all of twice, for a total of 6 games, and none until August 8th when the kids are practically back in school. Is this the type of schedule you remember growing up? Worse yet is the loss of the old-school rivalries within each league, but outside the divisions-- Reds/Dodgers, Cardinals/Giants, Cubs/Mets, or other combinations of the above. These had the potential to flare up and dominate entire decades.

It's all short-sided thinking, financially and otherwise, compromising these types of league rivalries that need to be better supported before they play out each autumn in the playoffs, and it takes the shine off the World Series as well, which was designed to be unique. When a National League club sees an American League team in the World Series, they haven't seen each other enough to be familiar anyway, and now there's little magic in the rarity also. We get the best of neither. The Mets/Yankees Series matchup in 2000 should have been epic, but the well had been poisoned and television ratings set record lows. There's been a lot of buzz around Chicago this summer about a possible Cubs/White Sox matchup come October, but why speculate-- and why wait? The two clubs will meet for three this weekend, and three more the following. Of course, the Cubs against anyone in the World Series would get the hemisphere's attention, but why are we always compromising?

The latest league trend is to mix and match the schedule to such a point that two teams competing in the same division can have completely different schedules. The Cubs meet the White Sox for 6, and the Orioles for 3 this year. The Cardinals play neither, but get the Royals for 6, and the Tigers and the Red Sox each for 3. For some bizarre reason, the Cards face the Tigers now almost every year, but they haven't played a game at Baltimore's Camden Yards in any of the 12 interleague seasons. The Cubs and Cardinals are supposed to have virtually identical schedules-- as they did for their first 121 years. They're turning baseball into college football, which everyone should recognize as the most corrupt sporting institution in America not controlled by Don King. There's no consistency or science to the scheduling, no level playing field, and the lack of fairness almost seems to be perpetuated, to create buzz on talk radio or something.

Major League Baseball is well aware these interleague games are nothing but exhibition fodder. That's why they don't schedule any of them in August and September.

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Baby Steinbrenner, George's son Hank, got teed off after Yankees ace Chien-Ming Wang sprained his right foot running the bases in an interleague game (played minus the AL's usual designated hitter) and sidelining him for an estimated six weeks--

“My only message is simple. The National League needs to join the 21st century. They need to grow up and join the 21st century... Am I [mad] about it? Yes. I’ve got my pitchers running the bases, and one of them gets hurt. He’s going to be out. I don’t like that, and it’s about time they address it. That was a rule from the 1800s.”

Please give this guy his league back. I don't want him soiling mine anymore than he wants to see crisply-played ballgames involving well-rounded athletes.

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Any Eero Saarinen fans out there? Sample this slide show presentation of the architect's finest work.

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Christopher Hitchens closes the book on the Hillary Clinton campaign. He seems downright gleeful about her electoral demise.

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You've been waiting for this and you never even realized it. Pollsters have put together a national county-by-county map revealing how and where Americans differentiate between "pop" and "soda."

Monday, June 16, 2008

Dateline: Newhall

My hometown of Newhall (est. population 976) in Benton County, Iowa will be featured in Tuesday's edition of the New York Times. Reporter Susan Saulny spoke at length with local farmer Dave Timmerman about the flooding effect on the area's corn and soybean crop. The story goes to show that even the flooding of the smallest tributaries across the state, like Newhall's Wildcat Creek, which you won't find registered in your home's road atlas, will be contributing to the limited crop outputs this year. Saulny describes Timmerman as "an optimist at heart and a pragmatist with German roots." Aren't we all?

My favorite line-- "...Under the wide skies of Benton County, an idyllic landscape that could rival a movie set with its picture-perfect backdrops of big red barns..." I seem to recall many more big white barns than red ones in the area, but that's parsing things. The Times botched that whole WMD thing in Iraq, but they got this one right.

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This AP photo is getting a lot of attention today. It's on the websites of both The Des Moines Register and Cedar Rapids Gazette. What are your thoughts? Trigger-happy poe-lee-cin' or justified security of the flooded areas? Of course none of us can be completely sure if we weren't physically there, but I vote 'justified' if the idea is to protect these access checkpoints.

Already an energy company employee fell through an open manhole cover in shallow water in Cedar Rapids, and this would become a larger issue than just one man and his property if contamination, natural gas, or chemicals come into play. It's one thing to blow up yourself or even your own home, but what then happens to the home next door if yours blows? The authorities are there to protect us all. If it's a more helpful way of looking at it, think of it as the floodwaters temporarily obscuring the property lines.

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NBC's Tim Russert, who died Friday, seemed like a perfectly nice guy, but I can't join in the chorus of praise for his work as Sunday morning moderator. The fact that Beltway insiders considered Russert so publicly and so universally to be the toughest of the political interviewers only worsened the impact on the electorate's level of misinformation when his "Meet the Press" product failed to deliver.

We live in an era in which politicians and their hacks are allowed to steamroll the traditional media, which is supposed to be our guardian by de-spinning the rather sophisticated bullshit spun out of each political camp on a daily basis. It's not even a fair fight at this point. Russert's lowest point professionally had to have been the Scooter Libby trial when Dick Cheney's communications director, Cathie Martin, testified that going on the journalist's show "was a tactic we often used. It's our best format."

Russert was frequently and expertly promoted by NBC as "a former prosecutor" and that came across distinctly in his style, but the format flaw of "Meet the Press" that ultimately compromised everything else was that Russert had to continue to reinforce the status quo of Washington to demonstrate for the television audience that he was the most daunting inquisitor therein. We were given constant reminders and implications that Russert was a blue-collar kid from Buffalo that had made it into "the club," but the idea all along should have been to stay the hell out of the club.

In Esquire in 2004, Tom Carson wrote:

(O)ne reason Russert never makes the powers that be squirm, except individually, is that he's refereeing a game whose rules he's eager to endorse, playing a time-honored role in Washington media culture. A decade or so ago, Ted Koppel was the Daunting Guy. In the eighties, it was Sam Donaldson, a sheep in wolf's clothing if ever there was one. And back when Nixon walked the earth, believe it or not, Dan Rather was supposed to be the toughie. This isn't exactly a list of angry villagers. It's a roster of careerists who've all known that despite the appearance of adversarial probing, the Daunting Guy's job is essentially ritualistic--not that far removed, independence-wise, from being Louis XIV's confessor. Like his predecessors, Russert challenges authority only to the exact extent that the Beltway-insider consensus has agreed that challenge is permissible. That's why he's more useful as a barometer than a scourge.

Regular "Meet the Press" viewers like myself were subjected time and time again, week after week, to the increasingly antiquated and irrelevant punditry of the likes of Washington insiders and Russert pallies James Carville, Mary Matalin, and Bob Shrum. Such segments would even routinely end with warm updates or references to the participants' children, advertising that the dinner party would thus continue even after the cameras stopped rolling. The fossilized remains of David Broder and William Safire were still getting carted onto the MIP set once or more per month to offer their keen insights on the stories of the day even after more than 600 "Meet the Press" appearances between them. The mood was always lighter than air, as if as an important reminder to the viewing public that Democrats and Republicans in Washington can all get along in spite of their differences.

Was there any politician that was afraid of going on "Meet the Press" during the time that Russert served as moderator and chief editor of the broadcast? Like any other discussion show in the traditional television medium, the topics were more often focused on the horse-racing of politics rather than on the substance of policy, and politicians were still evaluated more for their political skills than for their vision. The time of the man's death may not be the ideal time to point out these perceived flaws, but the man was so well-esteemed in our nation's capitol and his passing has elicited such outsized praise for his very public legacy that they can't be passed over. Journalistic ideas are constantly being shaped, in particular when journalists and their craft are cast into their own bright spotlight, and like the persons and subjects they investigate, we should demand a full accounting.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

The deluge

Sorry for the delay in blogging. I was in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids with several days off, and I stumbled onto an international news story there, but without internet access at the ready. City officials and residents of Des Moines have to be breathing a sigh of relief over the impact on our community relative to what's been happening in eastern Iowa along the Cedar and Iowa Rivers. In Cedar Rapids, where flood stage is 12 feet, waters climbed above the previous record of 20 feet to a preposterous mark of 31.3 feet. Thirty-nine hundred homes were under water, effecting over $700 million in combined property values, and as the river waters just start to recede this weekend, a monumental cleanup effort will only then begin.

In Iowa City, the water level is likewise staggering-- holding steady at 31.5 feet. (The old record was 28.52 ft.) Sixteen university buildings are effected, including the arts campus, Hancher Auditorium, and the Memorial Union, and the city is physically divided into two parts save for an open stretch of Interstate 80. The river at Iowa City is believed to be reaching its highest level though today, a couple days earlier and 18 inches lower than previously expected.

I traveled over downtown Cedar Rapids near the time of its peak water level late Friday morning en route to help a friend with some non-weather-related home repairs, but by 2pm, we got word that Interstate 380 between CR and Iowa City was going to be closing at 6 o'clock that day, and then would likely not re-open again for 7 to 10 days. At the time, we didn't know if there would be an alternate route back to Des Moines, and when that information crystallized later in the evening, it turned out it would have involved several hundred additional miles, being re-routed to the north on a pathway through the communities of Waterloo (where there was also tremendous flooding) and Ames. Interstate 80 traffic from Chicago westbound is having to be re-routed to part of that same stretch due to flooding in Cedar County, up first to Dubuque from the Quad Cities before passing through Waterloo and crossing south down I-35 to Des Moines.

In Cedar Rapids, residents will remain limited in their water usage for several days. They were already being asked on Thursday to limit usage to drinking water only, foregoing showers and baths, and naturally any lawn care or car washing. Paper plates were being suggested in lieu of dishes that require hand or machine washing.

My brother, dog-sitting for a month in Iowa City/Coralville, is now unable to get to his work in Cedar Rapids, and would be restricted regardless in reaching his home. The one-way road passing in front of his apartment complex has been closed, and though his possessions are no doubt safe at the property, particularly being on a higher floor, entering the building would likely require parking on a back street and traipsing through neighboring lawns.

You can't say enough about the rescue, medical, and environmental health efforts in eastern Iowa, and the residents as well, who it seemed were keeping remarkably cool heads. The news coverage I witnessed was exemplary, in particular that of the locally-owned and operated Cedar Rapids Gazette and its television sister, KCRG. We spent hours upon hours (Aaron and me, that is) fixated on the anchored broadcast coverage of Bruce Aune and Beth Malicki. Aune--pronounced ow'nee-- was already an old warhorse when I moved from the Cedar Rapids television market in 1993 (coincidentally right around the time of the most previous extensive flooding). He shaved off his mustache about the time Tom Selleck did, but he's still top-notch.

Next in the floodwater's sights, regrettably, are dozens of downstream communities in southeastern Iowa such as Burlington and Columbus Junction, the latter being the unfortunate town located at the confluence of the Cedar and Iowa Rivers.

Dad, if you're able to read this in Moscow (Moscow, Russia-- not wet Moscow, Iowa along the Cedar)--Happy Father's Day. The house and the dog are safe. Although your other son is falling behind in the lawn-mowing.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Sump pump central

To a casual observer, the state of Iowa would appear to be sinking. Our rivers instead are rising to alarming and historic levels. Bridges and eating establishments in downtown Des Moines were being closed today, downtown Waterloo evacuated, and at the Coralville reservoir in east-central Iowa, the overflow of the spillway on Wednesday morning is expected to surpass the level of even 1993. Residents of small towns such as Charles City, New Hartford, Washburn, Palo, and Chelsea have been ordered out by emergency management authorities. The predicted river crest in Cedar Rapids later this week would be more than two feet above the 1993 crest, and a foot and a half more than the record crests for that city in 1929 and 1851. Rapid, indeed.

Overnight, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be lowering the floodgates at the Saylorville Lake emergency spillway, which will bring a surge of water into the Des Moines metro area to its south. The Corps says it will take 12 hours for that water to reach downtown Des Moines. Hundreds of collegiate athletes in town for the NCAA Track and Field Championships at Drake University have forsaken the downtown hotels for drier accommodations, and Wednesday is also expected to deliver heavy rains once again across the state.

I'm fortunate. I'm on the first big hill west of downtown Des Moines, and on the top floor of my building to boot. For those of us on higher ground, the impact is on our transportation routes. Heading east on Interstate 80 on Thursday, I'll no doubt be faced with a swelling South Skunk River near Newton that was already approaching the surface of the coast-to-coast track on Sunday afternoon. The water at that time had encroached upon the parking lot of the infamous Adult Superstore at Exit 159. I had to buy an inflatable doll just to have a flotation device. I said-- I had to buy an inflatable doll just to have a flotation device. Ah, screw it.

The impact on the world outside Iowa will be spiking food prices. Flooded fields mean even less supply than was already anticipated. The U.S. Agriculture Department estimates that 10 percent less corn will be harvested this year than in 2007, and commodity prices later in the year could climb to more than double that of 2006.

Monday, June 09, 2008

"The Sopranos" in a Bakhtinian dialogical text

Fordham University in New York City just played host to a symposium focused upon the HBO television series "The Sopranos". The conference included a four-hour bus trip to visit series locations as well as a guest appearance by actor Dominic Chianese, who portrayed Uncle Junior.

From The New Yorker article embedded above...

"The most compelling presentations were not by the theorists but by other kinds of expert. Dianna Rivers, a professor of nursing from Texas, discussed the financial difficulties that Tony’s men, not employed by the kind of organization that offers Blue Cross, faced as a result of their frequent hospitalizations. Philip Scala, a retired F.B.I. agent, said that the ritual by which Christopher was “made” was entirely accurate, down to the burning of the saint’s picture, but that, as part of the lowering of standards so often deplored by Tony, the DeCa-valcante family, said to be the model for Tony’s crew, had abandoned the ceremony: “They would just have a pizza party and say, ‘You’re made.’ ” (This caused other families to disrespect them.) Two brave men involved in Mafia cleanups in Sicily—Fabio Licata, a judge, and Antonio Ingroia, a prosecutor—reported that “The Sopranos” never caught on with Italians. “They didn’t understand how a Mafia boss could have psychological problems,” Ingroia said.

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The Ten-pin shuffle: I jinxed it. The same month I made passing reference to the International Bowling Hall of Fame, the semi-popular tourist attraction located in downtown St. Louis, the museum's board announces that it's relocating to Arlington, Texas. It would appear another casualty of the baseball Cardinals' "Ballpark Village" boondoggle surrounding Busch Stadium III. Simultaneously, the Milwaukee, WI suburbs are losing the United States Bowling Congress to the same Dallas suburb. When did Texas supplant the American Midwest as the hub of the bowling world? I blame Barack Obama.

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The National Park Service is contemplating the return of part of Badlands National Park in western South Dakota to the Oglala Sioux tribe. There are delicate issues here involving tribal rights and environmental concerns. I wish I had the answers. The park is extraordinarily beautiful and worth the best of our federal conservation efforts, but having driven through the described southern part of the park and Pine Ridge Reservation last summer, the poverty coupled with the carelessly discarded refuse on the Indian land was alarming. There's hopefully-- and quite likely-- a lot of truth to the tribe activist's words in the linked article-- "The people took better care of it when it was theirs," but I'm not so militant as to buy into his claim that "the whole park service is environmental racism" against Indian peoples.

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People on the street are speaking out about Hillary Clinton's suspended presidential bid.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Vanity Fair explores Clintonworld

Everybody's talking about this Vanity Fair piece on Bill Clinton, including Bubba himself. (And who could miss this story behind a magazine cover like this?)

There are some juicy (read: slimy) new tidbits in the article pertaining to Bill's post-presidency globe-trotting aboard the private jet Clinton aides have dubbed "Air Fuck One," but actress Gina Gershon wants it known that she would never debase herself in such a way as to involve herself with our 42nd president-- and she was in "Showgirls."

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Through a mutual contact, I discovered this terrific blog maintained by an Iowa woman abroad. Val Flynn is a Peace Corps volunteer, only 23 years old, currently serving in an isolated part of China significantly effected by the Sichuan earthquake. Her written accounts are staggeringly vivid both as a profile of this region and then as a first-hand account of the earthquake's devastation. It makes my blog look like a student paper. Keep in mind as you read it that censorship in China is extraordinarily pervasive, and government officials are no doubt monitoring the site closely.

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Joshua Tyree of McSweeney's publishing house has never been able to buy into the plausibility of the Death Star's trash compactor, made famous in a scene from George Lucas' 1977 epic "Star Wars." I wouldn't link to it if it weren't important.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Please vote for Ed Fallon

If you live in Iowa's Third Congressional District, I'd like to encourage you to go to the polls on Tuesday to support Ed Fallon in the Democratic primary. If you're like me and not registered as a Democrat, you can change your party affiliation at your polling place. (You can always change it back.)

Iowa's Third District covers south-central Iowa, stretches across the Des Moines metro area, snaking north and east to cover even my home county of Benton, which is in the eastern part of the state. (Thank you, Tom DeLay.) Having lived my entire life, save for my college years, within the current borders of this district, I can vouch for Ed's personal humility and integrity, and for his commitment to the issues that greatly effect our district-- from cleaning up corporate-owned Washington to sensible urban and rural economic development to a sustainable agriculture and support for family farms.

Contrary to what the Des Moines Register claims, Fallon and his well-financed incumbent opponent, Leonard Boswell, could not be further apart on the biggest issues facing our country and the district. Boswell voted to authorize the war on Iraq (which Fallon has opposed since its inception), continuing to back its funding straight through the most recent legislative session.

Boswell voted for the PATRIOT act that allowed warrantless domestic spying and wiretapping on Americans, voting to even reauthorize it in 2005, and supporting Bush's immunity plan for the telecom companies that participated and that pour money into Washington. The incumbent supports NAFTA, fast-track trade authority for the president, and tax breaks for big oil. He accepts soft-money and has been extravagantly financed by PACs and lobbyists this election cycle and during each of the previous. Fallon has stood up repeatedly and consistently against all of the above.

If you live in the district, you've likely run into Fallon at a town hall meeting or a local farmers' market in recent weeks, but you haven't received mailings because Ed doesn't accept PAC or lobbyist donations. It's strictly a grass-roots effort. You've no doubt, though, been bombarded with almost-daily mailings from Boswell soft-pedaling his own shadowy record in Congress and accusing Fallon of helping to get George Bush elected in 2000 (by backing Ralph Nader), and then sinking so low as to accuse Fallon of setting sex offenders loose on children because Fallon had the courage to oppose the knee-jerk, preposterous "neighborhood" bills in Iowa that have created rural communities made up almost entirely of released sex offenders.

Boswell made himself a virtual laughingstock during this primary race, even among disinterested Republicans and Independents, by claiming that he was too busy to debate Fallon in any location or under any format. Boswell's agenda while in Washington has been almost as murky. During his tenure, he has introduced no important legislation whatsoever (I defy anyone to produce it), and he disappeared for almost an entire year recently with some mysterious, covered-up health ailment.

Before he was one of the well-established Bush Democrats in Congress, Boswell was a sellout in the Iowa Legislature where Ed Fallon alternately made his political mark as an incorruptible progressive respected on both sides of the aisle. In 1995, as head of the Senate, Boswell pushed through passage of the so-called "Decoster Bill," nicknamed for one of Iowa's most notorious corporate ag producers, that caused a drastic shift in Iowa law to support out-of-state corporate ag giants against fourth and fifth generation Iowa family farmers and families. The results have been devastating, as anyone acquainted with rural Iowa can now attest. As a member of the House Ag Committee at that same time, Fallon was one of, if not the Decoster Bill's most dedicated opponents.

I've met and visited with Ed many times, as many of his neighbors have over the years in the district he represented in the state legislative. (He lives in Sherman Hill two blocks away.) I haven't always agreed with him. I was disappointed when he told reporters earlier in the campaign that his biggest regret was having supported Nader in 2000. I emailed him expressing my disappointment in what I interpreted to be a regret in his own past idealism and political courage. I received a personal email the very same hour I sent it (paraphrasing back my own comments) explaining his belief that he felt the Nader endorsement caused a rift in the progressive movement. While temporarily fostering dreams of transforming myself into Ed's personal Jeremiah Wright, I came to my senses and determined that honest people can have honest disagreements when the cause is shared. The candidate has to be strong enough in his or her principles though to stand up to the polluted environment that is Washington and Ed Fallon is that candidate.

Iowa's Secretary of State may smell malfeasance in why a man would change his voter registration three times during the same two months (from Democrat to Green-- as I've done; to Democrat to Green again-- as I still plan to do), but Ed Fallon deserves my vote. I believe he deserves yours too. If all of their candidates had the integrity, substance, and track record that Ed has, we would all proudly call ourselves Democrats.

The Chris Moeller Archives