The Chris Moeller Archives

Put People First-- Iowa CCI in Action

Right-wing "Tea Parties" erupted all over the country in 2009. We know this because there was an eager news media there at every stop of the way to record each of the individual gripes and complaints about our "oppressive" government of the people. The Tea-Party movement had no ideas or solutions to offer the nation. They just bitched a lot, and bitched loudly, and a few times, violently. A lot of sizzle and no steak, and the news media lapped it up.

Yesterday in Des Moines, by contrast, a group of Iowa citizens numbering in the hundreds, armed with a list of actual ideas and solutions to the nation's and the state's problems, staged a large-scale media event of their own, first, at the Capitol building and then downtown. Yet you'll find no evidence of their activity yesterday or today in the city's one and only, now-decaying news daily, The Register. The paper skipped the story entirely.

Following a half-day of rallying and lobbying at the Statehouse, hundreds of members of the organization Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (of which-- disclosure-- I am a member and a rally participant during the earlier part of the day), representing multiple nationalities, students and the retired, Iowa-born and immigrant (to paraphrase a rally speaker), packed the downtown office lobbies of both Wells Fargo Bank and Bank of America to protest a pair of financial institutions responsible for helping to sink the national economy, plunging the state of Iowa into a $1 billion budget deficit, taking tens of billions in bailout funds from taxpayers, and then paying out billions in executive bonuses to their top-compensated employees.

Des Moines police were at both bank locations yesterday to chase the citizen activists out of the corporate offices, and the online news journal iowaindependent.com had a reporter on the scene as well, but a representative from the circulation- and revenue-hemorrhaging Register was nowhere to be found, as evidenced by the news outlet's list of stories available online. (Although, in the paper's defense, budget cuts have forced a number of newsroom layoffs in recent years, and the Lion's Club in Johnston was announcing a book sale.)

Nothing to see here, I guess. Only the seeds of a genuine populist political uprising. Perhaps protest placards at the scene were deemed lacking in swastikas and politician-as-Hitler images.

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You make the call: Which is the most accomplished Major League Baseball player?

Player A:
11 years, 828 runs scored, 1575 hits, 225 home runs, 838 RBIs, 253 steals, .280 batting avg., .802 OPS, a Rookie of the Year, 3 Top 10 MVP finishes, and 4 Gold Gloves

Player B:
6 years, 431 runs scored, 929 hits, 174 home runs, 587 RBIs, 57 steals, a .285 batting avg., .834 OPS, an MVP (only time in the Top 10), and 2 Gold Gloves

5 playoff games played in by each. No World Series.


Discussion below.

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President Obama should use his State of the Union address tonight to bludgeon Republicans about the head for their year-long commitment to obstructionism, says Salon's Joan Walsh.

The year began with a GOP legislator shouting "You Lie" during the Prez's annual address to the bicameral gathering of the Congress, ended with the Democrats losing their filibuster-proof Senate majority, and was marked throughout by the Republicans' stubborn refusal to cede to the President even on the country of his birth. Yet, he still seems to solidly support the prospect of bipartisanship. Maybe by next January, after a cycle of mid-term elections and 12 more months of personal smears, he'll be up to speed.

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Ed Begley, Jr. is still the coolest environmentalist around.

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To the question above, if you said Baseball Player A, then congratulations on agreeing that Andre Dawson should be enshrined in Cooperstown this July as a member of the Montreal Expos instead of as a member of the Chicago Cubs. The Hall of Fame itself gets to pick the cap that appears on the enshrined player's plaque, just as it gets to draft the text that appears beneath the player's image. Dawson told a Chicago radio station this morning that he's been informed by the Hall that his likeness will be that of the Expos player (Young Andre over Old Andre[?]), and that he's disappointed he wasn't first consulted.

Congrats to Dawson on changing the question to "For which team is he best-remembered?" from the previous "Should he even be in the Hall-of-Fame?" but this one is a no-brainer. It's no personal knock on Dawson. He's correct that he needed the combined service with both teams to be considered a Hall-of-Famer, and he clearly recognizes the very real life advantage of being connected to a popular Cubs franchise that has a thriving fandom and a global reach as opposed to being linked forever with Les Expos Defunt. But this is as it should be. The Hall is a museum, first and foremost, and Montreal may have been mugged of its baseball team (in 2004), but we don't get to write the franchise and its fans out of history as a result of Major League Baseball's corporate relocation actions.

posted by CM @ 7:17 PM