Oscar Night predictions 2011
Here are three predictions in advance of tonight's Academy Awards telecast:
#1-- "The King's Speech" will win for best picture. As the New York Times' A.O. Scott tells us, "Hitler + handicap + Shakespeare + $100 million = best picture."
#2-- Hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco, Hollywood's prom king and queen for the year, will annoy the hell out of me. They will not be funny in the slightest--
oh, but aren't they so cute? No, they're not. Bring back Chris Rock, I demand!
Or better yet, Ricky Gervais.
Franco thinks Gervais
"bombed" during his infamous second stint as host of the Golden Globes last month, but then Franco prefers his comedy to be unintentional judging by the fact that
he teaches a college film course on the subject of his own movies.
#3-- When I finally get around to seeing them, none of the 10 nominees for best picture will be as entertaining as the little comic gem I saw last weekend called "Cedar Rapids." This isn't an Adam Sandler-type Hollywood comedy where the studio's marketing department flushes out the story and Jennifer Aniston is added to the cast so that high school boys can take their girlfriends to the cineplex. "Cedar Rapids" is actually funny-- a
Wilder-esque romp also in the American Midwest tradition of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, who are not coincidentally executive producers of the new flick. Ed Helms might be our next Jack Lemmon. Run, don't walk, to see "Cedar Rapids."
"Cedar Rapids" Disclaimer #1: I was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1975.
"Cedar Rapids" Disclaimer #2: I was married to Anne Heche for three weeks in 2001.
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How valuable a commodity is Albert Pujols to the St. Louis Cardinals? So valuable that he's become one of
the Cubs' most marketable players?
Koch suckers
Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. There's a bill in the Wisconsin Senate, we all know by now, that would strip state employees of their right to bargain collectively for wages and benefits, but there's
a lesser-known bill (Senate #11) that, if passed, would allow the governor to sell any state-owned heating, cooling, or power plant to a private business, "without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state." "No approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary," and he can unilaterally lay off workers prior to the sell-off.
Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which we told you earlier in the week was one of the Wisconsin governor's largest campaign donors last year, and also a donor to about a dozen other Wisconsin Republicans, are a leading refining and chemicals company that
already have a utility monopoly across several states, have an oil pipeline that stretches across Wisconsin, and have coal plants in four Wisconsin cities: Green Bay, Manitowoc, Ashland, and Sheboygan.
A monkey's uncle am I. This bill would allow Governor Scott Walker to sell a state utility monopoly to his sugar daddies, cutting out entirely Wisconsin's citizens and its review and protection board in the approval process-- and for pennies on the dollar!
While America is debating the value of public labor unions.
Author Thomas Frank was
on the Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC Wednesday night. He released an incredibly clairvoyant book two years ago called "The Wrecking Crew," and has proven himself a useful authority. He suggests that, back in the 1800s, a private company was able to buy off entire state governments-- and often did. In Kansas-- Frank's home state as well as the home state of the Koch brothers-- that business was a railroad. Informed citizens in these states reformed by creating what we now think of as the civil service, a true public bureaucracy that protects us up to and including, in this case, publicly-owned utilities, and public utility boards to regulate them and provide oversight. Worker protections, spurred by unions, were a key element of these reforms.
These two bills before the Wisconsin Senate (and who knows what else) are precisely what the Koch brothers were getting when they purchased Scott Walker.
The Governor from Koch Industries
Newsflash: There is no legitimate citizen movement in the United States dedicated to ending the rights of public employees to collectively bargain for the pay and benefits. According to
Gallup, by almost two-to-one, 61% of Americans would oppose a law such as the one being pushed by Scott Walker in Wisconsin, compared to only 33% in favor. Democrats are obviously opposed-- 79 to 18%, but even self-described political independents are against bargaining restrictions at a stronger clip than the national average-- 62 to 31%.
That isn't to say that there isn't a
Corporate Republican movement to put an end to these hard-won human rights. Walker,
"the Governor from Koch Industries", has the direct backing of the corporate paymasters who put him in office last year, and by extension, the publicity machine of corporate media and some useful idiots in the Tea Party. In Des Moines yesterday, union backers held a large rally in support of workers rights at the state capitol, but the
"objective" reports a day later from the Gannett corporation had it that there were "twin tempests" at the statehouse-- one by the rallying workers and one by the Teabaggers. You have to dig into the story to find the facts that there were approximately 800 ralliers in the first group, compared with only about 120 in the counter-demonstration, the second group on hand to advocate for a race to the bottom economically between public and private-sector employees. Taken as just raw numbers, I'd like to point out that 120 is not a "twin" of 800, but such is the journalistic cult of the Tea Party.
Like the Tea Party itself, Scott Walker finds himself
well-funded by corporate interests in the wake of the devastating Citizens United Supreme Court decision a year ago. Only a housing and real estate group in Wisconsin gave more
directly to Walker's gubernatorial campaign last year than the Koch brothers' $40,000. Koch Industries is the second-largest privately-owned company in the U.S. The company's PAC
also gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn funneled an additional $65,000 into Walker's campaign coffers. The Governors Association spent
$3.4 million in television attack ads last fall on Walker's opponent. (This is
Walker's so-called "grass roots" political support.) Koch Industries is a private energy conglomeration, based in Wichita, Kansas, run by a pair of robber baron brothers, and sons of a John Bircher who opposed the American Civil Rights movement. Charles and David Koch collect their billions in revenue from business ventures in oil, manufacturing, investments, and politicians.
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Scott Walker, Unleashed!: Wisconsin's governor tells the world that his attack on public workers is about the health of his state's budget, but in private, he tells David Koch the truth. This battle, for Walker, is really about pushing Ronald Reagan's political ideology of union-busting. How do we know this? Because he got crank-called by a journalist for an online magazine in New York who pretended to be Koch, the governor's billionaire sugar daddy. (Listen to the 20-minute interview
here.) Nothing like a little dough to buy some political access whenever you need it, right? Classic. At the end of the call, Walker even says he'll take Koch up on the offer of a little bribe.
Low-profile acts of actual journalism
My esteem for Glenn Greenwald knows no bounds. Salon.com's expert on all matters related to American civil liberties is the most indispensable journalist America has produced possibly in my lifetime. If I didn't have so much self-love, this blog would be turned over to just a day-after-day-after-day link to what he's writing.
This afternoon Greenwald published
an indictment of recent actions of The New York Times that, to me, is so eviscerating of the newspaper's credibility-- so entirely damning and shaming of the paper's failed mission of journalistic duty-- that he's almost got me petitioning the publisher to close the shop. These are dark days indeed for "the gray lady"-- caught suppressing information about a secret war on Pakistan at the Obama Administration's request, and recasting on its pages murdering C.I.A. operatives and private military war profiteers as "diplomats."
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I watched the February installment of HBO's "Real Sports" program this weekend, and the television news magazine did an interesting feature story about the popular website-- and one of my favorites--
Deadspin. The justified refrain of Deadspin's writers and editors in regards to journalistic ethics and our modern media, combined with Greenwald's insights today, helped make it clear to me for the first time how our system now works-- whether we're talking about sports reporting or reporting in the political news media. Journalists like those at Gawker Media/Deadspin or WikiLeaks are the ones that actually confront the newsmakers with unpopular information and go about doing the duty of the Fourth Estate without regard to their personal "access to power." The traditional news services-- your city's news daily, for example, or each and every broadcast and cable television channel except for Democracy Now!-- revere and protect the political and corporate elite, fully complicit in the cover-up or in the spinning of the news.
When a blog, or an anti-secrecy group like WikiLeaks (none of whom are considered by the establishment media groups to be their "equals"), uncovers a cover-up, these traditional news organizations then have de facto permission to report the secret-- but you can be sure that they'll suppress it right up until the point that one of the "less ethical" sites does the dirty work of speaking truth to power. This is the playbook for the divulging of important government secrets, like the ones Greenwald or WikiLeaks concern themselves with, all the way down to Deadspin's sports stories, such as a certain Hall of Fame quarterback's habitual sexual harassment of female team employees.
A New York Times or a TV network news division will often possess knowledge beforehand of these more "sordid" stories-- and with strong evidence to boot, but the release of the particular details would be so inconvenient or embarrassing to the power elites they cover that it might jeopardize a reporter's insular access to that person, and the prestige (and dollars) that that access affords.
Once somebody
else has displayed the journalistic fortitude to deliver the story, it's full speed ahead to follow-up for everybody else. Maybe this is the way it's always destined to be in the industry when there are such sharp divisions of economic scale and financial compensation, but which of these two groups are actually engaging in journalism, and which group is more indispensable to an engaged citizenry. Theirs was not meant to be a profession of secrets or compliance.
King and Wisconsin
Focus your eyes on your state capitol building, Americans, active democracy may be arriving shortly in the form of thousands of protesters. Starting in Madison, Wisconsin this week-- in the state that gave us the La Follettes, Victor Berger, Russ Feingold, the "Progressive-Socialist federation," and 40 years of Socialist mayors in its largest city of Milwaukee.
Like Wisconsin, Iowa is crippled right now by a new governor that wants to use the national economic depression caused by deregulation and corruption in the banking and lending industries to force an elimination of social protections like state pensions and health insurance. If possible, both men would also put an end to corporate taxes entirely, and to the very fundamental right of public employees to bargain collectively.
This last issue is of no small historic significance. Dr. Martin Luther King very literally gave up his life in the pursuit of that right for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 when that city's mayor, Henry Loeb, and its Council claimed that it was illegal for public employees to unionize. Today, public employees are the last remaining organized faction of the entire American workforce that still, by and large, have pension plans of any kind. Other Americans have seen their pensions eliminated by a right-of-center political coalition of Democrats and Republicans and their corporate bribers, and with that mighty shift towards the union-busting whims of the Corporate Right has gone the existence of the American middle-class.
Another parallel to Memphis of 1968 is that the Wisconsin governor has threatened to employ the State Guard as his personal army to quash protesters. This was once common practice among state executives (particularly in the early 20th century) in putting down labor protests and strikes through the Mubarak-style threat-- and often follow-through-- of violence by the state. Tennessee's attack on the protesting, peaceful sanitation workers and their supporters in March of '68 marks the last time that such a state-sponsored attack was actually carried out in the U.S. against its citizens. The assassination of the movement's pacifist leader, Dr. King, meant an essential end to the people's tolerance of such "law and order" tactics by police.
Sixty-eight thousand protesters were on the streets of Madison Saturday, making any of the well-publicized and well-funded Tea Party rallies of the last two years, at the state level, look like an actual tea party. Collectively, state and local governments are the country's largest job provider so this can be seen easily for what it is-- an attempt to blame fair wages and benefits to a large number of citizens for budget shortfalls being experienced in many states. But these wages and benefits didn't cause these budget problems. The deficits were caused by a shortage in tax revenue through failures in human character to tax the wealthy, and by federal government allocations to the states being re-routed to such other priorities as Wall Street bailouts and two illegal wars.
Do state employees make more money and receive better benefits than average wage-earners? The answer is yes. But they're also better educated and older, statistically, which few of the studies you'll read take into account. According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, an exception, government employees of the same age and educational background actually make 4%
less than private sector employees.
Iowa is up next. Republican nutjobs here
have challenged the public employees' bargaining rights at the statehouse, even as our new governor, who stands behind that effort, has the gall to
collect a pension from his previous stint as governor when he's not even retired. A
rally for workers' rights has been scheduled at the capitol building in Des Moines for Tuesday afternoon at 1pm. Are you an Iowan looking for a chance to live your life in the spirit of Dr. King? Here's a chance.
Tony's influence
Tony LaRussa's "Don Tony/godfather" act is beginning to wear thin. Most St. Louis sports media officials see through
his public criticism of the Players Association as the usual misdirection strategy that it probably is, but that doesn't mean that his tirades of increasing frequency don't get tiresome, or that it's the best course of action for the team.
If you're not up to speed, the Cardinals manager criticized the union this week (in some of the strongest language possible) for supposedly forcing Albert Pujols to chase "the most money, the most money, the most money" in negotiations with the team. In other words, the best player in baseball has decided he will
not be giving the Cardinals a "hometown discount," and LaRussa either believes what's actually coming out of his mouth or he's trying to protect his star player from fan anger by redirecting the blame.
Forget for a moment what his manager's comments imply about Albert Pujols' susceptibility to being led around by the nose, it's a wild, completely unsubstantiated accusation against the union, one they deny, and also frankly, exactly the type of reason players need a union to look out for them. Some Cardinals fans probably believe that LaRussa, as a field manager and former ballplayer himself, is a middle-ground representative between his players and his bosses. He's not. He's a team employee and arguably it's most recognizable spokesman at any level. He's been a field manager since the late '70s, since even before the first protracted labor strike in 1981.
Baseball history would have been a little different if MLBPA director Marvin Miller had accepted a young ballplayer's request for a job with the association in 1977. Instead of using his law degree and baseball background for a career in the labor area of the industry, LaRussa became the third-winningest and second-losingest manager in the history of the game. He's also been, coincidentally, the highest-paid manager in the game during much of his 15-year tenure with the Cardinals. You would probably get more of an argument from your average baseball fan if you called LaRussa the best manager in the game than if you called Pujols its best player. It's also a little hard to believe that escalating player salaries haven't had at least some impact on the ability of a baseball manager to earn $3 million a year in salary, as LaRussa receives. Isn't this an example of the proverbial rising tide lifting all boats? LaRussa, it should be noted, also once left the Oakland Athletics as a free agent manager.
As with the Ozzie Smith and Scott Rolen personality-clash flare-ups in the past, LaRussa just starts spewing when he feels cornered by a line of questioning he doesn't like. Early Tuesday, the manager accused the union of "not just arm-twisting" in the Pujols negotiations, but "dropping an anvil on your back through the roof of your house." Yet he admitted simultaneously that he had no evidence to back his claim of interference or to explain the use of that unusual sentence. He was quoted as calling these phantom union tactics "bullshit," but then on Wednesday, he said, confusingly, that he "doesn't second-guess the union." So Tony doesn't have any evidence that the union is doing what he's accusing them of, but it made sense to him that they would be doing it after he "talked with some of (the Cardinals') veteran coaches," so he's going to call bullshit on them. Have I got all of that right?
Similar to his style of managerial maneuvering, the Tony Rules only have to make sense to Tony. At the beginning of the week, he cautioned Albert's teammates (and fellow union members) against commenting to reporters about the contract situation, which would be adding to the "distraction," but then he proceeds to make the most virulent anti-union comments that anybody can remember while he has nothing to back up his claims besides empty conjecture.
What a union is responsible for doing, above all, is educating its members, and fortunately, that's what Pujols' union representatives on the Cardinals, Kyle McClellan and Adam Wainwright, were doing on Tuesday. They both provided brief comments to the media, aired on ESPN, that outlined the union's responsibilities while deflecting from the details of Albert's specific case. Even as teammates, with a rooting interest in Pujols staying with the Cardinals, it was pretty clear they both had his back this week-- without either having to resort to criticism of his representation or insulting his ability to think and act for himself.
LaRussa is not the first baseball manager who has had a star player facing difficult contract negotiations, and he won't be the last. This is part of the business. He's just one of the very few who has felt the need to inject himself smack dab into the middle of it, either to "protect" all parties involved, or simply to run his mouth. But the claims of impartiality on his part are bogus. For one of Pujols' bosses to refer disparagingly to "powerful forces" acting within the union and even within Pujols' representation, and then to inject his
own forceful presence into the equation, is the height of hypocrisy.
What should be so demoralizing for Cardinals fans about the tack LaRussa is taking is the indication, at least from my perspective, that it's a first step in assigning unfocused blame if the Cardinals fail to get Pujols signed next fall. There are already reports that the Cardinals' best offer to Pujols this month was not only well short of the 10 year, $300 million total package that's been rumored to be what Pujols' seeks, but less perhaps than even the 5 year, $125 million deal Ryan Howard signed with Philadelphia last year. And Ryan Howard is not Albert Pujols.
Never forget that the Cardinals chairman is Bill DeWitt Jr. If you're not familiar, that's an old-school baseball family we're talking about there with that surname. Dewitt's father started with the Cardinals in 1916 under Branch Rickey, and served as an executive with one team or another until 1981. Bill Junior, himself, was with both the Reds and Rangers before buying the Cardinals with a group of his prep school pals in 1995. The DeWitt men are pre-divisional play. They're pre-expansion. Most significantly, they're pre-Marvin Miller. You can bet that it still means something to a DeWitt to have to pay out a big contract like this one that's being sought by Pujols. Forget
the union trying to "set a new bar." For an old school Lord of the Baseball Realm like Bill DeWitt, "setting a new bar" on players' salaries would be an insult to his personal pride and to his reputation within the club owners' fraternity. It would be a virtual slap in the face to the tradition of front office paternalism that defines who these guys are as men.
Yes, Stan the Man retired as a Cardinal, as any proud Redbird Rooter will quickly want to tell you, but a dried-up Dizzy Dean was sold to the Cubs in 1938, and Joe Medwick pawned off to Brooklyn in '40. Enos Slaughter was traded to the Yankees in 1954 (famously crying at the news), Rogers Hornsby to the New York Giants in 1927, and "Red" Schoendienst, an earlier Albert, following the Rajah to the Giants about three decades later. Loyalty is a two-way street, and there you have five former Cardinals, with 53 Cardinals seasons between them, each with retired numbers now by the club, that were told to hit the road back during the days when a "hometown discount" was called "the reserve clause." News to Tony LaRussa, self-described protector of the Cardinals tradition: a meddlesome players' union didn't have shit to do with any one of those deals.
Stan's day
Stan Musial, the greatest Cardinal of them all, is at the White House today to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Musial and basketball great Bill Russell become the 19th and 20th sports-related recipients of the award. It's an extraordinary national honor even though one of these was once presented to Donald Rumsfeld.
The ceremony begins approximately at 12:30 central time (with possible delays due to the President's often-changing schedule), and live streaming video of the ceremony will be available at Whitehouse.gov and MLB.com.
Stan has a long connection to politics, and just how cool is he? According to
Bernie Miklasz on assignment in Washington, the baseball great supported George McGovern for President in '72.
Sign the man already!
The St. Louis Cardinals are only two days away from a very important date in the history of their franchise. February 15th is the deadline for contract negotiations between the club and Albert Pujols' agent Dan Lozano. Pujols, consistent with his negotiation guidelines of past seasons, does not wish to have his baseball season distracted by contract talks. If a long-term deal cannot be worked out by Tuesday, when the Cardinals' spring training in Florida begins, Pujols will plan to file for free agency at the conclusion of the 2011 season in the fall.
Albert Pujols' new salary is expected to reach historic proportions in the baseball business. When I went to type that sentence, I first had it that his new salary would "break the bank," but when I saw it written, I realized how inaccurate it was-- that breaking the bank implies it's more than there is for the club to spend. This is far from the case. This is only what the Cardinals would like their fans to believe.
Per average ticket price, a Cardinals game at Busch Stadium is the third most expensive to attend in all of baseball. Though they play in one of the smaller television markets in the league, their cable TV deal is a regional package involving one of the league's few truly "national" teams in terms of fan following, and in local TV ratings, Cardinals broadcasts in their home city are tops in baseball. Despite three decades of uncharted growth in popularity-- both in terms of attendance (4th highest in MLB in 2010) and television revenue, the construction of a new taxpayer-supported ballpark, four playoff appearances, two pennants, a World Championship, and a record-breaking growth in league profit boosted by internet revenue, licensing, the new MLB Network, and the last new national TV deal involving FOX, TBS, and ESPN, the Cardinals' team payroll has dropped from the seventh highest in the league in
2003 to #13 in
2010, almost out of the top half of the 30 clubs, and now behind the Minnesota Twins, a team that was targeted for contraction as recently as 2002 and that has not won a playoff game since 2004, or a playoff series since 2002.
Since his debut in 2001, Albert Pujols, while being a model citizen of near-Musial-proportions and a popular community figure off the field, has also been a model of consistency and reliability on the field, as well as that field's top overall player. He's won three of the last six MVP awards handed out by the National League, finishing among the top nine all 10 years, the top four nine times, and in the top
two seven of those first ten seasons, which is flat-out ridiculous. He's the only player
ever to bat at least .300, hit 30+ home runs, and drive in 100+ runs for each of his first ten seasons (and counting). He's a career .322 hitter with 13 home runs in 56 post-season games and 199 at-bats. He won a pair of Gold Gloves, an MVP award for the NL Championship Series ('04), league awards named for Hank Aaron (twice), Roberto Clemente, and Lou Gehrig, and the Major League Baseball Player of the Year award three times. He won the first "Decade Triple Crown" in the National League since Rogers Hornsby in the 1920's.
Yet during no part of that first decade in the big leagues has Albert Pujols ever been among the
top ten highest paid players in the game. By at least 2009, with industry growth leading to even more large contracts, he'd fallen out of the top 25. The whole baseball world knows what Albert Pujols did for the Cardinals during those 10 years. He rewrote their record books and made some very unathletic men in the front office very rich. Now what are those men prepared to do for him during his second decade?
Do the Cardinals have the necessary money to spend in this "new economy"? You tell me. We'll measure two three-year periods. The Cardinals had a terrific run of success from 2004-2006: They played in two World Series ('04, '06), winning one ('06), and finishing two wins short of playing in a third ('05). From 2008-2010, the Philadelphia Phillies played in two World Series ('08, '09), winning one ('08), and finishing two wins short of playing in a third ('10). Identical.
In 2003, before this all started for either club (although the Cards had already won three divisions in a row), the Philadelphia Phillies' payroll was $95,338,704. The Cardinals' was at $101,825,848. By 2010, the Phillies payroll had
increased to $141,928,379. The Cardinals, despite their well-publicized claims of a stretched budget, of having to practically have the office staff donate plasma to get Matt Holliday signed as line-up protection for Pujols, had seen their payroll
drop to $93,540,751. Where is all of this new money going? We're not talking about competing with the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, or Cubs here. We're talking about the Phillies. From
Philadelphia. It's a stagnating industrial city like St. Louis. And of course, which of these two teams is now the front-runner in the National League for 2011? Hint: the one that has already added to their arsenal the pick of the free agent crop this winter, left-handed pitcher Cliff Lee. The best gets better. The Phillies use their success to invest more, not as an excuse to scale back.
Pujols and Lozano reportedly want $30 million per year for 10 years for the player, which would be an MLB record, although the $30 million annum would still be less than what Alex Rodriguez makes, at least for the first, overlapping part of the two contracts. Since winning the 2006 Series, Cardinals fans have seen the quality of player surrounding the Pujols nucleus deteriorate to the point that the Cincinnati Reds were capable of rising up and winning the division title in 2010. The Cards still claim "tough times" on payroll flexibility, but they knew this was coming, and frankly, it's disrespectful to even push the man into the free agent market after all he's accomplished and meant to the team's "brand," even if they think the most well-heeled clubs, like the Yankees and the Red Sox, would be out of the auction bidding at the end of the year. (And by the way, if Baltimore Orioles GM Andy MacPhail is truthful in
his recent claims that the O's would be effectively out of the bidding for Pujols at the 10 yr, $300 million price tag, there is collusion at play here again in the league. Orioles fans should sue that fool if he was actually unwilling to make such a move for Pujols that would utterly transform their shitty team.)
Pujols' remarkable ability has enabled the Cardinals to field a less than competitive team around him since winning the World Series. They've been able to field a team good enough to contend with the likes of the Cubs and the Reds in the Central Division, and good enough to keep the Busch Stadium turnstiles spinning, but it's been well below the marked improvement of the Phillies, who are now much better than they were almost a decade ago,
$50 million or so better, and along with the Champion Giants, the class of the league. The Cardinals have failed to win even a playoff game since taking the '06 title, appearing only once in '09. Remember, if the Cardinals added Pujols, the heart and soul of their franchise, at $30 million a year going forward, they wouldn't even be adding $30 million to what's already there. He's already due $14.5 million for the final year of his contract in '11 so they're only adding another $15 million to the existing books-- still well below the ascendant levels in recent years of the Phillies, not to mention the Cubs and the Mets of the league, who are both also over at least the $130,000,000 level.
The St. Louis newspaper has now been publishing articles debating Pujols' actual value--
today even comparing his financial worth to "the average working men and women" in the St. Louis area. That's a pretty old-fashioned, and frankly desperate argument to employ on behalf of the Cardinals' public relations machine. I thought the "average man" argument went out with Babe Ruth when it was reported in 1930 that he made more money than President Hoover and the Babe famously remarked, "I had a better year than he did." Albert Pujols is
expected to make more money. To say nothing of the all the red and white t-shirt and jersey-clad fans that descend on dormant downtown St. Louis 81 of the 365 days of the year for the purpose of seeing him play, he competes in a business that has solidarity in contract bargaining, and one in which even the wild success of the industry does not lead to an increase in the number of employment positions available. Those limited employment positions are bound to become increasingly valuable and lucrative to the most accomplished of those position-holders. (Now raising his taxes accordingly is another matter altogether.)
When a for-profit sports team implies that one of its players is being greedy during negotiations, a certain dim-witted segment of the fan population is bound to take its side regardless of the facts, especially in a smaller-size city in which the athletes are the biggest, most visible, and therefore, most polarizing celebrities in town, but I've got to even shake my head in disgust when I read comment after comment online now about how "greedy" Albert Pujols is behaving, and how Stan Musial would have never done what he's doing. The newspaper eggs them on. The Post-Dispatch published
a separate article this week with a stupid headline promoting the fact that Albert Pujols, under his new hypothetical contract, would be making more money
per plate appearance than Stan the Man made during any one of his three MVP seasons. Of course, Stan's long playing career
ended when John F. Kennedy was still President, and his MVP seasons were during the '40s. This article is so stunningly asinine as far as any modern insight into determining financial value, I don't even know where to begin with it, except to present it to you as something baseball players always have to contend with when dealing with a sports media that values its access to the team-owned clubhouse above all else.
The Cardinals may be attempting to swing a shorter-length deal on the guaranteed money, negotiations are a natural part of the process, and I haven't lost my general optimism that Pujols will wind up playing his entire storied career in St. Louis, but part of the reason for that optimism has been because I still see this as such a no-brainer for the club. Never has there been a more deserving player, perhaps, but more importantly, never has there ever been a more deserving player that provided less financial
risk. His durability, consistency, and character-- the key traits for any long financial commitment-- are his hallmarks.
There have been suggestions of late-- probably correct-- that Cardinals fans would split down the middle in blaming player or team if the marriage between the two ends after the 2011 season, but for sure there will be an irrevocable split between me and the fans who hold Albert Pujols accountable if he doesn't get the contract he has coming to him. If they see Albert as the anti-Musial, they're missing the picture completely. Stan, quite famously at the time, became the first $100,000 a year player later in his career (after the 17th of his 23 years, to be exact), and today, that earned contract is part of the historical record of his greatness. This new proposed contract for Pujols is
a precise equivalent. The dollar figures are definitely different, but nothing else is. Like Pujols, Musial got the big contract after what may have been the prime of his career, but when he was still the league's elite player. That contract was earned, not just because of the hits, runs, and runs batted in, but also because Musial the Man personified what the Cardinals wanted to be known for as a team. If the Cardinals take this final step in making Albert Pujols the personification of their club and of this generation of club ownership, they will have put themselves in the front seat of American sports teams in class and prestige. Albert Pujols is worth exactly that.
Tough Without a Gun
Stefan Kamfer has already written a crackerjack book about Groucho Marx (entitled "Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx"). His latest is a biography of movie legend Humphrey Bogart called "Tough Without a Gun." Slate's Tom Shone has written
a review of the book that beautifully describes Bogart's screen appeal. (Maybe Shone should write a Bogart bio, too.) It uses phrases like "the gradual erasure of lived experience" to describe how older actors, male and female, have disappeared from Hollywood's consciousness. Bogart was already 41 when he struck it big on the big screen (in "High Sierra"), and he would be dead of cancer by 57, but between those ages, he put together a string of such successful films that he would eventually be selected (in 1999) as the greatest male film star of all-time by the American Film Institute.
His classic films
"Casablanca",
"The Big Sleep", and
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" made the CM Blog's Top 50 list in 2004-05, but I want to advocate tonight for a different one-- "Dark Passage," which is sort of the forgotten film of the four that Bogart made with Lauren Bacall during the 1940s (the others are "The Big Sleep," "To Have or Have Not," and "Key Largo.") Load "Dark Passage" in your Netflix queue and look forward to having yourself an enjoyable evening one night soon.
It's a very peculiar film. Bogart, hard-boiled as always, is an escapee from prison. The film begins with the escape scene, and with the very unusual employment of a first-person camera technique from Bogart's perspective. The camera is Bogie. We see the face of his character only briefly when it's seen through the rear-view mirror of a truck, and it's not Bogart's face at all that we see, it's that of a different, unrecognizable actor. But we do hear the Bogart voice, and that iconic lisp.
The Bogart character is hiding in a barrel that rolls off the bed of the escape truck, and we continue to view the story through his lens for about the first third of the film before the character undergoes clandestine plastic surgery (from a strange and sinister doctor) to change his appearance and help evade the law. The "after" appearance of the face-lifted criminal is, of course, that of our star, Humphrey Bogart. Though admittedly-gimmicky, it's a very clever introduction to our hero, and that's all just in the first half hour of the film!
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A New York attorney named Chase Madar has written
a must-read essay in support of U.S. Army Private and patriot Bradley Manning. It's presented uniquely by Madar as an attorney's hypothetical opening argument for Manning's legal defense (if the Justice Department ever concedes to give the man his day in court, that is). In this "opening argument" structure, it becomes a terrific text for understanding a very complex story in simple terms.
Citing the Nuremberg Principles, which were long ago incorporated into the U.S. Army Field manual, Madar writes, "Our soldiers have a solemn duty not to obey illegal orders, and Pfc. Manning upheld this duty. General Peter Pace’s statement on a soldier’s overriding duty to stop the torture and abuse of prisoners, whatever his or her orders, is not just high-minded public relations; it’s the law of the land."
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Jerry Sloan has stepped down as head coach of the NBA's Utah Jazz. What does this development mean for Cardinals baseball fans, you ask? It means that Tony LaRussa is now
the longest-tenured head coach/manager of any of the major North American team sports. He was hired by the Cards on October 23, 1995.
A key moment for Egypt
The State Department's ball in Egypt is in mid-bobble. Optimism fades.
Are we supporting democracy? No. The counter-protesters, Mubarak's thugs, rolled in since last week. The scene turned bloody, revealing what we already knew about dictators: that they'll use any tool at their disposal to hold on to power. The U.S. has not demanded his immediate ouster, and they're pimping Mubarak's Vice President for less than two weeks, Omar Suleiman, our point man for
outsourcing torture, to succeed the President as despot. WikiLeaks-- that name again-- has published evidence this week that Suleiman has been
Israel's choice to succeed Mubarak. There are few surprises.
The United States cannot support free elections in Egypt only on the condition that we approve of the outcomes of the voting in advance. That's not democracy, that's imperialism. Despite the increasing threat of crackdown and violence, Egyptians continue to rally by the thousands for freedom, with waves of
labor strikes breaking out this week. It's a thrilling spectacle, but deeply unfortunate that the United States government refuses to back these people.
John F. Kennedy said it best nearly 50 years ago: "Those that make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Packer Nation
Congratulations to the NFL Champion Green Bay Packers. I don't root for the team as a habit, but they were a more likable team than the Steelers at the glamour positions and they're
a fine advertisement for socialism.
There's a system of revenue sharing among clubs in the NFL that is to be envied by other professional sports leagues and the Packers have aptly demonstrated that the owner is the most superfluous member of any pro team, but the small market praise for the Pack always rings hollow for me and I'm not awed by the stories about the long waits for season tickets.
Let's not pretend that such a situation is even possible in baseball that a city roughly half the size of Des Moines could compete with the Chicagos and New York Cities of North America at the highest level of competition, but the difference is structural, not economic. Football is largely a television game because of its scheduling slate and a club on the gridiron only needs to fill its stadium eight times a year. In baseball, television viewership from game to game is diluted because of the large number of games overall, and the home parks have to be filled for 81 homes games a season.
We could place a community-owned, non-profit
baseball team at the mouth of the Fox River in Wisconsin, displace the team downstate in Milwaukee as well as one of the two teams in Chicago, and give our new Lake Michigan West Shore baseball team the same terms and percentages of the current NFL television contract (plus the weather for fans would be better because northern Wisconsin summers are much more pleasant than northern Wisconsin winters), and that baseball team still wouldn't be able to make a go of it financially. There just isn't enough population in that part of the continent to fill all of those potential seats-- 45,000 seats multiplied by 81 games. Couldn't happen.
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Today's the day it dawned on me, after almost 36 years of life, that the Green Lantern and the Green Hornet are not the same figure in pop culture. The details of this discovery are not important, but suffice to say, I had never heard the two referenced together before.
A couple things to read this weekend...
Winter blows.
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Imagine my surprise to peak at the AV Club website tonight and find Alex Rieger and Elaine Nardo staring back at me.
"Vienna Waits," Taxi episode #68 gets the "Very Special Episode" treatment from the TV Club. "Taxi" is the most-screened program in the history of the Moeller Television Festival.
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Historians, take note: Ronald Reagan was born 100 years ago this Sunday.
Salon is the place to be for birthday coverage, offering "a respite from the hagiography" with their series
"The Real Reagan".
Where's that booming call for freedom?
Take a look at some of the great advocates of democratic expansion that are speaking out this week against actual demonstrations of liberty, freedom, and self-governance in the Middle East. Among them, the likes of
Glenn Beck,
Mike Huckabee,
Vice President Biden, and
the Likud Party in Israel. Ah, what tangled webs...
The citizen uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt should reveal for all to see the hypocrisies the Arab world has been forced to deal with for decades in regards to its relations with the United States and Israel. It's never been about "freedom" or "democracy" on the part of the West. That was only occasionally incidental. It's been about protecting the Israeli settlements and aggressive expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It's about having rulers in place that allow the two countries to outsource their torture and violate international human rights laws in the advance of their economic initiatives. The U.S. and Israel demanded Palestinian parliamentary elections, then it got them in 2006, but then refused to recognize Hamas, the elected majority party of the government.
If a new leadership coalition in Egypt adopts an anti-American stance, and this is not to be feared according to all reasonable reports (even Bill O'Reilly, in the Beck link above, acknowledges a very secular military in Egypt), but if it did, let me suggest that the anti-Americanism may not have been caused by the people's sectarian tendencies in that part of the world, as we've already been told again and again.
Their religious fundamentalists ("The Society of Muslim Brotherhood," et al) are not all terrorists in the same way that our religious fundamentalists in the U.S. are not all terrorists. It might be, instead, because the weapons and tanks being aimed at peaceful demonstrators this week have "Made in the U.S.A." engraved on them in small print. The Egyptian dictator Mubarak has been the recipient of more than $50 billion in U.S. aid over three decades. Whatever the new government will be though, we know it
won't be a puppet state of the U.S. and Israel, such as it has been, and that's what's truly feared.
Just who exactly is responsible for the revolutions on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, and Alexandria during this historic month? Well, aside from the millions of individual men and women of courage standing unarmed against their own repressive governments and against the stern glances of an American government seated high atop the proverbial fence that has, up until now, valued the "stability" of intimidation and authoritarianism in the region above all else, how about a shout-out to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks?
Indeed, we may be witnessing just the beginning of "the WikiLeaks revolution." Released diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks
revealed corruption by Tunisian President Ben Ali, forcing his ouster. Much to the particular benefit of the United States,
WikiLeaks cables released Friday show that pro-democracy leaders in Egypt have been meeting secretly with members of Congress and the State Department in recent years even as President Mubarak was being publicly supported by U.S. leadership. Thanks to this technological revolution that is also benefiting from the use of social networking websites, repressive regimes may just fall like dominoes now-- in
Sudan? in
Yemen? in Iran?
Just yesterday, the LA Times published
an editorial suggesting that WikiLeaks was dead, even as it simultaneously and bizarrely explained how newspapers are taking steps to ape it. This example, along with Bill Keller's self-serving and defensive comments from the other side of the continent last week, should illustrate just how behind-the-curve the people are that run newspapers these days.
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In Christopher Hitchens' memoir from last year, "Hitch 22," the author quotes Mario Soares, the first Socialist president of Portugal, as once saying to him in Lisbon: "If the army officers are so much on the side of the people, why do they not put on civilian clothes?" I'm reading that book currently and I thought of that line after watching
this marvelous, marvelous video, which might just make you well up with tears.
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The cutest member of the Bush family has
come out for marriage equality. Tolerance is sexy.
Moeller TV Listings 2/1/11
Tonight, Chris Elliott returns to "The Late Show" to promote "Eagleheart," his new show on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Here's a
promo for the series, which will debut Thursday night at 11 central.
And here's a clip of Elliott
as Jay Leno from back in the day. Or is he even doing Leno?
