The most beautiful melody in the world
What is the most beautiful melody on this Earth? Composer Jan Swafford
proclaims that "it's the one that at the moment you can't get out of your head. Not in the sense of worming annoyingly into your mind, but rather of somehow capturing something important and moving to you in particular, which may or may not be something that moves the masses."
My vote (today) goes to "My Romance" by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.
Here's Ben Webster blowing it.
Shady people in the Sunshine State
I read an article today about how deranged the state of Florida is. I can no longer find it, but sufficed to say, the list of recent heinous crimes and ill-advised human behavior emanating from the state that, on a map, appears as if it's America's flaccid penis causes extreme dizziness before you've even had time to wade into the grisly politics. The author claimed-- by way of a joke, although true-- that if you type “why is Florida” into Google, the search engine automatically adds as a suggestion “so crazy,” “so hot,” and “so weird.”
I decided to test this myself and also found “so humid” and “so trashy” among the top ten propositions. The top search suggestion was actually “called the sunshine state,” and a surprising (to me) #2 was “car insurance rates so expensive.” Policy rates are clearly on the high end of the scale there. Maybe that’s why Florida residents are wound so tight and in such frequent need of “stand(ing) (their) ground.”
Of course I had to try searching Iowa next. A “why is iowa" investigation delivered...
“called the hawkeye state”
“so boring”
“so liberal”
“so important in an election”
“soil good” (my favorite)
And “a major city”, which makes no sense.
I just found the article.
Here it is.
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This is
Senator Ron Wyden’s speech condemning NSA overreach. Edward Snowden’s approval rating, according to CBS today, is running about 25% to 57% in the red, but here we have a United States Senator, in his 17th year in office and from his perch on the chamber’s intelligence committee besides, sounding the same alarms of freedom under threat that Snowden has. Will we have no limit to the government’s authority to collect any and all information about law-abiding citizens? I thought we had a major one, but the Fourth Amendment has been dropped and shattered. Shame on Nancy Pelosi for her vote yesterday on the Amash-Conyers bill. Shame on John Boehner as well-- and it’s at this time I’d like to point out to Republicans that Boehner’s whip efforts yesterday with his caucus regarding the NSA Surveillance State vote just saved the Obama presidency.
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Note to drowsy Americans: William and Kate just named their baby in part after the king (George III) we revolted against. You’re bowing to the Boy King at the risk of your own cherished patriotism.
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Quote of the day: David Weigel at Slate.com, “The Weiner-Abedin marriage is to the Clinton marriage as
Sharknado is to
Jaws.”
More on Ryan Braun
It was an oversight yesterday not to mention the players’ role in this entire Ryan Braun fiasco. There has clearly been a groundswell movement of late among the players to increase testing, and the union has inexplicably gone along with it. It all speaks to Marvin Miller’s late-life contention that the dumbest thing the Players Association ever did, incidentally decades after Miller's leadership of the organization ended, was to agree to PED testing at all in their Collective Bargaining Agreement. Unions employ trained, professional leaders that understand the law (privacy and otherwise) better than the workers themselves do, and considering the high-priced legal opposition workers tend to face, the ‘why’ of this should be obvious.
In this instance, the players’ collective belief that random, rampant testing by the league would eliminate the “guilty-until-proven-innocent” media mentality of a decade ago has turned out to be as wrongheaded and foolish as some of us always knew it would be. Now we have a player accepting a punishment of arbitrary length that draws its basis from a murky personal affiliation rather than a positive test result, and is dependent upon the testimony of a shady storefront hustler that couldn’t even be categorized as a doctor.
The players are being shockingly hypocritical also. The rank and file members, many of them speaking out against Braun yesterday, seem to believe that superstars like Braun and Alex Rodriguez have some well-deserved retribution coming, while the rank and file who have been caught trying to extend their middling professional careers by a year or two have always been given a pass by their colleagues. Ironically, it's this mid-level talent skirting the rules that more directly threatens their livelihoods.
Of course, with all voluntary surrender of one's civil liberties, the real danger lies with what comes next. Major League Baseball players can certainly now expect less consistency in punishment, more punitive measures, and greater erosion of their fundamental rights as employees. Braun’s decision to accept a season-ending suspension during a year in which he’s struggled to remain healthy anyway, and in which his team has no chance at all of reaching the postseason, appears to be his most selfish decision to date.
Braun and gone
Though many sports pundits are suggesting such an action, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun certainly does not owe an apology to the man that mishandled his drug sample two years ago. Braun issued a public apology yesterday for apparent PED use after a new suspension was handed down by the league. It was a suspension that came absent an explanation of process and one that makes little sense under any accepted part of the league’s collective bargaining agreement. Braun has still not failed a drug test that wasn't later thrown out, and he has risked starting a trend of submitting to evidence that couldn't stand up in a proper court.
The league failing to abide by the accepted terms of the CBA’s drug testing policy in regards to handling urine and blood samples is why an arbitrator (Shyam Das) struck down the previous suspension against Braun last year. It’s Major League Baseball that still owes the apology for what they’ve done to their own competitive integrity. They owe a sorry to said arbitrator for firing him after he overturned a second suspension on the same grounds that he overturned Braun’s first. How can be trust Big Baseball when, in regards to its "biggest challenge," it fires its “independent” judicial branch for the crime of exposing its negligence? And without information forthcoming from the commissioner’s office so far about the process and evidence that led to Braun’s latest suspension, I’m not sure why it’s not still Major League Baseball that should be on public trial.
If Braun has to play by the rules, why doesn’t the league also have to? That’s the hypocrisy that led us into this PED mess to begin with.
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A must-read is
the text of Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now interview with Dr. Cornel West. The Obama hatchet team, fresh off its carvings of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, is already going to work on West so it’s best to get to take his words directly from him.
Defiling the name
Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son, Matt, has filed papers in Pennsylvania to change his legal name. It can’t be easy living your life in the shadow of such a hideous and ill-regarded family figure. William Hitler, the man Adolf Hitler called his “loathsome nephew,” changed his surname when he immigrated to the U.S., and today, the Hitler paternal bloodline
survives in almost-complete obscurity on Long Island. Josef Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, changed her name to Lana Peters and died in the small Wisconsin town in which she lived only two years ago at the age of 85. Charles Manson's son committed suicide. Meanwhile, Liz Cheney uses her father’s name to run for Senate in Wyoming. So you just never know.
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I’m trying to imagine a scenario playing out in the United States in which a black person kills a white person in self-defense and then doesn’t serve a prison sentence.
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This graph and the accompanying research is enlightening in respect to the shockingly large economic impact of slavery in the antebellum South—and in the establishment of the American empire. "Human capital" dwarfed even industrial capital. The study speaks to the dire and fundamental need for reparations to be made to the descendants of those that were enslaved by the Atlantic Slave Trade. It's an idea that has lied dormant for too long. Failure to follow through on initial promises of reparation led us directly to Jim Crow laws and the forming of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
As proving ancestry is difficult, if not impossible (the U.S. Census does not track descent from slaves), a good solution might be to adopt the one called for by a social movement called the Republic of New Afrika in 1968-- the creation of an independent Black-majority country comprised of what is now Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, as well as some adjacent Black-majority counties in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Florida.
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There are some people out there who seem
legitimately pissed that George Clooney won’t get married.
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Tonight, CNN's special "William and Kate Plus One," promoting the pending birth of the couple's anointed son or slightly-less fortunate daughter, declared unashamedly that the Royal Prince and the Duchess of Cambridge have always done it "their way." They chose their own flowers at their wedding, you see, and they honeymooned at the palace of their choosing. But as rebellious couples go, these two aren't exactly Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. Choosing your own spouse from the full list of global candidates would be rebellious.
Marrying a Catholic and abdicating the throne would be rebellious. "Prince" William is just a privileged little snot who doesn't have the stones to renounce his three dollar bill title, and who picked his bride from a validated list when he started prematurely losing his hair.
The dehumanization of Trayvon
The verdict in the George Zimmerman trial is just more evidence that we are living in a police state. Vigilantes are now effectively self-deputized to hunt unarmed black male teenagers and when they succeed in murdering one, the police—in the absence of public pressure—see no reason to take the perpetrator into custody or even to administer a toxicology test. Zimmerman had admitted taking two prescription drugs, Temazepan and Adderall, that can cause aggression, insomnia, and hallucinations. The jurors never heard that evidence because the police on duty looked upon the crime scene and didn’t see a crime.
Flash forward: the jury verdict is read and the same police department in Florida threatens a violent response to any civil unrest that might result from the court’s judgment. The police’s veiled message to African-American protesters is the same one that Zimmerman tried to relay to Trayvon Martin when he stalked him: You are animals.
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When you read stories online about Edward Snowden, it's obvious that many of the anonymous comments being posted attacking him are FBI plants. Of course it's impossible to know which ones are or how many, but it's kind of fun to make a guessing game out of it. If you think the concept of character-assassinating people with left-wing political opinions died with Hoover, you're the crazy one. The bureau is more lawless today than ever, as the individual reveals-- and then the attempted prosecutions-- of WikiLeaks prove. Snowden is Greenwald is Manning is Assange is Ellsberg is Peltier is Newton is Davis is Savio is Malcolm X is King is Parks is even Albert Einstein. The FBI is our national political police.
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Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger have both won the Nobel Peace Prize. If the award were more inconsequential, it would be the Heisman Trophy. But for what it's worth, Edward Snowden is
nominated to win it.
Three decades of Bill and Dave
While you're waiting for me to find time to blog, enjoy
this compilation of the greatest Bill Murray appearances on Letterman. Look for me when you're finished.
Baseball as Greek tragedy
Tonight, most definitely sometime during the 9 o'clock hour (Central time), the (once-) Great Albert Pujols takes his first-ever professional at-bats against the St. Louis Cardinals in Anaheim, California. A year and a half after Arte Moreno, an otherwise inconsequential man, paid 254 million dollars to separate the extraordinary player from his team of destiny, Pujols' steep performance decline has evolved into probably the most absorbing narrative thread in North American baseball.
The mighty slugger is no longer healthy enough to play in the field, which puts a giant asterisk next to any offensive numbers he's able to add to his career total while lumbering through the American League. But for what it's worth anyway, his OPS during his 234 career games with an expansion Junior Circuit franchise currently calling itself the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim is .822. Compare that to his career Cardinals OPS-- over
11 seasons!-- of 1.037. Pujols' OPS to this point in the 2013 season (.755) would be sixth-best in the Cardinals' eight-man lineup.
The decline has come fast and it has come with fury. If it were a piano, it would be falling from a 10th floor window. And the aforementioned Moreno still has eight and a half seasons left of paying him, followed by a 10-year service contract for the man in the team's front office. "Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance" are no longer "the saddest of possible words" in the baseball lexicon. They are these: "Albert Pujols trades in Stan Musial's legacy for Juan Gonzalez's."
Cardinals' blogger Dan Moore put it most devastatingly this week, "The saddest facet of Albert Pujols' decline is that it's happening far away from anybody that cares about it."
With more gay marriage comes the need for more vows
Liberals have really lowered their expectations over the years. In a Supreme Court session that has seen the gutting of both our Miranda Rights and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the celebration over the end of DOMA threatens to drown out these dangerous regressions. The end of Bill Clinton’s hideous anti-gay law is reason to cheer, to be sure, but even this ruling is a mere stutter-step from the conservative court. Last week's ruling in United States v. Windsor is not the end game. It is not the gay version of Loving v. Virginia. Fifty American states still have the authority to deny marriage rights to consenting adults of the same sex if they so choose-- and most states still choose.
Partying after a hard-won victory is fantastic-- and now that gay marriage is legal in more locales, we can all attend even more great parties, but it remains to be seen whether liberals care about anything anymore other than gay rights?
Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick pitch,
"Now that gay marriage is looking like a check in the win column, it is precisely the right moment to ask: What does it mean to be left anymore? Is there even a left left? Or just a center that calls itself left because it is always standing next to the dude labeled 'right' in the photographs?"
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Joke of the day: A government agent walks into the FISA court. Wait, no, that would be too much trouble.
