Checking in
Sorry I've been so quiet of late. It's because I've been laid up. I suffered a perforated gut muscle after hearing John Kerry tell Edward Snowden to "man up."
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The FBI
spied on Nelson Mandela when he visited the United States a year after his release from prison. We know this thanks to the investigative work of Al Jazeera America and an MIT graduate student named Ryan Shapiro. Just one episode in a long story about Mandela and the U.S. intelligence community.
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Maya Angelou, a native St. Louisan, was an activist, poet, and author. She was also a musician, actress, and monologist.
Here she is performing a soliloquy on the short-lived Richard Pryor Show in 1977.
Over there
A tardy Memorial Day link: Gawker Media has
absorbing photos of World War I battlefields as they appear today. The twenty-teens are a great decade to acquaint-- or re-acquaint-- yourself with the details of this bloody, senseless global war this is still being fought today in the parts of the planet that were colonized by the war's victors.
O.J. is innocent. Yes, innocent.
On the evening of June 13, 1994, William C. Dear and I were in the same city-- St. Louis. Dear, a private investigator, was delivering a speech at the downtown Convention Center before a group called the National Conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors. I was driving an ice cream truck in North County. The infamous event of June 12, 1994-- which is fast approaching its 20th anniversary-- was the murder of O.J. Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and another man, Ron Goldman. Simpson led the LAPD on a slow-speed chase down the freeway the following day, with a gun pointed at his own head. I heard the news that O.J. was being arrested at his mansion in Beverly Hills as I returned my Frosty Treats truck to the company dispatcher. A little TV had been turned on in the garage, and about a dozen people were gathered around it.
William Dear spent the next 17 years investigating the double murder for which Simpson was arrested and later acquitted, and then he released a muckraking book in 2012 entitled "O.J. Is Innocent and I Can Prove It." I picked up this 500-page book at the Des Moines Public Library on Saturday morning and had it finished by Sunday afternoon. I am 100% convinced that Dear's hypothesis is correct.
Dear has determined that the real murderer was the "overlooked suspect" at the time, O.J.'s then-24-year-old son Jason, and the evidence against Jason has been laid out by Dear as clear and confidently as one could imagine. O.J., the theory goes, took the fall to protect his son. As the truth is fully revealed about the LAPD's shoddy and incomplete investigation, it is clear that Jason, who was never interviewed by police, had both motive and opportunity in the slayings. He was suffering from-- and still does-- from mental illness and a rage disorder. By 1994, he already had a string of domestic violence incidents in his past.
I hesitate to give away most of the details in Dear's book, or to deprive you of the chance to enjoy the book the same way I did, but suffice it to say, Dear's private investigation has turned out plausible explanations for why there were two sets of footprints on the scene, why O.J.'s car contained such a small amount of blood after he supposedly committed such a grisly murder by stabbing, to whom the bloody glove and the dark-colored knit stocking cap really belonged, how a cooking knife (Jason is a professional chef) was uncovered by Dear in a storage facility among Jason's abandoned possessions and how the butt of that knife matches the laceration on the top of Nicole Simpson's head, why O.J. failed a privately-administered lie detector test (not because he was the murderer, as most have assumed), and why O.J., upon his arrest, kept telling police that he was not the murderer, yet felt "he was responsible."
Trust that Dear fully indicts Los Angeles police for their initial rush to judgment and for procedures that led even O.J.'s harshest enemies to remark at the time that they had "framed a guilty man." The author and investigator also indicts the department for how it continues to subvert justice to this very day. Their one-suspect investigation twenty years ago did not lead to a conviction in court, yet today, they consider the investigation to be closed. When Dear filed a FOIA request to review the knit cap and the bloody gloves for DNA samples, the L.A. district attorney responded by letter that this famous criminal evidence could not be located. Then Dear found them all on public display a year later in Las Vegas at a police convention.
More than a decade after the Simpson verdict, which the jury indeed got correct, one of the lead prosecutors in the case, Christopher Darden, was interviewed on television. The attorney best known for his decision to have perhaps the most famous defendant in the history of United States jurisprudence try on a pair of blood-stained gloves that didn't fit, made the statement: "If anybody believes O.J. Simpson did not commit the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, they are idiots."
Now, a private investigator has brought a mountain of evidence to light demonstrating that another man was the killer and the justice system of the city of Los Angeles refuses to act upon it.
Needles in a haystack
Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz just finished a $250,000 taxpayer-funded investigation into voter fraud in the state. For three years in office, Schultz has been warning Iowans that their democracy is under attack from illegal voters-- unregistered and illegals, convicted felons, and the like. Out of 238 individual investigations, Schultz's efforts produced 27 criminal charges, four of which were dismissed, two delivered not guilty verdicts or deferred judgements, and 15 cases are still pending.
The ones that remain are suspect as fraudulent as well because the voter's intent cannot be easily proven, and certainly no elections at any level of government, during the period of study, have been swayed by so paltry a number. To put the number 27 into some perspective, I received 1,876 votes when I ran for the state legislature in 2008 (and certainly I attracted my share of ineligible voters, amirite?). The number 27 fits inside 1,876 sixty-nine times. I got only 22% of the votes cast in my district-- a land mass whose entire border I could walk in one day. And I ran for office under the ticket of the
Green Party, which most eligible voters have never heard of. That's how meaningless the number 27 is in a state of three million people and two million eligible voters.
Oh American politics, you're silly. Do you know that? Schultz, with this investigation, was taking his marching orders from a well-funded right-wing movement nationwide that's designed to disenfranchise minority voters. Virtually all of our government representatives and their top electoral opponents are taking legalized bribes from corporations under a system in which no upper monetary limit is taboo. Meanwhile, our advocates in office are beating the bushes for criminals among the
voters.
Birds on the tube
By my count, three of the best shows on television feature St. Louis Cardinals fans in lead roles: Jon Hamm on AMC's
Mad Men, Billy Bob Thornton on FX's new
Fargo, and Andy Cohen (above) on Bravo's
Watch What Happens Live.
Two of the three were on Bravo last night when
Hamm (above) stopped by Cohen's show and recreated a popular
Mad Men scene with fellow guest and funny lady Amy Sedaris. Isn't it cool that Cohen conducts each program seated in front of a Cardinals cap?
Thornton (above) is as good as he's ever been in this
Fargo mini-series.
Here's the series' official trailer.
Sam the Ram
The St. Louis Rams made history today by drafting Michael Sam in the 7th and final round of the NFL amateur draft. Sam, who played his college ball near the Gateway City at the University of Missouri, becomes the first openly-gay NFL player.
I don't want to say that the people who run NFL teams still have a problem with gay athletes, and I'm thrilled that he was chosen by my favorite team and their head coach Jeff Fisher (whose
words for the moment were perfect), but the collegiate star almost went undrafted, and that's an almost preposterous circumstance. Sam was a unanimous All-American this past season, the co-defensive player of the year in the Southeastern Conference, the premier power conference he led in both sacks and tackles for a loss. He put that impressive senior season together while being "out" the entire time to his coaches and teammates.
Yet all we heard since his public declaration that he was gay three months ago was that he was undersized for his position on the defensive line for the NFL and under-athletic to move to a linebacker position. A league that can't shut up about how important the intangibles and a player's heart are to his success-- the league that did everything in its public relations power to make a star out of Tim Tebow-- soon after Sam's announcement found major "physical" faults with the defensive player that had the most impressive collegiate resume among this year's draft-eligibles. Few would go on record publicly, but plenty of "anonymous" team executives warned the sporting public that Sam's situation might cause a distraction to his new team-- this from a league that endures almost daily headlines involving player arrests and incidences of domestic violence, a league we know for a fact was, last year, discreetly asking its draft-eligibles about their private romantic lives.
In the draft, Sam finished only eight spots away from being "Mr. Irrelevant" as the last player selected, and many of us had become convinced that he wouldn't be selected at all. (Over the previous six NFL drafts, incidentally, the lowest that an SEC defensive player of the year has been drafted was the first round, 17th overall selection.) The most humorous moment of the three-day draft festivity for me this year up to that point was in the sixth round today when the New England Patriots chose a defensive end (same position as Sam) that played for the college of Concordia-St. Paul, an institution of higher education in Minnesota with fewer than 3,000 students enrolled and the following opponents on their 2013 football schedule-- Minot State, Bemidji State, St. Cloud State, MSU Moorhead, Minnesota State, Upper Iowa, Sioux Falls, Wayne State, Augustana (S.D.), Southwest Minnesota State, and Winona State. I guess the SEC's best defensive player was considered more of a gamble than this guy.
Sam joins an already-formidable "front seven" of pass-rushers on the Rams' defense. Congrats to him, Jeff Fisher, and the entire team for making history today. One has to shake his or her head at the individual decisions made by the other clubs to pass on him, but again as a Rams fan, this is a cherry on top of a big bowl of ice cream with Sam's historic selection. What a steal as the 249th pick! Gay marriage comes to Missouri! Michael Sam wedded to the Rams!
Our biggest challenge
The mass kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria is just an awful, awful story, one of the worst in the news in recent memory, and that's really saying something. It should remind every one of us, myself included, what a terrible menace fundamentalist Islam is to the world. The attack by terrorists on a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya last year was another recent reminder. These schools and public gathering places are indeed soft targets, and it makes one weep not just for the victims of the violence but for entire nations such as these in sub-Saharan Africa that have actually been so welcoming to refugees from the failed Islamist states to their north and east.
It's possible to hold both of these opinions in one's head at the same time: that it's self-defeating and immoral for United States covert forces to bomb Muslim weddings with robots, but also that liberals need to rid themselves of the popularly-held notion that there is an equality of cultural ideas in play here. It doesn't make one a racist to condemn the religion of Islam for the violence against and enslavement of women that so many of its adherents practice and that its holy and ancient guidebook boldly and repeatedly promotes. It is an undeniable fact that the Koran orders the death of infidels, a perpetual war against non-believers, and the total submission of women to men. It would be hard for you to convince me that Abubakar Shekau is misinterpreting the text he's reading. In fact, the argument could and should be made that true racism is turning a blind eye towards the violent crimes against brown and black-skinned women by the disciples of Allah when we know that in a million years there would never be such collective tolerance for
intolerance in the West if the female victims were white.
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In Oklahoma, a 4,000-acre wildfire rages and thousands are forced to leave their homes. A 56-year-old man dies when he refuses orders to evacuate his house. Climate change deniers, that man is you.
Ville de La Nouvelle-Orleans
I returned last night from my annual sojourn to New Orleans, and to the Jazz and Heritage Festival, or Jazzfest. I'm thrilled to report that America's most culturally-important city is in wonderful health and spirit. The weather's great too.
Not long ago, a friend suggested to me that I plan a trip one year to the South by Southwest festival. "That sounds wonderful," I responded, "I hadn't heard that they were moving it to New Orleans."
