MTF XIV
Moeller Television Festival XIV arrives today in Cedar Rapids. It's an annual tradition on the blog to publish the greetings that Aaron and I write for the festival programs. We're the co-founders of the event and here they are...
To participate in today’s caucus, you must be registered to vote and be 18 years or older by the date of the general election in November. If you are not registered, you can get a card by seeing Gretta Bromley. She’s wearing a green smock, a Gary Bauer button, and inadvertently, her wig backwards.
Once the caucus is called to order, party leaders (that’s not you, stay seated) take care of general business, including the election of a chairperson, a secretary, behavior auditors, and somebody to supervise the E-meter. After a performance of the Battle Hymn of the Republic by our precinct’s Log Cabin Crossing Guards, the caucus is ready to begin.
You will first divide according to your initial candidate of preference. Those of you supporting the Paul Tsongas/Miami Sound Machine presidential ticket are here on the wrong year. We’ll give you a moment to file out. The number of state delegates in play is proportional to the number of votes received in a state primary or caucus, but federal law doesn’t dictate how states choose their delegates so we decided on a variation of the car key game used at suburban wife-swapping parties. After the first vote has been recorded, a splinter group of the party has asked to address the gathering in the form of public counter-accusations of personal wrongdoing and thinly-disguised physical threats—also, forced abortions, if the opportunity presents itself.
Next is the In Memorium video segment. Longtime party member Ruth Stockman died this past summer of an extreme case of chapped lips. She was the head of our internet spamming division. Her son, Mark, is joining us today to try to get some attention.
Still delaying the final vote on the presidential nominee so that you can’t leave, we will then discuss planks to the party platform. This year, our pre-submitted proposals include eliminating the community’s 9-1-1 emergency system, opposing the Treaty of Versailles, endorsing the eight-hour work day, and encouraging the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Because this is a presidential year, there will be coffee provided.
The final, binding vote to elect our party’s presidential candidate comes last so have your car keys ready at this time. Then, on your way out the door with your new life partner, please do not speak to the media. It is important that party communication be consistent at all times and that selective disclosure be avoided at all costs. Failure to stay silent may result in significant liability for the party, and lead to a repeat of the UFO religion affair.
Please remember that this event is considered the first true test of the presidential race, and is, therefore, vitally important to our state and to our party. Please stand with pride tonight during party pride standing hour, for ours is the political engine that got Bobby Brown out of New Edition, wrecked the marriage of Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert, and single-handedly keeps the ION television network on the air.
Hugs,
Chris Moeller
Party Comandante and official spell-checker
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Moeller Television Festival Historical Lists
by Aaron Moeller
6 Most Frequently Screened Shows at Moeller Television Festivals
Late Night/The Late Show w/David Letterman (10 times)
The Simpsons (10 times)
Cheers (8)
Newsradio (8- counting this year)
Taxi (8)
WKRP in Cincinnati (8)
4 Shows With Highest Percentage of Total Series Episodes Screened
Mr. Show with Bob and David 13.3%
WKRP in Cincinnati 8.9%
Newsradio 8.2%
Arrested Development 7.4%
6 Great Shows Never Screened at a Moeller Television Festival
The Wire
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Night Court
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (until this year)
4 Shows That May Surprise You Have Been Screened
Family Feud
The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder
The Muppet Show
60 Minutes (three times)
5 Big TV Stars You've Never Heard Of
Tom Selleck
Jimmie “Dy-no-mite!” Walker
Abraham Kardashian
Marlee Matlin's interpreter
Bob Hope
5 Actors with Big, Infectious Laughs
Roseanne
Ricky Gervais
Alan Alda
Robin Williams
Horshack
5 Things You Could Be Doing Right Now
Volunteering at a hospital
Volunteering with Meals on Wheels
Volunteering with The Boys and Girls Club
Refilling your drink
Refilling my drink
Aaron's 5 Funniest People (after Woody Allen and Steve Martin)
Todd Barry
Ricky Gervais
Jonathan Katz
Tracy Morgan
Kevin Nealon
The 5 People Aaron Thinks Chris Would Say Are the Funniest
David Letterman
Martin Short
Tina Fey
That guy from that one movie that Chris thinks also might have been on Mad TV
Himself
4 Facts About the Moeller Television Festival
1. The first four festivals were two-day events.
2. For years a party sub from Subway was a mainstay at each festival.
3. The first episode presented at the first festival was the Cheers where Cliff Clavin competes on Jeopardy.
4. Three people have died of natural causes at Moeller Television Festivals, two people were killed off by George RR Martin, one died heroically and melodramatically on Grey’s Anatomy, two babies were born, and one was conceived during an episode of The Bob Newhart Show.
If you gotta caucus, vote Bernie
It would be really fun to vote against Hillary Clinton on Monday night. That would show her. But I can’t bring myself to attend a promotional and fundraising event for the Democratic party. It is the graveyard of progressive political ideas, and the caucuses are an unholy institution designed to suppress the will of the majority and keep it that way. The Hillary or Bernie debate should be happening in October, not January.
Instead, I offer the Democrats this simple promise. If you choose Bernie Sanders as your presidential candidate in the general election, you will have my vote. If you choose Hillary Clinton, you won’t.
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A lot of Democratic women are excited about voting for a woman. They’re flooding my Facebook feed. But if polls can be believed, virtually no registered Democratic women supported the McCain/Palin ticket. Funny that Clinton is considered such a friend to LGBT Americans since her husband gave us the Defense of Marriage Act, and she finally came out in support of gay marriage the same week that Bill O'Reilly did in 2013.
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Bernie Sanders is a remarkable candidate. His failure to pander to voters even on issues like taxes and gun rights drive home the point of what an empty pantsuit Hillary is. She is the Donald Trump of the Democratic race-- disingenuous and condescending. The difference is that he’s a mainstream Republican pretending to be a Tea Partier, and she’s a mainstream Republican pretending to be a Democrat. She truly thinks you are stupid-- sending her daughter out on the campaign trail to tell you that Bernie Sanders’ support for single-payer health insurance means he’s against affordable health care for working families. This is the same as when conservatives try to tell you that Nazis were left-wing Socialists. She's swift-boating him. In respect to Chelsea, being the only child of Bill and Hillary Clinton is a deeply unenviable position to be in, but the inability to feel shame is clearly a hereditary trait.
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I gave money to Planned Parenthood a couple years ago, and now I regret it. The best presidential candidate put forward by the duopoly in the lifetime of that organization comes along, and their directors choose this to be the one and only year they endorse someone-- his opponent. This lays bare the major political gap in this country between well-to-do, “liberal” white women, and the poor women of all colors that most require the services of Planned Parenthood. When I received my most recent financial plea from them, I scribbled the words “Ask Goldman Sachs” and sent it back.
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This list of political endorsements is instructive. Groups that follow the lead of their rank and file support Sanders. Political groups that have endorsement decisions made by “executive boards” choose Clinton.
The Hemingses- A Book Report
Annette Gordon-Reed’s 2008 book “The Hemingses of Monticello” is simply the best non-fiction book I have ever read. Its jacket in paperback advertises it as a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award winner, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, but I was only vaguely aware of its existence until a couple months ago-- that an African-American historian had written a notable book, first, on the vastly underexplored social and sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the much younger slave woman, Sarah “Sally” Hemings, that he owned as property and that was also the half-sister of his wife, and second, that the historian had followed up that tome with this more expansive biography of several generations of the Hemings family residing in Colonial Virginia.
What separates this book from other history texts is the extraordinary care and detail taken by Gordon-Reed to acknowledge what we have never been told, and to reconstruct historical records that are incomplete and often unreliable. Her book is endlessly thorough in exploring what it is about the relationships between the author of the Declaration of Independence and members of the Hemings family we can fairly assume to be true, and what we are left to speculate about. The central historical figure of the story is Sally, whose thoughts and actions have only been referred to peripherally until modern times, and indeed, whose humanity was not even acknowledged during her lifetime, having lived the totality of her life before the Emancipation Proclamation.
The author writes from the heretofore-ignored perspective of the utterly powerless. She’s forced to ferret out the actual details from historical documents that were written from the vantage point of persons that supported a doctrine of white supremacy. In the case of this family, the immediate perpetrator of their oppression, and many others they came into contact with, are considered giants in the nation’s history, treated by many still in fact to be akin to deities, growing in myth with the passing of time. The exploration of the lives of the Hemingses becomes essential because the men and women they slaved for lived such a well-documented life, and that allows us to search for truths in the margins.
Take for example, the details of Sally Hemings’ arrival in Paris at the age of 14 in 1787. The purpose of her sea voyage, as set by Jefferson, was to provide accompaniment for his daughter, Polly. The letters back and forth between Jefferson and his Virginia plantation, Monticello, address, not surprisingly, only the topic of Polly, but Gordon-Reed is concerned with the trip from Sally’s perspective. What would expectations have been for her? How would social propriety have been different for Sally than for Polly? The author examines how Sally is perceived by others, notably Abigail Adams, wife of John, who is living in London at the time, and receives the two girls as they are en route to France.
Abigail Adams would write to Jefferson: “The old nurse whom you expected to have attended her [Polly], was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl of about 15 or 16 with her, the Sister of the Servant you have with you [Sally’s brother, James]… The Girl who is with her is quite a child, and Captain Ramsey is of opinion will be of so little Service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge. She seems fond of the child and appears good naturd… The Girl she has with her, wants more care than the child, and is wholly incapable of looking properly after her, without some superiour to direct her. As both Miss Jefferson and the maid had cloaths only proper for the sea, I have purchased and made up for them, such things as I should have done had they been my own…”
Gordon-Reed impressively explores this letter from every possible angle, the account, as it is, from a privileged adult white woman about an African-American slave girl. She sections that Adams is, firstly, wrong about Sally’s age, thinking the girl to be two years older than she actually is, and therefore, believing her to be less emotionally or socially mature. The institution of slavery was also one defined in part by a hyper-paternalism so we must read also through that lens. Conflicting passages from Adams would suggest that Polly Jefferson was the one that was deeply immature, but the reverse is true in this letter to her father. Gordon-Reed explores other evidence known about Adams’ views on race, reminding modern readers that the Adams family’s well-known anti-slavery position did not mean they were not racists. She publishes text of revealing thoughts Abigail put down on paper later in life critiquing Shakespeare’s
Othello-- "Who can sympathize with the love of Desdemona? The great moral lesson of the tragedy... is that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature."
Adams never refers to Sally by name in the letter to Jefferson. Remember that, in the United States, Sally was legally a non-person. Also, and this may have caught your eye in the text, as it did Gordon-Reed’s, what is “Captain Ramsey’s” motivation in proposing immediate return transportation for Sally? If this proposition is being accurately conveyed, why is the sailor suggesting to a third-party his opinion that Hemings will be of “so little Service” to the Jeffersons that she should be returned right away to the United States, and under his protection?
The author doesn’t say so in so many words, but I will-- the implication of the offer is pretty gross. For Sally, the voyage would have been the hardest part. Once the girls have arrived in Paris, she could easily perform the same domestic duties she’s been performing in Virginia.
All of the historical records regarding Sally Hemings, early to late in her life, convey that she was observed-- by white, black, or biracial acquaintances universally-- to be physically attractive. Gordon-Reed is interested not only in that revealing comment by a peripheral character, but in Adams’ relaying of it. Needless to say, it would be totally unacceptable, in that time, for a ship captain to suggest to a Southern gentleman planter that a
white girl from his household be returned to a separate continent in his custody-- and a lady at the very top of the social hierarchy, as Adams was, would never conceive of endorsing such a plan. There was a reason, after all, that everybody agreed at the outset that Polly should have a travel mate.
While Ramsey’s designs, if true, were certainly shaded by Hemings’ physical attractiveness, Adams was likely just as affected by Sally’s appearance in her motivation. She certainly knew also of the widower Jefferson’s reputation with the ladies, and the fact that there was a full staff of servants at Jefferson’s hotel residence in Paris, and Hemings would not even be asked to be the primary caregiver for Polly. Abigail Adams, therefore, comes off quite passive-aggressive in her correspondence. As Gordon-Reed points out, it would actually be insensitive to
Polly to remove her from the presence of a girl almost exactly her age, whom she has known all of her life (who indeed is also her
aunt), in a foreign country with a predominately foreign tongue, that comes from the same mountain community in Virginia and now shares the same life experience of cultural re-location. With both of Jefferson’s Paris-residing daughters bound for boarding school, is Adams’ actually concerned about the propriety of Hemings living in a small hotel apartment with Jefferson? And if so, is she genuinely concerned with Hemings’ well-being, or with Jefferson’s reputation in Europe and at home in the infant republic, or both? For sure, we should no better than to simply take Adams' written words at face value, yet that's the type of thing historians did for decades.
Writing a history about largely-undocumented people, and from an unexplored perspective cannot be easy. This is not copy and paste stuff. But laying open hidden bits of enlightenment from ancient evidence must be very gratifying for a writer, and the dissection of such is a blast to read. What Gordon-Reed is doing is truly re-writing the American historical record, and doing so in the best sense of that phrase. She’s providing a correction to a story that is monumentally significant in the narrative of the United States. It's the type of achievement for which the Pulitzer Prize
should be given.
Even though there are countless texts from Jefferson describing his personal life, and countless more by others
regarding Jefferson, it seems that the early American statesman made it the highest priority of his life to hide from his political enemies and the world the fact that he was basically living as a married man with a Negro woman after the death of his wife. Though we’d very much like to, sexual relationships between slave and master cannot be boiled down to just a story of rape. At the macro level, we can do it-- Sally could not give her sexual consent to Thomas Jefferson because, as reinforced by the law of the time, he didn’t need it. She was chattel. (For that matter, he also couldn't
marry her, for the state would not recognize it.) His exasperating failure during his life-- and then upon his death-- to free all of his slaves and to put the principles of the Declaration of Independence at work in his own life make our story endlessly more fascinating.
It does an injustice to history to say that all of these slave/slaveholder sexual relationships were the same. Sally’s individualism cannot be sacrificed for the purpose of having her serve as representative of all other relationships, some of which, I promise, were vastly more stomach-turning than this one. Within none of the historical accounts does Jefferson come off as a man that felt he could rape black women with impunity (though, again, legally he could as long as they were his possession) and he did not exercise his power the way others did. By the same account, it cannot be demanded of Sally by historians that she attempt to violently resist or kill her master, as other black women did, to prove to latter-day observers that she had
not given her consent.
What Gordon-Reed arrives at on this subject is that, where man meets woman, black meets white, and slave meets master, some significant parsing needs to be done to get to the most precise truths of these people. And even within that construct, a Thomas Jefferson, a Sally Hemings, an Annette Gordon-Reed, or a Chris Moeller is not the same person today that he or she was yesterday, will be tomorrow. In the author’s lively turn of phrase, “Not
all of anyone ever
always does anything.”
Where does that leave us? These people lived in a time that was almost unfathomably different than the time we live in today. Not only is it difficult to comprehend the concept of humans as property, but we’re thankfully far out of step with their ideas on the inequality of the sexes and the age-appropriateness of sexual relationships. I definitely do not write that to excuse the behavior of Thomas Jefferson. Abolitionists were alive and active, even in Virginia, at that time (and they were densely-populated in the locales of Paris, where Jefferson served as ambassador, and Philadelphia, where he served as President). Examples of Jefferson's writing reveal that he was aware of his own moral deficiencies on the subject, even if he had a hard time confronting them with honesty. Contrasting Jefferson with the Adamses is an interesting exercise as Jefferson was a slaveholder, yet had biracial people as his closest confidantes-- not only Sally but her brothers, and men that he freed as slaves later that he referred to for years as "friends." The Adamses were
opposed to slavery, yet clearly held more socially-acceptable beliefs at the time (and less socially-acceptable
today) about the importance of keeping the white race pure.
Gordon-Reed writes of the probability that Sally enjoyed a certain measure of contentedness in her relationship with Jefferson. The evidence suggests that he tried hard in his attempts to woo her, and was too accommodating a personality to have been comfortable bedding her against her will. He shopped extravagantly for her in Paris. (One recorded spree translates to a thousand dollars in today's money.) She was already pregnant with his child when they left Paris (she would bear six of his children), and according to one of their sons years later, Jefferson had to agree to free their future children as each reached the age of 21 in order to convince her to return to Virginia when she could have lived in France as a free person. (Hemings had some leverage at this one and only juncture of her life as Jefferson never registered his slaves in Paris, and stood to lose them if discovered by the authorities.) Writes the author, “The world sent (Sally) a very definite and hard message about enslavement at the same time as it conveyed another powerful message about what was to be her role in life as a woman-- partner to a man and a mother. Those roles were tenuous because the law did not protect her in either of them. They were not, however, meaningless to her."
Sally could have been treated well by Jefferson in private, even lived in love with him, but he could not acknowledge her in public. He could have set his slaves free even during the course of his life, but his obsession with his historical legacy and the financial situation of his white family claimed higher priorities. The Hemingses lived in the shadow of an extraordinarily important-- and extraordinarily flawed-- man. They were members of a population that was incalculably oppressed and dispossessed, collectively tortured, and almost entirely unrealized as individuals. A close relationship with the third President of the United States did not shield any of them from that. Our story spins almost out of comprehension when we consider that Thomas Jefferson had this large family that consisted of in-laws, cousins, children, and a life partner (of some definition) that were
also his property, and even as I continue to write this report I feel the onerous weight of the topic upon a modern consciousness, and the very real danger of being misunderstood, or writing in an incomplete fashion. The topic is safe instead in the hands of Annette Gordon-Reed. You can borrow the book, but I encourage you to buy your own.
Moeller Television Festival XIV
It's almost two months late and switching cities, but the 14th annual comes this Saturday, January 30th, in Cedar Rapids at the home of Aaron and Alex Moeller. Starts at noon, and costs you nothing for a day of entertainment, food, and drink. RSVP today.
The Viewing Schedule...
“I’m So Bad” Inside Amy Schumer #12 Comedy Central 4/8/14
“Chuckles Bites the Dust” The Mary Tyler Moore Show #127 CBS 10/25/75
“The Gift of Hunger” Black-ish #7 ABC 11/12/14
“My Favorite Orkan” Happy Days #110 ABC 2/28/78
Open Remote:
“Fattest Asses” Broad City #5 Comedy Central 2/19/14
“Complaint Box” Newsradio #42 NBC 1/29/97
“Officer of the Year” Hill Street Blues #40 NBC 10/28/82
“Guess Who” Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist #25 Comedy Central 11/10/96
“Show #11.21” The Carol Burnett Show #275 CBS 3/5/78
“Mazel Tov, Dummies!” 30 Rock #132 NBC 11/29/12
“Kimmy Rides a Bike!” Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt #11 Netflix 3/6/15
A St. Louis Rams fan answers your questions
I don't speak for all of us, but I probably do for a couple. Have it at.
First one, how are you feeling now, four days after the non-anesthetized incision performed by Dr. Hairpiece?
Better.
Reality is starting to set in. The team is really not any good, and it has been difficult to get excited about it for some time. The Rams' 7-9 record this year is deceiving. They were basically eliminated from playoff contention in November, and at one time had a record of 4 wins and 8 losses. I'm ready for pitchers and catchers to report this year effective Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but a little Blues hockey on FOX Sports Midwest tonight, instead of watching the NFL playoffs, helped to repair my wounded civic pride. (A come-from-behind 4-3 overtime winner against the Canadians!) As the days turn to nights, I find myself increasingly annoyed not at the departure of the Rams, but at the departure of Georgia Frontiere's 1999 Super Bowl trophy. The
Los Angeles Rams don't have a Lombardi Trophy of their own, and the idea that St. Louis' rightful-hardware will be on display in Inglewood, California, rather than, say, encased in glass attached to a pendulum swinging between the two elephant legs of the Gateway Arch is aggravating.
What else sticks in your craw?
ESPN and Sports Center. Nobody considers these guys actual journalists, but they don't need to be in the business of organizing pep rallies either. The set of "Sports Center Los Angeles" (that's what the late night national telecast is called) on
Tuesday
was decorated with Ram emblems and electronic banners that read "I Love LA," and featured an in-studio visit from Los Angeles Eric Garcetti. I'm not sure what that cameo-- or the team name, for that matter-- is even about. The team is moving to
Inglewood, not Los Angeles, and Kroenke appeared with Inglewood mayor James Butts Jr. during a press conference on Friday in which Hizzoner basically claimed possession of the team, Kroenke almost started crying, and fans in attendance booed mention of the plan to share their new dream house with the Chargers.
It also sticks in my craw that people say St. Louis didn't support this team. The Rams sold out every home game from the team's inception in 1995 through 2006, and then the team embarked on the worst five-season stretch that any team in the NFL has ever experienced at any time going back to 1920. Support for pro football in St. Louis has been off-the-charts remarkable. This past year it far exceeded what it had been the last year the Rams were in Los Angeles in 1994.
What are you going to do now with your Rams stuff?
A lot of it is already in boxes-- mementos from a brighter football era. On a day-to-day level, the working keepsake is my St. Louis Rams checkbook cover. I guess I'm in the market for a new one, but the lady at the bank gives me a funny look now even when I order a new box of checks. The Isaac Bruce replica jersey is still hanging in the closet, and for cold beverages at home, I routinely use a plastic stadium cup featuring an image of current linebacker James Laurinaitis. I have a sentimental attachment to it because it reminds me of the time I came down with a painful case of Laurinaitis.
How do you think the city of St. Louis will fare?
Let's be honest. This minor evacuation of what basically amounts to a handful of part-time jobs is not a monetary loss for the city of St. Louis. A virtually undetectable decline commenced when the football Cardinals left for Arizona in 1988, and the proposed riverfront stadium
would have been the big financial loser. The act of proposing that plan alone-- the architects, surveyors, attorneys, advisors, and engineers-- cost the city $16 million. The loss of an NFL franchise, is a loss of
fun, not a loss in capital. In St. Louis, nobody came from out of town for the games, the people
in town will spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere, and it was only spending that took place eight days out of the year anyway.
What should be the city's new priority?
The economic priority should be adequately funding the public schools
. That was also the case on Monday when an entity still existed that called itself the St. Louis Rams. The Gateway City should also concern itself with, after more than a century, merging the city of St. Louis with St. Louis County, along with eliminating the dozens of little suburban municipal fiefdoms that exist throughout the metropolitan area, and ridding itself of its county prosecutor and what are surely dozens of still-employed racist police officers, but you were probably referring to new
sports priorities. Well, I spent a half-hour yesterday on Major League Soccer's Wikipedia page. They have 20 teams currently and say they plan to increase to 24. A trimmed-down, soccer-purposed version of the riverfront project might be a big winner.
Do you wish the Rams well in Los Angeles?
I do not. I hope that they have so little water in Southern California by the end of next summer that Kroenke has to wash his toupee with toilet water and baking soda.
What will you do with your NFL Sundays?
This is going to be easier for me than you might think. The NFL, while in impressive partnership with all four broadcast television networks, has actually not been very accommodating to this fan. In Des Moines, Iowa, I'm lucky if I get to see a Rams game on TV once a year. The team hasn't been marquee enough to be scheduled for a Sunday or Monday night tilt (although I'm sure they will be now), and for a typical noon game on Sunday, I've had my choice between a Chiefs or Broncos game on CBS and a matchup in the NFC North on FOX. The St. Louis Cardinals tend to oblige the fans with a trip deep into the National League baseball playoffs each year, and if they get as far as the League Championship Series, it's already Week 8 of the NFL season. Any time I have left over on Sundays next fall I'll probably spend blogging about the latest off-the-field scandal involving the National Football League.
Who will you root for now, or whom will you root for now?
Um, that's a nobody. And don't think about proposing your team to me as a viable option. Yes, this epic betrayal of a great city is largely the work of just three men-- Stan Kroenke, Roger Goodell, and that "ghastly skin mask" Jerry Jones (fake hair, fake heart, and fake face), but in a secret vote, 28 of the 30 teams approved it, and we can pretty safely assume the two that didn't are the Raiders and Chargers, who were also angling to betray their home cities with a relocation to LaLaWood. (They are rich
men, but they are NFL poor.) I get that your Packers are "owned by the fans," and not by one of these soulless corporate leeches, but I don't even want to hear it. Again, I draw your attention back to that relocation vote. Hypocrites.
I do not plan on watching the NFL anymore. Any American with a conscience has already spent some time considering the abandonment of this particular pastime, and that's even if you've never given a hoot about the city of St. Louis. I just have a great new excuse now to follow through with it. I'm still going to watch when the Bengals play the Steelers, however. That shit is insane.
Stan Kroenke is a bald asshole, Part II
"John" has a nice explanation online today, courtesy of Deadspin...
Three football teams want to move, from San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis. The cities are asked to come up with a plan to try and keep them. Oakland pretends it can’t hear you and does nothing. San Diego, who has been dealing with this for 14 years, says they have an idea, but won’t clarify what it is. St. Louis immediately goes into action and draws up a plan for a reasonable stadium that will revitalize the northern riverfront and financing is put into place. The land is acquired and ground will be broken as soon as the league commits to the city.
Time passes....
Oakland continues to play with its dick and ignore the situation. San Diego plans a vote for well after the relocation issue will be already voted on itself, to maybe get the money to start thinking about doing something. St. Louis is told their stadium plan will actually be 100 million more than they thought and they need to come up with that money too. So they say, ‘Sure, no problem. If you can loan us that money up front, we’ll raise the tourist tax a little and pay you back with that revenue’ and amend the stadium plan to reflect that.
The NFL throws a fit about STL counting on an extra 100 million for a stadium even though they’re going to get paid back and makes sure to send a press release chastising the city for actually trying to keep its team.
Then...
The owner of the Rams in the relocation papers says St. Louis is a failing city based largely on its placement on some growth index from some study and anyone who puts a team here would be doomed to financial ruin. So he’s going to move the team to Inglewood which actually RANKED LOWER THAN US ON THAT SAME FUCKING LIST. He also whines we don’t support the team that didn’t have a winning record in a decade and had the worst five year stretch in the history of the whole fucking league. (15-65)
So...come vote day.
Despite having a set stadium plan and a way to finance it in place, St. Louis loses its team. The San Diego owner has one year to decide if he wants to move into the Inglewood stadium with the Rams. But since that city vote is in June, there’s still a chance they get to keep their team even though they don’t actively have a stadium plan after 14 FUCKING YEARS. And Oakland, which has done not one goddamn thing to keep the Raiders, still has a team. For now at least. They play in a stadium where sometimes raw sewage backs up onto the field during heavy rains. Gotta take care of a city that lets that happen.
Oh and the best part? That extra 100 million that the NFL threw a fit about us counting on? That we were going to pay back? It’s been offered to both San Diego and Oakland if they build new stadiums in their current cities. Free of charge. It’s a gift!
I don’t think a city has ever been fucked this bad by a sports league ever. I don’t even know what second place would be. So you know what? I hope Stan Kroenke gets paralyzed from the neck down and once a day for the rest of his life someone rubs a cheese grater across a random part of his face. But at least make a small concession and have said cheese grater be made of solid gold. Dude’s rich. He’ll like that. Also the occasional teabag would be nice too. And that goes for anyone else that was a part of this. There’s no hell bad enough for that level of greed. Sorry this isn’t very funny.
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And from
Will Leitsch...
So, St. Louis has lost its team, and despite the local angst, there has been a decided lack of national sympathy for the city's plight. This makes a certain amount of sense. The Rams were in Los Angeles for nearly 50 years, and there is a certain symmetry to them returning; it is difficult for some to feel too badly for St. Louis for losing the team many believe they stole from Los Angeles in the first place. But there's also an undeniable antipathy toward St. Louis that has grown in recent years; it has somehow become acceptable in public discourse to just dump on St. Louis, a town that's going through some of the same problems that Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh have all gone through over the past two decades. If people talked about Detroit the way they regularly do about St. Louis right now, they'd be excoriated for it, and rightly so. This is a proud city with lifelong residents who are working their tails off to make it through an extremely difficult period. (And making some progress.) To ignore their efforts because you didn't like Tony La Russa and feel like making a cheap joke on social media is insulting in the extreme.
The frustration from St. Louisans is less about the Rams, in specific; they've been frustrated with that franchise for a decade already anyway. The frustration is that the city tried so hard to keep the team -- or a team, any team -- and were essentially just ignored by the NFL. Oakland and San Diego are barely trying to keep their teams; St. Louis put together a substantial plan, and not only was it dismissed out of hand, both Kroenke and the NFL took turns trashing the city on the way out the door. And then they gave the city a condescending pat on the head about it. Jerry Jones, the ghastly skin mask that owns the Dallas Cowboys, helped put the deal for Kroenke together and then had the nerve to say, "Don't rule St. Louis out. … It's an NFL city. It just didn't have it right this time. ... Get it right the next time relative to other teams." If St. Louis wants to get another team, hey, maybe it can sign a deal as terrible as the one it signed with the Rams in the first place, one that allows some other owner to exploit it for 20 years before we go through all this crap again.
Stan Kroenke is a bald asshole
E. Stan Kroenke is not Adolf Hitler. Hitler's hair was real.
The owner of the St. Louis Rams was named by his birth parents for St. Louis baseball champions Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial, but Kroenke's forte has been running successful sports teams
into the ground-- and on two different continents-- the Colorado Avalanche, the Denver Nuggets, the Arsenal Football Club,
the Greatest Show on Turf. In an attempt to extradite himself and his American football team from a city that just offered him $350 million in taxpayer money, he publicly released the text of his relocation application. It was a scorched-Earth ad hominem attack upon the Gateway City.
In his desperation to compete for the Los Angeles market against the joint stadium effort being put up by the family ownerships of the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders, Stan is poisoning the well back home. His temper tantrum essay skewed economic statistics and invented stories outright about attempted negotiations with city leaders. (His claim that the Rams don't-- and can't-- boast the type of fan support the baseball Cardinals enjoy was a long-awaited reveal about the insecurity of the Rams' front office.)
You gotta vote for me, he's saying,
because I can't go back there. It will be interesting to see how the NFL treats a city that has offered a third of a billion dollars in tax subsidies, and in turn, how the NFL's other host cities respond to that reaction. This would be a new precedent.
Kroenke really wants out. He never asked for a new stadium in St. Louis. He's putting up his own money to build one in Inglewood, California (directly
in the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport). Of the
three following entities-- a proposed new riverfront stadium in St. Louis, the Inglewood stadium project, and Kroenke's forehead-- only his forehead has a retractable roof. The man is bald, and the tent that he wears on top of his head is ridiculous. As the eighth-largest private landowner in the United States, you would think he would own a mirror. Maybe it's in another mansion.
Stan made his money the old fashioned way. He married into it. Ann Walton Kroenke is the daughter of Bud Walton, co-founder of Walmart. The descendants of brothers Sam and Bud add to their billions by building each of their business outlets with taxpayer money, paying as little as they can get away with to their employees, and using child slaves in China and Bangladesh to manufacture the products they sell.
"Silent Stan" said nothing to the people of St. Louis when he exercised his right of first-refusal as minority owner to take control of the team in 2010. He has said nothing during his tenure as the boss. His last public comments of any kind were made when he hired Jeff Fisher as head coach four years ago. Now he's talking a blue streak on paper on his way out the door. He claims he negotiated in good faith with regional officials, when in fact, there were no negotiations at all. And if there had been, how could they have been productive with elected leaders trying hard the entire time not to stare at the rodent suctioned to the top of Kroenke's head?
This is set up to be one of the most interesting weeks in St. Louis sports history. Nothing is assured. Both the Rams plan and the Raiders/ Chargers shared plan in Carson, California, requires approval of 24 or more of the other teams. A Post-Dispatch columnist
reasons that there would be at least nine votes in support of the Carson plan, and therefore opposing Kroenke in Inglewood-- the Chargers, Raiders, Panthers, Texans, 49ers, Jaguars, Giants, Steelers, and Chiefs. If the clubs had their druthers, they would surely choose the Rams and Chargers, but there's animosity on the part of the Spanos family in San Diego towards Kroenke, and the partnerships didn't shake out that way. It turns out that it's actually easier to get along with the family of Al Davis than with Walton-in-law.
If Kroenke loses this week, he'll be stuck in St. Louis at least for a time, and that's when the city should kick him in the balls. City leaders have gotta play it straight until the cards have all been played, but remember that Kroenke believes the city of St. Louis already to be in breach at the Edward Jones Dome because its upkeep does not place it in the top tier of league facilities. If the Raiders and Chargers "win" Los Angeles, Kroenke says he'll break ground at Inglewood anyway. Then the battle is between Kroenke and the league. So bar the Rams from playing in the Ed. He can go to L.A., in violation of the NFL's decision, and share a largely indifferent sports city with two other teams, or he can try to find an entirely new home, the first of which does not immediately spring to mind. St. Louis has already been dumped. If Kroenke is rejected by his latest pursuit, take advantage of the overplay and act punitively. The city has had two giant items in its favor throughout this negotiation (or lack of negotiation, if you prefer), even if they each get frequently forgotten by St. Louisans and football fans. Number one, a city does
not need an NFL team to prosper. In fact, some studies now suggest the opposite is true. And number two, the Rams, as operated under E. Stanley Kroenke, are no great prize. The city that gets the Rams is not getting Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk, Orlando Pace, Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, and Dick Vermeil. It's getting Nick Foles and Jeff Fisher. Let's start the bidding.
White justice vs. black justice
Two systems of criminal justice in America:
1. Armed white anti-government radicals seized federal property in Oregon, holing up in a wildlife refuge to protest the principle of public land ownership. (The protesters claim that the land was stolen from ranchers, but it was actually stolen by white settlers like the Bundy posse via a broken treaty with the Paiute Indian tribe in 1878.) After nearly a week, the gunmen continue their occupation undisturbed, and say only that they
believe warrants have been issued for their arrest.
2. Twelve-year-old African-American Tamir Rice is holding a toy gun in a public park in Cleveland. A 9-1-1 call goes out in which the caller states twice that the gun is "probably fake." City police pull up and shoot him dead less than two seconds, before their car has even come to a full stop. The killer cop, Timothy Loehmann, is given immunity from prosecution under the legal claim that the officer believed the gun to be real, Rice to be an adult and an immediate threat to the cop’s well-being. All this even though the two officers argued that they believed Rice looked like an adult and Ohio is a “right to carry” state. Video also shows Rice's 14-year-old sister being forced to the ground, handcuffed, and detained by the officers after the shooting and her running to her brother's aid. It also shows the officers waited four minutes before administering any first aid. Six months after the shooting, when the police department announced that it had almost concluded its investigation,
Mother Jones magazine uncovered that neither of the two officers involved in the shooting had yet been interviewed in the investigation.
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The NFL’s Rams, as anticipated since the day two years ago that Stan Kroenke acquired a large block of land near Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, have officially filed for franchise relocation. The St. Louis Rams could cease to exist as early as January 14th.
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In the relocation application that the Rams submitted to the league, a line reads that any team that signs on to St. Louis' and Missouri's new proposed riverfront stadium plan-- which includes $350 million in public money, "will be well on the way to public ruin, and the League will be harmed." This is the billionaire son-in-law of Bud Walton claiming that it's impossible for a pro football franchise valued at $1.45 billion, and with $290 million in annual revenue, to make do with a new stadium built with only $350 million in taxpayer money.
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It was a sad day for Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza. It was announced that they would be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer, but their induction is robbed of meaning because the greatest hitter and pitcher of their generation were left waiting on the same ballot.
