Media blackout
Where's the national news media coverage of the Jill Stein Green Party presidential campaign? Or the Gary Johnson campaign for the Libertarian Party? Eighty percent of Americans say that neither the Democrat nor the Republican in this debauched race "represent their values" and still the news media does nothing to inform of alternatives. It is a conspiracy by multi-national media companies to purposefully ignore the opposition to the candidates they have purchased.
What does that dissatisfaction statistic need to get to? 85, 90 percent? 97, 98? What will make things change? Take it from a person that knows a lot of immigrants. They see their ballots for the first time and are shocked to see that there are a myriad of other names on it. Since Monday, there haven't been any stories about Stein's campaign even on Alternet, at the Intercept, or at Mother Jones. And these news outlets purport to be
alternative! They are failing.
The United States of America: Where even
the children of Republican and Democratic candidates get more media play than third-party candidates.
What the hell comes next?
Booing at the Democratic Convention? An explainer:
What you're seeing is the passion of loyal, quite possibly tireless activists, young
and old, reacting to the fact that a system was rigged against them, seemingly and sadly something many of them didn't already know, and they have no outlet for any of that energy now except to cry out in pain, literally in some cases. They're looking at three and a half months of hyped-up election activity with nothing to do.
"Put that energy into Hillary"-- that's an extraordinarily stupid suggestion. The revolution these people see themselves as part of exists as much because of Hillary Clinton as it does Bernie Sanders. It was formed in opposition to her. If you hear a Clinton supporter tell you they are moving to Clinton, that person is actually moving
back to Clinton, like Sarah Silverman, who moonlights as a revolutionary but morphs into a patronizing maternal scold when the wind shifts.
It's building a house. No different. Bernie puts the work into a foundation. His workforce is outstanding, eager, energetic, idealistic, joyous. But the lot they're building on has been contaminated. It's not going to work out. It won't be habitable. The exhausted activists were told they were being delusional about their cause being sabotaged, and then Julian Assange revealed that they were being sabotaged by fraud and cronyism. There was never an 'out' to Sanders' strategy. He wasn't going to win the presidency, as a Democrat or as an Independent or a Green. But as an Independent or a Green, he wouldn't have to surrender. He wouldn't be forced to regret, as he inevitably will, the actions he took Monday to throw away his political moment, to fall in line behind fear. The voter's special gift is his or her vote. The politician's is his or her courage. It's the only attribute in the service of American government at any level that has any currency.
What's next for all that energy? Playing dress-up as a progressive Democrat at the state and local level sounds like a strategy no one could argue with, but it's entirely futile. Fat lot of good to build something from "the ground up" when there's no time left at all for, say, climate change. Stick your toe into public service, gang, and you'll see that each lever of government is owned and operated by and in service to corporate power. The corporations have staged a coup. It is over. The state and local level of politics
is indeed where the real shit gets done. That's why the corporations came for them first. Public institutions have been destroyed-- welfare for children and families slashed-- by the Clintons, schools defunded and
re-segregated, police departments militarized, prisons privatized until they are the new slavery, statehouses sold off representative by representative, and squeezed into gerrymandered districts that protect the corporate investment of the bribe.
As a liberal, you are the useful idiot. You tolerate the corporate elite, criticizing only its worst excesses. You poor sap, you have only one thing they want or need-- your vote, and you huff and puff justifiably over their sick behavior, but then give that vote to them in the end without making any demands. All of your activism, all of your energy, gone to waste. Worse than having done nothing at all.
What's left then if we are to avoid the neo-fascist takeover predicted in Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine," the shameful tactics of economic destruction that were tried out first "on the road," then came home? It's too late for that as well. It's been done. To you. But we
protest. We protest in our actions. We protest in the streets. We protest in online communities. We protest with our ballot. We subvert. We instigate. We expose.
Convention coverage continues
Tonight, this is what I posted in the comment thread of a Jill Stein story on Huffington Post today. I'm not gonna waste time re-wording it for a fresh audience here on the home page. My thoughts today after a dark day of watching Bernie Sanders go through his inevitable and ritualistic endorsement of Secretary Clinton.
Thank you, Democratic National Committee, may I have another?
My words, moments ago...
The terror expressed on this thread over Jill Stein's candidacy explains why she is the new ballcarrier in the revolution. The Clintons and the DLC gave us Trump, nobody else did that. Chasing Wall Street cash, to be more like Reagan, gave us Trump. The Clintons played Republican-lite for a quarter century, spit on the working class, and the results were the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, gerrymandering, massive losses in the Senate, Congress, statehouses, and in governorships. Obama took Bush's two wars and mushroomed it to five, six, I lost count. But by all means, blame the Greens, blame Nader, because we are your conscience, the reason you can't sleep at night when your standard-bearer is vacationing with the man that dropped 790,000 cluster-bombs on peasant farmers in Southeast Asia. You are older now. You still think the electoral college is bad, and superdelegates are bad, but what are you gonna do? The kids are still protesting in the streets, but you know, I see now where Mayor Daley had a point. Bernie was your lifeline, better than the party deserved, and you screwed that up, didn't you? Possibly alienated an entire generation of voters by discounting their votes. And you'll get Trump, and then 2020 will be the "most important presidential election in our lifetime," where there's entirely too much at stake not to vote for the Democrat. And that will make five presidential elections in a row.
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Democrats should view Dr. Stein as a solid back-up candidate in case Julian Assange really has indictment-worthy reveals on old Hill.
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I love that Americans are
fascinated by just how complicated and arcane their nation's nomination and electoral processes are. When actually the whole thing should be considered criminal.
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The revolution is down the street.
To your Left.
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I have a lot of political anger inside of me. You know this. It has sustained more than 11 years of blog postings. But here are two subtle things about oligarchic politicians that annoy me.
One, they use the phrase “middle class” incessantly, but never utter the phrase “working class.” I’m not sure what focus group told them to do this, but one certainly did, and it’s a more damaging action than one might think. We’ve been conditioned by lying scoundrels to believe that we are all “middle class.” But we can't all be, right? Hillary Clinton has middle class tax cuts that cover families up to $200,000 of annual income. According to economic numbers, that is not middle class. That’s rich. Conversely, and much more damaging, many very poor people consider themselves to be middle class when they are actually far from it. Poor people live next to other poor people (and rich next to the other rich, with security gates instead of dog fences) so being well-off becomes a matter of relativity in people’s brains. Nobody likes to believe they are poor, but politicians capitalize on this ignorance because it tempers class resentments that would certainly foster if people knew just how much
more money some Americans were making than they do. I think that they see the numbers, but they don’t "see" the numbers. They don't fully comprehend what they mean. At a certain point, you can’t appreciate the practical difference between someone making 20 times more than you and someone making 200 times more than you.
And then the rich get richer.
“Lower class" is no good as a phrase because the word class has two different connotations. And we all know that Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, for example, while each being quite wealthy, have no class. What I don’t get is why anybody would resent being called “working” class? Would they prefer being the opposite, the “idle” class?
Second thing that bugs me: When being interviewed, politicos start the answers to their questions with the word “look.” As in “
Look, we know that supplying arms to al Qaeda in Syria is going to be unpopular but we need to defeat ISIS.” Or “
Look,” it’s not going to be easy to infiltrate protesting pacifists but national security is at risk."
Is it just a verbal tick designed to ramp one up to his or her thoughts on a difficult subject? Is everybody just aping Vice President Joe Biden, who happens to be the worst offender to date? I personally find it lazy, somehow suspiciously test group-driven, but, most of all, condescending. I’m
already paying attention to you. I'm
looking!. How is it this person is struggling to come up with the words he or she wants to say, but I can so frequently
predict what those words will be?
Where da party at?
Thousands of Democrats demanded the ouster of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-Clinton as chair of the party’s national committee. They accused her of having conflicting motivations, being stubborn and out of touch with current times. And that’s just her hair.
Even as she heads to the exit, amid thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, she insists on staying on at her post through this week’s convention, delivering both the opening
and the closing address of the Democrats' televised cavalcade of stars, and then she accepts an honorary chair position with the Clinton campaign that she’s accused of having favored during the primary race. Nice. On
60 Minutes last night, during an interview that was designed to introduce Tim Kaine to the nation as the party’s vice presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton spent several minutes explaining to Scott Pelley that she had no insight into the Wasserman-Schultz/DNC affair, and wouldn’t be capable of knowing anything about what was happening with people that don’t work for her campaign, even as the Florida Congresswoman begins working for her campaign.
What has always been frustrating to true progressives about the Democratic Party is that, not only do their candidates and operatives too often choose political expedience over conscience, but they’re not even good at political expedience. You can't out-Republican Republicans. They have argued that their strategy has been a successful one for the party, but it’s created a horrible representative deficit in the U.S. Senate, in Congress, in state governorships, and we've seen the country drift aimlessly and shamelessly to the right. The decision this weekend by the Democrats and by Debbie Disaster to have her linger through this week distracts from the candidate, distracts from the “issues facing America,” and gives fodder to the Trump campaign, which looks shockingly more adult than the Clinton camp lately on issues such as trade and avoiding war with Russia.
Bringing Debbie Distraction formally aboard the Clinton train at this juncture will be correctly viewed as a big F-U to the progressive Sanders voters that Clinton should be trying to court. She still doesn’t get it-- showing the same ignorance in choosing Wall Street’s Kaine as a running mate over less compromised politicos such as Elizabeth Warren. Clinton is a true believer in the foreclosing political system that says you need a treasure chest of banking and corporate cash to win a presidential election, even as the 2016 campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Jeb Bush have all proved that the system has changed. She doesn’t yet recognize that her ongoing public display of political calculation no longer plays. The triangulation championed by the now-literally-defunct Democratic Leadership Council is finally being categorized and rejected by voters for what it is-- dishonesty.
Despite the loud reawakening of the political left in 2016, Clinton still takes for granted that she will get its vote. If and when she loses in November, however, it will be because she alienated those voters and they, alternately, stayed home or threw their support towards Green Party candidate Jill Stein (I personally recommend the latter). The Bernie campaign has succeeded in stiffening the backbone of millions of progressives, and Clinton will catch on to this fact now or later.
Her nomination was a terrible mistake aided by this internal party malfeasance. As Ralph Nader explained to Tavis Smiley on PBS last week, the Democrats should be running against “Cheating Donald,” as he was labeled by Nader in the Donald's catchy nicknaming style. The businessman has shown a willingness to cheat on consumers, business partners, regulators, creditors, and spouses. Yet they
can't run against that particular candidate because the Clintons are well-known cheats themselves, from the Lincoln Bedroom to Hillary's computer room to Bill's windowless corridor. Trump lingers close behind Clinton in national polls, and during the week that she should be using to catapult herself back to a comfortable lead, pundits are talking about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Taking the place of the outgoing party chairperson this Friday will be long-time party operative Donna Brazile, a familiar presence on the Sunday chat shows who was conspiring with the DLC (Republican) wing of the party even before it became fashionable during Bill Clinton’s presidency. In a supposed-nod to Sanders supporters, Debbie is now out, but then the hacks replace her with whom? They choose a person, in Brazile, who was also implicated in the WikiLeaks email release to be anti-Sanders and acting against his campaign. Said Brazile about the Sanders campaign endorsing Wasserman-Schultz's primary opponent, "I saw it this am. How stupid. Don't know how to respond to Bernie anymore." And then she turned down an interview discussing Sanders' campaign with the Washington Post, "I have no intentions of touching this. Why? Because I will cuss out the Bernie camp!" Another slap.
Thanks to these leaked emails-- Julian Assange is the gift that keeps on giving, Sanders was proven to be correct all along that the party machine was against him. And those of us that lamented Sanders' decision to run as a Democrat in the first place, rather than mounting an independent campaign from the left in the general election, were
really proven to be correct. With these snake-oil salesmen at the helm, it’s never even been about what’s good for Democrats. And it’s
definitely never been about what’s good for America. It’s a naked careerism displayed by individuals that continue to fall “up” inside their sanctified system of corruption, individuals like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Surprises of the week
It's hot and humid here in Iowa, and my reaction time has slowed. Unfortunately, this has been a week of news-making events that nobody could have imagined.
1. DNC emails are hacked and they reveal that staffers, whose precise job is to be neutral during the party primaries, were mocking the Sanders campaign and actively conspiring to weaken it. Among the actions they took was paying young people to push back online against Sanders supporters, planting stories, and attempting to intimidate journalists.
2. A University of Iowa football player was stopped on the streets of Iowa City while playing the mobile game "Pokemon Go," and had four guns pointed at him by five police officers. And then I click on the story, and it turns out that the player is black.
3. The Saudi government may have
had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.
4. Hillary Clinton picks a running mate that's been vetted by Wall Street. He's an establishment careerist and privatist that has championed TPP, NAFTA, "right to work," the coal industry, off-shore drilling, and he signed the repeal of the estate tax in Virginias as the state's governor.
5. It's revealed that Roger Ailes engaged in sexual behavior that calls to the mind Jabba the Hut.
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The preceding was sarcasm, but this was a
very surprising story this week: A Major League Baseball pitcher, Chris Sale, one of the league's best, was scratched from a start after he cut up all of the "throwback" 1976-style uniforms that his team was going to wear for a game. He did it during batting practice so the team wound up taking the field with their regular uniforms, but without Sale.
The Wars
The issue of Syrian refugees is really a moot one in the U.S. presidential election. They'll likely
all be dead from coalition airstrikes soon enough.
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What sort of liberties does the U.S. military take in the world? Consider this hypothetical of the exact reverse of our policies: Turkey's president Tayyip Erdogan, as he actually does, blames an American cleric for inciting the coup attempt against him earlier this month, without evidence, so.... he
orders a weaponized bomb dropped on the state of Pennsylvania, where the cleric lives.
Aaron's Swartz and the St. Louis Cardinals
Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, it is illegal to access a computer without authorization. Within the scope of this sprawling, unfocused law, you have committed a felony if you download too much information even from a website that you are authorized to use. If you violate one of the rules on that online service agreement that you agreed to in the pop-up box, but didn’t actually read,
that's a felony. If you lie about your age on an internet dating site, you have probably committed a felony because you have violated the service agreement of that site.
CFAA was passed by Congress in 1986, which, alone, should tell you much of what you need to know about its relevance to today’s world of computer crime. The only thing that’s changed about it during the three decades of advanced technology since is the increased size of the punishments for violating it. Misdemeanors have become felonies. This is the law that Reddit co-founder and member of the Internet Hall of Fame, Aaron Swartz, broke when he downloaded academic journal articles from the MIT network. He faced a million dollars in fines, 35 years in prison, and asset forfeiture when he committed suicide in 2013.
It’s also the law that former St. Louis Cardinals baseball scouting director Chris Correa broke when he accessed the password-encrypted Houston Astros’ player scouting records in 2013 and 2014, and now has been sentenced to 46 months in prison.
That’s a staggering penalty for an online “assault” that was not malicious and apparently did not seek to harm the Astros, but then so was Swartz’s. The New Yorker has called the CFAA “the worst law in technology.”
Correa testified that he believed his predecessor, Jeff Luhnow, had absconded with the Cardinals’ proprietary scouting information when he accepted the Astros’ general manager position in 2012. Correa pled guilty and was fired by the Cardinals shortly after the story came to public light. A question I have is to the people that repeat the line that “the Cardinals hacked the Astros.” If that scouting information on Jeff Luhnow’s computer belonged to him, and not the Cardinals, how does it then belong to the Astros? Correa “hacked” Luhnow, not the Astros.
But aside from that, this story, as it stretches beyond the realm of sports, is about a law that carries oversized sentences, not distinguishing between cases in respect to intent, and about a Justice Department that seems to have no sense of the weight of its actions. (Or worse, it does.)
I could launch into a defense of Correa here that compares the severity of his punishment to the punishment that inexplicably escaped Hillary Clinton, and I’m going to. Clinton will not be charged by the FBI for operating the business of the U.S. Department of State from her family's private email server, one that was
and is safe from Freedom of Information Act requests. Before she was out of office, she deleted emails, and then lied about it. The decision not to prosecute has left her free to continue her campaign for the highest office in the land. This was not the same message the Obama Administration sent when it vigorously pursued whistle blowers Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. They both graduated to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act. The Justice Department that pursued and punished Correa is not the one that let Wall Street bankers skate after they collapsed the global economy, nor the one that intimated that Hillary Clinton would not be charged, even though the FBI admitted it was "possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account" and that she was "extremely careless" in her "handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."
No, Correa got the Justice treatment that found Manning, Snowden, and lest we forget, Correa’s Major League Baseball colleague, Barry Bonds, who was pursued to the warning track for supposedly lying under oath to a grand jury involving his use of performance-enhancing drugs. (His obstruction of justice conviction was later overturned by an 11-judge panel on a 10-1 vote.)
My problem with Correa’s case, and cases like it, is that the sentencing standards are so out-of-whack as to endanger justice. We see this phenomenon today in nearly all areas of U.S. civil and criminal law. Prosecutors are permitted to seek ridiculously oppressive punishments, and it forces defendants to accept plea arrangements that they otherwise would never consider taking in lieu of their day in court. Did the outsized threat of prison prevent information from coming to light in this case? Correa threw himself on the mercy of the court, saying that he was "overwhelmed with remorse and regret for his actions," but he seems to also have been claiming
initially that he, or the Cardinals, were a wronged party.
The punishment has to fit the cybercrime. Was the discovery process sabotaged by Correa’s fear of receiving the maximum possible penalty?
My employer has an internet usage policy that I have been guilty of violating in the past. Accessing any online site from your work computer-- whether it be weather-related or anything-- without the consent of your supervisor, is prohibited. This policy is violated by multiple agents on a daily basis. Was I ever under the impression that I had committed a felony by doing this unsanctioned surfing? I was not. But I did, technically, because I violated the agreed-upon terms. What Correa did is a step above a violation of a service agreement. He circumvented password requirements (guessing it based on previous passwords Luhnow used). But 46 months?
From a competitive advantage, I’m hard-pressed to see much damage done to the Astros. It would seem to be at least one step above sign-stealing, although with fewer direct results on the field. There needed to be a punishment, and Correa lost his job. The results of the FBI's investigation seems to suggest that no other Cardinals' front office personnel were involved. The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, gets to decide a punishment for the Cardinals organization, whether it be a fine, a loss of selections in the amateur draft, a combination of those two things or more. The Astros can have field manager Mike Matheny if they want him.
I suspect the organization will accept its punishment without fuss. But if it were me, I would fight the whole thing Tom Brady-style. The New England Patriots are actually a good comparison on this topic, and I’m not referring to Deflate-Gate, an issue that is an utter absurdity. Instead, I’m referring to the Patriots secretly videotaping the St. Louis Rams’ practice and run-through prior to Super Bowl 36 in 2002. That stunt put the Rams at a severe disadvantage in that game, yet no punishment was ever handed down after the Patriots employee that did the videotaping made a public admission, and I don’t recollect that the United States Justice Department ever got involved.
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It’s delicious. Too delicious. Yesterday, Iowa Congressman Steve King tells MSNBC that everything that was ever good in the world came from Western Civilization and white culture. That very day ends with Melania Trump lifting entire paragraphs of her speech to the GOP Convention from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention. It’s just too perfect, so circular it’s a croquet ball. I’m hyperventilating. As Melania’s speechwriter might say, you can’t write this stuff.
The WNBA and a one-man sports round table
An unfortunate strike against the WNBA is that it was originally owned by, still partly owned by, and rests entirely today in the shadow of the
NBA.
The National Basketball Association clearly has had a pointed growth strategy, and it's one I question. They place their
men's basketball franchises in North America’s largest markets, then, after that, seem to favor secondary cities that boast no other major professional sports teams. You will find no top-tier professional basketball in Pittsburgh, Kansas City, St. Louis, Baltimore, San Diego, or Cincinnati, collectively home of 13 sports franchises, but you will in Sacramento, Memphis, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Orlando, Portland, and Oklahoma City. There’s no major football, baseball,
or hockey in any of these latter seven towns, but because the NBA believed (and still believes, in the case of applicable cities) in pairing men’s and women’s pro teams together by city (and even by nickname-- i.e., the Timberwolves/Lynx of Minnesota, the Suns/Mercury of Phoenix), that leaves at least a dozen major American cities without top-of-the-line pro basketball of any kind. It also leaves the women’s game relegated to a summer activity, and to second-tier status seemingly by its construction. They have an NBA one-off logo, but they are Robin to the NBA's Batman.
Take St. Louis as the perfect example of a deprived city. This past winter, the National Football League’s Rams split for Los Angeles, where team owner Stan Kroenke can now shop more conveniently at Rodeo Drive toupee shops. That leaves MLB’s Cardinals and the NHL’s Blues as the two STL franchises. The Gateway City is 47% African-American, and the WNBA is predominately African-American, but between the two local sports teams, there is currently only one African-American athlete, and believe it or not, he’s a hockey player-- and also, technically, Canadian. We know the NBA holds a grudge against the city ever since the NBA/ABA merger of 1976, when it got swindled fair and square in a business deal by the Silna brothers, Ozzie and Daniel, who owned the ABA’s Spirits of St. Louis. In return for folding their ABA team, the league has paid the brothers a percentage of league TV revenue in perpetuity that has now surpassed $200 million.
St. Louis should be considered an extraordinary, untapped market for women’s basketball. Kansas City needs a team too. Taxpayers there foot the bill for the $276 million Sprint Center, hoping to lure either an NHL or NBA team. Eleven years later, they have neither. No major sports league has tapped adequately into the potential for a cross-state rivalry between nearly-equal-size Missouri cities that produced what was then the most-watched World Series (most total households) in baseball history in 1985. The Midwest has been hugely supportive of women’s college basketball. Not far up the road from Kansas City here in Des Moines, girls’ high school basketball draws even in attendance with boys’ at the state level. Popular and successful collegiate women’s programs dot the Big 12 Conference.
The WNBA might actually become profitable if the Association stopped treating it as simply an advertising extension of their priority product--
men's basketball, if they stop simply placing their teams in arenas that basketball fans too often can’t be troubled to return to for summer outings after the NBA season concludes. Now they even have a television deal that puts the men's summer league games on ESPN in seasonal competition with the WNBA. I have one of the games on right now in the background. It's between the junior Celtics and the junior Cavaliers.
It frustrates me personally when I see the powerful cultural impact the WNBA is capable of having. I want in! Minnesota Lynx players, an overwhelming majority of which are African-American, sported t-shirts during their pre-game warm-ups Monday night that displayed solidarity with recent police shooting victims Alton Sterling and Philando Castile-- as well as the Dallas Police Department, incidentally. Their collective statement caused four off-duty police officers on private security detail to walk off the job at Minneapolis' Target Center-- part of the bizarre ritual American police have now developed pitting supporters of the policies of law enforcement by fear, misinformation, and murder against supporters of actual policing.
If the NBA had any foresight, they would re-locate their less-than-lucrative women’s basketball teams to cities that are the most-starved for basketball. They've already folded teams in the following NBA cities: Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Houston, Sacramento, Detroit, Orlando, Miami, and Portland, but then they expand or relocate to more NBA cities: Chicago, San Antonio, Atlanta, Dallas, and Indianapolis.
Instead of offsetting the teams against NBA big brother franchises and forcing fans inside during North America's warm summer months, move the games into the winter, basketball’s natural habitat, and pair them instead, perhaps, with hockey teams in cities that don’t share their arenas with NBA teams-- the aforementioned Blues, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Ottawa Senators, the Montreal Canadians, the Vancouver Canucks. Drop teams in some of those towns that the NBA has abandoned-- Kansas City, Cincinnati, Baltimore. Put a team in San Diego so that year-round warm weather sports fans in that locale have something to do between the end of the Chargers season at New Years, and the Padres’ home opener in April. How in the world do multicultural, progressive cities like Kansas City and San Diego not have women’s basketball? Does this make any sense? Who’s running this league? The answer to that is: some of the same people that made the business deal with the Silna brothers.
I would buy an entirely-new wardrobe of clothing supporting a WNBA team in St. Louis. Let’s bring the ABA-inspired multi-colored basketball back to St. Louis, and bring back the ABA team name, as well-- The Spirits of St. Louis. The Spirits live again, but this time, featuring chicks.
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The National League loses the All-Star Game again. What is it about the "This Time it Counts"-World Series home field concept that NL field managers still don't understand after 13 years? Forty-two-year-old novelty Mets pitcher Bartolo Colon is named to the team by his own manager with a 7-4 record, 65 strikeouts, a 3.28 ERA, and a 1.22 WHIP. The Cardinals' Carlos "Tsunami" Martinez stays home with an 8-6 record, 91 strikeouts, a 2.85 ERA, and a 1.16 WHIP. Ye there's no controversy. Little Pedro is not even a choice as an injury replacement. San Diego's Will Myers gets the start at designated hitter (in a National League city, huh?), his manager admits, because the game is
in San Diego. Good Lord. The fans make the dumb decision of making the .237-hitting Addison Russell the NL's starting shortstop. Fine, unfortunate that he has to bat once. But twice! Sluggers like Starling Marte and Jonathan Lucroy only batted once off the bench. Premier hitting shortstops Corey Seager and Almedys Diaz only batted once. And why isn't Bryce Harper playing the whole game. Or Paul Goldschmidt the entire game as the DH. Instead of one substituting for the other. Play to win next time!
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The National League batting title trophy will now be named for Tony Gwynn. I'm sure Stan Musial finished second again, as he must have when they decided to name the All-Star MVP award after Ted Williams. (I'll let you look up the lifetime All-Star game records for both Williams and Musial.) Of course, Gwynn's eight-batting-title swing produced 135 career home runs. Musial's seven-batting-title swing produced 475.
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New York and Boston still rule Major League Baseball. I guess we've collectively forgiven steroid cheats Colon and David Ortiz. They are the princes of the midsummer ball. Yet all-world players Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, who played west of the Hudson, remain frozen out of the Hall of Fame.
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Serena Williams would already have more Grand Slam titles than anybody else if Margaret Court and Steffi Graf had sisters with the tennis talent of Venus Williams. The story arc of the Compton, California Williams sisters is, in my opinion, the third-most extraordinary/fascinating story in American sports history, and certainly #1 for the most positive. I would put only above them the O.J. Simpson rise-and-fall narrative and the saga of Steve Bartman.
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Kevin Durant had no choice but to sign with Golden State and create a new "super team." It was predestined. LeBron needs a new challenge.
The long knives
Add Micah Johnson's name to the list of American Snipers that once plied their trade in the United States military. We've also had Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, Kelly David Bangle, another Fort Hood shooter, Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 inside the Washington Navy Yard, Sergio Valencia del Toro, the Wisconsin bridge shooter, Robert Stewart, the Carthage, North Carolina nursing home shooter, and Bradley William Stone, the killer of six, including his family, in Philadelphia.
Among the few online articles I could find on the topic, Texas officials
say that at least ten percent of their shooting perpetrators since 2003 are military veterans or active-duty service members, and that number has grown higher since 2013. A 2012 study by the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology found that nine percent of veterans nationally had been arrested since returning from a military tour, 23 percent among those that suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of which there have been more than 260,000 diagnosed in the U.S. after serving in conflict. Add these to the long list of "legal" shooters employed by municipal police departments that learned their first tactics of violent engagement while serving in the U.S. military. (Wow, it's much harder to find background information online on police shooters than it is civilian shooters.)
Studies are not easy to come by because nobody wants to admit in an imperialist state that our soldiers and ex-soldiers are "all messed up," but they clearly are. The Pentagon reported last week that, in the year 2014 alone, more than 7,300 veterans committed suicide. That translates to more than 20 a day. Absolutely staggering, though actually down slightly from 2010, when there was an average of 22 a day. These direct-line victims of the American war machine, and those lives that they impact at home, are not included in the casualty counts of our foreign conflicts.
When we are engaged in violent action abroad, and I include our aid of weaponry to rogue theocratic states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, violence manifests itself more extensively at home. It's that simple. The cause is not guns, specifically, or mental illness, specifically. It's the hyper-militarized police state that we live in, the one Dr. King labeled the most violent on the planet, the only one with more guns than citizens. We publicly execute our criminals, a reality which places us in the exclusive company of dictatorial and ayatollah states. When mass shootings take place at home, politicians name the solution as committing more violence abroad, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both did in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings.
Today's killers on the home front are a mirrored reflection of ourselves. That's why their photographed images are so fascinating to look at. In 2016, we're seeing the commercialized, capitalistic acceleration of a racist, violent culture, but it isn't new to either the current century or the last one. Slavery was an institution of death and violence and slave labor built the Empire. The ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples is a stain on the flag that cannot be washed clean. Eighteen Medals of Honor were awarded to the Seventh Cavalry for murdering women and children in flight at Wounded Knee in 1890. Today, the disproportionate incarceration rates for Native Americans in western states mirrors that of African-Americans. The reality of modern slavery finds that more African-Americans were killed by police in extrajudicial killings in 2015 (258) than were killed by lynching during the most deadly year of Jim Crow (161 in 1892). In police departments coast to coast, racism is openly tolerated. In supposedly-progressive San Francisco, 14 different police officers were found to have sent numerous racist, sexist, homophobic text messages to each other in 2012 and 2013, texts with messages like "all niggers must fucking hang," and they all kept their jobs. In the United States, major cities like
St. Louis and Baltimore still have separate police unions for white and black officers. If online Tweets can be trusted, the race is competitive between whether we have more black people or KKK members employed by our municipal police departments.
After Dallas this week, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch proclaimed that "the answer is never violence," but
her employer, the United States government, clearly believes quite the opposite. The result of our ongoing
global policing policy is more corpses piled up within our borders and without. Right wing critics are correct when they say that lawlessness is the problem, but that lawlessness is actually an imperialist state that answers to no international law enforcement or court for the actions of its government against foreign peoples or its own citizenry.
