Marketing tools abroad
This month has seen our president engaged in another social media war with an African-American person. I think it might be connected to the lunar cycle. Trump got three UCLA men’s basketball players released from the threat of several years in Chinese shoplifting jail, and the high-profile father of one of the players, sports apparel company CEO Lavar Ball, refuses to express his gratitude for services delivered.
Forget for a moment the fact that the three players, all of them incoming freshmen, immediately thanked Trump publicly at a press conference for his intervention on behalf of their home country, and Trump and Ball both recognize, without saying so, that a thank you from Ball would be a form of groveling by “one of the blacks” for what Trump, with all of his presidential power, did for him and them. I wouldn’t thank him either, under the circumstances. There was no motive whatsoever in Trump's actions that wasn't selfish.
What I really want to know is why UCLA athletes are visiting China for a week, representing their school and the Pac 12 conference, and promoting men’s college basketball in the United States, but not getting paid any money to do it. The three “student athletes” were reportedly caught shoplifting at Louis Vuitton during the full hour and a half they were given to sight-see between their slate of games, practices, and photo ops. The school website promotes two locations that the team visited during their time in Shanghai and Hangzhou. One is the world’s largest retail commerce company, Alibaba Group, and the other is Shanghai’s Disney Resort. I’m sure Coach Steve Alford has the guys career networking at Alibaba, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon. Upon graduation, they will each certainly be able to get jobs there, after Alibaba has purchased the distribution rights of the Pac-12 Networks to provide across linear and digital channels on Chinese YouTube, making it the first college sports TV network made available in mainland China. This sounds like a fantastic travel abroad or cultural exchange program. That conference network will be great for enrollment in the Pac 12 and UCLA. International students, on average, pay two and a half times what state residents do.
To say that these athletes were not on this trip to be used primarily as marketing tools is to speak in very naïve language. Do those that will have profited the most from this trip bear any responsibility to make sure 18-year-olds don’t do dumb shit while they’re there? What was done to prepare these men? I'm only asking. The arrest, subsequent hotel detention, and eventual release is a terrific reminder that the Pac 12 athletic conference and its “global initiative” is now doing business in a country with laws that are very different than ours. As each of the news releases on this subject were quick to tell us, the men each faced a punishment upwards of three to ten years in prison. Good thing we have skilled educators on the scene like Alford, especially one of the highest-paid ones in the California university system, to help guide them, along with the aid of President Trump's Twitter feed.
"Army of spies"
You can't make this stuff up:
Harvey Weinstein reportedly employed former members of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, in the service of trying to dig up dirt on Rose McGowan and other women that have accused him of sexual crimes. Mossad is permitted by its government to act outside of the constitutional laws of that state. Among its activities since its founding in 1949, it was given the contract of tracking down the three surviving Palestinian terrorists from the Munich Olympics and with finding fugitive Nazis. The latter venture was largely a failure as the secret organization trampled upon the sovereignty rights of multiple states.
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak says he was the person that introduced the Hollywood mogul to a group of these former spies that comprised a private security agency called Black Cube. The New Yorker magazine claims that one of these agents secretly recorded McGowan's statements while pretending to be a women's rights advocate. They compiled personal, psychological, and sexual profiles on dozens of people that worked for the Weinstein Company and that had also made claims of abuse against Weinstein. My boss sucks too. She's rarely brings in bagels.
The reporter that wrote this story in
the New Yorker-- an absolutely extraordinary piece of journalism-- is Mia Farrow's son and rumored to be the love child of Frank Sinatra, to whom he bears
a shocking physical resemblance.
I'm telling you, the power elite in Hollywood can match that of Washington D.C. for any and all of hubris, criminality, and corruption. For sure though they have more imaginative script writers.
---
During the shooting of
Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942, Jimmy Cagney's co-star Joan Leslie turned 17 years old. The studio had a birthday party for her on set. Jack Warner called in the newsreel cameras and Leslie, the industry's new "girl next door" on screen was presented by her boss with a new car. Warner shook hands with his young ingenue before the cameras, left the set, an assistant took the car keys, and Leslie never saw the car again.
Hollywood.
Another break-in at the DNC
Sometime during the last year and a half, or maybe during the 12 years before that, you might have read me referring to the Democratic National Committee as bought and paid for by the Clintons. But good lord amighty, I didn't think it was
literally true.
I'll be damned. Donna Brazile has jumped from the boat and in order to sell some books to the growing horde of reformed progressive voters, she's disclosing a memo that has evidently weighed heavily upon her conscience. It seems that in August 2015 the DNC was on the verge of bankruptcy and blowing through money at a clip of about three to four million dollars a month. President Obama didn't care a lick about it. He had taken his 2008 army of small donors and basically told the troops to stand down during each one of the two-year election cycles that followed. A program of attacking conservative Democrats in primary races threatened to alienate conservative Democrats and discourage them from funding the winning campaigns that were not being won. Obama, the de facto head of his party by virtue of being the United States President, put Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-Clinton, a woman he didn't particularly care for, in charge of the DNC and he left her there for six years. Obama was re-elected in 2012, but the party lost 1,000 state and federal seats nationwide between his first and his last day in office.
You almost have to wonder-- at least I do-- if he did it on purpose. Did he want the Democrats to be lost without him in the same way Michael Jordan wanted the Chicago Bulls to implode after the sixth title in 1998 in order to further prove how great he was? Barack turned "Obama for America" into "Organizing for America," then starved it. He abandoned Howard Dean's 50-state strategy for the party. He sucked up to corporate Democrats while alienating progressives. The only action he took in relationship to the DNC after putting DWSC in charge of it in 2010 was to wait until after last year's presidential race was lost, and then put his labor secretary Tom Perez in charge when it looked like Bernie backer Keith Ellison from Minnesota was going to get the post.
Anyway, back to Brazile and the summer of 2015. So the DNC is worse than dead broke one year before their nominating convention. They're in the red and there's a Hillary election party to pay for. By Brazile's account, the hole was 24 million dollars deep. They secretly put themselves up for sale, and there was only one bidder-- the well-heeled Hillary Clinton for President campaign. That bunch swoops in, keeps the juice running to the light switches, and then-- get this reveal from Brazile-- their staffers take over all of the positions in the party's national committee. They handle all of the day-to-day operations. So when we say that Hillary was "coronated," or-- with less adornment-- that the DNC showed partiality towards her in her primary race against Sanders, we're not even really referring to what is traditionally known as the DNC. The DNC now
is the Clinton campaign. I'm being totally serious. Can anybody confirm if this is mentioned in
Hillary's book? I haven't read it.
It's traditional for the party's nominee to take over responsibility for the debt of the national committee. Candidates, because they are personalities, do a much better job of raising money than does the committee, which is a rather vague-seeming yet vitally-important mechanism. The thing is though that none of this is supposed to happen until the nominee actually becomes the nominee. In this case, it happened 15 months prior to. See what we've been saying? Coronation.
Brazile already admitted months ago that she had handed over debate questions to Clinton during the primary race when the Clinton/Sanders drama was at its thickest and the politico was moonlighting at CNN between DNC assignments. And now this thought just entered into my mind for the first time-- presidential candidate Martin O'Malley
really didn't have a chance.
So now I see what Hillary's supporters meant when they said Bernie wasn't a real Democrat. His opponent
was the party apparatus. That's tough to compete with. You can't be more Dickensian than Dickens. All along, Bernie's raising money and his campaign contributions go to the DNC, where much it is spent on Hillary's campaign. Sanders voters have been trying to tell us this but they've gotta shout real loud to be heard. Remember when we heard about the alleged violence caused by Bernie supporters at the Nevada state convention? Remember the lobbyists serving as superdelegates? Remember the lawsuits filed by Sanders supporters citing collusion and the RICO statutes? Remember the suppression of Ellison and other Bernie supporters when they attempted to secure post-election positions with the committee? Remember the DNC emails that were
not hacked by the Russians, but rather leaked by one or more disgruntled Bernie supporters? Oh, did I just take it one step too far?
None of it was illegal. Within a wide range of reason, political parties can do what they want with their money. It's only yours up until the point you give it to them (and so good luck to you if you're drawing up that blueprint for your personal budget). They can make strategic financial and political decisions as they see fit. And this is the contagion you wind up contracting when you swim in the foul cesspool that is the Democratic Party. It's what you get when you try to reform an institution that is far past the capacity for reform. And they still don't get it. Go online tonight and read the defense of the misdeeds by the apologists--
Bernie wasn't a real Democrat so he shouldn't have expected a fair fight. Ok, were O'Malley, Lincoln Chafee, and Jim Webb real Democrats? Is the next move to purge the party of all
independent
voters as well?
More Democrats still voted for Hillary in the state-by-state primaries. True, and I weigh 220 pounds with your foot added to the scale. As I suggested before, the most recent purge of progressives with the committee took place
after election day. The superdelegate system, complete with voting lobbyists, has been affirmed for 2020. Among elected officials,
all but four of them in the Senate voted for the National Defense Authorization Act on September 18th, the military appropriations bills whose financial commitment to the war machine exceeded even that laid out by President Trump (and one of the dissenting votes was
not cast by liberal hero Elizabeth Warren). They ain't learned nothing. In fact, the power brokers now have greater cause to tighten their grip on the handle.
Fear not, though, oh lovers of peace and equal opportunity. This is what it looks like when it's all collapsing. Keep your eye out for more books to be published.
Hollywood harassment
Some opinions on sexual harassment, Hollywoodland, and the news media, in the order that they occur to me…
1. One shouldn’t be so naïve as to believe that Hollywood was immune from this behavior on a large-scale basis, either because it’s in “woke” California or representative of some sort of ultra-modern industry. If anything, the entertainment business is likely among the worst environments for women. There’s an implicit understanding within the visual media that physical attractiveness is an acceptable characteristic to consider in hiring, with talent being very subjective and arguably meaningless. By that I mean, acting talent is an important ingredient in the
quality of a particular production, but not necessarily in the profitability of that production. Talent there is, by and large, very disposable. Conditions are ripe.
2. I have had nothing but women as immediate supervisors at my work going back across two careers, five individual leaders, and 19 years. I can’t explain what a gratifyingly ideal it is to have the experience I have had and not to have dealt with any issues ever. I've taken that for granted, but shouldn't. Everybody should want a woman as their boss, based on my experience, regardless of the industry in which they work. Why don’t we have more women in charge? Aside: Do women have the same level of sex drive as men? I believe so, yes. Do they have the same sense of entitlement and license? No.
3. If I was given only one axe to grind on this topic, I would have to whet the protection of “innocent until proven guilty.” These now-daily reports are sickening in the details, but I refuse to let emotion cloud any of it. It is exactly
wrong that all accusers deserve to be believed. I don’t know who came up with that. All those that are accused and deny the charges deserve to be believed until they-- and we-- have been presented with the evidence, and they have been allowed to defend themselves against it, and
even then we should recognize the imperfections of the justice system. We are naturally skeptical of charges of crimes-- I hope, and that’s as it should be. I do not care if this gets me labeled as insensitive to this issue of sexual assault. I’m not going to apply a standard to sexual harassment or even rape that I don’t apply to murder or any other heinous crime. Professed victims of crimes deserve to have their charges investigated to their fullest, and without the threat of harassment, and if that's what's meant by "deserve to be believed," then I'm with that completely. But when charges are denied, I'm going to go with the evidence. Weinstein makes it easy because his comments today indicate he still doesn't get it.
4. I simply stop reading if I read an article that links the alleged predatory behavior of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, James Toback, Brett Ratner, and others within the Hollywood power circle to the political phenomenon that is Donald Trump--
if it then does not also link it as well to the legacy and the facts of the public life of Bill Clinton. To a man, the behavior these guys are accused of engaging in predates this time last year when Trump was elected, and also to a man, these are all Bill Clinton supporters going back to the 1990’s (as Trump was also for years). If there is anything in the political landscape that enabled the actions that we’re finding out now, it was the free pass that Bill Clinton got from self-described liberals and feminists when he was accused by Paula Jones and Juanita Broddrick of predatory behavior. He earned that pass only because he was pro-choice, and attached to it has been a very damaging legacy for the Left.
5. That’s all that the rest of us needed was one more issue where Trump gets to claim a victory because the Clintons’ financiers are revealed to be hypocrites.
6. I have more understanding for Hollywood denizens like Matt Damon and Quentin Tarantino, who reportedly knew of, or were witness to Weinstein’s behavior but said nothing. They both say they regret their inaction. If we’re going to cut the victims a break for not reporting assaults for fear of reprisal, then we also have to cut a break for onlookers that were subject to the same fear. When some of these people heard rumors and stayed silent, maybe that’s because they were rightfully aware of the lack of physical evidence in many of the cases and the risk of a defamation suit. Indeed, Ratner let loose with a very expensive defamation suit against an accuser this week.
7. It's all so icky, so warped. Corey Feldman says he’s going to name his sexual abusers, but first he needs several hundred thousands of crowd-sourced dollars to reveal the names as part of a movie that he’s planning to produce. And can a person emerge from the closet in a less affirming way then Kevin Spacey just did? He hides his homosexuality for decades and then he comes out in what certainly seems likes a ploy to change the focus of an attempted assault on a minor that he doesn't deny took place.
8. I’m not giving any pieces of art back. I still plan to watch and take pleasure in Weinstein Company movies and in the handful of Kevin Spacey performances that I really enjoy, just as I won’t give up the Cosby Show.
Happy Game 7 Day
A World Series reached its seventh game tonight. This is not an annual thing. It's the 39th time in history we've had one of these, and here's a fun fact: the St. Louis Cardinals have won
eight of them. That's more than any other team. Even the vaunted Yankees, with their 27 total championships, have only won five Game 7's, and the last one of those took place against the San Francisco Giants in 1962.
There is no sports team for whom Game 7 is more sacred. For the Cardinals, Game 7 means flickering memories of a hungover Grover Cleveland Alexander playing hero and Babe Ruth ending the action by getting himself thrown out attempting to steal second. It means Pepper Martin running with abandon and Burleigh Grimes throwing his "grandfathered" spitball to victory. It means the Gashouse Gang in a 13-0 blowout, Ducky Medwick being removed from a game in Detroit for the consideration of his own safety, and Dizzy Dean delivering what he promised. It means Enos Slaughter's "Mad Dash" from first base on a long single against the Red Sox. It means a complete game, nine-inning victory on the hill for the great Bob Gibson, and then a repeat of that same feat three years later. It means an Ozzie back flip, the self-styled "one tough Dominican" Joaquin Andujar, and the shutdown splitter of Bruce Sutter in the conclusion of the colorful "Suds Series," and then it means Chris Carpenter and David Freese each supplying the juice one more time and wrapping up the greatest combination-regular season/postseason comeback in American sports history.
It's the Dodgers and Astros tonight. The Dodgers clinched in a Game 7 in both 1955 and 1965, but for only one of those were they the
Los Angeles Dodgers and they've never done it at Dodger Stadium. The Astros of Houston, Texas, of course, had never won a World Series game at all until last week.
Good luck to both teams. The winning one will be remembered forever.
