7.28.2010

Game. Blouses.


“...So I took them all inside and made them pancakes.”

I was a little long-winded last week. So this week, just a light breeze.

The story of the week so far ( aside from Jon Stewart’s new beard) seems to be WikiLeaks dumping 92,000 classified documents related to the Afghan war on the Internet for everyone to read. The content ranges from America soldiers venting frustration to assertions that the Pakistani intelligence services are funding terrorism in Afghanistan with money provided for other purposes by the U.S. government. According to experts who seem to have nothing better to do than read through almost 100,000 pages of coded Times New Roman print, there really isn’t anything new in these documents - nothing we haven’t known for at least the past couple years. But finding new information really isn’t purpose of dumping that much information into a medium as vast as the Web. The point of an information dump on this scale is to simply bludgeon people over the head with the idea that this whole war is pointless. The overarching thread running through all these papers is the fact that we’ve been blowing things up and putting them back together in Afghanistan for almost 10 years and very little has actually changed. When Soviet tanks rolled into that country in December of 1979, we in the West ridiculed them for underestimating their enemy and failing to follow the old axiom of never getting involved in a land war in Asia. Thirty years and hundreds of billions - perhaps trillions of dollars later, we seem to be unable to admit that we may have made the very same mistake.

From the desk of What-the Hell-Took-So-Long, Tony Hayward is stepping down as Chief executive officer of British Petroleum. Usually when a company announces that replacing a CEO was a mutual decision, it means the decision was anything but mutual. However, in this case, I think I believe them. It’s pretty clear to anyone with a television that from the the very first day of the spill, Hayward has been clumsy, awkward and completely lost in dealing with the government, the media and the local interests. I don’t think anyone outside the Gulf Coast region wants this disaster to be over and done with more than Tony Hayward. He said he wanted his life back. Looks like he’ll get it. Which is more than we can say for the people of Louisiana at this point.

The Utah Supreme Court overturned two rape convictions of polygamist FLDS leader Warren Jeffs and ordered new trials. According to a CNN report,
“In Jeffs' trial, Elissa Wall testified that she repeatedly told him at the time that she did not want to be married and was uncomfortable with sexual advances from her husband, Allen Steed. She said Jeffs advised her to pray and submit to her husband, learn to love him and bear his children, or risk losing her "eternal salvation."”

I tend to think that men who like Warren Jeffs who prey on people searching for meaning and fulfillment in their lives are pretty despicable human beings, deserving of the punishment dealt to them for their acts. Apparently Utah disagrees. I guess there’s a reason I live far away from Utah.

Finally, four years ago a Fresno, California man purchased a box of small glass photographic plates at a garage sale for $45. He has since discovered that his small box of negatives are actually images shot by the one and only Ansel Adams, and may be worth about $200 million. That’s right. He made a 4.4 million percent return on his $45 investment. You know, I wonder how much that “Dogs Playing Poker” print I got at the flea market two years ago is worth today?

7.22.2010

Don't Call Me Shirley

What’s worse than being awake for 24 consecutive hours?  I don’t know.  What was the question again?

The well is capped.  Bet you never thought you’d hear those words, huh.  Almost three months after the initial explosion, British Petroleum has finally fitted its blown-out well with a containment cap, effectively sealing off the well.  At some point within the next week, BP will attempt to permanently seal the well bore with concrete via the relief wells.  They will then be able to turn their full attention to cleaning beaches, paying claims and bickering about how much money they owe the country in compensation.  Of course there is the small matter of an accurate well flow measurement.  Part of the purpose of getting this new cap in place was supposedly to finally get a precise measurement of the flow of oil.  Once the flow could be accurately determined, the government could figure out exactly how much money BP would have to pay in compensation.  But once the well was capped, and the spill cam showed nothing but blue water, The oil company had no interest in reopening it to collect the oil, and the government certainly didn’t want to be the one responsible for plumes of oil and methane gas reappearing on the spill cam.  While the physical spill may now be over, the legal battles have yet to begin.

Goldman Sachs announced early this week a quarterly profit of $250 million.  This was, of course, less than “analysts” expected, and therefore drove the stock price down a little bit.  But that $250 million profit was the change left over AFTER Goldman Sachs made a one-time pay-out of almost $1.2 billion in fines to the federal government.  At a time when 9.6 percent of Americans are desperate for work, Goldman Sachs is making half-a-billion dollars EVERY MONTH gambling with their futures.  I guess it’s good to be the king.

Overshadowed by another event I will get to later, President Obama signed the financial reform bill into law this past Wednesday, almost two years after the financial collapse.  The bill is significantly weaker than it had been only several weeks ago, due in part to the deft legislative maneuvering of one Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, and for reasons yet to adequately be explained by anyone, does not cover loans made by automobile dealers (often some of the worst offenders when it comes to predatory lending), but it is a significant improvement over what he had in place two years ago.  Will it prevent another financial crisis?  Probably not.  The financial industry is pretty good at evading whatever rules are created to restrain them.  But it should prevent the taxpayers from having to shoulder the burden of the industry’s poor decisions.  It should also prevent many bad decisions from being kept secret.  To repeat an overused cliche, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the fact that all complex financial transactions will now be required to take place on public exchanges will afford market-watchers an opportunity to spot disturbing trends and bubbles before they become large enough to take down the economy.  Of course, there is no shortage of people willing to do stupid things in full view of others, NBC’s entire prime time lineup is a testament to that fact.  But at least now we will be able to point, laugh and escort them away before their stupidity infects/affects the rest of us.

Last week at it’s annual meeting, the NAACP issued a resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to denounce any chapters or members perpetuating racist opinions or ideology.  Of course, any moron could see the resolution was doomed to fail before it was even drafted.  Tea drinkers have no respect for the NAACP or its resolutions.  The only thing that could happen, did happen, as the Tea Party movement took offense to being called racists (even though the movement was not called racist) and accused the NAACP of being the real racists.  Everything was proceeding as scripted until one Mark Williams, spokesman for the bus-riding, flag-waving Glen Beck idolizing Tea Party Express outfit decided to try his hand at comedy.  Williams wrote what he claimed was a “satirical” letter to President Lincoln in the “voice” of the NAACP.  In his “satire,” Williams ran the whole gamut of racial stereotypes, from laziness and welfare dependance to “things really were better under slavery,” unmasking himself more efficiently and more effectively than the NAACP ever could have.  His blatantly offensive rant was too much for the rest of the national movement, who issued a statement saying that neither Mark Williams nor the Tea Party Express was welcome in the movement any longer.

I relayed that story to provide the context for this one.  Some on the right were not happy with the NAACPs proxy takedown of Mark Williams.  Count among them influential conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart. Like many in the conservative echo chamber, Breitbart loathes the civil rights establishment, the current administration, democrats, liberals and any media outlets not beginning with the word “fox” and ending with the word “news.”  So, this past Tuesday, when someone sent him a “scandalous” edited, un-vetted two minute clip of a forty-plus minute address at an NAACP meeting earlier this year, he did the only thing he could do.  He published it to his blog.  In the edited version of the clip, Shirley Sherrod, a black woman employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as head of Rural Development in Georgia is speaking about how a white farmer who came to her for help in saving his farm.  She states that she did not “give the full force of what (she) could do” to help said white farmer save his farm.  At that point, the clip ends.  Eager to validate claims of the Tea Party and the rest of the echo chamber who had countercharged the NAACP with racism, Breitbart posted the video, claiming liberals and the “mainstream media” was covering up the true racist nature of the NAACP and the Obama administration.  Fox News immediately ran with the story, and merely hours later, Shirley Sherrod had been fired by the U.S.D.A., denounced by the NAACP and the clip was making the rounds on cable and network television news.

Fortunately, somebody remembered how actual journalism used to work in this country and started asking questions.  People began standing up for Sherrod, including the white farmer in the story.  The local chapter of the NAACP Sherrod was speaking at dug up the entire, unedited tape and released it to first the national organization, then to the rest of the media.  Turns out that what Sherrod was actually doing on that video tape was telling her own redemption story.  Early in 1965, when she was 17-years-old, Shirley Sherrod’s father was shot and killed by a white farmer in a dispute over several cows.  An all-white grand jury brought no charges against the shooter.  That summer when she went to register to vote at the courthouse, she was denied that right by the local white establishment.  After earning her masters degree she returned to rural Georgia to help minority farmers retain their land, and has been doing so for the past forty years.  During the late 80's, the white farmer mentioned in the video came to her for help.  And at first, as she said in the edited clip, she did not do everything she could to help him.  She sent him to get help from “one of his own.”  What Breitbart’s clip excluded, of course, was the most important part of the story.  Sherrod ran into that farmer again, not long after she had sent to a white lawyer for help, and found that the lawyer had done nothing for him.  Realizing that this white farmer was in much the same boat as many of the black farmers she had devoted her life to representing, she then did everything she could - going above and beyond the call of duty by some accounts - to help that man save his farm.  She and that farmer have since become friends, and Shirley Sherrod has expanded her life’s work and embraced the idea that white farmers, as well as black farmers and poor farmers of every persuasion are valuable and deserve to be treated as such.

But for about 12 hours, nobody knew any of that.  Why?  Nobody bothered to look for it.  They saw a “gotcha” moment and seized upon it.  Once they discovered they’d been had, hoodwinked, bamboozled by a blogger and activist by the name of Andrew Breitbart, there were plenty of red faces and stammering apologies, from the Secretary of Agriculture to the head of the NAACP to the network news anchors.  Talking heads from across the spectrum were demanding an explanation from Breitbart, and the return of Sherrod to her previous position.  Even Charles Krauthammer and Glen Beck implored the U.S.D.A. to apologize and reinstate Sherrod.  Seriously.  If Glen Beck thinks you’ve unfairly maligned someone not named Palin, you have REALLY screwed something up.  To their credit, Secretary Vilsack called Sherrod to apologize and offered her a promotion.  Breitbart, on the other hand, insisted on taking the low road.  At first he questioned the legitimacy of the unedited version of the tape turned over by the NAACP.  Then he claimed the farmer’s wife who came to Sherrod’s aide was a plant, and demanded to know what kind of research went into determining if she was indeed, the actual wife of the person mentioned on the video.  Then he claimed he never maligned Sherrod, and that this whole episode was a media distortion of the point he was trying to make.  He rounded out his discreditation by admitting he eagerly published a piece of video given to him by an anonymous source he knew nothing about, did nothing to verify it’s authenticity, didn’t know that the incident referred to in the clip happened 24 years ago, and really didn’t care that the point of the full story was the EXACT OPPOSITE of what his two minute clip lead people to believe.

Is the Department of Agriculture hypersensitive to issues of race?  Yes.  They have good reason to be.  They have quite the checked track record when it comes to such issues.  Did that hypersensitivity lead to the premature firing of Shirley Sherrod?  You bet.  Is this administration hypersensitive to issues of race - particularly reverse discrimination?  Uh huh.  Do they have good reason to be?  Sure.  Should they have waited for more facts before involving themselves at all?  Of course.  Lost in all of this (in addition to the signing of the financial reform bill) is the disgusting, shameful, absolute failure of the media to perform it’s basic function; provide the public with accurate, vetted information.  A popular conservative blogger posted a clip purporting to demonstrate reverse racism and accused the “media” of covering it up and refusing to report on it due to their “liberal bias.”  Not wanting to appear irrelevant in the face of the Internet, and super-ultra-mega-sensitive to any charge of “bias,” regardless of who the accuser is, the rest of the cable-verse picked up the story and ran with it.

Once upon a time, in the good old days, somebody would have maybe called Shirley Sherrod, or the white farmer for comment, BEFORE plastering the clip all over the six o’clock news.  Or perhaps called the NAACP and requested the full tape the clip was taken from.  Somebody might have tried to verify and corroborate the hysterical blather of an internet rabble-rouser before going to print with the story.  But those were the good old days.  That was the old media.  This is the future.  New and improved.  Where reputations are made by ruining people’s lives with lies and baseless accusations.  And no apologies or retractions are made for supermarket tabloid behavior.  Instead of issuing a mea culpa once they realized they’d been taken for a ride, the media immediately pivoted to accusing the administration of being too quick to jump into action without sufficient evidence.  It’s called displacement.  When my dog gets upset and can’t bite me, she attacks her brother instead.  Sadly, cable news has been reduced to a pack of dogs fighting over scraps.  Several years ago, Dan Rather ran a story featuring false documents relating to then president Bush.  Dan Rather was fired from CBS.  Who’s going to fire Andrew Breitbart from the Internet?

Race has always been a difficult subject for this country. No one likes to be discriminated against due to the color of their skin. And no one likes to be accused of discriminating against people due to the color of their skin. So, victims have developed organizations to protect them from discrimination. And the perpetrators have developed subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways of discriminating. Especially when politics are involved. The tactic of choice currently seems to be reverse discrimination. I’m sure you’ve heard the theories. Healthcare reform is really just “reparations” to black people. Tax increases are a plot to steal money from hard-working white people to give handouts to lazy minorities. Refusing to prevent a group of New York City Muslims from for exercising their Constitutional right to freedom of worship is an attack on American values. The boogeyman of the moment is the New Black Panther Party. Yes, Lee Atwater is alive, and his name is Megyn Kelly. For weeks now, the Fox News daytime anchor has devoted an enormous amount of time to the case of two members of the New Black Panther Party arrested in Pennsylvania during the 2008 election on charges of voter intimidation. According to police reports and video recordings, the men were picked up outside a Philadelphia polling station, dressed in black and pacing back and forth, one of them brandishing a nightstick. Recently the Justice Department dropped most of the charges against the men, as there was no evidence anyone was denied entry to the polling station, or was dissuaded from entering due to their presence. But according to Kelly, these men, and the group to which they belong, are the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, trolling the back roads of American cities in search of poor, unsuspecting white people to lynch. While it is easy to to unequivocally identify the New Black Panthers as a “hate group,” to compare them to the Klan is laughable. The Panther’s membership is limited to MAYBE a few hundred people, and their political actions have amounted to disrupting school board meetings and verbally assaulting Jews and Michelle Malkin. In comparison, the Klan boasted upwards of four million members at its peak, (about ten thousand now), has a long and sordid history of intimidation, abuse and murder. But, like Andrews Breitbart, the facts don’t matter all that much to Megyn Kelly. What matters is the narrative. Kelly understands that there is no image more frightening to white America, than a dark-skinned man with a weapon. And the image is all the more effective when painted daily by an attractive platinum blonde working for the “most trusted name in news.”

7.14.2010

Goal!

Ole ole! Congratulations to Spain overcoming a gritty Dutch side for their first ever World Cup victory! Enjoy the party for the rest of the week. Next week it’s back to that pesky debt crisis.

Just when you thought it was safe to point the intercontinental ballistic missiles somewhere else, the Cold War returns baby! Early last week the Justice Department announced they had arrested 10 Russian citizens accused of espionage against the United States, on behalf of the Russian government.  Russia, of course, denied the accusations.  What self-respecting nation would admit to espionage against another.  (To co-opt a phrase, the first rule of spy club is; you don’t talk about spy club.)  But by the end of the week, the accused spies were on an airplane back to Europe, to be exchanged for several persons convicted of espionage against Russia, on behalf of the United States.

Much ado about very little?  Probably.  In fact, the whole story is a little disappointing.  It’s like the “Evil Empire” isn’t even trying anymore.  According to the DOJ, the accused spies were charged with collecting information like attitudes toward Russia and American’s feelings regarding the election of Barack Obama.  Apparently they don’t get CNN in Moscow.  But perhaps the most amusing part of this saga was the reaction of people who for some reason seemed to think that espionage was somehow a thing of the past.  Nations spy on other nations, regardless of how warm the relations might be.  This country spends 700 billion dollars a year on defense.  You didn’t think that was all bombs and bullets, did you?

Speaking of war, two weeks ago Republican National Committee Chairman and perpetual comic relief agent Michael Steele stumbled over what was either a miserable attempt at revisionist history, or the most incredulous case of selective amnesia ever recorded.  Speaking at a fundraiser, Steele launched into an attack on the President’s war policy, claiming that Afghanistan was Obama’s “war of choice,” and not something the United States had “actively pursued” prior to Obama taking office.  I never cease to be astounded by the ability of the Republican leadership and sympathetic talking heads to completely forget/ignore eight full years of history.  It’s as if January 2001 to January 2009 never happened.  Just to refresh Steele’s memory, we have been engaged in Afghanistan since October of 2001, seven years and eight months before the current President took office.  Steele went on to admonish the President for remaining engaged in Afghanistan, insisting instead that we withdraw and leave Afghans to their own devices, even throwing in a Princess Bride reference about never getting involved in a land war in Asia.  I’m sure that sentiment accurately sums up the feelings of many Democrats who voted for the President a year-and-a-half ago.  Not only did he “misremember” eight years of history, he also forgot which party he currently claims to lead.  At this point I’m actually a little worried about him.  I think he would forget his brain if it weren’t locked so securely inside his shiny, shiny skull.

In the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2009, 24-year-old Oscar Grant and several others were detained by two Bay Area Rapid Transit Officers at a train platform in Oakland, California, following a fight aboard the train.  Following some sort of altercation, (what actually took place is the subject of dispute), officers - of which there were now seven - attempted to arrest Oscar Grant.  According to the officers, Grant resisted arrest.  He was forced face down to the ground and restrained by Officers Tony Pirone and Johannes Mesherle.  Feeling Grant was still refusing to comply, Mesherle directed Pirone to back away, then rose to his feet, drew his weapon and shot Grant once in the back.  Oscar Grant died in hospital seven hours later.  Mesherle maintains he intended to draw his Taser, not his firearm, and never intended to kill Grant.  Last Thursday, a Los Angeles jury agreed.  Johannes Mesherle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, and not guilty of either second degree murder or voluntary manslaughter.

Was justice served in this case?  I don’t know.  It seems to depend on what color you, and/or what side of the proverbial track you live on.  The supporters of the police claim Oscar Grant’s death was an accident, that he was resisting arrest and Officer Mesherle simply made a tragic mistake.  Supporters of Oscar Grant’s family claim Mesherle lost control of his emotions and murdered an unarmed, restrained man. On one hand, I certainly don’t think Johannes Mesherle intended to kill Oscar Grant on that train platform.  I don’t think Mesherle intended to put a bullet through Grant’s back either.  But, on the other, it’s clear that Mesherle intended to shot Grant with something.  Hypothetically, if Mesherle had intended to say, rob someone, but ended up shooting and killing said person in the process, he would be guilty of murder in the first degree.  The fact that Mesherle may have intended only to stun Grant with 50,000 volts of electricity, then somehow failed to notice he had instead drawn his firearm before he fired warrants something more than a verdict of simple negligence.

The disturbing aspect of this verdict for me is this.  We as a society have given the police license to kill in order to protect us from those who would do us harm.  But with great power comes great responsibility.  Those with the power of life and death must be held to a higher standard when exercising that power.  “Oops I wasn’t paying attention,” isn’t good enough when someone’s life is at stake.  At least it shouldn’t be.  A uniform, badge and a license to kill should not be a shield against fatal acts of carelessness.

Headline in the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal; Limbaugh Gets Mega Millions on Condo Sale.  I’ve spent the last hour trying to understand why the Wall Street Journal thinks that is news.

In an incredibly embarrassing display of self-aggrandizement last Thursday, LeBron James announced he will spend the next five years in South Beach, playing basketball fro the Miami heat.  During those five years with Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and nine other chumps, James promised fans not three, not four, not five, not six (whaaa?), but seven championships.  I guess that’s the new math.

I typically don’t write about basketball.  I haven’t paid much attention to the NBA since Michael Jordan retired the second time.  But this James free-agency business isn’t really about basketball. It’s really about the difference between being a first-class businessman and a first-class jerk. In less than sixty minutes, LeBron James managed to transform himself from one of the most popular athletes in the country to the most hated man in basketball, primarily because either he or his “people” couldn’t exercise a little self control.

Let’s be very clear about this. Nobody - except maybe the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers - has any problem with James shopping his talents to the highest bidder. Most people would jump into a pool of piranas for a guaranteed $16 million a year, I can’t imagine just sitting in my living room and having ten guys in thousand-dollar suits walk in and throw suitcases of money at me. What people object to is the manner in which the whole affair was handled. He could have announced his decision on Sportscenter, al-la his new teammates Wade and Bosh. He could have called a press conference at his house. He could have “tweeted” his intentions to his followers. He could have made any number of courteous, professional, business-like decisions. Instead, he attended some parties in Florida and Connecticut, then rolled up to perhaps the only Boys and Girls Club in America where the families of the kids there make more money than he does, and conduct an hour-long special consisting of video highlights of his greatness, the announcement of his decision, and then interviews during which he explained how difficult it was for him to leave Lake Erie winters for sunny South Beach. In fact, he didn’t have the where-with-all to inform his current team he was leaving. One of his associates sent a text message to the team only seconds before the live announcement was made.

It’s one thing to break up with your high school sweetheart. It’s another thing entirely to break up with your high school sweetheart for her younger, sexier, rival on national television. It was selfish, classless, and a really bad idea. And on top of all that, James has now set expectations so high, that if Miami does not win a championship this season - and multiples before his new contract expires - this will go down as the biggest failure/worst blunder in the modern history of the sport. Perhaps winning will cure all ills, perhaps it won’t. One thing is for sure. Losing will make he persona non-grata in two cities, instead of just one.

Many of the Dutch soccer fans attending the festivities in South Africa over the past month actually DROVE there. All the way from Holland. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a road trip.

Finally, there really is nothing like the feeling of going out on top. Congratulations to Paul the Oracle Octopus on his retirement from the World Cup prediction business with a perfect 8-0 record. Maybe he’ll transition into predicting election outcomes in his spare time, provided he can avoid the menu at some fancy German restaurant.

7.06.2010

The Sweet Smell of Freedom

This past Sunday was my first Independence Day as an American citizen. In honor of said achievement, (and the fact only two things of interest occurred last week), I will be taking this week off. Michael Steele madness can wait a few days. So, Happy Birthday America! You don't look too bad for 234. Not quite as fresh as your younger, sexier cousin to the north, but pretty good none-the-less.