Tag: Politics
Internet-fame adjacent
Bob Cesca does entertaining political and sometimes nerdy podcasts thrice a week, four times if you pay him
Because I sent him a couple of my Harris/Walz bumper stickers in the mail (and because he liked them, presumably), podcaster extraordinaire Bob Cesca gave me a shoutout on the subscriber-only portion (aka "Shadow Docket") of today's (9/5/24) podcast. Thanks, Bob! He also mentioned my business URL and this site, so hello to anyone visiting because Bob said "starshiptim.com" on mic. There are political posts herein, but fair warning, there is also talk of baseball, which I imagine most Bob Cesca Show listeners don't much care about. (Maybe I'm wrong—if you're a listener and also follow the pennant races in general or my hometown Seattle Mariners in particular, then bonus for you.) Also nerdly things, which probably has more crossover appeal. Anyway, glad you popped by. Let me know if you would also like a bumper sticker.
Bob did not mention my Presidential Primer project, which may have been because co-host David interrupted him mid-sentence, but for anyone inclined to assist—especially if you are a campaign volunteer/staffer for a Democratic candidate or otherwise know an avenue of distribution that would help—I put this booklet together back in April to educate the less-politically-engaged on the history of Democratic and Republican Presidential administrations. Since then I have endeavored to get it to folks who might be able to put it to use around the country, but haven't had a lot of success in doing so. Please download and share widely. If printing was not such an expense, I would suggest taking copies when door-knocking in swing states, but I know there's likely not a budget for that. Still, have a look and at least spread around the download URL: https://bit.ly/presidentialprimer.
Tagged
Politics,
Podcasts |
Posted on September 5, 2024 at 6:12PM | Permalink | 
| 
More journalistic malpractice
Thursday afternoon, ex-President VonClownstick held a "press conference" at his tacky golf motel/stolen document storage facility. The reporters in attendance were treated to exactly what anyone who's been paying attention would have expected: a standard-issue Trump Grievance Whine campaign rally rant, with questions from the "press" that went unanswered and un-followed-up on. But the worst thing about it was not the candidate, it was the collective cowardice/incompetence of the reporters.
Shameful.
It's not a new phenomenon. Reporters have been treating this clown in much the same manner for almost a decade. But what is new, at least to me, is to see a fellow journalist take these worthless reporters down on national TV. That's what Lawrence O'Donnell did on his MSNBC show Thursday night.
Worth a look. It's about 15 minutes long, and then segues into Tim Walz introducing Kamala Harris at a speech to the UAW that, unlike the inane Trump presser, was not carried live on television.
Tagged
Politics,
Journalism,
Lawrence O'Donnell |
Posted on August 10, 2024 at 5:18PM | Permalink | |
We're Not Going Back
I designed the above as a bumper sticker and ordered a couple dozen of them. If you want one, let me know.
I did this because I'm psyched. Like I said before, I did not expect Joe Biden dropping out of the race to result in a non-chaos nightmare, but boy am I glad to be wrong on that one.
Kamalamentom is a real thing, it seems, and I absolutely love the choice of Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz is a relatable guy, military background as well as Congressional and statewide executive experience, and maybe best of all, a public school teacher. As Rachel Maddow put it the other day (paraphrasing), knowing how to handle a high school cafeteria food fight will be a useful skill when dealing with Republicans in Congress.
The pair of them are inspiring, and they have ex-President VonClownstick flailing and melting down. It's got me feeling more optimistic than ever that we'll avoid the headlong dive into authoritarian dictatorship that, though it remains a real possibility, seems more remote.
I heard about the video below—a PSA for a new Minnesota law a few years back restricting cell phone usage while driving—when listening to a recent episode of the Bob Cesca Show, so I went and looked for it on YouTube. I enjoyed it a lot, I think it shows so much of Tim Walz's humor and midwestern charm and "America's Dad" personality that will be a delight on the campaign trail. Please to enjoy.
Tagged
Politics,
Kamala Harris,
Tim Walz |
Posted on August 10, 2024 at 12:50AM | Permalink | |
Now what?
Well, I didn't see that coming.
Really. I did not think I was wrong when I said Joe Biden isn't going anywhere. But clearly I was, because just before I left for my umpiring shift today he ended his campaign for reelection.
Not much news has broken yet, just the official statement of his withdrawal from the race and an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee. Plus word that several Democratic leaders have also endorsed Harris.
What made Joe change his mind? We may learn that at some point, we may not. I mean, we'll get a rationale sometime this week, I imagine, but I wonder if it will be real or just sanitized for public consumption. Was the president truly convinced this was the best move, or was he essentially forced into it by moneyed interests? Was it just due to polling? If it was simply polling data, then shame on the Democratic Party; the polling is janky and incomplete to say the least, and is more an indictment of the party apparatus' failure to break through the noise and bullshit in what passes for news media these days.
I hope, and I suspect, that President Biden made it a condition of his agreeing to step aside that all the party mucketymucks get behind Harris, that the alternative candidate possibilities that have been thrown around—Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, House and Senate leaders—promise not to run and fuck things up. That the condition for his agreeing to not run is the infighting stops. NOW.
It was not so much the president's debate performance that killed his candidacy as it was the subsequent freakout and colossally irresponsible corporate press obsessing over the freakout and ignoring the Republican promises to turn this country into an autocratic despotism. The people freaking out and the press seem to want chaos, as infighting sells newspapers (or their digital equivalents) and generates ratings on cable news, and the last thing we need now is chaos at next month's Democratic Convention. Assuming the decision was not, in fact, based on a legitimate and specific health issue, I have to imagine that President Biden is pretty pissed off right now.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a lengthy video on Friday warning against pushing Biden aside because of the logistics, the fact that the primary is over, and the fact that Republicans will exploit any chaos that results not just politically but legally, possibly finding ways for critical state ballot decisions to make their way to the six corrupt apostates on the Roberts Supreme Court. Her arguments are basically the same as the ones I've tried to make, and are why I am now freaking out when I wasn't before.
If there is chaos, we're in serious trouble. If it is a smooth, conflict-free (relatively; I mean, we are Democrats) transition to Vice President Harris atop the ticket, then things might start to look good again. But until the convention is over in a few weeks I will be metaphorically biting my nails and spastically twitching now and again in anticipation of a supreme self-inflicted fuckup that ends the country.
Tagged
Politics,
President Biden,
Democrats,
Kamala Harris,
AOC |
Posted on July 21, 2024 at 8:03PM | Permalink | |
Panic never leads to good decisions
It's been two weeks since the horrible, awful, no-good debate performance from President Biden. In that two weeks, the press—most notably the New York Times, but plenty of other outlets as well—has been stunningly irresponsible in perpetuating the panic within the Democratic party. A panic brought on by the two big events the president appeared at after his multiple trips to Europe last month: a fundraiser in Los Angeles and the so-called "debate" in Atlanta. The president was not at his best, to say the least, at either event, appearing tired and softspoken and failing to deliver the kind of tactical rhetoric that would effectively wound Donald Trump. Some Democrats have extrapolated from this that President Biden is too frail, too diminished, to continue running for reelection, and the Times and other media have jumped on it like flies swarming over fresh manure.
We've had two weeks of this and that two weeks of panic has done more damage to the campaign than the events themselves ever could have.
I get that people are scared. Hell, I'm scared. But what we're scared of is not Joe Biden.
Not one person outside of the MAGA cult lemmings, not even the cult's leaders, is afraid of what might happen if Joe Biden wins reelection. No one outside the cult lemmings fears a serious crisis befalling the nation if Joe Biden remains president because we know that Joe Biden is decency personified. Because we know that his vice-president, his cabinet, and his staff are supremely competent people committed to upholding the Constitution and American values and ethical behavior. Because we understand that if it should happen that Joe Biden became unable to continue his second term as president due to declining faculties, those competent people would step in, and should they be unable to convince the president he wasn't able to continue they would put country first and employ the 25th Amendment.
The only people that fear a second Joe Biden victory are the grossly uninformed, the rubes that swallow right-wing propaganda whole, and the racists/misogynists who can't abide a woman minority possibly succeeding to the presidency (and no one should give those people the time of day).
As I've said before, what we fear are stupid people. We fear the tens of millions of voters who behave like Level Seven Susceptibles, mindlessly absorbing Republican misinformation and fearmongering. Most of whom don't really have evil intent; only a relative few of these millions are actually pro-fascism, actually want to see their neighbors rounded up and sent to concentration camps, actually want the courts to continue shredding the Constitution, actually want to see American military troops stationed all over major U.S. cities enforcing a police state. They've just been conned.
That's who is causing the gigantic and potentially suicidal freakout within the Democratic party.
Let's just keep that in mind as we pore over yet more coverage of said freakout and see the freakout spread to our own circles.
I have had three conversations in the last week with friends who are in the Biden-needs-to-drop-out camp. I think they are very much wrong, but I understand why they feel the way they do. Winning this election is critical, and because the news media as a whole has proven itself unwilling to stand on the side of democracy and law and truth, the perception keeps growing that Biden Is A Problem That Can't Be Surmounted.
But here's the thing: it's too late to change candidates. If there were really and truly worries within the party about Biden's cognitive faculties and ability to do his job—real, thought-through evaluations and real rationally-arrived at concern—it would have surfaced when the primary campaign began and the push would have been made then to nominate someone else. But that didn't happen, and now the primaries are over, and the delegates and campaign funds and infrastructure belong to Joe Biden. The only—repeat, only—possible alternative candidate at this point is Vice President Harris, as hers is the only other name on the ticket and she is the only other person allowed to use those funds. (Not to mention the fact that Biden is beloved by the African American community and should he decide not to continue, bypassing his VP would be a slap in their collective face.)
But would switching to Harris actually make the race more winnable?
I've heard arguments that such a switch would galvanize young voters, that it would bring more people of color into the fold, that it would give a fresh sense of "youth" to the race. All of which is pure, unadulterated speculation conjured from an imaginary universe. Might it be true? Sure, maybe. Might it not? Sure, maybe. Those first two arguments in particular I think are specious; younger voters are by far the least reliable constituency year after year, and as mentioned, you risk alienating POC just as much if not more than attracting them by dumping Biden.
It's a matter of the devil you know versus the devil you don't. The potential for utter catastrophe is, in my view, far greater, enormously greater with the devil we don't. Incumbents challenged from within their party always lose. A challenge at the convention would invite chaos. Republicans would have a field day exploiting such chaos.
There is almost nothing I would want to emulate from the modern Republican Party—they are led as mindless drones by exploitative, greedy, power-hungry, fascistic liars with the ethical standards of Pol Pot—but they have illustrated something about the American public that the rest of us should take note of:
No matter how unfit and disastrous for the country they know most of the electorate would find their candidates, they close ranks and fight for him (it's usually a him, Marjorie Sporkfoot notwithstanding), and as often as not, it works.
Richard Nixon won thanks in large part to Democratic chaos in 1968. Ronald Reagan won in large part because Ted Kennedy primaried incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980. George W. Bush won—or came close enough that it didn't matter—in 2000 and 2004 despite being demonstrably stupid. And Trump won in 2016 despite his litany of crimes and crassness and obvious colossal ignorance. All of these Republicans championed policies that were profoundly detrimental to a large majority of Americans and all of them committed crimes in office (and, to this point at least, got away with them). Except for Reagan—who was able to use his Hollywood charisma to fool people into thinking he was a good guy and, for his reelect, to mask his Alzheimer's—they were also terrible candidates, but the GOP nevertheless closed ranks and pushed them through. (Please see and share my capsule history of the presidency.)
I'm not suggesting that Democrats now employ Republican tactics of lying to voters and conning them into thinking their guy isn't who their guy really is. Not only is that despicable, there's no need for it. Our guy really is a good guy fighting for all citizens, Americans and global citizens as well. He's just old.
No, I'm suggesting Democrats quit fighting amongst ourselves and back the President. Strongly, without reservation, without fretting about age or how loudly he speaks or how tiring the job of President is. Yes, by all means, coach him on better rhetoric to use when campaigning, get him in front of the public and on TV frequently to not only tout his phenomenal record but show the uninformed how dangerous the Republican plan to destroy the country really is. (We also need to remind people how awful the Trump Administration was and that Trump 1.0 was only that disastrous because there were patriotic Americans in government to stop him from taking even more ruinous actions, and Trump 2.0 would have no such patriots to get in his way. But I suspect that's a job for ads and surrogates more than for the president himself.)
All of us have known older people. Some frailer than others, some mentally sharper than others. We all (or mostly all) have the firsthand experience of knowing that only some senior citizens are incapable of rational decision-making, which is what the job of President boils down to. My grandfather lived to be 92, and sure, after he hit 80 he wasn't getting around as easily and his voice lost some of its timbre, but he never lost his faculties. He was sharp at 90, conversing about novels and relating stories of his aviation career and marveling over Vladimir Guerrero's ability to hit terrible pitches. He just spoke with less vocal strength. He had a friend, a fellow ex-pilot, who at 80 or maybe late-70s had physically declined so much he could hardly communicate. For whatever reasons, some people fare better than others, and physical decline from age does not necessarily bring cognitive failures with it. This shouldn't be hard to grasp.
Joe is over 80. Trump is a sociopathic criminal bent on tyranny. Joe has, like all but one president before him, shown obvious signs of age beyond the norm from the stress of being president. When Trump was president, he of course never actually worked enough to stress himself beyond the levels of his previous life of crime and grift, so his aging seemed "normal." Joe can get tripped up by his stutter and his over- or mis-preparation for appearances getting in the way of extemporaneous speaking. Trump will occasionally say something truthful by accident while spewing a torrent of bullshit. Joe is comparatively robust for a man in his 80s in a phenomenally stressful job. Trump is essentially a few Big Macs away from cardiac failure and is lazy as fuck.
This is not only a winnable race, it's a rout waiting to happen if the Democratic Party will just quit rending its garments and panicking over what the stupids might do if they think Joe Biden is an old man.
Focus. Get behind your guy, because he's not going away. Champion him, campaign your asses off, and make it clear to anyone who will listen that Biden's disembodied brain in a jar Futurama-style would still be infinitely more desirable than Donald Trump at any age.
Tagged
Politics,
President Biden,
Democrats |
Posted on July 11, 2024 at 3:27AM | Permalink | |
Court crisis
The six most dangerous people in the United States right now
The Supreme Court has been issuing incredibly bad rulings for two-plus years, but today's was the worst of the worst and has sent me into a fit of anger/frustration/(non-clinical) depression/outrage/terror/anxiety.
I was going to write a big screed about the indefensible and clearly unconstitutional "immunity" ruling but I find I can't focus my outrage into a coherent narrative in the time I have before I have to leave for umpiring. So instead I am going to quote Mary Trump, niece of the criminal ex-POTUS, who rightly is focused on preventing things from getting even worse.
The justices who are trying to make my uncle a king are traitors, equal to the traitors who attempted a coup against our nation and who have been spreading the Big Lie in order to undermine the American people’s faith in free and fair elections. With this immunity decision, they have launched an attack on our most important ideals. It’s a continuation of the 2021 coup attempt, and it’s the start of the next one, not just a rubber stamp for my uncle’s worst impulses and abuses but an open invitation for more .... This was an unjust and anti-democratic decision from a Court that no longer has any credibility and, apparently, no longer believes in its mission to uphold the Constitution.
Six unelected people have stripped basic human rights from millions of women, destroyed the federal government, and made it almost impossible to hold Donald accountable while coming very close to granting him the powers of a king. It’s time for tens of millions of us to rise up and vote in unprecedented numbers. That’s how we tell the New York Times editorial board to fuck off. It’s how we increase the likelihood that Donald goes to prison or, at the very least, never gets near the levers of power again. And it’s how we start to take back our country from the corrupt traitors on the Supreme Court.
This [SCOTUS] decision is the end of something and we have a choice: we can be demoralized and stop fighting, or we can use these horrific decisions as a rallying cry—because if we do nothing, the consequences will be swift and unthinkable. If we do nothing, Donald will win and that will be the end of the American experiment.
So let’s get it together. If we want to save our country and our future and our children’s futures, we have to elect Democrats no matter what.
This has all been worse than we thought it would be, but we now know it will absolutely get so much worse than we can imagine unless we own the fact that making sure American democracy survives is down to us and no one else.
This is DEFCON 1. SCOTUS is already doing what they can to implement Project 2025, just making shit up so violations of law and the very US Constitution—but only by the "right" people—is permissible.
The Roberts Court has stripped away reproductive rights from American women, stripped away regulatory authority from governing experts in any field, and declared Presidents are above the law so long as they can call their crimes "official." Not mentioned in Mary's great post is that the Court recently also legalized bribery of government officials, so long as the bribe comes after the favor as a "gratuity"; made it easier for frauds to be perpetrated on the Securities and Exchange Commission; stripped away portions of the Clean Air Act, thus allowing even greater pollution from corporate entities; allowed municipalities to criminalize homelessness; eliminated a ban on so-called "bump stocks" that convert guns into machine guns; and said states can gerrymander their Congressional districts as much as they like.
And that's just what I have off the top of my head.
The six justices appointed by Trump and by the Bushes are completely out of control, not even pretending anymore that they are not a subsidiary of the Republican Party, a Republican Party that has thrown its lot in with autocratic anti-American criminals. If we had a Congress without so many Republican enablers of this traitorous behavior, two of those justices—Alito and Thomas—would be impeached on monetary corruption grounds and a third—Chief Justice Roberts—for negligence as well as aiding and abetting criminality in several instances, not the least of which was the impeachment trials of Donald Trump which he presided over and completely abdicated his duties in. The other three are illegitimate based on (a) perjury in their confirmation hearings, and (b) their appointment by a criminal president.
The sooner any and all of these six people are removed from the Court the better. The sooner Congress and President Biden can expand the Court to match the number of circuit courts again the better.
Until then we're in big trouble.
Tagged
Politics,
President VonClownstick,
President Biden,
SCOTUS |
Posted on July 1, 2024 at 5:49PM | Permalink | |
Debate debacle
President Biden looks aghast at some of the many, many lies told by Donald Trump last night. We should all know by now that Trump brazenly bullshits about everything, so the startled face did the President no favors. He should have expected the spewing fountain of dishonesty and been ready to commandingly smack it down. While he did correctly call Trump a liar, the delivery was unconvincing.
So...that wasn't great.
Last night's presidential "debate" on CNN was profoundly disappointing and unsurprisingly has sent the pundit class into a state of panic.
I had expectations going in, expectations that Donald Trump would be, well, himself, and thus provide myriad opportunities for President Biden to smack him down (metaphorically) and contrast the incredible successes of the Biden Administration to the disastrous incompetence that was the Trump Administration, thus illustrating how blindingly obvious voters' choice should be in November.
Those expectations were met. The problem was, Biden failed to capitalize on those opportunities and had the demeanor of an exhausted elderly grandpa. Which isn't to say he was terrible; what he had to say was substantively decent, if not completely on point, but it was delivered in a manner that was not easy to immediately understand and reinforced the Republican propaganda that unfairly paints him as a doddering old man.
All that was frustrating. It made me wonder what the hell all that debate prep time at Camp David was used for and why the campaign thought arming the president with statistics and lists of numbers was a good idea. Biden was at his best when he let his clearly-prepped answers drop and spoke from the heart. He became more energetic and feisty then. Feisty Joe was good. But the obvious struggle he was having with making sure he got the prepared numbers into his answers was just really bad form.
What was most frustrating, though, is the pitches Biden let go by. Big fat hanging curveballs right over the heart of the plate screaming "hit me" that he didn't even take a swing at.
I could make excuses. The president was clearly dealing with a head cold and may well have been on some sort of antihistamines or decongestant medicines that, as I well know, make you a little fuzzybrained for a while. If so, I again point to the campaign aides and say "WHY WOULD YOU SEND HIM OUT THERE LIKE THAT?" but maybe they didn't know. I could focus on the journalistic malpractice committed by the alleged moderators of the debate, who didn't moderate anything and allowed countless egregious, blatant lies to spew from Trump's bulbous head completely unchallenged.
But in the end, Joe Biden had an opportunity to crush a grand slam homer and instead struck out on three meatball pitches basically served up on a tee. It is, to say the least, dispiriting.
The immediate reaction from pretty much everyone that watched it was to freak out. Now you've got a lot of people within the Democratic party talking about trying to nominate someone else. Which is not going to happen and the more time spent talking about the idea is, as California Governor Gavin Newsom put it, "unhelpful."
Presidential debates—which have only existed since 1960—are structured to emphasize the most surface-level elements of a candidate, and every cycle I wonder about their usefulness. Some are better than others, the "town hall" type that we've seen here and there since the ’90s actually give some opportunity to get into something unscripted and revealing. But generally they favor optics over substance, largely because of format.
(Some years ago I read a novel by the late newsman Jim Lehrer called "The Last Debate." I'm not recalling the details clearly now, but it told the story of a small group of journalists who contrived for themselves to moderate a presidential debate in a race where one candidate was profoundly dangerous and unfit to serve. The journalists made a choice to risk their careers by using the debate to crush the campaign of the dangerous candidate. They held his feet to the fire, as it were, on all of his misdeeds and completely abandoned the "rules" of the event by turning it into an airing of behavior that would appall a great majority of voters. I was really wishing for something even vaguely reminiscent of that kind of courage from last night's moderators and, of course, got bupkis.)
Joe Biden has been and continues to be an excellent President of the United States. The record is tremendously impressive. He has staffed his administration with quality, intelligent, capable, and supremely competent people who know what they're doing and work hard to advance an agenda that is in support of the American population as a whole. There is no reason on the merits to even entertain the idea of nominating someone else.
But the freak out is real, and it's based entirely on fear.
Fear of stupid people.
I get it. I, too, am terrified of stupid people in massive groups. The Republicans have been maddeningly deft in their efforts to manipulate and con the rubes of America, tens of millions of whom voted for the fascist last time without realizing he's a fascist. Republican politics have long been based in scaring the bejeezus out of their voters, but in the age of Trump they've abandoned all subtlety in their fearmongering, relying—apparently successfully!—on entirely made-up fantasies of nonexistent caravans of murdering migrant hordes, entirely made-up fantasies of mothers killing their infant children for the sake of convenience, entirely made-up fantasies of economics that even preschoolers on any Ferengi world would recognize as bullshit, and mountains of blatant racism and misogyny.
How many of those tens of millions of rubes believe the propaganda? I know there are plenty who don't believe it but still like it for the racism and sexism; those are the "baskets of deplorables" Hillary Clinton identified in the 2016 campaign. Those people aren't a new factor, we've always had them or people like them around. But the rubes. They scare us. And they are scaring people who should know better into calling for the President to walk away from this election.
President Biden held a rally today in North Carolina wherein he was far more energetic, far better in his demeanor, and was received with far more comfort from the masses. I've heard it postulated that the disaster of last night's debate might well spur the campaign into hyperdrive for the remainder of the summer and fall. Maybe. I do hope they learned from their mistakes, at least.
Joe Biden is 81 years old. President of the United States is a very stressful job. To those who worry about that, I say look at who he staffs his administration with. Kamala Harris is a brilliant vice president, and should the need for her to take over come to pass, we would all be in good hands. (I still maintain that a large part of the Republican-led opposition to Biden because of age is an unsubtle dog-whistle to the deplorables to be scared of the black lady taking over.) I am completely unbothered by Joe Biden's age because no matter how he performed at the debate or in any other forum, he does the job of President very, very well, and should he lose the ability to do that at some point, there will be capable people there to step in.
Besides, the other guys are running a con man. A convicted felon, serial fraudster, adjudicated rapist, wanna-be dictator who hates the very idea of American democracy and has no understanding of how anything works. Except, of course, how manipulating rubes works. That's his one skill. He has no others. (Except perhaps using blackmail to leverage otherwise-smart(ish) people into allying with him. Looking at the complement of dudes with an R by their names in the Senate seems to indicate he's had success with that.)
Bad debate or no, I don't think anything has changed here. The race is today what it was yesterday and was the day before. I wish the President had been quicker on his feet and hammered those juicy hanging curveballs last night—that might have made a significant difference in his favor—but there's still time to get some more at-bats. Meanwhile, the contrast between these two men remains monumental. In the words of Mary Trump, "President Biden had a cold and stumbled badly. Donald Trump is a traitor. The former should not in any way negate the latter.... I’ll take the decent guy with the sore throat who believes in democracy over the rapist insurrectionist monster every single time."
Tagged
Politics,
President VonClownstick,
President Biden,
CNN,
Journalism |
Posted on June 28, 2024 at 11:55PM | Permalink | |
The straw that stirs the drink
I did not watch the Rickwood Field game saluting the Negro Leagues between the Cardinals and the Giants last night as I was umpiring. But I have read the recaps and seen a couple of clips form the Fox (ugh) broadcast; the clip from the 5th inning when they went to a retro 1950s-style TV picture complete with no color, two or three camera angles only, and primitive on-screen graphics was pretty neat.
But the best writeup of the game comes from Craig Calcaterra, with special kudos for the section he wrote on Reggie Jackson's appearance in the broadcast booth. Rather than pick some pullquotes, I'll just share the whole section here.
Reggie Jackson brings the truth
Reggie Jackson joined the Fox MLB panel before the Cards-Giants game at Rickwood Field last night. During his appearance Jackson, who played 114 games for the Oakland Athletics’ Southern League affiliate in Birmingham in 1967, was asked by Alex Rodriguez about his feelings upon returning to Rickwood. Jackson did not lean into any feel-good sentiments that Major League Baseball or Fox likely wanted to hear from him. And he did not hold back.
"Coming back here is not easy," Jackson said. "The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled. Fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody." Jackson then described about how he would be called the n-word and would be denied service at restaurants and hotels.
Jackson then said, that if it wasn’t for his teammates and coaches with the Birmingham A’s, things would’ve gotten even worse:
"Fortunately, I had a manager, in Johnny McNamara, that . . . if I couldn't eat in the place, nobody would eat. We would get food to travel. If I couldn't stay in a hotel, they'd drive to the next hotel and find a place where I could stay. Had it not been for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi . . . I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally, they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless I got out."
Jackson said that without McNamara and his teammates, "I would've [gotten] killed here, because I would've beat someone's ass." Watch:
I embedded that video because it’s the only full-length, embeddable one I could find that focused on this part of his appearance, but it bleeps out the N-words Reggie used. They aired live on Fox, however and, given how prone baseball and baseball fans are to sanitize history and nostalgia, it was important that they did.
Listening to Jackson speak, I was struck by two thoughts.
First: though baseball didn’t put too fine a point on it, the game at Rickwood Field replaced the Field of Dreams Game in Iowa on the schedule as a special, small ballpark event. Though the reasons for skipping Iowa this year had more to do with business and logistics than anything else, kudos to Major League Baseball for moving away from the synthetic, sanitized version of history — if one can even call what was essentially a 1980s movie tribute version of baseball “history” — and embracing real history that actually matters.
Second: Jackson was not describing life in the Negro Leagues or during the heart of the Jim Crow era. What he described took place twenty years after baseball was integrated, over a decade after de jure segregation was outlawed, three years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and two years after the Voting Rights Act was passed. It was a time when many who are reading these words were alive, some of whom were adults. Jackson himself was an active major leaguer into the late 1980s yet he faced the sort of bigotry and discrimination that many people in this country tend to casually assume was the stuff of ancient history if, indeed, they even acknowledge it ever happened.
And make no mistake, we’re at a point in American history where there are many people — including people in positions of power or who are seeking positions of power — who are actively trying to bring back the conditions Jackson described and who want to turn back the clock to before the Civil Rights Era began. Our Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and multiple state legislatures have passed laws forbidding the teaching or even the discussion of racism, institutional or otherwise, in public schools and universities. Republican politicians and activists have their eyes set on eliminating anti-discrimination laws and have, as both a matter of policy and rhetoric, embraced the notion of returning Blacks and other minorities to the status of second class citizenship. And they have done so shamelessly.
Indeed, just two weeks ago, Byron Donalds, a sitting Republican Congressman who is actively seeking to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, argued that things were better for Black people during the Jim Crow era:
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds said. “And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”
Donalds didn’t get caught on a hot mic saying this. He said it before a crowd at a Trump campaign event in Philadelphia. And not a single Republican of consequence, let alone the man at the top of the Republican ticket, offered a word of criticism or pushback.
We’re living in a perilous time. A time when a large number of Americans want to erase the racial and social progress we have realized over the past 50-60 years. Those efforts cannot be stopped by our ignoring them. They must be actively fought, and the first step in doing so is by reminding people of what actually happened in those times and calling bullshit on those who wish to distort history.
In light of that, kudos to Reggie Jackson for not holding back on his account of his own personal history. Kudos to him for not contributing to the sanitization of history at large. It’s only through plain and straightforward words like his that we can keep others from dragging us back to the dark ages which so many fought and so many died to help us escape.
Craig's newsletter, "Cup of Coffee," is free once a week and subscription only for the other four days he publishes.
Tagged
Politics,
Baseball,
Republicans |
Posted on June 21, 2024 at 3:22PM | Permalink | |
Quotes of the week
A few notes from over the last week or so. I'd been meaning to post longer bits about each of these, but time got away from me and, you know, there was stuff to do. Anyway, a few things I heard/read that deserve some repetition:
- "I don't care about you. I just want your vote." This was former president Cheeto Hitler in a rare moment of honesty, talking to the crowd at his hate rally in Las Vegas. The man cares about nothing other than power for himself and becoming a U.S. incarnation of Kim Jong Un.
- "If the hood fits..." So said David Ferguson on The Bob Cesca Show last Thursday. David was referring to Supreme Court "Justice" Samuel Alito's outrage, outrage! at being called a bigot. "I just can't with these people," Ferguson went on. "They're like, 'how dare you accuse us of being prejudiced! We just hate black people and queers.' I want to Psycho-shower these people."
- “He can’t stand for 90 minutes, but he’s 100% able to be President? Have fun explaining that.” That was alleged Congressman Josh Hawley (MAGA-MO) criticizing President Biden, thinking that the format for next week's scheduled presidential debate will have the candidates seated at a table and that said format was demanded by the president. I seem to remember President Biden standing for a long address at the House of Representatives a couple months back without any trouble. And guess what—standing is not a requirement to be President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt held the gig for 12+ years without standing at all.
- "Time never applied to Willie Mays the way it applies to others. He is like a Kurt Vonnegut character, unstuck in time, everything, everywhere, all at once, simultaneously the Say Hey Kid playing stickball in the streets of New York and the wizard outrunning baseballs soaring toward the gap at Candlestick Park, and the slugger tearing into baseballs as if it is something personal, and the legend launching a million memories and making parents and grandparents feel like children." That's Joe Posnanski, remembering the great Willie Mays, who died yesterday at age 93.
- And this, from satirist Andy Borowitz:
THE OCEAN DEEP (The Borowitz Report)—Calling his longstanding fear of being devoured by them “delusional thinking at its saddest,” the world’s sharks issued a statement on Tuesday disavowing “any interest whatsoever” in eating Donald J. Trump.
“Given his constant intake of Diet Coke and hamburgers, there is nothing to indicate that Trump would be anything resembling a nutritious meal,” the sharks’ statement read. “The very thought of biting into him is nauseating.”
The sharks said that Trump’s anxiety about being eaten by them demonstrates “an inflated sense of his appeal, to say the least.”
“We thought the same thing when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed he was eaten by a worm,” the sharks wrote. “Why do these narcissists think they’re so delicious?”
In perhaps their most withering comment, the sharks concluded, “We might consider eating Trump if the only other thing on the menu was Steve Bannon.”
Tagged
Politics,
Baseball,
SCOTUS,
President VonClownstick |
Posted on June 19, 2024 at 3:47PM | Permalink | |
PAY ATTENTION
Anyone/everyone here watch The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu? (If you don't, you're missing out, it's excellent if scary.) You know the scenes that are flashbacks to the before-time, pre-Gilead, when things were incrementally sliding into theocratic fascist dystopia? We're on the cusp of living those flashback times for real thanks in very large part to our extraordinarily corrupt and willfully obtuse Supreme Court.
"Justice" Samuel Alito, third in seniority and first in fascistic ideology, brought us the latest SCOTUS ruling to roll back progress. Utterly ignoring the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, Alito declared for the Court that states can draw their district maps using racial demographics as their guide and it's just fine, so long as they put forth a "possible" claim that they're not using race as their "primary motivation" in their overtly-partisan redistricting agenda, and if a court rightly says "this is BS and violates the Constitution," just appeal it to the Supreme Court and they'll overturn that.
This is the latest in an apparently ongoing series of rulings SCOTUS has made to gut voting rights in this country and aid the modern Republican party in its efforts to disenfranchise, you know, "those people." In 2013, the Court delivered a ruling written by Chief "Justice" John Roberts that said the Voting Rights Act's key provisions were no longer necessary and struck them down, leading to a new wave of disenfranchisement legislating (the late Justice Antonin Scalia called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” during that case). In 2019, SCOTUS, in Alito's voice again, declared partisan gerrymandering didn't violate anything and could proceed without interference, placing limits on the challenges brought in the case ruled on this week that were still met.
Justice Elena Kagan delivered brilliant dissenting opinions in more than one of these cases. In the 2019 case, she wrote "If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government." She continued:
"The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country ... have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks. They do not require—indeed, they do not permit—courts to rely on their own ideas of electoral fairness, whether proportional representation or any other. And they limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges do not become omnipresent players in the political process. But yes, the standards used here do allow—as well they should—judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms. In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong."
Similarly, Alito and company once more ignored the judicial standard of conduct in this week's ruling, specifically the principle that a lower court be overruled only in cases of "clear error." From Kagan's dissent:
"In dismissing [the lower court's] strong case, the majority cherry-picks evidence, ignores credibility findings, misunderstands expert views, and substitutes its own statistical theories. Its opinion gives not a whit of respect to the District Court’s factual findings, thus defying the demands of clear-error review.
...
"What a message to send to state legislators and mapmakers about racial gerrymandering. For reasons I’ve addressed, those actors will often have an incentive to use race as a proxy to achieve partisan ends. And occasionally they might want to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters. Go right ahead, this Court says to States today. Go ahead, though you have no recognized justification for using race, such as to comply with statutes ensuring equal voting rights. Go ahead, though you are (at best) using race as a short-cut to bring about partisan gains—to elect more Republicans in one case, more Democrats in another. It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a 'possibility' of non-race-based decision-making, and it will be 'dispositive.' And so this 'odious' practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue."
This is just the latest abuse of power for partisan gain by the Roberts Court. It will continue, and continue, and continue until something is done.
We need Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress and in the White House. Only then will the bad actors perpetuating the ability of this lawless Supreme Court majority be circumvented and corrections can start to be made. Whether that comes in the form of impeachments of Alito and Clarence Thomas or expansion of the Court to 11 or 13 Justices or both or some other measure, the status quo cannot continue.
That way lies Gilead.
Tagged
Politics,
SCOTUS |
Posted on May 24, 2024 at 11:27PM | Permalink | |
One of these things is not like the other
A while back I made reference here to what I call the "battered spouse contingent" of the Republican party. I was subsequently asked what I meant by that, and it's pretty simple—people who continue to vote Republican despite the fact that Republican policies have hurt them repeatedly. That wasn't readily accepted as valid by my questioner, and in the interests of civility I didn't press the point overly much.
This individual reminded me a lot of people I've known over the years that have espoused sentiments like, "it doesn't matter who wins [a presidential election] because they're all the same." Or, "I voted for [third-party candidate] because s/he's the only one that I agree with," or for reasons of protest over the two-party system.
The "they're all the same" garbage seemed to peak (in my lifetime, anyway) in the 2000 campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore. We can thank Ralph Nader for a lot of that. But regardless of the why, the result of people thinking like that was a GWB administration that began with corruption of the energy industry (Enron, anyone?), then 9/11 shocked the president despite his having been warned well in advance that something like it was being planned, then the response to 9/11 changed the world for the worse for decades.
They were not remotely the same.
While it's not as prevalent as it was in 2000, the idea that there's little to no difference between the parties is still espoused by a not insignificant percentage of Americans. Most of this is out of ignorance, some willful some not, but today the idea is being pushed indirectly by the Republican party—because if everyone is corrupt, then who cares that so many Republicans are? The Trumpification of the GOP has us more polarized than ever, but the parties have been starkly different for a long time. People who are not political junkies like me just don't know it.
So I had this idea to put together a little snapshot of how the country did under the last several presidents, something that would be easy to digest. Kind of like the back of a baseball card, with the important stats and facts laid out in black and white. (While my formal education in American history is limited to some University survey courses, I am a bit of a history nerd and know a thing or two from study and from having lived through time with my eyes and ears open.) And then I heard Buzz Burbank on The Bob Cesca Show joke about how we need a "pamphlet drop" to remind people about everything from 2016-2021, and I started expanding the thought.
In putting that idea into form, I found it isn't practical to just list economic stats and global crises if you want to convey the performance of an administration. You need more information. But I've endeavored to find a middle ground between back-of-the-baseball-card and pages-in-an-encyclopedia to show at a relative glance how the country fared under different administrations.
So, parameters:
Firstly, to my knowledge and judgment, the last Republican president who was worthy of holding the office—that is, who took his oath the the Constitution seriously, who actively worked for the benefit of the people as a whole, who didn't commit or abet crime or corrupt practices, and who wasn't otherwise overtly doing harm for his own purposes—was Dwight Eisenhower, POTUS No. 34, whose term ended in 1961. (One could make an argument for Ford, but he wasn't elected as either POTUS or VP and that pardon... No. The pardon is a disqualifier.) In Ike's time, the Republicans were a centrist party that balanced a belief in free-market capitalism with the needs of the populace, were staunchly anti-Communist and saw the US as a global force for freedom and democracy, and were happy to maintain the social status quo. Since then we can see a steady decline from that to today's autocratic, anti-democracy, isolationist, corruptly fascist Republicans, with mileposts along the way in Richard Nixon, Henry Kissenger, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, all the way to Trump and his Trump Sycophants.
So we begin with Ike's successor, John F. Kennedy, in 1961, and examine several items for each administration: economic indicators, military conflicts, scandals, global or national crises, notable staff, important achievements or policies, and Supreme Court appointments. I wrap each one up with a brief(ish) few paragraphs of context, keeping things to a single page (though I did have to adjust my typesetting format a few times to make that work). It's a remarkably even split between the two parties in power—in those 64 years, there have been six Democratic presidents and six Republican presidents, each covering a total of 32 years (including 2024).
But before getting into the individuals, here's a composite back-of-the-card snapshot.
DEMOCRATS (8 TERMS)Total budget deficit increase: (–$2.716 trillion) Major wars: 2, 1 inherited |
REPUBLICANS (8 TERMS)Total budget deficit increase: $3.338 trillion Major wars: 4, 1 inherited |
Republicans added three and a third trillion dollars to the deficit, Democrats recovered over two and two-thirds trillion of it despite the handicap of having to pay all that interest on Republican debt. Republicans gave us almost seven years of recession to the Democrats' one and a quarter (more than half of which was recovering from The Great Recession of G.W. Bush). Tell me again how the Republicans are the fiscally responsible ones.
Anyway, here's the completed project. I plan on distributing it to some podcasters I like in hopes they will make it available to their audiences in hopes that members of those audiences will share it with folks they know and in an ideal world it "goes viral." Not really expecting that, based on my history in trying to promote things on the Internet, but we'll see.
Feel free to spread this around, everybody.
Tagged
Politics,
Republicans,
Democrats |
Posted on April 23, 2024 at 4:23PM | Permalink | |
Thoughts on the State of the Union
I did not watch/listen to President Biden give his State of the Union speech in real time last night. I had an umpiring shift and was otherwise occupied going out to Cal Anderson Park and moving soccer players off of our field (they were, for once, entirely cooperative; thanks, guys) before officiating a few games. I got home around 12:30am, put a pizza in the oven, and settled in to watch the speech in the wee hours.
It did not disappoint. This was a home-run of a SOTU address, not only touting the various accomplishments of the Biden term thus far, not only setting an agenda for future accomplishments in term two, not only calling out the dire threat and horror show returning the previous guy to office would be, but taking the fight right to people in the room with him—Republican Congressmen and SCOTUS Justices—and once again deftly handling the hecklers and outbursts from Congressional nutjobs.
Referencing FDR's "no ordinary time" remark regarding World War II, the president got things rolling with, “My purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment, either.” We have a new fight against fascism today, and this time it's not just overseas but domestic. In a skillful poke at Republican hypocrisy he invoked Ronald Reagan and the Berlin Wall, comparing Regan's demand that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall" to Donald Trump encouraging Vladimir Putin to "do whatever the hell you want." Driving it home, Biden said, “A former president actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. I think it’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. And it’s unacceptable.”
Biden successfully (I think) reached potential voters with lines like "Does anybody really think the tax code is fair?" and "Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America." Direct, forceful statements that simultaneously attacked Republicans, offered positive hope for progress, and appealed to not just the Democratic base but ideological moderates and, frankly, a lot of people that wear MAGA hats. (I mean, that latter group is too far gone to hear it, but the appeal was made nonetheless.)
Oh, and he absolutely torpedoed the "dottering senile old man" caricature of him that right-wing media has been constantly perpetuating. In the moment, Republicans were complaining not that "Sleepy Joe" is addlebrained and weak but that Biden was too loud, too fervent, too mean. Make up your minds, asshats.
I read a lot of takes from around the Interwebs today. Most were effusive, none were really negative except Sean Hannity's, and all he could say was that the president "seemed off," like he was grasping at straws to find any way he could spin the event to fit his old-man-Joe narrative. Some, like Pod Save America's Dan Pfeiffer, focused on the nuts and bolts of the speech's content, but most honed in on Biden's energy, Biden's ability to be quick on his feet and ad-lib, and the astonishing behavior of the Republicans.
In the course of his master class, Biden got considerable help from the other side—whose tantrums and outbursts and lies he handled with the deftness of a practiced Kindergarten teacher. They fumed, they pouted, they squirmed, and, like [House Speaker] Mike Johnson, they sat silently even when Biden was talking about removing lead from water in order to protect our children, lowering prescription drug costs, saving democracy from Russian aggression, and the record growth of small businesses—basically anything good about America or the positive progress this country has made since Biden had been in charge.
Biden said, unlike all the people who don’t, that he would always tell the truth about January 6: “You can’t love your country only when you win.” He asked Congress to uphold their oaths and defend the country against all threats, foreign, and, Biden emphasized, “domestic.” Speaker Johnson pressed his lips together and looked mighty uncomfortable. I don’t think he enjoyed himself tonight.
And Steven Beschloss brought it back to the bottom line:
It was a bracing, optimistic, vigorous expression of what the next eight months (and beyond) can look like. Biden made clear last night, as millions of Americans were listening, that now is the time to choose—not just who we want as president, but what country and what future we want. Few times in our history has that choice been more critical.
Well done, Joe. Keep it up.
Tagged
Politics,
Republicans,
President Biden |
Posted on March 8, 2024 at 8:37PM | Permalink | |