Thursday January 29
The Fighting Owners
So after Ted Leonsis traded Jaromir Jagr, he caught the Caps first home game and promptly beat the crap out of a 20-year old fan who started a cheer that rhymes with "shucks." The NHL has fined Ted and suspended him for a week, and both sides are now playing nice. Leonsis Suspended One Week, Caps Fined $100K [FOXSports.com].
Gee, I have flamed Leonsis in this blog, even generating a response from the man himself. Does that mean Ted is now going to come after me? Well, at least he would be picking on someone his own age. As our Pres said, "Bring him on"!!
Posted by glenn at Tuesday January 27
Feeding Cows
To stem fears about Mad Cow disease, the FDA has implemented a ban on feeding cow blood and chicken wastes to cattle. [nytimes.com]. Well I did not know that cows were so keen on drinking each others' blood and chewing on chicken shit. These things are herbivores, guys. What the hell are ranchers and feed lot operators doing feeding them animal parts in the first place?
Monday January 26
Yes, We Have No WMDs
The chief U.S. weapons-hunter in occupied Iraq, David Kay, now says that "we are very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons. I don't think they exist." Ex-Iraq Arms Hunter Blames Data for Failure [LATimes.com]. So White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan announced in reaction that "Saddam Hussein's regime was a gathering threat, and in a post-Sept. 11 world, we must confront gathering threats before it is too late."
That's well and true. But is it necessary to lie to your own people, and the world, in order to do so? The sad part is that the Bushies would have had the same overwhelming support of Americans -- and the same opposition from the goodie-goodies and pacificsts at the UN and the EU -- had they come straight and not manufactured stories about Saddam's WMD stockpiles. Now, in hindsight, the whole thing is looking very much silly.
It's way too late to argue that imminent threat of WMDs was not the principal justification for the war. That the Bush Administration's continued efforts to try to deny and deflect reality shows only their disdain for real democracy or their underlying hubris -- or maybe both.
Mr. Rogers Before His Time
When Captain Kangaroo passed away last Friday -- after 30+ years on network and public television as a children's show host -- he left lots of pleasant memories. Bob Keeshan, the actor, started as Clarabell the Clown on The Howdy Doody Show and then invented a new genre of children's television by joining with his friends Mr. Green jeans and all. He was Mr. Rogers before these as a Mr. Rogers.
Sunday January 25
Goodbye Jags
When the Capitals finally traded Jaromir Jagr to the Rangers Friday, it was as if a veil of honesty finally dropped down on the team. For months ownership and management had denied any intention to make major changes to team chemistry. But at the same time they were actively looking for some way to "escape" Jagr's $11 million per year salary, just dumping costs no matter what. [canada.com].
Well the "no matter what" is about to come home to roost. Without Jagr, the Caps have no star power and little scoring ability. Their defense and goaltending are already horrid. So Ted Leonsis' plan is apparently that if a team is losing games and money, it should lop off its good players to go with cheap, inexperienced youngsters and lose some more games. This is a shambles. Jagr's acquisition was designed to put Washington on the map and get the Caps to the "next level." But Ted & Co. never did anything else and left Jags virtually alone. For most of the time, Jagr played his heart out as a leader. At the end, you could see he did not care anymore. Of course, neither did Ted or the Caps, so who can really blame him?
Friday January 23
The Angry Man
Political commentators and late-night comedians are just tickled to death over Howard Dean's rant last Monday night -- to a bunch of college supporters -- in which, after losing the Iowa caucuses, he screamed, shreaked and overall acted just plain old pissed off. A Dean Roar is Echoing Far [ Philadelphia Inquirer].
I for one do not understand what's at all wrong with an outside-the-beltway candidate being angry at the sorry state of affairs that American national politics has come to be in Washington. After all, Ronald Reagan got mad a George Bush 41 in New Hampshire in 1980, shouting "I paid for this microphone" when Bush wanted to duck a debate. I still believe Peter Finch was right in the 1976 Acadamy Award winning film Network. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
We could use some more anger in America these days.
Thursday January 22
We Found Osama
I really love this editorial cartoon by the great Pat Oliphant, courtesy of uComics. (Click for larger view...)
Google Bombing
So if you enter "miserable failure" into Google you come up with George Bush's White House bio. Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point [nytimes.com]. They call this networked use of Web links "Google Bombing," since it takes a coordinated effort to influence the search engine's algorithms.
The only weird thing is that BBC reported on this fad nearly six weeks ago. What took The Times so long to catch up? And why haven't our conservative blog colleagues counter-attacked to place someone else in the #1 Google position for "miserable failure"?
Tuesday January 20
Not Very Interesting At All
Kerry Scores Comeback Iowa Victory [washingtonpost.com]. More of the same in American presidential politics. The bland, establishment figures come out ahead over those who want to revolutionize the system. This stuff has just became very boring. That's the opposite of conventional wisdom -- with pundits and talking heads rejoicing over Howard Dean's weak third-place finish and looking forward to a "realdog fight" -- but the fact is that the "new" Democratic front-runners have little or nothing new or interesting to say.
Monday January 19
Philly Fans
I usually disagree with Washington Post sports columnist Tom Boswell, but today he hit it right on the mark with his remarks about the fans at yesterday's Philadelphia Eagles/Carolina Panthers NFC Championship game. The spectators at Lincoln Financial Field, Boswell observed:
Early in the season, with the Eagles off to an 0-2 start, the fans called their team the "Stink at the Linc." Now I am not in any way an Eagles fan, but this attitude is disgusting. Combined with local parochialism that is unmatched in any NFL city -- so bad that visiting fans are often threatened with bodily harm just for showing up -- and you have a combination of the two worst charecteristics in sports. Drunken, unruly fans who hate their own team only slightly less than the visitors.
After surviving Rush Limbaugh's offensive September comments, Donvan McNabb deserved better. But he plays in Philadelphia, so he's stuck with what he's got. Which is not enough to keep him there. Of course, big players win big games, and McNabb's Eagles have now lost three straight conference championship games. Remember Danny White? Despite his talent, leadership and toughness, McNabb is now in that same class. Philly's fans are jaundiced, but they may actually be right, too!!
Sunday January 18
Spamming Blogs
Well I just spent an hour deleting 200 spammed comments -- advertising online casinos -- from Fear & Loathing. So I went over to Movable Type and upgraded to the new release version, which promises to "throttle" commenters by limiting the number of seconds between posted comments. We'll see if this works.
Friday January 16
4o Years Ago Today
As they wrote (sort of) in Sgt. Pepper's, it was 40 years ago today that the Beatles burst onto the American scene. Exhibit Marks Beatles' Journey to U.S. [Yahoo! LAUNCH]. Woah. A lot has changed since then. The relative innocence of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" is just astounding in hindsight. But those four lads from Liverpool changed the world, began the youth culture that still pervades our society, and wrote some music that still resonates today.
Who Cares About Iowa?
Jonathan Alter points out in Newsweek that the Iowa caucuses are a terrible test for presidential electability. Iowa's predictive record is dismal. George H.W. Bush won there in 1980, only to be bested by Ronald Reagan in New Hampshire. Bob Dole swept the caucuses in 1988, before George Bush made a comeback the next week. The same year, Richard Gephardt prevailed in Iowa, and immediately went nowhere. Who Cares About Iowa? [MSNBC.com].
So why should anyone care about who gets the "Big Mo" next Monday? Because the real losers are the ones who do so poorly against expectations that they cannot continue raising money. Iowa may not be a king-maker, but it is still the last straw for a lot of candidates, and likely will be this year as well.
Thursday January 15
You Can't Handle the Truth
Conservatives have had a field day with Ted Kennedy's speech of yesterday, calling him a "gassbag" who cannot handle the truth. "The truth is," according to Angela Phelps of Human Events, that "if any American lived a single day under the former dictator of Iraq, they too would have been screaming for regime change in Iraq."
Duh! No one disagrees with that. But this country has long ago -- read nearly 100 years -- given up on the Wilsonian notion that America can or should remake the world politically in her own image. When the Right argues such blatantly liberal notions as human rights as the basis for new war policies, something really weird is going on. And almost no one seems to notice or care how backwards this all is.
Some have called the Bush Administration's philosophy "democratic imperialism," with a small "d" and an emphasis on the second word. That's the truth. But neo-conservatives can't handle the fact that they have been spouting flamingly liberal doctrine in support of their imperialistic aims, so they just made up the imminent threat of WMDs. That's the truth.
Wednesday January 14
War As a Political Product
In a major speech today, Sen. Ted Kennedy said the Iraq war was a ''political product'' marketed by the Bush administration to win elections. ''The war has made America more hated in the world,'' Kennedy said. ''And it has made our people more vulnerable to attacks both here and overseas.''
I don't think any reasonable person would argue with this. It is also the case, however, that Saddam was a tyrant and deserved to be deposed. But as I have commented previously, without a clear and present danger -- the immediate threat posed by WMDs and bio-terror weapons that Pres. Bush assured America and the world Saddam possessed and was ready to use -- then the only reason to go to war was to protect the human rights of Iraqis. I personally don't think the war can be justified on that basis alone and am convinced that the electorate would opposed the war if it were presented in that correct fashion.
Packers' Depression
With Midwest football fans still reeling from the Packer's sudden-death overtime loss to the Eagles Sunday -- punctuated by their failure to go for it on 4th and 1 with just over two minutes left in regulation, coupled with a tremendous Donovan McNabb completion on 4th and 26 for the Eagles -- therapists there say folks are suffering from "dysphoria," a form of "depression that can interrupt normal eating and sleeping patterns." Great. Now we can all blame the blues on the NFL. Let's sue Brett Favre!!
Tuesday January 13
Digital Revolution Complete
This is a telltale sign that the digital revolution is over. The company that basically invented the camera for popular photography will no longer sell film cameras, limiting its product line to digital devices. Kodak to Stop Selling Traditional Cameras in U.S. [YahooNews.com]. That's a major sea-change in the digitization of America and, in all likelihood, the end of a brand that was once synonymous with photography itself. Polaroid went bankrupt when 1-hour photo shops made their instant prints obsolete, and now even Kodachrome itself is largely a thing of the past.
Monday January 12
Nobody's Coming
After the Washington Capitals scored a rare victory (and even rarer shutout) last night, the Edmonton Sun observed that "only the lowly Penguins have a worse record than the Caps, but Pittsburgh is incompetent for half the cost of the Caps' $50-million payroll." Outspoken Caps owner Ted Leonsis, who is in "the fifth year of what was supposed to be a five-year plan to build a champion," admits it's not going to happen, and is eternally grateful to the 12,000 fans who still show up for the games. "I'm amazed anybody is coming,'' he said.
Friday January 9
A Trial For Osama
Conservatives have had a great time the past month lambasting Howard Dean for suggesting that Osama bin Laden, if captured, should be put on trial and that his guilt should not be presumed. Well, just so happens that President Bush himself said the same thing -- about the tyrant Saddam Hussein -- in a December 15 news conference:
You're not supposed to pre-judge.
QUESTION: Yes. I'm just counting the years.
OK, good.
QUESTION: Do you believe that the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 should be included, as well as his assassination attempt against former President Bush?
That'll all be decided by the lawyers. And I will instruct this government to make sure the system includes the Iraqi citizens and make sure the process withstands international scrutiny. But we'll let the lawyers handle all that. And, as you know, I'm not a lawyer. And I delegate. And I'm going to delegate this to the legal community which will be reviewing all of this matter.
So, where is the conservative anger when their own man makes the same "slip"? And why has the media not picked up on this, despite the Republican insistence that the media are a bunch of flaming, Democratic-leftie liberals?
A Mission for NASA
President Bush is set to announce that he will challenge NASA -- in Kennedy-esque fashion -- to develop a permanent manned outpost on the Moon and land human beings on Mars within a decade. Conservatives are lauding this. Says Adam Keiper in the National Review Online, "the president is going to give NASA what it needs most: a vision worthy of America." Whether or not they are genuine, these sentiments may reflect an emerging consensus that America's space efforts need to be focused less on hauling stuff into orbit (read, "Space Shuttle") and more on exploring new worlds (read, "Mission to Mars"). Captain Kirk can't be that far behind after all.
Wednesday January 7
Mr. Britney
Local Girl Leaves Town, Makes Good, Breaks Heart [NYTimes.com]. "She, like, broke his heart," is what locals in Kentwood, Louisiana say about Britney Spears' quickly-annuled, 55-hour marriage to an old friend from kindergarten. Britney got an annulment on Monday for the impulsive ceremony at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, in which she wore ripped jeans and a baseball cap to wed Jason Alexander, football star and son of an auto mechanic. He says they were just chilling at 3:30 a.m. watching "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" in her hotel room. I can think of a lot better things to do than that with a girl of Britney's stature -- and they don't include either movies or wedding ceremonies!!
Princess Di
So while the British coroner starts an inquiry into the death of Princess Diana in her Mercedes limousine in Paris six years ago, the London tabloids have now released a letter allegedly written by Diana in the months before her death claiming that Prince Charles was planning to have her killed in a car accident to clear the way for him to remarry. Accusations Swirl Around Diana Probe. This is good stuf. Sick, but good!!
Tuesday January 6
Screwing Around In China
The Chinese ping pong team has bounced two of its members for romantic activities. Not because of any concern about sexual harassment or molestation, but rather because the Chinese olympic committee thinks its athletes have only "a few years to train and compete [and] cannot spend it too much on dating." [IHT.com].
You gotta love a country that is so NOT politically correct and that boots folks screwing in the closet not because of how it looks but because of how it affects actual work. (And of course all of this is trivial in comparison to the ping pong sex shows performed in Thailand.) Now if they could only do the same for those college students standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Morrow Is Dead
When CBS paid Michael Jackson to do a fawning "60 Minutes" inteview, I commented that Edward R. Murrow must be turning over in his grave. Well now CBS is denying that it paid Jackson, apparently hiding behind the euphamism that having its entertainment division "sweeten" the deal for a prime-time special by $1M if Jackson did the 60 Minutes interview is not paying for the interview.
CBS Charges "Times" Printed "Colossal Lie" [USAToday.com]. "CBS shredded whatever remained of its news division's ethical standards," wrote Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. "Checkbook journalism is a pretty dirty term, but it somehow seems inadequate to describe the arrangement. All that's missing is a wire transfer to a numbered account in the Cayman Islands." But again, a million dollars distributed from this budget or that budget doesn't necessarily taint CBS or the, uh, venerable CBS News any more than they have already tainted themselves by simply serving as Jackson's de facto marketing arm.
Maybe we should just all give up the pretense that there's anything left to journalism today. Morrow is dead and buried. He's never coming back.
Monday January 5
Overtime History
The Green Bay Packers' overtime victory over the Seattle Seahawks represents one of the better playoff games in NFL history. It was one of only five overtime games decided by something other than a field goal and the first-ever decided by a defensive TD -- this time an interception return by the Packers' Al Harris, dredlocks and all. The Packers' Defense Lets Brett Favre Watch This Ending. Coming on the heels of the 2002 season, in which Green Bay lost a playoff game for the first time ever at home at Lambeau Field, this win may be just what the doctor ordered for Favre and company.
Spirit Soars
With the successful landing of the "Spirit" spacecraft rover on Mars, we are once again, at long last, treated to the thrill of NASA getting it right. The rover beat dismal odds and landed inside an ancient Connecticut-sized crater on the planet late Saturday night. The touchdown sparks the most ambitious search yet for life on Mars and has the potential to reinvigorate NASA, which has come under stinging criticism for a string of failures.It's especially delightful since the British/EU probe "Beagle" still has not responded from the Martian surface, suggesting it was destroyed on entry.
Sunday January 4
The DVD Eats Hollywood
According to The Hollywood Reporter, in 2003 domestic theatrical revenue fell for the first time in 11 years. If this suggests that Americans are going to the movies less frequently, I certainly agree. Forget about the price, poor service and surly refreshment clerks, the simple fact is that there are only a handful of movies released every year that justify going out to see. Not when DVD and home theater technology have progessed to the point where most films are better viewed in the living room, rather than the movie theater. In short, 2003 was "the year when DVDs ate Hollywood."
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are worried about Internet file-sharing eroding the movie industry. I would think that Hollywood needs to be concerned more about the movie theater experience itself becoming a relic of history.
Friday January 2
The Top 10
One of the more fun annual year-end lists is Google's report on its "top ten" searches. For 2003, they say that Brittney Spears and Harry Potter were 1-2, followed by The Matrix, Shakira, David Beckham and 50 Cent. Even if one digs deeper, looking only at new searches, the results -- Laci Peterson, Kobe Bryant, etc. -- suggest that the Internet reflects our celebrity and crime-obsessed culture. Technocrats used to say "The Internet changes everything." I don't think so!!