2007 St Patrick’s Day Parade: Behind Jonah are Tony and Elizabeth.
Flower Children Keep On Truckin’
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Tag Archives: Parade
Ask, Tell, and now, Don’t Go, Don’t Kill
Denver’s GLBT parade was this weekend. Was there a Free Bradley Manning contingent? It may be asking this square state too much for a Queers Against Apartheid, as seen at the coastal festivals. We have a month before Colorado Springs’ pride. My idea at left.
Others: WE ARE ALL BRADLEY MANNING — ALL OUT 4 BRADLEY MANNING, ALLEGED WIKILEAKER, GAY HERO — SPRINGS PRIDE SAYS FREE BRADLEY MANNING — BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON WAR CRIMES IS NOT A CRIME! — BRADLEY MANNING: ANOTHER QUEER PRISONER WHO TOLD THE TRUTH, HE EXPOSED WAR CRIMES
I just got an email from Pres. Obama
I just got an email from President Obama. He wants me to lead. He says the politicians in Washington won’t do their job unless I do their job for them. At face value, that’s just weird. Are constituents to imagine that stump speeches fall by the wayside when the polls close and representatives develop amnesia from which only lobbyists can deliver them? Does anyone really believe that the public has to jump hoops for good governance? Who drinks crap-flavored Kool-Aid?
Pardon my disrespect. Yeah, Obama writes to me directly, and would you believe, often. He’s practically asking my advice on a daily basis, or that’s the impression he gives with his personable tone. Actually it’s strictly a one-way conversation, telling me what to do, offering gentle encouragement, and asking for money. It’s gotten so I can’t differentiate fund-raising from tax-collecting. I confess I’ve tired of inferring that if Obama is running low on fairy dust, it’s because I’m not clapping hard enough.
The problem is I think Obama is wearing thin with all this intra-constituent communication, and he’s delegating too much of the multi-tasks to Dumbama. In today’s letter, Obama wants me to solve an “Immigration Crisis,” his contribution? Boots on the ground.
Did Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address? That’s always the impression my teachers gave. No Civil Warmongering William Safire of his day laid claim to coining four score nattering nabobs. When did Americans decide their leaders needed ghostwriters? Why do we accept that an Ersatzbama can come across with the same winning sparkle? Because you know the president is not even reviewing these compositions either. He’s got ghost-readers on staff for that.
Alright, so we like our speeches peppered with wit, and we know not even the most luminous television hosts can tread water without a staff of gag-writers. Fine, if celebrities need personal assistants to hold their phones, we can’t begrudge a busy president his showbiz consultants.
But oh my goodness, why would we countenance forged personal emails?! Who wants a Notobama pretending to give us the inside scoop on the President’s daily thoughts? What kind of charade is that for a presidential parade?
And I ask you, have you yet heard Obama answer a simple question, and you’re left wanting to hear more? If I got an email that confided he didn’t believe the crap vetted for the corporate media, that would be a believable email. Instead we all get Minimebama email numbing us with what we know is the web’s potential for a ceaseless stream of digital drivel.
But I’m making quite an ignorant assumption, that we’re all getting the same stupid email. We assume the White House is spamming a consistent message, but maybe it’s highly customized, and for some reason, and I’d better take it to heart, they’ve pegged me as a big idiot.
I’m voting early, and I vote NO
I’ll show you an absentee ballot. As the election looms, the Klieg lights intensify on the TP bogey-persons, TV talking heads harp about what a nail-biter this will be, pollsters dance with them that brought ’em, Michael Moore does his usual U-turn, to urge us to suck it up for the Dems, Medea Benjamin defends her eternal faith that activism “might” still move Obama, and ever multiple emails presume Obama’s options must be preserved at all costs, usually a donation. Again I anticipate hearing from a friend who monitors local precinct printouts and calls to whip his charges to the polls. I’ve lost count of how many Facebook prompts I’ve gotten to pledge to vote — but this time I’m going to make my ballot count. No amount of corporate-sponsored fear-based gap-closing civic-enthusiasm is going to coerce me to play this game. I will not support war, lack of health care, and class war unchallenged. The beasts unleashed by Citizens United will not buy my participation.
Neither the conservative assholes, nor the liberal bullshitters can have it.
They can have their tyranny, their obscene income disparity, their open war on nature and fellow-humankind. They can have their liberal pretense as the less bitter pill. It’s a dose of cancer either way. I would have a preference actually, if forced to choose between a quick execution and a slow death by hard labor, but I would rather resist than be compelled to voice it.
Silence is not consent, it’s none of the above.
What candidate have you got that’s going to make a difference? In Colorado we’ve got nothing but corporate energy, weapons systems cowboys. Our good-cop senate incumbent is a corporate, education-privatizing, warmongering Zionist who like Obama says he’s against all that. What you got?
Imagine if American election monitors insisted on dipping American fingers in purple dye to prevent vote fraud. The traditional media photo representing Iraqi or Afghan elections makes it obvious it’s really to provide graphic illustration of their buy-in to the election process.
We judge the democracy flag-planting in Iraq and Afghanistan based on election turnouts don’t we? Why shouldn’t that symbolic math apply here too? Would Americans vote if their purple fingers were paraded to demonstrate their faith in American Democracy? Fuck No.
Let the state media denounce it as voter apathy — they can call it what they want, I won’t be there.
Ward Churchill wants his dollar back
DENVER– Remember the dollar bill awarded to Professor Churchill last year because the jury took him at his word that return of his tenure at the University of Colorado was the chief demand of his lawsuit for unlawful dismissal? Judge Larry [K]naves vacated the award and the verdict, which is why Churchill v CU is now being reprised for the Colorado Court of Appeals. As Lawyer David Lane outlined for the reporters, Churchill wants the reinstatement of an original secondary claim dismissed without a trial, he wants to resume teaching at CU Boulder, and precisely for its symbolism, Ward Churchill wants that dollar back. This post’s title is my guess at the Denver News headline.
Actually, mention of the solitary dollar was made in court, but from the other side. Believe it or not, CU argued against having to reinstate Ward Churchill because it adjudged the small award to be indicative of the 2009 jury’s intent. Instead of believing the jury’s statement, that they chose reinstatement in lieu of awarding damages, CU pretended that the trivial remuneration meant they couldn’t give a fig if the wronged professor got his job back either.
Oral arguments were heard today by the Colorado Court of Appeals, in a temporary venue located in the Denver Post building, which until recently was also home to the Rocky Mountain News. Was this a supreme irony, or like the usual M.O. in matters of Native American affairs, a direct insult? Ward Churchill had to plead for redress with authorities under the roof of the establishment most responsible for having slandered him.
How did it go? The room was packed, the judges did not appear to show their hand and promised a judgment would be forthcoming. Probably they say that to everybody.
David Lane gave his usual masterful performance, parrying cuts to the quick from the three judges as if his client’s claims were a foregone conclusion. Lane was ready with his trademark descriptive quips, Churchill’s persecution dubbed a “torchlight parade” where the CU trustees fell over each other to grab the microphone to denounce his September 11th Little Eichmanns quote, even as later they claim quasi-judicial immunity for terminating Churchill without prejudice.
Providing the perfect foil was CU’s counsel Patrick O’Rourke, the down syndrome-coiffed wunderbreadkind, who has me convinced there’s a niche for the incompetent lawyer shtick. How else to battle charismatic speakers like Lane, than play the everyman with a limp to elicit the jury’s sympathies. Lingering on my mind, as CU’s attack-defender lost his train of thought and asked a judge to repeat his question, was the news that O’Rourke is reportedly shortlisted for an appointment as judge, perhaps in recompense for his dispatch of Churchill v CU through the backdoor.
O’Rourke raised the inanity of having been presented with no evidence that the Boulder campus suffered a chilling effect as a result of Professor Churchill’s first amendment rights being violated. One judge ran with the theme, until Lane was able to politely corral the sophomoric philosophy quandary. I wished Lane could have gone for a laugh line: Clearly the CU faculty have become frightened to speak their minds, how else to explain the ongoing dearth of critics among them, in times of continuing and escalating barbarity by our history makers?
The turnout saw a good collection of Denver’s rising legal luminaries, Lane’s team from the original trial, the ACLU legal eagles, and members of the National Lawyers’ Guild. Also in attendance were notorious Denver activists and other Churchill supporters, including the owners of Boulder’s Left Hand Books. A notable absence for me was activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, who’d stopped by the original trial to show her solidarity for Ward Churchill and the besieged academics who served as his witnesses. At that time Stewart was appealing her sentence for aiding-and-abetting terrorists in her role as their defense counsel. This summer, Stewart received not a reprieve, but an even longer sentence, and consequently this month spent her 71st birthday behind bars.
As he did in the original trial, David Lane opened with the suggestion that this case was likely to have a legacy more broad than the presiding judges may all imagine. So far, whether the jurists for the establishment concur or not, I’d say he has been proven correct.
PPLFF says no BDS of Israeli Apartheid
Crap. The Anti-Apartheid BDS campaign targeted Cannes because of it, Hollywood luminaries boycotted the Toronto Film Festival over the same principles in 2009, you’d think the Springs gay community might have paid heed. Instead the 2010 Pikes Peak Lavender Film Festival opted to screen the Israeli melodrama Eyes Wide Open, Zionists’ illegal appropriation of Jerusalem be damned. When Canadian gays made international news for allowing Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march in their pride parade, in spite of Jewish philanthropists pressuring the City of Toronto to withdraw funding, I hoped that COS pride festivities might opt to climb aboard. Instead this weekend Colorado Springs gets a full-on endorsement of Israel’s ongoing illegal invasion of Palestine.
It was a false hope. The Pikes Peak area gay community has found itself so embattled since Amendment Two’s 1992 measure to legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, that common social causes are easily crowded out by Gay Marriage, DADT and brand recognition for LGBT. So much so that social justice activists can only participate in the pride parade on the condition that it be about solidarity, not antiwar. With gay issues being so politicized, should gays and lesbians get a pass on staying apolitical about war or racism? Whatever excuses we make, it’s a perfectly flamboyant example of silence equals consent. I count apolitical queens every bit as complicit with US military criminality as the above-it-all new-agers and NASCAR jackasses.
Set in an Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, Eyes Wide Open doesn’t address the Israeli-Palestinian troubles, it ignores them, effectively normalizing an ethnically-cleansed Palestine. The film tells the story of an extramarital gay affair between Jewish scholars, blablabla, minus the evictions of Palestinians in the path of encroachment by Israeli settlers, and the hijacking of Muslim holy sites . “Beverly Hills 90210” was fine without scenes of the LAPD repression of Watts or East LA, but 90210 wasn’t pretending to be taped on non-Jewish land.
Eyes Wide Open was the title of the 2005 American Friends Service Committee antiwar boot-counting exercise to open American eyes to the enormity of casualties of the Iraq War — before the Eyes Wide Open slogan was adopted by a 2008 Israeli PR project to encourage American Jews to pay more attention to their birthright offer of Israeli citizenship. The death count of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (now that the AFSC has been cleared to consider both wars illegal) has long since outgrown the AFSC budget for buying boots or lugging them around in rented trucks, and now EWO (Einaym Pkuhot) is a miserable tale about infidelity and sin.
Frankly, Trembling Before G-d was an incredible documentary about gay Orthodox men struggling with the DADT policy of Orthodox Judaism. I remember seeing it at the 2003 PPLFF, or so. I remember Rabbinical experts expounded on both sides of the argument with authority and humor. But that was before the BDS movement to curb Israel’s racist apartheid system. You either support the picket or you scab.
Objective reviews of EWO are scarce in the Zionist-dominated press, and increasing numbers are honoring the cultural and academic boycott of Israeli Apartheid. Refusing to see EWO is by no means concluding it is bad. For all I know the film may be using the ostracism of homosexuals within the Orthodox community to represent the growing alienation Israelis are feeling in the face of the open revulsion expressing itself by the rest of the world. Maybe it’s brilliant.
But I’m not deliberating about whether to see it. BDS means no to Israel, to its statesmen, artists, scholars and products. And the American companies which support Israel’s policy of Apartheid, several dozen, and now that includes our own PPLFF.
What are US Special Forces doing in the Philippines? Killing Filipinos.
At a recent party, I ran into a friend who mentioned her son was in the Philippines. “He’s in the Special Forces,” she explained tentatively in view of her audience, adding disarmingly “who knows what they are doing there.” I couldn’t help but snap back “They’re killing Filipinos is what they’re doing.”
I instantly regretted my cheap shot but spent the ensuing days rationalizing why the Philippines in particular should not have to abide American shoulder-shrugging.
What right has civil society to insulate itself from the unpleasant details about how it maintains order?
If her soldier had been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, I would have held my tongue, in the context of unrelated festivity at least. Whether you support the current occupations or not, the violent facts about who’s doing what are not disputed, generally. I’ve no business facing off with a lone mother who more than likely has mixed feelings about the wars, although put on parade it’s a different story.
Perhaps too, other US interventions prompt only vague comprehension of their nature, of the true evil which our country is perpetrating. But we can say the same thing about commercial enterprises which comprise the capitalist global onslaught. None of it party talk.
Few examples match the longevity of US imperial atrocities in the Philippines. There our public ignorance has no right to be ambivalent.
US military activities in the Philippines may as well be the Indian Wars for all the American public understands them, as racist and despotic, and ongoing. Our specialists have been exterminating Filipino insurgents for over a century. When we are not committing the atrocities ourselves, our military advisers are directing them for what has never risen above a client state. The rebels of Mindanao have been trying to fight off foreign occupation since the original Spanish invaders. They are the Philippines’ indigenous Taliban, and we keep trying to put them down.
The insignia of the 4rth Cavalry still commemorates what we call the “Battle of Bud Dajo” but what was in reality a massacre. where US Marines scaled an extinct crater to mount machine guns to fire into a Moro village and exterminate thousands of men, women and children.
The antiwar, anti-imperialist movement of the early 1900s knew the barbarity which our boys were visiting on the Filipinos. It was US soldiers who popularized “waterboarding” there. But since the facade of granting the islands their independence after WWII, Americans have absolved themselves of what is an ongoing occupation.
Will this be the future of Afghanistan’s puppet regime? Continued suppression of the Afghan’s efforts to fight for their liberty?
“Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” is welcome home for felons
There’s a new yellow ribbon on our block. Anymore, yellow ribbon stickers on cars designate wives of servicemen, or realtors sucking up to the military because the only real estate sales here come from Fort Carson’s ever expanding war training. Actually, vehicles of military families are now often festooned wildly with ribbons designating service, regiment and very specific distinctions. Their tailgates mimic the colorful macaroni worn by soldiers on parade. Fine time too, to abandon the old yellow ribbon and the specialization it stood for.
“I’m coming home, I’ve done my time.”
You remember the lyric. He’s about to be released from prison, after three long years, so it wasn’t for littering. What has his homecoming to do with US killers overseas except the obvious?
Our soldiers at war are serving their time, and there’s an argument to be made that they too are war’s victims. Hasn’t it become fitting that the yellow ribbon of pop music lore forgave a felon?
But the song forgave a felon for the crime he’d done, a changed man, now repentant, returning to make a humble appeal for forgiveness.
American soldiers coming home offer no sign they are rehabilitated, nor even that they have an inkling of crimes commited, nor certainly that they bear any of the responsibility. Our soldiers coming home probably mirror a real life parolee’s likelihood to be a recidivist.
FBI manhunt ends for Barefoot Bandit breaking & entering, petty crime spree
After a continent-wide manhunt, US and Bahama authorities have finally nabbed the “Barefoot Bandit,” interrupting 19-year-old Colton Harris-Moore’s two-year joyride with other people’s planes, boats and summer homes, proving that when it comes to the hierarchy of crime, law enforcement packs the big guns to protect PROPERTY. Don’t have a plane? Yeah, it’s not your property they’re worried about.
Police tracking the Barefoot Bandit admit that most of the time he wore shoes. Appropriately, in custody, the fugitive teen was supplied chains and who knows what else, but not footwear. Serial borrower and Facebook hero Harris-Moore lowers his head when paraded past the press, dispelling a notion he might be grandstanding, and walks with the hesitation of a tenderfoot on the tarmac. Curious bit of stage managing.
Queers Against Israeli Apartheid undaunted by Zionist intimidation
Organizers of the 2010 gay pride parade in Toronto have relented to allow the participation of QUEERS AGAINST ISRAELI APARTHEID. At first it was declared that the two words “Israeli Apartheid” would jeopardize their city subsidy and summon a perfect storm of angry Canadian Jews. Faced with queers determined to parade for their social cause in spite of the ban, Toronto Pride opted to honor their members’ freedom of expression.
What freedom means to me: not what it used to
As the next ships are mobilized to challenge the siege of Gaza, NYC supporters of Israel paraded a “True Freedom Flotilla” around the harbor. This point may already be moot, “Freedom” doesn’t mean what it used to. Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom are exercises in duplicity, and “Freedom of Speech” is hollow. The Oslo Freedom Forum was packed with globalization ringers. Freedom Fries were just embarrassing. The Smithsonian exhibit about America’s wars is entitled “The Price of Freedom.”
Karl Rove hides in Borders kids section until CSPD police officers called
BRIARGATE MALL, COLORADO SPRINGS- The good news is that Borders will not eject you for an objectionable t-shirt. But they do not hesitate to have CSPD officers revisit you four times to tell you that you remain at their discretion. Mall security on the other hand believes you have no rights outside the sliver of sidewalk at the parking lot’s edge. Today, everyone unmasked as a protester was kept one floor removed from where Karl Rove was signing books and posing for pictures in the children’s section upstairs, but we were able to parade our ARREST KARL ROVE message before those lined up to see him, and that line subsided an hour before the event was scheduled to end. Ha ha.
Camp OUT NOW delayed for St Pats
PEACE OF THE ACTION and Cindy Sheehan had to delay their March 13 start by two days, to accommodate the Washington DC’s St. Patrick’s Day. Parade organizers objected to sharing the National Mall with an antiwar protest encampment. Deja vu? Camp OUT NOW will raise their tents on March 15 on the lawns between the White House and the Washington Monument, to protest America’s ceaseless war-making. Sheehan and co will direct civil disruptions of DC activities and don’t plan to strike the tents until troops -and drones- are OUT. Join them!
Gay, married, or in the military: pick 2
I admit to feeling less supportive than I ought to for gays pushing for their right to wed — in the midst of every American’s crumbling civil rights — while our country decimates foreign human rights and lives. Couldn’t gay marriage activists at least share the spotlight with peace, out of consideration for the suffering of others, proportionately? How about: Make Love (Marital), Not War. Now gay rights are being made a wedge issue with the dubious right to aspire to be a soldier. Is now the time for us to urge the military to leave no gay behind?
I object as always to the presumption of a professional soldier’s moral validity.
To be fair, it may be that the gays-in-the-military meme is being pressed upon the gay activists. These days, military enlistment has lost a great deal of its appeal. Who can the Army pretend wants to join but can’t? Who else but a demographic that’s been historically denied? I can’t say for certain that gay rights activists haven’t been rallying at recruiting offices, but reporters always seem to find someone to complain they’re being discriminated against. No doubt the war-monger message-shapers can always track down one lone homosexual or two who want to play soldier.
With today’s economy, I’m sure there are not a few gay men and women who will decry the unfairness of being denied the military career path. Being gay doesn’t mean you’re a born hairdresser or a saint. Belonging to a victimized minority doesn’t automatically imbue you with empathy or a higher social conscience to preclude wanting to be a soldier. Gays can hate and kill with the best of grunts I’m sure.
The purpose of circulating this meme, that gays want the right to serve their country in uniform, doesn’t mean the Department of Defense intends to consider granting the right. This is not about enhancing gaydom. This is about putting some spin on the department’s recruiting problems. Who says no one wants to enlist? Gays do! This pseudo-rights campaign is meant to push straight boys into military service while they think it’s their exclusive right. Not only that, the campaign theme serves to reinforce that the military will be your sanctuary from gays. And if any lurk in the barrack, at least they are prohibited from showing it. In everyday civilian life, gays were much more bearable before they held parades to shove it in your face.
American media has come to delight in gayness writ Big Gay Al. But South Park is the only showcase for gay characters who aren’t the stereotypical decorator or fashion nerd. The gay home makeover does not cease to be a novelty, but I’d say the focus group is still out on construction contractor bears, gay bar trolls, and United Court female impersonators.
Without saying gays not welcome, the move to reexamine Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is really just spiffing up the old brand. Army of One, still gay-free.
What was the announcement today? That after years of criticism for the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, the military has decided to put the question to further study. That is to say, to begin a year-long inquiry into the matter. The Army is still gay-free, in all certainty will remain so, now with a year’s warranty.
I have this message for my gay compatriots in activism. If this issue is being forced on you, and you abhor as I, the loaded nature of the media soundbite, the implication that people want to be in the military, it seems to me you have have a unique opportunity to make this message your own. Do you want to be in the business of soldiering? Tell them why.
Tell them why you want to go to war. Borrow a page from the testosterone-heavy war lovers. War crime, playing god, abuse of authority, yours for the taking.
Decry the stereotypes of gays as effete fops. Gays can kill, gays can have blood lust. Gays can shoot at women and children, maybe even with greater enthusiasm. I’ll bet gays could absolutely massacre women. And girls. With relish. If the Army is going to peddle stereotypes, answer in kind.
No telling what gays can do to boys. They can give boys equal time, the menace today’s soldiers reserve for girls. No one’s children will be safe. A gay-straight platoon will wreak havoc on all enemy’s progeny.
Imagine an inter-squad rivalry between the straights and the gays, who can out-debauch whom. Clearly an enhancement on America’s war of terror.
Sarah Palin dons lipstick for Dog Dinner
She’s got a book tour, so what? But Oprah is willing to suffer her for two couch sessions, now Hillary Clinton wants to grant her a beer summit. Foreign leaders can’t get an audience without preconditions. Why is Sarah Palin accorded such stature?
David Letterman protested his contractual obligation to feature reality TV “Survivor” contestants on Late Night. He made them stand at the edge of the stage, at audience level, instead of joining him on the furniture reserved for celebrities and real people lifted from the news. But Letterman’s rejection of the contrived importance of the Survivor casts worked against him. The television audience grown fond of the individual contestants tuned in to see their moment in the spotlight with the king of late night, and felt intimately slighted themselves by Letterman’s haughtiness.
Maybe it’s a lesson the Dem powerbrokers don’t want to relive with John McCain’s last mate from tribe GOP. With the media able to make it all Sarah, all the time, who is the Obama administration to pretend Sarah Palin is just a hockey mom in lipstick –or was it a dog– I’m surprised to have forgotten the distinction.
Actually the distinction is the difference between Sarah Palin being champion idiot at a Dinner Game, or the winner’s date at a Dog Dinner.
I know what they’re doing, and it’s every bit as gruesome as parading the circus freaks. And worse. Those Palin supporters who are also railing at the loss of whatever it was the Constitution meant to them, are going to be proved right.
Of course it depends whether you think Sarah Palin ever had a chance in 2008, or whether she has any viability in 2012. I’m inclined to think not. And I’m pretty sure that’s the consensus of those eagerly pandering to Palin’s political aspirations.
Palin makes an ideal straw candidate. She is who the people want, by “the people” I mean of course, the sans culottes. What’s the new equivalent — the American ill-dressed? Palin appeals to all variety of voters who think politics need a shot of authenticity, whatever. And she hasn’t got a chance, she couldn’t even squeeze a middle school education between now and the start of a 2012 campaign. For the coup de grace, Palin’s character assassins could parade freak two, Levi Johnston, to drop a second shoe.
There’s everything to gain by floating Palin’s balloon, because you prevent opponents from materializing a real one. By all means, inflate Palin’s ego, and let her people’s hopes take flight. Blow, blow, the sky’s the limit.
This is the American two party system at its most efficient. It’s Billie Jean Kings versus Bobby Riggs, all show. Unlike King who only reluctantly agreed to the Battle of the Sexes with the aging baffoon, the Democrats are courting their challenger. The closer she can bring her big mug into camera frame, the bigger the money the Dems can draw from those staking odds.
It’s good for Las Vegas, it’s good for the Dems, it’s good for those who think the Democrats are better then the Repugs, but it’s curtains for democracy.
Johnny Damon the myth of sports news
Local news on TV gets a scant few minutes of coverage, where the story of the day vies with weather to edge out everything else that isn’t fluff. In national news, interviewees can seldom get an answer in edgewise before they’re rushed off for the commercial break. “That’s all the time we have” ends every news story, yet the day’s sports story is paraded before sport desk after sport center. I used to envy the attention Americans gave to sports, until I saw the scrutiny was illusory. For example, Johnny Damon’s double stolen base in game four of the World Series.
It may stand as the most memorable moment of the series, giving Sunday’s game to the Yankees. Damon beat a tag out at second, but continued running because the ball was behind him and there was no adversary guarding third.
As I write, I already remind myself of the SNL skit about Norwegians staging their own translation of an American TV crime show. In the spirit of being an outsider I’d like to add that Fox Sports has chosen unfortunate replay graphics, featuring stars bursting from the center of the screen. Most cutaways leave closeups of baseball players, almost all of them chewing and spitting. The graphics seem to erupt from their mouths.
The fact that no one was on third wasn’t immediately clear to the television audience, for whom third base was out of camera frame. I thought for a minute I was spectating a Playstation game, where a specialist I know can always rundown the pickle, but Damon strode unchallenged to the abandoned base. None had seen such a thing before, such was the hyperbole. With what looked like impulsive genius, Damon confounded fans and critics who’d been comfortable to agree with Damon’s own self-deprecating image as a dumb jock.
Johnny Damon’s stolen third base was the talk of the post play-by-play. It turns out the Phillies had made a Mark Teixeira shift which left the base exposed. The very semantics offer a clue to the real story, but the jocks dropped it there.
The final analysis for the viewers? I’ll put it in layman’s terms: the Phillies had shifted their players in anticipation of batter Mark Teixeira, who hits to a very consistent hole in the outfield. The shift left the Phillies third baseman to cover second, and the pitcher, if warranted, to watch third. But the pitcher wasn’t watching, and as Damon passed the third baseman on second base, he calculated that he could outrun both of them to the empty base.
Great story, no one is credited an error, New York shorn Johnny Damon emerges a strategist, and the authenticity of the surprise of adrenalin rush which Damon gave the viewers is affirmed. But might not the media team calling the game have served the audience better if they’d called the Phillies’ unusual position shift? The sportcasters deserve the error on this play, but mostly I think for their lack of post game candor.
Both infield and outfield players shift their positions depending on who’s at bat. That’s not news. Apparently when Yankees Mark Teixeira comes up to bat, the adjustment is out of the ordinary. And probably that too doesn’t merit mention. No doubt every team playing against the NY Yankees coordinates itself differently. But can we not surmise that Yankee runners who find themselves on base when Teixeira is hitting, are looking for exactly the opening which Damon took? And if the Yankees batting lineup is fairly consistent, would it seem probable that this opportunity regularly falls to Damon?
It takes nothing away from Damon’s feat, but I think to read his action on second base as improvisational is to pretend the World Series baseball audience was born on game three.
Antiwar COS -report from the front line
COLO. SPRINGS- Well, that wasn’t so hard. Our message was warmly received by soldiers who shook our hand in the staging area, and afterward we were thanked by others for what we are trying to do. Antagonism came from the crowd, but not as fiercely as we’d braced ourselves for. Eight years of horror has taken the edge off the “these colors don’t run” mentality. Hence the military imperative for parades like these. Our antiwar presence was all the more important to show the soldiers that some at home are fighting to rescue them. The rest of the attendees were giving them a “welcome home” as they did in 2004, and will keep doing only to redeploy them. The soldiers need to see more real support: a determination to stop these wars.
Compatriots of ours were circulating along the sidewalk with this flier:
We ask that you consider the costs of war
as you take part in this celebration.War kills people. War hurts people.
War kills animals. War destroys things.
War devastates the environment.This parade is a propaganda exercise
promoted by those who profit from war.The money spent on war could go to
making friends instead of enemies.
Many of us are mourning today not celebrating.
Note the “American Furniture Warehouse” is the most prominent part of that “thank you” handout.
This woman was trying to drown us out with cat whistles, until I took her picture.
More of our HEALTH CARE NOT WARFARE contingent stood further south on the corner, just out of frame.
Also not pictured:
LET’S NOT WORSHIP WAR, and U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN,
and my banner backdrops WAR NO MORE and PEACE NOW.
A young group made threats and tried to crowd us out, until the police intervened.
We were most appreciative of the officers’ prompt interventions, although one officer’s method was hardly comforting. He told one young lady, in a voice for us to overhear: “I know. If it were my choice I’d rip them from the sidewalk, but they have a right to be here.” We took that more as an expression of sympathy than an attempt to intimidate us.
Five officers all told, protected us, from leaping unto the parade route.
Coloradans4Peace condemn COS parade
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: COLORADANS-FOR-PEACE CONDEMNS COLORADO SPRINGS PRO-WAR PARADE.
–And why not? The rationales for the Iran and Afghanistan wars have been repudiated by the Obama administration. What place has this city to celebrate them? The wars have been declared illegal by international magistrates. How then can Americans presume to cheer their soldiers’ actions? Regardless the jingoism of the Colorado Springs community, to idealize militarism, while thousands of innocent civilians suffer under its boot every day, is unconscionable. A bigoted majority of Lamborn voters want to lynch a certain black man, should we give them a permit?
Red White and Brave Welcome Home
Colorado Springs will be hosting a parade on August 29 to welcome troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Its predecessor was a 2004 victory parade, this one is billed as a Red White and Brave Welcome Home. You might shy from holding an antagonistic banner like “I DON’T WORSHIP WAR,” but imagine a message draped from a balcony along Tejon Ave! WELCOME HOME, NOW STAY HOME or WHAT HAPPENS IN IRAQ, STAYS IN IRAQ or my favorite, addressed to the 50,000-plus expected to attend: WE’RE CELEBRATING THE MURDER OF HOW MANY CIVILIANS?
This isn’t a Veterans’ Day parade right? It’s one thing to be honoring troops. This parade is an appreciation, a “go get’em” to soldiers returned from Iraq to be redeployed to Afghanistan.
This parade is about recruiting more soldiers. It’s to show prospective recruits that the community supports what they do and are thrilled to send them off again to Afghanistan.
Would protesting the event represent any significant population of Colorado Springs? Although the majority of even this city are against the continued conflicts, I’ve no doubt very few dare speak out against the wars.
That’s where to come out in protest of the glorification of militarism is not about a democratic representation. It’s about what’s right. If 99% of Pikes Peak area residents were just fine with blowing unfortunate Afghan and Iraqi children to bits, I would still object to their wanting to hold a public parade to celebrate it. Let the world see that not every last one of us in Colorado Springs gets off on the carnage we’ve been perpetrating for going on eight years.
We wanted Odysseus, we got Othello
America needs an Odysseus, obviously, to outwit the Cyclops and put out his eye. Against the all-seeing American health insurance lobby, our politicians are virtually powerless. To overcome this omniscient villainy without an Odysseus, the only hope is to rush the monster all at once — and all at once, put it to the sword. Senators and congressmen may say the industry is too powerful to defy, I do not doubt it. But if all act in unison, the beast’s threats will be its last, and come to naught.
But isn’t that courageous scenario as plausible as hoping Obama could be our Odysseus? Greed is so much more persuasive than cooperation. Pitted against each other, the Senators collect huge bounties from their lobbyists. If they slay the great Insurance dragon, to the jubilant acclaim of their constituents, they gain nothing. A big, collective nothing for their pains.
But it’s a lovely fantasy. Eradicate the damn thing entirely. Exterminate it from root to tentacle. Decapitate the leaders, parade the profiteers before their angry victims, strip their families of their riches, make examples of them all. Put every last of their agents on the unemployment line. Or better, hold truth and reconciliation hearings to let the Little Eichmans face the aggrieved survivors of insurance casualties.
I’d like to see the insurance company employees squirm, in particular those attending the health care town halls, pretending to speak for common citizens, in reality trying to protect their miserable jobs. What if instead they feared for their lives? If we cannot reach their consciences, let us tickle their throats.
If the health care reform debate is going to raise mobs, it should rouse lynch mobs. Call for the blood of the 3rd party criminals, who feather their planes and yachts and mansions with the last breaths of millions.
The media are quibbling about the 46 million uninsured, belittling the number because it’s really only “everyone’s best guess.” What about the rest of us, the uninsured insured, and the under-insured insured. The health insurers take our money, but offer, when a claim must be made, only mediocre coverage, if any at all. Of course only the sick learn they have inadequate coverage.
If you worry the sick do not number enough to sway the American public, be assured the number will only grow bigger. But even if you count only the sick as victims of the insurance crisis, you must consider that the sense of security of the healthy is lost as well.
Until such time that angry Americans can storm the insurance monoliths, because their representatives in DC won’t do it, we hold out hope for a passing Odysseus. Unfortunately what we got was an Othello, against an Iago far too cunning.
Americans want clemency only for their own
How gracious of us! The US is beneficiary of a succession of clemencies shown to American citizens. Iran releases an American propagandist, North Korea forgives two more, Myanmar allows us to extricate a oddly errant citizen. All of them Americans, for which we are thankful, but still indignant and unrepentant. When Scotland elects to release a Libyan prisoner on compassionate grounds, the US president cannot object enough.
Do I compare a terrorist against journalists; someone who’s been incarcerated since 1990, versus 2009; someone extradited based on dubious testimony versus Americans caught red-handed?
When Abdel Basset al-Megrahi returned to a hero’s welcome in Libya, American family members of Lockerbie victims are incensed. The man spent nearly two decades in prison, maintaining his innocence throughout. Al-Megrahi only dropped his appeal when the Scottish court indicated it might grant him clemency. Nevertheless, the usual parade of American terrorism-decriers still want his blood. The families of victims received compensation strong-armed from Libya. They have to believe in al-Megrahi’s guilt or else question their entitlement to the payments.
Do Americans know the evidence upon which Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was convicted? Forensic experts found fragments of a shirt thought to have been wrapped around the bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103. The garment was traced to a small slothing store in Malta, where the clerk identified al-Megrahi months later, from a photograph shown him by US investigators, as the customer who purchased the item.
Al-Megrahi made this statement upon his release:
“I always believed I would come back if justice prevailed … I say in the clearest possible terms, which I hope every person in every land will hear – all of this I have had to endure for something that I did not do,”
Who put the bomb into the suitcase, and who got the suitcase on the plane? How did the suitcase bomb escape detection by airport security? Was the package sneaked past inspectors through a security breach created by US law enforcement, to smuggle heroin across the Atlantic in a sting operation targeting a drug ring?
Al-Megrahi wanted such questions answered, to bring to light his innocence. The great travesty of al-Megrahi’s release is that there will be no further scrutiny. All the international participants, it’s being reported rather candidly, are relieved. The US is bellowing not about the miscarriage of justice, but about letting a non-American off the hook.
Georgian Saakashvili, the anti Putin
He rode to power on a CIA/USAID/CPD-backed colored revolution (Georgia’s was Rose), he invaded South Ossetia at NATO’s prompting, but Mikheil Saakashvili startled when Russian tanks immediately took it back, and the Georgian president hasn’t stopped screaming for western support. He’s still fretting over something the Russian Prime Minister had uttered during that engagement.
Didn’t it seem, last August, that Saakashvili wanted to give Georgia back and return to his safe American home? He dared let US special ops advisers give Georgian soldiers insurgency training, but when the people of South Ossetia resisted falling into the sphere of western oil interests, Saakashvili went crying to mommy.
There is probably no denying that Russia will not abide a US puppet playing host to western terrorist subversives at its border. But Putin has been mum on the matter, choosing instead to parade about shirtless. We’re laughing at the Fabio act, but Putin’s foe in Georgia is shaking like he anticipates the pig scene from Deliverance in his future.
Saakashvili is raising the alarm, explaining Georgia’s vulnerability. Says he, “Putin has to break our neck. He has to fulfill his solemn pledge to hang me by a certain part of the body.”
Last year, during talks to end the conflict in South Ossetia, Putin had told French President Sarkozy that he wanted to hang Saakashvili “by the balls.”
Has the US no better contender to foist upon the newly westernized Georgians than sissy Saakashvili? They should have auditioned candidates with their shirts off.
August calendar
6- Day of World Solidarity with the Struggle of the Japanese People
18- Day of Solidarity with the Afro-American People
22- Doug Lamborn Health Care Town Hall, Woodland Park, 5pm
25- Doug Lamborn Health Care Town Hall, Canyon City, 4:30pm
27- Doug Lamborn Health Care Town Hall, Valley-High Golf Course, 7pm
29- “Red White and Brave” pro-war parade, Tejon Ave, 10am
Burn your uniforms…
All those who sat and watched and cheered when the Colorado Springs Gestapo beat elderly and disabled persons for the non-crime of participation in a parade, and still say after two and a half years that you’re “fighting for Freedom”. Bullshit. You had a chance to stand for freedom right here in America and in all that time chose not to do so.
Military both Active Duty and Paramilitary Youth groups like the Scouts and Devilpups and Young Marines… burn your uniforms. You’ve soiled them with the blood of Americans, repeatedly.
Your fascist attitudes and actions have earned you shame, yet you have not enough pride or dignity to even be embarrassed by your hypocrisy and Lies.
“Freedom” for only those who agree with you is slavery to everybody else. To say otherwise you shame the very name of Liberty.
And, when you do so you destroy your OWN liberty as well. You willingly put on the collar and the leash and the muzzle.
On YOURSELVES.
Right wing Simpletons, Call Home!
The heavily funded campaign for Right Wing Simpletons to call their Congressmen and tell them how afraid they are of Health Care Reform is ramping up, I just heard their Hate Speech commercial from the other room.
It’s like the Tea-Baggers and the “mass protest” outside the Letterman show, Camera Angle is everything.
The “massive protest” outside the Letterman Show on behalf of Simple Sarah was actually FIFTEEN
and they were outnumbered two-to-one by the cameras. You wouldn’t know it from the way it was portrayed, though.
Same with the highly contrived “Tea Parties”.
With the right camera work, it makes the Stupid Parade look like a massive Grass-roots uprising.
It wouldn’t take more than a couple hundred thousand to jam the switchboards at the Congressional Office Building.
The Right Wing “leaders” know that, and they hope their Demented Disciples will call in, and that it’ll look so much like a Massive Uprising even with only a fraction of a percent of 1% of the population actually taking part.
Levin was on the radio a few weeks ago bitching and whining about the Energy and environmental legislation passing in spite of the Rigged Call-in Campaign.
Here’s a thought, Right Wing Losers….
Maybe the Congressmen have caught on to it.
Maybe people who are smart enough to get elected to Congress are also smart enough to get a “heads up” when such a contrived “Grass roots” campaign is about to be launched.