PYSBRIoM: Doug Glanville

I was cool to this guy's blog at first. Who needs another ex-jock yapping about a game that he never was a superstar at in the first place? I can be judgmental. This is where I am deficient. To my credit, I did come back and read it every now and then. I like to give people a reasonable opportunity to win me over. This is where I am not deficient. Glad I did.

Doug Glanville knows the game and he knows how to write. Just as importantly, he's the rare smart jock whose intelligence and interests range well outside of the foul lines. I've been watching baseball (and reading about baseball) for many years. But there are very few writers who can hold my interest on the topic. There is the occasional Roger Angell, who isn't really a baseball writer but a writer who happens to write about baseball. Or revolutionary stat geek like Bill James.

But Glanville has won me over with his clear-headed and informative bits about baseball culture and the real struggles and concerns of the human beings that play the game. His current piece is about why players should bother showing up when their team is clearly going nowhere. Believe it or not, they should. And Glanville will tell you why. He gives even longtime fans new things to think about.

Robert Novak

Good riddance, you lying motherfucker.

I'm sure you had family that loved you. To them, I offer my profound condolences.

For the rest of us, you were a smug, deceitful right-wing apologist and propagandist who cared less about the truth and the safety and well-being of everyday Americans than you did about promoting your own ghastly ideology.

It's fitting that you died of a malignant brain tumor because you had the most malignant of brains.

You were the kind of person that makes me dearly wish that I believed in an afterlife, particularly the hot and crispy place, where right about now you would undoubtedly be checking in for an extended stay after a hasty triage to determine your proper infernal stateroom.

The world is a better place without you. You would probably take that as a compliment, as it implies that you "made a difference". Feel free. We'll get on with our lives without you to pollute our air any further.

You Call This a Debate? Take Out the "t" and Add a "cl".

Hello, people. I haven't been around much lately. I've been thinking about stuff, just not writing about it.

One of the things I've been thinking about is health care. (Really? You're, like, the only one. Nobody's talking about it.)

You know, we all had a lovely series of moments when Obama was elected and took office. Hurray, America. We elected a black man. The Bush/Cheney era was ending. It was cleansing. It was wonderful. A new day was dawning.

Bullshit. Utter fucking bullshit. We are now seeing just how dishonest and depraved this nation really is.

Obama was never a flaming liberal. He was always a pragmatic centrist "liberal". I knew he was in trouble almost immediately upon taking office when the stimulus bill, for which Obama spent a lot of time attempting to get Republican buy-in got, oh, zero Republican votes. The red flag was not that the bill got no Republican votes. I kind of expected that. The red flag was that Republicans and their enablers in the supposedly liberal media howled with fury about how partisan Obama was being. "He never consulted us! This bill was supposed to be bipartisan and it's the most partisan bill ever! He's a fraud!" I knew at this point that nothing would be easy and that there was nothing, literally nothing he could do to get anything worthwhile done. Bipartisanship requires two willing parties. And we were at least one short. Country first? Nuh-uh.

And here we are at health care, a big issue for folks and one for which there is broad support among the American electorate. Here's a lovely New York Times poll showing that 72% of Americans support a government-run health plan. 72%! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get 72% of Americans to agree on anything? We can't get 72% of Americans to agree that torture is a bad thing. Yes, torture, which is unequivocally and unambiguously illegal under domestic and international law, not to mention immoral and ineffective. But 72% were for a public plan. And 7% had no opinion in the health care poll, which means only 20% of Americans opposed it. That's slightly more than the number that like Dick Cheney. And athlete's foot.

And yet, where are we with the public option (which, by the way, is only a shadow of what we should be moving towards, which is universal single-payer)? Well, it's about to be killed. Why? Because of a few people shouting at town hall meetings, per the direction of a few right-wing and corporate-sponsored groups, and media ass monkeys all around the joint.

I really don't have the strenght to go into the details right now, which you undoubtedly know already, but suffice it to say that every single argument I've heard against a public plan, let alone single-payer, has contained at least one whopping big fat honking lie. Not an untruth, not a stretch, not a minor prevarication, but something grossly, demonstrably false. Death panels! 6-month waits! No choices! Government takeover! Tyranny! All of it patently untrue and promoted relentlessly by the insurance industry and Fox News. Surprise surprise.

For crying out loud, they took out end-of-life care counseling (counseling!) because apparently it was easier to do so than to just explain why the death panel idea was a lie. How low must your opinion of the American people be when you can't debunk something so easily debunked?

Not low enough, apparently. Because now they're talking about taking the public option out of the mix. Why? Because lying works. That's how stupid we are. Congratulations, insurance industry. This is an absolute triumph of propaganda. You've managed to take a topic about which there was broad consensus and make it seem like an apocalyptic gummint nightmare to which the villagers were revolting with the pitchforks and the torches in an inspiring show of democracy in action.

Hey, Congress. If you're thinking of passing a bill that can't even include something so modest, and for which there was such support, for fear of pissing off a few yahoos and the corporations whose bidding they do, don't bother, okay? I can't bear the thought of you and the president congratulating yourselves for doing something worse than doing nothing.

I have officially lost all of the good feelings I had about this country around the turn of last year. My opinion of this country is actually lower than it was during the nightmare that was the Bush administration. And that is really saying something.

Kenya Dig It?

Apparently, the birthers read my blog. Before my comments, they hadn't even bothered to forge a birth certificate for Obama. Situation rectified.

Of course, the thing's an obvious fake, debunkable with just minutes of Google time.

I thought I'd get one too. Here 'tis.

Go here for yours.

Enjoy!

Birth, Right?

I'm really having a difficult time understanding people. (This is news?) We just emerged from eight years of an utterly lawless administration, of which we continue to learn more and more details of just how far they were willing to go to undermine our constitution and system of checks and balances.

Some of us weren't happy with this and expressed our displeasure at the time. Our reward? We were told that we were deranged. Literally. They coined the term Bush Derangement Syndrome in order to plant the idea that we weren't reacting to actual crimes being committed by our so-called leaders but that we were poisoned by an irrational hatred of the man himself. This was really putting the cart of hatred before the horse of insanely undemocratic and immoral policy. It was a clever -- if cheap and dishonest -- way of deflecting attention away from the criminals and towards those nuts who would call them on their criminality. Sand in the face.

Now, here we are in the future. I certainly don't expect everyone to agree with our new leader. I'm a fan in general, but I have some serious issues with him. (First and foremost, his insistence on continuing some of the worst policies of his predecessor.) But the people who believe that Obama is not a U.S. citizen are seriously, literally, certifiably deranged.

How on earth can a person continue to insist, in spite of overwhelming (or at least, satisfactorily convincing) evidence to the contrary, that The Prez was somehow born in Africa? These people show up at rallies and at town halls insisting that there is some sort of conspiracy on and that we're still waiting for him to show proof of birth. This, of course, is over a year after his birth certificate was produced and published. Oh, and the State of Hawaii certified more than once that he was born there. And, yeah, after two Honolulu newspapers dug up their archives to find the announcement that the Obamas had a baby boy on August 4th, 1961.

This should be more than enough to satisfy anyone.

And yet, we still have this.



For extra fun, go to the YouTube page where this video came from and enjoy the eloquent comments.

I'd be willing to give them the benefit of a small amount of doubt if there were the teeny-tiniest base on which to build their nutty theory (and I apologize here for demeaning the word "theory"), such as a claim of a birth certificate from Kenya, for instance. Haven't heard about it. This is built on a foundation of nothing.

The absolute rage displayed by these people, and utter indifference to reason or logic, tells me that this is not about facts. It's about people who simply can't comprehend that their vision of America is moribund. And this is the way they express it, by clinging to a fable. They couldn't possibly be wrong. Obama couldn't possibly be popular. It must be a hoax. Facts to the contrary? Scream louder.

Deranged.

Insensitive Asshole Wins Golf Tournament

This is pretty much the definition of bittersweet.

Virtually unknown professional golfer comes out of nowhere to capture his first major tournament. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? Yay, Stewart Cink!

But no. The whole week everyone was watching 59-year-old has-been (and not-really-expected-to-be-at-his-age) Tom Watson, who had been leading for most of the week at this year's British Open. Piss on this story if you dare. Nobody who was not related to another golfer in the tournament wasn't rooting for the old dude to reclaim his former glory.

He didn't. And all he had to do was make par on the last hole, even after Sink birdied it. Nope. Didn't happen. Well, there was still a four-hole aggregate playoff. Oops. The geezer really croaked on that one. Oh well.

How much does it suck to be the guy that wrecked the feel-good story of the year? I bet the first-place money helps. But still.

Thanks for winning, you big jerk.

That's Not What They Meant When They Said That Skin Sells

Advertisements must be viewed to be effective. On TV, they get the full 30 seconds with no competition. In print and on the web, they need to pull your focus away from the exciting content you are so lustily consuming and say "Hey, look at me! I'm so goddamn interesting you will never get to that article about the new Harry Potter movie. At least not until after you've clicked through to the product I'm selling."

There are a few ways to do this. First, and most obvious, is the "Look at my tits!" ploy. Men will never ever stop falling for this. No matter how crass we consider it when examining the ads intellectually, the inner 16-year-old screams "Look at her tits!" And we do.

Second, there are the usual bright shiny colors and exciting graphics. This can be enhanced with new-and-improved Flash animations that actually fly across the screen to more effectively obscure your originally desired content, sometimes even forcing you to click on the "X" to close the offending doodad before you can view anything it obscures. Annoying.

But here's my least favorite. I got this screen shot from today's online edition of the New York Times.

Did you see it? It's subtle, I know.

I'll say this for it, it certainly draws focus. Of course, now I'm not interested in breakfast. Or lunch. Ever.

But they aren't selling lunch. They're selling...what? I'm guessing some kind of cure for the horrible affliction visited upon the poor slob pictured, with his/her face mercifully cropped. Delightful.

I could find out if I really wanted to. There's a button that says "Click here to learn more". What I really want is the one that says "Click here to learn less" or, more to the point "Erase this ad from your memory". Only twenty dollars.

Sarah Palin, Babykiller

Every day we get more evidence that not allowing Sarah Palin into the White House was a serious dodged bullet.

Today, we get this chilling photo from Jim Wilson of the New York Times showing just how demonic Governor Palin and her minions are.

As onlookers beam in approval, Palin mercilessly stabs this screaming baby to death with a fine point indelible marker.


Culture of Life indeed.

Robert McNamara

One fewer reservation at L'Inferne Marriott. Good riddance to one of the 20th century's most cold-blooded wasters of human life.

Everything of importance that this man did was well before my time, except for recanting most of it. For this, watch Errol Morris's chilling documentary "The Fog of War".

Apparently, he did some good too. His obituary will tell you all about his work on behalf of tolerance, education and whatnot. But this can't make up for the evil that was Vietnam and his place at the forefront of it.

In Morris's film, which you really need to see if you haven't already, he sounds as if he's describing a product launch that didn't go as planned. He's not entirely unsympathetic in the film, which is the most sobering part of it. It's an important reminder that people will commit the most horrible acts thinking that they're doing good, and that evil is not Darth Vader or Sauron but actual human beings with families, values and ideals who have really bad solutions to problems.

"Dr. Strangelove" was a satire, but about the only thing different in "The Fog of War" is the accent and the apology. The sentiment is pretty much the same. Humans are no more than pawns in the game and their actual lives have no meaning.





Goodnight, Doctor. Enjoy the company where you're going.

Karl Malden

Admit it. You thought he had been dead for years already. He was 97, after all. 97!

Growing up, I knew him as the guy on the American Express ads with the funny hat. And as the dude on "Streets of San Francisco" with Kirk Douglas's son. And he was old then.

It was only later that I found his earlier work in two classic films, "On the Waterfront" and "A Streetcar Named Desire", both directed by the great Elia Kazan and both starring some dude named Brando. He was clearly meant to be a character actor. That mug and that schnozz were there even back then. Not a handsome man.

But, as it goes, he could act. And he had himself a long and distinguished career. He stands in stark contrast to this week's other celebrity snuffings. Unlike Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, he lived a long life unmarred by controversy or suffering. His greatest achievement? He was married to the same woman for 70 years. 70! That's beautiful.

A good and well-lived life. Thanks, Karl, for doing it the way it oughta be done.