Worst 24 hours in DC since . . .

probably the day the Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush was president.  On that day in 2001, I remember thinking "well, there goes the Arctic Refuge."

The good news is, of course, that didn't happen.  We won.  But it's harder to find some good news in the last 24-hour news cycle.

One, phenom Steven Strasburg needs Tommy John surgery.  When that news came across my phone Friday morning I almost cried.  That fact alone, that I felt like crying about a baseball player I've never met, proves that old phase: 'sports fans are the most miserable people on Earth'. 

As I tweeted yesterday (@AthanDCTarheel), the Curse of Lez Boulez is real.  DC sports teams can not catch a break, and the only team that has historically won (history leaves out DC United) is the one with the most racist name in history, and boasted a proud racist owner for years in the 40s, 50s and early 60s.

Soul sucking as Strasburg's injury is, a sucking compounded by the timing since we found out about the diagnosis a day AFTER Bryce Harper's hope-inducing introduction and awesome batting practice session, there are SEVERAL silver linings. 

1. there were 10 pitchers in this year's all-star game who had the surgery, and almost 85  percent of the hurlers who have had the procedure come back just as strong or stronger
2. Stasburg is only 22 years old; his body is still growing and his youth should aid his recovery.  
3. hurting a shoulder is a much bigger problem for a pitcher than an elbow or forearm; many have opined that he can strengthen his shoulder while rehabilitating after Tommy John surgery.

Finally, their is Strasburg's attitude.  And I'm not talking about his work ethic.  I'm talking about his quote that it's better to have this happen now than say, at a time when the Nats are in a pennant race or battling for a World Series. Clearly, Strasburg is thinking big picture about his injury, surgery, recovery and career, so so should we.  But it still stinks to have to wait and hope things go well. 

Speaking of hope, let's hope John Wall or Bryce Harper are not hit by a bus.

Two, speaking of speaking of hope, the other bad thing to befall your nation's capital is the Glenn Beck rally.  I don't have much to add to the discussions about how outlandish it is for Beck to be linked to Martin Luther King and the "I Have A Dream" speech.  MLK was about making the country better and fulfill the meaning of it's creed; Beck's message is based on fear of the other and turning the clock back.  

And how can someone who claims President Obama is racist against white people and hates white culture profess to reclaim the civil rights movement?

But I do want to point out the irony of standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.  Not only is it inappropriate for Beck to stand near where King stood, but what about Lincoln?  Does it bother Beck and the Tea Party that Lincoln: 

• was the father of big government, a government that swelled in size to fight and win the Civil War?  
• actually fought a war against white culture, at least white slave-owning culture?  Many Confederates thought that Lincoln hated white people;
• supported redistributing land, for free, via the Homestead Act, an act that gave away 160 acres to anyone over 21 years old and was loyal to the United States. According to history.com, similar bills were proposed prior to the Civil War but were defeated by southern members of Congress who feared new territories populated by non-slave holding homesteaders who supported laboring over slavery.
• supported labor over capital: "labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
• strongly opposed the Tea Party's intellectual forefathers, the Know-Nothings, on immigration, stating that if they gaining power the Declaration of Independence would be amended to "all men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics."  That sounds Tea Partyish to me.

I really think the Palins, Becks and the Tea Party have already hit their high water mark.  I just can't see folks, except maybe in Utah or Idaho maybe Kentucky, voting for these guys in November.  Their time has past, and Americans rarely if ever vote their fears rather than their hopes.  

Hopes, for Strasburg's recovery, and in November.

Mosque push back

Excellent pieces in The New York Times today by Frank Rich, Nicholas Kristoff and Maureen Dowd (I stopped reading her a few years ago, but she wrote three great pieces this week and is writing like an adult again) on the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero.

Rich in particular points out that lost in this stupid debate over the proposed Muslim YMCA (or YuMMA if it's for Muslims*) is how demonizing Islam really hurts our fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  Newt Gingrich's statements alone will make an excellent Al Qaeda recruitment video.  And nothing would please Osama bin Laden more than to see a moderate and open minded iman lose this fight to build the cultural center in the land of free.

To say nothing of the fact that two mosques already exist near Ground Zero, as does a strip club. 

This has been a sordid and sad week for our Republic.  I've already blogged on the 'Obama is a Muslim poll.' My initial take was it loudly demonstrated the stupidity of 1 in 5 Americans.  But I want to fine tune that assessment; I think that poll - and the right wing hysteria over the proposed cultural center - primarily underscores how ideological many Americans are in the age of Fox News and the media/internet echo chamber.

There are way too many Americans who do not care about the facts, whose ideology makes it impossible for them to think straight. There are myriad causes for that. Right wingers see a black guy with a name like Obama and assume he's a Muslim/socialist/fill in blank. Many baby boomers and ex-hippies think 'feel' is more important that facts. So a boomer like George W. Bush invades Iraq despite there being no proof of weapons of mass destruction because he 'feels' that an enemy like Saddam Hussein MUST have some.  

And of course his fellow boomer, Bill Clinton, chose 'feel' over facts quite a bit in his personal life.

I think the anti-Islamic Community Center folks will trigger a backlash. Being mean, to put it simply, may resonate in the short term but makes you look bigoted and un-American in the long term. That's been true with supporters of slavery, Jim Crow, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrants groups, etc. etc. The arc of American history almost always - eventually - bends towards justice and the expansion of personal freedoms.

How ironic that a party currently dominated by ideologues who want less government are so determined to restrict a groups religious freedom?  Or so strongly opposes the right to everyone to get married.

But I also like the fact that Obama is back on message and calling for tolerance.  The courage of his convictions, and our American values, should win out in the case of the Ground Zero Islamic center.

And if the President needs more inspiration he should look to the Prime Minister of Turkey.  Yes, Turkey.

Last Sunday, the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was allowed to celebrate the Dormition of the Theotokos (the falling asleep in the Lord of the Virgin Mary) in the formerly Greek city of Trabzon (in the Pontic region of modern Turkey).  As it is here in the world's greatest nation/democracy, right-wing nationalists attacked Turkey's Prime Minister Tayip Erdogan for allowing the Patriarch to a) leave Constantinople and b) hold the service in a former Orthodox monastary.

For an interesting take on this story check out this column in the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.

Erdogan's response is equally apt for New York and Turkey: “Whoever believes in his ideas does not fear freedom of ideas."  The Prime Minister added that critics of allowing the ceremony "create a climate of fear to provoke unrest."  

That's what ideologues do, and hopefully they will not get away with it here in the land of the free and the land of brave.

* for the record, yumma is made with pine nuts NOT chick peas).

Well, now we know

The news that 20 percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim - not that there's anything wrong with that - proves without a doubt that one in five Americans is stone cold stupid (they also probably don't know that 1 in 5 is the same as 20 percent).

Often times reporters and pundits accuse liberals of always thinking conservatives are dumb, but this time we are right. The modern Republican party is 50 percent fiscal conservatives and corporate types who simply want no taxes or government regulation, and 50 percent stupid crazy people who think:

• humans saddled and rode dinosaurs;
• the September 11th attacks were an inside job by the government (so why are they mad about a mosque at ground zero? They should be protesting a new post office or army recruiting station). Of course many of them also believe that Saddam Hussein attacked us on September 11th, so I may be confused about this point;
• Obama was born in a madrassa instead of Hawaii;
• New Mexico is a foreign country;
• global warming is a hoax but that pro wrestling is real
• all of their tax money goes to welfare instead of the military, Social Security and Medicare;
• illegal aliens are streaming into the country to get gay married and then get on welfare/take our jobs.

Of course, there are some dumb lefties - some who also believe the 911 conspiracies or think Mary Landrieu is a liberal - but nothing like the right wing nuts.

It's funny, but also really depressing.  Are we ever going to be a mature nation, one that believes in facts and science and rational thought, tempered and moderated and shaped by emotions and honesty and humility and kindness?

But enough of that crap - wrestling's on!

Quick Take on the Sunday Post

Back in DC, and reading the Post on newsprint as opposed to on line (but as it was on the Outer Banks, I'm still not wearing a shirt; I offer that up as a warning to my coworkers and fellow Metro riders for Monday).

After an hour of reading the paper, here are three quick takes on the news:

• The lead article in the Post is on another infamous Alaskan plane crash that killed Reps. Begich and Boggs in 1972.  The article also references the 1978 plane crash that killed Sen. Ted Stevens' first wife.  I bring that up only to point out how odd - and ideological - Sen. Stevens was.  In December 2005, when he failed to successfully include Arctic Refuge drilling language in a defense appropriations bill (he was chair of that committee at the time), he called the day he lost that vote "the saddest day of my life." Really, sadder than the day your wife died in a plane crash?
• Dan Balz's column points out how Ds hope to weather voter dissatisfaction in the November midterm elections by pointing out how crazy the Rs are. Of course, the only agenda the Republican have is to repeat how mad they are; they do not have an agenda or a single idea on how to end the two wars Bush got us in, fix the economy, put people to work, or protect the planet. 

Pointing out how nutty folks like Dookie Rand Paul are is certainly a valid point.  But it also is a depressing statement about the American electorate.  Obama ran and won - in part - on being aspirational and solution oriented on health care, the economy, financial reform, clean energy, etc. Then again, he mainly won because the electorate was fed up with George Bush. Is the political shelf life of being optimistic and aspirational a mere two years in contemporary America?  Are we that cranky and distracted and immature, that we are only happy complaining about things rather than trying to implement difficult solutions to serious problems like energy and health care?  Seems like it.

• Finally, I close with two mundane items from sports.  One, FIFA is thinking about eliminating ties in World Cup matches.  But football should not stop there.  Ties should be banned from all football/soccer matches.  One of the frustrating things about soccer is that not every team in every game plays to win, and you gain a point for not winning.  Think about how stupid that phrase is: in some games in certain scenarios one of the teams is NOT playing to win. If you are not playing to win you should not be playing.  Banning ties would also get rid of the stupid point system employed by soccer; it should come down to wins and losses.  One important way to dramatically improve soccer is to ban ties from every league and tournament. 

And two, the right-wingers in charge of the USA Basketball, Jerry Colangelo and Mike Krzyzewski, are not picking any Tar Heels for this year's team set to play in the 2010 World Basketball championships in Turkey at the end of this month. But that's not all.  Colangelo had famously stated that anyone who does NOT play for the national team in 2010 will NOT be eligible for the 2012 Olympic team.  Predictably, Colangelo has backed off on that statement, in effect throwing the players who are playing in Turkey for the U.S. under the bus: 'thanks for playing in 2010, but sunshine patriots like LeBron and Wade are here for the Olympics so we don't need you any more.'  More right-wing hypocrisy.  As it was in 2006, this is not my America, so I will likely root for Greece if they play us in Turkey.

Hard Core Funky Beats

While at the beach in Avon in God's Country we've had a decent amount of rain, including a storm that rolled in last night as we were on the ferry from Okracoke to Hatteras Island.  Despite the rain we're having a great and relaxing time at the Outer Banks.   

Due to the rain we've been inside more than usual, and this morning I was playing my iPod on random when "Fight the Power' by PE came on (after a song by Kristi Stassinopoulou, FYI).  Listening to 'classic' PE - the song is from 1989, but you knew that - reminded me that the two worst things to happen to hip hop were: Snoop Dogg, who killed it my turning it into music for clowns and morons; and Terminator X's retirement from making hard core funky beats to become of all things an ostrich rancher (in God's country, where else?).


Hip hop has never fully recovered.

Managers

A quick blog on two managers.

Prior to the getting a hometown team in DC, I was a Braves fan (mainly due to superstation WTBS's domination of both North Cack and Florida, my two states).  And I would happily root for the Braves to win another World Series this season as a great send off for Bobby Cox.   

Cox is doing a great job with this year's Braves, but always does a great job.  Sports Illustrated recently ran a great piece on his longevity and his record-setting number of ejections.  It's a great article.

After moving to DC, also pre-Nats, the Orioles were my favorite American League team.  Easy to forget that once upon a time going to Camden Yards in the 90's was an huge deal.  Fantastic stadium - full of charismatic superstars like Cal Ripken, Robbie Alomar, Rafael Palmiero and Tar Heels like B.J. Surhoff - made it the place to be for many Washington sports fans.

Unlike many DC sports fans, who blamed O's owner Peter Angelos for keeping baseball out of the nation's capital, I never harbored any anti-Orioles sentiment.  Hard to be mad once you get a team, plus Angelos is Greek and a liberal.  

So I'm happy for the Orioles and their hiring of Buck Showalter - who is 4-0 so far. Instead of nickel-and-diming it with Lee Mazzilli and other rookie managers who quickly found themselves in over the heads in the ultra competitive AL East, the Os went big with Showalter.  I hope the undefeated mark leads to a successful run in Baltimore and that Showalter makes the Orioles relevant again.

Time to storm the barricades and board rooms!

Watching Greenspan on Meet The Press this morning say: "big banks, big corporations, and rich people are doing great."  Why do we like capitalism again?  

Government, via infrastructure and other projects, does a better job spending and HIRING than corporations do.  Time to storm the barricades and board rooms!