My memory is superior to most, but some things are so wretched even I manage to forget. But then you find yourself waiting in the check-out line, minding your own business, when you’re ears are violated by a 21-year-old dirge that should’ve never been heard in the first place.
So forget all my lists – there’s a new #1.
O’Brien asked James if race played a role in the backlash. “I think so, at times,” James said. “There’s always a race factor.”
Racism will always be with us, and so will self-absorbed professional athletes. I fail to see what one has to do with the other in this case. I suspect many of James’ contemporaries were equally disgusted with the televised spectacle that celebrated “The Decision” of a player who’s yet to win a championship.
But wait. “The Decision” wasn’t about LeBron James, says LeBron James, whose use of the third person tells you all you need to know about the man’s ego.
“If I have to take heat to give back to kids, I would do it the same way every single time,” James said.
So he’s a victim and a martyr. For the record, James signed a $110 million contract to play for the Miami Heat and makes countless more in endorsements, so giving someone else’s $3 million to the Boys and Girls Club is no sacrifice.
Columnist Jason Whitlock calls bullshit.
Please, let’s stop with all the nonsense that white folks are uncomfortable with LeBron because he’s “taken control of his career.”
Give me a &*%$ing break. The rationalization is as tired and lame as listening to Limbaugh defenders claim his black call screener is proof Rush is free of bias.
Rick Sanchez says something stupid and, perhaps, anti-Semitic, and loses his job. Good. He’s an idiot, always has been. But compare what he said to what Michigan assistant AG Andrew Shirvell said, and did.
Sanchez didn’t protest outside Jon Stewart’s house, or start a blog in which he called Stewart Satan’s representative. Nor did he claim that Stewart tried to recruit people into the Jewish lifestyle. Sanchez’s comments were made off the clock, so, using Shirvell’s logic, he has the right to say whatever he wants.
He does, but he doesn’t have the right to keep his job after publicly embarrassing his employer. If anything, Shirvell — not fired, but allowed to take a leave of absence — should be a higher standard, since he’s a civil servant.
Forget the smokescreens from the religious right: Michigan Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell should be fired.
It’s not what he said, though what he said was ignorant. It’s how aggressively he said it, and who he said it about. Shirvell is a middle-aged professional who should have better things to do than harass a college student, as he’s been doing regularly on a blog dedicated to the kid for the last six months.
On “AC 360,” Shirvell made no apologies for his blog postings, which include a picture of Armstrong with “Resign” written over his face. The same picture also had a swastika superimposed over a gay pride flag, with an arrow pointing toward Armstrong.
He even held a solo protest in front of Armstrong’s residence one night. That’s beyond creepy. I know I’d be fired if I did that. You shouldn’t be able to shit can someone because of who they hate, but you should be able to axe them when they make that hate so public — especially if the hater is a public servant.
Shirvell has taken a leave of absence but has not been fired. I suspect that will change when they find gay porn on his computer, which seems inevitable considering the evidence and what we’ve come to expect from such aggressive homophobes.
Michele Bachmann is a contender, but Paul Broun remains the nuttiest wing nut in Congress.
BROUN: I tell ya, we’ve got some new problems in Washington. Big problems. Just today, Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said people in America are not eating enough fruits and vegetables. They want to give all the power to the federal government to force you to eat more fruits and vegetables. This is what the federal, CDC, they gonna be calling you to make sure you eat fruits and vegetables, every day. This is socialism of the highest order!
Broun is a medical doctor, BTW.
After calling Jon Stewart a bigot, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, the Cuban Ted Baxter, proceeds to swallow his foot:
Dominick: How is he a bigot?
Sanchez: I think he looks at the world through, his mom, who was a school teacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that. Great, I’m so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine.
Dominick: What group is he bigoted towards?
Sanchez: Everybody else who’s not like him. Look at his show, I mean, what does he surround himself with?A few minutes later, Sanchez takes back the word “bigot,” changing it to “prejudicial” and “uninformed.”
Later in the interview, Dominick brings up the fact that Stewart is Jewish, so is a minority himself. Sanchez laughs this off:
I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah.
From an early age, I had two (seemingly unrelated) passions: newspapers and baseball.
When I was 16, I scored an interview for a sports clerk’s position at my local newspaper. After the standard queries, my future boss, SKA, asked me which team former big league catcher Bob Boone, who shares my surname, played for. I knew the job was mine. SKA wanted two things: competence and baseball literacy, a tall order in the heart of (college) football country.
SKA could be intimidating, and you best not pet his peeves: “1. Host is not a verb!; 2. Host is not a verb!!; 3. HOST IS NOT A FUCKING VERB!!!” I learned. He wasn’t a role model, but a harbinger.
I didn’t realize it until today when I read SKA’s latest Facebook dispatch:
I’ll never understand the Bobby Cox haters. Fourteen straight flags, 2,500 wins, Atlanta’s only championship and brilliant job this year getting an undernourished roster through a pennant race. Yet it’s never enough for the bandwagon goobers who think baseball is the same as high school football and if you don’t win it… all every year, you suck. Those who know nothing about the sport should shut up.
“In return for liking this status, I’d like for you to say something positive about soccer,” wrote a commenter.
OK, it ain’t high school freaking football, how ’bout that? Or worse, college football. There’s no BCS, they don’t schedule Eastern Southwestern Podunk State for homecoming and the mascots don’t try to dry hump each other in the end zone while there are perfectly suitable cheerleaders nearby for such purpose. And at least soccer doesn’t exist for the sole purpose of letting middle-aged Winnebago pilots get shitfaced every Saturday on a college campus, a place many have never been during the week when actual classes are in session. I’m just sayin’.
We also share a volcanic, though harmless — and often humorous — temper. But I still have my hair.
