Plenty of Hate to Go Around

There’s very little civility left in politics in Wisconsin, and we’re likely to see more strife and heated disagreement in the future, and very little common courtesy.

Why?  Start with the image at the top of this post – the clenched fist.  The labor version, seen here, has been copied and modified many times by various Democratic Party organizations.  There’s the version that has the number “14” superimposed on the fist, over the star, representing the 14 Democratic state senators who decamped to Illinois this winter.  The latest version has “16” replacing the 14, to indicate the two seats the Democrats picked up in the summer recall elections.

Clenched fist.  Sends a pretty clear message, doesn’t it? 

What I’m saying is it might be wise for the Democrats to tone things down a bit, and used something other than a clenched fist as their symbol.

There’s the relatively recent factor of hate-talk shout radio, exemplified in Madison by Vicki McKenna on the right (her show is also aired in Milwaukee), who yesterday told her listeners that Barack Obama hates Americans (really, Vicki?  The President HATES Americans?); and there’s Sly on the left, the veteran rabble-rouser who never met a labor organization leader or member  he didn’t like, and who delights in encouraging the “Walker-Stalkers” to go to every public appearance the governor makes, with the expressed purpose of heckling and disrupting.

There was the recent incident at Messmer Prep School in Milwaukee where somebody….and you have to presume it’s someone sympathetic with the left….super-glued shut the doors of the school so Governor Walker would have to use a different entrance to get into the school to give a speech.

And now we have the labor folks in Wausau telling the Republican elected officials from the area that they’re not welcome to march in the Labor Day Parade, saying it’s hypocritical for them to support labor one day a year and spend every other day doing things to the detriment of organized labor.  This is very much a “developing story” right now, and the mayor of Wausau may have something to say about who can and cannot use city streets, city police and fire protection, and municipal employees at a public event, and who can and cannot be excluded from same.

We have politicians on the right calling the demonstrators in Madison “union thugs” and defying court orders about keeping the State Capital open and making public remarks denigrating the personal hygiene of the demonstrators.

And both sides seem intent on shouting down anyone from the other side who speaks at a rally or makes a public appearance, such as the demonstrators who tried to shout down Sarah Palin when the Tea Party brought her here a few months ago.  (And then complained that “the right can afford better sound systems than we can”.)

We are a state divided, and both sides seem to be doing what they can to make the division deeper and wider.

The Lord God Shall Smite Us All

Although she keeps trying to distance herself from her recorded and well-documented comments, Michelle Bachmann  is eventually going to have to own this stuff, in some forum where she won’t be allowed to attempt to spin her way out of it.

She told Floridians Sunday that Hurricane Irene and last week’s earthquake were messages from God to politicians, to warn them to start heeding His Word (which, of course, by implication, is available through Bachmann).

After the St. Petersburg Times carried a report on Bachmann’s Tea Party rally there, and the story was then picked up by the Huffington Post, a Bachmann flack said the comments were made in jest.

Yup.

This woman is as bat-shit crazy as Glenn Boeck, who said Hurricane Irene was a blessing from God, reminding us we’re not in control.

I’ve done way too much reading about Bachmann, on the chance that someone like her, whose views and beliefs are so far out of the American mainstream, could actually become President.  The more I read about Rick Perry, who has many views paralleling Bachmann’s, the more amazed I become.

These are the folks who believe evolution is a theory and that the earth is only a few thousand years old. In other words, when science and their religious beliefs conflict, the Bible is the arbiter.  These are the candidates who appeal to those folks who cling to their guns and Bibles in tough times, to paraphrase someone else.

We’re in deep do-do.

(Photo above Copyright CBS News.)

Unbridled Fear and Wretched Excess

The media are doing what they do best; whipping up a great deal of fear and uncertainty about Hurricane Irene and where it may go and what it may do.

I am watching with more than passing interest, hundreds of miles from the path of any hurricane, as our daughter now lives in Yonkers, New York (NYC metro) and one of my closest, lifelong friends and his family live on Staten Island.

I had the mandatory parental chat with our daughter this morning (electronically, as did her mother last night – nobody really talks to anybody that much any more) and dispensed the usual parental advice, which boils down to what Mayor Bloomberg said: prepare for the worst and hope for the best.  She’s a smart young woman and she’ll do what’s appropriate; and, as the daughter of parents who’ve worked in media all their lives, she understands that the media’s default position is “excess”.

I’ll be interested to see if she actually calls us Sunday night or Monday (and whether or not she’ll be able to).  She did call after the earthquake earlier this week.  She works on the 8^th floor of a building in White Plains, and when stuff started rockin’, she and everybody else evacuated the building.  Knowing I’d been through three earthquakes in my southern California years, she wanted to compare notes.

In our chat this morning, I mentioned that I’d been through a hurricane (New Orleans, 1987), and when we were told to evacuate, we did…went up to Baton Rouge for a few days and came home to broken widows, water in the house, a tree leaning against our rear balcony and one that smashed our outbuilding, and a ‘frig full of food that had to be tossed, because the power was out for a couple days.  I asked her to imagine what it would be like to have no power for a couple or three days, no way to charge her cell phone, etc. and to plan appropriately.

It was just a year ago today at 5 AM that she (and her BFF Breanna, who rode along to keep her company and then flew back to Madison) pulled up stakes and headed off to grad school in New Rochelle.  And a few days after she arrived and unpacked, Hurricane Earl grazed Long Island Sound and dumped a lot of rain on New York.

We concluded our chat with the hope that on Monday we’d be laughing about it, and how the media would be screaming “New York City Dodged A Bullet!!!” and talking about what MIGHT have happened.

I hope so.

9-11 Memorial FAIL

Ten years later….all there is, is a hole in the ground, with a collection of construction workers and a handful of pieces of heavy equipment.

We’re just a few weeks shy of the tenth anniversary (or, as too many in the media will say, “ten-year anniversary”) of the 9-11 attacks. 

Many of those media folks, particularly the ones who sit in for El Rushbo while the blowhard is vacationing with fabulous people at some exotic resort smoking expensive cigars and drinking pricey Scots Whisky, are pointing to this shameful hole in the ground in lower Manhattan as evidence of the current mediocrity of the American spirit.  (Though this assertion, which originated, I believe, with Mark Steyn, flies in the face of the “American Exceptionalism” which is a keystone of the Limbaugh doctrine.)

Thing is, these hard right-wingers have a point here.

I think it is shameful and disgusting that in a decade, we have nothing but a hole in the ground to show for our pledge to “never forget”.  For heaven’s sake, John Kennedy got us to the moon in a decade!  (Albeit with a lot of help from Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and NASA.)

Nothing but petty arguments have surrounded this whole “9-11 Memorial” thing.  Every sub-set of the people directly and indirectly impacted by the events of that horrible day have wrangled, bickered, whined, and belly-ached about every aspect of the “plan”.  Every mewling had to be placated.  Everyone’s ego had to be massaged.

And what you see above is what we have to show for it.

This is a disgusting failure of leadership on many levels.

The Curse of S.I.

Let’s see if I have this right: you DO want your picture on the cover of Rolling Stone, but you do NOT want your picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated, because of the “Curse of S.I.”, which is, if your picture is on the cover of S.I. some bad thing will happen to you.

This old curse was talked about a great deal more a couple decades ago than now.  But there’s a resurgence of discussion about it, because the Brewers have been red-hot, and there this undercurrent of fear that having the pictures of three Brewers stars on the cover of S.I. will cause the team to go on a losing streak or that some injury will befall one of the three.

There was the case of Braves (back when the Braves played in Milwaukee) star third baseman Eddie Mathews , who was the first person to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated back in August of 1954. The Braves snapped a nine-game winning streak, and a broken hand later caused Mathews to miss seven games.  That’s when the curse started…with the very first issue of S.I.

In August of ’78, Pete Rose was on the cover of S.I., and his 44-game hitting streak ended that week. In January 2010, Vikings quarterback Brett Favre was on the cover with the headline "Favre on Fire" before the NFC Championship Game and lost, so I guess the curse can be good for Packers fans.  On January 19, 2011, Jay Cutler appeared on the cover, and then injured his knee as the Bears lost to the Packers in the NFC championship game.

There are scores of places on the internets where you can look up the list of athletes who have supposedly suffered from the Curse of S.I.

As I write this, on Wednesday morning, the Brewers are the hottest team in baseball, with a franchise-record 10-game lead on the Cardinals in the National League Central Division.

Fingers crossed.

Sad, On So Many Levels

The picture above, copyright CBS News, was taken at the memorial service for one of the Navy SEALs killed in the shoot-down of a helicopter in Afghanistan several days ago.  The dog in the picture was partnered with that SEAL, and he still has his “jump gear” on – the harness and ring that attach the dog to his SEAL master when they deploy from an aircraft. 

Partners forever.

The photo is indescribably sad on so many levels.  The death of one our nation’s highly-trained fighting men; the bond that forms between a dog and his master; and on and on.  Just sad.

When I first saw the photo, my first reaction was sadness – knowing, as a dog owner, how tight that bond between human and canine can be; knowing that the dog senses that his master, his partner, is no longer with us; sad that the young man in the coffin paid the ultimate price for his service to our nation.

Then, I felt some anger.  Anger that our troops are being misused in these horrible wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asked to be policemen, social workers, traffic cops, farm workers, teachers, construction workers, and all manner of things for which they were not really trained.  Particularly in the case of the Navy SEAL, who undergoes years of the most grueling physical and mental training you can imagine.

I see the role of the SEAL as exactly the kind of mission which ended in the killing of Usama bin Laden: a risky mission where lots of things can change quickly or go wrong or contrary to plan, demanding an almost superhuman physical effort and the ability to recognize threats instantly and react to them, where years of training pay off in the desired outcome.

I see the role of our armed forces as vastly different than the roles they’re being asked to play.  They’re not cops, they’re soldiers.  My vision has them being experts in wrecking stuff, blowing stuff up, in long-range and close-order combat, in assaulting a position, taking it and holding it, operating like finely-tuned parts of a huge and powerful machine.

I see them as a force to be feared and reckoned with, a force that when deployed, sends a message to evil-doers that justice is about to be served.

I do not see our armed forces as international police officers, social workers, construction workers, or anything other than as the finest fighting force on the planet.

I want the death of the SEAL in the photo above to have “counted”….to have meant something…and I pray that it did.

Monday Media Rant: "Efforting" A Recall

The phrase "Efforting A Recall" is the first thing that greeted my eyes this morning when I popped the TV on to catch the latest local news.  My favorite morning anchorman, that distinguished-looking tall fellow with a name that makes you think his family made a fortune in coffee, was talking about the odds that there actually will be an effort to recall Governor Scott Walker.

The picture over his right shoulder (screen left) had the words above (“Efforting A Recall”), with a Wisconsin flag and perhaps some other visual doo-dads.  I believe in TV they call these things “graphics” – or, at least they did centuries ago, when I worked in TV.

Don’t bother looking in the dictionary for the word “efforting”; you won’t find it.  Every time I type the word into Microsoft Word, where I write the original version of these rants, the auto-correct underlines the word in red and suggests that instead I use the word “affording” or “effecting” – both of which are real words.

“Efforting” is not a real word.  The Urban Dictionary probably says it best:

	A made up word used only by newscasters to show off that they're doing the job they're paid to do. A poor attempt to make the word ‘effort’ into a verb. To make it sound like something simple is tough to do, so they’re making extra effort. Often used as a stall when a report isn’t ready.

I’m sure my tall friend had nothing to do with the “graphic” shown over his shoulder while he was reading the story.  And he would never actually say such a word on TV.  But it’s very 21^st century for folks in the electronic news biz to use non-words such as “efforting”, “Med-Flighted” (another attempt to turn a noun into a verb), “tased” (don’t tase me, Bro!!!!!), because it shows they know the inside jargon of the biz.

Sort of like the anchors and reporters who now say ‘talk about you team’s chances of making the playoffs’ instead of asking a question during an interview.  I guess they figure giving a command to the interviewee will have more force than asking a question.

Or the sports folks who say “welcome in to the program/broadcast”.  Welcome IN.  Nobody actually talks like that.  Can you imagine anyone who grew up speaking English saying “welcome in to my house” or “welcome in to my world”?

I’m efforting restraint in not tasing all these jargon-mongers, so they don't have to be Med-Flighted to a local hospital.