Tom On Baseball

 It's Opening Day of the 2023 Major League Baseball season, and fans everywhere rejoice at the arrival of the Boys Of Summer, as the late Roger Kahn once referred to the old Brooklyn Dodgers. Opening Day marks the beginning of a journey of seven months during which the various teams of young men vie for athletic supremacy. Today every team is tied with 0 wins and 0 losses. As the season progresses, some teams will be revealed as being dazzlingly  good and others  will stand out for their sheer ineptitude. But some teams will surprise and give their fans an unexpected and exhilarating ride, but in the end the usual suspects will almost always  prevail  

Baseball has a broad appeal because most boys and many girls played The Summer Game as kids. We played casual games that were governed by ad hoc rules that reflected the reality of more or less the regulation number of participants, quirky playing fields, and non regulation balls Sometimes even the occasional dog would try to participate.  But the games that we played in the Summer heat, however much they had a special uniqueness,  were undeniably baseball. As fans we root for the laundry. The same player that we loved last season becomes a reviled enemy this year, simply because they were traded to another team. When we played those sandlot games each summer we imagined ourselves wearing the laundry of our hometown heroes. That's why when a young kid makes the Show with a team that he grew up rooting for, it's something magical. In 1964 a young kid from St.Mary's high school in Lynn made his debut with the Sox and hit a home run in his first major league at bat .He seemed destined for the Hall of Fame but a Jack Hamilton fastball broke his face derailed his career The baseball gods are like the fates of Greek mythology in that they can end a career at their whim.

Before I move on I want to refer you to the memorable meditation on baseball as delivered by James Earl Jones in the 1989 film 'Field of Dreams':

"The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again."

Play Ball!

Tom On How We Got Here

  the ultimate reality show is the ongoing carnival that is American politics. The age of the permanent campaign is now upon us. Perpetual conflict is the rule, rather than the exception, and the effect is to paralyze the mechanism of government so that nothing of substance gets done.

Politicians are more interested in building their brands than doing the people's business. They bloviate and pontificate while engaging in combat with their ideological foes who they tend to speak of as if they are evil incarnate. 

Congress was once a collegial institution in which the interests of the citizenry trumped partisan sniping But somewhere along the line, the political became personal, and the country has been the worse for it 

I trace the genesis of the current incivility to the midterm elections of 1994, when the GOP took control of the House under the banner of Newt Gingrich and his famous Contract With America.

Speaker Gingrich was a career backbencher who was a bomb thrower by nature, and he began the transformation of the Republican caucus into rabid culture warriors who were the drivers of the Whitewater investigation that eventually morphed into the Clinton impeachment debacle. 

That was followed by the 2000 election in which the SCOTUS essentially decided the election by stopping the process in it's tracks and essentially awarding the race to the Republican, George W Bush.

The two notable takeaways from that race was first: that the assertions made by the SCOTUS  in Bush v Gore were not to be considered a precedent, which is judge speak for admitting that the court had their thumb on the scales of justice

in this instance and second: Mr Gore's elegant concession to Gov Bush in an acknowledgement that, to continue litigating the matter would not be in the interests of the American people.

After that we saw the emergence of the Tea Party, which begat the Freedom Caucus, a proliferation of Conspiracy theorists, grifters, and insurrectionists that have seized control of the Republican Party.

Monday Morning Smile

 

Tom on Desantis

 A few years ago, my older brother and I reconnected after a 30 years.  I moved to New Orleans in 1975 and he married and remained in our home town, with 2 other siblings.

Fast forward to 2020, a facebook friend contacted me to let me know my brother had health problems and he needed to have a leg amputated.  At the end of this health scare, my brother lost both legs.  

It was during this time we started communicating via email and facebook. My brother has lived his life studying everything that interested him.  He's a master with words and his memory is incredible, unlike mine.  :)

What I'm getting at is that I'm going to share some parts of the emails I get from him that make me think and smile.  I hope you enjoy them.

In this email, he talks about ron desantis:  

 I've said it before and I'll say it again that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn't ready for primetime with respect to a rumored 2024 presidential run. 

Waging a kulturekampf,  ('Culture Struggle',or culture war. It sounds more like the censorious nonsense that it really is when you say it in German), on cartoon mice, Black and gay schoolchildren, and the forces of the 'Woke Rebellion', which is said to be an attempt by proponents of the 'Gay Agenda' and 'Extreme Liberalism' to 'Cram' their values down the throats of God-Fearing Christian parents.  

Most thinking people see this sort of worldview as the paranoid fantasies of Christian Nationalists and the delusional conspiracy theorists that seem to be as thick on the ground in the Sunshine State as palmetto bugs which, as you probably know, are simply cockroaches with prettified names.  

          DeSantis recently referred to the ongoing Russo-Ukranian war as a "territorial dispute" and marked himself as antithetical to what most people would view as core American values.  DeSantis is an autocrat in the making and he seems to reject long-established Constitutional protections that have served America well.  He apparently does not believe  in such outdated concepts as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and The Right to Free Assembly.  And while he claims to believe in the Freedom of Religion,but only certain religions with certain political views.  

I also detect more than a whiff of anti-semetism coming off of DeSantis in the way that he conflates Progressivism with George Soros and the Jews who some believe control the world.

Evil begins with a  little seed that is nourished by the words and actions of people like Ron DeSantis and his followers; of Donald Trump and his floridly    anti-semitic dinner guests of a few months ago; of Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Green's  assertion that California wildfires were caused by Jewish  Space lasers operated by members of the, (Jewish), Rothschild Banking family for the benefit of shadowy financial interests.  That's where we are now,and that's why. I'm afraid.  Because that little seed is growing like kudzu.  

Monday Morning Smile

 

Hold Him Accountable For Collusion

 

A Special Place in Hell

 I clearly remember this happening and have known something like this took place.  #FuckTheGOP, #FuckRonaldReagan

UPDATE: Saturday, Mar 18, 2023 · 8:39:00 PM CDT · Mark Sumner

Ben Barnes is 84, but in 1980 he was the youngest speaker of the Texas  youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and on his way to becoming lieutenant governor. He was also a close ally of former Texas Gov. John Connally. At Connolly’s request, Barnes took on a very special role in 1980—travel the Middle East and convince Iran to not release U.S. hostages, so that Ronald Reagan could beat Jimmy Carter.

As The New York Times reports, Barnes has sat on this story for the last 43 years. However, with President Carter currently in hospice care, Barnes has decided to reveal the plot, and the role he played in sabotaging Carter’s campaign.

“History needs to know that this happened,” said Mr. Barnes. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

The plot was simple enough. Connally and Barnes traveled “to one Middle Eastern capital after another” over the summer of 1980, as U.S. hostages were being held in Tehran. On every one of those stops, they passed along the same message for the new leadership in Iran: Don’t make a deal with Carter. Wait for Reagan. He’ll give you a much better deal.

When they arrived back in the United States, Connolly checked in with Reagan’s campaign chair, and future Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Casey. For his role in “torpedoing” Carter’s chance at reelection, Connolly hoped to be rewarded with the job of Secretary of State. He was not.

Completely ignored in this strategy was that every day of captivity put the lives and health of the hostages in Iran at risk. In addition, the military planned and attempted to execute a rescue operation in which eight U.S. service members died and another four were injured. Prolonging the crisis created a risk every day to the lives of those in Iran, and to members of the U.S. military. It also created ongoing harm to U.S. standing abroad and to national security in general.

Previous investigations into suspicions that Iran has been pressured to wait until after the election to make a deal had focused on the idea that Casey met directly with representatives from Iran. They had not focused on Connally or how messages might have been passed along through other officials in the Middle East. Multiple people confirmed that Barnes had told them all or part of the story at the time, and a check of flight records shows that Connally traveled to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel in July of 1980 on what he called “private business.”

A note found in Connally’s records, taken in the middle of that trip, shows how closely he was coordinating with the Reagan campaign:

“Nancy Reagan called—they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strategy meetings.” 

The Iranian government announced the release of the hostages after the election. Jimmy Carter was there to welcome them home on what should have been the first day of his second term, but was instead his last day in office.

Ronald Reagan would go on to eight years of deceiving the public, destroying the nation’s infrastructure, and promoting a racist, misogynist, anti-gay agenda that would metastasize into the modern Republican Party. And he got there just the way most people always suspected he did.

Who are the ACTUAL Pedophiles

 

Monday Morning Smile

 

So It's Come to This

 

Happy International Womens Day