Month: September 2015

The Gospel according to Bernie, and Colbert

We commit to the mental gymnastics necessary that allows us to abandon the least of these, to abandon the poor, to abandon the immigrants, to abandon those who are in prison.

bernie-sanders-3Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is running for the Democratic nomination for President, recently spoke at Liberty University, “the very conservative, very Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia,” once the headquarters for the very outspoken Rev. Jerry Falwell.

An evangelical responds to his speech, a graduate of Liberty University, who worked on the presidential campaign for George W. Bush in 2004. He compares Bernie to John the Baptist.

He was convicting the Christian leaders and the religious leaders in that university, and calling us out for being complicit in the abandonment of those who suffer, the least of these, and siding with the powerful and rich, the masters of this world. And he was convicting us and calling us out, and we scorned him, and we stared him down; and, with sour faces, we thought, “Who is this wacko, and why do all these people seem to follow him, seem to like him – this wild-haired Jew, crying out from the wilderness of the political left, in his hoarse voice?”…

And lightning hit my heart at that moment. And I realized that we are evangelical Christians. We believe the Bible. We believe in Jesus. We absolutely shun those who would attempt to find nuance and twisted and tortured interpretations of scripture that they would use to master all other broader interpretations, to find some kind of big message that they want to flout. We absolutely scorn such things, and yet somehow we commit to the mental gymnastics necessary that allows us to abandon the least of these, to abandon the poor, to abandon the immigrants, to abandon those who are in prison.

The very idea of evangelical Christians realizing that income inequality, for instance, is not a liberal position or a conservative position, but a fundamental Christian one, pleases me greatly. Perhaps Bernie Sanders IS the Christian candidate.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade had degrading words for Pope Francis while talking with Chris Wallace. “Yeah, I’m Catholic and he could stay home. Some of his comments just have no place. He’s in the wrong country…” The part that is on the audio, but not quoted in print is this sentence: “Capitalism is our savior.” Or should it be “Capitalism is our Savior”?

While never a great fan of Stephen Colbert – the “conservative pundit” shtick bored me sooner than it did my friend Alan David Doane – I was interested in the cultural folderol around the late-night programs in general, and specifically, him taking over the CBS Late Night Show for David Letterman. I did think the Joe Biden interview from the third show was more satisfying than the uncut version online.

The recent item I found most interesting about Colbert, though is Stephen Colbert – Witness. “In this rare, personal interview with Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, Stephen Colbert tells all” about his Catholic faith. It’s cued to his observations about Communion, at about 35 minutes. Earlier, c. 22 minutes in, he explains why he believes Jesus must have laughed; Wile E. Coyote is namechecked. I found the whole piece surprisingly moving, as it shows the depth of Colbert’s theological knowledge.
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Donald Trump Makes Up Bogus Bible Quote To Impress Gullible Christians.

Act like a pirate day 2015

andrew-mccutchenA heart condition hasn’t gotten in the way of Sean Campbell’s love of baseball. “He gets a day full of surprises from his favorite player, Andrew McCutchen.” The Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder “has worked with Make-A-Wish previously, having teamed up with them to give 12-year-old Matthew Beichner a tour of the team’s home field last year, after he signed a one-day contract with the team.”

BTW, the Pirates have a very good chance of making it to the playoffs this year.

ARRRR at Saratoga

From Daily Kos, June 2015:

Iceland has long been one of the more right-leaning Nordic countries… [In 2013], the right-leaning Independence and Progressive parties regained power in a landslide.

So it comes as a massive shock that the last few months of polling has shown the incumbent coalition hemorrhaging support not to the center-left Social Democrats or to the left-wing Left-Green Movement, but to the nascent Pirate Party, which has surged into the lead in public opinion polls due to dissatisfaction with the mainstream parties…

Even though Iceland is a tiny country, if just one nation changes its copyright laws and tries to fight the international copyright regime, it could have significant consequences given the ways that the Internet has worn down national borders. This election isn’t until April of 2017 at the latest…
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Muppet dramatic reading of A Pirate’s Life for Me.

Music Throwback Saturday: High School

The kids know what the deal is
They’re getting farther out everyday

mc5facesWhen my friends and I were at Binghamton (NY) Central High School, probably in the spring of 1970, we made an antiwar video. I no longer recall the plot, as it were, though I remember bringing my Johnny Seven OMA (One-Man Army) toy gun to the proceedings.

We used as the soundtrack a song from the Detroit-based, left-wing political group The MC5. It came from the second LP, Back in the USA.

The album was by produced by future Bruce Springsteen mentor Jon Landau, and predated punk rockers such as The Ramones by several years. It was a commercial dud, and very much unlike either of the group’s other albums or their legendary live shows, where “the group often overshadow[ed] the more famous acts they opened up for. ” But we liked it; in fact, I still own it on vinyl.

The selection used for the video was called High School. Some of the lyrics:
The kids know what the deal is
They’re getting farther out everyday
We’re gonna be takin’ over
You better get out of the way

‘Cause they’re goin’ to
(High school) Rah, rah, rah
(High school) Sis, boom, bah
(High school) Hey, hey, hey
You better get out of the way

One of the members, Fred “Sonic” Smith was married to singer and poet Patti Smith from 1980 until he died in 1994. They had collaborated on her 1988 album Dream of Life.

LISTEN to High School or to the whole Living in the USA album.

Basketball’s Phil Jackson is 70

Life in the Continental Basketball Association was tough, especially on the road.

philjackson_120829You may have heard of Phil Jackson as the coach of the Chicago Bulls, who won six National Basketball championships in nine years, thanks in no small part to Michael Jordan. Then he led the Los Angeles Lakers, with Kobe Bryant and, for a time, Shaquille O’Neal, to five championships.

I was first aware of Jackson, now the president of the New York Knicks, as the bespectacled “sixth man” (first man off the bench) for the Knicks in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But my greatest appreciation for him developed when he became the coach of the Albany Patroons in the minor-league Continental Basketball Association. The team played its home schedule in the tiny Washington Avenue Armory. The games were always standing room only, and the crowd helped make it more exciting. In those days, the Patroons led the league in attendance.

Jackson was hired to coach the Patroons because Jim Coyne, an Albany county executive and president of a new Continental Basketball Association franchise more than a quarter-century ago, had a thing for [Red] Holzman’s championship Knicks and especially for their role players. “He telephoned Jackson during the 1982-83 season to offer him the job that a former Knicks teammate, Dean Meminger, was about to lose.”

On the road

Life in the CBA was tough, especially on the road. Jackson described one doozy of a trip thusly: “Leave Oshkosh [Wisconsin] at 4:30 in the morning. Snowing like crazy. Drive to Milwaukee. Take a plane to Atlanta [Georgia]. Wait forever for a flight to Evansville [Indiana]. Fly to Evansville, sleep in a dive right along the highway for an hour, and play that night. Immediately get in a van and drive to Cincinnati [Ohio]. Get in at 5:30 in the morning.”

Jackson led the Patroons to a CBA title in 1984, his first full year as a head coach. “He then sent Coyne… a polite but firm list of contract demands. Among them: raising his annual salary from $25,000 to $30,000 and increasing his road per diem by $7. ‘I would never put a team in monetary stress for a few more bucks, but I do think you know that I am worth that much,’ Jackson wrote to Coyne, in a letter Coyne still keeps today. Jackson got his raise.”

The Washington Avenue Armory is half a block from 21 Central Avenue, where FantaCo, the now-defunct comic book store where I worked, used to be. So I got to see Jackson and the Patroons quite often during that first championship season.

Constitution Day 2015

Eliminating birthright citizenship… It implies a reckless urge to break down ancient legal principles without inquiring why those traditions existed in the first place.

Close up of the Constitution of the United States of America with quil feather pen
Close up of the Constitution of the United States of America with quill feather pen

Constitution Day is tomorrow, so I found some articles from the previous 12 months, pulling out quotes, to commemorate it. I suggest you read the whole article.

Civics For Dummies: Judicial Review
People who dislike particular court rulings often imagine that this power of judicial review wasn’t in the Founders’ original vision at all; somewhere along the line the Supreme Court just usurped it. But in fact, the Founders foresaw judicial review and approval.

How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment
“‘One loves to possess arms’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, the premier intellectual of his day, to George Washington on June 19, 1796.” What a find! Oops: Jefferson was not talking about guns. He was writing to Washington asking for copies of some old letters, to have handy so he could issue a rebuttal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secretary of state. The NRA website still includes the quote. You can go online to buy a T-shirt emblazoned with Jefferson’s mangled words.

Opinion analysis: Reasonable mistakes of law by police do not violate the Fourth Amendment
The vague word “unreasonable” in the Fourth Amendment is a lawyer’s playground, and questions about what sort of circumstances constitutionally permit law enforcement seizures have thus plagued the federal courts since the Fourth Amendment was adopted.

Arizona, the Supreme Court and the End of Gerrymandering
In the fullness of time, it all wound up in litigation, in a wrangle over the definition of the word “legislature” that eventually reached the Supreme Court. What is a “legislature,” exactly? Is it a body of elected officials? Is it a body appointed by the people to perform a specific legal purpose? Can it be both?

Nothing Is More “Conservative” Than Birthright Citizenship
Make no mistake, eliminating birthright citizenship would require an overthrow of established traditions. It implies a reckless urge to break down ancient legal principles without inquiring why those traditions existed in the first place. In short, it requires precisely the sort of thing conservatives are supposed to be against.

The Five Worst Supreme Court Justices In American History, Ranked
Even amidst this dark history, certain justices stand out as particularly mean-spirited, ideological, or unconcerned about their duty to follow the text of the Constitution.

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