Remembering 9/11, 2011

I never seem to do anything for 9/11. I know I should. Call some friends, agree ahead of time to get together, have some kind of blast for 18 or 19 of us, but it always escapes my mind. I used to be better organized.

I can never seem to remember where I was on its anniversary, either. Take two years ago: I'm pretty sure I was at a ballgame, but I couldn't tell you one way or the other. I know I published this piece at two in the morning; after that, I'm unsure. The only "where I was on 9/11" piece I've ever read worth a tinker's damn was David J. Roth's, and, aside from that, all others read like the works of self-aware wannabe talking heads who cast their eyes at a burning hellscape and said, "Memorize where you were at this moment, precious voice, because this can be your generation's JFK assassination."

I know I was at a ballgame somewhere around September 11, 2011, because last night, purely by accident, I found an old note I'd dictated on my iPhone for myself, and it immediately brought back the circumstances surrounding it. I was standing in line at a Tampa Bay Rays game, waiting to go to the bathroom.

Where Have You Gone, Glendolyn Beck? Joe Farah Turns His Lonely Eyes to You

Right-wing publisher Joseph Farah made headlines again for making things up. It's not much of a surprise, falling on the predictability axis somewhere around finding out that Lindsay Lohan was arrested behind a Tony Montana-sized pyramid of blow, or that Ben Roethlisberger forced entry to her house and then her pants. Friends of the site might remember Farah as the man behind both the ultra-conservative website World Net Daily and the idea that the birther rappers Wolverines weren't a total embarrassment.

What makes the current revelation about Farah's willingness to make shit up singular is that he boasted about it to a mainstream blogger who was in the process of trying to establish the parameters of World Net Daily's dishonesty in a published piece. Salon reporter Justin Elliott had already written about how Donald Trump's claims that Barack Obama had spent over $2 million to fight lawsuits from birthers weren't true, then turned his attention to the source of those claims, to further debunk Trump and whomever was spreading them.

Trump's claim was based on a series of stories on the right-wing and Birther news outlet, WorldNetDaily. I emailed WND editor and CEO Joseph Farah 90 minutes before my story was published to ask if he thought Trump's comments were accurate, and whether WND had evidence to back it up. After my piece came out, Farah angrily emailed me to take issue with my characterization of WND as "a discredited birther website." Our subsequent email exchange — in which Farah acknowledged that WND publishes "some misinformation by columnists," which he claimed all opinion journals do — is telling for what it says about the standards of one of the most influential news websites on the right.

I really recommend you go read the article, if only for the ample sources of previous made-up-hilarity from WND (including links to a Photoshopped picture that allegedly proves Obama wasn't somewhere, despite the fact that the person manipulating it forgot to matte out Obama's knee).

Farah's crowing about the standards of his own online newspaper damn himself and it for three reasons: contempt, his essential admission that even he acknowledges his own paper's regular illegitimacy, and bad, bad timing. The last is harder to explain, but the first two are fairly easy. In fact, the contempt part is glaring.

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part V: We Start the Pogrom at Ground Zero

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SomethingAwful: DEATH PANEL

Friends, if you're anything like me, you spend your days hoarding ammunition in expectation of the day that the liberal-socialist occupation government rounds you up in the dead of night, blindfolds you with a hood made out of pulped copies of the second amendment and takes you off to die in a FEMA Health Camp. I don't think we as Americans can sit idly by as this specter of totalitiarianism threatens our way of life with math and atheism. That's why I ask you now to view this very important message at SomethingAwful.com outlining the dangers facing all right-thinking people. Please take action before it's too late!

John Boehner
A Bunker, 2010

'The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama'

There's an old saying about journalism that it's the first draft of history. It's still sometimes true. In the past, columnists like Walter Lippman graduated to the level of historian or political philosopher. William Manchester went from the Baltimore Sun to The Killing of a President to a three-part biography of Churchill. Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam's first drafts for the New York Times helped form the backbones for A Bright Shining Lie and The Best and the Brightest, two Pulitzer Prize winners so fundamental to our understanding of Vietnam that their names have practically become metonym.

While there are still journalists out there like Dexter Filkins and George Packer, whose outstanding The Forever War and The Assassin's Gate (respectively) both present something like a first draft of the conflict in Iraq, journalism as a whole loses its privilege to this distinction with each passing year. The first draft of history might now be an anthology called Missing the Boat, a concatenation of Newsweeks and their ilk capitulating whenever confronted with the choice of accountability or access. Our famous first drafts are Judith Miller at the New York Times parroting administration talking points in exchange for high-level access, and the majority of the media during the HCR debate uncritically repeating words like "communism" while spinning the same culture-war narrative the Republican party has relied on for 20 years to obscure the fact that they have no political philosophy outside of "tax cuts."

Obviously, New Yorker editor-in-chief and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Remnick had his work cut out for him with The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.What's most interesting about the book is that he might have succeeded in creating a first draft of history — except at a remove. He's presented the rarely seen credible attempt at objective history, but he's done so with so little showmanship that it may take a long time for people to notice.

'Raise your hand if you love freedom. Notice your dead mom didn't move a muscle, kid.'

Here's the story so far: Marcelas Owens is 11 years old and doesn't have a mom. She developed pulmonary hypertension, a potentially fatal but very treatable disease. Because she got sick, she lost her job. Because she lost her job, she lost her healthcare. Because she lost her healthcare, she lost her (potential) access to treatment. Because she lost her access to treatment, she lost her life.

A month ago, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) told Marcelas and his mother Tifanny's story to President Obama as an illustrative tale of how fragile people's lives and economies are without healthcare. This week, conservatives responded by telling an 11-year-old that his mom should have pulled herself up by her healthstraps and got undead, like, doublequick. She's just lazy. She lies around on her back all day.

Their response combines the best of ignorance, self-serving fabricated victimization and imperial unconcern with the little things, like whether someone lives or dies. Let's go to the McClatchy article on the subject, which describes their behavior as "ridicule":

Fuck You, 2009

You sucked. First of all, Hitler got inaugurated. Then we all lost our liberty. Now there's some goddamn healthcare bill that puts a tax on life. I keep praying someone will just kill all the liberals who are doing this, but first you struck down James Inhofe, and then you tried to kill Rush Limbaugh. Now I find out you took Avenged Sevenfold drummer TheRev from us. You are a cold fucking bitch. You've consumed everything I've ever cared about. You see this wonderful spread of delightful snacks and crudites I've laid out, representing those things dearest to me? No, because you fucking ate it, you fucking fatty year. The only thing you had in abundance was bullshit, from Glenn Beck on TV to everyone anybody ever knew and wanted to forget getting on Facebook and creating more stupid drama in less than 12 months than in all the years since high school put together. The Chinese Zodiac sign for this year is a fat girl in a corset who smokes cloves and likes to brag at Denny's about how good she is at giving head even though the only time people are drunk enough to ask her to do it, she flips out and screams "I AM NOT A SLUT" and then tries to break their cell phones so they don't have her number anymore. Nobody wants to think of what she looks like naked, and goddamn, 2009, do I not want to know what you looked like sober. Here's the first image that comes to mind when I even wonder about it:


2010 will be the year of the potato. We begin by greeting its distilled nectar.

The AV Club's 50 Best Albums of the Decade Are All Wrong: Introduction & Albums #50 - #31

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Fucked-Up Video Wednesday: Now on Thursday

MICHAEL SCHWARTZ, SEN. COBURN’S CHIEF OF STAFF: It’s been a few years, but not that many, since I was closely associated with pre- adolescent boys, boys who are like 10 to 12 years of age...

If that doesn't make you want to watch this video, I don't know what will. Is it a day old? Yes. Is it awesome? Absolutely.

If you don't want to go through the whole thing, here's Schwartz's thesis: straight porn makes you gay, because it turns your sexual desires inward, making you focus on yourself?—which means a person like you?—which means, like, a man or something? (Assuming you're a dude already?)

Glenn Beck Compares Calling People 'Racist' to Taliban's Use of Suicide Bombers

I can't believe he didn't say "homicide bombers." Can we afford to go off-message like this? These people are not suicides; they're not depressed from Seasonal Affective Disorder, maundering through another lonely Christmas. They're murderers. Their purpose is to kill people.

Here's his video, with which I obviously disagree...


but if you want to skip to the relevant part about how those who would use the term racist to demonize their opposition are morally equivalent to Taliban suicide bombers, click here to get right to it.

All I can say is that I fervently hope Mr. Beck does not go off-message like this in the future.


Or the past.

You know, whenever.

Welcome, Massive Influx of New People

The bar graph of pageload activity on this blog for the last five days looks like four faint linoleum bubbles in a row standing next to a sequoia large enough to drive a car through. It's the inverse of Spud Webb in an NBA all-star lineup. It's a simile Dennis Miller would find himself incapable of making because he'd run out of hyphens.

I'm simultaneously very pleased while also grudgingly aware that that big traffic spike kinda reflects on all the preceding days of total obscurity in such a way as to make me look like a bit of a schmuck for all that solitary labor. It's things like this that remind me of a suggestion a friend made that I read one of those Dummies books on internet marketing, and it certainly seems like maybe he had a good point there. But any time I spent reading one of those Dummies books would only cut into my time doing anything other than reading them, so you can see the bind I'm in.

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part IV: The 9/12 Project—Building a Bridge to Nowhere with Fractions of Sense

Forgive my not watching Glenn Beck on Saturday, when he and his Freep-mustachioed army crossed the Potomac, entered the city, cast the congressmen out of the Temple of America and ratified the new Bible of Rights with blood taken from the incorruptible corpse of Ayn Rand, all to finally defeat 9/11. His 9/12 Project came off exactly as expected. By that, I mean nothing happened, but it was really loud, obnoxious and ignorant in the service of nothing.

I can barely handle the man in the best circumstances, and I wasn't going to try while hungover. I needn't have bothered anyway. Beck repeats himself ad nauseam, and there's really no reason to devote new effort to record his mass-distributed hysteria. The purpose of Beck's 9/12 Project is to bring America back to the way we all felt on the day after 9/11, but Beck is mistaken about almost every detail.

At the time, the United States reeled from violent dislocation, banded together to save even the least of our own from the direst straits and in the process cast off political labels for a temporary unity of purpose. Beck's crusade, however, demonizes taxes as slavery, lawful representation as criminal usurpation, Democrats as complicit with terrorists, the president as alternately Stalin or Hitler and pretty much everything he doesn't approve of as apocalyptically dire.

Because I've written about the teaparties of April 15, Beck's live broadcast on the same day and the July 4 teaparties, it's a waste of my time and yours to go into their particular ills with the same level of detail again. What you need to know about what happened on 9/12 are the following three things:

Nobody Puts Becky in a Corner

On July 28, Glenn Beck said on FOX News morning show Fox and Friends that he thinks Barack Obama is a racist and hates white people. This brings the grand total of closet racist minorities outed by FOX and other pundits to two, including Sonya Sotomayor, who viciously and unconscionably suggested that minorities might be more attuned to minority issues than white men. This comment further reinforced suspicions of Obama's racism. How could he be planning to name such a racist to the court instead of choosing amongst underprivileged white males, who had previously accounted for a mere 106 out of 111 justices in history?

You'd hope that cooler heads would prevail, but in ensuing weeks, radical left-wing splinter groups like GMAC Financial Services, ConAgra Foods, Geico Insurance, P&G, Progressive Insurance, Roche, Sanofi Aventis, RadioShack, Men's Wearhouse, Lawyers.com and Sargento Cheese have pulled their ad spots from Beck's show, no doubt cribbing from some Guerrilla Corporate Sponsorship checklist in Mao's Little Red Book. Beck is embattled, or so it would seem.

Field of Schemes: A Glimpse at the Neocon Playbook

Occasionally, we get an IM, an email or read a comment saying, "That might have gone a bit far." For instance, Ezra Klein's recent deconstruction of Megan McArdle in the Washington Post tonally paralleled a lot of what Mr. Awesome had to say about her column, and some readers reacted as if Klein had been infected with a kind of political rabies. One can only imagine their reaction had they read our piece here. Probably something on the order of setting fire to this portion of the internet to prevent the contagion from spreading.

We're not insensitive or insensible to such criticism. Admittedly, sometimes snide jabs here veer wide of the mark or hit it with a viciousness that's perhaps inappropriate. For some time now, I've regretted saying that, "Glenn Beck is such a glutinous wad of overfed white Americana that he looks like 185 pounds of lard and bull semen poured into a 5-foot 8-inch man-shaped condom." Condom was all kinds of wrong. I should have said "tapeworm."

Joking aside, sometimes the content excoriates individuals, but despite whatever attempts I make at handwringing, I can't bring myself to feel much shame or dismay at it. The targets of that acidity willfully fabricate evidence, often in service of ideas that can bring direct harm to people. Mr. Awesome flayed McArdle's column, but the column itself was like watching Harry Lime in The Third Man explaining his indifference to the specks of humanity on the ground, then interrupting his impious sermonizing to shout through a megaphone at them that his defrauding them and their being prey to indifferent death is to their benefit. Whatever I may say about Glenn Beck cannot elide that the man has stood in front of The Alamo and fetishized it as a symbol of armed insurrection, lionized a man who shot minorities in the back and killed them, then turned to his audience with a wink and a smirk that looks like it was carved out of a bucket of Country Crock, as if to say, "I'm just thinking out loud! I'm not advocating anything. By the way, the President is a Fascist because he is a Communist, like Hitler. You know what to do, gang!"

It's nearly impossible to be washed over with guilt at unkind words when these people so readily just make shit up, then couple it with equally unkind words intended to demonize the people they're already misrepresenting with contrived evidence. To give you an example of how thorough and pervasive this is, how arrogantly false it is, how almost proudly full of crap the sort of people we occasionally assail are, take baseball.

Youtube Doubler VI: Requiem for Alex Jones

A friend of mine sent me this.

You can listen to this on a loop endlessly. It actually gets funnier and more beautiful at the same time, due in no small part to the piano version of the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack.

Reminder that this person was an occasional commentator on Glenn Beck's show, appeared on FOX News on occasion, is a friend of Ron Paul and, like him, believes that we will be destroyed by human-computer hybrids controlled by David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Click the picture to play:

Previous YoutubeDoublers

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part III: A Pictorial Roundup of the Obese Shuffle of the Ignorant and Damned

Yesterday, while any reasonable person in America was busy spending time with friends, drinking cold beer and eating large amounts of animal parts, a subset of this great nation apparently began the day with posterboard, magic marker and loyalty oaths. While others entertained themselves, these patriots were busy making sure everyone else would be entertained by them throughout the week. Because it would require the intervention of a bored and capricious greek god to make the July 4th tea party protests any more of a sublimely humorous collision of ironies than they already are.

First of all, you have hundreds of people holding up images of Barack Obama as a leader of a cult of personality, implying that he thinks himself a godhead and that liberals worship him. Meanwhile, they're wearing Sarah Palin t-shirts, other Sarah Palin t-shirts, holding Sarah Palin bumper stickers, holding up Sarah Palin lipstick references, wearing Sarah Palin campaign signs, and waving countless handwritten signs sending her messages like "Run, Sarah, Run!" despite Palin's not being affiliated with the tea parties in any official capacity whatsoever.

And as if that irony weren't enough, there's the fact that her recent resignation from Alaska's governorship so dominated the holiday news cycle that it pushed their largely meaningless demonstration from the News in Brief sections of virtually every mainstream outlet and off their pages entirely. Their hero not only quit on them; she obliterated almost all traces of their relevance to the media. Nevermind the further irony that said heroes' state relies on government pork handouts for its own existence and practices a socialistic redistribution of wealth from energy profits.

Then, just when you think there can't possibly be any more ironies, there's the fact that a group of people who claim to "surround them" (whoever they are) managed to mobilize perhaps a tenth of the 3 million people they commanded on April 15th. Of course, on April 15th, their powerful grassroots movement had been promoted for three consecutive days on FOX news, with over $500,000 of free advertising time on that network, with that network setting up staging areas and on-location shows with live cameras. That, and the whole thing was funded and organized by an astroturf group created by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. But once you strip away niggling facts like no longer having millions in organizing and advertising capacity or the inducement of being able to get on live TV with news celebrities, these groups really do speak with the Voice of the People. About 1/1,000th of them, if we're generous.

There is just so much irony to work with, even at a glance. For instance, you have:

Search String of the Day for 7/2/09

I could probably post about two or three of these per week. They'd probably all be entertaining. I'm still always a little bit awed at how a search string for "Sluts Packin' Nuts #2" can redirect to something like my liveblog of Glenn Beck and the April 15th Tea Parties, but for the most part the novelty has worn off. Not because the searches and their connection, somehow, to text aren't intrinsically fascinating, but because I realize that I will never understand.

The internet is its own beast now, operating via its own inscrutable yet somehow still perfectly valid wisdom. We can either join the stream or wait for its surge to pulverize us. This is something we all must accept.

Still, I have to admit, I'm strangely honored that this redirected someone here. I would instantly read any article whose headline read, "Dead Yuppie Was Sodomized," and while I'm squeamish about going through those Google results, I have to confess some disappointment that I'm not looking at such a story right now. I'm even sort of upset at myself for not having written it. But it's the internet. I will never know. This too shall pass.

Also, since this isn't a very long entry, enjoy this picture:

Glenn Beck Literally Plays with Dolls

At what point does it start being scary for everyone that a headline like that is immediately believable? It's true, but there are probably still a few scattered millions who would look at it and think, "Naaah, that's gotta be some kind of joke." With each passing week, the few remaining Glenn Beck headlines that would cause me to feel doubt about their veracity get stricken from the list. I think all I've got left are:

Beck Eats Live Frog on TV to Illustrate Lesson About Federal Reserve

Beck Dresses in Waitress Garb Like Sookie Stackhouse,

Reads Founding Fathers' Minds for 1 Hour

Beck's Tear Ducts Secrete Raw Cookie Dough;

'Strains of Job Taking Their Toll House,' Say Doctors

and

Beck Behaves Like Normal Goddamn Human Being for 15 Minutes

The last one — it's the last one that's never coming off my list.

An American Nazi and the Rhetoric That Welcomed Him

Shortly after one p.m. yesterday, Twitter became useful. I got a beep on my phone and, thinking it was another observation about how good lunches are, was surprised to see a condensed txt-spelled Web2.0 notice: "Shots at Holocaust Museum." From there, I went to a couple of websites and message boards and began compulsively refreshing, joining in Google searches and sending in email tips.

I'd like to tell you a story about that — about how a handful of Google searches and grassroots reporting pointed up the tacit complicity of the soi-disant liberal media in the creation of and reporting on an American Nazi, and how their toleration, inattention or cowardice creates a national discourse that increasingly imports militant fringe rhetoric that demonizes millions of Americans.

___________________

TIMELINE

1:00 p.m.
An 88-year-old American WWII veteran who styles himself James von Brunn tries to enter the Washington, DC, Holocaust Memorial Museum. When he's seen with a suspicious bag, he withdraws a .22-caliber rifle, shoots and kills an African-American security guard named Stephen T. Johns. Shortly thereafter, other security guards shoot and wound von Brunn.


1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
• FOX News begins its coverage with a crawl that suggests the event is an act of terrorism. On-air personalities speculate about whether the shooter is a radical muslim. Talk flows to liberal permissiveness and moral relativism.
• Von Brunn's name and evidence of his whiteness are released. Shortly thereafter, FOX's crawl re-brands the event as a "shooting" and on-air personalities drop discussion of domestic terrorism.
• Google searches turn up von Brunn's popularity (going back years) on Stormfront.org, the nation's largest white supremacy website.
• Searches of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine reveal hundreds of entries on a site called HolyWesternEmpire.org, to which von Brunn seemed to be the sole contributor.
• Von Brunn's website includes this brief biography (emphases mine):

In 1981 von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal.

The denial probably stemmed from the fact that von Brunn's legal, non-violent citizen's arrest involved his attempting to hold the Fed board hostage with a hunting knife, a revolver and a sawed-off shotgun. Even during his incarceration, he refused to temper his story, sending this racist and deranged appeal for a pardon to then Naval Secretary Jim Webb.

MLB Tonight: Glenn Beck Deconstructed

"I'm terrible with sports."

One wonders why Glenn Beck bothered with the preposition and direct object at all. He uses the fact that Sonia Sotomayor once issued an injunction that ended the 1994 Major League Baseball strike as an excuse to try his hand at extended sports analogy, while analyzing anything that occurs to him. It's the same sort of word salad that ensues when you take the elderly out of hospice care for the day and they editorialize about every thing they see outside the car. Only in this case the person who shits himself and operates barely above a signals-recognition level has the second-highest rated cable opinion show.

I'm not even sure why he writes. The pieces are too short to make a point, let alone five. If they're an advertisement for his ad-libbing on TV, they're remarkably faithful to the content but misguided as brainbait. I suppose these things could just be the 30-second homily that ends his show, or he could legitimately be blogging these things intentionally. That seems hard to swallow, though, because of the the last two dramatically carriage-returned microparagraphs in his piece from May 27 (emphases mine):

In honor of President Obama's new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who saved the world by ending the Major League Baseball strike of 1994, I'd like to end with a little baseball analogy.

(I'm terrible with sports, so bear with me.)

Our government needs to keep their eye on the ball when nominating Supreme Court justices. We shouldn't be looking for someone who shows "empathy." Making decisions based on empathy is a violation of the Supreme Court justice's oath and it would lead to some horrible legal decisions based on feeling, not law.

We need China to stand up to the screwballs in North Korea and Iran over nuclear weapons and we need them to buy our debt. In other words, China holds the key to our economic and military future, so why are we talking to them about global warming?

And finally, the gay marriage debate in California: Instead of focusing on this as a states' rights issue, we are making a huge error by looking to international courts to form opinions.

Right now, it's the bottom of the ninth and we are down to our last out and our last strike.

Will our government take strike three looking? Or, will they wake up and save the day with a heroic three pointer on a penalty shot?

It's just a fuckup of such majesty that I literally cannot deal with it. I don't have the brainpower to navigate these kinds of mixed metaphors. Reading this is like doing one of those children's mazes on a McDonald's placemat, only no matter where you turn your pen, someone punches you in the fucking face. Your brain slams against the inside of your skull trying to process it. You get concussed.

Because I can't deal with that, I thought I'd turn to two people who didn't have that kind of problem, two men who really know their way around both punditry and the sports metaphor. Please welcome our guest analysts, Hall of Fame second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds' "Big Red Machine" and host of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, Joe Morgan; and former catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and host of FOX MLB Saturday and The Tim McCarver Show, Tim McCarver.

___________________
See that's the thing. Glenn Beck gets it. As a ballplayer, as a pundit, it's times like this in life that you've just got to dig in, hunker down in the trenches and step lively. The dustoff pitch might be coming, but when it does you've got to dust yourself off and be ready to do the little things, make the sacrifice and swing for those fences. Keep your eyes on the prize and the ball. The left eye doesn't see what the right eye is doing.

You know, he's a real hard-nosed and small-ball and rough-'n'-tumble scrappy player, Glenn Beck is. This is going to surprise you, but the person he reminds me most of is David Eckstein. Believe it. Really scrappy, small guy, tries hard, albino, cries a lot but they're tears that wet down the infield and keep the dust down. Glenn Beck is a cry-hard hitter, because he hits cries a ton and doesn't back down.

I know what you mean, Tim. I do. I believe in saying what you said. You look at Glenn Beck and his tears are something that don't show up in the statistics. There's no crying statistic in baseball and there shouldn't be, because you can literally tell a computer or a robot to cry and they have to because you programmed them to do it, which is actually what makes them explode, because they're electrical. But David Eckstein—and Glenn Beck, I mean—is a machine. Not a Big Red Machine, like I played on, but a crying machine. He really makes Team America better because he pulls them up by their heartstrings.

That is what I have meant for a long time, Joe. You can't look at the box score and talk about tearing up the way Glenn Beck does it, because the box score doesn't talk about crying, doesn't talk about how he's willing to look America in the eyes, in those calm eyes he has. The box score doesn't talk at all. They're just printed words. You have to get a person to say them out loud, and you can't hear a person from a basement. But when you hear them said, you have to read between the lines and examine the fine print. You know what's printed there, in the mind's eye?—heart.

I'm reminded of that movie about the women's baseball team. Remember that one? Starred Tom Hanks, who was in Big. In Big, he put a quarter into a machine and made a wish and became an adult and he learned something about being an adult and a child. I love that movie because he learned to work harder, to get from first to second—in life. You know who sometimes looks a little bit like Tom Hanks? My friend Dave Concepción.

Glenn Beck's got a babyface, but you know who else did? Don Drysdale. Don Drysdale used to say that he had a big babyface. That's what the other teams used to call him, Big Baby Drysdale. They say he sharted once into second base in the 1963 World Series but was called out on interference for being too adorable. Classic case of throwing out the baby with the baserunner before the barn door could come home to roost like a prodigal wolf in sheep's clothing.

Not afraid to get a l'il dirty. That's how you play the game right. Gritty. Shitty.

I'm sure the jukebox jackdaws and the statistics nabobs will tell you that sharting into the bases results in a 3% reduction in headfirst slides, but not when Charlie Hustle was playing. He didn't care if he had just stolen second and laid down a hershey highway coming into the bag. That's the kind of player he was. Hard-nosed and head first and that's what really inspires a team — that and crying.

I had the chance to play with him on the Big Red Machine with him and Davey Concepción, and I have to say, I think it made him faster. He launched like a bat out of hell into the wild second yonder like a rocket from the crypt, and you could tell when he felt the need for that speed he would sometimes show up at second base before the pitch was made to home, and the pitcher just didn't know what to do because you can't go home again.

Did I ever tell you about the time Whitey Herzog and I were in a Cadillac and thought we saw a portal opening up to the steaming feculent maw of Hell? We were so drunk — this was back when you could be drunk on the road as a ballplayer, not like now, when you have to do more training — I tried to drive into it because I thought I could destroy The Devil with Detroit steel. I couldn't, it was a roadside callbox, but that's especially true today. Right now the two devils are socialism and statistics, because they say the devil is in the details and in his bargains. Right now we're replacing our steel resolve with a weak hand that we've dealt ourselves into a corner. The only thing that can break us out is hustle.

Speaking of hustling, I think Beck makes a good point there about getting gay sex and sex before gay marriage. I think about gay marriage as like the infield fly rule, when you have a man on first or second and then another MAN comes up to bat, he either has to get a new base or he's called out. Unless he's really committed to that new base, and it's a woman base, and that's why they don't have that rule in softball.

Gay marriage is gay marriage, and straight marriage is straight marriage. I don't think anyone believes that gay marriage is the same as straight marriage. California isn't going to call straight gay or gay straight, and it's going to be fine. You're not going to see any lifestyle more taxing to live than an another.

That's where you're wrong. I think that—I think taxes are like the sacrifice fly. I think you've got to take yourself out of the game a little, but it lets the team win. But you can't get over the top of the ball. You've got to go deep. No one ever paid an estate tax taking a walk. Is there such a thing as On-Tax Percentage? No. You try walking in a tax. Rich people do all the little things. Go from first to third on a single. Steal. To be honest, most rich people remind me of my friend Dave Concepción.

When the Game of Life gets confusing like this, a lot of the times you'll see a player call for time in this situation, which is funny, because of course they can't stop time. Some have theorized there may be beings who can experience the whole timeline all at once, like seeing the ninth inning at the same time as the first and thinking they exist at the same time. That would be a VERY confusing way of looking at a ballgame, but I think if anyone could handle it, it'd be Bob Uecker. Speaking of Bob reminds me of a TV series called Out of This World, about a girl who could stop time. Amazing fact about that: the concept was revisited recently in the movie Clockstoppers. Which was directed by Johnathan Frakes.

Commander Riker.

Yes! Who I believe used radiation from the Duane Kuiper belt to accomplish that effect in the movie. Of course, it could harm the brain waves of the actors, making them erratic. That would be very similar to what happened to Joe Theismann, when he killed that guy.

Shhhh. I'm Billy Beane. I'm wearing Joe Morgan's skin like a suit. I get pulled over all the fucking time now.

Reminiscent of the movie Dragon Hannibal.

You can't tell me how much that movie made at the box office. It FELT real. To me. To Me as Him. The world he saw around him was imperfect. He saw the game — America's game — broken in two. Rogers Hornsby, greatest second baseman of all time, and he knew he was a racist, that that wasn't the way it is and that things didn't have to be the same, and he had to unite them, the Two Americas. He devoured the evil of The Other in Blake's vision. He became The Dragon. He had to father and give birth to himself. Self-Concepción. He became the Big Red Machine.

I disagree, Joe. There aren't Two Americas. You can split anything with numbers, but we're a whole. Three-hundred years ago a beautiful negress knelt at a crossroads outside New Orleans and wept to the night sky as she held a single rose close to her bosom, vowing to catch in it moonlight as it fell to earth like celestial nectar. Later she drank from it a tonic of her own tears and the night's gentle dew. Near her, in the brush, stood an Indian chief transfixed by her visage, who eventually girded himself to bring her another rose sweetened by the contents of a found honeycomb. The two later married and the child they bore was the first of generations of a tribe that eventually sired me, The St. Louis Cardinals.

Fuck math, fuck numbers, fuck everything. I want to drink blood. I want cum, piss, shit. I want to fill my pants with my piss and squib down a child's playground slide and fire out of it like a lubricated golf ball going *PUH* and launching out a whore's ass. Fuck truth, fuck a flag, stick your dick in a terrarium and fuck a whole microecology, fuck this gay Earth. I will EAT it. I will cut open a still-living bird and put my face inside it and try to snort out its fucking life essence. This is why I should represent YOU as Alameda County Supervisor of Elections.

Thanks to e-crony Rigamarock, who wrote about a third of the chat bits (the bad parts).