It's gettin' close, Christmas is.
AND IN THE SPIRIT of the Yuletide season, we present Robert Earl Keen's "Merry Christmas From the Family." Because, you know, he wadn't making that s*** up.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) thinks that President-elect Obama picked same-sex marriage opponent Rick Warren to give the inauguration invocation because Obama "overestimates" his ability to unify people.FRANKLY, FRANK underestimates his ability to annoy the s*** out of people.
"Oh, I believe that he overestimates his ability to get people to put aside fundamental differences," said Frank, the first House member to come out of the closet voluntarily.
Frank, on MSNBC on Monday, said that he's delighted Obama was elected and that the country is headed into the "best time" for public policy since the New Deal.
"But my one question is, I think he overestimates his ability to take people, particularly our colleagues on the right, and, sort of, charm them into being nice," Frank said. "I know he talks about being post-partisan. But I've worked, frankly, with Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, the current Republican leadership. The current Republican leadership in the House repudiated George Bush. I don't know why Mr. Obama thinks he's going to have them better than George Bush."
Before Monty Python, there was Jack Benny. Warped and absurd doesn't just come from nowhere, you know.
And sometimes, prime-time television in White Bread America (which is what we, today, assume what all of America must have been in December 1960, when the episode of The Jack Benny Program aired) was just downright twisted. So twisted there would be hell to pay if it aired today.
I'D TELL YOU how twisted, but that would give away the plot. And the jokes.
No, in the New Edgy Millennium, you can rhapsodize about giving your baby "D*** in a Box," but you can't show this.
In 2008, you can go just so far. We have standards of decency, you know. Some things still are offensive.
But if you can't be offensive at Christmastime, though, when can you in the New Edgy Millennium?
Strike a blow for freedom of expression. Watch.
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In Louisiana, you're OK, I guess, so long as you're posting stuff critical of the gay-rights movement.
A commenter on my last post had this advice for me: "Please post more like this rather than the anti-Louisiana stuff, okay?"
Not a chance.
Not when there's so much "anti-Louisiana stuff" to choose from. Not when it's so factually irrefutable. Not when the "anti-Louisiana stuff" usually is about things so egregious they take Nebraskans' breath away -- just as they do others unfamiliar with the state's certain reductio ad absurdum je ne sais quoi.
THERE'S NOT a chance in hell I'll quit posting the "anti-Louisiana stuff" so long as, for example, Louisiana vigilantes can kill a man just for being black . . . and Louisianians are OK with that. Naturally, the latest "anti-Louisiana stuff" -- the latest "anti-Louisiana" horror, actually -- has bubbled up from New Orleans like so much swamp gas . . . straight into the pages of the latest edition of The Nation:
The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.IN MUCH of this country after a natural disaster, sworn law officers wait to see evidence of looting, take the looters into custody and then read them their Miranda rights.
It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.
The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.
Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"
The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."
(snip)
During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored-car driver for the Brink's company and living in a rented duplex about a mile from Algiers Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out windows, pitching a hefty pine tree limb through the roof and dumping rain on Herrington's possessions. On the day of the shooting, Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape the stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point ferry terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.
Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer.... I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."
Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.
Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. "I was bleeding pretty bad from my neck area," he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup truck, he begged them for help. "I said, Help me, help me--I'm shot," Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, "Get away from this truck, nigger. We're not gonna help you. We're liable to kill you ourselves." My God, thought Herrington, what's going on out here?
He managed to stumble back to a neighbor's house, collapsing on the front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where, medical records show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays found "metallic buckshot" scattered throughout his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as "at least seven [pellets] in the right neck." Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery.
"It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun," says Charles Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. "If he hadn't gotten to the hospital, he wouldn't have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it."
After three days in the hospital, which lacked running water, air conditioning and functional toilets, Herrington was shuttled to a medical facility in Baton Rouge. When he returned to New Orleans months later, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station, whose officers patrol the west bank, and learned there was no police report documenting the attack. Herrington, who now has a wide scar stretching the length of his neck, says the officers he spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story, a fact that still bothers him. "If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was willing to go out shooting white guys, the police would be up there real quick," he says. "I feel these guys should definitely be held accountable. These guys had absolutely no right to do what they did."
Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."THE PROBLEM with Louisiana is that Louisianians are more upset that their dirty laundry gets aired than they are that their laundry is so dirty in the first place. I don't know how you fix such a culture.
Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"
He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."
Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."
Within that community the gunmen enjoyed wide support. In an outtake from the documentary, a group of white Algiers Point residents gathers to celebrate the arrival of military troops sent to police the area. Addressing the crowd, one local praises the vigilantes for holding the neighborhood together until the Army Humvees trundled into town, noting that some of the militia figures are present at the party. "You all know who you are," the man says. "And I'm proud of every one of you all." Cheering and applause erupts from the assembled locals.
Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."
"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful" -- her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."
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President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday defended his choice of a popular evangelical minister to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, rejecting criticism that it slights gays.ACTUALLY, the word I heard thrown around was "bigot." That's the label you're hung with by the agents of one-way "tolerance" if you are so gauche to believe some fundamental tenets of historical Christianity.
The selection of Pastor Rick Warren brought objections from gay rights advocates, who strongly supported Obama during the election campaign. The advocates are angry over Warren's backing of a California ballot initiative banning gay marriage. That measure was approved by voters last month.
But Obama told reporters in Chicago that America needs to "come together," even when there's disagreement on social issues. "That dialogue is part of what my campaign is all about," he said.
Obama also said he's known to be a "fierce advocate for equality" for gays and lesbians, and will remain so.
Warren, a best-selling author and leader of a Southern California megachurch, is one of a new breed of evangelicals who stress the need for action on social issues such as reducing poverty and protecting the environment, alongside traditional theological themes.
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization, said Warren's opposition to gay marriage is a sign of intolerance.
"The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament."THE SECULAR notion of marriage hews pretty closely to this view, not because the state is in the religion business, but because the state -- historically -- has recognized fundamental realities when it is confronted with them. To ignore fundamental realities, and basic biology and sociology, is to reap the whirlwind.
Being in radio today means never having the right answer to "What have you done for me lately?"
Even if you're a certified broadcasting giant.
ABOUT six years ago, a non-commercial station's production director and program director found themselves -- for some amorphous reason or another -- visiting the studios of Waitt Radio's Omaha operations for talks with the top brass there. I think they were supposed to get acquainted with the folks there as part of some strategic alliance.
Perhaps they were even supposed to learn something as they got the nickel tour.
As the two waited in the lobby, local radio fixture Steve Brown came breezing into the studios for his midmorning "Talk of the Town" show on news-talk KKAR. I think it would be fair to describe Brown that day as "ruddy" and a little bit rumpled.
The non-comm program director was new to town. Wouldn't have known Steve Brown if the man had run over him with a busload of KOIL "Good Guys." Didn't care who Steve Brown was.
IT DIDN'T MATTER that Steve Brown had forgotten more about radio broadcasting than this guy would ever know. No, he had his verdict, and he was sticking to it:
"How'd you like to end up like that guy?"
Interesting question. Let's see . . . end up as a legendary programmer? As an architect of some of the most successful Top-40 radio stations of the 1960s? As someone who'd recruited and mentored air personalities who went on to become household names across the nation?
Then end up as a successful local talk-show host and voiceover talent?
"That's Steve Brown," the production guy ended up telling his boss. "The guy's a legend. You could do a hell of a lot worse than ending up like him."
But that's radio for you nowadays. "Casting pearls before swine" is what legends do until they retire or die. Sadly, Steve Brown -- legend -- died Saturday at 68 while prepping for his talk show in the weekend wilderness of KFAB's program schedule, according to Radio Ink: Brown, says radio commentator and consultant John Rook at johnrook.com, "played a major role in the early history of Top 40 radio." KOIL under his purview served as a launching pad for Top 40 stars including Gary Owens, Dave Dean, Dr. Don Rose, and The Real Don Steele (a name Brown came up with). Brown also helped in the push to get the music of The Beatles and The Beach Boys on the air.
THAT DAY AT KKAR, Brown popped out during a commercial break to excitedly show the operations manager a ratings demographic where he thought he'd registered unexpected -- and surprising -- growth. The manager nodded, and Steve got back to his show.
"Steve Brown is . . . interesting," the OM told his guests, before excusing himself to put more Christmas music into the AudioVAULT computer system.
No, Steve Brown was interested. Enthusiastic. Still . . . after four and a half decades in the business. If the visitors were there to pick the brains of the "big boys," they had gotten a hold of the wrong brains.
Brownie was the guy at whose feet you wanted to be sitting. That's not going to happen now. Steve Brown is dead.
And so, pretty much, is the industry that forgot how to appreciate his kind.
There stands the glass
That will ease all my pain,
That will settle my brain,
It's my first one too-tay. . . .-- Webb Pierce, 1953
pootypants1 says...HELLO, HOUMA COURIER? I'd like to report a post on one of your news stories.
January 26, 2008 8:36:15 am
Even public school can be rediculuse. I pulled my son out and he is home schooled now. He wasn't allowed to have a jacket cause it had one white stripe down one sleeve(rules say solid colors) Then on top of that he is diabetic and takes 9 to 12 shots a day. If his blood sugar happen to drop to low he couldn't eat his candy in class(even with doctors written oders) he was expected to walk down the hall,down the steps, and to the office where they kept his emergency pack. By the time he would get there he could be in a comma. I have home schooled him for 3 yrs now. Works for Us.
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With schools and many businesses closed this morning, area residents took to the snow-covered streets to enjoy the rare weather.BATON ROUGE now has had more snow than Omaha so far this winter. You have nooooooo idea how funny I'm finding this.
Even as snow turned to sleet, sledders and even a snowboarder slid down the rolling white hills of City Park.
On the LSU campus, seniors Kirk Melancon and Cade Worsham ran around the snow-covered campus fairgrounds with a few-dozen other students.
The two roommates started with photos and snowballs, which eventually led to full-on snow wrestling.
“I have one more exam today at 5:30,” Melancon said. “But I had to come out here today. This is a one in 15-year snow.”
Meteorologist Danielle Manning with the National Weather Service in Slidell estimated that 3 inches of snow fell in East Baton Rouge Parish, 2 inches in West Baton Rouge Parish and 5 in Livingston Parish.
The average snowfall in greater Baton Rouge is 2 to 3 inches, she said.
When Chicago native Chris Horton looked out of his Baton Rouge window this morning, the winter scene reminded him of home.
“Straight up Chicago,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything but being in the Windy City.”
One thing that’s likely to be missing from the final stadium plan is a major commercial area. Though initial concept drawings included shops and a restaurant in the stadium structure, Jensen said concerns about the project’s cost and how often the public would frequent the businesses nixed the idea for now.OMAHA, I KNOW times are tough and getting tougher. And that's exactly why now is the wrong time to go all wobbly on us.
That change is a disappointment to Jason Kulbel, one of the developers of the Saddle Creek Records complex near 14th and Webster Streets. He said he is still holding out for a retail area near the stadium along Webster.
He said that’s essential to generating foot traffic, which is what Saddle Creek developers envisioned when they invested $10 million in the area.
“We’re hoping,” Kulbel said, adding, “I feel like we’re fighting the battle of our lives.”
Kulbel said he plans to make that case before Omaha’s urban design review board, which will review the plans at a public meeting at 3 p.m. Dec. 18. The meeting will be held in room 702 of the City-County Building, 1819 Farnam St.
The board was created in 2007 with the help of Omaha By Design to review and approve major city construction projects, thus ensuring uniform design standards. The board, which includes an architect, an engineer, a planner and a citizen representative, could ask for changes in the plans. It must sign off on the design before the city can issue building permits.
Jensen said a small amount of retail space is included in the stadium design. A store at the ballpark could sell team memorabilia, for instance.
However, in developing the final ballpark plans, Jensen said those involved determined that a stadium would be unlikely to draw retailers and feared that large commercial spaces would sit empty.
Condos and loft apartments, on the other hand, draw retailers, Jensen said.
The Metropolitan Entertainment and Convention Authority, which runs the Qwest Center, is overseeing the stadium’s design and operation.
Roger Dixon, MECA president, said the stadium plans most likely will be further tweaked before the Jan. 21 stadium groundbreaking.
“What has been filed with the city is the design at this point in time,” Dixon said.
Even Cannon couldn't help but find irony of his inclusion on the dais such a group.DEAR AP IN NEW YORK: Dr. Billy Cannon, in his criminal life, was a counterfeiter. Counterfeiting is a federal offense, kind of like a national writer thinking you get sent to the state pen for it. In fact, Cannon did his time at the federal pen in Texarkana.
"You heard all about guidance, leadership, doing the right thing, and there's a convicted felon sitting in the middle of them," Cannon said with smile. "One of the reasons I'm here today: I did the crime, I did the time, and I haven't had a problem since. Not even a speeding ticket."
Cannon did declare for bankruptcy in 1995. Out of work in 1997, he returned to the place he served his time — the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
He's been working as a dentist there ever since, fixing teeth and acting as a positive example for the inmates.
"I get to talk to them all when they come in and when they leave," he said. "I say, 'You know you can make it.' And they say, 'You made it Doc. We got a shot don't we?'
"I say, 'Don't waste it.'"
MORE SUCCINCTLY, the native Louisiana term for this -- basically the verbal equivalent of a Gallic shrug -- is "Well, dat's Loosiana for you!"2 a: the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity b: a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder
3: CHAOS, DISORGANIZATION, RANDOMNESS
Well, to be honest, most of the areas you document were run down and creepy even 25 years ago. The Broadmoor Theatre, which provoked so much nostalgia in your comments, was a notorious s***hole by the mid 80's at least. I saw "Time Bandits" there and believe me it did not have a good reputation even then.HERE'S THE RESPONSE I left on the Abandoned Baton Rouge post. I thought I'd share it here as well:
Louisiana is closer to the Caribbean in spirit than any other American state. It's poor, run down, hopelessly stratified, and half of the s*** there is broken. But then again, that's where its spirit also lies. I lived in Louisiana most of my life and it's impossible for me to imagine it without some form of decay.
I see no point in being rueful about it. There is more effortless, genuine weirdness on some streets in Louisiana than in the entire state of California. Take it from me. A clean, organized, well-maintained Louisiana wouldn't have given us Jazz, the Blues, the plays of Tennessee Williams, or much of anything.
Decay and casual insanity are too much of our character.
Posted by: Teeray in L.A. December 08, 2008 at 11:27 PM
I certainly hope Teeray in L.A. isn't seriously serious here. If you carry his argument to its logical conclusion, we're going to end up reinstituting chattel slavery and importing us some fresh African captives so they can make merry one day a week in a reconstituted Congo Square in New Orleans.I WISH Nina Simone were still alive. She could look one state to the west and write a rip-roaring sequel to her 1960s masterpiece about Mississippi.
Gawd knows what wunnerful new "original American artform" we might get out of that.
In essence, some Louisianians' twisted justification for the state's inability to govern itself for the benefit of the governed comes down to arguing that because God is capable of writing straight with crooked lines, we therefore ought to be as crooked as possible.
That's the *unvarnished* version of these apologists' argument. Viewed as such, it's patently nuts.
If you said as much about the 'hood -- "Let's keep the ghetto as f***ed up as possible so suburban white boys can have some good rap and hip-hop to jam to while cruising in daddy's SUV" -- you'd rightly be denounced as an exploitative racist bastard.
"Louisiana is closer to the Caribbean in spirit than any other American state," Teeray writes. "It's poor, run down, hopelessly stratified, and half of the s*** there is broken. But then again, that's where its spirit also lies."
That's a flat-out paean to cultural parasitism -- exploiting others' suffering to get ones' aesthetic jollies. And there are real people suffering amid Louisiana's trendy "Caribbean spirit."
And they don't have the luxury of hopping a 727 to Los Angeles and marveling at how quaint it all is as they sip their vodka on the rocks.