Hate is not a family value. Right?

So . . . do you think this might be a case where politically correct types, in a frenzy to wipe out "hate" -- I'm sorry, H8 -- have fostered hate against the "haters" in the name of "love," only to encourage a hate crime?

If that indeed is the case with the shooting today at what some regard as H8 Central, otherwise known as the Family Research Council in Washington, it would be the most unsurprising thing in the world. When you begin to dehumanize the "haters" in the service of what you hold as a righteous crusade of liberation, you not only have just made yourself indistinguishable from your enemy but you also have unleashed a darkness unlimited by ideology.

The darkness doesn't know "rights."

It could care less about "justice."

Diversity? Homogeneity? It's all the same to the abyss.

I WOULD IMAGINE the extent of one's outrage over the events reported by The Associated Press today is largely determined by which side of the culture war you're fighting for. We're Americans, and that's what Americans do these days.

An armed man walked into the Washington headquarters of a conservative Christian lobbying group Wednesday morning and was confronted by a security guard, whom he shot in the arm before the guard and others wrestled him to the ground, authorities said.

The man was taken into custody by the FBI and was being interviewed. Authorities did not identify the man or disclose where he was being interviewed. The guard was taken to a hospital in stable condition.

FBI spokeswoman Jacqueline Maguire said the man got into an altercation with the guard. However, police and FBI officials said it's too early to know the circumstances of the shooting, which occurred around 10:45 a.m. at the headquarters of the Family Research Council, or whether it was connected to the group's activities.

"We don't know enough yet about him ... or mentally what he's thinking," said James McJunkin, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office.

The Family Research Council confirmed in a statement that the security guard was employed by the group.

"Our first concern is with our colleague who was shot today," the group's president, Tony Perkins, said in a statement.

The Family Research Council advocates conservative positions on social issues and strongly opposes gay marriage and abortion.

DID I MENTION that FRC head Tony Perkins had been strongly supportive of Chick Fil-A and the stance of its president, Dan Cathy, against same-sex marriage?

I wonder what the Buchanan Obama Administration will have to say about ginning up the hate -- sorry again . . . H8 -- to the point where some start to think the final solution is some version of a Final Solution?


NEVER MIND.

It's just different down there

They take their football seriously in the Gret Stet.

And they take it even more seriously than that in Tejas.

Look at this opening sequence for the high school Game of the Week on Cox cable in southeast Louisiana. The high school Game of the Week . . . which airs live.

We have Cox cable here in Omaha, too. But we don't have that. We do good to have games on tape delay, if you can find them.

There just may be a good reason the SEC absolutely pwns the Big Ten in head-to-head matchups.

He has met the enemy. . . .

I hate it when this happens. . . .

As a rising star in Hungary's far-right Jobbik Party, Csanad Szegedi was notorious for his incendiary comments on Jews: He accused them of "buying up" the country, railed about the "Jewishness" of the political elite and claimed Jews were desecrating national symbols.

Then came a revelation that knocked him off his perch as ultra-nationalist standard-bearer: Szegedi himself is a Jew.

Following weeks of Internet rumors, Szegedi acknowledged in June that his grandparents on his mother's side were Jews — making him one too under Jewish law, even though he doesn't practice the faith. His grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor and his grandfather a veteran of forced labor camps.

Since then, the 30-year-old has become a pariah in Jobbik and his political career is on the brink of collapse. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

At the root of the drama is an audio tape of a 2010 meeting between Szegedi and a convicted felon. Szegedi acknowledges that the meeting took place but contends the tape was altered in unspecified ways; Jobbik considers it real.

In the recording, the felon is heard confronting Szegedi with evidence of his Jewish roots. Szegedi sounds surprised, then offers money and favors in exchange for keeping quiet.

Under pressure, Szegedi resigned last month from all party positions and gave up his Jobbik membership. That wasn't good enough for the party: Last week it asked him to give up his seat in the European Parliament as well. Jobbik says its issue is the suspected bribery, not his Jewish roots.

Szegedi came to prominence in 2007 as a founding member of the Hungarian Guard, a group whose black uniforms and striped flags recalled the Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi party which briefly governed Hungary at the end of World War II and killed thousands of Jews. In all, 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust, most of them after being sent in trains to death camps like Auschwitz. The Hungarian Guard was banned by the courts in 2009.

By then, Szegedi had already joined the Jobbik Party, which was launched in 2003 to become the country's biggest far-right political force. He soon became one of its most vocal and visible members, and a pillar of the party leadership. Since 2009, he has served in the European Parliament in Brussels as one of the party's three EU lawmakers, a position he says he wants to keep.

-- The Associated Press

3 Chords & the Truth: Overboard over 'over'

We're all over "over" over here on 3 Chords & the Truth.

What? No, really.

But that's "over," not Oveur. As in captain.

Victor's got the vector, and Clarence has the clearance, and Roger just rogered that . . . so we're taking off for a destination high over "over" and definitely not under the radar tracking tasty tunes on the Internets.

In other words, 3 Chords & the Truth, your one-stop source for audio wonderliciousness, is all over that sucker.

SURE, giving a whole segment of the show over to "over" may be overdoing it, but I don't think we're exactly going overboard over the thing on this week's edition of the Big Show. It sounds good to me over here, and I figure it will overwhelm you with excellence over there, too.

But it'll go over easy and sunny side up.

Of course, this week's devotion to "over" is only a scintilla of the oeuvre of 3 Chords & the Truth over the years, so it's not like we go over the top over "over." Just on this week's Big Show, we also display our overt affection for all things jazz . . . and rock . . . and blues, soul, country and the sounds of my native Louisiana. That's just how we roll here in the www.Revolution 21.org studios, located in beautiful Omaha, by God, Neb.

Eclecticism is the name of our musical game, and that musical match won't be ending until the fat lady sings. Which is good, because we don't do opera. Sorry.

WELL, I don't want to overtax your overwhelmingly ample patience, so I'll just say this week's show is a good 'un. That's all there is to it, plain and simple. I dare say you'll probably be over the moon once you start listening.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Over and out.

Mad Hatter don't care

Honey Badger takes what he wants.

In the end, a source says, that's why LSU football Coach Les Miles did what he had to. To get to the point . . . why do you think they call it dope?

And when that's the problem (allegedly), and when the star Tiger defensive back already had a suspension on his permanent record for synthetic marijuana, Mad Hatter don't care. Tyrann Mathieu's off the team, national-championship consequences be damned.

Some things are more important than college football . Miles knows that, and that's why you ultimately have to love the guy. He's putting his own multimillion-dollar butt on the line to make the point that rules are rules -- and it's not the first time the Mad Hatter's done it.

ASK Ryan Perriloux . . . him and legions of LSU fans who spent several years apoplectic about the quarterback chaos that principled hammer drop set in motion.

Verily, there is no stupider creature than an under-25 male. Double that for certain big-time college jocks, among whom Matthieu now stands as Exhibit A.

Here's what the New Orleans Times-Picayune is reporting:

The Honey Badger's days at LSU are done. The Tiger's All American cornerback and Heisman finalist Tyrann Mathieu has been dismissed from the team because of a failed drug test, a source close to Mathieu said Friday.

LSU Coach Les Miles made the announcement of the dismissal at a hastily called noon press conference, but he would not elaborate on the nature of the infraction.

"This is a very difficult day for our team," Miles said. "We lose a quality person, teammate and contributor to the program. However, with that being said, we have a standard that our players are held to and when that standard is not met, there are consequences.

"It's hard because we all love Tyrann. We will do what we can as coaches, teammates, and friends to get him on a path where he can have success. We are going to miss him."

(snip)

Miles declined to elaborate what the violation was other than team and school policies. He said he felt Mathieu still had a chance to rectify the matter personally.

"We have a simple policy here of behavior," Miles said. "Consequences are pretty (well) spelled out and defined. We did what we could do but Tyrann is no longer on our team. He violated team policies.

"For Ty, it's an opportunity for him to redirect. He's still got a bright future. I think he can reeally accomplish all the goals he set for himself. It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be doable."

DOING the right thing is its own reward. The Tigers' infamously insane fan base might have to keep repeating that one this season.

It's a nostrum that's as true as it is facile, but that doesn't always make it any easier to swallow -- particularly if your priorities aren't as apparently in order as Miles' seem to be.

Geaux Tigers.

When alumni get mad, miracles happen

This . . .

. . . is the last I saw of my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High School. I took these photos in October 2007.

Baton Rouge High is my hometown's best high school -- one of the nation's best, actually -- filled with talented, high-achieving students. Literally, filled with what hope a poor, dysfunctional state can count on for the future.

The facilities they inhabited pretty much showed them what a city and a state thought of them -- and about its future.

THEN enough alumni saw enough of what had become of the grand old school at 2825 Government St. And they got mad. And the engineers told the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board that the piddly repairs that had been scheduled for the campus were wholly insufficient -- indeed, impossible, given how far gone the facilities were.

So, in response, the school board considered tearing down the whole campus -- including the main building, a Gothic masterpiece built in 1926. And Bulldog alumni got really mad.

What grew out of that was a miracle. Just look at this grand tour of the school taken Friday by Channel 2 in Baton Rouge, WBRZ.


FIVE YEARS AGO, I was heartbroken at what I saw of my old school. No more.

Today, my heart soars. Investing in your children -- and in the places most important in their lives -- is never, ever a mistake.

These are the things futures are made of.

Leadership = Never having to say you're sorry

Your new superintendent-to-be quits her old job early because the emails she sent on official accounts read more like Lady Chatterley's Lover, only with dildos attached to chairs.

Nancy Sebring advises you about the reason for her early departure -- and that she's desperately trying to keep the whole thing out of the newspaper. She says she doesn't want Omaha Public Schools board members to be blindsided.

You, the board president, along with the board's lawyer, tell no one. And when it all hits the fan, you lie through your teeth about what you knew. You claim ignorance.

And when your lies are found out, your supporters start to cry racism. And sexism, for you are a black woman. If you've gone this far, what's a little shamelessness?

It must be interesting to be you, Freddie Gray.

ULTIMATELY, your fellow board members vote 8-4 to keep you as president, because the OPS board is more a close-knit conspiracy than a governing body. According to the Omaha World-Herald:

Before the vote, Gray made a statement highlighting her goals and accomplishments and urging her fellow board members to “continue on this journey with unity and purpose regardless of tonight's outcome.”

Gray said she wished to be judged on her entire work, not just the Sebring situation.

“There are privacy and withholding of information rationales that can be debated,” she said. “But it comes down to my fellow board members looking at my president's tenure totally and coming to the conclusion that we are, or are not, moving in the right direction.”

She said she believed that she still could be an effective board spokesman and leader. With a crowd of nearly 250 people packing the board room, Gray's supporters on the board praised her leadership and said she shouldn't be removed for a well-intentioned mistake.

“She made a mistake,” [board member Shirley] Tyree said. “She's going to have to live with that mistake.”

Tyree said she didn't want to disrupt the board as a second superintendent search gets under way and kids head back to school on Aug. 20.

[Member Justin] Wayne said the board “can't preach about accountability if we don't hold ourselves accountable.”

He said he wanted Gray to acknowledge that she made a mistake. If she did, he said, he would be willing to support the board publicly censuring Gray but allowing her to stay on as president.

“I heard a lot of people today talking about mistake. I've never heard Mrs. Gray use that word,” Wayne said.

Kersten Borer made the motion to remove Gray, calling her a “bold and passionate leader” but saying that removal was necessary “in order to move forward, improve communication and regain trust from the community.”

Wayne seconded the motion, but the votes weren't there.

[Member Nancy] Huston said Gray was at the center of “a scandal she did not create.”

“She has been a good president,” Huston said. “She is leading us.”

LEADING YOU is no virtue if it happens to be over a cliff.

Support for public education is a tenuous thing these days. When an inner-city school district starts to look as if its governed by arrogant, unaccountable incompetents and overall moral cyphers, it is only a matter of time before middle-class parents with the money to have options abandon it to the poor and to the incorrigible, who have neither.

Really, if you can't deal with l'affaire Sebring, can't get rid of a renegade board president and your moral compass can't point straight, running a successful school system really is a bridge too far. "Urban nightmare," on the other hand, isn't.

And "pathetic" is your everyday reality.

The cure for Monday

Normally, about this time on Mondays, my advice to you would be to start drinking heavily.

And you ought to listen to me. I've been to a doctor.

Sometimes, unfortunately, drinking heavily isn't a Monday-night option -- namely, because you used up the last of your booze Saturday night. Well, in that case, I recommend this bit from a 1990 episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie -- Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie -- on BBC2.

It'll make it all better. I promise.

I love it when a plan comes together

How it was supposed to work -- and the NASA scientists themselves admit it's sheer craziness -- is exactly how it did work.

And the Mars rover Curiosity just phoned home this morning. It even texted a picture of itself on the Martian surface. Kids today.

Meantime, CBS News and The Associated Press fill in the details:

Dutifully executing its complex flight control software, the Mars Science Laboratory silently raced toward its target Sunday, picking up speed as it closed in for a 13,200-mph plunge into the Red Planet's atmosphere and an action-packed seven-minute descent required a rocket-powered "sky crane" to lower the one-ton nuclear-powered rover to the surface. It seems to have gone off without a hitch.

"We are wheels down on Mars," came the news from JPL as engineers saw the first grainy image beamed directly back from the rover - showing one of its wheels on the Martian surface.

CBS News space consultant William Harwood reports from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California that the rover's target was Gale Crater and the goal was a pinpoint landing near the base of a three-mile-high mound of layered rock that represents hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years of Martian history, a frozen record of the planet's changing environment and evolution.

Exploring the crater floor and climbing Mount Sharp over the next two years, the Curiosity rover will look for signs of past or present habitability and search for carbon compounds, the building blocks of life as it is known on Earth.

But first, the rover had to get there and its entry, descent, and landing represented the most challenging robotic descent to the surface of another world ever attempted, a tightly choreographed sequence of autonomously executed events with little margin for error.

"We're about to land a rover that is 10 times heavier than (earlier rovers) with 15 times the payload," Doug McCuistion, director of Mars exploration at NASA Headquarters, told reporters. "Tonight's the Super Bowl of planetary exploration, one yard line, one play left. We score and win, or we don't score and we don't win.

TOUCHDOWN! In every sense of the word.

Life can be bright in America

Have I mentioned lately that I think Rita Moreno is the bomb?

And can you believe that this woman is 80? Eighty??? Really?

The eighth wonder of the world, she is. And she's here in America.

3 Chords & the Truth: Moved by the spirit

Sometimes, you just have to go where the spirit moves you.

That was the case on this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth -- the spirit was moving, and we at the Big Show went with the flow. I think you will enjoy the musical results of that.

But as the spirit was -- and is -- moving and I can't stop, I can't stop, I can't stop going with the noncorporeal flow, I'll finish telling you all about this spirit-driven installment of 3 Chords & the Truth . . . in tongues.

I say hey now -- hey now -- iko iko I day. Jockomo feeno ah nah nay . . . jockomo fee nah nay. Mairsey doats and dosey doats and littlelambsydivy, a kiddlely divey too, wouldn't you?

HEY! Theresabathroomontheright. Hey diddle diddle, put your kitty in the middle and we'll mmmmmf ! Mmmmmmf! Nanoo! Nanoo! The Big Show!

Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby.
Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, dooby-do-wah-do-wah-do-wah! Well ya wigga to the lef, ya wigga to da ri! Ya do the ooby-dooby with all of your might!

Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby. Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, dooby-do-wah-do-wah-do-wah coz I'm Henery the aighth, oy am! 3 Chords & the Truth!

Louie Louie, oh no! Me gadda go! Aye-yi-yi-yi, I seh, Louie Louie, oh bay, me gadda go!

IBIDA? Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn! Howsyer mamandem?

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

He's on a mission from Jah

Scott Wheeler, Northland Journal

Working in a stout former bank building with windows closed and air conditioners humming, Orleans County, Vt., sheriff's deputies didn't know what was happening in their parking lot until a neighbor called 911. A man on a big farm tractor, angry about his recent arrest for resisting arrest and marijuana possession, was rolling across their vehicles -- five marked cruisers, one unmarked car and a transport van. By the time they ran outside, the tractor was down the driveway and out onto the road.

With their vehicles crushed, "We had nothing to pursue him with," said Chief Deputy Philip Brooks.

Thursday afternoon's incident ended when city police in Newport, the county seat of the northern Vermont county, caught up with Roger Pion, 34, a short distance away.

No one was injured. At least two deputies had gone inside a few moments before after washing their vehicles, officials said.

"Nobody was hurt. That's the thing everybody's got to cherish," said Sheriff Kirk Martin.

Vermont State Police said in a statement that Pion would face seven counts of felony unlawful mischief, one count of misdemeanor unlawful mischief, one count aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, one count of gross negligent operation, and one count of leaving the scene of an accident.

-- The Associated Press

The cops forgot to add the one count of AWESOME!

I mean . . . ummm . . . in the most unfortunate, deviant sense of the word.

Um hmm. Yeah, that's the ticket.

All . . . and nothing at all

Behold Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, the man who has it all. Except for everything.

He does, however, have an excuse-making, enabling mother who raised her baby boy to be a pluperfect, self-absorbed cad. She seems to be proud of this, blabbing to the Today show that her son's penis only has time for "one-night stands."

If you have the stomach for it, here's part of the story from Fox Sports:

American swimmer Ryan Lochte has become a heartthrob over the past few months, but according to his mother anyone trying to lock him into a relationship will probably be left disappointed.

Lochte's mother Ike told Today that her son focuses so much on his career that he doesn't have time for a girlfriend. She said the following:

"He goes out on one-night stands. He's not able to give fully to a relationship because he's always on the go."

This report comes after an interview in Women's Health when Lochte revealed that the most attractive thing about a woman is keeping a "fit body," and that his celebrity crush is Carmen Electra.

Lochte also claims he mostly sleeps naked, prefers sex with the lights on, and when he sees a woman he wants to meet he makes eye contact and will, "give a wink and come back later because it keeps her thinking."

YOU'D HOPE she's thinking "What an ass!" Or . . . "A social disease is still a social disease, no matter from whom you contract it." But that's probably too much to hope for in this day and age.


WAY TO GO, Mrs. Lochte! You sure know how to raise 'em. Not.

I really can't add much to what Dr. Ruth tweeted today. A mother who's "wingman" for a son as he goes around using women sexually, then casting them aside due to being "always on the go" . . . what the hell can you say about that? Words fail, except to repeat that Ryan Lochte has everything, but ultimately nothing at all.

If Lochte represents the stuff postmodern American "heroes" are made of -- and he does -- our end is nearer than we think. You really don't need Chick-Fil-A's Dan Cathy to tell you stuff like that. We presume upon God's mercy at the risk of incurring His justice.

And I say this as "presumer" No. 1.

Sigh.

The United States of Acme

This country only starts to make sense if you think of it as a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Things start to fall into place further if you imagine some sort of superpower client state of the Acme Corporation. And you begin to achieve perfect clarity if you view the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in the personages of Wile E. Coyote, Foghorn Leghorn and Daffy Duck.

Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner? Emigrated to Canada in '04.

IN THAT LIGHT, may I present the latest Looney Tunes: Washington episode, "The Postal Service Runs Off a Fiscal Cliff" -- presented with limited commercial interruptions by Acme.

"Acme Corporation . . . if you're askin' for it, we'll let you have it. But good."

Now we switch you -- live and direct -- to CBS News and The Associated Press:

The U.S. Postal Service braced Wednesday for a first-ever default on billions in payments due to the Treasury, adding to widening uncertainty about the mail agency's solvency as first-class letters plummet and Congress deadlocks on ways to stem the red ink.

With cash running perilously low, two legally required payments for future postal retirees' health benefits -- $5.5 billion due Wednesday, and another $5.6 billion due in September -- will be left unpaid, the mail agency said Monday. Postal officials said they also are studying whether they may need to delay other obligations. In the coming months, a $1.5 billion payment is due to the Labor Department for workers compensation, which for now it expects to make, as well as millions in interest payments to the Treasury.

Some members of Congress are seeing Wednesday's default as a cry for help, CBS Radio News correspondent Dan Raviv reports from Washington. The Senate passed a bill in April to spread retiree health payments over a longer period and to allow the Postal Service to save money by canceling Saturday deliveries, but the House of Representatives has not taken any action.

Congress let the Postal Service delay Wednesday's payment for more than half a year.

Financial analysts feel Wednesday's default could be a step toward filing for bankruptcy, Raviv reports.

The defaults won't stir any kind of catastrophe in day-to-day mail service. Post offices will stay open, mail trucks will run, employees will get paid, current retirees will get health benefits.

But a growing chorus of analysts, labor unions and business customers are troubled by continuing losses that point to deeper, longer-term financial damage, as the mail agency finds it increasingly preoccupied with staving off immediate bankruptcy while Congress delays on a postal overhaul bill.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has described a "crisis of confidence" amid the mounting red ink that could lead even once-loyal customers to abandon use of the mail.

MEEP! MEEP!

Splat!

Dry around here. Real dry.

How dry is it around these parts?

Drier than a Baptist wedding reception, that's how dry. In fact, there's never been a drier July in Omaha.

Is it just me, or have there been a lot of fill-in-the-blank-ever meteorological moments lately? What we could use is a little melting ice sheet to water the parched and cracked earth of the Plains and Midwest.

Then again, climate change rarely does you any favors. As we hear from KETV television in Omaha:

For many farmers, this means giving up on the corn crop.

"The corn has basically stopped," farmer John McNamara said.

McNamara said he's been regularly watering his farm in Plattsmouth, but that it doesn't compare to a good rainfall; McNamara has lost 30 to 40 percent of his annual average production.

"You go to one plant, you have nothing. You go to another, you have nothing, this is happening a lot," McNamara said.

SUCKS, this does. Coastal Americans might be about to get a harsh economic lesson in the importance of "flyover country."

Word to the wise: Buy yourself a big freezer and stock up on beef now, when it's cheap because ranchers are having to sell off the herds they no longer can afford to feed because their pastures dried up and turned to dirt. Thus, the market is glutted.

Next year, however. . . .

Thank you, God!

Because the female breast is so unexceptional, tit libber Moira Johnston makes her living as a topless dancer at a topless bar, where cerebral gents pay good money to marvel at her sparkling personality and towering intellect.

And if a patron might get overenthusiastic about her towering intellect and sparkling personality, then grab hold of her unexceptional tatas, it of course would be no big deal. Obviously, that would be just one more way of saying "Atta girl!"

I'm sure that's how Johnston would see it, too. Because there's nothing exceptional -- or sexual -- about a woman's boobs.

But do you think she ever wonders why the most enthusiastic supporters of her tit-liberation movement are 13-year-old males?

Precocious preteen sucks worse than Roseanne

Parents who let an 11-year-old girl call herself a "singer-songwriter" and traipse through the Texas coffeehouse and showcase circuit need to have their heads examined.

Parents who let an 11-year-old white girl with an OK voice run around oversinging oversung Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé songs in public probably need to be horsewhipped.

And parents old enough to know better who let an 11-year-old girl who isn't do this to the national anthem at a major-league soccer game -- on television, no less -- need killin', to put it in their native Texan.


CONGRATULATIONS, asshats. There's now a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner worse than Roseanne Barr's. It's your daughter's.

You were happy to bask in the reflected glow of your little darling's prepubescent musical specialness. So you put her out there. And put her out there. And put her out there some more, because the fruit of mama's womb turned out to be a singer-songwriter!

I mean, if her website says it, it must be true!

And then you put her out there, before tens of thousands in a stadium and many more than that on TV. What could go wrong with an 11-year-old white girl trying to outdo Whitney Houston's version of a song that to most singers is what invading Afghanistan is to most empires?

Because, by God, people are gonna remember Harper Gruzins from Coppell, Texas!

Well, you got that right. The national anthem done in the style of Tibetan throat singing would have been less memorable . . . and more palatable.

Sadly for you, there's no reflected glory to bathe yourselves in. Worse for Harper, there's no shortage of Texas-size ridicule for a precocious preteen to bear all by her Lone Star self.

Somebody git a rope!


HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.

3 Chords & the Truth: The fundamentals

Listen, people. Rock 'n' roll ain't brain surgery.

If you learn a few fundamentals of the genre, learn its building blocks, you'll be fine. And there aren't too many fundamentals to rock music, even counting a tangential one -- that many fundamentalists are still suspicious of it.

This week, we devote most of 3 Chords & the Truth to the fundamentals of rock 'n' roll. Maybe that should be FUN-damentals, because they certainly are on the Big Show.

Anyway, here are the big ones that I could come up with off the top of my head.

FIRST, you gotta have girls. Without girls to sing about, there probably would be very little music in the world. We'd all be using out iPods to listen to Koran verses or something. No, of all the musical genres out there, rock arguably gets the most mileage out of the fairer sex.

That sounded real bad, didn't it? No, it's not that way at all.

Well, maybe it kinda is.

Be that as it may, rock needs girls to look at, lust after, woo, win, lose and pine over. And on the Big Show this week, we'll be seeing how many kinds of girls we can fit into one set. Of course, the first kind is "bad."

But there are other fundamentals of rock 'n' roll, too.

YOU GOT your love. And you sure got your cars.

And heartbreak. And dancing . . . lots of dancing.

And S-E-X. I just got your attention, didn't I? Now watch me mess with the search engines . . . SEX, sex, S-E-X, sexy, sex, sex, sexual sex.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Party on , Garth, because this is about to be one of the most-listened to episodes of 3 Chords & the Truth, ever. Did I mention seXXX? It's a rock fundamental, you know.

Oh . . . by the way, we have a nice, long vocal-jazz set on this week's program, too. It classes up the joint.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Tweets from the tolerant

This is America, which now means that if you express the "wrong" opinion, the "right" people are justified in doing any damned thing they want to you.

Three words to that, Roseanne: "Eat mor chikin."

With that, we begin another episode of Tweets From the Tolerant, brought to you by the Internet . . . if you have nothing constructive to say, say it here!

* * *

Suck my d*** chick filet- nazi chicken f***ing pricks

-- Roseanne Barr,
flunked sex ed, biology
(via Twitter)

anyone who eats S*** Fil-A deserves to get the cancer that is sure to come from eating antibiotic filled tortured chickens 4Christ

-- Roseanne Barr,
humanitarian

off to grab a s*** fil-A sandwich on my way to worshipping Christ, supporting Aipac and war in Iran.

-- Roseanne Barr,
??????????????????

christian liars: i never wished cancer on you at all-jesus will punish u 4 ur deceit-I said processed foods cause cancer.

-- Roseanne Barr,
angry theologian

I lost two brothers to cancer, Roseanne. What a truly heinous thing to say.

-- Jim Henson,
OBVIOUSLY a hater

Retreading my tweet I realize that I used the wrong word-I shouldn't have used the word deserves

I shouldn't have used the word deserves in my tweet and I apologize

-- Roseanne Barr,
got a call from agent

sex, lies and emailgate

Pity Freddie Gray.

The president of the Omaha school board decided to hone her mad JoePa skillz just when everybody -- and by "everybody," I mean the entire world outside State College, Pa. -- decided the late Penn State coach was criminally pathetic.

Consider this: You've just picked a new superintendent for Omaha Public Schools. Suddenly, your new hire abruptly resigns her job in Des Moines, Iowa -- weeks ahead of schedule. She contacts your board attorney. Something about emails. That they would expose an affair. Fairly explicit. A district email account. Public-records request from the Des Moines Register. Embarrassing.

Mein Gott! Mon dieu! What, oh what . . . what should you do?

Well, if you're Freddie Gray and OPS board counsel Elizabeth Eynon-Kokrda, you don't bother to find out what exactly is in those "fairly explicit" emails. You take Nancy Sebring's word for it that the content is "somewhere along the lines of what most seventeen year olds are reading in Cosmo." You don't even check out what most 17-year-olds are actually reading in Cosmopolitan today.

Also, you assume that a woman who's cheating on her husband with a man who's cheating on his wife is being straighter with you than with them. After all, Eynon-Kokrda tells Sebring, “my thought is you have a pretty sympathetic situation.”

Most importantly, you and the lawyer take what Sebring, the naughty superintendent, has told you and make it into "just our little secret."

Even though Sebring has reached out to you and counsel because “I don't want anyone on the OPS board to be surprised by this situation in Des Moines,” you don't inform a single board member because. . . .

Because. . . .

BECAUSE you feel obliged not to after the fun superintendent expressly said she didn't want anyone on the Omaha school board to be surprised by the brewing scandal.

“We had an individual who ... we thought was being very open and honest with us about something that was a very personal issue, a very painful issue for the individual,” Gray told The World-Herald. “We believed that we had a contracted employee who was reaching out and was telling us the truth.”

In a May 24 email to Sebring, Eynon-Kokrda wrote that she did not share Sebring's emails with board members: “I do not forward your emails because I want them arguably protected and/or not known to exist, per se, but I do advise Freddie of our contacts so she is current.”

In that same email, the lawyer wrote that Gray was the only OPS board member who knew of the Des Moines Register's public records request, through which that newspaper eventually obtained the personal emails.

WHO IS working for whom here?

It's rather interesting, in the same sense that his evening at Ford's Theater gave Abraham Lincoln a headache, that Eynon-Kokrda and Gray seem to lose track of where their primary loyalties lie. They protect OPS' wayward new hire to an extent she didn't even ask for, refusing to give the full school board even the slightest heads-up about her naughty-email problem in Des Moines.

They take Sebring's word for everything. In short, they try to keep her viability as OPS' new superintendent totally intact by aiding and abetting an ultimately failed cover up.

When she resigned abruptly from Des Moines in early May, Sebring said publicly that it was because she needed extra time to take care of personal matters, such as moving to Omaha and preparing for her daughter's summer wedding.

The newly released emails show that after resigning from Des Moines, Sebring kept in regular contact with Eynon-Kokrda, who relayed information about those contacts to Gray as all three anxiously waited to see what the Des Moines Register would do with the volatile emails the newspaper had requested from the Des Moines district through a public records request.

The emails Sebring made public last week were sent between May 18 and June 1, the day The World-Herald and the Des Moines Register broke their stories online.

The emails show that Eynon-Kokrda and Gray remained committed to making Sebring the next OPS superintendent if she could survive the uproar of the emails going public or if the emails never went public.

The three of them planned how they would respond publicly should news organizations discover that the emails were the actual cause of her resignation from the Des Moines job and publish stories about them.

(snip)

In a May 24 email to Eynon-Kokrda, Sebring wrote that four of the Des Moines emails were “highly personal and contain fairly explicit content (somewhere along the lines of what most seventeen year olds are reading in Cosmo),” referring to the women's magazine Cosmopolitan.

In the same email, Sebring offered to resign from the OPS job, telling Eynon-Kokrda: “I would rather bow out gracefully before starting my job in OPS, than be caught up in a scandal after I begin the job.”

She asked Eynon-Kokrda whether OPS would fire an employee who had done what she did.

Eynon-Kokrda wrote back that she would not recommend that Sebring submit an immediate offer of resignation, saying that “seems extreme” and “my thought is you have a pretty sympathetic situation.”

Eynon-Kokrda wrote that she knew of no OPS employee ever terminated solely for personal use of email, saying that OPS informs employees that emails are not confidential and that individuals must “use good judgment” but that sending personal emails has never by itself demonstrated sufficient poor judgment as to result in termination.

“The closest I've ever seen is where a principal involved with a subordinate at his school had about 50 texts and emails per day during school hours, over months and months (thousands of emails and texts on school phone) some of which proved he had inappropriately approved sick leave so she could join him on business trips,” Eynon-Kokrda wrote.

She wrote that if the situation “starts to really go south,” she would recommend meeting with the OPS board “to explain and provide them with the opportunity to circle the wagons.”

(snip)

“Freddie will be in about the same place,” Eynon-Kokrda wrote. “If asked for comment, she will say it isn't appropriate for her to discuss your personal life.”

If pressed, Eynon-Kokrda wrote, Gray would say that while people shouldn't use work email for personal purposes that interfere with job performance, “she is unaware of any allegation that you have anything but a stellar job performance record, and your personal emails and private life don't change that.”

UNTIL THEY did change that. The Register and the World-Herald not only ran their stories about why Nancy Sebring quit Des Moines so quickly, but they ran the worst of the emails, too.

At that point, Gray ended up running away from Sebring like her feet were on fire and her ass was catching. A thoroughly surprised (thanks to Freddie Gray) OPS board ended up accepting Sebring's resignation from a job she'd yet to begin.

The emails were exactly what one would expect from a Cosmo "sex issue," which I presume is just like a regular issue of Cosmo (as read by "most seventeen year olds") only a little more so. Thus, "circling the wagons" wasn't a viable option, as we already had learned low "in love" Nancy Sebring was with her boyfriend's d***.

And the emails got better than that.

UNFORTUNATELY for Gray, the board president's ability to lie convincingly to the press just doesn't get better at all.

On June 1, Gray told the World-Herald "she had heard only 'rumors and innuendo' about why Sebring resigned. During that interview, she said she had not discussed with Des Moines district officials the circumstances of Sebring's resignation and did not know what was contained in the emails.

"I haven't seen them," she said then, "so I have no clue what they are, what they're not."

In a later interview, a World-Herald reporter asked Gray whether Sebring had been in contact with her or Eynon-Kokrda about the personal emails prior to them going public.

“No, why would she be?" Gray had said.

UH . . . lots of reasons?

Unfortunately, some people never learn that when you tell a big one, at least be plausible:

Gray and Eynon-Kokrda told The World-Herald this week that they would have acted differently had they known the actual contents of the emails.

“She never characterized these as graphic, pornographic or in any way sexually embarrassing,” Eynon-Kokrda said. “She portrayed them as not salacious, as chatty, and as emails that would reveal that she had an affair.”

When Sebring wrote to Eynon-Kokrda May 24 describing the explicit emails as something a 17-year-old girl might read in Cosmo, that still didn't cause alarm, Gray and Eynon-Kokrda said this week, because they didn't perceive Cosmo as a raunchy magazine.

TWO PROBLEMS with this one render it a no-percentage assertion -- it requires Omahans to believe either that Gray and Eynon-Kokrda think they're really stupid, or that Gray and Eynon-Kokrda themselves are really stupid. Personally, I go for a third option: Yes, they think we're stupid . . . because they're idiots.

Make that complete idiots.

Here's Gray, back in June:

“For the board, this is about policy violation. It's not about the content,” she told The World-Herald after Sebring resigned. “These are things we tell our staff all the time not to do. It's a big violation to use company equipment and emails.”

BUT NOW Gray defends her secrecy and her inaction regarding Sebring's emails by saying she was misled about how bad they were. That she didn't think Cosmo was "raunchy," so it couldn't be that big a deal.

But if "it's not about the content," as she said last month, who cares? Sebring admitted to doing, in Gray's words, "things we tell our staff all the time not to do." Which, she told the reporter back then, was "a big violation."

And certainly no rationale to help a sister out, which is exactly what she and OPS' legal counsel set out to do. In secret.

The other OPS board members ought to be furious right now. Beyond furious, actually. But the biggest problem the school system faces today is that I'll bet most aren't that upset at all.

After all, if they "circle the wagons," Freddie Gray might be able to survive unscathed as president despite having been caught in more than one big lie. Despite having kept her board, and the board's constituents, completely in the dark about the time bomb ticking away nearby. Despite having proven that her loyalties lie not with her board, or the voters who elected her, but instead with a fatally flawed would-be superintendent whose personal and professional sins finally caught up to her.

If the board circles the wagons well enough, maybe there won't be the unpleasantness of Freddie Gray getting what she so richly deserves -- immediate removal as president, accompanied by the board's demand that she resign her seat.

NO, that would be ugly. Firing the board attorney would be, too.

In that light, I'm sure Gray is banking on her colleagues being "incredibly supportive," just like Eynon-Kokrda was for Sebring, because this whole World-Herald exposé thing is "ridiculous."

After all, "hindsight is 20/20." Yeah, that's the ticket.

This is the end. My only friend, the end.

Knowing the end is coming, knowing why it must be the end . . . the knowing does not lessen the hurt when the end finally arrives.

The Grim Reaper is a giant mechanical shovel. The Grim Reaper would be more poetic if we still called him a steam shovel. The Grim Reaper is just as merciless by any name.

And the Grim Reaper came for Omaha's old Rosenblatt Stadium today.

I've spent a fair chunk of my adult life, seen amazing things, communed with amazing friends in a place soon to be but a memory. Thanks be to God, steam shovels can't touch the ballpark in my mind.

THE ONE where I was sitting high above the first-base line. 1996. College World Series championship game. Bottom of the ninth. LSU down 8-7 to Miami. Two out. Head in hands. Knee jumping. Praying that Warren Morris just doesn't strike out. That he just gets on base somehow.

"The stretch by Morrison, the pitch. Swung on and hit to right field. That's way back there, way back there . . . HOME RUN! TIGERS WIN! TIGERS WIN! WARREN MORRIS! IT'S A TWO-RUN HOME RUN, AND THE TIGERS ARE THE NATIONAL CHAMPS! I DON'T BELIEVE IT!"

STEAM SHOVEL can't take that away from me.

The last Founding Father

I would be remiss if I failed to point out that George Jefferson was a Founding Father. He also is on the $2 bill.


Not many people will tell you the full story about how momentous the sitcom character's passing is, along with that of his alter ego, Sherman Hemsley. But I just did.

You can thank me later.

Yes, this is an oldie but a goodie. But how could I not revisit it on this sad and notable occasion? Jordan Jefferson: The gift that keeps on giving.

Movin' on up

George Jefferson's movin' on up to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky.

Sherman Hemsley is dead at 74.


I THINK heaven just got a little more entertaining with the long-awaited reunion of Jefferson and Archie Bunker.

Rest in peace, Mr. J.

Wings to almost die for

I regret that I didn't go to work for big, booming, powerful Channel 9 in Baton Rouge.

If I had, boredom would be something I'd never suffer, being that my people down in Louisiana are not a boring people. Whack, yes. Dull, no.

Blessed is the reporter who gets to report this story:

Authorities said a woman drove to a Baton Rouge restaurant after she was shot at another location Thursday night.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said a woman who was shot on Hyacinth Avenue drove to the Buffalo Wild Wings on Bluebonnet Boulevard.

Deputies were notified around 10:30 p.m.

They said the Baton Rouge Police Department is investigating the shooting.

WELL, they are damned good Buffalo wings. This has ad campaign written all over it -- the woman ought to get free wings for life. However long that might be.

Coming up at 5 and 6 on WAFB 9 News.

Well, duh!

Yeah. Um hmm.

It's confession time for Rick Reilly. If confessing the obvious is a confession at all.

Yeah, him and the entire American sports "journalism" establishment. Him and whoever is behind the team "features" aired during game-day broadcasts.

"Forgive us, Father, for we've fed the beast, constructing inspiring "narratives" out of -- if not whole cloth -- at least out of the fertile imaginations of university sports-information directors and PR staffs."

The acclaimed sportswriter came clean on ESPN.com about a week and a half ago, right after the Freeh Report set the record straight about what "doing things the right way" really meant at Penn State.

Whoopie.

What a fool I was.

In 1986, I spent a week in State College, Pa., researching a 10-page Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year piece on Joe Paterno.

It was supposed to be a secret, but one night the phone in my hotel room rang. It was a Penn State professor, calling out of the blue.

"Are you here to take part in hagiography?" he said.

"What's hagiography?" I asked.

"The study of saints," he said. "You're going to be just like the rest, aren't you? You're going to make Paterno out to be a saint. You don't know him. He'll do anything to win. What you media are doing is dangerous."

Jealous egghead, I figured.

What an idiot I was.

THESE TWO THINGS are clear, and always have been whenever we didn't have our fingers in our ears while screaming "Neener! Neener! Cancelcancelcancel!"

One, we like to hear what we want to hear. Two, the big business of major-college athletics loves lies almost as well as it does money -- lies grease the skids for "narrative" and narrative is what sells a product nowadays. Things can get ugly when reporters don't stick to the official narrative, which almost always causes them to fall back into line.

In other words, "What you media are doing is dangerous."