I think I dissected the Portland Trailblazers’ current problems, and the manner in which the franchise has gotten to the woeful place that it is today, way back in 1999. It’s inherent in my blue-print on destroying The World of Professional Sports. My little satire was botched by picking the wrong team for victory in the NFL… The Saint Louis Rams went on to win the next Superbowl. But, the NFL is structured under a Commie-Marxist model of revenue-sharing and the like, and the wieners of the league — The Detroit Lions and Arizona Cardinals — were coming off of decent seasons. The league is thinking of jettisoning some of their Commie-Marxist philosophy — with the player’s union demanding a move toward Laisez Faire Capitalism– a move most people believe would be a mistake, for Communism is what got the National Football League to the place it is today — the Premier Money-making Sports Venture in America. For the purpose of MLB, the wiser wise-guy pick would be any assortment of teams that refuse to try to win — The Detroit Tigers — as our Decades long Jinxes are falling away… the Chicago Cubs nearly got to the World Series, and if it weren’t for Steve Bartman would have had their crack against the New York Yankees. The National Hockey League, I might add, has succeeded in destroying itself without my input.

As for the Portland Trailblazers, and Enemy # One for Portland Trailblazer fans is Owner Paul Allen. He and his Company recently announced that the team is hemmoraging money, and they had the galls to ask the City of Portland and the State of Oregon for a bailout. But, I ask you to look at Paul Allen’s reign of Terror, and how the team itself has done. There are two periods of time under the ownership of Paul Allen where the Portland Trailblazers were “National Champion Contenders”. They lost to the Detroit Pistons, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Chicago Bulls on one end. They lost to the San Antonio Spurs and Los Angeles Lakers — and it is this series that I will zero in on in a minute, as it was the franchise’s best chance, and it tells the story.

So, the Portland Trailblazers have a — what? 15 point lead? over the Los Angeles Lakers in that seventh and deciding game of the Western Conference Finals, mid-way through the fourth quarter. The Eastern Conference is considered an inferior conference, though to be fair it would be a couple of years before you could look at the two conferences and say that the entire Western Conference roster of playoff teams was better than any team in the East, and the peculiarities of the Portland Trailblazers would show that they just might be vulnerable to the Indiana Pacers (who weren’t too bad… they won a couple games in the Finals). Depending on whether you are a Portland Trailblazers fan or a Los Angeles Lakers fan, the Portland Trailblazers then either blow the game, or the Los Angeles Lakers stage a valliant come-back.

The next season, the Portland Trailblazers come in with the slogan: “One Team, One Dream.” It’s a far cry from this year’s “Ready or Not, Here We Come” — a slogan that, for me, is an admission that they’re not very good. In the recesses of my mind, I once imagined a sports’ team with the slogan, “Amassing A Destruction of Biblical Proportions Upon the Opposition.” The question of what you’re going to do if that team does not manage to “amass a destruction of biblical proportions upon the opposition” is simply that the team is going to look kind of stupid. As for the Portland Trailblazers… they spent the majority of the season in first, second, or third place in the standings — credibly able to assert that they were “one team” with “one dream” — the dream being “The Championship.” But they started to lose. To everyone. They were in fourth place in the standings. Fifth place in the standings. Sixth place in the standings. They finished up with a Seventh Seed. Somewhere along the lines — probably somewhere between when they were in sixth place and seventh place– the team’s marketing department and commercials dropped the slogan “One Team. One Dream.”

Paul Allen attempted to buy (as opposed to develop) a Championship — future be damned — following that model of mine from 1999 to do so. He nearly succeeded. But when you try to buy a championship, you find out that you are one The Portland Trailblazers were a collection of extremely talented players, and it was said that if you bench the entire starting line-up, you’d have another starting line-up coming off the bench. It was flexible in that way. The problem being — when the team hits a wall, as it did mid-way through the fourth corner of game seven of the Western Conference Finals — there was no super-super start (Read, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal) to take over the game. Never mind that… it was an extremely expensive collection of players. Imagine that they won the Championship. Good for them. In a couple years, you’re going to still have to slash payroll, get yourself under the Salary Cap, get yourself under whatever the heck the name of that other Cap is, and you’ll end up with a bad team that doesn’t attract very many fans to the stands… and, oh, by the way: Paul Allen sold the stadium, having… you know… bought a very expensive, money-losing, but winning team.

Here’s to you, Paul Allen. Everyone seems to suspect that Allen wants to dump the Trailblazers and purchase the Seattle Supersonics. He has gone from being seen as Mr. Moneybags, throwing “what it takes” into getting a High-Calibre team onto the Sourt, to being seen as a Disinterested Carpet-bagger from up north. I imagine if he does buy the Sonics (who have their issues, and whose owners I hear are doing the same stunts to the city of Seattle and state of Washington as the Blazers are doing here in Portland and Oregon), he can follow my Sports Business model again. So, Seattle Supersonics fans can look forward to a team that teeters on the edge of a Championship, either making it or not making it. And then they can look forward to a horrible team. Enjoy it, Sporting Fans. That is all I have to say.

Once I heard that Norman Mailer and his son, John, were going to do Hannity and Colmes, I had to see how that interview went. I have the transcript, and some things pop out at me.

#1: HANNITY: As we continue on “Hannity & Colmes,” the always outspoken author, Norman Mailer, has collaborated on a new book with his son, John Buffalo Mailer, titled “The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America.” Norman Mailer and his son John join us now.
Let me just get it out of the way. I know, Bush is awful, he’s terrible, he lied. Let me guess: you probably want to impeach him, right?

NORMAN MAILER, CO-AUTHOR, “THE BIG EMPTY”: I don’t care. He’s not worth impeaching.

HANNITY: Really?

N. MAILER: Yes. He’ll become a martyr if he’s impeached. I’d as soon see him flounder along.

#2: HANNITY: You agree with your dad a lot?

JOHN BUFFALO MAILER, CO-AUTHOR, “THE BIG EMPTY”: On a lot of things, absolutely.

HANNITY: Oh, boy. Well, don’t worry; we’ll fix you. We’ll Hannitize you. Insufferable, he. You said — you called our president, George W. Bush, the enemy. Do you think George Bush is your enemy? A question that he is obsessed with, as though he doesn’t understand the terms of Democratic Debate being multi-sided. Do you consider Clinton the enemy, a#hole?

N. MAILER: Yes. He’s my spiritual enemy. I’ll give you — I can give you 82 examples, and I’m 83. I’ll come up with 83, tonight maybe more.
To begin with, he wrecks the American language. We’re a democracy and democracy depends on language growing. I say this over and over and over.
One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England. They do.

#3: HANNITY: You are a smart man; you’re a brilliant author. Politics, there’s a lot that I don’t agree with, but you go as far to say, your philosophy is we’ve got to live with terror. You went on and you made a statement about our country, the only reason we went to war — if I could find it here — was to boost the ego of white American males?
You know, Norman, those comments while we are at war, while troops are in harm’s way, while he is the commander in chief Groan, do you not see the outrage in that?

N. MAILER: Yes, I do. So what?

HANNITY: So that’s what you want to do?

N. MAILER: You know, you have the right in a democracy to make people angry.

HANNITY: You do.

N. MAILER: You have the right to speak your mind.

HANNITY: You have the right to be wrong.

N. MAILER: You have the right to be wrong. And I can be wrong and I can be right. I was not mocking the soldiers. I was a soldier, after all, along with a good many other people.

HANNITY: You’re undermining them, though. You’re undermining their leader. Groan.

N. MAILER: No, I’m not undermining them. Bush is undermining them.

#4: HANNITY: People said Reagan couldn’t…
N. MAILER: I thought I’d get my 30 seconds.
HANNITY: Reagan said it’s the evil empire.
COLMES: Hold on. It’s my turn to talk. Let me get John in here. Holy Cow! Alan Colmes is in the studio???

#5: N. MAILER: Can I get a sentence finished? One of the reasons they’re stupid is because they’re made stupid. They’re encouraged in their stupidity. When you have a president who speaks only in cliches — only in cliches — to the public — I’m sure he’s a little brighter in private — but when he speaks only in cliches to the public, he’s rendering the people stupid.

COLMES: You also say in the book…

N. MAILER: One last thought.

COLMES: Yes.

N. MAILER: And a democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They’re not just ipso facto and just go on and on.

COLMES: You the say the purpose of the right in America is to keep the majority as stupid as possible, as they run into less opposition by having stupid people. You basically put that squarely in the right’s province, that they’re the ones who are doing this.

N. MAILER: Yes. Yes. Well, they’re determined to keep us stupid. […]

HANNITY: Get away from the government schools and take the vouchers that Republicans are offering so you can have some competition and free market capitalism.

N. MAILER: Come on. I’m not here to debate things…

HANNITY: No, because I’m going to beat you in that debate.

COLMES: … me he would win. He actually admits that he beats me every night. Ba De Dum

#6: HANNITY: I’ve got less than a minute. I’m going to tell you something. You say 52 percent of this country is stupid.
N. MAILER: That’s my number.
HANNITY: All of you — all you liberals thought Reagan was stupid.
Reagan did the impossible; he brought the wall down. He ended the — the Soviet regime. The world is a better, safe place.
N. MAILER: You going to take up all my minutes?
HANNITY: I’m going to tell you something right now. George Bush is doing the same thing. You’re going to be proven wrong from the prism of history.
N. MAILER: I wasn’t proven wrong the last time.
HANNITY: Reagan…
N. MAILER: Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
HANNITY: Darn right he did.
N. MAILER: We bankrupted the Soviet Union. We didn’t defeat them.
HANNITY: We beat them.
N. MAILER: And look at the mess they’re in now. We didn’t beat them.
We bankrupted them.
HANNITY: They’re better off than what they were under — sure, they are.
Two superpowers. One bankrupted before the other one. And so it goes, and to the Reagan fetishist, the question: how do you propose we bankrupt Iran? Or, more importantly al Qaeda, for that matter?

Well, I see Fox News is carrying on with the Bush Administration line.

I can not find the transcript easily with a simple google search, so you are just going to have to trust me that the exchange went a little bit like this:

Barbara Boxer: In the event of a Civil War in Iraq, what is the job of American/Coalition troops going to be?

Bush: See… I just do not accept your premise that Civil War is going to break out in Iraq.

… Because… um… that conflicts with “Democracy is on the March”?

Why the media is creating this fictional world where a civil war in brewing either under the surface or just above the surface… well, they’re objectively pro-terrorist. All except Fox News, which is not afraid to ask the tough questions that nobody else is willing to ask but which are floating on the top of many minds, such as “Is the Iraq Civil War a media creation?” and “Could an all out Civil War in Iraq be a good thing?”

In the warehouse district of Portland… or maybe I’ll say in one of the warehouse districts of Portland…

Okay, really just a few blocks north of the Rose Garden on the wall of a warehouse front…

There is graffiti that reads “Free Spanish Anarchists.”

This begs more questions than it answers. What Spanish Anarchists? Any specific Spanish Anarchists or just Spanish Anarchists in general? Who is imprisoning Spanish Anarchists? Do you want to free Anarchists of any other ethnic variety? Or is this a tag alerting the world to “Free Spanish Anarchits” — as opposed to Inhibited Spanish Anarchits, if you will. The only Anarchist prisoners off the top of my head are Italian and from the early part of the past century: Sacco. Vanzetti. But Surely if can wrack my brain I can come up with a few others.

I also wonder about the “Lies” graffiti found on various newspaper boxes, occasionally joined with the adjective “Corporate”. I like the “Stoopid” that is written across the front of the box for The Sporting News (in front of PGE Stadium), which I guess means “No diversionary activities allowed under the coming proleteriat Revolution.” Stuffed shirts, those quasi-Marxist quasi-Anarchists. One more question: I see the word “Jacobin” entreating the boxes of some Oregonian boxes. Is this describing the perceived editorial bent of the Oregonian, or the desired political climate post-revolution?

I often buy one of those Fred Meyer-brand Hostess-knockoff pies. They now are 3 for $1, or 34 cents for one. Sometimes a frozen burrito is 3 for a dollar. 34 cents for one. And a candy bar, depending on which brand is having a sale, can be 3 for a dollar — 34 cents for one. It’s a bit tricky to get a sole pound of an orange or apples when they are on sale for 33 cents a pound, but I guess I just have to round it for a dollar’s worth of oranges or apples.

The number 34 is thus a magic number for me, though it results in some vaguely ingratiating troubles. See: if I am buying one of those pies (lemon or chocolate or apple), along with a candy bar (Butterfinger, maybe?) and a frozen burrito — the cost is $1.02. I have to either find a penny, or end up with 3 pennies along with some other change. The “3 for a dollar” is rounded up. Incidentally, if I buy 2 burritos and 1 pie, the cost is $1.01. The first item of any of them is 34 cents. The second and third are 33 cents.

A new CBS News poll released late Monday places President George W. Bush’s approval rating at an all-time low of 34% percent. Many in the media had noted a Bush “bounce” earlier in the year, but now his approval rating has plunged 8% in just one month.

The Bush bounce once made me think that Bush had found his floor, and the floor was just under 40. Need you know that I always thought 40% was more or less the floor for a presidential approval rating, certainly for a second-term president. But now that I think about it, sometimes the 40 cent yogurt is on sale for 30 cents… so floors can be dropped. If I were really desparate to get things to under a dollar I could thus buy the on-sale yogurt, a pie, and a burrito. That’d make 98 cents. And if only Bush had gotten to a 98 percent approval rating just after 9/11 instead of 91%, maybe his approval rating would only be eroded to 40% right now.

Was Bush’s approval rating rounded up from “3 for a dollar”, or a pure and honest third of Americans approving of his performance?

Vice President Cheney’s approval rating, already dismal, still managed to plunge–from 23% in January to 18% now.

I can’t think of anything I can purchase at Fred Meyers that costs less than 25 cents. So what the heck am I supposed to make of Dick Cheney’s approval rating. I think I bought a scarce bit of onion for purpose of sticking on hamburger once for 18 cents… so I guess Cheney is worth onion. I’m thinking that Cheney’s approval rating drop comes largely off the heels of shooting a man. Which, to float back to that topic, here’s the most troubling facet of the thing to me, from his interview with Brit Hume:

Well, ultimately, I am the guy who pulled the trigger, that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that is the bottom line. And there is no — it’s not Harry’s fault. You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that’s a day I’ll never forget….

Why did he even bring up the “other conditions that existed at the time” if not to alleviate some of his responsibility? (The most troubling part of the interview, that of him giving himself the power to declassify information, had nothing to do with the hunting of the lame quail.)

In other approval rating news, more Americans trust the Democrats on national security than they do Bush and the Republicans. This comes off the heels of Evan Bayh’s national security speech which captured the imagination of Americans like no speech since Kennedy’s Moon Speech. (Yes, I elaborated a jibe from Ed Schulz for that last sentence, but you understand the meaning.)

A warning: after that last post about the 1948 presidential run of Henry Wallace, my next post is going to be about the 1948 presidential run of Strom Thurmond. Heck — maybe I’ll expand this venture of looking at third party runs for president in American history. Anyone up for Eugen McCarthy in 1976?

To put Strom Thurmond’s run in context: unlike what you have heard, Thrmond’s bolt from the Democratic ticket of Truman over Civil Rights (scratch that: federal interference in state rights… riiiight!!) is not the beginning of the split into what would eventually consolidate into Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”. (Probably borne out of simply noting that Goldwater won some southern states, disgruntled as they were with Lyndon Johnson’s stand for Civil Rights.

Go back to 1928. The biggest battles of the Democratic Party platform involve the KKK, and involve Prohibition. The winner of the Democratic nomination, a Catholic named Al Smith — the son of immigrants whose most loyal constituency in New York State are immigrants — has an understandable “against stand” against the KKK (who, in their resurgance through the 1920s, split their time terrorizing blacks and terrorizing Catholics.) The most notable name against Al Smith who stopped Al Smith’s nomination in 1924 (and died in 1925), whom anyone remembers these days (what? You know who McAdoo was?) is William Jennings Bryan. And he comes out swinging for Prohibition, and for the KKK. The complicated political legacy of William Jennings Bryan in full force, and Eugene Debs looks more or less correct: “[Bryan] grew more and more conservative until finally he stood before the country as a champion of everything reactionary in our political and social life.”

There’s a rural — urban split here. And Hoover took advantage of the split, and for the first time a Republican cracked into the “Solid South”. Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant Bigotry. Some neo-“Know Nothing” sentiment.

FDR comes to power — the majority faction of Dixiecrats in a previously minority party becomes the minority faction of a majority party — and it has been thus ever since. They lose clout within the Democratic Party pretty quickly. But the revolt is on. In 1938, as Southern Conservative Democrats are making alliances with the Republican Party, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned to purge some conservative Democrats with “New Dealers”. He was pretty sharply rebuked.

Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign looks pretty undistiguishable in many respects to George Wallace’s 1968 campaign. It’s kind of funny. And we run over the same ground onward and onward.

I’m standing outside, waiting the Max train. A couple of Japanese tourists walk up.
“Take this for the Conversion Center?”
“Hm?”
“Take this to the Conversion Center?”
“One more time.”
“Conversion Center.”
I then realize that they want to go to the Convention Center. Except, I can’t think of the word “Convention Center” — it’s as if I’m wracking my brain and coming out with “Convextion Center”, and wondering what the heck a Convextion Center is– so I’m forced to let “Conversion Center” pass without the minor, but seemingly significant, correction.
“Yes. Yes.”
“Good. Thanks.”
As they walk away, I realize I should clarify which train they should and should not get on. “Oh! Blue and Red, yes, not yellow.”
“Yes, I know. Blue and Red, yes. Yellow, no.”

To go to the Conversion Center, I guess you take the 12 Bus up to the Scientology Center. Or maybe get in touch with some of the LaRouchites who will take you to one of their Cadre School / Conversion Centers. Or maybe to that new sequal that’s out to “What the Bleep?”.

From the issue of the New Republic currently on shelves, or being taken off the shelves in favour of the latest issue (incidentally with a cover story about how we must stay in Iraq, so I may well have to give it my “Weekly Standard” treatment shortly):

As the authors, Professors Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter Stone, know very well, Perot was not a typical third-party candidate. Many people were drawn to him, but they disagreed about why they were. When so many Americans were lured to Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in 1912, they knew why: to tame capitalism, to preserve natural America, to extend national power in the world. In the 1920s, those who voted for Robert LaFollette knew why they had to become progressives: to oppose ruthless individualism and competition and to assert the principle and practice of cooperation. In 1948, the voters who cast their ballots for Strom Thurmond did so because they were racists, and those who supported Henry Wallace chose him because they and he were fellow travelers of communism and the Soviet Union. (Please don’t roll your eyes. Wallace’s Progressive Party was a pure creation of the Communist Party.) Buchanan is a xenophobe and a nativist, and his followers latched on to him because that is exactly what they wanted; Nader is a paranoid with an ascetic streak who, like his supporters, wants to bring down U.S. capitalism. There were no mysteries about what attracted supporters to these candidates.

I shall go into Henry Wallace, Ralph Nader, and Strom Thurmond — because I actually have thoughts on all three of them. Who the hell has thoughts on Henry Wallace, Ralph Nader, and Strom Thurmond? I guess I just answered your question. Gawd, I’m weird.

Needless to say, it is comical to look back and see the Socialist Party of America, spear-headed by Norman Thomas, red-bait Henry Wallace, and also to see supporters of Strom Thurmond go back and forth in couching their “states rights” argument here, insisting it’s not about putting the negro down, and then hitting on how we need to keep the negro down the next day. 1948: Truman defeats not only the Republicans, but the Dixiecrats and the Communist Fellow Travelers. My next post will be looking at a 1948 NY Times article on the people populating Henry Wallace’s meetings. Please don’t roll your eyes. Wallace’s Progressive Party may or may not have been a pure creation of the Communist Party, and I note that Wallace was once editor of The New Republic, but his “Communist Fellow Travelers” seem to be rather decent individuals… and that they resemble Naderites a bit, we can excuse that and point out that Gore could not manage to defeat the Republican Party and the early 21st equivalent of Wallacites while unlike Truman he didn’t even have the Dixiecrats to worry about, so Truman is much better a politician than Gore was/is!

Someone left a couple of comments on my blog, and I note that he is a participant and advocate of this movment:

The American Peoples Congress (APC) is an idea whose time has come. The concept is simple – Every community of 30,000 people gets a chapter. Each chapter gets a council, which serves the interests of their members. Every 30,000 also gets you one representative, just like we had at the beginning of our nation’s history. And we experience truly open and responsive democracy for the first time in our lives, using the latest in democratic tools, like instant run-off voting and paper ballots.

Response, via the latest nom de plume for “elderly male”: howie – Americans Peoples Congress(APC)
——————————————————————————–
I like it. The whole paragraph in what it says and advocates.

From the perspective of Fox News, I do not know what the upshot of a Civil War in Iraq would be. Granted, we have easy footage for the type of war pornography the network specialized in during “Operation Iraqi Liberation” (Or Operation OIL)*, to be manipulated with added sound-effects as they did back during OP OIL, and with a week-end perview of the “Sites and Sounds” of Iraq for the week, upbeat music in the background with a montage similar to the orgasmic climax of “Doctor Strangelove”.

But we don’t have the easy storyline. Whose side are we supposed to be rooting for? During OP OIL, we had I believe it was Sheppard Smith proclaiming, “And today the SHIITE Hit the fan!”, those Shiite — being that they’re the majority faction in the country and thus whatever democratic inch Iraq has gotten being the dominant block of the US backed government — are thus already demonized by Fox News beyond repair.

So, sorry Fox News. You have little upside in welcoming on an Iraqi Civil War. Save your good tidings for America’s next invasion, when you can clean things up to make a good patriotic storylind of the USA versus fill-in-the-blank.

*You know, on second thought, I should start calling it by the Pentagon given name — the acronym OIF is similar enough to what you shout when you’re punched in the stomache that it would work just as well.