Category: Uncategorized

• Took in “Opperman” recently and, even before entering the theater, it felt like a Cold War, nuclear-Armageddon, back-in-the-day experience. The activist group, “Back from the Brink,” was handing out “Life With Nuclear Weapons: Not a Hollywood Movie” flyers. But it was “Opperman”—not “Fail Safe.”
• Remember G-rated movies? This year it’s likely that there will be no full-length, G-rated movies.

• However this season turns out, heroic or heartbreaking, it will have been an emotional and chaotic Rays roller coaster ride—from a historically great start to devastating injuries of pitchers to Wonder Franco’s legal status to a challenging finish. But it could be even more frustrating and devastating. I can attest.

The year was 1964. My Philadelphia family was gearing up for the World Series. (No playoffs back then–only league winners qualified.) The Phillies were coasting with a 6.5-game lead and only 12 games to go.

And we were big Phillies fans. The starting shortstop (Granny Hamner) lived three blocks away in a Magee Street row house. My dad played with several of the starters in Army camp games. We had serious skin in the game.

The Phillies then proceeded to lose 10 straight, and St. Louis won the pennant. To this day, it’s still called the big “Phold.” The first of those 10 was most notable: a 1-0 loss at home to Cincinnati. The winning run game on a steal of home by Chico Ruiz with Frank Robinson—THAT Frank Robinson—at bat. After the game, came one of the more memorable quotes in Philly baseball lore. Reds manager Dick Sisler was asked about Ruiz’s steal of home with Robinson at the plate. As in, what would have happened to Ruiz had he been out? His response: “He’d still be runnin’.”

• Wander Franco: Play the game you’re richly over-compensated for; don’t be a bling punk; respect others, notably women and teammates; learn some English; and become an impactful, positive part of the community that you are, at least for now, a de facto member of.
• The ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference) is adding California, Stanford and SMU. Is it now the Any Coast Conference?
• Boca brainiac: FAU head coach Tom Herman is a member of Mensa.

• Trump the RICO actor made more unconscionable history by becoming the first-ever former president to have a mug shot. So, instead of debate prep, he just practiced poses to perfect a fund-raising scowl.
• The more indictments (91 counts in four jurisdictions), the more Trump’s poll numbers rise, the more we wonder and worry over what’s happening to America.
• Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has not backed off. “We’re going to follow the law and the constitution regardless of who it helps or harms politically.” There was a time when that was a given. These are not those times.
• “I think what (Trump as the Republican nominee) means for folks across the country is four more years of Joe Biden.”—Chris Christie.
• “The American people are not going to vote for a convicted criminal.”—Nikki Haley.
• Judge Tanya Chutkan, the one overseeing special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump: “Mr. Trump, like any American, has a right to free speech. But that right is not absolute.” Truth Social notwithstanding.
• “In Trump World, incitement + indictment = excitement, plus big bucks.”—Barry Golson, author of “Gringos in Paradise.”
• *Trumpster Congressman Matt Gaetz has said it was his “dream” to become U.S. attorney general. Judge Judy’s chances are better.
• * “We don’t do plea deals.” –Art of the Dealer Donald Trump, still pleading his “witch hunt” case.

• “These are the times that try men’s souls.”—Thomas Paine.
• “My dear friend.” How Recep Erdogan, the president of NATO-member Turkey, refers to Vladimir Putin.
• “The age of pop-up movements and celebrity takeovers in our politics is likely just beginning, I’m afraid. And the time for loyalty oaths–to any party–is rapidly coming to an end.”—Matt Bai, Washington Post.
• “You can’t truly love this country and love the man who did everything in his power to destroy it.”—Bill Press, author of “Trump Must Go.”
• “Ensuring access to higher education for students from different backgrounds is one of the most powerful tools we have to prepare graduates to lead an increasingly diverse nation and make real our country’s promise of opportunity for all.”—Attorney General Merrick Garland.
• “If music be the food of love, play on.”—William Shakespeare.
• “Royalty and the political elite can stay in power until their deaths. … We need an age-limit constitutional amendment.”—Gary Franks, former Connecticut GOP congressman and podcast host of “We Speak Frankly.”
• “Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.”—President Ronald Reagan.
• “In a republic, legitimacy is derived from popular consent. But the only oath officials take is to the Constitution, not the people who elected them (or to their bosses).”—Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch.
• “The most horrific element of slavery in the American South: the ‘chattel principle,’ the legal definition of human beings as property.”—Williams College American History Professor Emeritus Charles B. Dew.
• “You’ve heard me say a million times that I’m not a Washington Democrat.”—West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
• “If you want the rainbow, you must take the rain.”—The late New York Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler.
• “This is a despicable act beyond politics.”—Los Angeles Mayor Karren Bass, in reference to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sending immigrant families to L.A., which was part of a Hurricane Hilary-caused (Southern California) state of emergency.
• “By today’s social standards, which forbid any suggestion of the ‘N-word,’ the right has supplanted the epithet with what it now derides as ‘wokeness.’”—Anthony Conwright, Mother Jones.
• “As owners increasingly turn to electric vehicles, gas tax collections will face continuing downward pressure and, in so doing, reduce the state’s primary funding stream for transportation.”—Florida Revenue Estimating Conference
• “The current combination of three at-large and four single-member districts benefits all county voters. Each voter currently has four commissioners representing them. Switching to all single-member districts means each voter has only one commissioner representing them.”—Teresa Potter, president of the League of Women Voters of Hillsborough and Pasco counties.
• “Our literacy rates are so low. … Our focus is to educate you. Nobody wants to brainwash your children.”—Hillsborough County School Board chairperson Nadia Combs.

Criminal indictments do not prevent Donald Trump from running and even being elected president again. No, that would take an electorate that has finally found reason to rid itself of a narcissistic, verbally incontinent, amoral autocrat who still remains an existential threat to decency and American democracy.

“It’s impossible to overstate the sense of unity and common purpose we felt. Every issue that had divided us as people and as parties seemed trivial in comparison.” That was former Florida Democratic Senator Bob Graham on Sept. 12, 2001.

That was then–more than two decades ago–and that’s what it took—something horrific. Is that what it will still take for a common purpose and sense of unity to come to the aid of a nation embroiled with harmful, hateful divisiveness?

Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus declared the need for a GOP “autopsy.” Remember that? Not exactly a toe tag for the body politic, but GOPsters were losing minority and younger voters, and if demographics were, indeed, destiny, the GOP’s future was in its rear-view mirror. It needed, underscored the “autopsy,” to reach out to nonwhite groups, employ more tolerant language and embrace comprehensive immigration reform. Alas, Priebus would become Chief of Staff to an autocrat who played the racist, nativist demographic cards from which this country is still struggling to recover.

Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus declared the need for a GOP “autopsy.” Remember that? Not exactly a toe tag for the body politic, but GOPsters were losing minority and younger voters, and if demographics were, indeed, destiny, the GOP’s future was in its rear-view mirror. It needed, underscored the “autopsy,” to reach out to nonwhite groups, employ more tolerant language and embrace comprehensive immigration reform. Alas, Priebus would become Chief of Staff to an autocrat who played the racist, nativist demographic cards from which this country is still struggling to recover.

• President Barack Obama’s farewell address referenced the perils facing America as well as a directive for Americans to take responsibility for their own democracy. He more than sensed what could be coming with his unconscionable successor. He thus urged Americans to “show up, dive in, stay at it.” It applies like never before.
• Morgan Stanley has made a “sizable upward revision” in its GDP forecasts—based on an economic surge that includes, most notably, the 2021 infrastructure bill. MS now projects a 9 percent GDP growth for the first half of 2023. Its previous forecast was 0.5 percent.
• Last month 187,000 jobs were added, and the unemployment ticked down to 5 percent.
• It’s beyond brutally ironic that the post-Holocaust, Netanyahu nation of Israel keeps pushing harder to the far right—such that it has been labeled a racist, apartheid state by some political partisans on America’s progressive left. The reality is unsettling and even understandable—but politically unhelpful.
• After a five-year, Trump-induced hiatus, the U.S. has rejoined UNESCO and become its 194^th member. “The return of the United States has a meaning that is bigger than UNESCO,” declared its Director-General Audrey Azoulay.
• VP Kamala Harris won’t be debating Gov. Ron DiSaster on the upsides of slavery. “I’m here in Florida. And I will tell you, there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.” She spoke at the African Methodist Episcopal Women’s Missionary Convention in Orlando.
• President Biden is neither compromised nor corrupt. But when it comes to the sleazy Hunter Biden, he’s either regrettably clueless or a fatherly, “Big Guy” enabler. High-profile, unforced errors—remember the emails and Anthony Weiner connection to Hillary Clinton?–hardly help the cause of keeping the truly compromised and corrupt from returning to power.
• Voter Priorities: Election day should be a national holiday; the Electoral College should be nothing more than an historical footnote; and Citizens United should be overturned.

• Politicians can be like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.
• No more “UFOs.” Because we finally know what they are? No. Because they’re now called unidentified aerial phenomena—or “UAPs.”
• Pronouns of choice? Can be socially and grammatically awkward. How about one for all? She-her-he-him: “SHIM”
• There’s socialism, and then there’s “socialism.” Just like there’s Denmark and there’s Cuba.
• Sign for a smoke shop targeting evangelicals: “Jesus, Maryjane and Joseph Welcome You.”
• T-shirt for the corpulent: “I Beat Anorexia.”
• Palindrome update: “Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog.”