All posts by HDLenoble

I am a writer and organizer who is trying to make a positive difference in the world and to make the lives of my fellow human beings slightly better.
Acting, Boardwalk Empire, Character Study, Directing, Drama, HBO, Morality Tale, The Sopranos, TV, TV Writing, World War I

An Empire Washed Away

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I loved HBO’s Boardwalk Empire from the first minute. I thought it was beautifully shot, well written, and had one of the greatest casts from top to bottom of any show I’d ever seen (I don’t know if it’s possible to top a cast led by Steve Buscemi, Kelly MacDonald, Michael Pitt, Shea Wigham, Jack Houston, Michael K. Williams, Gretchen Mol, Michael Shannon, Stephen Graham, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Dabney Coleman among others). I loved how the show could be daring, how no fictional character seemed safe, and how the show would start slowly as each season introduced new characters, themes, and plots, only to pick up at about the midway point and then sprint toward the season finale with each episode being more tense and explosive than the last. I loved that each season wound down with the new revelations and character developments making a second viewing of each episode not only rewarding but almost necessary. And yet for all of that, Boardwalk Empire’s conclusion left me with a bitter taste in my mouth far beyond what I felt for other dramas with divisive finales like The Sopranos, Lost, and (to a lesser degree) the Wire.

Coming into this final season I was upset with the time jump to 1931 and about only getting 8-episodes to say goodbye to the show (which had previously had 12 episodes a season, meaning this year was only 2/3rds of a typical BE season). As the final campaign began there was still a lot to love even if in many cases some of the good things seemed either rushed or too late. For example, the flashbacks showing Nucky Thompson’s rise were very interesting and added a lot of color to certain scenes and character relationships this season, but the flashbacks would have been far better if the scenes had come earlier in the show’s run because they gave us a much deeper understanding of who Nucky was, what drove him to do the things that he did, and how he became the mysterious man we had watched for five-years. It seemed a little late in the game to attempt to add depth to a character who, for most of the show’s run was (regardless of the great acting job by Steve Buscemi) probably the weakest leading man of all the great antihero-centric dramas that sprung up after the Sopranos. Had they come earlier in the show’s run, the flashbacks would have kept Nucky at the forefront of the show, but instead for four-seasons we had watched Nucky fade into the background of his own show and disappear behind more colorful and exciting characters like Jimmy, Arnold Rothstein, Al Capone, Margaret, Chalky White, and – perhaps the show’s most memorable original character – Richard Harrow. My unhappiness with the finale ties to Richard as well as the fact that a show that had done a great job at staying unpredictable began telegraphing its punches so blatantly in the final season.

It was obvious to me from the first second we met ‘Joe Harper,’ that the young would-be protégé hanging around Nucky was likely to be Tommy Darmody, but it seemed too sloppy to me for a show that had always been so precise because the ages didn’t seem to line up (based on my knowledge of history, Tommy would have been 14 at the oldest in 1931). However, that was only a small part of what concerned me with Tommy’s appearance and his pursuit of vengeance against Nucky for what Nucky had done to the Darmody family. Tommy’s knowledge that Nucky had murdered his father and betrayed his grandmother stretched credulity to the breaking point, but another thing that has been gnawing at me ever since we saw Tommy kill Nucky (and get arrested directly after): Richard Harrow’s entire storyline throughout seasons 3 and 4 is now meaningless.

Richard Harrow is probably the most beloved character to come out of Boardwalk Empire. A sniper in the US Army who had half his face destroyed by a bullet during World War I and wore a poorly painted tin mask to cover up his wounds, Richard returned home from the Great War so broken both physically and emotionally that he had lost his moral compass. Richard became close to fellow-soldier Jimmy because good-looking Jimmy – with his toddler son Tommy and pretty young wife Angela – was if anything even more damaged internally than Richard was. After Jimmy’s death at the end of season 2, it seemed that Richard’s role as a character on the show had died too, but instead he became a richer character as he tried to take Jimmy’s advice and ‘come back’ from the horrors he had witnessed, perpetrated, and endured in WWI and beyond. The prime mission in Richard’s life became taking care of the orphaned Tommy and trying to give him a better life, something that he saw would be impossible if Tommy was forced to stay under the care of his manipulative and mentally ill grandmother Gillian. Gillian chose to raise Tommy in a brothel she ran, and in order to free Tommy from that brothel and from Gillian, Richard mounted an assault on the gangsters who had taken over Gillian’s mansion in the season 3 finale and rescued Tommy.

However we found out in season 4 that Tommy was not totally free from his grandmother’s reach. Richard had brought him to stay with his girlfriend and later wife Julia Sagorsky but Gillian was pressing her own claim on the boy and in order to give Tommy a truly clean start, Richard was forced to take on one more mission for Nucky. Richard sent Tommy and Julia to Richard’s sister’s house in Wisconsin, but he struggled with having to kill again and he made a mistake, killed an innocent person, and was himself mortally wounded in turn. He died dreaming of the better life he had built for Tommy in Wisconsin. But the show ended with Tommy coming back and murdering Nucky in front of federal agents, meaning he is going to be arrested for premeditated murder and either jailed for life or even executed. Two seasons of Richard risking everything and eventually losing his life to save Tommy had been thrown away in order to have a neat symmetrical end where Tommy killed Nucky by shooting him in precisely the same place under the left eye where Nucky shot his father.

And now we come to the biggest problem with Tommy’s actions against Nucky: how did Tommy even know Nucky did anything to deserve such vengeance? Not only did Gillian almost certainly never tell Tommy that Nucky had murdered Jimmy, it would have been incriminating because her story to the world was that Jimmy had overdosed on heroin in the bathtub of her mansion. Richard almost certainly never told Tommy about what happened to Jimmy, and those who raised Tommy (Julia, her father, and Richard’s sister and brother-in-law) had no knowledge of Jimmy and almost none regarding Gillian and Nucky. Gillian lost custody of Tommy when he was somewhere around 6 or 7-years-old, meaning that the complexity of Nucky’s betraying the 12-year-old Gillian and giving her to the Commodore (whom Nucky knew to be a pedophile) would be lost on Tommy. And that brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves in any kind of fiction: a character being punished for something that we in the audience know that he or she did but that the other characters in the show (or book, movie, play, or whatever) would absolutely have no knowledge of.

It can be tempting for any writer to turn their story into a kind of morality tale – Nucky did bad things, and therefore he was punished for them; it is a common trope in fiction. However I had thought that with Boardwalk Empire, creator Terrence Winter was aiming higher and trying to give us a great character study and examination of crime in the 1920s-30s. In real life people do bad things all the time and no one ever finds out – although admittedly, most of those things don’t involve murder: people cheat on their spouses, steal from friends/family/strangers, and hurt people and they often get away with it. We in the audience know what Nucky did because we got to be there to watch him do them, but how on earth would Tommy know enough not just to be mad at Nucky, but to leave his home in Wisconsin and travel around 1,000 miles (during the Great Depression no less) with the intent to murder him? Yes it was poetic justice for the audience to see Nucky killed by a Darmody after he had done so many awful things to the family, but in real life there isn’t always such a clear answer and many times people get away with the awful things they do.

I am fine with the fact that Nucky died as I don’t always require happy endings, but the way it happened cheapens the show in so many ways as to leave me angry at the ending of a show I had loved from the beginning. I thought I was watching a character study that refrained from judging the characters for the often grotesque and despicable acts they committed, but at the end it turned into a morality tale that all boiled down to: don’t shoot the son of a 12-year-old girl who you handed over to a pedophile under his eye, or his son will track you down and shoot you under your own eye.

Assistance, Help, Medicare, Pride, Scoiliosis, Stubbornness, Welfare

Things We Are Not Supposed to Say #2

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“I need some help.”

It seems simple enough to ask for help, but it is a very hard thing to do (and to clarify, I’m not talking about anyone seeking help for addiction or other things like it – I’m speaking of financial assistance). We are encouraged in America to ‘pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps’ and in movies, books, and television we see character after character defiantly turn help away, always loudly proclaiming, “I don’t need your charity!” Why is it so hard to ask for help? Maybe it’s because, at least here in the United States of America, weakness and vulnerability are held in disdain. Asking for help is construed as a failure of the person in need of aid, and society roundly mocks those who require welfare or food stamps or unemployment insurance, or pretty much any kind of help at all from the government. In far too many cases we portray those who accept such assistance as lazy failures who have made a choice not to work out of a desire to be taken care of by more deserving ‘hard working’ people. A powerful stigma has been attached to governmental assistance and I know of many instances where people who were rightfully entitled to and in desperate need of such help have refused to accept it in order to avoid the negative associations with even needing such help to begin with, let alone taking it. I know this because I am one of those people.

On September 18th, 1998, I felt a sharp pain in my lower back as I rose to leave my first period class. I was born with Scoliosis and had a major surgery when I was 3-years-old, but in the 10-years after that surgery I had never had back pain of any kind; since that September 18th, I have never spent a single day out of intense back pain, and all of those days without hurting have long since faded from memory, and now seem like a dream of someone else’s life. The constant pain I deal with has put me in a situation where doing even the slightest bit of physical work is almost impossible. I can’t stand for very long, and while I can sit for a longer period of time, even that will hurt before too much time has passed. Walking or running hurts because my many spinal surgeries have left me with a fused spine and without the natural shock absorption that is a normal feature of the backs of most human beings. I am forced to take large quantities of powerful medications to deal with my suffering which makes many jobs impossible and makes driving even short distances something I must plan hours in advance to be sure my head is clear. I am in pain when I close my eyes to sleep at night, and again when I open them in the morning. It is my constant companion, and judging from the fact that most people develop back pain as they age, I’m not expecting it to get any better as I get older.

Because of my disability, I am eligible for many kinds of governmental assistance. While I enjoy the benefits of having Medicare, I have never accepted certain other things that I’m eligible to receive; I have not and cannot foresee accepting food stamps and welfare due both to the stigma attached to such things and my own foolish pride. I live a Spartan existence on the meager amount of disability money I get from the government while I simultaneously look for a job that will allow me to take advantage of my intelligence and my specific abilities, but it is hard to tell potential employers right off the bat that there are things one cannot do. I don’t even like to accept help when moving a heavy box; I refuse help and try to do it myself. Afterwards I’m either forced to admit defeat and accept the assistance I had refused before, or I manage to do the job myself and then spend the rest of the day – and sometimes more than one – dealing with the ramifications of my foolish decision.

I almost don’t know why I bring this up because I don’t expect to start seeking out or accepting aid tomorrow or any day soon. I have seen this strain of stubbornness in others both within and outside of my family, and have seen it lead to death too. I honestly believe that my grandfather’s death last year was in large part due to his refusal to accept the offer of my Aunt to move in with her both during and after Super storm Sandy hit New York and flooded his house in October of 2012. He finally took her offer after about a week of staying there freezing in his home and being forced – along with my step-grandmother, who had bad lungs for most of her life – to breathe in the mold of the rotting walls and hardwood floors. Just under a year later my step-grandmother Renee was dead, and my grandfather died two months after her. It should be a flashing neon light warning me of what can happen when one puts stubbornness and foolish pride ahead of necessity, and yet I have not changed my ways and I keep trying to deal with my disability the same way I have for years, keeping my head barely above the crashing waves while I refuse to accept the aid of the nearby rescue boats.

Asking for help is not easy and accepting it even less so. As a society we need to do a better job of teaching our children that it is OK to admit weakness and that requiring help is not some kind of moral failure. I hope we can pass this lesson on to future generations and remove the stigma of seeking help. And I hope that I too learn the lesson before I pass a point of no return, because over 16-years of near constant agony hasn’t been enough to convince me

Baseball, Basketball, Brooklyn Nets, Championships, Football, Hockey, New Jersey Devils, New York Giants, New York Islanders, New York Jets, New York Knicks, New York Mets, New York Rangers, New York Sports, New York Yankees, Sports, Team ownership

The Fall of New York Sports

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I never had a real choice regarding which professional sports teams I rooted for; I was handed them the same way I was my last name and my religion. I’m a third generation fan of the New York Yankees, Giants, Rangers, and (to a lesser degree) Knicks. I know how remarkably lucky I have been to be born into rooting for those specific teams, especially the Yankees and Giants, who have each won the most championships in their respective sports (5 World Championships for the Yankees and 4 Super Bowl wins for the Giants) during my lifetime. I was lucky be able to watch the Rangers end a 54-year-drought and win the Stanley Cup in 1994. Things have not gone perfectly for the teams that play in the metro area of the world’s premier city, but from 1968 through 2011 the longest period the city went without one of its (now 9) teams winning a championship was the relatively small gap between the Knicks winning their last championship in 1973 and the Yankees winning the 1977 World Series. Today there have been 3-years since the Giants won Super Bowl XLVI, but there doesn’t appear to be any championships on the horizon, and New York sports seems to be headed for a serious decline.

There has been another side to New York sports too besides the consistent success of the Yankees and Giants (and let’s not forget that the Devils had a dynasty of their own, winning the Stanley Cup 3 times between 1995 and 2003). As I mentioned above the Knicks haven’t won the NBA Championship since 1973 and haven’t even returned to the Finals since 1999 during the Patrick Ewing era. The Mets have only won the World Series once in my lifetime, and that was 28-years ago; the Islanders won the Stanley Cup 4-straight times from 1980 to ‘83 but they’ve not made it back to the Finals since 1984 and haven’t even won a playoff series since 1993; the Jets haven’t made it back to the Super Bowl since they shocked the world after the 1968 season by beating the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The now Brooklyn Nets haven’t won a championship since moving to the NBA from the ABA and haven’t made the Finals since they won the Eastern Conference in 2002 and 2003 during Jason Kidd’s prime.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about NY sports at the moment is no ‘sure-thing’ anymore. Between 1995 and 2012 the Yankees made the playoffs every season except for 2008, but Derek Jeter, the face of the franchise and pretty much New York Sports as a whole for almost 20-years, just retired and the team’s success as it moves into a new era is very much up in the air. The Giants have won two recent Super Bowls with Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning, but they’re almost certain to miss the playoffs this year for the third straight season and for the fifth time in the six-seasons since 2009, and the organization appears to be far too comfortable with the lack of results the team has seen from Coughlin and GM Jerry Reese. The Rangers played in the Stanley Cup Finals last season for the first time since 1994, but it is hard to have faith in the long-term success of the team when one remembers that they’re owned by Cablevision’s James Dolan and that Glen Sather (who may not quite deserve as much credit for helping to build the 1980s Oilers into a dynasty when the team had Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and other hall of famers all playing together in their primes) remains GM. Dolan also owns the Knicks and, since he appears to be a more hands-on owner with them, it is even harder to see sustained greatness for the team. There is some excitement with the franchise now that Phil Jackson has been hired to run the team, but no one knows if the experiment will be successful and it’s hard to trust that Dolan will be able to keep his word and give Jackson real autonomy to make decisions. Sadly, as atrocious a team owner as Dolan has been, he has lots of company among New York’s worst team owners: to the disgust of the team’s fans, the Mets are still owned by the Wilpon family; Woody Johnson continues to mismanage the Jets, who are now a laughingstock; no one really knows how invested Hank and Hal Steinbrenner are in running the Yankees; and Mikhail Prokhorov has been a joke of an owner who sacrificed most of the Nets’ draft picks for the rest of this decade in a weak attempt to win in the present.

I have been spoiled as a sports fan, but it is hard to see a New York team being a favorite to win a championship in the next few years, let alone one being able to build a foundation to be contenders for years to come like the Yankees were during the Derek Jeter era. Where can New York sports fans look to find stability and consistent excellence? New York may have 3 more franchises than any other city (Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Washington-Baltimore metro all have 6 pro teams) but there is no obviously great team in the bunch and not one of them is even favored to win its conference/league in 2014-15, let alone to win it all. There are many superstars who play in NYC, and a good number of young, exciting players who seem to have greatness in front of them, but when you look around sports and see some of the consistently great, stable franchises like the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA, the New England Patriots in the NFL, the Chicago Blackhawks in the NHL, and St. Louis Cardinals in MLB, you don’t see any New York franchise on that list anymore. It is incredibly rare to build a strong enough organization to win and/or compete for multiple championships – we were lucky to get to watch the Yankees do it, and there is no guarantee that we’ll ever get to see it again

$40 per vote, 2000 Presidential Election, 2010 midterm elections, 2014 midterm elections, Alaska elections, Arkansas elections, California elections, Citizens United, Colorado elections, Congressional elections, Elections, Electoral Cynicism, Florida elections, Health care, Legal Marijuana, Medicaid, medical reform, Nebraska elections, Obamacare, Oregon elections, personhood, Politics, prisoner reform, Voting, Washington D.C.

VOTE! Seriously, VOTE!

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Cynicism and apathy in American elections is like a disease. Americans look at congress and are disgusted (if the 8% approval rating is any guide), but too often it seems the response – especially among younger would-be voters – is not to work hard to ‘throw the bums out’ but instead to throw up one’s hands and walk away from elections entirely. Voting is one of the issues that I am most passionate about as, with my knowledge of history, I see it as a long battle to expand the franchise to as many people as possible, with a rearguard action always fighting to restrict access to the polls in order to hold onto power without actually serving the interests of the people. For those who want to restrict voting access, apathy and cynicism are their most deadly weapons and, no matter how many people I encourage to vote, and no matter how intelligent those people are, I often hear, “Why should I even vote, it doesn’t matter anyway!” Well, here are some reasons your vote does matter!

90,682,968 Americans voted in the last midterm elections in 2010. That’s out of an estimated 235 + million eligible American voters, or just under 38% of the eligible population. To contrast that, 53% of American voters cast a ballot in the 2012 presidential elections. The 2010 election cycle may not be a good guide as to what will happen tomorrow, but it is a good baseline because no midterm elections ever come close to matching the slice of the populace that votes in presidential elections. 2010 is also valuable as it was the first election after the Citizens United decision, and it is estimated that over $3.6 billion was spent on campaigns in that cycle, and it’s hard to believe that less has been spent in 2014 than in 2010 (numbers won’t come out until after the elections), and just in using the 2010 numbers, it means that even if YOU don’t value your vote, enough money was spent on the 2010 elections to equal over $40 for each vote cast. You may think your vote is meaningless, but obviously there are people and corporations with a LOT of money who believe otherwise and if they are so willing to part with at least $40 per voter, then they certainly think it has value.

Besides the congressional elections, there are also referendums, governorships, and state legislatures that will be decided tomorrow. Washington D.C, Oregon, and Alaska will all vote on whether to legalize and tax marijuana; Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota all have a raise in the state minimum wage on the ballot. Colorado and North Dakota have extremely strict anti-abortion “personhood” laws on the ballot, while here in California medical reform and prisoner reform will be voted on. And if you don’t think your governor matters, consider that in Texas, Rick Perry (for purely political reasons) chose not to expand Medicaid as part of Obamacare and therefore around 1 million Texans who would qualify for Medicaid have been left without any health care. It is very unlikely that Democrat Wendy Davis is going to win tomorrow, meaning that those 1 million Texans living in poverty will continue to struggle without the health care that is available to them, but in your state you might be able to make the difference because you never know how close the election will be. This brings me to another number you should consider when deciding whether to vote or not: 537. That’s the amount of votes that separated George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Avoiding all conspiracy theories and comments about the election result being stolen for the moment, the fact remains that in an election that saw 105 million Americans cast a ballot, it was less than 550 votes that meant we had President Bush and not President Gore

You really need to go and vote tomorrow, and make sure everyone you know who is eligible votes too! Voting is too precious a right to waste when so many states around the country are making it harder for people to vote, and when so many nations around the world go even further than that. Voting doesn’t solve every problem and your vote tomorrow won’t change everything, but in a nation where Blacks once risked (and often lost) their lives to vote and where it took women over 130-years of struggle to get the franchise, it is not just cynical not to vote, it is cowardly. So get out there and vote, honor our proud democratic tradition, and make the choice to be an active participant in our society and not a spectator

2014 midterm elections, Elections, Roberts Court, Supreme Court, Voter Fraud, Voter ID, Voter Suppression, Voting, Voting Rights Act of 1965

Playing Dumb and Blocking Votes

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The United States midterm elections are this upcoming Tuesday, November 4th. Every single eligible voter in the USA has the opportunity (and, in my opinion, civic obligation) to vote for their Representative in Congress and for other local or state elections and referendums on their ballots. However, there are those who do not believe every American should vote, and that voting should become more difficult, not less. One group that has come out in favor of limiting voting is in fact the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. The Court has played dumb by pretending that its decisions will not have precisely the impact that critics say the decisions will have, but it is not an accident that gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last year has resulted in making it harder for Americans to vote.

Last year in another of the contentious 5-4 decisions with the Republican appointed Justices (Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito by George W. Bush, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy by Ronald Reagan, and Clarance Thomas by George H. W. Bush) on one side and the Democratic appointed Justices (Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg having been appointed by Bill Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan by President Obama) on the other that have become the new normal, Chief Justice Roberts declared that racism in America was over. Roberts declared that there was no longer any need for the title of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that gave the federal government power to police the former segregationist states to keep them from enacting – as they had in the past from the end of the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction in 1877 to the passage of the landmark 1965 law– blatantly racist legislation in order to make it harder for Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities to vote. We have two ways we can look at decisions like this one and like in Citizens United when the Roberts Court approved a new, narrow definition of what constitutes corruption in politics; we can either believe that a majority of Justices on the Supreme Court are utterly oblivious fools who honestly don’t recognize racist and discriminatory voting laws or corruption in politics, OR we can believe that the Justices know precisely what their decisions are doing, who the decisions are harming, and who they are helping.

Surprising no one, once freed of the restraints of the Voting Rights Act, many of the former Confederate states (and some others with Republican legislatures that were not in the Confederacy) began the most aggressive and coordinated assault on voting rights that we have seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow. And we’re supposed to pretend that this was all an unintended consequence of the Roberts Court’s decisions and that the state legislatures enacting these onerous anti-voting laws are really serious about fighting in-person voter fraud and ‘shocked’ that the laws are going to deprive thousands of eligible registered voters from being able to cast their ballots.

Even forgetting the lack of in-person voter fraud, how can any supposedly honest and democracy-loving American justify the actions of states like North Carolina and Ohio and their moves to drastically cut early voting days and eliminate many polling places? These measures can’t possibly be considered necessary to combat voter fraud, so if they’re not to purposefully keep turnout down, what are they being enacted for? Can honest Republicans truly convince themselves that cutting early voting days and eliminating same-day registration is a way to police the almost non-existent threat of in-person voter fraud? Must we pretend that the drive to stop in-person voter fraud – which is the only kind of fraud that voter ID laws can stop – is the real impetus behind states requiring forms of ID that not everyone has, when such fraud is almost non-existent, and lie to ourselves that these new laws are not attempts at keeping certain voters from being able to cast their ballots?

I have seen otherwise intelligent (and in most other things honest) Republicans confronted with the fact that in-person voter fraud is almost non-existent and then reply with the weak argument that “We need IDs to own a gun or drive a car, why SHOULDN’T we mandate IDs to vote?” Even if, “Why not?” was not a lazy argument in favor of voter ID laws, the answer of “because there’s almost none of the voter fraud that voter ID laws are supposed to address, and thousands of eligible voters are being robbed of the sacred right to vote,” is almost irrefutable. Any person who is OK with thousands and thousands of his or her fellow Americans being disenfranchised in order to pursue fraud that he or she will often admit doesn’t exist is lying (maybe even to themselves) if he or she claims to support democracy. In reality the person only likes other people voting if those voters cast their ballots for the ‘right’ candidate. Even if the Republican position of “Why not voter ID?” wasn’t so easily addressed, the position amounts to the prosecution in a major trial saying to the defendant “Prove you DIDN’T commit this crime we’re accusing you of!” The burden of proof is on those who want to pass new laws and change the way we’ve run elections for generations, so once the fig leaf of ‘stopping voter fraud’ is blown away by the sheer weight of facts, the Republicans need to do a LOT better than to merely say, “Why not?” and then walk away before their lazy answer is addressed.

As I write this, Republican-led states are changing election laws all over the United States of America that are statistically guaranteed to keep thousands of eligible American voters from being able to exercise their franchise. The laws are also so specific as to be transparent regarding their real intention, which is blocking the votes of people who are likely to vote Democratic. This is obvious when we consider that states like North Carolina have refused to allow the government-provided IDs of public employees and IDs given to college students whether they attend a state school or not because both groups are likely to vote Democratic. We can’t just assume that all elected officials actually want us to be able to vote anymore, and that all the things that they have done to make voting more difficult are just unintended consequences of an honest attempt to purge elections of voter-fraud. We can’t pretend that Chief Justice Roberts didn’t know exactly what would happen when he gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because “racism (was) over.” This attack on voting rights is not an accident or a side-effect, it was the plan all along.

Therefore every single eligible American must vote on Tuesday, and if you know you’re an eligible voter, make sure you don’t leave your polling place without at the very least writing your vote down on a piece of paper and signing it; if you don’t vote before Tuesday it won’t count, so make sure you leave some record of your intentions so that you can at the very least go to court and defend your right to vote. If you’re cynical and don’t feel like your vote matters for much, I’ll be addressing that too in the next few days, but I am entirely sincere when I say that I don’t care who you vote for as long as you do in fact vote; I may disagree with your choice and try to convince you to vote for a different candidate, but your vote is just as important as mine and I’ll fight for every single one. Mark it down in your calendars and this Tuesday, November 4th, make sure you go vote – it is arguably the most important thing you’ll do in 2014.

Baseball, Basketball, Championships, Football, Hockey, Sports, Super Bowl, World Series

It is the Best of Times, Yada, Yada…

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With game seven of the World Series about to start, it is a good time to note that we live in an era of sustained excellence in sports, a time when the same teams led by the same familiar superstar athletes keep winning championships in the four major North American professional sports leagues. The San Francisco Giants are on the verge of their 3rd World Series Championship in Major League Baseball in the last 5-years, in June the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League won their 2nd Stanley Cup Championship in the last 3-seasons, and later that same month the San Antonio Spurs won their 5th National Basketball Association championship of the Tim Duncan/Gregg Popovich era by beating the Miami Heat in what was a rematch of the 2013 Finals. The same teams just keep on winning and it is hard for professional sports leagues to flourish when so few teams have legitimate chances to win championships, a fact which makes the present lack of variation at the top dangerous for the sustainability of the Big Four.

However it is also a time of excitement as teams and fan bases that have suffered decades of failure, mediocrity, and irrelevance have been challenging for and winning championships over at least the last five-years. To survive and thrive a sports league needs the fans of each team to have the legitimate hope that their favorite team can win a championship. The 2013 Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League won their first Super Bowl championship by beating the favored Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII; it was the first professional sports championship since the 1979 Supersonics won the NBA Championship, and it means even more because the Sonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008, leaving the city without any championship-winning organizations. The same LA Kings listed above as one of the examples of sustained excellence only won their first Stanley Cup Championship in 2012, 46-years after the team began play. The Kansas City Royals have a chance to win the World Series tonight, but prior to this month, the franchise had not even made the playoffs since it won the 1985 World Series.

To understand if sports leagues have too little rotation at the top, it is important to choose a specific time period to compare the results of each of the sports leagues. This is the 15th season since the start of the 21st century, so it would make a good starting point, however since the MLB and NFL seasons have not yet concluded and the NHL lost the entire 2004-05 season to a lockout, we’ll use 1999 as the start point, giving us 16 NBA seasons and 15 seasons of data for the other three leagues. That means that if there was perfect parity in each league, there would have been 16 distinct NBA champions and 15 of the other three sports leagues. In reality of course, it has been quite different. The NBA has had the least change at the top, as only six teams have made up those 16 slots; the Spurs and Lakers have each won five championships since the 1998-99 NBA season, the Heat have won three, and the Pistons, Celtics, and Mavericks each won once even though each of those three teams made the Finals twice. MLB has had a bit more parity with nine teams winning 15-World Series: the Yankees and Red Sox have each won three championships (and with one more win, the SF Giants would join them and there would be nine teams accounting for 16 instead of 15), the Cardinals and Giants have won two-a-piece, while the Diamondbacks, Angels, Marlins, White Sox, and Phillies have each won once. The NFL has done one better than MLB, as 10-teams have won 15 Super Bowls; the Patriots lead the way with three, while the Steelers, Giants, and Ravens have all won twice, and the Rams, Buccaneers, Colts, Saints, Packers, and Seahawks have all won once. The NHL has had the most change at the top, as 11 teams have won the Stanley Cup since the 1998-99 season; the Devils, Red Wings, Blackhawks, and Kings have all won twice while the Stars, Avalanche, Lightning, Hurricanes, Ducks, Penguins, and Bruins have each won once. In just the last 10-seasons the White Sox ended an 88-year drought, the Blackhawks won for the first time since 1961, the Giants won their first championship since moving to San Francisco before the 1958 season, the Saints and Seahawks won the first Super Bowls in their histories, the Bruins won for the first time since 1972, and the Mavericks won their franchise’s first NBA championship. However, many of those same teams have kept on winning even after ending their droughts, in the process extending droughts for other teams and leading to less variation at the top.

Tonight will determine whether the Giants are building a dynasty or if the Royals can bring Kansas City a pro sports championship for the first time since 1985. If the Giants win their fans will rejoice, but if the Royals win it will be a far more important win for Major League Baseball. Can a David rise up and knock off a Goliath? In a few hours we’ll know.

Post World Series Update: The Giants won 3-2. They have now won three championships in five-years, becoming only the 8th team to win at least three in a five-year span after the: 1910-13 Philadelphia A’s (winning in ’10-’11 and ’13), 1912-18 Red Sox (The Sox won in ’12, ’15-’16,and ’18 to give them four World Championships in seven-years), 1936-43 Yankees (The Yanks won four championships in a row from ’36-’39, and then won again in ’41 and ’43 to give them 6 in 8-years), 1942-46 Cardinals (like these Giants the Cards won in every even-year in a five-year period, winning in ’42, ’44, and ’46), 1947-’62 Yankees (these Yanks are the real gold standard when people talk about the Yankee dynasty; they won in ’47, set the MLB record by winning five-straight championships from ’49-’53, and won again in ’56, ’58, and ’61-’62. All in all they won 10 championships in a 16-year span, and won the AL Pennant every year from ’47-’64 except for ’48, ’54, and ’59, which is an unbelievable 15 times in 18-seasons), 1972-’74 A’s (The only other team than the Yankees to ever win three consecutive World Championships is this underrated Oakland dynasty), 1996-2000 Yankees (Winning in ’96 and then from ’98-2000 for four-in-five years. The team also won six AL Pennants in an eight-year span from ’96-2003), and now these SF Giants. Considering that the WS has existed for over a century it is a pretty short list. So congratulations to the SF Giants and their fans on joining this list of MLB’s greatest dynasties; now would you please stop winning so some other team can have a turn?

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Sources

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This will be a constantly updated list of any sources I use to find the facts I use in my articles.

Read the Fine Print:

“Co-Sponsors of H.R. 1091 – Life at Conception Act.” Congress.gov. Accessed October 20, 2014. https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1091/cosponsors?q=%7B%22cosponsor-state%22%3A%22Colorado%22%7D.

Questions #1:

“Forbes 400 Charles Koch Profile.” Forbes.com. Last modified 10/29/2014. http://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-koch/.

Playing Dumb and Blocking Votes:

“A Comprehensive Investigation of Voter Impersonation Finds 31 Credible Instances out of One Billion Ballots Cast.” Washington Post.com. Accessed October 31, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/.

Vote! Seriously, Vote!:

“The Money Behind the Elections.” Open Secrets.org. Accessed November 3, 2014.  https://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/.

“Voter Turnout.” FairVote.org. Accessed November 3, 2014.  http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/voter-turnout/.

“National Voter Turnout in Federal Elections: 1960-2012.” Infoplease.com. Accessed November 3, 2014. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html.

Desilver, Drew. “Voter Turnout Always Drops in Midterm Elections, but Why?” Pew Research.org. July 24, 2014.  http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/24/voter-turnout-always-drops-off-for-midterm-elections-but-why/.

Lerner, Kira. “10 Issues Voters will be Deciding on Election Day, from Minimum Wage Bumps to Marijuana Legalization.” ThinkProgress.Org. October 31, 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/election/2014/10/31/3586805/ballot-initiatives-2014/

Money in Politics, Politics

Things We Are Not Supposed to Say #1

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In what I plan to be an on-going series, I will ask questions or make statements that it seems society does not want us to ask or say. I don’t have the answers for every one of them, but I think it is important to at least ask the questions anyway and then maybe we’ll find the answers together.

“When is Enough Enough?”

With the US mid-term elections coming up in less than a week, the Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been spending large amounts of money just as they have in every election cycle since the Supreme Court opened up a spigot of dark money in its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission of 2010. Charles and David Koch spend tens of millions of dollars every election to try to elect politicians who will give Koch Industries (which the brothers inherited, by the way) a free hand to make even more money than they already do. The Kochs doing so much work in order to make more money than they already have seems ridiculous when one considers that each Koch brother independent of the other has over $40 billion. The question I want to ask – but that the media, society, the wealthy, and many politicians don’t seem to want us to ask – is: when is enough wealth enough?

We are raised in this country being taught through school that Capitalism is absolutely good and Socialism is absolutely bad, but that doesn’t go far enough for many in our country; many in the Republican Party have become devoted followers of Ayn Rand and her economic theories. Rand held that there is a moral good in selfishness and greed and that to even question such greed is to invite the benign corporations and rich individuals to leave America to find a home where they are not so underappreciated. With Ayn Rand as their guiding star, many wealthy Conservatives have adopted a self-righteous posture and treat any question or criticism that is posed to them as heresy and a threat to American supremacy.

So why do the Kochs keep spending so much money to elect friendly politicians when they need for absolutely nothing? There is nothing they cannot buy if they desire it, so their attempt to buy the government to make sure Koch Industries can be even more profitable is disgustingly gluttonous. At what dollar amount does it become socially distasteful for an individual or a corporation to just keep piling up as much money and influence as possible? When does greed become unattractive and unworthy of emulation? We as a society have the right to ask these questions even if they scare some in our nation who immediately brand any criticism of the accumulation of wealth as, ‘class warfare,’ and an example of treacherous Socialism. There is no easy answer for how we as a society can deal with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of so few, but the only way to actually find a solution to this very real problem is to admit it exists, call out greed for what it is, and teach our children to value other things besides just money.

Abortion, Elections, Politics, Social Policy

Read the Fine Print!

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The Senate race in Colorado between incumbent Senator Mark Udall, a member of the Democratic Party and US Congressman Cory Gardner, a Republican, is very close and is one of a handful of Senate races across the United States that may decide which Party controls the Senate for the last two-years of the presidency of Barack Obama.

Colorado seems to be getting increasingly liberal, twice voting for President Obama, legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, and generally supporting a liberal social agenda. Representative Gardner’s Conservative views on social and economic issues are for the most part far behind the views of most of the people he seeks to represent; those views are clearly indicated by Congressman Gardner’s co-sponsorship of HR 1091, the ‘Life at Conception Act.’ HR 1091 seeks to reverse much of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 that constitutionally enshrined the right of all women to have access to safe and legal abortions. Gardner’s bill strives to undermine Roe v. Wade by banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest and only allowing access to the procedure in cases where the mother’s life is at stake.

Because his social views are so repugnant to the majority of Coloradans, Congressman Gardner has cynically tried to hide positions that he has held for his entire public life. Gardner has tried to obfuscate his co-sponsorship of HR 1091 and has lied about the fact that the bill would even ban many forms of contraception. His plan appears to be to trick Coloradans into voting for him by pretending that if he is elected he’ll reverse positions he has supported for years and will cease to be a radical social Conservative.

Gardner is just one of many Republican candidates running for office in states with socially liberal populations who have been trying to hide their records from voters in the hopes that no one notices their words and deeds before the beginning of the campaign. What Gardner and other lying ‘moderate’ Republicans are basically saying is, “Listen, we know you don’t agree with us on social issues, and find our views on gay marriage, equal pay for equal work, the right for women to choose whether or no they have an abortion, birth control, science (especially Climate Change and evolution), religion, healthcare, LGBT rights, and gun control repugnant, but our economic policy ideas are so incredible that you should ignore everything you don’t like and elect us!”

If you help elect someone who has spent his or her entire career backing positions that you vehemently disagree with because you believe that the politician’s ‘transformation’ in the run-up to an election is genuine, then you will have no one to blame but yourself when that politician predictably governs in a way you don’t like. Don’t allow Cory Gardner and others like him to pull off this blatant attempt at a bait and switch, look into the past of Gardner and other ‘moderate Republicans,’ and don’t allow them to disown any parts of their record that they believe you don’t like: hold their feet to the fire and make them own their records

Civil War, History, Politics

Starting the Conversation

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Much of American history, with more than a few setbacks, has been about expanding the scope of the Declaration of Independence’s bold statement that  ‘All men are created equal’ to include more and more people. Today we basically hold it to mean, ‘All human beings are equal regardless of skin-color, gender, religion, sexual preference, economic situation, and more.’ However it was not easy getting to this place of greater equality for all Americans and we cannot take anything for granted as we dream of a still more equitable and just USA where each child is born with a legitimate chance at success regardless of where he or she comes from.

There has always been a push against such an America by those who hold wealth and power in the present, but history shows that while those reactionaries are often able to hold out and delay the forward movement of society for a time, the recalcitrant minority almost always loses. The reactionaries lost the Civil War and the fight over women’s suffrage, but even though they’re still losing these fights – as seen in their battle over gay rights – the victory of progress is far from assured and we cannot rest easily until we can truthfully claim to have done all that we possibly can to insure that our children have a legitimate chance at long, successful, and fulfilling lives.

So let’s use this platform to have an honest conversation with each other and filter out any preconceived notions; let’s hold nothing as sacred and speak truth to power regardless of who holds that power. Let’s use evidence to back up any claims we make, refrain from name-calling and trolling, while at the same time passionately (yet civilly) discussing what we can do to make our nation better and improve the lives of as many people as possible. Let’s stand up for what we believe in and refuse to be mere spectators of the events that take place in our neighborhoods, cities, states, our nation, and even the world

Above all, let’s be fearless in the face of the truth and beholden to no interest either from the Right or the Left. Future generations will know whether or not we succeeded in our attempts to better the world around us, so let us always be ready to hazard all that we have and all we are for the noble goal of leaving our posterity a legacy that they can be proud of.

– Heath David Lenoble