Phil Mushnick doubles down in defending his column:
“I don’t call black men the N-word; I don’t regard young women as b——es and whores; I don’t glorify the use of assault weapons and drugs. Jay-Z, on the other hand…..Is he the only NBA owner allowed to call black men N—-ers?”
And the answer, of course, would be, “Not as long as Donald Sterling owns the Clippers.”
Franco Harris, last week:
“I find it hard to believe that on Nov. 9th, that all 32 board members wanted Joe Paterno fired,” Harris said. “Hopefully, someone will come forward and admit they didn’t want Joe Paterno fired. This wasn’t a football problem. If it had been a football issue, believe me, Joe Paterno would have handled this.
“The present leadership thinks it’s right what happened and how this was handled. And we all know it was wrong. And this comes from our current leadership. They’re hoping everything goes on as normal. All I want is the truth.
“I think we deserve it.”
Hopefully, somebody supplied him with a copy of this article out of the New York Times today:
The board, scrambling to address the child sexual abuse scandal involving the university and its football program, had already decided to remove Graham B. Spanier as president. Then, many of those present recalled this week, the tension in the room mounted. Joe Paterno’s future was next up. Surma announced that an agreement appeared to have been reached to fire Paterno, too — the trustees having determined that he had failed to take adequate action when he was told that one of his longtime assistants had been seen molesting a 10-year-old boy in Paterno’s football facility.
Surma, those present recalled, surveyed the other trustees — there are 32 — for their opinions and emotions before asking one last question: “Does anyone have any objections? If you have an objection, we’re open to it.”
No one in the room spoke. There was silence from the phone speakers. Paterno’s 46-year tenure as head coach of one of the country’s storied college football programs was over, and the gravity of the action began to sink in.
Or more importantly (emphasis mine):
“To me, it wasn’t about guilt or innocence in a legal sense,” the trustee Kenneth C. Frazier, the chief executive at Merck, said of Paterno’s decision not to go to police. “It was about these norms of society that I’m talking about: that every adult has a responsibility for every other child in our community. And that we have a responsibility not to do the minimum, the legal requirement. We have a responsibility for ensuring that we can take every effort that’s within our power not only to prevent further harm to that child, but to every other child.”
Jim Gray must’ve been absent for those reporting classes when the professor was stressing the idea to “report the news, don’t be the news”:
The latest episode came on Thursday at Riviera, when Gray got in a heated argument with Dustin Johnson’s caddie, to the point that The Golf Channel has removed Gray from their coverage this week from the Northern Trust Open.
According to USA Today’s Michael McCarthy, Johnson’s caddie went into a profanity-laced screaming match with Gray after he reported on The Golf Channel earlier that day that Johnson had landed a two-shot penalty for being late to the tee.
Johnson’s caddie, Bobby Brown, took most of the heat for the late tee-time arrival, with Dustin even commenting after the round that he doesn’t look at the time, leaving that up to the caddie.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that Gray might have been busy back in those journalism classes already working on profoundly horrific sign-offs for radio broadcasts of the Super Bowl (last year he referred to New Orleans as a “city that was ravaged by wind”).
Terrific parody of this year’s Super Bowl disaster here.
I thought he said the same thing when I first saw that commercial:
“Hi, I’m Clay Matthews, NFL linebacker and inspiration to many fat people in Wisconsin. When I’m not out shopping for lingerie for my boyfriend to see me in, I like to help out in the community. Today, I have a very special message I would like to share with you in hopes that you’ll spread the word.
“And that word, is Douching.”
I wanted to click the “like” for this, but then that pudwhacker would have gotten the credit, right?
Tom Shales must still be having difficulty getting laid if he’s getting this desperate:
Perhaps in keeping with the newly globalized program, the commendable “In Memoriam” segment ended with a tribute not to American men and women who died in combat during the preceding week but rather, said Amanpour in her narration, in remembrance of “all of those who died in war” in that period. Did she mean suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?
Only if you’re Trig, I suppose. I know it’s not really the American way, but God forbid we mourn all loss of life. Empathy, after all, makes you a Nazi (according to Glenn Beck, I mean). Sullivan and Krugman were among those who pointed out Shales’ back-asswards logic back in March, although I thought Glenn Greenwald put it best:
So here we finally have a prominent journalist with a half-Persian background — in an extremely homogenized media culture which steadfastly excludes from Middle Eastern coverage voices from that region — and her national origin is immediately cited as a means of questioning her journalistic objectivity and even opposing her as a choice to host This Week (can someone from Iran with an Iranian father possibly be objective???). Could the double standard here be any more obvious or unpleasant?
Wolf Blitzer is Jewish, a former AIPAC official, and — to use Shales’ smear-campaign formulation — has frequently “been accused” of pro-Israel bias; should CNN bar him from covering those issues? David Gregory is Jewish, “studies Jewish texts with a top Jewish educator in Washington,” and has conducted extremely sycophantic interviews with Israel officials. Should his background be cited as evidence of his pro-Israel bias? The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is routinely cited as one of America’s most authoritative sources on the Middle East, notwithstanding numerous accusations of pro-Israel bias and, even more so, his choice to go enlist in the IDF and work in an Israeli prison where Palestinians are encaged; do those actions (far beyond his mere ethnicity) call into question his objectivity as a journalist such that The Atlantic should bar him from writing about that region? Jake Tapper — who Shales suggests as an alternative to Amanpour and who I also previously praised as a choice — is Jewish; does that raise questions about his objectivity where Israel is concerned?
Long live Christiane, I say. I suppose if Shales wants to continue pandering to the tea-baggers but covering up his lack of luck with the ladies, he’ll be assailing Fareed Zakaria next.
Quite frankly, you’re probably the worst person to be telling us you know anything about the word “Learn.”
A couple weekends ago, the last train out of Chicago to my suburban stop got held up roughly three hours because of a suicide. Considering what had happened earlier that day, I joked they must have been from Nashville.
This happens so often in this area, I tend to forget about the guys or gals driving that train. Certainly won’t be the case for me in this latest story:
Metra executive director Philip Pagano stepped in front of a Metra train — one of his trains — on Friday in Crystal Lake and killed himself. He was carrying a copy of Metra’s procedures on how to handle a service disruption after a suicide.
…
A suicide may be intended as an escape from justice. Or an admission of guilt. Or an expression of emotional ills largely unrelated to what’s in the public purview. Or just an attempt to close the book. But one person’s way out only causes agony for family members and friends.
And, in this case, for the train’s helpless engineer. Pagano stepped onto the track and looked the engineer in the eye just before the collision.
Real nice.
I don’t know how many suicides Metra’s had for the year—16 non-suicides last year—but as Kass notes, it’s our fourth in recent years once the corruption investigators get involved.
If this guy is committing seppuku over $56,000, one has to wonder what is about to be revealed in the coming days.
As a commenter over at Capitol Fax asked in regards to the financial issues involved here, “What are the fiscal controls at Metra that allow an executive to pay himself for as-yet-unearned vacation time? Don’t they have a controller or someone who ought to have prevented this?”
