The Zong

The great Bill Walsh has died of leukemia, and the Chronicle has a good piece up today about him. When I was growing up, I was spoiled by some of the greatest teams who ever played professional football, teams built up from nothing by the man himself, and it is as important as ever that I remind myself how good Niners fans had it when he was running the show.

Folks throw around the word “genius” to describe temporarily successful football coaches fairly often, (Mike Martz?) but in the Bay Area we were fortunate enough to have the real deal for more than two generations, and the West Coast Offense that Walsh created continues to exist and evolve in the NFL as a testament to him. Nevertheless, I think an even greater contribution to football that Walsh made was evident in the demeanor of the teams he led. Throughout (and despite) the franchise’s dominance in the 80s and 90s, the 49ers wore their success without showboating, developing a reputation for class and excellence that will forever be associated with Bill Walsh and the players he coached.

Thanks for all the great football, Bill. You are missed.

EXTRA CREDIT: For all my beloved Pats-fan cronies, Charles Robinson over at Yahoo! Sports has a great article about Walsh’s influence on Bill Belichick during his formative years. It’s a fitting tribute to the man and some great insight into the mind of Belichick, possibly the greatest coach since the implementation of the salary cap.

I’ll bet Bud Selig’s pissed that he decided to attend last night’s game, a fiercely impotent battle between two mediocre bullpens that resulted in the Giants once again going gently into that home dugout after 13 innings that must have kept the cadaverous commish wondering how many garlic fries his constitution could possibly withstand.

He lives on, and his surprise attendance as Bonds approaches .250 adds little more than a shrug to the festivities at AT&T Park, where fans continue to pay good money to watch a storied, revered baseball franchise suffocate each night under the plastic sheet of ham-handed fuckery that the front office has draped over the entire proceeding. It is sad for me to imagine how different the situation might be if the Giants were actually in contention right now, controversy or no. As it is, when he finally does break the record (if they don’t indict him first) the cheers and applause will sound for all intents and purposes like a giant sigh of relief, and shortly thereafter you can expect attendance at the park to look more and more like a baseball game in Florida as the Giants stumble around blindly in the basement of one of the weakest divisions in baseball.

Check out the upper right hand corner of this page. The race between the number of Bonds’ homers (19) and the Giants’ number of games beneath .500 (16!) is actually becoming a race, and their status as the worst team in the majors gets stronger every day. As soon as he breaks the record, it will officially be football season in San Francisco. For several years.

The early verdict is that nobody at the “historic” YouTube Debates/Commercial for Google last night did much to jostle the field of Democratic candidates, leaving self-titled “progressive” Hillary Clinton ever perched atop her growing mountain of moderate affirmative-denials. America evidently still digs mealy-mouthed status-quomongers with horrible taste in music.

While I loved seeing the candidates answering questions from snowmen and gun-fuckers, I’ll go ahead and say that last night’s debates should jostle the field a little bit when registered Democrats like me wake up and say “Hang on a second. Where the FUCK was Al Gore?”

Oh, right. He’s busy watching his kids playfully fucking with the entire fate of the planet. Silly me.

The son of former Vice President Al Gore has been charged with two felony counts of possessing a controlled substance and two misdemeanor counts of possessing a drug without a prescription, one misdemeanor count of marijuana possession and one count of traffic offence for speeding. The charges against Albert Gore III stem from his July 4 arrest when Orange County sheriff’s deputies stopped him for speeding and a search of his car found the drugs.

Speeding is a pretty stupid thing to do, especially when you’re driving around all hopped up on the hippie speedball. Nevertheless, he’s 24, and as this 30-year old curmudgeon sees it, kids are fucking stupid. Ask Jenna Bush.

What really caught my eye, though, was a little blurb in the Boston Herald, that paper that they forgot to tell you about, where Al Gore’s daughter basically says her dad is already the President of Being a Great Guy, and that’s enough for him.

According to ABC News, during a Friday book signing in Washington, D.C., Kristin Gore went farther than her father, saying it just wasn’t going to happen.

“He’s really not going to get in the race,” Kristin Gore reportedly said when asked if she had any insight into her father’s political plans. “He’s really liberated working on things he cares about.”

Thanks for clearing that up. The suspense was fucking killing me.

One thing is for sure. At a time when this country’s ideology has been ushered to the left by the Neoconservative Mind-Fuck of the Bush Presidency, I can think of no better candidate than one who is and always has been unapologetically progressive on environmental, social and foreign policy issues, and I can’t think of a better time for him to form a committee to explore the possibility of running for president than, let’s say the next two weeks or so.

Awhile back, I wrote about the Bush Administration’s desire to fuck over sick kids rather than raise taxes or stop using our money to destroy countries. Well, the situation is much more visible today, as congress works to pass Medicare legislation which includes an expansion of children’s health care that (surprise!) President Bush opposes.

President Bush has threatened to veto what he sees as a huge expansion of the children’s health care program, though some Republican senators have deserted him on the issue. The House measure calls for changes that the administration probably will find even more distasteful, including cuts in subsidies paid to private health plans serving Medicare beneficiaries.

Like the bill approved with a 17-4 vote last week in the Senate Finance Committee, the House bill would increase tobacco taxes to help finance expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Yep, that’s right. Not only does the bill increase cigarette taxes and give more money to insure uninsured children, it cuts payments to private insurance companies from Medicare. Sounds fucking awesome, right?

Rep. Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the House bill would “reverse the Republican drive to privatize Medicare,” by reducing payments to private health plans that care for 8 million of the 43 million Medicare beneficiaries.

The private plans, offered by companies such as UnitedHealth and Humana, say they provide more benefits than traditional Medicare.

But the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the government paid the private plans, on average, 12 percent more than it would cost to care for the same people in traditional Medicare. Moreover, it said, payments to the fastest-growing kind of plan - known as private fee-for-service plans - are 19 percent higher than the cost of traditional Medicare.

So, it would seem, that the only people supporting this bill are private insurance companies, their lobbyists, and the President of the United States, who sleeps soundly in the knowledge that his children have never been without health insurance in their lives, and that his ass is completely free of cancer.

It became evident to me this morning exactly what is going on with the Barry Bonds Grand Jury, which according to reports has extended its term for 6 months:

“Do I look concerned?” he said.

That is how Bonds answered the question of whether he was concerned that the grand jury investigating him might soon hand down an indictment. Asked to directly answer whether he was concerned, Bonds said, “No.”

The term of the grand jury, scheduled to expire this month, has been extended another six months, and a federal indictment on perjury and/or tax evasion charges could come as soon as September, the New York Daily News reported Saturday.

As “soon” as September, huh? Doesn’t seem that soon to me. I’m no legal scholar, but something tells me that due process doesn’t usually take this long when there’s a strong case against someone. I mean, I suppose one could posit that they’re waiting on Greg Anderson to get sick of the food in prison, or that they think Bonds still might confess during one of his friendly press-conferences, but I know what’s really going on here.

Chances are, you won’t have to wait for September for the indictment. They’ll indict him just as soon as he ties Henry Aaron at 755. The way Bonds has been hitting, it might take a little while, but then again, it’s Bonds. He might get pissed at someone about something and do it tonight.

I don’t know if Barry fucked a senator’s wife or cut off a federal prosecutor on the freeway, but there is an inordinate amount of time and money (yours and mine!) being spent on trying to indict a baseball player for lying under oath and tax evasion while Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby, both convicted criminals, are allowed to walk around on the street, presumably littering everywhere and mugging old ladies. Rest assured, someone in the Fed’s office grew up watching Hank in Milwaukee, and is really pushing to try and end Barry’s year, and possibly his career, right before he’s able to break the record. What a bunch of assholes!

I was kind of hoping that he’d do it in Milwaukee over the weekend, but it was a long shot because he sat 3 out of 4 games in Chicago. Good thing that the Giants aren’t actually in the race or anything, because it’s pretty obvious that the season isn’t about winning games at the expense of the fucking dog and pony show.

I know the usual format on The Zong is a pretty strict one: one post per Bush Junta outrage, (usually by the M.C.), and then we move on to the next miscarriage of justice. God knows the Bushies are considerate enough to make sure that we never run out of material, but I’d feel real real blue if I didn’t also get a chance to comment of the commuting of Libby.

To even use the phrase “there is a certain irony…” when referring to anything the Bush administration does anymore is to place yourself firmly in the “Well, DUH.” Hall of Fame: it’s like saying you believe in evolution. Nevertheless, we are truly through the looking glass, now, people, for it’s no longer the rhetorical dog and pony show that we have been witness to, but actual documentable reverses on that which is most scared in our land of laws: their legal opinion.

The Bushies have always been proudly neanderthal about the legal status of those found guilty in our system. Whether it’s a retarded death row inmate in Texas, or an innocent Afgahni swept up and sent to Gitmo, Bush and his posse of crimefighters have always swaggered about and enforced tough Texas Law. You did the crime, you do the time, parder. Said from the deck of a yacht in Kennebunkport, it has a certain charm, and plus, it rhymed.

But when someone from the Dick Cheney Secret Freedom Squad got swept up into our legal system and was actually found guilty of breaking the law - the same law they impeached Clinton on - the whole thing started to seem less totally - awesome - and - cool - just - like - the - Lone  - Ranger - but - with - more - guns - and - money.

So the irony is that the Bush reversal on sentencing guidelines may have stuck a pin in what for generations the GOP has held dear: making sure people poorer than them stay in jail. From the NY Times:

“By saying that the sentence was excessive, I wonder if he understood the ramifications of saying that,” said Ellen S. Podgor, who teaches criminal law at Stetson University in St. Petersburg, Fla. “This is opening up a can of worms about federal sentencing.”

The commuting of the sentence actually has given a huge amount of very valuable ammo precedent to those which are traditionally the swron enemies of the GOP: the trial lawyers. By setting such a precedent, and settin it so high, no action since Watergate has done more weaken the concept of keeping people in jail for longer amounts of time with less chance of parole. Bush has, in one swift move, undermined years of hard work by his side with one selfish act. Which is, you know, kind of getting to be like his specialty.

“It’s far more important than if he’d just pardoned Libby,” Ms. James said, as forgiving a given offense as an act of executive grace would have had only political repercussions. “What you’re going to see is people like me quoting President Bush in every pleading that comes across every federal judge’s desk.”

So true-believers, (any of you that actually read this leftwing rag), congrats, Bush Boy has totally just opened the Halls of Freedom to the nefarious Trial Lawyer Gang, and as we speak, they are drilling with a special laser through the very walls you fought so hard to protect. Better get him out of there before the next issue: I read a lot of comics, and these things have a way of snowballing.

By my calculation, the Democrats have held a majority in both houses of congress for about 8 months now. Why is it then that, even now, only Republicans can get anything fucking done in said houses? After a ceremonial round of dissent about the war in Iraq, the democrat-controlled congress caved into President Bush and his demands for more war money like a bunch of frightened little bitches. Remember that? Well now, without even an open debate in congress occurring yet, it seems that the White House may be finally discussing the possibility that George W. Bush fucked everything up and maybe they should figure out what to do next.

Of course, they might have had this discussion on May 1st if the Democrats had simply told him to sign the funding bill with benchmarks or there would be no funding bill, but what difference do another 255 dead American soldiers make (since that date) when you’re talking about good, old-fashioned fucking politics?

As it turns out, these discussions are occurring because of Republican dissent, and people who shouldn’t be talking are talking to the New York Times:

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

It would be easy for me to point out that the four Republican Senators now voicing dissent should have done so a long time ago, and to point my finger at them and call them assholes and stuff like that, but in their flip-flopping they have at least shown that they have the juice to do something, even in the minority, to change things. Between the recklessness of the president and the fecklessness of the Democrats, I guess we’re left with a government where the only men of action don’t actually believe in evolution.

Irony, thy name is Uncle Sam.

So, what did I miss?

The announcement Monday evening that Mr. Libby would serve no prison time in a polarizing case regarding the administration’s tough response to an outspoken Iraq war critic infuriated many Democrats, including presidential candidates like Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.Opinion polls had shown strong public support for Mr. Libby’s original sentence, and Reuters said Tuesday that interviews with ordinary Americans across the country found overwhelming cynicism about the president’s action.

But Republicans’ reactions were mixed. Some endorsed it, while others insisted that Mr. Libby was still being unfairly punished for work as a trusted administration aide. Two Republican candidates for president, Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani, supported the president’s move.

It would be disingenuous for me to call this move unexpected, or to say that the reactions from the left or right were surprising to me, but it’s important for me to outline, very briefly, a few ways in which this administration believes that having three different branches of government is for pussies:

• “The man a heartbeat away from the Oval Office asserts that some rules that apply to everyone else in the executive branch do not apply to him.”
• “The administration has argued that permitting habeas corpus suits by foreigners who are held as enemy combatants outside the United States would paralyze the military during wartime “by giving courts the power to review commanders’ decisions.”
• “President Bush claimed executive privilege Thursday, refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena for White House documents in the investigation into last year’s firings of U.S. attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department.”
• “A June 18 report from the Government Accountability Office found that federal officials have not complied with at least six new laws that President Bush had asserted in signing statements that he had no obligation to follow.” (That report can be found here)

And of course:

• “US President George W Bush has intervened to prevent Lewis Libby, a convicted former vice-presidential aide, from serving a prison term.”

Shouldn’t everyone in America be a little tired of all this? I mean, it would be one thing if we were actually living under a dictatorship, and if that dictator actually knew what he was doing, but at this point, it’s as if the American electorate (and two other branches) are allowing the administration to continue their game of pretend beyond all reasonable bounds. No other president in history has ever attempted to go so far towards dissolving our constitution before, and this one is doing it in such a clumsy, limp-dicked fashion that it’s embarrassing. I mean, say what you want about Nixon, but at least that asshole could fucking make sentences.