Wednesday Stuff

Jon Stewart brings us more idiotic blatherings from Mango Mussolini about crime, which (to hear a Repug say it) will ALWAYS be up when Dems are in charge, even though statistically it’s down across the country...I honestly didn’t know about Andrew Clyde of Georgia and the gun stores he owns that have been involved in mass carnage events (typical for his wretched party)...



...and Farron Cousins explains that U.S. House Repugs apparently don’t know how the law works...I honestly didn’t know Biden claimed executive privilege on the Robert Hur recording, which, as Cousins notes, Biden is allowed to do, which makes the contempt vote against Garland (with this guy voting Yea also) even more ridiculous (and once more, to do something about Bri-Fi at last, click here)...



...and when it comes to Our Treasonous Orange Pestilence, Chris Hayes points out a typically wacky scheme from #45 on tariffs, basically leading to a tax increase of about, oh, roughly 133 FREAKING PERCENT!!!...also, all G7 leaders are facing disapproval ratings because of inflation (again, coming out of the pandemic), though Biden’s -18 number is actually good by comparison...



...and I wasn’t necessarily looking for items related to Juneteenth, but perhaps these will suffice...Jesse Dollemore discusses a Rachel Maddow clip of Bronzer Beelzebub exploiting black voters, appearing at some venue supposedly for African Americans (though it’s filled with the white bread mayonnaise crowd) and then making a bee line to Charlie Kirk, who has made disparaging remarks about MLK, among his other offenses (and when it comes to politicians reaching out to African Americans, let’s damn well not forget this)...



...and Leeja Miller takes a typically clear-eyed IMO look at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion...good job to link DEI with Affirmative Action from the ‘60s and JFK and the EEOC, which of course is also the reason the wingnuts need to hate it I realize...Miller discusses the benefits of DEI as well as the pitfalls, and I don’t mean the unsurprising and utterly brainless wingnut snark...terrific point that when wingnuts complain that, supposedly, they’re being told to shut up, in fact, they’re only being asked to FREAKING LISTEN!!! (NSFW/H)...

...and growing up in Philly as I did, you of course have to have an allegiance to the hometown teams if you want to seriously call yourself a fan, and that usually means developing an animus towards opposing teams and players (in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, it was easy to feel that way about the Dallas Cowboys, for example...many still feel that way, but I honestly don’t anymore, though I want to see the Iggles beat them of course).

All of this boring pretext is to point out that an opposing team player had to be really good and play the game the right way to earn your respect. And I don’t think that standard was met any better than by Willie Mays of the New York (and later San Francisco) Giants, who just left us (he’s pictured above making his legendary catch in the 1954 World Series against Vic Wertz of the Cleveland Indians; when you analyze how hard the ball was hit, the direction it took and how Mays outran it, “The Catch” remains a truly remarkable feat even today).

(On Ken Burns’s great series “Baseball,” we learn that Mays had a signature move of sorts. When he was in the outfield and a ball was hit towards him, he would punch his glove with his fist to indicate that he had a bead on it and was going to catch it. He did that also on the ball hit by Wertz.)

I have no doubt that there will be commemorations involving the number 24 at parks all over Major League Baseball for the remainder of the year, as there should be. And I think this is an apropos selection for the occasion (which, as far as I’m concerned, should be a celebration of Mays’s life and baseball career more than anything else...great tune is by The Treniers).