Quoth the Gadfly: “it is manipulative at best, and dishonest at worst to justify a continuation of the war based on the need to ‘support the troops,’ and the rush to glorify the military or act like that institution is somehow sacrosanct ignores reality, especially when that reality dictates that institution deserves no more honor, or support, than the dishonorable mission it is fighting.”
For more of the Gadfly’s argument, go to “Political Beat”.
Memphis’ own operatic diva singing a Led Zeppelin classic? Yep, it’s “The Immigrant Song,” and you can hear it for yourself on
her latest CD. And you can read why she’s stretching her repertoire, in BostonNOW’s latest edition.
Kallen Esperian grew up hearing her mother play Nat King Cole, and in high school she loved musical theater. “I’d never been to the opera, but somehow I had an operatic voice,” says Esperian, who has performed on the world’s great stages with stars like the late Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo.
Recently the sound engineer of her Christmas CD came up with a list of songs — classics, jazz, and rock — that he thought would fit her voice and style.
Find out more here. And you can also check out an MP3 of “Immigrant Song.”
More than 20 local environmental and outdoor recreational groups will host Memphis’ first “Green Volunteer Expo” from 5:00-7:30 p.m. this Thursday, September 27th, at the Memphis Botanic Gardens.
The first “Greening Greater Memphis” meeting attracted more than 1000 people, letting city and county officials know that there was great interest in environmental issues in this city and county.
Event organizers are touting Thursday’s meet-up as a chance to “work with green groups and thinkers, share ideas and find out how you can help in the next step of Greening Greater Memphis.”
For more info, check out the Greening Greater Memphis’ website, or call (901) 767-PARK
The only man to intercept a Tom Brady pass in a Super Bowl, former Memphis Tiger defensive back Reggie Howard, is back in Memphis to make a difference following his retirement from the National Football League.
Howard starred at Kirby High School and walked-on at the University of Memphis, where he suffered a broken neck in a game against Alabama-Birmingham. He made the Carolina Panthers as an undrafted free agent in 2000 and left the team during training camp this year.
Howard and his wife Artesia returned to his hometown and launched the Reggie Howard Foundation with a mission to provide activities that build leadership skills and self-confidence to area youth.
The foundation will host a charitable concert September 28th at the Botanic Gardens, with proceeds going to Memphis City Schools.
For more information, visit the foundation’s website.
Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi has a dispatch from former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson’s campaign trail, and it’s not pretty.
When asked which is harder, playing the president or being the president, Thompson replied, “Neither of ’em are that hard.”
Taibbi, who introduces Thompson as the new Republican front-runner, writes, “It was bad enough when the GOP field was led by a grinning Mormon corporatist and a fascist ex-mayor itching to take his prostate pain out on the world, but Thompson is the worst yet — a human snooze button, campaigning for the head-in-the-sand vote by asking Americans not to think but to change the channel.”
Taibbi goes on to say that Thompson is selling a double-dose of Middle American delusion: “What Thompson inspires is something much more appropriate for Americans of the TV age: He gets audiences purring in a cozy stupor. Their eyes glaze over and they end up looking like a bunch of flies happily lapping up their own puke.”
Well, we told you it wasn’t pretty.
To read more, click here.
What price a championship?
I’ll go
out on a limb and argue that the 2007 St. Louis Cardinals season has been the
most painful, trying campaign since this proud franchise first laced up spikes
in 1892. Had any of the following five(!) events taken place, the season would
have been played under a cloud:
•
Pitching ace — and 2005 Cy Young winner — Chris Carpenter was beaten around by
the Mets on Opening Day, then lost for the season with elbow damage. His surgery
will keep him out a good portion of 2008 as well.
• Relief
pitcher Josh Hancock — driving drunk, without a seat belt, on his cell phone —
was killed in a car accident in late April.
• Scott
Spiezio, the Cardinals’ top reserve during their 2006 championship run, entered
a rehab program in August to help him overcome a chemical dependence.
• On the
last day of August, rightfielder Juan Encarnacion had his left eye socket
crushed by a foul ball as he stood in the on-deck circle at Busch Stadium. The
question now is not so much if Encarnacion will play baseball again, but if
he’ll have vision in his left eye.
• After
a sparkling late-summer month that saw Rick Ankiel steal the national spotlight
by hitting nine home runs in less than 100 at-bats, Ankiel’s name came up in an
investigation of an illegal pharmaceutical ring. According to the investigation,
Ankiel received shipments of human growth hormone near his Florida home in 2004.
Wow.
Take me out to the ball game, right? Keep in mind, these are merely the clouds
that formed after Opening Day. Future Hall of Fame manager Tony LaRussa was
booked for driving under the influence last March after he fell asleep at the
wheel near the team’s spring-training facility in Florida.
Injuries
and chemical substances are nice excuses if one chooses to go that route. But
the fact is, the 2007 Cardinals were profoundly lacking in the one commodity a
baseball team cannot win without: starting pitching. When the St. Louis brass
decided to let sixty percent of last year’s rotation (Jeff Suppan, Jason
Marquis, and Jeff Weaver) leave via free agency, they did so not anticipating
that the other forty percent (Chris Carpenter and Mark Mulder) would miss
virtually the entire season to come. Find any major league baseball team —
champions or otherwise — and eviscerate its starting pitching to this degree,
and calamity will ensue. The extra, often tragic, baggage endured by this year’s
Cardinals was merely distraction as the house burned. (Consider that the
combined record of starters Kip Wells and Anthony Reyes is 8-31. Perhaps Suppan
was worth an extra million or three.)
So
what’s next? Far more questions than answers as the Cardinals start their
earliest offseason in four years. Will LaRussa return, and be part of the fix-it
team? (The guess here is that he’s gone. A pitching rotation can be dismissed in
a single offseason, but rebuilt?) Will veterans Scott Rolen and Adam Kennedy —
shelved for the season’s final month for surgery — regain their primes, or will
they be expensive baggage (that word again) surrounding Albert Pujols in 2008?
And what about the kids — Brendan Ryan, Ryan Ludwick, Skip Schumaker, and yes,
Mr. Ankiel — who found more playing time at Busch Stadium than anyone
anticipated in a title defense? Who among these names will be part of the
solution?
Death,
drugs, and catastrophic injury. If a deal was truly struck with some
otherworldly power for the Cardinals’ unlikely 2006 championship, the argument
here is that the debt has been paid, and with considerable interest.
I’ll
wrap this week’s column with seven words I’ve never spoken or written: I’m glad
the Cardinals’ season is over.
Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn got a dose of tough journalism tonight on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show. Substitute host David Shuster did the honors:
Shuster: “Let’s talk about the public trust. You represent, of course, a district in western Tennessee. What was the name of the last solider from your district who was killed in Iraq?”
Blackburn:”The name of the last soldier killed in Iraq uh – from my district I – I do not know his name …”
Shuster: “Okay, his name was Jeremy Bohannon. He was killed August the 9th, 2007. How come you didn’t know the name?”
Blackburn: “I – I, you know, I – I do not know why I did not know the name…”
Shuster: “But you weren’t appreciative enough to know the name of this young man. He was 18 years old who was killed, and yet you can say chapter and verse about what’s going on with The New York Times and Move On.org.” [snip] “Don’t you understand, the problems that a lot of people would have, that you’re so focused on an ad. When was the last time a New York Times ad ever killed somebody? I mean, here we have a war that took the life of an 18-year-old kid, Jeremy Bohannon, from your district, and you didn’t even know his name.”
Maybe Blackburn forgot she wasn’t on Fox.
See the video here.
There have been many, many forums so far, involving
candidates for mayor and the various city council positions.
Almost all of them follow the same formula: opening
statements, policy positions stated in response to generalized questions in
specific subject areas like crime, education, economic development, than a
standard vote-for-me close.
Retired businessman Lester Lit broke new ground at a League
of Women Voters forum for District 9 candidates Monday night. Not only did Lit,
a candidate for District 9, Position 3, criticize an opponent at length and by
name, he used the entirety of his opening and closing statement time to do so.
Lit devoted his one-minute opening time to an attack on
Reid Hedgepeth as lacking qualifications to serve. Then, flanked by fellow 9, 3
candidates Mary Wilder, Desi Franklin, and Boris Combest, Lit used the
two-minute period allotted him for a closing statement to say this:
“…There really is an 800-pound gorilla in this room, and
he’s not here tonight. His name is Reid Hedgepeth, and I’m going to tell you
right now, with the backing that young man has, he could very well win this
election, and that upsets me. I’m mad as hell to think that he could, because we
have four very qualified candidates on this panel here tonight, and I’d feel
very good if any of the four could serve as your representative on the next city
council. I would not feel too happy if Reid Hedgepeth serves as my representative
on the City Council.“He has been to no forums. He has been to no neighborhood
associations. He is maintaining his campaign strictly with a hundred-thousand
dollar budget on TV and slick mailers that he sends out, such as this one right
here [brandishing a mailout flyer], which is — this is not even a picture
of Memphis — this is Detroit that they’re using pictures of to mislead you…. Y’all
were nice enough to come out this evening to try to learn about the candidates.
I think you need to go one step further and educate yourself about the missing
candidate, the one that I’m afraid could steal this election because of
financial backing that he has.“I forgot to mention in my opening that not only has he
never voted in a city council race in his life, he also made two separate
donations to Rickey Peete two years after the last city election. So you do
your homework. If you want to vote for one of us, you’ll get a good council
person. Let’s not make any more mistakes. We’ve had enough mistakes. Let’s not go down that road anymore.”
2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy’s intimate, exhilarating new film, doesn’t have much in common with genteel, starry-eyed rom-coms like Before Sunrise or Before Sunset.
Warm, fuzzy memories of those two chatty but precious Richard Linklater films, which paired Delpy’s French intellectual fantasy chick with Ethan Hawke’s pretentious, scheming American backpacker, are effectively obliterated when we get our first glimpse of Marion and Jack (Delpy and Adam Goldberg, well-muscled and well-wrapped in a blanket of Cape Fear tattoos), a couple in their mid-30s who are taking the overnight train from Venice to Paris; Marion is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a gun that’s pointed at her boyfriend’s chest.
In interviews, Delpy has compared Marion’s impulsive, surprisingly confrontational behavior to Robert De Niro’s actions in Raging Bull …
Read the rest of Addison Engelking’s review in this week’s Flyer.
AP — Former Memphis Grizzlies GM and NBA commentator Dick Versace is looking for a new job: congressman.
The 67-year-old Versace, a Democrat, said Thursday that he will bid for the 18th Congressional District seat in central Illinois. Incumbent Republican Ray LaHood announced in July he will retire when his term runs out in 2009.
Versace said he will tour the district in a 28-foot motor home called the “Common Sense Express” after he formally announces his intention to run for office at a news conference in the next couple of weeks.
“I’m going on a listening tour,” he said.
Versace is well known to basketball fans around the country. He is a former NBA assistant coach and head coach, and was a longtime television commentator.
In 2005, he stepped down as the Memphis Grizzlies’ general manager after six years with the team.
But before that, he was at Bradley University, where he won three Missouri Valley Conference Championships and a National Invitational Tournament title from 1979 to 1986.
“I feel a real debt of gratitude to the Peoria area,” said Versace, who has homes in Peoria and Chicago. “I had the most wonderful eight years of my life there.”
Versace joins Chuck Giger, a retired Navy aviator who lives in Chatham, as a Democratic candidate. At least three Republicans have announced they will seek the GOP nomination for the seat.