Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace has been making the rounds, explaining Friday’s major trade of Pau Gasol to the Los Angeles Lakers. Yesterday, he took time to field a bunch of Chris Herrington’s questions …
Month: February 2008
Final unofficial returns for the presidential preference primaries in Shelby County, with all 274 precincts reporting:
Democratic Primary: Total votes, 98,033; Barack Obama, 68,516 (69.89 percent); Hillary Clinton, 27,914 (28.47 percent).
Republican Primary: Total votes, 50,320; Mike Huckabee, 18,930 (37.62 percent); John McCain, 14,852 (29.5 percent); Mitt Romney, 13,735 (27.3 percent); Ron Paul, 352 (3.64 percent).
The Election Commission says there are 611,000 registered voters in the county. If so, then the turnout was 24 percent, which was higher than the 15-20 percent some officials had predicted. There were 13 days of early voting.
On election day, the polls closed on schedule at 7 p.m. despite the heavy storms that swept through the area beginning at 5 p.m.
–John Branston
Categories
Stacey Campfield is a Serious Person
In this week’s Flyer, Bianca Phillips wrote about a piece of legislation proposed by state representative Stacey Campfield (R-Paleolithic) that would prevent public elementary and middle schools from allowing “any instruction or materials discussing sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.” (Yeah, we know, some real forward thinking going on there.)
When the Flyer posted the article online, we added what we thought was an obviously photo-shopped picture of Campfield holding a bumper sticker that read, “Confederate Values.” (It should be noted that we did not photo-shop the picture; it was taken from a humorous political blog.)
We post funny pictures to accompany articles now and then, you see. We’ve run pictures of Trent Lott in a Dashiki, Pau Gasol in drag, and Harold Ford with a big cowboy moustache, for example, when we thought those pictures complemented the tone of an article.
Well, darned if we didn’t tick ol’ Stacey off. He called the Flyer office today and demanded in a very deep and serious voice that we remove the picture. Campfield contended that since the article was “serious,” we shouldn’t run a satirical picture with it.
Well, that’s a matter of taste, not of law, but maybe he has a point. So here’s what we’re going to do: We’ll add a note below the offending picture acknowledging that it was photo-shopped. And we’ll also post the real picture (at right), which we think accurately reflects the seriousness of Mr. Campfield’s status as a legislator.
UPDATE: We have removed the photo at the request of the Knoxville News Sentinel.
You can see where we might get confused as to where “satire” ends and “serious” begins with this guy.
–Bruce VanWyngarden
Categories
How Are You Doing Out There?
Here at Flyer World Headquarters, we’re battened down, waiting for the next wave of weather to hit. All over the tri-state area there are reports of tornadoes, buildings destroyed, hundreds of trees down, and a few reports of fatalities in the Memphis area.
It’s a weird night, as we find ourselves switching back and forth from storm-tracking weather radar on the local stations to presidential primary election coverage on CNN. If you’ve got a story or an anecdote to share about your experiences tonight, use the comments function. We’d like to hear it.
And be careful out there.
Barack Obama led Hillary Clinton 67 percent to 29 percent in early voting in Shelby County but Clinton was the winner in Tennessee. In the Republican presidential primary, Mike Huckabee and John McCain each had 32 percent of the early vote. (NBC called the state for Huckabee at 10:45.)
Returns were delayed at the Shelby County Election Commission because of the storm and computer problems. Some election commissioners said it could be after midnight before the votes cast Tuesday were counted. But Clinton had such a big lead that Obama cannot catch her, although he will get a share of Tennessee’s 85 delegates.
Early voting returns for the Democratic primary: 21,253 votes cast, 6,182 for Clinton and 14,305 for Obama. In the Republican primary, 9,658 votes cast, 3,130 for Huckabee, 3,099 for McCain, and 2,572 for Mitt Romney.
James Johnson, administrator of elections, said voting machines continued to run on battery power even when the storm knocked out the electricity in some areas.
“We didn’t lose anything,” he said.
He estimated that the turnout would be about 15 percent of Shelby County’s 611,000 voters, or approximately 70,000 votes.
“We haven’t gotten significantly bigger numbers in presidential preference primaries since the early 1980s,” he said.
Polls closed at 7 p.m. The storm hit at about 5 p.m., with residents being urged to stay inside or go to their basements. A spot check of voting precincts in Midtown at 6 p.m. showed three or four voters at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church and two voters at Trinity Methodist Church.
UPDATE: Final tally:
Final unofficial returns for the presidential preference primaries in Shelby County, with all 274 precincts reporting:
Democratic Primary: Total votes, 98,033; Barack Obama, 68,516 (69.89 percent); Hillary Clinton, 27,914 (28.47 percent).
Republican Primary: Total votes, 50,320; Mike Huckabee, 18,930 (37.62 percent); John McCain, 14,852 (29.5 percent); Mitt Romney, 13,735 (27.3 percent); Ron Paul, 352 (3.64 percent).
The Election Commission says there are 611,000 registered voters in the county. If so, then the turnout was 24 percent, which was higher than the 15-20 percent some officials had predicted. There were 13 days of early voting.
On election day, the polls closed on schedule at 7 p.m. despite the heavy storms that swept through the area beginning at 5 p.m.
–John Branston
All the local TV channels had planned significant coverage
of Super Tuesday. All would end up junking their election plans and, with all
due regrets, sending their talking heads home.
At Channel 5, WMC-TV, that meant Wendi Thomas, Jonathan
Lindbergh and myself. At Channel 13, it meant Flyer online columnist Cheri
DelBrocco, among others. The fact that all of us, and the gurus lined up by Channels 3, 24, and 30 missed out on facetime and didn’t get
to dope out the numbers for TV watchers was unimaginably immaterial, of course,
given the bona fide Tsunami that surrounded us. Nay, from time to time seemed
actively to be threatening us, our families hunkering down at home, and the rest
of the Memphis and Mid-South area.
Multiple tornadoes! Waves of tornadoes lasting for
hours -and headed, we could tell from the big conference-room TV screen at WMC-TV
– right through Shelby County, angling into the heart of the city..
At one point, hail was literally banging off the window of
that Channel 5 conference room, the full-length window that ran the length of
the room. My colleague John Branston called in once or twice with verbal
snapshots of the activity at the Election Commission, but there, too, activity
of the normal kind was evidently stalled, with some of the returns delayed.
By switching away from the hard-working Dave Brown, and
catching a few minutes of CNN’s election coverage, it was possible to find out
that Tennessee had been one of the first states called (24 altogether were to be
heard from before the night was out). CNN’s analysts, and presumably others,
gave it to Hillary Clinton – who, early on, had a 20 percent margin, a far
larger one that had been anticipated.
That was due almost certainly to the fact – a truism in
politics, particularly for Democratic operatives charged with get-out-the-vote
activities – that bad weather suppresses working-class votes disproportionately.
Especially the kind of extra-bad weather that showed up Tuesday. And even more
especially in that the final two hours of voting time were virtually wiped out.
The reason is
that working-class folks have ONLY the early-morning hours or the after-work
hours to vote. The middle class, especially the homemaker component of it, has
much more latitude. Not even to mention the out-and-out professionals —
disproportionately conservative, white, and, where relevant, Republican. So two
evening hours of wipe-out is going to hurt the working-class part of the
spectrum disproportionately.
And in Memphis,
it had been acknowledged by everyone that the black working class would go
overwhelmingly for Obama.
Even as I was
trying to explain this effect to someone over the telephone, one of CNN’s
gurus was outlining it for one of the network’s panels, widening the eyes of
his colleagues with his tales of the stream of tornadoes passing through our town.
But even so, Hillary
Clinton would have won Tennessee. Just not by as much. Complete totals from the
state and from elsewhere will be posted when we have them
–Jackson Baker
From the Los Angeles Times: Pau Gasol didn’t play, but it didn’t matter. He was still the story of the day.
While much of Los Angeles was asleep Sunday morning, Gasol spoke at a crowded news conference at 7:30 a.m. PST, 90 minutes before the Lakers played the Washington Wizards here.
The first several questions and answers were in Spanish, but it was still easy for non-Spanish speakers to discern Gasol’s happiness, if not relief, to be with the Lakers instead of the Memphis Grizzlies, who traded him to L.A. on Friday.
“The best part is that right away I will have a chance to win,” he said in flawless English. “We have the opportunity to go out there and accomplish something great and something special.”
Read more here.
Friday afternoon when I arrived at FedExForum for Chris Wallace’s press conference to discuss the trade of Pau Gasol to the Lakers, I noticed something different about the cinder-block walls in the hallway of the Don Poier Media Center: Several of the series of color placards that adorn the hall were missing — eight in fact. All the images of Pau Gasol had been removed — “ripped down” seems more appropriate considering the remnants of paper and glue still attached to the wall where placards once were.
This wouldn’t have seemed all that odd, except that there were still several solo images of lesser former Grizzlies (Dahntay Jones, Lawrence Roberts) adorning the hall …
Read the rest of Chris Herrington’s epic post-mortem take on the Pau Gasol trade at Beyond the Arc.
Categories
FROM MY SEAT: Gasol, Folks
I
interviewed Pau Gasol during the third month of his NBA career, in January 2002.
My task was to profile the lanky, then clean-cut, 21-year-old forward who was
climbing his way up the list of Rookie of the Year candidates for the Memphis
Grizzlies’ gameday program. We sat down after the team’s practice at Rhodes
College — the first brick had yet to be placed for FedExForum — and spent a few
minutes talking about the new life of an NBA player, and the hopes that player
had for the months and years ahead. I was astonished at one missing element to
this Spanish novice in Memphis: humility. And I mean that in a good way.
When the
Grizzlies traded Gasol to the Los Angeles Lakers last Friday for salary-cap
relief — the acquisitions of Kwame Brown and Javaris Crittenton were merely to
make the dollar-figures work, as required by the NBA — the team ended the
closest thing to an “era” the franchise can claim. Gasol went on to win that
Rookie of the Year trophy — an honor he coveted, particularly being the first
European player to win — and became the first (and still only) All-Star in
Memphis history when he suited up for the Western Conference in 2006. Even
including the team’s five years in Vancouver, Gasol leaves as the Grizzlies’
career leader in games (476), points (8,966), and rebounds (4,096). He was the
centerpiece for the team’s three consecutive playoff teams from 2004 to 2006.
Alas,
those three playoff teams lost all 12 games they played. And sadly, this will be
part of Gasol’s Memphis legacy. He was a good player — a star, even — but not a
difference-maker. Not The Man 11 other players in uniform can lean on for the
biggest of wins and a postseason run. He was Pippen without Jordan. McHale
without Bird.
The
two-year descent the Grizzlies have suffered since that last playoff appearance
might well have begun when Gasol broke his left foot competing for his beloved
Spanish national team in the 2006 World Championships. The Grizzlies lost 17 of
the 22 games Gasol missed to start the 2006-07 season and really haven’t had
their collective heads above water since. New blood has arrived — in the forms
of Rudy Gay, Mike Conley, and Kyle Lowry — to provide hope for a return to
playoff basketball in the Bluff City. But the hope wasn’t enough to keep Gasol
(and his salary of just under $14 million) in the mix for the current brass.
With the departure of Stromile Swift factored in, these are — good, bad, or ugly
— the New Griz. General manager Chris Wallace and coach Marc Iavaroni have
established their presence and the dawn of, dare we say it, a new era in Memphis
NBA history.
The
trade seems like a rarity, in that it should benefit both parties. For Gasol, he
must be tingling with delight, landing in the middle of a playoff race, asked
merely to complement the incomparable Kobe Bryant (a player who just might have
found his own Pippen). And the Grizzlies – suffering in attendance figures every
bit as much as they are in the standings — now have budget flexibility to (1) pay
necessary bills short-term and (2) decide just how much cash to throw in the
free-agent derby this summer. A transformation is needed for this franchise, and
it couldn’t be accomplished in its entirety with Gasol’s bearded face still in
the picture.
“You
have to be confident if you’re going to be able to do things on the court,”
Gasol told me six years ago. “I’m very ambitious. I want to be one of the best,
ever.” Who knows whether or not Gasol will land in that conversation when his
career ends. But you get the impression the ceiling for the now 27-year-old
former All-Star just rose with his move to the City of Angels.
“Pau Gasol must be tingling with delight, landing in the middle of a playoff race. And the Grizzlies – suffering in attendance figures every bit as much as they are in the standings — now have budget flexibility to (1) pay necessary bills short-term and (2) decide just how much cash to throw in the free-agent derby this summer. A transformation is needed for this franchise, and it couldn’t be accomplished in its entirety with Gasol’s bearded face still in the picture.”
For the rest of Frank Murtaugh’s take, go to “Sports Beat”.
The most high-profile local endorsement yet of a presidential candidate was scheduled for a 5 p.m. announcement Monday, as 9th District congressman Steve Cohen prepared to make a statement expressing his support for Democrat Barack Obama.
Cohen said he had reached his decision after much soul-searching but had finally concluded that “Obama is the best chance of moving forward that Americans have had since Bill Clinton in 1992.”
The congressman acknowledged that it was difficult to take a position counter to Hillary Clinton, whom he said he also admired. “But this is one of those choices that comes along only rarely, and we can’t let it pass. Obama is the clearest option for change and the best chance to say no to the special interests.”
Monday’s announcement was to take place at Obama’s local headquarters at Eastgate.
On the eve of Tuesday’s Super Tuesday voting in Tennessee and 21 other states, Hillary Clinton did not go unspoken for, however, City councilman Myron Lowery announced over the weekend that he would be endorsing the New York senator.
UPDATE: Cohen was joined at the endorsement ceremony by the Rev. Keith Norman, the chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party, who said his endorsement of Obama came from “Pastor Keith Norman, not from Chairman Keith Norman.”
Norman made a brief statement of support for Obama, saying, ” “Hope is my choice, and therefore I’m here tonight to make Barack Obama my choice for president.” He then introduced Cohen and stepped aside as the congressman made his own remarks.
Calling the 2008 presidential election “the most important” in his lifetime, Cohen said Obama would be a departure from politicians who were “too cozy with lobbyists and special interests.” He compared Obama’s inspirational qualities to those of John F. Kennedy and also likened the Illinois senator to both Robert F. Kennedy and former president Bill Clinton, husband of Senator Hillary Clinton, Obama’s current Democratic primary opponent.
Obama and the ex-president were the two “most charismatic” political figures and the two most able to synthesize and articulate issues, said Cohen, who noted pointedly, “Barack Obama is the only one on the ballot tomorrow.”