Month: November 2009

Hello, Goodbye

Post author By Frank Murtaugh
Post date November 19, 2009

CREDIT: Joe Murphy

It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast within a 24-hour window for
University of Memphis athletics.

Friday night at FedExForum, 17,584 fans turned out to greet
32-year-old rookie basketball coach Josh Pastner for the Tigers’
regular-season opener against Jackson State. Then at noon Saturday, an
announced 18,031 fans sat in the Liberty Bowl to say goodbye to
55-year-old football coach Tommy West, whose dismissal after nine years
at the Tiger helm was announced five days earlier.

As tends to happen with greetings and sendoffs, one was positive
(Pastner is undefeated as a head coach), the other not so much (West
remains a victory shy of 50 wins with the Tigers). Sports are
transient, particularly the college variety. Last weekend will stick,
though, for Pastner and West.

“After the game, Mr. R.C. Johnson came and gave me the game ball,”
said Pastner to a contingent of media after the Tigers beat Jackson
State, 82-53. As if the coach needed to enhance his
innocent-as-a-choir-boy image, he actually referred to the U of M
athletic director as “Mr. R.C. Johnson.”

“I took the ball and I told him — and I mean it — this
has nothing to do with me. It’s about the players. The players win the
games. This will never be me. Credit goes to the guys. They stepped up,
gutted it out, and found a way.” He may be new to the gig, but Pastner
has his victory cliches polished and packaged.

What he’s missing, to this point, is that the 2009-10 basketball
season is very much about him. The first legitimate roar in FedExForum
this season came during the pregame video, when a gleaming face above a
white shirt — that would be Pastner’s — appeared behind a
rotating basketball-as-globe as the theme from 2001: A Space
Odyssey blasted from the arena’s sound system. He will not score a
point this winter, or dish out an assist, or grab a rebound. But don’t
doubt that Josh Pastner is the star of his team. (The news Saturday
that yet another recruiting gem — Atlanta’s Jelan Kendrick
— is on his way to Memphis only cements this region’s devotion to
the Pastner Way.)

The atmosphere was considerably more subdued when West met the
Memphis media one final time Saturday afternoon after his Tigers fell
to UAB, 31-21. (On the list of things West will not miss about his
career as Memphis coach: press conferences in the back of what was once
the visitors’ locker room at the Liberty Bowl.) Unlike his emotional
statement on November 9th, though, West had a firm grip on his comments
and his sense of humor.

“I’ve got strong emotions,” he said. “But I’m not going to go into a
tirade today. If that’s what you’re waiting for, I’m not going to do
it. I took four Xanax before I came in here.

“Nine years is a long time. I’m going to miss being here, I really
will. This is a good place, and there are good people here. This
happens. It’s our business. You hate it for the seniors that you’re
having this kind of year. A sour year. I’m not worried about myself.
But most of those players won’t play again. I’m gonna coach some more,
so it’s not about me. I hate it for them. I’d like to have seen them go
out at home the right way.”

West described the calls he’s received from his peers in Conference
USA and managed a chuckle in recollecting the chats. “Everybody likes
you this year, because they beat you,” he said.

On an idyllic, 70-degree afternoon for football, I counted a
solitary sign in the Liberty Bowl that acknowledged West’s pending
departure. Not exactly poetic, it read “W the Coach.” The letter stood
for “West,” of course. Sadly this year, it can’t stand for “win.”

We Recommend We Recommend

Hell on Earth

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date November 19, 2009

CREDIT: Milan Kopcok | Dreamstime.com

I’m so confused. If the fiery pangs of eternal damnation are —
as French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre suggested — a metaphor for
“other people,” why on earth would the North American Sartre Society
hold a conference bringing people together, thus creating hell? Could
it be a masochistic urge to bathe in a river of reflective
consciousness? Or is the lure of a jug-wine and cheese-cube mixer so
great that even academics who should know better will risk their lives
by revealing to their colleagues that they are nothing but remote
objects with Merlot-soaked egos?

If any of this ridiculous musing interests, entertains, or offends
you, then you can go to hell. And by that I mean the North American
Sartre Society’s biennial conference, which is being hosted by the
University of Memphis’ Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities. The
three-day conference, which features moderated discussions on topics
such as “Violent Freedom and Violent Acts,” kicks off Thursday,
November 19th, at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art with Beaujolais
Nouveau, crepes, and a one-night-only performance of No Exit,
Sartre’s best-known play and the source of his most famous quotation,
“Hell is other people.”

No Exit follows three despicable characters into a
surprisingly bland afterlife. Joseph Garcin, an adulterer and coward,
Inès Serrano, a manipulative murder accomplice, and Estelle
Rigault, a lusty gold-digging killer, are locked in a room where they
steadily drive one another insane with their reflections of the past
and projections into the future. Hell is presented as a vast structure
or a series of structures made up of small rooms and winding halls like
a hotel. Or maybe a college campus.

Music Music Features

“Solo” Flight

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date November 19, 2009

Dan Auerbach is halfway through his winter tour, sitting in a diner
in Baltimore, Maryland. He’s got a fever — nothing as extreme as
H1N1 or as ridiculous as the boogie-woogie flu, but an annoying
low-grade illness that’s got him doped up on Advil’s over-the-counter
flu remedy and a host of nasal decongestants.

“Right now, I’m getting to be lazy, which is both a good and bad
thing,” Auerbach croaks by phone from this tour stop. “I’m trying to
feel better, but that means that everybody else has to pull my
weight.”

Everybody else. The words have an interesting ring for the 30-year
old guitarist, who, after eight years with the Black Keys, the duo he
formed with drummer Patrick Carney, is touring with a wealth of
performers, including his backing band, Hacienda, and opening acts
Justin Townes Earle and Jessica Lea Mayfield.

“When I’m on the road, I feel good when I’m surrounded with really
good, honest, genuine people,” Auerbach says. “It’s a lot like being
around family.”

Family is key for the Akron, Ohio-born rocker, who wrote and
recorded Keep It Hid, his first solo album, with the assistance
of his father and uncle.

Auerbach’s dad, Charles, accompanied him on a life-changing road
trip to Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint in Holly Springs, Mississippi, a
decade ago, while his uncle James Quine is a living link between
Auerbach and the late punk guitar legend Robert Quine. In the studio,
Quine served up snarling riffs à la the Stooges’ James
Williamson on the song “Street Walkin’,” while the senior Auerbach
penned the stark heartbreaker “Whispered Words (Pretty Lies).”

On the road, Hacienda — a San Antonio band that Auerbach
describes as “hugely inspired by Stax Records, old soul records, and
old rock-and-roll records, a lot like the Sir Douglas Quintet, a group
they never heard” — provides the brooding accompaniment for
Auerbach’s sound, which soars between folk and blues and 1970s-era hard
rock yet never alights anywhere for long.

“Everybody I’m inspired by is dead, for the most part,” Auerbach
notes, with a dry laugh. “Over the last few years, I feel less akin to
those people and more my own person. It doesn’t make my love for them
any less.”

“Those people” include a wealth of Southern talent, ranging from
Kimbrough and Sam Cooke to Ike Turner, who inspired and participated in
the recording of the Black Keys’ last album, Attack &
Release, yet died before it was released in early 2008.

“The combination of [producer] Danger Mouse and Ike was so
intriguing,” Auerbach recalls. “Who in the hell would’ve thought we’d
ever work with those two people, especially combined on one project? We
weren’t there for Ike’s sessions, but there were a couple of songs that
he finished electric guitar on and sang on.”

More recently, the Black Keys and co-producer Mark Neill traveled to
Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to make a follow-up to Attack &
Release at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, where Aretha Franklin
recorded “Respect” and “Chain of Fools” and Percy Sledge cut “When a
Man Loves a Woman.”

The small-town tedium, noted by the Rolling Stones during sessions
for Sticky Fingers and captured in the documentary Gimme
Shelter, was hardly what Auerbach and Carney expected.

“I have no idea how things got recorded there,” Auerbach says. “For
the 10 days Patrick and I were in Muscle Shoals, we both wanted to
shoot ourselves!” Then he gets serious:

“We went down there in complete seclusion, stayed at the Sam
Phillips Marriott in Florence. We like to get out of town, and we just
wanted to go someplace that had history. Muscle Shoals Sound Studio
really did it for us. We recorded 16 songs in 10 days.”

When he rolls into Memphis for his concert at Minglewood Hall on
Friday night, Auerbach plans to take his entire contingent to
Shangri-La Records and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, where
he’ll shoehorn in a few more history lessons before it’s time for the
sound check.

“I love Memphis,” says Auerbach, who can discuss the nuances of
obscure blues tunes and Stax songs turned rap samples then nimbly shift
gears to talk about the merits of contemporary acts like Jay Reatard
and Those Darlins.

“The musicians I like [in Memphis] nowadays are so far removed from
everything I was originally inspired by,” he muses. “I dunno what it is
about Memphis. Obviously, it’s a mix of South and North and black and
white. I dunno what it is, but the grass is always greener.”

Music Record Reviews

Introducing: a rising star in local rap.

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date November 19, 2009

On God, The Government, The Game, local rap up-and-comer
Teflon Don is helped out here and there by more established local stars
such as Tom Skeemask and Nasty Nardo. And though Nardo’s swaggering
flow on “Let’s Get It Get It,” in particular, is a welcome addition,
Teflon Don (aka Don Askew Jr.) doesn’t really need the help on this
impressive, promising debut.

Though his music is familiar — built on skittery high-hat
beats, springy synths, and a rumbling low end — Teflon Don
makes it clear from the outset that he’s aiming to be a somewhat
different kind of Memphis rapper.

“You can count on this/I spit experience,” he raps on the opening
“It’s Go’n Be Alright.” “Late at night sometimes when I cry I really
reminisce/Especially about the past/It’s getting real ugly/I wish I was
a kid in bed where my mother tucked me … Right now I see your
struggle/I cannot let it go when I think about my baby brother/Oh yeah,
we love each other/He better not ever hustle.”

Horny club anthems such as “The Way She Move” and “Shorty So Fine”
establish that Teflon Don is no schoolmarm, but this North Memphis
native sees a rising crime rate as a problem, not an opportunity, and
college as a way out, with the military as a last-chance escape plan.
This is what’s called clear-headed realism. “Call yourself a man cause
you started selling dope?” he sniffs on the title track, “Pussy-ass
nigga, I’d rather sell my hood hope.”

On God, The Government, The Game, Teflon Don is pure
Southern, rough-edged musically and vocally but with a head on his
shoulders and a willingness to tap into honest emotions: At his best,
he’s somewhat reminiscent of young David Banner. If he generally avoids
some of his scene’s lyrical potholes, he can’t escape some of the
musical ones.

There are overly repetitive choruses here (“Count My Money”). And
sometimes the music gets draggy without the saving grace of a
compelling groove (“I Represent”). But overall this is a promising
introduction to someone who’s talented enough to push his game much
further. (“God, the Government, the Game,” “Let’s Talk About,” “Going
Through Some Thangs”) — Grade: B

Music Record Reviews

Things Are Not All right

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date November 19, 2009

It’s been a breakout year for local Goner Records, whose
busiest-ever release schedule has raised their national profile and
made them one of the most interesting and productive indie rock (if not
quote “indie rock”) labels around.

The latest Goner release is Things Are Not All Right, the
label’s second from Chicago trio CoCoComa, which is led by
drummer/singer Bill Roe and guitarist/singer Lisa Roe, initially a
simple husband-and-wife duo smartly rounded out by bass and organ from
tag-along Mike Fitzpatrick.

Things Are Not All Right — the album’s 10 songs
clocking in at a rambunctious 26 minutes — is fun, energetic
genre music. It’s unlikely to appeal beyond the garage-rock scene in
the way that the likes of the Reigning Sound and Jay Reatard do, but
it’s sonic catnip for aficionados of the form.

Truthfully, it’s the kind of rough, simple stuff that improves live
in a dark club with sweating, bouncing compatriots, but Things Are
Not All Right is pretty okay on disc too. And a lot of the time
it’s more than that.

Bill Roe leading off the urgent “It Won’t Be Long” with the promise
“Our love is strong/It will endure” is a righteous, winning moment. The
borderline rockabilly breakdown on the final stretch of “Never Be True”
swings hard. And vocal harmonies are a cut above throughout. (“It Won’t
Be Long,” “Lie to Me,” “Never Be True”) — CH

Grade: B+

Book Features Books

Island Style

Post author By Leonard Gill
Post date November 19, 2009

First, he was calling from his home on Deer Island, Maine, to let me
know of his latest book. Then he was headed for the Frankfurt Book Fair
in Germany to publicize that book, and it wasn’t such a great time to
talk. Then he was in transit again — on his way to Havana, where
he has a house too (in addition to homes in New York and on St. Croix).
But on his way to Cuba, I finally had a chance to catch up with Michael
Connors (who grew up in Memphis). He was in Naples — Naples,
Florida — where Connors, author of the new (and beautifully
produced) Caribbean Houses: History, Style, and Architecture
(Rizzoli), was in the middle of a morning walk. He apologized for being
a little out of breath, but he was eager to talk about Caribbean
Houses, the author’s latest look (after French Island
Elegance, Caribbean Elegance, and Cuban Elegance) at
the antiques — and architecture — of the islands.

Memphis Flyer: In Caribbean Houses, you not
only consider the decorative arts but also the architecture of
Caribbean colonial culture — a centuries-old mix of cultures.You
take in more than the furnishings to look at these townhouses and
plantation great houses as a whole. That’s a broadening of your
interests, no?

Michael Connors: I couldn’t continue to imitate myself, but
I’ll admit, it was a learning curve. I’m not as “acclimated” to
architecture as I am to the decorative arts. I enjoyed learning what I
didn’t know — the terminology of architecture — but the
decorative arts follow architecture: Romanesque, Renaissance, Baroque,
Classical. I knew the periods.

The hundreds of photographs by a team of photographers in
Caribbean Houses are spectacular. You were on hand for
every shoot?

I had a number of photographers, because my main photographers
weren’t always available. When these houses open up, you can’t wait,
unless you want to take years to make a book. I’m not that way. I don’t
like waiting.

And yes, I’m there for each photograph. I look through the camera. I
know what’s in every frame. I know what I want to talk about in the
text. I know what I want to show my readers. This book tells its story
through the eye, so the photography’s extra important. And so are the
stylists who helped me out. I’m not good with flowers.

How long did it take for you to put together Caribbean
Houses?

Two years, solid. I sold my antiques gallery in New York in 2007.
I’m dedicating myself strictly to writing now, and I’ve already got
another book, English Island Elegance, ready. It should be
published a year from now.

I’m also contracted to do a book on historic Cuban houses, so I’m
living in Havana now — 21 days at a time, because that’s all the
time the country permits — and I’m really enjoying it. But in
Cuba, when it comes to historic structures, it’s often preservation by
neglect. At some point, though, neglect turns into deterioration.

You ever get back to your hometown, Memphis?

Oh yeah. My webmaster is a fellow in Memphis. I still have friends
in Memphis. And one friend, musician/producer Jim Dickinson — he
unfortunately just died. But every opportunity I get — any excuse
I can find is more like it — I’ll get down to Memphis.

You’re keen to point out in Caribbean Houses
an important fact, a fact too easily overlooked: that if it weren’t
for the laborers and their skills, these significant colonial buildings
and their furnishings wouldn’t have existed.

For centuries, those laborers have been unrecognized — unpaid
but more accurately slave labor. The indigenous Amerindians and African
West Indians were put to task to do the work. It’s time they’re
recognized, and it’s important that this patrimony be recognized as
part of their heritage too, so that they take pride. The colonial era
is as much their patrimony and their material culture as it is
anyone’s.

Food & Wine Food & Drink

Local Flavor

Post author By Pamela Denney
Post date November 19, 2009

CREDIT: justin fox burks

Push open the door of the new Farmer’s Market Midtown on
Union near Belvedere and John Raney is ready with a handshake.
“Are you a Midtowner?” he asks. “Welcome to your market!”

Greeter, owner, and Midtown enthusiast, Rainey is a retired
commercial broker who believes the neighborhood is ready for a metro
market specializing in local products and personal service.

“We like to say, ‘Farm fresh to you,'” Raney says. “If you want beef
from Neola Farms six days a week, come here. Fresh-frozen shrimp from
Muddy Waters in Louisiana? We’ve got that too.”

Raney is still developing his produce suppliers, but his groceries
include many vendors who sell in the area’s seasonal markets: nuts from
Delta Pecan Orchard, grits from Delta Grind, frozen entrées from
No Time 2 Cook, baked goods from Big Ono and Backermann’s, coffee from
McCarter Coffee, and local honey.

The market also sells gifts such as pottery and handmade soups and
is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Farmer’s Market Midtown, 1632 Union (726-1031)

Van Cheeseman remembers the coldest morning of last winter
like only a farmer can. It was 14 degrees outdoors, and inside his cold
frame, it was only 9 degrees warmer.

“Everything was frozen,” he recalls about his lettuce and arugula.
“But by noon, it had thawed and was fine.”

Thanks to the cold frame’s two layers of plastic, which trap in the
afternoon heat, Cheeseman is able to grow produce during the winter
months at his Flora Bluebird Farms in Holly Springs,
Mississippi. “It’s all experimentation, but we have plenty to keep
selling. We hope to be here all winter,” he says.

Broccoli raab, Asian greens, mustard greens, mesclun mix, sweet
potatoes, spinach, cucumbers, kale, and the last of the summer tomatoes
are some of the vegetables available now and sold Saturdays from 10
a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Cooper-Young Farmers Market in the parking
lot of Tsunami restaurant. Later in the season, bitter greens, Bibb
lettuce, heirloom garlic, beets, and onions will join the lineup.

A handful of other growers join Cheeseman at the Saturday market.
Dodson Farms from Forrest City, Arkansas, and Gracious
Garden, also from Holly Springs, sell vegetables, and Shoaf’s
Loafs sells baked goods. Donnell Century Farm from Jackson
sells all-natural Angus beef on the first, third, and fifth Saturdays
of the month.

Since produce availability will vary each week, Cheeseman suggests
contacting vendors for weekly e-mail updates. Check the Flyer‘s
Hungry Memphis blog for addresses.

Cooper-Young Farmers Market,

928 S. Cooper, Saturdays 10 a.m.-1 p.m.,

I seem to be the only food writer in America who missed the Lee
Brothers’ first cookbook on Southern cooking, which garnered all kinds
of attention, including the James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year.
Lucky for me, I grabbed their new book off a co-worker’s desk, and
lucky for you, the chefs are stopping in Memphis as part of their
whirlwind tour through two dozen cities.

Charleston natives Matt Lee and Ted Lee will be at
Davis-Kidd Booksellers Thursday, November 19th, at 6 p.m. to sign
copies of Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home
Flavor (Clarkson Potter). Thanks to Brontë Bistro, the
event also will include complimentary appetizers from three of the
book’s recipes: green goddess potato salad; collard greens with poblano
chilies; and cocktail eggs with roasted peppers and country ham.

Davis-Kidd events coordinator Christina Meek expects a crowd. “I
just got an e-mail from Matt Lee saying the books are selling out,”
Meek says.

Appreciated for their creative spin on Southern favorites, the Lees
like to update traditional recipes with fresh flavors and seasonal
ingredients. I made the book’s collard greens soup last week, which
calls for red chili flakes and kosher salt to kick up the seasoning and
turnips and cannelloni beans to bulk up the greens. The result? A soup
so good it’s unlikely you’ll have leftovers for freezing.

Film Features Film/TV

An Education

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date November 19, 2009

British import An Education‘s title is a double entendre
referencing two very different types of instruction that the film’s
16-year-old heroine finds herself choosing between: the education she
receives in her all-girls school as she grinds her way toward Oxford
and the one she receives on the arm of an older man, who whisks her to
art auctions, jazz clubs, and gay Paris.

Set in early-’60s suburban London, a place just beginning to swing,
An Education presents a few crucial months in the life of Jenny
(Carey Mulligan), a bright-eyed young brunette conquering her studies
under the watchful eye of her striving but only superficially strict
middle-class parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour).

The film’s opening credits present a montage of of-the-era teen
girldom: field hockey, hula hoops, instruction in cooking and poise.
But Mulligan’s Jenny is Gidget as burgeoning sophisticate, punctuating
her bubbling classmate conclaves with Camus jokes and illicit
cigarettes and sweetly deflecting the awkward advances of a bike-riding
boy out of her league.

“I’m going to talk to people who know lots about lots,” she exclaims
to friends about her Oxford future. “I’m going to read what I want and
wear black. Listen to music. Look at paintings. See films.” Her father
complains that “French singing is not on the syllabus,” but Jenny’s
cultural desires extend beyond what looks good on a college admissions
essay and beyond her parents’ comprehension, which makes her a prime
target for David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), an alluring man more than
twice her age who forces a meet-cute by picking up a soaking Jenny and
her endangered cello while she waits for a bus after orchestra
practice.

And, as David takes Jenny from a classical concert to an after-hours
club boasting a different kind of symphony — that of smoke
and drink and Etta James covers and heady conversation — that
Jane Eyre paper for English class doesn’t seem quite so
important.

There are subtle signs of trouble along the way, but director Lone
Scherfig doesn’t let the viewer know any more than Jenny, so the unease
increases gradually. There’s a good Hitchcockian thriller lurking
beneath the surface (echoes of Suspicion and Shadow of a
Doubt) as the audience tries to figure out where David fits on the
misguided-to-dangerous scale, though the potential violence is more
psychological and emotional than physical.

Like most coming-of-age stories, this one is heavily dependent on
its lead performance, which is a doozy. Mulligan was 22 when An
Education was shot, but she plays 16 going on 17 flawlessly. The
whole movie could be experienced through Mulligan’s reaction shots, and
she and Scherfig handle the treacherous territory of sexual awakening
with a winning mix of bluntness and restraint. It’s a star-making
performance.

Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Post author By Randy Haspel
Post date November 19, 2009

I would like to offer a heartfelt and blanket apology to anyone I
ever mocked or criticized for having inadvertently cast a vote for
Sarah Palin while trying to register their choice for John McCain as
president. To my lasting humiliation, while casting a vote for Al Gore
in 2000, I am guilty of voting for the mamzer Joe Lieberman. At the
time, I felt it was an inspired choice by Gore. Holy Joe was the
anti-Clinton, and I was thrilled at the prospect of the first Jewish
vice president. Now, Lieberman’s looking more like the Antichrist, and
he has announced his intent to join with the Republicans and filibuster
Harry Reid’s health-care-reform proposal or any bill that contains a
public option, as a “matter of conscience.”

I know this guy believes that he holds up the sky, but how can he
speak of “conscience” when he betrayed his own party, supported the
opposition candidate for president, and was the second Democrat to
speak at a Republican convention, after the nar Zell Miller. Lieberman
means to stand in the way, like George Wallace in the schoolhouse door,
and prevent the Democrats from even voting on their centerpiece issue
on the Senate floor.

All this cranky noise from Lieberman is the continuation of a
pattern of revenge against the party for backing the legitimate winner
of the Connecticut senatorial primary in 2006, Ned Lamont. Lieberman
was re-elected as an independent but caucuses with the Democrats, and
to guarantee that he would play nice, he was allowed to retain his
chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. At the risk of
encouraging Jew-on-Jew violence, it might be time for Rahm Emmanuel to
think about slipping a horse’s head under Lieberman’s linens.

If you’ll permit me a couple of ad hominem attacks, Lieberman looks
like the Joker from Batman, and when he speaks he reminds me of the
Saturday Night Live characters from the 1980s, Doug and Wendy
Whiner. Every time he opens his yap, he embodies the term “mealymouth.”
In the latest Quinnipiac poll, even Connecticut voters believe his
views are more in line with the Republicans.

So why continue with this sham? The handy website Opensecrets.org lists Lieberman’s top
campaign contributors. Why am I not surprised that his major donors
include Aetna, Hartford, Pfizer, and Purdue Pharma? Rather than serving
the public or his constituents’ interests, Joe is serving his corporate
masters that got him re-elected.

I long for the days when there was a strong Senate leader like Sam
Rayburn or LBJ, who used arm twisting to assure the success of the
party’s promises rather than fluff and flattery. And who is the Senate
Whip whose responsibility it is to guarantee the votes are there and to
enforce party discipline? Illinois senator Dick Durbin. I don’t think
Durbi or Harry Reid have ever raised their voices. As a result, rather
than a unified party doing the will of the people who put them there,
we have a version of a Democratic Party Fight Club, with the Blue Dogs
peeing on the carpet.

Senator Patrick Leahy has suggested punishing Lieberman by stripping
him of his committee chairmanship, but I think it’s past time to boot
his tuchis from the party, so he can find his true home as a spokesman
for Fox News. Either that, or force him to filibuster and read the
phone book on the Senate floor while people are suffering. Lieberman is
already in bed with the Christian right over their staunch support for
the state of Israel. His ultra-Zionist views allow him to
compartmentalize the fact that the evangelicals’ long-term vision for
the “end times” in the Holy Land is for either the conversion or death
of the Jews.

Earlier this month, comedian Mel Brooks announced the founding of a
nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the word “schmuck.”
Brooks announced at a rally in Brooklyn that “schmuck is dying.” For
many of us, saying “schmuck” is a way of life. Yet when I walk down the
street and see people behaving in foolish, pathetic, or otherwise
schmucky ways, I hear only the words “prick” and “douche bag.” The
literal meaning of the Yiddish word “schmuck” is a man’s penis, more
specifically, the foreskin. But over the years it has become used to
describe any arrogant, annoying, or disagreeable person. Brooks told
reporters at the first “Schmucks for Schmuck” rally, “You can be a poor
schmuck, a lazy schmuck, a dumb schmuck, or just a plain old schmuck.
We must save this word.”

I have a tip — forgive the pun — for Mel’s campaign:
Take a long look at Senator Joe Lieberman. I think you may well have
found your poster boy.