The Refs

Okay, Okay, New Orleans, we heard you the first time.

Y'all were robbed, ripped off, shafted, screwed, cheated and you had a Super Bowl stolen from you due to something called Spontaneous Blindness on the part of the referees

I'll let NOLA.Com, the New Orleans online news paper describe what happened.

"With 1 minute and 45 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, and the game tied 20-20, the Saints faced third-and-10 at the Los Angeles 13. Quarterback Drew Brees threw a pass along the right sideline to wide receiver Tommylee Lewis, and Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman leveled Lewis before the ball arrived. However, none of the officials threw a flag."

It was textbook pass interference.  It wasn't a "judgment call". It was pass interference because Robey-Coleman did what he had to do to prevent a possible touchdown, just like he's been taught all of his life.


But, there was no flag. New Orleans lost the game to Los Angeles. And New Orleans went bonkers.

You have never seen bonkers like a New Orleans bonkers. Like everything New Orleans, it was way over the top involving law suits, speeches on the Senate floor and your basic whining. The good times stopped rolling in The Big Easy.

It would be easy to tell the good folks in New Orleans to get over it. But, they have a point. If a ref can't see that, what is he doing in the business?

It is sort of that way with the news media.

It is important to have a free and independent news media.They are the referees of society. They  are the ones to let us know what is going on at City Hall, the County Commission  and all the way up to the White House.  They are the ones entrusted with letting us know what all of those knuckle heads are really doing-not what they say they are doing.

By the way, I hate that quote from  "Mr. Dooley":  "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable".

No, it is not. The job of the news media is to tell the story as accurately as possible. 


Two recent stories have revealed a new purpose of the news media.  The purpose of the news media is to somehow get rid of The How In The Hell Did He Get To Be President, President Trump.

Buzzfeed reported the latest blockbuster news that President Trump told his lawyer, Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.  Lying to Congress is a clear impeachable offense. The problem: Buzzfeed said their source came from inside Robert Mueller's Independent Counsel's office.  Mueller's office issued a tweet stating that it was not true.  Buzzfeed stands by their story. Good luck with that guys.

The second story is the now all-too-familiar story of The Covington Catholic Kids at The Lincoln Memorial.  It had all of the elements of a great story  Race. Wise Indigenous "Elderly Man" (wait, he's only four years older than me). MAGA hats. Smirking.

I did not realize smirking was such a big crime in America. 

A lot of Blue Check Mark people of Twitter condemned these kids and one, in particular, that was pictured standing in front of the   "Elderly Man" beating a drum.  According to the Blue Check Mark people, this one kid was smirking.

That infuriated a lot of people.  How dare he smirk at an elderly man beating a drum in his face!

One journalist said this:

"And to all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go [expletive] yourselves".

Twitter was going on a couple of minutes of the tape. Other tapes show something different, which it wasn't this gigantic crime against humanity that the original story portrayed.  As late as Wednesday night, some in the news media were still trying to demonize these kids, who were just living their own personal Bonfire of The Vanities.

By the beginning of the week, we learned that the news media totally botched this story, basically making a mountain out of a molehill.  The first story in  The New York Times was titled: "Boys In 'Make America Great Again Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”.  The next story they ran, after the fog of baloney dissipated, was titled:  "Fuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video of Native American Man and Catholic Students.”

This story was just too good to investigate.  It checked all of the boxes, particularly the new odd one that we have to fear roaming bands of Catholic School boys.

It all goes back as a reflection on Trump and how he "empowers" hate groups by making them wear red hats and smirking at elderly men

The problem is the news media for years have been picking the good guys and the bad guys. You can tell the good guys by their drums, the bad guys by their smirks.

When the press totally messes up a story like this one, it is like the refs missing a pass interference call in the football game.  It doesn't make you trust the refs.

Catlin Flanagn says this in The Atlantic:

"I am prompted to issue my own ethics reminders for The New York Times. Here they are: You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will casually harm them. Two years ago, they fought back against you, and they won. If Trump wins again, you will once again have played a small but important role in that victory."

Don't You Forget About Me

Okay, millennials, I have something to confess to you.

Baby Boomers (born from 4,000BC to 1964) have been playing a little joke on you.

We will make a cultural reference from our youth just to watch the blank stares you give us.

For example, on WSB radio's The Von Haessler Doctrine, the host, Eric Von Haessler will repeat a common Boomer Cultural reference like Mikey from the Life cereal commercial.  Eric's producer, who is two years older than my son, will have no clue who Mikey is and may not have heard of Life cereal.


Boomers do this all the time. We'll talk about what a lady killer Warren Beatty was and a Millennial will ask you who Warren Beatty was.

I first noticed this several years when watching a TV show with some friends.  Sheryl Crow was introduced and she sang a song called "Steve McQueen".  My friend's teenage daughter asked "Who's Steve McQueen?'

I couldn't believe it. But thinking back on it, Steve McQueen had been dead for well over twenty years by then, so there was no real reason for her to know about Steve McQueen.  I didn't know anything the stars from my parents' youth.  I had heard of Jack Benny and Bob Hope. But I would bet you most of the Class of 1977 had never heard of Fred Allen and still haven't.

But the problem is and what we (boomers) are trying to prevent what Kyle Smith (Kyle is a millennial name if I've ever heard one) calls "The Great Forgetting".

He describes a MIT professor playing a song in class, asking students to name the artist and the song if possible.  One student, now mind you this is MIT, said "Coldplay".   It was John Lennon and the song was "Imagine".  Smith says, "That’s as close as you can get to iconic, when it comes to a work of popular art. Culturally speaking, it’s just about dead. John Lennon has been gone for 38 years. His work is disappearing from our collective memory".  

The professor, Cesar Hildago, is studying how long "famous" people endure after they die. His estimate is five to thirty years.   Help me if you can I'm feeling down.

Smith goes on to say, "Even very intelligent young people who are highly attuned to popular culture have more or less shrugged off everyone who was famous before they were born. If you can be as famous as John Lennon was and be forgotten in 30 years, fame is even more evanescent than we all thought."

I've experienced this myself with the famous Beatles debates I've had with various millennials over the years.  I will hear a millennial say, "The Beatles are overrated" and I have to argue because it is so stupid.

I know music is all about taste and if someone doesn't like The Beatles, that's okay, everybody has an opinion. But as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own set of facts."  You cannot deny the impact The Beatles had in the short period of time they were together.

Smith says, "These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley." Like it or not, Bing Crosby barely makes a blip when it is not Christmas and he was one of the most popular singers and actors of his time.

It is not just about music either.  You hear people talk about "Back To The Future" and "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" but rarely about "E.T", the biggest box office hit of the '80s.  "Rain Man" swept the Academy Awards in 1989, but if you go up to a millenal and say "It is time for Wopner", they will look at you like you have two heads.


The problem is we are losing a lot when we forget the past. We lose that Bing Crosby was an incredible singer and performer. We lose "Help", "Penny Lane" and "Hey Jude".

But we, and I'm speaking for The Boomers now, are worried that you Millennials will forget about us.  We just wanted y'all to enjoy what we enjoyed. We should have known you wouldn't. We did the same thing to our parents and our parents' friends.

Time Keeps On Slippin'

You may remember that a couple of years ago I was knee deep in class reunion stuff.

Yes, the Wheeler High School Class of 1977 had their fortieth reunion in 2017 and I helped out and gave a little humor speech, that was mainly about "rolling".

If you don't know what "rolling" is, it is when a bunch of kids get together and throw toilet paper in the trees of a friend's house. Now, some people call this "vandalism" because you are on someone's property, uninvited and throwing toilet paper into trees.  You just can't win with some people.

Back in the mid-'70s, we called this "innocent fun".

Everybody rolled houses. I mean everybody. The Baptist kids, the stoner kids, the nerd kids, the jock kids, and the band kids.

My wife even rolled houses.

One time, my wife was telling me one of her rolling stories. It was about how she and a couple of her friends went out at 2:30 in the morning and rolled this guy's yard.

I listened and said, "Your mother. Let you. Go rolling. At 2:30 in the morning?" My wife's mother was a saint and would not approve of this use of toilet paper at this time in the morning.  Especially for a boy's house.  The boy would learn that it was some girls had rolled his yard and soon he would wonder if they were naked while they rolled the yard.  To be fair, she wasn't wrong, because back in the '70s the only thing boys thought about was naked girls doing things naked (opening a locker, getting the mail, taking an algebra test, etc). By the way, "Doing Things Naked" would be a great name for a band.

My wife looked at me and said in a sexy whisper, "My mother never knew about it."

Rowr!  I responded by requesting her to bring her bad girl self over to me.

I don't hear about rolling anymore.  Maybe it's because of all of the perpetually knotted panty people got their way and it is taboo to throw toilet paper into a friend's tree. I don't know. It might have more to do that if a bunch of kids did go rolling today, all of them would have to post an Instagram story about it as soon as it happened.

What got me into thinking about my reunion, which was very successful I might add, is that it dawned on me that I will turn 60 years old this year.

Five years until I am eligible for Medicare.

I was the last kid born in my immediate family. I was the last kid born on my mother's side of the family.  I was the third to the last kid born on father's side.  I was always the youngest. However, now I am not.

I don't feel 60 years old except for my back, which sometimes feels like 120 years old. My hair is sprinkled with gray, but still, I have all of it. Like the saying goes, I'd rather it turn gray than turn loose.

I try to keep up with pop culture as much as I can.  I know Drake is famous. I'm not sure what for, but he is famous.

To be honest, pop culture is sort of boring to me.  Everybody is "woke" and there are certain things you can say, like the F word except in church and broadcast TV. At least right now.

But, there are a thousand words you can't say and if you do, woe be unto thee.  The Twitter mob will come after to you and convict you without a trial or jury.

Back when I was in high school, there was no GOOGLE.  We had the encyclopedia.  Today, it can take seconds to find information on a topic.  Back then, it took weeks, sometimes months to research a project.

The picture below illustrates this:

This is a picture of some of Wheeler's finest if you have an elastic definition of "finest". (I am the striking young man wearing glasses and the hairstyle called "Combed Once A Week".)

You will notice that we are in the library (or "lie-berry" as the Vice Principal pronounced it) "working" (again: elastic definition) on a research project.  Only one book is open and only one person has a pen.

My point is back then you had to work to obtain information. Now it is at your fingertips.  I told my wife that if we had PCs, tablets, and smartphones back then, I'd probably have at least two PhDs by now. But, there wasn't and now I'm entering "the golden years" with zero PhDs.

I was one of the lucky ones. The Vietnam War ended when I was in 8th grade and they ended the Draft.

Our music was great. Much better than whatever is out now.  Back then, country music was country music written by and for people who wore their names on their work clothes.

Okay, we had disco. Sorry.

One more thing and this is going to show my age: GET OFF OF MY LAWN. Unless you have toilet paper. That stuff is not cheap.

The Goofy, The Crass, And The Tax Lovers

Just when you think things could not get any goofier, here comes the 116th Congress.

Supposedly it is the most "diverse" Congress in history if by diverse you mean more women and minorities.  However, there's not a lot of diversity if you look at the out and out goofiness that was on display.

For example, Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema's swearing-in received a lot of attention.  Here's a sample of some of the headlines from the internet. As the great Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.  I have added parenthetical comments.

AZ CENTRAL. COM:  Krysten Sinema's dress draws attention at Senate swearing-in.  (Sen. Sinema's dress was, let us say, different, and it certainly drew attention to her swearing-in.)


Huffington Post:  Krysten Sinema's swearing-in look was a bold Queer statement.  (It was a bold statement. It said: DO NOT TAKE ME SERIOUSLY.)


Boing Boing:  Arizona's kick-ass new bisexual Senator took her oath on the U.S. Constitution administered by cringing, homophobic Dominionist Mike Pence  (I'm not sure how many cups of coffee the writer had before writing this headline.  I'm pretty sure, though, Mike Pence was not "cringing" since he had swore-in Richard Grenell as the Ambassador to Germany with Grenell's same-sex spouse holding the Bible. I know a majority of "Boing Boing" readers have no idea what a Dominionist* is.)


It is odd. I listen to Hugh Hewett every weekday morning. I read National Review. I watch Fox News. I never once heard anything about Sinema's sexuality.  It seems to me that we here on the awful right would have at least casually mentioned it. Nope, never did.

However, as bold as Senator Sinema was, it was a distant second to Representative Rashida Tlaib's potty mouth.

In case you have been in a cave, Representative Tlaib said of President Trump, "We are going to impeach the (phrase that rhymes with Brother Trucker)".

So many things to unpack here, but let's give it a try.

I'm about 99% sure Trump will be "impeached" because, according to Yale Law School Graduate Gerald R. Ford, 38th President of The United States, an impeachable offense is anything The House says is an impeachable offense.  For Trump, the impeachable offense is winning The White House.

There is a 0% chance Trump will be removed from office because the Senate would have to expel him and Republicans control the Senate. Absent of a tape where you hear Trump say, "You know, Vladimir, collude in the election and help me win" you will simply not get 60 Senators to remove Trump from office.

So, at best, impeaching Trump will be an empty political gesture.  It does nothing to address infrastructure needs, reform entitlement programs, create economic opportunities, or a host of a hundred million problems that  Congress should be looking at.

As far as the language is concerned, SMH as kids text nowadays.  I'm not sure why the F-dash-dash-dash word has become acceptable in society.  Maybe it is Cable TV. Maybe it is Popular music. It is difficult to find an F-dash-dash-dash word free zone.

To be fair, there have been some Democrats who have condemned  Sliaib's sailor talk. However, Speaker of The House  Nancy Pelosi was her typical homer self when asked about it.

Aunt Nancy said, "You have to weigh the equities. That is not the position of the House Democratic Caucus. The equity to be weighed is: that’s freedom of speech of an individual member. As I said, generationally, that would not be the language I would use, but nonetheless, I don’t think we should make a big deal of it. I really don’t. 

"That’s probably the way people talk. Again, I’m a grandmother. It’s a different story. Words weigh a ton, and the president has to realize that his words weigh a ton, too. Some of the words that he used [have] a direct impact on people’s lives. My colleagues’ comments do not have an impact on people’s lives".

What is so hard in saying it is vulgar language and has no place in our national discourse?  We have spent the last three years clutching our pearls at Trump and his awful vocabulary and The Speaker of The House can't even send a bar of soap to a new member?

Finally, we had our latest national cutie-pie, Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez propose a 70 percent marginal tax rate to create a "Green New Deal" to fight "climate change", which GQ says is sensible.

My question:  why only 70 percent?  Why not 80 or 90 percent?  Shoot, if "climate change" is such an issue, why not a 100 percent?

Yes it is true in the '50s and the '60s the marginal tax rates were up to 90 percent, but, and this is important, the SUPER RICH, did not pay 90 percent of their income in taxes back then. There were deductions and loopholes back then too.  There's no reason to assume there would not be deductions and loopholes now.  It would just make the Super Left feel good because it makes it look like they were doing something.

Plus, let's be transparent and honest.  The only thing Democrats really love is taxes. At least it seems that way.  They can't wait to get into office and raise taxes.  Even here in Cobb County, we had two Democrats elected on to the county's school board. The first thing to come out of their mouths was to raise taxes and have a "conversation" about repealing the senior citizen school tax exemption.

Democrats had (note the word "had") a great opportunity to run towards the middle and create a sensible dialogue that all liberals claim they want.  What this week proves is that they don't want to do this.

*Dominion theology is is a group of Christian ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their personal understanding of the Bible.



















AOC