Your intrepid SP crew took it upon themselves to tackle the Great Minnesota Get Together last week, and I decided to take a low-quality snapshot tour for everyone’s enjoyment. Click on past the jump to see all of the technicolor goodness.
A quote:
“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who are not dumb and are keenly aware that it’s in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home . . . on Primary Day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”
In the middle of this article from the STLtoday.com, there’s a nice little story:
Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster Steve Blass once won 19 games in the majors, but he is known more for what took him out of the majors. Suddenly and inexplicably he couldn’t throw a strike. So it was with profound empathy and amazement that Blass called Rick Ankiel’s 20th home run Friday night.
“It’s stunning,” Blass said about Ankiel, the pitcher-turned-slugger. “No one can appreciate what he has done, how he’s come and what he has accomplished like I can. … I can tell you chapter and verse about what happens to you emotionally when you go through what he did and what I did. To hold it together and come out on the other side like he has is tremendous, just tremendous.”
The Wades and I have chatted about this a bit privately, and I think Ankiel’s story is maybe the most under-rated of the year. I think probably because we’ve never really seen anything like it since Babe Ruth. I’m certainly not calling Ankiel the Sultan of anything, I’m just saying that it’s really a tremendous story to be able to be a proficient major leaguer at both pitching and hitting, and especially with the adversity that Ankiel had to face along the way. Impressive stuff, as Mr. Blass would know.
So the basic fact is: the Government, somewhere in the executive branch, possibly even the Big Shrub, committed a felony by wiretapping Americans. Today, the legislative branch, led by the opposition party, covered it up. 99% of the media would rather not cover it, since it could someday be their corporate interests who will need the same thing. The same percentage of the citizenry seems not to care.
You could watch this video to have a slightly deeper insight as to what “politics as usual” did to this country today (and as always, h/t to Glenn Greenwald for the clip).
And for those of you who are saying that things will be different once Obama is in charge - that he’s an agent for Change… he voted for this too. After as recently as October, when he said that he would always oppose it. Sounds a lot like business as usual to me. Maybe Barack thinks this kind of precedent could be useful to him as President. It’s now a fair question to ask.
It’s a sad day for ‘Merica. I assure you that Patrick Henry is halfway to China right now, from spinning in his grave. Go read it for yourselves.
