From Steven Colbert

Romney´s motto:
"If it ain't broke, insist that it is, and maybe they'll hire you to fix it."

See? I Can Be Fair and Balanced Too

To show that I occasionally can be critical of more than just the right, why do some people on the left refer to "undocumented" immigrants rather than "illegal" immigrants?

I have very little sympathy for those who would make illegal immigration a political football, and absolutely none at all for the part of the Arizona law that was struck down, whereby police could have stopped any persons they wanted for any reason, or no reason, and demanded to see their documentation.  But, still, we're adults; let's call a spade a spade, to resurrect an expression I haven't used or heard for about four decades.  Some immigrants are legal and some are illegal.

The following story, which is taken from a fund-raising email I received, is no less poignant and the incident to which it refers is no less outrageous if the victim is "illegal" rather than "undocumented."  

Last October, a reporter approached The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund with disturbing cell phone video he had obtained. That grainy footage captured a handcuffed man, prone on the ground, being tased and beaten to death by US Border Patrol agents.

The victim was Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, a San Diego construction worker, father of five, and undocumented immigrant. Local police ruled his 2010 death a homicide, but then closed their investigation with no agents charged. Earlier this month, the impunity came to an end—with 16 members of Congress demanding a full investigation by the Department of Justice.

It was The Investigative Fund that made the difference. We sent the reporter, John Carlos Frey, to the border to investigate Anastasio's death, and we met with producers at the PBS show Need to Know. The result was an April 20 broadcast that sparked a massive national petition drive and an explosion of activism by community groups such as the Southern Border Communities Coalition. Anastasio's mother even flew to Washington, DC, to demand accountability.

 Since the Need to Know segment aired, John's reporting has gone viral: He published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times and the story was covered in outlets ranging from ABC News and MSNBC to Univision, the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, and the London Daily Mail. Now The Investigative Fund is working with John to expose more troubling deaths at the border.

 Put another way, if the Border Patrol agents beat a handcuffed man to death, their actions are just as deserving of prosecution if the victim was an illegal immigrant as they are if he was an undocumented immigrant.

Heitor and I now refer to each other as "my undocumented husband."

Was It Really A Good Year for Liberals?

An article by David Cole in today's on-line version of "The Nation" magazine, specifically about the Supreme Court ruling on ACA, makes an interesting point about this years session of the Supremes. 

A Good Year for Liberals Before a Conservative Court

Indeed, it is worth noting, as the term draws to a close, that this conservative Court issued a surprising number of liberal decisions this term. It struck down mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles; invalidated a penalty imposed on broadcasters for “indecent” speech; struck down a law making it a crime to lie about one’s wartime honors; extended the right to “effective assistance of counsel” to plea bargaining; invalidated most of Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070; ruled that installing a GPS to monitor an automobile’s public movements requires a warrant; retroactively applied a liberalized crack cocaine sentencing regime to persons who had committed their crimes before the reforms were introduced; and held that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial right requires the state to prove facts that increase a criminal fine to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. All in all, not a bad year for liberals before a conservative Supreme Court. But stay tuned, because next year it is likely to take up affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act and gay marriage.

Cole makes an interesting point, but instead of celebrating all I can think about is how fragile many of these rulings were.  I don't recall the details for all of them, but many I know were 5-4 decisions.  Those could all be undone if the next president gets to replace a Ginsburg or Breyer with another Scalia, Thomas or Alito.

The early analysis of today's healthcare decision that I've read agrees with some of the opinions I read shortly after the case was argued, at the time most people were focusing pessimistically on the antagonistic questioning by the court's conservatives.  What I read then agrees with the analysis I'm reading now (hell, it could all be written by the same people, for all I know), namely that Roberts is smart enough to be concerned with the image of the court as an institution and is worried about the degree in which Americans already consider it politicized.

Most analyses I've read of the Roberts court before today suggest it is more aggressively driven by an activist conservative agenda than any court in history, and I would partially balance all of the "liberal" decisions cited by David Cole with the fact that the court had the opportunity to hear a case from Montana that would have allowed a reassessment of their Citizens United decision, but they opted not to do so. (Although it is worth noting that most of the stories we've been reading about the super PACS and the huge individual contributions to them would exist even without the Citizens United decision....sad to say.)

Stimulus Program for Republicans

There is a very interesting article in the NY Times on line, by Bruce Bartlett, whose conservative credentials are indisputable.  He's worked for Reagan, Bush Sr., Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.  The article is called "Stimulus Even Republicans Can Support."

It is actually a well-written and thoughtful article in which he accepts the Keynsean argument that government spending does stimulate the economy and, in some cases directly and others indirectly, contribute to GDP. 

From the bi-partisan position that cuts in defense spending will mean a loss of jobs, he make the obvious point that defense spending created those jobs.  And obviously other government spending also creates jobs and contributes to GDP.

I'll boil it down to his final two or three paragraphs: call public infrastructure programs and education military spending.  Because, of course, Republicans love military spending.

There would be a rational military reason for doing so in both cases.  National Security was one of the justifications (maybe the main one) for the construction of the interstate highway system under Eisenhower, and for other infrastructure spending earlier under FDR.

"Enthusiasm" and "Mitt Romney" In The Same Sentence

 

Just to piss off you Republicans and remind you of your nominee.

It Makes Ya Proud

The headline reads "Justices Bar Mandatory Life Sentences  for Juveniles," and I couldn't help but think "about time."  But, much as I wanted to think it might have been otherwise, I knew I was going to read it was a 5-4 decision and, of course, it was.

Justice Kagan,  in the majority opinion, said that treating teenagers (in the two cases before the court, 14-year old males) as adults violates “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” I read "evolving standards" and knew that was like red meat to the Fab Four of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito.  In a separate dissent all his own, that phrase lit Alito up like an 18th-century firecracker. (If I am mixing metaphors, so be it.  Mistakes are being made all over the place.)

Here is my favorite sophistry of the dissenting opinion, written by Roberts.  The fact that the US has 2500 juveniles serving life sentences without parole, which places the US in a league all our own, makes what I think of as civilized people cringe in embarrassment.  But to Roberts, that huge number of incarcerated kids proves that this is not "unusual" punishment, and therefore constitutional.  It is clear to me that, along with all the other problems with the constitution, it could have been improved with the addition of the little word "or."
As in "cruel and/or unusual punishment."

By the way, this ruling just struck down mandatory sentences of life without parole.  In our wonderful progressive society, individual judges can still choose to sentence 14-year old to life without parole if that is what turns them on.

It still amazes me that the make up of the Supreme Court is never a serious factor in presidential races. If McCain had won, this ruling would have gone the other way because he would have appointed the same kind of justices as Bush did.  If Romney wins, it might be reversed in four or five years.

Remember also, in all the nostalgia for Bush Sr. that seems to be going around, that we have him to thank for the cynical appointment of Clarence Thomas.

The "Arizona" ruling is just too messy to think about for now.  This one is easy.

Silly State Politics

I miss Molly Ivins' a lot.  Even though she wrote about the lunacies of Texas politics, this story from North Carolina would have been in her wheel house.

The state of North Carolina has something called the Local Food Advisory Council, whose innocuous mission statement is copied below.

 It is the purpose of the North Carolina Sustainable Local Food Advisory Council to contribute to building a local food economy, thereby benefiting North Carolina by creating jobs, stimulating statewide economic development, circulating money from local food sales within local communities, preserving open space, decreasing the use of fossil fuel and thus reducing carbon emissions, preserving and protecting the natural environment, increasing consumer access to fresh and nutritious foods, and providing greater food security for all North Carolinians.

Nothing very controversial, right?

Well, so you might think but, alas, conspiracy nuts are everywhere.  When a bill was introduced to extend the Food Advisory Council's mandate for an additional three years, some NC House Republicans had a problem with that word "sustainable."

Rep. Glen Bradley tried to amend the bill to remove the word from the panel's mission. He said the term "sustainable" is government doublespeak, intended to "lull the public into complacency."

Bradley warned his colleagues that "sustainability" is part of the UN's Agenda 21. 
"'Sustainability' is a term that was designated [by the UN] in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that means 'social justice' more than 'sustainability,'" Bradley said on the House floor.

(Damn those "social justice" agendas. The same problem the pope has with the nuns.)

Sustainability "is the efforts of the UN to circumvent our constitution to have the government more and more in control of people," Pittman said. "It’s not about maintaining a resource. It’s about getting the people more under the control of the government."

The amendment was defeated 51-63, but the Republicans who joined with the Democrats to kill it are already being targeted in the next election by the conspiracy theorists.

Everytime someone says we need to end a federal program and substitute some sort of block grant to the states as a more cost-effective alternative, remember...this kind of local lunacy probably isn't that unusual.  Are these the people you want administering any program more serious than getting out of bed in the morning?

Summing It All Up

Thanks to Heitor for this (not that he made it up).

It's a Strategy

Life In Hell

Matt Groening is ending his "Life in Hell" comic strip.  I wish I had been a more faithful reader, but I forgot about it after I left Minneapolis...where it used to be printed in one of the weekly alternative papers.

At least the Simpsons is continuing.

Race Matters

A story in today's NY Times is a good refutation for anyone thinks we live in a post-racial world.  Actually I don't know any serious person who thinks we live in a post-racial world, but I know people who, for whatever dishonerable reason, like to pretend we do, or who act as if the best way to bring it about is to act as if it already exists.

The story is about Michelle Obama's white relatives in the south.  There is one 69-year-old woman who, even though she says "you really don't like to face this kind of thing," who has decided “I can’t really change anything....but I can be open-minded to people and accept them and hope they’ll accept me.”  Gawd bless her. The rest of the family are hiding in their houses and refusing to talk. I don't get it. Why the trauma?

It seems to me that there is a lot of sentiment in the south that celebrates the confederacy but wants to sanitize history by pretending slavery didn't exist or, if it did, that it didn't involve my ancestors.  A corollary would be that, if my ancestors were slave owners, at least they were the good kind.

Accept it. Slavery existed, and slave owners raped slave women. Consensual sex undoubtedly took place between owner and slave as well, and we can also contemplate the fact that some sort of love was a possibility (although it always stopped just short of emancipation, and there was always the extremely awkward and weird situation of knowing that some of your slaves were your children).  The point is that we don't know what happened in any given situation, and who cares at this point? Your great-great-great-grandfather raped his slaves?  Well, there was a lot of that going around at the time. It doesn't reflect badly on you.

Living in Brasil, where mixed race backgrounds are the norm, but not many people can connect their lineage with the wife of the President, I am amazed. As I suggested at the beginning, race still matters in the U.S.

Bush's Economy

Despite the Jeff Danzinger cartoon I posted recently which disparaged the intelligence and fairness of the American people, I find it encouraging that a Yahoo News story (OMG!!, I'm citing Yahoo News!) says that a recent Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans recognize that Bush has more blame for the sorry state of the current economy than Obama.  Even 50% of the Republicans think so.

After four years, clearly Obama owns a lot of the economy, and there is much for which to fault him and much that he has to defend.  But it is reassuring to see that in the United States of Amnesia people have not forgotten everything that has happened since the year 2000.

Keep the Faith

Another George Kennan quotation seems apt, from a letter he wrote to his sister in 1937 or 1938.

"I hate democracy; I hate the press....; I hate the 'peepul;'  I have become clearly un-American."

George F. Kennan: An American Life

I recently finished the Kennan biography by John Lewis Gaddis, and an still mulling it over in my mind.  Only after finishing it did I see that it won the 2012 Puliter Prize for biography.  I can understand why.

There is some interesting background to the book.  Gaddis first sought out Kennan about writing his biography when Kennan was about 78 years old.  Kennan liked what he knew of Gaddis's work, and he gave his permission, but the two of them agreed that the book would not be published until after Kennan's death and, also I believe, that Kennan would never read a word of it.  Kennan then proceeded to live for another 23 years, dying in 2005 at the age of 101.  Then it took Gaddis another 6 years to finish writing the book and get it published.

Kennan was such an interestingly complex man, a diplomat who was more of a scholar and a poet, a naturally gifted writer who himself won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the Bancroft Prize, and probably others.  I remember how much I enjoyed the first volume of his memoirs, which he published in 1967.  He was the originator of the Marshall Plan, the man who coined the term and the concept of "containment" of the USSR (although he came to disagree strongly with the overly-militaristic way in which it was interpreted), the author of the most famous diplomatic dispatch in U.S. history, the "long telegram" of 5500 words from Moscow in 1946, a man who spoke fluent German and Russian, who could talk with both Stalin and Gorbachev without an interpreter. Or could have, if Stalin would have met with him.  He is still the only US ambassador to the USSR who was declared persona non grata and booted out of the country. He was the number two man in the German embassy when Hitler declared war on the US, and was interned for 5 months.  He was hated by the many on the American left at the beginning of the Cold War, and by the those on the right when it was in full swing.

The despised (in this blog, at least) Henry Kissinger supposedly observed in 1979 that "George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history."

The reason the book deserves the Pulitzer is because it shows us the man in all of his many contradictions, a man both humble and petulant, scholarly and petty, an independent thinker who needed praise, a lifelong student of history and policy planner for the future who was extremely negative and pessimistic about the present...and his "present" lasted a long time.

Here are some isolated quotes from the book, most of which are taken from Kennan's diaries and letters (Sorry for the weird spacing.  I'm having lots of formatting issues.):

And what was the task of a university, "after all, if not to ready its students for "their prejudices, not to impregnate them with its own?"

Princton history courses had allowed stretching a little knowledge into a lot of opinions.

It seems to me that this country (the U.S.) doesn't want government....It will suffer unlimited injustices and infringements on liberty from irresponsible private groups, but none from a responsible governing agency. Its people would rather go down individually, with quixotic courage, before the destructive agencies of uncontrolled industrialism--like Ethiopian tribesmen before Italian gas attacks--than submit to the discipline necessary for any effective resistance.

"You speak off-the-record...and worry for weeks about the resulting leaks. Speak publicly and it is as secure as a safe. No one knows what you said."

"....with a sense of deep gratitude and of happy acceptance of this American world, marked as it is by the mediocrity of all that is exalted, and the excellence of all that which is without pretense."

There was no room, in the modern world, for moral indignation, "unless it be indignation with ourselves for failing to be what we know we could and should have been."

Written during the 1950s (even though it sounds like 2012)

"The tone of political life has become sharper; the words have become meaner; the attempt is often made today to bring people to distrust other Americans--not on the grounds that they are dumb or selfish or short-sighted (that sort of thing has always gone on in our political life) but on the grounds that they are disloyal, that they are connected with hostile outside forces, that they are enemies to their own people."

"I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshields, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling-stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country-clubs, the bars-and-grills, the empty activity, the competitiveness, the lack of spontaneity, the sameness, the drug-stores, the over-heated apartment houses, the bus terminals, the crowded campuses, the unyouthful youth and the immature middle-aged--all of this I could see recede behind the smoke of the Jersey flats without turning a hair."

 Of a writing obligation he took on late in life:

It was a "publish before perishing" obligation.

"...Saint Augustine, whose Confessions had taken up far too much of God's time"

Regarding the acquisition of wisdom with age:

"....as one to whom these imputations would presumably be applicable, I am bound to say that this theory is at best complicated, and at worst questionable.

"Remember your humanity, and forget the rest."

New Expression for the Day: Sado-Monetarism

Some interesting tidbits from today's paper.

From Paul Krugman's column:

What explains this trans-Atlantic paralysis in the face of an ongoing human and economic disaster? Politics is surely part of it — whatever they may say, Fed officials are clearly intimidated by warnings that any expansionary policy will be seen as coming to the rescue of President Obama. So, too, is a mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming, a mentality that a British journalist once dubbed “sado-monetarism.”

  Whatever the deep roots of this paralysis, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it will take utter catastrophe to get any real policy action that goes beyond bank bailouts. But don’t despair: at the rate things are going, especially in Europe, utter catastrophe may be just around the corner.

 From the NY Times, this headline: "Jeb Bush Questions G.O.P.'s Shift Right"

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said his father, George Bush, and Ronald Reagan would find themselves out of step with today’s Republican Party because of its strict adherence to ideology and the intensity of modern partisan warfare.

I'm glad he didn't try to include his brother in the same group with his father and Reagan.  Of course, Jeb also made the obligatory assertion that the blame is equally shared by both parties.  But anybody with eyes and ears knows that isn't true.  The recent book It's Even Worse Than It Looks, by centrists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who have both made careers following Congress say the culpability is not equal. They see an "asymmetric polarization" with the Republican extremists hogging most of the blame.

This reminded me of Maureen Dowd's column from last Saturday, "Poppy Chic," which almost made me nostalgic for Bush Sr., if I could just ignore or overlook certain unpleasantries like Lee Atwater and Willie Horton.  Hell, compared to the Shrub, I am nostalgic for Poppy.  By the way, did you know that Obama (not Junior) awarded Bush  Sr. the Medal of Freedom (for whatever that's worth at the pawn shop).

The Global Simpsons

I haven't seen Duff beer in the stores yet, but Heitor found this empty on the street.  They have a real website, so that must mean they have a real beer.

Who knows?  Maybe somewhere in Brasil there is a Moe's Tavern too.

No More Click and/or Clack

Sad to say, "Car Talk" on NPR is going on permanent hiatus as of October.  The good news is that there are 25 years worth of recorded shows that will be recycled.  It will seem odd in 2020 to listen to callers whose 1970 Ford Fairlane is making a funny noise, but the automobile information was only a part of the show's appeal anyway.

My favorite "Car Talk" moment came when I was living in a condo in downtown Minneapolis. I was driving home one Saturday and the topic was shock absorbers. They mentioned that the way to tell if you needed new shocks was to push down on the corner of your car and see what happened.  If the car simply returned to its previous position, fine.  If it continued to bounce once or twice, you needed to replace your shocks.

I pulled into the condo parking lot at the same time as one of my neighbors; he turned left into his parking spot
and I went a little further and turned into mine.  Naturally I got out and pushed down on the front corner of my car.  As I did so, I glanced up and saw my neighbor doing the same thing on his car.

Mark Twain and Other Language Questions

Those of you who read this post as an email and don't go to the blog itself are missing out on some clever New Yorker (mostly) cartoons that I post more-or-less daily, and also some occasionally interesting quotations of the day.

Today's offering is from the ever-quotable Mark Twain:
"Faith is believing in what you know ain't so."

Which reminds me of another Twain quote I've always loved:
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger"

And now, back to the matter of language, and the first Twain quotation above.  Those of us of a certain age remember that "ain't" ain't a word, but the language changes with time, and now it is listed in my dictionary.  My question is: why is it spelled with an apostrophe?  Does "ain't" equal "ai not?"

The Supremes: No Longer at the Top of the Charts

According to a NY Times article, polling shows the Supreme Court's approval  rating is at an all-time low of 44%.

 The public is skeptical about life tenure for the justices, with 60 percent agreeing with the statement that “appointing Supreme Court justices for life is a bad thing because it gives them too much power.” One-third agreed with a contrary statement, that life tenure for justices “is a good thing because it helps keep them independent from political pressures.”

Perhaps when people think about it for a little longer than it takes to respond to a poll, they might realize that a lifetime appointment does not make a justice any more independent from political pressures than, say, a ten-year, non-renewable appointment would.

Despite the difficulty of amending the constitution, perhaps it is time to try again. Obviously I think Scalia, Thomas, Alito and that crowd should have limited terms, and others think Ginsberg and Breyer should be sent packing. 

It might be that term limits for SC justices is the only thing the left and the right can agree on.  It would be nice if this issue would get some bi-partisan high-profile champions. Perhaps there is even yet some hope for a constitutional amendment. 

Language Oddities

It is only since living in Brasil and teaching English and trying to learn Portuguese that I have come to  see how unimaginative some English words are.

In the first instance, I didn't so much "come to see" as have it pointed out to me by a Brazilian friend who thought "popcorn" showed a complete lack of creativity, compared to the poetic, somewhat alliterative Portuguese alternative of "pipoca."

Since then, with Heitor and I, it has become something of a game to recognize these functional, but extremely prosaic, English words.

Of course, compound words are a normal and useful feature of the English language and the facility with which we can create them is probably even a strength of the language, but sometimes, if you stop for just a split second, you can see the sense in which they appear downright silly, especially in our case here where there is a single Portuguese alternative.

Heitor's personal favorite is "keyhole," and it must seem like a silly word for others as well, because it has given us derivatives like "piehole" and my favorite, "carhole," from the Simpsons, where Moe thought the French-sounding "garage" was just too lah-de-dah.

I also think "keyhole" just sounds silly, but because the Portuguese alternative to keyhole is not really very imaginative either (buraco de fechadura = hole for the lock), my favorite for now is "fireplace."  Think about it; how dumb is that?

Some others on our list:
clothesline (ever hung anything there besides clothes?)
afternoon (duh)
backpack (I love the Portuguese alternative of "mochila.")

Your assignment is to keep this in your mind, think about the words you use every day, and add to the list.  But, remember, you can't merely select compound words, because there are so many.  Try to find ones that seem to you to have an inherent silly factor.

Mitt Romney Jokes

The right wing may control the debate in American politics, but they at least they must realize they don't have a single funny comedian.  Poor consolation for the rest of us, but nevertheless here are some of Bill Maher's recent offerings:

...the Facebook IPO, where regular people got screwed, and the banks and insiders did ok...or, as Mitt Romney calls it, the American Dream.

Mitt Romney does have a point when he criticizes Obama about the country's educational system.  We are graduating millions of people in this country who are so lacking in basic analytical skills that they are considering voting for Mitt Romney.  As George Bush said, "Our kids is not learning."

Romney's main claim to credibility as a candidate is his business experience at Bain Capital.  Then last week he made the mistake of appearing with Donald Trump in Las Vegas, which only reminded people that you can make a fortune in business in America and still be a total fucking idiot.

Pollsters in Florida reported that when you ask people on a cell phone who they're supporting, overwhelmingly they are for Obama.  When you ask people on a land line, Romney.   Romney also has the support of  people who refer to the coffee maker as the percolator and the television remote as the clicker.

Romney has begun vetting his VP possibilities.  His campaign is looking for a strong conservative, but someone who will not upstage Romney.  So the search is on for a strong conservative in a coma.

Romney, courting Latino businessmen at a luncheon in Los Angeles last week, said he has always had a great relationship with the Latinos....as long as they don't wake him up with the leaf blower.

The media can keep giving oxygen to the story of Trump and the birthers, but they're neglecting a much bigger scandal, which is...wife-ism.  Let's face it, Mitt Romney comes from a Mormon background.  I don't know how many wives he has, I'm not saying I believe in it, I'm just saying he was born on a Mormon compound. I'm not a wifer, but for some reason he has never shown his original marriage certificate.  Again, I'm no wifer, I'm just saying he has the blood of a nomadic, polygamist tribesman and I think that has shaped his world view....and why, on the short form, obviously a copy, of his marriage certificate, which is all that his campaign has supplied does it say "wife" and not "only wife?"  I'm just asking the questions that the lame-stream media won't ask about Mitt's unholy harem of obedient sister wives, which I really hope I'm wrong about.  By the way, how is it that Mitt and Ann Romney have 5 kids and they're all thirty years old?  And you've seen the picture of Mitt pointing to the picture of the Olympic symbol.  What is it?  Five rings. And what else has five rings?  Five wives!  And why did Mitt Romney drive to Canada with his dog strapped to the top of his car?  Could it have been because his station wagon was full of wives?  I'm not saying I believe this wifer stuff.  I take Mitt Romney at his word...but how do you explain this video: (use your imagination) "I have the same view on marriage that I had when I was governor and that I've expressed many times.  I believe marriage is a relation ship between a man and a woman...and a woman, and a woman, and a woman, and a woman....."

More About the Cleveland Baseballers

As I was watching the broadcast of the Twins-Cleveland ballgame today, I learned that Cleveland is dead last among all major league teams in attendance so far in 2012.  And that despite the fact that they have led the Central Division for most of the season (although they slipped to second a week or so ago).

The leaders in attendance are the Phillies, with nearly 45,000 butts in the seats for every game.  Cleveland is within a hair of slipping below 17,000.

In 2011, Cleveland  was in 25th place, out of the 30 major league teams, with 22,726 fans/game.
In 2010, Cleveland was last, with 17,435/game (the Yankees were first with 46,491).
In 2009, Cleveland was in 25th place.
In 2008, Cleveland was in 22nd place.
In 2007, Cleveland was in 21st place.

It would be nice if it were possible for someone to make a connection between the name/logo and low attendance, and could show the ball club's owners that the inherent racism associated with the team was costing them revenue.  Or at least convince them that a name change and an associated marketing campaign, highlighting the high road they were taking, might be to their benefit. 

As regards that high road, it would be typical corporate bullshit, but we'd just have to let them get by with it and, actually, hope it were successful, and their attendance increased.  I mean it would be hard for them to stake a claim to high mindedness on this issue, since the club as been in existence since forever. But we could collectively hold our noses and let them project their illusion.

A curious aside:  Cleveland's ballpark is named "Progressive Field."

I was fascinated to go to the team website and find a video of their Neanderthal-appearing owner awkwardly reading a statement about the club's commitment to diversity.  They also have the following statement on their website.

The Cleveland Indians are committed to developing and maintaining an environment that embraces diversity. We seek to attract, develop, and retain a diverse workforce that brings a broad range of perspectives and experiences to our company. Through supporting an inclusive work environment, we strive to recognize and value the distinctiveness of each employee and to take full advantage of those differences to encourage creativity and innovation, to improve our productivity, while cultivating our acceptance and respect for each other and our communities.

To further this commitment, in the Spirit of Larry Doby, the first African American in American League history and who later was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame as a Cleveland Indian, we are dedicated to the process that diverse job candidates are considered for every position we post. We are committed to finding and hiring the best qualified candidates for each and every position...in the Spirit of Larry Doby.

Talk about corporate bullshit.

If anyone were interested in letting the Cleveland Baseball Club know that this seems mildly hypocritical, the site to go is here.

The Cleveland Baseball Club

How can we still accept a baseball club known as The Indians in 2012, let alone with this logo?





 If baseball fans everywhere would boycott the games, it shouldn't take more than a couple of days for the other owners to force Cleveland to make a change.  The major responsibility obviously rests with Cleveland fans.  Some of them clearly have no shame.  I watched last night's game and saw a mother in the stands with a 4-5 year old kid with a decal of this logo stuck on his cheek.  Ahhh...teaching values.

Native American groups organize protests outside the stadium at the opening of every baseball season in Cleveland, and the fans apparently ignore them and just walk on by.

Some unacceptable alternatives:
 
After righting this injustice, we can move on to the Washington Redskins.