Charles_Jaco's Blog

The newest poll of Missouri from the Public Policy Polling grup, is an eye-opener for anyone who still doesn't think that race is the big (and hidden) issue in this campaign.

 

The poll reveals that overall, John McCain leads Barack Obama in Missouri, 50% to 40%. That would Missouri out of the "battleground" column and into the "safe for McCain" category. But the devil, and the truth, is in the details. Obama is losing badly in Missouri because a huge number of white people oppose him.

 

Accordin to the poll, 46% of white Missourians support Kenny Hulshof, the Republican candidate, for governor. 45% of them support Jay Nixon, the Democrat. In other words, the two are running dead even among white Missourians. Bugt among those same people, McCain has a 21 point lead over Obama, with McCain drawing 56% of the white vote, while Obama just gets 35%.  Among African-Americans, it's a blowout--81% for Obama, 14% for McCain.

 

Why the disparity? Easy answer--racial polarization. And despite the best efforts of some pundits and some voters alike to stick their heads in the sand and deny that race is the central issue in this campaign, the reality of the numbers keeps popping up in state after state. Bob Herbert of The New York Times has an interesting column on this effect in Michigan.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/opinion/26herbert
.html?ref=opinion

 

Substitute "Missouri" for "Michigan," and the situation seems pretty much the same.

Joe Biden might be a deep thinker on international affairs, but he's a huge yawn as far as attracting votes goes. A snap poll from The Washington Post shows 3/4 of voters minds aren't going to be changed by the Biden choice, which is no surprise. People's attention is still on Obama and McCain, not their number twos.

 

A good deal of that attention toward Obama comes from racists. Not your granddaddy's burn-a-cross-and-shout-the-n-word-racists, but the far more contemporary 21st century version. It's something I touched on in my last post. A new version comes from the folks over at Slate.com.

 

Take a look:

http://www.slate.com/id/2198397/

 

The 2004 presidential election was not about John Kerry at all. It was, rather, completely about George W. Bush.  The campaign was not so much Bush vs. Kerry as it was Bush vs. The-Guy-Who's-Not-Bush.

 

2008 is the same. Rather than Obama vs. McCain, it's Obama vs The-Guy-Who's-Not-Obama. The academic polling models say that after two terms of an unpopular president, a sinking economy, and a war that's draining both national morale and tax dollars, the opposition party should be a shoo-in to take the White House.  Remember, though, academic aerodynamic models also say it's impossible for a bumblebee to fly.

 

So why could Obama lose, and lose by a possibly substantial margin? That one's easy--he's a black guy with an Islamic-sounding name who scares the bejabbers out of many white voters, and makes millions more uncomfortable. Take the latest Missouri poll from Public Policy Polling--McCain leads Obama 50% to 40% in this vital battleground. But among white Missourians, it's 56% McCain, 35% Obama.  Among African-American Missourians, it's 81% Obama, 14% McCain.  Is race a central factor? No. Race is the central factor.

 

It's an evolution of the racial politics that the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater outlined so clearly to Case Western Reserve University political science professor Alexander Lamis in a 1981 interview. Lamis included it in a compilation he edited called Southern Politics in the 1990's (Louisiana State University Press, 1999):

 

"You start out in 1954 by saying, (n-word, n-word, n-word). " By 1968 you can't say  (n-word)—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

 And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "(n-word, n-word)".

 

So now we're even more abstract and coded than ever. "Obama is a celebrity" means "he's an uppity black guy." The bumper sticker with Obama's picture reading "Be afraid. Be very afraid"?  More code, meaning this black guy will get elected, and get even with white folks. The anonymous emails claiming Obama refused to meet with wounded troops, or refused to put his hand over his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance? He's an unpatriotic  black guy.

 

Don't fool yourself. This is exactly what millions of white voters are thinking. And it's why that, unless Obama gets a surge of first-time voters unlike anything we've seen before, he's probably going to lose.

Let's start today's sermon with a quote from the good book, also known as the U.S. Constitution, specifically Article VI, Section 3:

 

"no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States"

 

That seems clear enough. It also seems clear enough that Saturday night's "faith forum" featuring televangelist Rick Warren grilling both John McCain and Barack Obama at Warren's opulent mega-church in California is just that kind of religious test and, therefore, unconstitutional.

 

Disguised as an exploration of the candidate's "character", this televised inquisition is nothing but a spiritual litmus test that goes like this--you can't be moral unless you believe in god and worship regularly. Therefore, since we all want our presidents to be moral, we can only elect people who believe in several thousand year old superstitions.

 

None of this is new. Lawmakers in ancient Greece and Rome were often censured, and sometimes driven from office, for failing to show the proper respect to the gods. They, too, believed that morality was a direct result of believing in the deities. This is just the sort of nonsense the founders hoped to avoid by seperating church and state.

 

According to the American Religious Identification Survey taken by the City University of New York, 14% of Americans are non-believers. That's larger than the American population of Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Jews, and Muslims combined.

But in this political-religious feeding frenzy, none of those people exist. And the un-American--and dangerous--rationale for ignoring them is that non-believers must be immoral. That, of course, is delusional, but no more so than pandering to voters by appearing as part of Rick Warren's song-and-dance act.

 

"

...don't bother. This article from factcheck.org will explain why.

 

That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously

. by Lori Robertson

 

 I’ve noticed that chain e-mails, particularly those about politics, have a lot of things in common: urgent and frightening messages; spelling errors; a tendency to blame mainstream media for not telling the real story; and false, misleading, utterly bogus, and completely off-base claims.

If there was ever a case where readers should apply a guilty-until-proven-innocent standard, this is it. We at FactCheck.org ask the public to be skeptical about politicians’ claims. With these e-mails, outright cynicism is justified. Assume all such messages are wrong, and you'll be right most of the time.

Yes, there are a few chain e-mails floating around the Web that are actually true – but not many. And when it comes to messages about the top presidential contenders, truth in e-mail is an elusive quality. In our Ask FactCheck feature, launched late last year, we've looked into several e-mails our readers have sent to us. We're just getting started, but overwhelmingly they have turned out to be false. Snopes.com has been investigating e-mail and other urban legends since 1995, and the site's founders, Barbara and David Mikkelson, have written articles about 31 e-mails about Barack Obama and Hillary (and Bill) Clinton. Only two e-mails were completely accurate. While a handful had elements of truth in them or couldn’t be verified, the vast majority were flat-out false.

Another writer who debunks rumor and lore is David Emery, author of About.com's Urban Legends page. He lists seven e-mails about Hillary Clinton and five about Barack Obama. His verdict: 12 false and misleading, 0 true.

We have yet to see e-mails about John McCain, and Emery notes a decidedly anti-Democrat tilt to the bulk of the e-mail chatter. But there's still plenty of time before the election. In 2004, a left-leaning e-mail claimed the Bush administration was quietly pushing legislation to reinstate the military draft. The claim was bogus, but the e-mail prompted such paranoia that a GOP-controlled House overwhelmingly voted down a bill to reinstate the draft just to show that it rejected the measure. Snopes has chronicled two claims about McCain – both were true, and one was a positive story.

In an e-mail to FactCheck.org, Emery says in 10 years of this line of work, he has looked into a thousand or so e-mails. Pressed to give a ballpark figure for how many are true, he responds: "I'd venture to say that less than a tenth of what's circulating out there at any given time turns out to be 100% true. A substantially larger portion – maybe around half of all the emails or a little more – contain a mixture of facts and falsehoods." Then, there's a little thing called "spin." "You can take a string of incontrovertible facts and present them in such a way that they point to a false conclusion."

As for e-mails with political themes, Emery, who has been at this longer than we have, says the phenomenon has increased greatly in recent years, with a marked surge in 2004 with attacks on John Kerry. "I'm tempted to say that Internet rumor-mongering has become, for lack of a better word, 'integral' to the political process over the past few election cycles." Internet-fueled innuendo has prompted stronger and quicker responses from the candidates, says Emery, who adds that it's unclear whether or not any of these e-mails were written by political staffers themselves. "It's possible, and I think even likely, that at least a few of these rumors were started by political operatives, but I'm not aware of any hard evidence of that."

More Popular = More Likely to Be Bogus

We've noticed that the more times something is forwarded, the more likely it is to be false. We suggested this perverse theory when we threw cold water on the claim that the United Kingdom, or the University of Kentucky, had stopped teaching about the Holocaust. E-mails about Obama, for instance, have been particularly popular – they now rank as No. 3 on Snopes.com’s list of the 25 Hottest Urban Legends and one rumor holds the No. 1 spot in Emery's top 25. But only one of the e-mails these sites have examined is true – and actually only a certain version of it passes the truth test.

This is the one claiming that Obama didn’t put his hand over his heart while the Star Spangled Banner played. That specific allegation is correct, as documented in a photo of presidential candidates at an Iowa steak fry. But it’s false, as some versions of the e-mail said, that he "will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag." We debunked this and other legends about Obama early this year after receiving a rush of questions about them. Again, for the record, he is not a Muslim, his middle name is not Mohammed, and he placed his hand on a Bible when he was sworn into the Senate. And he puts his hand over his heart when he says the Pledge of Allegiance. We even have pictures to prove it.

Still, two months after we wrote that story, we continue to get messages from readers asking about his patriotism, his religion, his church and whether he’ll take the presidential oath with the Quran.

Often, the message itself includes major red flags that should alert readers that the author is not to be trusted. Here are just a few of what we’ll call Key Characteristics of Bogusness:

• The author is anonymous. Practically all e-mails we see fall into this category, and anytime an author is unnamed, the public should be skeptical. If the story were true, why would the author not put his or her name on it?
  
  
• The author is supposedly a famous person. Of course, e-mails that are attributed to legitimate people turn out to be false as well. Those popular messages about a Jay Leno essay and Andy Rooney’s political views are both baloney. And we found that some oft-quoted words attributed to Abraham Lincoln were not his words at all.
  
  
• There’s a reference to a legitimate source that completely contradicts the information in the e-mail. Some e-mails will implore readers to check out the claims, even providing a link to a respected source. We're not sure why some people don't click on the link, but we implore you to do so. Go ahead, take the challenge. See if the information you find actually backs up the e-mail. We've examined three such e-mails in which the back-up material clearly debunks the e-mail itself. One message provided a link to the Tax Foundation, but anyone who followed it would have found an article saying the e-mail's figures were all wrong. Another boasted that Snopes.com had verified the e-mail, but Snopes actually said it was false. 
  
  
• The message is riddled with spelling errors. Ask yourself, why should you trust an author who is not only anonymous but partially illiterate?
  
  
• The author just loves using exclamation points. If the author had a truthful point to make, he or she wouldn’t need to put two, three, even five exclamation points after every other sentence. In fact, we're developing another theory here: The more exclamation points used in an e-mail, the less true it actually is. (Ditto for excessive use of capital letters.)
  
  
• The message argues that it is NOT false. This tip comes from Emery, who advises skepticism for any message that says, "This is NOT a hoax!"
  
  
• There’s math involved. Check it. One message that falsely claimed more soldiers died during Bill Clinton’s term than during George W. Bush’s urged, "You do the Math!" We did. It’s wrong.
  

We hope that by writing about some of these messages we can enlighten a few readers and arm some of them with ammunition against their e-mail-forwarding friends. But clearly our battle against the viral e-mail monster has just begun. Months after debunking a popular piece of rubbish about Nancy Pelosi’s plan to tax your retirement savings and give the revenue to illegal immigrants, we’re still getting questions about whether it could possibly be true. Let me repeat: It’s not.

In another item on a common falsehood (but not yet, as far as we know, an e-mail legend), we suggested that a reader try ridiculing his friends to dispel their apocryphal beliefs. And we were serious. If the cold hard truth – or even an ounce of common sense – isn’t an effective weapon in combating a bogus notion, what is?

It seems that no matter the facts, the desire to believe some of this stuff is just too strong. Emery, too, has come to believe that there's not enough proof in the world to stop certain political propaganda. "I have come to the conclusion that especially where political rumors are concerned, most people are so locked into a particular world view that they tend to reject any information, no matter how well supported, that contradicts their cherished assumptions," he says. "It's scary, actually how polarized we have become."

In a 2004 report on this topic, our director, Brooks Jackson, called for an end to the e-mail madness, saying, "This cyber-sickness should stop. All it takes is a little bit of common sense and skepticism, some curiosity and a few keystrokes. Nailing these lies can even be fun."

Apparently, lots of Americans didn’t heed the call. If you don't find checking out these e-mails to be fun, or just don't have time, I suggest an easier alternative: a healthy use of the delete key.

 

In a follow-up to the last post about the Internet and growing American illiteracy, you might enjoy the following from George Mason University professor Rick Shenkman, founder of the History News Network and author of  Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter:

 I do not wish to engage in a debate about the Iraq War. But the thought of planting a largely Christian army in the middle of the Muslim Middle East over the opposition of most countries in the region, when put as I have just put it, sounds daft. Why did it not ring bells of alarm to Americans in 2003 and after, especially as it became clear that our troops would be staying a long time and that no quick victory was possible? It did not because the administration saw to it that the issue was framed differently. We weren’t planting an army. We were spreading God’s miraculous gift of freedom to a benighted people very much in need of America’s missionary help. It was the triumph of myth over logic.

Why were Americans so susceptible to myth? Foreign policy specialists don't usually spend a lot of time reflecting on this question. They should. It's the key to what often goes wrong when foreign policy issues become the subject of public debate.

The answer is, I'm afraid, simple. Myths count more than facts in these debates because Americans don't know many facts and don't care to take the time to learn them. Unlike subjects with which they have first-hand experience--think gas prices--matters related to foreign countries are both exotic and incomprehensible to most Americans. This leaves them sitting ducks for wily pols who want to take advantage of their ignorance by playing on fear and patriotism.

The extent of Americans' ignorance is underestimated. To take one example that will give you an idea of the vast ignorance with which policy makers must come to terms: A majority of Americans do not know that it was their own country which dropped the atomic bomb.

Not all is grim. On the positive side, Americans did not make wholly irrational demands of their leaders after 9/11. American Muslims were not rounded up and sent to concentration camps after 9/11 (as Japanese-Americans were after Pearl Harbor). Mosques were not closed down. Nuclear weapons were not employed against our perceived enemies. And nobody was lynched. Given what has happened in American history any one of these responses or all of them might have been anticipated. That none occurred and that nothing like them occurred is worth noting.

But polls indicate that a significant segment of the American public was susceptible to wild conspiracy theories. A Scripps-Howard poll in 2006 found that 36 percent believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that U.S. officials either allowed the attack to take place or were involved it.

Americans do not have a monopoly on conspiracy thinking. Nineteen percent of Germans said in a 2004 poll that 9/11 was the work of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. The French turned Thierry Meyssan’s book The Appalling Fraud into a best-seller, despite the absence of evidence for its chief and crazy claim: that the Pentagon attacked itself on 9/11 with a cruise missile. Millions of Muslims around the world persist in believing that Jews were given advance warning of the attack on the World Trade Center.

But instead of the thoughtful debate we should by rights have had in this country, we settled for slogans:

• We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here
  
• The Global War on Terror (GWOT)
  
• Mission Accomplished
  
• You are either with us or with the terrorists
  
• The axis of evil

To be sure the public eventually turned against Mr. Bush's war in Iraq. The one thing the public usually gets is success and failure. And Mr. Bush's war has been a spectacular failure when judged against all of the many measures by which he has asked us to judge it.

As we head into the fall campaign and listen to the debates about the war we should keep in mind the limits of public opinion. If we don't begin to address the problem of gross public ignorance there will be more Iraqs.

One poll finding we should all keep in mind is this, as I have been reminding HNN readers the past few weeks. Even after the 9/11 Commission reported that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attack 50 percent of the country persisted in believing there was. The implications of this are mind boggling.

...or has it just speeded-up the process of dumbing down America?  Some thoughts in this book review from the Los Angeles Times:

'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes. By Lee Drutman, Special to The Times
July 5, 2008

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."

Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."

This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."

Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."

And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.

At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk "being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary."

But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can't understand why "kids these days" don't find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking -- the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.

The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). But amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout "The Dumbest Generation," there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril.

Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."

The Dumbest GenerationHow the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 Mark Bauerlein

 

Forget border insecurity and depressed wages. The real reason immigration (illegal and otherwise) will be one of the hottest issues in the 2008 election is summed up in five simple words by commentator, former presidential candidate, and sometimes white nationalist Pat Buchanan:  "White America is in flight."

 

The phenominon of Scared White People (or acronymically, SWP) is nothing new.  The Know Nothing movement of the 1840's was founded by native-born Protestants angry over Catholic immigration from Ireland and Germany. A hundred years later, white flight almost emptied out cities like St. Louis. And now, terrified of brown people speaking Spanish, the intellectual heirs of the Know Nothings are falling all over themselves with proposals to seal the borders, make English the official language,  and deny housing and jobs to illegals.

 

As homosexuals were to the 2004 election, so Mexicans will be to 2008. Allegedly concerned about the "devaluation" of marriage and the demise of civilized society, anti-gay marrriage amendments and referenda in 2004 created an issue that brought social conservatives to the polls in vast numbers. Fear of immigrants will probably do the same in 2008 in states like Missouri, where a constitutional amendment to make English the state's official language will be on the November, 2008 ballot.

 

The fascinating trend here is that the SWP movement often isn't exactly sure what it's scared of. All its members know is that America is changing and they don't like it. The latest statistics to give them shivers were Census Bureau figures showing that four states--Texas, California, New Mexico, and Hawaii--now have populations where white non-Hispanics are the minority, a trend that will overtake all of the United States by 2050.

 

Instead of figuring out how to deal with and embrace the future, SWP want to retreat to 1950. Expect the politics of fear to push a lot of buttons--and turn out a lot of voters--in 2008.

Random thoughts this week on Iraq:

 

• The New York Times publishes this article, detailing how the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has recruited a whole new generation of suicide jihadis and has radicalized young men who previously were worried about girls and soccer, not suicide and jihad. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to know why things are going so badly.

 

• Tim Lomparis, political scientist, Vietnam veteran, and military analyst extrordinaire said during our seminar together at SLU a few weeks ago that withdrawing from Iraq suddenly would create chaos, instability, and pulverize the world's oil supplies. He said it more succinctly to the San Francisco Chronicle:

 Timothy Lomperis, a former military intelligence officer now at St. Louis  University, contends that leaving Iraq would only mean having to return again with 500,000 troops.

"The idea that we can redeploy away from the cities and let Baghdad turn into a swirling vortex of chaos and that any kind of negotiated solution is then possible is utterly naive," Lomperis said. "By 'redeploying' we will have created a Somalia, with the big difference that neighboring powers will be drawn into it like a whirlpool, with 50 percent of the oil on the world market, and bring our economy to its knees."

That is the chief argument to stay -- made many times before the Iraq Study Group, which still embraced a gradual, partial withdrawal.

 

• If you live by the sports metaphor, you die by it, too. Rep. John Shimkus (R)-Illinois, a West Point graduate and deep thinker on long-term strategic affairs, used a baseball simile about Iraq and got pounded for it. Read a newspaper account here, and take a look at the congressman's appearance on Fox 2 here.

 

• The first GOP debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library produced some disagreement on social issues, and as you'll read here, almost total agreement on staying the course in Iraq.

 

• Operation Rat Trap in Iraq has been going after top leaders of al Qaeda. Helped by Sunni tribal chiefs who are sick of the religious fundamentalists, it seems to be going well so far.

 

• And Rep. Lacy Clay (D)-Missouri, wants to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney for lying about the reasons we invaded Iraq in the first place.

 

        There are St. Louis baseball fans of a certain age (translation: over 65) who will swear up, down, and sideways that the Cardinals never threatened to go on strike to protest Jackie Robinson's integration of the major leagues in 1947. But do some online searching and there it is, big as brass, from the New York Herald Tribune of May 8, 1947.   It's best summed up by this entry from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica:

"Some Dodger teammates openly protested against having to play with an African American, while players on opposing teams deliberately pitched balls at Robinson's head and spiked him with their shoes in deliberately rough slides into bases. Not everyone in baseball was unsupportive of Robinson. When players on the St. Louis Cardinals team threatened to strike if Robinson took the field, commissioner Ford Frick quashed the strike, countering that any player who did so would be suspended from baseball."

I include this not only because we're approaching the 60th anniversary of the strike story, reported by legendary sportswriter Stanley Woodward, but because it serves as a reminder of how foggy we can all get when we swear our allegiance to and define big parts of our lives by a professional sports team.

A number of media outlets (including Fox 2) have been lambasted by some fans (which in this case is, literally, short for fanatics) demanding that newspapers, radio, TV, and online news sources stop reporting about the death of pitcher Josh Hancock.  Like Bill Maher says when he skewers the White House "I couldn't make this stuff up, folks."

Hancock was reported by eyewitnesses to be visibly intoxicated the night of the crash. Managers at Mike Shannon's  offered to get him a cab or give him a ride. He was overheard saying he'd been ripped by Tony LaRussa for staying out drinking and being late for a game. The night before that game, Hancock was involved in a wreck. In Sauget. At 5:30 a.m.

Ahem. None of this is to imply Josh Hancock was anything but a stand-up guy in the clubhouse. He apparently signed autographs for kids. His teammates thought the world of him.  But it appears he died as the result of drunk driving. We're lucky no one else was killed. So where is the problem in all of this?

The answer is hidden deep inside the minds of people who identify so completely with a multi-million dollar business--in this case, the Cardinals--that their judgement is impaired.

On the next edition of The Jaco Report (Saturday April 21 at 6:30pm and Sunday April 22 at 8:30am), we look at both the changing climate, and the changing political climate around a new proposed toll bridge downtown.

 

This weekend is Earth Day, which started out a few decades ago as a celebration of the Earth's diversity, and since then has morphed into something more urgent. Our guest to talk about global warming, climate change, and its potentially catastrophic effects over the next few decades, is Dr.William Dannevik, head of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at St. Louis University. Dr. Dannevik started out professionally as a physicist, helping design nuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory. His speciality now is climate change and climate modeling.

 

His point is fairly straightfoward: there is no longer any scientific debate about climate change. The only debate now is how much human beings have to do with it, and how fast the climate is changing.  The roadblocks to getting this across are twofold: the "flat earthers," people who refuse to believe global warming is real, and those who stand to make money from continuing the pollution that adds to global warming.

 

 Next, we talk about how the demand by Missouri that a new bridge over the Mississippi River be a privately owned and operated toll bridge is apparently dead. We look at the politics and big money decisions surrounding any new bridge, and talk with Rep. Russ Carnahan, congressman from Missouri's Third Congressional District and member of the House Transportation Committee.

 

 

A moment of full disclosure--I own three guns. When I lived in Florida, I had a license to carry a concealed weapon, but then, even house plants and stem cells in Florida are armed. I've fired everything from M-16's and AK-47s to MAC-10's, Uzis, and a .50 caliber sniper rifle capable of punching a hole in an engine block at half-a-mile.

 

Having said that, I've always believed there are too many handguns in this country and it's much too easy to get them. Assault rifles--semi-automatic weapons with a large ammunition capacity--are also too easy to get. I wish the NRA convention were still in St. Louis, so I could go down to the America's Center and listen to one of their perky blonde spokeswomen say--once again--that guns don't kill people, that people kill people.

 

The part about the people killing other people is true. But it's awfully hard to kill as many with a knife or a tire iron. I'm currently working on a series of pieces about urban violence, and am looking at where all the illegal guns on the streets come from. One things for sure--at some point, each and every one of those weapons started life as a legally manufactured handgun.

 

Where did the shooter at Virginia Tech get his guns? And what was he doing with them at school? Without this shooting, we would never have had a chance to know, since the NRA helped pushed through federal legislation, called the Tiahrt Amendment, making it practically impossible to trace illegal guns before there's a shooting.

 

I hope NRA officials sleep easy tonight. I won't.

 

Update:

Well, it  seems part of the NRA was still in town after all. Tne NRA Board, including luminaries like Motor City Madman Ted Nugent and Former Congressman Bob Barr, hung around an extra day to meet in St. Louis. Not only did they not have any comment, their meeting was apparently swathed in extra security, including a protective force composed of former Secret Service agents.

 

FBI sources are tellng ABC News and National Public Radio that the gunman, a student from Fairfax County, Virginia, may have been able to fire off so many rounds because he was possibly carrying high capacity ammunition clips. Those ammo clips became widely available when Congress refused to renew a federal ban on assault weapons.

 

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a hawk, a conservative, and a staunch supporter of President Bush and the Iraq War, apparently draws the line when it come to America's love of guns. Howard has attacked the U.S. "gun culture", and congratulated himself for the Australian government's policy of buying guns from private owners.

 

And a Virginia Tech student and gun enthusiast tells ABC News that he wishes someone in the vicinity of the shooter had been carrying a concealed weapon so the gunman could have been killed early on. He also says he's been mistaken for the killer because he's of Asian heritage and because his personal website is loaded with references to guns and pictures of him with weapons.

This Sunday, April 15th, The Jaco Report looks at the National Rifle Association convention here in St. Louis, and at whether the NRA's anti-gun control stance is at least indirectly responsible for the upsurge in gun violence in America's cities.

 

A group of ministers affiliated with the St. Louis Clergy Coalition  claims that the NRA's campaign against gun control and gun tracing leads top more illegal guns on the streets, which has led to an upsurge in gun violence in St. Louis. The NRA replies that the spike in violence has more to do with local police not arresting criminals, local prosecutors not being tough enough, and local judges being too lenient.

 

Si is there a correlation between illegal guns on the streets and the NRA's positions. A group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns thinks so. The group, which includes St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, has campaigned to allow cities to share data on illegal guns, hoping it will help them pinpoint exactly where the illegal guns originate. But that sort of information sharing is currently illegal under a federal law passed in 2004 at the urging of the NRA.

 

Watch The Jaco Report on Sunday, April 15th, at 8:30am, on Fox 2, and give us your opinion.

Major League Baseball has started running a game of the week on Fox 2 every Saturday at 3pm. This means The Jaco Report will (probably) be starting around 6:30pm, and usually later than that, rather than our normal 5:30pm air time. This will last at least through mid-September.

 

What this means for viewers is that the Saturday evening show will usually be a good deal shorter than our normal half-hour, and at a later time, through the baseball season,. But not to worry. The full half-hour Jaco Report will now also air Sunday mornings on Fox 2 at 8:30am, leading into Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace at 9am.

 

This weekend's show promises to be a good one. We start with Sgt. Kevin Ahlbrand of the St. Louis Police Officer's Association debating with Zaki Buruti of the St. Louis African People's Organization about the lack of a verdict in the case of Kevin Johnson, who admitted killing Kirkwood police officer William McEntee in July, 2005. African American jurors all voted to convict Johnson of second-degree murder, while most white jurors opted for first-degree murder. The jury ended up hopelessly deadlocked. We look at differences in perception between the black and white communities when it comes to court cases involving police.

 

Then, we're joined by Dr. Stephen Patterson of the Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, talking about the (often) controversial topic of the historical Jesus. For decades, Dr. Patterson has specialized in researching what we know--and don't know--about the actual existence of Yeshua bar Yusef, whom we know as Jesus of Nazereth.

 

Again, if our programs are cut a little short by baseball, we promise to air them in their entirety every Sunday morning at 8:30am.

Courtesy: Paula Scher/New York Times