theCLog

The latest bad news about Memorial Stadium should – it probably won’t, but it should – move the county to reconsider its stadium and baseball park plans. As we’ve written before, an opportunity to solve two problems at once is at hand. Lots of people want the Charlotte Knights to move to a new ballpark downtown, but lawsuits over the complicated land-swaps proposed to facilitate putting the park in Third Ward — and gripes about using land previously designated for a large uptown park — have kept the Knights in Fort Mill. Meanwhile, the county is sitting on the Memorial Stadium land, the stadium is a wreck, and will cost nearly a million dollars to repair. It was a fine stadium for a long time, and is a great historical relic, but it’s not worth the price it’ll take to fix it.  At one point, the county considered using Memorial Stadium’s land for the baseball park, until someone figured out a way for Uptown big wheels to make more money. But the deal cobbled together by Center City Partners is going nowhere, and Memorial Stadium is in limbo. It’s time now to reconsider the Memorial Stadium option for baseball. Now, will someone on the commission please put 2 and 2 together? Maybe county manager Harry Jones could claim he thought of a great way to save the county money and bring baseball downtown, and incidentally save his skin after his recent controversies.

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God knows there were plenty of events and people to choose from for the weekly Stupid Thing of the Week. Locally, the school board went along with Supt. Gorman’s idea to gut one of CMS’ most successful programs – and did it at the last meeting of the board’s current line-up; needless to say, the new board will start reconsidering the moves at their first meeting. Nationally, Carrie Prejean got all pissy on Larry King Live; singer Fergie let everyone know she’s bi but her husband is well-endowed; Lou Dobbs quit his job at CNN and said he’d been hounded by a mob mentality, “similar to what we saw in Italy in the 1930s” (you might want to re-read your history, Lou, and maybe stop the pity party); a beaver on CBS’ The Early Show peed in the announcer’s face; Sarah Palin went on Oprah and dissed the people who’d chosen her to run for VP in the first place; and Sammy Sosa revealed he’s been using a skin lightener for some damned reason.

But for sheer tone-deaf cluelessness – which is always a plus when you’re vying for Stupid Thing of the Week – you can’t beat our winner, Ian Campbell, a re-enactor and tour guide at Latta Plantation Park. Campbell, an African-American history buff who has devoted a lot of time to bringing history to life at the park, was giving a tour to about 60 fifth-graders from Rea View Elementary in Waxhaw when who did he pick to represent plantation slaves? Why, the only three African American students in the group, of course! Kids were humiliated (and in fifth grade, that’s huge), parents were enraged, and school administrators vowed never to send their kids back to Latta. It doesn’t appear that Campbell meant any harm, but again, a history buff being that clueless about race relations is kind of mind-boggling.

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Former President George Dubya Bush is giving a speech today at Southern Methodist University (SMU). He and his wife Laura will be on the Dallas campus to unveil the programs to be offered at the George W. Bush Institute at SMU. Please, no tired coloring book jokes. Groundbreaking for the Dubster’s big, shiny institute won’t take place until a year from now, but plans are underway to flesh out programs for the scholarly forum’s “four core principles.” So far, though, no one seems to agree on what the four principles are. One report says they are democratic freedom, opportunity, responsibility and compassion. Another source says no, the core principles are education, global health, human freedom, and economic growth. It’s already starting to sound like the early planning for the Iraq war. No one asked me, nor are they going to, but I think the four principles should be making rich people richer, bungling disaster assistance, prideful arrogance in foreign policy, and how to kill young Americans through bad decision-making and sheer incompetence. Whatever principles the institute settles on, it’s nice of Dubya to take some time away from writing his memoirs; it can be pretty tedious work looking up how to spell “pretzel,” “bike ride,” or “rendition.”

Dubya tries out one of those newfangled computers

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A lot of liberals in North Carolina are mightily pissed off at Rep. Larry Kissell, but the new congressman doesn’t seem to care. N.C. progressives are furious, not to mention feeling duped, over Kissell’s vote against the House healthcare reform bill. N.C. liberals put in a lot of hours, effort and money to get Kissell elected and now feel deceived and angry. What’s making them doubly mad is that neither Kissell nor anyone on his staff is returning calls or messages from riled up former supporters. One progressive activist put it this way, on the BlueNC Web site: “As of last night not a single person I know had heard back related to his health care vote or anything else, for that matter. It is one thing to make a vote that one national analyst described as the second most confusing vote against the bill. It is another to not have the common courtesy to at least explain that vote to people who have given his campaign money in the past.” James Protzman, one of the founders of BlueNC, describes the disillusioned former Kissell supporters as “People who listened to his happy talk and bought it hook, line and sinker.” More to come, I’m sure.

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OK, first the state told employees who are part of the State Health Plan (SHP) they’d have to pay higher prices unless they quit smoking. Apparently not satisfied with minding their employees’ personal business, the SHP has now thought up ways to punish employees who lied about their smoking habits. The SHP is contracting with a company to, as NC Policy Watch puts it, “travel around the state shoving swabs in the mouths of workers.” If you fail the test, or refuse to take it, you’ll be moved from the 80/20 plan to the 70/30 plan for at least one year; and not only you, but also other family members who are covered, whether they smoke or not. Sometimes it seems this country’s puritanical background, and our fellow citizens’ busybody habits, will never let go.

Bad state employee! Bad!

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Today is Veterans Day, and the nation is having its annual festival of hurrahs and heart-tugging nods toward the flag. And then, if the past is any indication, the country will go back to giving veterans about 2 seconds’ worth of thought each day.

Hopefully, though, the past won’t be a guide this year — not with the recent massacre at Ft. Hood still fresh in our minds. Nor with reminders from VA Secretary Shinseki that veterans “lead the nation in homelessness, depression, substance abuse and suicides.” Nor with a new study revealing that more than 2,200 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance. The Obama administration deserves credit for its array of efforts to improve the lot of veterans, but there’s still much more to be done.

One important thing the President can do is establish policies that would drastically cut the number of wounded vets coming home from some Third World hellhole, starting with getting American soldiers out of the hopeless, never-ending mess that is Afghanistan.

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Now that the health care reform fight has moved to the U.S. Senate, North Carolina’s Sen. Kay Hagan is seen as a key figure in determining what kind of reform comes out of Congress. Hagan supports reform, but has made noises about being “flexible” on the public option part of a reform bill. Our view is that not including a public option would be disastrous, with little to keep the health insurance companies honest in terms of premiums and coverage. You can be sure that Hagan is going to have her ear bent every which way by health industry lobbyists — including the galling folks who run Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina – who are urging her to oppose a public option. It’s up to supporters of real health care reform to contact Hagan and tell her to stand up to the insurance interests. This is how real politics works, folks, so go beyond your vote for Obama, and make some calls if you want to help move a progressive agenda forward.

Here are phone numbers for Sen. Hagan: Toll Free, 1-877-852-9462; D.C. office, 202-224-6342; and the Charlotte office, 704-334-2448.

Hey, how's it going — call me!

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Religious fundamentalists are pretty much the same everywhere. Which is kind of funny, considering that each fundie group, whether Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, or what-have-you, thinks it’s the one true source of Truth with a capital T. One of the things shared by fundies worldwide is their sheer hatefulness; they see God as a wrathful avenger, and applaud other fundies who deal out “punishment” to those they see as enemies of their faith.

Yesterday, the similarities were crystal clear. Anwar al Awlaki, a radical American Muslim imam now living in Yemen, praised the Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, as “a hero” who was following God’s wishes when he killed U.S. soldiers last week. Officials say Hasan has communicated with Awlaki at various times.

Around the time Awlaki was praising Hasan and promoting his own hateful vision of religion yesterday, Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church group was rallying in front of the school attended by President Obama’s children, bearing signs proclaiming, “God Is Your Enemy.” Phelps’ group is known for its hatemongering, and have often disrupted the funerals of American troops killed in Iraq, claiming that God is punishing the U.S. for its support of “rampant, disgusting fags.” The group also picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, declaring that the victim of homophobic violence was a “filthy sodomite” who deserved what he got – a sentiment all the Anwar al Awlakis and Fred Phelpses of the world would agree to.

A member of Phelps' family shares the love

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County Manager Harry Jones must be awfully good at schmoozing the commissioners. That’s the only explanation I can find for the fact that rumors are not flying about Jones’ job being in jeopardy. That’s especially true after the daily paper’s Sunday story about the DSS “Case of the Disappearing Kids’ Christmas Money” fiasco, and Jones’ handling of it. As Fred Clasen-Kelly reported, Jones and other members of county government received an e-mail from a Bank of America employee named Harry Lomax, who criticized the county’s handling of the DSS mess.

“There seems to be a need for a wholesale cleanup of many county agencies, and I think that starts from the top down,” Lomax wrote. A week later, the “top” in “top down,” County Manager Harry Jones, forwarded a copy of Lomax’s e-mail to a BofA VP with the question, “Do you know Harry Lomax?” There’s no way to interpret Jones’ e-mail as anything but an attempt to quash Lomax’s complaints, but BofA seems to think Jones’ move was a good idea. The bank’s government liaison Betty Turner replied quickly to Jones, saying Lomax’s e-mail was “embarrassing” and that she was “tracking it down.”

As Jeff Taylor at the MeckDeck Web site aptly put it, this kind of behavior is reminiscent of “the time when uppity mill hands who questioned local leaders were met with, ‘What’s your name again? I know your pastor.’ The threat was clear — shut up and know your place.”

Jones’ ill temper and extreme defensiveness in the face of criticism — two deadly traits for a supposed public servant — come as no surprise to this writer. A few years ago when I held the editor position at CL, Tara Servatius wrote a lengthy expose of myriad problems in the county’s utilities department, specifically the miserable job they were doing controlling (or not controlling) sewage spills. Jones pitched a fit, and had his PR folks write up a massive reply to the story, which still didn’t satisfy our objections or refute our points, but that’s a whole other issue. What was most interesting was Jones’ fevered reaction to the story; at one point, he told the commissioners he was sending out copies of the county’s rebuttal, but not to Creative Loafing “because they don’t care about the truth.” Then-chairman Parks Helms had to remind Jones that he was obligated to send us a copy, and Mr. Big Stuff finally calmed down a little.

The latest example of Jones’ manner of operating falls in line with numerous previous reports of him treating county government as an Uptown good ol’ boys’ club. It’s time the county commissioners did something about him. The DSS scandal; the continued payment of a full salary to a former employee in ill health; his recent bonus of nearly $40K during a time of cutbacks; followed now by his attempt to intimidate Mr. Lomax by appealing to the concerned citizen’s boss, well, the pile has just gotten too high. Jones’ entrenchment and his snarling attitude toward criticism have become counterproductive to good governance. The Commission should censure Jones, take back the bonus (undeserved in any case, considering the DSS fiasco), and apologize to Lomax and the citizens of Mecklenburg County.

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Sarah Palin didn’t want anyone to bring recording devices or cellphones to her big speech Friday night at a Wisconsin Right to Life fundraising banquet. No wonder. The Politico Web site bought tickets to the event, and their report is a showcase of Palin’s, er, limited vocabulary, tortured sentences, and, more troubling, her goofball conspiratorial view of government and all those evil liberals. Besides going off on a factually challenged rant about the “In God We Trust” motto being moved to the edge of new dollar coins (a Bush era episode which was reversed two years ago), “Palin … frequently wandered off-script to make a point, offering audience members a casual ‘awesome’ or ‘bogus’ in discussing otherwise weighty topics,” according to the account by Politico’s Jonathan Martin.

Here’s our favorite quote from Palin’s Friday speech (see if you can make sense of it): “It is so bogus that society is sending a message right now and has been for probably the last 40 years that a woman isn’t strong enough or smart enough to be able to pursue an education, a career and her rights and still let her baby live.” Quick question: Who in hell is telling women this? Anyone you’ve heard of? Didn’t think so.

Don’t forget, Ms. Eloquence has a book coming out soon. In case you missed it, author and columnist Carl Hiaasen wrote a hilarious column, posing as Palin’s book editor, for last Sunday’s Miami Herald. Don’t miss it.

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