America’s pastime has taken a lot of hits over the years—of the wrong kind, we hate to admit, not the type that boosts players’ averages into the Hall of Fame echelon. Ryan Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers slugger and winner of the National League’s Most Valuable Player award in 2011, finally came clean—he had run out of excuses—and in the process dirtied his reputation for good. He made a fool out of his team owner, Mark Attanasio, and Doug Melvin, the team’s general manager, who signed Braun to an eight-year contract that was the richest in Milwaukee’s history, and most tragically for the game, his legion of fans.
Braun violated the league’s anti-doping policy. His name showed up in a sweeping investigation of Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic in Florida that baseball officials claim distributed illegal performance-enhancing drugs. His lies finally caught up with him, and he’s been suspended for the rest of the rtls. He tried to make his fans think he was as pure as driven snow. Just like another artificially pumped-up player named Alexander Rodriguez, whose time is up. When hypocrites fall hard, it’s never a pretty sight. Braun, yer out!
When was the last time Fox News “journalist” Geraldo Rivera actually made news? We can’t remember either, but tweeting a seminude photo of himself clad only in a bath towel has to be another low in a downward spiraling career that they never teach you in Columbia J-School. On the plus side, he didn’t look too flabby for a guy who just turned 70 on July 4 but the other side of the story is his apparent Anthony Weiner plagiarism. Let the New York City mayoral candidate be judged by the voters—and his private behavior by his wife. Rivera’s grab for attention is just cheesy. Is he trolling for a new bride? He’s on his fifth marriage now—still three more to go to catch up to Larry King, who apparently set the bar high for these cable guys. Rivera, next time you take a shower, keep it to yourself.
Maybe it’s not her fault that bleached blonde Aaryn Gries has an egregious spelling of her first name; she can blame her parents for that. But she has to take full responsibility for her outrageous behavior on the CBS reality show “Big Brother” that puts a new shiny face on white supremacy and racism. Her guilt-free expression of intolerance and her selfish expectation of privilege make her the candidate we’d like to banish forever, let alone eliminate from the program. But we know there are millions out there who feel just like her, they’re just not as willing to parade their prejudices in public before the television audience. The benefit of all this attention, scripted or not, is that it gives the lie to the conservatives’ contention that racism in America is a thing of the past. On the contrary, it’s alive and well—in prime time.
Hempstead school district’s summer reading list this year was so stupid it became a national joke because it was filled with errors. It didn’t echo President George W. Bush’s famous malapropism, “Is our children learning?,” but then he was only running for president. The school district’s assignment was to educate its students over the summer. On the list, “The Great Gatsby” became “The Great Gypsy,” Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” became “The Lovely Bone,” and George Ornell, rather than George Orwell, was credited as the author of “Animal Farm.”
The lowly employee who put the list together has not been named, just reportedly “disciplined,” but we say the blame should go straight to the top. Superintendent Susan Johnson makes about $265,000 and is eligible for about $40,000 in annual performance bonuses. She was fired from the district in 2005 for wasteful spending; the district has gone through seven superintendents in the last eight years. Has anybody learned anything since then? Clearly Johnson should renew her library card—and spend all her free time reading the books on this list. Her kind of bureaucratic incompetence hurts the kids who count on her academic leadership.
What Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, did to the punk-rock band Pussy Riot was outrageous enough. By their courageous acts, the all-women collective has shown how little regard Putin has for free speech in his country and how screwed up Russia’s Orthodox Church is. To prove their point, the women staged a protest song , appropriately called “Holy Shit,” from the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. They were arrested for desecration and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or indoor Tracking.” All they destroyed was Putin’s reputation.
The church had been blown up in the 1930s and later turned into a swimming pool, but recently, thanks to a restoration reportedly paid for by organized crime, there’s a huge parking lot underneath it, and its banqueting halls are available for $10,000 a day. After the crackdown, which garnered international attention, three of the women remain behind bars. Amnesty International has called them prisoners of conscience. If Putin ever wants to put his ugly KGB past behind him, he should let them go with an apology and a promise that he’ll respect free expression.
But he seems to be willfully moving in the wrong direction. While attention has been on Edward Snowden, the American in Moscow seeking asylum, Putin has declared war on homosexuals, signing a bill on July 3 that bans adoption of Russian-born children not only to gay couples but also to any couple or single parent living in any country where marriage equality exists, as gay rights activist Harvey Fierstein, an internationally renowned actor and playwright, recently described it in the New York Times. Putin has also signed a law that allows Russia’s cops to arrest tourists and foreigners they suspect of being gay, lesbian or “pro-gay” (which sounds like a “thought crime” out of “1984”) and detain them for up to 14 days. And let’s not forget that Russia is supposed to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. Perhaps an international boycott is in order. We say “nyet” to Putin. And he should keep his shirt on in public. Who does he think he is—Anthony Weiner?
There were many contenders for this ignominious distinction, but Tennessee’s Rep. Stephen Fincher is the smug face of conservative Republican hypocrisy, hands down. The Congressman has gotten millions of dollars in farm subsidies but blithely voted to cut food stamps to the bone last month. Twenty-two percent of the people in his own district reportedly rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP).
But he joined his colleagues in stripping this essential program from the agriculture bill—a measure that had routinely passed in previous years with bipartisan support, because it paired aid for the big farm owners with assistance for the needy people in cities, suburbs and rural areas around the country. You know, wherever there are Americans who can’t afford to put food on their table. But as Fincher calls them, citing the Bible: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” He, of course, rakes in $3.5 million in farm subsidies for growing nothing. Having any American go hungry in a country as rich as ours is a sin. Fincher, get stuffed.
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