Steven Rubio's Online Life

drumroll for my blogroll

Time.com has posted their “First Annual Blog Index”, what they consider the 25 best out there (along with the five most overrated blogs). While I often come across material from those 25 blogs via other links, I do not have any of them in my Google Reader RSS feed, so I guess I’m an outlier. So, using the Reader’s “Trends” function, here are some blogs/websites I actually do read:

• TV Squad (156 posts read over the past 30 days, 11% of the available posts): This is mostly for Maureen Ryan … I still call it “TV Squad” even though it has been taken over by HuffPost.
• Deadspin (135 posts, 20% of available): “Sports News Without Access, Favor, or Discretion”
• SB Nation Bay Area (130 read, 19% of available): Another sports site; “Pro Quality, Fan Perspective.”
• McCovey Chronicles (82 read, 62%): SF Giants site.
• A plain blog about politics (77 read, 82%): Smart political scientist blogging from a centrist Democratic perspective.
• Salon.com (67 read, 17%): I read Salon a lot more than this shows, because I visit the website multiple times each day, and those don’t show up in Reader.
• If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger There’d Be a Whole Lot of Copycats (64 read, 100%): You can tell how much I love this site by the 100% read figures. Everyone should have this in their feed reader.
• Baseball Prospectus (54, 18%): Like with Salon, I visit the BP site several times a day, so the % figures don’t reflect how much time I spend there.
• ESPN.com (48, 35%): This doesn’t count the ESPN baseball and soccer pages, which I visit a billion times a day.
• Feministing (44, 44%): A new-to-me blog that is already climbing my list of good reads; “Young Feminists Blogging, Organizing, Kicking Ass”.

I don’t actually know how Google Reader computes these things, so I’ll add two honorable mentions that turn up on a list titled “Clicked” … not sure what that means, but I read these whenever something is actually posted there, which is frequently in Alan’s case, not-so-frequently in Tim’s case:

• What’s Alan Watching: Alan Sepinwall on TV.
• Bastard Machine: Tim Goodman on TV.

In most cases, I recommend the above dozen sites if you are interested in the subject matter. I think “A plain blog” and “Feministing” are worth reading, even if you don’t think you’d agree with what you’d read … I find myself disagreeing with “A plain blog” on a regular basis, but I love reading it just the same. And one more time, I highly recommend “Gunslinger” … they don’t post every day, but every post is a delight, and it’s almost all photos, so you don’t have to worry about reading too much, if that’s your problem.

why it matters

ozzie and fidel

Perhaps you aren’t a baseball fan, and so, when Ozzie Guillén made the news, you weren’t aware that Ozzie tends to say whatever pops into his mind, that this sometimes gets him into trouble, but that he is a sportswriter’s dream precisely because he speaks his mind. (He is also entertaining on Twitter for the same reason.) Perhaps you now know that Ozzie, who is from Venezuela but who has become a U.S. citizen, speaks English as a second language. His English is better than my Spanish, but he tends to think in Spanish, even when he is speaking English, or so he said recently.

Anyway, Guillén is in the news because of things he said in a Time magazine interview. Guillén only recently took on the job of managing the Miami Marlins, after 8 years in charge of the Chicago White Sox, who won a World Series under his reins. Miami has a problem … let me restate that, the Miami Marlins franchise in Major League Baseball has a problem. Simply put, no one goes to their games. They have won two World Series in recent times, but over the past eleven seasons, they have finished in the bottom five in the majors in attendance, including three straight years when they were last. They have made efforts to change this, and for 2012, they have a new ballpark (built under some controversy and a lot of public funds), and a strong marketing push to the many Cuban-American fans in the area. As a popular and well-known Latino, Guillén was a part of this push.

Ah, but South Florida is also full of anti-Castroites. So it was a marketing disaster when, in the Time interview, Guillén said, “I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that motherfucker is still here.”

He also said that he loved Fidel Castro, and there is some dispute about how he meant to use the word “love”. As he said when offering the required apology, “I was thinking in Spanish, and I said it wrong in English.”

Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and this would have likely blown over in a few minutes if Ozzie was still managing in Chicago. But this is Miami. So the Marlins issued an official statement:

There is nothing to respect about Fidel Castro. He is a brutal dictator who has caused unthinkable pain for more than 50 years. We live in a community filled with victims of this dictatorship, and the people in Cuba continue to suffer today.

I have no idea what Marlins ownership thinks of Fidel Castro. But I can imagine what they think about marketing, about money, about getting people through the turnstiles. So they suspended Ozzie Guillén for five games.

Joe Sheehan had his usual insightful analysis in his newsletter:

This is an economic decision that has nothing at all to do with Cuba, Fidel Castro or Ozzie Guillen's long history of being opinionated. This is public relations, not politics. This is the Marlins, at a critical moment in their history and desperately trying to win over a city they've bent over for years, making damned sure that they don't lose any of the momentum gained by their new ballpark or waste the hundreds of millions of dollars they committed in finding players to romp around in it.

Cuban-American fans of the Marlins are likely not satisfied with a five-game suspension. This matters to them in ways it doesn’t matter to a Berkeley Commie like me. As Jose Canseco (yes, that Jose Canseco) tweeted, “I hope Ozzie Guillen clears up His Castro comments. My dad took us away from Cuba for better life in USA. Glad he did.” (Unrelated trivia: I spent an afternoon watching an A’s game in a luxury box with, among other people, Jose’s dad. He was a nice man, but I told him I didn’t like the 1989 World Series ring his son had given him to wear.)

There are other ways to look at this, of course. Prometheus Brown tweeted, “so apparently praising Fidel Castro is a bigger crime than killing an unarmed black teenager in Florida huh”.

But I’m with Joe Sheehan: it’s about money.

international law

Bruce Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale, in the Los Angeles Times:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington has provoked a broad debate over the military and political wisdom of an attack on Iran. But so far, there has been little attention to the legal issues involved, which are crucial. American support for a preemptive strike would be a violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution. …

In 1981, the United States joined in the U.N. Security Council's unanimous condemnation of Israel's preemptive assault on an Iraqi nuclear reactor. … In standing with the Security Council to condemn the Israeli raid, the Reagan administration was embracing a tradition of U.S. statesmanship that began … in 1837 …

Today, we are at a crucial legal turning point. If President Obama supports Netanyahu's preemptive strike, he will transform Bush's Iraq aberration into the founding precedent of a new era of international law. He should instead reaffirm Reagan's position in 1981 and return the presidency to its traditional commitments to international law abroad and constitutional fidelity at home.

a new standard of openness

Peter van Buren on whistleblowers:

There is a barely visible but still significant war raging between a government obsessed with secrecy and whistleblowers seeking to expose waste, fraud and wrongdoing. Right now, it is a largely one-sided struggle and the jobs of those of us who are experiencing retaliation are the least of what’s at stake.

Think of those victims of retaliatory personnel practices and imprisoned whistleblowers as the canaries in the deep mineshaft of federal Washington, clear evidence of a government that serves its people poorly and has no interest in being held accountable for that fact. This administration fears the noise of democracy, preferring the silence of compliance.

politics, and taking a leak

Salon had a brief piece yesterday where political journalists and analysts offered their favorite “campaign-related fare”. What got my solipsistic attention is that I know two of the people who were asked for their choices, which instantly made me think of the article as somehow “mine”.

The problem is, I don’t have much to contribute to the topic beyond my peripheral connection to the writers. I thought long and hard, and this is what I came up with as my best campaign-related moment. Congressman Ron Dellums, who was my favorite politician for so long I can even forgive him for his time as mayor of Oakland, stopped by the Berkeley campus when I was at Cal. I forget why he was there, but it was during a presidential election, so it was probably 1988. I happened to be walking across lower Sproul Plaza and saw the Congressman and a couple of “aides” (i.e. bodyguards) ahead of me. I had to take a leak, so when Ron stopped into the men’s room, I followed suit, and found myself standing a couple of urinals away from Representative Dellums.

So, of course, I asked him to convince me to vote for the Democratic candidate for president.

It was the typical dicks-in-hand conversation common in men’s rooms across this great nation of ours, albeit with one of the participants being a bit more famous than the other. I suppose I had visions of Hunter S. Thompson asking questions of George McGovern when both were taking a leak early in the 1972 campaign. I was going to get a scoop! Nah, let’s face it: the truth is, I was star-struck, and wasn’t thinking about much at all.

As I recall, Dellums cussed more than once as he explained the standard “sure, the Democrat leaves a lot to be desired, but anything is better than the Republican” line. I thanked him and said if anyone could convince me of the rightness of that argument, it was the politician I most respected.

The point of the story, in 2012, is simple: I have nothing but lame campaign-related tales to tell.

There is a follow-up to this story, or rather, to Ron Dellums and me. There was a guy who used to hang out on our block occasionally. He was convinced that he was the illegitimate son of Ron Dellums. His “proof” was that his mom … ah, why bother, it was so goofy it didn’t even qualify as “proof” with scare quotes attached. This guy did not look a thing like Ron Dellums, although he thought the resemblance was clear. Some of us dream of winning the lottery; this gentleman dreamed of being recognized by his “real” father.

Here’s a clip from a long-forgotten movie that relates to all of this, if you happen to have taken a hit of acid this morning:

as the republicans choose their presidential candidate

Anthony D. Romero, executive director for the ACLU, on the recent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act:

President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law. … The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. …

We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court. … Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today. [emphasis added]

“Frank Mikulak, Hand Nailer” may have had the last word, on the Onion site: “Why would we need to detain American citizens indefinitely when we already have the authority to shoot missiles at them from drones?”

i have a memory

I had my students read two speeches by Martin Luther King, one of which was the inevitable “I Have a Dream” (the other was “Where Do We Go from Here?”). Their assignment was to write a five-page essay analyzing why “I Have a Dream” is so much more a part of American culture. Everyone knows it, it gets trotted out every year on his birthday, and it gets taught in classes beginning at a very young age. Meanwhile, you have speeches like “Where Do We Go from Here?”, which demands a guaranteed annual income and, ultimately, a restructuring of American society.

I hoped the students would point out the ways the ubiquitous presence of “Dream” tends to sanitize our view of King, eliminating his more radical side. And a few students picked up on that. But most of them pointed to more obvious reasons, and they were right to do so; many of those reasons were right on target.

And so, many essays noted that “I Have a Dream” was given before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, and was broadcast live on television and radio, while “Where Do We Go from Here?” was given at the meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, resulting in an audience far smaller than its more famous counterpart.

I found myself walking down memory lane. As much as I hate nostalgia, I’ve come to mistrust memories in general even more. Mistrust … that’s the right word, memories can’t be trusted. Which means I’m not sure how close this memory is from when I was 10 years old, but …

I remember watching “I Have a Dream” on television.

The memories are vague. The black-and-white TV was in the corner of the living room … my mom was watching as well (in my memory, she is ironing clothes, but I have no idea why that’s part of the scenario) … no one else was there. The latter doesn’t make complete sense. My dad would have been at work. It was summertime, so none of the kids would have been at school, which explains why I was home on a Wednesday. But where were my siblings? My older brother was 16, and the younger ones were 6, 5, and 3. Most, if not all, of them should have been home. Still, in my memory, it’s just me and my mom and the black-and-white TV.

Funny thing is, I don’t remember a bit of what King said. I feel like I knew it was important, or why were we watching it? But that’s about it. In subsequent years, I filled in the blanks. I know what he said now, I can hear his voice, I know some of it by heart, just like so many Americans do.

But that’s how memory works. It starts with a kernel, which is then influenced by outside forces, until you start remembering things that didn’t actually happen.

As is often the case when you have written a blog for almost nine years, I am repeating myself to some extent. Here is what I wrote back on August 18, 2009:

Look at this picture:

This is David Bell scoring the winning run in the game that put the Giants in the 2002 World Series. I was at that game, and I can remember it as if it were the proverbial yesterday. In my mind’s eye, I can see Bell sliding across home plate on his belly, as we in the stands shared the joy you can see on the players in this picture. That memory looks exactly like the picture, in fact, which is one reason I love the picture so much.

Except … my seats were just to the left of home plate, so the angle from which I saw Bell was … well, I’m not good at describing spatial stuff, but whereas the picture is taken from someone who experiences Bell sliding towards them, my vantage point was such that Rich Aurilia (#35) was leaping in my general direction. In other words, my memories of this moment, which match the picture, are not really my memories of Bell’s slide, but rather of the picture of Bell’s slide. And that’s one reason why memory is a funny thing.

your tax dollars at work

 

welcome to the promised land

Garance Franke-Ruta compiles a series of photos and videos from the Occupy movement:

“Too Much Violence and Pepper Spray at the OWS Protests: The Videos and Pictures”

The list feels endless. UC Davis, Portland, Seattle, Berkeley, New York, Denver, and Oakland, and Oakland, and Oakland, and Oakland, and and Oakland.

It is hard to look at this kind of attack and think this is how we do things in America.

And yet it is all too American. America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.