Category Archives: Theo Epstein

Post-war On Christmas Hot Air

Peace Is At Hand

Huzzah, the war is over! Who won?

Santa & Guns

God’s Lobbyists

The Indiana Family Institute is headquartered, appropriately enough, in Zionsville.

Makes sense, considering the outfit is awfully Jesus-y.

The IFI calls itself a “non-partisan public education and research organization.” Which, right off the bat, is a lie. Its charter, focus, blogs, and and other efforts are directed almost exclusively toward leaning on congresscritters to vote along Jesus-y lines.

In 2013, we learned how scads of similar organizations, in order to avoid paying taxes, say they’re serving the public weal and don’t ever even think about trying to sway public opinion from the pulpit.

Case in point, this morning I read this blog headline on the IFI website splash page:

Screenshot from IFI website

Politics, baby, pure and simple.

Nothing would please me more at this moment than for the IRS to order outfits like the IFI to whip out their checkbooks and start scribbling.

The IFI, according to science and religion writer Clay Farris Naff in the Huffington Post, is one of the prime movers behind HJR-6, the pending Indiana statehouse resolution that would call for the flamboyantly straight majority in this great state to piss all over the idea of gay marriage.

Politics, pure and simple.

See, the resolution is the first official step in the process to add an amendment to the Indiana state constitution that Right Wingers, holy rollers, and closeted elected officials hope will quash the idea of officially recognized homosexual love once and for all. Because that, my friends, is the biggest threat to our liberty, our civilization, and our carefully crafted collective hetero facade.

It’s voting, dig? First the statehouse votes to put the proposed amendment before the people. Then the people vote, up or down, on the amendment.

Voting. Politics. Any questions?

The IFI focuses on three main issues:

Or, to put it all in more straightforward language, making sure religions can discriminate against anyone they desire, making sure gays don’t infect the rest of us, and stopping sluts from getting preggers.

“The IFI Network,” its website crows, “is making the difference in Indiana, and you can be part of this important work.”

Screenshot from IFI website

Politics In The IFI Blog

Clearly, one of the most effective ways of “making a difference” is pressuring legislators to push forward on anti-gay action.

Politics.

The single initiative the IFI trumpets is its Hoosier Congressional Policy Leadership Series. It’s a monthly class for ‘interested professionals” looking to learn how to play footsie with “top policy leaders.”

In other words, how to be a lobbyist.

Politics.

“The program’s mission is to advance conservative policy and faith-based servant leadership principles with community leaders…,” the website reveals.

It’s bad enough I have to share air I breathe with people who are convinced the mythical creator of the Universe has been whispering in their ears, but making me foot a sliver of their bill for foisting their cocksure morality and biblically-rationalized hatreds and fears on the rest of us is too much.

Folks, we have to make these plaster saints pay their own freight. Make them pay taxes.

Then I’ll ask them to keep their fever dreams and religious hallucinations to themselves. I don’t ask them to believe in my crazy fantasies, do I? When’s the last time you heard me calling for the general populace to revere the word of my lord and savior, Theo Epstein?

Epstein

Our Father, Who Art In The Front Office….

The Pencil Today:

HotAirLogoFinal Tuesday

THE QUOTE

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

Einstein

HAPPY N. Y.

Things I hope for this year:

◗ Barack Obama makes it through all 365 days without a serious attempt on his life.

◗ The gamesmanship between Iran and the West peters out.

◗ Someone (besides me) comes up with the bright idea of imposing an embargo on gun manufacturing for at least a year. We’ve got plenty o’guns already; let’s chill on making new ones for a while, no?

Guns

Plenty

◗ The Loved One continues on in sterling health.

◗ My faulty cardiac cellular structure does not betray me and go haywire just yet.

◗ Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, et al continue to make positive strides in their remaking of the entire Chicago Cubs organization.

Image by Kyle Terada/US Presswire

Hoyer (L) & Eptsein: My Happiness Is In Their Hands

◗ Certain friends who suffer right now from mental and emotional distress can find relief.

◗ We move significant steps closer to:

  • Universal affordable health care
  • Universal affordable safe, secure housing
  • Universal affordable access to education, including colleges and universities

◗ Thousands — nay, hundreds of thousands — of new visitors to this communications colossus.

Multi-cast Tower

The Electron Pencil Tower, Outside Beautiful Bloomington

THE ELECTRON PENCIL COVERS THE EARTH

How cool was 2012? I’ll tell you how cool.

The Electron Pencil drew readers from 176 countries on this mad, mad planet. I mean, we even got readers from such exotic outposts as Suriname, Cameroon, Tajikistan, Papua New Guinea, and Moldova. Truth. That’s what WordPress tells us.

TajikistanOur Most Loyal Tajikistani Reader

Whoever you people are, thanks.

Our next goal? Mars.

NICE GUYS FINISH….

The hell of professional sports is that the best people are far too often the worst coaches.

For instance, Chicago Bears head coach Lovie Smith was fired yesterday after leading the team to an overall winning record of 81-63 in his nine years at the helm. He even led the Bears to a Super Bowl, where they were demolished by some guys wearing blue from Indy in 2007.

From all accounts, Lovie Smith is one of the calmest, most compassionate, most dignified men in the entire sports world. That’s quite an accomplishment when one considers the typical NFL field boss has the morals and character of a mafia don.

From the Boston Globe

“Good” Isn’t Good Enough

But poor Lovie apparently lacked the cutthroat necessities to push his players and entire organization past the point of fairly good to that of dominant. He wasn’t a killer, as the term is defined in the uber-biz of games for pay.

Lots of folks who cheerlead for high school and college sports programs claim that participating in the games is great for the moral and character development of young men and women. Team play, they say, prepares youngsters for success in life.

My response? Man, I hope not.

Amateur sports have bought into the win-at-all-costs mentality of the pro games. Most states’ highest paid employees are the coaches of their university football or basketball programs. Character? Hah! Just win, baby.

Scene from "The Godfather: Part II"

The Next Bears’ Head Coach?

I don’t feel sorry for Lovie Smith, the man. He made a pile of dough disappointing the very demanding Chicago football fans. Neither he nor his children will have to worry about their next meals for the rest of their lives.

Our mania for sports (of which I, a live-and-die Cubs fan, am all too much a part) teaches us too often that good, civilized men are failures. I feel sorry for us.

PROGRESS, SORT OF

When I was a kid, my Uncle Vince and his family lived in the tony Chicago suburb of Northbrook.

Uncle Vince (who’s still alive and kicking at the age of 96, BTW) bought his home in the late 1950s when Northbrook was still ringed by farmland. He got in when the getting was good. Within 25 years, Northbrook had become one of the meccas to which extremely comfortable white families could escape from the big, bad, scary (read, increasingly black) city.

My own family was still in the city — admittedly on the outskirts, but, nonetheless, my suburban aunts and uncles would constantly pepper my parents with pleadings to “get the hell out of that shithole where people live on top of each other.”

Uncle Vince’s Northbrook house was straight out of a real estate man’s wet dream. It had a broad front lawn. A garage door that opened at the click of a button from inside the car (a wonder in that day and age.) An automatic dishwasher. Air conditioning (we had windows.) A chime doorbell, as opposed to our raucous buzzer. Uncle Vince’s backyard was more than an acre which, in my neighborhood, would have covered some half dozen homes and yards.

Seemingly every time we visited Uncle Vince, my cousin Tony would be washing his brand new Pontiac Grand Prix on the big driveway in front of the house.

Pontiac Grand Prix

A Rich Kids’ Car

I always thought that Uncle Vince was as rich as the Rockefellers. At the age of seven, I figured his home was a mansion.

The one thing folks in Northbrook didn’t have was black neighbors.

This fact was brought home to me one day when I overheard Uncle Vince telling my father about a horrible, alarming incident that’d happened on the block the previous week. Uncle Vince spoke in hushed tones, as if loath to shake up the women and the kids.

A black man had been seen walking down the street.

Pete Seeger & Friends

Someplace Other Than Northbrook

Neighbor had consulted with neighbor. Certain high-ranking municipal officials had been notified.

Uncle Vince tried to put a good spin on the incident. Perhaps the black man was in Northbrook to do some menial labor. Or maybe he was lost.

Then Uncle Vince and my father fell silent, as if in contemplation of a too-horrible alternative.

Not that my family’s Chicago neighborhood was an integrationist’s dream, mind you. One day, a couple of years earlier, while I was walking to the grocery store with my mother, a black man had passed us by, the first I’d ever seen in the flesh.

I gaped at him as he passed. Ma clunked me on the side of the head and hissed, “Don’t stare!”

Still, the man fascinated me. “Ma,” I asked once I was certain he was out of earshot, “what’s wrong with that guy?”

BB King's Hand Photo by Mike McGregor

Why?

“He’s just going to work somewhere, I guess,” she said.

“Oh.” I pondered the situation and then came to a conclusion. The man had a job that made him extremely dirty. Perhaps he dug holes somewhere nearby. Why else would his skin be black?

“Ma?”

“What?” she said, edgy, aware of the Pandora’s box lid being lifted.

“Why doesn’t he just take a bath?”

She clunked me on the side of the head again.

Only later, when I was eight, did I learn what the man’s problem was. Mr. Mitchell, our neighbor from across the alley explained it. The man, he said, was a nigger.

I went inside. “Ma,” I said, “what’s a nigger?”

She clunked me on the side of the head.

Eventually, I learned to duck when asking tough questions. I also learned that black men stayed out of places like Northbrook and Highland Park and Palatine and Glenview. It was no more likely that a black family would live in any of those places than they would on the moon.

Times change, though.

Michael Jordan lived in Highland Park when he was the toast of the town. When I was small and Ernie Banks was Chicago’s favorite black man, he had to live in the South Side neighborhood of Chatham, which was black. Progress.

Ernie Banks

Not A Good Neighbor?

Today, I learn that the rapper Chief Keef has bought a big, comfortable home in Northbrook. Chief Keef is not white Chicago’s favorite black man. His first album, “Finally Rich,” debuted a couple of weeks ago on the Interscope Records label.

The album includes the songs “No Tomorrow,” “Hate Bein’ Sober,” “Laughin’ to the Bank,” and “Ballin’.”

Chief Keef won’t be 18 years old until August yet he’s already gained a startling reputation. He’s been busted on a weapons charge and is being investigated in connection with the shooting death of rapper “Lil Jo Jo” Coleman — a homicide which Chief Keef mocked on his Twitter page. He has posted a video of himself firing a gun at a shooting range, a violation of his juvenile court probation. He has threatened critics with violence. He has also posted an Instagram video showing him getting a blow job.

Chief Keef

Northbrook’s Very Own, Chief Keef

No, Chief Keef is not Chicago favorite black man. He’s not even a man yet.

He owns a home in Northbrook, though.

He’s made a lot of money in his short life so far. Money absolves a lot of sins.

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