A lovely May morn to all!

1 As I have always said, the Yankees are evil. Most serious baseball fans,  and presumably all Baltimore Orioles fans, remember how in the 1996 ALCS play-offs,  a young New York Yankees fan named Jeffrey Maier turned what should have been a crucial out for his team into a game-tying home run by Derek Jeter in the 8th inning of Game 1, by reaching over the fence and catching the ball before it could fall into O’s rightfielder Tony Tarasco’s glove. This was interference, but it was before the challenge and replay rule, and the umpires, as is too often the case, missed the play. The Yankees won the game, the series and the World Series, and the Yankees and their city celebrated Maier as a hero—for, in essence, cheating on their behalf. The rules announced at the beginning of each game dictate that such conduct will result in an offending fan being thrown out of the stadium, but never mind: the ends justify the means, consequentialism, moral luck, double standards, hypocrisy…readers here know the litany. Misconduct was rewarded and extolled because everyone loved the result. New York, New York!

Now let’s go forward 22 years to last night’s tense game between the Yankees and their eternal rivals, the Boston Red Sox, also in Yankee Stadium (the new version.) The Yankees, as they had the previous two nights, rallied late against the hapless Boston bullpen and tied the game, 4-4, in the 7th inning. In the Sox 8th, J.D. Martinez hit a lazy fly that just got over the short right field fence and leaping gargantuan Yankees rightfielder Aaron Judge’s glove, into the outreached glove of another young fan, except that this one did not reach over the fence, and did not, as the replay showed clearly, interfere with Judge in any way.

Ah, but the home run he caught was hit by a Red Sox player, and put the Yankees behind in the game, after the fans’ hopes had been raised.

Yankee Stadium security hauled the fan out of the stadium.

The Red Sox won the game.

Good.

2. The Good Illegal Immigrant on stage…just to remind us of how pervasive false narratives are..I have kept an April 10 New York Times feature around just to raise my blood pressure in case I need a jolt. The article hails “Miss You Like Hell,” a new musical produced at Manhattan’s Public Theater. The show is about the pain and suffering endured by people who are in the United States illegally, having presumed to take what they want in defiance of our laws and policy, but no sense of wrongdoing is even hinted at in the story. The Times uses the deceitful cover-phrase “undocumented immigrant,” which was devised deliberately to blur the illegal immigration issue.

Today, as has been increasingly the case throughout the news media, a front page Times article uses “immigration” interchangeably with “illegal immigration.” This, of course, advances the lie that the those who oppose illegal immigration—that is, those who oppose law-breaking without consequence as national policy–are anti-immigrant.

This same story was headlined by the Washington Post, “Trump unloads on Homeland Security secretary in lengthy immigration tirade.”

No, in fact, the reported “tirade”—leaked by anonymous sources, natch—clearly involved the Department’s failure, in the President’s eyes, to sufficiently block illegal immigration. This same story, in its various versions around the web, citing that Times report, tells us that Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen was “close to resigning.” This is, once again, the fad variety of fake news I call “Psychic news,” when it what an official allegedly thought about doing but didn’t do is treated as news. You won’t believe some of the things I have thought about doing. In the case, of Nielson, she supposedly thought about quitting. This is simply not news. I would guess that I have thought about quitting ever job I ever had, including this one, often and seriously. It is of no consequence unless I actually do it. Someone who isn’t me announcing what my thoughts seemed to be to them is unequivocally worthless. Yet to the New York Times it is front page news, because it continues to promote the paper’s “resistance” narrative that the Trump administration is on the verge of imploding.

Not only isn’t this ethical journalism, it isn’t journalism at all. It is partisan warfare.

3. Rudy gets fired from his law firm. As part of his bizarre defense of President Trump regarding the venal gutter-attack of Stormy Daniels, Giuliani told Fox News that such payments were made all the time by lawyers for their clients, including his own prestigious firm, Greenberg Traurig. “That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm funds…Michael would take care of things like this like I take care of this with my clients.”

Well, I’m pretty sure Rudy spoke the truth, but the fixer function of law firms comes under the heading of “dirty little secrets,” and Greenberg Traurig, understandably, was not happy to have itself compared to a bottom-feeder like Michael Cohen. Rudy had been on  a leave of absence from the firm, but the law firm’s chairman announced yesterday, “After recognizing that this work is all-consuming and is lasting longer than initially anticipated, Rudy has determined it is best for him to resign.”

In other words, he was fired.

In an earlier statement about Rudy’s “hey, everybody does it!” remarks on Fox, the firm had said, “We can’t speak for Mr. Giuliani with respect to what was intended by his remarks. Speaking for ourselves, we would not condone payments of the nature alleged to have been made or otherwise without the knowledge and direction of a client.”

4.  We call this “the white cop’s dilemma”...I love the Human Resources blog Evil HR Lady, but a recent post about avoiding PR disasters involving African American customers was uncharacteristically myopic. Describing the recent racial controversies involving Starbucks and Nordstrom’s,  she wrote,

“If the customer were white, would you be acting that way?” This is the simple conversation starter that can prevent racial problems in stores and restaurants.

Well, sometimes. The other question that must be asked, unfortunately,  is “Even if I would act the same way with a white customer, will this conduct be characterized as racist simply because of the customer’s race and mine?”