Yesterday was November 22. According to the vast majority of the news and entertainment media, it was no different from any other day, apparently. In all likelihood, the same was true of most Americans. “Oh, yeah…November 22! Better buy that turkey!”
November 22 is not like any other day in America, however. It is the date in 1963 that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 46 years old and the 35th President of the United States of America, was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Continue reading
Tom Yawkey owned the Boston Red Sox for four decades and his wife Jean owned them for one more; it is accurate to say that he was the most influential individual in the storied team’s existence. Yawkey bought the team in the mid-Thirties, after it had suffered through one of the worse stretches of awful play on record, sparked by an earlier owner’s fire sale of its best players, including Babe Ruth. Yawkey ran the Red Sox with an open checkbook and a stated objective of giving the city of Boston the best championship money could buy. Soon the once-pathetic team was fielding all-time greats like Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Lefty Grove, and a brash young phenom named Ted Williams. By the time Yawkey died in 1976, the Red Sox had one of the largest, most loyal and fanatic fan bases in sports, and the team was entrenched in New England culture. Boston remains properly grateful, and the re-naming of the street outside Fenway Park “Yawkey Way” is no perfunctory tribute. (The names of Yawkey and his wife Jean are spelled out, vertically, in Morse Code on the famous hand-operated scoreboard on Fenway Park’s left field wall.
The Red Sox came close, but they never won that World Championship under Yawkey. One of the primary reasons was that the Yawkey way was racist. Continue reading
“People seem to listen to you more when you’ve got a bagful of cash.” Thomas J. Donohue, president of The U.S. Chamber of Commerce. From a story in The New York Times, noted by City Ethics.
Throughout his career, Donohue has demonstrated a talent for distilling fact, wisdom, irony and humor into plain-speaking quips. My all-time favorite: “Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I hear what I have to say.”
The real test of one’s understanding of and opposition to bigotry arrives when it isn’t directed at you or you group, but suddenly becomes a useful tool.
Two for-profit groups are competing to establish a .gay internet suffix, which sounds like a very good idea. Getting it established will be expensive, but it also will be lucrative if it catches on, with each registered internet site using the domain having to pay a fee. Both groups say they plan on contributing a chunk of those future profits to gay causes. Continue reading
The Congressional Black Caucus is complaining that the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE)is unfairly targeting black members. Seven African-American Congress members are the targets of full investigations, 15% of the total black members of the House. And they are the only members currently under a complete investigation. Continue reading
Commercial: The 2010 Hardball Times Baseball Annual is hot off the presses, and it contains an article by me analyzing the standards of character, integrity and sportsmanship that are or should be applied to candidates for the Hall of Fame. Continue reading
Two teachers are out of a job. Both share some responsibility for their fates. The question is how much, and whether their school districts over-reacted to their conduct.
The easier of the two tales, and by far the funnier, took place in Prairie Village, a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. A Mission Valley middle school teacher (make that ex-teacher) named Ryan Haraughty was drawing a map of the United States on the blackboard and drew Florida out of proportion. The extra-long, engorged Florida drew snickers from his teen age students, which Haraughty acknowledged by quipping, “Florida got excited.” Hilarity ensued. Continue reading
They are finding decomposed bodies in the Cleveland home of Anthony Sowell, eleven lat last count. Police had visited the house before the discovery and noticed the smell, but never followed up, even though they knew the owner was a violent sex offender. No ethics controversies so far: the police were obviously careless and incompetent, and Sowell was, well, a serial killer. There are no ethical serial killers.
The ethics issue that screams to me in this story, however, is all about the women: all missing for months or years, all young, from poor families, and black. Did you see any national media stories about them when they were missing persons and not abused corpses? I didn’t. Continue reading
Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro, North Carolina needs money, so it decided to sell the one thing that it knew parents and students would pay for.
Grades. I’m not kidding. Continue reading
Virginia executed the D.C. Sniper tonight, and I am not sorry. Apparently not very many others are either: in stark contrast to past executions, like that of Gary Gilmore, anti-death penalty protests regarding the execution of John Muhammad have been minimal.
A responsible society is obligated to have a death penalty to set an appropriate upper limit for state imposed punishment. Without such a ceiling, the punishment for every other crime must be ratcheted down, and this tends to lower the penalty for capital crimes as well. The Lockerbie Bomber would never have been released after a short prison term in the U.S., as he was by Scotland; in all likelihood, he would have been executed. As with Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, and Muhammad, it would have been a case of the punishment fitting the crime. Continue reading
