MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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michael o. allen

The New York Muts

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I am very happy for Johan Santana. He’s set for life.

The New York Mets? They are doomed.

Santana makes them only marginally better. Those saying this trade makes them a lock to win the National League East are just plain loco. The Mets lost so many close games last season you would have thought that was the objective. And don’t forget “The Collapse,” or was it “The Choke?”

Whatever it was, the Mets did not address it by trading for Santana. The Mets’ lame lineup had trouble scoring runs last year. They’ll still have trouble scoring runs this year. Their pitching is suspect still and they’ve mortgaged their future by trading the farm to get Santana.

Willie Randolph is a good man and a good manager but Omar Minaya will sacrifice him to save his own job this year. It’ll give Minaya more time to prove himself a worse general manager of the Mets than Steve Phillips. Remember him?

A Thief

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I have acknowledged my bias against the New England Patriots in the past. I root against them in this Super Bowl not because of any love for the Giants but because of my hatred of this team. Sports reporters regard Patriots head coach Bill Belichick as some kind of genius. Except for the constant reports of his cheating ways.

Back in September, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell levied the biggest fine of an NFL $500,000 on Belichick and socked the team another $250,000 after determining the franchise violated league rules by videotaping defensive signals from Jets coaches in the teams’ regular-season opener. The league also ordered the Patriots to forfeit either a first-round draft choice or second- and third-round picks.

Now comes news that the before the Patriots beat the heavily favored St. Louis Rams in the 2002 Super Bowl, Patriots personnel videotaped that team’s final walk-through before the game.

Belichick’s reputation has been that he’s a cretin of a human being but, at least, a football genius. How does his genius reputation survive despite evidence of serial cheating?

A Well-liked Gentleman

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In the remaining days before Super Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), is reaping endorsements like they’re going out of style. What I know is that, whether this pushes him over the hump in California or not, this is impressive. The L.A. Times said this in its endorsement:

An Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation’s youngest state, with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims. No public relations campaign could do more than Obama’s mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world, nor could any political experience surpass Obama’s life story in preparing a president to understand the American character. His candidacy offers Democrats the best hope of leading America into the future, and gives Californians the opportunity to cast their most exciting and consequential ballot in a generation.

Wow! The Times finishes with this little ditty:

In the language of metaphor, Clinton is an essay, solid and reasoned; Obama is a poem, lyric and filled with possibility. Clinton would be a valuable and competent executive, but Obama matches her in substance and adds something that the nation has been missing far too long — a sense of aspiration.”

Poor Hillary Clinton, (D-N.Y.). So she’s dutiful but stodgy and uninspiring. I mean it’s not as bad as what her rabid enemies usually say about her, but still . . . Imagine being married to that famous Cassandra, Bill Clinton? But to then run against Obama is worse than unfair. It’s cruel. Let’s say she wins the nomination (because, despite all the kudos Obama is getting, he still faces what seems like insurmountable odds). How do you run for the whole enchilada (with the tsunami of filth that the Republicans are readying to throw at you) knowing you ain’t the prettiest belle at the ball? You failed the inspiration test?

Wait. There’s more. La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the country, which is based in Los Angeles, also gave Obama its endorsement. Although the paper called Hillary “extraordinary,” it knocked her for being “calculating” in opposing to driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, the paper could not find enough nice things to say about Obama on immigration:

It is this commitment to the immigration issue which drove Obama to condemn the malicious lies made during the immigration debate, to understand the need for driver’s licenses, and to defend the rights of undocumented students by co- authoring the DREAM Act.

And, oh yes, they also think Obama is inspiring:

We need a leader today that can inspire and unite America again around its greatest possibilities. Barack Obama is the right leader for the time. We know that he is not as well known among our community and while he has the support of Maria Elena Durazo, Senator Gil Cedillo and others he comes to the Latino community with less name recognition. Nevertheless, it is Obama who deserves our support.

I have a radical proposal: Why not make Obama president and Hillary the prime minister. Someone’s got to run the country while Obama bats his eyes at its people, inspiring them.

Point . . .

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less.

I finally saw Cloverfield and that’s my verdict. There’s no real story arc, no redemption, no character development, absolutely nothing startling or surprising in this film. It is also unsatisfying because the five friends they followed in the movie are especially unlikable people and unworthy of our concern for their fates.

The premise appears to be to take those initial moments on Sept. 11, 2001, when we did not know who or what attacking the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and to make the attacker be some all powerful, unseen for a long stretch, self-replicating, and indefinable monster.

At the end, the only thing that would have satisfied me would have been if the monster devoured the surviving couple. Alas, it didn’t.

Commonality

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Although some insist that Latinos are too racist (the Clinton campaign inexplicably fanned this idea early in the campaign) to vote for black candidates, this man begs to differ and these two guys give better reasons why Latinos could support Hillary Clinton without being racists.

John Schulian

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“Lord, how they hated to see Moe Hill come to Waterloo. When he had a bat in his hands and a Wisconsin Rapids
uniform on his back, a sense of dread rose from those

Iowa townies like summer heat off two-lane blacktop.”

Twilight of the Long-ball Gods by John Schulian

I was a teenage immigrant to this country when I first read Schulian in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times. He wrote with such empathy and wisdom then that I missed his absence from the national landscape now. Where have you gone, John Schulian?

"The Slave Ship"

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The Slave Ship opens with an extensive and unforgettable inventory of the trade’s particular horrors. There are the accused conspirators in a failed slave ship revolt forced by their captors to eat the hearts and livers of the recently executed. A captive starves himself to death after several unsuccessful attempts to rip open his throat with his fingernails. A black sailor accused of fomenting an insurrection gets pinned to the mast by the ship’s captain, who leaves him to rot to death without food or water over the course of three weeks. Sharks trail slave ships from one edge of the Atlantic to the other, overgrown by the time they reach Jamaica from feeding on human carcasses tossed overboard en route. Captains embrace the spectacle of grisly executions with devilish glee. The desecration of human bodies becomes at once efficient, whimsical and sadistic. A London merchant orders the captain of his ship to brand each captive with the first initials of his wife’s and daughter’s names. One master lowers a shrieking woman feet first into the Atlantic; when “she was drawn up” moments later, according to Rediker, “it was found that a shark…had bit her off from the middle.” The Atlantic slave trade has been the subject of rigorous historical study for more than four decades, but no previous work comes as close to conveying its terror.
The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker

Bridget

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I hope it’s her choice that she is not seen in these rapturous images of the victorious McCain clan. George Bush used her existence to smear McCain eight years ago and this was apparently a traumatic experience for young Bridget. But her invisibility in the current campaign is troubling.

Why not?

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Because of her endorsement of Barack Obama, some are saying Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius could be a vice-president nominee for Obama. I think a better choice would be Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor running for U.S. Senate.

It’ll be a better, tougher ticket against the troglodytic McCain-Huckabee ticket.