Silence Pesky Free Speech
Jim Schutze
Mon., Oct. 31 2011
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2011/10/the_dallas_way_to_honor_jfk_si.php
Dear John F. Kennedy Library Foundation:
Good move on blowing off the Sixth Floor Museum and executive director Nicola Longford regarding her plans for a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Kennedy assassination in Dealey Plaza. Believe me: You don't want to touch this gang with a 10-foot pole.
According to a story in this morning's Dallas Morning News, Longford and her assassination museum "are planning to take over commemoration activities" at Dealey Plaza in 2013. Their avowed aim, The News says, is to "avoid the carnival atmosphere that has often prevailed at previous anniversaries on the plaza."
Yeah. Let me tell you about that. There will be a hearing in federal court this Friday on another attempt to avoid a carnival atmosphere in Dealey Plaza -- that attempt being the city's decades-long goon-style campaign of intimidation against best-selling author Robert Groden. Groden has been hauled into court 81 times by his own count, including at least one tough session in jail, for the offense of selling books and tapes and speaking his mind about the assassination in Dealey Plaza.
More than 80 times the city has attempted to shut down Groden's exercise of free speech in Dealey Plaza. They have been tossed out of court by their own municipal judges every single time. Groden finally decided to sue in order in preserve the right of free speech and assembly for himself and all people in this very important place, a national landmark.
In The News story today, Longford is quoted as saying, "We have reserved Dealey Plaza for that date [November 22, 2013]. I think, for the 50th anniversary, we have an opportunity to offer a dignified, appropriate event for the city of Dallas."
So, John F. Kennedy Library Foundation: I ask you to think about this. What does that mean, "take over?" How do you "take over" a national landmark with the avowed aim of controlling speech there?
I spoke this morning with Groden's lawyer Bradley Kizzia, who said he had never heard of anyone taking over Dealey Plaza in order to prevent other people from coming there and doing whatever they want to do within the law.
"It's a federal national historic landmark," he said. "I doubt that that entity [the museum] can legally do that. They sure shouldn't be able to do that, to preclude the access of other citizens seeking to exercise their First Amendment right. That sounds very troubling to me."
I talked to Groden as well. He scoffed at the idea that the museum had even contacted you about participating. I'm sure you know who Mr. Groden is -- proprietor at one point of the world's most authoritative film and photographic library on the assassination. He told me he has contacted members of the Kennedy family in the past on various issues and that they have shown no interest in Dealey Plaza or what goes on there.
It sounds from the story in The News, that you, John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, feel the same way. Longford is quoted as saying: "I don't think the Kennedy family has changed their stand."
No kidding. Why did she even ask? I have a call in to her about it, of course, but based on past behavior I would guess she will not return my call. So I am left to wonder what is it that she does not get about this situation?
Groden gets it. He understands that Dealey Plaza is not and will never be a memorial to the life of JFK, no matter what ludicrous efforts the Sixth Floor Museum may expend to create such an absurdly euphemistic, historically irresponsible impression.
It's where he was killed. That's what's important about Dealey Plaza. It was the scene of brutal catastrophe. What, we might ask, can be dignified about an assassination? JFK's murder here, even after half a century, is still an ongoing source of anger, confusion and anxiety in our nation. The only way for Dallas to even approach expiating its own role would be to stop trying to stifle debate in the place where it happened.
Let's talk about this whole thing of planning two years ahead to take over Dealey Plaza to make sure everything will be "dignified." I think you should put it in a certain context. On June 13, 2010, Dallas Police arrested and jailed Groden. Groden alleges that the arrest came about at the request of Sixth Floor Museum security personnel. That's a fact at issue in the ongoing lawsuit. The museum has refused to comment when I have tried to ask them about it in the past.
But I ask you this, John F. Kennedy Library Foundation: Have you ever even been accused of getting authors thrown in jail? What is dignified, pray tell, about slapping the cuffs on a late-middle-aged scholar, tossing him the back seat of a cop car and hauling him off to the slammer? And by the way, when is the last time you tried to take over a prominent public space in order to control speech here?
A quarter century ago I interviewed the late Stanley Marcus about the assassination, and he told me he thought Dallas bore significant blame. He said the city's fault was for refusing to recognize the festering climate of extremism in its own backyard before the assassination. If anything, Longford's impulse to clamp down on freedom of expression on the anniversary is of a cloth with the same phenomenon Marcus described a half-century before. If someone were going to write a senior thesis about it at Harvard, he or she might even call it "Why Dallas Slept."
If I were you, I wouldn't come to Dealey Plaza until Dallas wakes up.
Showing posts with label Dallas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dallas. Show all posts
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
LeBron James and the Quote Heard Round the World
Dave Zirin | June 13, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/blog/161374/lebron-james-and-quote-heard-round-world
The most polarizing athlete in sports, playing for the most polarizing team, just gave us the most polarizing post-game quote in living memory. Lebron James, after his Miami Heat lost the NBA Finals to the Dallas Mavericks, and after playing profoundly beneath his Herculean stature, said the following:
“All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they have to get back to the real world at some point."
Damn. Those who aren’t sports fans — or I guess it’s more appropriate to say, “fans of the many soap operas that swirl around sports” might not realize what a break from the book of clichés this statement represents. Most post-game comments are so polished and filed down, they’d make a Mitt Romney speech look edgy. Players routinely behave for the cameras like they just graduated from the Madeira School for Girls. It’s like athletes went to a Meet the Press seminar on “how to say nothing.”
After last night’s crushing loss, Lebron’s All-Star teammates Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were predictable portraits of propriety. Wade said, “First of all we give credit to the Dallas Mavericks…. We ran into a team that was obviously better than us.” Lebron, after a season that saw him ditch his hard-luck teammates in Cleveland, take his talents to South Beach, and transition from hero to heel, chose to go a different route.
As one could imagine, he is getting crushed across the sports columns and the interwebs for letting the mask slip and speaking his mind. It's being read as the ultimate statement of the “spoiled, arrogant” athlete. One headline read, “Lebron: reminding you that he's super rich and you're not.” Jalen Rose on ESPN said, "He needs to learn to speak to the media. He puts his foot in his mouth time and time again.” The NBC sports site Pro Basketball Talk blared the headlined, LeBron has a few arrogant words for those who hate him [1]. Writer Kurt Hellin wrote, “LeBron is never going to win over many of those haters. But calling them jealous loses some on the fence.... Lebron has a long line of public relations blunders in the past year. You can add this one to the list.”
When I read Lebron's words, frankly, I did a triple take. It’s practically a pro-wrestling quote designed to bring audience "heat" as an end unto itself. I kept thinking of former WWE heel Rick Rude starting matches by saying, “What I'd like to have right now is for all you fat, out of shape, [insert city] sweat-hogs to keep the noise down while I take my robe off and show all the ladies what a real man is supposed to look like." But even in the scripted world of professional wrestling any heel knows that you rile people up before matches, not after.
There's little point in mining Lebron’s psyche for his intentions. Was he being defensive? Insensitive? Even cruel? I have no clue and don't really care. But I do think the quote deserves examination on its own terms. How can we deny the truth that many of us look to sports as a distraction from the trials and tribulations of our own lives? How can we deny that the reason so many of us read the sports page before the front page is that one is both bearable and comprehensible while the other simply isn’t?
We live in a crumbling nation with epic unemployment, two million people behind bars, and vast wealth inequality, while being told that we inhabit the best country on earth and to think otherwise is heresy. In such a world, sports become more than an escape: it’s a refuge. It’s much easier - and emotionally manageable - to hate Lebron James than face our collective future.
Make no mistake, I'm not arguing that Lebron James was trying to point out the way sports deflects attention from other realities. I don’t put his comments in league with another hated athlete, Barry Bonds, who in 2005, asked why Congress had time to investigate steroids while people were dying in New Orleans. But his words should give us pause. There’s nothing wrong, in my view, with sports being a sweet evening escape from the problems that face us the next morning. There is something wrong with seeing athletes as avenues for our aggression when the real culprits exist outside the arena.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/161374/lebron-james-and-quote-heard-round-world
The most polarizing athlete in sports, playing for the most polarizing team, just gave us the most polarizing post-game quote in living memory. Lebron James, after his Miami Heat lost the NBA Finals to the Dallas Mavericks, and after playing profoundly beneath his Herculean stature, said the following:
“All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they have to get back to the real world at some point."
Damn. Those who aren’t sports fans — or I guess it’s more appropriate to say, “fans of the many soap operas that swirl around sports” might not realize what a break from the book of clichés this statement represents. Most post-game comments are so polished and filed down, they’d make a Mitt Romney speech look edgy. Players routinely behave for the cameras like they just graduated from the Madeira School for Girls. It’s like athletes went to a Meet the Press seminar on “how to say nothing.”
After last night’s crushing loss, Lebron’s All-Star teammates Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were predictable portraits of propriety. Wade said, “First of all we give credit to the Dallas Mavericks…. We ran into a team that was obviously better than us.” Lebron, after a season that saw him ditch his hard-luck teammates in Cleveland, take his talents to South Beach, and transition from hero to heel, chose to go a different route.
As one could imagine, he is getting crushed across the sports columns and the interwebs for letting the mask slip and speaking his mind. It's being read as the ultimate statement of the “spoiled, arrogant” athlete. One headline read, “Lebron: reminding you that he's super rich and you're not.” Jalen Rose on ESPN said, "He needs to learn to speak to the media. He puts his foot in his mouth time and time again.” The NBC sports site Pro Basketball Talk blared the headlined, LeBron has a few arrogant words for those who hate him [1]. Writer Kurt Hellin wrote, “LeBron is never going to win over many of those haters. But calling them jealous loses some on the fence.... Lebron has a long line of public relations blunders in the past year. You can add this one to the list.”
When I read Lebron's words, frankly, I did a triple take. It’s practically a pro-wrestling quote designed to bring audience "heat" as an end unto itself. I kept thinking of former WWE heel Rick Rude starting matches by saying, “What I'd like to have right now is for all you fat, out of shape, [insert city] sweat-hogs to keep the noise down while I take my robe off and show all the ladies what a real man is supposed to look like." But even in the scripted world of professional wrestling any heel knows that you rile people up before matches, not after.
There's little point in mining Lebron’s psyche for his intentions. Was he being defensive? Insensitive? Even cruel? I have no clue and don't really care. But I do think the quote deserves examination on its own terms. How can we deny the truth that many of us look to sports as a distraction from the trials and tribulations of our own lives? How can we deny that the reason so many of us read the sports page before the front page is that one is both bearable and comprehensible while the other simply isn’t?
We live in a crumbling nation with epic unemployment, two million people behind bars, and vast wealth inequality, while being told that we inhabit the best country on earth and to think otherwise is heresy. In such a world, sports become more than an escape: it’s a refuge. It’s much easier - and emotionally manageable - to hate Lebron James than face our collective future.
Make no mistake, I'm not arguing that Lebron James was trying to point out the way sports deflects attention from other realities. I don’t put his comments in league with another hated athlete, Barry Bonds, who in 2005, asked why Congress had time to investigate steroids while people were dying in New Orleans. But his words should give us pause. There’s nothing wrong, in my view, with sports being a sweet evening escape from the problems that face us the next morning. There is something wrong with seeing athletes as avenues for our aggression when the real culprits exist outside the arena.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Mark Cuban: Coolest Owner in Sports
The victory of the Dallas Mavericks over the Miami Heat in the NBA finals has largely been portrayed as a deserved vindication of Dirk Nowitzki, and rightly so. But the one guy besides Dirk who probably deserves applaud is owner Mark Cuban, who has confirmed he is the coolest owner in sports since Eddie DeBartolo ruled San Francisco.
The Konformist isn't big on gushing over billionaires, and our position still is even the best owner is basically deadweight. But as far as deadweight billionaires go, Cuban is definitely a king of kings.
Haters say Cuban is obnoxious and arrogant. This is true. But he's the one owner who clearly is in sports not for the money but the love of sports. And two post-victory actions tell you what he is made of. One, he decided to cover the costs of the Maverick's victory parade rather than pawn it off to the cash-strapped metropolis. Two, perhaps more telling but less noticed, he left a $20K tip for the staff on a $90K bar tab on victory night. This was at a club in Miami, BTW, and not in Dallas.
Hopefully he will soon join the fraternities of owners in the NFL, MLB and NHL. Sports needs guys like him...
Mark Cuban will pay for your $110,000 bar tab. And your parade
Kelly Dwyer
Tue Jun 14, 2011
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie/post/Mark-Cuban-will-pay-for-your-110-000-bar-tab-A?urn=nba-wp4996
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Fiesta Bowl Scandal
From the SF Chronicle:
The Fiesta Bowl will be investigated by the Bowl Championship Series after organizers for the Arizona game fired president and CEO John Junker on Tuesday for "an apparent scheme" to reimburse employees for political contributions and "an apparent conspiracy" to cover it up.
The reimbursements, according to an internal report released by the bowl, total at least $46,539. The BCS will investigate to "consider whether the Fiesta Bowl should remain a BCS bowl game."
The upshot: the Cotton Bowl, which is at the gigantic Cowboys Stadium and is backed by billionaire Dallas owner Jerry Jones, will likely replace the Fiesta Bowl as the fourth major bowl in 2014 when the current BCS contract expires...
BCS to investigate Fiesta Bowl
March 29, 2011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/29/SPGM1IL349.DTL
The Fiesta Bowl will be investigated by the Bowl Championship Series after organizers for the Arizona game fired president and CEO John Junker on Tuesday for "an apparent scheme" to reimburse employees for political contributions and "an apparent conspiracy" to cover it up.
The reimbursements, according to an internal report released by the bowl, total at least $46,539. The BCS will investigate to "consider whether the Fiesta Bowl should remain a BCS bowl game."
The upshot: the Cotton Bowl, which is at the gigantic Cowboys Stadium and is backed by billionaire Dallas owner Jerry Jones, will likely replace the Fiesta Bowl as the fourth major bowl in 2014 when the current BCS contract expires...
BCS to investigate Fiesta Bowl
March 29, 2011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/29/SPGM1IL349.DTL
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Black Eyed Peas to Play Super Bowl
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/11/26/black-eyed-peas-to-play-super-bowl
Black Eyed Peas to Play Super Bowl
Glen Levy
11-26-10
Rumors that they know how to run routes couldn't be confirmed. The announcement was about the group playing the halftime show, not the actual game.
But still, this remains somewhat of a big deal as the Black Eyed Peas will be the first non-classic rock act to perform since Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson took to the stage in 2004. Well, at least that passed without incident.
"They could have picked anybody," will.i.am told Rolling Stone. "They could rock a million and get Cheap Trick...But it says something that they picked us." Will.i.am goes on to say that, "I've been at every single one of them since that. The Prince one, the Paul McCartney one, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen." (he must simply have neglected the Who one, the Rolling Stones one and the U2 one.)
The Grammy award-winning group formed 15 years ago and have sold more than 28 million albums and nearly 31 million digital tracks. By happy coincidence, their new album, The Beginning, drops on Tuesday. The Super Bowl takes place on Feb. 6 at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas. And pretty much the only prediction NewsFeed is willing to make right now is that the Cowboys won't be playing.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Jerry Jones: Tony Romo's season might be over
http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl/feed/2010-10/cowboys-troubles/story/jerry-jones-tony-romos-season-might-be-over
Jerry Jones: Tony Romo's season might be over
10-29-10
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones acknowledged that quarterback Tony Romo might not play again this season, the Dallas Morning News reports.
Romo is out at least six weeks with a broken collarbone. If the Cowboys are out of playoff contention by the time he returns, it might not make sense to put him back on the field.
Jones backed off comments made after Monday's loss to the New York Giants, when he said Romo would play when he was healthy. Six weeks might be optimistic, given previous returns by other quarterbacks with similar injuries. Eight weeks would appear more likely -- and what would mean Romo would return for the Cowboys' game at Arizona on Christmas night.
"I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to know how fast he's going to heal," Jones told the Daily News. "The faster he heals, the better I like it.
"We will be weighing that aspect of where he is in the healing process relative to any risk that you might take with him playing."
Jon Kitna will start Week 8's home game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. His backup will be Stephen McGee, who will be the No. 2 quarterback for the first time in his career. McGee didn't take snaps with the first-team offense this week, working with the scout team instead.
With the Super Bowl in Cowboys Stadium, Jones had hoped his team would be playing for the NFL title on its home field. But on Thursday, Jones admitted he was "very disappointed" at the possibility his dream would not be fulfilled. No team has started 1-5 and still made the playoffs under the 12-team playoff format that began in 1990.
"We carefully put together our team, contracts, structured it to we might have a chance to be in the Super Bowl," Jones said Thursday, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "I know there was a relationship there about being able to play in your own Super Bowl, but believe it or not, I am a realist and I know it’s never been done before. I had that in the proper perspective."
The Jaguars are one of two teams remaining on the Cowboys schedule that enters Week 8 with a losing record.
Jerry Jones: Tony Romo's season might be over
10-29-10
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones acknowledged that quarterback Tony Romo might not play again this season, the Dallas Morning News reports.
Romo is out at least six weeks with a broken collarbone. If the Cowboys are out of playoff contention by the time he returns, it might not make sense to put him back on the field.
Jones backed off comments made after Monday's loss to the New York Giants, when he said Romo would play when he was healthy. Six weeks might be optimistic, given previous returns by other quarterbacks with similar injuries. Eight weeks would appear more likely -- and what would mean Romo would return for the Cowboys' game at Arizona on Christmas night.
"I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to know how fast he's going to heal," Jones told the Daily News. "The faster he heals, the better I like it.
"We will be weighing that aspect of where he is in the healing process relative to any risk that you might take with him playing."
Jon Kitna will start Week 8's home game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. His backup will be Stephen McGee, who will be the No. 2 quarterback for the first time in his career. McGee didn't take snaps with the first-team offense this week, working with the scout team instead.
With the Super Bowl in Cowboys Stadium, Jones had hoped his team would be playing for the NFL title on its home field. But on Thursday, Jones admitted he was "very disappointed" at the possibility his dream would not be fulfilled. No team has started 1-5 and still made the playoffs under the 12-team playoff format that began in 1990.
"We carefully put together our team, contracts, structured it to we might have a chance to be in the Super Bowl," Jones said Thursday, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "I know there was a relationship there about being able to play in your own Super Bowl, but believe it or not, I am a realist and I know it’s never been done before. I had that in the proper perspective."
The Jaguars are one of two teams remaining on the Cowboys schedule that enters Week 8 with a losing record.
Monday, May 31, 2010
The Path to Recovery
http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/the-future-of-the-city/archive/2010/05/the-path-to-recovery/56393/
The Path to Recovery
May 7 2010
Richard Florida
Economic peaks and valleys are part of the life cycle of any society. They can be difficult, sometimes horribly painful, but just as trees shed their leaves in the fall to make room for the new growth of spring, economies reset themselves. Times of crisis reveal what is and isn't working. These are the times when obsolete and dysfunctional systems and practices collapse or fall by the wayside. They are the times when the seeds of innovation and invention, of creativity and entrepreneurship, burst into full flower, enabling recovery by remaking both the economy and society. Major periods of economic transformation, such as the Great Depression or the Long Depression of the 1870s before it, unfold over long stretches of time, like motion pictures rather than snapshots. Likewise, the path to recovery can be long and twisted--the better part of three decades in the case of those two previous crises. Seen in the greater context of history, economic crises inevitably give rise to critical periods in which an economy is remade in ways that allow it to recover and begin growing again. These are periods I call Great Resets.
We're still very early on in the current economic Reset, so it's difficult to fully grasp how it will ultimately play out. But we can all sense that our way of life is changing and our economic landscape is too. This emerging new way of life will be less oriented around cars, houses, and suburbs. We'll be spending relatively less on the things that defined the old way of life. We'll have to, if we expect to have money left over to sustain the new industries that will emerge in the Great Reset and usher in an age of renewed prosperity. Before we can nurture the new industries of the future, develop new forms of health care and biotechnologies, or even explore new forms of education or more experiential forms of entertainment and recreation, we first have to free up capital by producing the goods of the old industrial order more cheaply and efficiently.
We've reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the "ownership society." Owning your own home made sense when people could hope to hold a job for most or all of their lives. But in an economy that revolves around mobility and flexibility, a house that can't be sold becomes an economic trap, preventing people from moving freely to economic opportunity. Not only has that piece of the American Dream grown dark, but it's also clear that financial excess in the housing sector was one of the central causes of the economic crisis. Housing sucked up far too much of the nation's and the world's capital, and too many people--already overextended by the purchase of outsized houses--used those homes like virtual ATMs to finance carefree consumption. Every Great Reset has seen our system of housing change, and this one is no different. The rate of home ownership has been on the decline for some time now. Many of those who still choose to buy homes will choose smaller ones, while many more will opt for rental housing.
Our new way of life is likely to depend a whole lot less on the car. In October 2009, The New York Times reported, "The recession and a growing awareness of the environment are causing many people to reassess their automobile ownership. After more than a century in which an automobile represented the American dream, car enthusiasm may no longer be a part of Americans' DNA." Car culture no longer exerts the powerful pull it once did. More and more families are deciding to share cars, and young people are putting off buying them and using public transit, bikes, their feet or Zipcars (membership-based, easy-access short-term car rentals) instead. It's not just that oil and gas have become expensive, it's that traffic and gridlock have become a deadweight time cost on us and our economy.
One constant in the history of capitalism is the ever-more-intensive use of land, as mercantile towns replaced agricultural villages, major industrial cities replaced those towns, and massive complexes of suburbs, exurbs, and edge cites expanded the boundaries of those cities. The change we are living through is much more than a movement from suburbs to denser urban communities. What we are seeing is the rise of a new, bigger, and denser economic landscape than ever before--the rise of vast megaregions such as the corridors stretching from Boston to New York and Washington, D.C., around greater London, and from Shanghai to Beijing. These concentrations of population, which encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings, have grown swiftly in recent years.
The largest megaregion in North America is the great "Bos-Wash" corridor, initially identified by the geographer Jean Gottmann. Strecthing down the East Coast, it includes Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and is home to more than 50 million people while producing more than $2 trillion in economic activity. Its economic output is greater than that of either the United Kingdom or France and more than double that of India or Canada. The second biggest, which Gottman dubbed "Chi-Pitts," covers more than 100,000 square miles and is home to 46 million people, producing $1.6 trillion in economic output. Other megaregions in North America include:
•Char-lanta: Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham, 22 million people
•So-Cal: Around Los Angeles, 21 million people
•Tor-Mon-tawa: 22 million people
•Nor-Cal: Around San Francisco, 12.8 million people
•So-Flo: Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, 15 million people
•Dal-Austin: Dallas and Austin, 10 million people
•Hou-Orleans: Houston and New Orleans, 9.7 million people
•Cascadia: Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, 9 million people
•Pho-Tus: Phoenix and Tucson, 4.7 million people
•Den-Bo: Denver and Boulder, 3.7 million people
Around the world, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mumbai are hubs of giant megaregions. Each of these is a financial and commercial center with tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars in output.
These megaregions, not nations, really power the global economy. Taken together, the world's 40 largest megaregions account for two-thirds of all global economic activity and 85 percent of the world's technological innovation while housing just 18 percent of its population. Megaregions are the strategic power centers of the economy, housing 85 percent of all corporate headquarters in the United States and Canada.
Though many analysts have predicted that the importance of cities--and that of location--would fade with globalization, the reality is that cities and megaregions have become more important economically than ever before. Even as globalization has spread factories, businesses, and laboratories to places such as India, China, Brazil, and beyond, these activities are being concentrated in the megaregions of those countries. Contrary to the notion that the world is flat, the most successful megaregions, in fact, are becoming economically stronger and spikier, not flatter.
Megaregions are to our time what suburbanization was to the postwar era. They provide the seeds of a new spatial fix. They expand and intensify our use of land and space the way that the industrial city did during the First Reset and suburbia did in the Second. As people pour into the world's great megaregions, inner cities and close-in suburbs are being reclaimed and rebuilt. Older suburbs, especially those on transit routes, are being reorganized and rebuilt into denser communities offering more condos and town houses as well as single-family homes. Suburban malls and office complexes are being retrofitted and turned into walkable areas with a mixture of housing, shops, and restaurants and in some cases even new parks. Subways and rail transit are being expanded as highways clog.
The location decisions made by new college grads have interested me for years. Their choices involve evaluating not just the company they'll work for but the labor market it's located in and what the surrounding area has to offer. Because they are both highly skilled and highly mobile--three to five times as likely to move than, say, a 45-year-old--the decisions they make about where to live are likely to leave a lasting imprint on our economic geography.
To get at the factors that attract and keep young Gen Y members, those born between the years 1979 and 1990, in certain places, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I analyzed the results of a Gallup survey of some 28,000 Americans. Jobs are clearly important. Gen Y members ranked the availability of jobs second when asked what would keep them in their current location and fourth in terms of their overall satisfaction with their community. From this perspective, big cities make sense for them, as they offer more robust labor markets with more and better job opportunities in a wide number of fields. In an age in which corporate commitment has dwindled, job tenure has grown far shorter, and people switch jobs with much greater frequency, career success involves a great deal more than simply finding the right first job. In these highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success for young people depends on locating themselves in a thick labor market that offers diverse and abundant job opportunities. Picking an economically vibrant location is an important hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.
But remember that jobs were not the highest-ranked factor. Across the board, the survey respondents said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance. These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness. They not only desire a thick labor market but also seek what I have come to call a thick mating market, where they can meet new people, go out on dates, and eventually find a life partner. And whereas older Americans see high-quality schools and safe streets for their children as key, Gen Y understandably ranks the availability of outstanding colleges and universities higher. Many are likely to go back to graduate school and want to have good programs nearby. For all these reasons, big cities at the heart of megaregions top the list of their choices.
The auto-dependent transportation system has reached its limit in most major cities and megaregions. Commuting by car is among the least efficient of all our activities--not to mention among the least enjoyable, according to detailed research by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues. Though one might think that the crisis would have reduced traffic (high unemployment means fewer workers traveling to and from work), the opposite has been true. Average commutes have lengthened, and congestion has gotten worse, if anything. The average commute rose in 2008 to 25.5 minutes, "erasing years of decreases to stand at the level of 2000, as people had to leave home earlier in the morning to pick up friends for their ride to work or to catch a bus or subway train," according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which collects the figures. And those are average figures. Commutes are far longer in the big West Coast cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco and the East Coast cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. In many of these cities, gridlock has become the norm, not just at rush hour but all day, every day.
Just about the only remedy for traffic congestion anyone ever suggests is building more roads and highways, which of course only makes the problem worse. New roads generate higher levels of "induced traffic," that is, new roads just invite drivers to drive more and lure people who take mass transit back to their cars. Eventually, we end up with more clogged roads rather than a long-term improvement in traffic flow
More and more people are choosing to take the subway, train, or bus or even walk or bike to work and go about their daily business--providing they live in an environment that allows for such choices. In Manhattan, 82 percent of workers get to work by public transit or bicycle or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County, and 16 times the rate for residents of metropolitan Atlanta. The New York City subway is a remarkably effective technology for moving masses of people around quickly and efficiently. Between 8 and 9 in the morning on a typical workday, more than 385,000 people use its subway system to commute into the central business district.
New York is not the only place where this kind of change in commuting and local traffic patterns is occurring. In Washington, D.C., 57 percent of commuters get to work by means other than driving a car--more than a third take public transit, 12 percent walk to work, and 2 percent ride their bikes; just four in ten drive to work alone. In Boston and San Francisco, roughly half of workers get to work without their cars--roughly a third of commuters take transit, and 10 to 15 percent walk to work. In Philadelphia, 41 percent commute without cars and 27 percent take transit.
These numbers may seem like a drop in the bucket. But 60 percent of Americans surveyed in 2005 said they want to live in walkable communities with shops, restaurants, movie theaters, schools, and churches nearby. We're already seeing the shift as increasing numbers of people move to walkable communities closer to where they work. That will clearly expand in coming decades.
For the time being, most Americans remain behind the wheel. Today, more than three-quarters of Americans drive to work alone. They have no other choice. There are, however, other things we can do to ease congestion and take more cars off the road. Employers can offer more flexible schedules and the ability to work from home or telecommute. But as we've already seen, in many cities traffic is not just a rush-hour problem. The only alternative left is to price the roads. We pay for everything else: we pay to take the subway, ride the bus, or take the train, we pay to drive through the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels or over the George Washington Bridge. Why should the roads be essentially free? If we want to make traffic better, we have little choice other than to make people pay for the roads they drive on.
Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. Adapted from THE GREAT RESET: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida. Copyright 2010 by Richard Florida. Reprinted by arrangement with Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
The Path to Recovery
May 7 2010
Richard Florida
Economic peaks and valleys are part of the life cycle of any society. They can be difficult, sometimes horribly painful, but just as trees shed their leaves in the fall to make room for the new growth of spring, economies reset themselves. Times of crisis reveal what is and isn't working. These are the times when obsolete and dysfunctional systems and practices collapse or fall by the wayside. They are the times when the seeds of innovation and invention, of creativity and entrepreneurship, burst into full flower, enabling recovery by remaking both the economy and society. Major periods of economic transformation, such as the Great Depression or the Long Depression of the 1870s before it, unfold over long stretches of time, like motion pictures rather than snapshots. Likewise, the path to recovery can be long and twisted--the better part of three decades in the case of those two previous crises. Seen in the greater context of history, economic crises inevitably give rise to critical periods in which an economy is remade in ways that allow it to recover and begin growing again. These are periods I call Great Resets.
We're still very early on in the current economic Reset, so it's difficult to fully grasp how it will ultimately play out. But we can all sense that our way of life is changing and our economic landscape is too. This emerging new way of life will be less oriented around cars, houses, and suburbs. We'll be spending relatively less on the things that defined the old way of life. We'll have to, if we expect to have money left over to sustain the new industries that will emerge in the Great Reset and usher in an age of renewed prosperity. Before we can nurture the new industries of the future, develop new forms of health care and biotechnologies, or even explore new forms of education or more experiential forms of entertainment and recreation, we first have to free up capital by producing the goods of the old industrial order more cheaply and efficiently.
We've reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the "ownership society." Owning your own home made sense when people could hope to hold a job for most or all of their lives. But in an economy that revolves around mobility and flexibility, a house that can't be sold becomes an economic trap, preventing people from moving freely to economic opportunity. Not only has that piece of the American Dream grown dark, but it's also clear that financial excess in the housing sector was one of the central causes of the economic crisis. Housing sucked up far too much of the nation's and the world's capital, and too many people--already overextended by the purchase of outsized houses--used those homes like virtual ATMs to finance carefree consumption. Every Great Reset has seen our system of housing change, and this one is no different. The rate of home ownership has been on the decline for some time now. Many of those who still choose to buy homes will choose smaller ones, while many more will opt for rental housing.
Our new way of life is likely to depend a whole lot less on the car. In October 2009, The New York Times reported, "The recession and a growing awareness of the environment are causing many people to reassess their automobile ownership. After more than a century in which an automobile represented the American dream, car enthusiasm may no longer be a part of Americans' DNA." Car culture no longer exerts the powerful pull it once did. More and more families are deciding to share cars, and young people are putting off buying them and using public transit, bikes, their feet or Zipcars (membership-based, easy-access short-term car rentals) instead. It's not just that oil and gas have become expensive, it's that traffic and gridlock have become a deadweight time cost on us and our economy.
One constant in the history of capitalism is the ever-more-intensive use of land, as mercantile towns replaced agricultural villages, major industrial cities replaced those towns, and massive complexes of suburbs, exurbs, and edge cites expanded the boundaries of those cities. The change we are living through is much more than a movement from suburbs to denser urban communities. What we are seeing is the rise of a new, bigger, and denser economic landscape than ever before--the rise of vast megaregions such as the corridors stretching from Boston to New York and Washington, D.C., around greater London, and from Shanghai to Beijing. These concentrations of population, which encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings, have grown swiftly in recent years.
The largest megaregion in North America is the great "Bos-Wash" corridor, initially identified by the geographer Jean Gottmann. Strecthing down the East Coast, it includes Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and is home to more than 50 million people while producing more than $2 trillion in economic activity. Its economic output is greater than that of either the United Kingdom or France and more than double that of India or Canada. The second biggest, which Gottman dubbed "Chi-Pitts," covers more than 100,000 square miles and is home to 46 million people, producing $1.6 trillion in economic output. Other megaregions in North America include:
•Char-lanta: Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham, 22 million people
•So-Cal: Around Los Angeles, 21 million people
•Tor-Mon-tawa: 22 million people
•Nor-Cal: Around San Francisco, 12.8 million people
•So-Flo: Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, 15 million people
•Dal-Austin: Dallas and Austin, 10 million people
•Hou-Orleans: Houston and New Orleans, 9.7 million people
•Cascadia: Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, 9 million people
•Pho-Tus: Phoenix and Tucson, 4.7 million people
•Den-Bo: Denver and Boulder, 3.7 million people
Around the world, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mumbai are hubs of giant megaregions. Each of these is a financial and commercial center with tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars in output.
These megaregions, not nations, really power the global economy. Taken together, the world's 40 largest megaregions account for two-thirds of all global economic activity and 85 percent of the world's technological innovation while housing just 18 percent of its population. Megaregions are the strategic power centers of the economy, housing 85 percent of all corporate headquarters in the United States and Canada.
Though many analysts have predicted that the importance of cities--and that of location--would fade with globalization, the reality is that cities and megaregions have become more important economically than ever before. Even as globalization has spread factories, businesses, and laboratories to places such as India, China, Brazil, and beyond, these activities are being concentrated in the megaregions of those countries. Contrary to the notion that the world is flat, the most successful megaregions, in fact, are becoming economically stronger and spikier, not flatter.
Megaregions are to our time what suburbanization was to the postwar era. They provide the seeds of a new spatial fix. They expand and intensify our use of land and space the way that the industrial city did during the First Reset and suburbia did in the Second. As people pour into the world's great megaregions, inner cities and close-in suburbs are being reclaimed and rebuilt. Older suburbs, especially those on transit routes, are being reorganized and rebuilt into denser communities offering more condos and town houses as well as single-family homes. Suburban malls and office complexes are being retrofitted and turned into walkable areas with a mixture of housing, shops, and restaurants and in some cases even new parks. Subways and rail transit are being expanded as highways clog.
The location decisions made by new college grads have interested me for years. Their choices involve evaluating not just the company they'll work for but the labor market it's located in and what the surrounding area has to offer. Because they are both highly skilled and highly mobile--three to five times as likely to move than, say, a 45-year-old--the decisions they make about where to live are likely to leave a lasting imprint on our economic geography.
To get at the factors that attract and keep young Gen Y members, those born between the years 1979 and 1990, in certain places, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I analyzed the results of a Gallup survey of some 28,000 Americans. Jobs are clearly important. Gen Y members ranked the availability of jobs second when asked what would keep them in their current location and fourth in terms of their overall satisfaction with their community. From this perspective, big cities make sense for them, as they offer more robust labor markets with more and better job opportunities in a wide number of fields. In an age in which corporate commitment has dwindled, job tenure has grown far shorter, and people switch jobs with much greater frequency, career success involves a great deal more than simply finding the right first job. In these highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success for young people depends on locating themselves in a thick labor market that offers diverse and abundant job opportunities. Picking an economically vibrant location is an important hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.
But remember that jobs were not the highest-ranked factor. Across the board, the survey respondents said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance. These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness. They not only desire a thick labor market but also seek what I have come to call a thick mating market, where they can meet new people, go out on dates, and eventually find a life partner. And whereas older Americans see high-quality schools and safe streets for their children as key, Gen Y understandably ranks the availability of outstanding colleges and universities higher. Many are likely to go back to graduate school and want to have good programs nearby. For all these reasons, big cities at the heart of megaregions top the list of their choices.
The auto-dependent transportation system has reached its limit in most major cities and megaregions. Commuting by car is among the least efficient of all our activities--not to mention among the least enjoyable, according to detailed research by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues. Though one might think that the crisis would have reduced traffic (high unemployment means fewer workers traveling to and from work), the opposite has been true. Average commutes have lengthened, and congestion has gotten worse, if anything. The average commute rose in 2008 to 25.5 minutes, "erasing years of decreases to stand at the level of 2000, as people had to leave home earlier in the morning to pick up friends for their ride to work or to catch a bus or subway train," according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which collects the figures. And those are average figures. Commutes are far longer in the big West Coast cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco and the East Coast cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. In many of these cities, gridlock has become the norm, not just at rush hour but all day, every day.
Just about the only remedy for traffic congestion anyone ever suggests is building more roads and highways, which of course only makes the problem worse. New roads generate higher levels of "induced traffic," that is, new roads just invite drivers to drive more and lure people who take mass transit back to their cars. Eventually, we end up with more clogged roads rather than a long-term improvement in traffic flow
More and more people are choosing to take the subway, train, or bus or even walk or bike to work and go about their daily business--providing they live in an environment that allows for such choices. In Manhattan, 82 percent of workers get to work by public transit or bicycle or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County, and 16 times the rate for residents of metropolitan Atlanta. The New York City subway is a remarkably effective technology for moving masses of people around quickly and efficiently. Between 8 and 9 in the morning on a typical workday, more than 385,000 people use its subway system to commute into the central business district.
New York is not the only place where this kind of change in commuting and local traffic patterns is occurring. In Washington, D.C., 57 percent of commuters get to work by means other than driving a car--more than a third take public transit, 12 percent walk to work, and 2 percent ride their bikes; just four in ten drive to work alone. In Boston and San Francisco, roughly half of workers get to work without their cars--roughly a third of commuters take transit, and 10 to 15 percent walk to work. In Philadelphia, 41 percent commute without cars and 27 percent take transit.
These numbers may seem like a drop in the bucket. But 60 percent of Americans surveyed in 2005 said they want to live in walkable communities with shops, restaurants, movie theaters, schools, and churches nearby. We're already seeing the shift as increasing numbers of people move to walkable communities closer to where they work. That will clearly expand in coming decades.
For the time being, most Americans remain behind the wheel. Today, more than three-quarters of Americans drive to work alone. They have no other choice. There are, however, other things we can do to ease congestion and take more cars off the road. Employers can offer more flexible schedules and the ability to work from home or telecommute. But as we've already seen, in many cities traffic is not just a rush-hour problem. The only alternative left is to price the roads. We pay for everything else: we pay to take the subway, ride the bus, or take the train, we pay to drive through the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels or over the George Washington Bridge. Why should the roads be essentially free? If we want to make traffic better, we have little choice other than to make people pay for the roads they drive on.
Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. Adapted from THE GREAT RESET: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida. Copyright 2010 by Richard Florida. Reprinted by arrangement with Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Erykah Badu's 'Window Seat' Nudity Could Have Gotten Her A Year In Jail
Mar 30 2010
Erykah Badu's 'Window Seat' Nudity Could Have Gotten Her A Year In Jail
Dallas police said guerilla shoot broke public indecency laws; directors say they had bail money ready.
Gil Kaufman
Erykah Badu was willing to bare it all for her "Window Seat" video. But when the singer and a small crew took to the streets of her native Dallas on St. Patrick's Day to shoot the provocative clip, they did so without an official permit and, they said, with full knowledge that the guerilla adventure could land them in jail — for up to a year.
"They definitely did not get a permit," Dallas Police Department Senior Corporal Janice Crowther said of the video, in which Badu slowly strips out of her clothes until she is standing naked near the same spot where President Kennedy was gunned down in Dealey Plaza in 1963, and then is shot herself by an unseen sniper. "To shoot that video they would have had to get a special events permit from the events office and it would have had to specify what type of filming they were doing, what subjects they would use and any traffic control they would need."
Crowther said such a shoot would also typically require a police officer to be standing by while filming was going on. Not only did the Badu video not have that police presence, but if an officer had been on site, Crowther said they would not have allowed it to go on.
"That's more than likely why they circumvented the permit," she said. Directors Coodie and Chike of Creative Control told MTV News that they did not apply for or obtain any permits for the shoot and kept a keen eye out for any police while filming.
"What was crazy was the fact that ... it's a high tourist area, so there was patrol cars all day, and I [was hearing] sirens, looking up and seeing some kind of sherriff's car or something," Chike recalled to MTV News on Monday. "So I was like, 'This is gonna be interesting.' Her contingency plan was get arrested — she was big on doing it."
"We had bail money and everything," Coodie chimed in. "I think she really wanted to get arrested and even make a bigger message. You know what I'm saying?"
As soon as it wrapped, they said, Badu was hustled into a van and whisked from the area.
"And then people were like, 'I'm calling the police!' " Chike said.
"It was nothing but two or three people, it was nothing that crazy at all," Coodie said. "There was that one lady, though, that was really crazy, she was like, 'That was so offensive!' "
A spokesperson for Badu's label had not responded to MTV News' requests for comment or details of the shoot.
Had Badu been spotted by an officer, she could have been arrested for a class B misdemeanor charge of indecent exposure, which carries a fine of up to $2,000 and a jail term of up to 180 days, or both, Crowther said. But, considering that there were children present during the shoot, Crowther said that charge would probably have been bumped up to a Class A enhanced indecent exposure charge, which pushes the fine up to a maximum of $4,000 and up to one year in jail, or both.
Because there were no officers who witnessed the nudity in the shoot first-hand — which Crowther said likely took less than 90 seconds to complete — it's unclear what, if anything, Dallas police can do about it.
"No charges have been filed thus far," she said. "We need a witness to testify to prosecute a case, but people were probably so shocked, and it happened so fast, that we don't have any record of anyone calling 911. We have not had any witnesses come forth to press charges."
If a witness does come forward and lodge a complaint, however, it's still possible that Badu and her crew could face some police sanction, according to Crowther. If a police officer witnessed the shoot and comes forward, the charge could be stronger.
To see the video:
http://www.erykahbadu.com/
Friday, January 29, 2010
Babewatch: Coco Lectric
We take this break in honor of Coco Lectric of the Austin, Texas burlesque group The Jigglewatts. These pics are from her show this month at the Lakewood Theater in Dallas.
To see more:http://www.cocolectric.com
http://www.thejigglewattsburlesque.com
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
FBI agent witnessed JFK's autopsy
O’Neill and James Sibert figured prominently in David Lifton’s book, Best Evidence, with their report of surgery on the JFK’s head wound, suggesting that the “best evidence”, president’s body, had been tampered with before autopsy.
Kenn Thomas
Steamshovelpress.com
Francis X. O'Neill; FBI agent witnessed JFK's autopsy
By J.M. Lawrence
Globe Correspondent / February 6, 2009
Retired FBI agent Francis X. O'Neill Jr., who was one of the last surviving investigators who observed President John F. Kennedy's autopsy in 1963, has died.
Mr. O'Neill, who lived in Brewster, died of a stroke Tuesday in Cape Cod Hospital, according to his family. He was 85.
For decades, Mr. O'Neill battled conspiracy theorists about the JFK assassination. He later became a Connecticut state legislator and recently finished his autobiography, entitled "A Fox Among Wolves."
"The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable that Oswald alone shot and killed President Kennedy," Mr. O'Neill wrote, according to galleys of his book, which is scheduled for publication this year.
Mr. O'Neill and senior agent James W. Sibert were sent by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to meet the president's body at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and to begin the bureau's investigation.
"Frank was a hard-working fellow; he would tackle anything," said Sibert, who is 90 and lives in Fort Myers, Fla.
After the assassination in Dallas and the arrival of the body in Maryland, the agents joined the motorcade to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where they kept track of who entered the autopsy room.
Mr. O'Neill confiscated and exposed the film of a Navy service member who began taking pictures at the autopsy but did not have security clearance, according to author Gerald Posner, who interviewed Mr. O'Neill for his book "Case Closed."
Conspiracy theorists often point to the lost film to bolster their theories, Posner noted.
Mr. O'Neill appeared before several investigative panels over the years. He adamantly rejected theories claiming the president's body had been switched.
In an interview with Posner, he lamented a minor mistake in his FBI report, in which he wrongly used the word "surgery" and fueled speculation that somehow Kennedy's body had been altered between Dallas and Maryland. "We weren't doctors," he told Posner.
He retired from the FBI in 1978, after serving as assistant special agent in charge of the Connecticut office for four years.
He worked as chief of investigations for the Recording Industry Association of America's antipiracy division before going into state politics in 1980.
He lost his first bid for the Connecticut House of Representatives and was elected in 1982 in the 98th District. He held office until 1990 and was a staunch opponent of the state's income tax, which narrowly passed the House after he left office.
Born in Elmhurst in Queens, N.Y., he was the oldest of six. He fought in World War II as a paratrooper with the 503d Regimental Combat Team in the South Pacific and made jumps on Corregidor, an island in the Philippines.
After the war, he returned to New York and received a bachelor's degree in economics from Fordham University. He enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War and later joined the New York City Police Department. He became an FBI agent in 1955.
He and his wife Elizabeth were married for 57 years.
"Dad was the strongest advocate you would ever want on your side," said one of his sons, Frank III of Madison, Conn.
He said his father visited the Philippines to see the graves of his Word War II buddies.
In addition to his son and wife, Mr. O'Neill leaves six other sons, Brian of Medford, Andrew of Killingworth, Conn., Colin of Nanuet, N.Y., Owen of Guilford, Conn., Damian of Okinawa, Japan, and Regis of Middletown, Conn.; a daughter, Sheila Baker of Southington, Conn.; two brothers, Joseph of Vero Beach, Fla., and Vincent of Glen Rock, N.J.; a sister, Rita Black of Indian Land, S.C.; and 18 grand- children.
A funeral Mass will be said Monday in St. George Church in Guilford, Conn. Burial will be in Massachusetts National Veterans Cemetery in Bourne.
Kenn Thomas
Steamshovelpress.com
Francis X. O'Neill; FBI agent witnessed JFK's autopsy
By J.M. Lawrence
Globe Correspondent / February 6, 2009
Retired FBI agent Francis X. O'Neill Jr., who was one of the last surviving investigators who observed President John F. Kennedy's autopsy in 1963, has died.
Mr. O'Neill, who lived in Brewster, died of a stroke Tuesday in Cape Cod Hospital, according to his family. He was 85.
For decades, Mr. O'Neill battled conspiracy theorists about the JFK assassination. He later became a Connecticut state legislator and recently finished his autobiography, entitled "A Fox Among Wolves."
"The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable that Oswald alone shot and killed President Kennedy," Mr. O'Neill wrote, according to galleys of his book, which is scheduled for publication this year.
Mr. O'Neill and senior agent James W. Sibert were sent by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to meet the president's body at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and to begin the bureau's investigation.
"Frank was a hard-working fellow; he would tackle anything," said Sibert, who is 90 and lives in Fort Myers, Fla.
After the assassination in Dallas and the arrival of the body in Maryland, the agents joined the motorcade to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where they kept track of who entered the autopsy room.
Mr. O'Neill confiscated and exposed the film of a Navy service member who began taking pictures at the autopsy but did not have security clearance, according to author Gerald Posner, who interviewed Mr. O'Neill for his book "Case Closed."
Conspiracy theorists often point to the lost film to bolster their theories, Posner noted.
Mr. O'Neill appeared before several investigative panels over the years. He adamantly rejected theories claiming the president's body had been switched.
In an interview with Posner, he lamented a minor mistake in his FBI report, in which he wrongly used the word "surgery" and fueled speculation that somehow Kennedy's body had been altered between Dallas and Maryland. "We weren't doctors," he told Posner.
He retired from the FBI in 1978, after serving as assistant special agent in charge of the Connecticut office for four years.
He worked as chief of investigations for the Recording Industry Association of America's antipiracy division before going into state politics in 1980.
He lost his first bid for the Connecticut House of Representatives and was elected in 1982 in the 98th District. He held office until 1990 and was a staunch opponent of the state's income tax, which narrowly passed the House after he left office.
Born in Elmhurst in Queens, N.Y., he was the oldest of six. He fought in World War II as a paratrooper with the 503d Regimental Combat Team in the South Pacific and made jumps on Corregidor, an island in the Philippines.
After the war, he returned to New York and received a bachelor's degree in economics from Fordham University. He enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War and later joined the New York City Police Department. He became an FBI agent in 1955.
He and his wife Elizabeth were married for 57 years.
"Dad was the strongest advocate you would ever want on your side," said one of his sons, Frank III of Madison, Conn.
He said his father visited the Philippines to see the graves of his Word War II buddies.
In addition to his son and wife, Mr. O'Neill leaves six other sons, Brian of Medford, Andrew of Killingworth, Conn., Colin of Nanuet, N.Y., Owen of Guilford, Conn., Damian of Okinawa, Japan, and Regis of Middletown, Conn.; a daughter, Sheila Baker of Southington, Conn.; two brothers, Joseph of Vero Beach, Fla., and Vincent of Glen Rock, N.J.; a sister, Rita Black of Indian Land, S.C.; and 18 grand- children.
A funeral Mass will be said Monday in St. George Church in Guilford, Conn. Burial will be in Massachusetts National Veterans Cemetery in Bourne.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The SEC by Mark Cuban
http://blogmaverick.com/2008/11/17/the-sec/
The SEC
Mark Cuban
Nov 17th 2008
I wish I could say more, but I will have to leave it to this, and let the judicial process do its job.
November 17, 2008
RE: SEC Civil Action in the United States District
for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division
Mark Cuban today responded to a civil complaint filed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States District for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division. In its complaint, the Commission charges that Mr. Cuban engaged in violations of the federal securities laws in connection with transactions in the securities of Mamma.com Inc.
This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division.
Mr. Cuban stated, “I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”
——————————
——————————
Ralph C. Ferrara, Esq.
Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
1101 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 1100
Washington, D.C. 20005
The SEC
Mark Cuban
Nov 17th 2008
I wish I could say more, but I will have to leave it to this, and let the judicial process do its job.
November 17, 2008
RE: SEC Civil Action in the United States District
for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division
Mark Cuban today responded to a civil complaint filed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States District for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division. In its complaint, the Commission charges that Mr. Cuban engaged in violations of the federal securities laws in connection with transactions in the securities of Mamma.com Inc.
This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division.
Mr. Cuban stated, “I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”
——————————
——————————
Ralph C. Ferrara, Esq.
Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
1101 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 1100
Washington, D.C. 20005
Insider Trading, or Political Persecution?
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/insider-trading-or-political-persecution/
November 17, 2008
Insider Trading, or Political Persecution?
By Floyd Norris
Did Mark Cuban, the Internet entrepreneur turned owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and would-be buyer of the Chicago Cubs, violate insider trading laws in a particularly egregious fashion?
Or is he the victim of a political hit job because he helped finance a movie that was scathingly critical of President Bush?
Either way, the insider trading complaint from the Securities and Exchange Commission today arouses a lot more interest than most enforcement actions.
I’ll get to the facts of the complaint in a minute, but first here is Mr. Cuban’s reaction. His lawyers issued a statement saying:
This matter, which has been pending before the commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its enforcement division.
Mr. Cuban stated, “I am disappointed that the commission chose to bring this case based upon its enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”
A person close to Mr. Cuban provided me with a copy of an e-mail message said to have been sent by Jeffrey Norris, an S.E.C. lawyer in the Fort Worth regional office (and no known relation to me.) This e-mail message seems to have been sent after an exchange in which Mr. Norris complained that Mr. Cuban had financed a movie called “Loose Change” that discusses the president’s actions relating to Sept. 11.
From: Norris, Jeffrey B. [mailto:NorrisJ@SEC.GOV]
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 2:27 PM
To: Mark Cuban
Cc: Cox, Christopher
Subject: RE: “Lose Change”
I AM SHARING THIS WITH CHAIRMAN COX. NEITHER HE NOR THE COMMISSION ENDORSE MY OPINIONS, BUT IN LIGHT OF YOUR THREAT, I THOUGHT SHOULD SEND THIS TO HIM.
Mark:
If this upsets you, I wonder how George Bush feels. I assume that Mr. Cox would view your involvement with “Loose Change” much as I do. After all, he served his country as a Republican Congressman from Orange County for nearly 20 years and was appointed by President Bush. If you feel like sharing my thoughts with Chairman Cox, be my guest.
Previously, I thought you were merely foolish and naïve. Now, however, I see that you are also a hypocrite. I guess your belief in free speech has severe limitations. If someone else is the victim of an absurd conspiracy theory, you defend your right to participate in smearing the good name of a patriot like President Bush. But, when you are the subject of a parody of the attack you have endorsed, you suddenly issue threats.
I think I will e-mail this to Chairman Cox myself. I think he will enjoy it. I’m sure he is also a Laker fan.
Since Chairman Cox may not know the background, I will explain. Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and has participated in distributing the vicious and absurd documentary, “Loose Change,” which posits that President Bush planned the demolition of the World Trade Center as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. We have had some past exchanges about my opinion the Mr. Cuban’s support for this project is irresponsible and immoral. Below, I parodied his position that every opinion, no matter how absurd and vicious, deserves to be broadly disseminated.
The copy sent to me does not include the previous parody.
John Nester, an S.E.C. spokesman, said this afternoon that the investigation was conducted by the S.E.C.’s Washington office, and that Mr. Norris was not involved in it. He added:
“Chairman Cox has never met the individual who corresponded with Mr. Cuban, nor has he spoken or corresponded with him in any way. After those communications came to light, the matter was referred for disciplinary action against the individual. To avoid any potential appearance issues, Chairman Cox recused himself from the Commission vote, and he has not been involved in this investigation at any time.”
The vote he refers to was the commission’s vote to file the case.
Mr. Norris has not returned a call left for him at his office.
Now for the facts of the insider trading case.
Mr. Cuban made a substantial profit from a quick trade in an Internet company that, oh-so-briefly, was a hot stock in 2004. It is not clear from public records just how much money he made, but even if the S.E.C. succeeds in its efforts to take about $750,000 in profits from him, he will still be one of the few public shareholders to rank as having made a lot of money from the company.
Mamma.com was, and is, an Internet search engine. In late February 2004, it was trading for around $4 a share. Then it announced earnings and announced new advertising features and the stock took off, aided by some stock tip sheets. (That trading brought on an S.E.C. investigation, which ended without charges being filed.)
The trading was crazy. A company with 10.5 million shares outstanding was trading more than 60 million shares a day while the stock ran up. There was heavy short-selling.
Mr. Cuban disclosed that he had acquired 600,000 shares, a 6.3 percent stake, by March 15, 2004. He did not disclose a purchase price or say when he had acquired the shares.
According to the S.E.C., on June 28, 2004, the company’s chief executive asked Mr. Cuban if he would like to participate in a planned new offering of the company’s stock. After being warned that he was receiving confidential information, Mr. Cuban is said to have expressed dismay about the offering. “At the end of the call, Cuban told the C.E.O. ‘Well, now I’m screwed. I can’t sell.’ ”
But a few minutes later he did sell 10,000 shares in after-hours trading. He sold the rest the next day. He took in $7.9 million, realizing an average of $13.24 per share. After the close on June 29, the offering was announced, and the stock opened the next day at $11.89. The S.E.C. figures that is a measure of his illicit gain.
Mamma.com is still around. In fact, I did all the searches connected to this blog using that search engine, and it performed quite adequately. But it has not prospered. The corporate name has changed to Copernic and the current stock price is 28 cents. At that price, Mr. Cuban’s former holding would be worth $168,000.
Mr. Cuban disclosed that sale, as required for a major holder. It is not clear what caused the S.E.C. to begin its investigation in early 2007, two and a half years after the sale. But if Mr. Cuban had waited to sell, he still would have gotten a very good price for the stock — at least from the perspective of 2008 — and the S.E.C. would have had no case.
As it is, there appears to be no question about when Mr. Cuban sold the stock. The S.E.C. cites phone company records and company memos about the timing and content of the call. If those memos were accurate, it appears that Mr. Cuban knew he had a duty not to sell until the information about the offering was made public.
But even if all that is true, the Norris e-mail, sent from an S.E.C. e-mail address, indicates the commission has a lawyer with, at best, very poor judgment.
November 17, 2008
Insider Trading, or Political Persecution?
By Floyd Norris
Did Mark Cuban, the Internet entrepreneur turned owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and would-be buyer of the Chicago Cubs, violate insider trading laws in a particularly egregious fashion?
Or is he the victim of a political hit job because he helped finance a movie that was scathingly critical of President Bush?
Either way, the insider trading complaint from the Securities and Exchange Commission today arouses a lot more interest than most enforcement actions.
I’ll get to the facts of the complaint in a minute, but first here is Mr. Cuban’s reaction. His lawyers issued a statement saying:
This matter, which has been pending before the commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its enforcement division.
Mr. Cuban stated, “I am disappointed that the commission chose to bring this case based upon its enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”
A person close to Mr. Cuban provided me with a copy of an e-mail message said to have been sent by Jeffrey Norris, an S.E.C. lawyer in the Fort Worth regional office (and no known relation to me.) This e-mail message seems to have been sent after an exchange in which Mr. Norris complained that Mr. Cuban had financed a movie called “Loose Change” that discusses the president’s actions relating to Sept. 11.
From: Norris, Jeffrey B. [mailto:NorrisJ@SEC.GOV]
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 2:27 PM
To: Mark Cuban
Cc: Cox, Christopher
Subject: RE: “Lose Change”
I AM SHARING THIS WITH CHAIRMAN COX. NEITHER HE NOR THE COMMISSION ENDORSE MY OPINIONS, BUT IN LIGHT OF YOUR THREAT, I THOUGHT SHOULD SEND THIS TO HIM.
Mark:
If this upsets you, I wonder how George Bush feels. I assume that Mr. Cox would view your involvement with “Loose Change” much as I do. After all, he served his country as a Republican Congressman from Orange County for nearly 20 years and was appointed by President Bush. If you feel like sharing my thoughts with Chairman Cox, be my guest.
Previously, I thought you were merely foolish and naïve. Now, however, I see that you are also a hypocrite. I guess your belief in free speech has severe limitations. If someone else is the victim of an absurd conspiracy theory, you defend your right to participate in smearing the good name of a patriot like President Bush. But, when you are the subject of a parody of the attack you have endorsed, you suddenly issue threats.
I think I will e-mail this to Chairman Cox myself. I think he will enjoy it. I’m sure he is also a Laker fan.
Since Chairman Cox may not know the background, I will explain. Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and has participated in distributing the vicious and absurd documentary, “Loose Change,” which posits that President Bush planned the demolition of the World Trade Center as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. We have had some past exchanges about my opinion the Mr. Cuban’s support for this project is irresponsible and immoral. Below, I parodied his position that every opinion, no matter how absurd and vicious, deserves to be broadly disseminated.
The copy sent to me does not include the previous parody.
John Nester, an S.E.C. spokesman, said this afternoon that the investigation was conducted by the S.E.C.’s Washington office, and that Mr. Norris was not involved in it. He added:
“Chairman Cox has never met the individual who corresponded with Mr. Cuban, nor has he spoken or corresponded with him in any way. After those communications came to light, the matter was referred for disciplinary action against the individual. To avoid any potential appearance issues, Chairman Cox recused himself from the Commission vote, and he has not been involved in this investigation at any time.”
The vote he refers to was the commission’s vote to file the case.
Mr. Norris has not returned a call left for him at his office.
Now for the facts of the insider trading case.
Mr. Cuban made a substantial profit from a quick trade in an Internet company that, oh-so-briefly, was a hot stock in 2004. It is not clear from public records just how much money he made, but even if the S.E.C. succeeds in its efforts to take about $750,000 in profits from him, he will still be one of the few public shareholders to rank as having made a lot of money from the company.
Mamma.com was, and is, an Internet search engine. In late February 2004, it was trading for around $4 a share. Then it announced earnings and announced new advertising features and the stock took off, aided by some stock tip sheets. (That trading brought on an S.E.C. investigation, which ended without charges being filed.)
The trading was crazy. A company with 10.5 million shares outstanding was trading more than 60 million shares a day while the stock ran up. There was heavy short-selling.
Mr. Cuban disclosed that he had acquired 600,000 shares, a 6.3 percent stake, by March 15, 2004. He did not disclose a purchase price or say when he had acquired the shares.
According to the S.E.C., on June 28, 2004, the company’s chief executive asked Mr. Cuban if he would like to participate in a planned new offering of the company’s stock. After being warned that he was receiving confidential information, Mr. Cuban is said to have expressed dismay about the offering. “At the end of the call, Cuban told the C.E.O. ‘Well, now I’m screwed. I can’t sell.’ ”
But a few minutes later he did sell 10,000 shares in after-hours trading. He sold the rest the next day. He took in $7.9 million, realizing an average of $13.24 per share. After the close on June 29, the offering was announced, and the stock opened the next day at $11.89. The S.E.C. figures that is a measure of his illicit gain.
Mamma.com is still around. In fact, I did all the searches connected to this blog using that search engine, and it performed quite adequately. But it has not prospered. The corporate name has changed to Copernic and the current stock price is 28 cents. At that price, Mr. Cuban’s former holding would be worth $168,000.
Mr. Cuban disclosed that sale, as required for a major holder. It is not clear what caused the S.E.C. to begin its investigation in early 2007, two and a half years after the sale. But if Mr. Cuban had waited to sell, he still would have gotten a very good price for the stock — at least from the perspective of 2008 — and the S.E.C. would have had no case.
As it is, there appears to be no question about when Mr. Cuban sold the stock. The S.E.C. cites phone company records and company memos about the timing and content of the call. If those memos were accurate, it appears that Mr. Cuban knew he had a duty not to sell until the information about the offering was made public.
But even if all that is true, the Norris e-mail, sent from an S.E.C. e-mail address, indicates the commission has a lawyer with, at best, very poor judgment.
SEC accuses Mavs owner Cuban of insider trading
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3708124
SEC accuses Mavs owner Cuban of insider trading
ESPN.com news services
November 18, 2008
Cuban Accused Of Insider Trading WASHINGTON -- Federal regulators have accused billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban of insider trading for allegedly using confidential information on a stock sale to avoid more than $750,000 in losses.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Cuban on Monday in federal court in Dallas. The agency said that in June 2004, Cuban was invited to get in on the coming stock offering by Mamma.com Inc. after he agreed to keep the information private.
The SEC said Cuban knew his stake -- pegged at 600,000 shares, or 6 percent ownership in the company -- would be sold below the current market price after learning that Mamma.com was raising money through a private investment in a public entity (also known as a PIPE).
A few hours after receiving the information, Cuban told his broker to sell all shares in the search engine company, according to the suit.
After the stock sale
In his own words, Mark Cuban mentioned Mamma.com in a March 2005 entry on his own blog, blogmaverick.com, explaining his decision to sell off his stock in the company.
Finally, and this has nothing to do with Naked Shorting, I wanted to reference Mamma.com. I had purchased stock in Mamma.com in hope that it could be an up and coming search engine. I thought I had done some level of due diligence. Talked to the company management. Talked to some employees who worked in sales. Read the SEC Filings. I knew that they had a checkered past and had been linked to stock promoter Irving Kott, and that their law firm still handled some of Kotts business, but the CEO, Chairman, lawyers all said that things were reformed and the company was focused on its business.
Then the company did a PIPE financing. Im not going to discuss the good or bad of PIPE financing other than to say that to me its a huge red flag and I dont want to own stock in companies that use this method of financing . Why? Because I dont like the idea of selling in a private placement, stock for less than the market price, and then to make matters worse, pushing the price lower with the issuance of warrants. So I sold the stock.
I bring all of this up now, because in one of the comments in the Naked Shorting thread, a poster mentioned Lines Overseas Management of Bermuda and how there had been allegations made against them . That rang a bell. Turns out this was the same company that Mamma.com's current CFO used for a private placement for Mamma.
I said at the top that I found out some interesting things in this thread, this was probably the most interesting. I will leave you to make your own decision as to whether this connection matters or not. Im glad I sold my stock.
The Commission is seeking to impose financial penalties and confiscate gains from the trades. It is up to the U.S. Attorney in Dallas to determine whether Cuban should face criminal charges.
"As we allege in the complaint, Mamma.com entrusted Mr. Cuban with nonpublic information after he promised to keep the information confidential. Less than four hours later, Mr. Cuban betrayed that trust by placing an order to sell all of his shares," Scott W. Friestad, deputy director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in a statement. "It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market."
According to the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Clark, a lawyer for Cuban, said, "We're shocked. We find it incredible that given all the important issues that the SEC has to address with regard to today's economy they've sought to bring a $750,000 case relating to a he-said she-said about one trade against a person whose integrity has never been questioned before with regard to the securities markets."
Clark also said he was "further shocked because the whole enforcement process was tainted by express bias by enforcement officials and certain other misconduct that we will happily detail to the judge in this case."
In a statement posted on Cuban's blog, blogmaverick.com, attorney Ralph C. Ferrara said Cuban would challenge the suit.
"This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion," Ferrara said. "Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission's claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division."
In the same statement, Cuban said, "I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff's win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff's process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government's claims are false and they will be proven to be so."
According to the SEC, the complaint seeks to permanently enjoin Cuban from future violations of the federal securities laws, disgorgement (with prejudgment interest), and a financial penalty.
"Insider trading cases are a high priority for the Commission," Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in the statement. "This case demonstrates yet again that the Commission will aggressively pursue illegal insider trading whenever it occurs."
Cuban's situation is drawing comparisons to Martha Stewart's involvement in insider trading in 2001. Stewart was also charged with obstruction for lying to FBI investigators. She was convicted in March 2004 on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and two counts of making false statements and was sentenced to prison.
Mamma.com, a Canadian company, merged with Copernic Technologies in December 2005. Copernic also offers search software and online advertising services. Mamma.com now trades under Copernic's ticker, CNIC.
The NBA had no comment.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
Related Topics: NBA, Dallas Mavericks
SEC accuses Mavs owner Cuban of insider trading
ESPN.com news services
November 18, 2008
Cuban Accused Of Insider Trading WASHINGTON -- Federal regulators have accused billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban of insider trading for allegedly using confidential information on a stock sale to avoid more than $750,000 in losses.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Cuban on Monday in federal court in Dallas. The agency said that in June 2004, Cuban was invited to get in on the coming stock offering by Mamma.com Inc. after he agreed to keep the information private.
The SEC said Cuban knew his stake -- pegged at 600,000 shares, or 6 percent ownership in the company -- would be sold below the current market price after learning that Mamma.com was raising money through a private investment in a public entity (also known as a PIPE).
A few hours after receiving the information, Cuban told his broker to sell all shares in the search engine company, according to the suit.
After the stock sale
In his own words, Mark Cuban mentioned Mamma.com in a March 2005 entry on his own blog, blogmaverick.com, explaining his decision to sell off his stock in the company.
Finally, and this has nothing to do with Naked Shorting, I wanted to reference Mamma.com. I had purchased stock in Mamma.com in hope that it could be an up and coming search engine. I thought I had done some level of due diligence. Talked to the company management. Talked to some employees who worked in sales. Read the SEC Filings. I knew that they had a checkered past and had been linked to stock promoter Irving Kott, and that their law firm still handled some of Kotts business, but the CEO, Chairman, lawyers all said that things were reformed and the company was focused on its business.
Then the company did a PIPE financing. Im not going to discuss the good or bad of PIPE financing other than to say that to me its a huge red flag and I dont want to own stock in companies that use this method of financing . Why? Because I dont like the idea of selling in a private placement, stock for less than the market price, and then to make matters worse, pushing the price lower with the issuance of warrants. So I sold the stock.
I bring all of this up now, because in one of the comments in the Naked Shorting thread, a poster mentioned Lines Overseas Management of Bermuda and how there had been allegations made against them . That rang a bell. Turns out this was the same company that Mamma.com's current CFO used for a private placement for Mamma.
I said at the top that I found out some interesting things in this thread, this was probably the most interesting. I will leave you to make your own decision as to whether this connection matters or not. Im glad I sold my stock.
The Commission is seeking to impose financial penalties and confiscate gains from the trades. It is up to the U.S. Attorney in Dallas to determine whether Cuban should face criminal charges.
"As we allege in the complaint, Mamma.com entrusted Mr. Cuban with nonpublic information after he promised to keep the information confidential. Less than four hours later, Mr. Cuban betrayed that trust by placing an order to sell all of his shares," Scott W. Friestad, deputy director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in a statement. "It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market."
According to the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Clark, a lawyer for Cuban, said, "We're shocked. We find it incredible that given all the important issues that the SEC has to address with regard to today's economy they've sought to bring a $750,000 case relating to a he-said she-said about one trade against a person whose integrity has never been questioned before with regard to the securities markets."
Clark also said he was "further shocked because the whole enforcement process was tainted by express bias by enforcement officials and certain other misconduct that we will happily detail to the judge in this case."
In a statement posted on Cuban's blog, blogmaverick.com, attorney Ralph C. Ferrara said Cuban would challenge the suit.
"This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion," Ferrara said. "Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission's claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division."
In the same statement, Cuban said, "I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff's win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff's process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government's claims are false and they will be proven to be so."
According to the SEC, the complaint seeks to permanently enjoin Cuban from future violations of the federal securities laws, disgorgement (with prejudgment interest), and a financial penalty.
"Insider trading cases are a high priority for the Commission," Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in the statement. "This case demonstrates yet again that the Commission will aggressively pursue illegal insider trading whenever it occurs."
Cuban's situation is drawing comparisons to Martha Stewart's involvement in insider trading in 2001. Stewart was also charged with obstruction for lying to FBI investigators. She was convicted in March 2004 on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and two counts of making false statements and was sentenced to prison.
Mamma.com, a Canadian company, merged with Copernic Technologies in December 2005. Copernic also offers search software and online advertising services. Mamma.com now trades under Copernic's ticker, CNIC.
The NBA had no comment.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
Related Topics: NBA, Dallas Mavericks
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The Birthplaces of 10 Great American Foods
http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20040.html
The Birthplaces of 10 Great American Foods
by Streeter Seidell - November 10, 2008
We’ve compiled a list of all the foods you love, and all the places you need to thank for them.
1. Louis’ Lunch, New Haven, Conn.
The Hamburger
There are competing claims for the coveted “Inventor of the Hamburger” title, but according to Louis’ Lunch (and the Library of Congress, for that matter), this small New Haven restaurant takes the prize. The story goes something like this: One day in 1900, a rushed businessman asked owner Louis Lassen for something quick that he could eat on the run. Lassen cooked up a beef patty, put it between some bread, and sent the man on his way. Pretty modest beginnings for arguably the most popular sandwich of all-time, huh? If you visit Louis’ today, you’ll find that not much has changed. The Lassen family still owns and operates the restaurant, the burgers are still cooked in ancient gas stoves, and, just like then, there is absolutely no ketchup allowed.
2. The ChipShop, Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Fried Twinkie
Sometimes what counts isn’t being the inventor, it’s being the innovator. Take the fried Twinkie, for example. The Twinkie—in all its indestructible glory—has been around for ages, but when ChipShop owner Christopher Sell had the brilliant idea to freeze the snack, dip it in batter, and deep-fry it, the Twinkie took gluttony to new heights. Even The New York Times raved about how “something magical” happens when you taste the deep-fried Twinkie’s “luscious vanilla flavor.” Sell, who was trained in classical French cuisine, didn’t start with the Twinkie, though. In his native England, he fried up everything from M&M’s to Mars bars.
3. Myers Avenue Red Soda Co., Cripple Creek, Colo.
Root Beer Float
If you thought what happened up on Cripple Creek only happened in song, you’re sorely mistaken. In August of 1893, a failed gold-miner-turned-soda-company-owner named Frank J. Wisner was drinking a bottle of his Myers Avenue Red root beer while looking up at Cow Mountain. Just then, a full moon illuminated the snowcap on the otherwise black mountain, and Wisner had a brilliant idea—float a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a glass of his root beer. The new drink was christened the “black cow” and became an instant classic. Today, of course, most of us call it a root beer float.
4. Cozy Dog Drive In, Springfield, Ill.
Corn Dogs
In 1946, Ed Waldmire, Jr., revolutionized the stick-meat world when he debuted the Cozy Dog—the first corn dog on a stick. At first, he wanted to call his creation the “Crusty Cur,” but his wife convinced him to change the name to “Cozy Dog.” She felt people wouldn’t want to eat something described as “crusty.” Good call, Mrs. Waldmire. Shortly after the Cozy Dog’s inception, the Cozy Dog Drive In opened alongside old Route 66 and has been serving up corn dogs ever since.
5. Lombardi’s, New York City, N.Y.
The Pizzeria
Pizza has existed in one form or another for a long time, but America got her first true pizzeria when Gennaro Lombardi opened up a small grocery store in NYC’s Little Italy. An employee named Anthony “Totonno” Pero started selling pizzas out of the back, and in no time, Lombardi’s was concentrating on its burgeoning pizza business instead of plain old groceries. In 1905, the establishment was licensed as a pizzeria, and it’s stayed that way ever since. Well, almost. The original restaurant closed in 1984 but reopened down the street 10 years later. On its 100th anniversary in 2005, Lombardi’s decided to offer its pizza for the same price it’d been sold for in 1905—5 cents a pie. Needless to say, the line wrapped around the block.
6. R.U. Hungry, New Brunswick, N.J.
The Fat Darrell
You may not know what the Fat Darrell is, but when you hear what it contains, you’ll understand why it’s truly a work of inspired genius. Since 1979, Rutgers University has played host to a collection of mobile food vans collectively known as the “Grease Trucks.” Originally, they served a sandwich called the Fat Cat, which contained two cheeseburger patties, French fries, lettuce, tomato, and onions. Then one night in 1997, a hungry (and broke) student named Darrell W. Butler convinced one of the vendors to put chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, French fries, and marinara sauce on a sandwich. Strangely, the concoction sounded so appetizing that the next 10 people in line ordered it, and the Fat Darrell became a mainstay at the Grease Trucks. Hey, not any old sandwich gets to be named Maxim magazine’s top “Meat Hog” sandwich.
7. Pat’s King Of Steaks, Philadelphia, Pa.
Philly Cheesesteak
Philadelphia is known for many things (Ben Franklin, the Liberty Bell, and Rocky, for starters), but fine dining is not really its forte. That’s OK, though, because Philly is the home of Pat’s King of Steaks, and Pat’s King of Steaks is where the Philly cheesesteak was born. One day back in 1932, hot dog stand owners Pasquale (Pat) and Harry Olivieri decided to change things up and make a steak sandwich with onions. A cab driver who ate at Pat’s daily insisted on trying the new sandwich, and with the first bite declared, “Hey, forget ‘bout those hot dogs, you should sell these!” Cab drivers know fast food about as well as anyone, so the brothers did just what the cabbie suggested. In no time, the modest stand turned into the Pat’s that exists today. Controversy remains, however, over who’s responsible for putting the cheese in cheesesteak. Pat’s claims it was the first to do so (in 1951), but across-the-street rival Joe Vento of Geno’s Steaks (opened 1966) insists he added the finishing touches.
8. Brown Derby, Los Angeles, Calif.
Cobb Salad
Let’s face it; most salads are wimpy little affairs meant for nothing more than occupying your mouth while you wait for the main course. Not the mighty Cobb, though. With lettuce, eggs, bacon, chicken, avocado, tomatoes, chives, watercress, Roquefort cheese, and a special dressing, the Cobb salad is not your traditional salad (or a healthy one, either). The man responsible for the concoction is Robert H. Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles. Late one night in 1937, Cobb and his friend, Sid Grauman (owner of the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre), were rooting around in the Derby kitchen looking for a snack. Cobb essentially grabbed whatever was left in the fridge, chopped it all up, and prepared a salad. Grauman came by the next day and ordered himself a “Cobb salad.” Word spread quickly (this was Hollywood, after all), and soon it became the landmark restaurant’s signature dish.
9. Pig Stand, Dallas, Texas
Onion Rings
According to most sources, the onion ring was invented when a careless cook at a Pig Stand location in Dallas accidentally dropped an onion slice in some batter, then pulled it out and tossed it in the fryer for lack of a better destination. Now, you’d think inventing the onion ring would be enough for one restaurant chain, but not Pig Stand. The company also lays claim to opening America’s first drive-in, inventing Texas toast, and being one of the first restaurants to advertise using neon signs. Not bad for a little outfit from Texas.
10. Melrose Inn, Prospect, Ky.
Derby Pie
A Kentucky favorite, derby pie is a chocolate and walnut tart with a pastry-dough crust—and that’s about all we know about it. Why? Because the recipe is jealously guarded by the Kern family. Melrose Inn manager George Kern created derby pie in the mid-1950s with help from his parents, Walter and Leaudra, and the dessert was such a hit that the family was soon baking the treat full-time. In fact, Mrs. Kern, being the crafty monopolist she was, copyrighted the name, and to this day, you can only get real “Derby-Pie®” through Kern’s Kitchen, Inc. Not only that, but a man from New England once handed Leaudra a blank check for the recipe so that his daughter could make the pie at home. She refused.
The Birthplaces of 10 Great American Foods
by Streeter Seidell - November 10, 2008
We’ve compiled a list of all the foods you love, and all the places you need to thank for them.
1. Louis’ Lunch, New Haven, Conn.
The Hamburger
There are competing claims for the coveted “Inventor of the Hamburger” title, but according to Louis’ Lunch (and the Library of Congress, for that matter), this small New Haven restaurant takes the prize. The story goes something like this: One day in 1900, a rushed businessman asked owner Louis Lassen for something quick that he could eat on the run. Lassen cooked up a beef patty, put it between some bread, and sent the man on his way. Pretty modest beginnings for arguably the most popular sandwich of all-time, huh? If you visit Louis’ today, you’ll find that not much has changed. The Lassen family still owns and operates the restaurant, the burgers are still cooked in ancient gas stoves, and, just like then, there is absolutely no ketchup allowed.
2. The ChipShop, Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Fried Twinkie
Sometimes what counts isn’t being the inventor, it’s being the innovator. Take the fried Twinkie, for example. The Twinkie—in all its indestructible glory—has been around for ages, but when ChipShop owner Christopher Sell had the brilliant idea to freeze the snack, dip it in batter, and deep-fry it, the Twinkie took gluttony to new heights. Even The New York Times raved about how “something magical” happens when you taste the deep-fried Twinkie’s “luscious vanilla flavor.” Sell, who was trained in classical French cuisine, didn’t start with the Twinkie, though. In his native England, he fried up everything from M&M’s to Mars bars.
3. Myers Avenue Red Soda Co., Cripple Creek, Colo.
Root Beer Float
If you thought what happened up on Cripple Creek only happened in song, you’re sorely mistaken. In August of 1893, a failed gold-miner-turned-soda-company-owner named Frank J. Wisner was drinking a bottle of his Myers Avenue Red root beer while looking up at Cow Mountain. Just then, a full moon illuminated the snowcap on the otherwise black mountain, and Wisner had a brilliant idea—float a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a glass of his root beer. The new drink was christened the “black cow” and became an instant classic. Today, of course, most of us call it a root beer float.
4. Cozy Dog Drive In, Springfield, Ill.
Corn Dogs
In 1946, Ed Waldmire, Jr., revolutionized the stick-meat world when he debuted the Cozy Dog—the first corn dog on a stick. At first, he wanted to call his creation the “Crusty Cur,” but his wife convinced him to change the name to “Cozy Dog.” She felt people wouldn’t want to eat something described as “crusty.” Good call, Mrs. Waldmire. Shortly after the Cozy Dog’s inception, the Cozy Dog Drive In opened alongside old Route 66 and has been serving up corn dogs ever since.
5. Lombardi’s, New York City, N.Y.
The Pizzeria
Pizza has existed in one form or another for a long time, but America got her first true pizzeria when Gennaro Lombardi opened up a small grocery store in NYC’s Little Italy. An employee named Anthony “Totonno” Pero started selling pizzas out of the back, and in no time, Lombardi’s was concentrating on its burgeoning pizza business instead of plain old groceries. In 1905, the establishment was licensed as a pizzeria, and it’s stayed that way ever since. Well, almost. The original restaurant closed in 1984 but reopened down the street 10 years later. On its 100th anniversary in 2005, Lombardi’s decided to offer its pizza for the same price it’d been sold for in 1905—5 cents a pie. Needless to say, the line wrapped around the block.
6. R.U. Hungry, New Brunswick, N.J.
The Fat Darrell
You may not know what the Fat Darrell is, but when you hear what it contains, you’ll understand why it’s truly a work of inspired genius. Since 1979, Rutgers University has played host to a collection of mobile food vans collectively known as the “Grease Trucks.” Originally, they served a sandwich called the Fat Cat, which contained two cheeseburger patties, French fries, lettuce, tomato, and onions. Then one night in 1997, a hungry (and broke) student named Darrell W. Butler convinced one of the vendors to put chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, French fries, and marinara sauce on a sandwich. Strangely, the concoction sounded so appetizing that the next 10 people in line ordered it, and the Fat Darrell became a mainstay at the Grease Trucks. Hey, not any old sandwich gets to be named Maxim magazine’s top “Meat Hog” sandwich.
7. Pat’s King Of Steaks, Philadelphia, Pa.
Philly Cheesesteak
Philadelphia is known for many things (Ben Franklin, the Liberty Bell, and Rocky, for starters), but fine dining is not really its forte. That’s OK, though, because Philly is the home of Pat’s King of Steaks, and Pat’s King of Steaks is where the Philly cheesesteak was born. One day back in 1932, hot dog stand owners Pasquale (Pat) and Harry Olivieri decided to change things up and make a steak sandwich with onions. A cab driver who ate at Pat’s daily insisted on trying the new sandwich, and with the first bite declared, “Hey, forget ‘bout those hot dogs, you should sell these!” Cab drivers know fast food about as well as anyone, so the brothers did just what the cabbie suggested. In no time, the modest stand turned into the Pat’s that exists today. Controversy remains, however, over who’s responsible for putting the cheese in cheesesteak. Pat’s claims it was the first to do so (in 1951), but across-the-street rival Joe Vento of Geno’s Steaks (opened 1966) insists he added the finishing touches.
8. Brown Derby, Los Angeles, Calif.
Cobb Salad
Let’s face it; most salads are wimpy little affairs meant for nothing more than occupying your mouth while you wait for the main course. Not the mighty Cobb, though. With lettuce, eggs, bacon, chicken, avocado, tomatoes, chives, watercress, Roquefort cheese, and a special dressing, the Cobb salad is not your traditional salad (or a healthy one, either). The man responsible for the concoction is Robert H. Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles. Late one night in 1937, Cobb and his friend, Sid Grauman (owner of the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre), were rooting around in the Derby kitchen looking for a snack. Cobb essentially grabbed whatever was left in the fridge, chopped it all up, and prepared a salad. Grauman came by the next day and ordered himself a “Cobb salad.” Word spread quickly (this was Hollywood, after all), and soon it became the landmark restaurant’s signature dish.
9. Pig Stand, Dallas, Texas
Onion Rings
According to most sources, the onion ring was invented when a careless cook at a Pig Stand location in Dallas accidentally dropped an onion slice in some batter, then pulled it out and tossed it in the fryer for lack of a better destination. Now, you’d think inventing the onion ring would be enough for one restaurant chain, but not Pig Stand. The company also lays claim to opening America’s first drive-in, inventing Texas toast, and being one of the first restaurants to advertise using neon signs. Not bad for a little outfit from Texas.
10. Melrose Inn, Prospect, Ky.
Derby Pie
A Kentucky favorite, derby pie is a chocolate and walnut tart with a pastry-dough crust—and that’s about all we know about it. Why? Because the recipe is jealously guarded by the Kern family. Melrose Inn manager George Kern created derby pie in the mid-1950s with help from his parents, Walter and Leaudra, and the dessert was such a hit that the family was soon baking the treat full-time. In fact, Mrs. Kern, being the crafty monopolist she was, copyrighted the name, and to this day, you can only get real “Derby-Pie®” through Kern’s Kitchen, Inc. Not only that, but a man from New England once handed Leaudra a blank check for the recipe so that his daughter could make the pie at home. She refused.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Leave Josh Alone
Leave Josh Alone
By Dave Zirin
Dallas Mavericks All-Star Josh Howard has been raked over the coals of public opinion this week for daring to say what more than a few athletes think. He was caught on someone's cell phone camera saying that he doesn't stand for the national anthem because "I don't celebrate this [expletive]. I'm black." Judging by fan and media reaction, you would have thought he was barbecuing some bald eagle over a flaming pit of American flags. You would, given the peals of outrage, never know that there's been perhaps some more pressing news in the papers this week.
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, to his eternal credit, has posted some of the anti-Howard emails he has received and they are the most vile, racist trash you could read outside a Klan chat room. (http://blogmaverick.com/2008/09/18/thanks-for-the-advice-on-josh/).
Many of these courageous e-bigots actually attempt to link Howard’s mini-rant to the ascension of Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Their crude threats reflect a white fear as old as the United States itself: that no matter how much blood black Americans spill for this country, their loyalties are dual and divided. It's a fear that -- in a backhanded way -- acknowledges that since racism is still so prevalent in our society, the loyalties of the descendents of slaves must be suspect. But instead of confronting the reality of racism, the e-bigots among us instead lash out in both frightening and filthy fashion.
Well, count me out. Count me out as someone who will pile on Josh Howard. Howard is someone who said, during his 2004 senior year at Wake Forest University, that the war in Iraq "was all about oil." He then saw his draft stock plummet to the point where he was picked after no-talents like Reece Gaines and Ndudi Ebe. I saw one scout even call Howard a risky pick saying that, "Anti-war views may reflect rumored erratic behavior." Count me out as someone who thinks anti-war views are erratic.
Count me out of the fraternity of sports writers who under a kabuki pantomime of liberalism will "defend Howard's right to say what he wants" and then crush him for opening his mouth. Take J.A. Adande of ESPN.com. He starts his anti-Howard piece by writing, "What makes America the best country on the planet is that you are free to stand or sit for the national anthem, to sing along or to yell in anger at the government as much as you want without getting tossed in jail for your political beliefs." What claptrap. Someone needs to send Adande a copy of the Patriot Act. Or maybe he could ask the people who attempted to exercise their Constitutional rights to “yell in anger” at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN, only to be subject to "pre-emptive" raids and prison. Maybe he could ask the journalists who were beaten and arrested by police for attempting to report on it.
But then Adande continues:
"Howard, the Dallas Mavericks forward coming off a year in which he publicly admitted his penchant for smoking marijuana and defiantly partied away during the NBA playoffs, has a termite-ridden soapbox."
Yes, Howard admitted that he is an NBA player who smokes weed. Stop the presses. He also celebrated his own birthday after a playoff game. Adande must think it's a slippery slope: weed, birthday parties, treason. If Howard’s soapbox is “termite-ridden” then Adande’s platform is a house of cards.
This garbage is exactly why it's so hard to get athletes to open up about what they think. Reporters are seen as there to mock any ideas they have beyond "Drink Gatorade… and play one game at a time." Count me out of this smirking and all-too-condescending game of journalistic gotcha.
Count me out also as someone who thinks any critiques of the anthem are somehow off limits.
Count me instead as someone who has no clue why this is the only country in the world that feels to need to play the national anthem before sporting events. Count me as someone who believes that sports are beautiful but enforced nationalism before a captive audience is not. Count me as someone who resent the fact that we are raised to see sports and nationalism as inherently conjoined.
Count me as someone who will never criticize an athlete for resisting this ritual. A photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists during the anthem adorns my wall. I have written in defense of people like Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, drummed out of the NBA for not standing during the anthem, and Toni Smith, the former Manhattanville College basketball player who turned her back on the flag in 2003 to protest "not just the war abroad but the injustices here at home." They were right to question the assumed permanence of this exceptionally American ritual.
Fusing the anthem with sports is a practice that was started in order to build patriotic fervor during World War II. When "the good war" ended and the permanent Cold War begun, it simply never left. It is supposed to represent freedom, but, as we see with Josh Howard, it's the freedom to do little more than smile in silence.
Well, count me out.
[Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]
By Dave Zirin
Dallas Mavericks All-Star Josh Howard has been raked over the coals of public opinion this week for daring to say what more than a few athletes think. He was caught on someone's cell phone camera saying that he doesn't stand for the national anthem because "I don't celebrate this [expletive]. I'm black." Judging by fan and media reaction, you would have thought he was barbecuing some bald eagle over a flaming pit of American flags. You would, given the peals of outrage, never know that there's been perhaps some more pressing news in the papers this week.
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, to his eternal credit, has posted some of the anti-Howard emails he has received and they are the most vile, racist trash you could read outside a Klan chat room. (http://blogmaverick.com/2008/09/18/thanks-for-the-advice-on-josh/).
Many of these courageous e-bigots actually attempt to link Howard’s mini-rant to the ascension of Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Their crude threats reflect a white fear as old as the United States itself: that no matter how much blood black Americans spill for this country, their loyalties are dual and divided. It's a fear that -- in a backhanded way -- acknowledges that since racism is still so prevalent in our society, the loyalties of the descendents of slaves must be suspect. But instead of confronting the reality of racism, the e-bigots among us instead lash out in both frightening and filthy fashion.
Well, count me out. Count me out as someone who will pile on Josh Howard. Howard is someone who said, during his 2004 senior year at Wake Forest University, that the war in Iraq "was all about oil." He then saw his draft stock plummet to the point where he was picked after no-talents like Reece Gaines and Ndudi Ebe. I saw one scout even call Howard a risky pick saying that, "Anti-war views may reflect rumored erratic behavior." Count me out as someone who thinks anti-war views are erratic.
Count me out of the fraternity of sports writers who under a kabuki pantomime of liberalism will "defend Howard's right to say what he wants" and then crush him for opening his mouth. Take J.A. Adande of ESPN.com. He starts his anti-Howard piece by writing, "What makes America the best country on the planet is that you are free to stand or sit for the national anthem, to sing along or to yell in anger at the government as much as you want without getting tossed in jail for your political beliefs." What claptrap. Someone needs to send Adande a copy of the Patriot Act. Or maybe he could ask the people who attempted to exercise their Constitutional rights to “yell in anger” at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN, only to be subject to "pre-emptive" raids and prison. Maybe he could ask the journalists who were beaten and arrested by police for attempting to report on it.
But then Adande continues:
"Howard, the Dallas Mavericks forward coming off a year in which he publicly admitted his penchant for smoking marijuana and defiantly partied away during the NBA playoffs, has a termite-ridden soapbox."
Yes, Howard admitted that he is an NBA player who smokes weed. Stop the presses. He also celebrated his own birthday after a playoff game. Adande must think it's a slippery slope: weed, birthday parties, treason. If Howard’s soapbox is “termite-ridden” then Adande’s platform is a house of cards.
This garbage is exactly why it's so hard to get athletes to open up about what they think. Reporters are seen as there to mock any ideas they have beyond "Drink Gatorade… and play one game at a time." Count me out of this smirking and all-too-condescending game of journalistic gotcha.
Count me out also as someone who thinks any critiques of the anthem are somehow off limits.
Count me instead as someone who has no clue why this is the only country in the world that feels to need to play the national anthem before sporting events. Count me as someone who believes that sports are beautiful but enforced nationalism before a captive audience is not. Count me as someone who resent the fact that we are raised to see sports and nationalism as inherently conjoined.
Count me as someone who will never criticize an athlete for resisting this ritual. A photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists during the anthem adorns my wall. I have written in defense of people like Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, drummed out of the NBA for not standing during the anthem, and Toni Smith, the former Manhattanville College basketball player who turned her back on the flag in 2003 to protest "not just the war abroad but the injustices here at home." They were right to question the assumed permanence of this exceptionally American ritual.
Fusing the anthem with sports is a practice that was started in order to build patriotic fervor during World War II. When "the good war" ended and the permanent Cold War begun, it simply never left. It is supposed to represent freedom, but, as we see with Josh Howard, it's the freedom to do little more than smile in silence.
Well, count me out.
[Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
NFL Team Values Average $1 Billion
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601079&sid=aW_sThvHEe04&refer=home
Cowboys Lead as NFL Team Values Average $1 Billion, Forbes Says
By Mason Levinson
Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- The National Football League is the first professional sports league to have its franchises average over $1 billion in value, with the Dallas Cowboys remaining atop Forbes magazine's annual rankings.
The average value for an NFL team this year is $1.04 billion, mostly because of revenue from seating and sponsorships at new stadiums, Forbes reported in its ranking of the 32 teams. The Cowboys, owned by Jerry Jones, are worth $1.61 billion, a 7 percent increase over 2007.
Values have more than tripled from $288 million since Forbes first began the ranking 10 years ago.
Daniel Snyder's Washington Redskins ($1.54 billion) remained second after leading the rankings for seven years before being supplanted by the Cowboys in 2007.
With a new shared stadium scheduled to open in 2010, New York's Giants and Jets each saw a 21 percent increase in franchise value.
The Giants ($1.18 billion) are fourth, trailing the New England Patriots ($1.32 billion), whose operating income of $58.1 million is highest among the top 10 teams. The Jets are fifth, with a value of $1.17 billion.
The Cowboys' value rose 28 percent in 2007, adding about $350 million, because the team is building a $1 billion stadium in Arlington. Scheduled to open in 2009, the arena will seat 80,000 people, can be expanded to hold 100,000, and will host the 2011 Super Bowl, the first to be held in the Dallas area.
The Houston Texans ($1.13 billion), with an operating income of $43.9 million, rank sixth, followed by the Eagles ($1.12 billion), Colts ($1.08 billion), Bears ($1.06 billion) and Ravens ($1.06 billion).
To contact the reporter on this story: Mason Levinson in New York at mlevinson@bloomberg.net.
Cowboys Lead as NFL Team Values Average $1 Billion, Forbes Says
By Mason Levinson
Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- The National Football League is the first professional sports league to have its franchises average over $1 billion in value, with the Dallas Cowboys remaining atop Forbes magazine's annual rankings.
The average value for an NFL team this year is $1.04 billion, mostly because of revenue from seating and sponsorships at new stadiums, Forbes reported in its ranking of the 32 teams. The Cowboys, owned by Jerry Jones, are worth $1.61 billion, a 7 percent increase over 2007.
Values have more than tripled from $288 million since Forbes first began the ranking 10 years ago.
Daniel Snyder's Washington Redskins ($1.54 billion) remained second after leading the rankings for seven years before being supplanted by the Cowboys in 2007.
With a new shared stadium scheduled to open in 2010, New York's Giants and Jets each saw a 21 percent increase in franchise value.
The Giants ($1.18 billion) are fourth, trailing the New England Patriots ($1.32 billion), whose operating income of $58.1 million is highest among the top 10 teams. The Jets are fifth, with a value of $1.17 billion.
The Cowboys' value rose 28 percent in 2007, adding about $350 million, because the team is building a $1 billion stadium in Arlington. Scheduled to open in 2009, the arena will seat 80,000 people, can be expanded to hold 100,000, and will host the 2011 Super Bowl, the first to be held in the Dallas area.
The Houston Texans ($1.13 billion), with an operating income of $43.9 million, rank sixth, followed by the Eagles ($1.12 billion), Colts ($1.08 billion), Bears ($1.06 billion) and Ravens ($1.06 billion).
To contact the reporter on this story: Mason Levinson in New York at mlevinson@bloomberg.net.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Most affluent city might surprise you
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2008-08-26-income-side_N.htm
Most affluent city might surprise you
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
8-26-8
What's the most affluent city in the USA?
(a) San Jose
(b) San Francisco
(c) Honolulu
(d) Plano, Texas
The answer is Plano — and that surprises even the mayor of this 260,000-person Dallas suburb.
"I'd never heard that before," Plano Mayor Pat Evans says. "But it's good to know."
The Census Bureau released its annual report on income and poverty Tuesday. The results offer an interesting — and often unexpected — portrait of who's rich and who's poor in the USA.
Plano was the report's star among cities with populations of 250,000 or more. It had the highest income and lowest poverty rate.
Plano's median household income in 2007 was $84,492, up 10% from 2006. Placing a distant second: San Jose, with a median income of $76,963.
Plano is the home to corporate headquarters for Frito-Lay, JCPenney and other companies. Billionaire Ross Perot founded computer giant EDS and Perot Systems, both still based in Plano.
The city is north of Dallas at the end of a light-rail line. Gymnast Nastia Liukin, Olympic gold medalist in Beijing, trains there.
Despite its affluence, the median home price is about $225,000, Evans says. By contrast, San Jose's median home price is $744,000.
"We've got the lowest taxes and highest level of services in North Texas," the mayor says.
The poorest city in the nation was Detroit, with a median household income of $28,097. It fell to the bottom spot this year, replacing Cleveland.
The Census Bureau report also showed:
•States. Maryland remained the top state in income, and Mississippi remained the poorest.
Energy states Alaska and Wyoming had the biggest income gains. Four states lost ground: Michigan, Kentucky, New Mexico and South Dakota.
•Congressional districts. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who represents suburbs outside Washington, has the most affluent constituents. Their median household income was $103,664.
Rep. José Serrano, D-N.Y., who represents Harlem and the Bronx in New York City, has the district with the poorest residents. Median household income was $23,291.
•Regions. Income grew in the South and Midwest. It fell in the Northeast and did not change in the West.
Most affluent city might surprise you
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
8-26-8
What's the most affluent city in the USA?
(a) San Jose
(b) San Francisco
(c) Honolulu
(d) Plano, Texas
The answer is Plano — and that surprises even the mayor of this 260,000-person Dallas suburb.
"I'd never heard that before," Plano Mayor Pat Evans says. "But it's good to know."
The Census Bureau released its annual report on income and poverty Tuesday. The results offer an interesting — and often unexpected — portrait of who's rich and who's poor in the USA.
Plano was the report's star among cities with populations of 250,000 or more. It had the highest income and lowest poverty rate.
Plano's median household income in 2007 was $84,492, up 10% from 2006. Placing a distant second: San Jose, with a median income of $76,963.
Plano is the home to corporate headquarters for Frito-Lay, JCPenney and other companies. Billionaire Ross Perot founded computer giant EDS and Perot Systems, both still based in Plano.
The city is north of Dallas at the end of a light-rail line. Gymnast Nastia Liukin, Olympic gold medalist in Beijing, trains there.
Despite its affluence, the median home price is about $225,000, Evans says. By contrast, San Jose's median home price is $744,000.
"We've got the lowest taxes and highest level of services in North Texas," the mayor says.
The poorest city in the nation was Detroit, with a median household income of $28,097. It fell to the bottom spot this year, replacing Cleveland.
The Census Bureau report also showed:
•States. Maryland remained the top state in income, and Mississippi remained the poorest.
Energy states Alaska and Wyoming had the biggest income gains. Four states lost ground: Michigan, Kentucky, New Mexico and South Dakota.
•Congressional districts. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who represents suburbs outside Washington, has the most affluent constituents. Their median household income was $103,664.
Rep. José Serrano, D-N.Y., who represents Harlem and the Bronx in New York City, has the district with the poorest residents. Median household income was $23,291.
•Regions. Income grew in the South and Midwest. It fell in the Northeast and did not change in the West.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Parker long has thrived on matchup with Kidd
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_ylt=Ak2hAirJ8hVsuBgENSOH43K8vLYF?slug=jy-parkerkidd022808
Parker long has thrived on matchup with Kidd
By Johnny Ludden, Yahoo! Sports
Feb 28, 2008
The call came from the Bahamas. Tony Parker was on the other line, and he wasn’t happy. He had gone to the Caribbean to soak up some sun, and yet his mind kept drifting 1,300 miles to the northwest. The San Antonio Spurs were actually interviewing someone for his job.
This wasn’t news to Parker. He knew the Spurs had planned to bring Jason Kidd to town. Parker had said all the right things, too. Publicly, and in private to his coach, Gregg Popovich. He told everyone he understood why the Spurs would want to shower their free-agent dollars on Kidd. This wasn’t any point guard. It was Jason Kidd! The NBA’s best. Who wouldn’t want him?
Deep down in his heart, though, Parker was never comfortable with the idea. Hadn’t he just beaten Kidd in the NBA Finals? He didn’t play his best, but he was only 21. He would get better. Kidd was 30. And all this talk about the two of them playing together? Neither of them could shoot. Someone would eventually have to go. Parker was betting it wouldn’t be the guy getting the $94 million contract.
Parker’s family and friends called to tell him the Spurs had rolled out the red carpet for Kidd the second his private jet touched down at San Antonio International Airport. Tim Duncan drove Kidd around town. Popovich arranged for a chef to cook dinner for Kidd and his wife. Parker grew more frustrated. Finally, he picked up the phone and called a reporter.
“I know I’m the best point guard for this team,” Parker said. “I can lead this team.”
The following morning Kidd announced he was staying in New Jersey. Parker’s comments didn’t have much, if any, impact on his decision. The Nets had secured a commitment from Alonzo Mourning to join them, and Kidd’s friends had always doubted his wife would ever agree to move to San Antonio.
But what happened next said something about Parker and why the Spurs should feel optimistic Thursday night when Kidd again visits. Every time the two point guards have met since that fateful week in July 2003, Parker has walked away the winner.
Kidd never had the benefit of playing next to a big man of Duncan’s caliber in New Jersey, and he has a significantly better supporting cast now that he’s lining up next to Dirk Nowitzki and Josh Howard. But there’s also a reason why Parker said he was “very happy” to hear that the Dallas Mavericks had traded for Kidd: It meant he no longer had to worry about Devin Harris.
No team has matched up better with the Spurs in recent seasons than the Mavericks. Harris was a part of that. He’s one of the few guards quick enough to stay in front of Parker, and he also gives him trouble on the other end of the floor. The trade also cost Dallas 7-foot backup center DeSagana Diop, whose length had bothered Duncan on occasion.
Kidd’s arrival in Dallas very well may end up being filed in the Spurs’ be-careful-what-you-wish-for folder. The Mavericks need an on-court leader experienced enough to wrestle away some of the sideline play-calling from coach Avery Johnson. The hope, at least, is that Kidd will coax his new teammates to run and to cut back on Dallas’ isolation-heavy offense. The Mavericks also welcome Kidd’s toughness.
“You can’t say Jason Kidd isn’t going to help them,” Parker told reporters in San Antonio. Privately, however, Parker is surprised Dallas made the trade. He never understood why Mavericks owner Mark Cuban didn’t re-sign Steve Nash and he doesn’t understand now why he would part with Harris. When Chris Paul used his own quickness to expose Kidd during Dallas’ loss to the New Orleans Hornets last week, Parker smiled.
Parker never had a problem with Kidd listening to the Spurs’ recruiting pitch. He likes Kidd and has long marveled at his game. Popovich and GM RC Buford were the targets of Parker’s frustration, and there are other reasons why their decision to pursue Kidd, while entirely justifiable, wasn’t the best.
To free up more salary-cap room to sign Kidd, the Spurs traded their first-round pick that summer. Duncan had urged them to consider drafting a fellow Wake Forest product. When the Spurs sent the pick to Phoenix and Dallas immediately followed by taking Duncan’s preferred choice – the same Josh Howard who will be running alongside Kidd Thursday – Popovich wondered aloud in the draft room whether they had made a mistake. The Suns, meanwhile, used the Spurs’ pick on Leandro Barbosa, who developed into the NBA’s reigning Sixth Man of the Year.
Looking back, the Spurs helped improve their two biggest rivals all for the right to insult their own young point guard. Two championships later, Buford can afford to joke that his tombstone won’t be complete if the names “Howard” and “Barbosa” aren’t engraved under his own. At times, Popovich has sounded more than willing to even hammer them onto Buford’s granite himself.
But there’s something else that came from the Spurs’ interest in Kidd: It made Parker better. Parker may never admit it, but whenever he sees Kidd there’s part of him that feels like he needs to prove himself all over again.
After Parker arrived for training camp in the fall of 2003, Popovich reminded him of his comments. You think you’re the best point guard for us? You think you can lead this team? Then show me.
For the next month whenever Parker threw away a pass, whenever he took an ill-advised shot, Popovich was in his ear again. Show me.
Sitting on a podium in Cleveland last June, Parker showed his coach and everyone else. The best point guard for the Spurs?
In one hand he cradled the Finals MVP award. The other held his third championship trophy.
Johnny Ludden is the NBA editor for Yahoo! Sports.
Parker long has thrived on matchup with Kidd
By Johnny Ludden, Yahoo! Sports
Feb 28, 2008
The call came from the Bahamas. Tony Parker was on the other line, and he wasn’t happy. He had gone to the Caribbean to soak up some sun, and yet his mind kept drifting 1,300 miles to the northwest. The San Antonio Spurs were actually interviewing someone for his job.
This wasn’t news to Parker. He knew the Spurs had planned to bring Jason Kidd to town. Parker had said all the right things, too. Publicly, and in private to his coach, Gregg Popovich. He told everyone he understood why the Spurs would want to shower their free-agent dollars on Kidd. This wasn’t any point guard. It was Jason Kidd! The NBA’s best. Who wouldn’t want him?
Deep down in his heart, though, Parker was never comfortable with the idea. Hadn’t he just beaten Kidd in the NBA Finals? He didn’t play his best, but he was only 21. He would get better. Kidd was 30. And all this talk about the two of them playing together? Neither of them could shoot. Someone would eventually have to go. Parker was betting it wouldn’t be the guy getting the $94 million contract.
Parker’s family and friends called to tell him the Spurs had rolled out the red carpet for Kidd the second his private jet touched down at San Antonio International Airport. Tim Duncan drove Kidd around town. Popovich arranged for a chef to cook dinner for Kidd and his wife. Parker grew more frustrated. Finally, he picked up the phone and called a reporter.
“I know I’m the best point guard for this team,” Parker said. “I can lead this team.”
The following morning Kidd announced he was staying in New Jersey. Parker’s comments didn’t have much, if any, impact on his decision. The Nets had secured a commitment from Alonzo Mourning to join them, and Kidd’s friends had always doubted his wife would ever agree to move to San Antonio.
But what happened next said something about Parker and why the Spurs should feel optimistic Thursday night when Kidd again visits. Every time the two point guards have met since that fateful week in July 2003, Parker has walked away the winner.
Kidd never had the benefit of playing next to a big man of Duncan’s caliber in New Jersey, and he has a significantly better supporting cast now that he’s lining up next to Dirk Nowitzki and Josh Howard. But there’s also a reason why Parker said he was “very happy” to hear that the Dallas Mavericks had traded for Kidd: It meant he no longer had to worry about Devin Harris.
No team has matched up better with the Spurs in recent seasons than the Mavericks. Harris was a part of that. He’s one of the few guards quick enough to stay in front of Parker, and he also gives him trouble on the other end of the floor. The trade also cost Dallas 7-foot backup center DeSagana Diop, whose length had bothered Duncan on occasion.
Kidd’s arrival in Dallas very well may end up being filed in the Spurs’ be-careful-what-you-wish-for folder. The Mavericks need an on-court leader experienced enough to wrestle away some of the sideline play-calling from coach Avery Johnson. The hope, at least, is that Kidd will coax his new teammates to run and to cut back on Dallas’ isolation-heavy offense. The Mavericks also welcome Kidd’s toughness.
“You can’t say Jason Kidd isn’t going to help them,” Parker told reporters in San Antonio. Privately, however, Parker is surprised Dallas made the trade. He never understood why Mavericks owner Mark Cuban didn’t re-sign Steve Nash and he doesn’t understand now why he would part with Harris. When Chris Paul used his own quickness to expose Kidd during Dallas’ loss to the New Orleans Hornets last week, Parker smiled.
Parker never had a problem with Kidd listening to the Spurs’ recruiting pitch. He likes Kidd and has long marveled at his game. Popovich and GM RC Buford were the targets of Parker’s frustration, and there are other reasons why their decision to pursue Kidd, while entirely justifiable, wasn’t the best.
To free up more salary-cap room to sign Kidd, the Spurs traded their first-round pick that summer. Duncan had urged them to consider drafting a fellow Wake Forest product. When the Spurs sent the pick to Phoenix and Dallas immediately followed by taking Duncan’s preferred choice – the same Josh Howard who will be running alongside Kidd Thursday – Popovich wondered aloud in the draft room whether they had made a mistake. The Suns, meanwhile, used the Spurs’ pick on Leandro Barbosa, who developed into the NBA’s reigning Sixth Man of the Year.
Looking back, the Spurs helped improve their two biggest rivals all for the right to insult their own young point guard. Two championships later, Buford can afford to joke that his tombstone won’t be complete if the names “Howard” and “Barbosa” aren’t engraved under his own. At times, Popovich has sounded more than willing to even hammer them onto Buford’s granite himself.
But there’s something else that came from the Spurs’ interest in Kidd: It made Parker better. Parker may never admit it, but whenever he sees Kidd there’s part of him that feels like he needs to prove himself all over again.
After Parker arrived for training camp in the fall of 2003, Popovich reminded him of his comments. You think you’re the best point guard for us? You think you can lead this team? Then show me.
For the next month whenever Parker threw away a pass, whenever he took an ill-advised shot, Popovich was in his ear again. Show me.
Sitting on a podium in Cleveland last June, Parker showed his coach and everyone else. The best point guard for the Spurs?
In one hand he cradled the Finals MVP award. The other held his third championship trophy.
Johnny Ludden is the NBA editor for Yahoo! Sports.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Police officer escorting Clinton dies
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080222/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_officer_crash
Police officer escorting Clinton dies
By SCHUYLER DIXON, Associated Press Writer
02-22-8
A police motorcycle officer died after a crash while escorting Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade to a campaign rally.
"We are just heartsick at this loss of life in the line of duty," a subdued Clinton told reporters after the Dallas rally.
The New York senator and Democratic presidential candidate canceled her next appearance in Fort Worth, Texas, telling about 2,000 people who had gathered outside the Tarrant County courthouse that it would be inappropriate to campaign in the wake of the officer's death.
Instead, she went to Methodist Medical Center, where she planned to visit with the officer's family.
"It is important that we respect and appreciate their service," she said. "I certainly am grateful for all they do for me."
The 20-year Dallas police veteran, who was not immediately identified, died after apparently crashing into a concrete barrier along a viaduct near downtown Dallas, said Lt. Vernon Hale, a police spokesman. Aerial video showed wreckage scattered for several yards.
The officer was in the rear of the motorcade, following it as it took a turn not far from Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
Asked if police had enough lead time to plan a safe route, Hale said, "It doesn't matter with our guys. They've been doing this so long. Of course, we already had one tragedy in Dallas."
In August 2006, an Albuquerque, N.M., police officer in President Bush's motorcade died in a motorcycle crash. Germaine Casey, 40, died on Aug. 27 when he crashed as Bush returned to the airport after a fundraiser for Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.
In November 2006, Honolulu police Officer Steve Favela died when he and two other motorcycle officers crashed while part of a presidential motorcade.
___
Associated Press Writers Beth Fouhy and Anabelle Garay, both in Fort Worth, Texas, contributed to this report.
Police officer escorting Clinton dies
By SCHUYLER DIXON, Associated Press Writer
02-22-8
A police motorcycle officer died after a crash while escorting Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade to a campaign rally.
"We are just heartsick at this loss of life in the line of duty," a subdued Clinton told reporters after the Dallas rally.
The New York senator and Democratic presidential candidate canceled her next appearance in Fort Worth, Texas, telling about 2,000 people who had gathered outside the Tarrant County courthouse that it would be inappropriate to campaign in the wake of the officer's death.
Instead, she went to Methodist Medical Center, where she planned to visit with the officer's family.
"It is important that we respect and appreciate their service," she said. "I certainly am grateful for all they do for me."
The 20-year Dallas police veteran, who was not immediately identified, died after apparently crashing into a concrete barrier along a viaduct near downtown Dallas, said Lt. Vernon Hale, a police spokesman. Aerial video showed wreckage scattered for several yards.
The officer was in the rear of the motorcade, following it as it took a turn not far from Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
Asked if police had enough lead time to plan a safe route, Hale said, "It doesn't matter with our guys. They've been doing this so long. Of course, we already had one tragedy in Dallas."
In August 2006, an Albuquerque, N.M., police officer in President Bush's motorcade died in a motorcycle crash. Germaine Casey, 40, died on Aug. 27 when he crashed as Bush returned to the airport after a fundraiser for Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.
In November 2006, Honolulu police Officer Steve Favela died when he and two other motorcycle officers crashed while part of a presidential motorcade.
___
Associated Press Writers Beth Fouhy and Anabelle Garay, both in Fort Worth, Texas, contributed to this report.
Order to stop weapons screening at Obama rally
http://www.star-telegram.com/dallas_news/story/486413.html
Thu, Feb. 21, 2008
Police concerned about order to stop weapons screening at Obama rally
By JACK DOUGLAS Jr.
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.
The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.
Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.
"Sure," said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a "friendly crowd."
The Secret Service did not return a call from the Star-Telegram seeking comment.
Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked.
Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event.
"How can you not be concerned in this day and age," said one policeman.
Thu, Feb. 21, 2008
Police concerned about order to stop weapons screening at Obama rally
By JACK DOUGLAS Jr.
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.
The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.
Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.
"Sure," said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a "friendly crowd."
The Secret Service did not return a call from the Star-Telegram seeking comment.
Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked.
Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event.
"How can you not be concerned in this day and age," said one policeman.
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