Today is Patty Griffin’s birthday. Here she is singing Springsteen:
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Hall-of-Fame manager Connie Mack was, for decades, one of the fiercest enforcers of the so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” that kept Major League baseball white-only.
Mack won 3,731 games in 53 years as a manager. And he lost 3,948. Loser.
Mack retired in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, but Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics team wouldn’t integrate for yet another three years.
They named a stadium after Connie Mack in Philadelphia. Then they tore it down. It makes me happy that the former site of that stadium is now home to a Charismatic mega-church congregation where people of many races and ethnicities worship together.
It also makes me happy to learn that Mack’s great-grandson — a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida now running for the U.S. Senate — once got the snot beat out of him in a bar-fight with a black ballplayer. Connie Mack IV, who witnesses say was visibly drunk, mistakenly thought it was a good idea to start a fight with journeyman slugger Ron Gant. According to witnesses, Mack fought dirty, but still lost.
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Also in Florida Republican politics, the legislature there is considering a plan to lower the minimum wage for tipped employees. Democrats should make sure this one is a roll-call vote — forcing proponents of the measure to vote “Aye — I support reducing the wages of the people who handle my food when I’m not looking.”
A poll to find out if most non-Muslim New Yorkers approve of the NYPD’s mistreatment of Muslims might as well just ask those folks: “So, are you a self-centered jackwagon who believes in double standards?” That a majority answer “Yes” is depressing, but not necessarily newsworthy. (See also: Polls on marriage equality.)
Charles Kuffner has a good roundup of the pros and cons of the “Homeless Hotspots” at SXSW.
Susie Madrak asks, “So why aren’t fundamentalist Christians, who claim to follow the literal interpretation of the Bible … picketing seafood restaurants, screaming at people to turn back and save their souls before they eat the unclean food?”
It’s a rhetorical question (read the whole thing), but I’ll jump on that as an excuse to refer back to my answer to that question: “The Abominable Shellfish: Why some Christians hate gays but love bacon.”
In Christianity Today, Dean A. Anderson looks back fondly on the 40th anniversary of Donald W. Thompson’s A Thief in the Night. He manages to do so, somehow, without ever mentioning Donald W. Thompson. Odd. (The Godfather came out 40 years ago yesterday — think anyone will do an article on that without ever mentioning Francis Ford Coppola?) Fortunately, Randall Balmer has already provided us with a terrific profile of the idiosyncratic auteur — the Russ Meyer of the Rapture — in Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Into the Evangelical Subculture in America.
This Religion News Service headline is five words too long.
This blog post headline from Ed Brayton is perfection.
James F. McGrath on Rule No. 1.
Stuff Fundies Like on what ignoring Rule No. 1 looks like in practice.
Jason Pitzl-Waters tells us about “That Time Kirk Cameron Infiltrated a Druid Ritual.”
People who work in wirehouses shouldn’t throw stones.
The Lutheran Insulter does an impressive job of creating a random-Martin-Luther-insult generator while scrupulously avoiding the Luther insults that really need to be avoided.
How long does it take for the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority to recognize a dirty joke? Sofa King long.
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