The Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act during six hours of oral arguments spread over three days starting this coming Monday. What’s all the hoohah about, you ask? Can’t remember what caused the whole uproar? Your friends at NPR are here to help, with a brief and cogent summary of the issues at hand that even non-lawyers can digest.
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Just one question to answer today
Please, no pushing, you will all get a turn. This dropped out of the electronic wind earlier this week; I can’t make out what conclusion this rigorous experiment returned, but I thought you’d like a chance to answer the lad’s question—click the comments balloon at the top right.
OK, I’ll start:
“Yes, and you will be one of them.”
We can’t all start thinking for ourselves, of course…but Wowie!
My my my: how rare and brave are the new owners of the Houston Astros, standing right up to all-powerful Major League Baseball and everything!
After all, it’s so obviously clear that having Houston’s baseball players wear these shirts for two whole games this year would spark a wave of 
gun violence unprecedented in scope and depravity that there should be no question but that forbidding them from doing so was the only responsible option for the right-thinking people who direct what all other people should and shouldn’t do and think. Even if, as is likely, the team will only be seen by upwards of hundreds of fans on those days—including kids, I tell ya; think of the KIDS!—they-who-pass-judgment chose not to tempt fate and were super-duper-diligent in expressing their directions to the rest of us.
But the Houston Astros did not meekly accepted the dictats of our overcautious society; oh no. After exercising the temerity to consider the merits of a situation (but only after having received permission to do so, of course), team management expressed a considered and independent opinion:
“We made this decision for a number of reasons,” Astros owner Jim Crane said in a statement. “We listened to our fans, who were almost unanimously in favor of wearing the original jersey. We wanted to honor all of our past uniforms during this special 50th anniversary season, and we felt it was important to be true to the tradition of the franchise.”
Oh. My. God. They did what their fans wanted?! The team did what it felt was right?!! A bold move, unquestionably…but where will we all be if that sort of behavior were to catch on?
Where the outdoor fun is found, even if you play the course
I’d find this funny in any case, but as a golfer I find it humorous in the extreme, and a great example of why it’s important to keep a close tab on your punctuation.
Today I found in the mail a flyer from an area golf establishment offering special rates on memberships that include play at a number of area courses, cheap lessons, family social events, etc., and all for a reduced entry fee. I’m not likely to join since the course closest to my house is about ten times as far away as where I play now (at a much lower monthly rate), but still I looked over the flyer. There, among the many enticing offers and colorful photos and alluring graphics, is a testimonial from “Canongate Member since 2011.” Well, if old C.M. really said this, in this way, I understand his reason for maintaining anonymity.
In the pull quote the man tells me that he and his wife and sons have spent their first day as members at their new club, that they enjoyed a lovely meal, and that then they spent “three hours outdoors together having more fun than we’ve had in a long time, and playing golf too.”
It’s a smile…
Milo, you’re no Hall of Famer and I can prove it
Listening to a baseball game on the radio is a special treat, but I haven’t been able to tune in to my Houston Astros since the mid-1980s because I cannot abide the play-by-play announcer. So I was quite pleased recently when Milo Hamilton announced he was retiring from the broadcast booth after the 2012 season. Appreciation of one broadcaster or another is to some degree a matter of taste, I grant you; in this case, I’m finally getting the bad taste out of my mouth after more than 30 years!
In the days of my first experience with cable television in Austin, Texas in the late 1970s, when all you got was a dozen or so channels in total including the local stations, the special offerings including the independent “super stations” WTBS (originally WTCG) in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago which carried a ton of syndicated programming plus all the games of the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs baseball teams. To a fledgling broadcaster and long-time baseball fan it was pretty cool to see how stations in other cities put on their broadcasts, and since the Cubs played all their home games in the afternoon back then I saw them a lot. In a very short time I decided that I did not care for the style of either of the Cubs play-by-play men, Harry Caray and Milo Hamilton.
By 1985 I was back in Houston, and was disgusted at the news that the Astros hired Hamilton to be the second play-by-play guy behind long-time local favorite Gene Elston. By 1987 Elston was unceremoniously dumped and Hamilton had the top spot in the radio broadcast. He has some ardent fans—most notably Astros management, that hasn’t fired him in all these years—but Hamilton is the subject of high derision and ridicule, and it’s not just me: check out the comments forum at Houston’s Leading Information Source, or even the Astros’ own website, when the news broke that Hamilton was going to announce his retirement.
Among the things I’ve always loathed, right after his increasing inability over the years to stay focused on the game playing out right in front of his damn eyes, has been Hamilton’s pomposity, his exuberant affection for all things Milo and his assumption that you love all things Milo too. This includes the unbecoming habit of reminding the listener that he’s a Hall of Fame broadcaster, referring to the fact that he won the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1992. Well, during the big doings over the retirement announcement I saw a story in the Houston Press that gave me pause: John Royal asserted that Hamilton is not a member of the Hall of Fame, just the winner of an award the Hall gives. I had to find out for myself:
There you have it boys and girls, the bar-bet-settling evidence straight from Cooperstown! Milo Hamilton, no matter which halls of fame you claim, you are not a member of baseball’s hall. Happy trails! Oh, frabjous rapture!
But as joyous as the news is, as wonderful the feeling of smacking down a hated asshole can be, it’s raised an issue. My friend Mark Sterling, a product of Detroit who shares my distaste for Hamilton’s on-air style, and who is a lover of the late long-time Tigers broadcaster who also won the Frick, had this response to the notice heralding my achievement:
A fine piece of investigative work, indeed; certainly adding proper perspective to Milo’s body of work. However, in the case of fellow “award winner” Ernie Harwell, Red and I will stand like the house by the side of the road, and watch that one [Craig’s assessment] go by…
Oh crap, what I have I done? (Milo, what have you done? You’ve gone and screwed it up for everybody.)
And then it hit me: this is only a problem for creeps like Hamilton who’ve overreached and taken credit for something they’re not entitled to. We’ve all heard other Frick Award winners referred to as Hall of Famers by others, but the mikemen don’t bear the responsibility for that error. They’re all in the Hall, in the exhibit in the Museum, and we who appreciate their work aren’t wrong to think of them as being in the Hall. (Donna Stell, another friend who read the Hall’s response to my question, wondered if that makes Hamilton an exhibitionist; yes, I believe it does.)
So, I was relatively proud of myself for coming up with information that like-minded baseball lovers can appreciate. I shared it among a group of friends, and made the parenthetical aside that “this may be the most worthwhile thing I have done this week;” my friend Tom Adolph, no doubt voicing the sentiment shared by many others, replied “This may be the best thing you have ever done.” If so, I can live with that.
HEY, IT'S PAT RYAN'S BLOG! 