Larry Johnson’s propaganda effort has worked. His promise to produce a “stunning” and “dramatic” video of Michelle Obama ranting about “whitey” has overloaded his servers. The revelatory post is supposedly here; at least that’s headlining memeorandum at the moment. I can’t get to it at the moment.

BooMan claims a transcription will say:

Why’d he cut folks off medicaid?
Why’d he let New Orleans drown?
Why’d he do nothing about Jena?
Why’d he put us in Iraq for no reason?

The antecedent to “he” is supposedly George W. Bush. Purportedly, Michelle Obama pronounces “Why’d he” as “Whitey.” Given that I haven’t heard the slur “Whitey” since the heyday of “The Jeffersons,” this strikes me as quite plausible. I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve heard the video.

UPDATE: It’s 0906, six minutes past 0900 by my calculations, and still no tape. The above link is actually to a report from Johnson’s colleague SusanUnPC that Fox News has the video in question, not the promised video. My BS detector, already pegged like a pony on this one, is about to melt. That “Republicans who have seen the tape of Michelle Obama ranting about ‘whitey’ describe it as “STUNNING” does not ease my worried mind.

UPDATE: 1058. Still no joy.

UPDATE: 1138. The blog hasn’t been updated since 0743. Has Michelle Obama had Larry Johnson assassinated? That would truly be both stunning and dramatic.

UPDATE: 1241. FBI, CIA, if they’ve seen it, they ain’t saying. No news. Still no news.

Well, actually, there’s some news. Call it the dog that didn’t bark.

FYI, for those expecting to SEE the tape, GET REAL. Read Larry Johnson’s description of what is ON the tape. That is the story.

Except that, well, we were kinda promised we’d, um, see the tape.

UPDATE: Oh, and apropos the “rock like a pony” theme that I’ve been developing, this pitch in Johnson’s sidebar is quite amusing.

Today’s Washington Examiner editorial argues that the convictions of Bob Ney and Randy Cunningham and the criminal indictment of William Jefferson may well be just the tip of an iceberg of corruption in Congress.

While federal prosecutors don’t claim Jefferson used earmarks in his solicitations, let it be noted that the same disdain for the public trust epitomized in the crimes of which the Louisiana Democrat is accused is cultivated by the earmarking process.

Because the total annual value of earmarks in recent years has equaled but a small portion of the overall federal budget, some too-clever critics — most recently Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in National Review — have incautiously dismissed calls for reform as mere distractions from more important issues. But House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. David Obey’s recent disclosure that his panel has received more than 36,000 earmark requests in just five months — more than double the total for all of 2005 — makes clear that many in Congress are hopelessly in the grip of what Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., calls “federal spending addiction.”

Either genuine ethics reform — not the business-as-usual smoke and mirrors thus far offered — is enacted ASAP, or the conclusion will be inescapable that Congress cannot change because abuse of office for personal gain has become the norm on Capitol Hill.

Perhaps naively, I still believe genuine corruption among Congressmen and other major officials in American politics is an aberration rather than routine. The people who aspire to and land in those high offices are mostly already quite successful and motivated by some combination of a genuine desire to serve, an interest in public policy, fame, and power. Money is likely low on the list; certainly, most could make more money elsewhere.

Still, the earmarking system is a classic case of “the real crime is what’s legal.” Transparency should be the hallmark of the appropriations process and secret deals are anathema to that. The process brings suspicion on what I believe to be the lion’s share of Congressmen who at honorably. It’s high time for serious reform.

Sad news:

Actor Mike Evans, best known as Lionel Jefferson in the TV sitcoms “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons,” has died. He was 57. Evans died of throat cancer December 14 at his mother’s home in Twentynine Palms, said his niece, Chrystal Evans.

Evans, along with Eric Monte, also created and wrote for “Good Times,” one of the first TV sitcoms that featured a primarily black cast.

Michael Jonas Evans was born November 3, 1949, in Salisbury, North Carolina. His father, Theodore Evans Sr., was a dentist while his mother, Annie Sue Evans, was a school teacher. The family moved to Los Angeles when Evans was a child.

He studied acting at Los Angeles City College before getting the role of Lionel Jefferson in 1970s situation comedy “All in the Family.” Evans kept the role of Lionel when “The Jeffersons” launched in 1975. The hit show was a spinoff featuring bigoted Archie Bunker’s black neighbors in Queens who “move on up to the East Side” of Manhattan. Evans was replaced by Damon Evans (no relation) for four years, then he returned to the series from 1979 to 1981.

He also acted in the 1976 TV miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man” and made guest appearances on the TV series “Love, American Style” and “The Streets of San Francisco.” His last role was in a 2000 episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger.”

In recent years he had invested in real estate in Southern California.

Not only is 57 far too young to die, it’s surprising that it took a week for the news to get out considering Evans’ stature. “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons” were iconic shows and “Good Times” was a pop culture sensation during its day.

For some reason, although we watched “Good Times” during its run (the show was itself a spin-off of “Maude,” which was another spin-off of “All in the Family”) I never made the connection that Evans was the fellow who had played Lionel Jefferson. I didn’t know until reading this story why he had left the cast of “The Jeffersons” only to return four years later; the gap coincided with the run of “Good Times.”

GHW

Joseph Braude argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, easy access to the Internet may actually make social revolution less likely. His focus is the Iranian case but its implications are much wider.

The Internet may actually impede political change in Iran as much as it facilitates it. While 100,000 or so Iranians post their passions to the blogosphere, 4,900,000 other users are evidently doing something else. It is well known, for example, that Iranians massively consume Western entertainment–sports media, pop music, and other elements of global culture that the regime in Tehran bans from the public sphere. This injection of hours of hi-speed fun into Iranian homes makes daily life under a theocracy less different from daily life anywhere else–and probably less difficult to tolerate. The advent of Web use in Iran might be less of a net gain for dissidents than many Iran watchers expect because the revolutionary change Iranians want has already arrived. And the truce between the reigning mullahs and their subjects may well have been fortified, rather than undermined, as a result.

[...]

Young Iranians are not unlike young people everywhere, for whom Western civilization’s lighter side is a much greater draw than its intellectual heavyweights. The trouble with the rise of the Internet in Iran is that rather than unite the two groups against the regime, the new medium may instead isolate them from each other. The ranks of Jeffersonian idealists are less likely to be swelled by fans of Jefferson Airplane and “The Jeffersons” if the latter crowd can at last enjoy its new media risk-free–without sticking their necks out in a political movement inspired by the former. As far as the shallow side of youth culture is concerned, the cause of reclaiming Iran’s public space from its self-appointed guardians of public virtue–who ban hand-holding in parks and foreign films from movie houses–is less urgent in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth: Internet dating, movie downloads, and other gifts of the global village have effectively stocked private space with countless Western trimmings.

A similar phenomenon can be observed in other countries; and it isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes the Internet’s role as a pressure valve can serve a valuable social purpose. Take Israel, where the Al-Aqsa Intifada, from 2000 to the present, has coincided with substantial growth in Internet use. As a telecom analyst during the first three years of the conflict, I asked Israeli Internet service providers to account for their outstanding profits. They posited that, in part, Israeli families preferred to linger less in public, where suicide bombers struck, and used Web access to enrich life at home. For many Israelis, the Internet made war with Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs more tolerable–thereby helping the country to weather the worst days of the terrorist campaign.

But if the Internet played a role in counteracting the Islamist agenda in Israel, it has probably been a blessing to Islamists in Iran: that is, a boon to the status quo. The Iranian government seems to have figured out how to use the medium to its advantage: Over the past four years, the regime’s strategy of social control over the Internet has switched from sweeping security crackdowns to the more subtle practice of technological filtration, accompanied by the periodic jailing of some bloggers. No other Muslim country, to my knowledge, has gone through a similar evolution. Back in May 2001, Tehran police shut down more than 400 cyber cafés in advance of the country’s June elections. Four years later, the government has replaced such clumsy measures with more targeted efforts against specific kinds of Internet use. According to OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative partnership among Harvard Law School, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge, the regime has adopted “one of the world’s most substantial Internet censorship regimes.” And it’s what the government is–and isn’t–censoring that’s particularly noteworthy: “Currently, Iran’s filtering focuses on Iran-related, and particularly Farsi-language, content. Non-Iran specific sites, such as news, human rights, and foreign government pages, are subject to less filtering, though pornography, sex, gay, and some proxy and circumvention Web sites are subject to censorship with varying degrees of effort.” In other words, the sites that could really hurt the government–those maintained by Iranian political dissidents–are heavily censored. By contrast, foreign sites that allow Iranians to participate at a distance in Western culture are less likely to be blocked.

The vast majority of people are incredibly risk averse. Even Americans, steeped in a culture of rugged individualism and with one of the least repressive governments in the history of mankind, are mostly passive players in politics. Braude’s observations, therefore, hold up to the common sense test.

By allowing its subjects access to all but the most dangerous (from the regime’s perspective) parts of the Internet, the government is acting shrewdly. While there may well be a large number of people hungering to taste that forbidden fruit, the number of them willing to die to do so is likely small indeed.

Wellington Mara, owner of the National Football League’s New York Giants and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, died today from cancer at age 89.

Wellington Mara, Co-Owner of New York Giants, Is Dead at 89 (NYT)

Wellington Mara, the co-owner of the New York Giants of the National Football League, a presence with the franchise since his father founded the team in 1925, and the senior management figure in pro football, died today at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 89. The cause was cancer of the lymph nodes, according to a statement by the Giants.

Mara became the patriarch of a marquee family on the New York sports scene. He was the N.F.L.’s last link to an era when teams like the Pottsville Maroons, Dayton Triangles and Rochester Jeffersons played in the shadow of the college game and Red Grange of Illinois embodied the football hero.

Mara sat on the Giants’ bench at the Polo Grounds as a 9-year-old ball boy on Oct. 18, 1925, when they played their first home game, losing to the Frankford Yellow Jackets. He witnessed the famed “Sneakers Game” when the Giants outmaneuvered the Chicago Bears by wearing rubber-soled footgear in the 1934 championship game on a frozen Polo Grounds field.

After 31 seasons at the Polo Grounds, Mara took the Giants to Yankee Stadium in 1956, and they became the glamour franchise of the N.F.L., winning the league championship that season and playing in the title game five times in the next seven years.

Mara moved the Giants to the New Jersey Meadowlands in the 1970’s, weathering an outcry from New York City’s mayor, John V. Lindsay, when he announced his plans. The Giants went to the Super Bowl three times after that, winning it twice, and their games at the 75,000-seat Giants Stadium are invariably sellouts.

Mara’s father, Tim, who died in 1959, was a charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Wellington Mara, the Giants’ president and co-chief executive officer, was elected to the Hall in 1997 as the Maras became the first father and son to be inducted.

The Mara’s, a longtime division rival of the Dallas Cowboys, always comported themselves with class. Their like will be sorely missed around the NFL.

Related links:

Wellington Mara Biography, Pro Football Hall of Fame

Wellington Mara, president of the New York Giants who now shares co-chief executive officer duties with co-owner Robert Tisch, is a man whose entire lifetime has been dedicated to the National Football League and his family-owned Giants.

The son of the late Timothy J. Mara, who was the Giants founder and a charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Wellington Mara joined the Giants in 1937 as a part-time assistant to the president. He began full-time work in 1938 as club secretary and later served as vice president before becoming the team’s president after the death of his older brother, Jack, in 1965.

Mara’s extensive experience in organization, player personnel, trading and drafting has helped produce 14 NFL/NFC divisional titles and four NFL championships during his 60-season tenure that began with his graduation from Fordham in 1937. Even when he was a college student, Mara made a significant contribution when he drafted and signed future Hall of Famer Tuffy Leemans in 1936. Mara-engineered trades that brought such stars as Y.A. Tittle, Andy Robustelli and Del Shofner to the team were combined with his drafting of Frank Gifford and Roosevelt Brown, both future Hall of Famers, to mold the Giants into a dominant team in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

From 1956 to 1963, the Giants won six divisional championships and the 1956 NFL title. In more recent years, Mara’s Giants won Super Bowls XXI and XXV. Mara, who was born August 14, 1916, in New York City, now is respected as one of the most knowledgeable executives in pro football.

Since 1984, he has served as president of the National Football Conference. He currently serves on the Hall of Fame and realignment committees, as co-chairman of the long-range planning committee and on the NFL Management Council’s executive committee. In previous years, he also was a member of the constitution, pro-college relations and commissioner search committees.

Wellington Mara’s enshrinement to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 26 July 1997, by Frank Gifford

Right up front I’d like to say, Wellington Mara’s election to the Hall of Fame is so long overdue. He and the Mara family have played a decisive and powerful role in helping to guide the National Football League for over 70 years. Well and his family were a dominant presence in this league long before the sellout crowds, huge television and multi-million dollar player contracts and Super Bowls. Yes, the Mara family’s fingerprints can be found all over just about every successful move the NFL has made over those 70-plus years. Indeed, it was Wellington Mara’s strong support of the Hall of Fame that helped this shrine become a reality here in Canton back in the early sixties. And today, Hall of Fame history will be made as Wellington joins his father, the late Timothy J. Mara, who was inducted in the Hall of Fame’s very first class back in 1963. I could spend my allotted time this morning detailing Wellington’s enormous personal impact on the NFL. The league’s growth, its popularity, its phenomenal financial success, have paralleled Well’s lifetime commitment to the game he loves so much.

I could speak in detail how his unselfish decision in the early days of meaningful television money guided the NFL toward an unprecedented united prosperity. That decision to share equally with all teams television’s revenue obviously would hurt the Giants. But, Well’s vision of a league only as strong as its weakest franchise was right then and it’s right today. There have been so many positive league decisions in which Well has played a quiet but major role such as the AFL-NFL merger and he has served on every meaningful league committee. Nor has he ever been one to look for the praise or the credit. His satisfaction has always been that the NFL was just doing the right thing but that is how Wellington Mara lives his life – doing the right thing. I spoke a moment ago about Wellington’s commitment to the NFL. That commitment, as strong as it is, follows first his spiritual commitment and then his commitment to his family and that never varies. Well and his wife, Ann, who is with us today, have 11 sons and daughters and 30 grandchildren. Many of them are here today, and I’m going to have them stand up. . come-on all the Maras and the in-laws. And that represents a lot of off-seasons.

Wellington also has an extended family. That family is made up of former players and coaches and their wives and their children. I can’t tell you and Well would kill me if I did, how many times some member of that extended family has needed help and Well has been there. I know, because he has been there for me. I became a member of that extended family when Wellington scouted and drafted me as his number one pick in 1952. He also signed me to my first contract and I won’t embarrass both of you by telling you for how much. What I will tell you, is as I grew to know him and he grew to know me, I never worried about a contract. He was always more than fair nor did I even bother to sign some of them. Well’s word was and is his bond. I know he won’t like this, but I can honestly say Wellington Mara is the most honest and decent man I have ever known. Can that kind of man, one could ask, can that kind of man succeed in the world of pro football? Well, Wellington Mara has been the key ingredient in the Giants’ six NFL championships, 18 divisional titles and today Wellington Mara becomes the 24th member of the Giants organization to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame. I mentioned that Wellington Mara was my presenter in 1977. As always, he spoke very elegantly and said many kind things about me as a player. But what I remember most is his reference to me as a member of the Mara family. As the son a father would want to have. I don’t know about that Well, I’d just like to say to you . . . you are the father every son would be blessed to have, the brother any man could want and certainly the best friend anyone could ever have. Congratulations Well, this is so deserved.