The Schmitt family

We’ve been fans of the New York Jets since the beginning. That’s not an exaggeration, either. My dad wandered over to their offices on Madison Avenue in New York and picked up our season tickets before they played their first game at Shea. The only way anyone could have been following the team longer was to have attended Titan games at the Polo grounds. We remember going to Shea with my grandfather, who’s been gone for 35 years now. We remember “bumping into” Ed Sullivan there (literally), who was a fan, and the excitement of the Superbowl win is an actual memory of a real experience rather than something we read about. This year marks the 45th season we’ve been going to games.

After several years at Shea, we discovered that if we left the house 15 minutes earlier, and brought food, we could sit outside the stadium and watch everyone else come in from our folding chairs in the parking lot. We cheered with everyone else in the lot when the temperature display on the billboard near the parking lot dropped another degree and headed inside to endure the wind off of Flushing bay so we could watch our team with friends we only knew from the games. The woman I married met my parents for the first time when I brought her to a game at Shea.

We followed the team to the Meadowlands, where they were a tenant of the Giants, and almost the entire section moved with us. Lenny, who sat behind us at Shea, still sits behind us now. We thought it would be nice if we could actually have our own stadium, but we didn’t think about it a lot.

We learned a few years ago that a new stadium was going to be built next door to Giant Stadium, which would be owned by both teams. The current stadium is still fine, but this one will have luxury boxes, which really don’t apply to us. This year we learned the details. To purchase seats in a similar location at the new stadium requires the purchase of a Personal Seat License for fifteen thousand dollars a seat, which then allows us to buy the same seats going forward for about the same price as we do now. The only allowance being made for 45 seasons of attendance is that seniority will be applied before lotteries are held to allow us to choose licenses for seats at the new stadium. And, since the team records only go back to 1974 or so, we’ll need to compete with with everyone else who has attended for 35 to 45 years, or so. We are also being allowed to compete for seats that are two sections further from the field and don’t require a license or a new mortgage. Either way, there’s no provision we’ve heard of that would sit us near Lenny or all the other Sunday friends we know by face if not name.

I spoke to Lenny last night (after so many years, we do have the number), and he said that this has definitely changed things. He used to live and breathe all things “Jet”. After the way the team has handled this, it isn’t the same. We found out the loyalty only extended one way.

I’m not generally a fan of celebrity endorsements. Somehow, the idea that someone might base their decision on who should be president based upon an endorsement by someone who makes their living pretending to be somebody else, or singing or playing music, or throwing some sort of ball, is kind of scary. But in a blog entry by Paul Reiser today on The Huffington Post, he really hits the nail on the head; John McCain is becoming the schoolyard bully who steals your lunch money and blames you because you brought it. Another, non-celebrity, blog by Kathleen Reardon also says it well when she asks,”Is It Sexist To Want The Person Flying The Plane To Be A Pilot?“

I saw an interview with John McCain, yesterday, where he stated that if Obama had agreed to his plan for Town Hall style debates, the campaign would not have taken a negative tone.

So let me get this straight. Most of the mud being thrown over the fence has been from the McCain campaign. But if Obama had allowed McCain to control Obama’s strategy, then McCain would have played nice????

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that it give a voice to a lot of people who haven’t had much of one before and generally enhances the dissemination of knowledge. Knowledge and Voice are an essential ingredient to a functioning democracy. However, the current election shows us that whenever the privileges of a free society are available, someone will abuse them.

Last night, a friend forwarded me one of the viral emails floating around about Senator Barack Obama, attributing a rediculous quote to him to challenge his patriotism. The quote was a complete fabrication. This morning, we received one containing a list of books that Governor Palin wanted banned. It was also a fabrication. The fabrication of so-called information does a disservice to the privilege of Free Speech.

The email about Obama built upon another viral email sent out earlier which took a picture of Obama without his hand over his heart while two of his opponents did and claimed that he refused to honor the Pledge of Allegiance. This also was not true. At the event in question, he DID put his hand over his heart during the Pledge. The picture was taken during the playing of the National Anthem. If someone wants to use that standard, then the question can be asked, though by that standard anyone who’s ever attended a ball game could have their patriotism questioned! Deliberately twisting it into something which it is not is an obscenity.

The Governor Palin thing takes a different kind of fact and twists it. She did, in fact, ask the city librarian a question about banning books. Personally, I think that even consideration of the banning of books is frightening enough. The email states that she also later tried to fire the librarian. This was also true. A quick Google search indicates that she did not think the librarian was supportive. Her reasoning is open to interpretation, and contrary to the Republican attack machine is certainly worthy of investigation and/or consideration. However, adding the claim that she actually followed through with an attempt to ban books, enhanced by a list of books that was completely fabricated, turns a valid set of concerns into an obscenity.

Spreading maliscious rumors is not new to politics. Apparently, Thomas Jefferson himself controlled some of the efforts to discredit Alexander Hamilton and the Whigs tried to do it by tying a Jackass to Andrew Jackson (which backfired, when the Democrats adopted it as a symbol of the working man as well as their party). But, I think the cynical use of this kind of disinformation has become revolting.

In the current election cycle, the “validation” of these attacks rose a notch when Hillary Clinton felt compelled to say that she didn’t know whether Obama was a Muslim which took things to the level of an official campaign comment (by the candidate, herself, no less) and was not acceptable.

Yesterday, the McCain campaign went a step further, releasing an ad which put up the headline “Obama on Palin” followed by a video of Obama using the expression, “Lipstick on a Pig.” Looking at the entire segment from which the expression was extracted shows that he wasn’t discussing anything about Governor Palin at the time, and was using the expression to describe some of the policies of John McCain. The McCain campaign trotted out its surrogates expressing outrage about the sexism of the remarks because the reference to lipstick had to have been a reference to the gender of his VP candidate, and completely ignoring the fact that the expression has been frequently used by McCain himself, including during a Town Hall type of event in which he gave an opinion on Hillary Clinton’s health plan.

The whole thing is an obscenity and should be considered an insult to the intelligence of the voters.

I went to a town meeting in Oxford a couple of nights ago. Town meetings have to be among the more interesting ways of running towns. In general, they have to be a lot closer to the Athenian style of democracy than you have with town councils and other variations of government. Anyone who wants to speak can do so. The meeting was presided over by the elected First Selectman and two Selectmen, one of whom was the last First Selectman. According to the rules, a moderator was elected who then stated that he would attempt to limit peoples comments or questions to 3 minutes so that everyone would have a chance to speak.

There were several items on the agenda, the first of which were dispensed with rapidly. The last one drew a great deal of interest. In an objective world, the elected representatives would describe what they had proposed and why they proposed it. Then the people would have a chance to discuss it. At first it seemed to be going that way until the former First Selectman jumped up and raised a point of order that the current First Selectman was exceeding her three minutes! Then, his backers wanted to limit the Director of Development to the same three minutes for explaining the details of the deal being presented to the public. The whole thing seemed to be more geared towards obstruction than participative democracy. Hopefully, in the future we’ll see rules that specifically state that the rule shouldn’t be applied to the overall presentation of what it is we’re about to discuss.

Whatever position people held on the issue being discussed and eventually voted on shouldn’t matter. The people in front were elected to do a job, and should have been permitted to present that work to the public without this kind of nonsense. It’s not about party (or party faction, which is clearly an issue there). It’s about giving approval or disapproval of a town action. There seems to be a group of people here with the wrong goal.

Will’s Eagle Court of Honor was held on June 15, 2008, and it worked out very nicely with the entire family being involved. Will’s sister Becky is a member of the Venture Crew with the troop (Venturing is a co-ed part of the Boy Scouts that extends to age 21), Nancy and I were seated in the front, and Harry, as a Webelos Cub Scout, was the escort for the newest Eagle Scout. Clicking on the picture to the left links to an album of photos from the ceremony, taken by Lorenzo Recine and much appreciated.

Since it was Father’s Day, it was nice to see how many adults came to the ceremony. It speaks volumes about the commitment of these guys who shepherd the Scouts. Read the rest of this entry »

• Saturday, May 31, we get a first pass on how the Florida and Michigan delegations will be addressed; probably half for Florida, but Michigan will be interesting.
• Sunday, June 1, Puerto Rico votes, most likely going to Clinton.
• Tuesday, June 3, Montana and South Dakota vote; then we find out what the next metric is that the Clinton campaign wants to use to measure results and where the new goal post will be.

After the results came in from North Carolina and Indiana last week, almost nobody except Hillary Clinton and her surrogates believe she has a shot at winning the nomination. Or, at least, they say they believe it. At this point, she’s either living in an alternate universe, is looking for some strength to negotiate for a position in an Obama administration, or is really playing for the 2012 nomination.

If it’s a negotiation she’s after, I wish they would all just get it done. The longer this goes on, the more harm is done to the Democratic chances in November. Of course, that may be her goal, allowing her to go after 2012. But, that would mean 4 more years of the disasters brought on by the Bush administration, from Iraq to constitutional abuses to the economy and the environment. She would essentially be stating that her own goal of the presidency is more important than undoing the damage of the last eight years, not to mention the additional lives that will be lost or destroyed in Iraq before she gets to run again. If that’s the case, she’ll have no right to run again and ask for her party’s support.

I’ve said before that I cannot vote for Hillary, but if Obama decides to give her the Vice Presidential nod, I can live with it for the sake of unity. If it’s something else they’re after, just get it done so we can move on.

That’s the heading on a blog entry by Dave Winer, this morning. Of the various blogs that I read, his would be the one I don’t miss, and haven’t for many years. I think he hit the nail on the head this time.

note on 4/15, his Political Notes entry, added later, expanded on those thoughts nicely.

Well, as we noted, Friday was the night of the prom at Notre Dame (they do a combined Junior/Senior event). They looked great, and it sounds like they had a great time (from what little they’ll say, which I suspect is positive).

It brought back a lot of memories of my own while I watched them begin to build memories of their own. I’ve really begun to enjoy watching my kids go through rites of passage that I remember well, myself. They’ve got a certain disbelief in their eyes when I tell them it wasn’t that long ago, but I suppose that’s just one more example of the things they’ll have to learn for themselves.