March 24, 2022

25 years ago, a Joe Louis bloodbath helped propel the Detroit Red Wings into a glorious era

25 years ago, a Joe Louis bloodbath helped propel the Detroit Red Wings into a glorious era
Darren McCarty’s gory vengeance on Claude Lemieux is core hockey lore

By Joe Lapointe on Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 4:00 am


(Detroit Metro Times) In the summer of 1996, I took my son, Marc, on a coast-to-coast tour of college campuses so he could choose a school. By chance, we crossed paths with a prediction for a hockey explosion that would launch a championship era for the Detroit Red Wings.

We lived on the East Coast then, but Marc wanted to check out (among others) the University of Michigan, in our state of birth. While we ate pizza in an Ann Arbor restaurant, a tall man with an athletic build and a mustache approached our table.

I recognized Dave Lewis, an assistant coach with the Red Wings. By then, I'd covered the National Hockey League for three newspapers in three cities; he'd played in the NHL for four teams before coaching.

"Joe," he said. "It's going to happen at Joe Louis Arena. Be there. People will come from Saskatchewan to see this."

He was smiling, slightly, but his tone and words were serious. I can't directly quote most of them because I didn't take notes and it was a quarter-century ago.

But I recall vividly his vow: the Red Wings would then wreak vengeance upon Claude Lemieux of the Colorado Avalanche for maiming the face of Detroit's Kris Draper with a blind-side check into the boards in Denver that spring during a bitter Western Conference finals series in the Stanley Cup playoffs of 1996. ...............(more)

https://www.metrotimes.com/news/25-years-ago-a-joe-louis-bloodbath-helped-propel-the-detroit-red-wings-into-a-glorious-era-29601798

March 23, 2022

Man found with drugs after getting trapped in port-a-potty

COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) – A Florida man found stuck inside a port-a-potty was arrested on drug charges after deputies found him screaming for help.

According to WBBH, deputies with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office were called after reports of a suspicious person and someone shouting.

When a deputy arrived, a man could be heard yelling loudly. As the deputy got closer, she could hear the screams and saw a foot sticking out of the bottom of the port-a-potty.

The deputy was able to get the man out of the bathroom and identified him as 34-year-old James Gousse. Deputies said Gousse told them he had gotten his foot stuck in the door. ........(more)

https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/florida-man-found-with-drugs-after-getting-trapped-in-port-a-potty/

March 23, 2022

Florida Man Hospitalized After Tiger Attack at Wooten's Airboat Tours

A man is suffering injuries on both arms after a tiger attacked him at a tourist attraction in Florida's Everglades area on Tuesday afternoon.

The Collier County Sheriff's Office confirmed via their Facebook that the attack occurred around 4:30 p.m. local time, when deputies were dispatched to Wooten's Everglades Airboat Tours.

The sheriff's office reported that "a tiger in an enclosure at that location was being fed by it's [sic] caretaker when a 50 year old male, an employee of Wooten's who was not authorized to be with the tiger, entered the tiger's enclosure. The tiger attacked the man and caused injuries to both arms. The man has been transported to a hospital by EMS." .............(more)

https://people.com/human-interest/florida-man-hospitalized-after-tiger-attack-at-wootens-airboat-tours/

March 23, 2022

COVID-19 Recovery: Riders are Coming Back but Where are the Drivers?

As restrictions begin to lift and the world shifts its attitude to “living with COVID-19,” agencies are reporting upticks in ridership, such as the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Metropolitan Council and the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System.

While the increasing ridership trend is welcome news, there has been an equal if not greater number of announcements from agencies saying they are limiting services due to a driver shortage. To highlight this phenomenon, the Shared-Use Mobility Center (SUMC) released a report in November 2021, “Managing the Labor Shortage at Transit Agencies,” that documents the drastic drop in transit industry employees, saying from “March to April of 2020, employment in the transit and ground passenger transportation industry fell from about 498,000 to 321,000 employees.”

While the drop is significant, this labor shortage has been years in the making; it was just exacerbated by the pandemic, explains a report released February 2022 by the Alliance for a Just Society, the Labor Network for Sustainability and TransitCenter.

Take Steamboat Springs Transit (SST) in Steamboat Springs, Colo., for instance—a ski resort area with a heavy reliance on seasonal drivers. Jonathan Flint, transit manager for SST, explains filling the seasonal driver roster has always been a challenge, but was making progress by working with areas that have an opposite seasonal demand.

“We had made that successful up until COVID-19 hit, [then] we started losing some of our drivers,” Flint shared. ..................(more)

https://www.masstransitmag.com/management/article/21259119/covid19-recovery-riders-are-coming-back-but-where-are-the-drivers

March 23, 2022

A tale of two Covid Americas: can the US unite behind a pandemic strategy?

(Guardian UK) In Mississippi and Massachusetts, two pharmacists working in very different parts of America have seen a sharp drop in demand for Covid-19 vaccines in recent months. Their best guesses for why they’ve seen such slowdowns diverge considerably.

Saad Dinno, co-owner and pharmacist at four drugstores in the suburbs of Boston, wagers that most people in his community are up to date on their vaccinations. As he speaks from Acton Pharmacy, in the Massachusetts town of the same name, his bet is a fairly safe one – 95% of the people in this county have had at least one shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Bob Lomenick, the owner of G&M Pharmacy in the northern Mississippi college town of Oxford, where just 60% of people in the county have received a single shot, offers a different explanation.

“We still have lots of people, even today, who just refuse to get the vaccine,” said Lomenick. “I don’t get into controversial discussions with them, all the evidence proves they [vaccines] are effective. I got all of mine and my family got all of theirs.”

The Boston suburbs where Dinno practices are awash in blue Democratic voters, with few surrounding areas voting for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election by margins smaller than 50%. Meanwhile, precincts in Oxford split closely between Donald Trump and Biden, but voters in many surrounding districts broke for Trump by a margin of 74% or more, a detailed map of both precincts showed. ..............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/23/us-divided-pandemic-covid-vaccines

March 23, 2022

Elie Mystal: Our Constitution is "actually trash" -- but the Supreme Court can be fixed

Elie Mystal: Our Constitution is "actually trash" — but the Supreme Court can be fixed
Author and scholar Elie Mystal on our deeply flawed Constitution and the long, dark history of legal racism

By DEAN OBEIDALLAH
PUBLISHED MARCH 23, 2022 6:30AM


(Salon) Elie Mystal, attorney and author of the New York Times bestseller "Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution," wanted actor Samuel L. Jackson to record the audio version of his book. Mystal's title, after all, is drawn from one of Jackson's famous lines in "Pulp Fiction." But if you've seen Mystal on cable news, you know he doesn't need Jackson to provide passion and emphatic delivery. Mystal gives you all that and more, as you will see first-hand in our recent "Salon Talks" conversation.

Mystal takes, shall we say, the controversial position that the U.S. Constitution is not only "not good," but that it's "actually trash." He notes that our founding document was drafted by men who owned slaves and enshrined that evil institution with the infamous Fugitive Slave Clause and the "three-fifths compromise." But Mystal's bigger point is that our Constitution is given too much deference: "We act like this thing was kind of etched in stone by the finger of God, when actually it was hotly contested and debated, scrawled out over a couple of weeks in the summer in Philadelphia in 1787, with a bunch of rich, white politicians making deals with each other."

Mystal also lays bare the myth that the motivation behind the Second Amendment was about self-defense or a check on the government. As he notes, George Mason — then the governor of Virginia and one of the drafters of the Constitution — flat-out said that the Second Amendment was meant to guarantee that Southern states could form a "well-regulated militia" to "fight slave revolts." Mason and other Southerners feared that the federal government wouldn't help them put down slave uprisings, and they needed to have guns close at hand.

....(snip)....

You were recently on "The View" talking about your book and created some controversy. The first line in "Let Me Retort" is "Our constitution is not good," followed up a few paragraphs later with "Our constitution is actually trash." You're obviously trying to challenge people. Tell people what your goal is there.

There are two things going on there. One, the veneration that this country has for the Constitution is simply weird. It's crazy. It's not what other countries do for their written documents. We act like this thing was etched in stone by the finger of God, when actually it was hotly contested and debated, scrawled out over a couple of weeks in the summer in Philadelphia in 1787, with a bunch of rich, white politicians making deals with each other, right? These politicians were white slavers, white colonizers and white abolitionists — who were nonetheless willing to make deals with slavers and colonists. No person of color was allowed into the convention. Their thoughts were not included. No women were allowed to have a voice or a vote in the drafting of the Constitution. And quite frankly, not even poor white people were allowed to have a voice or a thought in what the Constitution was. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/03/23/elie-mystal-our-constitution-is-actually-trash--but-the-can-be-fixed/

March 22, 2022

Ketanji Brown Jackson Rose Above the Muck on Day One

(Slate) Despite the history-making nature of her nomination, there is some big Back to the Future energy at work during this week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Republicans who command a 6-3 supermajority on the current Supreme Court, a ratio that will be wholly unaffected by this week’s proceedings, chose to spend much of Monday’s opening day of hearings howling in outrage about all the ways they have suffered at the hands of Democrats. As a result, they spent the morning relitigating the insults heaped upon Miguel Estrada, Judges Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Janice Rogers Brown, Amy Coney Barrett, and of course Brett Kavanaugh. Many of the GOP senators’ opening statements were focused specifically on Kavanaugh, whose alleged misconduct was depicted by Sen. Ted Cruz this morning in terms of “teenage dating habits”—as if his most egregious alleged high school sin lay in asking Jennifer to the prom instead of Susie. It should go without saying that Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault, which has nothing to do with “dating,” but nobody on either side seemed to even tacitly acknowledge that distinction on Monday.

But it’s not just that Republicans largely spent the morning meandering aimlessly through the fog of outrages past. The most outrageous points of attack on Judge Jackson included Sen. Josh Hawley’s insinuation that she is soft on child sex abusers—a charge that has now been roundly debunked, even on the right, as wrongheaded and “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” So for obvious reasons, these Republican senators find themselves back sipping at the ancient well of “judicial philosophy.” And as though nothing has changed since Robert Bork left the building, this line of criticism gets rooted, again, in tired speeches about things like “originalism versus living constitutionalism.” It’s not just that this “debate” insofar as it was briefly interesting in the 1980 is now analytically useless—like announcing whether you’re a Monica or a Rachel on the set of Ted Lasso—but also there are no “originalists” left on the court, not really, and the last “living constitutionalist” has been gone for decades.

The conservative legal movement has hopscotched joyously of late, toggling between originalism and textualism as it suits their ends, but also toward complete abandonment of both, with a new interest in “common good constitutionalism” joining the party. When members of the Judiciary Committee browbeat Judge Jackson for refusing to state her “judicial philosophy” or for her inability to reduce it to a four second tiktok video, what they are attempting to do is lay claim to a debate that has long outlived its descriptive utility, and a debate which covers up the hypocrisy of a court that is more purposefully ends-oriented than any in modern history.

Which leads us to the Democrats, who on Monday did an able job of noting that Jackson’s nomination is historic and that her family should be proud, but a dismal job of defining anything akin to a progressive legal philosophy. (Protip: “recognizing regular people” is no more a coherent judicial philosophy than is “originalism”). Democrats seem to have all but given up on the larger project of using these confirmation hearings to make any salient argument about the importance of the court, even in a midterm election year, and even in a midterm election year in which Democrats stand poised to lose the Senate, and even, somehow, in a midterm election year in which the Supreme Court looks ready to reverse Roe v Wade, has already reversed it in Texas, stands ready to allow guns in New York subways, and to dismantle the EPA. ..............(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/ketanji-brown-jackson-day-one-muck.html

March 21, 2022

Someone, Anyone -- Stand Up!: Who will have the courage to protest Putin's biggest fanboy on Fox News

Someone, Anyone — Stand Up!
Who will have the courage to protest Putin’s biggest fanboy on Fox News?

Kirk Swearingen
Mar 19

5 min read


Recently, the world watched, with a mixture of astonishment, delight, and concern, as an employee of Russian state television Channel One interrupted the evening news program by coming onto the set, shouting “Stop the war! No to war!” while holding up a large handmade sign that said Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.

News editor/producer Marina Ovsyannikova rushed out behind a female anchor (reportedly Putin’s favorite), who was presenting the national state-sanctioned “news,” with a sign decrying the lies being told there about Putin’s terror war against Ukraine.

....(snip)....

My question is, who will stand up for journalistic integrity here at home behind Fox News Channel’s most vocal Putin cheerleader, Tucker Carlson? It immediately became a meme, but who will actually do it?

You know, Master Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, pretend populist, who grew up rich because members of the actual proletariat were eating his step-mother’s TV dinners; Tucker-of-the-Inevitable-Bowtie Carlson, who somehow manages to get U.S. males whipped up by strategically fretting about men being emasculated; Tucker of the Perpetually-Confused-Expression, who happily weaponizes stupidity; the Fox News “host” who, with a lot of competition among his colleagues, has stepped up as Putin’s number one apologist in the United States — so much so, that the Kremlin has noted how important it is for their propaganda efforts to showcase Carlson’s work as often as possible.

I planned to give some examples of Carlson’s fawning for Putin, but where does one begin? So many times has Tucker lavished praise on Putin or attempted to undermine Putin’s critics that he is being called the “TuckyoRose” of his generation, and some call for him to be investigated by the Department of Justice. ..........(more)

https://medium.com/politically-speaking/someone-anyone-stand-up-20490bee1bbf

March 21, 2022

Washington D.C.: Metro's next rail cars to be built at new $70 million Maryland plant

(WaPo) Metro’s next series of rail cars will be built at a $70 million plant in Maryland that will employ nearly 500 people and supply rail cars for the Washington-area system and transit agencies across the country.

Hitachi Rail announced Monday it has chosen Hagerstown as the home for an assembly plant that will release Metro’s eighth generation of rail cars starting in late 2024. Metro selected the company about 18 months ago to build 256 cars for its 8000 series, with an option for as many as 800 cars this decade.

The lucrative contract worth about $2.2 billion came with the requirement that Hitachi Rail assemble the cars at a plant in the Mid-Atlantic region. The announcement advances Metro’s lengthy journey to go from bidding to planning for its next rail car, a process that included Congress inserting itself into negotiations over cybersecurity fears and concerns about what would be built domestically.

....(snip)....

Hitachi Rail, a division of Tokyo-based Hitachi Ltd. and which has a U.S. headquarters in Pittsburgh, holds contracts to build a new rail system in Honolulu and rail cars for Miami’s transit system and Baltimore’s subway. ..............(more)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/03/21/metro-cars-8000-series-hagerstown/?

March 19, 2022

Both the north and south poles are currently melting at the same time, which is highly unusual

If it's feeling unseasonably warm where you live, there's a scientifically alarming reason for it.

According to recent updates from Extreme Temperatures Around The World, a weather specific Twitter account run by extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera, Earth's poles are currently exhibiting unusually extreme heat with areas of Antarctica more than 70 degrees warmer than average, and parts of the Arctic over 50 degrees warmer than usual.

"They are opposite seasons. You don't see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time," Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado told The Associated Press Friday night. "It's definitely an unusual occurrence."

As a whole, The Antarctic continent was about 8.6 degrees warmer on Friday than a baseline temperature for this season established between the years 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models reported on by Associated Press.

"Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen," said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/03/19/feeling-hotter-than-it-should-be-where-you-live-youre-not-alone/