Spoiled Rich Girls aren't learning a dang thing - Celebutante justice in L.A.

One of my favorite commercials is the one in which three different guys are swerving down city streets with their cars full of beer, red wine, and vodka respectively. They get to a police checkpoint, roll down their windows, and booze pours out of the car onto an officer’s feet, followed by the question,”Sir, have you been drinking tonight?” The spot ends with a warning, “You drink, you drive, you lose.”

In Los Angeles, celebutante justice is making a joke out of drunk driving laws. Two cases last week got me wondering: what would have happened to me? What if I had pulled a Nicole Richie and used an off-ramp to merge onto the 134 in Burbank, was driving the wrong way in the carpool lane when the Highway Patrol pulled me over, then gave the officers the excuse that I was whacked out of my mind on weed and Vicodin?

What would my punishment have been if I had pulled a Lindsay Lohan and gotten arrested for DUI in May after crashing my car into a tree in Beverly Hills (then fleeing the scene), went to rehab for six weeks, turned myself into police, and four days later stole a car with two people in it, chased another car down PCH from Malibu at 100 mph, tore through the streets of Santa Monica at 85 mph chasing another car to the police station where I lied to police (saying I wasn’t driving), failed a field sobriety test because my blood alcohol level was over .12, and had cocaine in my pocket when they arrested me?

I know what wouldn’t have happened. Unlike Nicole, my father isn’t a Commodore so I wouldn’t have been sentenced to serve only four days for my second DUI arrest in five years (especially when the minimum sentence for a second offense is supposed to be five days) and I would have been in custody a good deal longer than the 82 minutes it took to process and release her. And unlike Lindsay (and Malibu’s other most wanted drunk driver, Mel Gibson), I can’t afford to hire Blair Berk, the miracle worker who got the charges against Lindsay reduced to two counts of being (not driving) under the influence of cocaine, two counts of driving with a blood alcohol level above .08, one count of reckless driving, and got both DUI charges dropped so Lindsay will serve only one day (if that) in jail.

I would be locked up in the Men’s Central Jail right now – which is one of the main reasons why it’s not me we’re talking about. Like Nicole and Lindsay, I’ve been known to enjoy a substance or two. But unlike them, I know what would happen to me if I got arrested for DUI, so I don’t drive when I’m partying. If you went to a suburban high school like I did, you learned that lesson sometime between sophomore and junior year and you may or may not have had the point driven home by having to attend a classmate’s funeral.

It’s a lesson Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan never learned – and it’s a shame that it’s a lesson the criminal justice system in Los Angeles county is failing to teach them. Because Nicole and Lindsay are what I call “SRG’s” or “Spoiled Rich Girls” - and SRG’s have no concept of reality. They’ve been coddled and pampered their whole lives by their parents and teachers, they’ve been protected from the real-world consequences of their actions, and have never been held accountable for the decisions they make. They don’t listen to their fathers, they don’t listen to their mothers, and they definitely don’t listen to their boyfriends, fiancés, or husbands. An SRG will only listen to two people: another SRG or a police officer - because the only things an SRG fears is the loss of her friends and the loss of her freedom. In a city and county full of SRG’s, Los Angeles should send a consistent message when it comes to drunk driving.

In Paris Hilton’s case, Judge Michael Sauer understood that. When he learned she was sent home after serving five days of her forty-five day sentence, Judge Sauer sent her back to jail. The message was clear: you drink, you drive, you lose. But in Nicole’s case (two DUI’s in five years) and Lindsay’s case (two DUI’s in two months), the message is: you drink, you drive, you lose about an hour-and-a-half out of your day. It’s a message I’m sure every SRG in Los Angeles received loud and clear. And if you think it’s going to scare them into not driving home from Les Deux or the Green Door after a night of partying, you’ve got another think coming.

Another superstar falls from grace - Michael Vick & Bad Newz Kennels

Michael Vick has been a star football player all his life. He was the starting quarterback all four years of high school and went to Virginia Tech on a full scholarship where he led his team to an undefeated 11-0 record and a berth in the National Championship as a freshman. In the 2001 NFL draft, the Atlanta Falcons took him #1 overall, then signed him to a six-year contract worth $62 million. He was twenty years old, on top of the world, and had his whole life ahead of him. In his first NFL season, he only started two of his team’s games - but in them, he lived up to the hype and stood out as the most dynamic and exciting quarterback in the NFL. It was around this time he also started a project which would cement his reputation as the stupidest quarterback in the NFL: a dogfighting and breeding operation called “Bad Newz Kennels” run from a house in Smithfield, Virginia owned by Vick and occupied by his cousin, Davon Boddie.

Ironically, the whole problem started with a dog. A police dog, actually, who smelled marijuana in Boddie’s car outside a nightclub in Hampton, Virginia on the night of April 20th. He was arrested and charged with possession with intent to distribute (on 4/20 of all days) and five days later, police raided the Smithfield house where they found guns, drugs, paperwork detailing the Bad Newz Kennels operation, and 66 dogs (55 of them Pit Bulls). Had he been smart, Vick would have come clean at this point. Instead, he tried to pass the buck by saying, “I’m never at the house. I left the house with my family members and my cousin. They just haven’t been doing the right thing.” It wasn’t the best message to send.

The implication being that he, Vick, had no idea what was going on at the 15-acre property and his assumption being that Boddie, his cousin, would never give him up to the police. While he may have been right, he forgot about the “Bad Newz Kennels” brain trust: Tony Taylor, Purnell Peace, and Quanis Phillips, who were all implicated as well (probably by the documents seized in the April 25th raid). Those guys had to wonder: if Michael Vick was willing to push his cousin under the bus, how loyal would he be to them? This is where his life as Michael Vick knew it began to end.

Acting on tips from informants, the feds searched the Smithfield house again on July 6th, this time looking for dog carcasses. They knew what evidence they were after and they knew what they were going to do with it because about a week and a half later, the federal grand jury indicted Vick, Taylor, Peace, and Phillips for running an operation which trained pit bulls and oversaw dog fights. Believing these guys would be loyal to him, on July 26th Vick was dumb enough to enter a plea of not guilty – still claiming he really didn’t know what went on at the house.

At the same time, prosecutors were working to “flip” Tony Taylor by using the same basic divide-and-conquer move my Assistant Principal used in Middle School: they cited him as the ringleader. Right on cue, Taylor told the feds that Vick put up the money to finance the whole operation in an attempt to save his own skin. Once they had Taylor, it must have been a piece of cake to flip Peace and Phillips, who said they personally witnessed Michael Vick killing at least 8 dogs who didn’t perform well in “testing”. And with that, it was a wrap.

The judge is expected to sentence Vick to 12-to-18 months in prison, then the NFL will most likely suspend him for at least a full season, so he won’t be eligible to take the field until the 2009-2010 season. At that point, he’ll be 29 years old, he’ll have been out of football for two years, and every team in the NFL will already have a starting quarterback who, while he may not have Vick’s physical skills, also won’t have Vick’s baggage.

He was a poor black kid from a bad neighborhood who used his God-given talent to rise above his surroundings, go to college, become the #1 overall pick in the NFL draft, endorse his own Nike shoe, electrify crowds who came to see him play, become the highest paid player in NFL history (when he signed a ten-year, $130 million contract extension w/a $37 million signing bonus in 2004), and earn himself about $20 million per year in salary and endorsements. He is now the stupidest player in the NFL, though, because he threw it all away so that he could kill dogs.

Rappers used to be delightful - Kanye vs. Curtis

From the beginning, hip-hop wasn’t a noun, it was a verb. The basic elements of hip-hop culture are DJ’ing, MC’ing, graffiti art, and breakdancing – and it was something you lived, not something you bought in a store. The people who did it and did it right (spoke perfect slang, wore the right clothes, and were always in “the place to be”) were known as “B-Boys” and B-Girls”. That was me: Pumas w/fat laces, Lee jeans, and puffy down jacket, chillin’ with the HBO (Home Boys Only) Crew at the Chez Vous Rollerway in Boston calling everything and everyone “fresh”.

As a culture, hip-hop has its roots in poverty. When you can’t get a venue, the party jumps off in the park. When you don’t have a generator, you patch into the streetlights for electricity. When you can’t afford a band and a singer, you get a DJ and an MC – the DJ will take the best part of a song and, using two copies of the record, literally spin them backwards on two turntables so that part is repeated over and over and over again (using a mixer to switch from one to the other, rhythmically scratching over the transitions so they never missed a beat) as the MC kept the party live by chatting back-and-forth with the crowd or telling a true-life story about what goes on in the neighborhood from his experience. Either that or there might be a few MC’s on the mic, battling each other to see who the crowd likes more. That’s what MC’s did: they kept the party live or they bested an opponent with mic skills. That’s how rap music was born and it’s been a part of my life since “Rapper’s Delight” (a party record) by Sugar Hill Gang and “The Message” (a true-life story record) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

I will always listen to rap music and I will always love it. But unless they’re on the mic MC’ing, I truly do not care what any rapper has to say - because the skill-set required to be a rapper (the ability to rhyme and count to eight) is learned in grade school and the rapper’s worldview can be summed up in one phrase, “I’m the best.” Essentially, your average rapper is a 4th grader with an oversized ego and an enormous chip on his shoulder. And your average rapper couldn’t MC if his life depended on it. But after RUN-DMC looped the best eight bars of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and took their version to #1, the record industry realized that rap music sells. And after Compton’s own NWA showed that the “gangster rapper” sells more than any other kind, rappers have basically forsaken MC skills and have been trying to out-gangster and out-sell each other ever since.

Which brings us to this weekend’s announcement by Mr. Curtis James Jackson, III. That’s his government name. You probably know him as 50 Cent. He’s a rapper (not an MC) who nobody had ever heard of until 2000 when he put out a tune called “How to Rob” on an underground mixtape. Since his debut album dropped in 2003, he’s released two more and sold over 20 million records. Over the weekend, he bet his recording career that his next album would outsell Kanye West’s next album, which is dropping on the same day. “Put it this way, if Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent,” he said, “I won’t put out any more solo albums.” He also said, “The people who give out trophies, pick him because he's safe.” He added that he, “sold 1.1. million records in four days and, I didn't get one trophy for The Massacre, for the entire album. Then release Get Rich Or Die Trying as a soundtrack, sell 3 million records of the soundtrack and soundtracks are harder to sell than solo albums...and then, no trophies for the soundtracks.” Can a gangster get a tissue?

Just cut to the chase. Because of his investment in Vitamin Water about three years ago, he made $400 million when Coca-Cola bought its parent company Glaceau, so he doesn’t really need to work. If he’s more concerned with how his album sells relative to Kanye West’s than he is about using the mic to keep a party live, tell a true-life story from his experience, or demonstrate some kind of skills, then he’s not really an MC anyway and can just go ahead and retire right now. One more reason why I don’t listen to rappers talk: the albums are scheduled to be released on September 11th.

Cooperstown will surely call Bonds' name someday - The best baseball player ever

Now that Barry Bonds has broken Henry Aaron’s all-time home record, there are a couple of things which need to be talked about. He’ll with anywhere from 756 to 780 homers, and just might call it a career after this season. Whenever he retires, some people (but not “baseball people”) will ask if he belongs in the Hall of Fame because he’s been accused of using performance enhancing drugs. While he waits the required five years before he’s eligible to be considered, there will be a trickle, then a flood of “I once saw Barry” stories – all about baseball, none about steroids, and he will be elected on the first ballot.

Through most of his career, Bonds was the rarest of baseball specimens, a five-tool player: one who can run, field, throw, hit, and hit for power (for other examples, see Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Joe DiMaggio as well as future Hall of Famers Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez). And because the baseball season is 162 games long and he has played 22 seasons, there will be no shortage of stories featuring Barry displaying one of those five tools.

Fans in Pittsburgh will remember Barry’s first MVP season in 1990 when he carried the Pirates to the League Championship Series. Or 1991, when he finished second in MVP voting and carried the Pirates back to the LCS. Or 1992, his second MVP season, when he took the Pirates to the LCS for the third straight time. Of course, Giants fans (and Dodger fans) will remember 1993, the year Barry introduced himself to the National League West with 46 homers and his second consecutive MVP award. At that point, with three MVP’s in four years, Barry’s Hall of Fame ticket was punched. The list of 3-time MVP’s is short, with none since 1986, and they’re all in.

He was the best, most feared hitter in baseball and the highest paid player in the National League until 1998, when Gary Sheffield made $6 million more than Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa banished the bad memories of the strike-shortened 1994 season, one home run at a time.

The message from baseball was clear: we will not only pay for home runs, we will over-pay for them. Barry Bonds may be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. He realized that when the ball goes over the outfielders’ heads and into the stands, he doesn’t need speed on the basepaths. So he sacrificed one tool (baserunning) for another (power hitting) and built up his muscles in order to turn base hits into extra base hits, and turn extra base hits into home runs.

Did he use performance enhancing drugs to build up muscle mass? He is a professional athlete with access to the state-of-the-art in sports nutrition, of course he did. But more importantly, did he break any rules in the process? NO HE DID NOT. There was no prohibition on the use of performance enhancers at that time, as evidenced by the huge jar of androstendione in Mark McGwire’s locker during his post-game interviews in 1998. Barry Bonds simply recognized that the game of baseball was changing and that he needed to change with it. Was it cheating? Absolutely not. Hitting is a battle between the pitcher and the batter, and whatever substances Barry Bonds (and other hitters) used for the care and maintenance of their bodies, pitchers were also using. That’s a zero sum gain in my book. With the “steroid era” lasting from about 1997 to 2002, the only Bond’s stat which stands out is his record-breaking 73 home run season in 2001. And if steroids alone were enough, Jose Canseco wouldn’t be stuck on 462, he would have hit 38 more and would be in the Hall of Fame right now.

In the years before the “steroid era”, Barry Bonds won as many MVP’s (3) as any other player in baseball history. In the years since, he won more MVP’s (4) than any player in baseball history, bringing his total to a mind-boggling seven. By the time he retires, he’ll own the all-time home run record, the single-season home run record, he’ll be one of four players with 40 homers and 40 stolen bases in a season, the ONLY player with 400 homers and 400 stolen bases, the ONLY player with 500 homers and 500 stolen bases, the ONLY four-time, five-time, six-time, and seven-time MVP, and the greatest player in the history of the game.

And I, for one, will be grateful for the fact that I got to watch him play every day when I lived in San Francisco between 2003 and 2006 and have three summer’s worth of stories that start with, “I once saw Barry…”

Clinton is afraid of competition - Barack Obama is coming

The warm glow of party unity surrounding the Democrats in Washington is gone, chased away by Senator Hillary Clinton after last Monday’s CNN/YouTube “debate”. Why did she do it? Because she’s scared to death of Senator Barack Obama.

It started when they were both asked whether they would, in the first year of their administration, meet with the leaders of rogue nations. Senator Obama went first saying, “I would. The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration, is ridiculous.” Senator Clinton came back with, “I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year. I will promise a very vigorous diplomatic effort. I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don’t want to make a situation even worse.”

Had it stopped there, it would have been a one-day story. But it didn’t. On Tuesday, Senator Clinton was in Iowa (where she’s nervous about trailing John Edwards) and broke the cardinal rule for front-runners: do not engage your opponents.

She was baited into it by a reporter saying that Senator Obama’s statement that the time to ask how we were going to get out of Iraq was before we got in meant he was suggesting she didn’t think enough about an exit strategy before her vote to authorize the use of force. And man did she ever take the bait. She responded with, “I would not vote that way were I to do it over again,” and the reporter had her on the defensive.

He pressed on, asking if her answer to the question about meeting with leaders of rogue nations was a reversal of her statement in April that she “thinks it’s a terrible mistake for our President to say he won’t talk to bad people.” She didn’t see it as a reversal and said Senator Obama’s response was, “irresponsible and, frankly, naïve.” It would be one thing if a campaign staffer made this statement, but when it comes from the candidate herself, it is a serious breach of protocol and a genuine escalation of rhetoric. Then it was on.

Senator Obama came back firing with both barrels on Wednesday saying, “if you want to talk about irresponsibility and naïveté, look at her vote to authorize George Bush to send our troops into Iraq without an exit plan and then asking the Pentagon about what the plan is five years later.” Then on Thursday, he drove the point home, burying Senator Clinton’s attempt to make hay out of all of this by saying, “I’m not afraid of losing the PR war to dictators, I’m not going to hide behind a bunch of rhetoric. I don’t want a continuation with Bush-Cheney. I don’t want Bush-Cheney light. I want a fundamental change.”

By then, Senator Clinton had clearly given up the fight and was trying to act like she didn’t start it by saying, “Well, this is getting kind of silly. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life but I’ve never been called George Bush or Dick Cheney certainly.” Then she tried to take another shot on the way out with, “We have to ask what’s ever happened to the politics of hope?”

There’s an expression we use on the block (in the ‘hood, around the way, whatever you want to call it) when someone starts something they can’t finish: we say “they don’t want none.” By the end of the week, Senator Obama knew Senator Clinton really didn’t want none, so he came back with, “The notion that we can’t have a substantive argument, or that I can’t challenge some of their conventional wisdom without somehow sacrificing the broader themes of our campaign – which is to bring people together and change the tone of politics – I think makes no sense.”

And with that, it was over. Senator Clinton had tried, and failed, to play up what she perceives to be her advantage over Senator Obama: her so-called experience. The only thing she succeeded in doing was to show that Senator Obama, a truly nice guy, is not to be trifled with. He took her best shot, blocked it with his gloves, dipped his shoulder, and counter-punched. And while neither of them is likely to deliver a knockout blow between now and Super Tuesday, Senator Clinton will certainly think twice about getting back in the ring with Senator Obama unless it’s really necessary. If she was afraid of him before last week (and clearly she was), she’s got to be petrified of a one-on-one debate with him now. She’s seen his punching power and she knows she doesn’t have the chin to take it.