L.A. dropped the (foot)ball - From two NFL teams to none

I love NFL football, and I’m not alone. From coast-to-coast, the NFL owns Sundays in the fall and winter. And I don’t care who you are or where you live, I can already tell you where you’re going to be on the last Sunday in January next year: at a Super Bowl party watching a football game. As a New England Patriots fan (not a band-wagoneer, I’m actually from Boston), I’m lucky because I know there’s a good chance my home-town team will be playing in that game. But if I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t even care. Because if I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, I know there is no chance my home-town team will be playing. The worst part is the reason why that kid (and any other kid who has grown up here in the last 12 years) doesn’t have a home-town NFL team to root for: because the city of Los Angeles doesn’t understand that an NFL team needs a modern stadium. So while Maryland (for example) can build not one, but two NFL stadiums, the great state of California (among the top ten economies in the world) and the city of Los Angeles (the 2nd largest media market in America) can’t even build one. And that’s a crying shame because kids growing up in LA are deprived of the joy of football on Sundays.

It didn’t have to be this way - LA had both the Rams and the Raiders playing here. But the Rams were playing in an outdated stadium in Anaheim, and the Raiders were playing at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which the Rams had abandoned because it was too old). Then Personal Seat Licenses (giving fans exclusive rights to buy season tickets for a particular seat in a stadium) became the rage in the NFL. The money from PSL’s became a powerful new revenue stream to provide financing for stadium construction - which could be used to lure a team to a new city. And that’s exactly what happened. With Los Angeles unwilling or unable to work out a deal to update either building, the Rams went back to St. Louis and the Raiders returned to Oakland - and their owners pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. At the end of the day, it was the costs associated with the Northridge Earthquake which convinced the LA Sports Commission not to renovate the Coliseum, and it was that incredibly short-sighted decision which cost LA - and the kids growing up here – their home-town NFL team.

Since then, Los Angeles has gotten further and further out of touch with the realities of becoming an NFL city. With the Rams and Raiders gone, there are only two ways to get pro football back: relocation or expansion. But when Baltimore used a new stadium and PSL money to entice the Browns to leave Cleveland in 1995, relocation was off the table. That left expansion. Unfortunately, starting an NFL team from scratch takes money – and lots of it. And when then-Governor Gray Davis wouldn’t allocate $150 million of public money to build parking garages for a new stadium in 1998, he told any potential team owner that they shouldn’t expect any love from the city or the state. The NFL got the message there isn’t really any interest in having a team here, and the great city of Los Angeles, the capital of America’s entertainment industry, was shown up by Houston, Texas (which had a $300 million stadium plan in place and an owner ready to pay the $700 million franchise fee) when it was granted the NFL’s 32nd team.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the city of Los Angeles needs an NFL franchise. This isn’t Cleveland, Ohio or Green Bay, Wisconsin – so it’s not like the city’s identity is tied to its pro football team. There is no question that the city’s bread will always be buttered by the film and television industries. But how can Los Angeles not have NFL football when the Rams were here before the Lakers or the Dodgers? It just doesn’t make any sense to me that a city in southern California (of all places) can have two pro hockey teams and no pro football team.

The worst part is how LA has been played for a fool ever since. Team owners in Cincinnati, Tampa Bay, and Seattle have all used LA’s lack of NFL football as leverage to secure some kind of public financing for new stadiums, while kids growing up in LA have to choose between the Trojans or the Bruins - and never have a team to root for on Sundays.

'Juice,' your public no longer awaits you - Saying goodbye to OJ Simpson

I wish I had been writing this column back in 1994 during the OJ trial because I wanted someone to point out how hard is was to believe that any man (not just OJ) would cut his kids’ mother’s throat and leave her body in the front yard for them to find the next morning. That man would have to be crazy. And OJ Simpson may be a lot of things, but crazy isn’t one of them. That’s what I thought until this weekend when he was booked on suspicion of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy, and burglary in Las Vegas. Now I’m thinking he just might be out of his mind.

He was in town to be Best Man at a friend’s wedding and it was supposed to be a joyous weekend (so much for that idea). It all started to go wrong once OJ found out that a memorabilia dealer was in Vegas and in possession of some very personal items belonging to OJ which were supposedly stolen from his mother. Reportedly, OJ’s plan was to, “show up with a bunch of boys and take my (stuff), and they can’t do nothing about it.” This is where he lost me – mainly because he’s a 60-year-old man. A geezer old enough to be a grandfather is going to get a gang of guys and go gather up his goods? Has he been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies? Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m of the opinion that when somebody steals from you, you know they stole from you, you know where they are, and you know they have your stolen stuff on them, you call the police. That’s precisely why we have police.

But not OJ. As he put it, “the police, since my trouble, have not worked out for me,” and that when he calls the police, “it just becomes a story about OJ.” But unlike his road rage incident, his ticket for speeding a boat through a manatee zone, or his stealing satellite TV, this time it’s alright for the story to be about OJ because this time, OJ was actually the victim. Unfortunately, OJ has an express ticket on the crazy train (next stop: Clark County jail), so he apparently decided to conduct a sting operation where he would confront the memorabilia dealer and make him either return the items or OJ would call the cops. He decided to handle it on his own first because, as he put it, “I’m at the point where I don’t rely on the police.”

That plan may have worked had it not been for the fact that two of OJ’s “boys” allegedly had guns on them and one of OJ’s “boys” (the one who first informed OJ the memorabilia dealer was in town) made a tape recording of the incident. So when the tape is played back, OJ’s sting operation has all the elements of and sounds suspiciously like an armed robbery. What’s more, OJ apparently admitted everything to Las Vegas police and even gave an interview to an AP reporter about the incident saying, “this is not a case about OJ stealing anything.” His favorite cereal has to be Coco Puffs, because clearly OJ Simpson is cuckoo.

At this point, the main legal issue will be the guns that were allegedly in the room at the time of this incident and whether or not OJ knew the guns were going to be there. And somewhere in heaven, the late, great Johnnie Cochran is scratching his head wondering, “didn’t you learn anything from your impromptu chats with Detectives Lange and Vannatter? Don’t you remember that rarely has anyone gotten in trouble for saying too little? For your own sake, why can’t you just shut up?”

After his acquittal, OJ Simpson was supposed to go away, that was the deal. Whatever he did (if he did it), he got away with. So he was supposed to take his young daughter and son far away from Brentwood where they have a shot at a normal life, get them through college, and do what every other parent does: make their kids the priority in their life and live vicariously through them. He had run the risk of losing them forever as he rotted away in prison, but thirteen years later, he seems to have forgotten all about that in a useless attempt to prove how tough he is to a couple of guys who, in the grand scheme, don’t mean anything to him. Now he’s remembering that there are a lot of people who want to see him behind bars by any means necessary and realizing that he’s once again in danger of losing the only things that should really matter to him: Sydney and Justin.

In American policy 101, Bush gets a bi fat 'F' - Protecting the troops from the Commander in Chief

President Bush is dead to me. Mostly because he insults my intelligence.

In the next few days, he has to provide an assessment of the Iraqi government’s “progress” toward meeting their agreed-upon economic, security, and political benchmarks - and he’s going to attempt to convince me and my fellow Americans that there is some actual “progress” to report. He’s going to tell us that in places where American troop levels have increased, violence has been reduced – as though that’s some kind of revelation. He’s going to refer to Sunni tribes fighting Al Qaeda as “bottom-up” reconciliation – as though they’re cooperating with the central government and as though they aren’t the same “Sunni insurgents” who have killed American soldiers. And he’s going to try to convince us it’s in America’s best interest for over 100,000 troops in a largely Christian army to occupy a Muslim country in perpetuity. For me, all of this begs one very important question: does the President think we’re stupid? I think he does.

Let’s go back to last summer when the mission was to train Iraqi forces to provide their own security. Baghdad was a cauldron in which there were about two car bombs going off every day. The central government elected in December of 2005 had been unable to come to any kind of understanding on passing reconciliation legislation through most of 2006. Knowing that the violence in Baghdad was carried out by Shiite militias associated with the central government as well as by terrorists, my fellow Americans and I had had enough of their excuses by November, and we sent a message to the President and his Republican enablers in Congress: it’s time for a change of direction in Iraq. So he created the “Baghdad Security Plan” with the objective of giving the central government “breathing room” to do their work by sending about 25,000 more troops. It wasn’t what we wanted, but it was a step in the right direction because it was a move toward holding the Iraqi government accountable.

The key was that it would get us one step closer to being able get our troops to the one place we know they are safe: back home. That’s what my fellow Americans want and that should be the President’s focus. But since George W. Bush thinks we’re stupid, he’s going to try and make a big deal about the fact that he’s planning to maybe pull the additional troops he sent to Iraq this year out by this time next year – essentially leaving troop levels in the fall of 2008 right where they were in the fall of 2006 and making his “troop surge” two years long. Despite the fact that my fellow Americans and I “thumped” his party out of power over this issue, he’s going to ignore us and focus on how to keep as many troops in Iraq as long as possible so that the eventual, inevitable withdrawal doesn’t happen while he’s still in office.

Since President Bush is dead to me, I’m not waiting for his official assessment, I’m going to grade him on his Iraq policy now. I’ve seen the Government Accountability Office’s report (no political progress), I’ve seen the reporting from Marine General James Jones’ Commission (no political progress), and I’ve heard from General David Petraeus (some military progress) and Ambassador Ryan Crocker (no political progress), so I’ve got all the information I need. Though I usually grade on a curve, it’s “pass/fail” at this point. That’s because the metric is incredibly simple: military progress + a lack of political progress = failure. On his Iraq policy, President Bush receives a big, fat “F”.

Now it’s up to Congress to find a way to protect our men and women serving in Iraq from a Commander in Chief totally divorced from reality, determined to keep them in harm’s way, but without a compelling reason for doing it. When asked directly by Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia whether or not military operations in Iraq are making America safer, General David Petraeus said he didn’t know. Well I know. I know that if you don’t answer that question with an immediate and unequivocal “yes”, then the answer is “no”.

I blame President Bush for our problems in Iraq. I blame him for misleading the country into an invasion and occupation we would have never gone along with had we known the actual plan. But now they’re aware of what’s really going on in Iraq, the blood of any US service personnel killed in that country will be on the hands of Congressional Republicans who could provide a veto-proof majority and force the President to change his obviously failed policy, but don’t have the guts to cross party lines.

Why cry over the war when you can laugh? - Benchmarks & the Iraqi government

George W. Bush is my president, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like seeing him squirm – especially given his administration’s casual relationship with the truth. And I absolutely loved watching the White House scramble to respond to leak of the Government Accountability Office’s draft report entitled “Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq” last Thursday.

The most important thing to understand about the GAO’s report on Iraq is that it requires a strict yea-or-nay, it-is-or-it-ain’t judgment on the Iraqi government’s progress on 18 specific benchmarks (3 yes, 15 no, 2 mixed). The most important thing to understand about the timing of the leak of the draft report is that it was published only five days before the actual report was to be submitted to Congress. So what was the point of the leak? To let the my fellow Americans know what was in the report before any of the president’s sympathizers got their hands on it. It says, “While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced.” It says attacks against Iraqi civilians haven’t changed and the “capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved.” The overall conclusions are that “key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion (they promised to spend) in reconstruction funds.”

The scrambling started immediately, with outgoing White House Press Secretary Tony Snow up first. “Well, look, it's no secret that many of the benchmarks have not been met,” he said. “What is significant is that there's progress toward a great number of them.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, he went on to say, “look, if you're trying to do an overall judgment on what's going on in Iraq, the idea that somehow your standard is everything completed, or nothing completed seems to me to be a pretty high standard to meet. On the other hand, if you're trying to figure out, are you making progress toward the goals that you have set out, that's probably the proper way to look at it.” According to the White House, actually meeting the benchmarks seven months after they were agreed to isn’t as important as making progress on them. I’m sorry, but my fellow Americans didn’t vote the president’s Republican enablers out of Congress last November because we wanted to see more progress in Iraq, we did it so we could see more progress in getting our troops out of Iraq.

I understand Tony Snow is a cancer survivor and that he’s leaving the White House because it’s become too expensive for him to continue to serve his country, but does he really want to go out like this? Defending an inept and incompetent government which refuses to listen to or respect the will of its people? Or worse – defending the government of Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki? Wouldn’t he rather be remembered as a hack Fox News correspondent than the third in a succession of talking monkeys that President Bush sends to the White House briefing room to spin the day’s talking points to the assembled press corps?

As much as I enjoyed watching Tony Snow try to stay on message while being asked about the GAO draft report, Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, and Senator Larry Craig in the same briefing, the real fun was watching President Bush’s reaction. He didn’t wait five days for the actual report, he made a surprise trip to Iraq where he met with General Petreaus, Ambassador Crocker, and the “leaders” of Iraq’s central government the day before the report was to be submitted. No better way to get in front of the story (and dominate a news cycle at the same time) than using Air Force One. What made the whole spectacle hilarious was that this meeting didn’t take place in Baghdad (the seat of the central government), it took place in Anbar Province. President Bush explained that, though, by saying, “the government they represent, of course, is based in Baghdad - but they're here in Anbar because they know the success of a free Iraq depends on the national government's support from the bottom up. They know what I know: that when you have bottom-up reconciliation like you're seeing here in Anbar, it'll begin to translate into central government action.”

So seven months after the Baghdad Security Plan to provide a stable environment in the capital so the Iraqi government to have one last chance to work out their issues was implemented, President Bush meets with the leaders of that government - in Anbar province - to announce progress in the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq. And I have to laugh at this man – if only to keep from crying.