The What Have We Learned team sings a duet of "Blue Christmas" with Elvis.
It's as bad as you think. We nailed it in one take. Well, by "nailed" we mean...well,
That, and some jokes about Michael Jackson's new lung, a man and his polar bear and bowling for Hanukkah.
The York Revolution is stealing ideas from Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
It is selling the press box suite at the ballpark, usually reserved for special guests, which, I guess, means people the team wants to suck up to, to the highest bidder.
Team General Manager and Aurora, Illinois native Matthew O'Brien said, "I'm sitting on gold here. This is a valuable thing, and I'm not going to give it away for free."
He left out a few words -- words that made the original Blago quote more colorful.
The team said anyone interested in acquiring the "Senate Suite," for 2009 Opening Day should call 717-801-4474 from any pay phone at a non-descript location and ask for "The Leprechaun." Bids will be accepted until the Atlantic League season opens on April 23.
The Revolution's marketing director, Greg Vojtanek, a Godley, Ill., native, said in a statement:
"Mr. O'Brien is doing nothing unethical here, and Kyle Orton is the best quarterback in the NFL."
The press release says, "Payment for the Senate Suite must be delivered at an undisclosed time and location of the York Revolution's choosing between April 24 and 30. Payment will be accepted in cash only, and in unmarked, non-consecutive 50-dollar bills. In the event two bidders tie, the tie will be broken on who's haircut most resembles that of a fourth grader from the 1960s at the time of their bid. When O'Brien was again asked about the coincidence of that rule compared to Governor Blagojevich's appearance, he answered 'for the last time, I have no idea who that is.'"
All proceeds from the bribery will benefit a The Beautiful York Endowment Fund.
It seems that nobody understands what's happened to our economy better than Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.
His column today begins:
"The revelation that Bernard Madoff -- brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community -- was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.
"Yet surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?"
Krugman nails it. The expansion of wealth in the financial sector has come at the expense of working people in this country. Our economy, apparently, is built on wishes and fantasies -- the rich get richer while the rest of us go deeper into the hole the new robber barons have dug.
Read the whole thing here.
In this week's edition of What Have We Learned, Tom apologizes for several things, sort of.
And we sort of make jokes about the elderly using computers and Matlock and the governor of Illinois allegedly shaking down a children's hospital.
Speaking of apologies, we discuss U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter's unfortunate comedy career.
Here is a video of our former York City cop and suspected serial rapist/fugitive Mike Johnson standing on razor sharp swords and breaking boards over his head.
Looks like it was shot in front of his mom's house.
Here are a couple of other videos of "Cobrafast" in action:
Charlie Brown gets down. Check out Snoopy on the guitar.
Say what you will about President Dubya -- and lots of us have been saying plenty of not very nice things -- but the guy can duck with the best of them.
Senate Republicans really showed those union guys who's boss.
A small group of Senate Republicans who represent Southern states that have foreign car manufacturers have blocked the bailout for the Big Three U.S. auto manufacturers. It's their revenge for the Civil War, I guess.
This is a disaster.
And it's based purely on the GOP's zeal to bust the United Auto Workers Union.
And, as we've come to rely upon from the Republican Party of late, it's based on myth and B.S.
First off, GOP leaders often quote a $70-an-hour figure when citing the U.S. car makers' labor figures. That's nonsense. UAW workers make an average of $28 an hour. Even calculating health care and pension costs, you can't get to $70 an hour.
How they get to $70 an hour is by adding up all of the health care and pension costs for all of the Big Three's retirees and dividing it by the number of current union workers.
It's not just misleading. It's a lie.
The myth that UAW workers make so much more money that their counterparts at southern, non-union plants is also B.S. For instance, according to the Detroit Free Press, non-union Toyota workers in the south make an average of $30 an hour.
This is simply the GOP exerting political vengeance on the unions.
The failure of the bailout will have disastrous repercussions. The Free Press reported this:
"Experts said it would take just days or weeks -- no later than the first week of January -- for the cascade of plant closures, layoffs and bankruptcies from automakers and suppliers to turn Michigan and its surrounding states into an industrial wasteland, where many in the unemployed populous would need to prepare for foreclosure."
The ripple effect will be devastating on our economy. Forget recession. We're talking depression.
Welcome to Mad Max America.
It's also strange, at least to me, that Congress would hand over $700 billion to the thieves on Wall Street, without any real questions asked, while playing hardball with companies that actually make stuff. The wealthy get wealthier and working people get the shaft.
See you in the breadline.
Here's Del McCoury and some friends singing all about those Breadline Blues.
Bettie Page, the pin-up queen from the '50s, has passed away at age 85 in Los Angeles.
Bettie was an icon.
Read her L.A. Times obit here.
Her life was a grand adventure, starting from her humble beginnings in Tennessee to her world-wide fame as a sex symbol. Her later life was sad, as she suffered from depression and mental illness.
She was an American original.
Here is BR-549's country tribute to their hometown girl made good:
The What Have We Learned team takes a hint from Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and puts a seat on the team up for sale. Make an offer! We're easy, but we're not cheap. Wait. Maybe we're cheap and easy. Who knows?
That and a very special selection of jokes about York County suspected serial rapist Michael L. Johnson Jr.
And what does Sesame Street have to do with torture?
Like a lot of you, I was confused by District Attorney Stan Rebert's comments in Thursday's York Daily Record regarding suspected serial rapist Michael L. Johnson Jr.'s fleeing.
Johnson, suspected of three rapes in which he posed as a police officer, which he used to be, was supposed to turn himself in to face charges in two of the cases.
He was out on $100,000 bail on charges filed in Maryland at the time.
He didn't show.
Now, it might just be me, but if you have a person suspected of multiple offenses, out on bail, do you call him up and say, "Hey, we're going to file some more charges so how about stopping by the police station?"
It seemed very odd. And it was very odd that authorities were surprised that Johnson took off.
Which brings us to Rebert. He said, "I don't like the fact that this guy got away. But he is the one who posted bail and ran. Shame on him, not us."
Shame on him?
I'm sure he's feeling pretty bad about being out on the loose. Shame on him for running and being, in the words of authorities, armed and dangerous.
Another thing: York Police had one case, a rape of an admitted prostitute and drug addict in which the victim got the license plate number of the person who raped her. The number matched that on the van that Johnson allegedly used in his crimes.
That happened in September. True, the van was registered to a friend of Johnson, but how much investigating would it have taken to tie that van to Johnson and eventually get an ID from the victim.
That's how Baltimore police cracked the case, tracing the van to Johnson and showing the victim a photo array that included Johnson's driver's license photo.
The Baltimore rape occurred in November. Could it have been prevented had York police caught Johnson in September?
Lots of questions.
Not many good answers.
This year's Christmas card from Southern Strategy features this photo:
The caption reads: All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names.
Your first day of deer season story comes from Indiana:
"MARKLE, Ind. (AP) -- Police in Indiana say five deer that wandered onto a highway overpass have jumped to their deaths on Interstate 69, one of them crashing through a tractor-trailer's windshield.
"Indiana Department of Natural Resources spokesman John Salb says the deer may have been spooked by cars as they were crossing the overpass Friday. They fell 20 to 30 feet onto the highway.
Police say the driver of the tractor-trailer rig struck by one of the deer was not injured."
The story says that deer season is stressful for the deer.
OK!
A blast from the past...
Still funny after all these years.
And a new one...
In case you missed it, here's Sarah Palin holding a news conference as some guy behind her kills turkeys.
Happy Thanksgiving!
All I can add is David Letterman's really going to miss Palin when she finally does go away.
Mike Argento, a York native and graduate of York Suburban Area High School and Penn State, first came to the York Daily Record in 1983. He even had gray hair back then. After stints covering everything from cops to city hall to state government to the environment, he began writing a column for the paper, three times a week, in 1989. His column can be about anything and so is his blog, which encompasses life in York County and beyond. And, for the record, as he told his wife the other night, he wishes people would stop asking him, 'What's wrong with you?' He really doesn't know.
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