Sunday, September 20, 2015

MLB pre-playoff hate, North Korea's gulag fun and GOP presidential staffer bar brawls


- It’s too bad Republican presidential contenders Rand Paul and Marco Rubio won't be in the race much longer. Neither has a Donald-Trump’s-hair-soul-versus-common-decency chance of winning the GOP nomination or even cracking the top five in the polls, but based on the (alleged) actions of two of their campaign staffers, it’s worth keeping these two hacks around awhile longer. Enter John Yob, a Paul aide, and Rubio deputy campaign manager Rich Beeson. Yob claimed - in that bastion of judicial magnitude known as Facebook of all places - that Beeson slugged him at a bar on Mackinac Island, where a number of Republican candidates have gathered for the weekend. Police are now investigating those allegations of a bar fight between these two pencil-necked political dorks, including a video Yob claimed to have of Beeson assaulting him. He later provided that video to media outlets rather than Mackinac Island Police Chief Brett Riccinto, who probably would have liked to see the video before CNN. "Any time you're at a bar past midnight things seem to get misconstrued as to what happened," Riccinto said. Really? You mix beer, liquor, people who are up way too late and plenty of testosterone and bad sh*t happens? The video is extremely grainy - damn bars failing to invest in proper stage lighting so videos shot in their confines have better quality - but it does appear to show a physical confrontation. It does little to affirm Yob’s claim that  the man who hit him in the video is Beeson and both campaigns have done their best to burrow inside their spokesman-formed shells and issue no comment whatsoever on the matter, although Yob did say will press charges against Beeson. Screw the next 25-man GOP blowhard debate; put these two ass hats in the octagon together, slap some fight gloves on them and let’s see them settle this UFC style……….


- Ice Cube’s edge continues to be dulled past the point of recognition and at this juncture, there really isn't any going back. Sure, the recent NWA biopic was merely another step in the commercialization of the career of a man who long ago abandoned the hard life he once espoused, but if he truly is going to play Scrooge in  a modern retelling of Charles Dickens' festive classic “A Christmas Carol,” then things just went from bad to really disturbing. Cube has taken on many, many family-friendly roles over the years and his days of gangsta rap are far behind him, so the idea of becoming a holiday movie actor is merely the next step in a sad devolution. The movie will be titled “Humbug” and it was snapped up by Universal following a four-studio battle for the rights. Should Ice Cube sign on, the project could reunite him with director Tim Story, with whom he worked on the cop flick “Ride Along.” The Scrooge role would see him play a miserly real estate agent, a part that has been played by scores of actors and voiced as an animated character by many others over the years. The word on the street is that Cube could make as much as $10 million for playing Scrooge, a sum that would feel mighty nice in his bank account and help dull some of the sting a person should feel when they used to be part of one of the baddest rap collectives on the planet and are now nothing more than a common, kid-friendly thespian……..


- And so the dance continues. North Korea continues to claim that it doesn’t have any hard labor camps to punish anyone with enough temerity to refuse to mindlessly go along with what its communist regime decrees and the outside world claims that the situation is only getting worse. Pointing the finger this time is the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (CHRNK), which has issued a new report claiming that the Notorious Kim Jong-Un’s crew has been expanding space for women in its notorious prison labor camps to accommodate the number of Koreans forcibly returned from China. These women had the audacity to flee the impoverished nation on the north end of the Korean Peninsula to seek the economic means to survive in China, only to be expelled from their adopted country for a life of forced labor, savage beatings, starvation, episodic executions and other crimes against humanity. It’s not the sort of trade most people want to make, but it’s fully detailed in The Hidden Gulag IV, an update of the Committee’s decade-long examination of the North Korean system, published on Friday. North Korea’s remote and extensive secret prison network is the stuff of nightmarish legend and it’s laid out with the help of separate analysis of satellite photographs and interviews with inmates who endured stays in the horrific system and subsequently escaped to South Korea after their release. K.J. Un’s atrocities were previously laid out last year, when a U.N. appointed commission issued its own report on North Korean widespread and savage repression of its own citizenry. The U.N. Security Council for the first time debated whether to refer the Kim regime’s human rights atrocities to the International Criminal Court as crimes against humanity, a discussion that not surprisingly remains in progress……….


- They’re two of Major League Baseball’s biggest rivals, their fans despise each other with relentless fervor and they’re division rivals who have a high chance of meeting in the playoffs next month. But why not add some extra heat to the rivalry as the season winds down? Enter the theatrics at Wrigley Field during the Cubs’ 8-3 win Friday in the opener of a three-game series. The fun began early in the game when Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo was hit by a pitch, but life really got interesting in the fifth inning when St. Louis outfielder Matt Holliday being hit by a pitch on the helmet courtesy of Cubs starter Dan Haren. Haren immediately showed regret for the pitch, as did Cubs catcher Miguel Montero, but St. Louis either wasn’t buying their contrition or didn’t care because two innings later, Cardinals reliever Matt Belisle intentionally threw at Rizzo in retaliation. Belisle dotted Rizzo on the leg and was ejected along with Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, but that didn’t placate the rage of Cubs manager and all-around quirky guy Joe Maddon. "I'm really disappointed in what the Cardinals did right there," Maddon said after the game. "We did not hit their guy on purpose. That was an absolute mistake. To become this vigilante group that wants to get their own pound of flesh, that's absolutely insane, ridiculous and wrong. We don't start stuff, but we will stop stuff." Look at Maddon, issuing thinly veiled threats and tough-guy proclamations. Belisle weakly attempted to claim that hitting Rizzo was unintentional, which is helped by the fact that Rizzo has been hit a major league-leading 29 times overall this season. After Cubs outfielder Chris Coghlan ended the season of Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Jung Ho Kang the previous day with a vicious slide into second base, dealing a blow to another possible playoff foe for the Cubs, Chicago is setting up what should be one hell of a postseason for itself……..

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