Sorting out the history of what one can claim for team history — the New Orleans Hornets have changed their name to the New Orleans Pelicans, jettisoning the team nickname they had when they were based in Charlotte.  This allows the new team based in Charlotte, the Charlotte Bobcats, to change their name to the Charlotte Hornets.  Which sets up the odd question: who owns the team history of the old Charlotte Hornets?

The answer is, apparently, New Orleans.  The fans in that city get to dote over the old performances by Glen Rice and the rest; Charlotte fans are stuck with their brief history.

This makes things a little odd for fans in Seattle, who had to scuttle all the memories of — like, losing to the Bulls in 6 in the NBA Finals (“Sweepless in Seattle!”) and Gary Payton carrying the team for a few years thereafter, and the Brent Barry era, and their one Title from the late 1970s.  All of that belongs to the team located in Oklahoma City — that city’s fans get to claim it.  It appeared for a while that fans of the Seattle Sonics could pick up on the history of the Sacramento Kings and claim all their history — “Hey!  Remember Vlad Divac!  What a player!” — but just when the fans in Seattle had a chance to implant this team’s history into their collective consciousness — the Kings are staying put, apparently.

Hard to be a Seattle sports fan.  The city’s NBA history has been wiped blank, and moved to Oklahoma — nothing happened in this city, and if a new team comes in, the history of basketball in the city will start over

Interestingly, if the Seattle Seahawks ever moved, it would be different.  The precedent has been set with the Cleveland Browns, whose franchise moved to Baltimore and then when a team came back into Cleveland, all the old Cleveland Brown history belongs to the new Cleveland Browns team and not the Baltimore Ravens.  So, Baltimore will just have to content themselves with their two Superbowls (and Trent Dilfer shouting “I’m going to Disneyland!” because of the pr nightmare Disney would’ve had in sending the game’s mvp there) — and when Cleveland’s team gets to claim that time John Elway marched 99 yards down the field on them.  Lucky them, I guess.

Today was apparently “Benghazi Day” on Fox News.  Undoubtedly on talk radio, excepting for the possibility that Limbaugh might be talking about himself and his current dealings with his syndicate for a few hours.

Looking over the conservative blogosphere and message board land, I am always struck on the chest thumping of this rather innocuous Hillary Clinton quote, taken askew out of context to shade into nefarious covering of the up.  When this happens, you suspect nothing but a broad stoke of searching for the gotchas.  An auto-pilot that will play out any quote and spit out something that looks like this “Impeach Obama for stock market declines” whether it fits the reality or not.

And here we get to an interesting “looking past Obama” fissure on it, which slides into the confluence of the Democrats sighing on the panel and the anti-Obama figures slap dashing their hand… it’s an accidental “point”/ “same point” I saw when reading over my opinion magazine blogs this day.  Observe.

Point:  “The meta message that they’re trying to get out there is that this is a failure in judgment that goes to character,” Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a senior Democrat on the Oversight and Foreign Affairs panels, told The Hill. “It didn’t work with Obama, so [they’re hoping that] maybe it’ll stick to Clinton.
“They’re trying to bring her numbers down. That’s what this is all about.”

Same Point.
My Twitter feed tells me that these hearings will spell the doom of the Obama administration. I’m going to make the wild prediction that it most certainly will not. It may spell doom for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chances as president in 2016, but even that will depend on who her opposition would be.

Supposedly Clinton is unassailable right now — I saw a dailykos post which referenced her having the surest road to the White House since Eisenhower.  (“She’d win Kentucky, for Pete’s sake!“)  In a few years we’ll find out if this is all actually true — she’s swerving back to a partisan figure after one term of not being so.

The post-mortems for a special election — one of big stature because of the Republican Comeback figure of Mark Sanford…

… he won.  It’s South Carolina.  The Republicans “came home”, and all that.  Judging from the campaign comments coming out of Elizabeth Colbert Busch during the home-stretch — she was in that “finding a center of a center of a right flank” bind.  And so Mark Sanford’s gambit of challenging a cardboard cutout of Nancy Pelosi across the state worked like a charm.

There will be a moment of partisan stoking going about … Republican spin “Even someone with Mark Sanford’s baggage”, Democratic spin is a little harder, but hinges on relative closeness, and… I don’t know… may go to “will take him on in the general election”.

Now herein lies my question.  How did the Green Party candidate do?

And mind you… in the last two Senate elections, the Green Party is what you would have had to turn to avoid Democratic joke candidates… (“When I say ‘Alvin’, you say ‘Greene’. “)  [Though I don’t think the Green Party had a candidate in 2008, so never mind.)

At the moment, with 91 percent of the precincts reporting… he appears to have won point five percent.

His goal of getting to the high single digits appears to have been a non-starter.  I suppose the interesting thing about the last poll, which showed Sanford edging ahead and this candidate Eugene Platt at four percent — if the margin of error were four percent, he would indeed be within the margin of error.

Internet commenters buzz in and ask the provocative question, which is just a means to start off into some stuff they have

This guy’s been busy.  (See too down here.)

Ever wonder why Portland has such a long history of opposition to fluoridation?

No.  Not really.  Gauging the dates, I have a pretty good idea why, but nonethless we get into this.

It might have something to do with this (excerpt from “The Fluoride Deception” by Christopher Bryson):

Or… it might be — let’s see…
1956 … no.  This is about the Commies.
1962 … no.  This is about the Commies still.
1978 … yes.  No longer fear the Commies.
1980 … no.  Reagan Revolution, from the ascension of the Christian Right — fighting the United Nations.  To be fair by this point we do have this “Military Industrial Complex” molding in here to form “new coalition”s, which is where we are scrabbled in 2014.

Sold to New Yorkers as a public-health initiative, the Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth had powerful links to the U.S. military-industrial complex, and to the efforts of big industrial corporations to escape liability for fluoride pollution. In 1956, for example, the Committees booklet Our Children’s Teeth was hot off the press. Before most New York parents had an opportunity to read about fluorides wonders, lawyers for the Reynolds aluminum company submitted the booklet to a federal appeals court in Portland, Oregon, where the company had been found guilty of injuring the health of a local farming family through fluoride pollution (see chapter 13). Inside the booklet, the judges were told, “are to be found the statements of one medical and scientific expert after another, all to the effect that fluorides in low concentrations (such as are present around aluminum and other industrial plants) present no hazard to man.” (Today such a pseudo grass-roots effort would be known as an “astroturf” organization because of its fake popular character and essentially corporate roots.) The committee was funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and its goals were to break the political logjam in New York and to help topple dominoes across the country, according to the committee’s program director, Henry Urrows. “That was the working assumption-our justification as far as the Kellogg people were concerned-and it turned out that was quite correct because we broke the back of the anti-fluoridation movement by winning in New York and Chicago,” Urrows told me.

Well they didn’t break Portland!

All very interesting.  But you do have to say… at least the Communist and Corporate Malfeasors accidentally stumbled into imrpoving the populace’s teeth enamel.

Well, let’s see.

“This really does reshuffle the deck in some fascinating ways that confound traditional lines,” said Phil Keisling, director of the Center for Public Service at Portland State University’s Mark Hatfield School of Government. “It has created some pretty interesting bedfellows on both sides of the ideological divide.”
How interesting? Consider some of those lining up against fluoridation: the Oregon Sierra Club’s Columbia Group, the Portland NAACP, the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute, the Kansas Taxpayers Network and an Indiana-based alternative health company that advocates, among other things, using tanning beds for vitamin D dosage.
On the other side? OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, the Urban League of Portland, the Northwest Health Foundation, the campaign funds from several Democratic state legislators and conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson.

Hm.

Regretably the Oregonian doesn’t seem to have this letter in their oregonlive page, but there was actually a letter in today’s paper arguing the portion of the water district not getting to vote on the measure, which alludes to a kind of “No Fluoridation without Representation”… could be the slogan that brings the measure down if the part of the district can swing the election.

Small boy sitting on his father’s shoulder walking down the street.  Down the street, a woman is dressed, for whatever reason, is a Snow White costume.  He points at her, and says “Hey!  Snow White!”

A few seconds later, the boy laments.  “I wish I could be a girl.”
The dad, with a cautious tremble I attribute to minor hetero-normalitive fears, asks, “Why’s that?”
“Because,” the boy says.  “Then I could use the girl’s bathroom.”

[…]

Now, I know it may be a mistake to analyze the “Kids say the darnedest thing” utterances like this, but…
Huh?
No, really.  I was kind of expecting that the kid would reply — coming off of seeing Snow White — with “Then I could wear a dress” or “be a princess” or some such flashing fancy of Gender Envy —

And here I note that feminists shouldn’t be the only ones worrying about Disney’s Princess-Marketing effect on little girls; Traditionalist Christians may want to worry about its effect on little boys —

— but–
You’re not really missing anything in the girl’s bathroom.  Are you?

Something I knew I would see in quick order when I saw the Portland Mercury’s cover — blurbing why the Sane Opposition Against Water Fluoridation is Wrong, or some such phrasing…

… the Anti-Fluoridation crowd would stick their literature into the boxes.

And so it is.  Interesting, they haven’t done so with the Willamette Week boxes.  Which has the same editorial position for water fluoridation.  But the cover is of “Best New Band”…

A curious thing.  A couple of the reasonings against water fluoridation — inherent in the campaign slogan “Fluoridation Chemicals” — are just kind of obnoxious.  As in — if I go ahead and sympathize with their cause, the reasons would not be “chemicals in the pure water” — which seems to suggest this pure water where the city can just nab pristine water and out of the tap comes one parts H and 2 parts O that has never touched anything between there and here.  The other line lands about where climate change skeptisim and tobacco industry hacks always land: “science divided”.

Of course, there is a line of logic in the Willamette Week’s editorial which is faulty.  Skip to the part about the association of dentists, if they were going on their material interests, would be against water fluoridation.  There’s an interesting “can have it both ways” on the matter — hypothetically, if the national association of dentists or whatever the umbrella group was came out against water fluoridation — um… one could claim they had material interest to do so, and throw away whatever principled opposition by way of the alternative science divided being delivered?  No, that whole part of the column throws me for a loop.