When Confederates become Yankees instead, nothing makes much sense

When it comes to the use of imagery of the old Confederacy, it’s next to impossible to tone down the images so as to downplay just what that attempt at secession from the United States was all about.

The altered, and actual, logo images

You usually wind up coming up with some effort that manages to offend everybody with its lameness. It’s almost like, “Why bother?!?”

BUT THAT DIDN’T stop a Southern Illinois business from trying to find a way to make acceptable the logo of Confederate Railroad – a band that was supposed to be a headlining act at the DuQuoin State Fair next month.

Many of the locals are upset that Illinois officials, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker, cancelled the band’s contract to perform, citing the fact that their band logo includes depictions of the old Confederate battle flag and expresses sympathies for those who favor the memories of an old segregationist society.

While others say that reading such a view into the band’s logo and music goes way too far! It’s just about the music – which is sort of country-fied but also has enough of a rock ‘n’ roll sensibility to it.

It seems that a local business – Black Diamond Harley Davidson – has taken it upon themselves to sponsor the concert, instead of the state of Illinois. Which might sound like a brilliant business move on the part of the company. They’ll get all the good will from the band’s fans who are now more than willing to blame Illinois for cancelling the concert.

BUT IT SEEMS that Black Diamond also wanted to have the good will of those who find offense at Confederacy imagery.

Hence, their advertising materials for the Sept. 5 concert depict an altered version of the band’s logo. The freight train locomotive that usually has Confederate battle flags flying from it now have U.S. flags.

A concept that has the band’s flags even moreso offended than the initial denial of the band’s performance at the state fair.

The same people who were calling for a boycott of the DuQuoin Fair are now saying they may not want to attend this concert either – because they’ll see it as a censored version of the event they really want. They may wind up going to an alternate concert Aug. 27 in Effingham.

WHICH, TO BE honest, is something that the vast majority of Illinoisans wouldn’t pay any attention to if not for all the political hooey that has arisen as a result.

What actually amazes me is that the Harley Davidson dealership may well have opened itself up to litigation, since it would involve an altering of the band’s logo most likely without their consent.

Their attempt at creating a compromise may well wind up biting themselves in the behind. They’re most likely to wind up wishing they’d never bothered – even if they somehow do escape having to pay out some financial settlement.

The negative publicity is likely to stick.

ALTHOUGH I HAVE to admit this wouldn’t be the most stupid maneuver meant to evade the negative overtones of the Confederacy.

Roy White later became a Yankee instead

For that, we’d have to think back to the existence of the Columbus Confederate Yankees. It was a real-live baseball team that existed in the mid-1960s that was a minor league affiliate of the New York Yankees.

Many teams merely attached their own nicknames to those of their minor league ball clubs. But back in that heated era, it was figured that the people of Columbus, Ga., would refuse to support a team called the Yankees. Resulting in the Confederate Yankees that wore a battle flag patch on the sleeves of their pinstriped uniforms that were hand-me-downs of the Yankees themselves.

The result was a stupid image that left many fans confused. What exactly is a “Confederate Yankee?” Probably somebody who rides around on a Confederate train bearing the Stars and Stripes, and thinks everybody else is too confused to tell the difference!

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Is Chicago a tyrant for wanting to ban the taking of up-skirt images & video?

It is an argument I hear occasionally from people with conservative beliefs on social issues – the problem with government trying to regulate our lives is that every time they pass a new law, they manage to steal another piece of our freedom.

Protecting us from perversion? Or hurting our rights?

As though the theoretical version of paradise is no government, and people having the ability to do whatever they want without risk of prosecution.

OF COURSE, THE more rational of individuals realize that government serves as the balancing act, of sorts, to ensure that one person’s pleasure isn’t someone else’s horror.

That certainly is what will be at stake when the City Council meets on Wednesday and includes among their activity a measure meant to protect the women of Chicago (and those ladies who choose to visit our fair city) from having their most private parts placed on the Internet for perverts of the world to view.

It got some ridicule and derision last week when a council committee reviewed an ordinance that includes up-skirt photographs and images among the list of things that can be considered an invasion of privacy.

Some may want to think that this is political people getting worked up over a non-issue. Others may actually think it is their right to take pictures up the skirts of women who happen to catch themselves in a moment of indiscretion.

ACTUALLY, IT’S ABOUT taking into account the fact that some people who try to get these pictures are of the approach that they’re somehow entitled to make some money off of someone else’s exposure.

These are the people to whom I want to scream, “Get a Job, you Loser!!!!” Of course, they probably think the rest of us are “suckers” for working for a living.

Aldermen in recommending the measure pointed out the fact that these up-skirt pictures that will soon become a criminal act have value for the people who take them.

Sure enough, look up “Chicago upskirt” on a search engine and you’ll find a string of websites that feature video snippets and still photographs that seem to be taken by people who hang around underneath staircases (think “el” trains and the stairs leading to lower Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive) with cameras ready.

PERSONALLY, I FELT a tad sleazy looking at these images, which seem to grasp the attention of those amongst us who get a rise out of a few seconds glimpse of panties – or no panties in some cases.

Then again, being in the news-gathering business, most of the up-skirt shots I have seen in my lifetime were those taken by photographers at basketball games who happened to be positioned near the cheerleaders. The pursuit of the perfect view of a player stuffing a ball also produces the occasional shot of a cheerleader with her skirt flopping up over her waist.

Those, of course, become images that never actually make the newspaper.

Personally, I feel a bit stupid that our City Council is compelled to have to pass an ordinance on this issue. It ought to be a common-sense idea that taking pictures up a woman’s skirt without her consent is downright creepy.

THEN AGAIN, WE have a society with some fairly creepy elements. Let’s hope we’re able to get this particular measure approved by the aldermen without anyone making some sort of stink that claims supporting the would-be photographers amounts to “freedom” and the “American way.”

But I’m also realistic enough to know that some people will try to find a loophole to try to get around it.

What happens on windy days when a sudden gust blows a woman’s skirt up in public and we get the perfect glimpse of her panties? Will we now get would-be photographers whipping out their camera-equipped phones in search of the “money shot?”

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LeBron can take his 2nd title and stuff it; he’ll never top the Jordan image

Personally, I find the whole Michael Jordan vs. LeBron James argument to be silly.

Anybody who seriously follows professional athletics (not those who paint themselves all kinds of funky colors to try to get themselves on television) knows there is no definitive way to compare ballplayers of different eras.

IN FACT, ONLY a fool would try to make such an argument seriously. Then again, we have a lot of fools amongst us.

So I’m sure we’re going to hear many people claim that LeBron (whose Miami Heat team won its second-straight NBA title this week, beating the San Antonio Spurs 4 games to 3 in the championship series) is the greatest. We can forget about anything “MJ” accomplished.

We’ll even get those people who will start screaming “six” over and over until they keel over dead from a heart attack. As in the fact that Chicago Bulls teams with Jordan managed to win 6 NBA titles.

Does this mean that if James-led Miami teams manage to come up with five more titles before the kid hangs up his sneakers, he will be the undisputed greatest dribbler ever??!?

IT’S A BATCH of nonsense to think either way. Because there’s nothing James could ever do to detract from the overall image that Jordan created – which went well beyond anything he ever did on the basketball court.

LeBron James is an athlete. Jordan took his skills into creating an image that for many will forever define professional basketball – often taking it to extremes where it seems like we couldn’t escape his image.

His restaurants. His shoes. His cologne. It was everywhere.

The closest one can find to Jordan in terms of celebrity professional athletes is baseball’s Babe Ruth. It doesn’t matter what “numbers” James puts up – his image doesn’t come close. Shaquille O'Neal was more of a celebrity than LeBron. Anybody who tries to get worked up is being ridiculous.

I BRING THIS issue up because I’m trying to anticipate many verbal brawls that could get way too physical (leave it to sports fans to think that their favorite team creates “life or death” issues).

I’m not arguing here that Jordan is better. Although if Jordan were just a ballplayer, I doubt Bulls fans would remember him any more fondly than Bob Love or Horace Grant, or basketball fans remembering Wilt Chamberlain or Kareem Abdul Jabbar!

They certainly wouldn’t have felt compelled to let him have his own NBA franchise – one that shows any skills he has about basketball are limited purely to what he once could do on the court. Nobody expects the Charlotte Hornets to match the Bulls anytime soon. One wonders if the Hornets will ever be as good as the Charlotte Knights -- the underachieving Chicago White Sox minor league affiliate?

In fact, in my mind, the thing for which LeBron James will be most remembered is that he seemed to trigger the modern trend of top-notch high school athletes skipping out on college altogether to jump to the NBA.

IT WORKED OUT for him, although most of them wash out. Anybody remember Eddy Curry – the onetime star of suburban Thornwood High School who didn’t lead the Bulls to anything significant and – the last I heard – was playing professionally in China?

I’m willing to concede that Jordan was the top ballplayer of his era, and James the best of what we see now. Although it’s bound to happen that in a couple of decades there will be somebody on the basketball court whom everybody will want to believe is THE BEST!!! because that’s all they’ve seen in person.

And a whole generation of kids of the future will think of LeBron as some old fool, the way that kids of today are too eager to think of Jordan as just another old fogy.

Besides, those of us in Chicago know full well that the sports team that “matters” these days is the Blackhawks – who could on Saturday put themselves only one win away from a second Stanley Cup hockey championship in four seasons.

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‘Confused politician’ truly redundant. Or, does 'slammer’ serve good beef?

“This isn’t a double-negative?”

GORMAN: Making sure she doesn't vote wrong

That bit of skepticism and concern came from the lips of Cook County Commissioner Elizabeth Doody Gorman, R-Orland Park, when she and her colleagues were voting on a measure Tuesday that had instigated hours of debate at a previous meeting.

GORMAN WAS CONCERNED she was about to vote the “wrong” way on something because maybe the issue was worded in a way that she’d have to vote “no” to support something.

In fact, she wasn’t the only person confused. It took nearly 15 minutes to take a roll-call vote of 16 individuals (county Commissioner Earlean Collins, D-Chicago, was absent) because everybody was clueless about what was happening at that moment.

Commissioner William Beavers, D-Chicago, engaged in a back-and-forth repartee with the board secretary to ensure that his “yes” vote really was an affirmative one that meant exactly what he intended it to mean.

I would say it was amusing to watch. But the fact that it was our tax dollars at work made it most-definitely a chore.

WHAT WAS AT stake was the food service contract for Cook County Jail (yes, if we incarcerate people, we have to feed them).

Aramark, based in Philadelphia, had the contract.

But the county is now going to transfer over to Sioux Falls, S.D.-based CBM Managed Services, which has a division that specializes in food service at correctional facilities across the country.

It seems that one of the potential perks is that CBM is capable of offering the inmates a culinary treat – if they’re willing to pay for it themselves.

ONCE THE TRANSITION is made and things are up and running, inmates being held at the county jail will get one night a week where they can have an Italian beef sandwich for their dinner (a Buona Beef brand sandwich, I’m told).

Before you start getting all worked up about inmates being coddled, keep in mind that the only ones who will get such a sandwich will be those who have enough money in their jail inmate accounts to cover the cost.

But I can envision the rants and rages of the alleged “law and order” types, and perhaps that fear of instigating these people is what caused the county board members to be overly cautious about casting their votes.

Because this is exactly the kind of issue that gets distorted into a nasty attack ad or the subject material for a campaign mailing by some future opponent who figures real people don’t have time to figure out the “truth” behind the attack.

THEN AGAIN, THIS probably was the ultimate example of “fear and ignorance” combined in our government officials. It definitely wasn’t a pretty sight.

In the end, the measure got a 13-1 vote, with county Commissioner Joan Patricia Murphy, D-Crestwood, being the lone “no” vote. Two other commissioners cast “present” votes – which probably means they couldn’t figure out at all what they should do when they were finally confronted with the roll call.

And soon, the inmates of our county jail will have a food option that might make their incarceration while awaiting trial (or serving a short sentence for a minor offense) just slightly more bearable.

Not that I would want to be held as an inmate for any length of time. Getting a sandwich stuffed with something other than bologna just doesn’t seem worth it.

AYKROYD (as Blues): Not a fan of the oatmeal



EVEN IF THE Cook County Jail develops a reputation for serving a quality beef sandwich!

I suspect that for most of us, all we’re going to know about the food at the jail is what we learned from The Blues Brothers film – namely that the oatmeal is lousy.

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Should this have lasted a little longer?

There’s a chance that we will stop officially thinking about Jon Burge, the one-time police commander on the city’s Far South Side who has long been accused of using brutality against those who wound up at the old Pullman Area police headquarters.

A City Council committee on Monday recommended a $7 million payment to settle a lawsuit filed by two men who claim they were tortured while in police custody by officers who were merely following the lead of Burge.

THAT SETTLEMENT IS likely to get final approval come Wednesday. The City Council could put an end to this fiasco that has lingered over Chicago for so many decades.

Burge himself could soon become just another inmate of the Federal Bureau of Prisons system – where he is serving time not for his violent actions as a cop but because he denied them during testimony he gave in a federal court case.

In short, perjury. Just like how Al Capone did his time in prison for income tax evasion – rather than anything he or his racketeers actually did in ratcheting up the violence in Chicago back in the 1920s (an image our city still is trying to live down).

The part of Burge himself becoming just another schnook serving time in prison doesn’t bother me.

YET AFTER ALL these years, I have to admit that a part of me is bothered to see this lawsuit get settled. Just like the Cook County Board earlier this year was eager to settle the lawsuit filed against it because a Felony Review officer working for the state's attorney's office didn't realize how flawed the evidence was in these cases.

For it seems that city officials were more concerned about preventing a deposition from being given in the lawsuit by the man who was Cook County state’s attorney back at the time that Burge and his cop crew were at their peak.

DALEY: What would he have said?



None other than Richard M. Daley, who went on to become the longtime mayor of Chicago and is now an attorney with serious connections (not bad for a guy who had to try repeatedly before he could even pass the bar exam in Illinois so that he could call himself a lawyer).

It really seems that city officials were more concerned about keeping Daley from embarrassing himself (and the city by association) than they were in providing the defendants with compensation for their ordeals.

WHICH INCLUDED NOT only their moments of police torture but the ordeal of a criminal conviction and decades in prison – before it was determined that the police conduct tainted the whole process to the point where it had to be undone.

Since the lawsuit is being settled, there’s no longer a reason for Daley to ever have to open his mouth and talk about the matter while under oath.

Which probably means we’re never going to truly know what happened all those years ago. The Burge name will forevermore cause certain people to smirk, and others the scowl.

The former will be the ones who enjoy the image of a cop “getting what he deserves,” while the latter will be the ones who think that whatever Burge and his crew did is somehow justified – and that the people who suffered somehow “had it coming.”

AS THOUGH ANYONE deserves to have a plastic bad placed over their head by someone who wants the threat of suffocation to serve as the impetus to providing a self-incriminating statement that made a cop’s job of getting a criminal charge against someone, anyone (who cares who really did it) all the more easier.

If anything, that latter attitude is going to linger for years. It may be one that we will never shake off.

Some people will be convinced that the real injustice was committed against the police, and that somehow the money that will be paid out in the settlements is somehow being wasted.

Which is nonsense. But it is the outcome that we’re going to face because our city officials seemed more interested in not doing anything to resolve this ugly situation, and were more concerned with just making it go away!

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And here I just got a new smart phone that supposedly has a quality camera

On the one hand, I happen to believe that anybody who feels the need to whip out their portable phone to use the built-in camera to take pictures of anything that happens to capture their fancy is engaging in pretty insipid behavior.

My new 'toy,' and soon I'll have a restriction



Then again, I do believe people have a right to act in ways that are stupid. It’s their choice.

WHICH IS WHY I can’t help but think that a bill now pending before Gov. Pat Quinn is such a gross overreaction. I don’t see the need to codify the fact that anybody who feels the need to pull out their portable camera and take pictures of an accident scene is being insipid.

The bill in question got its final vote of approval in the General Assembly on Monday. The Illinois House backed a measure making it illegal for any automobile driver to make a call with their portable phone within 500 feet of an auto accident scene where emergency vehicles have flashing lights.

It also would be illegal for people to send pictures and video messages while driving their cars – regardless of whether there’s an auto accident occurring nearby.

In theory, there is an exemption that allows someone in a car to pull out their cell phone and make a call to report the emergency situation. But I can’t help but think that if there are ambulances and police squad cars around the area with their lights flashing, it means they’re already aware of the accident.

SO WHERE’S THE real exemption?

Personally, I would never feel compelled to whip out my phone to snap a picture of an auto accident I happened to drive past – even though the Nokia Lumia smart phone I got just last week (my old Blackberry completely died) supposedly has as one of its selling points a higher-quality camera than most hand-held phones have.

Whenever I see people walking down the street feeling the need to suddenly snap a picture of something that they randomly encountered in life, all too often I can’t help but think it’s such a waste of time.

I usually don’t think to say anything, figuring it’s their business what they do – or what they choose to clutter up their phones’ memory with. So I can sort of see the idea of a law addressing these situations.

IT’S JUST THAT this bill seems like such overkill – even if its backers claim their concern is reducing the chance of someone causing yet a second accident because they were paying too much attention to the first one they were trying to shoot pictures of.

Besides, a part of me can’t help but wonder if this is someone trying to come up with yet another law making it a sordid act to take pictures of police in action.

We already have those laws that make video without police permission a potential felony, and it is a good thing that the courts have shown themselves to be hostile toward the idea of enforcing the letter of that law!

Does somebody really fear that somebody is going to capture a moment on digital that might make law enforcement conduct at an accident scene look less than honorable? An embarrassing moment caught for posterity (or at least until the camera owner gets bored with the shot and deletes it)!

WE HAVE SERIOUS problems confronting our state Legislature. I’d like to see some effort put by our politicians into addressing them.

So while I understand that our legislators are capable of addressing many issues at once, I can’t help but wonder how much brain matter that could have gone into balancing a budget or properly funding Medicaid or pensions got put into addressing the “scourge” of those handheld phone cameras snapping shots of police milling around an accident scene?

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EXTRA: What goes through peoples’ minds about King Day these days?

There are times I wonder just how much have we managed to trivialize the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. – all in an attempt to make him more acceptable for society as a whole.

KING: Have we lost the 'real' man?

As we participate in ceremonies all across the country on Monday to pay homage to King’s memory – just what “memory” are we remembering?

BECAUSE MUCH OF what we hear these days – some 44 years after the man’s death – makes him sound like an African-American version of a “peacenik” or “hippie;” images which themselves have been tampered with by the conservative ideologues to try to trivialize their significance.

I can’t help but wonder just how many people of an older generation are gnashing their teeth and silently seething at the very thought of an official holiday (and now, even an official memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.) to pay tribute to the man whom they once lambasted as an “agitator” and a “Communist” – to use a couple of the nicer epithets that used to get tossed out with regards to King.

I’d like to think the fact that the only people who still use those terms to describe King are Ku Klux Klan members (and even then, only when they’re looking to provoke a brawl) would be evidence of our society having changed to the point where we now realize how thoroughly stupid we ever were for thinking such a thing.

But I can’t be that naïve. Younger generations won’t ever fully appreciate the contempt level once felt for King – which is both good AND bad.

GOOD THAT THEY don’t get the hate first-hand, but bad that they might not appreciate the degree to which King and his followers had to overcome. Because what they sought is really so obvious that only the biggest of nitwits were opposed to him.

Unfortunately, too many of the rest of us who don’t want to be called on our trash-talk of the past were more than willing to sit back and let the ideologues rant and defer to them so as to avoid a confrontation.

It strikes me as so similar to the debate taking place these days whenever immigration reform and the growing Latino population comes up that it makes me think we really haven’t learned much of anything.

What made this thought boil over in my brain was a King Day celebration I attended Monday in south suburban South Holland, where the Rev. Reginald Williams, Jr., of First Baptist Church in University Park (all the way down at the southernmost edge of the Chicago area) gave his own assessment of King’s image – which he calls, “a man taken sorely out of context.”

BECAUSE TOO MANY people reduce King to a few lines of “peace” rhetoric without placing it in the context of just how opposed some segments of our society were to such “peace.”

As Williams put it, “they made him a wimp who held a utopian dream.”

He cited, as an example, the famed “I Have a Dream” speech made from Washington, D.C., where everybody remembers the line about, “My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

But we then ignore the line in the same speech in which King said that “Negroes” were in the nation’s capital that day to “cash a check” for freedom and unalienable rights, except that, “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”

REMEMBERING THE REAL King and his struggles might very well stir up the old resentments. Yet trying to ignore the resentments as though they never existed merely trivializes the whole matter – which is something we should never want to do.

Because then, King’s memory becomes just another holiday – perhaps a black version of President’s Day. One in which some people get some time off without really understanding why, and some businesses concoct special sales to try to get those people to use their days off to shop some more.

It may bolster the economy a bit, yet I can’t help but think that Williams was on to something on Monday when he said, “Corporate America has created an image to use King to sell anything from bedsheets to chicken wings.”

Somehow, I doubt that King – when he wrote his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’—had in mind trying to bolster the bottom line for Shark’s Fish & Chicken!

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What makes cheerleading worthwhile?

Let me state up front that I agree with the mother of a six-year-old girl from Michigan who was offended that the cheerleading squad her daughter was a part of was doing chants that were sexually suggestive.

To hear a six-year-old chant about her sore back, tight skirt and jiggling “booty” is in poor taste. Only a complete nitwit (including the coaches of this particular squad) thinks there are any circumstances under which this is appropriate.

BUT WHILE THAT particular six-year-old has received international news attention for her plight (she got kicked off the squad when her mother complained that the chant was trashy for such little girls), a part of me can’t help but wonder what was going through that mother’s head to begin with.

To me, the whole idea of cheerleading at age 6 is just inappropriate because I do associate it with attempts to put sexual images into the atmosphere surrounding a ballgame. So why should we be surprised that this particular squad was doing the same thing that many other cheerleading squads across the country are doing?

Admittedly, there is a difference between a six-year-old and a 16-year-old saying such things – although one could argue that even a 16-year-old (who legally is considered to be underage for sexual purposes) shouldn’t be chanting such things.

But I can comprehend why someone running this particular youth cheerleading program might be misguided enough to think they’re standing up for the rights of the majority – who probably got into cheerleading because they want to do the same things as the older girls.

WHAT REINFORCED THIS idea in my head was an experience I had Sunday while waiting to get my hair cut. It was a unisex salon, which means that among the women and men ahead of me in line was a 16-year-old high school cheerleader whose mother was also there to watch to ensure that her daughter didn’t try to get her hair cut in any style that might be considered trashy.

It was during that point that I heard her talk about the chants her daughter does. She wasn’t complaining about taste as much as the fact that the cheerleaders often didn’t seem to have a clue what was actually happening on the playing field.

As she put it, one of her daughter’s squad’s cheers involved saying that the other team was “playing like shit,” then giving pelvic thrusts to emphasize the dirty word. The only problem was that the squad’s team was getting its own butt whipped at the time.

That IS the attitude of modern-day cheerleading – crude taunts, combined with those short-skirted uniforms that often feature plenty of bare midriff. Teenage girls doing these things under any other context would create a situation for the police to have to deal with - particularly for the men in the stands who happen to be watching.

IT IS A sexual display. I honestly believe that if people tried to alter cheerleading to de-sex it, we’d head much more in the way of grumbling and moaning. In fact, that’s what we’re hearing from the squad involved in the Michigan incident, which justifies kicking a six-year-old off the squad on the grounds that they defending “what everybody wants” as opposed to “what one person wants.”

Which is why I wonder how naïve the mother in this particular instance was if she thought that having her six-year-old become a cheerleader was somehow protecting her from such lascivious images. I would think that it amounts to deliberately exposing the kid to such an atmosphere, which I think is wrong.

Now I know I’m going to hear from some mother-types who are going to tell me that I’m being a dirty old man for thinking that cheerleading is inherently about sexual decoration for the gym or the football field during the game. They’re going to claim that it is about the athletic movement and the stunts.

The flips and leaps and splits in mid-air.

IN SHORT, THEY’RE going to claim it is a more colorful version of gymnastics. Which I might believe if not for the fact that I have never seen any kind of serious gymnast perform in a uniform with a skirt so short that it continually rides up so we can constantly see brightly-colored panties on display.

This is the reason why so many people have a hard time keeping a straight face whenever cheerleader advocates argue that their activity is a full-fledged sport, rather than just a sexily-clad pep squad for the real sports.

That ought to be the reason we appreciate the “cheerleaders” who work for professional football and basketball teams. They’re honest. There is no pretense that anything they’re doing in those tight, tight shorts and halter tops is in any way athletic.

No amount of broadcasts on ESPN2 of the cheerleading competitions are going to cover up the fact that many of the people who are tuning in to watch are merely into ogling the girls, with a few other twisted types rooting for an accident that leaves someone injured.

PUTTING A SIX-year-old on the track to want to do this when they’re really too young to comprehend the significance of what they’re doing strikes me as a lack of judgment on the part of a parent, even if it is not quite as sleazy as the people who really think that six-year-olds should be chanting about “shaking our booties.”

I just can’t help but think there are more worthwhile activities for six-year-olds to take part in. Such as my own niece who went through a brief cheerleading phase, but now at age 8 is showing some interest (and talent) at the piano.

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