I have mixed feelings about all these Confederate statues coming down, but ESPN’s move Tuesday is ridiculous. Rick Astley and Foo Fighters team up because, you know, sure.

We’ve all seen the reports on the news for the past few weeks, coming in from all parts of the country. San Diego, California. North Carolina. Virginia. Montana. From all parts of America, Confederate statues, monuments and plaques have been coming down.

“They’re a symbol of our racist past!” “How can we honor these men in our parks and neighborhoods, how can we let their awful actions, the way that men like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis tried to split apart our country, just stand there and be honored?”

And on an immediate, visceral level, I get it. There’s no way in 2017 African-Americans, or any Americans, should look at Lee or Davis or Nathan Bedford Forrest and give them any kind of praise or honor. The ridiculousness of our Orange Grifter President saying ‘they’re trying to take away our heritage, and our culture!” again on Tuesday night never fails to make me shake my head in wonder.

But I also feel like, and again, I’m still working through my feeling on this, I also feel like: Who cares about a stupid statue in a park?

There are thousands of statues in thousands of parks all across America, and ask yourself, when you’re in a park in your city or when traveling somewhere else, do you really take a look or even notice these statues? Do you spend minutes of your life reading the plaques and genuflecting before them? Maybe you do. I certainly don’t. These statues were mostly built long, long ago, for one reason or another, and now mainly serve as places for pigeons to poop, or tired walkers to take a rest.

I’m not, in ANY WAY, saying that taking down these statues leads to a slippery slope of renaming every Thomas Jefferson public school or George Washington monument, because hey, they owned slaves too (Note to our moron-in-chief: Owning slaves not quite equal to leading a revolution and breaking away from America to fight a war. As my smart and funny e-migo Luke Martin asked on Twitter recently, “Do other countries have monuments to men who took up arms to rebel and leave the country or is that just a thing in the United States?” Answer to that is no.)

But I just … I don’t know. I don’t know what taking down statues really accomplishes, other than symbolically making a knee-jerk reaction to the current climate. Does it end racism in America? Does it change the mind of people who look up to Lee and Davis as heroes? Probably not.

(As an aside to all of this, did you see this story Tuesday night about ESPN pulling an Asian-American broadcaster named Robert Lee from a college football game at the University of Virginia, because of “sensitivities” in light of recent events? The dude is ASIAN! He wasn’t alive in 1861! ESPN also cited the unfortunate “coincidences” of his name.
I mean… this is about as asinine as it gets. ESPN in a statement later Tuesday claimed that Lee himself said he’d be more comfortable not doing the assignment, but I don’t know… just a ridiculous overreaction by ESPN here.)

Like I said, I’m not sure what the right answer is regarding these statues or monuments, nor am I sure how I feel. It’s more complicated than I expected.

**Next up today, I present the following, without comment. My beautiful Foo Fighters-loving wife told me about this;the Dave Grohl-led band did a concert over the weekend and at the end, they invited Rick Astley on stage, and then they proceeded to Rick Roll the audience by playing his awful 1980s hit “Never Gonna Give You Up,” but in a hard rock kind of way.

It’s quite the spectacle.

**Finally today, I think I’ve said this before but I think some articles are written in the New York Times just for me. Like this one, for example. Eddie Murphy’s hilarious 1983 stand-up comedy special “Delirious” was a huge staple of my childhood; I watched it, listened to it, repeated its best lines over and over with my friends. It was awesome.

Maybe the best part of the special his Eddie’s “Ice Cream Man,” bit, and if you’re already laughing, you’re like me. The New York Times broke down the brilliance of the 4-minute bit, and it’s actually really great.

Of course, the whole bit itself (above) is worth watching first. Definitely NSFW, in case you weren’t sure.

The Texas school board is bat-shit crazy, VP Joey B entertains again, and Rove gets slammed

I make fun of the state of Florida on here a lot  because A, I live here, and 2, because it’s just such a bizarre place.

But as odd as the Sunshine State is, I’ll still venture to say that Texas is a wackier place. By a country mile. (I always liked that expression, even though I never lived in the country.)

You may have heard about this, but if not, I’m here to tell you that the schoolchildren of Texas are in for an awfully rude awakening when they get their new textbooks.

Last week the Texas Board of Education voted to significantly change the school curriculum. Some of the things they are modifying are reducing the scope of teaching Latin history (because hey, only white people’s history is important, right?), a more positive showing of Cold War anticommunism in the 1950s (that Joe McCarthy fellow was right to accuse every American of being a Russki sympathizer! They all just lied to Congress back then!), and my personal favorite, de-emphasizing Thomas Jefferson and his writings.

Let that sink in for a moment. THOMAS JEFFERSON! One of the most important men in the history of the world, guy who wrote that little piece called the Declaration of Independence, is not going to be given prominence in Texas history books.

Why, you ask? Easy. He helped draft that little “separation of church and state” thing that’s still the law of the land. And you see, in Texas, that’s not a real popular position.

What’s really scary is that Texas’ textbooks often filter over to other states with shortages, so it’s not just the loons of the Loon Star State whose kids will be affected by this.

De-emphasizing Thomas Jefferson. Un-by-god-believable.

Psst, hey Mexico, got a second? Want to get a rematch in that whole 19th century war thing with those guys?

**I’ve been wondering for a while who, exactly, Joe Biden is in this administration, and yep, it turns out he’s Fredo Corleone. He’s the lovable guy who can’t help screwing up, and yet he never curbs his behavior or stops being the guy he always is.

And we can’t help loving him. Tuesday’ ole’ Joe was at it again, saying the F word with a thousand microphones around at President Obama’s health care reform press conference. Ah, Joe.



**Finally, Karl Rove is a desperate man. Desperate to be paid attention to. Desperate for people not to notice that all he and his party stand for now is obstructionism, and extreme point of views not shared by intelligent Americans.

Watch as David Plouffe, Obama’s adviser (and a Delaware graduate like me!) calmly points out how out of touch and out of step Rove and his GOP buddies are. I was delighted by this clip: