The Balance Cosmic, by Mike Gold Brainiac On Banjo #284, collect ‘em all! – @MDWorld

July 23, 2012 Mike Gold 1 Comment

They say you can’t make this stuff up. As a professional heroic fantasy editor, I respond: “Of course you can. They just won’t pay you enough.” Well, hot damn, I’ve now got to reconsider my snappy comeback.

Perhaps you heard the story about the new Chicago Cubs co-owner, Joe Ricketts, who was involved in a bit of brouhaha two months ago. The New York Times said his Political Action Committee, The Ending Spending Action Fund, had a $10 million ad campaign in the works to “attack President Obama in ways that Republicans have so far shied away,” calling for “running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright.” The whole thing was pretty damn racist as well as religionist, and it withered in the cold light of day. Certainly, Mr. Ricketts – who describes himself as “Libertarian half the time, Rush Limbaugh the other half,” has quieter and less traceable ways to spend his fortune. For example, anybody can send money to the Koch Brothers’ PAC.

So now it turns out Joe has a daughter who is also a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs. In fact, Laura Ricketts is the first openly gay Major League Baseball team owner. That sounds a lot cooler than it really is; why shouldn’t there be an openly gay MLB team owner? Laura’s also a co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s LGBT Leadership Council and a fundraiser for Barack Obama. And she’s got plenty of money as well.

So what’s Laura doing with it?

Laura got together with actor Jane Lynch, tennis legend Billie Jean King, businesswoman Sarah Schmidt (petroleum distributor U.S. Venture; yes, you’ve got that right, that’s oil money!), gay rights activist Urvashi Vaid and onetime newspaper publisher Alix Ritchie to launch L-PAC.

No, that’s not the name of the next James Bond villain. So what’s L-PAC?

“L,” in case you don’t watch teevee, stands for “lesbian.” And PAC still stands for “political action committee.”

According to the Associated Press, their initial goal is a mere one million bucks, although they’d be thrilled if they can raise more. The wire service (Whya service? Whya no cater?) speculates they’ll spend some of the money aiding the Senate campaign of Wisconsin Representative Tammy Baldwin, who is openly gay and a strong same-sex marriage advocate. As of this writing, Tammy’s polling within four points of former Republican state governor Tommy Thompson, who is not to be confused with Tommy Tune.

I don’t know who said “what goes around comes around,” but I do know what Cubs’ superstar shortstop Ernie Banks always said.

Ernie always said “let’s play two.”

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place. He also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.