MARTY B TV: DALLAS COWBOY MARTELLUS BENNETT - MY APOLOGY(I GET MONEY APOLOGY)

From the Dallas Morning News:

"The Dallas Cowboys have fined tight end Martellus Bennett one game check, roughly $22,000, for making a derogatory YouTube video that was released Monday, according to two sources.

The video was taken down Tuesday and Bennett apologized Thursday in a different video.

Bennett, who is African-American, used profanity and derogatory terms to describe African-Americans and gays in the initial video. He also wore a white autographed Cowboys helmet during the video."

Slings & Arrows

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME since being a Dallas Cowboys fan has been this embarrassing, if recent reports of widespread dysfunction, bad morale and lack of discipline are to be believed. Seems like everyone and their proverbial mama has the inside dope on why, or at least a plausible theory on how it's all devolved since that 12-1 start just a season removed. The problem here for the Cowboy fan is what to believe: separating fact from fiction, sensationalism from reality, and long-time biased Cowboy haters from objective, reputable sources.

This morning the first thing I hear out of my trusty old Westclox is ESPN's Mike & Mike discussing the state of the Cowboys, specifically an article that morning in the Dallas Morning News that excoriated Jerry Jones for his mismanagement and lambasted Tony Romo for his play down the stretch. Actually, Greenberg and Golic went on to stick up for Tony Romo, who got his share of the blame for the Cowboys' late season collapse.

Greenberg said, "If you're giving up on Romo, you're out of your mind. He can still be great." Then they kind of went around the league and concluded that only 8 other teams really had better "quarterback situations" than Dallas.

But if Cowboy bashing is the cottage industry that it seems to be, then oh what a week it's been for untold legions of Cowboy haters across this great nation. No matter where you turned, there was another report of Team Turmoil's sorry state, more chronicles of their impending demise, free advice on how to right the ship, or plane as it were, and of course the low blows and cheap shots. It was about as pretty as a lengthy Joan Rivers closeup. Here's a sampling:

From Calvin Watkins in Tuesday's Dallas Morning News:

"Multiple sources close to the team paint a picture of turmoil inside the locker room far greater than originally thought, and the organization is determined to solve the problems. Sources say there were many issues this season that call into question team discipline, commitment and accountability.

The team charter left late for road games five times this season because players were late to the airport according to three sources. The total represented more than half of the eight regular season away games. Sources declined to name the late players. The Philadelphia trip was delayed by more than an hour.

Compounding those disciplinary issues was a growing problem of relationships between players and coaches. Sources said players lost respect for defensive coordinator Brian Stewart, who came across more as a player than a coach and made what they termed questionable play-calling. According to five sources, several offensive players lost respect for Garrett for his failure to corral quarterback Tony Romo in practice.

Romo, sources said, often forced throws in practice and often did not treat practice work consistently. The quarterback's practice habits were so bad, sources said, that they affected the way he played in games and could have factored into the offense's problems."

From Jean-Jacques Taylor's in Wednesday's Dallas Morning News:

"Your Cowboys are the NFL's laughingstock these days. Folks chuckle at the notion of the team plane regularly leaving late for games because players were tardy – no matter how desperately the Cowboys try to spin it by blaming weather or mechanical issues. They laugh at the absurdity of players who earn eight-digit signing bonuses being fined $100 for being late to meetings or missing treatment sessions. Ridiculous.

These days, the owner is a joke. So is the coach. We all know the team is a joke, after its annual December collapse culminated with a pathetic performance in a 44-6 loss to Philadelphia. It doesn't have to be this way forever. Obviously, the Cowboys could make some stunning off-season moves to create a change in culture that will ultimately lead to success.

After six seasons of winning football games at a .565 clip and making three playoff appearances – no wins, though – and capturing one NFC East title, your Cowboys are a joke again. Now, they won't like that characterization. They'll fume. So be it. Occasionally, the truth hurts. But if Jerry is mad, then he should be angry at himself for putting this collection of ill-fitting, underachieving parts together. Or for allowing Tony Sparano to leave for South Beach without recognizing his talent as a head coach. Or for a group of faux stars who led the league in penalties and ranked near the top in turnovers.

The franchise is in shambles. It lacks discipline and leadership. The players do as they please. Accountability is a dirty word. Leadership in the front office and locker room is non-existent. And Jerry wonders why we consider these Cowboys a joke."

Troy Aikman checked in on Tony Romo's practice habits:

"Somewhere in there somebody doesn't think that (Romo) is doing what it is he is supposed to be doing, which I find hard to believe only because I've had the opportunity on a number of opportunities to visit with him. I've talked to him before a number of games in production meetings. He is a real historian when it comes to the game. It's important to him. He wants to be good. And I think that he's got skills that are very unique.

I think maybe things happened so quickly for Tony in terms of obscurity to all of a sudden national spotlight that he hasn't fully grasped what being the Cowboys quarterback is all about. And you don't go to Cabo the week before a playoff game. You just don't do it...To say 'I don't worry about perception,' you better worry about perception because it is a big part of making it through some very difficult times...I just thought you never wanted to give...anyone reason to think you didn't play well other than you just didn't play well."

From Albert Breer (Sporting News):

"The Dallas Cowboys’ 13-3 season of 2007 was seen as a jumping-off point to a new era of glory. It explains why the Cowboys spent $200 million to sign a handful of veteran players in the offseason. It shows why team officials thought the risk of acquiring Adam “Pacman” Jones was worth it. It’s the reasoning for burning two high picks, one in the middle of the first round, to get wideout Roy Williams in midseason. That 13-3 season? It looks like it could be the high point in a tumble down a steep slope.

But that’s hardly the beginning or end of problems involving the team. Sources have indicated that a divide between the offense and defense grew as the defense rose to the top of NFL rankings, and the offense was splintered by burgeoning controversy involving quarterback Tony Romo, receiver Terrell Owens and tight end Jason Witten late in the season. And in the same way, once the air of accountability that Bill Parcells demanded wore off, after Parcells had been gone for about a year, it wasn’t coming back.

I am very aware that we have the visibility that we have,” Jerry Jones told the Dallas media on Tuesday. “With all of that goes a lot of criticism.” Sometimes, it’s deserved. And yes, sometimes America’s Team is victim to its own high profile. But this isn’t one of those times. The equity built on a 13-3 season has circled the drain."

From Randy Galloway's Thursday Star-Telegram column:

"For the last 20 years, or four U.S. American head coaches later, King Jerry of Cowboy Kingdom has experimented with all forms of government leadership. He had given his country the soft-softer-softest head coach method, and King Jerry also has gone with a couple of iron-fisted dictators. You don’t have to be a Commie to know that democracy based on pacifist leadership has seriously failed in Cowboy Nation. The only success (Jimster), and the only progress (Big Bill) came with leaders who made Castro seem like Howdy Doody. Speaking of puppets, Jerry certainly likes to appoint wooden heads.

The blame, of course, goes to the King. It’s not news that Jerry is a football idiot. But at the moment, Cowboys Parkway in Irving is the Wall Street of the NFL, where a combination of greed and stupidity has reached a crisis point. This is the worst moment of King Jerry’s 20-year reign, even with a roster that is moderately rich in talent, at least on paper.

...Tony Romo should and would be ranked as the No. 1 team concern. The game is about the quarterback. There is no worry in the NFL like quarterback worries, and Romo is now a huge worry. But despite needing a lube job on his brain and his game, Tony currently sinks to third — I said third — on the Cowboy Kingdom list of biggest headaches.

No. 1, by far, is the toxic chemical disaster that spilled across the locker room in December, and shows absolutely no sign of being resolved.Then there’s the No. 2 biggest headache for the Cowboys — lack of locker-room leadership — which directly connects with No. 1, and even No. 3.

Over many years, going back to Tom Landry, we’ve seen some bad teams at Valley Ranch, most of them void of adequate talent. But only in about ’96 or ’97 (as the demise of the Dynasty Days began), can I remember anything remotely close to this mess, and at least to me, this is worse than that."

And finally, from Tim Cowlishaw in Thursday's Dallas Morning News:

"Mike Shanahan has replaced Wade Phillips as a head coach before. Clearly, it's time for him to do it again. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones can put to bed all these tales of woe at Valley Ranch with one easy hiring. All the talk of loose discipline, of in-fighting between teammates, between players and coaches, all the stuff that sounds so crazy and in some cases so irrelevant can be shoved aside.

Here's why the Cowboys can't continue with the Wade Phillips era. Thirteen years and 13 NFC teams. That's what the NFC championship, once a regular playground for your Cowboys, now represents. It has been 13 seasons since the Cowboys played in an NFC title game. That's the longest streak in club history. The previous longest was nine years – Tom Landry's last six seasons and Jimmy Johnson's first three. Now, it has been 13 seasons under five head coaches, which immediately tells you the problem has more to do with Jones than the coaches themselves.

Unless Jones truly believes that "all publicity is good publicity" and he thinks the stories coming out of Valley Ranch for two months now are helping him sell tickets to his new stadium, then Jones knows it's time for major fundamental change at the top.

Or at least as close to the top as Jones will allow any coach to get. All Jones has to do is make that splash during Super Bowl week that he so dearly loves."

THEN TONY ROMO himself weighed in, assuring fans that not making the playoffs was just as devastating to him as it was to them. This became a big issue after Romo seemed to shake off the 44-6 season-ending loss to the Eagles too easily, saying that he was disappointed but that winning a championship wasn't a matter of life and death to him ("If this is the worst thing that ever happens to me, then I'll have lived a pretty good life").

Romo told the Dallas Morning News' Todd Archer that he

"might have tried to find a silver lining to talk myself into feeling OK. But I'm still not OK with it." After that game, Romo collapsed in the shower because of rib cartilage injury. He missed three games with a fractured pinkie, suffered a 13-stitch gash on his chin in the first game and injured his back later in the season, while going through other maladies.

"I think this was definitely the most trying physical year I've had in my athletic career," Romo said. "Sometimes you have to go through that, and if you do go through something like that, you can be stronger."

Romo did not want to talk about his relationship with Terrell Owens, joking, "Haven't we been through that already?" or his practice performance, which sources questioned late in the season.

However, Romo has said he treats practices like games in order to be ready for any situation that might arise when things are for real, and his coaches have never questioned his work in practice.

"I promise you," Romo said, "this football team is going to be a good football team next year."

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For a guy whose career record is 27-12 as a starting QB, it sometimes seems like Michael Vick gets better press than Tony Romo lately.

A look at the numbers shows his 81 TDs versus 46 INTs is good enough for a lifetime 94.7 QB rating. However, Romo has become way too cavalier with the football, adding unnecessary fumbles to the risks he takes throwing passes downfield.

Somehow the story of the overachieving undrafted free agent who came from nowhere to become starting QB of the Dallas Cowboys has become overshadowed by the perception that Romo is a celebrity athlete who has become too full of himself.

And whereas once, during the height of Romomania, you would have needed a large fleet of Winnebagos to transport Tony Romo's bandwagon of glad-handers and well-wishers, now all you'd need are a few Little Red Wagons.

As Romo told Peter Jackal of his hometown paper, the Wisconsin Journal Times, in a January 18th column called "Romo's Healing Process Has Begun":

"Believe me, the NFL is such a reality show. Week to week, you’re the best player in the league to the worst player in the league. It all depends on what you’ve done for me lately. That’s part of the game and you understand that. It consumes a lot of your life, this game. I think I’m very lucky to do what I’m doing and have the people around me that I have. It keeps everything in perspective. But it’s also very difficult.”

Almost as difficult as being a Cowboy fan these days.

No Pants Subway Ride 2009

Ah, to be young and clueless...

Kleenex - Ain't You (1978)

LIFE by Alternative TV

Sham 69 - Hey Little Rich Boy

Crass - Do They Owe Us A Living

The Kinks - Dead End Street

A Bush Bash

OF COURSE I'M BIASED, but I may have just created the ultimate George W. Bush-bashing CD. Now, the search for the perfect mix tape has been an ongoing activity of mine from way back in the Album & Cassette Age, almost Sisyphean in its ultimate unattainability and pure unreachableness. Indeed, there may be no such thing as a perfect mix of music: I realize perfect for me may not be perfect for y'all, and vice-versa. But most of us can agree that it's high time we mark the end of our long, long national nightmare, and to that end I offer up a soundtrack, because to realize that two depraved, corrupted Sons of Bushes were allowed to govern this silly little nation-state of ours for 12 of the past 20 years is enough to blow a seismic hole in the sanest of minds.

Anyway, if you go to Soundboard.com, you can find audio clips of the outgoing p(R)esident himself butchering the mother tongue with a severity heretofore unmatched. For instance, the mix starts off with his infamous "Fool Me Once" gaffe--

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

--followed up with Neil Young's Walk On. Simple, but effective, as in WOULD YOU PLEASE EXIT THE WORLD STAGE NOW THAT YOU'RE FINISHED SCREWING EVERYTHING UP. Now, I could have been obvious and followed that up with Young's "Campaigner" ("Even Richard Nixon has got soul..."), or maybe something from his own recent anti-Bush album, Living With War, but that would break an elemental rule of mixtape/CD-making: Thou Mayest Only Use One Cut Per Artist, No Exceptions. I didn't make the rule, but it's one I follow religiously, for better or worse, unless of course it's a Double Shots or Triple Play compilation where you set out to pair two or three songs per artist in hopes of harmonic convergence, world peace or some similar lofty goal.

I stumbled on the phenomenon of the MP3 Blog quite by accident a few months ago. I was looking for some song lyrics, and lo and behold a new universe slowly revealed itself to me, and it was Good and Plentiful it somewhat borderline legal. These sites, with names like Star Maker Machine, Boogie Woogie Flu, Aquarium Drunkard, snuhthing/anything, Locust Street and Rising Storm, typically feature heartfelt, passionate writing about songs and albums and such that touched a chord, sparked a feeling, changed a life, or just sounded good together.

We go from the aforementioned "Walk On" to "Harlem Shuffle," a song covered by the Rolling Stones a few decades back. Turns out the original version was by Bob & Earl. Also turns out Earl Lee Nelson died last year, both facts I learned on a Street called Locust just a few short days ago.

The mix moves on with a clip of clueless Bush trying to explain what "Sovereignty" is to an audience that can scarcely believe its ears, such are the obvious mental shortcomings on display by the titular leader of the proverbial free world. Remember that beauty from 2004? When asked about Indial tribal issues, Bush responded thusly:

"Tribal sovereignty means that; it's sovereign. I mean, you're a — you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities." (see it here)

I truly believe that Bush had some kind of reverse King Midas thing going on these last 8 years, where everything this clueless putz touched literally blew up in his/our face(s). Assuming, that is, you weren't in the defense or oil services industry. It would be funny in a surreal kind of way if we weren't all living with the tragic consequences. It is as if Kenny Lay was in charge of the whole goddamn country these last 8 years, but instead of just running Enron into the ground...well, you know the rest. Now, after he physically vacates the premises, and following some sort of exorcism of his cursed spirit, the national karma can finally begin its healing process.

But let's return again to the issue at hand, my fellow 'mericans, as we continue our Music for a Bush Bash mix. Following the second Bush gaffe, we segue into Bob Dylan's "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", a somewhat obscure track from the Highway 61 sessions that never made it onto the album but easily sits among my 5 all-time favorite Dylan songs. It's got a slightly venomous, accusatory tone (said venom rumored to be directed toward Andy Warhol), similar to "Positively 4th Street" and "Queen Jane Approximately," only with better, more frantic guitar work. Not a political tune per se, but as I may or may not have already said, I'm going for timeless subtlety here.

Next it's "White as Diamonds" by someone who apparently calls herself Alele Diane. I downloaded the song like 2 days ago, have no idea what it's about, but it's folkish and I decided to squeeze it in. It may be a reach, but you don't want to be too dogmatic while trying to stick to the theme. Only time will tell and even time has its off moments. You don't need me to tell you that.

(Officially decided to call the mix A Bush Bash. Notice the play on words, Bash meaning to harshly criticize as well as the more vernacular party. Man, am I on my game today or what?)

We get back to basics with Billy Bragg (under the pseudonym Johnny Clash) singing -- get this -- "Bush War Blues" with lines like "Troops in Iraq wanna know what they're righting for, it's George W. Bush's reelection war." Can't remember where I found this, but if I can't use it now, then when, knowwhatimean? I think you do.

We're really rolling along now, so I hit you with Joe Strummer's "Forbidden City," followed by Kathleen Edwards' "In State," the Kinks' "Some Mother's Son" (Some mother's son lies in a field/ Someone has killed some mother's son today/Head blown up by some soldier's gun) and then a spoken word dealio by William Burroughs called "When Did I Stop Wanting to be President?" I've never really listened to it in its entirety, but I have a good feeling it's gonna fit into the mix both literally and figuratively.

The next song at first seems like a real head scratcher: a cover of the Beatles' "Run For Your Life" by one Nancy Sinatra. Lyrically it kind of mirrors how a whole lot of us feel about the former Decider-In-Chief. Think about it and get back to me later. I got all day here.

We're still only about halfway through this 80-minute shindig when I throw "Fake Empire" by Brooklyn's own The National. I know, I know, I'm namedropping here, but when it's serving a higher purpose it's not as pathetic as it looks at first glance.

We got a little retro with Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man." Sure, it's essentially a love song, but imagine if you will a disgraced Bush lip-syncing along to a line like "I'll be what I am, Solitary Man." I know I will.

The home stretch begins with the Yardbirds' "Stroll On," which is actually "Train Kept a-Rollin'" with slightly different lyrics, but it's too good a song to pass up no matter what the context, followed by "Cry Tough," a reggae song by Alton Ellis. That brings us to another fairly hard and fast mix CD rule: There's really no reason not to include at least one reggae or ska song in every compilation. Next is XTC's White Album-ish "Dear God."

We start to close things out with an alternate version of the Byrds' "One Hundred Years From Now," then Captain Beefheart's "I'm Gonna Booglarize You," Carbon/Silicon's "What the Fuck" and the Clash's swirling "Somebody's Got Murdered." For the unitiated, Carbon/Silicon is Mick Jones' new band. C'mon, you're better than that.

Commander Cody provides a nice change of pace next with "Daddy's Gonna Treat You Right," and in our context let's say the words can get a little creepy. Then it's "Be Stiff" by Devo, and finally "God Save the USA" by the reliably incendiary Pennywise.

So that's it. I think we learned a little here today and, more importantly, it's now safe to celebrate the end of Bush's Reign of Error while simultaneously looking forward to better days.