Is that you Clyde? Seriously, this isn't cool! I'm the symbol this town needs! Not you!

Yesterday in the Quick Links I relayed the story of a proposed group of vigilantes that would "activate" (their words, not mine) if the city were to lay off 43 police officers this summer. Everybody and their mothers agreed that it was a horrible idea... ok, well everybody with a brain did (oh, and Mike Fitzgerald). Others called in to say "I have a death wish! Sign me up!" Which really wasn't that surprising.

What was surprising was that somebody called up to say they had that idea already. No really, they even have uniforms. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Angels of Christ (Ok, technically it's given by David Siders). They are by far the most depressing militia of all time.

They're run by (or at least represented by) Martin Hernandez of Stockton who decided to protest the proposed layoffs of at least 43 of Stockton's finest. Because, you know, the city wants to lay those officers off.

As if that uniform (which if our knowledge of all things Olden Polynice is correct, can't be legal) wasn't depressing enough, this group comes complete with delusions of grandeur!

From Siders' blog:

"Hernandez said there are 16 people in his group and that he has detained perhaps 20 people in three months for the Stockton Police Department to arrest."

Oh, so their working with Stockton PD. I wonder what they have to say about this uptick in vigilantism.

"Officer Pete Smith, a department spokesman, said, 'I’ve never heard of Angels of Christ.'"

Hmmm, that seems to directly contradict Hernandez's comment. Do they just drop criminals off on the Police Department's stoop? Surely they have more training than the Stockton Armed Militia.

"Hernandez said he learned in Sacramento 10 years ago how to arrest people and use weapons"

Oh, well that's in no way comforting. Nothing says "safety" like 10 year old detainment tactics. At the very least they're a bunch of big guys. You know, like bouncers or something. Somebody imposing looking and this disheveled, unemployed man is just their spokesperson.

"Hernandez, of Angels of Christ, is at the podium... He is introducing Sandra, who he said is also an Angel of Christ."

Aww, isn't that adorable. They let women into their group. Sandra must be some sort of Amazon woman if she can hang with the AoC.

"Sandra said she is a teenager."

What. The. Fuck. Fucking teenagers!?

So let me get this straight. Stockton's proposing laying off upwards of 90 police officers and the residents of our fair city come back with multiple vigilante groups patrolling the streets with one involving teenage girls? Seriously!? This is the best fucking idea we can come up with?

I hate to sound like an elitist (that's Fitzy's schtick) but this is why we have our current government structure. The residents of Stockton can never eeeeeeeeever bitch about the horrible ideas presented by the City Council again. Sure, some of them may present silly ideas like declaring bankruptcy. But that idea pales in comparison to having an armed, overmatched group of vigilantes roaming the most dangerous areas of Stockton or replacing sworn officers with sad-looking dudes and teenagers. Hell, compared to impending vigilante warfare declaring bankruptcy looks like as good an idea as a Scarlett Johannsen topless scene.

Sadly, the national media is picking up on these stories. They love to exploit crazy people apparently. In the previously linked Fitzy article the World's dumbest attorney Ron Stein said he had an appointment his morning to talk to the Associated Press. Great, because if there's one thing Stockton needs it's more negative press. Is it too early to start drinking bourbon?

NBA proposes $1.9 B-B-B-B-Billion arena plan/Cal Expo revamp

Fuck.

(Kings beat writer) Sam Amick quotes the independent economist as calling the NBA's cost and revenue projections "optimstic" and saying that "this particular project has problems in terms of feasibility ."

Somebody pass the Cuervo

FUCK!

I had the Record redesign review allllll fucking ready to go and like that it fucking disappeared. I'm way too pissed to spend another 45 minutes rewriting it. Fuck. God fucking dammit.

We think it sucks and there's no emphasis on Local news, there's just less news. I'd put it more eloquently but I'm 3 seconds away from chucking my computer out a window. This site's taken away too much of my free time today. I'll see you next week.

Breaking News: The Record to eliminate 209Vibe, castrate Ian Hill

(Update and bump to the top because fuck it, this is end of the day news: If you didn't believe us before, Ian Hill made the official announcement on 209Vibe.com about an hour ago.)

We don't get to much actual news to break to you guys but when we do, it's usually a doozie. And this is one hell of a doozie.

Effective after next month 209Vibe is no more. Everything. 209Vibe.com, the print edition, even Ian Hill is being moved from LENS to the newsroom.

We should probably note that this isn't based on rumor, it's been confirmed by a couple of sources. The Record is blaming that wonderful catchall the economy. Which is kind of hard to swallow considering we know from personal experience it costs jack shit to maintain a website.

We'll try and get more information when we can, but we can't state enough how much of a blow this is to the local arts scene that just caught a huge break with the Plea for Peace Center.

Leave it to the Record to eliminate their best feature. Fuck.

Kings Kolumn: The impromptu, barely-coherent ramblings of a frustrated Kings fan in which I somehow argue for and against the firing of Reginald Theus

(Ed. note: Yeah, sorry for the late start. Hopefully we've conditioned you to not expect much on Mondays by now.)

I hadn't planned on doing a Kings Kolumn today, but news happened so I felt compelled to. The following isn't very good. At best it's the ramblings of a Kings fan who was forced to go from "relaxed, whatever happens, happens" mode to the end of his rope in about 15 mins. It's what our friend B at the H2O Poetry Slams would call "organic". And it still contains more original analysis than what Highfill will give you tomorrow. What should be the topic of his entire column will be a bullet point so he can make a joke about St. Mary's that roughly 15 people will get. If they're feeling frisky they might reprint Amick's column. I wouldn't hold my breath. So feel free to print this up, bust out the glue stick, and paste this right over Ol' Bulletpoint's ramblimng mashup of topics. The following may be rambling, but at least it's about a single fucking topic. Which brings us to our topic...

Fuck

If you haven't heard by now allow me to shit in your salad. The Kings fired Reggie Theus this morning. It wasn't a particularly surprising move considering he's been on the hot seat before the season even fucking started. It's just frustrating. Frustrating and infinitely fucking depressing.

It's frustrating because, as I've said before, Reggie Theus did not injure this team. He didn't sprain Kevin Martin's ankle. He didn't peer pressure Brad Miller into smoking that joint. He didn't trade our best defensive player during the offseason. Reggie Theus did the best that he could with what he had (which right now isn't much) and did a passable job. We've beaten two of the best teams in Western Conference without our best player. If that's not a passable job, I don't know what is.

I've spent the past season and a half on various Kings sites talking about expectations. I consider last season to be successful because the team exceeded my expectations for the year. I knew they weren't going to make the playoffs and I just wanted them to play an exciting brand of basketball. Go ahead and be bad, but be entertaining while you do it. Sure that may seem like a low set of expectations, but anybody who witnessed the year under Musselman knows that asking for entertaining ball from a team that was largely unchanged from the Muss year was asking for a lot.

This season I had similar expectations. Only the most optimistic fan thought we were going to make the playoffs. In the 07-08 season 50 wins was the threshold for making the playoffs in the west. I'd have danced in the street if we hit 41 wins. With the trade of Ron Artest the message was clear to most fans, we're going young. But apparently everybody forgot what "going young" meant after the season started.

Going young means sacrificing traditional measures of success. This season's success was never going to be measured by the number of wins and losses. This season was supposed to be measured by player development. Player development that's all fucked to shit now because team brass was impatient. That's perhaps one of the most frustrating parts of this whole thing. They took an uncertain situation and made it even uncertainer. We all kind of got the hint that Reggie wasn't long for this world after the team didn't pick up his '09-'10 season option. We really knew he wasn't when Joe Maloof tore apart his defensive prowess (along with now interim coach Kenny Natt's) on KHTK.

By the time we reached the Laker game last Tuesday we all knew that barring some sort of miracle Theus wasn't going to be coaching the team next season. Theus was for all intents and purposes his own interim coach following the debacle against Utah. Then some sort of miracle happened and the Kings beat the Lakers, and then hung around with them that Friday and everyone pretty much declared Reggie's job safe for the season barring some sort of apocalyptic collapse at home against an east coast team they should be able to handle. Oh fuck.

And like that, he's gone. Patience is at a premium in sports, especially with head coaching jobs. But this has to be one of the rare instances where the owners showed less patience than the fans. Like I said before, the Maloofs haven't seen a team this bad before. We have, we had to suffer through the Gary St. Jean years. The Maloofs are different fans than us. For them, this is the lowest of the low. For us, this doesn't even touch the '89-'90 season. Maybe that's where the problem lies. Our expectations for the "bad" part of "bad, but entertaining" were different than the Maloofs' expectation of bad. They see "Remember the Spartans" and go "Wow, that's the worst thing ever" and then we go "You think that's bad? Here's a dvd of 'A Walk to Remember.'" (Fuck, that movie scarred me for life. I still haven't forgiven that ex. Yes, I was whipped beyond whipped back then.)

Now, I'm not saying Theus didn't deserve any of this. His end of the season clusterfuck where he wouldn't stop talking to the media probably accelerated matters. The team also was sorely lacking in areas that can really only be attributed to the coach. Effort and motivation. That's how a team can beat the Lakers one night, then go down by 25 in the first quarter to the Knicks on another. While you can blame a lot of the teams inconsistency on youth (and I do, a lot), the team's inconsistent effort can solely be blamed on Theus. If you can't motivate your players to give 100% every game then...well, you get fired. I just don't think he should've been fired now.

What does firing him now accomplish? Well, fucking nothing. It just breeds more uncertainty after everybody thought we had just gotten through all of that bullshit with the Laker win. If anything, the team played poorly because they had that air of uncertainty around them. Vanquishing the Lakers was supposed to lift the air of uncertainty. Now it's even more uncertain than before. We just got finished with a guy who was a massive media distraction (Artest) and now we have to deal with questions about the next coach. Did Martin give the team and ultimatum? Had the team tuned him out? Did Jason Levein have anything to do with it? Our nice, quiet, entertaining season is now the same uncertain bullshit as it's been for the past 3 years.

As fans we were able to accept the team sucking because at least we had a plan, develop young talent and clear up cap space for 2010. Sure it was the same plan every other team has but it's a fucking plan. We knew where we were going and Geoff Petrie was executing the plan exactly how we all thought it was going to go. Now? Who the fuck knows. The outlook is bleak. Am I being somewhat of a fatalist? Yeah, but you look at the list of available, experienced head coaches and you try and have a sunny outlook for the team's future (I accidently thought the words "Coach Flip Saunders" and threw up in my mouth a little bit). At least with Reggie we always had the hope that he'd grow out that glorious mustache.