NBA Refs

Now this is news.

The NBA ref who bet on games is alleging that the NBA urged its refs to throw the 2002 playoffs to the Lakers over the Kings. This is juicy.

Curt Schilling, of all people, described the problem that NBA refs face:

Every SINGLE play up and down the floor has MULTIPLE fouls being committed by multiple players. These guys are in close, every play. They are beating the crap out of each other, and the refs see it. That makes me think that the game is called and paced exactly how the refs want it to be.

Everything's a foul; it's all at the complete discretion of the refs about whether to call it.

Just wait until Congress gets involved. As they've shown before, Congress loves to dig into this stuff. NO ONE does Sanctimonious like members of Congress.


As a sidenote, the Celtics presently lead the series 2-1, so in theory they could win the next two games. I would bet dollars to donuts that the series will at least go back to Boston for Game 6. Zero chance the Celtics win the next two games.

Clemens!

The Clemens hearings were today, at least the first round. Tom Verducci has a great summary.

At this point, I don't think *anyone* is believable. It's clear that McNamee should never be trusted. I'm sure some of the things he's saying are the truth. But he's now changing his story too many times for me to keep track.

Clemens is also entirely unbelievable. He keeps changing his story, and he never managed to describe why McNamee would lie about what happened.

I think part of the problem is that professional athletes aren't used to having anyone actually pay attention to what they say. They are asked dumb questions ("What does this game mean for you?") their whole life, they give the same stock answers ("We're taking things one game at a time") and then repeat. Their job isn't to be honest, it's to perform on the field. They are used to lying, both the big lies and the small ones. Normally, they are the ones who choose what questions to answer and which sportswriters to ignore. Here, the dynamic is reversed. Congress chooses the questions, but they have to come up with something for every one of them.

Outside the bubble, where people actually pay attention to their every word, and where their questioners have the power, they stumble. They're not used to this.



Not surprisingly, these hearings give sportswriters the opportunity to look ridiculous. Jason Stark:

What I'll be looking for -- what you should be looking for -- is who squirms, who stammers, who hedges. Look for body language. Look for who can't recall what.

Hey Jayson, do you by any chance remember the last round of congressional hearings? Do you remember if there was a player who had the whole 'convincing body language' thing down? Remember how that turned out? Maybe don't trust the body language quite to much.

Now this is interesting, on a couple of levels. First, of course, the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin, which is that it never happened. (Sidenote, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed by Congress, gave LBJ the authority to vastly increase US troops in Vietnam.) So Congress was given false information by the administration and based on that false information it approved the administration's decision to go to war. (In Vietnam)

Obviously, the previous sentence could have been written about the present war in Iraq. Which brings up the second level that this new information is interesting. The present administration seems like it's trying to bury the discovery of the 40 year old mistake because the parallels are so obvious that even the President's defenders cannot deny them.


2000 Americans have now died in Iraq. There will be more, unfortunately, many more, sacrificed in a bloody, unwinnable war on the other side of the world. I don't know how many, and I don't know how long it will take, but sooner or later we will pull out of Iraq and then we will wonder what exactly we were doing there in the first place. I have no doubt that in 40 years, the present war in Iraq will be viewed as a serious mistake, just as today the Vietnam War is rightly seen as a mistake. And our children will wonder how it was that America could have so completely failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam.

I'm rather entertained by major league baseball players 'deciding' whether to testify before Congress.

Some good quotes:

Schilling: "It depends on what it's for."
Giambi: "I have no idea what they're trying to do. I'm just trying to play baseball."
Palmeiro: "March 17 is my wife's birthday. That should tell you right there what my answer is."
Sosa: "I don't know about that. I'll have to call my agent."

Uhhhh, guys. This isn't the local sportswriter. Their entire lives they've been accustomed to talking when they want, and not talking when they don't want to. They can tell half-truths, and evade or ignore the question whenever they want to. But this game is not being played on their terms. Sportswriters don't have the power of the subpoena.

You can't just "decide" whether to testify if Congress wants you. If they're stupid enough not to attend, I fully expect them to receive subpoenas, and then they won't have any choice. Steroids are a great issue for members of Congress. It's high visibility, so they'll get their names in the press. There is no lobby out there fighting for steroids, so they're not going to antagonize anybody. It's bipartisan. It plays great in the heartland. Everybody understands it. There are plenty of opportunities for practiced one-liners that might get picked up in USA Today. And the baseball players aren't going to do themselves any favors by hemming and hawing. Personally, this is the rare time that I think Congress is on the right track. Make those guys raise their right hands and get the truth out there!

What they should do, of course, it just come clean. Apologize, maybe tear up a little, and swear a solemn oath to the American People that they'll never do it again. Perhaps mention The Lord, and how much He means to them (connection to steroids: uncertain, but the American people love mentions of The Lord). This story would be old news quickly. But if they fight it, it's just going to drag on and on. There will be editorials in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Talking heads will cover the whole thing on Court TV. There will be Commissions, and much discussion about Baseball History and the Sacred nature of the game. And there will be discussion of The Children.

I wonder when the first prominent member of Congress will get up and say that it's time to bring the troops home from Iraq. In Vietnam, we were there in force maybe 14 years. The Soviet Union was about 12 in Afghanistan. Are we still going to be in Iraq in 2016?
I disagreed with decision to go to war, but once we went in we clearly couldn't leave right away. These days, however, it's obvious it's going poorly, but how long do we wait until we give up? How many lives is our pride worth? At this point, I'm prepared to pull out after their election. Which may (or may not) happen at the end of January.
We shouldn't be there, and we especially shouldn't participate in an Iraqi civil war.

The administration's 'justification' for the war in Iraq (which, though unspecified, lingered murkily in the penumbra between weapons of mass destruction and a connection between Saddam and Al Quaeda) has of course been conclusively proven false. But that doesn't stop many people from believing it, and it doesn't stop Dick Cheney from bringing it up, even though he knows it's a lie.


Strikes me that this isn't the first time we've done this. I see similarities to the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. LBJ claimed that US ships had been attacked by the North Vietnamese. Congress believed him and passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was the legal justification for the war.
The problem was that there was no attack. US ships were shooting at nothing and then observing the explosions caused by their shots. The evidence was ambiguous then, but the administration kept insisting that the attack happened. Old myths die hard--in his generally fabulous book, MacNamara insists that the evidence was ambiguous, even though it wasn't then and isn't now.

Iraq is a roughly similar situation. In both cases, the administration took some ambiguous (at best) evidence and kept insisting it was true, parlaying it into congressional support. Even afterward, people still believe the lie. So far, we've avoided huge casualties in Iraq, but we were in Vietnam for eleven years after that resolution. Do we want to be in Iraq until 2013? I sure hope not.

I think the government is doing a crappy job of protecting us all from terrorism. For instance, I'm not aware that it's doing much at all about the (high) risk of someone loading a shipping container full of explosives and/or a little nuke and blowing it up in a harbor. But to be fair, that's a hard problem.

BUT some things are easy problems, and the feds are failing at those too. I think Congress did well to bring all airport screeners into the federal government. But since they're all now under Tom Ridge, why is it still a disaster? I think an emblematic problem is the ongoing debate over whether one should take one's shoes off before going through the x-ray machine. Why is it that they can't come up with a rule? Either it is or it is not safe. Either shoes should or should not be passed through the x-ray machine separately. Why the ambiguity? If shoes should be x-rayed, they should be x-rayed every time. Period. Not at some airports, or only at big airports, or only if you tick off the guy who runs the machine (this seems to be the rule in San Francisco--if you're advised to take your shoes off and you don't, you're inevitably pulled aside, your shoes are removed, and they give you the Wand Treatment).

Granted that the shoes thing is a small issue, but it's also an ridiculously simple problem to solve. The feds have had three years since the attacks of September 11 to come up with a policy for an extremely simple situation. Why should I trust that they're making better progress in more complicated issues?

The commission investigating the attacks of September 11 came out with their report. I have yet to read it, so I don't yet know whether I agree with its substantive recommendations.

But it does seem that Congress is going to do something, even if it's all for show. They're going to have some hearings, and the leaders of the commission are going to testify. This is a good thing. We need to have a big debate about our intelligence agencies. And Congress is the entity to debate this. I do hope they keep talking about it. It's interesting, though. In the last couple of weeks, Congress has seen fit to diligently focus on the crucial issues of a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, and flag burning. It seems to me that there are a few more important things to pay attention to, and maybe this will get them to do so. For all of our sakes, I hope so.


As a sidenote, it's interesting that W says he supports the commission's work, considering he fought like hell to keep them from ever meeting in the first place. Then he wanted to appoint Henry Kissinger---HENRY KISSINGER!!!--one of the dirtiest Americans alive!--to be its head. Can one imagine a less reputable choice? Forget the deaths in Chile, in East Timor, in Cambodia, (etc. etc. etc.) that he sanctioned (ok, don't forget them, but that's not my point...). Aside from these, he's directly responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of Americans (and Vietnamese, for that matter) because he gratuitously prolonged the Vietnam War. What if we'd pulled out in 1970? How many Americans would still be alive? How many of their children would know their fathers? As John Kerry said in 1971, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

I know this is a tangent, but every American, and I mean everyone, should read this:

http://hnn.us/articles/3631.html

Really, everyone should read this. And everyone should educate themselves about the issues, because Kerry was right then and he's right now. Vietnam was the wrong war, fought for the wrong reasons, and the wrong time. And all we got for it was a shiny black wall. And whether our spoils from that war were worth that shiny black wall.

Now that spring training games have begun, baseball reporters can start over-analyzing the results of games. Newspapers will publish the standings and reporters will talk about a teams "record" as if it matters. This is entirely ridiculous. Spring training isn't a time to win games. Managers are trying young prospects, and a team's actual players often don't play the full game. Many games are split squad games anyway. As a policy, I refuse to pay attention to any spring training scores.

In other baseball news, the players union is really digging itself into a hole on the steroid/human growth hormone issue. I'm not sure what Gene Orza is thinking (he's the #2 guy at the players union, and he's been loudly claiming that cigarettes are worse for one's health than steroids and that because baseball doesn't prevent players from smoking, it shouldn't prevent them from using steroids either). From a strategic standpoint, I'm pretty sure that the union would rather negotiate with the owners than with Congress, but if they're not careful, they'll find themselves in congressional hearings. This is an election year, and what member of Congress wouldn't want to get on the evening news pontificating about the perils of steroids and the risks to Our Youth from the use of these drugs by professional athletes?