This link from Deadspin brought more than 1,000 new friends into our little orange bowl this week. Lucky for the sportsbooks, the link wasn’t posted until after Kent State soundly beat Akron in Saturday night’s MAC final. The books shouldn’t be so lucky if you check with Cleveland Frowns before you put your plays in for this weekend’s second round NCAA Tournament matchups. As for the first round, we’re generally content to see how things play out, but we think Kent is a good buy again on Thursday against the Runnin' Rebels of UNLV. Both Kent and UNLV
have performed well against the spread this season, but UNLV (Nevada Las Vegas) has done so in the sportsbooks’ back yard. This should account for some extra value in a Kent play on Thursday. The betting public appears to be evenly split, with
the experts on Covers.com leaning toward UNLV. This should give us even more comfort in going with Kent. Finally, Kent is led by Mike Scott,
a senior with NCAA Tournament experience, and a pair of transfers who have settled well in Northeast Ohio,
Hammin Quaintance, and MAC Player of the Year Al Fisher, who essentially
fell into the Golden Flashes’ lap after being recruited sight unseen. This is all reason enough to believe that there’s something special about this year's Kent squad, and reason enough to
pick Kent State -2.5 over UNLV.Until this weekend, some Frownie Bytes to chew on…
More Snubs: Ohio State isn’t invited to the Big Dance this year and
some folks are crying snub. Regardless of whether the Buckeyes deserved an NCAA Tourney slot, that they weren’t invited is consistent with the theory advanced
in the below post – that the NCAA does not want folks to be reminded that the best college players leave for the NBA after one season, and takes this into account in the postseason tournament selection process. Last year’s Zips pointed up this fact vis a vis LeBron’s former high school teammates Dru Joyce and Romeo Travis, and this year’s Buckeyes, the first team to have three freshman selected in the top 21 picks of the NBA Draft (Oden, Conley, and Cook), provide an equally forceful reminder.
Maurice Clarett’s Livelihood: Commenter bj raised the question in the below post that perhaps Maurice Clarett “was mostly responsible for screwing up his own life.” Perhaps we ought to be hesitant to judge a man who has had his very livelihood taken away from him. Telling Clarett that he could not play football is something like
telling Picasso that he couldn’t paint. Even if it was for only one year, should we really be surprised that Clarett went a bit crazy under such circumstances? What is it that they say about Idle Hands?
Steele Hard on Obama: Shelby Steele is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who specializes in the study of race in America. He takes the general position that “too much of what has been done since the Great Society in the name of black rights has far more to do with the moral redemption or self-satisfaction of whites than with any real improvement in the lives of blacks.” Steele has just published a book on Barack Obama called “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.” The Wall Street Journal published a hard hitting Steele piece today that gives us some insight into the title of his book. Some excerpts:
“[I]n the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. . . Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin. . . .
But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.)
. . . Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?”
The whole thing is worth a read. Comments are especially welcome on this piece.
Steele on Iraq: Let it be known that Steele is no one trick pony. In one of the finer pieces I’ve read on Iraq, in December 2006 Steele brilliantly argued that “America is a danger to the world in its own right, not because we are a powerful bully but because we don't fully accept who we are” He explains that:
“Only reluctant superpowers go to war with a commitment to fight until they can escape. So today the talk is of "draw-downs," "redeployments," etc. But all these options are undermined by the fact that we simply have not won the war. We have not achieved hegemony in Iraq, so there is no umbrella of American power under which a new nation might find its own democratic personality, or learn to defend itself. We have failed to give "peace in the streets" to the people we are asking to embrace the moderations of democracy. Without American hegemony, these "draw-downs" and "redeployments" are acts of outrageous moral irresponsibility, because they cede hegemony to the forces of menace--the Sunni insurgency, the Shiite militia, the Islamic extremists, the wolfish ambitions of Iran. It was America's weak application of power that made space for these forces to begin with. To now shrink the American footprint further would likely offer the country up as a killing field and embolden Islamic radicals everywhere.”
This is another one that’s
worth reading in its entirety. It’s also worth noting that this was written before “The Surge.”
Primary Update: Two weeks ago
I wrote about the Ohio/Texas/Rhode Island Democratic Primary results, and suggested that they might reflect that Hillary’s “experience” means that she has no choice but to be more realistic than Obama about Iraq and trade (in view of her past support for NAFTA, and her vote in support of the authorization for the war), and that voters in last week’s primaries might have appreciated this realism on the part of Clinton, even if Obama is the candidate who would end up enacting more “realistic” policies on both of these issues. I also discussed what I viewed as the other viable interpretation of the results, that is that the voters in these primaries did not perceive the difference between the candidates on these issues, but rather view them both as selling the exact same dream, and happened to view Hillary as a better salesperson for that dream last week. I framed this as the “more cynical view.”
Dan Henninger, Cleveland native and Wall Street Journal editorial page editor,
subscribes to this more cynical view, and elaborated on it again
in a recent column: “amid the screaming, raucous throng [at Cleveland State University], the fact remains: Her message is a downer. It is completely negative. She helps predisposed audiences to bring their resentments into sharp focus, and explode . . . It may yet turn out that this woman and hard times are a strong match to win the Democratic Party's nomination.”
The whole piece reads to me like it might have been written by a Clevelander who’s been living in New York for too long. Maybe he’s right, but with all else held equal, could folks really view Hillary as a better salesperson than Barack? I find it hard to believe that there’s not something out there that resonated with last Tuesday’s Hillary voters that goes beyond mere salesmanship If it’s not their “differences” on these two primary issues, what could it be? (Before you suggest the obvious “cynical” answer, look at the different states that each of them has won. I wonder what Henninger really thinks about the answer to this question. He doesn’t seem to be telling.)
A Huge Bummer: that Eliot Spitzer ended up resigning last week. Had he stayed on, we might have had a productive public discussion about the costs and benefits of the legal prohibition on prostitution, and more importantly, about the difference between law and morality. It’s a shame to see the man resign based on a narrative that essentially refuses to consider the worthiness of the broken law that has forced his resignation. Spitzer has a lot of money. It would have been interesting to see him let his lawyers go to work, spin this incident as the mundane, private matter that it might actually be, and go about his business governing. The fact is, we all have the right to break any law we want, even governors and former prosecutors, as long as we pay the legally mandated penalty. The legal penalty for Spitzer’s lawbreaking most certainly did not necessitate his resignation. Jay-Z’s counsel would have been useful:
"I've got great lawyers for cops so dress warm.
Charges don't stick to dude he's teflon.
I'm too sexy for jail like I'm Right Said Fred.
I'm not guilty, now gimme back my bread.
Mr. [U.S.] Attorney I'm not sure if they told you-
I'm on TV every day, where the f**k could I go to?
Plus – [Spitz] don't run, [Spitz] stand and fight.
[Spitz] a soldier, [Spitz] been fightin all his life.
So what could you do to me? It's not new to me.
Sue me; f**k you - What's a couple dollars to me?"
Perhaps they don’t prepare one to mount this kind of defense at Harvard, Princeton, and those fancy New York prep schools. While we can’t fault Spitzer for resigning given what he might be going through personally, we might hope that our next leader who finds himself in such a position due to a similar law might stand stronger against a current of irrational public condemnation.
By now many of you have seen this video or have heard Jay-Z’s new anti-DeShawn Stevenson diss track “Blow the Whistle.” While the video contains some excellent highlights - showing how thoroughly LeBron dominates the Wizards in the Playoffs - this track, and Jay-Zs involvement in this “bullsh*t NBA Playoff feud,” serves only to embarrass LeBron and (especially) Jay, and unnecessarily elevates the status of DeShawn “Soulja Boy” Stevenson. In sum, if you’re DeShawn Stevenson, you call LeBron “overrated,” LeBron responds, and Jay-Z makes a track about it, you’ve already won, no matter who wins the basketball games.
