Not Dead

Despite the lack of recent posts, I’m not dead — just otherwise occupied. Events over the past 2-3 months have led me to take on another… ah… non-office time project, let’s just say. That has seemed a bit more urgent than blogging, and it isn’t close to done yet.

I will have Toronto trip notes soon, though, I promise (actually, they’re in another Safari tab right now, in an unfinished state). Meanwhile, some thoughts.

• Abu Ghraib — really don’t know what to think about this one, other than the easy superficial observation that it’s bad news. That said, is it being overblown by an opportunistic lefty press? Yep. (I was afraid the BBC World Service newscaster Friday night was going to break down into tears of joy as he read a report of Rumsfeld’s apology.) What can be done about that? Not bloody much. Was the release of this news timed for maximum political effect? Abso-friggin’-lutely! It torpedoed good economic news and quieted the latest Kerry-Vietnam uproar. Speaking of which…
• John Kerry and Vietnam — so now you have to have served in the active-duty military to be worthy of political office, eh? So much for the principle of civilian control of the military. For that matter, why don’t we just change the Constitution so only those who have served can vote? And I probably wouldn’t care that much about his post-Vietnam activities (accusing fellow troops of war crimes, negotiating on his own with the North Vietnamese in Paris, etc.) if he wasn’t making Vietnam his defining campaign issue.
• John Kerry 2005 — what’s he going to do if he does get elected and finds out that Vietnam was done thirty freakin’ years ago? (Other than fly over and kiss Jacques Chirac’s butt, that is.) It seems unbelievable, but when you compare his voting record and his campaign speeches, Waffles-boy appears to have fewer consistent guiding principles than our last Democratic president.
• The Virginia budget — I’m fine with it. Money has to come from somewhere, and if we were going to kill off the car tax once and for all, something had to give. The national left and the Virginia hard-right share a curious blind spot where the dot-com boom of 1998-2000 is concerned: both sides seem willing to accept it as a valid point of reference when it was really an economic “perfect storm” of sorts, in which technology and culture joined up to turn the economy sideways. The lefties blame President Bush for what was essentially a correction in the system following the wild run-up of the dot-com era. The VA hard-right isn’t much better, trying to stick to tax policies that were formulated based on the oversized tax receipts of that time. TANSTAAFL — I’d rather pay a higher sales tax (which I can control, either by buying online or just cutting back on the stupid stuff I purchase on occasion) than either (a) pay Henrico County every year for the right to own my car, or (b) watch my Virginia Tech degree lose value as our state higher-education system goes down the tubes from lack of funding. Can we dispense with the ideologically-based childish tantrums, please?

More soon — really. I mean it.

Dreamin'

Thoughts on the recently concluded Dream Job, ESPN’s entry into the reality-show world where 12 contestants competed to become a SportsCenter anchor:

• I’ve been saying for two weeks something similar to what Kit said tonight: that the last six finalists were all nearly certain to get jobs in the field. Think about it: the finalists have all essentially been through a month-long ESPN boot camp of sorts.
• The weakest parts of the show were the non-job-related events — particularly the stupid little games in the early rounds. The quiz segments could have been punched up a little bit too — they did a good job with that in the Mike-vs-Aaron final.
• I voted to cut Mike, because Aaron had better sports knowledge, but it was basically an even competition after Maggie and Zach were punted.
• Speaking of Zach, ESPN had better hope that there was a non-compete clause in his Dream Job appearance contract, because I expect Fox Sports Net to be lighting up his cell phone as I’m typing this. He was a little too edgy for ESPN, but Murdoch’s boys have no problem with that kind of thing.
• Shocker of the day: Maggie holding her own against Tony Kornheiser in PTI.
• Two things probably did Aaron in: his head-on-a-hinge Braves-Cards lead when the teleprompter got pulled versus Mike’s strong April-19 pull on Yankees-Red Sox, and that he wasn’t quite as strong in PTI as Mike.

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Bertuzzi, the Instigator Rule, and P.R.

Even if you’re not a hockey fan, you’ve probably seen a clip of the incident Monday night in Vancouver. In the third period of what ended as a 9-2 Colorado Avalanche blowout, Todd Bertuzzi of the Canucks sucker-punched the Avs’ Steven Moore from behind, then jumped on him, driving his head into the ice. Moore suffered several broken vertebrae, a concussion and deep facial cuts as a result of Bertuzzi’s mugging, which was in retaliation for a clean but brutal hit by Moore on Canucks captain Markus Naslund in February.

Bertuzzi was suspended today by the NHL for the duration of the 2003-04 season and playoffs, which seems appropriate to me. But the NHL is between a rock and a hard place regarding a solution to the larger problem of premeditated, retaliatory violence getting out of hand.

Multiple commentators have suggested (see sidebar — link hat tip to Eric McErlain) that the instigator penalty is to blame for incidents like this. For those unfamiliar with it, the instigator rule ensures that a player who comes on the ice specifically to start a fight gets an extra two-minute minor penalty (which takes a skater away from his team) and ten-minute misconduct (which does not), in addition to the coincidental five-minute majors for both participants. End result: two-minute power play for the “victimized” team, and a fifteen-minute cooling-off spell for the instigator.

So the instigator rule discourages immediate retaliation, which sounds good. The problem is that teams don’t forget about the initial slight, which lets the anger build over time — and that usually makes the inevitable retaliation worse. In the old pre-instigator, self-policing hockey world, Bertuzzi or Canucks teammate Brad May would have had a straight-up fight with Moore on his next shift, and thus closed the book on the Naslund hit within 15 minutes. Instead we got this, and the usual suspects are again decrying the brutality of hockey based on their nightly ration of the first 10 minutes of SportsCenter. But the obvious solution looks, to the uninitiated, like it encourages more fighting, and thus is a no-no to the public relations-conscious NHL office. It’s a bad fix for Gary Bettman and the NHL’s disciplinary “vice-principal” of sorts, Colin Campbell — and for hockey fans like me, who have to defend our sport yet again.

L/D Sideline: Michael Moore and Internationalism

WARNING: HIGH FLAME CONTENT.

SERIOUSLY. YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GO AWAY.

OK, you asked for it…

No American has done more to screw his countrymen abroad recently than Michael Moore.

This trip was the third time I’ve had to deal with the impression that clown has created of American conservatism. A Canadian au pair, a South African working in Britain, a (former) pharmacology student from New Zealand doing a post-graduation world tour, all got most of their ‘education’ on American conservatism from that lying @#$-clown. So I don’t get any time to articulate my own positions, I instead have to get back to zero by refuting all the crapflooding he’s done.

The world’s superficial understanding of America does really bad things for our world image already — how could it not, when most of their knowledge of American culture comes from Hollywood? Moore has capitalized on that superficial familiarity to make his fortune and gain fame selling distilled hyper-leftism and fomenting what often transforms into hatred of America at the international level. He’s got the right to do it (and as a capitalist, he’s quite good at marketing his product), but that doesn’t make it any less of a disgrace.

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"We Got Him"

A few things to consider about the weekend’s big news. We’ll start with the BBC fun.

• POW status — driving around listening to the BBC World Service on XM yesterday, one of their guests was a British academic (at least it wasn’t the clown from the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University they liked to interview in February — talk about built-in bias) complaining about Saddam’s picture being shown. In his expert opinion, pictures of Saddam should not have been shown in the media, since (again, in his expert opinion) he qualified, as head of the armed forces, as a POW. This statement went completely unchallenged.
• More BBC bias — from the Reporters’ Log, we have this gem from Guto Harri in London: “We all imagined that if the Americans got a tip off they would just bomb somewhere off the face of the earth.” Gee, stereotype Americans much, Guto? The bias speaks for itself, kids.
• French-bashing — they took about 10 minutes to read e-mails from all over the world, including a great one from a listener in Paris. The general tone was something on the order of, “Capturing Saddam was a bad thing, and I’m really scared, because now that the Americans have struck him down, the Ba’athist resistance shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” The mental image of this guy hiding behind his computer waving a white flag had me laughing for a good mile-and-a-half down the road.

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