Tennessee Hates Good Students

It's pretty easy to summon up outrage these days. Much of it is fake, a pose of outrage geared toward scoring easy political points, a trend I have called "fakerage," though "mockrage" would be as good a term for it. The world of sports is not immune from this phenomenon, which sometimes makes it all the more difficult to recognize a true outrage when it occurs.

Well, Sports Illustrated's Phil Taylor has found one. In his "Point After" column in this week's SI Taylor tells the story of four would-be cross country runners at Chattanooga's elite McCallie School. All four are elite students. And all four should be elite athletes on the school's cross country team. But they have been declared ineligible not because of anything they have done, but because they are such good students that they attend the school on academic scholarships.

Tennessee athletic officials, recognizing the legitimate possibility of abuse of academic scholarships for high school athletes, have nonetheless committed a pretty absurd injustice by ruling these students ineligible. And state officials have shown no sign of budging. Essentially because of the possibility of abuses that surely could be policed were the state inclined to try to do so, these four students who have abused nothing do not get to experience being high school athletes. I'm sure we could all find better examples of petty bureaucratic dogmatism, but we'd have to search pretty hard. Let's hope that Taylor's column proves to be the push factor allowing the three who will still be in school next year to run for McCallie. The other is Harvard bound in the fall.

Context Free Headline of the Year (So Far)

"Dogs Don't Use Condoms".

(Bonus: Pamela Anderson is prominently involved, but then again, of course she is.)

The Peril of Anecdotes

OK, let us see: Joe the plumber and independent voter wants to buy the plumbing company he works for, which earns $250,000+ a year, and he is concerned about the tax burden for which he will be responsible.

Shall we deconstruct the sentence?

"Joe" - His name is Sam (But ok, given what follows I'll assume that he might be known as Joe, as that seems to be his middle name).

"the independent" - He is a registered Republican.

"plumber" - He is unlicensed.

"wants to buy the plumbing company he works for" -- But which is not apparently for sale, which Joe is not actually trying to buy, and which Joe could not afford to buy on his $40,000 income. Oh, and that damned licensing issue again.

"which earns $250,000+ a year" - Actually it's about $100,000, which is important given the supposed magic number of $250,000 based on Obama's tax plan.

"and he is concerned about the tax burden for which he will be responsible." - Obviously (well, maybe not so - people usually are unclear on the arcane tax code) any rate hike for those incomes above $250,000 would only count against the money earned above $250,000. But beyond that, my favorite part of all of this is that Joe has a tax lien against him. So he is not paying his taxes now.

So here is what is accurate in the sentence:

"Voter plumbing company he works for, and he is concerned." Actually, I think Sarah Palin uttered that exact sentence in her debate in response to a question about foreign policy.

The New England Revolution: Is There Anything They Can't Do (Other, I Mean, Than Win an MLS Title)?

In a pre-9/11 world the story of members of the New England Revolution subduing a clearly deranged streaker on a cross-country flight would fall into the category of amusing stories that bloggers use to fill out their content (guilty!). Although the story is absurd, it is also easy to imagine why "Some passengers became frantic during the incident." And even if you are a passenger who did not become frantic, and even if you are no pollyanna, a closed space with childrfen is probably not the time you are going to chuckle about a streaker. A lot of guys I know, myself included, would have jacked the guy in the face the first time the guy popped out of the bathroom in the altogether. Nonetheless I look forward to seeing how Homeland Security and the FAA overreact to this event and come up with utterly irrelevant and improper responses, a la the arbitrary and absurd 3 oz. bottles-in-ziplocks solution to a non-problem.

You've Got To Be F@(&ing Kidding Me Watch

Courtesy of Truthout via ABC News' blog Blotter: According to a letter from California Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman and a statement from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which Waxman chairs:

The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

Give Cheney credit for adhering to the tenets of the Big Lie. The damage from this administration will be decades in the undoing.

You Just Can't Trust 'Em

A Russian man has filed for divorce from his wife after the devastating discovery that she has been feeding him pumpkins in his pies rather than the apparently more desireable courgettes that she had brazenly led him to believe that he was eating. My favorite bit is that she had been engaging in this nefarious bait and switch for six months, and though he has been cherishing the pies, he argued, "She knows I absolutely hate pumpkins and she lied to me for months about it just because the pumpkins were cheap."

Hatred is a fickle, and, for stretches of up to half-a-year, elusive thing, dear reader.

Following up his unassailable pumpkin-loathing argument with another glittering display of logical mastery, he concluded, "What else has she been lying about? What man could trust a woman who fed him pumpkins for half a year?"

Indeed.

Flatulence

I am remarkably blase about this year's Super Bowl. But I'd like to hear one even vaguely justifiable reason for Sportsguy's picks column today to spend 90% of its time discussing Anna Kournikova. Basically, he ran into her the other night in a bar in Miami, and so this well-compensated journalist sent to Miami with an undoubtedly enourmous expense account to give us a feel for the game spends the bulk of his time writing about a women's tennis player who peaked years ago? He even actually tells a vaguely creepy story about his former intern playing high school tennis in Massachusetts. Then he swerves in order to tell us that he went to a Heat-Cavs basketball game (and to drop a cheap shot or two on LeBron's lap -- which may or may not be valid, but which certainly added to our trip down Nonsequiter Lane) Un-fucking-believable. And keep in mind -- this guy is in Miami and is supposed to be helping us give a damn about the Super Bowl.

This is the sports journalism equivalent of hearing a 15-year old tell his favorite masturbation story. From when he was thirteen.

In the pantheon of I don't give a fuck journalism, this is in the top 5 (See -- I can mail it in like Sportsguy too.)