Today must be a full moon or something. Some of the news stories are really strange today. Some are just odd and some are just further examples of stupidity.
Let's start with everyone's favorite NFL wide receiver, Terrell Owens. In this story, Owen's claims he was misquoted. Now, if you know Owen's interesting history and relations with the press, this claim would not seem to be that surprising. However, he's claiming he was misquoted in his own autobiography! This should serve as a notice to Cowboy owner Jimmy Jones and coach Bill Parcels what they can expect this season with Owens.
On a more serious note, the US Senate today defeated an ammendment to a appropriations bill that would have funded the construction of a fence on the US-Mexico Border. Of course this is the same fence that the same Senate approved building a few months ago. This is perhaps one of the reasons people are so entirely distrustful of politics and politicians. The public favors a strong border that people can't just walk across by an overwhelming majority. Politicians know that, but don't want to do it, but also don't want voters to think they don't care. Answer: Vote in a large majority to construct the fence, have press releases, photo-ops and make speeches; but then when it comes right down to it, undo the vote when no one is looking by failing to allocate any money to actually do the construction.
Back to sports. My favorite team, the Dodgers, have historically, not done too well with signing pitchers to long term contracts (I think back to Dave Goltz and Don Stanhouse in 1980 to Kevin Brown and Darren Driefort more recently). Right now the Dodgers are saddled with hopefully the last of these really bad signings. Odalis Perez is in the second year of a 3 year $24 million contract (this means that he makes roughly $150k PER WEEK!). Since signing this contract he has been ineffective (when he hasn't been hurt). This year he is 4-4 with an ERA of 6.79. After giving up the winning home run in the game last night he complained not that his pitching was bad and he was hurting the team, but that the Dodgers were treating him like trash. Perez has almost no trade value, so the Dodgers almost certainly will just designate him for assignment. Which means he can keep collecting his $150k PER WEEK and not do any work for about another year and a half. Most people would not equate that salary to being "treated like trash."
Now to something really serious (only the response by some is absurd). In the growing war between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas, the Hezbollah terrorists used an unmanned drone with explosives to attack an Israeli naval vessel. That Hezbollah has this level of technology certainly demonstrates that Iran and/or Syria have supplied their surrogates with some significant weaponry. That anyone evaluating the situation rationally thinks that Iran and the nut-cases running that country are people that can be negotiated with is an exercise in complete denial of reality. The radical Arab countries have been using Hamas and Hezbollah (among others) to keep Israel bleeding for years. It looks like (1) Israel has come to a determination that this has to stop and that (2) President Bush is inclined to let Israel do what it has to do to survive.
Israel is an ally and the United States, I think, needs to become more actively involved in this war. The moderate nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia can't help, but they can't and won't object. Neither wants Iran to expand its influence any further and none of them (and Turkey to the north) have any use for Syria. Syria, like North Korea and Cuba, is simply a relic regime left over from the old Soviet Union days. It is little more than a national terrorist base for everyone who stands to overthrow democracy. Syria and Iran detest anything smacking of a pluralistic democracy. They hate the idea of Iraq being a pluralistic democracy; they hate Israel for the same reasons (although they use religion and "support for the Palestinians" as a pretext) and look what these countries have done to keep Lebanon from returning to a democracy. Turkey, I think, realizes that their own pluralistic society would be the next target of the radicals should they continue unstopped and certainly Egypt knows exactly how popular their government is in Iran and Syria.
Posted by Narnia3 at July 14, 2006 12:18 PM | TrackBack