You must have ben reading my mind!

But, this is a GREAT story. A long must read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24football.html

You're making sense but the usual suspects are just going to continue to spout the ususal lines. They can't help themselves. They exhibit an oxymoronic "heroic cowardice" that's positively hilarious. It was captured perfectly in Tom Tomorrow's "Dangerous Man" cartoon yesterday. These hardy souls are fighting the "Islamofascists" by barking rubbish on the internet sites (cue dramatic music) they are so central to the fight, they dare not use their real names on the internet because they would face mortal danger from hordes of angry Muslims!!!! Heores all, we owe them a debt of gratitude.

Anyway, conflating all Muslims into one and going on about Islam in general, is just the poorly reasoned babble they use to cover their anti-Arab bigotry.

"Ah yes, those championships sure help to rehabilitate a reputation. You may want to ask Bob White and David Robinson about Rodman's value as a hard working team player who never lost the support of his coaches and was always reliable on the court. Or has everyone forgotten Rodman taking his shoes off and lying down at the end of the bench during crunch time in the Western Conference Championship Series? At that moment he looked pretty much exactly like TO--a good player, but a clunhouse cancer whose selfishness outweighed the value of his play. Then he went to the Bulls, won three championships, and all was forgotten."

Don't forget to ask Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Bill Lambier, John Salley and Rick Mahorn. Rodman won two championships with them and was quite the team player before he went to SA.

Rodman's SA saga was interesting. The "lying down at the end of the bench thing was much ado about nothing. He was out of the game already. What's was more damaging to SA's chances was when he got suspended afther he fouled Stockton. Rodman was quoted some time afterwards when asked about the series and said something about "big time players scared to take shots under pressure". It was clear he was talking about Robinson and Sean Elliot. The two big stars of the Spurs then who had the rep, unlike the bball assassins he played with in Detroit, of fading under pressure. In fact, Karl Malone routinely thugged Robinson around and made him disappear.

That all cahnged when a certain Mr. Duncan arrived on the scene. As the story goes, Malone did his usual roughouse on Robinson, and in this case, Robinson went down in a heap on the floor. This so incensed the ROOKIE Duncan that he promptly went on a bball rampage. A new sheriff was in town and the rest is history.

King's latest is a perfect example of the plague of statism that's reduced sports to announcers babbling incoherently about stuff like "...the number of homeruns hit by left handed second basemen after sundown on the second friday of the month ...."

In this case, the premise is the problem. First, he pooh poohs rebounding and defense to tilt the argument to offense (and in TO's favor) and the he states that Rodman was a liability on offense which he wasn't. Ben Wallace is a liabilty on offense. Then, he compares Jayson Williams best years with Rodman's Chicago years and after coming to the conclusion that it's basically a wash, acts as if that proves the two were interchangable which they weren't. And so on....c'mon give the Worm his due.

What!? Don't tell me you actually believed your lying eyes and understood the context rather relying on "stats" to guide you. How dare you? Why it wouldn't have made any difference if Jayson Williams was playing for the Bulls and Rodman was in the swamps of Jersey playing for the Nets!

Funny how all you hear from some is...poor innocent country dwelling common folks are being talked down to by pointy headed east coast intellectual city slickers....

Country dwellers condesend too. They just condescend about different things.

You need to add to your "unless the subject is"....morality...religion...family values...real Americans...and so on. I know the popular mythology is that of the haughty city slicker talking down to the innocent and naive salt of the earth homelander but that's only half the story at best.

Nice smackdown of NOW/Pirro's nonsense.

"Not so. Bill Clinton split the popular vote among himself, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot in '92 and among himself, Bob Dole and Mr. Nutbag (um, Perot) in '96. None achieved a majority. In fact, Clinton barely cracked 40% in '92 and fared only slightly better in '96."

Mann said "won the popular vote" not "achieved a majority". Btw, in fact Clinton got 43% of the vote in '92 and 49% in '96. In both cases, he got way more total votes than either Bush Sr. or Perot.

For the record, "Mothers Who think" was first changed to, I believe, "Parents Who Think" precisely because of valid complaints (from FATHERS in particular) about it's rather self-asorbed focus on MOTHERHOOD, and MOTHERHOOD only, issues.

Imagine the problem with calling your ENTIRE "Life" type section "Mothers Who Think". Of course you can't grasp the problem with that because you'd rather play into the MOTHERHOOD martyrdom syndrome and pretend that the only people who could have a problem with it are "aggressive proselytizing child-free types". As if "every other news source on the planet" treats mothers as invisible cyphers who aren't human beings in their own right. Please! What precious rot. Perhaps you need to go micro, stfu already and get over whiny yourself.

Anyway, Heather's column was very amusing and well done. Good luck to her.

Heh, every once in awhile I stumble upon something.

The idea that those "60's" events you described were somehow a big part of the "rural/metro divide" is problematic not because those events didn't occur but because they were not the basis for the pre-existing attitudes. They were simply "justifications" for beliefs that were already held.