"...when Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat came from 2-0 down to beat the Pistons, bringing some sparkle to the Larry O'Brien Trophy."

Beat the whom? Methinks your (admittedly very impressive) prognostication success has muddled your memory. The Heat did beat the Pistons 4-2, but of course since they're from the same conference that wasn't for the Larry O'Brien Trophy. You meant the Mavericks.

...if by funny you mean tragic and appalling.

Just like Dean Smith ten years ago, Brett Favre in 2007 represents the confluence of (1) a legendary career (2) reaching its end (3) with arguably his best season ever (4) as he shatters a major all-time career record (or, in Favre's case, more than one). How could SI resist that combination?

It's one thing if you have to choose between a lifetime achievement award and recognizing a player or coach having an epic season. But if you can do both at once, why wouldn't you?

"Knight is a huntin', gun totin', proud Republican votin', rule-abidin' no-nonsense guy."

Um...you left out police officer assaultin'. And chair throwin'. And player chokin'. And racial slur usin'. And student attackin'.

It never fails to amaze me how Knight's supporters simply can't accept the fact that most people detest Knight because he's a hypocritical, abusive thug. Nah - it must be because he's old-fashioned, and them thar libruls done hate old-fashioned people! Yeah, that must be it!

All this talk of a "blind spot" for Knight is just absurd. Kaufman always uses his column to call out the players, coaches, media people, etc. in sports that do reprehensible things. If he calls out Knight unusually much, that's because Knight is unusually despicable.

That's an odd complaint to make, considering that Roy Williams is being (quite rightly) excoriated for not calling a timeout during Kansas's brutal first half run against the Tar Heels until the Kansas lead was pretty much insurmountable. If Williams had used his first-half timeouts to cool the red-hot Jayhawks and calm his own jittery team -- instead of saving them for, well, nothing -- UNC might very conceivably have won that game.

Keeping that in mind, I'm not sure why I should admire a Stanford coach who also failed to call any timeouts while her team was, in her words, "discombobulated" and "not playing with any offensive flow at all". Isn't that exactly the situation timeouts are for?

It blows my mind that people like mateostgo can complain about "paid superdelegates" with a straight face.

Actually, the superdelegates kept Hillary in the race long after it was clear that Obama would have a majority of pledged delegates. Barack realistically locked that up on May 7, the day of the NC and IN primaries, and mathematically clinched it on May 20 -- yet the race went on, wasting millions or dollars that could have been used to fight McCain, only because of those superdelegates that you insist somehow favored Obama over Clinton.

It's simply not true. Obama won, period. I'm weary of this lie that Clinton was screwed by the very superdelegates who kept her candidacy alive, or that she was somehow cheated out of the election by party bigwigs (who of course are those same superdelegates).

Enough with the lies and spin. Obama won. Deal.

soylentgreenleftovers 1, fake Dem 0

"...33 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed..."

Um, that would mean that the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1975. Wrong decade.

Otherwise, a brilliant essay.

I was really disappointed by this film.

Much of the acting is HORRIBLE. Patrick Wilson (as Nite Owl) is terrible, and Malin Ackerman (as Laurie) gives maybe the worst performance I've ever seen in a major film. She's just painful. It's a shame, because Jackie Earle Haley is wonderful, and so are several others, but the leaden line readings of those two really drag down the film.

Also, Zack Snyder has no sense of restraint or subtlety at all, and that gets old. The scene where Dreiberg and Laurie fight off muggers has arms snapped with protruding broken bones and gushing blood, and sharp objects shoved through people's skulls. All of which is wildly inappropriate for that scene and those characters, but Snyder is so in love with his violence porn that he can't help himself. The movie puts in overwhelming gore just for laughs, so when it later tries to horrify you with violence (as with Rorschach and the dogs) it comes off as silly instead of shocking.

And (SPOILER ALERT!) I can't forgive the movie for acting like the deaths of 50 million people is not a very big deal -- and then acting like the death of one main character IS a big deal. I've always had mixed feelings about Moore's original ending, but he did make us feel the magnitude of the loss of life, and the weight of the terrible bargain made. This movie can't be bothered with that. The tone of the final scenes is totally wrong -- it's offensively cavalier, almost flip.

Rant over.