King,

I'm in total agreement about the NBA seeding, but I think we're a little too quick to dump on the third-best division winner. In leagues with unbalanced schedules, you have to reward the division winners. I don't like giving the Clippers the home-court in their 6-3 matchup with the Nuggets. The Clips had a better record, but the Nuggets won their division. They played different schedules, so comparing the number of wins might be misleading.

To fix this, just take the three division winners and the best non-division winner and seed them 1 through 4, by record. That avoids the current scenario where a 5-seed has a tougher opponent than a 6- or 7-seed, which rewards tank jobs. It also gives that winner of a weak division a deserved home-court in the first round. And if they're that substandard, they shouldn't survive a 5-seed anyway.

King,

America is a big place that successfully supports a lot of businesses and passions with just two or three percent of the population -- Star Trek conventions, line dancing, scrapbooking -- so I don't see why soccer has to be big to be successful.

We may be drawing 2.0s on the ratings this year, but we've drawn in the 3.0s before. Let's infer from that that there's a pool of ten million people in the USA who really really care about soccer. We should be able to have success on a par with countries of that size. The FIFA top 64 includes the following nations with a population of around 10 mil -- Angola, Belgium, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Serbia, Senegal, Tunisia, Sweden, Portugal ... and the Czech Republic. So I don't see any reason not to _expect_ us to do as well as these other countries, whether or not we ever appear above the fold in the sports section ever again.

By the way, soccer players may or may not make great punters, but Darren Bennett of the Chargers and Vikings had a pretty solid career in the NFL after playing Australian Rules footy for years.

The Argentine national team would not only wipe the floor with the current Knicks team, but if they played a regular season in the NBA they'd probably make the playoffs as a 7- or 6-seed.

The perenially bad NBA teams don't make the playoffs because their teams manage, through a combination of lousy chemistry and poor motivation, to be way less than the sum of their parts. A premier national team could beat any of those squads seven times out of ten.

On the flip side, a premier NBA team like the Spurs or Pistons would beat a national team precisely because they have good team chemistry and players capable of putting their best effort. That's when it would finally boil down to talent vs talent. That's the lesson that the international players have taught the league in the post-Jordan era, and it's made the NBA a better product.

If the government could quash unmarried sex for people in their 20s, it would have a crushing effect on our popular culture as well -- effectively destroying most network TV programming (and all sitcoms) as we know it.

D:

Get FOX out of the henhouse. Vote Democratic.

R:

Why pay more for the same crappy service? Vote Republican.

Face it, New York and Los Angeles get destroyed a lot in movies because it's a win-win for the accountants who greenlight them; horror for blue states and porn for red states.

Destroying countless acres of farmland isn't going to feature in any of our movie plots soon, though you can argue the effect would be far greater.

What an obvious insult to Eddie Gaedel, the famous midget pinch-hitter who wore the number 1/8. Honoring everyone in baseball history except Gaedel is a slap to vertically-challenged Americans!

I recently spent several weeks in Europe, and despite my best efforts I got a crash course in what it is like to be the ignorant foreigner who can't speak the local language. It's embarrassing and debilitating. My experience was vastly improved with even a little facility.

"English-only" is the latest denial tactic about America's real position in the world. If we so much as concede that we might want to speak fluently with non-Americans, well, that's practically treating them as equals. Which might mean that America isn't completely superior!

If you want to survive in the world for the next 50 years, think about picking up some Chinese to go along with Spanish.

Fortunately for the Secret Service, yarmulkes don't fly quite as far as shoes.

That's assuming Oddjob hasn't converted.

Gibbs is still showing more courtesy and consideration to Cheney than Cheney will ever show to a Democrat.

If the press corps is so shocked, we need to pull out all the stops. It's time to apply that old "golden rule" and treat Cheney the way he treats others. Sen. Leahy could provide some pointers.