Yes, I think that not only racism, but also what might be called assholeism, have contributed greatly to my past hatred of Barry Bonds and my campaigning for his banning from the game and that his post 1998 statistics be stricken from the record. I see that such sentiments were greatly out of step with the majority of baseball fans, and that, as stated above, Barry's job is to hit the long ball and he has done so magnificently.........and America does not care, nor should it, whether any old performance enhancing drug had any role in any homer hitting performance. The records will stand regardless of merit, and a place of honor in the Hall of Fame awaits.

What I would like to propose, to make up for my past hatred of Barry Bonds, and I was certainly not alone in such rejecting hatefulness, that Barry Bonds be immediately awarded 300 bonus homeruns to be added to his lifetime total. Once he not only passes the record of Hank Aaron, but sails by it to a total surpassing 1,000 lifetime homers, I feel that I can truly put my Bonds hatred in the past, and can again give the book of major league baseball records the respect that it would then deserve.

You state that the Mavs would have to get by both the Suns and the Spurs to reach the finals. Not so. They will have to face only one of those teams.

What we have now is decidedly not a "farm program". The farm program was done away with by the Republican Congress in the 90's, and supplanted by the "Freedom to Farm Folly" constructed by Dick Armey. The stated purpose of this act was to let the free market work it's wonders, and thus crash the markets for core farm commodities, enabling the US to corner the world markets with its ultra cheap farm production. This lunacy actually worked just as it was designed to work......and soon congress had to deal with the prospect of massive farm failures and bank failures and potential collapse of rural cultural structures.

Freedom to Farm was replaced by the present patchwork subsidy system that seems to please no one. All one can say is that it is far better than Freedom to Farm..........and now I read that some want a return to the Freedom to Farm philosophy in order to "raise global farm prices" so that third world farmers can sell their production at high prices and use the money to by cheap food for their countries on the world markets.........The lunatic spirit of Dick Armey lives!

It seems to get increasingly frequent that the vegan morality/meat eater evil argument is reframed as being a Factory Farm/animal welfare argument. The logic generally goes: Today almost all animal farming is factory farming. Factory farming treats animals with cruelty, torture , and suffering. Anyone who has any concern for the welfare of animals would refuse to purchase and consume the products of family farming. Therefore, all must stop eating animal products and become vegans.

One weakness of this argument is the murkiness of the Factory Farming concept. This term is defined in a myriad of ways, and is confused with other concepts such as industrial farming, corporate farming, large scale farming, confined feeding operations, and even farm operations where the operator does not physically live on the property. Overall, there is a frequent emphasis on this being defined as broadly as possible.

Why? Because of the numbers. Those who believe that eating animal products is immoral are in the distinct minority. But if you reframe the issue as being, on one side, those who wish animals to be treated humanely as opposed to those evil persons who wish to torture and abuse animals, then the vegans appear to be on the dominant side, and their argument seems no longer a moralistic argument. The problem is that here the reframing is as phoney as a Carl Rove campaign, and it remains a basically moralistic argument and they still don't have the numbers.

I've been a classic baseball fan for years. A lot of years. I'm through. Baseball is dead and Gary Mathews Jr. killed it. I have followed the Rangers, and I cheered for this juicehead. There is no longer a game. No winners or losers or records. Baseball can get the fuck off my TV, my radio, my newspaper. It isn't worth a second of my time. Joan Walsh can have it. I'm already gone.

i ....the overall percentages of fans who are rooting against Bonds (52 percent), who think he should be recognized for the home run record (57 percent) and who think he should be voted into the Hall of Fame (58 percent).

It should be noted that these percentages are relevant only if you accept the pollsters assumption that baseball fans are 25% black and 75% white. I doubt that this is accurate, especially since hispanic and asian fans are excluded. I think that the construction of the poll certainly skews the data in Mr. Bonds' favor.

When Nash played for the Mavs, he was just as good a point guard as he is now. In the playoffs, all other Western Division teams knew that the most effective way to play the Mavs was to punish Nash.......especially when he would dribble around back and forth under the basket until getting either a layup or a pass to a teammate for a dunk. The Lakers and the Spurs were among the most abusive to Nash. The Mavs would whine about the abuse that Nash was handed, but the national press couldn't have cared less. They labled the Mavs "soft" for complaining. Contrast that with the new found national love for Nash and the Suns. It makes me sick. Poor Steve.....abused by thugs. Give me a break. If it's fairness you want, then give the Suns the exact same indifferent shrug that was awarded the Mavs.