We get both an introduction to the Cuban-Americans, welcomed into this country when escaping a brutal regime, seeking to permanently hijack our foreign policy for the benefit of whatever they want to do today (hello, Elian Gonzalez!), and the families of POW-MIAs, who wanted to hijack our foreign policy for the benefit of their own inability to let go of the past (which I can understand on a personal level, but hardly at the level of policy).

The Vietnam War was, as John Kerry so eloquently put it, a mistake. Lyndon Johnson acknowledged as much to Richard Russell on a White House tape recorded before the Bay of Pigs. 50,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese died for that mistake. The families of those who were lost over there, however, were wrong to try to hold our foreign policy hostage to their needs. And to attack John McCain for reaching a different conclusion about how to heal the wounds of that war (and do the very odd thing--give political cover to a President of the opposing party who was doing the right thing on the issue, as eloquently described by Michael Lewis in his book about the 1996 campaign) is beyond selfish. I don't agree with a lot of what McCain stands for, but the is uniquely entitled to make up his own mind about the aftermath of Vietnam.

There may have been ways for John Edwards to get press attention in this campaign, other than speaking out on issues that really matter to people and taking the high road in debates. He could have staged media events, or made outrageous statements, or used his wife's breast cancer in inappropriate ways, and the media might have taken note.

Instead, he chose to stick to the issues, to stand for, in Howard Dean's famous phrase, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, and all we heard about him was haircut jokes.

And then he chose to walk away when it made sense to do so, not as a kingmaker or a power broker, but as a man whose issues will either be taken up by the two remaining candidates, or they will just sell their souls a little further to the media machine.

I intended to go to my caucuses and support John Edwards. I have no clue what I'm going to do now.

Of course, the game was in Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

Low seed, teams had played before with the more expected result, Villanova throws a near perfect second half and you kept expecting Georgetown to power out of it, but they never did.

Not that there were many humans more different than Rollie Massimino and Tom Coughlin.

Chevy has a series of radio spots involving internet and text abbreviations (so 1990's, but then again, it's radio). They explain "LOL", even. The kicker is supposed to be that the Chevy has an acronym so it's cool like text, get it?

Then they said, and I wish I were making this up, "WTF: Wow, that's fantastic!"

My immediate take was, WTF?

Clearly someone in Chevy's and Westwood One's clearance department is so lame they had no idea something was being slipped past them.

The fact that he didn't coach any NBA all-stars after Isiah, but did win an NCAA championship after Isiah (which is, oddly enough, the goal he was hired for, not to be a free farm team for the Association) proves it. His teams were better than the talent he had. He was the last man to coach an undefeated NCAA championship team; Dale Brown had four NBA first round draft choices, including Shaquille O'Neal and Chris Jackson, on a single team and didn't win diddly-squat.

Yes, he had a temper. He certainly didn't get a lot of slack in the media because of it. His personality is a lot like Barry Bonds, but while Bonds is under indictment, Knight can go watch his son coach with pride.

Bob Knight was a member of the 1960 Ohio State national championship team under Fred Taylor, along with John Havlicek and Jerry Lucas. His first head coaching job was at Army, and he left his job to his former player and then assistant Mike Krzyzewski.

The Western Conference has ten good teams, so there won't be anything like a walkover in the playoffs for the Suns no matter what their seed (not that anyone should be considered a walkover after the Mavs ran into the Warriors last year). And the top three teams in the East are all far better than the Cavs were last year.

I would have thought the time to take a gamble like this would be when there was an opportunity to take advantage of a weak conference, or when a conference was topheavy and the gamble was to get over a specific obstacle. The Pistons won championships with both strategies, getting Rasheed to put them over the top in a weak conference, and gettin Mark Aguirre to finally overtake the Celtics in the late 90's.

But when the conference is this strong, I don't see completely changing your system mid-season. You have no idea whom you're going to play in the first or any other round, so you don't know if Shaq's remaining qualities, even if they do mesh with the rest of the team, will be what you were looking for.

So count me among the quizzical.