Perhaps the most ill-chosen sports metaphor of all time ...

'Bama Football coach compares team's 21-14 loss to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. I kid you not:

http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/7467808?MSNHPHMA

Saban says 'Bama loss a 'catastrophic event'
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) - Alabama's latest loss has coach Nick Saban searching for ways to motivate his team.

Citing the 9-11 terrorist attacks and Pearl Harbor, Saban said Monday his team must rebound like America did from a "catastrophic event."
In this case, that would be an embarrassing 21-14 loss Saturday to Louisiana-Monroe.

"Changes in history usually occur after some kind of catastrophic event," Saban said during the opening remarks of his weekly news conference. "It may be 9-11, which sort of changed the spirit of America relative to catastrophic events. Pearl Harbor kind of got us ready for World War II, or whatever, and that was a catastrophic event."

Alabama's just getting ready to face No. 25 Auburn, its biggest rival, on Saturday.

A Saban spokesman said the coach chose the 9-11 and Pearl Harbor references to illustrate the challenges facing his team.

"What Coach Saban said did not correlate losing a football game with tragedy; everyone needs to understand that. He was not equating losing football games to those catastrophic events," football spokesman Jeff Purington said in a statement to The Associated Press. "The message was that true spirit and unity become evident in the most difficult of times. Those were two tremendous examples that everyone can identify with."

Sorry, Mr. Spokesman, but your flexible P.R. skills are not going to save Saban from his flagrant arrogance. Keep in mind Saban is this same conceited f*ckwit head coach at the Miami Dolphins who assured his team and bosses that he wasn't leaving for Alabama, while at the same time arranging for the press to cover his departure (via a 'Bama booster's private jet) for the announcement of his acceptance of helm of the Crimson Tide.

Gore's Nobel No Boost to Presidential Bid

Well this must take the gilt off the Nobel Peace Prize for the former Veep.

Despite winning the exceedingly misnamed gong, Al Gore has seen no boost in the number of people who think he ought to run for President. The Gallup Organization, which skews consistently Left in its polling, claims the following results:

Asked if they would like to see the former vice president run for president in 2008, people said no by a 54 percent to 41 percent margin, according to a Gallup Poll. That was about the same as last March, when people opposed his running 57 percent to 38 percent. Even among Democrats there was no visible surge of interest in Gore. In the new survey, 48 percent said they would like him to run and 43 percent said they would not. Last March, Democrats were in favor of him entering the race 54 percent to 41 percent -- statistically the same as the new poll. Gore, who won the prize last Friday for his work raising awareness of global warming, has not said he is a candidate for the White House but has never definitively ruled it out -- including for a race in the future.

The second bolded point is especially telling: even among Democrats there was no visible surge of interest in Gore. That has to be devastating to Gore, who has never given up the ideal of the Presidency, the role for which his parents prepared him from childhood. His energy in all things "Climate Change" comes from the desire to vindicate his lost bid for the presidency, and you can bet your child's college fund that he wanted the Oscar (which he did not win, BTW) and the Nobel to propel him into the White House.

I wonder if this will mean he re-doubles his efforts toward ratification of Kyoto or if he will draw down to lick his wounds?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-101607-gorepoll,1,4688911.story

Mexico pays to educate Mexicans in the U.S.: won't do so at home

From the W-T-F? Department: http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_091907_education_mexican_curriculum_.ede64566.html

Some Oregon schools adopting Mexican curriculum

Some Oregon high schools are adopting Mexico's public school curriculum to help educate Spanish-speaking students with textbooks, an online Web site, DVDs and CDs provided free by Mexico to teach math, science and even U.S. history.

The Oregon Department of Education and Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education are discussing aligning their curricula so courses will be valid in both countries. Similar ventures are under way in Yakima, Wash., San Diego, Calif., and Austin, Texas.

"Students come to us with such complex issues," said Tim King, director of Clackamas Middle College and Clackamas Web Academy, where a virtual course using Mexico's learning materials got started this week.

"We've had to change in order to fit into each school scene, become more complex and open ourselves up to new situations." (Editor's Note: Is Oprah in charge?) Oregon officials say the approach is intended as a supplement to keep students learning in Spanish while also gaining English skills. Until now, Oregon school districts generally have relied on bilingual aides or used Spanish material different from the English material others are studying.

"That's not enough," said Patrick Burk, chief policy officer with the superintendent's office of the Oregon Department of Education. He said the idea is minimal disruption for immigrant Latinos.

"The availability of resources is astounding," said Burk, who flew to Mexico with Oregon curriculum officials in August to discuss making equivalency standards official. "We're able to serve the students so much better if we're working together."

Why are American schools seemingly the last to understand what we all know: that the greatest capacity human beings have for the acquisition of language is when we are children? Immersion is the best way for these youngsters to learn English, and yet Oregon, Washington, California and Texas are not only putting English on the back-burner, but are subverting their own curriculum in favor of Mexico's. Mexico's!

Ah, but the author saves the best for last ...

Mexico has made its national curriculum available to communities across the U.S. since 2001 to encourage Mexican adults and youths to continue an education often abandoned back home due to limited resources. (Emphasis Mine)

Mexico is spending money educating Mexican and Latinos in the U.S., but they won't guarantee educating students in Mexico??? Outsourcing at the expense of their own children??? Viva Mexico!

Jesse Jackson is a race-baiting scumbag

Yes, I said it.

Anyone who "attends" here regularly (and I really do wish you'd comment!) knows I am no fan of Senator Barack Obama. I think his candidacy is a "Cult of Personality", as his statements on both foreign policy and domestic issues betray his not being ready to assume the mantle of the President of The United States. A lesser quibble of mine is his lamentable tendency to play the race card, and I believe he has embraced his African-American ethnicity at the expense of his multiracial heritage.

Perhaps the irony is too rich here. I do not, however, take any pleasure in the following headline:

http://www.thestate.com/local/v-print/story/177514.html

Jackson criticises Obama for "acting too White".

The Rev. Jesse Jackson called Tuesday on Democrats seeking the 2008 nomination for president to give S.C. voters “something to vote for” when they go to the polls in January ... Jackson sharply criticized presidential hopeful and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for “acting like he’s white” in what Jackson said has been a tepid response to six black juveniles’ arrest on attempted-murder charges in Jena, La. Jackson, who also lives in Illinois, endorsed Obama in March, according to The Associated Press.

“If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena,” Jackson said after an hour-long speech at Columbia’s historically black Benedict College. “Jena is a defining moment, just like Selma was a defining moment,” said the iconic civil rights figure, who worked with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1965 Selma civil rights movement and was with King at his 1968 assassination.

Later, Jackson said he did not recall making the “acting like he’s white” comment about Obama, stressing he only wanted to point out the candidates had not seized on an opportunity to highlight the disproportionate criminal punishments black youths too often face.

Jackson also said Obama, who consistently has placed second in state and national polls behind New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, must be “bolder” in his political positions if he is to erase Clinton’s lead. Langtry's Note: "Bolder" equals "Anti-White".

Jackson is the only African-American ever to carry South Carolina in a presidential primary election.

Jealous much, Jesse?

Granted, the moment one recognizes their political fortunes have 'played out' has to be humiliating, especially when one has entertained lifelong delusions of grandeur and attempted to acquire them, in the most literal way, by any means necessary (read "Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson" by Kenneth Timmerman:
http://www.amazon.com/Shakedown-Exposing-Real-Jesse-Jackson/dp/0895261081/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/105-9290247-2395630?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190228282&sr=8-2 )

That doesn't excuse emphasizing the tired, frankly dangerous fable that to achieve, excel and 'represent' is to be "White". It's time for the media to stop embracing Jackson as the nations's most prominent civil rights leady, and their complicity in helping to perpetuate Race Fictions must stop. Yesterday.

If September's Vogue is 840 pages, and 727 pages are adverts ...

shouldn't the magazine be sold at a discount?

I love how the cover says 840 pages of fearless fashion (see here http://holycandy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/siennamiller-vogue.jpg ) ** thanks to Candy @ www.holycandy.com ** when, in fact, I'm getting exactly 113 pages of content created by something other than their advertizers (how much of that is Table of Contents, Editor's Note, and Contributors?). Seriously: I'll bet that that's less than the editorial content of the average issue, and yet the September issue costs more!

And sorry, Anna Wintour, but the issue is boring. Staid, knit-witted (the section on handknit pieces is hilarious, and not in a good way), and dull.

James Lileks on the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist (and eminent Blogger) James Lileks has a continuously updated column that's a must-read for anyone who is interested in the Minneapolis I-35 Bridge collapse from a local perspective. I have mixed feelings about this story: I don't, for example, believe that the United States is living on borrowed time with regards to its road and bridges infrastructure. Some bridges need repair now, to be sure: but to conflate one incident with a imminent nationwide danger is exaggeration at best, fear-mongering irresponsibility at worst.

Of course, who is doing the fear-mongering?

National media is guilty first and foremost, with local media in cities other than Minneapolis following a close second. Quite simply, there is no reason for Chirs Cuomo to reporting live from Minneapolis, and even less reason for Chicago's local NBC-5 station to be sending their investigative reporter to do live feeds from the scene. I understand that there is ever-increasing pressure to fill newscasts with stories, whether they come from publicists hawking studies and celebrities or the NTSB.

What Lileks points out is the key query: "At what point is the story news, and at what point is it just Disaster P*rn****phy?"

The following excerpt says it all (http://buzz.mn/?q=node/2176)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10:22 AM Headline over at KSTP:

“Hear the screams from inside the bus.”

You know what? I don’t want to hear the screams from inside the bus. I don’t want to hear someone’s kid shrieking in panic, begging her mom to come save her. Why would I?

This is the point in the story where we start to debate what’s news, and what’s just disaster-pr0n. I’m not making the comparison here, because they’re different events in every way. But nothing about 9/11 hit me as hard as the memorial wall on Grand Central Station, a collection of all the fliers and MISSING posters people had stuck up at the site after the Twin Towers were destroyed. They were mute, handmade pleas, and believe it or not, they didn’t need a voice over that said “for now the family sits and waits, wondering what the news will be” or whatever generic tag gets slapped at the end of the grieving-survivor boilerplate story.

I understand why they do those stories, but I have a hard time watchng them. I don’t want to wonder if the cameraman’s wondering how close he should go on the face to get the tears, because on one hand this person is experiencing great private grief, but on the other hand the light is hitting that teardrop just perfectly. Mostly I want them to leave the people alone. I don’t need to be told what they’re feeing. I can guess.

A Question about "Racial Profiling"

Drudge linked to an article in Yahoo! News about pressure being put on Maricopa Country, Arizona Sheriff Arpaio to end a phone hotline for reporting information about illegal immigrants. Latino "leaders" anf "faith-based" groups are angry, saying such a hotline is an exercise in "Racial Profiling".

PHOENIX - Latino leaders and faith-based organizations want Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to disconnect the hotline he created for people to report information about undocumented immigrants, saying it raises the chance of racial profiling.

But Arpaio said Wednesday that he won't disconnect the hotline and stressed that deputies would investigate people only if authorities had probable cause.

The hotline began last Friday and has received about 300 messages, which include tips about family and friends, employment, day laborers, drop houses and crank calls.

Arpaio said officials are analyzing the tips and officials have not acted on any of the calls.

"There's nothing unconstitutional about putting up a hotline," Arpaio said, pointing out that U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have similar hotlines.

Here's where my question comes in ...

Isn't "Racial Profiling" when you profile someone solely on the basis of race when no crime is, in fact, taking place? Since when did "Racial Profiling" come to encompass reporting law-breakers who happen to be primarily, but not exclusively, members of a particular ethnic group?

Has "Racial Profiling" become yet another ruse employed by Leftwing groups to eliminate not just courses of action available to law enforcement, but discussion of of issues where race has a a subordinate role?