Seems Reasonable

I'm not sure the UK Telegraph understands the meaning of the word paranoid.

They've written a story on how the pressure of the NATO bombings is starting to get to Gaddafi who has started moving from hospital to hospital in an attempt to save his life. The paper quotes unnamed diplomats who describe Gaddafi as "paranoid."

The Telegraph just keeps right on truckin with their story. Had it been me writing the story, I might have stopped for a sentence of two to explain to the reader that if a person sees NATO bombing everything of value in his country, including his own house, then being worried about being killed is a rather prudent concern and not "paranoia".

Wouldn't it be more ridiculous if he were acting differently? Bombs falling all around him and takes the dog for a walk or spends a quite day at home with one of his army of lady police?

I have no beef with NATO trying to take out Gaddafi, by and large he seems like something the world won't miss, but the media at least should give the guy the dignity of not branding him as a delusional paranoid for thinking we're trying to kill him when he's exactly right.

Speaking of Gaddafi, what's more ridiculous, the fact that he's still just a colonel or that he still insists that his army of surgically enhanced bodyguards are all virgins? The next dictator who shows restraint and decor around the ladies will be the first. besides, he's got 72 virgins waiting for him in the next life, no need to stockpile them in this one.

Use Your Head, Just Not That One

The hyper leftists in San Francisco have moved one step closer to an electoral "victory."

In these bleak economic times, the City will get to decide in November whether or not circumcision should be banned as genital mutilation. Just like they do it in Africa!

Right. The fact that liberals want to have the government regulate and eliminate parental choices and religious practices (unless they're Muslim) is no great shocker but it seems as if nobody realizes the screaming contradiction here.

Outlawing circumcision in one of the most tranny friendly cities in America? How in the world can people with even the slightest hold on reality come to this position? That a parent deciding to circumcise his kid for hygienic or religious reasons is somehow a fanatic barbarian while some wispy eighteen year old who wants to have a doctor flay his junk into a sparkling new vagina is somehow not only sane but a hero for realizing that God mistakenly put Suzie into Steve? Good lord.

Don't get me wrong, if a tranny wants to go all the way, have at it. There shouldn't be laws against it but the people of San Francisco are drawing a very crooked line in the moral sand regarding what we can do with our genitalia. Now, it's possible to have a legitimate opposition to circumcision. But when a city has publicly declared that they are going to indulge such radical elective surgical procedures, they lose the ability to take a moral stand against one that is minuscule by comparison.

The silver lining to this is that San Francisco must have figured out how to escape both the national financial crisis and the financial stranglehold that California puts on its cities. There can be no other explanation for why a city would even entertain this kind of nonsense. When people talk about government waste, they are almost always talking about money spent for some project but what about the cost of time wasted? Some government hack had to type this up, compose it for print, print it up, etc., etc. I hope when all the down and out in that city are being told that there is no more money for government cheese, housing assistance or discounted heating oil that they remember that at some point their elected official had to sit down and make sure that the people got to vote on whether to allow circumcisions.

The Examined Life

As a man moves into his 30's, he starts to reflect on aging and what it means. I'm no different and as I did some deep reflecting on my life and myself as a person, I came to the realization that the Raiders haven't had a franchise quarterback since I was born.

Surely this had to be a mistake, I said to myself, so I looked it up.

1980 - Jim Plunkett
1981 - Marc Wilson
1982 - Jim Plunkett
1983 - Jim Plunkett
1984 - Marc Wilson
1985 - Marc Wilson
1986 - Jim Plunkett
1987 - Marc Wilson
1988 - Jay Schroeder
1989 - Vince Evans, Steve Beuerlein, Jay Schroeder (none played enough to qualify for the passing title)
1990-1992 - Jay Schroeder
1993-1996 - Jeff Hostetler
1997 - Jeff George
1998 - Donald Hollas
1999-2003 - Rich Gannon
2004-2005 - Kerry Collins
2006 - Andrew Walter
2007 - Daunte Culpepper
2008 - JaMarcus Russell
2009 - JaMarcus Russell
2010 - Jason Campbell

Dear god that is awful. How on earth did they get to the AFC title game in 1991 riding the cannon of Jay Schroeder and the mind of Art Shell? Inconceivable. I would argue that there isn't one franchise guy on the list. Plunkett is good but there's a reason he was dumped by the Pats. If those Raider teams weren't loaded, he would've been terrible there too.

The Rich Gannon era is the only possible time the Raiders might have had a franchise QB. The stats back it up and the went to the Super Bowl once. But really, if a guy doesn't play until he's 36 and is successful mostly because Jon Gruden was a genius, can you really call him a franchise QB? I think as good as Gannon was, that was because we had a franchise coach, not a stud QB.

As sad as this list is, knowing that you can't win in the NFL without a QB, I choose to look at the Silver lining. No longer will I ask myself why we've sucked for the better part of two decades, I'll just look at this list and marvel that we even managed to win 4 games a year. With this level of ineptitude at the most important position, the team should have been disbanded or moved to Cleveland long ago. Seriously, Don Hollas? Jeff George? I didn't even have the heart to put in Todd Marinovich. Even the putrid Bengals got Boomer Esiason and Carson Palmer pre-knee explosion. As legendary a list of grade A suck this list is, the fact that they managed a few playoff appearances and a title game seems like an undeserved bounty.

Assuming there's football this year, it'll be refreshing to watch Jason Campbell take the field to hold the ball to long and know that this performance is historically near the top of the barrel. That and a 12 pack should take the edge right off.

The Last Frontier?

I realize that the media is always looking for the next big story about overcoming societies prejudices and bias but the media is going overboard today.

Two stories broke today about gays in sports, one somewhat significant the other not really news at all.

The first one I saw was that Will Sheridan had come out as gay. For those who don't remember, Sheridan was a pretty good power forward for Villanova. His story is pretty straightforward, when he came out to his team, they were cool with it and most of the opposing crowds didn't make an issue of it except for the scholars at St. Joe's. Granted, it wasn't all easy, his father didn't speak to him for a year after he was told. Aside from that though, his revelation doesn't seem so traumatic. There will always be people who criticize you for something you are, especially in a sports arena.

Looking at it objectively, Sheridan's story seems like a victory for society. A visible athlete comes out of the closet as gay and is met with mostly acceptance and indifference. Isn't that what we are looking for as a society? Knowing that there is always that small percentile who will hate for no good reason, isn't indifference and acceptance what we should want? I think so.

That's what makes the next story so needlessly publicized.

Today Phoenix Suns President Rick Welts also came out of the closet as gay, believed to be the first high ranking sports official to come out of the closet. I understand how in the testosterone fueled world of pro sports that coming out as gay as an active player is treacherous business but are we supposed to believe that being a paper pushing office worker is so high stakes that being the first gay one to come out is groundbreaking because it's tangentially related to sports? This seems about as relative as the first gay beer vendor coming out of the closet.

This isn't to minimize the importance of the event for Welts however. I'm sure I don't have any idea what it's like to feel like you had to hide something like that, although I suspect being a Republican in college is a similar burden. My only question is why do we need a breaking news ticker to announce that a paper pushing bureaucrat is gay? Surely if the star athlete, black guy from the mean streets of Philly can get through being gay relatively unscathed, the lilly white executive in Tucson should be a yawner.

I know it goes against all the liberal sensibilities but we should really take a small victory lap here. Public acceptance of gays is pretty high these days. Nothing ever gets 100% accepted but when people shrug their shoulders at the news that you're gay, that's the sign of progress. If gay marriage is what's making this perception of intolerance persist then that's unfortunate. That's an issue that has become a political and religious wedge issue despite that fact that it has no practical impact on society these days.

I guess the last true frontier is for an openly gay, active major leaguer to come out. Even that is probably scarier in theory than in reality. Whenever these ex-players come out as gay, most of their teammates seem to have figured it out already. Hopefully the positive, non-reaction to today's dual outings will convince any gay that they can just be gay and that they have reached a level of acceptance where it is no longer required to hold a press conference for such a thing. I think most people are there already.