Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Update on Joel Klatt

Joel was held overnight in a Houston hospital after sustaining a concussion in the CU/Texas game. He was released the next day. He is expected to make a full recovery but it is still not certain if he will be ready to play in the bowl game. Thanks for the prayers and concern of all of you who wrote. I am sure Joel wants to play with his team in their last game before he graduates but the important thing is that he will be fine.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

An update on the CU/Nebraska fiasco

From the same columnist who wrote the only MSM piece I saw denouncing the fan behavior at the game we have an update in today's column about the roaring defeat at Texas.

More CU students got expelled from the loss to Nebraska than traveled to the Big 12 Conference title game.

While it is good news in my opinion that some students got expelled this is typical of today's MSM. We are left to guess how many students did each. Assuming that he uses the English language correctly, more than one. No clues about narrowing it down more than that. His statement is true (assuming it isn't sarcasm which it may be if you read it in context) if 3 students were expelled and 2 went to the Texas game.

I don't give a fig about the latter number but it would be nice if the press made a couple calls and found out how many were given the heave-ho after last weekends embarrassment. It should be well into the middle double digits. Maybe I will give it a shot.

He also makes a number of references to graduation rates of the football program but gives us no numbers. He implies that they are falling but never explicitly says so. Are they? Are they better or worse than most division one schools? No clue. This is very important IMHO. One of the reasons I was/am a Bobby Knight fan was his graduation rates. I knew a few of the players in school and it is no secret how he got those rates and there was no hanky-panky involved. His success on the court was secondary to his insistence that his players were students first.

Also worth noting, he still calls the witch hunt over recruiting a scandal and harps on it throughout the column. I suppose he also couldn't be bothered to read the official investigation report. If you read the whole thing you have to come to the conclusion that "the scandal" is much ado about nothing. It ain't the LA Times but the Denver Post is not exactly full of great reporting.

Prayers for Joel Klatt

I have never met Joel and as I have said I don't follow CU football so I wasn't watching the game and was unaware until a few minutes ago of his injury. I have spent some time with his parents and they are great people. The other folks at my church who know Joel all say he is a wonderful guy. Joel, the starting quarterback for CU, was sent to the hospital with a concussion in yesterday's game with Texas and expected to be held overnight. I expect to hear an update today as mutual friends are coming to my house. I will pass it along.

Mark Steyn does it again

With his unique flare, some humor, and a fair bit of history lesson, he makes the case for supporting Senator Joe Lieberman (or is that President Bush) on Iraq policy. You must read it. There are many juicy tidbits in it.

Actually, the administration's been doing that for two years -- setting dates for the return of sovereignty, for electing a national assembly, for approving a constitution, etc, and meeting all of them. And all during those same two years Kerry and his fellow Democrats have huffed that these dates are far too premature, the Iraqis aren't in a position to take over, hold an election, whatever. The Defeaticrats were against the benchmarks before they were for them.

...

The stability fetishists in the State Department and the European Union fail to understand that there is no status quo: things are always moving in some direction and, if you leave a dictator and his psychotic sons in business, and his Oil-for-Food scam up and running, and his nuclear R&D teams in places, chances are they're moving in his direction.

...

And here's where the scale of the Bush gamble becomes clear. Islam and "the West" have a long history. And, without rehashing the last millennium and a half, the Muslim conquest of Europe and then the Crusades and the fall of Andalusia, if you take out a map of the world and look at the rise of the European empires you notice a curious thing: in conquering the world the imperial powers for the most part simply bypassed the Islamic world. They made Africa and South Asia and Latin America and everywhere else seats of European power, but they left the Middle East alone. And, even when they eventually got their hands on the region, after the First World War, they made no serious attempt to reform the neighborhood. We live with the consequences of that today.


Go read the whole thing.

Hat Tip: Powerline, who also publishes an interesting exchange on the Lieberman article.

Coincidentally, earlier this week, reader Michael Valois asked Columbia Journalism Review editor Steve Lovelady "what he thought
about the MSM ignoring Joe Lieberman's positive report from Iraq." Valois wrote:

Steve, Sen. Lieberman just returned from his FOURTH post-invasion trip to Iraq and writes in the Wall Street Journal: "I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn...It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern."

Why can't we read about Sen. Leiberman's views in the NY Times or in the Washington Post? Why is it that President Bush and Sen. Lieberman can give facts to readers from BOTH sides of the aisle, but Mr. [Calvin] Woodward can't manage to do so in an AP wire dispatch?

Lovelady responded:
You think the New York Times and Washington Post should write a story every time a neocon hawk pens an essay for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page?
Somehow, I don't see that happening...


And there, ladies and gentelemen, you have it.


Let me see if I have the scorecard correct. In the 2000 election there were 3 neocons on the two main Presidential tickets: The Republican Presidential candidate, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate and the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. Is that why all those old people in Florida got so confused? Wow, now I understand.