There is a God

There is a God and he has answered my prayers! He has sent us some piching! According to the Sacramento Bee the Giants have signed Barry Zito to a seven year contract!!! Halleluja!

Ford, part deux

And leave us not forget that Ford s ne hell of a football player, who was the MVP his senior year at Michigan, won two national championships, and was offered contracts by the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions. (he was good looking too: likely the only president besides Regan who ever worked as a model).

The Last Great President

I wasn't old enough to vote when Ford pardoned Nixon. I just figured it was part of a deal they'd worked out. I do remember being for Carter in '76. But Ford deserves some praise.

It is an eternal truth that, even in the case of Nixon, all presidents are great presidents once they are dead. We hear it in tributes and obituaries and revisionist eulogies for weeks on end. Ford deserves the title. He really does. This isn't just moist-eyed grief at the loss of someone I would never vote for and never support outside his role as commander in chief. He really was a great president. Can you imagine what would have happened is Spirow Agnew had succeded Nixon? Or Connoly? Or, for that matter, *any* democrat?

So now we are faced with all these warm obituaries for a dead president once again. People will note that Ford's two and a hlaf years were extremely eventful: the fall of Saigon, the Helsinki accords, Tonkin Gulf, the energy crisis, and the huge '70s recession. That's enough for anybody to deal with. They will also call him a great leader and a great man, etc. And he was. Ford is a strong argument for archetypes (or stereotypes). He, like Truman and Eisenhower (who, though born in Texas, was brought up in Abeline Kansas), was the true midwesterner. He was un-pretentious, simple, straightforward and honest. He wasn't a slick southerner like Clinton, a Hollywood insider like Regan (yes another midwesterner, but a Hollywood guy nonetheless) or a New England blue blood like the Bushes. He was a small town boy from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was straight out of Andy Hardy or Homer Price, and that is the kind of guy we needed at that moment in history. Argue all you want about the pardon (and there are good argumnets on both sides), it had the effect Ford wanted: it saved the country from a prosecution that would have paralyzed it for years to come. That's leadership in anybody's book.

But now that he's dead will we *finally* learn anymore about the Kenedy assassination, or do we have to wait for Arlen Specter to kick off? Of course, there may not be any more to learn, but that's another blog.

Why the ACLU?

I'm often asked by my conservative friends why I would support such a leftist, liberal, commie group of crime lovers like the ACLU. Look at recent actions and the answer should be obvious:

When it comes to protecting my--our--rights, the only group which is consistently out there fighting for us, the only group we can rely on to be on our side, is the ACLU. By our side I mean the side of We the People. Certainly the government won't protect us becuase when it coumes to our rights it is the government we need protection *from*. While I don't agree with the ACLU's interpretation of the 2nd ammendment, on first ammendment issues they are our greatest defense.

Need proof? Look at what the curent administration has done in relationship to the press. They have tried and tried to silence critics and to hunt down anyone who might dare to cast a spotlight on their activities. The US attorney in New York recently served a rather creative subpoena on the ACLU demanding any and all copies of a doccument leaked to them. It is an attempt at "prior restraint," preventing the publication of information before it happens. The supreme court has in the past ruled that prior restraint is prohibited, and this subpoena is an endrun around it. The problem is not the doccument itself, which is a policy doccument and has nothing to do with military secrets: the problem is the administration once again trying to act in secret and silence anyone who seeks to force them into the open so we the people can actually see what our government is doing.

This is why I support the ACLU.

This is news

Yesterday's lead story in the Daily News was about the naming of a student activities room at City College, where I teach, after Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther who was convicted of killing a New Jersey State Trooper in the 1970s and is now a fugitive living in Cuba. There was a full cover picture of Shakur with a gun in her hand, dark sunglasses and a big afro, looking like she'd stepped right off the set of Cleopatra Jones. The headline was "DISGRACE!" The story explained that Shakur was wanted as a terrorist with a $1,000,000 bounty on her head. It quoted several New Jersey State Troopers expressing their outrage over the fact that Shaur was being honored at a tax-payer supported public institution.

Here's the thing. The room was named for Shakur in 1989. The sign has been on the door for seventeen years, and the troopers have known and complained about it all along.

So what makes this news?

I'm told it might have something to do with a labor dispute at the school, something about installing a new transformer in the library basement. How this links to a wannabe Che Guevara on the lamb in Cuba for 30 years is something of a stretch though. Certainly News knows better than this.

Talk about a slow news day.

Football yet again

Well, we get the game *I* wanted to see. I know that nobody in Ann Arboro or LA wanted it, but I did. AS USC was slowly sinking into oblivion against UCLA I caught a glimps of the Florida score and said "Wouldn't it be great if USC lost this game and Florida jumped both them and Michigan, and it ended up Michagan vs. USC in the Rose Bowl." Low and behold...

Since my Sig-O is a Michagan alum, I have had to keep a low profile since the BCS bids were announced.

My pre-season NFL pick was the Chargers and it is looking pretty good there too.