News: February 2007 Archives
The only thing surprising about Jason Whitlock's report from the All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas is that a major sports writer has the nerve to call out the NBA on the rapid degeneration of its fans.
NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas was an unmitigated failure, and any thoughts of taking the extravaganza to New Orleans in 2008 are total lunacy. ...All weekend, people, especially cab drivers, gossiped about brawls and shootings. You didn't know what to believe because the local newspaper was filled with stories about what a raging success All-Star Weekend was. The city is desperately trying to attract an NBA franchise, and, I guess, there was no reason to let a few bloody bodies get in the way of a cozy relationship with Stern.
Most journalists depend on maintaining good relations with their subjects in order to keep their access privileges, so the situation must be bad indeed for the truth to be leaking out everywhere.
I was there. Walking The Strip this weekend must be what it feels like to walk the yard at a maximum security prison. You couldn't relax. You avoided eye contact. The heavy police presence only reminded you of the danger. ...David Stern seriously needs to consider moving the event out of the country for the next couple of years in hopes that young, hip-hop hoodlums would find another event to terrorize. Taking the game to Canada won't do it. The game needs to be moved overseas, someplace where the Bloods and Crips and hookers and hoes can't get to it without a passport and plane ticket. ...
All-Star Weekend Vegas screamed that the NBA is aligned too closely with thugs. Stern is going to have to take drastic measures to break that perception/reality. All-Star Weekend can no longer remain the Woodstock for parolees, wannabe rap artists and baby's mamas on tax-refund vacations.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure much of this behavior is under the NBA's control. Many of its players are thugs, so they naturally attract that sort of fan.
So hundreds of JetBlue passengers were stranded on a plane for 10 hours at JFK Airport yesterday, but I don't understand why they didn't just get off.
We have pictures from inside JetBlue Flight 751 on its way to Cancun. One hundred and 34 passengers sat on the plane for more than nine hours today. Passengers didn't get off until 5 p.m. And as you would imagine, all that time never getting to Cancun had passengers furious."There was no power and it was hot. There was no air. They kept having to open the actual plane doors so we could breath," a passenger on the flight told us.
"Nobody gave us any answers. They kept telling us we know as much as you do. And I said, I don't work here, you work here, give me answers," another passenger said.
"Everybody is incredibly tired and frustrated and we didn't expect to be in New York tonight, so it's ridiculous. Just sitting there and sitting there and them saying they were going to pull us into the gate and they never did. There was very little food. It was just a nightmare," a passenger told us.
So why didn't the people just leave? Was someone holding a gun to their heads? Just get up, get off the plane, and walk to the terminal. Alternatively, use a cell phone to dial 911 and get the the police to come. This isn't rocket science. Some people are sheep.
Happy Valentine's Day. I'm working from home again today due to snow, and I'm getting a lot more done than I do when I go into the office. Go figure.
Are any of you doing anything special tonight? Jessica and I had our Valentine's Day yesterday because we're having some friends over tonight to watch Lost. Most of the married people we know aren't planning to do anything fancy tonight... maybe that's more for daters?
The greater St. Louis area is experiencing phenomenal economic development and has benefited from "missing" the real estate bubble that hit the rest of the country. Residential real estate in the St. Louis area only climbed about 30% from 2000 to 2006, compared to an 80% national average, and the prices are continuing to crawl upwards rather than receding like many other areas. These steady prices have encouraged a lot of commercial and residential development in the suburbs, as well as industrial development outside the city core, and downtown itself is also in the throes of "revitalization".
Cordish is seeking to build six blocks of signature restaurants, specialty stores, entertainment venues and office space next to the new Busch Stadium. The developer, which has built similar projects around the country, is partnering with the Cardinals organization, which owns the land.In the midst of the World Series, the city and Cordish announced, to much fanfare, they had reached a deal in principle. Since then, a flurry of last-minute discussions pose potential changes to the project's scope.
In the first phase of the project, Cordish is now committed to 324,000 square feet of space for stores, restaurants and entertainment. That's about 10 percent less than the firm committed to originally. It would still build 100,000 square feet of offices and add 1,200 parking spaces.
They might also build a ton of condos, depending on market conditions (there are already hundreds of new condos going up in the city, and it's not clear how the market will look in 2009). The biggest strike against the city itself is the 1% city earnings tax on residents, workers, and businesses, but there's talk of eliminating it.
Anna Nicole Smith just dropped dead, and I wouldn't care at all except that my entire office is now buzzing with the news. I've never seen any other news story spread through my office this quickly, and it's really bizarre.
All the hubbub about Nancy Pelosi's private Air Force jet is ridiculous.
The Department of Defense yesterday sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that puts limits on the size of the plane she may use to travel across the country and restricts the guests she can bring, The Washington Times has learned.A congressional source who read the letter signed by Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert Wilkie said it essentially limits her to the commuter plane used by former Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, which requires refueling to travel from Washington to Mrs. Pelosi's San Francisco district. A second source, in the Bush administration, confirmed the contents of the letter.
The Washington Times first reported last week that Mrs. Pelosi's staff was pressing the Department of Defense for an Air Force aircraft large enough to fly nonstop to San Francisco. She also has pressed to be able to include other members of the California congressional delegation, her family members and her staff on the plane.
"It's not a question of size. It's a question of distance," Mrs. Pelosi told reporters yesterday. "We want an aircraft that can reach California."
Look, she obviously needs a jet that can get her from California to DC without stopping. If there's another terrorist attack or a war and she needs to get to work she can't be stopping to refuel. She should also be restricted from bringing non-work-related passengers onto the plane, because it's not her own personal jet.
This whole topic of conversation is stupid. ABC News reports that an Air Force C-37A is probably available that could fly coast-to-coast without the excessive cost of the C-32.
The practice was wrong and evil, but it's stupid for Missouri to consider issuing an "apology" for slavery as proposed by State Representative Talibdin El-Amin, a Democrat.
JEFFERSON CITY | Missouri would be one of the first states to apologize for a history of slavery under a resolution introduced by a St. Louis lawmaker.The resolution details more than 140 years of slavery and says “an apology for centuries of brutal dehumanization and injustices cannot ease the past, but confession of the wrongs can speed racial healing and reconciliation.â€
An acknowledgment of the wrongness of slavery is certainly not out of place, but that acknowledgment has already been written into our Constitution with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers. What better "apology" can be made now, when both the perpetrators and the victims of slavery are long since dead?
It's utter nonsense until you realize that this call for an apology is really just the opening salvo in the legal battle for "reparations". (Sorry for putting quotes around everything, but it's hard to take the ridiculous vocabulary seriously.) Those who advocate taking money from white Americans and giving it to black Americans as some sort of payment for slavery handily ignore a myriad of facts: there are no living ex-slaves; there are no living ex-slave-owners; many American whites' ancestors had no involvement with slavery or even fought to end it; many American blacks' ancestors had no involvement with slavery or even sold slaves to the slave traders. If you overlook those critical points, the proposed reparation equation is:
(1) reparations = (average white American wealth) - (average black American wealth)
But that equation is ridiculous on its face! Why should the ancestors of slaves compare their wealth to the wealth of white Americans, when without slavery they would never have left Africa? Why isn't the proper equation:
(2) reparations = (average black African wealth) - (average black American wealth)
Under equation (2), the reparations would be negative. That's right: as horrible as slavery was, those who have benefited most from it are modern black Americans. This doesn't mean that slavery was a good thing, but it does illustrate that calls for "apologies" and "reparations" are foolish and reflect a complete ignorance of history.
