Pro Sports’ Stunning Hypocrisy On Gambling

From ESPN:

“Isaiah Rodgers and Rashod Berry of the Indianapolis Colts and free agent Demetrius Taylor were suspended indefinitely — through at least the 2023 season — for betting on NFL games last season. In addition, Tennessee Titans offensive tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere was suspended six games for betting on other sports at the workplace. The four suspensions were announced Thursday by the NFL. The Colts subsequently announced that both Rodgers and Berry have been waived as a consequence of their suspensions. “The integrity of the game is of the utmost importance,” general manager Chris Ballard said in a statement. “As an organization we will continue to educate our players, coaches, and staff on the policies in place and the significant consequences that may occur with violations.”

Meanwhile, while watching the Boston Red Sox play the Toronto Blue Jays yesterday, I noticed that about 75% of the commercials were promoting on-line betting on baseball games, including that baseball game. At one point the Red Sox play-by-play announcer read the over-under odds on the game’s total runs and other odds. Several of the gambling ads featured David Ortiz, the Red Sox icon who is about to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

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And Another One Bites The Dust To Conform To The Woke Indoctrination Imperative…

The National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) chooses debate topics for high school competition and runs hundreds of high school tournaments including the annual national tournament, which started this week  in Arizona. Six thousand students from across the country will compete. The NSDA  rules are very clear that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs.”

Nevertheless, Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA, reveals that the organization does not enforce its rules, apparently in the interest of what progressives regard as “the greater good.” The database includes each judge’s “paradigm,” meaning what that judge regards as important in judging debating technique. (The use of jargon like “paradigm” is why I dropped out of debate club.) Does a debater speak too fast, look down when speaking, have an annoying voice, or say “uh” too much? Does he or she use too many anecdotes, rationalizations or appeals to authority? When debate competitors learn that a particular judge will be judging their performance, they need to pay heed to that judge’s priorities….which is why the presence of this judge’s “paradigm” in the database is disturbing:

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Ethical Quote Of The Month: Dan Abrams

“We are supposed to be in the business of calling out the spin, not creating it…If we want the public to trust us in the news business, how can the entities themselves lie or spin their own news?”

—Lawyer, TV pundit and news host (“Nightline”) Dan Abrams, condemning NBC’s story that Chuck Todd was leaving “Meet the Press” to spend more time with his family.

Oh, bingo, Dan! And the answer to Abrams’ rhetorical question is: Given how much, often and routinely they lie, news organizations shouldn’t expect the public to trust them, yet they do, because they have no respect for the public’s intelligence and no regard for the duty of journalists in a democracy to keep citizens informed.

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Signature Significance Cubed: This Weekend’s Despicable Political Cartoon By The Washington Post’s Ann Telnaes

It is signature significance for a political cartoonist to issue such a cheap, dishonest, juvenile, partisan and unfunny cartoon even once: no cartoonist with wit or taste would create such garbage

It is signature significance for the editors of a newspaper that it would allow such junk to appear in the paper’s pages. Doing so proves that the newspaper has no journalism standards.

It is signature significance that any Washington Post reader would approve of such a cartoon. Such a reader must be either ignorant, biased into crippling stupidity, or corrupt.

Just to point out the obvious lies, distorions and hypocrisies in the cartoon:

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On The Lincoln Project’s “Open Letter” To Ron De Santis

I have sometimes taken flack here for the blog’s liberal use of the term “asshole,” widely regarded as a vulgarism, to describe certain individuals or their conduct when no other description seems to suffice. I would offer the letter above as further evidence that in some cases, nothing other than “asshole” will accurately characterize the individual or individuals at issue. Indeed, I confidently offer this translation of the letter:

Hello! We’re the Lincoln Project, and we are entirely made up of assholes who depend on Donald Trump’s continued political viability to justify our pathetic existence and raise money for our own enrichment. But if you’ve been paying attention you probably knew that already…

I love the letter; if I ever write another book, I’ll use it as a graphic illustration of the unethical mind. It’s such a wonderful self-indictment, immediately beginning the list of its ethical breaches with incompetence. The Lincoln Project is a professional trolling operation, and it can’t even do that well.

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Integrity Test For The Mainstream Media: Will It Remind The Public That Biden’s New Immigration Policy Is What He Mocked Trump For In 2020?

That’s a silly headline, isn’t it? First, the MSM has already established that it has no integrity, so any tests are superfluous. Second, the mainstream media sees its job as protecting Democrats, not calling attention to their lies, distortions of facts, embarrassments, failures and hypocrisy.

Still, if ever Donald Trump was handed an opportunity to say, “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I told you so, you big dummy!” this is it. During their final debate in the 2020 campaign, Biden expressed disgust at the Trump policy disqualifying aspiring illegal immigrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they neglected to first apply for asylum in the other countries they traveled through on the way here, saying,

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Actor Richard Dreyfuss

“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?…This is so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless and treating people like children.”

—-Actor Richard Dreyfuss, Academy Award-winner, lamenting the successful invasion of “diversity, equity and inclusion” into his profession and the movie industry.

Dreyfuss’s outburst was provoked when he was asked in an interview with PBS’s Firing Line about his opinion of the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences’ new DEI mandates, which will kick in for the 2025 Oscars. “They make me vomit,” the famously outspoken Hollywood liberal said. “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is. What are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. You have to let life be life and I’m sorry, I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”

The answers to Dreyfuss’s queries are, in order,

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Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”

New York Times reporter and opinion writer Julia Angwin has been given a prominent space in the latest Sunday Times to expound on why another kind of speech needs to be suppressed, controlled and if possible, censored: “fear speech.”

Already the relentlessly radicalizing progressive hoard has embraced the anti-American concept of censoring other kinds of speech according to their very subjective definitions: “misinformation,” meaning opinions or analysis they disagree with, or distortions of truth that emanate from someplace or some one not devoted to advancing the Left’s goals and agendas, and “hate speech,” which they want to have excluded from First Amendment protections as they define it on a case by case basis. Now the Times is starting the metaphorical ball rolling to target more speech that these two categories might miss. Its designated messenger declares,

This year, Facebook and Twitter allowed a video of a talk to be distributed on their platforms in which Michael J. Knowles, a right-wing pundit, called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The Conservative Political Action Coalition, which hosted the talk, said in its social media posts promoting the video that the talk was “all about the left’s attempt to erase biological women from modern society.”

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

Note the carefully crafted rhetoric: stoking fear of a marginalized group. Stoking fear of a group to marginalize it as much as possible for political gain is apparently hunky-dory, as in…

She continues,

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If You Need Additional Evidence That Paying Attention To Celebrities’ Political Posturing Is Evidence of Crippling Gullibility—And You Shouldn’t—Here It Is

That’s Kim Kardashian above, the perfect embodiment of empty celebrity. She was one of many “glitterati” who attended the 2023 Met Gala on May 1, and willingly participated in the theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” The whole event was billed as a tribute to the late fashion icon one of the all-time great designers, who was also indisputably a terrible person, at least according to the public pronouncements and signaled values of Hollywood’s, New York’s, cosmopolitan and the fashion world’s stars.

Piers Morgan, who, like a stopped clock, occasionally is spot-on accurate, was outraged by the event’s hypocrisy, writing,

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Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid: The Phony Women’s Poker Tournament

This whole story is so ridiculous on so many levels that it nicely encapsulates just how stupid The Great Stupid has become. Allow me to explain…

Dave Hughes, 70, entered what was advertised as an all-women poker tournament at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Florida and won $5,555. This somehow sparked outrage, but all-female poker tournaments are illegal in Florida, violating the state’s anti-discrimination laws. Any man could have entered, but for some reason, only he did. The other 82 players were female.

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