The Broken Spectrum Of The World - Delivered

As reported by Rivals.com

Robert Marve found out this week he was never anything more than a mercenary, just a pair of swift legs with a strong arm brought to the University of Miami to win games. It’s how it is in most college football programs.

He once thought otherwise. It’s easy to get confused.

College football players are called “student athletes” after all. The NCAA spends tens of millions on a public relations campaign that stresses the games are a tool for kind-hearted coaches to take “kids” and mold them into “men” who then go “pro in something other than sports.”

Marve no doubt was told that by joining the Miami “family” he’d have numerous “father figures” on campus. He enrolled with high hopes.

It didn’t work out. After two years, one season and 11 starts he wanted to transfer. Miami coach Randy Shannon said he could but only before taking what is one of the NCAA’s most ethically empty traditions and putting it on steroids.

Schools commonly limit where a player can transfer, often to other schools within its league.

Shannon took it to the extreme. According to Marve, he was prohibited from transferring to 27 schools.

That included all 11 of the other teams in the ACC, all 12 in the SEC and four others in the state of Florida. Even lower-level programs such as Florida International apparently now terrify the Hurricanes.

Friday evening, after this column was originally posted, Miami softened its stance slightly and will now allow Marve to transfer on scholarship to any SEC school other than Florida, LSU and Tennessee. Miami alleges those schools were tampering with the player. The ACC and in-state ban stands though.

Marve hails from Tampa. His father Eugene has prostate cancer and while it’s not the stated reason for the transfer, Marve understandably wants to stay in the Southeast, if not in state.

This is always a shameful practice. Marve is just one of many players from many programs dealing with it. No university should ever, under any circumstance, be allowed to prohibit a player’s future due to competitive fears. Even if Miami’s tampering allegation is true – Marve has denied it to the Associated Press – the Hurricanes should take it up with the other schools, not the player. It has nothing to do with the other ACC or in-state schools, yet those bans remain.

The player should be allowed to transfer at full scholarship in conference, in state or across the street if they want.

Anything less isn’t just un-American, it’s an admission that winning is everything. There is no decent argument for this except fear of losing. This isn’t a non-compete clause for business execs, these are college students.

It’s wrong not just for the coach and athletic director who draw it up (in this case Shannon and Kirby Hocutt), but the conference commissioner (John Swofford) and NCAA president (Myles Brand) who allow it.

It speaks to the widespread lack of courage and leadership in college athletics. Anyone with any of it would take one look at the practice and end it. Naturally no one says a word.

You can only expect so much out of a football coach, these guys are trained to be ruthless. They’re so gone they don’t even recognize the problem. Worse is that Brand and Swofford, the adults that should know better, aren’t tough enough to explain it to them.

For the NCAA it’s completely dishonest. The organization and its individual programs enjoy tax-free status and thus beat the federal government out of billions annually. This is just amateur sports, they argue, nothing more than an extracurricular activity.

You never see a school prohibit someone on a theatre scholarship from transferring though.

Shannon deserves special scorn and extra analysis by potential Hurricane recruits because of the outrageous breadth of the provisions. Not that you can be a little bit pregnant, but banning Marve from so many schools takes this practice to a new level of Machiavellian behavior.

More than personally punishing Marve, what Shannon is really trying to do is intimidate his other players – dare to leave and I’ll bury you.

The reason Marve, or any player from any school, wants to transfer doesn’t matter. It never should.

It doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if Marve had off-field issues or was a model citizen. It doesn’t matter if Marve is just being impulsive or if Shannon drove him out. It doesn’t matter if this is about football, school or offensive coordinators. It doesn’t matter if Marve woke up one day and decided he never wanted to see a palm tree again.

If he wants to transfer he should be able to transfer. Anywhere he wants, no questions asked. Football programs take recruits based on frivolous things such as favorite colors. They can’t reasonably expect deeper if they want to go. Besides, Marve already has to sit out one season as punishment.

Marve’s high school coach says Miami won’t get any more players from his powerhouse program. Eugene Marve says every recruit should take a long look at what Shannon is really about.

And they should. Clearly at Miami you’re a piece of meat. If you’re going to go there you better hope and pray it works out. If not, they might try to bully you off to the other end of the country.

Recruits should also ask every other school pursuing them what would happen under similar circumstances, however. If told they can leave at will, they should get it in writing. While Miami’s case is extreme, there are plenty of rival coaches watching to see if such broad limitations are the wave of the future. A tradition that was wrong from day one might wind up worse than ever.

These “teacher-coaches” are a lot alike.

So are athletic directors, conference commissioners and NCAA executives. They’re too craven to do the right thing, if they’re even still capable of recognizing it.

 Reported by ProPublica.org

Former Illinois attorney general Roland Burris, embattled Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pick to replace Barack Obama in the Senate, is no stranger to controversy.

Public fury over the governor’s alleged misconduct has masked the once lively debate over Burris’ decision to continue to prosecute – despite the objections of one of his top prosecutors – the wrong man for a high-profile murder case.

While state attorney general in 1992, Burris aggressively sought the death penalty for Rolando Cruz, who twice was convicted of raping and murdering a 10-year-old girl in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. The crime took place in 1983.

But by 1992, another man had confessed to the crime, and Burris’ own deputy attorney general was pleading with Burris to drop the case, then on appeal before the Illinois Supreme Court.

Burris refused. He was running for governor.

“Anybody who understood this case wouldn’t have voted for Burris,” Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, told ProPublica. Indeed, Burris lost that race, and two other attempts to become governor.

Burris’ role in the Cruz case was “indefensible and in defiance of common sense and common decency,” Warden said. “There was obvious evidence that [Cruz] was innocent.”

Deputy attorney general Mary Brigid Kenney agreed, and eventually resigned rather than continue to prosecute Cruz.

Once Burris assigned Kenney to the case in 1991, she became convinced that Cruz was innocent, a victim of what she believed was prosecutorial misconduct. She sent Burris a memo reporting that the jury convicted Cruz without knowing that Brian Dugan, a repeat sex offender and murderer, had confessed to the crime. Burris never met with Kenney to discuss a new trial for Cruz, Kenney told ProPublica.

“This is something the attorney general should have been concerned about,” Kenney, now an assistant public guardian in Cook County, said in an interview. “I knew the prosecutor’s job was not merely to secure conviction but to ensure justice was done.”

Kenney was not alone in her beliefs. Prior to Cruz’ 1985 trial, the lead detective in the case resigned in protest over prosecutors’ handling of the case, according to news reports at the time. 

And rather than argue Burris’ case before the state supreme court, Kenney also stepped down.

“What I took away was that [Burris] wasn’t going to do anything to seem soft on crime,” Kenney said. “He didn’t have the guts.”

In her resignation letter, Kenney claimed Burris had “seen fit to ignore the evidence in this case.”

“I cannot sit idly by as this office continues to pursue the unjust prosecution of Rolando Cruz,” she wrote. “I realized that I was being asked to help execute an innocent man.”

Burris’ response at the time: “It is not for me to place my judgment over a jury, regardless of what I think.”  (We have also left a message for Burris at his office and will post an update if we hear back.)

State prosecutors carried on with the prosecution, even after DNA evidence in 1995 excluded Cruz as the victim’s rapist and linked somebody else—sex offender Brian Dugan–to the crime.

Eventually, prosecutors’ case hit a wall. The Illinois Supreme Court reversed Cruz’s conviction and granted him a third trial. (The court declared that the trial judge in the case had improperly excluded Dugan’s confession, and thus compromised Cruz’s defense.) In the new trial, Cruz was acquitted. The judge in that case concluded, “I’d hope and pray the person or persons - whoever is culpable - is brought to justice.”

In late 1995, Cruz finally walked free after serving 11 years on death row for a crime he did not commit.

A grand jury later indicted four sheriff’s deputies and three former county prosecutors for their roles in the Cruz case. They were eventually acquitted. Burris was never accused of any wrongdoing or misconduct. Dugan is scheduled to stand trial for the crime next year, 26 years after it was committed.

I’ve been following the story in Illinois concerning Governor Blagojevich since the issue of him trying to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat. I believe its safe to say this is a gigantic mess, but I’m not so sure this is entirely the governor’s fault.

I watched yesterday as the governor held a press conference and selected Roland Burris to fill the senate seat. Soon after the conference had begun, congressman Bobby Rush who happened to be standing in the back of the room, was asked to come up to the microphone and speak about the situation. He applauded the governor’s choice and said he had prayed for this to happen. He went on to say that the senate currently had no black senators which is an injustice and that this was a step towards ensuring that there are more black senators.

Back on December 9th, Bobby Rush stated that the governor has no moral basis for appointing the next senator for the state of Illinois and if he were to appoint someone, they would be just as tainted as the governor. Odd that he is fully supporting the governor now that he has appointed a black man to the senate seat. I can’t help but feel that this is becoming a race issue, which it should clearly not be, and that Bobby Rush is acting in a racist manner. He then went on the CBS Early Show and talked about segregation in schools back in the mid 1900’s, and compared the white Democrat Senators to the same people who supported segregation, stating that they should not put themselves in the same situation as segregationists. While I don’t believe the senate should be able to block someone from being seated if they are legally able to take the seat, this is nothing like segregation.

Bobby Rush aside, I believe that Governor Blagojevich does have the power to appoint whoever he see’s fit to that senate seat. He has not been impeached or convicted of any crimes and the Illinois congress has not restricted his power to appoint, therefore he has every legal right and an obligation to appoint someone to the empty senate seat before the new session of congress convenes. Perhaps he did do something illegal, maybe he didn’t. However here in the United States, we are innocent until proven guilty, at least that’s what they say.

However I don’t believe the governor should have appointed someone to the seat, even though he had the power to do so. Seeing as how he is currently being charged for several issues, the senate seat being the top matter, he should not have appointed anyone due to a conflict of interest. The Illinois congress could have held a special election to fill the seat, the Governor even gave his support for such an election. The election was talked about shortly and then scrapped by Illinois Democrats under the guise of not wanting to have the tax payers pay for a special election. They normally don’t have any problems spending and wasting our money, why is this case so different? The truth of the matter is likely that the election was scrapped for fear of losing the seat to a Republican, great confidence they have their.

I might have to agree with Illinois possibly having the most corrupt state government, if not a few other choice words.

Happy New Year!

Bombing in the Gaza strip by Israeli planes heads into its fourth day today, still going strong since they began bombing on Saturday. The bombing began in response to continuous rocket fire from Hamas militants in the Gaza strip after a cease fire was agreed to.

For those that don’t know, Hamas was elected to power in Palestine during the last election, which did not go very smoothly as there was much intimidation during the polling. Hamas believes that Israel has no right to be here in the world and constantly calls for their destruction. They refuse to live in peace with the Israelis and have ignored countless ceasefires. Recently, a Hamas spokesperson in Egypt stated that they had no choice but to resume rocket fire and that they would be steadfast and swift, and then victory would be at hand. They gave no actual reason for why they have no choice to resume firing rockets into Israel, however Israel has upheld their end of the ceasefire and had not fired on Gaza militants until recently when the bombing began.

So far the Israelis have bombed several military compounds, training centers, a Hamas sports complex, several Hamas government buildings, and a Hamas university, all mostly deserted at the time when they were bombed. Most Hamas installations are grouped among civilians areas, designed to prevent them from being bombed or attacked by using civilians as shields. Somewhere around 50 civilians have been killed so far, and well over 300 militants have been killed.

People around the middle east, France, and Britain have been protesting the Israeli bombings and have been very supportive of Hamas. People who have given interviews from the middle east, including a Palestinian woman who was interviewed earlier today, have all portrayed Hamas as the victim here, and several have called for Israel to face war crimes. There is no reasoning with a lot of these people, and while we should continue to pursue diplomatic options, we need to remember that these people are unreasonable and military options should always be on the table. I’d like to hope that I speak for most all Americans when I issue my support to the Israelis, and I feel that we should help them in any manner we can.

The Israelis are a peaceful people, that just want to live their lives without the constant threat of rockets being fired into their communities. If this were happening to us from Mexico, we would have already gone in and probably overthrown the government. Our citizens would be outraged if they would of had to endure such conditions for an extended period of time, as the Israelis have had to do. I support peace in the middle east, but I will not stand idly by as our allies uphold a ceasefire and their enemies continue to fire rockets at them.

Put yourselves in their situation, what would you do?

What do you do once you begin spending so much money that you risk facing a one billion dollar spending gap? Easy, instead of cutting your massive spending on programs that shouldn’t be getting as much or any money at all, just go ahead and close down some libraries. That’s what the mayor of Philadelphia is planning to do.

Imagine that, the government is overspending and is putting the burden on the citizens. I almost find that hard to believe, considering our federal government is in trillions of dollars of debt and climbing each day. Instead of making wise and much needed spending cuts, Mayor Michael Nutter has decided that closing down our education centers will solve the problem. Never mind that our education system is underfunded as it is. Next they’ll start closing down schools because of a lack of money, oh wait, they did that here in Waco a couple months back. Our education isn’t that important anyways I suppose.
Why is it that our government feels the need to waste so much money and spend on projects that don’t enhance our society and living situations? We are taxed so much to the point that we should have a first class education system with a library every couple of blocks. Our government generates so much revenue from taxes, they could afford to have normal government operations, improve our education system, ensure defense, improve the community, and still give us a tax cut in the end. This is just on a local state and city level, as the federal government is a far worse offender.

As it stands and we continue forward as is, the government will continue to spend more and more money and cut spending in much needed areas to fund other unneeded projects, both raising our taxes and borrowing more and more from the Chinese, who owns about 46% of our federal debt. In the end, it all comes to a screeching halt as we run out of money and crumble due to our government’s irresponsible fiscal spending. All the while as our elected officials vote to raise their pay year after year as the rest of us struggle.

I sure feel comfortable knowing that while I’m at the grocery store trying to make my small food budget work, my hard earned money is lining the pocket of some person that probably doesn’t even pay for most of their meals and plane rides, and takes about 3 months of vacation a year.