“They Ain’t Honest…”

Have you heard about Georgia Republicans? They’re trying to create a “commission,” whose job it would be to “discipline and remove state prosecutors.” In the U.S., laws are written to apply to everybody, even a law aimed at a single person or group. The “state prosecutor” Republicans want to “discipline and remove?” Why, that would be Fani Willis, the Fulton County D.A. who brought charges against Donny for his alleged crimes against the United States (or in this specific case, Georgia).

Georgia Republicans don’t care that Donny’s a traitor. They love the guy. The Georgia State Supreme Court, basically, refused to issue a ruling, saying the work of District Attorneys is outside of their purview, which has stopped the commission for now. SO, the Georgia Republicans are trying to remove judicial oversight of their actions so they can proceed with their nasty, whiny commission anyway.

I’ll tell you this: NOTHING says, “We know he’s guilty” more loudly that trying to keep him from even being tried because you know in your shriveled little heart of hearts that he did what he’s accused of doing and if he goes to trial, he’s also going to jail…

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Well, sanity is available for the world’s viewing pleasure in the Middle East for the next four days. (Hurry! Only three days left!) They’ve taken a pause in the killing and dying to release hostages and bring in some humanitarian aid.

Not to worry, though. Even as the pause was being announced, Netanyahu made an appearance to assure the world this was just a pause and ONLY a pause and as soon as the agreed pause time was over, Israel would get right back to killing and bombing.

It’s like paying off an over-charged credit card. You pay it down and pay it down until you reach a point where, with one mighty push, you can pay it off! That’s how Netanyahu seems to me. He can see the end of Gaza, once and for all, with just one mighty push – and he’s planning to push hard.

But yeah, let’s focus only on Hamas rhetoric about pushing Israelis into the sea…

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I’ve decided I want to start a GoFundMe page. I’m trying to raise money to purchase guide dogs for the officials in the NFL. Normally, I’m a big fan of putting disabled people to work, if possible, but I think hiring blind people to officiate games may have been a poor execution of the concept. If it happens they’re not blind, there’s no rational explanation for the calls they’re making, week in and week out. At least, there’s no honorable, rational explanation.

You know what you can find on YouTube every week now? A summary of that week’s bad and questionable calls in the NFL. Every week. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was like, two or three plays but these videos are often as long as twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of bad calls, every week? And it’s not just me and the guy making the videos. The videos, themselves, offer no additional commentary but the broadcasters usually offer their own – and they tend to agree the calls make no sense and are clearly just…bad. Twenty minutes of “What the heck was that?” Every week. (As a sidebar: I’m expecting the NFL to crack down on broadcaster commentary any moment now. It doesn’t help when even the broadcasters are publicly questioning the questionable calls…)

It’s a very subjective area, though, exactly what the NFL counts on to get away with it. Sometimes, the videos show a call in one game that officials handle differently in another game. To me, that’s just a different set of officials, demonstrating that this is a tough thing to quantify. Bad calls have existed in every sport for as long as sporting has included officials. They are, after all, only human and mistakes happen. But I wrote at the beginning of this season that I suspected they would increase, now that the NFL has announced it’s “partnership” with Fan Duel, the sports betting web site. It seemed like tin-foil hat stuff, at the time, but just prescient now.

Gambling was removed from ALL sports in America (theoretically) when the 1918 Chicago White Sox got busted accepting bribes to throw the World Series. Yeah, the whole team, except for one player. The powers that be in the sporting world at the time worried that an association with gambling would hurt the integrity of their “product,” the games. Of course it does. Who cares who’s playing whom if the outcome is a foregone conclusion, decided in secret by a small handful of people?

I watch football to see the games unfold. Imagine the damage done to the overall game if it comes out that the games “unfold” in New York before they ever even start. It’s not like the bad calls have to change the outcome of the game, either, although they do that, too. Sometimes, in betting, all they have to do is control the spread and they control who pays whom and how much.

Okay, still tin-foil hat stuff. I have no evidence to prove the NFL is rigging games. All I can point to is the huge number of inexplicable bad calls that do, actually, change the games, an admittedly subjective measure, and how often those calls are happening. Combine that with the NFL’s now well-established, easily demonstrated, and sadly infamous greed, and the idea that the NFL might rig games to increase their own revenues cannot be dismissed as paranoia.

I’ll tell you this: I’d rather just watch the games play out naturally leading to an honest and fair outcome. But in this day and age, in this once-great nation, what chance does honest and fair have against a little more money in someone’s already overstuffed pocket?