NCAA’s hypocrisy on Penn State is breathtaking

Posted by noonante on August 8, 2012
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“Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people.”

One sometimes hears or reads a statement that is so preposterous on its face that you wonder if the person making the utterance could keep a straight face.  That’s the way I reacted when I read that New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo stated that state government should take control of horse racing to fix what are still  –  three months later  –  unidentified problems.  This particular statement was made by Mark Emmert, President of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, in announcing stringent sanctions against Pennsylvania State University for its handling of allegations of sexual abuse of minors by a former assistant football coach.  Now, I do not dispute the need for severe sanctions against a college where the highest officials, including the University President as well as Head Football Coach, the widely revered Joe Paterno, did nothing to prevent a serial pedophile from using both university facilities and his connection with the university to rape and sexually abuse minor boys.  Unless you are a member of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church  –  or, it seems Penn State  –  you know enough to report such matters to law enforcement, and certainly do not enable further such criminal behavior.

If Emmert left it at that, fine.  But he had to go into his most sanctimonious posture and pretend that something beyond protecting the NCAA “brand” was at stake.  Does he really mean that this action portends an NCAA that will place “educating” athletes above the enormous revenues generated by football and basketball programs?  Or that the “nurturing” of young men and women will mean the NCAA will no longer enforce ridiculous rules that prevent said youngsters from continuing their educations in the event their athletic coach takes away a scholarship for reasons unrelated to misconduct?   Perhaps Emmert’s sudden high-minded approach to the well-being of young people means that the NCAA will take the lead in eliminating the concussions experienced by so many football players (and other athletes) that can have such devastating life-long consequences.  If they are serious about reforming the NCAA, they could start by responding to Civil Rights historian Taylor Branch’s piece in The Atlantic on the NCAA’s systemic exploitation of athletes, or to some of Joe Nocera’s columns in The New York Times, one example of which is here, in which he excoriated the NCAA’s abuse  –  albeit through bureaucratic mindlessness  –  of the “student-athletes” they claim to represent.

In a New York Times puff piece on Emmert accompanying their coverage of the sanctions, they cited sources “close to him” about the frustrations he had experienced in “enacting change in college athletics.”  They proceeded to quote him as saying that the NCAA’s “membership, especially the presidential leadership, has done an extraordinary job … addressing some of the core problems that we have.”  (Emphasis mine.)  Let’s ignore Emmert’s referring to himself not only in the third person, but using a phrase that may lead one to think he is talking about Barack Obama.  One of the “core problems” we think Emmert is referencing is the “failure of institutional integrity leading to a culture in which a football program was held in higher esteem than the values of the institution [and] the values of higher education.”  Those are the words from the consent decree between the NCAA and Penn State that was signed by Emmert.

So how did Emmert himself promote those values when he was at a university?  According to the Times‘ puff piece, when he was chancellor at Louisiana State University,  he was “instrumental in hiring Nick Saban, who led the Tigers football team to the 2003 national title.”  For those not familiar with college football, the same Nick Saban could very well be the poster boy for the imbalance between a football program and the values of an educational institution.  His current employer, the University of Alabama, pays him the tidy sum of $4.7 million  plus a potential bonus of $700,000 that he probably received when he led Alabama to this year’s national title.  Lest you think that is unrelated to the mission of a publically-funded college, Chancellor Emmert would inform you, again according to the Times, that LSU’s success on the gridiron allowed him to “put a story about their physics program in the sports section.”  As a long-time fan of college football, I can attest that when I think of LSU, I am thinking about quantum mechanics along with Billy Cannon.

Emmert’s success promoting LSU’s physics program led him to the presidency of the University of Washington.  How much does Washington pay its football coach?  According to USA Today‘s College Football Coach’s Salary Database from 2006-11, the Huskies’ mentor receives a piddling $2.2 million with the possibility of a million-dollar bonus.  Since the Penn State resolution will ensure that “football will never again be placed ahead of educating … young people,” the coaches at the following institutions are probably in for significant salary cuts:  Texas, $5.2 million;  Auburn, $3.5 million;  Iowa, $3.8 million;  Michigan, $3.3 million;  Oregon, $2.8 million;  LSU, $3.8 million;  Florida, $3.2 million;  and, Oklahoma, $4 million.  (All salary figures are from USA Today and omit bonuses.)  You may note that each of these institutions is a taxpayer-funded public entity.  Private ones, for the most part, are not included in the database.

We can also assume that the NCAA’s newfound zeal for education-over-athletics will carry over to the basketball programs.  So Kentucky’s John Calipari, who had teams at two different state universities retroactively removed from their Final Four appearances, will no longer blatantly (as he acknowledges) recruit blue-chip high school players to attend UK for a year before moving on to the NBA so Kentucky can win the NCAA championship, as it did this year.

I cannot let a piece on hypocrisy go by without acknowledging that I am a long-time fan of both college football and basketball, and attended a university that has had its share of scandals in the basketball program (and pays its football coach $1 million per year).  I agree with the NCAA that Penn State is deserving of severe penalties (although they will be appearing on television, and the football scholarships are being reduced to “only” 15 per year for a limited period).  But let’s be honest.  The NCAA’s sanctions are merely an effort to get past a major scandal, and do not portend a change in attitude to athletic programs that measure national TV revenues in the billions, and care not a whit about the educational experiences of so-called “student athletes.”  While Penn State can be accused justifiably of “protecting its brand” in its approach to Jerry Sandusky, the same can be said about the NCAA, even if the NCAA is not guilty of protecting and enabling criminal behavior.

And we should not forget those who enable the distortion between football or basketball programs and the actual purpose of a university.  We can look down our collective noses at the Penn State students who were so upset about the sanctions leveled against the university, but behind each of those students is a university administrator, member of the Board of Trustees, or a contribution-giving alumnus.  When the Boston-based radio program On Point devoted an hour to the Penn State sanctions on July 24, one of the participants was Dan Beebe, a former commissioner of the Big 12 conference who became an investigator for the NCAA.  When discussing the lack of a proper perspective on college sports, he described receiving calls from United States Senators complaining about calls by a referee.  He expressed his satisfaction that the issues confronting our nation were in such good shape that members of the world’s greatest deliberative body could devote time to a call in a game.

Can Mitt Romney tell the truth about anything? – #2

Posted by noonante on August 5, 2012
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In today’s installment, we find the presumptive Republican nominee expressing “outrage” at a lawsuit by the President’s campaign that, according to Romney, claims “it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period.”  (Quote is from Talking Points Memo.)  Romney probably meant “servicewomen” and not all women, and he must have overlooked the fact that servicepeople are allowed to vote during the same period as other citizens of Ohio.  The blatant untruth is that the lawsuit is not seeking to take anything away from members of the armed services.  Rather, it seeks to give all citizens of Ohio the same rights as members of the military.  A copy of the actual suit can be read at Dave Weigel’s piece in yesterday’s Slate.com.

The background outlined in the lawsuit is also quite instructive.  Ohio, you may recall, had horrible problems with lengthy voting lines in the 2004 elections.  Six-hour waits were reported, and the lawsuit states that, in one place, some voters had to wait until 4:00 a.m. the next day to cast their ballot.  The solution devised was to permit voters to cast ballots in-person in advance of Election Day.  This permitted 93,000 people to vote in the 2008 election before Tuesday.  The Ohio Legislature, controlled by Republicans, amended the early voting law so that one small group, including members of the military, could vote in-person up until the day before Election Day.  All others had to vote by the Friday before Election Day.  In the legal action, the plaintiffs claim, “The Ohio General Assembly has failed to articulate any justification for this differential treatment … and no justification can be discerned.”

A more cynical observer, of course, may see this as yet another attempt by Republican-controlled legislatures around the country to deprive eligible voters of their rights.  That is the real outrage here, along with yet another attempt by Mitt Romney to blatantly distort reality.

Romney’s tax fraud

Posted by noonante on August 2, 2012
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I’m not talking about his personal situation, about which I have not seen any evidence that he has done anything illegal.  Rather, it is his ongoing insistence that he can cut taxes, increase significantly defense spending, and reduce the deficit.  There are people who believe such palpable nonsense  –  after all, a significant minority of Republicans believes President Obama is not a citizen, is Muslim, or both.

Researchers from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center reported that Romney’s plan for revenue neutral tax cuts would result in the richest-of-the-rich getting an average cut of $250,000 while the average family earning less than $200,000 would need to pay an additional $2,000.  Let’s put that another way:  the richest people in the country would receive a tax cut that is larger than the average income of 95 percent of their fellow citizens, and it is those same fellow citizens who would pay for the cut.

Romney has been less than forthcoming about the details of his tax proposals  –  the same approach he takes on all of his policies  –  because if he lets folks know what he would do as their President, he would be criticized.  It’s hard to make this stuff up.  So the Tax Policy Center gave him the benefit of the doubt in coming up with their analysis.  As stated by Benjy Sarlin in Talking Points Memo, “They assumed for their analysis that Romney would try to eliminate tax breaks favoring the rich as much as possible to pay for his plan, before turning to popular middle-class deductions on health care and mortgage payments to make up the remaining gap.”  Even with such an unlikely assumption, the authors concluded, “It is not possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that does not reduce average tax burdens and the share of taxes paid by high-income taxpayers under the conditions described above, even when we try to make the plan as progressive as possible.”  (From Catherine Rampell in the August 1 New York Times.)

The response of the Romney campaign is as predictable as it is tiresome.  Eric “Etch-a-Sketch” Fehrnstrom called the report a “joke” according to Sarlin in today’s TPM.  Policy Director Lanshee Chen, again according to Sarlin, denounced the report as “just another biased study from a former Obama staffer.”  Chen, in her zeal for objectivity, apparently forgot to mention that another author was on George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.  And when this same “biased” Tax Policy Center provided assessments of the tax plans of some of Romney’s competitors during the Republican primaries, the Romney campaign praised the group for its “objective, third-party analysis.”

While I will not be holding my breath for more details on tax policy from the Romney camp, we can expect another flurry of baseless speculation on Romney’s choice for his running mate.  This has been the campaign’s shiny object that attracts an eager media each of the last two weeks when hit with negative publicity.

Romney keeps his word

Posted by noonante on July 27, 2012
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As I watched the Republican Presidential debates early this year, I was dispirited by the almost complete lack of sophistication on foreign policy issues, particularly the seeming lack of awareness that these represent some of the most challenging and intricate issues a President will face.  With the exception of Jon Huntsman and  –  hold on to your hats  –  Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann  –  I am not sure anyone acknowledged how difficult some of these matters can be.  While there was almost a unanimous agreement that Barack Obama was a total failure, when it came time to proposing actual, you know, solutions, there was a remarkable amount of policy statements that were quite similar to what the current administration was actually doing.

No one has been more dismissive of Obama’s efforts than Mitt Romney.  His stock position is that Obama is a complete failure and that he  –  Romney  –  would do “exactly the opposite.”  As with most of his positions, of course, he is woefully short on specific critiques and even less forthcoming on what a President Romney would do.  I have characterized him as a vapid person running a vapid campaign, so I must admit there was a certain amount of pleasure in watching him dip his toes into diplomatic waters.  He began the week by stating inaccurately the views of a high-ranking member of Australia’s government in such a way that it reflected negatively on Obama.  Then, he totally irritated his hosts in what Romney erroneously called “the nation of Great Britain” by dissing both their Olympic preparations and the level of enthusiasm by citizens of the UK.

So he has done “exactly the opposite” of Barack Obama.  When the latter was a candidate visiting overseas in the 2008 campaign, he was met with a level of adulation that resulted in Republicans criticizing him as a “celebrity.”  No one will be saying that about Mitt as he was ridiculed by both David Cameron and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.

What’s going on with New York racing?

Posted by noonante on July 17, 2012
Posted in: Horse Racing, Political/Social commentary, Politics. Tagged: , , , . 1 Comment

Can it be two months since that the situation with the New York Racing Association was so dire that the Cuomo Administration felt it necessary to engage in a campaign of character assassination, innuendo and bare knuckle politics to seize control of NYRA and New York’s racing? What’s happened since then?

  • Cuomo’s legislation, the “Racing Accountability and Transparency Act,” was enacted by the Legislature without amendment, and only one dissenting vote in the Senate.  I cannot find what the vote was in the Assembly.  So a major industry in New York is taken over by state government with no one in authority  –  including an all-too complicit media  –  dissenting.
  • According to the Governor’s on-line press office and the Legislature’s web site, the bill that was passed a month ago has yet to be signed by the Governor.
  • Fredric U. Dicker, in Monday’s New York Post, reports that Cuomo is waiting until after the Saratoga meet to put NYRA “out of its scandal-scarred misery.”  We know that Dicker, who is writing a biography of Cuomo with the Governor’s cooperation, may not be the most objective observer, but he at least has good sources.  He quotes one unnamed source as saying that “Saratoga will be the last hurrah for the blue bloods who have controlled [NYRA] for so long.”  I guess we will have to wait for the “Accountability and Transparency Act” to be signed to discover if this is the official position of the Administration.
  • The State Legislature, totally on board with accountability and transparency, enacted another law in the last minutes of the session giving Catskill OTB the authority to reopen OTB parlors in New York City.  You may recall the defunct NYC OTB as that rarest of gambling businesses  –  one that could lose money despite being guaranteed a percentage of wagers taken.  Why does the Catskill OTB ring a bell?  They were the enablers of what has to be the biggest betting scandal ever.  In 2002, their tote machines permitted an individual to make a wager on the Breeders’ Cup Pick Six after the first two races had been run.  Had the bettor not been as dim-witted as the security folks at Catskill, he may well have gotten away with a multi-million dollar payout.  While vetoing this legislation would seem to be a no-brainer for the self-proclaimed integrity-conscious Cuomo Administration, the web sites of the Governor and Legislature do not reveal whether this has happened yet.
  • The Franchise Oversight Board, one of four state agencies responsible for oversight of NYRA under the pre-“Accountability and Transparency Act” days, and chaired by Cuomo’s Budget Director, released its annual report.  While portions of the report look like a shoddy high school term paper meeting a pages requirement (do we really need to know that Channing Hill was the 10th leading jockey at the Aqueduct spring meet?), the report contains some truly disturbing indications of where the Cuomo NYRA is moving.  While the importance of VLT revenues to racing has been an unquestioned assumption through the many years it took state leaders to conduct an unblemished procurement for a VLT operator, the Franchise Oversight Board concluded, “NYRA must establish a long-term financial goal to end its reliance on VLT subsidies and immediately develop plans on how it will meet this goal.”

So there you have it.  A manufactured crisis in the spring resulted in the extraordinary takeover of a major industry by state government.  This is the same state government that has yet to demonstrate through its past performances that it is capable of honestly and efficiently managing anything related to racing, let alone complete control of it.  It is the same state government that in the report issued by the Franchise Oversight Board identified payments made to racing by the private operator of Aqueduct’s VLT terminals as a “substantial investment made by the State.”  Yes, the payments are required under state law, but there is no state money involved.  It is the individuals who patronize the Aqueduct casino whose wagers go to racing.  Let’s not forget that it these long-delayed payments that finally enabled the “old” NYRA to project a profit for this year.

We now await the next stage of this drama.  One of the recommendations in the recent report by the Franchise Oversight Board is the need to “grow fan interest in the sport.”  While this is so obvious to anyone who is a racing fan, and is something that bedevils racing jurisdictions across the country, I am having a difficult time seeing how this occurs under a Governor whose interest in racing seems to be limited to its effect on his priority of bringing casinos to New York.  Or is this all just a parochial battle to get rid of the “blue bloods?”

Do we need tougher financial regulation?

Posted by noonante on July 13, 2012
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These are headlines from today’s front page of The New York Times‘ Business Page:

  • Geithner Tried to Curb Bank’s Rate Rigging in 2008
  • Internal Failures [money laundering] Disclosed At HSBC
  • At Peregrine Financial, Signs of Trouble [$215 million missing] Seemingly Missed for Years

These are not from the police blotter, but just today’s news from the financial sector.  Mitt Romney thinks we need even fewer controls over our financial institutions, despite headlines such as these, the Libor scandal, and the terrifying news from the 2008 economic collapse involving  –  of course  –  some of these same players.

The fastest 86 hours, 12 minutes and 22 seconds in sports

Posted by noonante on July 12, 2012
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That is Cadel Evans’ winning time from last year’s Tour de France.  There may be something wrong with me if I can be transfixed by watching either a marathon on TV or the almost month-long bike race that winds through France and neighboring countries.  The scenery is spectacular, whether it is shots in the Alps or Pyrenees, or the villages in the French countryside older than our nation.  The coverage by NBCSP (formerly Versus) and NBC on the weekends is top-rate with knowledgeable and entertaining commentators.  It makes one wonder why we cannot expect the same from  –  to cite one example  –  college football broadcasts here.  If you cannot watch the broadcasts that begin at 8:00 am (or earlier), NBCS televises an abridged version (a mere three hours) each evening at 8:00 pm.

Can Mitt Romney tell the truth about anything? – #1

Posted by noonante on July 12, 2012
Posted in: Political/Social commentary, Politics. Tagged: , . 1 Comment

Mitt Romney is a smart guy with a reputation for attention to facts and detail.  So why is it that he is seemingly incapable of telling the truth about anything?  Today’s Boston Globe reports that contrary to numerous prior statements, Romney did not leave Bain Capital in 1999, but three years later in 2002.  At least forms filed with the Security and Exchange Commission and financial disclosures required of public officials in Massachusetts report that Romney is identified as the “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president” of Bain according to the article by Callum Borchers and Christopher Rowland.

Why is this important?  Of course, we would like to think we are not going to engage in years of a Clintonian parsing of every word, including the meaning of “is”.  But his date of departure from Bain has been his defense when criticized for the companies who laid off workers and/or went bankrupt during Bain’s control of them from 1999 to 2002.

If this were the first time Romney has been challenged for  –  and I am being charitable here  –  making stuff up, we could be lenient.  But there is a reason I labeled this #1  –  I anticipate it will be a regular series unless Romney suddenly morphs into a modern day George “I-cannot-tell-a-lie” Washington.

How is Court decision good for Romney?

Posted by noonante on June 28, 2012
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The conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney was in a win-win situation on the Supreme Court decision. If the Court found it unconstitutional, he could say “I told you so,” providing one was willing to parse his numerous conflicting statements on the issue.  If they upheld it, he could argue that “you need me to repeal Obamacare” (which he has since said.)  But since the case turns on Chief Justice Roberts’ saying it was constitutional because it is a tax, how does Romney justify the individual mandate he achieved in Massachusetts as being an increase in taxes?  Now, I understand that Romney has demonstrated a remarkable ability to twist positions, both his own and the President’s, but won’t someone call him on this one?