The Vig

The last two minutes of tonight’s Blazer radio broadcast were an embarrassment to the organization.  McMillan subbed in Batum, Oden, Frye, Bayless, and Rodriguez with 2:39 left in the fourth.  As soon as the ball came in, Wheeler started complaining that Houston still had most of their regulars in the game.  As play continued, Wheeler kept harping on Adelman, at one point calling him “classless”.  Really?  A coach leaves his starters in an extra whistle or two and suddenly he’s classless?  Save it.

Speaking of classless, a minute or so later, Ron Artest apparently ran into the stands after a ball or something and rather than return to the floor, he took a seat.  I didn’t see it, I only heard it described by the now-hyperventilating Wheeler and Harvey.  Harvey went so far as to say if he were still playing, he’d fight Artest everytime they met on the floor for the rest of his life.  This was after Wheeler’s classless comment, yet Wheeler did nothing to wheel in his partner.

The homerism of the Blazer announcers this season has been a topic on at least one radio station in town and has been a conversation I’ve had with a few folks.  This town used to have some greats on both radio and TV.  I would say we deserve better, but after listening to the yahoos on Dawson’s Morning Sports Page, I’m not so sure.  What I wouldn’t give though for Dave Twardzik back on the radio.

Another thought.  I wonder what it would take to get Kevin Calabro to come down and take over radio duties.  I wonder what he’d say if Allen were to back the Brinks truck up and offer him the gig with the understanding he’s free to go the second Seattle gets an NBA franchise back.  Alternatively, give him the TV gig with the understanding he does all home games and say 15 road games a year.  That would leave him plenty of time in Seattle.  Then we slide Barrett over to radio.  That would work too.

Either way, Wheeler, Harvey, and the awful Mike Rice have all got to go.  Like now.

Professor Jaynes has an interesting nugget coming out of Blazerland.  Mike Golub is out at Vulcan.  On the surface this doesn’t sound like much, but understand he played a big part in the ongoing negotiations between Vulcan and the Gallacher group over “the lease”.  He’s a hockey guy in a basketball and football organization.  His departure means the Hawks may be back to square one.  That’s not good.

I had been optimistic about the Hawks relationship with the Blazers and Rose Quarter management.  Now, I’m not so sure.  I guess we’ll wait and see.

As I write this, the NFL draft is just a few short hours away.  If you read nothing else about the draft, read this.  Deadspin’s Drew “Big Daddy Balls Drew” Magary’s profane analysis of what makes the draft must-see TV is spot-on accurate (make sure you stick around for Rolf, the Nazi shark).

…what I find interesting about the NFL Draft is that each draft pick (particularly those who are invited to attend the event in New York) gets the same kind of treatment before they’ve ever done anything. It’s a premature Hall of Fame ceremony of sorts. It’s the exact inverse of how the real world works, which never stops blowing my mind.

Exactly. You’re going to watch teams take guys tomorrow who in two years we’ll all be wondering what the heck they were thinking. Yet those dudes will be worth eight figures and, depending on who they surround themselves with, will either be colossal failures or set for life. There will be no in between.

The Lions, who pick first, will make Georgia quarterback Matt Stafford the first pick.  After that, the rest of the top-ten is a jumbled mess of linebackers, defensive ends, wide receivers, and tackles.  Who goes where is anyone’s guess.  The kid who’s been rocketing up the draft boards is USC quarterback Mark Sanchez.  Just a few weeks ago Sanchez was projected to be a late first-rounder or maybe even a second-rounder.  I was sort of hoping he’d be around at #12 for my buddy Scott’s Broncos to pick up.  The consensus tonight is he’ll be long gone before then.

Like most everyone else, I had a pretty low opinion of Sanchez.  The kid didn’t exactly distinguish himself at USC, and his great Heisman winning forefathers, Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, have kind of tarnished the whole Trojan quarterback mystique.  My opinion changed though during a five minute spot he did with radio host Jim Rome back during Super Bowl week.

See there’s this thing called Radio Row at the Super Bowl.  There’s one at baseball’s all-star game too.  Basically it’s a room full of radio hosts broadcasting live from the event and legends of the sport as well as current players work their way through this room and get interviewed all in this one spot.  99% of these guys are brought in by various sponsors and at the end of each spot, the sports jock does a pitch for their sponsor.

So Sanchez comes in and does his thing with Rome.  They talk about USC and why he’s turning pro.  About the controversy with Pete Carroll.  Stuff like that.  At the end of the spot, Rome asks him about his sponsor and Sanchez does his 30 second pitch, he leaves, Rome goes to commercial.  That’s that, right?  Wrong.

Rome comes back from the commercial and spend the next three minutes describing what had just happened with Sanchez.  He explains how he has cheat sheets prepared for each player’s pitch.  The sponsor makes sure each radio jock has a prepared sheet with bullet points the player needs to hit.  According to Rome, he generally slides it over to the player at the appropriate time, the player fumbles over it and thats that.  Not Sanchez.  Rome said when it came time for Sanchez’s pitch, he slid the paper over to Sanchez, who didn’t take it.  Instead Sanchez delivered his 30 second pitch from memory and hit every single point.  It was effortless.

Rome said he asked Sanchez whether he’d spent all night rehearsing that.  He said he had.  Rome went on and on about how professional that was and how Sanchez had taken care of even that little detail.  That’s a professional.  And in case you hadn’t noticed, the NFL is a professional football league.

Why did that moment stick with me?  Imagine any other top-ten quarterback from the last few years or so.  Imagine which of them would have taken the time to do that and which wouldn’t have.  Vince Young?  Matt Leinart?  JaMarcus Russell?  None of ‘em.  You can talk all you want about guys with laser arms and cases full of awards.  That stuff is all meaningless.  It’s what’s between your ears.  Sanchez has it.

If he really goes to Seattle tomorrow, the Seahawks will be very fortunate.  Their fans will hate it.  They believe they should go o-line.  They can do that next year.  They need to get someone to replace Hasselbeck, who’s not going to be around too much longer and QBs like Sanchez don’t come around that often.  He’s the right pick.

Yippee, the Coliseum is saved!

The problem now is the Coliseum still needs at least $20 million in maintenance and no one has asked where that’s going to come from.  As Dylan points out, even if the Coliseum is saved it will forever be competing with the baseball stadium for maintenance funds.  That’s an instant recipe for disaster and when it comes time to implode the thing a decade from now, we’ll be hearing the same arguments, only it’ll be $50-plus million to refurbish it.

No, the correct answer is if we must build a stadium, whether it’s built in the Rose Quarter or in Lents, the Coliseum needs to go.  The building is obsolete and the city has neither the funds nor the desire to refurbish it.  Funds that are being spent there now should be shifted to the new facility.  It would be the wisest and most prudent use of those funds.

Apparently this is real.  Oh to be one of the lucky few.

Madison and Jefferson both got 2 terms.  If Obama gets two terms, he’s is on pace for a few north of 70.  Not quite in the same league as the greats, but still pretty damned impressive.  Better than Reagan, at least.

Hat tip, and all praises to: Sullivan.

Flush with $6.6 billion of TARP funds, US Bank is offering new customers $100 if they open a new checking account with direct deposit.  The offer on their website shows the program ended March 31, but the flier I got in the mail this weekend says the promotion ends June 30.  Could be a regional thing.

Either way, I’m signing up to get my piece of the action.  There aren’t many places outside of Vegas where you can turn $50 into $150 without really doing anything.

Some interesting reporting out of The O the other day.  Turns out when Umpqua Bank came in and “took over” Bank of Clark County a few months back, they only took the deposits.  They left the loans with the FDIC.  The result has meant layoffs for local businesses who’s lines of credit have been recinded by the FDIC.

Smart move by Umpqua, I suppose.  They get lots of cash to help out their iffy balance sheet, and assume zero of BoCC’s risk.  And what is Umpqua doing with their money?  They’ve promoted a “LEED accredited loan specialist” to their new position of eco-banking manager.  Uh huh.  So they’re prepared to loan out money to various “sustainable projects” which may or may not be economically viable, but not to local businesses who’ve been around for years and have a solid record of paying loans back.

I don’t get this at all.  Umpqua took on over $200 million in TARP funds in late-2008 and they’re getting ready to send it back out the door so we can build eco-roofs and bike racks while local business, for which the TARP was created in part to save, chokes to death.  What a country.

I watched a debate on Facebook several weeks ago between a couple of grade school friends of mine. One, a conservative Republican, the other a liberal Democrat. The Republican at one point complained that Obama just stood for everything he was against. My Democrat friend replied, “welcome to my last 8 years”. It was an aha moment for me. It probably shouldn’t have been. Losing has consequences. It’s what the Republicans kept telling us during the Bush years. Now they’ve lost and they can’t handle the consequences.  It’s tough to find any sympathy for them right now.

The thing is, I think there is a space right now for a spirited debate about the role of government.  What we do and don’t want it doing.  I would love to get out there and mix it up.  Unfortunately, one side of the debate is completely bereft of meaningful ideas beyond tired bromides and vague complaints about “Potato Day”.

They’ve been left sputtering to themselves and among themselves.  It’s a fascinating and dangerous thing to watch.  The Republicans desperately need someone to come in and talk them back from the ledge.  Unfortunately they drummed that leader out of their ranks years ago, whoever she was.

Tom Ricks had a reading at Powell’s tonight. To call it depressing would be an understatement. Driving home, I just wanted to crawl into a hole. In Ricks’ opening remarks, he laid out his case for the failure of the surge. Yes, it’s tamped down the violence, but it hasn’t created the political stability the president promised in 2007. By that measure, Ricks says, the surge has failed.

What’s worse, there’s still no way out of Iraq. Not now, and maybe not ever.

Here he is six weeks ago discussing many of his points with Jon Stewart.

Stewart went on to call Ricks “Mr. Sunshine”.  He ain’t kidding.

Early on Ricks said it’s unconscionable that we might stay, but what would happen if we left would be even worse.  As I recall, that’s what Ricks said when he was here in 2007.  There are still no good options for us getting out of there.  And what’s worse, is we’re going to go broke by staying.  As he started to talk about the Romans and their excursions into Mesopotamia back in the day, I started to wonder if we weren’t headed down the same path.  One which will ultimately lead to our end.  That’s why I titled this Eat, frink, and be merry.  I don’t know that we have another option at this point.

He made a few other interesting points.

• Colin Powell’s political skills as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff scared the crap out of the civilian military leadership.  So much so that every succeeding CJCS has been weaker politically than the last.  He described them as pliant.  He did have a few good things to say about current CJCS Mullen, who is a Gates appointee.  Perhaps we’re in good hands going forward.  But he seemed to blame Myers and, to a lesser extent, Pace for not standing up to Bush 43 when they should have.
• He believes we’ll be out of Pakistan and Afghanistan long before we’re out of Iraq.  Ricks believes India and Pakistan are on a collision course.  India, he says, has been very restrained in their response to the Mumbai attacks.  It can’t last.  At some point he believes India will strike at Pakistan’s nuclear arsinal and we (the US military) won’t want to be in the neighborhood when that happens.  So we have that to look forward to.
• Ricks believes Obama has been rolled by the military.  He sees Obama’s lips move, but hear’s George Bush’s words.  It pains me to hear that as an Obama supporter, but I think he’s right.  However, even Ricks acknowledged the economy has got to be priority 1 for Obama right now.  So we continue Bush’s policy for another year.  The more I look at Iraq, the more I think we’ve hit a pause button there.  We can come back to it once we’ve cleaned up our other messes.  Is that an apt analogy?  It’s as close as any.
• Ricks wonders what a troop drawdown may mean.  I missed the first part of the story he told to illustrate his point.  The conclusion, however, involved American planes being called in on a strike which was called by, I believe, either a Kurdish or a Turkish officer.  The American planes called off the strike after they arrived because they didn’t see anything wrong on the ground.  Without American eyes on the ground, how are we going to know who and where the bad guys are?  This was our problem leading up to the invasion.  We didn’t have any idea what awaited us on the ground.

The one question I wish I’d asked, was based on an observation he made about the political and military situation in Iraq should the US leave.  He painted the result pretty starkly.  He said the Turks wouldn’t allow an independent Kurdistan on their southern border, so the Turks would come in after we left.  The Iranians would come from the east to help out the Shiites.  And because of that, the Saudis would come in to help out the Sunnis.  It would turn into a three-way regional war, and it would be our fault.  Another reason we cannot leave.  So I wonder, given all the different regional players in the area, what made Saddam successful?  That is to say, we’ve popped the top on a regional can of worms that up until a few years ago, one guy was able to contain.

Now I know the short answer is brute force.  Tom Friedman made a fantastic point in From Beruit to Jerusalem when he said the one thing everyone respected in that neighborhood was brute force.  You may not be on the same side as the big dog, but at least you knew where you stood.  But how did Saddam manage to climb to the top and consolidate his power?  And won’t this be the template for the next guy, whether it’s Maliki or Sadr or someone else?  This is what I wonder, because at some point there’s going to be a Next Saddam.

As depressing as the talk was, and it was relentless, he did throw out a glimmer of hope.  I wish he would have made the point more forcefully and not simply used it as a throw-away line.  Our way out of this is by ending our need for foreign oil.  Period.  He called Friedman a pompous ass before declaring he was right about our need for renewable energy.  He suggested if we’d invested the money we’d spent to date on Iraq on renewable energy instead, we would have all driven to the talk in cars powered by water. A stretch, to be sure.  But it’s something we need to get serious about.  And now.

Ricks’ talk was filmed by the website pdxjustice.org.  I’ll post a link to it here when they have it up.  Just make sure you don’t have any sharp objects around when you see it.