A Shoe on the Freeway

The state of Connecticut has decided 50 points is the tipping point for high school football. It will now suspend for one game any coach whose charges defeat their opponent by 50 points or more.

Mercy rules exist in some youth sports. The 10-run rule, for example, is a staple of Little League with variations in other sports, all designed to take some of the sting out of a serious whuppin.

I suppose there are some practical matters, too. When 7-year olds are winning 37-1 and the 1 hasn’t throw a strike since his baptism, call it. Tournaments need to run on some sort of timely schedule, too.

But high school football is quite removed from kids chasing butterflies in right field. Even so, blowouts occur. You’ll always find a few knucklehead coaches who will run up the score, leaving in their starters when the outcome has long been decided. May they swallow their whistles.

Still, coaching or encouraging kids not to score is ridiculous.

If you play or coach long enough, you’ll understand what it’s like to open up a big ol’ can and what it’s like to be on the wrong end of it, too. Yes, there are powerhouse programs, but what goes around comes around — even for the winners.

Let market forces work. Wal-Mart does not suit up a high school team. Coaches who run it up will get theirs someday, even if it’s a reputation of being a jerk. I have seen that a couple times. Yeah, they win, but in the respect category, they never quite seem to find the end zone.

Nobody is on top forever, either. Exhibit A suits it up in red in Lincoln. If your third and fourth teamers are still kicking booty, maybe sports officials who make up the rules should look at the other guy.

Mercy rules might have their place in Little League, but leave them off the high school football field.

Posted by George Ayoub at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

President Dubya’s call for troops on the border Monday night framed one of the most difficult issues regarding immigration.

What to do with the charged atmosphere.

He encouraged us to find the “rationale middle ground” — which I applaud — in a highly emotional arena.

Weighing rational and emotional will be key. The president believes, as I do, that there is rationale middle ground among the details that remain to be worked out.

Rational either invites to change or weeds out those at the fringe of debate, those for whom this is all about race or those who believe we can go on indefinitely without some reform or those who believe it is a simple matter to determine someone’s citizenship or those who believe that the border is working.

It is not.

No reasonable person can argue that our borders are not both porous and currently difficult to make otherwise. A wall or a fence will change the landscape, but I’m skeptical about its return. Troops may make headlines but adding agents is the key. Bush said he has added agents, which is true, but a request for more was met with cold water.

According to Calvin Woodward of AP, Bush’s budget last year only requested 200 more agents when a 2004 immigration law set the requirement at 2,000.

Bush was right too when he said we sent back 6 million but, according to Woodward, the overall number of aliens caught dropped three years in a row until 2004 and has never been as high as the 1.6 million nabbed in 2000, the year before he took office.

Still, the president is doing the right thing by pushing the debate and urging it to be reasonable. His pleas for keeping politics out of the debate notwithstanding, we need to do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons and leave expediency for PACs and talk shows.

Securing our borders has to be in combination with other “rational” parts of immigration reform. Stemming more illegal immigration can only go so far. The president wagged a metaphorical finger in our faces when he said it was unwise and unrealistic to think we could send all the illegals aliens home.

True, but it was an economic finger too, as a number of states’ economies are bolstered through cheap labor provided by undocumented workers.

And any plan with some teeth for employers hiring undocumented workers is only as good as a way to determine a worker’s status. Add to that the endless maze toward gaining citizenship and the government all but giving up on determining who is legal and who is not. Hence Bush’s caution of a reality check.

I read a piece recently about a Hispanic activist in California who said illegal workers should be given a choice of punishment: Pay a $2,000 fine or be sent home. She said that a financial consequence, which fits within Bush’s unwise and inefficient framework, will punish those here illegally. It may also set in motion the possibility of citizenship.

Of course for all that to happen many puzzle pieces would have to be in place, including a border that is secure and maintained that way and a naturalization process that works.

Posted by George Ayoub at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After listening to many political hopefuls chirping about running government like a business and professing their own stellar CEOmanship skills, let’s borrow from commerce for a little post-election reality:

You get what you vote for.

No good waking up Wednesday morning with buyer’s remorse. Too late to say “What have we done?” Not good enough to wonder if just filling in the blanks made any difference. We get what we voted for.

Yes, we can analyze what happened (paralysis by analysis?). It might provide insight into the mood of the electorate, such as it is. “Electorate: noun; about a third of the people, on any given election day.”

The upshot of such enterprise is often confounding. On Election Day, a CBS News/NY Times poll indicated people found the Dems more favorable than their GOP rivals by nearly 20 percentage points. But when asked to rate specific Democrats — Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry — the bottom fell out of the donkey.

Political hacks — this is the season for them and their individual renditions of high dudgeon — may fawn over such trends and numbers and percentages. The rest of us, however, have to live with the results.

What is the relationship between what has been promised or bragged about and the real world, where we live. Should we wonder, too, if winning has become more important than governing. But then that is a question that needs to be asked before an election, isn’t it?

Posted by George Ayoub at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)