Thursday 28 June 2018

The Vacancy Situation

There are three 'games' that likely will come out of this Supreme Court episode:

1.  I think the person selected will come from a state that has a serious Democratic versus GOP senator race going on, and will trigger an intense mess for the Democrat to defend his position. 

2.  The hearings probably won't start until the end of July, and I can't suggest a full-up vote occurring until the last week of August.  That means that McCain's chance to vote against the situation....is going to require him to be flown to DC.....pushed into the Senate chamber in a highly weakened state....and the news media won't be able to focus much positive on him as his career drifts out.  In other words, the last 'act' of the 'McCain-play' is a pretty sad state of affairs.  Might this force McCain to retire now, and give the Governor a chance to play into this?  I doubt it, I think McCain wants to hold the seat until his passing.

3.  Finally, the next two months are entirely about the court vacancy....NOT about the Trump-Russians business, Stormy, faken news, and the news folks are fairly screwed to tell any other story. 

Here, I might add one more slant....I don't believe that Kennedy is the last one for this period to announce retirement.  I think within four weeks....a second name will come up.  All of this really disturbs the marginal and limited Democratic political strategy for November. 

Soccer a White-Kid Sport in America?

Some fairly well known female American soccer player suggested that today, and it got front-page coverage in the sports news.

I sat and paused over it.  In 1970, around the sixth-grade, we got introduced to soccer at my rural Alabama school.

The PE teacher stood there, and handed the twenty-odd kids in my group (all boys from the 6th and 7th grade) the ball and gave a brief two minutes of explanation.   To be honest, I don't think Mr 'G' knew much of anything on the sport, other than having watched it played on TV.  The two minutes of explanation really didn't help much.

So we set the ball down....picked up two sides, and tried to play for 35 minutes.  It was a total failure.

The two goalies just stood at their ends, and the group of 18 kids kept the ball in a tight 50-foot circle, and just attempting to kick it, but it really never moved more than four feet this way or that way.

We came out the second day, and I volunteered to be a goalie.  I observed the lack of movement over the ball for an entire 40-minute period.

Then we came out a third day, and the same results.

By Friday, someone probably put the suggestion to Mr 'G' that this wasn't much of a sport, and that ended the experiment.  I think over the whole week....some of the kids didn't move more than 100 feet during the PE period, per day. 

We never played it again.

White kids, as this lady puts it.....really just never grasped the game because of the lack of introduction.  I think in fifty years.....little has changed.  I suspect you could bring this up with Mr G today, and he'd probably tell you that this was the most stupid sport to introduce to Alabama kids.  I might agree.