A couple of thoughts on the John Chaney incident: I will take the word of people who know Chaney and who have played for him that he is a wonderful human being, but his off-the-wall behavior is a matter of longstanding record and the media coddled him until that behavior helped end John Bryant’s collegiate career.
Let’s face it, most of the Philadelphia sports media looked the other way or, worse, justified Chaney’s boorish behavior in the past. The Hall of Fame coach may be a great father figure to his kids, but in my book that greatness has long been tainted by a tendency to be self-righteously arrogant any time you disagree with him. (Full disclosure: I spent 30 minutes listening to Chaney scream at me on WIP 20 years ago because I disagreed with his stance on Prop 43.)
The local sports media was also silent about the decline in Temple’s basketball fortunes that have left Chaney’s team without an NCAA bid since 2001.
Some people I know believe Chaney was cut some slack because he is African American, which is hardly fair because it was his skin color that forced him to wait years for a head coaching job with a big-time basketball tradition. It’s my experience that the media cuts you slack when they like you, and there is a good deal to like about John Chaney.
But more critical handling by his friends might have reined in Chaney instead of encouraging his intemperate outbursts. The coach likes to preach tough love, and right now that’s what he needs too …
Having been a federal employee, I view with interest President Bush’s suggestion that his privatization plan for Social Security merely gives everyone what federal employees have had right along. For the record, Mr. Bush is fudging the facts again.
It is true that federal employees, under what is termed FERS, can invest in a thrift savings plan and can direct that money into a number of different funds. But that same federal employee also gets a guaranteed Social Security pension, unlike under the Bush plan. Also, the government matches the federal employee’s contribution dollar for value, which of course the president’s plan does not.
You can’t compare the two situations, but the president is doing so to mislead the American people. If in fact you don’t believe the president would deliberately mislead you, I refer you to his initial underwhelming projections of the cost of the Iraq War and the cost of his Medicare drug package …
On the other hand, Mayor John Street and City Council could learn a lot from the federal government’s code of ethics when it comes to awarding contracts. The feds have very specific dollar limitations on the gratuities their employees can accept so as to not only prevent bribes from deciding who gets which contract, but also to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Violate those guidelines and get caught and you could wind up doing jail time or, as a minimum, lose your job.
The feds’ system isn’t perfect (reference Halliburton), but contrast it to the way Philadelphia operates with its blatant favoritism toward those who contributed to the mayor’s campaign …
Spare me all the hand-wringing from Philadelphia’s restaurant and bar owners about the proposed no-smoking ban. We heard the same kind of howls when they were forced to set aside a no-smoking section in their venues and business continued to boom.
The people who are currently allowed to puff away in the cocktail lounges and bars of this city are not going to make a beeline for South Jersey. What they’ll do is step outside for a smoke, where they won’t be inflicting their habit on the rest of us patrons and the poor bartenders who have to work under those miserable conditions. Surely Councilman Rick Mariano has heard of the same ban in New York City.
When I was there about a month ago, I paid $14 for a fancy martini in the Oak Room of the Hotel Algonquin, where it was jammed and nobody seemed to mind the absence of cigarette smoke …
Here’s my two cents’ on the controversy over the recent remarks of the Harvard University president regarding whether female brains are structured differently than their male counterparts, at least when it comes to figuring out the intricacies of math and science: The political thought-control police of the left are afraid this will just add support to those who want to keep women out of what is an overwhelmingly male field.
We shouldn’t lose sight of what ought to be our goal: the removal of obstacles from the path of qualified minorities. Removal of those obstacles doesn’t guarantee an equal outcome. Larry Summers’ remarks were meant to explain why, despite every effort being made to the contrary, women are not flocking to the fields of math and science.
Based on my own math and science scores, I’m either a big exception to the rule or my brain is female.
