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Commentary & Opinion

Commentary & Opinion

  • Anyone who is at all surprised that with the increased legalization of sports gambling has come a rise of investigations into athletes and coaches tampering with games and sharing insider info is either oblivious to human nature or willfully ignorant.
  • I used to teach a course on the US Supreme Court, starting around 1990 and until I retired almost three decades later. I’ve lost my patience with it.
  • Have you seen advertisements on TV celebrating American technology and then warning ominously that “some in Washington” want to stifle our technological progress? I have seen many --- they usually feature small business owners praising American technology and warning about bad plans floating around Washington.
  • There was a bumper crop of listener comments this week. Here are highlights.
  • If you watched college basketball last night, you likely had the unfortunate event of seeing Virginia have one of the worst offensive performances since the sport stopped using peach baskets. They lost to Colorado State 67-42 in a game that was not a close as the score might indicate. And perhaps the only people more frustrated than Virginia fans are anyone at Oklahoma, Seton Hall, and Indiana State. Those schools were likely the first three not picked in the field of 68 to play in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, where Virginia was definitely one of the last at large teams selected, much to the chagrin of schools with better analytics and resumes and all the other alleged criteria used by the selection committee to choose the field. So when Virginia played like a YMCA rec team after a night of heavy drinking, I’m sure all those on the outside looking in said some profanity laden version of “I told you.”
  • There have been waves of prejudice in our country lately that are very troubling, a combination of hardened attitudes and outrageous mistreatment of different minorities, including Muslims, Jews, Asians, immigrants, Blacks, Hispanics and LGBTQs, reflecting in surveys, legal battles and attacks, much of it encouraged by Trump for political advantage.
  • Last week was the annual recognition of the need for government openness. First celebrated nationally in 2005, “Sunshine Week” was launched as a collaboration of national news organizations to promote transparency in government. The idea is that governments are more effective when they allow public oversight and access to documents and proceedings as well as openness helps curb waste and increases government efficiency and effectiveness.
  • People have always learned important life lessons from theater. Take the plays of Shakespeare, for example. The moral of Romeo & Juliet is clearly that nothing good can come of hatred; Macbeth is chilling in its lesson that danger and darkness lie in deep ambition. Julius Caesar? Maybe it’s this: Be careful how you wield power (and who you choose as friends).
  • The village of Kinderhook, NY has undergone a remarkable renaissance over the last few years. The revival has been anchored by a complex of shops and restaurants, an art gallery and a yoga studio, together known as the Knitting Mill. The Old Dutch Inn, overlooking the storybook village square, has been transformed into a boutique hotel. And lest anybody think I’m exaggerating, Taylor Swift was spotted at one of the yoga classes and rumored to be house hunting.
  • Let's hear what our listeners have to say. Here are this week's highlights from the WAMC Listener Comment Line.
  • Decades ago, my father-in-law, of blessed memory, decided to spend the night with me and my wife in our small Manhattan apartment after he finished some business meetings. Looking to impress dear old dad with our maturity and independence, we cleaned and shined our two-bedroom obsessively for a week. The big night, which happened to be Halloween, arrived, and we were nervous. Who doesn’t want to prove to their parents that your adult life is up to their expectations?
  • If you talk to University of Florida football fans, a community of which I consider myself a member, they will tell you times have been hard enough the last few years. The Gators haven’t won a bowl game since 2019 and didn’t even play in one last season. All the while we’ve watched SEC foes Georgia and Alabama win national titles and have recent losses to the likes of Kentucky and Vanderbilt, who we always assumed was only in the conference for their SAT scores. And depending on what you believe, it might actually get worse.