By Tinker Town Tiger:
What substance?
All the world is a stage to these political running dog's. With the magic of music, art, TV, motion pictures, sports, politics, and of course Washington DC. And just about everything else for that matter. The way television broadcast the information that they pass off as news, is mind boggling. These daily shows has me sometime wonder just how in heaven's sakes did we all get into this fix as a society. But then again, I realize, quote: That's Entertainment folks! http://www.youtube.com/watch?
P.S. Except these issues are very serious, and Obama really doesn't have any real talent to help the American people with!?
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MSN.com
All the world is a stage to these political running dog's. With the magic of music, art, TV, motion pictures, sports, politics, and of course Washington DC. And just about everything else for that matter. The way television broadcast the information that they pass off as news, is mind boggling. These daily shows has me sometime wonder just how in heaven's sakes did we all get into this fix as a society. But then again, I realize, quote: That's Entertainment folks! http://www.youtube.com/watch?
P.S. Except these issues are very serious, and Obama really doesn't have any real talent to help the American people with!?
------------------------------
MSN.com
- 'I will put everything I've got into this'President Obama announced a series of legislative proposals aimed at limiting gun violence, teeing up for a political showdown in Congress.
- Gun sales jump | NRA ad spotlights Obama's kids
- Female gun ownership rising | Weigh in on Facebook
- 7 best exchange-traded funds for 2013 These ETFs will stack your portfolio with high-quality stocks & growing emerging-markets companies. The good news is many of them are cheap, too.
- Expert picks best stocks for this year
- 5 funds for your 401k
Tinker Town: "Wow, Notre Dame football player Te’o said that he spent some time with a woman who does not exist. Iyiyi I yei !?"
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Jack Swarbrick Press Conference - January 16, 2013
------------------------------Tinker Town: "Wait a moment did that Notre Dame college football player play a sick joke on us the American people...Oh please say it ain't so Notre Dame, because you keep telling us that the joker was the victim...Ha ha ha... Oh please Notre Dame do you really think that the American people are that big of a fool. Shame on you!?"
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http://sportsillustrated.cnn.
Te'o girlfriend hoax filled with more questions than answers
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http://www.poynter.org/latest-
Notre Dame football player Te’o girlfriend hoax ‘became truth through the media”
by Jeff Sonderman
Published
Jan. 16, 2013
6:48 pm
Updated
Jan. 17, 2013
5:53 amDeadspin | CBS Sports | Huffington Post | SB Nation
The sports editor at The South Bend (Ind.) Tribune was, not suprisingly, in a meeting when we called Wednesday to ask about the Deadspin bombshell that the widely reported stories of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o's girlfriend were an elaborate hoax.
“I can tell you we’re as baffled as anybody,” said the staffer answering the phone on the sports desk. In a statement published online, Tribune Executive Editor Tim Harman said, “If this story was a cruel hoax, as the University of Notre Dame has now indicated, we indeed were taken in, as were many others, including officials of the Notre Dame football program.”
Deadspin reported at 4:10 p.m., in a narrative so twisted it’s difficult to summarize, that every bit of a long-running media storyline of Te’o's girlfriend “Lennay Kekua” — how they met after a football game and talked every night on the phone, how she suffered a serious car crash and later died of leukemia — was entirely fake.
Kekua didn’t exist.
Deadspin writers Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey really stick it to other news media in their post, highlighting the many times that outlets like the South Bend Tribune, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, The New York Post, CBS, The Associated Press and the L.A. Times ran stories about Kekua or their relationship.
How could so many people write versions of this fairytale relationship without checking it out?
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http://mobile.slate.com/
Sports
Sports Nut
The Fake Girlfriend Experience
Why didn’t sportswriters catch on to Manti Te’o’s phony relationship? Because they didn’t care to look.
By Josh Levin
Updated Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013, at 10:28 PM ET
As Deadspin laid out in brutal detail on Wednesday, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s dead girlfriend is neither dead nor Manti Te’o’s girlfriend nor a corporeal being.
Te’o and Lennay Kekua never met on the field at Stanford, never hung
out together in Hawaii, and didn’t talk on the phone each night as she
lay dying of leukemia. As we wait to learn more details of this amazing
hoax, it’s worth examining the second-biggest mystery of the Manti Te’o
fake girlfriend saga: How did the sports media come to spread this phony
story?
The writer who did the most to popularize Te’o’s tale of triumph over tragedy was Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel. In late September, Thamel wrote
that the Notre Dame star “played remarkably well under the most
depressing of circumstances—the death of his girlfriend and grandmother
within [a] 24-hour span before the Irish's game against Michigan State.”
(The part about his grandmother's death is true.) In the Oct. 1 edition
of the magazine, which placed Te’o on the cover
and noted that the linebacker “has restored the shine to the Golden
Dome,” Thamel reported the precise date of Lennay Kekua’s supposedly
almost-deadly car accident (April 28) and stated that her “relatives
told [Te’o] that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a
coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice.” And in a Dec. 20 piece,
Thamel explained that Kekua wrote Te’o a series of inspirational notes
before her passing, and that her brother Kainoa and sister U’ilani
“would read the letters to Manti” to help soothe his pain. "It's given
me a sense of strength and perseverance," the Heisman Trophy finalist
told the Sports Illustrated writer.
If Thamel or anyone else at SI had used Nexis or Google,
they would’ve discovered that Lennay Kekua (not to mention her brother
and sister) didn’t exist. A reporter doesn’t expect to learn that his
subject's dead girlfriend is nothing but a fake Twitter avatar. But a
reporter, especially at a fact-checked magazine like SI, also
doesn’t generally put someone’s name into print and say that she smashed
up her car on April 28 without confirming the spelling and the
wreckage. That assumption of basic competence filters down to everyone else in the sports media ecosystem: If Manti Te’o’s story of woe is in Sports Illustrated, then it must be true.
So why didn’t Thamel and his cohorts at ESPN and elsewhere figure out they were all on a Catfish-ing exhibition? Because they fell victim to confirmation bias. Even before his great 2012 season, Te’o’s golden-as-the-dome image had been cemented. He was a humble leader, a Boy Scout, a religious fellow who put family first, a player who returned to Notre Dame for his senior season because, in the words of his father, “he was led there to do something.”
Manti Te’o was a sports hero, and his standout play this year demanded the details to flesh out that storyline. There’s a journalistic cliché:
If your mother says she loves you, check it out. For sports
hagiographers, it’s more like: If he makes a lot of tackles, don’t you
dare check anything. Stardom demands that feature writers color in the
lines with off-field greatness. And Te’o’s character, it seemed, was
unimpeachable. After all, there had been all these stories about how
humble and religious he was, and how he’d been led to Notre Dame to do
something.
There must be sports villains to stand alongside the heroes, of
course. That brings us to Pete Thamel’s other recent college football
opus, and the other kind of confirmation bias. In the Oct. 22 issue of SI, Thamel and Thayer Evans wrote a cover story on Tyrann Mathieu
called “Trials of the Honey Badger.” Mathieu, a 2011 Heisman Trophy
finalist, was kicked off the LSU football team prior to the 2012 season,
reportedly because he smoked marijuana. For the SI piece,
Thamel and Evans went to Louisiana and performed the kind of dogged
shoe-leather journalism that nobody bothered to do when reporting on
Manti Te’o, humble Boy Scout. Their prize finding: Mathieu’s face
appeared on a nightclub flyer, which might possibly constitute an NCAA
violation.
In addition to playing the part of NCAA enforcers, Thamel and Evans
want us to know that Mathieu is at a “crossroads.” “Three decades ago
his father came to the same point,” they write, making a comparison
that’s entirely unsupported by their reporting. The Honey Badger’s crime
is smoking weed—he was arrested on marijuana possession charges
after the SI piece came out—a practice that doesn’t land the typical
college student on the cover of a national magazine.
Mathieu’s father, by contrast, is in prison for killing a man. Thamel and Evans want us to believe, I guess, that Mathieu’s going to murder someone if he doesn’t straighten up.
Mathieu’s father, by contrast, is in prison for killing a man. Thamel and Evans want us to believe, I guess, that Mathieu’s going to murder someone if he doesn’t straighten up.
The Honey Badger, like Manti Te’o, is a cartoon character. But since
Mathieu found himself on the sports world’s naughty list—troubled
athlete, at the crossroads—he was the athlete who got a vetting more
suited for a presidential candidate.
SI’s Mathieu and Te’o features both infantilize their
subjects in their own way. In his Oct. 1 cover story, Thamel writes that
Te’o has “linked the program’s glorious past with a promising future,”
helping redeem Notre Dame from “the George O’Leary résumé fiasco, the
death of student videographer Declan Sullivan in a tower collapse and
the allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against a player by a St.
Mary’s College student who committed suicide soon after.”
No matter what we learn about Te’o in the coming days, this
black-and-white narrative—good man fixes bad things—enlightens no one
and does the athlete no favors.
According to Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, Te’o was the “perfect mark” for this fake girlfriend hoax, not its perpetrator. “He is a guy who is so willing to believe in others,” Swarbrick said at a press conference.
Whether or not that’s true about Te’o, it’s an apt description of his chroniclers. Sports Illustrated
looked at the linebacker and saw a classic template, not a human being
who demanded the scantest thought or scrutiny. In the end, they got back
the exact amount of effort they put in. This was journalism as
fill-in-the-blank exercise, the creation of a simple story that tells
you what you already know. In this case, what we already knew happened
not to be the truth. If only Manti Te’o hadn’t been such a boy scout.
Then we might have known how interesting he was all along.
Update, Jan. 16, 10:40 p.m.: ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, who voiced a five-minute video feature
on Te'o's tragic losses, says he was unable to find Lennay Kekua's
obituary or documentation of her car accident. He didn't follow up,
though, because the Notre Dame player "said the family would prefer not
to be contacted" and "at that moment, you simply think that you have to
respect those wishes."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
-----------------------------
http://www.usatoday.com/story/
John L. Smith lands job at Colorado school
From wire reports9:17p.m. EST January 16, 2013
Story Highlights
- Former Arkansas coach expected to start at Division II Fort Lewis in March
- He takes over a program that was 0-10 in 2012
- Skyhawks have not had a winning season since 2006
His new place barely holds 3,000 fans.
Smith went up against teams such as Alabama that were contending for national championships.
Now, he will get to face squads in the hardly known Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference.
Smith was hired Wednesday as head coach at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., a Division II school coming off an 0-10 season, after being let go as coach at Arkansas.
He will make around $67,000 a season, which will be renewed on a year-by-year basis, and only have 16 or 17 scholarships to dole out.
That's a long way from SEC football.
Sure, Smith had other offers to become a position coach that paid more after he was let go by the Razorbacks. But this quaint mountain town located about 330 miles southwest of Denver is simply his kind of place. Plus, he's reunited with director of athletics Gary Hunter, who gave Smith his first head coaching job at Idaho in 1989.
"To get a quality coach like John L. Smith, we're very fortunate," Hunter said. "When this became a possibility, I called him up and said, 'Durango is a gorgeous spot to live, why don't you come on over here and put this program back together?' "
That was enough enticement for Smith, who's an avid skier and now will be surrounded by some of the best powder skiing in the world.
The two sides have yet to officially formalize their deal. So far, a simple handshake agreement has been sufficient. Smith is expected to begin his new head coaching assignment March 1, the school announced.
"When he gets here, we'll march into human resources and get a contract," Hunter said.
He chuckled over the phone.
"Not exactly what's going on in the NFL or SEC, huh?" he said.
Smith was hired away from Weber State last April to step in for ousted Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino, just weeks after a scandal that erupted following Petrino's motorcycle accident that involved his mistress.
The Razorbacks had big hopes under Smith, especially after starting the season ranked in the top 10. But the team struggled to a 4-8 record and the John L. Smith era came to a close.
And now the 64-year-old former Michigan State and Louisville coach gets an opportunity to resurrect his career in Durango, a city with a population of around 17,000. He has plenty of work to do in turning around the Skyhawks, a team that's only had 10 winning records in 50 seasons as a four-year school.
"To me, it's a situation where we're going to have to work hard to try and get the excitement up, get the program going in the right direction, win some games and graduate our kids," Smith said.
In 19 seasons as a head coach, Smith has an impressive record (136-94) and picked up a few accolades (Big Ten Coach of the Year at Michigan State in 2003) along the way. He's also been to seven bowl games and captured six conference titles.
This hiring is definitely a coup for the school.
"Fort Lewis College is making a commitment to football," Hunter said. "Many of our other programs have reached the pinnacle of success at the national and regional levels. We want our football alumni and fans to have the opportunity to enjoy that same success."
Hunter isn't expecting an immediate turnaround.
No, that's asking too much out of his good friend.
"Our first goal is to be competitive, to be respected," Hunter said. "Then, maybe we can attract recruits and other good football players, because winning takes care of itself.
"The one beautiful thing about John L. is this: What you see is what he is. There's not a dishonest word out of his mouth. I knew him when he wasn't making anything at Idaho and then making big money at Michigan State. He's the same guy. He's the same down-home, fun-loving guy."
Smith replaces Cesar Rivas-Sandoval, who announced his resignation a week ago after three seasons and a 6-25 record.
Among Smith's assistant coaches will be Skyhawks defensive coordinator Ed Rifilato, who played for Smith at Idaho and also served as director of football operations under Smith at Louisville in 2002.
"He's a great player's coach," Rifilato said.
http://theadvocate.com/sports/
Last of LSU’s early enrollees arrive
Sports Information Director Michael Bonnette said Wednesday that quarterback Hayden Rettig and wide receiver Avery Johnson were admitted to LSU as enrollees for the Spring 2013 semester.
Classes began Monday.
Rettig (6-foot-3, 205 pounds) of Los Angeles Cathedral, was delayed by a paperwork issue.
Johnson (6-1, 185) of Pompano Beach (Fla.) Blanche Ely had to wait for a test score to be approved by the NCAA Clearinghouse. He signed with LSU in 2012 and prepped at Hargrave (Va.) Military Academy this past year.
Johnson is the younger brother of former LSU All-American cornerback Patrick Peterson.
LSU had six other early enrollees who arrived and began classes Monday: athlete prospect John Diarse (6-0, 210) of Monroe Neville; offensive tackle Fehoko Fanaika (6-6, 340) of College of San Mateo (Calif.); Marietta, Ga., quarterback Anthony Jennings (6-2, 205); Lincoln, Neb., Southwest defensive end Christian LaCoututre (6-5, 267); Lemont, Ill., offensive tackle Ethan Pocic (6-6, 285); and Northeast Mississippi Community College tight end Logan Stokes (6-4, 240).
Stokes has already signed his national letter of intent with LSU, the only member of the 2013 class to do so.
All of LSU’s early enrollees are eligible to participate in spring practice.
LSU has a total of 26 commitments/signees for its Class of 2013. Aside from Stokes, the rest of LSU’s class may sign their national letters of intent beginning Feb. 6.
Nkemdiche to visit
The nation’s consensus No. 1 prospect will apparently make LSU his last stop before national signing day.Defensive end Robert Nkemdiche (6-5, 265) of Loganville, Ga., Grayson, reportedly will take an official visit to LSU on Feb. 1, the final weekend before the start of the national signing period.
Nkemdiche is expected to make the visit along with teammate David Kamara (5-10, 175), a three-star cornerback.
Nkemdiche is set to visit Florida starting Friday and Ole Miss on Jan. 25.
The Rebels are considered the leaders over LSU for Nkemdiche, where his older brother Denzel is a linebacker.
Nkemdiche decommitted from Clemson in November.
Riley offered grayshirt
Linebacker Duke Riley (6-1, 205) of Class 2A state champion John Curtis posted on his Twitter page Wednesday that he has received an offer to grayshirt by LSU.A grayshirt is a player who signs with a school and pays his way for a year with the prospect of receiving a scholarship in the future.
The Class 2A defensive player of the year, Riley is strongly considering Ole Miss and TCU. Riley is ranked as the No. 16 prospect in Louisiana by ESPN.
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http://www.dandydon.com/
Dandy Don's LSU Sports Report
Good morning, Tiger Fans,
LSU has now enrolled eight players for the 2013 class, including Hayden Rettig and Avery Johnson who both enrolled yesterday after receiving clearance from the NCAA. Of the eight, four will likely count back to the 2012 class, making room for LSU to take commitments from at least three more players in this year’s class which currently includes 26 commitments (counting the early enrollees). I say “at least” because there’s always the possibility of one or two of the current commitments not qualifying.
Nobody knows how this will pan out and who will receive LSU’s final remaining scholarships, but I think it's safe to say that the three biggest position needs in this year's class are at DE, DB, and WR. LSU would love to sign at least one more big-time defensive end like Robert Nkemdiche or Tashawn Bower. Nkemdiche, the nation's No. 1 ranked prospect, is scheduled to visit LSU on February 2, and Bower (currently committed to Auburn) is scheduled to visit on January 25. LSU would also love to sign a big-time safety like Priest Willis, Jamal Carter (currently committed to Miami), or Tahaan Goodman, and maybe a cornerback like Eddie Jackson or David Kamara. As for adding a wide receiver, the most likely candidate appears to be Louisiana's own Kevin Spears who has received an offer and will be visiting this weekend.
Read more...http://www.dandydon.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?
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