Nice

The acquisition of Jared Jordan's draft rights is a smart move that will pay big dividends. And it underscores that Isiah is not done dealing even if dealing simply means cutting bodies.

Allan Houston may be Dolan's golf buddy but he's the last person the Knicks need muddling the roster situation. My guess is that the Knicks are being polite but privately hope Allan's comeback attempt implodes. The Knicks are overloaded with one-skill-short-of-a-starter talent and Houston may still have a shot but he'd have to have had defense enhancement surgery to help the Knicks.

My mantra is still NO to Allan.

Shocking Revelations at MSG

All week, sportswriters have been sensationalizing the observation that James Dolan doesn't seem to know what's going on in the Knicks organization!

-yawn-

I'm getting sleepy...

Rascist Hypocrisy

The media is roasting Isiah Thomas for pointing out an inconvenient truth - that we live in a complex, post-modern, cultural milieu. Isiah had the audacity to suggest that the word "bitch" used by blacks has a different meaning than the word "bitch" as applied to a white suburban household.

I am reminded at the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" that biographer Gerald Nicosia claimed that Kerouac's greatness came from creating new meanings for words and he cited "Vision" as an example.

Chris Rock used to do a stand-up bit that ended with "but you got to understand!" and it related to criminal justice applied to blacks. So I am confused by a black woman not "understanding" the nuance except as a selective belligerence.

Harvey Araton touches on this subject in a column called, Teaching the Importance of Staying Centered.

My father always told me that the most important thing is what you think of yourself. He had an expression about there being all these little red wagons that get pulled around and that it’s got nothing to do with me.”

Who, then, better than Russell, in his gravelly voiced and informal, meditative manner, to lecture the freshly minted rookie class of 2007 about the wagon train of critics awaiting them — hauling around some legitimate grievances about the state of their sport but also, in too many cases, hurling familiar stereotypes and stones?

Ready to hold them to unmatchable standards — as in the case of the injured and absent Greg Oden, already anointed as the next Russell — or to modes of idealized behavior existing mainly in sanitized versions of bygone eras that were televised in black and white but are seldom remembered in shades of gray.

Think, for example, that N.B.A. pugilism began with the Bad Boy Pistons, or with Ron Artest rampaging into the waiter seats at the Palace of Auburn Hills?

“We had fights in All-Star Games,” Russell said, competitive pride on his sport coat sleeve matching the gift from Commissioner David Stern, a ring commemorating all 11 titles.

Think that the great Russell was above instigating a scuffle by explaining to an opponent, as he put it yesterday at the N.B.A.’s Rookie Transition Program at the Doral Arrowwood resort, “why they didn’t have a chance?”

Think again.

“Nowadays, they call it trash talking,” Russell told the rookies. “But see, that’s from the suburbs. In the projects, we’re talking folks, about things that are pertinent.”

The media is addressing an audience of racial hypocrites who not not "understand". They are the ever-ready crucifixion squads so easily whipped into a angry mob calling for a lame apology, or a resignation, or some other such bullshit. By making someone feel small the angry mobs feel larger.

And I have witnessed years of corporate feminism as a consultant in dozens of companies and industries. My mother told me stories of how she and her girlfriend's worked hard in factories - hunched backs, arthritic fingers and joints, hard - hard work. And I have watched prima donnas whose daddy or mommy or rich uncle propped them up after they cost corporations millions with their incompetence and then would show up at advocacy dinners pissing and moaning about glass ceilings.

In too many cases the other side of a glass ceiling shelters no racists or malevolent brotherhoods - only bastards looking out for themselves and no one else.

So let's talk about the Jena 6 case. A federal investigator in Louisiana decided that the incident of nooses being publicly displayed "had nothing to do with" the ensuing activity that jailed a black student or two.

Nothing? Really? Are they saying that in Louisiana displaying nooses on school grounds is just a Future Farmers of America pep rally ornament? How quaint.

You see, during this same week, a nostalgic set of Nazi memorabilia made its way into the MSM. Oh the good ole days! Life for employees of the concentration camps was such a hoot. "Ooops, I finished ALL MY Blueberries..." and the camp's hostess mugs a face of disappointment.

At my sons' High School open house, I asked the teacher of an Introduction to Criminal Justice course what the kids seemed interested in. "A lot of them are looking forward to being prison guards", he said with no hint of irony.

And why not. The Abu Ghraib sexual exploits have captured the teen-aged imagination. You can shock 'em, sock 'em, and rock 'em - get overtime, good benies, maybe a nice pension. Public defender is not part of the American Dream anymore.

Forget endless war rhetoric, we are in the age of endless, minority incarceration because it has, thanks to educational initiatives like NCLB, become a guaranteed career path. You can't outsource prisons now, can you?

So when protesters showed up in Jena, pick-up trucks circled the buses of those who came to express their concern. The pick-up trucks had nooses dangling from the back of them. Now usually nooses hanging from the back of pick-up trucks are used to drag gays, dead animals who pissed off their owners, or an FFA float.

So, guys like Isiah who suggest that a word or a noose might have another meaning should be publicly ostracized until they're forced to apologize or quit.

Nobody wants to argue semantics anymore. That's so Beat.

Conviction in The Jenna Six Case Thrown Out!

I knew we could get this out of the way before the season began.

Read all the details here. In summary;

JENA, La. -- A Louisiana appeals court has tossed out the battery conviction of a black teenager who faced 15 years in prison for the beating of a white classmate amid racial tensions in the north Louisiana town of Jena.

Mychal Bell had been convicted of aggravated second-degree battery. He's one of the so-called Jena Six, a group of black teenagers charged in the beating of Justin Barker last December.

Talking Crazy

I watched a hallucinatory speech by President Bush tonight. He once again linked Iraq to 9-11 and democracy in the Middle East, blah F'n blah...

Lewis Carroll never had that kind of imagination.

When Marbury makes silly remarks everyone questions his ability to lead the Knicks as though he's just KA-RAZE-EEEEE!

Seems like a double-standard to me when a delusional white guy can get on national TV and truly talk crazy and then have the press corp debate the carziness but when a true leader like Marbury has a slip of the tongue he's suddenly unqualified.

It ain't right I tell ya.

Muhammad Ali's Anchor Punch Explained

Now hold those eyelids open:

Let's bail out Minny

How about Jerome James for Juwan Howard straight up?

Howard would be a great bench presence.

I know we have a crowded roster but...

Justin Reed has been released by Houston. I thought this kid had some very nice upside when he was with the Celts and I wouldn't mind a bit seeing him in training camp just in case Isiah puts together a multi-player swap for Kobe, Artest, or Marcus Camby.

An Operatic Weekend at KnicksMecca

Enjoy.