Now, who is David Tyree? If you're a football fan and watched the Giants play the Patriots in 2008, you might have seen one of the greatest plays in Super Bowl history as the game was winding down. Eli Manning escaped a sack, threw a Hail Mary third down pass deep over the middle of the field and a fourth string receiver named David Tyree miraculously caught the ball pressed up against his helmet with one hand. That play led to the Giants defeating Tom Brady's 18-0 new England powerhouse team for an improbable win. Tyree was never anything special as a player, but became a local hero and got a book deal out of the legendary play. Unfortunately, he was hurt soon afterwards and was gone from football. Now he's come out of the woodwork to become a vocal leader against marriage equality as the NY state bill legalizing gay marriage is in its final stages.

With the legislative session in overtime and the votes of a handful of Republican state senators up for grabs, the fate of a "gay marriage" bill that would make New York the largest and most influential state to redefine marriage remained uncertain Tuesday.

Why is Tyree's behavior so egregious? He has come out and said that he would have dropped The Catch of the Ages on purpose if it meant that the bill would not pass. That's right, he's willing to trade a Giants Super Bowl win in order to be sure gay rights would be defeated. That's sick.

David Tyree, hero of Giants' Super Bowl upset of Patriots, said he'd trade win to block gay marriage

- Giants 2007 Super Bowl hero David Tyree said he'd trade "The Catch" and the team's unlikely championship to keep marriage between one man and one woman.--

Tyree, who called the catch a "gift" he couldn't repeat if he tried, said "there's nothing worth more than [maintaining heterosexual marriage] right here for me."

Asked if he'd give up the Super Bowl to stop gay marriage, Tyree said: "Honestly, I probably would."

"Nothing means more to me than that my God would be honored," he said. "Being the fact that I firmly believe that God created and ordained marriage between a man and a woman, I believe that that's something that should be fought for at all costs."

"So I'll lay down everything I am to preserve the honor and integrity of the God that I serve."

He said his new role as a gay marriage opponent sheds deeper meaning on his Super Bowl catch.

"Perhaps God orchestrated that play to give me a platform for what I'm doing here today: To urge political leaders all over our nation to reject same-sex marriage," he said.

Tyree said he doesn't fear his stance will tarnish his image with Giants fans who support gay marriage.

To think that Tyree would undermine his teammates, the fans, the league, 97.5 million viewers and his bosses for an ideological homophobic viewpoint is unconscionable. His stance on gay marriage doesn't bother fans like myself because he has a right to believe what he wants, but to tie that into how he performs on the field is something that should tarnish his image forever. It's nuts.

Many professional athletes are in the religious right camp, but fans watch to enjoy the competition. Many readers know I follow sports and its Media Village because, well I enjoy sports, but also because AM sports talk radio and even ESPN has a lot of influence on local elections. It was critical in electing Scott Brown when Martha Coakley made a huge mistake about Curt Schilling. She ran a terrible campaign, but radiotalkers roasted her on Boston sports talk and it definitely had an positive influence for Scott Brown.
And Margery Eagan of the Boston Herald said the exact same thing on CNN:

EAGAN: Well, she got very good press from "The Boston Globe," not from my paper, "The Boston Herald." But you know something? People don't like -- TV journalists and newspaper journalists do not like to talk about the influence of talk radio. Let me tell you something. There was a nonstop hammering of Martha Coakley on the AM stations here, on the huge sports stations here. She was the evil incarnate and Scott Brown was the next coming. And, you know, the New England Patriots in the playoffs lost early on. It was as if there was this transference from Tom "Terrific" Brady, the quarterback of the Patriots, to Scott "Terrific" Brown. You look at the rallies for Scott Brown, they were very white, they were very suburban, they were Gillette Stadium fans, and there was almost this...

I could make numerous analogies about this to David Tyree, but as an ex-professional athlete he has spit the bit, jumped the shark and crossed the line. I'll always remember Super Bowl 42, but Tyree has damaged himself. If Curt Schilling came out in 2008 and publicly said he would have lost game six on purpose against the Yankees in the 2004 playoffs to end the curse just to make sure McCain won in 2008, I wonder how Red Sox fans would feel?

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Credit: The Chocolate Swirl

Football, food, million dollar commercials. Who are you rooting for? What's the best play of the game? Kickoff is at 6:30 pm Eastern / 3:30 Pacific.

Also, Blue America has a Super Bowl game going on. Everytime The Packers score, donate to the Blue America fund to help get rid of Wisconsin's biggest disgrace: Paul Ryan.

Football open thread,

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Credit: Crooks and Liars

Are you ready for some football!?! Are you ready for some Midwestern, below-freezing, possible-snow football? Kickoff for Bears vs. Packers, in Chicago, is at 3 Eastern / 12 Pacific. Steelers vs. Jets, in Pittsburgh, kicks off at 6:30 Eastern / 3:30 Pacific.

Open football thread below....

First, a shameless plug: Please go read my latest piece at AlterNet about America's most revolting breakfast foods. From Reese's Puffs to Hardee's Monster Biscuit, these are the most comically unhealthy breakfasts you'll ever find.

Now, onto the more serious business of robots taking over the entire world through the stock market.

60 Minutes ran an excellent piece last night about high-frequency trading:

For those of you who don't know, an estimated 70% of trades on the stock market today are generated by high-frequency trading algorithms that scan market data for inefficiencies, anomalies and the like and buy or sell stocks based on the probability that they'll go up or down in a very short period of time. So let's say Microsoft's stock has been trading down 25% on the day. An algorithm detects that this is unusually low and snatches it up, then trades it three minutes later after its price has appreciated.

The key here is that the algorithms get pricing data milliseconds before human traders do and place orders accordingly. This helps them skim pennies off of stocks millions of times a day, which adds up to big long-term gains at the end of the year.

Let's make this simple by using a sports analogy, or rather a virtual sports analogy. If you've ever played fantasy football, you know that you set your lineup of players roughly one hour before game time and you aren't allowed to change it once the games start. But let's say you're playing in a league that lets you change your roster during games. And let's say a rival player is watching games on an old analog set while you're watching it on Direct TV. As you're following games you notice that your rival is signing and dropping players five seconds before they score a touchdown. Because he doesn't have the five-second delay that you have, he's able to grab players off the waiver wire who have just scored right before the system records the score officially. And at the end of the day, you check your league to learn that your rival has accumulated 5,469 fantasy points in one week alone.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, "Our markets are completely insane." When 70% of trades are made by algorithms that don't have any sense of a stock's underlying value and are only skimming pennies off the top, we have no idea if price changes are the result of real-world events or if they're just being driven by computers trading with themselves. And what's more, if a firm enters a trade that sets off several algos' alarm bells it can result in a massive flash crash like the one that happened in May.

I'm not sure of very much in this life, my friends, but I feel pretty confident that turning our stock market over to robots will probably end badly for most of us.

Elbert Jovante Woods, the son of the former Cincinnati Bengals fullback Ickey Woods, died this Saturday. He was only 16. A cornerback high school football player, he’d been practicing with his varsity team on Wednesday and later collapsed at home. He was rushed to hospital with a severe asthma attack, and put on life-support, but never recovered. His doctors blamed extreme heat and poor air quality for the teen’s death. ‘We've actually had a lot of patients in the last week come in with exacerbation of asthma,’ said Dr. David Bernstein, a University of Cincinnati researcher. ‘We think it's probably related to air quality.’

All of us at C&L extend our heartfelt sympathy to Woods’ family, the loss of a talented, vibrant child a tragedy for anyone. (And aside from anything else, I’d like to note that Jovante was an organ donor, his gift of life is now helping eight other people – the kid was a star, in every sense of the word.)

Like Jovante, I and several other members of the C&L staff, have suffered from life-long asthma. Unlike Jovante, however, I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world where the air quality is so relatively clean that lichen – which are incredibly sensitive to air pollution – grows on the asphalt of roads, even in cities as big as Auckland. Jovante, on the other hand, lived in Cincinnati, one of the worst cities for air pollution, having been ranked 2nd statewide and 11th nationwide for the worst fine particle, or ‘soot,’ pollution, and ranked 5th nationwide for soot pollution.  Power plants are the largest source of fine particle pollution, which is formed when sulphur dioxide and other pollutants react in the atmosphere.  Fine particle pollution is high year-round in Cincinnati and has routinely exceeded EPA’s standard for what is safe to breathe over the long-term. 

Continue reading »

Video Clip O' Fun: Da Ali G Show

Bruno exposes homophobia while attending a football game in Alabama, and conducting an interview at an American Expo.

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Where's the moral outrage?

"Raiderettes in Paradise," a romp around the beach with half-naked cheerleaders aired right before kickoff today.

Given the amount of attention that the Monday Night Football skit caused, where's the uproar over this half hour bikini-a-thon?

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Monday Night Football skit Video Clip

We had to upload another version because of all the traffic!

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MSNBC Pat Buchanan said:

From Suburban Guerrilla:

PUSHING BACK

Mark Kleiman's got it right:

What should we do about it? Why, we should make them pay.

The contemporary Republican Party has demonstrated a complete lack of scruples and no sense of limits in either taking power or using power. (The current "purge" -- their word, not mine -- of the Directorate of Operations at the CIA to rid it of those not personally loyal to GWB is just the latest example.)

If they keep playing football and we keep playing croquet, guess who's going to keep winning?

Pelosi and Reid, and the rest of us, need to take a page from the Republican playbook of 1993-2000. No surrender, no compromise, no bipartisanship, no civility, no reaching out to Republican officeholders (as opposed to detachable Republican voters): nothing but scorched earth from here to victory.

No, it won't be pretty. But continuing to be ruled by these thugs is worse.

Monday Night Football Flack!

There is a better version of this clip that we put on 11/18

A skit that aired before the Eagles/Cowboys game drew fire from angered viewers, resulting in numerous complaints to ABC about the segment.

The FCC is investigating whether ABC has violated it's indecency rules.

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Check out the spot and let us know what you think! Is it indecent or are we headed back to the fifties?