Left Coast Sports Babe

So now what’s the difference between Barry Bonds’ reputation and Alex Rodriguez’s reputation? About five years.

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Now A-Rod’s name has been leaked as only one of the first of 104 players who reportedly tested positive for steroids in 2003. Maybe we should put a flag with an asterisk out in front of the Baseball Hall of Fame and be done with it.

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It does kind of put a whole new spin on Joe Torre’s “A-Fraud” label.

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Despite still being unsigned less than two weeks before the start of spring training, Manny Ramirez told the Los Angeles Times that “that he wouldn’t be disgruntled by the lengthy contract talks. ”

Nah, he’ll find something else to be disgruntled about.

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After the Coast Guard and others had to rescue over 150 people from a broken ice flow on Lake Erie, an Ohio sheriff stated “if there was a section in the code about common sense, we would have had 150 arrests out there today.”

With all due respect sir, if there were a section in the criminal code about common sense, there wouldn’t be room for them in the Ohio prisons.

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Back to politics: The bad news, over 600,000 Americans lost their jobs in January. The good news, two of them were Bush and Cheney.

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Considering the fact that the Cardinals and Steelers were whistled for a combined total of 18 penalties and 162 yards, should Super Bowl XLIII go down as the best ever game of Flag Football?

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The turning point in the game may well have been an interception thrown by Kurt Warner at the end of the first half, which was returned by the Steelers’ James Harrison 100 yards for a touchdown. (Despite the fact that with time expiring, all the Cardinals had to do was knock him out of bounds.) In fact, it was such an improbable touchdown, are we sure the Stanford band wasn’t somehow involved?

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School children in Pittsburgh will get a mini-holiday Monday, as the city’s public schools will open two hours later than normal. But for those residents worried about sports championships affecting education time, at least this won’t happen next fall with the Pirates. (Or for Canadian readers, most likely for the Penguins either.)

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And in Seattle sports fans are asking “What’s a championship?”

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Back to politics. My suggestion for trimming the national debt, since paying taxes has clearly become so confusing. For anyone in the U.S. considering running for political office or accepting a cabinet level position – a six month amnesty for paying back taxes. If you think you have forgotten or misunderstood any taxes in the past 20 years you get six months to pay up and make it right, with no additional penalties. After that, with anything that comes out in the media or a vetting process the penalties will triple.

Could put a real dent in the deficit…

The Smithsonian has apparently asked Aretha Franklin for her inaugural hat. Presumably for the American Museum of Natural History

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Apparently new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has almost $6 million in debts from her presidential campaign. With a record like that, maybe it would have been a better match had Obama appointed her Secretary of the Treasury.

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When the Illinois Senate impeached Rod Blagojevich, they also barred him from ever holding public office in future. Which was probably unnecessary. Blagojevich has shown no interest in ever moving to Louisiana.
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More fallout from Ted Haggard saying he is not gay but a “heterosexual with issues.”

Joe Biden has declared himself to be “taciturn with issues.”

The Detroit Lions a “NFL team with issues.”

And well, former Illinois Governor Blagojevich still maintains his innocence, and says that he doesn’t have issues.

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Michael Steele became the first African-American chair of the Republican National Committee. Among those who he beat out, Ken Blackwell, the African-American former Secretary of State for Ohio. This election shocked many rank and file Republicans, mostly because they didn’t know they had two African-Americans left in the party.

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Phil Mickelson has spent much of his golf career trying to emulate Tiger Woods. And this weekend he has succeeded, both of them will be free to watch the Super Bowl.

(note to non-golf fans, Mickelson actually missed the cut this weekend, for the first time in his season debut since he turned pro.)

Normally Mickelson doesn’t shoot anywhere near that badly in a tournament until Sunday.

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In an ESPN poll, 53 percent of Americans think the Arizona Cardinals, outranked in almost every major category by the Pittsburgh Steelers, will win the Super Bowl. And we wonder how so much of this country is suffering for being economically unrealistic…

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Of course, an old white guy from Arizona being the winning Super Bowl quarterback is about as unlikely as a young black guy winning the Presidency.