PLAIN DEALER OPINION

NBA Commissioner David Stern was right to suspend Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas for bringing guns to the locker room — editorial
By The Plain Dealer Editorial Board
January 12, 2010, 4:01AM
Before he died in November, Abe Pollin was one of Washington, D.C.'s most successful businessmen and philanthropists. In 1997, upset about rising violence in the District and the earlier assassination, in Israel, of his friend Yitzhak Rabin, Pollin decided to give his pro basketball team a new name.

The Washington Bullets, he said, simply sent the wrong message -- especially to young, impressionable inner-city fans. After a contest, the team was rechristened the Wizards.

Too bad Gilbert Arenas, the Wizards' biggest star and recipient of a $111 million contract from Pollin, failed to grasp his late employer's message -- or wisdom.

Arenas has admitted that after a pre-Christmas gambling argument, he put four unloaded guns in the locker of a teammate, along with a note: "Pick one." He says it was just a joke. Prosecutors in Washington aren't laughing; they've launched a criminal investigation.

Though league rules ban weapons in the locker room, NBA Commissioner David Stern initially deferred to law enforcement authorities. But Arenas kept making light of the situation, even pretending to "shoot" his teammates in a pre-game huddle. That was too much for Stern. Before Washington played the Cavs last week, he suspended Arenas indefinitely without pay -- about $147,000 a game.

You can argue whether pro athletes should be role models; the fact is, they are. It's also a fact that some 10,000 Americans a year die from gun violence. Guns aren't funny.

Abe Pollin understood that. Because Arenas did not, his career and freedom are at risk.

Source:cleveland.com/

The Miracle Of Marijuana

In Washington DC, there's considerable anticipation of the medical marijuana initiative finally being allowed to take effect. DC voters backed Initiative 59 with 69 percent support in 1998, but, of course, American citizens have less self-rule in Washington than Iraqis have in Baghdad, and so a bunch of congressmen from far far away decided that we needed their rule rather than democracy and voided the whole thing. But that ended last month with an appropriations bill and a Congressional majority that believes in democracy at home as well as abroad.

Good timing. New research suggests that marijuana acts in the opposite fashion to legal and taxed alcohol and nicotine, and fr from destroying brain cells, actually helps them re-grow:


Xia Zhang, an associate professor in the U of S neuropsychiatry research unit, led the team that tested the effects of HU-210, a potent synthetic cannabinoid similar to a group of compounds found in marijuana. The synthetic version is about 100 times as powerful as THC, the compound responsible for the high experienced by recreational users.

The team found that rats treated with HU-210 on a regular basis showed neurogenesis – the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. This region of the brain is associated with learning and memory, as well as anxiety and depression.

The effect is the opposite of most legal and illicit drugs such as alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and cocaine.

“Most ‘drugs of abuse’ suppress neurogenesis,” Zhang says. “Only marijuana promotes neurogenesis.”

Of course these tests need to be done in humans. Maybe soon America will be sufficiently adult to start following reason rather than fear.

Source:andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/

George Michael: The man who was must-see TV

Through word of mouth in the community of people that revolved around and adored George Michael, I'd come to know in recent days that he was sicker than he would ever let on. And anyway, when the phone rang one recent Sunday morning George was in vintage form. He was having a good day and was in full voice, which is to say very loud, jumping from one topic to another. The Redskins stunk, the Wizards stunk, he hated a column I'd written a few days earlier. It was George unplugged, George wanting to know the latest, the same old George who'd just gotten off the phone with The Squire or Abe or Dan, George who hadn't slept because he'd been watching some NBA game on the West Coast until 1:30 in the morning.

After the conversation ended, my wife asked how George was doing, how he really and truly was. And I told her I had no idea. Like typical men, I didn't ask and he didn't tell me. In this case, I didn't have the courage to ask. He was fabulous in those 30 minutes, like it was 10:50 p.m. and he was minutes from a newscast. And if that was going to be the last conversation we'd ever have -- and it was -- then that's the way I wanted to remember George Michael: funny, informed, irreverent, a little profane, always engaged.

I spent Thursdays with George for 13 years, 40 Thursdays a year for nearly a dozen of those years. "Redskins Report" with Sonny and Riggo during football season, "Full Court Press" with Tony Kornheiser and David DuPree during basketball season. My professional life has been greatly influenced by two indomitable men named George. Solomon, who brilliantly ran The Washington Post sports section for a quarter-century and Michael who became the only sportscaster in America to develop a dominant national profile while working a local gig nightly for a quarter-century.

Before cable TV was in millions of homes George Michael brought us the world weekly, with a tiny little band of men and women who worked on Nebraska Avenue and produced an unthinkable volume of award-winning work. Every other sportscaster worked in a confined space; George worked wherever he wanted and did it all: football, basketball, baseball, hockey, golf, tennis, 'rasslin', rodeo, racin', here, there, everywhere. You think there was anybody else who could comfortably engage Wayne Gretzky, Dale Earnhardt Sr. and Cal Ripken, and tell them on-camera they were full of it? There wasn't.

George Michael left us as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning.

Those closest to him, starting with his saintly wife Pat, were relieved because the suffering had become too great. In the 70 years before that he was an American original. He outworked just about everybody, never conceded stories to newspapers like just about every other TV sportscaster, was at times an insufferable perfectionist and commanded a room no matter who else was in it. Twenty-five years ago, before I began spending Thursdays with George, I walked into a room -- I don't recall the occasion -- and there stood Joe Gibbs, John Thompson and Sonny Jurgensen all being hassled in full voice by George Michael. It took awhile before I realized he could do it not because his personality was so outsized, which it was, but because they found him outside of all the showmanship to be credible. They respected him. Even better, they trusted him.

Just about everybody did.

By will and force of personality as much as anything, George Michael made himself must-see TV in Washington. When the Redskins stunk you wanted to know what George thought. When Abe Pollin decided to build a downtown arena you wanted to know what George was going to say.

Didn't mean he was the sweetest man in the world. God, George had a temper.

Source:washingtonpost.com

DC Sports In The 2000's: A Decade of Disappointment

We continue our look at the trials and tribulations, the failures and successes of DC's four pro franchises in the past decade. In Part 1, we analyzed the Redskins' performance over the last ten years. In Part 2, we broke down the Wizards' journey in the 2000s. In Part 3, we hit the ice with the Capitals, led by a dynamic owner and a two-time MVP.

Like Dan Snyder and the Redskins, the Washington Capitals began this decade with a new owner. A young former businessman and sports fan Ted Leonsis, purchased the team in 1999 from original owner Abe Pollin. Both owners have spent the first decade of this millennium learning through experience how to run a professional sports team. Both have had a mixed bag of successes and letdowns and both are still waiting to win a championship. In the past ten years Ted Leonsis and the Capitals have had considerably better regular season success than the Redskins, Wizards, and Nationals. The Caps have won four division titles this decade and finished in second place twice while neither the Redskins, Nationals, or Wizards have won their division. Shockingly, however, the Capitals have only advanced in the playoffs once in the 2000’s, equal to that of the Wizards, and less than the Redskins who did it two times.

How could it be that the Capitals have been so disappointing when it comes to winning in the playoffs? There is no clear answer but the consensus is that the Caps are on the right path and will get their fair share of chances in the next few years. Comcast SportsNet anchor Russ Thaler explains the last ten years for the Caps as the “decade that Ted Leonsis learned how to be a successful owner.” Thaler said that through trial and error Leonsis has built a “winning team from top to bottom,” eventually engineering a “Caps emergence on the D.C. sports scene.”

When Ted Leonsis took over the Capitals in 1999 the team was one season removed from a Stanley Cup appearance. The season before he bought the team was marred by injuries and they had missed the playoffs. Leonsis’ first two regular seasons as owner were out of a storybook, as the Caps twice captured the Southeast Division Title. Both years ended prematurely with playoff series defeats to the Pittsburgh Penguins.

In the offseason of 2001, Leonsis and the Capitals decided the best way to beat the Pittsburgh Penguins was to acquire their best player. The Caps traded three young prospects to the Pens for five-time Art Ross Trophy-winner Jaromir Jagr. Later that year Washington signed Jagr to a seven year, $77 million dollar contract, the highest in NHL history at the time. When Jagr came to the Caps he was arguably the best player in the National Hockey League. His acquisition brought considerable hype to a team that played in a city that had previously flown under the sport’s radar. Though Jagr and the Capitals failed to make the playoffs in his first season the team set a franchise record for home game attendance.

In the summer of 2002 the Capitals continued to aggressively build their roster, they signed Jagr’s former linemate from Pittsburgh, Robert Lang. The Caps did not make the playoffs the next year but were back in the postseason in 2003. In the 2003 playoffs they lost a devastating series to the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Caps won the first two games against Tampa Bay, only to get swept in the next four. In Game Six, in D.C., the loss became especially painful as the two teams fought through overtime. The Lightning got the victory when a too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty led to a Lightning power-play where Martin St. Louis scored the game-clinching goal.

Comcast SportsNet managing editor Joe Yasharoff saw Jaromir Jagr’s years in Washington as having “highlights here and there, but overall he absolutely didn’t live up to the hype.” He was brought in to make the Capitals a Stanley Cup contender but the plans just never materialized. The loss to the Lightning precipitated an effort by the Caps to scrap their roster and rebuild. In 2003, over budget and with a league lock-out looming, the Caps traded away many of their roster’s centerpieces including Steve Konawalchuk, Peter Bondra, Sergei Gonchar, and Jaromir Jagr. They went on to win the NHL Draft Lottery and secure the number one overall pick.


In finishing at the bottom of the league the Capitals received draft lottery odds with the third best chance to get the first pick. With extraordinary luck they drew the number one pick and were able to select Russian phenom Alexander Ovechkin, a prospect that Yasharoff described as a “once-in-a-lifetime player.” Ovie’s arrival changed everything, it drastically altered the course of a franchise and forever changed the landscape of Washington, D.C. professional sports.

In that stroke of luck in landing Alex Ovechkin, the Caps curbed the trend that has plagued the district’s other franchises. The Wizards and Redskins have had terrible misfortune in drafts of late and have been adversely affected by wasted picks. The Capitals were not only fortunate enough to be able to draft Ovechkin but the pace at which he has developed is unbelievable. Alex Ovechkin came into the league as a can’t-miss prospect but was still overshadowed by the “heir apparent” to Wayne Gretzky,
Sidney Crosby. Ever since Crosby was in middle school he was tabbed as the successor to the greatest player to take the ice. Since both have entered the league, however, the “Great Eight” has shown a closer resemblance to the “Great One.”

At just 24 years old, Ovechkin has already claimed the Calder Trophy for rookie of the year and two Hart Memorial Trophies as league MVP. His emergence as a superstar and most valuable player was quicker than Lebron James and Tim Lincecum. He is the best hockey player in the world and he resides in Washington, D.C.

Russ Thaler points to Ovechkin as a rarity in the nation’s capital in the sense that he “started here, made his name here, and became a winner here.” In the last decade there have been few players that D.C. sports fans can point to with the same career path. Most of the aging stars that have come through the turnstiles -Michael Jordan, Jaromir Jagr, Bruce Smith, Deion Sanders, Jerry Stackhouse, Brandon Lang, Jason Taylor- failed to bring success to Washington. Any success Ovechkin has will be in Washington, the Capitals locked him up with a 13-year, $124 million contract extension in 2008.

In Ovechkin’s professional career the Capitals have certainly become winners in the regular season. However, they still have not made a deep run in the playoffs. They missed out entirely in Ovie’s first season but have made the postseason in the two seasons since, each time losing in a game seven. In Ovechkin's first playoff series, the Caps rallied from a 3-1 series deficit to force a seventh game against the Philadelphia Flyers, only to lose the game (and the series) 3-2 in overtime.

That offseason, the Capitals front office made a tough decision in letting long-time goalie Olaf Kölzig go via free agency. Kölzig had played his entire career in the Capitals organization. He helped the Caps reach the Stanley Cup Finals in 1998 and won the Vezina Trophy in 2000 for the NHL’s best goalie. The decision was unpopular but was in the team’s best interest. Kölzig had been one of the most popular players in team history but he was past his prime. The Capitals replaced him and were able to win the division once again the next year and return to the playoffs.

The playoff exit for the Capitals in 2009 was one that D.C. fans would like to forget. Dismissed a year earlier in Game Seven of the first round, Washington was triumphant in their first series in '09, defeating the 7th seeded New York Rangers. The Caps had fallen into a 0-2 series deficit before newly promoted goalie Semyon Varlamov helped them top the Rangers in seven games.

In the second round, hockey fans got their dream matchup. The Caps faced their longtime playoff nemesis and 2008 Stanley Cup runner-up, the Pittsburgh Penguins. The series showcased possibly the three best players in professional hockey: Ovechkin, Crosby, and Evgeny Malkin.

For most of the series, the showdown lived up to the hype and more. Ovechkin and Crosby dueled under the spotlight created by a personal rivalry stemming from the regular season. An exchange of words created an almost Magic and Bird-type aura around their competition. The series was highlighted by an outstanding Game Two in which both Ovechkin and Crosby scored hat tricks. By the time Game Seven got underway, even the most casual hockey fans were glued to their television set. What ensued was a Capitals letdown of epic proportions. The Penguins immediately took control, jumping out to a 4-0 lead just 2:13 into the second period. The game was capped off by two Sidney Crosby goals as Pittsburgh took the series on their way to a Stanley Cup Title.


Despite the crushing loss to Pittsburgh, the Washington Capitals should have plenty of chances for playoff success ahead of them. Just because they didn’t get past the second round in this decade does not mean it won’t happen soon. The Caps are a young team with a core of legitimate star players and an excellent minor league system. They will more than likely make a deep run towards a Stanley Cup in the near future, maybe even this spring.

Source:csnwashington.com/

Congress and the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

Every member of Congress, whether in the House of Representatives or the Senate, is elected by the people to serve their interests and reflect their will. Earlier, we cited some striking figures about American public opinion on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Just as a reminder—
• 77% of Americans support establishing a Palestinian state;
• 74% of Americans support applying economic and diplomatic pressure on Israel to reach a peace settlement;
• 69% of Americans say they want the Bush Administration to lean toward neither side in the conflict.
Yet as a body, the US Congress is vocally and uncritically supportive of Israel. Though Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid and maintains a 36-year old military occupation, Congress has never held a hearing to discuss how Israel uses the aid, how it conducts its occupation or the human rights situation of the 3.5 million Palestinians living under that occupation. In the 107th Congress, no less than 37 bills and resolutions were introduced that dealt with Israel or the Palestinians. Less than ten of those were constructive. The majority expressed solidarity with Israel, condemned Palestinians, or introduced the possibility of sanctions against the Palestinian Authority. Congressional leadership in the 108th Congress has made shielding Israel from compromises called for in the Roadmap a higher priority than supporting this international peace initiative.

Congress—the body that is supposed to most closely represent the will of the people—could not be more out of sync with American beliefs and attitudes about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Members of Congress are not hearing us. Or worse—they are hearing us, but are choosing to ignore us.

The remainder of this toolkit is designed to give you the tools you need to convince your representatives in government to listen and to play a constructive role that helps, rather than hinders the cause of peace for all the peoples of the Middle East.


Negotiating the Terrain

This issue, more than most others, is perceived as sensitive and politically volatile on Capitol Hill. Before embarking on a plan of congressional activism, there are some helpful points for you to know, and remember.
Congress Can Have an "Us vs. Them" Mentality

Even though more Americans want their government to be balanced on this issue, organizations and activists that are uncritical of Israeli policies have typically been more vocal on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress and their staffs are just not used to hearing the voices of those seeking balance in US policy. This has led many in Congress to believe that there is no mainstream constituency concerned with Palestinian/Israeli peace. Many believe that only their Jewish and Arab-American constituents care about their position on this issue. And they assume that all of their Jewish constituents share the views of the lobby groups that are uncritical of Israel. That misunderstanding very often leads them to believe that it is just politically safer to support Israel uncritically.

A goal of congressional activism should be to let members of Congress know that the vast majority of their constituents want to see balance in American policies. It is key to let them know that this is not a question of Jews against Arabs—not in Palestine/Israel and not here at home.

For example, a recent poll conducted jointly by the Arab American Institute and Americans for Peace Now about the attitudes of Jewish and Arab-Americans found a belief on both sides that the Bush Administration should be steering a middle course in its policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; strong backing in the two communities for secure and independent states for Israelis and Palestinians alike; and support in both communities for a negotiated peace proposal that is broadly based on a land for peace framework. There are several new grassroots groups within the American Jewish community that are working to advocate for a just peace, often in coalition with Arab-American or American Muslim groups.

This Isn't about Being Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestine

Just as members of Congress too often see this as a question of Jew vs. Arab, they are also likely to view advocacy efforts through a pro-Israel or pro-Palestine lens. Many congressional offices will see pro-just peace constituents as wanting to change their position from pro-Israeli to pro-Palestinian. A goal of congressional activism should be to shift this perception and encourage members of Congress to focus on a solution to the conflict that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine... not to mention, pro-American. It is key to be clear about that when communicating with congressional offices. For better or worse, Palestinians and Israelis are neighbors. Neither side is going anywhere. Neither people will have true peace, security and freedom unless the other also has peace, security and freedom. Members of Congress should be encouraged to pursue balanced policies that seek to advance the cause of peace and justice, not the perceived interests of one side over another.

Lobbying Congress—Like Democracy—Is a Process, Not an Event

If you remember only one thing in this handbook, let this be it! When working for a just peace in Palestine/Israel, remember that you are asking members of Congress to think about this conflict in a new way, in a way that challenges ingrained assumptions and may be politically costly. That takes time and sustained effort. It cannot be done in an hour-long meeting or with a letter, no matter how well written it is. Above all it takes a relationship.

A goal of congressional activism should be to build a relationship with a congressional office that can affect attitudes and policies over time. You will want to introduce yourself and others who share your goals to your representatives as constituents who care about this issue enough to let it affect how you vote. Because lobbying is a process and not an event, congressional activism will be more effective if you take the time up front to plan a course of action to affect change over time. Developing a strategy is a key to effective activism, whether you are a lone constituent or part of a grassroots activist group.