Centers' Little Helper

Dennis Hans, unrenowned former adjunct professor of mass comm and American foreign policy, relentlessly exposed the Bush administration’s “techniques of deceit” BEFORE the Iraq war, when it could have made a difference (see links). For decades he has fought baseball’s discrimination against lefthanded infielders and promoted his ingenious clockwise solution. A lifelong advocate for a flowing, non-brutal, flop-free NBA, he now champions the cause of its second-class citizens: the centers.

Friday, October 27, 2006

Amare needs a second opinion pronto
Amare Stoudemire is jeopardizing his career when he takes the advice of the Suns’ medical and coaching staff to play and practice through the pain he’s experiencing in his surgically repaired knees. [LATE UPDATE: The Suns have now clarified that they don't want Amare to practice or play with pain. Instead, they want him to distinguish "soreness" from "pain," and to push through the former but sit out with the latter. Exactly HOW he's supposed to make this distinction is not clear. It's not as if he's been living with troublesome knees all his life and thus has oodles of practice in making this subtle distinction. This could be a prescription for transforming occasional soreness into the chronic variety.]

Amare should instead listen to himself and his own shrewd advice to take a day off periodically rather than push through the pain or even the theoretically "normal and expected" soreness. He also should immediately contact Matt Harpring of the Jazz (who, like Amare, underwent microfracture knee surgery) and Matt's surgeon and ask about the success they had early last season when the doc mandated limited minutes and no back-to-back games — and Coach Sloan followed the doc's orders to the letter. Later in the season, after Matt had a couple of successful, pain-free months under his belt, the doc gave him permission to play without limitations so long as the pain didn't return, and by that point the knee was up to the task. Now that was after Matt's SECOND operation. The year before, after the first, he played every day until the pain became unbearable. The damage he did in doing so necessitated that second op. Harpring learned the hard way what Amare and the Suns hopefully can learn the easy way. Incidentally, back before Matt had his first op, but after fighting through knee pain for several months, he got — with the Jazz's blessing — FIVE different medical opinions before choosing surgery and the surgeon to perform it.
Amare should also talk to Jason Kidd, who can remind him that frequent stiffness and pain is not part and parcel of a successful recovery from microfracture surgery. Kidd has had none of that. Not once since his comeback has he looked like he was dragging a leg or in pain. He hasn’t missed a game, and he’s had no trouble with the knee. That’s not the case with Amare, and it wasn’t the case initially with Harpring. Amare should not assume that the Suns’ “braintrust” know what they’re talking about with their full-speed-ahead, skip-no-games-or-practices, ignore-the-soreness approach.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

NEWSWEEK: Majority of Americans now believe Bush misled on Iraq; Hans, Rangwala and others made that case BEFORE the war

Newsweek reports that “for the first time in the NEWSWEEK poll, a majority of Americans now believe the Bush administration knowingly misled the American people in building its case for war against Saddam Hussein: 58 percent vs. 36 percent who believe it didn’t.”

Just a reminder, in the weeks and months BEFORE the March 20, 2003 invasion, I explained in great detail just what Bush, Powell and company were up to and how the mainstream media — aside from a few honorable exceptions — were helping them get away with it, as you can see from the chronologically listed links below. See in particular the overlapping essays “Lying Us Into War” and “The Disinformation Age,” where I document at length what I dubbed the Bush team’s “techniques of deceit.”

Grifter-in-Chief Bush Aided by Media’s Wusses of Mass Credulity (Oct 19, 2002)

Bush Is Racking Up “Frequent Liar Miles” (Jan 18, 2003)

Rumsfeld Offers Media Good Advice on How to Protect Viewers From Leaders’ Lies (Jan 25, 2003)

The Evidence Bush is Withholding Weakens, Not Strengthens the Case for War (Jan 28, 2003)

The White Hawk Club (who gets to talk on public-affairs TV) (Jan 30, 2003)

An Open Letter to the U.N. About Colin Powell (Feb 4, 2003 — pre-U.N. presentation)

Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His “Techniques of Deceit” (Feb 10, 2003)

I’m Calling You Out: Marching Orders for Journalists, Officials and Celebrities Who Believe in “Informed Consent of the Governed” (Feb 19, 2003)

With “Liberals” Like These, Who Needs Conservatives: How Powell wowed Mary McGrory and Richard Cohen, the crème of the Washington Post’s credulous crop (Feb 23, 2003)

Public’s Pro-Inspections Posture Mostly M.I.A. on Talking-Heads TV (Feb 28, 2003)

The Disinformation Age: How George W. Bush and Saint Colin of Powell are lying America into an unnecessary war — and what honest journalists can do about it (March 4, 2003)

How to Deter Bush’s Fibbing and Hoopsters’ Flopping (March 14, 2003)

Far and away the most thorough, relentless and accurate analyst of the shaky pre-war claims of the Bush and Blair administrations was Glen Rangwala, a young professor of politics at Cambridge University in England, His pre- and post-war writings are collected here.

Don’t miss his devastating critique of Powell, posted Feb. 14, 2003 — that is, well before the start of the war — dissecting each of the 44 claims he made at the UN.

Rangwala was on the case long before I was, working with the anti-war wing of Britain’s Labour Party but receiving scant attention from the overrated Brit media, which trumpeted the claims in Blair’s now-discredited Sept 2002 dossier but not Rangwals’s critique. It wasn’t till January 2003 that I stumbled across his mammoth analysis of U.S. and U.K. claims about Iraqi WMD, first posted Sept. 27, 2002. That’s two weeks before the U.S. Congress granted Bush the authority to got to war against Iraq should the need arise (it never did, of course, but he went anyway). Here’s an updated version of Glen’s mammoth analysis.

If the US and UK media had served their citizenries rather than their governments, the rush to war would have ground to a halt.