Charlie Hustle went to that great clubhouse in the sky Monday. He died unattended in his La Vegas home. No cause of death was given, though it’s known he had cardiac procedures done. He was 83. Pete Rose’s life contained both triumph and tragedy. It was splendid on the baseball field between first pitch and the end of the game, but often a train wreck off of it. Most fans of the Grand Old Game are familiar with Pete’s gaudy list of accomplishments as a player, his awards, his records, his endless highlights. In 23 seasons as a player and player-manager, most of them in his native Cincinnati as a member of the Reds, Pete collected more base hits, 4,256, than any Major League player ever. Before he accomplished this in 1985, Ty Cobb’s previous record of 4,191 was thought to be unreachable. In his prime, Pete was a perennial .300 hitter. He won three batting titles and one MVP award and helped Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine to two world championships. He led both teams with 10 base hits and a .370 batting average. His Reds beat the Boston Red Sox in 1975 in what many consider the greatest World Series of all time. He was a regular starter in the National League’s All-Star lineup. He finished his career with a .303 lifetime batting average. But it wasn’t just the numbers he put up that will imprint Pete’s memory on the minds of baseball fans forever. It was also the way he played the game. He richly deserved the sobriquet “Charlie Hustle,” as he knew only one way to play the game. That was all-out, flank-speed, attack on all fronts, take no prisoners. Had all players approached the game like Pete did, America would suffer productivity losses in spring and summer as most of the population would be watching baseball games. Pete played both football and baseball in high school, and brought the football mentality to the diamond. On base, he was a ballistic missile. He played in an era when baseball, especially around second base and home plate, was still a contact sport. (Kinder, gentler rules lately have eliminated much of this carnage.) Opposing infielders and catchers knew not to get in his way unless they had their affairs in order. Catcher Ray Fosse of the Cleveland Indians famously learned this when Pete knocked him into low earth orbit to score the winning run in the 1970 All-Star game. Pete was criticized for doing this in an All-Star game, which is basically an exhibition game, nowadays not taken seriously at all. But it was a baseball game, and Pete took all baseball games very seriously. He didn’t have a soft pedal. But when the shouting was over and the fans went home, life wasn’t as rosy for Rose. Addiction is a slippery concept, often used loosely. I don’t like to use it at all. But it’s fair to say after putting his body on the line in a ball game, Pete like to put his money down after hours. The man did like to gamble. Had he stayed with the slots and the ponies, all would likely have been well. But when he extended his betting to baseball games, including those involving the Cincinnati Reds he was managing at the time, his sure Baseball Hall of Fame selection was derailed. Then–Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti cast Pete into baseball outer darkness in 1991, suspending him for life. No more jobs in baseball. No Hall of Fame. For the sin of gambling on the game, which has always been verboten, he was made a baseball non-person, which he remained until his death. Pete’s personal life was otherwise messy, with two divorces, and a lost paternity suit. He leaves behind two ex-wives and five children. A man shouldn’t be judged by the comments of his ex-wife, which of course represent only one side of the case. But I recall his first wife Karolyn appearing on a talk show. From memory, two of her comments stick out: “As a human being, Pete was a great ball player.” And, asked about Pete’s intellectual interests, she replied: “The only book I ever saw him read was The Pete Rose Story, and he skipped parts of that.” Funny, but Pete had no chance for on-air rebuttal. For all the post-game missteps, baseball fans would rather focus now on his heroics on the field than on the various ways he ran amok off of it. Giamatti’s decision to ban Rose for life, especially the no Hall-of-Fame part, was controversial with fans. I was fine with banning him from jobs in the game, which fans have to believe is straight on the field. But banning him from the Hall seems as much like punishing the fans as punishing Pete. Pete finally admitted betting on baseball, but insisted he never bet against the Reds when he was managing, which he could have choreographed to his advantage. Out of the game, Pete kept body and soul together very nicely selling autographs and meet-and-greet sessions with his estimable self. It’s reported he made in the neighborhood of a half million dollars yearly doing this. Took a bit of the sting out of not having a plaque in Cooperstown. In fact, he was at a sports show in Tennessee the day before his death. Charlie Hustle. Hustling to the end. RIP. And thanks for the memories. The post RIP Pete Rose — Few Played the Game Even Remotely Like Him appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

And again. As October arrives — with barely a month left until the 2024 election — the Washington Post and the Washington/national left-wing media, legal, and political establishment is betting on election interference to steal — er, “win” — the election for the Democrats. Mysteriously, a new court filing by Smith was “unsealed” to lay out “new evidence that Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election were taken as a private candidate.” Notice the game here? Trump’s 2020 efforts to ensure election integrity have been deliberately recast as subverting the results. Which is to say, honesty and integrity in counting election returns is not to be tolerated. And the last-minute, right-before-the-election unsealing of “Special Counsel” Jack Smith’s filings is supposedly a public service — not what it clearly is: election interference. The Post prints all of Smith’s filing. And it is indeed interesting, filled as it is with decidedly partisan untruths ill-disguised as a supposedly accurate portrayal of Trump’s post-2020 election conduct. Examples abound. Here’s but one: When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). Stop right there. The actual crime was blocking an accurate and truthful counting of ballots by the voters of those named states. And it was Trump who was demanding election integrity. As noted in this space, when it comes to Pennsylvania, there is a long history of voter fraud. Here is just one headline from back in the day: New York Times: Vote-Fraud Ruling Shifts Pennsylvania Senate The Times reported this in its 1994 story:  Saying Philadelphia’s election system had collapsed under “a massive scheme” by Democrats to steal a State Senate election in November, a Federal judge today took the rare step of invalidating the vote and ordered the seat filled by the Republican candidate. In 2008, as the Obama–McCain election neared, the Pennsylvania Republican state chairman said in a statement:   Between March 23rd and October 1st, various groups, including ACORN, submitted over 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election Board with 57,435 rejected for faulty information. Most of these registrations were submitted by ACORN, and rejected due to fake social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, clearly fraudulent signatures. In July of 2020, this was the headline from the U.S. Department of Justice on a former Pennsylvania Democrat congressman:  Former Congressman Charged With Ballot Stuffing, Bribery, and Obstruction And as that story unfolded, CNN headlined:  Ex-Democratic congressman sentenced to prison in yearslong Pennsylvania election fraud scheme There’s more of a similar nature on the record when it comes to the issue of election integrity in Pennsylvania over the years. There is a history — and not a good one. So, getting back to the upcoming election, Jack Smith now declares that it is a crime to demand election integrity, and for demanding that integrity, Trump has committed a crime. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump has joined the prevaricators, saying that Trump was guilty of “fomenting the riot that unfolded at the Capitol.” Trump did no such thing, urging supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Did a relative handful get out of control and riot? Yes. But the thousands  upon thousands there in Washington that day were completely peaceful.  Were the Trump critics to be taken seriously, history would be rewritten by casting blame on ’60s heroes Dr. Martin Luther King, and Democrat Sens. George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy because the causes they outspokenly supported — civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War — periodically resulted in open violence with riots in places like Newark, Detroit, Washington D.C., and one college campus after another. In fact, so bad was some of the opposition to those causes back then that 1968 GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon won the presidency campaigning on platform of restoring “law and order” to the nation. Make no mistake. The American Left — and the Left internationally — is decidedly authoritarian at its core. In today’s America, Joe Biden and his henchmen have vividly illustrated their authoritarian instincts by using the power of the federal government to literally prosecute and jail the Democrats’ leading political opponent — Trump. They are the stuff of a banana republic. The latest release coming from Jack Smith is nothing if not another look at Smith’s own authoritarianism, and his eager willingness to interfere in the 2024 election to resolve it to his satisfaction. Not good. Not good at all. The post Jack Smith’s Election Interference appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a law banning legacy and donor considerations in admissions at all private colleges and universities in the state. California is the fifth state to do so, following Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia. Newsom praised the law, saying, “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few.” According to the Stanford Daily, 13.6 percent of admits to Stanford University in 2023 were children of alumni or donors. Inside Higher Ed reports that it was 14.4 percent at the University of Southern California in 2022, and 13.3 percent at the University of Santa Clara. Pepperdine University’s is around 9 percent. Last year, 2.5 million students were enrolled in California’s colleges or universities. Even at USC — with the highest percentage of legacy or donor admits — nearly 87 percent of the student population of more than 45,000 were not the children of alumni or donors. This hardly sounds like college in California is available only to “a lucky few.” But whatever. The truth is that giving spots to children of alumni isn’t the big problem with academia. Saving a few seats for relatives of megadonors isn’t the big problem with academia. It isn’t even preferential treatment for athlete applicants that’s the big problem with academia. The problem is tenure. There. I said it. Tenure was originally intended to protect faculty from retaliatory action for pursuing meaningful, if controversial, research. But what it was intended to do and what it’s doing are different things entirely. The scandals and headlines coming out of higher education provide plenty of evidence. Last year’s ugly antisemitic protests, threats, and violence on college campuses shocked the nation. But when three Ivy League presidents from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress and none was willing to condemn calls for violence against Jewish students, that shock turned to outrage. Liz Magill, then-president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned after the congressional hearings. The university’s announcement stated that Magill would “remain a tenured faculty member” at the law school. Claudine Gay, then-president of Harvard University, initially refused to resign — until it was discovered that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation and other research. Gay then stepped down from the presidency. She kept her tenured chaired professorship and her approximately $900,000 annual salary. The standards for publication in the social sciences and humanities have become theater of the absurd. In 2018, scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian exposed this by writing, as the Atlantic described it, “20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions,” including homophobia in dog parks and Hitlerian feminism. A significant number were accepted for publication. Then there’s the serious scholarship that gets condemned by the academic community because it skewers sacred cows. Brown professor Lisa Littman coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 paper; Littman’s research revealed the explosion of self-identification as “transgender” among pre-teen and young teen girls with diagnosed disabilities (like autism) who spent large amounts of time on social media. Littman was viciously attacked as being “transphobic,” and the journal that published her findings was cowed into retracting her paper (which was later republished). A later article by researchers Suzanna Diaz and Michael Bailey that supported Littman’s theories was similarly attacked and forced to be retracted. Critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi was awarded tenure and a chaired professorship at Boston University for promoting a worldview that espouses retaliatory discrimination “to remedy past discrimination.” He has plenty of company on college campuses across the country. And then there are the countless lesser-known tenured faculty members at American colleges and universities who defend Marxism, communism, and socialism, despite a death toll of more than 100 million people, as well as widespread economic devastation, poverty, starvation, government oppression, incarceration, and torture. Those economic and political philosophies should have been condemned to the “dustbin of history” decades ago. But they weren’t. Why? Because tenured faculty keep them alive. In what other profession — besides perhaps government — do you get to espouse catastrophically societally detrimental views and not only remain utterly unaccountable for the consequences but have guaranteed employment from which to do it? It isn’t just the social sciences. The processes associated with obtaining research funding, and those for hiring, promotion, and tenure within universities, enable tenured faculty in the hard sciences to block the research of applicants to doctoral programs, Ph.D. candidates, and untenured faculty members whose work might call into question, contradict, or even disprove that of senior faculty members. This has had profound (and negative) consequences for Alzheimer’s research, as author Sharon Begley explained in her 2019 article in the medial research journal Stat. These same structures have also prevented researchers whose work refutes the prevailing claims about anthropogenic climate change from making their work more visible and well known to the general public. The appalling state of our press is another consequence of bad theories espoused by tenured faculty. Journalism schools used to teach that the profession required the pursuit of truth and holding powerful people accountable. Now a popular approach is that the role of journalists is to manipulate the public into believing what they’re told and behaving the way you want them to. It should not surprise us, therefore, that our media has been working with government to censor truthful speech and characterize it as “misinformation.” And when opponents of those who want to increase their power point to the constitutional prohibitions against those encroachments, here come the “scholars,” prepared to argue that the limitations of presidential power in Articles 1 and 2 are the problem. The Electoral College is the problem. The composition of the United States Senate is the problem. The First Amendment is the problem. The Second Amendment is the problem. The Due Process and Equal Protection clauses are the problem. The Constitution is the problem. Recent polls show declining public confidence in higher education. As more Americans realize that some of the country’s most grievous problems have their origin in academia, enrollment, confidence and donations will continue to dwindle. At least until academia acknowledges the problems and takes steps to address them. Elsewhere in the private sector, employment is not guaranteed. But employees can be protected from retaliation and unlawful or unethical termination of their employment by well-drafted contracts and properly crafted human resources policies and procedures. There’s no reason academic employment cannot operate the same way. To find out more about Laura Hollis and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Now It’s Time to Eliminate Tenure appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from World Alternative Media: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from SGT Report: Biden and Harris have abandoned the American people repeatedly and at every turn. And now there are Americans literally dying for help in Tennessee and North Carolina and FEMA is actively blocking volunteers from helping as corpses begin to rot where entire towns have been wiped out. This is yet more blatant […]

from The National Pulse: An unknown number of Bank of America customers found their accounts with a zero balance on Wednesday, as many complained of outages and disruptions online. According to Downdetector, thousands of customers reported being unable to access their bank accounts, while those who could found they had zero or missing balances. The incident incidents peaked shortly before 1 PM […]

Garth Brooks has spoken out after being accused of rape and sexual assault by a hair and makeup artist. Continue reading…

Who needs to play in a giant globe anyway