The big news this week came from the world of sports where the Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49ers in an epic, lights-out battle. Ravens fans rejoiced, but San Franciscans took it pretty hard. Word is nobody was in the mood to create world-changing communications devices or killer apps all week.
In baseball, Ryan Braun made me a nominee for the biggest sucker blogger hall of fame. A little more than a year ago, I defended Braun against his doping charges and cheered when he got off on a technicality. Now, it turns out his name popped up in the records of the biggest MLB and college baseball doping operation on the planet. It was just because his lawyer was doing research, Braun said. Seems more likely it was Braun doing research on the effect of steroids on his batting average. I wish I could still say I believed it wasn't so.
In the world of politics, Republicans continued to fall over one another to support sensible immigration reforms they once vowed to stop. Presidential hopefuls like Marco Rubio did a 180, now supporting the very provisions he opposed only a short while ago.
"I threw you under the bus to get tea party support when I needed it, and now that I figure I don't have a chance to be president without some of your votes, I'm switching sides in a cynical calculation that you'll forget about my earlier position in a couple of years," Rubio said. But he said it in Spanish, and so it sounded a lot nicer.
And in local news, we had two final candidates for Madison public schools' superintendent for about fifteen minutes. Then it turned out one of the candidates had a series of shady dealings in his recent past, including charging personal expenses to his district account and going around bidding rules to hire a consulting firm, which happened to be headed by a guy convicted of sexual battery of a child.
The district paid the Iowa-based headhunter firm of "Google Search? What's a Google Search?" about $31,000 for that crackerjack work. Unless the school board knew about it in which case, oh I don't know, you just gotta wonder. I'm pretty sure we won't be getting to the bottom of this anytime soon.
That's all I've got for now, kids. Have a good weekend.