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Jan 9, 2017; Tampa, FL, USA; Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban signals one during warm-ups prior to the game against the Clemson Tigers in the 2017 College Football Playoff National Championship Game at Raymond James Stadium. Mandatory Credit: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

Alabama Softball: Crimson Tide Falls to Volunteers in Pitchers Duel by Kyle Anderson

Alabama Basketball: Braxton Key To Declare For NBA Draft by Ronald Evans

Alabama Football has 4 linebackers who turned down freshman play time and full scholarships to sit on Bamas bench behind first round draft picks. Bamas only 1,000+ yard rusher in 2016 may be the third best back who suits up for the Tide in 2017. Nick Sabans 7th consecutive number one ranked recruiting classfeatures 4 of the top 12 receivers in the country according to a report by Matt Zenith for Al.com. Bama was the only team to sign more than one.

and we signed FOUR.

Alabama Football put a gray shirt on 4 star Jarez Parks and new offensive analyst Chris Weinke because Saban solves problems off the field the same way he solves problems on it. Recruiting. Nick Saban is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.

Football Oversight Committee Chairman and Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby wants to put the King of college football in check. He plans to do that by placing a cap on the number of staffers a team can hire.Alabama Football currently has 97.

This is what Nick Saban himself had to say about it:

Alabama Football head coach Nick Saban in post game presser as reported by al.com.

College football has the fewest coaches per player of any sport in college. Staffers arent coaches. They dont interact with players. They break down film, analyze data, streamline process, run down information, schedule, double check, and handle tasks that eat up a coachs day.

So why would Bob Bowlsby target football staff size as opposed to gymnastics, baseball or tennis? Thats easy. Football pays the bills and the Big 12 is behind on rent.

According to a report by Heather Dinich for ESPN, Bowlsby hired some extra staffers of his own to figure out why The Big 12 cant make the playoffs. They added a championship game. It didnt help in 2016 when 11-2 Big 12 champion Oklahoma was passed over for a playoff spot.

Bowlsby responded by asking for clarification from the college football playoff committee as to why Washington, with a weak out of conference schedule and Ohio State, who didnt win their conference got in ahead of a Big 12 team according the Heather Dinichs report for ESPN.For clarification, the Sooners lost to Ohio State 45-24 at home in 2016. Oklahoma is still the only team from the Big 12 to ever make it to the big show and they werent on stage long after losing to Clemson 37-17 in 2015.

The bottom line here is that the commissioner of a conference with 10 teams named the Big 12 wants to dictate the right number of staff for the rest of college football. He didnt always feel that way though. In 2013 Bob was all but advocating for succession from the NCAA in response to frustration that the member organization no longer represented the best interests of his conference.

Source: Bob Bowlsby as reported by Chuck Carlton for SportsDay

Of course, that was before Bowlsby was appointed to his position as Chairman of the Football Oversight Committee in 2015. The same Bob who was whispering revolution in 2013 is talking about full blown socialism in 2017.

Bowlsby justified his slide to the left by saying that limiting staff size would level the playing as smaller FBS programs cant spend the kind of money that Power 5 programs pay according to a report by Creg Stephenson for al.com.In contrast, Nick Saban said at his April 14th presser as reported by al.com that the amount of money Alabama pays staffers is so little that its almost criminal.

Bowlsby is grandstanding as a champion for FBS programs in 2017 but in 2013 he said, in response to his frustration at not being able affect substantive Division I change because of smaller schools that picked apart proposed legislation that:

Division I is too cluttered. Meaningful legislation gets stalled or picked apart. And a one-size-fits-all model is unworkable when Division I athletic department budgets range from $3 million to $160 million. Not all sports are March Madness, where Florida Gulf Coast can create compelling story lines as Kentucky.

Source: Bob Bowlsby as reported by Chuck Carlton for SportsDay

2013 and 2017 Bob would seem to have little in common past their overly diplomatic prose until you scratch the surface of their flaky facade and realize they are the same person with the same goals. They are both looking our for their own in the Big 12.

In 2013 that meant putting FBS schools to the sword. In 2017 it means using them as a shield to guard against backlash. 2013 and 2017 Bob both want to see Big 12 schools at the top. The problem is that teams out west cant reach the bar Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Dabo Swinney and Jimbo Fisher have raised so Bowlsby has come up with a solution.

Lower it. Legislate it to a maximum height. Make sure its low enough that Big 12 coaches can reach it from the bottom half of the top 20 in recruiting. Add early signing days to keep big programs like Alabama Football away from recruits committed to smaller teams. Eliminate camps that big programs conduct away from their school. Restrict head coach recruiting visits.

These kinds of rules are nothing new to college football but the reason for them now is Nick Saban.In an age of scholarship limits, restrictions and more parity of play than has ever been seen in college football, Saban has found a way to outwork the rules. He has set a standard for hustle that seven consecutive number one recruiting classes echoes across the entire landscape of college football.

Bowlsby and the rest of his red comrades dont like the sound of it.

Continued here:
Alabama Football: NCAA Flirts with Socialism While Eyeballing Bama - BamaHammer

Violet and Clement Attlee on election day, 5 July 1945. Photograph: Planet News Archive/SSPL via Getty Images

As if they were somehow similar and, of course, dissimilar to Jeremy Corbyn, your editorial (May must focus on deep-seated structural ills, not just Brexit, last week) mentions Clement Attlee and Tony Blair in the same breath: leading, progressive, reforming governments with zeal, albeit in very different ways. Not half.

Before his government, though bankrupt, founded the National Health Service and built more than a million homes, Attlee, who was voted the greatest prime minister of the 20th century, became and called himself a socialist. Thus, Attlee is not an easy figure for New Labour or an Observer editorial to appropriate.

On the other hand, Blairs toxic legacy was to prolong Thatcherism, which included continuing and expanding both PFI and privatisation of the NHS, which, with subsequent Tory help, has all but destroyed it.

The implied comparison between Jeremy Corbyn, Blair and Attlee is invalid, though, because Blair was not trying to return a belief system to its roots, which Corbyn is, those roots being closer to the socialism of Attlee than the New Labour of Blair.

David Murray Wallington Surrey

Saying that unless she changes course, Mrs Mays legacy will be to have moved Britain backwards is true, but misses the point. This is not some unintended consequence, but the mens rea of the Tories approach.

For them, Britain has abandoned its true path as a buccaneering, free-market economy. Margaret Thatcher may have stopped the rot but she couldnt entirely turn the clock back.

The European Union, by extra-territorialising anything from environmental protection to human rights, effectively prevented them from achieving their aim and so had to go.

Meanwhile, austerity as a political project continues apace; cutting back the hated state while at the same time blaming it for all our woes, thus handily diverting attention from the inequities, cupidity and sheer incompetence of 21st-century capitalism.

Where will it end? The short answer is where ever they can be stopped. There isnt a blueprint or a plan to be interrupted, but instead the Tories will catch whatever wave of disillusionment or event they can to achieve their aim; its an intent and a goal, not a timetable. But be clear, this Tory back to the future is no accident its a design. Simon Diggins Rickmansworth

While your editorial correctly highlights longstanding structural problems in our public policy, it doesnt mention the fact that, because this country is obsessed with measuring everything, we have lost sight of things you cant measure.

For example, schools train students to pass exams, but do not educate. The health system treats, but does not seem to care. Employment offers dead-end jobs, but not careers. Is it time for Theresa May to push for a paradigm shift? Kartar Uppal Sutton Coldfield

The major way to reduce the gap between rich and poor is a fair, progressive system of direct taxation. For example, a 75% tax rate on incomes above 1m.

The present government is in hock to an influential group of free-marketeer Tory MPs, who are fanatically committed to a low-tax and small-state agenda, so expect inequality the gap between rich and poor to get even wider, with dwindling public services and even greater adverse consequences for British society. Dr Robin C Richmond Bromyard Herefordshire

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Corbyn's socialism continues Attlee's legacy, not Blair's - The Guardian

Happy Friday. Welcome to the mailbag.

Follow me on Twitter to submit questions for future mailbags. Or check out my Facebook page. You also can send old-school email to TedMillerESPN@gmail.com.

To the questions!

Ken from Vancouver, Washington, writes: When I saw that a Clemson defensive lineman [Scott Pagano] was transferring to Oregon, I knew you wanted to give everyone your hot take. So hot take it, if you please.

Ted Miller: In short, a huge pickup.

Can one guy transform a defense? No. But the combination of positive additions to the Ducks defensive effort this offseason is substantial.

The biggest one was the hiring of Jim Leavitt, who transformed Colorado's defense from horrible to good in two seasons. The second biggest one is the Ducks going back to a 3-4 instead of Brady Hoke's 4-3, which was a massive mismatch of personnel to scheme. That in itself bolsters the Ducks' D-line by concentrating the talent up front and reducing the depth demands.

Third, and I'd bet this was a large part of Pagano picking Oregon over Oklahoma, is Joe Salave'a, one of the best D-line coaches in the country.

While the Ducks' D-line has been injury riddled this spring, most of the depth chart from 2016 returns. While the general awfulness of the Ducks defense in 2016 makes that of questionable value, experience typically matters in college football. All those sophomores and freshmen who played last year should be bigger, stronger and smarter.

Finally, Pagano is a legit player. Clemson has become a D-line factory, and Pagano has been a part-time starter for two seasons on teams that played great defense while earning berths in the national title game.

Oregon's defense is going to be better next year, but the starting point for that prediction is that it can't be much worse. Adding a player like Pagano and surrounding him with great coaching suggest potentially larger steps toward respectability.

And Oregon with just a mediocre defense is a dangerous team in the Pac-12.

Durbs writes: It looks like the NCAA is going to make new rules about coaching staff sizes with new regulations, a Robin Hood approach that aims to socialize college football as the universities that invest in their teams will be penalized in order to help the ones who do not. This thinking fits with the lefty West Coast of entitlements and regulations and affirmative action but my question to you is why should winners who just work harder to win be penalized so the losers that make bad choices can keep up? Let's face it, this is about Alabama and Nick Saban dominating and all you jealous people trying to bring the Tide back to the pack. People who do well in the USA do so because they work harder and have better ideas. That is Alabama football. So why should we retreat or be over-regulated? It doesn't work with social policy and it's flat wrong. Same with football.

Ted Miller: Gosh, that is quite the polemical stack of political boilerplate.

Yup, I'm pro-regulation. It makes sense to me that the NCAA, as overseers (for better or worse) of the multi-billion dollar business of college football, should attempt to create staffing standards for college football teams. The motivation behind that belief is college football should be about football, not which school is most aggressively seeking a competitive advantage by throwing around money.

College football will be better in the long- and short-term if the NCAA ruled that an FBS team can only have 10 assistant coaches (just voted up from nine) and a non-coaching support staff of, say, no more than 30.

Is that socialism? No. You could pay that staff as much as you want. Only every team would operate with the same number of staff members.

And don't be self-righteous about the sanctity of "The Way Things Have Been." Nick Saban and Bret Bielema not too long ago tried to change the rules of football just because they didn't like no-huddle offenses.

Part of my position here is a belief that college football is better when it includes a larger number of competitive programs. Standards would protect many programs where the "university" is primary and football team is secondary, while also helping programs where football comes first to not go off the deep end as directed by a cabal of rich boosters.

Elliott writes: Say I've invented a happy meter for fans. Between Oregon and Washington, whose fans are going to be happier at the end of the season?

Ted Miller: That depends what sort of fan you are.

From the perspective of today, I'm picking Washington to beat Oregon when it visits Husky Stadium on Nov. 4.

So, if you're the sort of Ducks fans who views the annual battle with the Huskies as the singular measure of a successful season, well, sorry about that. You won't be happy at season's end.

That said, preseason expectations will be significantly different for both programs. Washington is riding high. The Huskies will be ranked in the preseason top-10 and picked to win the Pac-12's North Division. So the potential for disappointment will be much larger.

Imagine: Washington fans grousing because the Huskies went 9-3 and are playing in the Alamo Bowl.

Meanwhile, Oregon looks to many like a declining program, one that cratered to a 4-8 finish two years removed from playing in the national title game.

When Oregon beats Nebraska in Week 2 and begins to regain its swagger, it will surprise many who thought the Ducks' moment was over.

Imagine: Oregon fans feeling energized because the Ducks went 9-3 and are playing in the Alamo Bowl.

So, bracketing off their head-to-head matchup, I think there is a greater likelihood that now-greedy Washington fans are going to be less happy with the 2017 season than Ducks fans, who are going to see their program regain some mojo in Year 1 under Willie Taggart.

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Mailbag: Socialism and Oregon-Washington happiness measures ... - ESPN (blog)

In every corner of Venezuela, this socialist project has failed.

Venezuelas socialist experiment has failed. Spectacularly. Lack of food, basic commodities like toilet paper, and medicine has resulted in a population that is on the verge of starvation and increasingly committed to removing failed president Maduro from office. The latest protests have resulted, so far, in five protester deaths.

NPR reports:

Protests are mounting against embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and the death toll is mounting too. As demonstrators braved a tropical storm on the streets of Caracas on Thursday, a 36-year-old died elsewhere of wounds he had sustained in other protests days earlier.

Opposition lawmaker Alfonso Marquina announced Gruseny Antonio Calderons death on Twitter, calling him another victim of the dictatorship.

Calderon is the fifth protester to die of injuries sustained in clashes with police since the latest round of protests kicked off roughly two weeks ago. According to authorities, others include a 13-year-old boy and two college-age students.

Despite the deaths, the recent unrest shows no sign of relenting. The Associated Press reports organizers had planned protests for more than 300 municipalities calling for new elections and the removal of certain judges seen as overly friendly with Maduros regime and demonstrations have even swelled to low-income areas of Venezuelas capital city, where socialists have typically drawn their staunchest supporters.

And the AP notes that as security forces have turned to crowd-control devices such as tear gas, protesters have responded by coming ready with goggles, vinegar-soaked rags and gas masks.

. . . . Those of us who are on our way out of this world have much to protest, he told the Herald. Theres no bread or medicine. In every corner of Venezuela, this socialist project has failed.

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Socialism Fail: Fifth Protester Dies in Most Recent Venezuelan Protests - legal Insurrection (blog)

The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect ...By Paul G. Kengor on April 13, 2017 at 11:23am

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Editors note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.

Last year, socialism was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. That is hardly a surprise. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He earned over 13 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters have only a hazy idea what socialism entails, but most surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called means of production as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.

American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: Ive published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.

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Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive, and impoverishing. It creates not economic prosperity but backwardness, and often genuine deprivation (see Venezuela). In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the fundamental cell of society: the family.

But surely socialisms founders didnt realize that their system just flat-out didnt work, right? Actually, they believed that it didand in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.

Since at least the early 1800s, when the effort began in earnest, extreme-left radicals have sought to undermine the natural-traditional-Biblical familythe Western Judaeo-Christian model anchored in a man and woman as parents of a household. The steady assault on this timeless model has been a long march that culminated in the chaos of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and in the antics of the nature-redefiners of todays secular left, which employs bullying, state coercion and demonization to forcibly redefine everything from marriage and parenting to biological sex (or as they now call it gender), and whether a child in the womb is even considered a life.

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Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto wrote of the abolition of the family, which even in 1848, they could flaunt as an infamous proposal of the communists. What, precisely, they meant by that is a complicated subject. But complexities aside, there is no question that efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work, from Marx and Engels to sordid figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet and assorted 60s New Left radicals from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to Mark Rudd and Tom Hayden. They included groups ranging from the Bolsheviks to the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxists to the Planned Parenthood eugenics progressives to the Weather Underground and many more.

A glance at this list of dubious characters reveals a mangled mosaic of the wide-ranging left. Among them, the earliest and maybe most revealing of the socialists specificallyat least from a family-focused perspectivewas perhaps Robert Owen.

Owen (1771-1858) was an English utopian-socialist who made his way to American soil. On July 4, 1826, as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the geniuses of the Declaration of Independence, both dramatically breathed their last gasps on the 50th anniversary of their eloquent achievement on behalf of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Robert Owen stood atop his new ideological colony in New Harmony, Indiana and delivered his Declaration of Mental Independence. It is a document you surely didnt read in school, but perhaps you should have, because it foretold the spirit of our modern age. Owen proclaimed:

I now declare to you and to the world that man up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race.

I refer to private property, absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual property, combined with some of these irrational systems of religion.

There it was: property, religion, marriage. This was Robert Owens unholy trinity.

Owens acolytes began their new civilization by scrapping the Christian Anno Domini calendar, marking 1826 as their new Year One. He was imitating the Jacobins, who had likewise reset the calendar in 1794 amid their bloodcurdling de-Christianization of France. (Mussolini and Pol Pot would later follow suit.) Owen established what the 1960s hippies would call communes. Owens socialist communes pooled not only profits but people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family. His socialism was cultural as well as economic, as socialism and its enthusiasts always would be.

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The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years, with Owen curiously absent from his creation for sustained periods, thus setting the standard for future leftist-utopian chieftains: They rarely live according to the rules and systems they create for others. Socialism and communism have always been for the people, the masses, the ruled, but rarely for the rulers. Castro, Stalin, Pol Pot, Maogiven the choice, they never lived the same way with the same rules and equal salaries as the serfs. Indeed, how could they? Their socialist-communist cocoons were always intolerable because they were bankrupt and unnatural. No one chooses that misery.

But the unnatural is what so many leftist utopians pursued then and in the years and centuries ahead. Even as Robert Owens New Harmony commune quickly collapsed, a dozen or so imitators sprangup around the country. Rarely did any of them last more than four years. Owens leftist vision remained alive and undeterred. The social system is now firmly established, he asserted.

An uphill stream of Owen-like dreamers on the left would keep the flame alive, from the 1820s to the 1960s in their own communes, and into the 21st century with their own versions of marriage and family. Never learning from failed projects of the past, they would always convince themselves that the previous project simply wasnt done quite rightnot yet. When they implemented their commune, their utopia, their more enlightened and modern view of marriage and the family, it would surely work this time around. Such is the socialist faith.

Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was another merry socialist who reviled property, marriage, and religion. He dreamed of collectivizing the masses in communes where they could undergo fundamental transformation. (He also believed that human efforts would someday turn the seas to tasty lemonade.) A forerunner to 1960s New Left radicals on American college campuses, Fourier openly advocated the abolition of monogamous marriage, and championed polyamory, homosexuality, and other forms of what Margaret Sanger and the 1920s American progressives would celebrate as free love. Fouriers lead disciple in America, Albert Brisbane, practiced what his master taught, proving himself exceptionally progressive by maintaining several mistresses and fathering three illegitimate children.

Predictably, the Fourier-Brisbane communes would work about as well as Owens ideological colonies, and the ones that followed. There were probably forty some such communes that sprung up around the country in this period, and quickly dissolved. No matter, leftists never give up. All they need is more power than the previous group of ideological colonists, and then theyll get it right the next time. It is the governing spirit of their ideology. Just wait for their better, more enlightened ideas on marriage, family, sexuality, gender, and on and on. Forward!

On the heels of Fourier came John Humphrey Noyes and his Oneida colony and their newfangled designs for the family, which included group marriages that shared both intimacy and children.

All of these nature-redefiners plowed new ground for new versions of the family according to each of their ideological conceptions. To borrow from Pope Francis, they were engaged in ideological colonizations. Each new generation came up with its own socialist colonies, all the way to the Red Family Colony in Berkeley in the 1960s established by Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer. The 60s New Left also launched its glorious smash monogamy movement, which was an exciting form of marriage that would be (and had to be, they insisted) non-monogamous.

In short, these were the bold ancestors of todays same-sex marriage movement and LGBTQ sex-gender redefiners. They all shared in common, then and today, the rejection of any notion that there is a single natural, traditional and Biblical model for the family.

It is not possible to speak of the family, insisted Friedrich Engels. Indeed, just ask the broad range of leftists in the current-day organization Beyond Marriage. They agree wholeheartedly with Engels on that one.

The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website.

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Socialism Attacks The Family, Just As Its Inventors Intended - Western Journalism