Sheryl Swoopes' coming-out party was only a couple of hours old Wednesday morning on ESPN.com when a passionately angry e-mail splashed down in my in-box.

It was a friend of mine -- an athletic administrator at a high-level Division I-A school. One of the most competent and respected professionals I know in college athletics. He's also a gay man.

He hasn't come out, not yet. Ask him a direct question about his orientation and he probably wouldn't deny it -- but the risks remain. In the machismo-drenched world of male team sports, admitting you're gay is like skydiving without checking your parachute. You hope for a soft landing, but it's still a leap of faith that could end up going very, very wrong.
And now Sheryl Swoopes is close to pushing him out.

Swoopes' public declaration in ESPN The Magazine that she is a lesbian was not the contentious issue with my friend. The issue was the following quote from Swoopes:

"The talk about the WNBA being full of lesbians is not true. There are as many straight women in the league as there are gay. What really irritates me is when people talk about football, baseball and the NBA, you don't hear all of this talk about the gay guys playing. But when you talk about the WNBA, then it becomes an issue."

continued: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?id=2206636

As a former Clinton aide, the indictment of Lewis 'Scooter' Libby and the announcement that Karl Rove remains in the prosecutorial hot-seat gives me no schadenfreude. First because many of my fellow Texans in the Bush White House are friends of mine; others are acquaintances I've known for years. I feel their pain. Second, because no one who loves the White House and reveres the presidency can take joy in seeing it besmirched. And third, because the ultimate result of the alleged criminal conduct was to march 2,000 young heroes off to die in an unjust, unwise, unprovoked and unwarranted war.

The plain fact is that after a seven year non-stop investigato-rama, no senior Clinton White House official was ever even charged with wrongdoing. Much less indicted. Much less convicted. In fact, the highest-ranking Clinton official to be convicted of wrongdoing in connection with his public duties was the chief of staff to the Agriculture Secretary. Betcha five bucks you can't even name the Clinton Agriculture Secretary in question, much less his chief of staff. Unlike Nixon (whose Watergate crimes were manifest), unlike Reagan (whose White House was corrupted by the Iran-Contra crimes), unlike Bush 41 (who pardoned White House aides and Cabinet officers before they could testify against him), Bill Clinton presided over the most ethical White House staff in decades."

Margaret Carlson
Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Though loyalty is a virtue, party
loyalty is often a vice. A particularly virulent species has
infected the administration of President George W. Bush, and it
is a danger to giver and receiver alike.
This loyalty binds the entire network of family and friends
that contrived to elect him. There is hardly a Republican who
won't twist into embarrassing contortions in order to
demonstrate it.
This loyalty fosters debilitating cronyism, putting people
like Michael Brown and Harriet Miers (if Bush gets his way) into
jobs they simply are not suited for. Loyalty to Bush's war has
put Vice President Dick Cheney, his top aide I. Lewis
``Scooter'' Libby and Karl Rove, the president's longtime
adviser, in a prosecutor's crosshairs.
This loyalty has made aides afraid to bring the president
unwelcome news. White House Counselor Dan Bartlett had to bypass
senior staff and smuggle in a tape of the evening news to show
Bush how badly things were going in Katrina-stricken New
Orleans, contrary to what his loyal aides were telling him."

Gene Lyons
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
With everybody in Washington anticipating dramatic, possibly melodramatic, developments in the Valerie Plame CIA leaks investigation, it's worth noticing what it reveals about the appalling state of American political journalism.
As one with first-hand experience of the odd blend of arrogance, high-handedness and sheer professional incompetence in high places at The New York Times, very little in that newspaper's coverage of self-dramatizing reporter Judith Miller surprises me.
Shocking yes, surprising no.
In one very limited sense, the Times' eight-year infatuation with Whitewater was even odder than its naive boosterism about Iraq's mythical WMDs. No state secrets were involved. Any skeptical reporter with a working brain could deconstruct the coverage. Correct the errors and fill in the blanks, and the Whitewater 'scandal'--as even Kenneth Starr eventually had to conclude--basically vanished. Having written two books on the subject (one with Joe Conason), I'll spare you a rehash."

New York Times: Maureen Dowd: "After W. was elected, he sometimes gave visitors a tour of the love alcove off the Oval Office where Bill trysted with Monica - the notorious spot where his predecessor had dishonored the White House.
At least it was only a little pantry - and a little panting. If W. wants to show people now where the White House has been dishonored in far more astounding and deadly ways, he'll have to haul them around every nook and cranny of his vice president's office, then go across the river for a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the Pentagon. The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how unshocking it all is. It's exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we'd actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike. Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his Praetorian guard all these years that it's been hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and candid talk from Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he's been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice."

In today's NY Times, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, in reference to the Fitzgerald/CIA leak investigation, is quoted as saying that she hoped 'that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.'

If you check the online record you will see that this is the same Kay Bailey Hutchison that voted in favor of both counts of impeachment against Bill Clinton. More disturbingly, she writes in the Congressional record dated February 17th, 1999:

'I do not hold the view of our Constitution that there must be an actual, indictable crime in order for an act of a public officer to be impeachable. It is clear to this Senator that there are, indeed, circumstances, short of a felony criminal offense, that would justify the removal of a public officer from office, including the President of the United States. Manifest injury to the Office of the President, to our Nation and to the American people and gross abuse of trust and of public office clearly can reach the level of intensity that would justify the impeachment and removal of a leader.'

My question for today is: Why are contemporary Republicans so full of shit? And a follow-up...How did the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and General Eisenhower get taken over by such lying, thieving, self-serving scoundrels?"

In today's NY Times, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, in reference to the Fitzgerald/CIA leak investigation, is quoted as saying that she hoped 'that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.'

If you check the online record you will see that this is the same Kay Bailey Hutchison that voted in favor of both counts of impeachment against Bill Clinton. More disturbingly, she writes in the Congressional record dated February 17th, 1999:

'I do not hold the view of our Constitution that there must be an actual, indictable crime in order for an act of a public officer to be impeachable. It is clear to this Senator that there are, indeed, circumstances, short of a felony criminal offense, that would justify the removal of a public officer from office, including the President of the United States. Manifest injury to the Office of the President, to our Nation and to the American people and gross abuse of trust and of public office clearly can reach the level of intensity that would justify the impeachment and removal of a leader.'

My question for today is: Why are contemporary Republicans so full of shit? And a follow-up...How did the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and General Eisenhower get taken over by such lying, thieving, self-serving scoundrels?"

New York Times: "THERE were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did we go to war in Iraq?
'It still isn't possible to be sure - and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war,' writes the New Yorker journalist George Packer, a disenchanted liberal supporter of the invasion, in his essential new book, 'The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.' Even a former Bush administration State Department official who was present at the war's creation, Richard Haass, tells Mr. Packer that he expects to go to his grave 'not knowing the answer.' Maybe. But the leak investigation now reaching its climax in Washington continues to offer big clues. We don't yet know whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby or Karl Rove has committed a crime, but the more we learn about their desperate efforts to take down a bit player like Joseph Wilson, the more we learn about the real secret they wanted to protect: the 'why' of the war. To piece that story together, you have to follow each man's history before the invasion of Iraq - before anyone had ever heard of Valerie Plame Wilson, let alone leaked her identity as a C.I.A. officer. It is not an accident that Mr. Libby's and Mr. Rove's very different trajectories - one of a Washington policy intellectual, the other of a Texas political operative - would collide before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury. They are very different men who play very different White House roles, but they are bound together now by the sordid shared past that the Wilson affair has exposed."