inkbluesky

I read this story yesterday, Former NBA Referee Pleads Guilty

Former NBA referee Tim Donaghy pleaded guilty in New York today to two federal felony charges in connection with a betting scandal that has rocked professional basketball.

Donaghy, 40, who refereed NBA games for 13 years before resigning last month, faces up to 25 years in prison and a $500,000 fine when he is sentenced on the conspiracy and fraud counts. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for the purpose of defrauding the National Basketball Association, and conspiracy to transmit wagers through interstate commerce.

I’m not an expert on betting scandals and conspiracy to defraud the National Basketball Association, nor am I an expert on sentencing guidelines. All seems pretty serious though. A possible 25 year sentence for a forty year old is no petty matter. While I tend to doubt it’ll get the full 25 he may spend the rest of his middle age behind bars. Whether this is fair or not for a white collar crime I don’t know, but just recently  we had a high profile public official found guilty by a jury of his fellow citizens for Obstruction of Justice, Making a False Statement, Perjury, and another count of Perjury. If one was forced to choose which count was the most appalling it would probably be the first and it is inextricably tied to the others. This guy obstructed justice to protect other most likely guilty parties. After the trail one juror even asked where those people were - the ones the guilty party lied and obstructed justice for. This guilty party received what sentencing guidelines and some observers characterized as a medium sentence - the judge didn’t throw the book at him nor did the judge let him off easy - Libby Sentenced To 30 Months In Prison, $250,000 Fine (Libby received 30 months for obstruction of justice, but he received 15 months on other charges. The sentences will be served concurrently.) Even that rather mild sentence for what many people considered to be either treason or complicity to commit treason was commuted by the prisoner’s old friend, the current president of the U.S. Cronyism is an age old institution. When Tim Donaghy betrayed his trust he went terribly wrong and according to recent history he also made a terrible error in not having friends in high places where justice plays out a little differently. Maybe semi-presidential candidate Fred Thompson (R) can start up a save Tim fund like he did for Scooter, you know for the sake of Tim’s family and all.

summer in tuscany 

THE GREAT IVY LEAGUE NUDE POSTURE PHOTO SCANDAL ( the caps are not mine)

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970’s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

[  ]…Hersey went on to say that the pictures were actually made for anthropological research: “The reigning school of the time, presided over by E. A. Hooton of Harvard and W. H. Sheldon” — who directed an institute for physique studies at Columbia University — “held that a person’s body, measured and analyzed, could tell much about intelligence, temperament, moral worth and probable future achievement. The inspiration came from the founder of social Darwinism, Francis Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population.”

The photos were destroyed and according to hearsay anyway included some VIPs. The nudity isn’t all that bizarre for a college fraternity, but the somewhat coerced body piercing and a photographic record of the kids of America’s richest and most powerful families suggests that Britney Spear’s antics are amateurish by comparison.