Month: June 2013

Luis Suarez Walks Alone

Continuing to diss the loyal fans who supported him through the eight game suspension for being a racist and 10 games for being a carnivore in public, Luis Suarez continues his public campaign for Real Madrid to come in for him. But so far the Spaniards are apparently not willing to match Liverpool’s required fee.

And new boss Carlo Ancelloti may have a different EPL star in mind though as rumor has Los Blancos lining up a record transfer fee for the player who beat Suarez out for Player of the Year, Gareth Bale. How much? Let’s say £85 million, £5 million more than the team paid for Ronaldo.

But even with Bale on board will Ronaldo stay? So far he hasn’t signed a contract extension and so a handful of billionaire-backed clubs are preparing bids with lots of zeros at the end. Man City, PSG, Chelsea all seem interested.

Perhaps most intriguingly there’s Monaco. The team, owned by a Russian rival of Chelsea’s Abramovich, has already spent £120 million or so on three players but adding CR7 would surely be enough to take them from Ligue 2 to Champions League in one season, and not having to play in European competition this season would make him fresher for the World Cup next summer.

If he leaves Madrid, with Higuan also out the door, Bale would need someone more than Karim Benzima to partner with and then Suarez, even at £40-50 million, looks much better.

Hard to see the terrific LFC fans, supportive as we’ve been the past two seasons, getting past the poor-mouthing of Luis Suarez the last few weeks.

The Difference between Obama and the Republicans

Robert Scoble recently wrote, in a comment to his G+ thread on the news blowing up around PRISM, that President Obama “hasn’t exactly been met with love and flowers by the Republicans for the past few years. Shows there still is a difference.”

Sadly I have to disagree. The President hasn’t gotten love or flowers from the GOP because he isn’t a member. If he was elected at the head of the GOP ticket, their response to his proposals would’ve been very different.

In fact we can look back to public statements by GOP Congressional leaders around 2010, they said that from their party’s perspective every single piece of legislation and appointment coming down from the White House should be dead on arrival. In other words the quality of the item being voted on was totally irrelevant.

Efforts like PRISM, and let’s remember that the Administration didn’t feel it needed any new legislation to authorize this monster, are being criticized by Republicans. But if it wasn’t PRISM, if the President had proposed a new MPG standard that treated trucks like cars or sent Secretary of State Kerry to launch a Kissinger-style shuttle diplomacy with the warring parties in Syria, the result would be no different; the GOP Congressmembers and pundits would be out in force telling us how bad this is for America.

Because how can anything proposed by the Democrats be good for America.