Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Well, I have a favorite Sportscaster

I used to like Olbermann, and now I like him more, but he's not exactly a sports guy anymore. Costas I always liked, but again, mostly when not doing sports.

Well, I think a lot of us can now decide we like Jim Lampley. He post today at the shiny, new, incredibly well-underwritten celebrity-blogorama.

Okay, I like Lampley but have decided to have a bitter all-consuming, hatred for the Huffington Post, all born of jealousy.

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.


Somebody is a blog-reader!