Monday, March 23, 2009

Monday musings...

Well, it turned out to be a tough year for the ND women's hoops team. They had things all lined up well--they won over 20 games, and were one of the host sites for the 1st and 2nd round of the NCAA women's tourney, which meant the Irish would play at home. And yesterday they were slated to play a #10 seed, Minnesota.
But Minnesota beat ND, 79-71. Coach Muffet McGraw was really displeased with how the team came out in the game, but I suspect injuries caught up with them. 2 starters were lost earlier this year to season-ending injuries, then another starter, Lindsay Schrader, left the game yesterday real early in the second half, not to return. As a result, ND suffered defensively, and had a thin margin for error. It caught up with them yesterday, as Minnesota got hot from outside. The good news for ND: every single player on this year's team returns, and they have a great recruiting class coming in. Still, this loss hurts. That's one of the lessons of team sports, and why it's so riveting: you want things to have a happy ending for hard-working teams, but...no guarantees.

Michigan State's men's team, however, made clutch shots and got clutch stops--and beat both Robert Morris on Friday and USC on Sunday to survive in the NCAAs...

In other news--so President Obama is against the punitive tax levied on those AIG bonuses, passed by the House last week. Well--maybe the president realizes that there remains a conservative movement out there, and that many Americans retain some conservative ideas--that they'd down the line re-think, and not like, such a tax. That's why it's important that we're here.

Bill Bennett today puts Obama's projected deficits in context:
"Let me put the CBO report plainly in context: President Ronald Reagan was blasted by Democrats (and still is) for running a deficit that reached over 5 percent of Gross Domestic Product at their peak. But Obama’s deficits are running 10 percent and 13 percent of GDP over the next two years."

But the stock market rallies big-time today, perhaps because of the Obama Treasury Department's plan to buy up troubled bank assets to the tune of $500 billion to $1 trillion.
Will the rally last? And how much money will we pump into the economy before we're done?