If you'll pardon me, I'm going to do something a little out of character. I'm going to defend both Terrell Owens and the Detroit Lions at the same time.

(I suppose it's out of character for me to talk sports in this forum, but you can take it as a social commentary too.)

I'm sure you've heard, by now, of Owens' situation. He spoke out against his quarterback and his team. He said that the Eagles would be undefeated if they had Brett Favre as their quarterback. He said the team's management disrespected him by not publicly recognizing his 100th touchdown reception.

He was, in effect, fired for his comments.

On Monday, Dre Bly, the Detroit Lions' oft-injured cornerback with an adverb for a name, had some thoughts on the causes for their coach getting the axe. He said, "We're all at fault, but I just feel like Joey [Harrington]'s been here four years, and being the No. 3 pick in the draft, he hasn't given us anything." Harrington is the Lions' quarterback.

Again on Monday, Jeff Garcia, the Lions' backup quarterback, said that "you start to question whether the organization has the people in place who can go about making the proper selections."

Let's tally this up.

Owens: Criticized ability and contribution level of quarterback.
Bly: Criticized ability and contribution level of quarterback.

Owens: Criticized choices and intelligence of management and ownership.
Garcia: Criticized choices and intelligence of management and ownership.

Owens: Suspended for four games, deactivated for the remainder of the season.
Bly: Still on active roster.
Garcia: Still on active roster.

Now, this isn't a race thing. Garcia's white, Bly's black. It's not a money thing, because both Garcia and Bly were free agent signings, and got a decent paycheck. So what is it?

It's just a flat-out double standard. Owens was already outspoken, and had already said things critical of his team and his playmates. And yet this was somehow worse? It was only because the media latched onto it, and Owens was under the crosshairs of conservative groups for his "racy" Monday Night Football spot, that he was taken down so hard. Bly and Garcia made the exact same level of anti-team commentary, and yet they're not being shown the door.

I'm not in favor of Congress investigating the Owens suspension; it's a matter for Owens and the Eagles to settle (in court, if necessary). I do like that a Republican is willing to take on an issue fraught with worker's rights and race relations, and is on the better side of it, but it's not Congress' business. I'm not in favor of Bly and Garcia being indefinitely deactivated, either, because I wasn't in favor of Owens being indefinitely deactivated. If the Eagles wanted to cut ties with Owens, they should have cut him and allowed him to play for another team if he could find a buyer.

Bly and Garcia should be treated with the exact same level of harshness that Owens was. The fact that they're not is bald-faced hypocrisy by the NFL.

I'm sitting in front of a fire in the old home town today, and the dog is asleep on the floor by my feet. The comfort of the situation is making me circumspect, so I'm just going to rattle on here for a little while.

Thanksgiving was kind of a rough one for me. Damn near all the great big extended family was packed into one house (pretty rare that we can all get corralled that completely), and we were enjoying ourselves. Wine was drunk, food was packed into faces at a record pace. Unfortunately, during the end of the meal, my grandfather fell startlingly ill (he's getting up there in age, and has developed some health problems). We weren't sure of the severity of whatever was getting to him, but it was really a good thing that my mother and one of my aunts are nurses. They were able to get him comfortable and pretty stable while the ambulance made its way through the 20 or so cars in the street and driveway to take him to the hospital. We were all shook up, to varying degrees. But it turned out that it wasn't anything terribly bad--just a severe dizzy spell, from all indications--and he should be back home today from the hospital.

The bridge between this post and my last post is that my grandfather is a World War II veteran. He's a quiet guy, and a tough guy. He drinks beer, smokes, and eats an alarming amount of meat. For all that, he still goes to the YMCA one day every week to swim (although that's gotten a little curtailed recently), and is one of those old-school guys that appears to defy all rules of diet and health. So it was quite a shock to see him in that state. He's the old oak of the family. I hope he can get past this spell and keep on kicking for a good while yet. We all love him a lot.

So I hope all of you could find something to be thankful about yesterday, and year round, for that matter. We all have a lot more than many others around the world, but for all our relative affluence, we still feel loss when things are taken from us. Let your loved ones know how much they mean to you this season. Give 'em a hug, or in the case of your goofy uncle, a hard chuck on the shoulder. It'll mean a lot, even to him.

Please send thanks and good wishes to any veterans you know today. No matter the cause for which they fought, or the theater in which they fought, they chose to serve their country, and deserve our respect.

And as I listen to Dick (Cheney) rumble on about how much we owe United States veterans, I think about how much his administration has done to reduce or remove as many post-service benefits and aid programs as they can.

Remember who votes to give veterans the thanks they deserve and the assistance they so often need, and who wants to just turn off the lights at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital.

I was all set to feel good for a while since Democrats won all sorts of statewide elections yesterday. It was a really good day.

Not anymore.

The United States Army has admitted to using incendiary weapons in Iraq that, while perhaps not officially chemical weapons, have the unfortunate side effect of melting human flesh down to the bone.

You might say that this is war, and war has unfortunate costs. Maybe your Republican friends say that.

Can they justify this? If you're sensitive to graphic images, just tell them to click here, and you can let it be.

We are being governed by war criminals. In addition to profiteering, cronyism, election fraud, and treason, our leaders are perpetrating crimes against humanity.

I don't know who to tell you to call, because a regime capable of this certainly won't give in to Russ Feingold, John Conyers or Barack Obama.

Then again...

Our friend and alleged statesman, Senator Trent Lott, who currently has no house, had some thoughts on the best direction for the Supreme Court.

"I believe the president can come up with a highly qualified, man, woman, or minority *, that is a strict constructionist, and a conservative, that the Democrats will not be able to filibuster." --10/27/05, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country

You might think, if you listened to the right wingnuts, that being a "constructionist" is like being one of those guys who dresses up like a revolutionary soldier and reads from the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July. "Boy, a constructionist must really love the Constitution. He's all about that shit!" Allow me, if that is your opinion, to disabuse you of that notion.

Use the wingnuts' own language. Imagine that the Constitution is a house. Imagine that this house was built with an empty room (let's say it's above the garage), with no closet or plumbing. No identifiable purpose, just an empty room. If you moved into this house, would you leave this room empty and useless, or would you see what you could use it for? Bear in mind that additions had already been built onto this house, so you know that the builders of the house did not intend to have it remain unchanged forever.

A constructionist who moved into this house would not only not use this room for anything, but he'd probably seal it off with bricks. And he'd likely tear down most of the additions that had been built (he'd leave the room with all the guns, but everything else would go).

This is the way a "Constitutional constructionist" or "originalist" or "literalist" (although the wingnuts don't use that one anymore because it sounds too much like "fundamentalist," which is what we're really talking about here) would treat the Constitution.

Do you like the right to engage in legal acts in the privacy of your own home?
Get over it! You're probably a deviant anyway.

Would you like to be able to have an abortion if you were raped, or if childbirth would kill you?
Too bad, slut!

What if you want to, but your husband says you can't?
"Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee!"

If a member of your household, god forbid, happens to run afoul of the law, and in the process of serving the search warrant that only names the abode and not the inhabitants as the target of the search, you and your children get strip searched anyway?
All in the name of justice, sucker! Now bend over.

If you think these three scenarios get progressively less likely to be an avowed position of a Supreme Court nominee, then maybe you should take a good long look at Mr. Justice Samuel Alito, the newest horror to be vomited onto the American people by this administration.

And then maybe you should call, write, or e-mail your senator. Trust me, they read constituent mail. If they're decent statesmen or stateswomen, they will respond. If they don't respond...well, would you be likely to patronize a restaurant if you ordered your food and it never came?

Samuel Alito is less than half the Justice that Sandra Day O'Connor is, and would be an abomination unto the Court. Tell the Senate how you feel with your words, and if they don't listen, tell them with your vote.

* Does this sound to you like in Trent Lott's heart of hearts, he considers minorities in a group of life forms separate from males and females? Before you say that's silly, maybe you should click here.