NCAA screws Ohio State. Again.

Jerks:

The NCAAsuspended Ohio State wide receiver DeVier Posey for five more games Friday and three other Buckeyes for one game for taking too much money for a summer job.
Offensive lineman Marcus Hall, defensive lineman Melvin Fellows and last year's leading rusher, Daniel Herron, will miss one game and must repay benefits after receiving pay for work not performed from booster Bobby DiGeronimo, who has been banned from any further contact with Ohio State athletes.
Posey was overpaid $728. Herron and Fellows both accepted approximately $290 in excess pay while Hall received $230 in overpayment.
Posey and Herron already had been suspended five games for accepting cash and tattoos from a Columbus tattoo-parlor owner.
Posey, the Buckeyes' leading returning receiver, will not be able to play until Nov. 19 against Penn State. The others will be available at Illinois a week from Saturday, although Fellows is out with a medical issue.
Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith called the penalty against Posey "harsh."
"I am extremely disappointed with the NCAA's decision regarding Devier Posey," Smith said in a statement. "This penalty is harsh considering the nature of the violation and the five-game suspension already served by this student-athlete."

That, friends, is your 2011 Ohio State football season.  The offense is in free fall without Posey.  They may not win another game.
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Suckers!

We told you and told you. But noooooooo .... you, you in the GOP leadership, you never listen.  Notions of "civility," "comity" and "tradition" with the national Democrat leadership are only means to an end.  Their end.  Republicans may offer and try to respect such notions, but such acts are only very rarely reciprocated. 

The latest example:

In a shocking development Thursday evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) triggered a rarely used procedural option informally called the “nuclear option” to change the Senate rules.

Reid and 50 members of his caucus voted to change Senate rules unilaterally to prevent Republicans from forcing votes on uncomfortable amendments after the chamber has voted to move to final passage of a bill.

Reid’s coup passed by a vote of 51-48, leaving Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fuming.

The surprise move stunned Republicans, who did not expect Reid to bring heavy artillery to what had been a humdrum knife fight over amendments to China currency legislation. 

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New addition to the library

Rome & The Sword: How Warriors & Weapons Shaped Roman History, by Simon James.  My initial scan-thru suggests this book will be really good.

Good news on missile defense

Spain has agreed to help us with missile defense:

Spain and the U.S. have announced that Spain will provide a base for U.S. ships in support of NATO's missile defense system.

The Oct. 5 agreement was announced by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at NATO headquarters in the margins of a meeting of NATO defense ministers here Oct. 5 and 6.

Under the agreement, four U.S. Aegis ships will be based at the Rota naval base near Cadiz in Spain. The agreement is part of U.S. President Barack Obama's phased adaptive approach to missile defense, under which ship-based, anti-ballistic missiles are being deployed in the eastern Mediterranean followed by ground-based systems in Romania and Poland.

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Roman Trip-Tiks

It seems that in Britain they are trying to determine if a path was built over an ancient Roman road:

A ground-breaking archaeological search for an ancient Roman road starts in Purbeck next week.

Experts will excavate part of the straight footpath running through Sandford Heath, known locally as the Roman Road.

Historians hope this dig will, once and for all, answer whether the thoroughfare visible today was constructed over an ancient road built during Dorset’s Roman occupation.

[...]

Historians believe such a road could have been built by the Roman army during the conquest of Dorset, not long after the Roman invasion of Britain in AD43.

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Protectionism can be a good thing

The US Senate is taking up measures to strike back at Communist China for its currency manipulation:

The Senate voted Monday to advance legislation pressuring the Chinese government to stop undervaluing its currency, a practice most economists agree is giving the country an unfair trade advantage and is costing the U.S. jobs.
The Senate voted 79-19 to end debate on a motion to proceed to the bill, the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011. While the vote does not mean the bill has passed, the strong show of support suggests it could well be approved in the upper chamber by the week’s end. Passage through the House is less clear, however, and GOP leaders have given no indication they will move forward with it.

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Who are the Alawites

that have ruled Syria for decades?  Michael Totten links to an article in the New Republic that gives some insight.  The article is titled "The Cult: The Twisted, Terrifying Last Days of Assad’s Syria."  A taste:

It would be interesting to know more about the ideology of those who are imposing this regimen of killing on their fellow citizens. Twenty-six hundred citizens, say the human rights organizations, have been killed so far, with no end in sight. Are the army units doing this in the name of religion?

Just about every observer who has analyzed the conflict in the western press—Robert Fisk in The Independent, Anthony Shadid in The New York Times, Malise Ruthven in The New York Review of Books—has reminded readers that beneath everything else in Syria, there lies the bitterness of the Sunni-Alawi rivalry. There are about three and a half million Alawis in Syria (out of a total population of 22 million). It will not do to impugn an entire religion, but those who’ve written about this topic do not fail to observe that the most influential positions in the army are occupied by Alawis, that the all-powerful mukhabarat, or secret service, is dominated at every level by Alawis, that Alawi officers have superintended every large-scale episode of killing in Syria in recent years (at the Tadmoor Prison in 1980, in Hama in 1982, and now in Deraa, and Hama again), and that the family which has been inflicting this variety of civic calm on Syria for the last 40 years has been an Alawi one.

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