Are you ready Are you ready Are you ready, ready Are you ready for some football? – Hank Williams, Jr. I don’t ever remember a time when football wasn’t King. Yes, there’s always been baseball (love it), basketball, hockey, and golf to a lesser extent, but football has always reigned supreme in the hearts of most Americans. In the past,...

Two football stories made the news yesterday, but the focus on one all but buried the other. Let’s begin with the obvious. By now, most people have seen the video circulated by celebrity news web site TMZ that shows what happened inside the elevator between Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Rice and then-fiancé-now wife Janay. Frankly, after watching it, Rice is lucky...

Like many, I was sickened and repulsed by the single still images that came out of somewhere in Syria of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff before each was savagely beheaded by a member of ISIS, or ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), an extremist group so devoted to hate and heinous acts of terror that even...

Before my summer recess, The Take needs to acknowledge the Summer of Discontent – from the bizarre to the… bizzaro! A horse is a horse, of course of course… …except when the horse belongs to the queen of England. According to a report by The Associated Press (July 12), “[Estimate] A racehorse owned by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II that won...

I sometimes get accused of liberal bias. So, I thought I’d take this commentary to focus on PolitiFact’s check on recent Democrat statements. Virginia Democrat Senator Mark Warner – Warner has represented Virginia in the U.S. Senate since 2009. He serves on the Banking, Budget, Commerce and Intelligence committees. He is the honorary co-chairman of the Forward Together PAC. Warner...

Photo Credit: Thomson200 Talented linebacker Brian Banks spent more than five years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. Not only was his freedom gone, but his chances at a pro-football contract evaporated after a woman claimed that Banks had raped her. In a story from KCBS-TV (May 24, 2012), “Banks was 16 years old when he was arrested...

In war, no one’s hands are clean. Whether by “boots on the ground,” or a bomb dropped by a MQ-9 Reaper drone, the innocent always become casualties. Nonetheless, before I start to unwind my ethical opinion about the use of military drones, I want to begin with a few basic facts. According to a breakdown in The Washington Post by...

Do attacks by armed drones do more harm than good? That’s the question posed in Room for Debate (Sept. 25, 2012), a regular column in The New York Times. “A new study,”Debate writes, “found that because of the many unintended civilian casualties, U.S. drone attacks against terrorist targets in Pakistan have been an effective recruiting tool for extremists, but have not been effective in...

Drones – unmanned aerial vehicles – seem to be everywhere in the news these days. Attending a recent fireworks show, I spotted something with blinking lights sitting in the same position in the sky. After watching it for more than twenty minutes, the blinking object descended into the hands of a waiting operator. It was a drone. In order to...

“Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.” – Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics Robert “Alex” Green, reporter and editor of the Bryan College newspaper, The Triangle, said that his teachers taught him to tell the truth, and that’s what he did. After the Christian school officials killed his story detailing that one of...