Free Republic

Professional football should come with a warning label. Like cigarettes, football can be hazardous to your health ... and all too frequently lately it can be fatal. If the sad truth of Junior Seau’s tragic death yesterday is that it came by his own hand, as Oceanside, Calif., police believe was the case, he is only the latest example of the ravages of a sport whose concussive demands seem to be regularly destroying its own. Only a week ago, Ray Easterling, a former defensive back with the Atlanta Falcons, took his life in similar fashion — with a handgun that...

EXCERPT "I think they should but they won't. They intended exactly what they did. "They were looking for the result they got yesterday," she said of Fox. "I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person."

HIS other attributes and liabilities notwithstanding, Arnold Schwarzenegger deserves much credit for becoming the only recent California governor to value and promote vocational education — and his timing could not be any better. For years, a college-oriented educational and political elite — pandering to parents who universally consider their progeny to be budding doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers — has been consciously dismantling the state's once-exemplary system of job-oriented education. Heaven only knows how many tens of thousands of California youngsters have been pushed out of high school without diplomas because adults sent the message that anyone without a college...