Sports At Politics

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old bartender from The Bronx, defeated U.S. Representative and U.S. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley in one of the most surprising political upsets in U.S. history. With all but nine of the district's 447 precincts reporting, Ocasio held an insurmountable 57.5% to 42.5% lead over Crowley in the Democratic primary in New York state's 14th Congressional District, which is entirely within New York City and includes parts of Queens and The Bronx. Crowley has graciously conceded defeat to Ocasio. As someone who is not a New Yorker, but followed the race for the Democratic nomination in the 14th District of New York on social media, I can explain a number of reasons behind Ocasio's surprise victory: Ocasio did have some political experience prior to running for Congress, specifically, she was an intern for the late U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy while she was a college student at Boston University in Massachusetts. Ocasio, despite ha...

Golf fans in the United States are accustomed to televised golf tournaments being produced by either CBS, which has several decades of experience producing television productions of golf tournaments, or Golf Channel, which is a 24-hour cable channel devoted to golf ( except when NBC can't find another channel to air NHL ice hockey playoff games on ) that is owned by NBC's parent company, Comcast, and produces NBC's golf telecasts. Both CBS and Golf Channel are known for high-quality productions of golf tournaments. However, the broadcast rights for the United States Golf Association (USGA) national golf championships, including the U.S. Open and U.S. Women's Open, are currently held by Fox, which doesn't have a lot of experience covering golf tournaments (they've held the USGA broadcast contract since 2015) and only airs a few golf tournaments per year on Fox and its co-owned cable sports channel FS1. Fox's golf tournament coverage tends to have a lot more...

With the 2018 FIFA World Cup men's soccer tournament beginning Thursday, I'll take this opportunity to predict the outcome of every match of this year's World Cup tournament. For the group stage, each match in each pool is listed in chronological order (although the last two matches of each group are played simultaneously), and my prediction for each mach is listed using the following format: (Team A) (Team A predicted score)-(Team B predicted score) (Team B), and the individual match predictions are followed by predicted pool standings. For the predicted pool standings, standings for each team use the following format: (Wins)-(Draws)-(Losses) (Points); for teams that I predict to advance out of group stage, their elimination stage seeding is listed as (group ranking)(group letter), and any tiebreaking criteria used is noted as well. For the elimination stage, predictions for individual matches follow an identical format to those for the group stage, with three exceptio...

The backlash that the National Football League (NFL) has received (examples here and here ) for adopting a "stand-or-stay" rule in regards to performances of the U.S. national anthem before NFL games might be just the beginning of the NFL's problems in the upcoming NFL season. Several NFL players, whose names have not been revealed, have reportedly told Shaun King of the New York Daily News that they are considering sitting out the season unless NFL team(s) sign Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, two NFL players who are not currently under a contract with any team due to the NFL team owners effectively blacklisting them from the league for protesting against racism in America. Furthermore, King has claimed that the goal of the unnamed players is to get as much as one-quarter of the league's players to sit out with them. BREAKING: Several star @NFL players have told me they are considering sitting out the season until the de facto ban of Eric Reid and Colin Kaepern...

Earlier this week, news broke that the France family, the family that founded and owns a majority stake in the stock car racing organization NASCAR, is looking to sell the sanctioning body to another company , and that Goldman Sachs intends to facilitate such a sale. Very little is known about any individuals or companies that might be interested in buying NASCAR, although, depending on what might be sold along with the sanctioning body (it's not clear if ARCA, a stock car racing organization recently acquired by NASCAR, and/or the sports car racing organization IMSA would be included in the sale, for example), the sale could be valued as much as several billion dollars. On a related note, Brian France, the grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France, Sr., has been rumored as a possible buyer of the NFL's Carolina Panthers, although I doubt that a member of the France family will buy the Panthers. NASCAR has been in decline in recent years for a couple of major reasons. First, sup...

Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, has announced that he will resign from office, effective "at the close of business" tomorrow. The reason why Schneiderman is resigning from office is because four women have accused Schneiderman of physically abusing them : Now Schneiderman is facing a reckoning of his own. As his prominence as a voice against sexual misconduct has risen, so, too, has the distress of four women with whom he has had romantic relationships or encounters. They accuse Schneiderman of having subjected them to nonconsensual physical violence. All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal. But two of the women, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, have talked to The New Yorker on the record, because they feel that doing so could protect other women. They allege that he repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent. Manning Barish and Selvaratnam categorize the abuse he inf...

One of the biggest threats to the existence of human life on this planet is the recent trend of global warming, or the increase in Earth's average temperature. According to the Carbon Brief website, human activity has caused virtually all of the long-term global warming that has been observed since 1850 . If you were to ask me who I thought was the foremost leader in the race to save our planet, you might think I would respond by naming a prominent American politician who views global warming as a serious problem, such as legendary U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), or a leader of a foreign country who views global warming as a serious problem, such as French President Emmanuel Macron. Actually, it's American cross-country skier and Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins , who, while at the U.S. Capitol last week, gave an example of how her sport is threatened by global warming: Jessie Diggins traveled from her home in Afton, Minn., to La Clusaz, France, in December 2016 t...