Dawn Staley and South Carolina completed their perfect season, ending Caitlin Clark’s historic college career with an 87-75 win over Iowa in the NCAA championship game Sunday.
With Staley directing a relentless attack from the sideline, the Gamecocks (38-0) became the 10th Division I team to go through a season without a loss. And they accomplished the feat after they lost all five starters from last season’s team that lost to Clark’s squad in the national semifinals.
“It doesn’t always end like you want it to end, much like last year. But my freshies are at the top of my heart because they wanted this. It’s awesome. .... It’s awesome. It’s awesome. It’s unbelievable,” Staley said. “When young people lock in and have a belief, and have a trust, and their parents have that same trust, this is what can happen. They made history. They etched their names in the history books.”
Clark did all she could to lead the Hawkeyes to their first championship. She scored 30 points, including a championship-record 18 in the first quarter. She will go down as one of the greatest players in NCAA history. She rewrote the record book at Iowa (34-5), finishing as the career leading scorer in NCAA Division I history with 3,951 career points...
Good for the champion University of South Carolina women's basketball team going 38-0 (they went 36-1 last year and 35-2 in 2021-22). Good for record- setting Caitlin Clark and her Iowa teammates. Good for women's collegiate sports. Given that women's college basketball is smashing viewership records (college or pro, men or women), universities need to re-calibrate how they fund and promote their women's athletics programs. In the meantime, Clark is expected to make only $76,000 base salary when she turns pro (though her endorsement value is in the millions). Perhaps she'll be the one to propel the WNBA into a new era, eventually achieving greater parity with men's pro basketball.
Michael Whatley, Donald Trump's hand-picked Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, lumped in Ukraine with China and Iran when listing the United States' "aggressive" adversaries on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures.
"Joe Biden's feckless leadership has shown China, has shown Ukraine, has shown Iran, that they can feel free to be much more aggressive on the world front to the point where even they will try and meddle with our elections here," Whatley told host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.
Whatley, who previously served as the chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, was elected to lead the RNC in March and now serves alongside co-chair Lara Trump, daughter-in-law to the former president. [snip]
"I think that we are seeing right now that this election truly, truly matters on national security...when America is weak, the world is a far more dangerous place," Whatley said about this year's upcoming election on Sunday.
He then blamed Biden for showing countries like Ukraine that they can meddle with U.S. elections, despite there being no evidence to prove his claim. Meanwhile, Ukraine has been dealing with a war against Russian aggression since February 2022.
It has been over two years since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of the Eastern European country. Biden has been a strong ally to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky throughout the conflict and continues to press Congress to give more aid to the war-torn country, while some Republican lawmakers push against additional funding...
This grubby pro-Putin peckerwood apparatchik is a reminder that, long after the Malignant Loser is a bad memory, Christofascist Republicans like him will still be around to offer their alternative facts, upside down and backwards agitprop, and just plain dirty lies. Speaking of which --
Tim Sheehy, a charismatic former Navy SEAL who is the Republican candidate in a U.S. Senate race in Montana that could determine control of the chamber, has cited a gunshot wound he received in combat that he said left a bullet in his right arm as evidence of his toughness.
“I got thick skin — though it’s not thick enough. I have a bullet stuck in this arm still from Afghanistan,” Sheehy said in a video of a December campaign event posted on social media, pointing to his right forearm.
It was one of several inconsistent accounts Sheehy has shared about being shot while deployed. And in October 2015, more than a year after he left active duty, he told a different story.
After a family visit to Montana’s Glacier National Park, he told a National Park Service ranger that he accidentally shot himself in the right arm that day when his Colt .45 revolver fell and discharged while he was loading his vehicle in the park, according to a record of the episode filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana.
The self-inflicted gunshot left a bullet lodged in Sheehy’s right forearm, according to the written description accompanying the federal citation that the ranger, a federal law enforcement officer, gave Sheehy for illegally discharging his weapon in a national park. The citation said the description was based on Sheehy’s telling of events.
Asked this week about the citation, which has not been previously reported, Sheehy told The Washington Post that the statement he gave the ranger was a lie. He said he made up the story about the gun going off to protect himself and his former platoonmates from facing a potential military investigation into an old bullet wound that he said he got in Afghanistan in 2012. He said he did not know for certain whether the wound was the result of friendly fire or from enemy ammunition, and said he never reported the incident to his superiors.
Sheehy said he did not shoot himself in the park in 2015, but rather fell and hurt himself on a hike, necessitating a trip to an emergency room, where he said he told hospital staff he had a bullet in his arm, triggering his interview with the ranger...
He's a Republican. If their lips are moving, they're lying.
