A Specter haunts the NFL

Another Pats fan heard from. Throwing crap at Specter like a maddened liberal in the hopes that something will stick does not change the smell of Kraft and his pet comissioner. Comparing the quarter million dollar wink and headshake he handed to a team proved to have cheated to the multimillion dollar kicks in the balls coupled with season long suspensions Roger so blithely handed to players does kind of seem out of proportion. Quit wasting your tme and ours imitating the MSM and try to report a story based on its merits.

I must agree with Mr. Yount. Being from Pa., I am NO fan of Sen. Specter.He is a typical-RINO, along with Sens. Collins,Graham etc.
The "investigation" into this Spygate is a total waste of taxpayers money.
It should be interesting if as many have reported, that Chris Matthews will run against Sen. Specter. That should be a race to watch.
But getting back to this article, the writer has a clear anti-philly hatred which takes over for any legitimacy he may try to put forth.

What's really funny about this...is that...as a young attorney for the Warren Commission Spector developed the "single-bullet" theory to cover up the murder of the President...now, he gonna investigate the NFL?

There is a little town out west, maybe you've heard of it, it's called Las Vegas. And just in case you were born yesterday, I have to tell you that in Vegas over the course of the last seven years billions of dollars have been wagered on NFL football games. When you add up all the collective betting on football on a global scale it is hundreds of billions of dollars. A lot of people lost a lot of money because of the Pats cheating.

Now,in the gambling world, its called "fixing a game" when organized cheating occurs within a sports franchise. When this happens you leave the rhelm of sports and enter the sleazy world of crime.

Regardless of what Rodger would have us believe, Specter knows that the Pats had a huge advantage from cheating. So would people betting on the game if they knew about the fix. And lots of people knew about the cheating, probably the whole team. So, how many of them were betting on the games? It's not a stretch to think at some point over seven years organized crime might have gotten wind of it. When a horse race or a boxing match is fixed, they don't loose a draft pick, someone goes to jail. I hope Specter gets to ask questions to some people under oath. A LOT OF PEOPLE LOST A LOT OF MONEY BECAUSE OF THE PATS CHEATING. THEY FOOLISHLY BELIEVED IN THE INTEGRITY OF THE NFL WHO KNEW OF THE CHEATING AT LEAST TWO YEARS AGO AT GREEN BAY. You have to realize that cheating in pro sports is something bigger than the sport itself. With the amount of money that goes through gambling transactions, any type of cheating has to be investigated. And that is the door that Goodell, Kraft and Rooney et al. don't want Specter to open.

This story broke nine months ago. In that time we know that Specter sent a letter to Roger Goodell, sent a follow-up letter, spoke with Goodell and conducted a brief meeting with a person with knowledge of the situation.

That doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of time to spend on one of the many issues he deals with. He's the ranking member of the committee with oversight of the N.F.L.'s antitrust exemption. If the league conducted a sham investigation into cheating --as the evidence suggests -- then it's totally appropriate for him to inquire into the matter.

This move shows how bankrupt the GOP has become while in power. While Rome burns, this guy plots how to get re-elected using a cheesy little melodrama. The GOP is no better than the opposition at governance. Arlen, like the rest of the US Senate, has produced little of substance. But, it's a nice career position and most of the solons just love sticking around to play pattie cakes with each other.

The public mood today is to clean house, and it's not the NFL they're concerned with. We face some daunting problems in the financial services sector, lack of any real energy security policy, a sense of where the country is headed, namely downhill. The GOP is not providing any positive vision. The solons just fiddle while Rome is burning! So, Arlen, if you pull this little stunt, you've just written your retirement ticket, and maybe that's a good thing! Fie on the RINO's!!!

The GOP may not be providing much positive vision, but what vision it is providing is still better than the alternative. As for those daunting problems in the financial services sector, the longer we go the less ominous they appear, and energy security policy is more because of Democratic resistance to sensible policies like increased oil drilling in the US and increasing nuclear power than to GOP ineptitude.

Screenplay is flat out wrong. There was no cheating by the Patriots. Like so many others, he has not read the NFL bylaw the Patriots "broke," a bylaw that runs three paragraphs long and ultimately is not about videotaping but in-game use of taped footage. There was no Patriots cheating.

What Specter did was get information from the league, then speak with a former Patriots video go-fer with a history of lying on his resume, a history of theft, a history of harassing his co-workers and taping conversations with his bosses, and a self-important axe to grind against his former team because they fired him (he used to lie about the circumstances behind him leaving the team), someone with no corroborating evidence for his more damaging allegations - and Specter chooses to believe the former Patriots video go-fer. This is how foolish this whole issue has become.

Do people in Boston use a different dictionary or what?Since when is winning football games by "misinterpreting the rules" and breaking the bylaws not cheating? Please stop, you already scored a 10 on the laugh meeter.

While I completely agree that neither Mr. Specter nor the federal government has any authority to go poking around the NFL, I am perplexed as to how such behavior qualifies the Senator as a "RINO". Sticking arrogant, self-righteous noses where they have no right to be is a hallmark of the Republican Party...does the Terri Schiavo Panderthon ring a bell?

It's great to see Arlen putting his time to good use - besides being a RINO.

The Senate is now governing Football?
It should be obvious that the good Senator should be relieved of all leadership duties
since he is under great stress due to physical problems.

If his staff won't do this then it falls on Senate Leadership if there is such a thing to intervene.

Specter is a moron but this multi-billion dollar industry, the NFL, is trying to pull a fast one and save it's bute'. A team wins 3 Super Bowls, each one by 3 pts. and we find out they were cheating. Well, let's fine em' half a million dollars, burn the first batch of videos and not release the bulk of the other videos. There is nothing wrong going on here. Everyone look the other way we have exonerated everyone involved! The NFL stands to lose billions if this "blacksox" scandal gets its proper exposure.

Congress has no business investigating the NFL. This is not putting Senator Spector's time to good use as some have suggested. Others have suggested this is appropriate because the NFL is a multi-billion dollar industry. Here's a proposition. Investigate the multi-trillion dollar "industry" known as the federal government. After all fraud and waste has been eliminated from the federal government, attention can then be focused on the NFL.

Screenplay, the bylaw wasn't broken. Stop laughing and start reading properly.

Chris J., they weren't cheating. What a lot of people refuse to understand is how extensive taping (allowed by the rulebook) is by all teams and how the three-paragraph bylaw at the heart of this wasn't broken. The real "blacksox" scandal is not Bill Belichick; it is that Roger Goodell overreacted, doing so with consumate clumsiness and arrogance and apparant ignorance of his own rulebook.