Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign is methodically building a political firewall across the South in hopes of effectively locking up the Democratic nomination in March regardless of any early setbacks in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

    Mrs. Clinton's advisers, struck by the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders in those two states, have been assuring worried supporters that victories and superdelegate support in Southern states will help make her the inevitable nominee faster than many Democrats expect. They point to her popularity with black and Hispanic voters, as well as her policy stances and the relationships that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have cultivated. Mrs. Clinton was similarly confident at this point eight years ago, before Barack Obama and his superior organizers began piling up delegates, including in many Southern states.

Ponder this:

This strategy may or may not be successful in the long run, but it's terrible politics. Losing support among young progressive activists, white liberals and first-timers to politics, Clinton's strategy isn't to aggressively fight to win back the hearts and souls of those voters, but rather to build a firewall around her support among minority voters in the South.

[...]

The Clinton campaign needs to change its instincts. Its prevent defense approach to politics is terrible optics. It is bad for both the campaign and for the fortunes of the Democratic Party. There is no reason Hillary Clinton shouldn't be able to win the votes of younger and more liberal activists--and there's certainly no reason she should be ceding white voters generally to Sanders or Biden. But she would have to fight for those votes, and she seems to have no inclination to do so.

But sometimes even that can be funny.

Riding the Light

This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective

I wanted to add a couple things, it can take millions of years for a photon to reach the surface of a star to be 'released'.  

But thing that blows my mind, because a photon travels at the light of speed, no time exists.  From to say 1 million light years away, to the photon it takes zero time to reach it's destination.  Meaning that all photons have the exact same lifespan, which is none.

"Goodell had imposed a $500,000 fine on Belichick, a $250,000 fine on the team and the loss of a first-round draft pick just four days after league security officials had caught the Patriots and before he'd even sent a team of investigators to Foxborough, Massachusetts. Those investigators hadn't come up empty: Inside a room accessible only to Belichick and a few others, they found a library of scouting material containing videotapes of opponents' signals, with detailed notes matching signals to plays for many teams going back seven seasons. Among them were handwritten diagrams of the defensive signals of the Pittsburgh Steelers, including the notes used in the January 2002 AFC Championship Game won by the Patriots 24-17. Yet almost as quickly as the tapes and notes were found, they were destroyed, on Goodell's orders: League executives stomped the tapes into pieces and shredded the papers inside a Gillette Stadium conference room."

This is an astonishing revelation. Coach Bill Belichick and the Patriots got caught red-handed stealing their opponents' signals, yet for all intents and purposes, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell basically enabled their cheating to continue by first slapping them teams collective wrists with punitive sanctions, and then covering up what they actually did.

"'Goodell didn't want anybody to know that his gold franchise had won Super Bowls by cheating,' a senior executive whose team lost to the Patriots in a Super Bowl now says. 'If that gets out, that hurts your business.'"

Most league owners and executives were of the opinion that Goodell handed the Patriots a big, fat Mulligan on the spying charges, and they weren't happy about it. Thus, when the issue of New England's deflated footballs reared its head last January, it's not all that surprising that so many of them were now ready to draw blood.

"Interviews by ESPN The Magazine and Outside the Lines with more than 90 league officials, owners, team executives and coaches, current and former Patriots coaches, staffers and players, and reviews of previously undisclosed private notes from key meetings, show that Spygate is the centerpiece of a long, secret history between Goodell's NFL, which declined comment for this story, and Kraft's Patriots. The diametrically opposed way the inquiries were managed by Goodell -- and, more importantly, perceived by his bosses -- reveals much about how and why NFL punishment is often dispensed. The widespread perception that Goodell gave the Patriots a break on Spygate, followed by the NFL's stonewalling of a potential congressional investigation into the matter, shaped owners' expectations of what needed to be done by 345 Park Ave. on Deflategate. It was, one owner says, time for 'a makeup call.'"

Further, the culture of cheating in New England under Coach Belichick became so pervasive and corrosive that, well, just read the following:

"In fact, many former New England coaches and employees insist that the taping of signals wasn't even the most effective cheating method the Patriots deployed in that era. Several of them acknowledge that during pregame warm-ups, a low-level Patriots employee would sneak into the visiting locker room and steal the play sheet, listing the first 20 or so scripted calls for the opposing team's offense. (The practice became so notorious that some coaches put out fake play sheets for the Patriots to swipe.) Numerous former employees say the Patriots would have someone rummage through the visiting team hotel for playbooks or scouting reports. Walsh later told investigators that he was once instructed to remove the labels and erase tapes of a Patriots practice because the team had illegally used a player on injured reserve."

Personally, I'm now so thoroughly disgusted with the NFL, and the New England Patriots and Roger Goodell in particular, that at this point I'm unlikely to watch many games this season -- and that's even before the highly anticipated film "Concussion" hits the theatres in December. While this ESPN piece is certainly a lengthy read, it's an important story for all sports fans who are laboring at present under the assumption that all is on the up and up, come game time and the opening kickoff.

"I don't think fans really want to know this. They just want to watch football. But if you tell them that the games aren't on the level, they'll care. Boy, will they care."
- Unnamed Carolina Panthers coach / executive, to ESPN (2015)