Squeaky Clean or Squeaky Mattress?
Yep, about the only time I pay any attention to basketball is when another star falls. Who's turn is it this week? Why that would be Kobe Bryant Charged with Rape. (Lots of Google News story goodness here.)

Makes you wonder that he admitted the adultery (i.e. sorry honey but yeah, I had sex with this 19 year old girl while you thought I was getting my knee operated on) but that he didn't force himself upon her.

Uh, okay. Let's see, you could have come clean when this first started up but you didn't. Strike one.

You could have admitted to your wife and the rest of the world that you did have sex with her which would have defused a huge amount of this issue but you didn't. Strike two.

What's strike three going to be? She's pregnant with your kid? She gave you HIV? You gave her herpes?
There's another one coming up and its going to pretty well take ol' squeaky clean Kobe from the penthouse to the cellar.

Or it might all be a fabrication by the woman so that she could squeeze him for money. Who knows anymore?

How close are we to having athletes carrying consent forms with their condoms when they go out?

I can see it now.

"Hey baby, you lookin' fine, want to get with a superstar?"
"Oh yeah, you so sexy. Let's go!"
"Okay but first I've gotta have you read and sign this contract saying any sexual relations between the two of us is consensual."
"Consensual? Yeah, I like the sound of that, sounds sexy. Gimme a pen." And they would proceed to sign away their rights.

At which point, the other side of the coin rears its ugly tail. If these women sign papers indemnifying the players of rape then what's to stop them from doing anything they want to the women. They've got no danger of being busted so they could then proceed to rape the women and get away with it.

Hmm, thorny issue. Perhaps athletes should do what most people do and try to not have sex with people they aren't married to? Nah, where's the Wilt Chamberlain style fun in that?

One thing I am aware of now thanks to all the coverage of the story is that residents of Eagle, Colorado are not the brightest bulbs in the bunch. It became a racial issue immediately and one of the town's 13 black residents accussed the police of trying to keep a "young brother down". Um, what? If he raped a woman then it matters not in the least that he's black or rich or a professional athlete, he's a rapist.

Why do people always assume race is a factor when a black man is charged with a crime? Yes, in many cases it is a factor but its asinine to think that black people are constantly arrested for no reason aside from their being black. And if there's any racism I've seen in this whole thing so far, its the black resident of Eagle quoted in some of the stories who's a racist by boiling everything down to black and white when things are for more involved than just the color of one's skin. But oh wait, I'm not allowed to accuse a black man of being a racist, that's prejudiced of me, seeing as how I'm white and all. But that's crap.