Lampley Ignores the First Rule of HolesAnd keeps digging. His
first post over the Huffington blog got smacked down
by Byron York.
At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, May 7, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and to see the odds as of that moment on the Kentucky Derby. Bellamy Road was a 5-to-2 favorite. You can look it up.
People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted horse racing experts and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that Bellamy Road would win the Derby.
And he most certainly would have, at least if the race had been run fairly and legally. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, with the 50-to-1 Giacomo winning the race, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.Lampley comes back with:
In an attempt to refute the logic of my previous post about the stolen Presidential election of 2004, Byron York compares the handicapping of the Kentucky Derby to oddsmakers' responses to the exit polls which demonstrated John Kerry was the actual winner on November 4. This is typical neocon disingenuity, a shunt designed to ignore the real question.
Handicapping a horse race is sophisticated alchemy, the highest form of tea-leaf reading but tea-leaf reading nevertheless. To compare the data in the Daily Racing Form directly to the kind of scientifically disciplined information that comes from time-honored exit polls is intellectual garbage and York knows enough to know that.Except of course, that York was not comparing the exit polls to the Kentucky Derby, but the betting in the online sports books on the election to the Kentucky Derby. Which means it's an excellent comparison. Remember,
Lampley started the whole argument by saying that the online sports books showed Kerry winning:
At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite.And the part about the time-honored exit polls is foofaraw. They projected Gore the winner in Florida in 2000; which did not turn out to be the case. They initially showed the Republicans losing horribly in 2002; at the end of election day the Republicans had regained their majority in the Senate with seats to spare.
Lampley closes with a bit of bluster:
Byron York won't scare me off. Not with lightweight stuff like that.Jim Lampley calling Byron York a lightweight? Oh, that is rich.
