Well, 2008 has just begun and it proves to be a wild one. Roger Clemens has almost singlehandedly started the year off with a bang. And if I were Roger, the fact that Congress is pushing back its hearing with him, Andy Pettitte and Brian McNamee almost a month (from January 16th to February 13th) is an ominous sign. Clemens' head lawyer Rusty Hardin responded to the news by saying, "Roger hasn't done anything. The federal government looking at Roger is fine with me."

At this point, if Hardin really feels that way, why not publicly declare that Clemens will not invoke the Fifth Amendment (the right not to incriminate oneself) during the hearing? Trust me, after the whole Mark McGwire debacle in Congress, if Clemens ever wanted to get the undecided sports people onto his side, waiving his Fifth Amendment right would be a heck of a way to do it.

What will probably happen is that the hearing will be abnormally uncomfortable for Clemens. He's going to be grilled not only about steroid and HGH use, but also about his supposed lidocaine and vitamin B12 injections, as well as his own stated Vioxx abuse. He's going to be grilled about various things he has said in public which just don't line up with what really happened. He's going to have every interview he ever gave lined up to show where he says something in one interview and then contradicts it in another.

And he's going to be skewered for setting up a call to talk about McNamee's son as a pretext for trying to entrap McNamee and get something to bolster his own case. What it demonstrates is that he'll do anything to win, and that's probably as good a reason to guess that he did steroids and HGH as any. Honestly, now Clemens is going to understand why lawyers want their clients to say as little as humanly possible.

So we move from that stupidity to the Golf Channel suspending anchor Kelly Tilghman for two weeks. Why? Because she complimented Tiger Woods by saying that his game is so dominant that the only way that other players could possible hope to challenge Woods would be to "lynch him in a back alley".

I know that the word "lynch" has some very negative historical connotations. But does Tilghman deserve a two-week suspension? The Golf Channel deserves a lot of blame for picking her to be the first female golf anchor. Maybe they did it as an affirmative action move, but there are very very few people who think that she got there on merit. And her most recent comment demonstrates that she's far from a polished anchor.

Let's be honest, a big reason she was picked is because she's very attractive and athletic looking. Don't believe me? Heck, why did they not groom Nancy Lopez for that position? Lopez has 47 LPGA victories and was inducted in to the World Golf Hall of Fame at age 30. She's far more qualified than Tilghman will ever be. But Nancy has one disqualification: she's not as attractive as Tilghman. That's not an opinion, it's a fact.

Still, I think Tilghman's suspension is ridiculous. She apologized in a sincere manner to Tiger Woods and the viewers. Shouldn't that be sufficient? If she had slandered Woods, then it would be an entirely different story, but the irony of it all is that she's being punished for actually complimenting his superb golfing abilities. What I kind of wish would happen is that Tiger Woods would take a break from protecting his image and do the right thing: call a press conference and/or write a letter to the Golf Channel that pleads with them to not suspend her.

Tilghman didn't cheat or lie or steal, she just made a mistake. That's all it was, and when we get so touchy that even the smallest mistake (in this case a single word) followed by an immediate and public apology is given a two-week punishment, then instead of having announcers and anchors who are passionate about sports and life, we're going to have a bunch of corporate guys who measure every word that comes out of their mouths.  Is that what we really want?

Some people might vilify both Tilghman and Clemens as two terrible people. Even if we ignore all the accusations against Clemens, it's tough to condone his taping of that conversation with McNamee which was expressly supposed to be about McNamee's ill son. Tilghman might be stupid, but Clemens taping that conversation was just plain wrong. That makes Tilgham and Clemens like 2 peas in 2 different pods.

Rescind Tilghman's suspension. I think she's already learned her lesson.