Maybe you’ve heard about Becky Hammon, the 31-year-old WNBA star who will play for the Russian basketball team in the Beijing Olympics. Flag-waving bloggers and conservative radio hosts (including one tool who was sitting in for Schnitt in Tampa recently) have derided her as a traitor, even suggested that joining the Russian team was an act of treason.

What a basket of bullshit.

This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...