With kickoff less than 24 hours away, I can already feel the excitement growing in the pit of my stomach.
Despite an almost unprecedented lack of coverage, I really think this will be an entertaining game.
Arizona’s offense is awfully tough and prone to bringing out a trick play or two, while their defense has been playing some fairly respectable ball this postseason.
With Pittsburgh, all you hear is defense, defense, defense and with good reason, as it’s probably the best defense in the league. However, Pittsburgh’s offense can be quite dangerous as well.
In the end, I just think that the Cardinal’s offense will be too much and they will win in a 34-28 shootout.
Judging by my past Super Bowl prognostications, however, I think it’s fairly safe for you to liquidate everything you have of value and place it on the Steelers.
It is nice to see that President Obama is being flexible and pragmatic about his policies, but we have already seen an awful lot of backtracking from him and we are not even into February yet.
The questions this raises for me are the following:
Did Obama fail to recognize the ramifications of using highly protectionist rhetoric during a time of a global economic downturn?
Does he understand that if we enact protectionist economic policies that our trade partners would retaliate?
Was he hoping to just slide this measure through, hoping no one would notice it was in there?
After his inability to express the content of his first two Presidential orders to the media, did he even know that this measure was part of the bill?
Again, it is nice to see some flexibility from President Obama. However, I am beginning to wonder how much of this backtracking is flexibility and how much is ineptitude.
Of all of President Bush’s “sins” in the eyes of those on the Left, his supposed barrage on our personal freedoms was certainly one of their most despised.
According to these people, free speech, the very foundation of our republic, was under constant attack by President Bush and his evil henchmen, with laws and programs like the Patriot Act and the NAS wiretaps.
Judging by the recent deeds and words of those on the Left, however, you’d think that they were quite fond of restricting personal freedoms, particularly free speech.
You can see this is numerous arenas, but especially over the country’s radio waves.
There is now a debate whether the “Fairness Doctrine” should be reinstated due to the utter dominance of conservative talk radio. Liberals claim that the country needs the Fairness Doctrine to level the playing field regarding the talk radio industry.
If you are not familiar with it, the Fairness Doctrine is not really a document. It is an abandoned policy by the FCC to regulate the content of the nation’s broadcasters to ensure both sides of an issue are heard.
While on paper, this policy seems to make sense, in the real world, it doesn’t hold water. To support this policy, one must believe that, in this case, radio stations are colluding to stop liberal viewpoints from being discussed.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There’s one simple reason radio stations air so much conservative programming…it’s profitable.
What the liberals that support the Fairness Doctrine fail to understand is that conservative talk radio is wildly popular and liberal talk radio simply isn’t. This is not an opinion formed by my conservative ideologies; this is a fact…just look at the ill-conceived Air America and the enormous contracts of conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
If conservative talk radio was not a cash cow for radio stations, they would pull it in a second and broadcast more listener-friendly programming to drive ratings.
Believe me, if there were any liberal talk radio hosts that were as popular and generated the same ratings as their conservative counterparts, there would be more airtime given to them.
That’s not what Dick Durbin, John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi would lead you to believe however. They seem to believe that conservative radio is yet another right-wing conspiracy to stop the free flow of ideas.
What rubbish.
An interesting closing note on this section; you don’t hear liberals trying to extend the Fairness Doctrine to apply to television, magazines or newspapers.
Hmmm... I wonder why.
That’s all for now folks. Until next time, take care and be well.
Is this today’s version of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? Good God, I certainly hope not.
Yeah, let’s hinder international trade during a global economic downturn; that makes a lot of sense.
Again, the Left is doing it’s best to not, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, “let a serious crisis go to waste” by masking their intentions of punishing corporations as “patriotism”.
It lists some proposed questions that he would like to see senators ask Leon Panetta, President Obama’s choice to lead the CIA.
Here are some of the best ones:
• Last year you wrote in the Washington Monthly that even if waterboarding could stop the next terrorist attack or suicide bomber, it should not be permitted. According to our intelligence community, waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques President Obama has banned helped stop a number of terrorist attacks, including a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles and a plot to fly passenger planes into Heathrow Airport and the Canary Wharf in London. Knowing these facts, do you still believe waterboarding should not be permitted under any circumstances? And if so, which of these attacks would you prefer had not been stopped?
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the mastermind of 9/11 — reportedly underwent waterboarding while in CIA custody. Since you believe waterboarding is torture, doesn't it follow that the evidence against Mohammed should be thrown out under the "exclusionary rule" and his case dismissed?
• Since 9/11, the CIA has successfully conducted targeted killings of senior al-Qaeda leaders by armed unmanned aerial vehicles. Will the CIA continue to use these tactics under your leadership? And if so, why is it acceptable for the CIA to conduct targeted killings of senior al-Qaeda leaders, but unacceptable to question senior al-Qaeda leaders using enhanced interrogation techniques?
• President Obama has pledged to intensify the hunt for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. If another senior al-Qaeda leader is captured, what will you do with him now that Guantanamo Bay and the CIA's secret prisons will be shuttered? What will you do when that terrorist — with intelligence on plots to attack America — refuses to talk? And if an attack that could have been prevented by enhanced interrogation techniques takes place, will you accept personal responsibility?
Please read the entire article, as it is an outstanding read.
The Obama administration’s “stimulus package” was just passed by the House of Representatives and now heads to the Senate where it will meet little to no resistance before it is passed onto the President for his final approval.
My guess is that Obama will sign it by noon on Friday.
What are we paying for in this bill? Well, here’s a brief outline of some of the programs that are needed to “stimulate jobs” (thank you Wall Street Journal):
·$1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that has not turned a profit in 40 years
·$2 billion for child-care subsidies
·$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
·$400 million for global-warming research
·$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects
·$650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons
·$30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects
·$600 million more for the federal government to buy new cars
·$7 billion for modernizing federal buildings and facilities
·$150 million for the Smithsonian
·$81 billion for Medicaid
·$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
·$20 billion for food stamps
·$83 billion for the earned income credit for people who don't pay income tax
·$54 billion will go to federal programs that the Office of Management and Budget or the Government Accountability Office have already criticized as "ineffective" or unable to pass basic financial audits
·$66 billion more for education. That's more than the entire Education Department spent a mere 10 years ago and is on top of the doubling under President Bush.
·$335 million for sexually transmitted disease education and prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
It’s not that all of these programs are without merit; it’s just that so few of them offer the opportunity to stimulate the economy or create jobs…the supposed very point of this bill.
This is nothing more than the Obama Administration using the “economic crisis” to get his pet projects through without any questions.
Simply maddening!
If you read the linked AP story, the level of delusion of some Congressmen, notably David Obey of Wisconsin, is really quite striking.
Here are a couple of his quotes:
"Another week that we delay is another 100,000 or more people unemployed. I don't think we want that on our consciences."
React: First, does he have any factual evidence to back up this number or is this just him spit balling? You know when President Bush was in office, a statement like that would have been categorized as a “scare tactic”. Not now though. These irresponsible figures are the “cold-hard facts”.
"They don't look like Herbert Hoover, I guess, but there are an awful lot of people in this chamber who think like Herbert Hoover."
React: Perhaps Obey would like to read some recent economic studies on the Great Depression and how it was FDR and his spending programs, programs that eerily resemble this spending plan, that turned a garden variety recession into a nearly decade and a half depression that was only rescued by World War II.
I’m sure he didn’t have time to read any of those studies, as he was hard at work getting this bill passed. After all, I’m sure he wouldn’t want any more lost jobs on his conscience.
That’s all for now folks. Until next time, take care and be well.
I guess we’ll have to make due with $200 million for the National Mall, $150 million for Coast Guard work on navigation hazards and $360 million for child care at military bases.
According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, a mere $26 billion of the House stimulus bill's $355 billion in new spending would actually be spent in the current fiscal year, and just $110 billion would be spent by the end of 2010. This is highly embarrassing given that Congress's justification for passing this bill so urgently is to help the economy right now, if not sooner.
Phew! And I thought the stimulus package would be misguided and inefficient!
It appears that President Obama wants to eliminate space weaponry from the U.S.’s defense program.
My question is…why?
Why should we categorically eliminate an entire array of weapons that may keep us safe and prevent a terrorist attack or even an attack from a hostile nation?
I am sure most of you have already heard about the girl’s high school basketball game that ended in a 100-0 rout a couple of weeks back. For those of you who have not, on January 13, DallasAcademy and CovenantSchool played an intra-conference girl’s, high school basketball game in the Dallas, Texas area.
DallasAcademy is a very small school for developmentally challenged (Dyslexia and ADD for example) girls. In fact, only 20 girls attend the school, eight of them playing on the basketball team.
CovenantSchool won the game by using some questionable actions that did not exactly scream sportsmanship, like continuing to shoot 3-pointers in the fourth quarter, pressing DallasAcademy well into the second half and celebrating on the court when they scored their 100th point of the game.
Now the media has been in an uproar over this. The coach for CovenantSchool, Micah Grimes, has been fired after refusing to apologize for the lopsided victory. The principal of CovenantSchool even offered to forfeit the game, an act that makes, literally, no sense to me. What would that even accomplish?
Maybe I am insensitive, but I do not understand the outrage here.
Were the coach and players for CovenantSchool jags? Of course they were, but when is being a jag a crime? Did they win with sportsmanship and dignity? Absolutely not, but that is certainly not a new phenomenon either…in sporting events or in life in general.
Listen, I’ve been on the wrong side of many routs in my day and I do sympathize with the girls from DallasAcademy. The St. Veronica Vulcans, my grade school basketball team, were regularly killed in the vast majority of our basketball games (yes, you did read that correctly, my grade school mascot was a Vulcan…live long and prosper indeed!) and I turned out alright. I mean, if this loss is the worst thing to happen to these girls, they will live unbelievably wonderful lives.
I think this is just the latest example of our society’s misguided attempt to artificially inflate the self-esteem of children.
You see it all the time now. Events where everyone gets a trophy, athletic games where scores are not kept and mercy rules all have good intentions, but I think do more harm than good.
By eliminating losses, you rob kids of the thrill of victory. By praising everyone, you neglect the kids that succeed. By rewarding mediocrity and failure, you denigrate excellence and achievement.
Additionally, if people do not learn how to handle losses or disappointments during fairly insignificant events like childhood sporting events, how are they going to handle real losses and real disappointments later in life that do matter, like missing out on a job, not being accepted to their dream college or when a relationship disintegrates?
To me, there were great lessons taught to everyone during this game.
The girls at DallasAcademy learned that sometimes, life can be incredibly cruel and you are not always going to get your way. The best thing to do in those situations is do your best and figure out how to do better next time.
The girls at CovenantSchool learned that humility, dignity and grace are far more valuable and difficult to gain than a win in a high school basketball game. They will also learn, very soon I suspect, that what goes around comes around as well.
Micah Grimes (what a perfect name for the villain of this story, by the way) learned that you should admit when you are wrong and seek forgiveness. He also learned that nobody likes it when you rout a bunch of developmentally challenged high school girls either.
I realize the conundrum parents and league officials face when dealing with kids at young ages, because you do not want them humiliated or shown up. However, I also think that kids are far more resilient than what most adults realize and learning a lesson or two will do more good than the harm caused by a lopsided defeat…even one that’s 100-0.
That’s all for now folks. Until next time, take care and be well.
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