Author: VD

1. The call on the fumble recovery in the Vikings-Packers game was unconscionable. The Viking had the ball in his possession on the ground. He was clearly down. And if the ball can be taken away at any time even after a player is down, then why doesn’t the fact that the Vikings ended up with the ball and handed it to the official come into play?

2. There’s no substitute for a dependable running game. Teams that think 3rd-and-2 is a passing down aren’t going to go far in the playoffs.

3. St. Louis owns Seattle. There’s just no other explanation.

4. Atlanta is winning, but Michael Vick can’t possibly be considered a great quarterback, let alone a superstar, when he can’t find his wide receivers. There’s a word for quarterbacks that rely so heavily on their tight ends – mediocre. Do you think Randy McMichael would have such big numbers if it weren’t for the fact that Jay Fiedler and AJ Feeley can’t get the ball to Chris Chambers?

5. Why is it that NFL coaches can master the intricacies of the on-field chess game, but can’t figure out simple clock management?

6. Denny Green has put together a surprisingly good squad in Arizona. If he can find a running back, they could make some noise next year. A better quarterback might not hurt, but as we all know, it’s THE SYSTEM that is the star when Denny’s the coach.

7. I’m not impressed by Philadelphia’s big win in Dallas. The Cowboys are in melt-down mode and Terrell Owens reminds me of the Irish guy on my soccer team a few summers ago. He would always score three goals against the weak sister teams, but disappeared entirely against the good teams. The Eagles will certainly make the playoffs, but I won’t be surprised if they get upset before reaching the Super Bowl.

8. Jack del Rio is a surprisingly good coach. I didn’t expect anything out of Jacksonville this year, but they are a solid team that quietly overperforms, rather like Carolina last year. As for Carolina, no team is going to survive three running backs going on IR, except perhaps the Vikings.

9. Are you enjoying the 49ers collapse as much as I am? I don’t hate them, I just want to see them go through a decade or two of irrelevance. Speaking as someone who was forced to spend plenty of time out in the Bay Area ten years ago, it’s just a sheer pleasure to think about those smug looks turning into dismay.

10. With eight of the ten top teams in the league hailing from the AFC, things don’t look good for the stock market next year.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and three other Cabinet members have resigned, escalating the shake-up of President Bush’s second-term team.

I’m not saying that I’m now expecting a new era of peace, sanity and a grim determination to do whatever needs to be done, but getting rid of the most overrated Secretary of State in the long, ignoble history of useless bureaucracy is never a bad thing.

If only he was taking his entire department with him. To Cuba.

William Safire, the conservative voice on the New York Times Op-Ed page for more than three decades, will end his regular column in early 2005, a Times spokeswoman said Monday. “He’s written it for a long time and has been talking to [Times Publisher] Arthur [Sulzberger Jr.] about this for a year and a half,” said spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. “His last column will be Jan. 24.”

Safire, 74, joined the paper in 1973 after working as a speechwriter for President Nixon, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for distinguished commentary. He plans to continue his Sunday New York Times Magazine “On Language” feature, which began in 1979, Mathis said, but he will end his syndicated column.

Somehow, I don’t think I’m on the short list for a replacement….

M1A1 opens the envelope:

You are hereby awarded a Rory for the best use of a reference to Wonko The Sane in a non-blog opinion column.

Fuck off, M1A1….

From Sports Illustrated:

Oklahoma-Nebraska [NCAA football game] attendee Tom Brokaw, a guest of OU president David Boren, was booed by the Sooners crowd when introduced Saturday night.

They don’t hide their contempt for us. So, why should we bother? I would have loved to see the look on Brokaw’s face.

290 of the nation’s Catholic bishops will meet at the Capitol Hyatt for their yearly business meeting and to tie up loose ends on the massive sexual-abuse crisis that has shaken the U.S. Catholic Church to its core in the past two years. Although it’s been less than a year since the church revealed that there were 10,667 cases of abuse committed by 4,392 priests in a 50-year period, the message at the meeting will be that the crisis is under control. But it’s far from over, says a local Catholic priest who says the true source of the crisis is a priesthood that is “honeycombed” with homosexual clerics, especially in the Diocese of Arlington.

However, attempts by the Rev. James Haley, 48, to persuade his bishop of the problem have backfired. After hearing from the priest about numerous instances of homosexual activity among diocesan clergy, Arlington Bishop Paul Loverde ordered the priest silenced Oct. 23, 2001. This “precept of silence” — usually only employed during church trial proceedings — is rarely used to silence a whistleblower….

Father Haley says his only crime is his insistence that homosexual priests, not solely pedophiles, are at the root of the sexual-abuse crisis. The Catholic priesthood is demoralized, he says, by groups of homosexual clerics who control who gets admitted to seminary, which men get nominated for bishop and which priests get the plum parishes. Based on his 17 years in the priesthood, he estimates that 60 percent of the Diocese of Arlington’s 127 diocesan priests are homosexuals, which is high compared with national estimates of 30 percent to 50 percent from other authorities on the priesthood.

I’ve never been one to subscribe to anti-Catholicism, although like Big Chilly, there is considerable humor to be found in referring to our Catholic friends as papists. It is more the church hierarchy’s response to the crisis of homosexual abuse in the priesthood than the incidence of abuse itself that is making me wonder if perhaps those that I’d always considered to be Protestant whackos might not be a little closer to the truth than I’d previously thought.

Then, too, there was this recent statement with regards to the unlamented dead terrorist: “Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a statement that Arafat

‘was a leader of great charisma, who loved his people and who sought to guide them toward national independence. May God, in his mercy, receive the soul of the illustrious deceased’….”

This truly does not strike me as an organization that is on the same side I’m on.

From the New York Times:

If George Lakoff had his way, the Kerry campaign would have run a commercial attacking the “baby tax.” Dr. Lakoff, a Berkeley linguistics professor and Kerry campaign adviser, wanted to divide the interest on the national debt by the number of Americans born each year. The result, $85,000 per newborn, say, would have been handed to a baby in the form of a bill, and the baby would have started to cry. That, Dr. Lakoff says, “frames” the issue “in a way people can understand.

“Framing” is a hot topic among political junkies and in the blogo-sphere right now, thanks to Dr. Lakoff. In “Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” his surprise best seller, Dr. Lakoff argues that Republicans have been winning elections because they have been better than Democrats at framing issues – from taxes, to abortion, to national security – in ways that resonate with core American values.

As I wrote today, you either have to be an idiot, a utopian socialist or a maleducated ur-idiot in order to actively support the modern Democratic party. Dr. Lakoff demonstrates this rather neatly with his example cited above. Does he really think that the “Baby Tax” is a winning frame for the party of big government and increased government spending? Where in the evil name of the GAO does he think that debt was acquired in the first place, at Neiman Marcus?

North American national borders would be virtually eliminated under plans being considered by senior business and political leaders from Canada, the United States and Mexico for a “NAFTA-plus,” continent-wide, customs-free zone with a common approach to trade, energy, immigration, law enforcement and security.

A tri-national task force, chaired by former Liberal Party deputy prime minister John Manley, with the full backing of all three governments, is plotting the roadmap for this new, bolder alliance meant to compete with the European Union. William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts and Pedro Aspe, former Mexican finance minister, join Manley on the panel that reports directly to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The mission has the formal blessing of Tom Ridge, U.S. Homeland Security secretary, who is close with President Bush. The elimination of borders along the lines of the EU experiment seems to be high on the agenda of the panel.

“I think we’ve had 11 years of incrementalism, and during that time we’ve seen the EU expand its borders, eliminate borders among (member) countries and launch a common currency,” explains Manley in the diplomatic magazine Embassy. “We’re going to have to provide a vision that is more bold than incrementalism.

I warned you about this a few months ago. The EU took fifty years to reach its current point of a constitutional super-state, while we’re only ten years into the AU program that is being pushed by both factions of the bi-factional ruling party. Democrats may be morons, by nature or maleducated nurture,as I wrote today, but what excuse do Republicans have as their leaders continue to shred the Constitution?

There may well be another war to “preserve the Union”. I just wonder how many patriotic conservatives realize yet that the Patriot Act was referring to its targets, not its purpose.

Last week: 7-7. Overall: 74-54. Fantasy: 4-4-1

W-Pittsburgh Steelers over Cleveland Browns

W-Philadelphia Eagles over Dallas Cowboys

W-Indianapolis Colts over Houston Texans

W-New England Patriots over Buffalo Bills

L-Kansas City Chiefs over New Orleans Saints

W-Green Bay Packers over Minnesota Vikings

L-Tennessee Titans over Chicago Bears

L-Seattle Seahawks over St. Louis Rams

W-Baltimore Ravens over New York Jets

W-Atlanta Falcons over Tampa Bay Buccaneers

W-Arizona Cardinals over New York Giants

W-Cincinnati Bengals over Washington Redskins

L-Detroit Lions over Jacksonville Jaguars

W-Carolina Panthers over San Francisco 49ers

Bloody refs. There’s no way the Packers recovered Ferguson’s fumble on the kickoff return. However, Daunte’s shovel pass to Onterrio was the nail in the coffin in my fantasy game – I was playing Chokechain – so there was some small consolation in leaving my pick-16 partner and last year’s champ in serious playoff jeopardy at 4-6. He deserved to lose for having insisted on putting the Chiefs-Saints so high.