AFCC Championship Game

Finally calmed down enough to comment on the Steelers so-called AFCC game. What an embarrassment. Here's the rant:

The Steelers have equal or better talent than the Cheatriots, but that talent wasn't used properly by the coaching staff who remains unable to make in-game adjustments (like the Ravens game when he ran up the middle the entire game when it was clearly being shut down). Granted there were some TD drops by the receivers in the AFCC game, but the planning was atrocious and Bill Bellicheat made Tomlin and company look ridiculous.

Immature players who have to make the first down sign or celebrate a tackle when they're down by 21 points. That drives me nuts. Scoreboard,idiot! Maybe they're too busy on Facebook Live to care. And why does the coach put up with the juvenile antics? Bet you won't see that stuff from Belichick's team since it's not tolerated.

And let us not forget that a Hall of Fame QB's best years are being wasted by an OC and coach whose talent is suspect at this point. But Coach Cool Shades wears neat sunglasses, so there's that.

Starting a WR (Sammie Coates), who can't catch a cold since breaking his fingers or hands or whatever earlier in the year, over some impressive rookies or solid veterans (Heyward-Bey, for example). When WR is one of the deepest talent positions on the team, why start the crippled guy?

Then there's the best running back in the league who can't stay healthy (when he's not getting 4 game suspensions for wacky weed.) and said in a post-game media interview that he was hurt before the game. Smart move, dude. Another team just lost a 2nd round draft pick next year for not disclosing an injury. Go back to making your rap videos.

I'm especially disappointed that the team didn't win this one for their Hall of Fame 38 year old linebacker (who is still the biggest bad-ass on the field despite his age) who hopefully will come back for one more year.  His skill is rushing the passer, yet he gets put in coverage. What the heck were you thinking? Can we get a real Defensive Coordinator, please?

So to sum up, there were problems with execution by the players, especially the offense, but the coaching staff's job is to put players in the best position to win and they clearly didn't do that.  I mean, really, having your corners play 10 yds. off the receivers in a zone (with almost no blitzing) when you're being dinked and dunked to death? Why can a casual fan sitting at home see this but the professionals can't? Whatever happened to the smash mouth Blitzburgh defense of years past? How about man-to-man/press/bump and run coverage?  At least this way you're covering somebody instead of leaving opposing WRs alone in the end zone and giving their QB 8-10 seconds to throw the ball.

Rant over. There's plenty of time to heal and look forward to training camp next year (I mean the fans, not the players), but the window is closing fast for this team to win another Super Bowl. Go Falcons!

Crowd Sizes

Lots of hub bub about Friday's inauguration crowd compared to Obama's, as well as Saturday's Women's March.

Of course Obama's inauguration crowd was bigger. Trump voters actually had to work on a Friday to support the other half of the country who is unemployed, while it was just another day in welfare paradise for Obama's crowd.

As to the Women's March, it was on a Saturday, so of course crowds are going to be bigger than other, weekday events. Duh. Yet we have the biased media reporting these things like they are extraordinary. I'm not surprised.

Bye, Felicia

In the same speech, he mentioned his administration was scandal-free. Let's see:

Scandals
The Worst Perversion Yes, there were Obama-administration scandals. Many, in fact.
          

By Kevin D. Williamson — January 17, 2017

          

The Obama administration was full of scandal, though we have a lazy and partisan news media that is determined to see no scandal in it.

The lame-duck columns have been nearly unanimous on the point: Barack Obama is remarkable among recent presidents for having been utterly untouched by scandal, personal or political.

The personal can be conceded: There is no serious allegation that President Obama suffered from the liberated appetites of a Bill Clinton, and the White House interns have by all accounts gone unmolested. But this is hardly remarkable: There were no such allegations about George W. Bush, either, or about George H. W. Bush, or about Ronald Reagan, or Jimmy Carter. Richard Nixon’s name is a byword for scandal, but not scandal of that sort. Nixon’s shocking personal perversion was his taste for cottage cheese with ketchup.

So, three cheers for Barack Obama’s manful efforts to live up to the standard of Gerald Ford. Well done.

The political issue is a different question entirely.

Not only was the Obama administration marked by scandal of the most serious sort — perverting the machinery of the state for political ends — it was on that front, which is the most important one, the most scandal-scarred administration in modern presidential history.

For your consideration:

Under the Obama administration’s watch, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies from the BATF to the NLRB were illegally used to target and harass the president’s political enemies. The IRS targeting scandal was the most high-profile of these, but others are just as worrisome. Federal investigations and congressional oversight were obstructed, and investigators were lied to outright — a serious crime. The administration protected the wrongdoers and saw to it that they retired with generous federal pensions rather than serving federal sentences for their crimes.

The Obama administration oversaw the illegal sale of arms to Mexican traffickers for purposes that to this date have not been adequately explained, and those guns have been used to murder American law-enforcement officers.

President Obama’s secretary of state was involved in a high-profile case in which she improperly set up a private e-mail system to evade ordinary governmental oversight; she and her associates routinely misled investigators, obstructed investigations, and hid or destroyed evidence. These are all serious crimes.

The Obama administration made ransom payments to the Iranian government and lied about having done so.

Under the Obama administration, the Secret Service has been a one-agency scandal factory, from drunk agents driving their cars into White House barriers to getting mixed up with hookers in Cartagena.

Under the guise of developing “green” energy projects, the Obama administration shunted money to politically connected cronies at Solyndra and elsewhere.

Obama’s men at the Veterans Administration oversaw a system in which our servicemen lost their lives to bureaucratic incompetence and medical neglect, and then falsified records to cover it up.

Under the flimsiest of national-security pretexts, the Obama administration used the Department of Justice to spy on Fox News reporter James Rosen. It also spied on the Associated Press.

The Obama administration’s attorney general, Eric Holder, left office while being held in contempt of Congress for inhibiting the investigation of other Obama administration scandals.

But, no: No embarrassing stain on a blue dress.

Without minimizing the authentic personal degeneracy of Bill Clinton, sexual scandals are minor concerns. They become large public scandals because the numbskulls understand sex and can relate to sexual infidelity. If you’ve ever tried explaining to someone how futures trading works and watched his expression turn to that of a taxidermied mule deer, then you know why it is Bill Clinton, and not Hillary Clinton, who is the face of scandal.

It is one thing to have a degenerate president. It is something else — something far worse — to have a degenerate government. Barack Obama may have spent the past eight years as sober as a Sunday morning (his main vice, we are told, is sneaking cigarettes) and straight as a No. 2 pencil, but he leaves behind a government that is perverted.

A liberal society with decent government requires that the pursuit of political power be insulated from the exercise of political power. That is why we have a Hatch Act and why the various dreams of the would-be campaign-finance police — who would have congressmen and presidents write the rules under which congressmen and presidents may be criticized and challenged — are in reality nightmares. (Here, let us say a word of thanks for the First Amendment and Citizens United.) Having an IRS that sorts nonprofits by their political stances in order to facilitate the harassment of political rivals is in real terms far worse than anything Bill Clinton got up to with Monica Lewinsky, and far worse than the shenanigans that Gordon Liddy and the rest of the Nixon henchmen got up to in the Watergate. The BATF harassment of True the Vote and other Obama-administration enemies is the stuff of which banana republics are made. Using the machinery of the state to seek political power and to aggrandize the political power one holds is the most destructive form of political corruption there is. A sane society would prosecute it the way we prosecute murder or armed robbery. It is a scandal and more than that: It is an assault on the foundations of a free society.

The fact that the same people at CNN who were colluding with the Clinton campaign cannot see a scandal in the Obama administration does not mean that no scandal was there.

For the Democrats and their media partisans, scandals — like homelessness and war casualties — are something that happens to other people.

— Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

Podesta Emails Show How America is Run

Though this article was pre-election, it is illustrative of the corruption:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/31/the-podesta-emails-show-who-runs-america-and-how-they-do-it

Obama’s Ephemeral Legacy Anchored in Delusion

In the end America went her own way as if the Obamas had never come.

That is a paraphrase of the last sentence, “In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come," of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman's book "Sand Against the Wind -- Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45."

Like Tuchman’s description of the American experience in China, the policies of Barack ObamaBarack ObamaConway: ‘We would welcome a call’ from LewisObamas make MLK Day visit to homeless shelterBooker will attend inaugurationMORE failed largely because they “were not indigenous demands of the society and culture to which they were being offered.”

Obama ended his administration as it began, with a participation trophy. In 2009, he was given the Nobel Peace Prize for what he might do, and now, less than three weeks before he leaves office, Obama awarded himself the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service for what he didn’t do.

Delusional is the only term that I can muster to describe the chasm that has existed between what the Obama administration perceived or wanted us to believe and the actual state of the nation.

Over the course of eight years, Obama’s pronouncements steadily became, not motivational instruments or representations of a desired state of affairs, but feats of political transubstantiation, where, if he utters them, words become reality.

Reflecting upon his time in office, Obama recently noted the “extraordinary progress” the country has made over the last eight years.

Like beauty, progress is in the eye of the beholder.

Obama thinks race relations have gotten better during his administration, while 2016 polls have indicated that Americans believe race relations have gotten worse and their concern about it is at the highest level since 2001, when data were first collected.

In the political equivalent of a “Jedi Mind Trick”, Valarie Jarrett, Obama’s close friend and longtime adviser, as well as much of the main stream media, claimed that his administration “hasn’t had a scandal,” ignoring such outrages as Benghazi, the IRS fiasco, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, ObamaCare, Pigford, the Veterans Administration’s death list and others.

Obama’s “progress” no doubt includes the Democrat Party’s net loss of 1,042 congressional and state legislative seats, governorships and, finally, the presidency.

A week after the election, Obama said that Americans were “indisputably better off” because of him despite a doubling of national debt, Gross Domestic Product growth of less than 3%, a decrease in the work force participation rate, a stagnant median household income and an increase in the number of food stamp recipients by 10.7 million people, 32% higher than when he took office.

In his weekly address to the nation on Christmas Eve 2016, Barack and Michelle claimed “we made America more respected around the world.” Even college students, their core constituency, don’t believe that, seventy-three percent having said that the United States is less respected by other countries than it was in the past.

I will not mention the threat of radical Islam, because Obama thinks it doesn’t exist.

It was an administration built upon a combination of ideology and incompetence. Ultimately it became an architect of errors rather than a supplier of solutions. Final recognition of which will occur when public awareness exceeds the media’s capacity to varnish the truth.

In the end, Obama’s legacy will be his pursuit of the appearance rather than the substance of accomplishment, an illusion, as enduring as sand against the wind.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com

"Blast From the Past" Post Regarding Trayvon Martin

Since the Steelers are in the playoffs, here's a golden oldie from the dude in the Steelers cap:

Fitting tribute to the outgoing president who increased racial division, demonized cops, and changed American culture for the worse.

A Few Steelers Videos for Playoff Weekend

Re-living past glory:

Obama: A Legacy of Abject Failure & Deceit

Alas, there is little else that can be said of him and his time in office that is positive. Given the high expectations that accompanied the beginning of his Presidency, it was almost inevitable that Obama would come to disappoint in some ways. Too often, however, his promised potential proved to be unfulfilled, as the audacity of hope became but an empty pipe dream. 

 Obama the candidate promised a new bipartisan era that would heal America's divides but the country he leaves as his presidency ends is now more divided than ever. Political polarization is more pronounced than possibly it ever was before.

 In his initial years, buoyed by a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, he made little effort to be conciliatory and rammed through his signature health care reform bill without a single Republican vote. When the Republicans regained control of House in 2014 and later the Senate four years later he made no serious attempts at outreach. Gridlock between a Congress and the White House of budgetary matters did not even elicit an attempt by Obama to find middle ground. 

 When legislative initiatives such as gun control failed to secure the necessary votes to pass Obama descended to moral lecturing and at times outright pouting. 

 Stubbornness was met with stubbornness, and in later years the President increasingly resorted to rule by executive order and weakening of Congressional checks such as the filibuster. With Republicans now hold both the White House, Congress and soon to once again have a majority on the Supreme Court, the now established precedent of "I won" may very well become a nightmare for Democrats of their own making.

 Obama took something of a victory that had been achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan and replaced it with defeat born by the premature withdrawal of American troops for no other reason than a crass political desire to be done with the whole affair and, in the former's case, he facilitated the rise of the Islamic State, possibly the most heinous entity of the twenty-first century. 

 He stood by and did nothing as the Arab Spring destabilized the entire Middle East, and in those cases where he did act, such as Libya, his interventions served only to make matters worse. Iran is now on a clear road to a nuclear weapon, and Turkey - next to Israel possibly America's closest ally in the region - is now under the thumb of a soft-Islamist autocrat who increasingly is joined at the hip with Russia.

 Syria will doubtlessly be remembered as the greatest black stain upon Obama's tenure. Under his watch, a rebellion against the Al Assad regime grew into a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more. 

 Red lines were declared and then quietly ignored as they were crossed, as the chlorine gas and barrel bombs of the Damascus regime rained death from above. 

 That Aleppo, the birthplace of the rebellion and the last urban centre held by those rebels not openly aligned with Islamic State, has finally fallen only weeks prior to the forces of Al Assad backed by Russian jets and Iranian militiamen is a poignant symbol. America, for its part, has been reduced in this whole sorry affair to dispatching Obama's UN ambassador to berate Al Assad and his allies with empty declarations of "have you no shame?".

 As we say goodbye to Barack Obama, we would be forgiven for accompanying it with a corroding good riddance. His place in history, by virtue of him being the first African American president, is secure. It will be more just, however, if he is remembered for what he truly was: a failure who oversaw the decline of Pax Americana and the descent of the world in chaos.

http://www.poletical.com/obama-abject-failure.php


Obama’s Legacy Of Deceit

 In its remaining days in power, the Obama administration suddenly punished Vladimir Putin’s Russia for allegedly interfering in the U.S. presidential election. It claimed that Russian or Russian-hired hackers tapped into the records of the Democratic National Committee as well as the correspondence of John Podesta, a Clinton advisor.

 But what the Obama administration did not say was that such cyber-crimes are by now old hat. Both the Russian and Chinese governments have been hacking into far more important U.S. records and government archives for years without earning retaliation

 The administration also did not mention that the election hacking occurred largely because of Podesta’s own carelessness in using his security password. Moreover, it failed to acknowledge that the Republican National Committee was likewise targeted, but apparently had enough safeguards to prevent successful entry into its records. Finally, the administration refused to mention that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange went on the record saying that he did not receive the email trove from the Russians.

 The truth is that Obama, throughout his presidency, has appeased Putin. As president, Obama ended the previously agreed-on Eastern European missile defense; he made open-mic promises to be more flexible with Putin after his reelection; he barely responded to Russia’s aggression toward Crimea and Ukraine; and he constantly criticized both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney for being inordinately tough on Russia.

 Until now, he saw no reason to stop enabling Russia. Had Hillary Clinton won the election, Putin’s alleged hacking would not have earned any administration attention. But this time around, an emboldened Putin allegedly went too far and crossed the only red line that Obama might have enforced by supposedly enabling the release of information that might have turned off some voters on Clinton.

http://www.hoover.org/research/obamas-legacy-deceit

Deplorable Americans Decided to Drain the Swamp

Of the many post-election articles I read, this one generally sums up things best for me.


By Todd Starnes

Our long national nightmare is over and the Republic has been saved.

I’m originally from the Deep South. My father, who passed away in 2006, was a blue-collar worker. We lived paycheck-to-paycheck. We went to church on Sunday. We lived a quiet life – just like many families in so-called “Fly-Over Country.”

My father was a member of the Silent Majority and had he been alive he would’ve cast his vote for Donald J. Trump.

I’ve lived in New York City for more than a decade now – and I’ve seen firsthand the contempt for country folks like my father – people from Rural America.

As I wrote in my book, “God Less America,” I feel like a Duck Dynasty guy living in a Miley Cyrus world – where right is wrong, wrong is right – it’s as if our values have been turned upside down.

President Obama called us bitter. He said we were the kinds of people who cling to guns and religion.

Time and time again he stood on foreign soil and apologized for our nation. And to this day it remains unclear whether he believes the United States is the most exceptional nation on Earth.

Hillary Clinton called us deplorable – irredeemable.


"To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it."

The only thing deplorable was Hillary Clinton's basket of grossly generalistic comments.

"And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up," she went on to say. "He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric."

Her campaign portrayed Conservative Catholicism as a “bastardization of the faith” and seemed to imply that Evangelicals are a bunch of impoverished country bumpkins.

We were mocked by Hollywood and dismissed by Academics. We were marginalized by the media – bullied and belittled by sex and gender revolutionaries.

But all that changed on Election Day – when Donald Trump became a champion for the Silent Majority. He gave us a voice.  And now the Silent Majority is silent no more.

We the People have decided that it’s time to drain the swamp.

It’s time to restore traditional values. It’s time to protect the Constitution. It’s time to defend our sovereignty. It’s time to save unborn babies.

It’s time to stand up for the American working man and bring jobs back from China and Mexico. It’s time to eradicate the scourge of Obamacare.

And it’s time to hire the bricklayers so they can start building that giant wall.

The Deplorable Americans have spoken – and on the eight day of November in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Sixteen – we have decided to Make America Great Again.

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