I picked three games correctly against the points, only Indy at Baltimore surprised me.
I'd take both visiting teams tomorrow, setting up a battle of New Orleans and New England in the Super Bowl. I'm more confident on New England, somewhat less on New Orleans. Don't bet against Tom Brady in the playoffs!
If Chicago does win, it would set up a rematch of the game 21 years ago where the 1985 Bears became the second (and last) team to go 15-1 in the regular season and win the Super Bowl. Oddly enough, the first team to do it was the 1984 San Francisco 49ers.
Conference Championship Trivia: Can you name the only quarterback to start and lead his team to wins in both the AFC and NFC Championship games? Can you name the only quarterback to start and lead his team to losses in both the AFC and NFC Championship games?
I heard about this in an email from a friend and didn't know quite what to make of it. Although the Lefty bloggers are moaning about how Fox is slandering Obama, they miss that they're also getting in a mention that Hillary's camp leaked this information.
Ron Paul: Things Will Be Better Now the Democrats Are In Charge
You know, I was pleased when Ron Paul joined the Republican Party, and welcomed his idea of pushing libertarian ideas into the Republican mainstream. But... he's showing his kooky side right now.
Dr. Ron Paul, Texas Congressman exploring a run for President, appeared on The Alex Jones Show Wednesday [MP3 link] and had the following to say about 9/11:
"CALLER: I want a complete, impartial, and totally independent investigation of the events of September 11, 2001 . I'm tired of this bogus garbage about terrorism. Ask Michael Meacher about how he feels about this bogus war on terrorism. Can you comment on that please?
HON. DR. RON PAUL: Well, that would be nice to have. Unfortunately, we don't have that in place. It will be a little bit better now with the Democrats now in charge of oversight. But you know, for top level policy there's not a whole lot of difference between the two policies so a real investigation isn't going to happen. But I think we have to keep pushing for it. And like you and others, we see the investigations that have been done so far as more or less cover-up and no real explanation of what went on.
JACK BLOOD, GUEST HOST: I think it's fair to say that of all the candidates out there, the one most interested in reopening the investigation and clearing the questions is Dr. Paul; and you should be commended for that.
Our buddy Pam Meister has an excellent column in the American Thinker today on the effort to create the European Union.
In other words, Europeans are building a common society not as Europeans, but as non-Americans, much in the way that John Kerry ran for president in 2004 - not on any solid Democratic plan, but as a non-George Bush.
As John Kerry lost his 2004 presidential bid, will Europeans fail in their bid to become a solid European community?
Remember that in blogging, you are not supposed to be unbiased. You're not a straight reporter of the days events. Readers want you to deliver information to them, but they also want to know what you think about it. Feel free to get snarky; snark definitely succeeds in blogging.
There's a sports talk radio show called The Jungle with Jim Rome, and although I can only listen to it in small doses, he has excellent advice for bloggers: Have a take, and don't suck. Rome doesn't want callers who call in and ask him "What do you think about Peyton Manning versus Tom Brady?" He wants people who tell him what they think of Tom Terrific and Peyton the Choker (Or Tom The Lucky and Peyton the Unfortunate).
Your posts will generally be better the more there is of you in them. If you have a creative spark, this is where you can let it shine. Are you funny? Sharp and caustic? Good with Photoshop? Erudite in your subject matter? Be a show-off!
Note that putting the "you" in your blog is not limited to opinion. You can also add work to your posts. For example, last year I took on a claim by the American Prospect which was repeated by NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, that Jack Abramoff's clients had sharply reduced their contributions to Democrats after Abramoff began representing them. I proved that in fact Abramoff's clients increased their donations to both Republicans and Democrats sharply after he took over. Result? Both the Prospect and Krugman were forced to issue corrections to their articles. This took a lot of work with a spreadsheet and analysis of various sources. But it paid off in spades as my blog got cited in the National Review Online among other places.
Yes, we all link to stories that we find interesting, but if you add something of yourself to your posts, you'll be far more likely to attract attention.
And attracting attention will be the focus of my next post.
Jack Cashill looks into Sandy Berger's pants and thinks he's figured out what Berger was Bergling.
To understand what that “smoking gun” might have been and how it involved Clarke and Berger, let us turn to the fateful summer of 1996. At that time Col. Buzz Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high security assignments. One morning in "late-summer,” Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka."
As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. "I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it." The President’s hand written comments on the documents verified the same.
The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef’s uncle.
Understandably, the 9-11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Bush National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was asked on her first real question: “Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?”
I think that's right on the money. It was a big mistake, because the 9-11 Commission (rightly in my estimation) did not spend a lot of time pointing fingers and assigning blame, which is why the Jersey Girls were so bitter about the report--they wanted heads to roll.
St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. I assume that St. Jude is watching over John Kerry's 2008 presidential campaign, and a (probably small) group of football fans in Chicago.
I'm going to do a series of posts on blogging, called Blogging 101.
The first advice I would offer an aspiring blogger, is to specialize. Rather than blogging about dozens of different topics, blog about about a few. The advantage of this is that it turns you very quickly into an expert on those topics. And expertise on a topic that's hot is what drives readers and other bloggers to your blog, and results in radio, TV and magazine interviews. I've been blogging on the 9-11 "Truth" Movement on the Screw Loose Change blog for about 9 months now, and my work there has been mentioned in Time, US News & World Report, Vanity Fair and the Sunday Times of London. Heady stuff!
Obviously, specialize in topics that you find interesting; if you don't like reading about Barack Obama, you won't be able to interest your readers either. Note however that you don't have to like Barack Obama himself; indeed a snarky blog on Obama would probably attract a good deal of readers, just as the Kerry Haters blog did in 2004.
More that one topic is certainly a good idea; football-only blogs don't get a lot of readership in April, and Obama mania may not last long. But be careful that there is some reasonable overlap between your topics in readership, or you may find the football fans turned off by your mockery of Obama, and your Obama mockery fans turned off by your opinions on Bill Parcells' playcalling.
Remember that you are trying to present yourself as an expert in the topics you're blogging on; that means that you have to do the work. Learn as much as you can about your topic, both online from in books/magazines/TV. One trick that I've picked up can be quite useful. Go to Google. Type in "Barack Obama" (or any other chosen topic) in the search feature. Then Click on the News Tab at the top of Google, which will take you to this page. Scroll down to the bottom. See this?
New! More ways to find the latest on Barack-Obama:
* Search blogs * Create an email alert
Create an email alert (requires registration with Google). Then, every time a story is printed in just about any news source, you will receive an email. This helps you keep on top of your topic.
Also click on the search blogs category; this will tell you who else is keeping tabs on the Illinois senator. These are the blogs you will be checking in with regularly to see what they're saying about Barack. There are other blog resources as well; Technorati and TruthLaidBear are especially helpful, enough so that I will devote a post to using their features.
Police were watching and photographing five of the men charged with plotting to bomb London's transport system more than a year before the failed attacks, when they were camping in northwestern England, prosecution witnesses said Wednesday.
One of the alleged plotters also was questioned by British police as he tried to board a flight to Pakistan the same year, but was later allowed to travel.
Ramzi Mohammed, 25, was shown boarding the train and turning his back to a mother with a child in a pushchair before allegedly trying, and failing, to detonate a bomb in his rucksack.
Here's a picture of the six men accused; Mohammed is the top middle:
Jonah Goldberg gets in a few whacks on John Kerry. Good timing, because once the campaign really gets underway, nobody's going to be talking about the Botoxicated Brahmin.
Despite enormous name recognition; despite the kind of sympathetic coverage that only alleged victims of the “Republican attack machine” get; despite constant efforts to stay in the news, a stockpile of cash from his wife, and his last campaign; and despite enormously impressive hair; he is near the bottom in all the important rankings of serious candidates.
And when I say near the bottom, I mean if he claws his way up a bit, he’ll be at the bottom.
In November, Kerry came in dead last in a Quinnipiac poll asking respondents whether they had warm feelings for various prominent politicians. Kerry came in around “arctic.” The National Journal asked its brain trust of political insiders (consultants, graybeards, et al.) to list their top 10 Democratic prospects for ‘08. Kerry came in behind Sen. Chris Dodd — and Dodd came in 10th. All Kerry got was footnote status as an also-ran.
Heheh, behind Dodd? That's sort of the definition of dead in the water.
Obviously a lot of conservatives were getting excited about Chuck Hagel, wondering if this bold new face of the Republican Party had a chance to win the nomination in 2008. And then Robert Scheer endorsed him.
CHUCK HAGEL for president! If it ever narrows down to a choice between him and some Democratic hack who hasn't the guts to fundamentally challenge the president on Iraq, then the conservative Republican from Nebraska will have my vote. Yes, the war is that important, and the fact that Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, the leading Democratic candidate, still can't -- or won't -- take a clear stand on the occupation is insulting to the vast majority of voters who have.
Of course, Scheer isn't serious; he's just using the Republican to bash the insufficiently liberal (in his estimation) Hillary.
Moo-On Planning Attack Ads Against McCain During Republican Primaries?
Buried near the end of a post griping about how John McCain has supposedly flip-flopped on the War in Iraq (actually they show that McCain was against the invasion back in 1990), get this bit:
To further bring home this point Moveon.org will be releasing television ads in New Hampshire and Iowa, also known as McCain's two paths to paradise, pointing out his many flip flops on war and his weak case for escalation.
Sounds like the cows over at Moo-On know who's going to be the toughest candidate for the Democrats to beat in 2008.
U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter's long-shot bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination got a boost over the weekend when he emerged on top in a straw poll of Republican precinct committeemen in Arizona's most-populated county.
Hunter, R-El Cajon, got 96 votes among the 458 ballots in the non-binding poll of Maricopa County party officials asked to list their first choice for president.
Hunter easily beat Arizona's own U.S. Sen. John McCain, considered a front-runner in the GOP presidential race, who drew a comparatively paltry 50 votes. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney came in second in Saturday's poll with 82 first-place votes.
Hunter remains very unlikely to win the nomination; I can't remember the last member of the House of Representatives to even win a primary in the presidential sweepstakes.
Love his small-L libertarian ideas but hate his big-T Truther notions. "Contrived, Gulf of Tonkin-type incident"? Are you sure this isn't Ru Paul speaking?
Who is he? The media, in their rush to anoint him as the "great black hope" of the Democrats, are having a hard time deciding which icon he most resembles. Is he the new Jack Kennedy?
"I was in the hall when he gave that speech and I heard a future president," says Mr Luntz. "Here was the American dream embodied in a young man running for Senate, a new Jack or Bobby Kennedy."
Both Reagan and Obama delivered a single speech that captured the public's attention and catapulted them to the front rank of national figures. On Oct. 27, 1964, Reagan as a private, albeit well-known, citizen spoke in a paid political telecast on behalf of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy. The Arizona senator lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson a few days later, but Reagan--telling voters, "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny"--became fixed in their minds as a political force on the strength of his message and delivery.
In much the same way, Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention made people take notice of, in a phrase from his speech, "a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too."
