Monday, February 06, 2017

Big Come-back Win for Patriots in Superbowl

Yesterday afternoon I tuned in FOX a little before three and they had a salute to the Hall of Fame football players from Black colleges.  There were six who are no longer with us and there were another eighteen who were introduced live.  They sang America the Beautiful and the Star Spangled Banner.  I went for a cigarette and missed the George Bush coin toss but I saw the replay of it later.  Everybody knew the Patriots would win but how they won was very unorthodox.  I went to dinner and missed a chunk of the first half.  We had beef chow mein with chunks of beer and stuff over these Chinese style pasta noodles, which they have been using lately.  I think my plate was less filled than other people’s.  At any rate I was still hungry after eating the meal and we had canned peaches with whipped cream for dessert.   Atlanta got off to a 21 to nothing head start.  The score was 21 to 3 at half time with New England scoring a field goal.  There was the usual protracted wait before the half time show.  Lady Ga-ga gave a good performance, not that I was familiar with her music.  There were a lot of visual and pyrotechnic effects and there were no live vocals.  You could tell she was faking the keyboard playing because it was playing while she did other things.   I went for a cigarette.  Joe is for the Atlanta Falcons as was I and Jeff was routing for the Patriots.  The Falcons scored again in the third quarter making it 28 to 3 at one point leading by 25.  Then the Patriots scored their first official touchdown and missed the extra point.  They botched the on-side kick.  But then things went crazy.  The Falcons never scored again.  After one more Patriots score the commentators said “The Patriots have narrowed it to a two score game” trailing by sixteen.  It so happens that they scored on the two points afterward- - both times.  When the lead was eight points Atlanta marched down the field and were nearly on the twenty yard line ready to kick a field goal to put the game out of reach with time running out.  But they were sacked over ten years and a holding call gave them another ten point loss and they were on the 45 yard line.  To make a long story short the Patriots died it up with less than two minutes to go.  The score was now 28 to 28.  I went for a smoke knowing the Patriots had won the OT coin toss.  When I returned they were on the two yard line and scored and the winning score was 34 to 28.   I wasn’t in any mood to stick around for the trophy presentation.  This was the first time there was a come-back from more than ten points in a Superbowl game and also the first Overtime in a Superbowl game.

Then I had it on Sixty Minutes and it was the “Hamilton” play musical.  I didn’t know that the reason why Hamilton never became President was because of a sexual scandal.  After this it was the Pope’s personal choir which sings in the Sistine Chapel.  It’s a men and boys choir with no women.  They have to learn not to sing too loud or “overbearing” but to have that angelic, heavenly sound.  They talked at length about the rigorous training the boys undergo in their section of the choir.  After that it was NCIS.  Bill bought some cookies and gave me seven of them, which I was happy to have because I was so hungry.  

Donald Trump made the statement that Vladimir Putin isn’t so bad.  Yes, he’s a killer but the United States isn’t innocent when it comes to killing.  That’s almost treasonous to the Republican point of view because it’s admitting we kill innocent people in our wars.  Others were outraged by Trump’s statement.  People also took offense to Trump’s use of the term “so called judge” to question the judicial credentials of the judge who ruled against him on the travel ban thing.  President Trump's latest accusation is that "the media" as some unified entity or something - - is suppressing stories about ISIS terrorist attacks around the world, out of some seeming goal of brainwashing us or something.  Trump is losing his mind!  Jeff said that Hillary was a bisexual and has a female lover, but he’s still vote for her over Donald Trump.  One lady called on Thom Hartman’s show says an expert told her we are on the verge of “complete social breakdown” within four years.  If the blue states fight to get out of the Union they will do OK because New York and California are the producer states and the red states are the freeloader states.  But apparently those from the red states say “Oh yeah?  While we’ve got the guns on our side”.  Mike Meloy said in 2012 that if Romney got elected that year we’d get social revolution immediately, but if Obama got elected than that would be a slower process.  Who’s to say we’ll be in just a couple of months the way things are going. 

The Ninth Circuit Court upheld that Seattle judge’s injunction against the Trump administration as far as that travel ban is concerned.  The old policies under Obama are thus reinstituted and people who have been waiting to fly here from Syria and Iraq are not free to have their visas reactivated, until the window “closes”, which could happen.  It seems increasingly certain that this “travel window” is going to stay open and it’s unlikely that any people will be deported once they’re here.  That would be too much trouble. 

Virtually all Democratic senators are expected to vote against President Trump’s picks to lead the departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury and his top budget nominee — a historic rebuke of a first-term president’s Cabinet selections.  But clearly though people in so many areas profess resistance Trump’s policies, and they can protest till the cows come home, nothing is going to show for it in actually progress in stopping Trump from implementing his grand scheme.  If Trump wants to make people like me happy he can start by getting rid of Priebus and Bannon.  Extremists having the ear of our President is not a good thing.  Perhaps the most cabinet post is not on this list and that is the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  If he has been confirmed we’re all in hot water right now.  The Senate is scheduled to continue confirming Trump’s Cabinet nominees this week, with a vote scheduled for Tuesday to approve Betsy DeVos, nominated to run the Education Department. Senators are poised to confirm Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to serve as the next attorney general by the end of the week.  Clearly the choice of Sessions for Attorney General is going to signal a sharp turn away from filing civil rights or minority rights cases.  But those votes are expected to happen with little or no Democratic support. Only Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has announced plans to support Sessions. As of Monday, no Democrat has announced support for DeVos, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), nominated to lead Health and Human Services, or Steven T. Mnuchin, nominated as treasury secretary. We know the Treasury guy is a crook.  They all are scheduled for up-or-down votes in the coming days.  Near-unanimous opposition to a first-term president’s Cabinet picks is rare and hasn’t happened in recent history. These are not ordinary times.  But it comes amid a growing furor among progressive groups calling on Democratic lawmakers to oppose all of Trump’s nominees and policies. A CNN poll released on Sunday showed that just 59 percent of Democrats approve of their party’s leaders, a sign that die-hard partisans want lawmakers to serve as a more aggressive check on Trump.   On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicted that “If not total unanimity, we’re going to have near Democratic unity in opposing the remaining nominees for President Trump’s Cabinet. But the view from where I sit is that each and every one of these battle will be futile.  And that’s something we’ll have to live with for many years.  

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