Today in 1968, Jimi Hendrix recorded “All Along the Watchtower,” musically assisted by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Dave Mason of Traffic:
The number one album today in 1978 was the best selling movie soundtrack of all time:
Today in 1968, Jimi Hendrix recorded “All Along the Watchtower,” musically assisted by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Dave Mason of Traffic:
The number one album today in 1978 was the best selling movie soundtrack of all time:
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay starts writing about phobias, then says …
Me? I’m terrified of Aaron Rodgers.
Seriously. Who isn’t scared of Rodgers at this point? Besides exuberant Green Bay Packers cheeseheads, that is. The most frightening thing left in these NFL playoffs isn’t the Atlanta Falcons or the Pittsburgh Steelers or even Grumpy Bill Belichick’s New England Patriot Dance Machine, but a scruffy, solitary 33-year-old quarterback.
Rodgers. If my team is alive, I don’t want any part of him.
Consider Sunday’s thrilling Green Bay victory over Dallas. This thing was setting up to be a Cowboys comeback for the ages: the Packers racing to a 21-3 early lead, and then Dallas rallying to tie it late, led by rookie quarterback Dak Prescott.
When Rodgers took to the field deep in Packers territory in the closing minute, he noticed what he had left to work with:
35 seconds.
“There’s too much time left on the clock,” Rodgers said later.
Too much time!
Here a brief list of things I cannot do in 35 seconds or less:
1. Put on both shoes.
2. Find my keys.
3. Log into my company email.
4. Decide if I want hash browns (which is weird, because I always want hash browns.)
5. Dress my kids for a snowstorm (I also cannot do this in 35 years or less.)
But 35 seconds is plenty enough for Rodgers to help his team win a football game, as it turns out. Even after a crushing Dallas sack (how did Rodgers not fumble?) left Green Bay with a third-and-20 from its own 32. It was enough time for a rolling Rodgers to locate tight end Jared Cook, who brilliantly tiptoed on the sideline’s edge and pulled in a 36-yard completion. It was enough for Mason Crosby—and let’s hear it for Mason Crosby, a historic performance, kicker man—to come on for 51-yard field goal, and that was that.
Another Aaron Rodgers Green Bay epic in the book.At this point, it’s absurd, expected. When you play Rodgers, you don’t really play him. You’re at his mercy. I don’t want to use some cliché like “standard rules of space and time don’t apply” but it’s true: standard rules of space and time do not apply. If you give him a few seconds, he’s good. If you give him one play from his own side of the field, he’s good.
Which leads us to the Hail Marys. Rodgers is to Hail Marys what Steph Curry is to midcourt 3-pointers. It’s a fluky thing for everyone else. For them, not so much.Ask yourself: If it’s your team, do you want to watch Aaron Rodgers heave a Hail Mary in the closing seconds of the half?
I don’t need an answer, because I know it. If you’re on the other sideline, a Rodgers Hail Mary is absolutely terrifying. Ask the New York Giants.
The Packers are a quirky kind of headache. They are probably the most imperfect team left in the NFL postseason. They have a depleted roster, especially on defense. After that early deficit, Dallas was able to move the ball rather easily on both the ground and in the air. Rodgers is without his best receiver, Jordy Nelson, who suffered broken ribs against the Giants in the Wild-Card round (it isn’t clear if Nelson will be back for the NFC title game.)
Green Bay’s flaws aren’t news. The Packers began their 2016 season 4-6, on the outside of the playoff picture, with chatter swirling about head coach Mike McCarthy’s job status and Rodgers’s diminished effectiveness. He isn’t the same, was the prevailing criticism.
That’s when Rodgers suggested that the Packers might be able to “run the table,” win their final six games and get a playoff spot. Which is a rather brash thing to predict. And it’s exactly what Green Bay did.
I’m assuming Atlanta was happy the Packers won Sunday—it means another home game for them, a championship closer for the Georgia Dome. The Falcons were impressive in handling Seattle on Saturday.
And yet this also means facing Rodgers in a climate-controlled environment. I always assume that when great quarterbacks from harsh-weather outdoor stadium teams get to domes, they turn into giddy free-range chickens. They think: This is amazing! I can’t believe people get to play here! I can feel my fingers!
It certainly felt that way for much of Sunday’s game in AT&T Stadium. It will probably feel that way for portions of next Sunday’s. Packers fans can’t wait. Aaron Rodgers is on the loose. The rest of us should be hiding behind the couch.
Sports Illustrated’s Peter King delves further into Sunday’s remarkable finish (with NFL Films video here):
This happened in the last five minutes:
5:00 left, fourth quarter: Green Bay 28, Dallas 20. Cowboys driving, but even if the kid quarterback, Dak Prescott, can score here, he’ll still need a two-point conversion to tie, and have a prayer of extending the game.
4:17 left: The kid squeezes a seven-yard TD pass into Dez Bryant on a short post route. The kid executes a quarterback draw well, but Packers linebacker Jake Ryan corrals him around the 1. Prescott’s will, and his body, barrel across the goal line. Prescott has brought Dallas all the way back from a 21-3 deficit against the great Aaron Rodgers. Two facts here. One: No rookie quarterback has thrown three touchdown passes in a playoff game in the past 50 years, and now Prescott has. Two: Prescott’s ridiculously good. Tie, 28-28.
2:00 left: Rodgers throws an ill-advised pick (that is the last time in this column you will read “Ill-advised” and “Rodgers” in the same sentence) to Dallas safety Jeff Heath … but wait. Rookie corner Anthony Brown gets called for pass interference for hooking Ty Montgomery early in his route. Iffy call, but watching it six more times Tuesday, it’s the right one. Brown hooked him and interfered with his route. Jason Garrett doesn’t like the call. Why would he?
1:33 left: Mason Crosby ambles onto the field to try the longest playoff field goal of his career–56 yards. He’s made 21 straight playoff field goal. His last miss: a 50-yarder he shtoinked off the left upright six years ago to the day in Atlanta. He boots a low, half-knuckleball liner that’s eight feet above the crossbar, just inside the right upright. Rodgers shows more glee on the sidelines than he ever shows after a TD pass, punching the air violently. Green Bay, 31-28.
0:49 left: Who exactly is the rookie here? Prescott to Terrence Williams for 24 up the gut. Prescott on a cross to Jason Witten for 11. First down, Packer 40. And then Prescott does something that looks stupid in the moments after the game. He spikes the ball. Odd, because the Cowboys have one timeout left, an incredibly reliable kicker (Dan Bailey), and they’re five to seven yards from a low-risk field goal in the weatherless stadium. If they’re playing for the tie and overtime, they should let the clock run. If they’re playing to win it right here, they’ll need that down they just gave away. Sure enough, Prescott throws a seven-yard out to Cole Beasley … clock stops … and Nick Perry bats down a pass at the line … clock stops … and it’s fourth down. What have the Cowboys done? Have they left enough time for Rodgers to score?
0:35 left: Bailey, with the easiest-looking 52-yard field goal in world history. Rodgers confers with Randall Cobb on the Green Bay sideline. I am guessing he might have said, “Can you believe they spiked it and left us enough time to win?” Tie, 31-31.
0:21 left: There’s going to be parade down the center of the Saginaw Valley (Mich.) State campus for Jeff Heath after the season. The feisty safety bursts around left tackle on a blitz and nails Rodgers for a 10-yard loss, back to the Green Bay 32. Watching at home in Columbus, Ohio, a good pal of Rodgers’, A.J. Hawk, is shocked, like the rest of America, that Rodgers has the ball in his right hand, ready to throw, and doesn’t feel the rush at all. You can see it in his eyes on the replay. He had no idea anyone was coming. And boom! Heath levels him. “Man, how’d he hold onto that ball?” Hawk wondered Tuesday, when I interviewed him for The MMQB Podcast With Peter King. “When that happened and he held onto the ball, I said to my wife, ‘He’s going to make a deep throw to win it, right now.’” On replay, it’s more amazing. Heath’s sacking arm is within eight or 10 inches of the ball but never could find the target to punch out. But it’s moot anyway. Rodgers needs 33 yards to get into field position and has maybe two plays to do it. But …
0:18 left: The act of the sack isn’t even done, but Rodgers, after a total clock-cleaning and his head bouncing back and forth like a crash-test dummy’s, pirouettes up quickly and signals for Green Bay’s second timeout. There’s some presence of mind.
0:12 left: Sideline route to Cook. Excellent coverage by Dallas’ Byron Jones, who sticks his arm in to bat a perfect pass away. Incomplete.
Third-and-20, Green Bay 32. How many 35-yard completions against seven DBs you got on that playsheet, Mike McCarthy? Shotgun snap. Ty Montgomery as a sidecar. Three Cowboys rush.
0:11 left: Rodgers spins completely around to face the left sideline and begins a loop.
0:10 left: Rodgers takes his first look downfield. Guard Lane Taylor breaks away from the mosh pit at the lane to protect Rodgers, and here comes the only rusher with a chance, linebacker Justin Durant.
0:09 left: Taylor engages Durant, who tries to use his quickness to get around the guard. Nothing doing. Rodgers stops. He bounces once, looking downfield.
0:08 left: Cobb’s open, slightly, just past midfield, but not deep enough. Useless throw. Rodgers pumps and recoils, and then jogs three more steps to his left. At home watching in Minnesota is Rich Gannon, who knows Rodgers well. “This is the most difficult throw for a right-handed quarterback,” Gannon told me on the podcast Tuesday. “Going to his left, throwing right-handed.”
0:07 left: Rodgers, three yards from the left sideline, now has Durant coming into his vision. But here’s the important thing: Taylor did a terrific job slowing Durant long enough for Rodgers to release it. Rodgers reaches back while still moving left slightly, never stopping to set up, and he rears back to throw, and the ball leaves his hand. He’s got a prayer to hit Jared Cook 38 yards away. Hey, it’s probably overtime. Take a shot.
0:06 left: “I can make that throw 15, 18 yards,” Gannon said. This Rodgers throw passes midfield with juice on it. A line drive.
0:05 left: Cook, who took a long, looping route to the left sideline from the right tight end spot, sees the ball coming toward him. “I used to watch him on the flights back home when I was on the Rams,” Cook said, “and I’d think, ‘He’s a beast.’ Now I see him make these passes every day.” Like this one. Here it comes, and Cook knows he has to be mindful of his feet. Stay inbounds, feet.
0:04 left: Ball hits hands. Cook falling out of bounds. Feet close to stripe. Ball secured. Cook on ground. Gannon is wowed at home in Minnesota. “He put it in a 12-inch box!” Gannon says, awestruck.
0:03 left: Cook on ground. Out at the 33. Head linesman Jeff Bergman, 15 yards behind the play, immediately signals no catch. “Pass is incomplete, out of bounds,” Joe Buck says on TV. Side judge Rob Vernatchi, 11 yards in front of the play, staring at Cook’s feet, sprints toward the play, signaling it was a catch. Bergman and Vernatchi converge at the 32. Bergman slaps Vernatchi on the rear end, as if to say, “You had it. Good call.” Which it was. Perfect, decisive call by Vernatchi.
Troy Aikman in the booth: “Unbelieva–
Buck: “Unbelievable!”
Two minutes and 40 seconds later, ref Tony Corrente has the ruling.
Corrente: “After review, the ruling on the field of a completed pass is confirmed.”
0:00 left: Crosby, from 51 yards for the win, good! But wait, Dallas timeout. He has to do it again.
0:00 left: Crosby, from 51 yards for the win … jussssst inside the left upright. Good. Green Bay, 34-31.
Three 50-yard field goals in the last two minutes of a game has never happened. “Really it was four,” radio host Chris Russo said Tuesday. “He made the other one and Garrett called time.” Never mind Rodgers: How about the icy kickers?
But that throw.
“To fit that ball in there,” Gannon said. “Incredible.”
Rodgers is breathless, seemingly, when Erin Andrews gets him on the field. “I mean, it’s just kind of schoolyard at the time,” Rodgers tells him. And as our Robert Klemko tweeted after the game, Cobb told him that Rodgers made up each receiver’s pattern in the huddle before the play. That really makes the whole story better.
The world moves so fast. Slow it down this morning, and appreciate one of the best games we’ll ever see.
Rodgers has had an unbelievable postseason. Pick your own favorite:
Gay is unfortunately correct that the Packers might be the worst team left due to their somewhat porous defense thanks to all the defensive backfield injuries and their sort-of adequate running game. (But the worst of four is still better than the remaining 28 teams, including the previously number-one-seeded Cowboys.) Not having Jordy Nelson Sunday and possibly not having Davante Adams will make things even more difficult.
If you thought the Packer defense was tested by the Cowboys, consider that the Falcons were the top scoring team in the NFL this regular season, ahead of fourth-place Green Bay. On the other hand, if you think the Packers’ defense wasn’t very good this season (21st in scoring), the Falcons’ defense was worse (27th in scoring). Based on that betting the over in an over–under bet (which as of now is 61.5) seems appropriate. (For comparison purposes, the Cowboys were fifth in scoring offense and scoring defense.)
This will be the third straight week the Packers will play in the postseason someone they played in the regular season. They looked awful and lost to Dallas 27–16 (and the game wasn’t that close), and then two weeks later lost to Atlanta 33–32 on a touchdown with 31 seconds left. The Packers lost three more games after that, and haven’t lost since then.
This looks eerily similar to the 2010–11 postseason (which included a surprisingly large win over Atlanta), but history generally doesn’t repeat itself, and one feels like the Packers’ magic can’t continue. The NFL would love a Patriots–Packers Super Bowl, but I don’t think the Falcons are going to cooperate.
Americans voted in November for seismic change, but our outgoing president is still as clueless as ever about the nation he governed.
In his farewell speech-cum-lecture earlier this month, President Barack Obama proclaimed that he made America better by “almost every measure.”
The statement goes far beyond optimism, and lands squarely in the realm of delusion.
Eight years of Obama’s leadership has left America demonstrably weaker and more divided. Rather than the promised “healing”—racial and other—the Obama era frayed the ties that bind us.
The number one British single today in 1966:
The number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1975:
James Wigderson as we reach the next-to-last day of Barack Obama in the White House:
His own ambition was to be a transformative figure like Ronald Reagan, and his long farewell to the American people is supposed to remind people of George Washington. Instead, Obama’s ambition outweighed his ability, and the last week has us wishing Chevy Chase was back on Saturday Night Live – “Our top story tonight, Barack Hussein Obama is still saying goodbye to the American people.”
Let’s remember the promise of eight years ago when Obama was the change he was seeking, or something like that. He took office after a terrible financial collapse and recession. However, the Bush Administration had already taken the immediate steps of the Wall Street bailout to stabilize the economy, and it was Obama’s fortune to preside over the nation’s economic recovery.
Obama’s $804.6 billion stimulus, crafted by Congressional Democrats, contributed to doubling the national debt in his time in office. It’s estimated that only $33 billion went to “shovel ready” transportation spending. Much of the money was spent shoring up state government spending on Medicaid and education, including here in Wisconsin. But at least the Recovery.gov website was redesigned, and it only cost $18 million.
The “summer of recovery,” like the effects of global warming described by Al Gore, never seemed to arrive. Economic growth through the beginning of 2016 averaged just 2.1 percent. While unemployment is down, labor participation is the lowest it’s been since Jimmy Carter was in office, and that’s only partially due to demographics.
It certainly didn’t help that under the Obama Administration the Federal Register, the book of federal regulations, is now over 97,000 pages long. Worse, according to Forbes the problem isn’t just the regulations but the growth in “Agency guidance documents and memoranda, notices, bulletins, circulars, other decrees.”
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration’s environmental policies didn’t help, either, including his war on coal. Yes, natural gas got cheaper, thanks to fracking technology, but much of the coal industry was hit hard by EPA regulations, putting thousands out of work and raising energy costs. The good news is that Obama never addressed the public on energy costs wearing a sweater and suggesting we adjust our thermostats. We can thank the private sector and fracking.
Finally, the greatest disappointment of the Obama domestic agenda has to be Obamacare. The greatest lie Obama ever told was the promise that if you liked your health insurance you can keep it. Not only did that turn out to be a lie, but people were having a hard time keeping their new insurance policies through the exchanges, too.
Insurance companies like Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealthCare dropped out of the exchanges when it became clear they couldn’t make money by being in them. The insurance companies remaining in the health care exchanges often have such high deductible and premium costs to make them unaffordable, even with government subsidies.
Obamacare co-ops were designed to create more competition, but only seven of the original 23 co-ops now remain, according to The Hill. In Illinois, Oregon and Ohio, 92,000 people had to scramble to find insurance when their co-ops failed in 2016.
As large private health insurance companies leave the market and the co-ops fail, many consumers are left with no choice. Business Insider reports a study by Avalere Health said 36 percent of the “exchange market regions” may only offer one insurance carrier in 2017. Nearly 55 percent will have two or less carriers. The Heritage Foundation says that number could grow to 70 percent of the counties in the United States next year.
Obama said recently that 20 million people have health insurance coverage that did not have coverage before. The Heritage Foundation points out the number is closer to 14 million, and 11.8 million of them received coverage through expanding the rolls of Medicaid, not private insurance. As many of them are discovering, “coverage” does not equal care, and are frustrated by the number of doctors that do not accept Medicaid.
So, no, Obama didn’t preside over a civil war, although race relations actually got worse during his time in office and police departments feel besieged by liberal politics. He didn’t get impeached, although his administration was hardly scandal-free. Obama is not the “worst president ever.”
But his domestic policies can be graded a failure on the Obama standard. Instead of the transformative figure he hoped to become, Obama’s policies should be swept away by a Republican congress that achieved success when it ran against the Obama agenda.
The Washington Post reports on Donald Trump’s controversial (those three words are now a cliché) choice for secretary of education:
Former senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut on Tuesday introduced Betsy DeVos at her Senate confirmation hearing for education secretary in the upcoming Trump administration — and in the process he dissed the entire education establishment.
DeVos is a Michigan billionaire tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Education Department. Supporters see her as a tireless advocate for school choice while critics say she has spent decades working to privatize the public education system.
Lieberman — a member of the board of the organization that DeVos founded, the American Federation of Children — talked about DeVos in glowing terms and said she has helped hundreds of thousands of children.
“She is disciplined, organized, knows how to set goals and then develop practical plans to achieve them. She is really a purpose-driven team builder,” he said. He noted that the Department of Education is bigger than anything she — or virtually all of the senators on the panel — had ever run but said she is ready to take on the task.
And then, he said: “I know that some people are questioning her qualifications to be secretary of education, and too many of those questions seem to me to be based on the fact that she doesn’t come from within the education establishment. But honestly I believe that today, that’s one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job.”
To Lieberman, then, working within the public education system is disqualifying to run the Education Department. Understanding, from the inside, how the system works, isn’t a qualification.
So what is a qualification to Lieberman?
“She has many others. She’s a mother and a grandmother. She cares about children more generally, and she has been involved in education, like so many parents and local citizen school board members across America for almost 30 years,” he said. And he noted that she isn’t only a “philanthropist and advocate for reform” but also “mentors students in the public schools of Grand Rapids, Mich.
“And here’s another important qualification: She will ask the right questions,” he said.
The Education Department is nearly 40 years old. Public education has gotten worse in the U.S. since the Education Department came into existence. Among other things, nearly every big city in this country has a terrible school system, including Milwaukee. The pernicious influence of teacher unions has been well documented in this blog.
Elsewhere in the Capitol, the Post reports …
Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who has spent years battling the Environmental Protection Agency, on Wednesday ran into a litany of questions about his fitness to run the agency given his litigious history, his views on climate change and his close ties to the fossil fuel industry.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the EPA told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at his confirmation hearing that he plans to steer the agency away from what he sees as an era of overzealous and unlawful regulation during the Obama years.
Pruitt said his EPA would be one that respects the authority of states and is open to a “full range of views,” namely those of an energy industry that felt overburdened by Obama-era rules.
Pruitt, who has long been supported by the fossil fuel industry, dismissed the idea that if someone supports the oil and gas interests, he can’t also favor environmental protection.
“I utterly reject that narrative,” he said. “It is not an either-or proposition.” …
Pruitt’s tenure as attorney general in Oklahoma has been marked by his role in opposing many of the Obama administration’s key initiatives, often arguing that the executive branch was overstepping its constitutional authority and trying to circumvent the role of Congress.
Pruitt has been a leading voice among a group of Republican attorneys general who sued over issues including the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reforms and immigration. But he has been particularly aggressive in attacking the EPA’s efforts, repeatedly suing the agency to challenge its legal authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants, and the quality of wetlands and other waters.
That combative approach has earned him broad support from fellow Republicans and from the fossil fuel industry, which helped fund his campaigns and contributed large sums to the Republican Attorneys General Association under Pruitt’s leadership.
Yet his nomination has galvanized environmental advocacy groups, who note that Pruitt dismantled a specialized environmental protection unit that had existed under his predecessor and poured resources into a new “federalism unit” aimed at challenging “unwarranted regulation and systematic overreach” from Washington. …
Pruitt rejected the “climate denier” label in his opening remarks Wednesday, saying “science tells us that the climate is changing” and that human activity plays a role. But how we measure that human influence and what policy actions we take to combat global warming are “subject to continued debate and dialogue,” he said. …
For his part, Pruitt has repeatedly framed his EPA opposition as driven not by ideology but by constitutional questions over the separation of powers.
“There truly is an attitude in Washington that the states are mere vessels of federal will, and so long as they act in accordance with the federal government’s view . . . things are fine,” he said in a speech in July. “But when states actually engage and exercise the authority they possess, that’s where the conflict and the tension rises.”
Pruitt has powerful forces pushing for the GOP-controlled Senate to confirm him.
The conservative America Rising Squared, an arm of the Republican super PAC America Rising, recently launched ConfirmPruitt.com to promote him as someone who can return the EPA to its “core mission” of protecting the nation’s water and air but leaving broader authority in the hands of the states and industry.
Last week, a coalition of nearly two dozen conservative advocacy groups separately backed his nomination, writing that he has “demonstrated his commitment to upholding the Constitution and ensuring the EPA works for American families and consumers.”
I think nominees like DeVos and Pruitt, though obviously they weren’t nominees before Trump was elected, are one of the reasons Trump won. The election certainly was a rejection of what Obama did in eight years and what voters thought Hillary Clinton would do if elected.
The number one single today in 1959:
The number one British single today in 1967:
Today in 1971, selections from the Beatles’ White Album were played in the courtroom at the Sharon Tate murder trial to answer the question of whether any songs could have inspired Charles Manson and his “family” to commit murder.
Manson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.
The goo-goo (short for “good government”) types, including Wisconsin daily newspaper editorial writers, have been clamoring for years for a supposedly non-political redistricting process to avoid Republicans’ gerrymandering districts to benefit themselves.
Why won’t that work to increase Democratic numbers in the Legislature? Alan Greenblatt explains:
A couple of decades ago, half the Democrats in the Iowa Senate represented rural areas. By the time the last session got underway, there were only two Democrats left from the mostly sparsely populated counties west of Interstate 35. Now, there are none. The inability of Iowa Democrats to compete throughout an entire half of the state is a big reason why the GOP took over the state Senate in November.
All over the country, Democrats have a similar geography problem. With an overwhelming share of their voters living within a limited number of metropolitan districts, it’s hard for them to compete in broad swaths of territory elsewhere. This handicap, which has made the U.S. House into something resembling a fortress for Republicans, is making it increasingly difficult for Democrats to win legislative chambers. “When you sit down and start counting the number of state legislative districts the Republicans have and the number of chambers they have, it’s evident that the Democrats have a structural problem that they need to overcome,” says Colorado State University political scientist Kyle Saunders.
In a red state like Texas, for example, Democratic legislators are limited to the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley and just a handful of urban counties. In a purple state like North Carolina, Republicans were able to maintain their supermajorities at the legislative level, despite Democrat Roy Cooper winning the governor’s race last fall. Even in a more favorable state for Democrats such as Colorado, which Hillary Clinton carried, Republicans were able to hold onto their majority in the state Senate. The concentration of the Democratic vote in Denver and the Front Range gives Republicans a built-in advantage in the chamber. Despite a big push from Democrats to take it back, there were only two or three suburban or exurban districts where they even had a hope of picking up seats.
When Republicans won control of the Minnesota House in 2014, nearly all their victories came outside of the Twin Cities area. In November, the GOP’s strength in the rest of the state allowed the party to capture the state Senate as well. “I had one of the Minnesota leaders tell me a year ago that the House Democrats had gotten too Twin Cities-oriented,” says Bill Pound, executive director of the National Conference of State Legislatures. “That’s why they were in the minority and that was the danger to their Senate majority.”
Democrats are already hoping for an anti-incumbent wave election in 2018 that will return them to power in many states. They also like to blame GOP gerrymandering for the challenges they face in many districts outside the cities. But Iowa has a redistricting process that is scrupulously nonpartisan. In that state, rural Democrats have become not just endangered, but nearly extinct. In order to make a comeback, Democrats have to hope that voters outside of population centers will start giving their candidates more of a hearing than they have lately.
… he’s not going to be president for very long, because none of us will be around for much longer, or so claims London’s Daily Star:
Conspiracy theorists have been warning a massive planet – called Planet X or Nibiru – will wipe out life on Earth for some time.
Now a paranormal researcher claims to have combined astronomy, scientific research and the Bible to calculate the date of the apocalypse.
In his book Planet X — The 2017 Arrival, author David Meade says the killer planet will first appear this September.
And it will crash into Earth the following month.
According to Meade, Planet X is actually a star with seven planets and moons – including Nibiru – orbiting it. The so-called “truther” explains we haven’t spotted Planet X or Nibiru yet as they are approaching from a different angle, above the South Pole.
He said: “This makes observations difficult – unless you’re flying at a high altitude over South America with an excellent camera.”
Overwhelming evidence suggests the alien star system will approach from the south, pass to the north and then loop back around, Meade claims.
The gravitational pull of the passage will be devastating, Meade says – but its effects are already being felt.
He says recent earthquakes and volcanoes around the dreaded Ring of Fire are down to the push and pull of Planet X system.
Catastrophic earthquakes have rocked Japan, Peru, New Zealand, Argentina and Indonesia over the past few weeks. …
Meade claims the Book of Revelation, in the Bible, says when Nibiru will reveal itself.
Revelation 12: 1-2 speaks of a “sign in heaven” of “a woman clothed with the Sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head”.
Using computer models of the movement of the stars and planets, Meade claims this will match the astral alignment on September 23.
He said: “During this time frame, on September 23, 2017, the moon appears under the feet of the Constellation Virgo.
“The Sun appears to precisely clothe Virgo…Jupiter is birthed on September 9, 2017.
“The 12 stars at that date include the nine stars of Leo, and the three planetary alignments of Mercury, Venus and Mars – which combine to make a count of 12 stars on the head of Virgo.
“Thus the constellations Virgo, Leo and Serpens-Ophiuchus represent a unique once-in-a-century sign exactly as depicted in the 12th chapter of Revelation. This is our time marker.”
The Bible says all this will happen before an angel opens the Sixth Seal of Revelation – and when he does there will be a great earthquake and the moon will turn red.
Meade claims the sign of the Red Dragon with seven heads, 10 horns and seven crowns on its head – mentioned in Revelation 12: 3 – represents Nibiru.
Using “biblical chronology”, he says this will appear on October 5 – and wipe out life on Earth.
Maverick scientists have speculated about the existence of another planet – usually called Planet X – since the 19th century. But the theory fell out of favour, so in 1976, when writer Zecharia Sitchin claimed to have to have found a description of a giant planet called Nibiru among the writings of the Babylonians – an ancient civilisation famed as pioneers of astronomy – he was ridiculed as a crackpot.
He claimed the orbit of Nibiru – which was home to advanced alien race called the Annunaki – brought it near Earth every 3,600 years.
So-called “truthers” have prophesied the next time Nibiru passes nearby it will destroy life here with a collision or near-miss. They were roundly mocked – until scientists at the California Institute of Technology found evidence that suggested the prophesy might actually be true.
Space boffins claimed to have found evidence of a long-fabled ninth planet up to 15 times the size of Earth in the dark outer reaches of the Solar System last year.
They named the icy giant – which takes 20,000 Earth years to orbit the Sun – “Planet 9”.
Just like Meade, they claim Planet 9 is approaching Earth from an oblique angle.
And they say it is so gigantic its gravitational field is actually causing the Sun itself and the entire Solar System to tilt on a six-degree angle.
And in a final staggering coincidence, the Caltech astronomers claim we will see Planet 9/Planet X/Nibiru…by winter 2017.
About “biblical chronology,” the Book of Revelation was written after the Gospels, but most Biblical scholars give the most importance to the Gospels. And Matthew 24:36 quotes Jesus Christ as saying, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Just in case, though, root for the Packers to win the Super Bowl and for the Badgers to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship. There may not be another one.
The number one single today in 1960 was written by a one-hit wonder and sung by a different one-hit wonder:
The number 45 45 today in 1964 was this group’s first, but not last:
Today in 1974, members of Free, Mott the Hoople and King Crimson formed Bad Company: