Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

Civility for thee but not for me

January 14, 2016

Wisconsin politics
James Wigderson:

I must have missed something. When state Rep. Bob Gannon, a Republican, made an obscene gesture to Democratic Minority Leader Peter Barca, the fake outrage was just silly. Reporters took to Twitter and Facebook to report the press releases of every Democrat that dared to comment on the issue of the middle finger.

Where did this sudden love for virtue and civility come from?

I don’t want to excuse Gannon’s behavior. I don’t want state representatives flipping the bird at each other when they get ticked off. In a perfect world, when Barca was attacking Gannon’s statement about crime in Milwaukee and calling Gannon a racist, Gannon should have walked up to Barca and hugged him. He could’ve whispered in Barca’s ear, “I know how hard it is to hear how liberalism has failed African-Americans. I’m sorry I’m causing you pain.”

But Gannon reacted in a human way and left his professionalism in the locker room. Later, Gannon apologized and shook Barca’s hand, momentarily ending the controversy until the next time Democrats try to get under Gannon’s skin.

Of course, unavailable for comment was Democratic state Rep. Gordon Hintz, who during the debate over Act 10 yelled at former state Rep. Michelle Litjens, “You’re (obscenity) dead!” I’m sure Hintz has some interesting thoughts on civility on the floor of the Assembly. Hintz would probably comment, “Bring an umbrella,” in case Democratic state Rep. Chris Danou gets frustrated and throws a cup of water at his colleagues, as several legislators saw him do during the same Act 10 debate.

Now that Barca has a newfound love for order and respect for his colleagues, maybe he’ll tell his colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle to stop calling Republicans racists and tools of the Koch brothers every time there’s a difference of opinion. The obnoxious name-calling by Barca and his colleagues is even more offensive than Gannon telling the Democratic leader he’s No. 1 with the wrong finger.

Perhaps Barca himself might actually read the memo on campaign finance from the Legislative Reference Bureau before he accuses his Republican colleagues of trying to get undisclosed corporate donations for their campaign committees. He might learn that the Government Accountability Board’s Executive Director Kevin Kennedy is not telling the truth about the law, and Barca could thank his Republican colleagues for getting rid of the GAB. Maybe these steps might encourage Barca’s newfound love of civility.

While Barca is at it, he could encourage Democratic members of the Legislature like Rep. Christine Sinicki and Sen. Dave Hansen to not use obscenities on social media when describing the governor. He could even suggest to Sinicki that to improve the reputation of the Legislature she might want to stay out of legal trouble.

Then Barca could walk out into the Capitol Rotunda and speak to the protesters. He could tell them that stalking legislative staff and Republican legislators around the Capitol is not encouraging civility. He could tell them that screaming protest songs, including new twists on Christmas carols that personally attack members of the Republican Party, at the top of their lungs every day at noon is not conducive to the professional environment he would like to see in the Capitol.

Barca might even comment on how, the same day he’s complaining about Gannon’s behavior, protesters are in the Capitol carrying signs with swastikas and calling Republican legislators Nazis. He might suggest to the protesters that it’s not very polite.

While we’re at it, perhaps Barca and his colleagues could apologize for publicly supporting the Government Accountability Board’s illegal spying on conservative organizations and activists. One local activist and political commentator, Brian Fraley, recently discovered that the GAB has been snooping in his email for four years without his knowledge. The only reason he was told was that the courts made special prosecutor Francis Schmitz tell everyone who was being spied upon. They have Fraley’s every movement, his tax records, and all of his personal contacts, even though he wasn’t the target of any criminal investigation.

So here is my advice to Barca who suddenly has found a love of civility and collegiality. If you really want to lower the tensions and increase the mutual respect on the legislative floor, you first.
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State of the (dis)Union

January 14, 2016

US politics
That is the headline of James Taranto, who watched Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech so we didn’t have to:

“I stand here confident that the State of our Union is strong,” President Obama summed things up last night. To which one might have puckishly responded: Strong maybe, but what union?

The invited audience at the annual address included many human symbols of national division: culture-war conscientious objectors Kim Davis and the Little Sisters of the Poor; Jim Obergefell, victor in the Supreme Court battle that occasioned Davis’s objection; representatives from Black Lives Matter and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. There were even empty seats to show disrespect for the Second Amendment and opposition to abortion.

The president acknowledged the country’s divided state in the most interesting line of his address:

It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency—that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.

Likewise, there’s no doubt our column would improve if we wrote as well as Shakespeare: We thank God for our humility.

It would have been more interesting—and shown real self-awareness—if the president had acknowledged his political talents are in some respects wanting when compared not with the universally acknowledged great presidents but with the successful presidents of his own lifetime. We’re thinking here of Reagan and Clinton, who like Obama held office during fractious (if not quite as fractious) periods under divided government. In terms of both compromising with the opposition and emerging victorious from confrontations with it, Reagan and Clinton each enjoyed considerably more success than Obama.

There’s a glaring disconnect in Obama’s characterization of partisan “rancor and suspicion” as being among his “few regrets.” What he’s saying is that he does not regret his actions, only their inevitable consequences. In his 2008 campaign he aspired to unify the country, but he also aspired to “transform” it, “fundamentally” no less. Transformation turned out to be the priority.

His signature “achievements”—we’re thinking here of ObamaCare and the Iran deal—were won by bullying doubters in his own party, shutting the other party out entirely, and, crucially, ignoring overwhelming public opposition. He’d have accomplished a lot more had the country been on his side, but had the country been on his side, there would be no need for fundamental transformation. He seldom evinces any doubt that he is right and his detractors—even if they include the large majority of the American people—are wrong.

That attitude expresses itself in what David Gelernter, writing in the Weekly Standard, calls “the Obama sneer”:

FDR’s bouncy, feisty smile, Reagan’s geniality, Clinton’s one-of-the-boys grin, W’s good-natured earnestness are part of history; and Obama’s real “legacy” (aside from worldwide crisis) is that bitter sneer. His rudeness to political opponents has made a rotten political climate much worse.

The Obama sneer is polarizing, which serves him poorly in some regards and well in others. It makes him look weak and reactive and alienates people who are not already on his side. On the other hand, it’s an effective technique for rallying his partisans. And Obama has set the tone for the campaign to succeed him. Both parties’ leading candidates to succeed Obama—Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—are following his lead in that they are running campaigns of division.

The sneer was very much in evidence last night (note that these quotes are from the address as prepared; there were slight variations in the delivery):

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction. … Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it. You’ll be pretty lonely. … I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. … As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. … Our answer needs to be more than tough talk or calls to carpet bomb civilians. That may work as a TV sound bite, but it doesn’t pass muster on the world stage. We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire. … We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. … When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world.

Toward the end, he observed: “A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.” But as the above, far-from-conclusive list demonstrates, he demands agreement on a hell of a lot.

The assertion that “it diminishes us in the eyes of the world” when “a kid is bullied” (“called names” in his ad-lib) is just bizarre. The idea that we can “try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis” is unrecognizable even as a caricature of any view anyone currently espouses. (It sounds like a caricature of George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural.)

The reference to carpet-bombing was an allusion to something Cruz said, but Obama seemed to be reacting to Trump more than anyone else. The liberal site Talking Points Memo has a list of “Obama’s Top 10 Shots at Trump in the State of the Union Address.” (Trump himself was in typical form last night, tweeting “The #SOTU speech is really boring, slow, lethargic—very hard to watch!”)

The Republican response was also widely understood as a rebuke to Trump. Real Clear Politics’ Caitlin Huey-Burns:

Nikki Haley’s response to the president’s State of the Union address on behalf of the GOP was much more a rebuttal to the Donald Trump-style of politics that has tainted her party in the race to succeed Barack Obama.

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation,” the South Carolina governor said from the statehouse in Columbia, S.C., Tuesday night.

That Trump was evidently such an influence last night confirms his status as the most dominant figure in American politics today. He is likely to retain that status at least for the next four weeks, and he hopes it will be closer to nine years. Just how long it turns out to be will have a lot to do with the ultimate character of the Obama legacy.
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 14

January 14, 2016

Music
The number one British single today in 1960:

The number one single today in 1978:

The number one British single today in 1995 came from a Swedish group that did a wacky country-ish song:

(more…)
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The Rams and Chargers or Raiders

January 13, 2016

Sports, US business
The Los Angeles Times reports:

NFL owners voted 30-2 to allow the St. Louis Rams to move to Los Angeles for the 2016 season and to give the San Diego Chargers a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood.

The Rams’ home will ultimately be on the site of the old Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood in what will be the league’s biggest stadium by square feet, a low-slung, glass-roofed football palace with a projected opening in 2019 and a price tag that could approach $3 billion.

“We realized this was our opportunity,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said.

Goodell, while pointing out the Rams are returning to their former home market, also predicted the Inglewood stadium would change “not just NFL stadiums and NFL complexes but sports complexes around the world.”

The historic vote in a fourth-floor conference room at a suburban hotel left open the possibility of the Chargers or Oakland Raiders sharing the Inglewood stadium.

The league will also give the Chargers and the Raiders each $100 million to put toward new stadiums if they stay in their current home markets. No public money will be used to build the Inglewood stadium.

If the Chargers do not exercise their right to move to Inglewood by Jan. 15, 2017, the Raiders will have a one-year option to join the Rams.

Rams owner Stan Kroenke called the decision to leave St. Louis “bittersweet.”

The Times’ Bill Plaschke comes off as less than totally happy about the Rams’ return to L.A.:

The sports landscape around here has changed dramatically in the last two decades, and there are some things you should know.

First, we didn’t ask you to come back. Oh, we may have whined occasionally during Super Bowl weeks, but we didn’t hold giant rallies or send emotional letters or really miss you that much. We play fantasy football, we watch DirecTV, we drive to Las Vegas for a three-team parlay. We’ve had our fill of the NFL without actually having a team.

Live football? We’ve fallen in love all over again with the pro-style programs at USC and UCLA, just check attendance figures.

Sundays? We’ve done just fine watching the Dodgers on Sunday afternoons in the fall and the Lakers on Sunday nights in the winter.

Second, we’re not paying for you to come back. Every place else you’ve gone, the grateful locals have slipped you a few bucks to show up, but not here, not even close, which is probably why it took 21 years for you to return.

We didn’t pry open civic pocketbooks or agree to any special taxes like some of those other smaller towns. We’re sophisticated enough to understand that you’re not a hospital or firehouse, that billionaires shouldn’t need handouts to bankroll their pigskin parties.

So understand first that you’re here because you want to be here and because you think you can make money here, not because anybody was dying to see you again. Consider yourself lucky to be back on our turf. And while you’re here, you’ll have to play by our three simple rules:

You must win. You must entertain. You must do both with the sort of decency and integrity that makes us feel comfortable enduring long lines of traffic, long lines at bathrooms, and mosh pits in parking lots for a chance to watch you play.We’ve done that at Dodger Stadium and the Rose Bowl and the Coliseum, and we’ll do that for you. But you have to earn it.

You must learn from Frank McCourt. The former Dodgers owner tried to cheat us and we ran him out of town.

You must learn from Donald Sterling. The former Clippers owner embarrassed us so we ignored him for years, until the NBAfinally ran him out of town.

The NFL has made plenty of money off a tribal mentality among its fans, but we don’t think like that. Sports is not our obligation, it’s our entertainment, and when the fun stops, we stop showing up. You lose, we’re gone. You take us for granted, we’re gone.

We don’t owe you cheers — even Kobe Bryant has been booed here. We don’t owe you unconditional love — even with three consecutive division titles, the Dodgers brand has been splintered by an ownership group that refuses to fix a contact that has left more than half their fans unable to watch on television.

Watching the NFL march back through our door is like watching the return of a quiet, beloved relative who left home to become rich and famous. Now that he’s back and wants everyone to join his party, well, hmmm.

When the Rams left town, they were viewed as a sweet neighborhood operation whose players weren’t too proud to participate in an infamously corny music video — “Let’s Ram It!” — and whose most ardent fans wore watermelons on their heads. But these Rams are coming back as an ATM for the reticent Stan Kroenke, and are a team that hasn’t made the playoffs in 11 years.

The Rams’ evolution has mirrored that of its league. The NFL has become the biggest and coldest of businesses, run by owners who have trivialized domestic abuse, covered up the effect of concussions, and mishandled legitimate cheating allegations against its most celebrated player, all in the last couple of seasons.

But there is much potential here, because the NFL is also about community. Just ask those purple-bundled fans sitting in below-zero temperatures in Minnesota last weekend, or the roaring sea of orange that can be found in Denver this weekend, or the thousands of screaming “12s” who show up all season in Seattle.

The NFL has become a shared experience like none other in sports, with a unique ability to connect even the most diverse neighborhoods in a weekly experience that for its most ardent fans has become sacred habit. Because it is as powerful on television as it is in person, because it owns every Sunday between September and February, and because its players represent helmeted superheroes unlike those found in any other league, the NFL owns the sports landscape in nearly every community it exists.

At least, everywhere else. And maybe here one day. But it’s not going to be easy.

The Rams and Chargers can’t just untie a bag of footballs, roll them across the Coliseum floor, and expect everyone to bow and pay $150 for the privilege.

The Lakers and Dodgers run this joint, and college football teams are giants, and nobody wins like the Kings, and nobody has more drama than the Clippers, and in 21 years Los Angeles has become arguably the nation’s most interesting sports town — without the national pastime’s help.

Welcome back, NFL. Now make us glad we missed you.

Next up on the relocation clock is either the Chargers, which moved from L.A. to San Diego in their second year of existence, or the Raiders, who moved from Oakland to L.A. in 1982 and from L.A. to Oakland in 1995. There’s also the Jacksonville Jaguars, whose owner has denied rumors of moving to St. Louis and London.

The San Diego Union Tribune’s Kevin Acee writes:

Chargers chairman Dean Spanos has the offer of an additional $100 million to help his stadium effort in San Diego that he didn’t have before Tuesday. He also has the fallback – or is it the first option? – of playing in a brand new stadium in Los Angeles in three years.

“I don’t want to mislead anybody or say anything that would not be correct,” Spanos said after leaving a press conference in which the decision was announced. “… In the next several weeks or so I am going to sit down and look at my options and make the decision in the near future.”

Yes, non-committal would be the most accurate way to describe Spanos’ commitment to engaging in stadium negotiations in San Diego.

However, the team has for months been quietly working on the possibility they would have to exercise such a Plan B in San Diego. Should they choose to try to stay, the Chargers would fund a citizens’ initiative with an eye toward a November ballot measure. The decision would have to be made in the next month. The language of a citizens’ initiative has to be final (with the same language that will appear on the ballot), and Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani said a signature drive would need to begin in March.

This was, Spanos has maintained all along, about having options.
“I have created that situation,” he said Tuesday.

Multiple owners said it was Spanos’ decision to maintain the San Diego option rather than join Kroenke immediately. However, too much should not be read into that. As one owne explained, there needed to be more exploration done by the Chargers on the partnership with the Rams.

The Chargers have until Jan. 17, 2017, to negotiate a deal with Kroenke to share his stadium in Inglewood before the rights to those negotiations would move to the Raiders.

Ostensibly, the Chargers have a year to get a deal done in San Diego. …

The league and the Rams have been working on the framework of a partnership agreement. The Chargers contingent met multiple times Tuesday with the league’s finance committee and on Wednesday will meet with league staff to go over the potential Inglewood deal. It is also believed Spanos and Kroenke will meet.

None of the three teams that were seeking to move to L.A. wanted to be the second team to arrive, and that will be among the Chargers’ considerations in the coming weeks. They may also commission polling to gauge how conditional approval to move would affect their chances at a successful campaign in San Diego. The team has long pointed to polling that showed a lack of support for a measure calling for public help building a stadium. …

Giants co-owner Steve Tisch said it was “unlikely” a second team will play in Los Angeles in 2016. However, regardless of whether the Chargers try for an election in San Diego, two owners said on the condition of anonymity they believe the Chargers would ultimately end up in Los Angeles.

Said San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York, whose team last year opened the first NFL stadium in California in almost a half-century years, largely with private money: “I think Dean genuinely wants to stay. He knows it will be an uphill battle.”

Up the state of California from both San Diego and L.A. is Oakland, whose Tribune editorializes:

With three teams vying to relocate to Los Angeles, NFL owners accepted the St. Louis Rams bid and offered the San Diego Chargers a one-year option to join. The Raiders were frozen out, told they could go only if the Chargers decide not to.

However, the NFL owners offered Davis a consolation prize: $100 million to help finance a new stadium in Oakland. It’s a nice parting gift, but it won’t bridge the funding gap he faces if he wants a new facility.

He’s essentially back to square one but without a viable threat of moving to Southern California. That means it’s time for him to stop trying to squeeze East Bay taxpayers for a subsidy and find another source.

It’s time for him to recognize what a good thing he has going here. The fans have been incredibly loyal despite his late father’s traitorous 13-season move to Los Angeles. The taxpayers continue to fork over money for the Coliseum renovations Al Davis required two decades ago as a condition of the team’s return.

And, despite all the grumbling now from the Raiders, the Coliseum location is superb, sandwiched between the BART station and the Nimitz Freeway and closer to San Francisco than the 49ers new stadium.

Mark Davis can keep threatening to move, perhaps filling the void in St. Louis or his latest rumored alternative, San Antonio. But that means building a fan base from scratch. Some of the Raider Nation followed him to Los Angeles three decades ago, but flights to Missouri and Texas will never be as quick, cheap or frequent.

He can look across the bay for a deal with the 49ers to share Levi’s Stadium, but it’s unlikely there’s enough room in the facility for both team owners’ egos.

Or he can talk seriously about the current Oakland site. Davis might need to find an investor to help him out. Or he could look at renovating, rather than rebuilding, the existing facility, which would be a good and cheaper option.

Meanwhile, Oakland has two teams to accommodate. The A’s, after the Supreme Court scuttled its San Jose bid, are seriously exploring options in their home city.

There’s plenty of room for the Raiders, too. And no one is talking about one stadium for the two teams again. But Davis will have to abandon his fantasy that he will be given control of the entire Coliseum site.

He’s welcome to stay. But he’s going to have to pay his own costs.

It occurs to me that instead of trying for a smooth writing transition here, a chronology of every team and city involved might be more efficient, beginning with …
1920: American Professional Football Association forms, including the Chicago Cardinals. APFA changes name to National Football League in 1922.
1936: American Football League forms, including the Cleveland Rams.
1937: Cleveland Rams move into NFL.
1946: Rams move from Cleveland to Los Angeles after winning 1945 NFL title. All-America Football Conference forms, including the Cleveland Browns and the Baltimore Colts.
1950: AAFC dissolves, with three teams, including the Browns and Colts, moving into the NFL. AAFC’s Los Angeles Dons merge with Rams. Colts dissolve after 1950 season.
1952: Dallas Texans form, but go bankrupt during the season.
1953: Dallas Texans move to Baltimore and become the Colts.
1960: American Football League forms, including the Los Angeles Chargers, Houston Oilers and Oakland Raiders. Chicago Cardinals move to St. Louis.
1961: Los Angeles Chargers move to San Diego.
1970: AFL and NFL merge, with Baltimore Colts and Cleveland Browns moving into the Amerian Football Conference with the 10 former AFL teams.
1972: Owners of Baltimore Colts and Los Angeles Rams swap franchises.
1980: Los Angeles Rams move to Anaheim.
1982: Oakland Raiders move to Los Angeles.
1984: Baltimore Colts move to Indianapolis.
1988: St. Louis Cardinals move to Phoenix. (Name changed to Arizona Cardinals in 1994.)
1995: Rams move from Los Angeles to St. Louis. Raiders move from L.A. back to Oakland.
1996: Cleveland Browns move to Baltimore and become the Ravens.
1997: Houston Oilers move to Memphis, moving to Nashville one year later and becoming the Tennessee Titans one year after that.
1999: New Cleveland Browns join NFL.
2002: Houston Texans formed.

This probably reads like the New Testament’s begats, or looks like a game of whackamole. What should be obvious is that the NFL abhors a vacuum, which in this case was L.A. after the Rams and Raiders left the same year.

The vacuum now is St. Louis, whose Post–Dispatch’s Jeff Gordon writes:

Our city’s sad pro football history got another painful chapter. We lost the football Cardinals to Arizona after their mostly inept run under the Bidwill family.

And now we’re losing the Rams after their mostly inept run under former showgirl Georgia Frontiere and her partner/successor, Silent Stan. What did one city do to deserve so much incompetence? Is St. Louis cursed as a football town?

Is it time to move on from the gridiron and pursue something new, like Major League Soccer?

In fairness to the Bidwill family, it did move the Cardinals from Chicago. And Frontiere moved the Rams from Los Angeles which — if we’re being totally honest here — is the rightful home for that franchise.

When a city steals a team, turnabout becomes fair play. That is why St. Louis so badly wanted an expansion team to start fresh. The Stallions would have been ours, for better or worse.

Still, it’s tough to lose teams after supporting through thick and mostly thin. Twice fans made an emotional investment in a franchise and twice they were jilted through no fault of their own.

Bill Bidwill was a bad owner here and in Arizona. The Cardinals only gained traction in the Valley of the Sun after Michael Bidwill replaced his hapless father as the franchise’s point man.

Kroenke was a bad owner, too, and there was no such relief from his regime in St. Louis. His son was busy in Colorado overseeing also-ran teams there. Stan took the reigns of a losing team and kept it on its sub-.500 path, against all odds.

Along the way he did nothing to revitalize support for the franchise. His team president, holdover Kevin Demoff, served as the Architect of Doom.

As the losses eroded and the franchise’s future became more uncertain, attendance plunged at the Concrete Circle of Death. That was totally understandable, as other owners saw. Intentionally or unintentionally, Kroenke poisoned this market.

The league-wide ill regard for Kroenke was evident in his struggle to move West. This shouldn’t have been so difficult for him. Remember, he moved boldly to solve the NFL’s decades-long LA problem.

He bought land in Southern California, a breakthrough move. He partnered with another developer to design a massive multi-use project that included a privately financed state-of-the-art stadium. He greased the political wheels in Inglewood to make sure the locals were on board.

Kroenke and his partners had everything needed to bring the NFL back to LA: The team, the land, the plan and billions of dollars to invest.

And still he met resistance. Amazing! All he had to do was co-opt San Diego Chargers owner Dean Spanos as the stadium’s second tenant and this was a done deal.

Understandably, Spanos wanted no part of Kroenke. He sought an alternative solution in Carson, Calif., and partnered with the Oakland Raiders in the process.

Playing from behind, those teams and that stadium gained significant support from owners, including five of the six on the committee studying LA opportunities.

Despite Carson’s support from owners who studied the issues most closely, the Inglewood proposal still had more votes as the meetings neared. So key owners and NFL executives tried to get Kroenke and Spanos together, working to broker a more favorable deal for the Chargers.

That didn’t happen until push came to shove at the end after one round of voting. These two antagonists needed significant third-party assistance to start finding common ground.

The ownership divide spoke volumes about Kroenke’s standing with fellow owners. NFL leaders hoped to come up with a Grand Compromise before the owners met in Houston.

But with commissioner Roger Goodell providing his trademark strong leadership, no resolution emerged from meetings last week.

Lobbying continued from both sides, with Spanos leading the charge toward the Carson project (with Raiders owner Mark Davis in tow, bowl cut and all) and Kroenke pushing his Inglewood plan, where groundwork for the development is already underway.

As the Houston meeting neared, the Inglewood initiative gained momentum. Then came the presentations and more chit-chat among the millionaires and billionaires who own teams.

When it came time to vote, Kroenke still didn’t get the number he needed to move forward. But he got 20 votes, just four short, and that gave him a commanding edge on the Spanos/Carson proposal.

That put the owners on the clock to bridge the gap and solve the problem. Ultimately they did, jobbing St. Louis in the process while rewarding the Raiders with a nice participation bonus.

The NFL made up the relocation process as it went along, but that is a Goodell trademark.

Now Dave Peacock and Co. have a stadium plan with no tenant. St. Louis barely cobbled together the stadium financing it had — failing to satisfy the NFL in the process — and now the city will encounter bidding wars if it tries to get back in the game.

Already there is noise about the Raiders playing Oakland off San Antonio and the STL. Oh, boy.
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Trump vs. the NFL

January 13, 2016

Sports, US business, US politics
Donald Trump’s latest unfiltered comments are reported by the Washington Post:

When Donald Trump looks at America, he sees a country that has gone soft, but that’s not all. He also sees pro football, a sport that is now the national pastime, going soft, too.

In a rally attended by about 2,000 people Sunday in Reno, Nev., he hit that theme and others and placed a lot of blame on the game’s referees, saying they just throw to flags to impress their wives, who are watching at home. While he admitted that he still loves New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, the game now is just unwatchable for him.

After talking about Iraq, he segued onto the topic of the NFL, with playoff games on his mind.

“It’s a Sunday, who the hell wants to watch these crummy games? I just want to watch the end. By the way — okay, let me go there for a second. Let me end that story. So we gave them Iraq, we’re stupid. We’re stupid. I’ll change things. Believe me, I’ll change things. And again, we’re going to be so respected. I don’t want to use the word ‘feared.’ What I just said about a game — so I’m watching a game yesterday. What used to be considered a great tackle, a violent head-on [tackle], a violent — if that was done by Dick Butkus, they’d say he’s the greatest player. If that were done by Lawrence Taylor — itwas done by Lawrence Taylor and Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke, right? Ray Nitschke — you used to see these tackles and it was incredible to watch, right?

“Now they tackle. ‘Oh, head-on-head collision, 15 yards.’ The whole game is all screwed up. You say, ‘Wow, what a tackle.’ Bing. Flag. Football has become soft. Football has become soft. Now, I’ll be criticized for that. They’ll say, ‘Oh, isn’t that terrible.’ But football has become soft like our country has become soft. [Applause] It’s true. It’s true. The outcome of games has been changed by what used to be phenomenal, phenomenal stuff. Now these are rough guys, these are rough guys. These guys — what they’re doing is incredible, but I looked at it and I watched yesterday in particular. So many flags, right? So many flags. And I could imagine a guy like Lawrence Taylor and Dick Butkus, who was really rough, and some of these guys sitting there watching. ‘Wow, what a beautiful tackle.’ ‘Fifteen yards! That’s — the game is over.’ You can’t kick a field goal any more.”

He wasn’t finished.

“It’s become weak and you know what? It’s going to affect the NFL. I don’t even watch it as much anymore. It’s going to affect the NFL. I don’t watch it. The referees, they want to all throw flags so their wives see them at home. ‘Oh, there’s my husband.’ [Laughter] It’s true. ‘He just broke up — he just gave a 15-yard penalty on one of the most beautiful tackles made this year.’ Right?

“It’s boring — although I love Tom Brady. I gotta tell you. I do love Tom. He’s a great guy. But it’s different. But it’s become soft and our country has become soft.”

It will not surprise you that online biographies of trump claim he was a “star athlete and student leader” at New York Military Academy. He was not a football player. His experience in football consists of purchasing the United States Football League’s New Jersey Generals. Trump is blamed for the demise of the USFL because of his outspending other USFL teams (though he ended up with no championships) and convincing the league to switch to a fall schedule to compete directly against (or merge into) the NFL. It failed. So did Trump’s efforts to buy the Buffalo Bills.

(It is interesting to contemplate, though, what might have happened had the USFL managed to get to the 1987 season. The 1987 NFL season was interrupted by the owner lockout and three weeks of games with replacement players. The NFL probably felt it could exert its muscle because of the demise of the USFL and the resulting flood of ex-USFL players, including future Packer Reggie White. Had the USFL not expired after it won an antitrust lawsuit and was awarded all of $1, that lockout probably wouldn’t have happened.)

There are people who agree with Trump’s assertions about the NFL. This is despite the NFL’s spending significant money trying to figure out how to stop the flood of concussions and other injuries affecting NFL players, alarmingly shortening NFL players’ post-retirement lifespans. (As one Post comment said, “Real men have CTE!”, concussive traumatic encephalopathy.) If current and former NFL players don’t want their sons to play football, that should tell you something about football’s need to reduce player injury.

At the same time, Trump’s statement demonstrates lack of business sense. Every time you think the NFL couldn’t get more popular, it becomes more popular. The latest figure I can find says 234 countries have NFL programming, and not merely by the Armed Forces Network for American military. NFL games can now be seen three nights per week, to go with Sundays. CBS is charging $5 million for a 30-second Super Bowl 50 commercial.

Purists don’t like the NFL’s decreasing emphasis on defense. (And yet: Seattle 10, Minnesota 9 in Sunday’s NFC playoffs.) The NFL has figured out over the past four decades that (1) popularity increases through offense, and (2) offense attracts the less-purist fan in this era of nearly unlimited entertainment choices. The most important, and therefore highest paid, NFL players are quarterbacks. Does it not make sense to protect your highest paid players through the rules?

From a political perspective, Trump’s latest ready/fire/aim statement might make him slightly more popular with Republican voters. It is completely unlikely to have any impact with non-Republican voters. (One wonders whether Democrats even like football, since it includes, among other things, coaches who verbally invade players’ safe spaces, scantily clad cheerleaders, and lots of money.)
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 13

January 13, 2016

Music
The number one single today in 1960 topped the charts for the second time:

It’s not a secret that the number one album today in 1973 was Carly Simon’s “No Secrets”:

Today in 1973, Eric Clapton performed in concert for the first time in several years at the Rainbow Theatre in London:

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Republicans vs. Trumpublicans

January 12, 2016

US politics
Michael Gerson takes an alarmist view of what a Donald Trump presidential nomination might mean to the Republican Party:

Every Republican of the type concerned with winning in November has been asking the question (at least internally): “What if the worst happens?”

The worst does not mean the nomination of Ted Cruz, in spite of justified fears of political disaster. Cruz is an ideologue with a message perfectly tuned for a relatively small minority of the electorate. Uniquely in American politics, the senator from Texas has made his reputation by being roundly hated by his colleagues — apparently a prerequisite for a certain kind of anti-establishment conservative, but unpromising for an image makeover at his convention.

Cruz’s nomination would represent the victory of the hard right — religious right and tea party factions — within the Republican coalition. After he loses, the ideological struggles within the GOP would go on.

No, the worst outcome for the party would be the nomination of Donald Trump. It is impossible to predict where the political contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton would end up. Clinton has manifestly poor political skills, and Trump possesses a serious talent for the low blow. But Trump’s nomination would not be the temporary victory of one of the GOP’s ideological factions. It would involve the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the party and its history. If Trump were the nominee, the GOP would cease to be.

Whatever your view of Republican politicians, the aspiration, the self-conception, of the party was set by Abraham Lincoln: human dignity, honored by human freedom and undergirded by certain moral commitments, including compassion and tolerance. Lincoln described the “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

It is this universality that Trump attacks. All of his angry resentment against invading Hispanics and Muslims adds up to a kind of ethno-nationalism — an assertion that the United States is being weakened and adulterated by the other. This is consistent with European, right-wing, anti-immigrant populism. It is not consistent with conservatism, which, at the very least, involves respect for institutions and commitment to reasoned, incremental change. And Trumpism is certainly not consistent with the Republicanism of Lincoln, who admitted no exceptions to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and was nominated, in part, because he could appeal to anti-slavery German immigrants.

Liberals who claim that Trumpism is the natural outgrowth, or logical conclusion, of conservatism or Republicanism are simply wrong. Edmund Burke is not the grandfather of Nigel Farage. Lincoln is not even the distant relative of Trump.

Trump, in some ways, is an odd carrier of ethno-nationalist beliefs. He held few of them, as far as I can tell, just four years ago. But as a demagogue, he has followed some of America’s worst instincts wherever they have led, and fed ethnic and religious prejudice in the process. All presidential nominees, to some extent, shape their parties into their own image. Trump would deface the GOP beyond recognition.

Trump is disqualified for the presidency by his erratic temperament, his ignorance about public affairs and his scary sympathy for authoritarianism. But for me, and I suspect for many, the largest problem is that Trump would make the GOP the party of racial and religious exclusion.

American political parties are durable constructions. But they have been broken before by powerful, roiling issues such as immigration and racial prejudice. Many Republicans could not vote for Trump but would have a horribly difficult time voting for Clinton. The humane values of Republicanism would need to find a temporary home, which would necessitate the creation of a third party. This might help elect Clinton, but it would preserve something of conservatism, held in trust, in the hope of better days.

Ultimately, these political matters are quite personal. I have spent 25 years in the company of compassionate conservatives, reform conservatives, Sam’s Club conservatives or whatever they want to call themselves, trying to advance an agenda of social justice in America’s center-right party. We have shared a belief that sound public policy — promoting opportunity, along with the skills and values necessary to grasp it — can improve the lives of our fellow citizens and thus make politics an honorable adventure.

The nomination of Trump would reduce Republican politics — at the presidential level — to an enterprise of squalid prejudice. And many Republicans could not follow, precisely because they are Republicans. By seizing the GOP, Trump would break it to pieces.

George Will holds similar views about how a Trump nomination would affect conservatism.
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Leftists vs. America

January 12, 2016

International relations, US politics
Self-described former leftist David Horowitz:

The Soviet Union is gone, and history has moved on. But the Stalin-apologist dynamic endures as the heritage of a post-Communist Left, which remains wedded to fantasies of an impossibly beautiful future that collides with the flawed American present. The Left is now the dominant force in the American Democratic party. Its extreme disconnect from realities is encapsulated in the support for the transparently racist movement called “Black Lives Matter,” which attacks law enforcement and defends street predators, excusing their crimes with the alibi that “white supremacists” created the circumstances that make some commit criminal acts. This extremist movement has the “strong support” of the entire spectrum of the “progressive” Left (including 46 percent of the Democratic party, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll).

Black Lives Matter is a movement built on the fiction that police have declared open season on innocent black Americans. According to progressive fictions, police are the agents of a “white supremacist society” — a claim alone that should make one wary of the sanity of those who advance it. The facts belie the very basis of the claim that African Americans are being indiscriminately gunned down by police: African-American males, accounting for 6 percent of the population are responsible for more than 40 percent of violent crimes. But a Washington Post report on all 980 police shootings of 2015 reveals that only 4 percent of fatal police shootings involved white officers and black victims, while in “three-quarters of the incidents, cops were either under attack themselves or defending civilians,” or, as Michael Walsh observed in the New York Post, police officers were “in other words, doing their jobs.” One incident in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., became the launching point for the Black Lives Matter movement and its malicious claim that innocent blacks were being wantonly gunned down by racist police. The alleged “victim,” Michael Brown, had just committed a strong-armed robbery and refused to comply with Officer Darren Wilson’s order to surrender. Instead the 300-pound street thug attacked Wilson in his vehicle, tried to wrest his gun from him, and then walked away before turning and charging him. Several shots failed to stop Brown, until one killed him.

Ignoring the facts, Black Lives Matter promoted the lie, invented by Brown’s robbery accomplice, that Brown had his hands up and was attempting to surrender when he was shot. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” quickly became the anthem of the movement. But this lie was refuted not only by black eyewitnesses testifying before the grand jury convened for the case and by forensic evidence, but by a review conducted by former attorney general Eric Holder’s Justice Department, otherwise bent on demonstrating the existence of bigotry in the Ferguson police department. Meanwhile “protesters” went about setting fire to Ferguson, causing millions of dollars of damage, because if there was no justice — no hanging of Wilson — there would be no peace, as the now familiar mob slogan framed it.

Black Lives Matter then set about taking its crusade to other cities, most prominently to Baltimore, where a career criminal named Freddie Gray became another cause célèbre. Gray had suffered fatal injuries inside a police van where only another captive was present. As the Black Lives Matter–inspired mobs began to gather in “protest,” Baltimore’s black Democratic mayor ordered police to stand down, allowing them to destroy millions of dollars of property. The state’s black Democratic prosecutor then indicted six police officers, three of them African American, on various ludicrous charges including first-degree murder.

The immediate result of Black Lives Matter’s war on law enforcement was an epidemic of crime, as police officers decided that aggressive law enforcement was dangerous to their lives and careers. Homicides in the Ferguson area and in Baltimore jumped 60 percent. Virtually all the victims were blacks, revealing the hypocrisy of a movement for which black lives didn’t really matter — attacks on the law enforcement and on the “power structure” did.

How could any reasonable citizen — let alone one with progressive aspirations — support a roving lynch mob like the one in Ferguson? How could half the Democratic party support a movement that condemns America as a white-supremacist society, disregarding the reality that the president and chief law-enforcement officer, and thousands of civil servants and elected officials, including the mayors and police chiefs of large urban centers, such as Memphis, Tenn., Atlanta, and Philadelphia are black? (In Detroit the new mayor is actually the first white mayor in 40 years, while its police chief is still black.)

One can embrace the absurdity that America is a white-supremacist society only if afflicted with the illusion that all statistical inequalities affecting African Americans, like high crime rates, are not reflections of culture and character but marks of racist oppression. (This particular absurdity — universal as it is among American progressives and the current U.S. Department of Justice — is easily refuted: If statistical disparities proved racism, the National Basketball Association in which 95 percent of the starting multimillionaires are black would be an association controlled by black racists, as would the National Football League, while the National Hockey League would be under the thumb of white racists.) Progressives are delusional about black racism and black crime because they are in thrall to the vision of an imaginary progressive future in which social justice will guarantee that every individual outcome is the same.

The Left is blind to the responsibility of inner-city populations for their off-the-charts violent-crime rates. The failure to embrace the responsibilities of parenthood is as characteristic of the progressive attitude as is its blindness to the betrayal of inner-city communities by Democrats, responsible almost entirely for the disgraceful condition of America’s cities. Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and numerous other centers of out-of-control black poverty, failed public-school systems, and black-on-black violence are 100 percent controlled by the Democratic party and have been so for 50 to 100 years. Yet 95 percent of the black vote and 100 percent of the progressive vote continues to go to Democrats who oppress African Americans. Unfortunately, progressives’ sordid history of supporting criminals at home is accompanied by an equally dishonorable record of sympathy for America’s enemies abroad. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was one of the monsters of the 20th century, launching two aggressive wars, dropping poison gas on the Kurdish minority, and murdering 300,000 Iraqi citizens. But when America proposed deposing him, more than a million progressives poured into the streets in protest. At first, the Democratic leadership supported the Iraq invasion as a just and necessary war. But three months later, with American men and women still in harm’s way — and under pressure from the progressive Left — they turned against the very war they had voted to authorize and, for the next five years, conducted a malicious propaganda campaign, worthy of the enemy, to discredit America’s intentions and to obstruct our military mission.

Because the Bush administration chose not to defend itself by confronting the Left’s subversive actions — including the exposure of three national-security programs — leftist myths about the Iraq War persist to this day, even in some conservative circles. To set the record straight: Bush did not lie to seduce Democrats into supporting the war, and could not have done so, since the Democrats had access to the same intelligence reports he did. The war was not about extant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, as Democrats dishonestly claimed: It was about Saddam’s violation of 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions designed to prevent him from pursuing the WMD programs he was developing. The Democrats’ betrayal of their country’s war effort crippled its progress and, with the election to the presidency of an anti-war leftist in 2008, led directly to the explosion of terrorism and bloodshed that has since engulfed the Middle East. But it wasn’t just the surrender mentality of the Obama administration that fueled these catastrophes. With the full support of the Democratic party, President Obama embraced the Muslim Brotherhood and America’s mortal enemy, Iran, providing its ayatollahs with a path to nuclear weapons and dominance of the region — causing Sunni Arab states to prepare for a Middle Eastern civil war.

Just as leftists acted as propagandists for the Soviet empire, discrediting America’s Cold War effort and conducting deceptive campaigns to hide Soviet crimes, so the Left today disparages the Islamist threat and opposes the security measures necessary to protect the homeland — most alarmingly the sealing of our southern border. Progressives have created seditious “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to cooperate with Homeland Security and the immigration laws in more than 300 outlaw municipalities under Democratic control. This betrayal has gone un-reversed for years and led to the needless deaths of numerous American citizens at the hands of illegal-alien criminals, of which there are more than 200,000 in our jails alone, and obviously many more inside our borders.

Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. But in truth, 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed at Jews, with a small minority directed a Muslims.

Exploiting the myth of Muslim persecution, progressives oppose scrutiny of the Muslim community, including terror-promoting imams and mosques. They immediately denounce proposals to screen Muslim immigrants as religious bigotry, and thus close off any rational discussion of the problem. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy. Most notoriously the president and his operatives cynically spread the lie that an obscure Internet video about Mohammed was behind the Benghazi terror attack. Speaking like an ayatollah before the U.N. General Assembly, shortly after the attack, Obama declared: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” What an American president should have said is: “The future must not belong to those who murder in the name of Islam.” Our country is at a perilous crossroads, one that is made immeasurably more dangerous by a national party that blames its own country for the crimes of its enemies, and by a political opposition too feckless and timid to hold its fellow citizens accountable for their unconscionable acts.

Our country is at a perilous crossroads, one that is made immeasurably more dangerous by a national party that blames its own country for the crimes of its enemies, and by a political opposition too feckless and timid to hold its fellow citizens accountable for their unconscionable acts.
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 12

January 12, 2016

Music
It figures after War and Peace-size Presty the DJ entries the past few days, today’s is relatively short.

The number one album today in 1974, a few months after the death of its singer, was “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim”:

The number one single today in 1974 introduced the world to the word “pompatus”:

Today in 1982, Bob Geldof was arrested after a disturbance aboard a 727 that had been grounded for five hours:

(more…)
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Postgame schadenfreude, home team edition

January 11, 2016

Packers
I wrote here Saturday that the Packers, as badly as they had played since the bye week, had a decent chance to win their first-round playoff game at Washington because the Redskins aren’t very good, NFC (L)East title notwithstanding.

It turned out that spotting the Redskins an 11-0 lead was just what the Packers apparently needed. Green Bay’s 35-18 win was the best the Packers have played in months against, well, a playoff team. The Redskins didn’t beat a playoff team all season, including in the playoffs.

The Washington Post’s Mike Jones reports:

With the third-quarter clock ticking down and the heat coming on second and long, Aaron Rodgers fired a rope of a pass 15 yards to wide receiver Randall Cobb at the 50-yard line — two yards beyond the first-down markers. A smile crept across Rodgers’s face as the quarter ended.

As of late, smiles have been infrequent for the Green Bay Packers. They entered Sunday’s first-round playoff game against the Washington Redskins at FedEx Field having lost two straight, and opponents had exploited an injury-riddled offensive line and battered Rodgers, robbing him of his usual magic.

But on Sunday evening, order had been restored. The 2014 NFL MVP proved too masterful for the Redskins’ defense. Meanwhile, Green Bay’s defense found ways to cool off Kirk Cousins and his offense after impressive displays early in the game and to start the second half. And so, with a 35-18 defeat to Rodgers & Co., the Redskins’ turnaround season came to an end.

Rodgers and his teammates used that 10-play, 76-yard, 5-minute 39-second drive that spanned the end of the third quarter and start of the fourth — which was capped by a two-yard Eddie Lacy touchdown run — to take the wind out of the Redskins’ sails. That score put the Packers out of reach at 32-18.

A season-best crowd of 81,367 packed into the Redskins’ stadium to witness the team’s first playoff game in three seasons. They hoped to witness Washington’s first playoff victory since the 2005 season and the first at home since 2000.

But after the home team treated them to promising displays at various points of the game, from the middle of the third quarter on, Green Bay had its way with Washington. And by the 4:39 mark, when Mason Crosby’s 29-yard field goal put the Packers up 35-18, the bulk of the fans headed for the exits.

Rodgers, whose Packers will play at Arizona in the second round of the playoffs, led his team by completing 21 of 36 passes for 210 yards and two touchdowns. Cousins, meanwhile, completed 29 of 46 passes for 329 yards and a touchdown. The quarterback also rushed for a touchdown — the only other one of the day for the Redskins. …

Through the first quarter, Rodgers completed just 1 of 8 pass attempts. But he found a rhythm in the second quarter, completing 5 of 7 passes while marching his team downfield on a nine-play, 80-yard scoring drive capped by a 12-yard pass to Cobb.

The savvy Rodgers twice kept the Redskins off-balance by quickly getting his team to the line as Washington was trying to substitute players.

The Rodgers-to-Cobb touchdown, and the successful kick, cut the score to 11-10 with 2:59 left in the quarter. Washington held the ball for just 32 seconds on the following possession, and that left Rodgers with plenty of time. Completing 7 of 8 passes, Rodgers directed a nine-play, 60-yard drive capped by a 10-yard toss to Davante Adams. Thus completed a 17-0 scoring run by Green Bay, who went into the locker room up by six. …

Green Bay’s rushing attack continued to click down the stretch. Rodgers ended the third quarter with a 15-yard strike to Cobb, and the Packers rushed for 49 yards on eight carries, ending with Lacy’s two-yard jaunt and a two-touchdown lead.

The home teams last weekend either lost (the Redskins and Houston, wiped out 30-0 by Kansas City) or suffered daggers to the heart. Earlier Sunday, the Vikings blew a 9-0 lead, but were in position to kick the game-winning 27-yard field goal. And then … click here for what happened next.

https://mtc.cdn.vine.co/r/videos/93EE2BB9981298076436489703424_43595982665.5.1.12551865228283520222.mp4?versionId=dr77UOGuegt1eqaBuRjtG9i48jK7xH6A

The egregious miss made the Washington Post’s Des Bieler ask if that was the worst missed field goal in NFL postseason history:

Well, probably not, given that it came in a first-round game. In fact, most Vikings fans, once they regain their composure, would probably say that it wasn’t even the worst in the team’s star-crossed postseason history.

That dubious honor likely goes to Gary Anderson, who missed a 38-yarder — indoors, at the team’s old home in the Metrodome, after having been perfect all season — that would have given Minnesota a 10-point lead late in the 1999 NFC championship game. Instead, the Atlanta Falcons scored a game-tying touchdown, then shocked the heavily favored Vikings in overtime and moved on to the Super Bowl.

Of course, there’s missing a field goal in the first playoff round, there’s missing one in a conference title game, and then there’s missing one that would have won a Super Bowl. Yes, it’s time once again to invoke the name of Scott Norwood.

The Buffalo Bills kicker missed a 47-yarder with eight seconds left in Super Bowl XXV, allowing the Giants to escape with a 20-19 victory. That distance certainly made the attempt anything but a gimme, as opposed to Walsh’s chip-shot effort, but the highest of NFL stakes probably keeps Norwood atop this unfortunate list.

The Star Tribune’s Patrick Reusse places this loss on top of the Vikings’ unfortunate list, perhaps because …

I sent out this Tweet during the 2-minute warning of the fourth quarter, when the Seahawks were leading 10-9 and facing third down out of the break: “12-10, Vikes, mark it down.’’

This was done out of a genuine feeling that the Seahawks would be stopped and the Vikings would move into field-goal range for Blair Walsh – already 3-for-3 on an afternoon when Seattle coach Pete Carroll was reluctant to allow his guy to try them.

That is what occurred. The Seahawks were stopped and the Vikings moved into a field-goal range. And soon I was offering this Tweet:

“Gary Anderson falls into 2^nd place on list of worst missed FGs in history of Minnesota Vikings Football, LLC.’’

Actually, I spelled it Andersen, because I always get our Gary mixed up with Atlanta’s Morten, who made the overtime field goal to beat the Vikings in the NFC title game in January 1999.

The responses in Tweetland were almost unanimous in disagreement with my contention that Walsh’s miss in a first-round playoff game could surpass as worst-ever Anderson’s miss in a game that could have sent the Vikings to a Super Bowl.

No matter.

I’m sticking with my contention that Walsh’s on Sunday is now No. 1 and here are the reasons:

1-Anderson’s field goal from 38 yards came with 2:18 to play and with the Vikings leading 27-20. It would have put the lead at 30-20 and made it roughly 90 percent that the Vikings would win.

Yet, Atlanta did score its tying touchdown with 57 seconds remaining. If that had been a touchdown to cut the lead to 30-27, there was always the onside kick and the possibility of a recovery for the trailing team.

Ask the 2014 Green Bay Packers about that one.

Thus, Anderson’s field goal attempt did not come with a guarantee of victory, only an extreme likelihood.

2-Walsh’s field goal would have put the Vikings ahead 12-10 with under 30 seconds to play. He would have flopped a kickoff down near the goal line, and Seattle would have had a couple of desperation plays with no timeouts remaining.

Walsh’s field goal would have won the game … 100 percent.

3-Walsh’s field goal was 11 yards closer. That matters. It’s more improbable to miss a 27-yarder in frozen conditions than it is to miss a 38-yarder, even when it’s being kicked indoors.

4-The fact Anderson hadn’t missed a kick all season was merely a quirk, not a factor in whether it should be rated as a worse miss than Walsh’s on Sunday.

5-The 1998 Vikings deserved what they got against Atlanta. Yes, the Falcons were 14-2, but it wasn’t a “this team is fantastic’’ 14-2 … more a tribute to an Atlanta team with resiliency.

The Vikings were 15-1 and they were a fantastic football machine on offense.

The Vikings played well but not great on that Sunday in the Metrodome. They allowed a team that was their inferior – the Falcons – to hang tough and it cost them.

6-The 2015 Vikings did not get what they deserved on Sunday. It was so miserably cold that it had to take fortitude for the 22 athletes on both sides to involve themselves in every play.

The Vikings were taking on a Seattle team with a ferocious defense and with an offense that had been tearing up most opponents through the second half of the schedule. This included the Vikings, 38-7, in early December in the same TCF Bank Stadium.

Mike Zimmer’s defense held the Seahawks scoreless into the fourth quarter. It took Russell Wilson scooping up a ball like the baseball player he was to create a long, busted play and give life to Seattle’s offense.

And then after it fell behind 10-9, the Purple defense still held the Seahawks and gave the offense a chance. All the Vikings needed was one little drive to pull the upset, and they got it with a pass interference call and then Kyle Rudolph’s rumble down the sideline.

I know the Seahawks were 10-6 and the Falcons of 17 years earlier were 14-2, but in my judgment, this was a more-complete team the Vikings were playing in sub-zero freezing on Sunday than in January 1999.

And the Vikings had ‘em beat, and then Walsh missed a 27-yard field goal. It didn’t cost the Vikings a Super Bowl trip, but it cost them a chance to stay alive.

Considering odds faced, effort expended and victory guarantee provided, it puts Walsh’s missed 27-yarder ahead of Anderson’s 38-yarder for worst-ever missed field goal for the Vikings.

The Star Tribune’s Jim Souhan might as well be cast in the old “Hee Haw” segment “Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me”:

There is always another generation to disappoint. The Minnesota Vikings have been losing games like this for 50 years, but they had not choked in a playoff game in six years, and they had not lost a home playoff game with an improbably missed field goal in 16, not until Sunday afternoon, when Blair Walsh smother-hooked a kick that missed its intended target and squarely struck millions of frostbitten and jangled nerves.

The Vikings’ playoff game against Seattle began with an homage to Vikings tradition and Minnesota weather, as Bud Grant braved subzero temperatures in a golf shirt at midfield for the coin flip, and it became the ultimate homage to the dark side of Vikings lore, the shadows that haunt the franchise like a child’s closeted ghosts.

If you had never seen the Vikings game or visited Minnesota before, sitting in the stands on Sunday would have explained everything: The natives’ imperviousness to cold, the fans’ whistling-through-the-graveyard passion, and the despair of a frigid walk to an icy car in weak, winter sunlight in the wake of another inexplicable loss. This was Frozen remade as tragedy.

When the Norse gods of disappointment demanded their periodic sacrifice of an innocent psyche on Sunday, it was Walsh’s turn to fail. He powered three field goals through the uprights and heavy air to give the Vikings a 9-0 lead, had done as much as a kicker can do to be a football hero, until the fourth quarter arrived and the Vikings’ demons joined the huddle.

Mike Zimmer’s defense had intelligently contained Russell Wilson all game but on the first drive of the fourth, Wilson turned mistakes by both teams into the first of four game-turning plays.

A shotgun snap flew over his head. Wilson turned, inserted his mouthguard, made a sliding recovery, began looking downfield as he rose to his feet, skated around overeager cornerback Captain Munnerlyn and found Tyler Lockett for 35 yards to the Vikings’ 4. Two plays later, Seattle scored to make it 9-7.

Two plays from scrimmage later, Adrian Peterson fumbled. Inexcusable Play No. 2 led to a Seattle field goal. It was 10-9.

Inexcusable play No. 3 arrived with less than five minutes remaining. Wilson lofted a pass to the left. Vikings safety Andrew Sendejo dove, got both arms on the ball, and dropped it as he hit the turf. Had he caught it the Vikings would have been near midfield.

Despite their mistakes, the Vikings would not implode. Their historical failures are not rooted so much in collapse as in excellence betrayed. They would have their chance.

Another defensive stand gave the offense the ball at the Vikings’ 39 with 1:42 remaining. Seven plays later, Walsh jogged onto the field to attempt a 27-yard field goal. Walsh planted his foot strangely close to the ball and yanked the kick to the left, like a bad golfer trying to overcompensate for a slice.

Teammates bowed their heads. Zimmer bent over, hands on knees. Thousands of fans who had sat in the cold for four hours recoiled. The Vikings’ failures are stunning yet predictable. “It’s shocking,’’ defensive end Everson Griffen said. “It’s very disappointing that we lost and the only thing we can do now is … I really don’t know.’’

“It’s a chip shot,’’ Zimmer, the pragmatist, said. “He’s got to make it.’’

By missing, Walsh joins the 12th man in the huddle, the Favre interception, Gary Anderson’s miss, Darrin Nelson’s drop and four Super Bowl losses in the franchise’s virtual museum of malaise.

Well, Cincinnati has as many Super Bowl rings as Minnesota. The Bengals squandered a comeback and lost to archrival Pittsburgh 18-16.

The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Paul Daughterty:

A game that descended into brutal, chaotic farce was won by the Pittsburgh Steelers on Saturday night.

The cool every Bengals player promised during the week was nothing but hot air. When the Bengals needed to play with poise, they committed two personal fouls on the same play. And that was the ballgame.

Seven is worse than six was worse than five. Every Bengals playoff loss is a stab in the same eye. Resurrecting reasons to believe gets harder each year. The Bengals aren’t the Cubs. We don’t find their losing lovable. We’d need another 100 years for that.

But make no mistake: Playoff L No. 7 of the Marvin Lewis Era was the worst. Given the sadness, skepticism and cynicism provoked by the previous six, that’s saying something.

It could also be the most telling.

Mike Brown is Mike Brown, so there very likely will be no change at the top. But if any game would force that, it would be this one. Too many players were out of control. That’s on the head coach. Too many stupid things happened. Passion has its place in football. Reckless stupidity does not.

I won’t go into detail about the game, its frantic finish yet another eye-stab. You saw it. You don’t need to read about it.

It’s mindless to blame a few plays or a few players for a loss that had more twists than a medieval thumb screw. It might have been easier had the Bengals lost 15-0. Chalk it up to another playoff fade. Only, they didn’t fade. They took the lead, 16-15, and with a first down at the Steelers’ 26 with 1:36 left, had the game won.

Only this is January and these are the Bengals so Jeremy Hill, bless him, fumbled. Then Ben Roethlisberger, whose right shoulder was ground meat, took Pittsburgh 74 yards in nine plays. Chris Boswell kicked a 35-yard field goal with 14 seconds left to send Cincinnati to its most crushing loss in … forever.

You saw that.

So here’s the thing, and it is indisputable: You cannot launch yourself at a defenseless receiver’s head, after a pass sails uncatchably high. You can’t be pushing and shoving after the referees tell you to stop. This has nothing to do with curses or bad luck or “choking’’ or any of the millions of other reasons we’ve used to rationalize the postseason carnage.

It has everything to do with playing smart, poised, selfless football.

“We fought, then unraveled when it counted the most,’’ Michael Johnson said. “Roethlisberger didn’t hurt us on that last drive. We hurt us on that last drive.’’

Vontaze Burfict and Adam Jones are terrific football players, whose games feed off emotion. Emotion without control is dangerous. The Steelers had 22 seconds left in their season when Roethlisberger threw incomplete across the middle to Antonio Brown. It would have been 2nd-and-10 from the Bengals’ 47, a bad place for Pittsburgh to be with no timeouts and needing 15 yards at least for a chance to kick a wet ball in the pouring rain through the uprights.

Instead, Burfict drilled Brown with a vicious headshot: Fifteen yards. Jones went ballistic at the call, wouldn’t stop: Fifteen yards. The ball ended up at the Bengals’ 15, where Boswell chip-shotted the game-winner.

Afterward, Burfict said little. Jones said less, except to stage an expletive-fest on Instagram, against the referees. He doesn’t get it and, at age 32, he likely never will.

No one is a bigger stickler for decorum on the field than Marvin Lewis. And yet he enjoys players who live on the edge of control. Always has, since the days of Odell Thurman. That’s fine: Every team would like to have players with the talent and fury of Burfict and Jones.

But when the fury escapes from the leash and costs you games, the coach is going to be the one held accountable. The irony is, Lewis likely saved Jones’ career, and gave life to Burfict’s. Now, he’s open to criticism because he can’t control their behavior on the field.

The Packers return to Arizona Saturday night. If they win, they will either go to Carolina again or host Seattle again. Two of the four remaining AFC teams are Kansas City and Denver, which were also on the Packers schedule.
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