Randy Rosetta noted today at Gridiron Now,
“In a sport where rivalry games serve as the constant lifeblood, nobody does
bitterness and contentious showdowns quite like the SEC. Every week, it seems
like at least two teams from the best football league in college football
collide with bragging rights at stake and hatred for the other overflowing like
the stadiums that are often filled to capacity and then some.”
For the past 10 seasons, the Alabama-LSU
game has catapulted into the spotlight as arguably the biggest game in the SEC
and one of the most impactful games nationally every season.
My SEC sister, Diogenes, is a devout LSU
fan. I am a rabid Alabama fan. I consider it a blessing to share a sport I
love with someone I care about. Since
2014 she and I have had a friendly wager on the Bama-LSU game. The loser would make a donation to The
Wounded Warrior Project; out of love for our brave military service members the
winner would make a donation as well.
This is the way two dyed-in-the-wool fans handle their fierce
competitive spirit.
Continuing our tradition, this year we
agreed to make a contribution to Shriners Hospitals for Children. Since 1922, more than 1.3 million children
have received life-changing care at Shriners Hospitals helping them reach their
potential to lead more fulfilling lives regardless of a family’s ability to
pay.
I designated the Shriners Hospital
located in Shreveport and here’s the letter they sent me:
“You have not lived today until you have done something
for someone who can never repay you.” — John
Bunyan
As we approach
Thanksgiving and the season of giving, I hope you’ll join us in the joyful act
that reflects a thankful heart and relishes in the happiness that comes from
helping those less fortunate than ourselves.
If you’d like to donate to the Shriners Hospitals for Children here is
the link. May God bless you today and always.
I think
we can agree the Cubs played sloppy baseball last night. They’re one game away from adding to a
century of futility. Only 5 of 44 teams
to fall behind 3-1 in the World Series have come back to win the crown.
Joe
Maddon’s got his top three starting pitchers lined up for tonight’s game: Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta and Kyle Hendricks. With lights-out pitching in his arsenal
Maddon needs, no, must find a way to get Kyle Schwarber in the lineup. The Cubs desperately need Schwarber’s
bat. The guy can swing the lumber!
When
the cameras pan the stands at Wrigley you see so many elderly fans who’ve been
waiting a lifetime for the Cubbies to win the World Series. I hope they can pull off the comeback of the
ages for them. I can think of nothing
more wonderful. It’d be one for the
history books.
The Cubbies trail the
Indians 2-1 in the World Series and Cleveland has regained home-field
advantage, with the guarantee the series will return to Ohio for at least one
game.
I refuse to succumb
to the fatalism of some Chicago fans. A
Cubspocalypse is comin’.
UPDATE 10-28-16 11:33AM: We regret the user who uploaded this video to YouTube™ has removed it without explanation. Its not surprising that someone somewhere was offended by the jabs it took at Crooked Hillary. We apologize for any inconvenience.
UPDATE
II 10-28-16 11:54 AM: I was
able to locate a different user’s upload of the same video. Let’s see how long this stays up. Thank you for your patience.
I really wasn't going to comment on this, but I've seen a flurry of opinions about Newt's "slapdown" of Megyn Kelly, or how "hypocritical" she was to have, on at least one occasion, posed alluringly and then obsess over Trump's alleged sexual peccadilloes.
Give me a break! For the record, I have been a long time fan and defender of Newt. I admired his Contract with America, I defended him over the gross distortions of allegations against him supposedly handing his ex-wife divorce papers on her hospital sick bed, and I would have voted for him for president, if he'd had the fire in the belly required to capture the 2012 nomination. In that 2012 debate when he stood up to the media bias of the questioning, I cheered him for his backbone. His exchange with Megyn Kelly? Not so much.
In all the years I've followed his career, this moment was IMHO, his least dignified, most disappointing and most embarrassing moment. Newt has a reputation as a historian and a shrewd political strategist. Both true. He typically has the ability to calmly and rationally dissect whatever arguments are presented to him. This occasion... not so much.
The first four and a half minutes are a pretty benign back and forth, but around the 4:48 minute mark, things begin to get heated. Kelly is pressing Newt to admit, in the face of numerous polls, that his candidate may be slipping (alternate universes aside). The supposed slide timed to the allegations surrounding what he may or may not have said to a beauty queen (exacerbated by his dwelling on the story for days), and the crass remarks on the audio leaked from Access Hollywood.
MK: "If Trump is a sexual predator, that is..." NG (interrupting): :He's not a sexual predator! You can't say that! You cannot defend that statement!"
MK (Crosstalk): "Okay, that's your opinion, I'm not taking a position on it." Let's stop it there for a second.
The tandem of ace
Cubs’ pitcher Jake Arrieta and slugging phenom Kyle Schwarber set the Tribe on
its ears last night dominating Cleveland in a 5-1 victory bringing the 2016
World Series back to Wrigley.
Arrieta went 5⅓ shutout
innings while Schwarber went 2 for 4 with a walk and 2 RBIs. Schwarber became the first position player in
MLB history to earn his first hit of the season in the World Series after
missing all but three games of the regular season after tearing two ligaments
in his left knee back in April.
Team doctors allowed
Schwarber to be the DH in Games 1 and 2.
Will he be cleared to play the outfield at Wrigley? "We'll
see," Schwarber said. "I haven't tried it. So we'll take it day by
day, like I said."
Manager Joe Maddon
could play Schwarber in left field and move Ben Zobrist to right. Jason Heyward was benched due to a hitting
slump of just 2 for 28
The Cubbies now hold
a home field advantage for Games 3, 4 and 5.
Can they win the Series by taking all three games at Wrigley? The experts say yes. The Cubs have a 62% chance of taking home the
crown to the Tribe’s 38% according to Five Thirty
Eight.
I’m not hanging my
Cubbies hat on any sports expert’s notion—I’m going with my gut—the Northsiders
will sweep the Tribe.
Not normally a superstitious person, I was reticent to
trundle down to my polling station and cast my vote in the 2016 presidential
election. After all, in 2008 and again
in 2012, my guy got shellacked.
I had an 8:45 AM appointment with my pulmonologist during
which I learned that there had been an issue with the refrigerator used to
store vaccines for the flu and pneumonia.
After I left the doctor’s office I went to my local pharmacy and got
both shots. I was feeling slightly
invincible. “How about a bite to eat and
then girding your loins to tackle that early vote?” I asked myself.
I pointed the car in the direction of my polling station to
find folks lined up around the building and out to the street. I thought about aborting my plans, but
reasoned that the lines weren’t going to get any shorter so I parked the car
and assumed my position in line.
People were friendly.
No one was on their phone. Some
conversations were fairly audible, others were hushed. About 20 minutes in, I heard a woman
somewhere in the back of the line begin to hack and wheeze and cough. I thought, “This is my chance to be a real
smartass.” So…I hollered quizzically, “Hillary? Is that you?”
The reaction from those in line was priceless. “Lock her up!
Lock her up!” they chanted. I
made a funny.
When I finally made it inside and a poll worker escorted me
to my voting machine, I looked down at the first screen totally unprepared for
the impact of seeing the name of the first ever unindicted felon on the ballot
for President of the United States. This
was a moment in history—a chance to stake my political claim—to stop a corrupt
bitch from being coronated.
I watched Game One of
the World Series last night and was astonished at how piss-poor home plate
umpire Larry Vanover was.
I thought, as did
millions of other baseball fans, that Major League Baseball was making a more
concerted effort to get its best umpires into the World Series while minimizing
the appearances of its weakest umps.
One headline from the
Chicago Tribune read: “Corey Kluber helps Indians to 6-0 victory
over Cubs in World Series.” Kluber’s a
great pitcher, but Vanover is the one who “helped” the Indians win. It was infuriating to watch this dolt call a handful
of balls off the plate strikes and to a greater extent pitches right smack dab
in the strike zone balls.
According to Baseball Prospectus,
Vanover’s K/BB ratio is 2.25 compared to the MLB average of 2.58. His ERA is 3.93 while the average MLB rating
is 4.18 and finally, his WHIP rating (walks plus hits per inning pitched) is
1.29 compared to the MLB average of 1.33.
Tonight's HP ump Larry Vanover has one of the smallest zones in MLB, and rated below average as far as his calls matching the typical zone.
Cubs left-hander Jon
Lester was noticeably upset about the disparity between calls made on his
pitches and those of the Tribe's hurler.
He had a chat with Vanover at the end of the third inning to express his
ire. “I don’t know if he had a
(microphone on),” Lester said. “It was just two professionals talking to each
other about what was going on. I don’t comment on umpires. I’m a competitor. I
think every ball I throw should be a strike. We talked it out; we hashed it out
and moved on from there.”
Anyway, we’re done
with Vanover. He will rotate to the
field and will be the replay official for Games 3-7.
CNBC published an interesting piece noting the 2016
World Series could be one of the last World Series in which balls and strikes
are called by a home plate umpire.
“Sportvision, a subsidiary of sports powerhouse SMT, has
the technology to call every single ball and strike with near perfect accuracy,
using its "Pitchf/x" product.”
“Pitchf/x is the
rectangle you see on TV that shows the strike zone. It's the same technology
that undermines umpires when they clearly miss a call. And it's the same
technology that can reduce umpires from key decision-makers to caretakers at
baseball games.”
I’m not going to
overreact (not much anyway) to this setback.
Kluber dominated the Cubs. It’s
not the end of the world. Game Two starts
tonight at 7:08 PM ET on FOX. The early
start is due to a forecast of rain in Cleveland.
Those “Loveable
Losers” are losers no more. From his
broadcast booth in baseball heaven Harry Caray was shouting “Holy Cow!” at the historic news the Chicago Cubs won the NLCS against the LA Dodgers and a trip to the World Series. The World Series I tell ya!
Seventy-one years
removed from their last pennant, and 108 years since their last World Series
crown, the Cubbies begin the series at Progressive Field in Cleveland. The first pitch will be tonight at 8:08 PM ET
on FOX.
My beloved Atlanta
Braves were awful this year but I remember well the utter euphoria in 1995 as
the Braves won the World Series against the Cleveland Indians. I have a soft spot for the Cubbies. How can you not root hard for a team that has
the longest title drought in baseball history?
Indians first baseman
Mike Napoli said, “The baseball gods are really happy right now. I wanted the Cubs to win just because I knew
how cool it would be to be a part of it.
I think it’s going to be a special World Series. There’s two droughts and there’s going to be
a winner.”
The political action
committee of Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, an influential Democrat with
longstanding ties to Hillary and Bill Clinton, gave almost $500,000 to the
election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. That very same official played a role in the investigation of
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of
State under President Barack Obama. Campaign finance records show McAuliffe’s
political-action committee gave $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of
Dr. Jill McCabe, the wife of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Why did she spend $1.5 million for a chance at a $18,000/year state senate gig? She and husband wanted a second car I guess
Please campaign loudly on the argument, “the average family paying $4800 more per year than in 2008 is a sign the law is working.” https://t.co/XRLihbHIk9
This
afternoon, beginning at 3:30 PM ET, all eyes will be glued to a TV set in
anticipation of the battle that will be waged at Bryant-Denny Stadium in
Tuscaloosa. Bama haters are itching to
see the Aggies serve up the Tide’s first loss of the season.
Some
would have you believe that Alabama must lose a game this season and it will
come at the hands of either A&M or LSU.
Is there any reason
to believe that the Aggie defense that gave up 684 yards of offense to
Tennessee, a team Bama held to under 200 yards last week in Knoxville, will win
today? The ESPN Matchup Predictor gives
The Crimson Tide a 76.7% chance at victory and A&M a pathetic 23.3%.
Folks in College
Station have high hopes of a win today and uploaded a hype video to pump them
up:
OK, TA&M has played very well so
far this season. The Aggies are rested
as they come off a bye week and they’re hanging their hat on QB Trevor Knight
who led the Sooners to a 45-31 victory over my beloved Boys from Tuscaloosa in
the 2014 Sugar Bowl.
Knight ain’t no “Johnny
Football” and their “12th Man” will be noticeably absent in a stadium filled with
over 108,000 rabid Houndstooth-hat-wearin’ crimson-clad fans in Tuscaloosa. Alabama has vanquished other quarterbacks cut
from the same cloth as Knight. I don’t
think for one moment that he will be able to sit in the pocket and exploit the
Tide’s secondary nor will he have any better success running against Alabama’s
D-line than Josh Dobbs did last week.
Saban and Kiffin will have the Aggies on their heels early and often.
This presidential
race has been a three-ring circus and not the good kind we remember as kids.
The avalanche of
leaked emails brought to us by Julian Assange, the FBI 302s exposing Clinton’s
quid pro quo, strong suspicions of intentional voter fraud, voter intimidation
by DNC operatives like Robert Creamer and the blinding liberal bias and media
collusion has folks reeling in disgust. Apparently,
this election cycle will determine the presidency of No Longer America.
Makes ya wonder if all
the circus clowns whose job it was to sweep up after the elephants ran off to
become campaign spokesmen for Hillary. I
hope they’re happy to be in league with The Beast because if she wins on
November 8th they’re going to be stuck powdering Granny’s folds for the next
several years. They must be so proud.
In case you haven't noticed, there have been some major disturbances in the Force,
er, interruptions in the Internet today. Several of you may have commented
here, and we have not replied because Disqus is down. Not just here, but
most everywhere I've visited. The Disqus site itself is accessible, but
comments are down.
Twitter is down, along with other random sites. It has been called a Distributed Denial of Service attack. The Feds are aware of it and are trying to track down those responsible for it.
There's is nothing wrong with your set. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.
If you are suffering from Extreme Twitter Withdrawal, please call 1-800-Get-a-Life. Operators are standing by...
The soundbite everyone
seems to have seized on after the third and final presidential debate was
Trump’s declaration that if he loses the election he might consider the results
illegitimate because the process is “rigged”.
Granny huffed and
puffed that her opponent’s answer was “horrifying” saying he was “talking down
our democracy.”
With the mounting
evidence of intentional voter fraud, voter intimidation and media collusion
with the Clinton camp is it any wonder that Trump would make such a statement?
The g-d Left have
argued vehemently in the past that “their” elections were stolen, i.e. John
Kerry in 2004.
In August, according
to The Federalist, Politico’s Ben Wofford wrote a piece explaining
how the election could be hacked in 7 minutes.
The piece focused on a professor who bought an $82 voting machine and
hacked with it so he could manipulate the results.
Wofford noted, “In
American politics, an onlooker might observe that hacking an election has been
less of a threat than a tradition,” citing Huey Long’s infamous rigging in
1932, and the 1948 “Lyndon Landslide” during which Lyndon B. Johnson
“mysteriously overcame a 20,000 vote deficit in his first Senate race.”
In September of this
year, disgraced former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz denied George W. Bush won
Florida in the 2000 presidential election saying Al Gore AKA ManBearPig won it
and the Supreme Court elected Bush to the presidency.
In October 2002, at a
private fund-raiser in Los Angeles for Democratic Sen. Jean Carnahan of
Missouri, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told the crowd that President Bush merely
had been “selected” president, not elected.
Remember the hanging, swinging, pregnant, dimpled and tri-chads and the
infamous “butterfly” ballots?
According to a 2012 Pew Charitable
Trust report,
roughly 18 million voter registrations are either “significantly inaccurate” or
invalid—enough to tip an election. Yet when Donald Trump echoes the concerns
about election integrity many Americans have had for years, it’s totally
insane.
It’s pretty plain to
see that election-rigging only matters when
Democrats lose.
Relive the insane machinations of the Gore-Lieberman
Sore-Loserman “recount” from this HBO documentary clip:
The media colluded with the DNC to take out Bernie and the Clinton campaign to take down Republicans, but Trump's dangerous to our democracy
Those annoying document dumps, courtesy of Russia, just keep gumming up the works for Granny
don’t they?
Desperate, and I do
mean desperate, for a debate bailout Hillary addressed Russia’s alleged interference in the
presidential election by calling her opponent a “puppet” of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
“It’s pretty clear
the Russians have engaged in cyber attacks against the United States of
America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing
to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever
he wants to do and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very
clear favorite in this race,” Clinton asserted.
“I don’t know Putin,”
Trump said. “He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be
good. He has no respect for her. He has no respect for our president, and I’ll
tell you what—we’re in very serious trouble because we have a country with
tremendous numbers of nuclear warheads. From
everything I see has no respect for this person.”
"Well, that’s
because he'd rather have a puppet for president of the United States and it's
pretty clear," Clinton fired back.
"No puppet.
You’re the puppet," Trump immediately said.
She squirmed, and
noticeably so, at the charge.
WikiLeaks laid bare
that the former Secretary of State didn't see Russia as a problem. On May 29, 2013 Granny recounted a meeting
with Putin while SOS.
“We talked about a lot of issues that were not the
hot-button issues between us, you know, his view on missile defense, which we
think is misplaced because, you know, we don’t believe that there will be a
threat from Russia.”
Six days later at an
annual conference for Goldman Sachs CEOs Clinton chirped, “I would love it if
we could continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia.”
Granny
and Bubba Clinton, as well as campaign chairman John Podesta, enjoyed a close
relationship with Russian interests throughout The World’s Most Dangerous
Community Organizer’s regime.. Podesta’s emails reveal that he sat on the board
of directors and owned 75,000 shares of the Russian-backed Joule Unlimited. He
has transferred those shares to an anonymous holding company.
Bubba received a $500K speaking fee from Renaissance Capital, a
Russian investment firm, on June 29, 2010, just as the Russians announced their
intention of buying Uranium One and with it one-fifth of the U.S. uranium
supply.
From The
New York Times, a publication loathe to criticize the unindicted felon:
At the heart of the
tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been
major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and
his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to
the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.
Beyond mines in
Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the
Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United
States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for
national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of
representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the
agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by
Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As the Russians
gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from
2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton
Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four
donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly
disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with
the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties
to the company made donations as well.
And shortly after the
Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One,
Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment
bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
At the time, both
Rosatom [Russian atomic energy agency] and the United States government made
promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets
to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.
Remember this hot mic
moment from 2012 just before the general election?
Trump’s running mate,
Gov. Mike Pence, made the rounds on Sunday’s talking head shows proclaiming, "The
media is piling on with such unsubstantiated claims, ignoring an avalanche of
hard evidence, documented evidence, of deeds by the Secretary of State"
contained in the WikiLeaks email dump.
CNN’s Jake Tapper
described DNC Chair Donna Brazile’s feeding debate questions to Clinton as “journalistically
horrifying.”
Joe Concha,
contributor for The
Hill, put the media’s coverage of Campaign 2016 in glaring perspective when
he compared the air time on network news to accusations against Trump and the
WikiLeaks revelations related to Granny Clinton.
“Reaction to Trump's
critique of the media by many left-leaning media members and advocates was
about what one would expect, referring to it as dangerous and dark and
totalitarian and conspiratorial and just about every other word from the 2016
Hyperbole Style Guide. Those conclusions, of course, are just air without any
real foundation in terms of numbers or data to support it.”
[SKIP]
“In viewing
recordings by The Hill of each major network's evening newscasts, which are
watched by an average total of 22 million to 24 million people nightly, the
newest batch of WikiLeaks revelations was covered for a combined 57 seconds out
of 66 minutes of total air time on ABC, NBC and CBS.”
“Those leaked emails
include derogatory comments about Catholics by senior Clinton campaign
officials and more disturbing examples of collusion between the media and her
campaign. It’s newsworthy stuff.”
“On the other hand,
allegations from four women of unwanted sexual advances by Trump were covered a
combined 23 minutes.”
“Add it all up, and
one presidential candidate's negative news of the day was somehow covered more
than 23 times more than another candidate's negative news of the day.”
[SKIP]
“When looking at the numbers, Trump may actually have a
point.”
With the dereliction
of duty by the nation’s largest media organizations and their role as propaganda
arms of the Democratic Party, it bodes ill for the future of an already putrid
media that no longer serves the best interests of Americans or the world.
This is precisely why the electorate ended up so angry.
Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans.
During a campaign
rally Saturday in New Hampshire, Donald Trump accused rival Hillary Clinton of
being "pumped up" during their last debate, saying they should both
be tested for drugs before the next one.
Trump said, "Athletes,
they make them take a drug test, right. I
think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. Why don't we do that? We
should take a drug test, prior, because I don't know what's going on with her,
but at the beginning of her last debate, she was all pumped up at the
beginning, and at the end it was like, 'Oh, take me down,'" imitating his
opponent.
"She could
barely reach her car.”
After a shocking
video showing her collapse during the 9/11 ceremony emerged, scores of
political pundits and news agencies began to question her stamina and strength
to serve as president.
Drug testing?!? You have to wonder if @HillaryClinton will/should reconsider next debate, given the depths to which this has sunk.