I am not so much interested in Troy Aikman’s first NFL pass, since it was in a preseason game and technically didn’t count. What I am interested in is Pat Summerall’s intro to this game, because he was the master of that, with his great voice, knowledge of the game, and pure intelligence. He not only could have written his own intros, but he also had a great sense of humor. Then combine him with John Madden, the greatest NFL analyst you’ve ever seen, and you have a Hall of Fame duo.
Harold Ramis will be missed for his comic writing and acting because he comes from the old school, which is about being funny, but being funny in an intelligent way. Instead of being funny in a clumsy way, telling the fans to look at the klutz, Ramis brought intelligence to his humor that wasn’t obvious. You had to think to get it. To me, Harold Ramis was a master of dry wit and humor that wasn’t obvious, but definitely noticeable if you paid attention and figured it out.
Harold Ramis’s movies were about real people who tended to be bright but were underachievers or slackers who needed inspiration to reach their full potential. The movie Stripes is the perfect example of that, where two lazy wiseass guys sign up for the U.S. Army because they needed something constructive to do.
Groundhog Day is another example, where an obnoxious fellow who considers himself superior to the Pittsburgh weathermen gets stuck repeatedly in Groundhog Day and discovers what is really important and how to deal with his colleagues responsibly.
The movie Vacation, perhaps one of the top five comedies of all time, with Chevy Chase, is a perfect example of a middle-class family man who aims to give his family the vacation of their lives. He drives his wife and children from Chicago to Los Angeles to an amusement park called Wally World. He is over his head, with the trip turning into a series of disasters. The dog incident is hilariously brilliant, although theoretically should be sad. Enough said!
Harold Ramis’s movies weren’t based on klutzy people and his humor wasn’t cookie cutter, borrowing lines and humor from other films because supposedly everyone laughs at the same thing. His humor was smart and off the cuff, with a great innovative wit.
Harold Ramis would have been a great writer for Saturday Night Live and MASH because he had their type of humor. That is what I’ll miss most about him.
The good news about Ukraine is that its dictator is out of power and will probably be arrested by the new administration and held accountable for his regime. But this is a big country of around 50 million people, with a good deal of land, natural resources, and ethnic diversity, which is still in economic and political trouble. It is not clear that the current Federal Republic in Ukraine will last, but perhaps break up into smaller countries.
The Arizona gay discrimination bill is as dead as it should be and will not come back to life because of simple economics, potential loss of revenue to this vast, beautiful State. Had that bill become law, businesses would have refused to come into the State, not only the NFL but also airlines, conventions, and others. Governor Jan Brewer voted with the state’s wallet on that bill.
The tax reform plan offered by Representative Dave Camp, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is the best plan offered by anyone in this Congress yet. With the Senate still working on a bipartisan proposal, it is an interesting plan in that it would cut taxes for people at the top and cut loopholes, but then add excise taxes on the wealthy to make up the difference. However, this is an election year, and at the end of the day, House Republicans prefer the current tax code.
Socialism is the perfect example of how labels can get you in trouble if you are not a political junky, or at least a political fan, someone who follows politics on a regular basis but who perhaps is not a political junky, such as perhaps a government employee. When people think of Communist Republics, they tend to think of Socialism, when really these Communist Republics are not so much Socialist, looking out for the people, but are interested in protecting the state, meaning the regime, more than anything.
I’m not even sure Socialist is the best way to describe someone who is a Democrat ideologically, meaning someone who believes in Democracy, however you want to define it. It also can mean someone who also believes in state-owned economics, meaning a state-run economic system. Today’s Democratic Socialists tend to be in favor of capitalism or at least have accepted capitalism as a necessary evil to fund the big government that they want.
Since Barack Obama became President of the United States 5 years ago, when all of the socialist charges were thrown at him, I’ve been thinking about Socialism and what it is and what it means to be a Socialist. The more I hear from actual Socialists, the more I believe that Socialism is not really about nationalizing industries to create a state-owned economy, It is about creating an economic system that works best for everyone, not just the wealthy or corporations or people with political connections with the central government, but everyone.
My idea of a modern Socialist, for instance, Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont, the only self-described Socialist in the U.S. Congress, is someone who believes in capitalism, but only if it works for everyone. For that to happen, you need a central government big enough to see that people get the day-to-day services that they need to live well, such as education, health care, pensions, and health insurance and a safety net, a government strong enough to regulate the private economy well, Everything else should be in private hands, but in the hands of the many and not the few.
Sweden is the perfect example of a Socialist-Capitalist economic system where the economy is largely private but where the welfare state is big enough to give people the services they need. Everything else that economies need to run well, where you must have competition to make it as productive as possible, should be left in private hands, such as automobile production, communications, media, restaurants, agriculture, etc., but paying their share of taxes to finance the welfare state.
A modern or Democratic Socialist does believe in big government economics but also that government shouldn’t try to run the economy itself. You need the people to be able to take care of themselves as much as possible, with the central government doing the rest to see that the economy is as strong as possible and works for everyone. So when we talk about Marxism and state-owned economics, maybe we should call that economic statism or simply just state-owned economics but not Socialism.
I love Baltimore Memorial Stadium, but the last few years of Memorial Stadium for baseball, let’s say 1986-91, were pretty bad for the Orioles, except for 1989. The Orioles had five losing seasons in that period and lost 90 or more games four times and set the modern American League record for losses in 1988, with 108, including losing their first 21 games of that season. Yet there were still great moments and Oriole games in this period, especially in 1989, when they went from last to second in the American league, finishing just one game out of the AL East race.
There’s an old saying about the American political system that goes something like this: It is the worst political system in the world except for all the rest. Not exactly a high bar to shoot for, kind of like a football team that only wins one game all season and says, “Well at least we didn’t go winless.” And even if that saying about our political system is true, it’s simply not good enough when you think about the power that is centralized in Washington with all that money coming into the city, buying influence, with most Americans not knowing how the money is spent and where it came from.
Not trying to make a libertarian anti-big government argument here, but they have a point that when so much power is centralized in one city and one government and when the two political parties are not even in favor of full campaign disclosure for all political incumbents, candidates and third-party campaigns, it is easy to see why you have such a corrupt political system, because regardless of what Washington politicians do for the most part, good or bad in a lot of cases, very few people know what they are doing, who they are talking to, where they get their money, and what their donors expect in return.
No wonder we have a United States Congress with an approval rating somewhere around 10 percent, with the people who do approve either no longer living or in mental institutions and who can’t tell the difference between a good Congress and a bad Congress. Because this is why the word politician is equated with conman or scammer, “Oh, he is an elected public official, he must be up to no good,” instead of applied to elected public officials as public servants. Because who are you really serving when your reelection depends so much on a few donors?
To talk and think about the Tea Party, you have to know the state of the Republican Party in late 2008 and early 2009, when they were basically shut out of power at the Federal level, facing a new Democratic President with Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, both House and Senate. To speak positively about the Tea Party for a minute, they were the energy that a badly damaged Republican Party, thanks to the Bush/Cheney Administration, needed to wake up and get back into the fight, not only with issues but also with rhetoric and an agenda to take on Obama Democrats.
To be real about it, we would probably be looking at not only a Democratic administration but probably also a Democratic Congress in both chambers right now, with Democrats still controlling a majority of governorships and legislatures, because the GOP was in debt. However, the corporate-funded Tea Party groups gave the GOP the resources that it needed to get back in the game politically and put many races that wouldn’t have been competitive otherwise in play for Republicans to not only take on Democratic incumbents but also to beat them and beat them handily.
The Super Bowl for the Tea Party was November 2010 election day, when the GOP won back the House of Representatives with 62 seats but didn’t win back the Senate because of their oddball Tea Party candidates, to put it lightly. It picked up six seats in the Senate, giving Senate Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a large minority to be able to obstruct the hell out of Senate Democrats and the Obama Administration and gave the Republican Party a majority of governorships and state legislatures.
That is really where the story ends positively for the Tea Party and the broader Republican Party because the Tea Party is not representative of America as a whole, coming primarily from the South and rural America and older Anglo-Protestant stock in a country that is diverse racially and ethnically and becoming more diverse every day, where many of these Americans see the Democratic Party as diverse and tolerant, unlike the GOP.
In 2012 the Tea Party was a negative factor and, if anything, held them down as badly as President George W. Bush held them down in 2006 and in 2008, even though the GOP was able to hold onto the House. President Obama was reelected in an Electoral College landslide and again because of the Tea Party and some of their oddball candidates (Todd Akin comes to mind) pretty quickly trying to run statewide in swing States, Senate Democrats not only held onto the Senate with vulnerable incumbents, but picked up two seats as well.
We still have the 2014 mid-terms, but we are already seeing establishment Republicans now not afraid to take on the GOP, like Governor Jan Brewer in Arizona or former Tea Party candidates like Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey. This suggests that the strength of the Tea Party peaked in 2010 and since the fall of 2011, they’ve been sliding, with 2012 almost a wasted election for the Republican Party, an election they should have won easily. We are seeing the adults in the Republican Party take over, charting a new course for the GOP.
The four top heavyweights of the 1970s as far as wins, championships, and those they beat in the ring were Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, and Ken Norton. Three of these fighters beat Muhammad in the ring, Joe Frazier in 1971, Larry Holmes in 1980, and Ken Norton in 1973. The greatest heavyweight boxer of all time losing to these three fighters in 9 years is just one example of how great the heavyweight boxing division was in the 1970s and how far it has fallen today.
If only this were true, and the Portland Blazers instead of the Chicago Bulls had drafted Michael Jordan in 1984; how different the NBA would’ve been! The Blazers and Bulls played each other in the NBA Finals in 1992, by the way, which was a classic six-game series that the Blazers could have won with Clyde Drexler at the off-guard instead of Air Jordan and Kevin Duckworth at center and instead of Sam Bowie, the man they drafted in 1984.
We’ll never know, obviously, but had the Bulls drafted Sam Bowie instead of Michael, they would have been stuck with an injury-prone center who had a bad foot in college before he got to the NBA, which everyone including the Blazers knew about. That only got worse the more he tried to play in the NBA, because the man had a stress-fracture in his foot that never healed properly after he injured it the first time in 1981 or 1982, and this was from a movie made about big Sam’s career. So his foot was simply never strong enough to play basketball, at least not basketball at the professional level.
But look at the positive aspect of this story, a team with both Michael Jordan and Clyde Drexler on it. I mean, think about it, you have Mike at the off-guard and Clyde at the wing-forward because Clyde at 6’7″, 220 pounds or so, was big enough to play up front. Both were great players, both were great scorers, both were very good defenders, both could handle the ball, both could shoot, both could drive, both could rebound, etc. If you had the Blazers, with Terry Porter at point guard, and then you had found a solid center, the Blazers would have been serious NBA Finals contenders for at least 10 years.
Without Mike and with Clyde Drexler, the Blazers were NBA Finals contenders for 3 years from 1990 to 1992, and then they fell back to the middle of the pack in the Western Conference in the mid-1990s. With Sam Bowie, the Bulls would not have even been a playoff team for probably another 5 years with such an big investment in their center, who was missing half of the season or more every year. The Bulls and NBA would have been a lot different.
What I respect most about Ron Paul, former U.S. Representative from Texas and presidential candidate for both the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party, is his honesty. He’s truly against big government from both an economic and a personal standpoint, like all classic libertarians or classic conservatives. In this video, he explains why he’s running for president for the Libertarian Party in 1988, to grow the size of the Libertarian Party and not to actually win the election but to bring publicity and new members to the LP.
Football Stadium Digest covers major stories and events in the planning, construction and operations of NCAA and professional NFL football stadiums across the United States and Canada.
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