The AFC is shaping up as a Ponies/Patsies showdown if teams play to form.

Last week the Ravens dispatched the Bolts kinda decisively, 24 – 9 in what is more accurately described as an offensive rather than defensive struggle.  Flacco and the Ravens finally put something together while Luck wasn’t able to.

A big deal will be made about the last match-up between Payton Manning and Ray Lewis with Lewis retiring after the season, but the game is more likely to turn on the Ravens offense or lack thereof.  The Ravens changed offensive coordinators just last month because they were so ineffective.

Payton Manning is Payton Manning, not Tebow, and the Broncos are likely to make this a very tough game for Lewis because they don’t suck and can put up a score or two.  On the other hand it bespeaks a kind of institutional idiocy that they hired him in the first place so there is hope for the Carrion Crows.

Still, the Ponies won 34 – 17 in their match-up 4 weeks ago, in part because running back Ray Rice has fumble fingers and didn’t get many calls, and they have one of the best records against the pass in the league.

I’m missing both games today for a holiday party with some of the people I know through my other life as a community organizer.  As always it’s up to you to make your own fun though I’ve tried to encourage a couple of folks to stop by.

Trouble in River City.

Our regular featured content-

• On This Day In History January 11 by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

And these featured articles-

• Bananas 1a- I brake for stupid. by: ek hornbeck
• Congressional Game of Chicken: Fixing Filibuster, Part V by: TheMomCat
• You’re On Your Own, Dick by: TheMomCat

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

Our regular featured content-

• On This Day In History January 10 by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

And these featured articles-

• Students First? by: TheMomCat
• Bananas, Part 1 by: ek hornbeck
• While You Weren’t Looking the Deficit Problem Mostly Gone by: TheMomCat

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

July

August

September

October

November

December

So Monday night Notre Dame got crushed by Alabama 42 – 14 and I for one was not unhappy with that result.

Why I won’t be cheering for old Notre Dame

Posted by Melinda Henneberger, The Washington Post

December 4, 2012 at 11:02 pm

What’s really surprising me are those who believe as I do that two players on the team have committed serious criminal acts – sexual assault in one case, and rape in another – but assumed that I’d support the team anyway, just as they are.

“Aren’t you just a little bit excited?” one asked the other day. There are plenty of good guys on the team, too, I’m repeatedly told. And oh, that Manti Te’o is inspiring. I don’t doubt it. But as a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?

…

Two years ago, Lizzy Seeberg, a 19-year-old freshman at Saint Mary’s College, across the street from Notre Dame, committed suicide after accusing an ND football player of sexually assaulting her. The friend Lizzy told immediately afterward said she was crying so hard she was having trouble breathing.

Yet after Lizzy went to the police, a friend of the player’s sent her a series of texts that frightened her as much as anything that had happened in the player’s dorm room. “Don’t do anything you would regret,” one of them said. “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea.”

At the time of her death, 10 days after reporting the attack to campus police, who have jurisdiction for even the most serious crimes on school property, investigators still had not interviewed the accused. It took them five more days after she died to get around to that, though they investigated Lizzy herself quite thoroughly, even debriefing a former roommate at another school with whom she’d clashed.

…

A few months later, a resident assistant in a Notre Dame dorm drove a freshman to the hospital for a rape exam after receiving an S.O.S. call. “She said she’d been raped by a member of the football team at a party off campus,” the R.A. told me. I also spoke to the R.A.’s parents, who met the young woman that same night, when their daughter brought her to their home after leaving the hospital. They said they saw – and reported to athletic officials – a hailstorm of texts from other players, warning the young woman not to report what had happened: “They were trying to silence this girl,” the R.A.’s father told me. And did; no criminal complaint was ever filed.

Notre Dame and Penn State: Two Rape Scandals, Only One Cry for Justice

Dave Zirin, The Nation

January 7, 2013 – 10:25 AM ET

Two storied college football programs. Two rape scandals. Only one national outcry. How do we begin to explain the exponentially different levels of attention paid to crimes of violence and power at Penn State and Notre Dame?

At Penn State, revered assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was raping young boys while being shielded by a conspiracy of silence of those in power at the football powerhouse. At Notre Dame, it’s not young boys being raped by an assistant coach. It’s women being threatened, assaulted, and raped by players on the school’s unbeaten football team. Yet sports media that are overwhelmingly male and ineffably giddy about Fighting Irish football’s return to prominence have enacted their own conspiracy of silence.

…

But this conspiracy of silence and slander is bigger than just the school. Deindustrialized South Bend, Indiana, is a company town, and the company is Notre Dame football. The football program in 2012 was valued by Forbes as the third "most valuable" in the country, behind far larger state universities in Texas and Michigan. This is just the formal economy. Informally, every hotel, every bar, every kid at the side of the road selling bottled water depends on Notre Dame football. Home games generate $10 million in local spending for a community of just 100,000 people. It is the beating economic heart of South Bend and women have become, in this sclerotic set up, the collateral damage.

But the cone of silence that surrounds a company college football town is not enough to understand why Penn State’s rape scandal was front-page news the second the Sandusky scandal went public and Notre Dame has been largely protected by the press. The only answer that makes sense is that raping women has become “normalized” in our culture, while raping little boys has not. The only answer that makes sense is that the rape of a young boy sets all sorts of alarms of horror in the minds of the very male sports media, while the rape of women does not. The only answer that makes sense is that it’s been internalized that while boys are helpless in the face of a predator, women are responsible for their assault. The accusers are the accused.

This is not just a Notre Dame issue. At too many universities, too many football players are schooled to see women as the spoils of being a campus god. But it’s also an issue beyond the commodification of women on a big football campus. It’s the fruit of a culture where politicians can write laws that aim to define the difference between “rape” and “forcible rape” and candidates for the Senate can speak about pregnancy from rape being either a “gift from God” or biologically impossible in the case of “legitimate rape.” It’s a culture where comedians like Daniel Tosh or Tucker Max can joke about violently raping, as Max puts it, a “gender hardwired for whoredom.” The themes of power, rape and lack of accountability are just as clear in the case of the Steubenville, Ohio, football players not only boasting that they "so raped" an unconscious girl but feeling confident enough to videotape their boasts.

As Jessica Valenti wrote at TheNation.com, “It’s time to acknowledge that the rape epidemic in the United States is not just about the crimes themselves, but our own cultural and political willful ignorance. Rape is as American as apple pie-until we own that, nothing will change.”

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Rendell Attacks Safety Net While Calling for More Elected Republicans

By John Amato, Crooks and Liars

January 07, 2013 10:00 AM

Rendell and himself would solve all our problems in a week and a half if he was allowed to. Rendell goes on to support the idea that it’s fine if more reasonable and conservative Republicans are elected to Congress. Did it ever cross his mind to maybe mention that electing many more progressive Democratic politicians would be the best solution to the crisis?

Rendell: Look, even if it means there are a few more Republicans in the Senate and the Congress, if they’re reasonable Republicans who are moderate-conservative then that’s a good prescription for America.

Republicans holding the House hostage isn’t enough for Rendell, he wants a few more, just in case their majority isn’t strong enough — and wants to add a couple more in the Senate, which would give R’s one-party rule. Ed Rendell, a major league embarrassment!

The Fountainhead

Let’s have a look at that handshake again, in slow motion.

Are ‘grand bargains’ still possible?

By Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post

Jan 06, 2013 06:14 PM EST

Here’s a radical idea: What if a “grand bargain” – or any sort of large legislative measure requiring significant bipartisan compromise – simply isn’t possible anymore?

…

There’s plenty of reason to believe that the idea that the government can, will – or even wants to – rise to the occasion (as Boehner and Obama have advocated in recent days) is a total fallacy.

…

All signs point to the fact that if the grand bargain isn’t dead, it’s darn close. Miraculous comebacks happen in politics, which makes it worth watching, but they are the exception, not the rule. Given that, it may be time to accept that the idea of Washington doing big things in a bipartisan way is a thing of the past – perhaps never to be recovered.

Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.