NFL Championship Round Picks

It comes with a feeling of great relief that the football season is almost over. There are only two Sundays left: the championship round two days away and the holiest American day, Super Bowl Sunday, February 7.

Each year at this time I feel the same way -- nauseated -- because for two straight weekends in January I do nothing but watch football on television. It's not healthy. And each year I draw the same conclusion: In the United States identity, public personhood, social intelligence -- call it, label it whatever way you want -- is indistinguishable from commercial consumerism.

The first game on Sunday, the NFC Championship game, Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Green Bay Packers (3:05 PM EST, FOX), is an "instant classic" matchup between GOAT Tom Brady and MVP Aaron Rodgers. Tampa is a strong team with a loaded offense and young, dominating defense who shellacked Green Bay earlier in the season. I see this game coming down to whether the Buccaneers defense, led by coordinator Todd Bowles, will fluster Rodgers with blitzes and create turnovers. I'm betting that Rodgers, a fellow Berkeley man, who seems to be thinking more quickly and clearly now than at any time since the Packers won the Super Bowl ten years ago, will counter those blitzes with quick-release passes. Plus the game is being played at Lambeau Field. Take the Packers.

The AFC Championship game, Buffalo Bills vs. Kansas City Chiefs (6:40 PM EST, CBS), is a tough one because of the multiple injuries suffered by star Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in the unexpected nail-biter last week against the Browns. Mahomes was knocked out of the game with a neck injury and it took a fourth-down completion by backup Chad Henne to seal the victory. (What an amazingly ballsy call by head coach Andy Reid!) 

Mahomes is expected to start, but his mobility will be severely limited, both because of the neck and the toe. Buffalo is peaking right now. A lot of people are climbing on the Bills bandwagon. Kansas City beat the Bills in Buffalo earlier this year by running the ball. The Bills were able to squash the Ravens run game last week. So one would think they could suffocate the Chiefs' Darrel Williams and Le'Veon Bell. But I am going to say that Andy Reid has schemed up something potent. Take the Chiefs.

Trumpism Here to Stay

The oldest president ever at inauguration ascends to the throne today in the nation's capital guarded by 25,000 troops, a few of whom have been relieved of duty because of the possibility of insider attacks reminiscent of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

Of the big questions tossed up after the January 6 mob riot on Capitol Hill the foremost is definitely where the Republican Party goes from here. Thomas Edsall's column this morning samples academic opinion and concludes mildly, no doubt so as not to piss in Biden's inaugural punch bowl, that nativism, bigotry and xenophobia (now called Trumpism) are here to stay in the Grand Old Party. The only smiley face Edsall manages is a fairy tale about Generation Z voters riding to the rescue in ten years, similar to the fairy tale of rising Hispanic voter hegemony with which mainstream Democrats have comforted themselves for the last 15 years. Now that black and brown people are disaffiliating from the Democratic Party, a new collective hallucination is required.

Of course Trumpism is here to stay because Trumpism has been in the works at least since Brown v. Board of Education. In other words, Trumpism is synonymous with the modern Republican Party. You can't have a Republican Party without Trumpism. There will be some sort of kabuki to satisfy Wall Street and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But in the end the party that will fracture first is not the GOP but the Democrats.

Sunday NFL Divisional Round Picks

Some takeaways from yesterday's games are 1) after losing three-out-four playoff games in the last three seasons, it's time to declare the Ravens offense led by phenom Lamar Jackson a dud in big single elimination contests; and 2) Green Bay is going to be tough to beat at home.

This afternoon we will have the opportunity to see how formidable the Cinderella Cleveland Browns are when they travel to Arrowhead Stadium to take on the Kansas City Chiefs (3:05 PM EST, CBS). The Chiefs over the course of the season have played at a higher level than any other football club. No defense has been able to shut down Pat Mahomes. I don't think the Browns will be the first. Take the Chiefs.

Today's Buccaneers vs. Saints matchup (6:40 PM EST, FOX) is being advertised as a battle of aged, future-hall-of-fame quarterbacks Tom Brady and Drew Brees. Despite beating Tampa twice this season and the game being played in the Superdome, New Orleans is only favored by a field goal, a testament to the hold that Tom Brady has over the mind of the tout.

I like the Saints at home. New Orleans has a strong defense and a multifaceted offense. Whenever I've seen the Bucs play this year it seems to me that Brady has struggled to establish a rhythm. In a contest of faculties between head coaches Sean Payton and Bruce Arians, I'll take the wily and vicious Sean Payton. Take the Saints.

Saturday NFL Divisional Round Picks

With the U.S. Capitol on lockdown in anticipation of more unrest what better way to spend the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend than watching football on television? 

As I see it, two of the four divisional-round games this weekend are straightforward -- Los Angeles vs. Green Bay and Cleveland vs. Kansas City -- and two are tricky -- Baltimore vs. Buffalo and Tampa Bay vs. New Orleans.

The first game of the weekend is Rams vs. Packers (4:35 PM EST, FOX) in Wisconsin at Lambeau Field where it currently is 33 degrees with snow showers. The weather should tell us everything we need to know about this matchup. The Rams are banged up, and that includes quarterback Jared Goff, receiver Cooper Kupp and all-pro defensive lineman Aaron Donald. While rookie running back Cam Akers isn't listed on the injury report, he hobbled off the field last week in the 4th quarter against the Seahawks.

Any hope the Rams have of winning in Green Bay is entirely dependent upon Akers putting together the kind of game he had when he ran for 131 yards against the Seahawks. This would keep Aaron Rodgers on the sidelines and Goff from having to throw the ball in the snow with his injured hand. 

Though Green Bay's defense ranks behind Seattle's against the run, leading one to believe that the Rams can repeat their formula for victory -- a ground-and-pound offense married to a smothering defense -- my mind's eye looks back to Tennessee vs. Green Bay game at the end of December when the Packers limited rushing king Derrick Henry to just under 100 yards. 

This game boils down to Aaron Rodgers against the Los Angeles pass rush in the snow. My feeling is that Rodgers is so mobile and accurate he is going to pick apart the Rams. The line is Green Bay by 6.5. Take the Packers.

The primetime Ravens vs. Bills matchup (8:15 PM EST, NBC) is trickier. Some are confident that Buffalo will win; others, Baltimore. Most agree that the Bills have trouble stopping the run. In the game against the Colts last week, the Bills gave up a combined 150-plus yards to Indianapolis running backs Jonathan Taylor and Nyheim Hines. Good running backs? Yes, absolutely. But with the Ravens we're talking about possibly the greatest rushing team of all time.

The big unknown here is how Lamar Jackson performs in primetime. He has a history of bed-shitting in the playoff spotlight. He played brilliantly against the Titans in the wild-card round. I love the guy, the way he plays the game, his unparalleled athleticism at the quarterback position (Michael Vick doesn't come close), his demeanor. But my concern is that Baltimore falls behind early and Jackson freezes.

But really I think this game boils down to how the Ravens defense handles Josh Allen. Allen was able to put the Bills on his shoulders at key moments against Indianapolis and carry Buffalo to victory. By the numbers Baltimore has a good pass defense, though, as it seemed to me, Ryan Tannehill carved up the Ravens with play action. The difference here is that the Bills don't have a Derrick Henry in the backfield to make the safeties bite on play action.

The line is Buffalo by 2.5 points. Take the Ravens.

Sunday NFL Wild-Card Round Picks

Worship of violence does seem crucial to fascism. Violence purifies and redeems; it clarifies and enthrones. The National Football League celebrates violence, but there is more to it than that.

Take Sunday's first game, Ravens vs. Titans (1:05 PM EST, ABC), a contest between the league's two top rushing teams. Is the Tennessee Titans offense violent? Yes. With Derrick Henry throwing tacklers to the turf helmet first it is the epitome of violence. The Titans are the number two rushing team in the league. The number one team is Baltimore. The Ravens are what I consider a finesse team. Are they physical? Yes. But physicality and violence are not synonymous. Quarterback Lamar Jackson directs a potent read-option attack which has led the league in rushing two years in a row, and led the league by a significant margin. Jackson is the first quarterback to rush for multiple 1,000-yard seasons.

For the Ravens to have a hope of advancing in the playoffs Jackson needs to be able to complete passes. The Ravens were favorites in each of the last two post-seasons only to be humiliated at home, first by the Chargers, who brilliantly loaded the box with defensive backs, completely suffocating the shifty Ravens QB, and then by the Titans. But the good news for Baltimore is that Jackson has been completing passes. When I watched a Ravens game earlier this season they had zero pass attack. That has changed.

The Tennessee Titans, the games I have watched this season, have not impressed me, besides their win over Buffalo. Pick the Ravens.

The team most analysts are dismissing is Chicago. In the Bears vs. Saints matchup (4:40 PM EST, CBS/Prime) New Orleans is favored by 10, the largest point spread of the wild-card round. There is likely to be one upset in the wild-card round. I just haven't seen enough Chicago football this season to know if the team is capable of shocking Drew Brees. I watched enough of New Orleans to know the Saints are beatable on any given Sunday. All in all though their offense is too potent even with a diminished Brees under center. Take the Saints.

The final game of the weekend, Sunday Night Football's Browns vs. Steelers (8:15 PM EST, NBC), is predicted to be competitive. I don't see it. If Pittsburgh backup QB Mason Rudolph played Cleveland to a near draw on the road what is Ben Roethlisberger going to do to the Browns at Heinz Field? Even if Roethlisberger is not what he used to be, the Steelers at home are still a much better team than Cleveland. Pick the Steelers.

Saturday NFL Wild-Card Round Picks

Against a background of the highest daily COVID death numbers to date and a political crisis in the Washington D.C. the National Football League will stage its first-ever "Super Wall Card Weekend."

As in years past I am going to use The Times' Benjamin Hoffman's predictions as a baseline. Hoffman's picks include the point spread. I think it is hard enough to pick games straight up. So I ignore the point spread. I am going to pick Saturday's games this morning and then Sunday's games tomorrow because I am running short on time and need to leave soon for the office.

Colts vs. Bills. (1:05 PM EST, CBS)The first of the Saturday games features the Indianapolis Colts traveling to Orchard Park to take on the sizzling Buffalo Bills. The line is Bills minus 6.5. I thought it would be more. I guess touts have faith in the Colts ground game and the vaunted Indianapolis defense. All I know is what I witnessed in the second half of the Colts recent game in Pittsburgh. A complete and total bed-shitting. I also know that Buffalo QB Josh Allen is super-impressive, possibly the most impressive quarterback in the NFL. Imagine a 6'5" Russell Wilson, in other words a mobile, strong-armed quarterback who can actually see down the field. 

Buffalo's running game has tailed off from last year but that's because the offense is much more dangerous with Allen running the empty set. That's how you beat the Bills. You have to smother their empty-set offensive. Can the Colts do it? It's possible. Will they do it? It's unlikely. Take the Bills. 

Rams vs. Seahawks. (4:40 EST, FOX) As someone who watches every snap of every Seahawks game I could go on and on about this matchup. Seattle is favored by four points. The teams split the two regular season games they played. The Seahawks have key injuries on defense and the Rams have quarterback problems due to Jared Goff's injured thumb. Seattle's offense has been spotty for months. Nonetheless in that timespan Russell Wilson had one of his best games when the Rams were up here a couple weeks back. Take the Seahawks.

Buccaneers vs. Footballers (8:15 PM EST, NBC) I suppose an upset is possible here with an 11-5 Tampa team led by GOAT Tom Brady suffocated by Washington's fast, agile, young defensive line. I am a Ron Rivera man, having gone to the same university and shared a bench with him one sunny morning in 1982 while he sang a Clash song. Tampa is too strong. Take the Buccaneers.

The Ongoing Erosion of the Major Political Parties

Yesterday's brief MAGA occupation of the U.S. Capitol while unprecedented paled in comparison to, say, the storming, occupation and ransacking of the Hong Kong Legislative Council in 2019. No fires were lit or artwork destroyed but four people died. 

Nonetheless political elites are appalled, frightened and enraged by Wednesday's events. The sacrosanct center of the Washington Consensus was shown to be on par with Caracas or Kiev. 

So far the main elitist demand appears to be more Internet censorship. Trump's Twitter and Facebook accounts, his main cybernetic link to his followers, were locked yesterday.

My takeaway from all of this -- Trump's quixotic crusade to overturn the results of an election he lost by seven million votes; the GOP debacle in Georgia's runoff election; and now the MAGA riot in the U.S. Capitol -- is that Trump or a Trump-like demagogic political figure will never be allowed to capture one of the two major political parties again. 

Efforts to erect a version of China's Great Firewall, construction of which has been underway for years in the U.S., will be redoubled. The Republican Party will be encouraged to rejigger its nomination process to prevent a repeat of Trump.

The big question is whether this is possible. Can one branch of the duopoly excise its base of support and still win elections?

I say yes if the other branch of the duopoly is going to do the exact same thing at the same time. That's what were looking at post-#ForcetheVote, post-#FraudSquad. As Glen Ford writes this morning,

In [AOC's] self-pitying funk, the Bronx fashion-plate and champion tweeter -- a rival of Trump, in that regard – sounded no different than the standard “because…Trump” Democrat, blaming the outgoing Orange Menace for her own political cowardice: “[I]n a time when the Republican Party is attempting an electoral coup and trying to overturn the results of our election, this is not just about being united as a party. It's about being united as people who have basic respect for the rule of law.” Having nothing to offer their “base,” Democrats make Trump the excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters. What will they do when the Orange Ogre is finally gone?

Doubtless, they will blame the Russians and a “handful of outspoken left-wing activists,” as MSN dubbed the #ForceTheVote advocates, for undermining the smooth workings of “American democracy.” However, the exodus of the leftmost ranks of the Democratic Party has finally begun, and will accelerate in the excruciatingly unending Covid-19 crisis, and as the post-Covid corporate economic order emerges with the full collaboration of the Democratic Party. The biggest benefactor of the New Year’s revolt is the Movement for a People’s Party, coordinated by Nick Branna, which vows to run a slate of congressional candidates in 2022 and mount a presidential bid in 2024. For the first time in this century, significant numbers of young people of all races – most of them unabashed Democrats only yesterday, it seems – are expressing raw hatred for the Democrats, who are richly deserving of the utmost contempt.

Realignment

If Jon Ossoff holds on and retains his slender lead in the Peach State over the odious David Perdue, Democrats, Raphael Warnock already having been declared the victor over the poisonous plutocrat Kelly Loeffler, will have accomplished something significant, control of the U.S. Senate, and with it, control of Congress.

With septuagenarian Joe Biden White House bound, unless, of course, Trump pulls off a coup, Democrats will control the national government for the first time in a decade.

Before asking what such a government portends I think it's important to declare, post-Georgia runoff, that we are in the middle of a historic political realignment.

The genius of Trump is his ability to win the votes of the old, weird America, the rural bedrock of the nation mostly ignored by Madison Avenue and inside the beltway. But the problem here is that consistent appeals to this voting bloc cuts against the grain of the historically GOP suburbs, which are college educated, nominally socially progressive and peopled by viewers of CNN. According to a GOP insider:

“Suburbs, my friends, the suburbs,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to Mr. McConnell. “I feel like a one trick pony but here we are again. We went from talking about jobs and the economy to Qanon election conspiracies in 4 short years and — as it turns out — they were listening!”

Meanwhile Democrats, with their adherence to the neo-McCarthyism of Russiagate, which requires a tight embrace of the Intelligence Community, have swung to the right. This swing to the right has exposed the irrelevance of the Bernie wing of the party. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are sticking with Trump, leading me to believe that Trumpism has legs.

Going forward what we need to watch for is whether Trump can maintain hold of the GOP; for the Democrats, whether the whole progressive charade of the Squad and Justice Democrats can maintain the allegiance of the left wing of the party.

Assange Extradition Blocked

Some good news this morning. The judge presiding over Julian Assange's show trial ruled that, due to his poor mental health, the WikiLeaks founder cannot be extradited to the United States:

The judge, Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court, said in Monday’s ruling that she was satisfied that the American authorities had brought forth the case “in good faith,” and that Mr. Assange’s actions went beyond simply encouraging a journalist. But she said there was evidence of a risk to Mr. Assange’s health if he were to face trial in the United States, noting that she found “Mr. Assange’s risk of committing suicide, if an extradition order were to be made, to be substantial.”

She ruled that the extradition should be refused because “it would be unjust and oppressive by reason of Mr. Assange’s mental condition and the high risk of suicide,” pointing to conditions he would most likely be held under in the United States.

If you read about the trial on Craig Murray's blog or via Consortium News -- major news outlets bizarrely opted not to cover "the trial of the century" -- you know the United States Government's case was  a tapestry of the absurd. If anything, the trial proved that the USG should have been targeting Guardian reporters David Leigh and Luke Harding because they were the ones who published the password to unlock the trove of unredacted classified diplomatic files supplied to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning. Furthermore, WikiLeaks wasn't even the first outlet to publish the unredacted cables; that was Cryptome. Why weren't its founders on trial in the Old Bailey?

It's hard to feel confident about the future of the free flow of information. Independent journalists might be thriving online but a firewall has been erected between them and the mainstream. Reading the newspaper is not what it used to be.

#ForcetheVote

Jimmy Dore went from being a YouTube-based comedian to a vital public intellectual at the end of 2020 with his #ForcetheVote campaign to get the Progressive Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives to use its numbers to leverage a vote on Medicare For All! 

The idea is simple. Because of the poor showing of House Democrats in November, their majority has narrowed to a razor-thin number of votes. A handful of true Progressives should withhold support for another Nancy Pelosi speakership unless she brings Medicare For All! to a vote.

A completely sensible idea, nonetheless one publicly rejected by Progressive superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) because she thinks that Medicare For All! would lose such a floor vote. But that's exactly the point -- to spotlight how completely out of touch the people's house is with the people. A super-majority supports Medicare For All! A floor vote will shine a bright light and provide the opportunity to challenge no-voting representatives in the next election.

If House Progressives can't force a vote on publicly-funded healthcare in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the U.S. body count for which will approach half a million by spring, then they are not politicians who merit support. Subsequently, I have cancelled my regular contributions to AOC and Rashida Tlaib on ActBlue.

Anyhow, a little bit of good news at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. Even if Pelosi is reelected as speaker today without Progressives flexing their muscles Jimmy Dore has done us all an enormous favor. He has exposed impostors on the left edge of the Democratic Party. Both branches of the duopoly need to be confronted, challenged, and, if necessary, destroyed to bring about a closer alignment between  politicians and public sentiment. People want publicly-funded healthcare. People want an end to overseas military adventures. Yet one would never know by looking at Congress and the White House.