Apocalypse

Looks like sev­en­teen days until the end of life as we know it.

March 4 is the day the US fed­er­al gov­ern­ment shuts down if the politi­cians can not find a mid­dle ground.

March 4 is also the day the cur­rent NFL col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ment expires. Play­ers and own­ers need to find a mid­dle ground.

I’m not hold­ing my breath on either sit­u­a­tion. I am more con­cerned about the for­mer than the latter…politicians must play their games.

Saints and the Republicans

This from a post at fivethirtyeight.com:

Repub­li­cans were crow­ing about social­ism and gov­ern­ment takeovers way back in the sum­mer of 2008, and oppos­ing vir­tu­al­ly every pol­i­cy that the Democ­rats put forth from the first meet­ing of the 111th Con­gress last Jan­u­ary — a time when Oba­ma’s approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those mes­sages weren’t work­ing for them — they were par­tic­u­lar­ly inef­fec­tu­al, for instance, for the McCain cam­paign, and there were lots of sto­ries in the spring about the num­ber of peo­ple who iden­ti­fied as Repub­li­can slip­ping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their mes­sag­ing strat­e­gy, and it has allowed them to frame every­thing that has come there­after in ways that are more res­o­nant with the public.

This reminds me of the NFC Cham­pi­onship foot­ball game between the Saints and the Vikings. The Saints defen­sive game plan includ­ed an empha­sis on hit­ting Bret Favre. They got sev­er­al hits on him but failed to sack him. Still, they did not change the plan. Favre threw for 310 yards, but still the Saints worked to hit Favre. Sure enough, before the game was over, Favre reward­ed them by throw­ing three inter­cep­tions (the stats say two because the Saints did not catch one of the balls thrown right to them).

And the Saint won.