The Twisted Economics of John McCain
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald has compiled a revealing look at John McCain’s flip-flopping positions on the economy. He’s against regulation, he’s for regulation, he doesn’t know anything about economics, he’s an expert on economics. Make up your own mind.
Season Ticket: Four and Counting
Wide receiver Lee Evans
Bills historian Dave Staba contextualizes the team’s 4-0 start:
Winning your first four games, an accomplishment Buffalo achieved with Sunday’s 31-14 win in St. Louis, does not guarantee a great season. Over the nearly half-century since the creation of the current Bills, though, it comes pretty close.
Seven previous editions have opened with at least four straight triumphs. Two won a league championship, two others earned a Super Bowl berth, one reached the conference title game and another remains the subject of the franchise’s most tantalizing what-if discussion.
Only once, in 1975, did a Buffalo team win four games before losing one, yet fail to reach the playoffs.
Blame that one on O.J. Simpson, since it’s easy and fun and he’s otherwise occupied with all that Las-Vegas-hotel-room unpleasantness. As in his 2,003-yard season two years before, the future repeat felony defendant set a National Football League record, this time by scoring 23 touchdowns, yet his team—perhaps drained by the force its superstar’s ego —somehow faltered before the postseason.
The other six 4-0 starters account for most of the franchise’s high points.
After four years of slow starts and general mediocrity, the 1964 Bills thrashed their first four opponents by a combined score of 117-53 and didn’t stop slapping people around until they reached 9-0. The freakishly talented Cookie Gilchrist led an offense quarterbacked by Jack Kemp, with occasional assistance from Daryle Lamonica, while a star-laden defense established itself as the most dominant in the sport. Buffalo finished 12-2, winning the American Football League crown—the biggest prize available at the time—with a 20-7 win over San Diego.
Even without Gilchrist, whose equally outsized personality led to his banishment to Denver by coach Lou Saban shortly after the win over the Chargers, the next season started nearly as well and ended in almost exactly the same fashion. A 4-0 beginning turned into a 10-3-1 season capped by a 23-0 defeat of the Chargers.
Those Bills didn’t make it to the Super Bowl because there wasn’t one yet. The ’91 and ’92 teams should have been so fortunate. They opened 5-0 and 4-0, but ended in much less glamorous fashion, getting walloped by Washington and Dallas, respectively, in the sport’s annual apocalyptic finale.
At least they got there, though, which is more than could be said of the 1988 squad, the first of the great Jim Kelly-Bruce Smith-Thurman Thomas-Andre Reed teams. After sweeping the season’s first quarter and entering its final month at 11-1, the Bills lost three of their last four and, along the way, surrendered home-field advantage for the AFC title game to Cincinnati, a pivotal factor in a 21-10 loss to the Bengals.
Which brings us to 1980. In their third year under coach Chuck Knox, the Bills fully emerged from the post-O.J. Dark Ages by beating Miami for the first time in more than a decade, a goalpost-destroying feat that springboarded them to a 5-0 start.
Blending a strong young defense, solid special teams and versatile rookie running back Joe Cribbs with the maturation of long-maligned quarterback Joe Ferguson, Buffalo won its first division title since 1966 with an overtime win against the Los Angeles Rams.
That victory triggered an iconic moment, as half-dressed players led by Fred Smerlas emerged from the locker room for a curtain call, dancing at midfield to the strains of “Talking Proud,” the now-easily-mocked ode to civic pride that somehow failed to stem the exodus of industrial jobs that was only just beginning.
Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, that season and that song can be relived here.
Of course, it has an unhappy ending. Ferguson sprained an ankle in the regular season’s penultimate game and was still hobbling when the Bills visited San Diego for a first-round playoff game three weeks later. Still, he had the Bills ahead by a point with two minutes left, when safety Bill Simpson infamously whiffed on Chargers’ receiver Ron Smith, who scored the winning touchdown in the most shocking of fashions.
The Chargers were upset a week later by the Raiders, who would have had to travel to Buffalo for the AFC title game had Simpson’s grip been more firm. And Oakland went on to win the Super Bowl rather easily against Philadelphia. So if Ferguson had only stayed healthy, well, you know.
With a quarterback quickly emerging as one of the game’s most poised, a young running back who can run and catch and defensive and kicking-game units that produce game-turning plays on a weekly basis, this year’s Bills most closely resemble the 1980 edition to this point in the season.
All they need now is a theme song.
Dave Staba has covered the Bills since 1990. He welcomes e-mail at dstaba13@aol.com. A full report on Sunday’s game will appear in the October 2 issue of Artvoice.
September 28, 2008
B-52s at Rockin’ at the Knox
Weather predictions of showers for Saturday night proved wrong and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was jammed packed for their Rockin’ at the Knox annual fundraiser concert. This years headliner was the whacky “new wave” party band of the eighties, The B-52s, and the band’s stage energy was as high as a beehive hairdo.
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September 26, 2008
Debate Live: Sneak Attacks Abroad
McCain on preconditions to talking with Iran: He’s lost this point, which is no surprise; but he makes a noble effort at the end to salvage some sympathy. Obama’s wielding of Kissinger trumps McCain’s feigned incredulity.
Obama on Russia and Georgia: Obama’s got a balanced and somewhat subject-broadening (or, to be less generous, subject-changing) response. McCain’s analysis on pipeline and military issues is spot-on, and to his credit, Obama doesn’t look for a weakness there.
When Obama switches the subject to alternative energy investments again, that’s smart: Russia’s power is based on its ability to broker petro-products. But will it seem an evasion or a smart transition? McCain’s not arguing…
Debate Live: Let Me Tell You Something Else…
In a debate that began like a Tower of Babel, in which questions were answered with non sequiturs, in which both candidates tried to pound the square pegs of their chosen talking points into the round holes of Jim Lehrer’s questions, McCain just drove that metaphor of the cliff. Into a deep, square, roundish canyon.
The barracks bombing in Beirut? The tired technique of evoking a conversation with “A mother whose son is…”?
Obama’s response is strong, up until the point that he, too, conjured some Jane Anybody. At which point my hostess brings me another beer, and Jim Lehrer turns the conversation to Iran…
Debate Live: Maverick, Iceman
McCain just called himself a maverick.
And now he’s making the attack he’s been waiting for: He’s saying the surge in Iraq was a success, and that he lobbed for it early and continues to stand by the tactic.
He’s relying on this argument, both to eclipse the current financial crisis as an issue and to make Obama seem weak on what McCain and those who gravitate toward his way of thinking call “national security.”
Obama, I think, could have done better than to dwell on the cost of the Iraq war. He’s going to be the candidate who was (at least) skeptical about the war. So just go whole hog: Say it was mistake. maybe even argue that the surge’s vaunted success is not a given. And all this stuff about Afghanistan? It’s a fantasy argument: If we focus military resources there, we just move the quagmire.
That said, Obama does sound voter-palatable on the matter. McCain’s attempt to differentiate between a tactic and a strategy was a suicide mission.
But at least the give-and-take has begun between the two.
Debate Live: Do I Stutter?
Some surface observations, since that’s what most debate analysis comes down to: Obama stammers. He sounds a bit rougher than one might expect, and McCain is wearing a terrible tie. And (I’m on ABC now) what’s that weird aquatic motion graphic? Does that represent sea level?
Debate Live: The Scorekeepers
If you’re watching CNN, there are six circles flanking the screen on which pundits are apparently scoring the fight in real time. The scoring system is impenetrable.
Nonetheless, it seems Castellanos is seeing hits recorded everywhere, but he scores it even so far. Brazile gives Obama a narrow lead. I can’t tell what Paul Begala is doing.
Borger (lower left hand) appears to have left for the bar. If this were a drinking game, Borger would be a buzzkill. Is he even listening to this debate?
Debate Live: McCain Starts Quiet, Carries an Old Pen
To begin, McCain sounds a bit frail and tired, which draws down the hardass maverick caricature he’s been composing for himself.
Then he makes that crack: “What are you afraid I can’t hear him?”
It gets a laugh, and he takes some strength from it, finds his feet. Then he’s talking about bears, and then he pulls what looks like a permanent marker out of pocket and says he’s going to veto all spending bills. That’ll make government more efficient.
Why Sarah Palin Has Less Foreign Policy Experience than Just About Anybody in WNY
The Associated Press reports that Alaska governor Sarah Palin is defending her boast that her state’s proximity to Russia gives her foreign policy experience. “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.” She added that “we have trade missions back-and-forth.”
Hard-nosed reporter Katie Couric asked Palin how that closeness benefited her foreign policy experience. Palin replied, “Well, it certainly does because…our next-door neighbors are foreign countries.”
Well, I can see Canada from Niagara street. I could walk across the Peace Bridge this afternoon and eat some Chinese food at Ming Teh, but I don’t expect Condoleezza Rice to call me up and ask my opinion about putting strategic missiles in Poland.
Seriously, how many of us have the nerve to claim we have enough foreign policy experience to be Vice President of the United States by virtue of the fact that we went to Sherkston this summer and brought back a case of Canadian beer? Isn’t that a back-and-forth trade mission? Those frat boys from UB heading up to watch the Canadian ballet are on par with Henry Kissinger, I guess.
And how’s this for old time religion?
“You can’t blink,” Palin is fond of saying. Apparently, you can’t think, either.
Check out the VP candidate in this 2005 video where she’s being blessed by whacko Bishop Thomas Muthee at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church, where she was an active member until 2002. She’s not speaking in tongues—which is an accepted form worship at the church—but she is holding her hands up to heaven while being blessed and anointed against “every form of witchcraft.” Muthee, according to an MSNBC report is responsible for inciting an actual witch hunt against someone in Kenya. No joke.
Great. Her global experience is limited to gazing across stormy seas at a distant land mass, and she practices old-fashioned christian values…like Salem, Massachussetts, 1692.
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