Blocked field goal at the end allows Packers to escape with win over Bears

 

The  Packers continue to “own” the Bears after their 20-19 win on Sunday, but this was another game, like the win against the Texans, that they didn’t deserve. The Bears ran 25 more plays and had a 13-minute advantage on the time clock, but this was a game where the Bears didn’t do enough with their opportunities; they are just not that good enough a team not to. On all seven of their possessions they managed to enter Packer territory, but it was simply wasted. The Packers, on the other hand, blew two red zone opportunities, one on another interception thrown by Jordan Love, his eleventh of the year, already equaling last year’s number, and in the fourth quarter a 48-yard pass to Christian Watson was wasted on downs.

The Packers were simply fortunate to win this game despite their mistakes; the Bears are just not that good enough a team to overcome more than one game-changing mistake with another young quarterback, Caleb Williams, replacing Justin Fields, and frankly isn’t an improvement. They couldn’t afford a 60-yard pass from Love to Watson with under 4 minutes to play for the go-ahead score, and then allowing Karl Books to sneak in between two linemen to block the potential game-winning field goal. “Good” teams should be able to do enough to beat “bad” teams, but as we saw two weeks against the Lions, doing “just enough” against “bad” teams is not good enough against a “good” opponent.

This game should have been a loss for the Packers, but you have to take whatever “fortune” allows you. Watson had one of the best games of his career, with catches of 17, 25, 48 and 60 yards for a total of 150 yards on just 4 catches. Love threw only 17 passes the entire game but for 260 yards, and it was the long throws that moved the chains, not the running game, which managed barely 100 yards on 25 total rushes, albeit with a few at critical times to set-up touchdowns. But again, this game probably should have been in the loss column, and coming out of the bye-week did not see much improvement in the team’s efficiency, at least on offense.

Next week the Packers play at home against the 49ers, and this is simply not the same “dominant” team we have been seeing in recent years with already four losses and maybe five by the time they make it to Lambeau. Injuries on offense and a defense not as good as the Super Bowl team last year have been blamed, but they are still a “good” team, and the Packers simply cannot afford to play careless like they have been; todays win was certainly nothing to be “joyous” about, more like just “relief” that you managed to escape with yet another win “this time.”

Where the Packers are at in the bye-week, and other shameful things that happened last week

 

So where are the Packers at the bye-week? Certainly with a better record than at this point last season, 6-3 as opposed to 3-6.  A kick or two and a pick-6 or two less the Packers could have the division lead rather than currently in third place in the NFC North.  Last week’s loss at home against the Lions was typical of how frustrating the Packers losses have been this year, The Packers out-gained the Lions by 150 yards, yet they scored just 14 points. 

Three errors led to a 17-point swing in the 10-point loss: Jordan Love’s second pick-6 of the season, Brandon McManus missing his first field goal attempt in his third game as a Packer, and the failure to advance a single yard further on second-and-one inside the Lions’ 10-yard line. Although on paper Josh Jacobs had a good game, most of his output was on two 30+ yard runs, and when he needed to gain just that one yard on fourth down, he failed.

Love is effectively 3-3 as the starting quarterback, with Malik Willis doing what was necessary for him to do to lead the team to three wins and no losses. That included not throwing any interceptions, as opposed to Love’s league leading 10 interceptions in seven games after throwing 11 in 17 games last season. After throwing 15 TD passes in his first five games, Love has thrown 0 TD passes in the past two, with 2 INTs. 

Is the health of Love the issue, is he playing with an injury, and will two weeks be sufficient to cure whatever ails him? If a nagging injury isn’t affecting him, then the next question is what explains his unpredictable play, and will it be “fixed?” Yes, we saw him resurge in the second half of the season last year, but that could be explained by the gaining of experience; that shouldn’t be the excuse this year.

The Packers are 1-3 against winning teams, 5-0 against teams with losing records (I count the Cardinals in that group because they were 2-4 at the time, but have since won three straight). Who is left? The Packers play road games against the Vikings and the Lions, and at home against the 49ers. They play at the Seahawks, and that is a 50-50 game. There are still two games against the Bears, and two home games against teams currently on unexpected skids, the Dolphins and Saints.

So much for football, because it's on the backside of my mind these days. Not to bring “politics” into this (well, I am) allow me to say that I was born in Cleveland, but spent most of my “formative” years in various places in Wisconsin. As I intimated in my “White” post 1 , my youth was not particularly pleasant, but according to the school books on state history, there was a certain amount of “pride” for being known as the home of the “progressive” movement led by “Fighting Bob” La Follette. 

One thing those history books left out or skimmed over was that the state was also “home” of one the most infamous and morally and ethically-corrupt senators in the country’s history, Joseph McCarthy, who after destroying so many lives was finally confronted as a man without "decency" or "shame." This past Tuesday, the state had a choice to make, and they chose indecency and shame.

Frankly, the only “connection” I have with the state now is my 50+ year fandom of the Packers, and I prefer to believe the team is just a conglomeration of people from disparate backgrounds from all over the country who are forced to congregate in Wisconsin  just to play for a football team, and they have no other connection to the state and its shameful support for a convicted felon who if people think prices were high before, wait until Trump puts his deportation, tariff and tax plans into effect—if he isn’t completely lying about that, too. 

The reality is that people need to stop looking for scapegoats and look at themselves in the mirror—and too many people, even in an allegedly “blue-wall” state like Wisconsin, a majority saw someone as evil as Trump looking back at them, and they “liked” what they saw.

People either have short memories or are not told by their parents or grandparents that the more things “change,” the more they stay the same. In fact, things have been a lot worse in the past on its own, because that is just the way things go in a "free market" economy. The only thing that changes much is the rhetoric, and occasional alterations in priorities—for Democrats, maybe health care or infrastructure, for Republicans, doing what the corporate oligarchy who pay to keep them in power commands them to do.

As I mentioned before, at least in its first four seasons, Laugh-In was subversive in its humor, as shown in this sketch, which shows us that from a certain perspective, things were always “bad”:

 

What I think is bad is something like this...

 

 

...where the First Baptist Church in Seattle gave away its parking lot not for affordable housing (and uphold its "christian" values), but for yet another new "luxury" apartment for the well-off.

So who was in the middle of eight years as governor of California where "beautiful downtown Burbank" is located, experimenting on the state the far-right policies he would later impose on the whole country? Ronald Reagan. In fact for a century, from 1899 to 1999, the state was run by Republican governors for 80 of those years.  And people wonder why California is part of the “left coast” now.

Of course Reagan had a more paternal view of Hispanics than Republicans do today, granting amnesty to 3 million undocumented people in the 1986 immigration law, assuaging Republican lawmakers with making future legal entry and work visas more difficult to obtain. There was also the expectation that these people would show their “appreciation” by voting Republican, as a Pat Oliphant cartoon at the time suggested, with Reagan wearing a sombrero and walking through a farm field with Mexican farm workers, telling them they were part of the “family” now—not exactly what people call them today, if they ever did. 

In his review of the Costa-Gavras film Missing, Vincent Canby wrote

Whether or not its facts are verifiable, ''Missing'' documents, in a most moving way, the raising of the political consciousness of Ed Horman who has, until this devastating experience, always believed in the sanctity of his government and accepted its actions and policies without question. Among other things ''Missing'' does is to convince you that, next time, you're not going to waste your vote. The passive citizen is the citizen-victim.

Damned if a majority of people in this country didn't do exactly that. The far-right is claiming that this election is a "victory" for "ordinary people." Hogwash. What Trump has in store for the country is a "victory" for the corporate and billionaire class, throwing crumbs of hate and ignorance to "ordinary people." They think things will get "better"? Just wait; stock prices may go up, but who benefits from that? Not them. 

The day after, the deluge

 

I remember the day after former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke lost the Louisiana governor’s race in 1991, Romania-born poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, a professor of English at LSU, observed that despite Duke’s defeat he still felt anger and disillusionment. Codrescu admitted that when he looked around him, he could only wonder in frustration at which of those 3 out of every 5 white people he walked by actually voted for this despicable excuse for a human being, as the exit polls reported.

PBS released a documentary not long afterward called Backlash: Race and the American Dream, which investigated why someone like Duke would “appeal” to a majority of white voters. It can be found here 1 , dissecting Duke's “platform,” which  inflamed the “passion” of white voters’ “anger” at black crime, welfare, and affirmative action—all under the invisible umbrella of white supremacy and privilege.

I’m sure that some people, like myself, somehow believed that after Trump’s Nazi Party rally in Madison Square Garden, at least some Trump voters would have second thoughts that would not be reflected in the final polls. But it was too little, too late for “celebrities” and Geraldo Rivera to change their minds at the last minute and urge their social media followers to vote for Kamala Harris, especially those who already cast a vote for Trump in early voting. The final tally shows Harris losing all seven swing states (looks like that Brazil-based pollster was “right” after all), and it also appears that Harris will be only the second Democrat to lose the popular vote since 1988.

It was simply astonishing to me that many people simply believed Trump’s lies about how “bad” the economy is compared to when he was previously in office. Even when it was double-digits, inflation only kept pace with rising income after the pandemic, and was a function of low quantities of consumer goods with workers at home and little foot traffic in stores before people suddenly decided they wanted to buy things. 

Otherwise, the economy was in far better shape than economists had predicted. So that was a fake issue played-up by Trump, and louder the lie, the more gullible people actually “saw” it. “Little” lies are ignored or forgotten; it is the “big” lies that “stick,” because people then think there must be something “there.”

We are told that 8 percent of all voters, those called “double-haters” because they “hate” both candidates, voted for Trump, compared to 3 percent in 2020. The question is why did they “hate” Harris? She was not a convicted felon in the hush money case, a convicted financial fraudster, convicted of lying in a civil rape case, she wasn’t giving secrets to the Russians or betraying the identity of an informant in the Kremlin, she didn’t leave Kim Jong Un waiting at the alter and make him even more insane than he already was, she wasn’t keeping a stash of classified documents in the bathroom for barter to our enemies, she didn’t disrespect our international allies and give them concern if the U.S. still wanted to be the leader of the free world or just a friend of dictators, she didn’t pass a tax cut for the rich that was paid for by working people, and she didn’t cause that insurrection on January 6.

In fact, why don't we "speculate" further and come to the conclusion that Trump's principle motivation for running for president again was not to "save" the country, but to "save" himself from the consequences of his crimes, since as president, the Supreme Court has given him virtual immunity. If he was any other citizen, he would be sentenced to prison time after 34 felony convictions to cook the books and direct his underlings to conceal fraud as in the hush money case; instead, he will "pardon" himself.

In fact, you don’t hear any talk from “radical leftists” erupting in violence, which was just another lie devoid of evidence from Trump, when it was reported that it was his supporters who were preparing for violence if he lost. There were a dozen bomb threats in Pennsylvania polling places on Tuesday. Did those attempts at voter intimidation and suppression matter, in the end? Probably not, but why have such threats in Democrat-leaning districts if not to “convince” many it was “unsafe” for them to vote?

Let’s look at a couple of NBC exit polls and see if they mean anything:

 

The first is from the 2020 presidential election, the second one from this year. What do they tell us? They tell us that white voters, male or female, didn’t vote much differently in either 2020 or 2024. Although a slightly higher percentage of white women voted for Harris, a majority still voted for Trump; the fact that 15 percent more white women voted than in 2020 (37 from 32 percent of total votes) meant that the total number votes they cast for Trump was likely the same. 

Overall, non-white voters accounted for a lower-percentage of the total vote, from 33 percent in 2020 to 29 percent in 2024. The black vote was slightly depressed, and the percentage of black male and female votes for Trump was actually little differentiated; in 2020, 19 percent of black males voted for Trump, statistically insignificant from the 20 percent in 2024.

But it was the Latino and “other races" that apparently made the difference. For “other races," support for the Democratic candidate fell from a positive 20 percent gap to just 5 percent, while  for both Latino males and females, support for the Democratic candidate fell significantly, with Latino female voters apparently less motivated to vote by one-quarter over 2020’s numbers.

I think that the problem with Latino voters was two-fold. Harris did not really differentiate herself from Trump in regard to border policy, immigration or asylum policy, so there was no real “choice” there other than whether or not you liked Trump’s dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric. The failure to humanize migrants and tell their stories as I tried to do in my last three posts in regard to the election showed that neither party really “knew” this segment of the electorate.

But I also blame Latino voters themselves, especially those of Mexican heritage who should know better the dangers and difficulties people face today in a violent society controlled by cartels, where whole communities were wiped-out for daring to oppose cartel gangs. Surely they knew friends or family effected by this violence, and knew how nearly impossible each successive immigration “reform” law made it to immigrate legally into this country, and  for plainly racist and xenophobic reasons. 

Voting “Republican” doesn’t make them immune from racism, no matter how “white” you think you are, because white nationalists only see someone who is “probably” illegal. In Texas, Ken Paxton’s actions to deter Latino votes shows that white Texas fears the time that Latinos actually realize that they have the power to say enough is enough, and that they will speak for themselves, and not allow racist whites who want them to “disappear” to do it “for” them—if, of course, Democrats are willing to allow them to.

So what do these numbers “really” tell us? Or better yet, what does it say about “us”? As in 2016, as much as people disliked Hillary Clinton and the media acting like she was “entitled” to the presidency, few people—even most Republicans—believed that a clown show with as much “baggage” as Trump could possibly be acceptable as the “leader” of the free world. And yet against all probability he won, and he proved that he himself didn’t expect to win because all he brought to the “table” were the scraps of his racist beliefs and disgust with “rules” and “laws” that he spent a lifetime having his stooges commit crimes to evade.

Everyone with any credibility who worked with Trump were as one that he was incompetent and dangerous, at least in foreign affairs and the military. Like Hitler, Trump had little patience for policy or paperwork (let alone reading it), but he allowed his henchpersons free reign to pursue their own destructive, racist agendas if it “pleased” him. He allowed the Federalist Society to handpick the most extreme-right judges to the federal benches without regard to their qualifications or respect for the law, only abiding by their own “cultural” prejudices without regard to the rights of others to hold and practice contrary beliefs.

Trump is now telling us that “God” chose to “save” him in order to “save” the country. Can there be no better reason to disprove that there is a “god” in this universe? I still don’t understand what it is that Trump is trying to save us from. Again and again, he can’t think of anything himself, but himself and his own vindictive, petty grievances which apparently many millions of people share. The truth doesn't matter, and he has told us before that ignorant, ill-informed people will believe any of his lies and made-up “facts,” the bigger the “better”:

 

Why the media or the Harris campaign didn't find this clip and repeated it over and over again in campaign ads I don’t know, but in retrospect it would have certainly been more effective than just calling him a fascist over and over again, and actually showed voters how fascists use propaganda. Forcing voters to come face-to-face what he actually thought of “common people” and used them for his own benefit may have worked wonders.

In the end, people need to self-examine. I mean why was it that in two elections, voters seem to prefer a boorish, disrespectful liar over a female candidate more qualified for office and experienced in public service than he was (well, in Clinton’s case, not by that much, admittedly).  As much as we might criticize the Latino vote, at least both male and females voters showed a significant preference to Harris over their white counterparts. Is it white people who are not “ready” for a female president? 

And while we are at it, what are people thinking voting for a Republican-controlled Senate, giving Trump the power to stack the federal judiciary with more far-right judges, and a House with another Republican majority after it spent the past two years wasting tax payer money on pointless "investigations." It is just so, well, stupid.

As much as people think Latin culture is “macho,” Mexico at least beat the U.S. to the punch and elected its first female president, and given how much Trump feels contempt for any female world leader who dares to speak to him as if they are “equals,” we can surmise that a majority of voters in this country feel the same way. I mean, why not if the fact of Trump's incomprehensible election bears it out?

Perhaps some voters do not believe that Harris “earned” the presumptive nomination, and there should have been some mini-primary, followed by a vote at the Democratic convention after a debate had taken place for delegates to decide who they preferred. It is interesting to note that polls had shown that voters preferred “any” Democratic candidate over Trump other than Biden—and apparently Harris as well. 

Harris probably should not have made abortion “the issue” early on, because as it turned out, it didn’t help her win. She probably should have pivoted from that earlier and made an effort to “speak” to male voters—but more especially to the issues of non-white voters, male or female, because as seen in the exit polls, that is where she lost the election; aping the far-right line on the “border crisis” and immigration did not help her with white voters, and merely underlined the fact that she didn’t understand what would motivate minorities, especially Latinos, to vote for her.

In the end, what we might see as a result of all of this is that it won’t be just the people that Trump voters inhumanly want to hurt that will be so, but in the inevitable economic downward spiral that economists had predicted but didn’t happen during the Biden administration, and will engulf Trump voters as well. It will because they didn’t listen to the experts who told them that Trump’s “promises” on immigration, tariffs and taxes will have a disastrous effect on the economy if implemented. 

In fact, it appeared that people were desperately searching for reasons not to vote for Harris, choosing to ignore Trump's unfitness and countless negatives that were apparent every time he opened his mouth.

What is really unfortunate about all of this is that Trump voters, who haven't see any substantive difference in their lives from one administration to the next, will when Trump actually carries out the radical "plans" he and people with fascist inclinations like Stephen "America for (white) Americans" Miller and Elon Musk have for the country.  And when that happens, it will be just too bad for the rest of us that it won't just be deserving Trump voters who gets sucked into the maelstrom of his vindictiveness and lies, but those who tried to stop the destruction of democracy itself.

It's down to the wire to decide what kind of country you want this to be

 

There are some things that are more important than a football game to talk about, and that is Tuesday’s presidential election. While Donald Trump is making ever more insane claims like the “Great Depression” will start in three days if Kamala Harris is elected, this is just “typical” of the hysterical lies and misinformation that we are being informed by the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times is being spread on X in the past few day about “election fraud” in Pennsylvania. I wouldn’t doubt that Trump supporters themselves are busy planting fake “evidence.”

Right-wing media is playing-up the Brazil-based Atlas Intel polls that claim that Trump is leading every swing state; critics have noted problems with their “methodology,” which shows that 40 percent of the black vote in Michigan is for Trump. If that is true, then we can only surmise that those voters have fallen headfirst for his lies and are themselves searching for scapegoats other than recognizing the destructive consequences if Trump actually does follow through on his deportation, tariff (de facto sales taxes) and tax plans whose negative impacts we've discussed before. And his continuing to load federal courts with far-right "culture war" judges will see a steady erosion in what they like to think of as a basic "right."

Or maybe they like his bullying antics or feel a “commonality” with his complaints about his criminal history (he still hasn’t been sentenced in the New York hush money case). But the reality is that many Trump supporters seem to believe only the “other guy” will suffer the consequences of his simple-minded “plans”; no, it will be themselves as well: an exploding bomb doesn’t care if you are Democrat or Republican, let alone your color, race or creed.

Here 1 Vox tells us that Trump supporters are already gearing up for a violent reaction if Trump loses, and there are reports that ballot drop boxes are being set afire in districts with close races in Democratic-leaning areas.  Let’s get real here: the Trump campaign is desperate enough to do any corrupt and unethical thing to get him elected. Trump has no interest in what the people want or need—only the egomaniacal fantasies of an increasingly demented mind.

Trump has no dignity, no human decency, and has no idea what he is doing. He throws ideas of a “plan” which are not well-thought out, but simple-minded declarations that sound “cool” to him and his supporters. Economists say his deportation, tariff and tax plans pose greater threats to the economy, inflation, Social Security, Medicare and the federal deficit than what anything Kamala Harris has proposed. Vox here 1 also warns us about the danger posed by a Trump administration with a vaccine-denier like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in “charge” of health care policy.

Why trust Trump with foreign policy just because he claims to be “friendly” with murderous dictators? Putin in Russia and the Taliban in Afghanistan saw Trump as an incompetent who could be played like a fool, and he set the table for what would happen next. Putin thought that Joe Biden would “blink” like he expected his “friend” Trump would have, as he did when in ignoring Russian troop incursions into eastern Ukraine. And then Trump’s exchange of “love letters” with Kim Jong Un led to nothing positive, with Kim now behaving like a spurned “lover.”

While the Trump campaign focuses on fueling fear and paranoia, the Harris campaign says she will cut taxes for the middle class, make housing more affordable, help small businesses, bring down healthcare costs, etc., etc. But you can only try, especially if there is a Congress that is not cooperative, and with the limitations of executive action. But at least it is in keeping with Democratic principles of taking the interests of working people first.

Trump and his allies in Congress don’t even pretend to do any of those things, because they only answer to the corporate and billionaire class, who pay billions into the propaganda coffers. Was the country made “great” during Trump’s during his first (and hopefully, only) term in office? Certainly not in the eyes of our allies, but maybe in the eyes of his own economic and social “class.” Yes everything was “great” for him and his friends, and he somehow managed to convince people that what was “great” for him was “great” for them too. 

But was it? Really? I saw my tax refunds drop by half after his tax cut plan. The rich got the rest of it. What’s so “great” about that? I dare you to name one single thing Trump did for "you" that had nothing to do with fueling hate against other people.

This weekend I watched the new Icarus Films restored Blu-ray edition of Patricio Guzman’s 1975 film The Battle For Chile, considered one the greatest documentaries ever made, which has a “you are there” feel without “talking heads” interpreting what they remembered. The documentary told the story of the “surprise” election of Salvador Allende in 1970 despite the millions of dollars spent by the CIA to spread misinformation and propaganda to prevent it 3 and subsequently aiding the opposition in fueling chaos 4 . Even months before the 1973 coup, the New York Times seemed to believe that Allende would remain the democratically-elected president until his one term would be over in 1976. But apparently, the Nixon administration was not going to wait that long.

Allende’s programs were called “socialist,” but only to hypocritical Americans. In Chile, impoverished indigenous children were excluded from the public educational system because their families couldn’t afford to send them to school; Allende instituted scholarships to allow them to attend schools. He also instituted a free milk program in schools and impoverished communities. Working people needed places to live to raise their children, so he started a program to build 120,000 affordable residential buildings. When they reached working age, he instituted minimum wage laws and tax breaks, continued the previous administration’s land redistribution program, and ordered that the construction of the Santiago subway system prioritize working class neighborhoods. For when they grew old, he increased social security payments.

All parties in the country—contrary to popular belief in the U.S. at the time—backed the continuing process of nationalizing U.S.-controlled copper mines. But the majority opposition legislature opposed any action that gave more power to the working class. It declared a “boycott” of any executive initiative to that effect. The law to punish economic crimes was rejected. The law to create a ministry for the family was rejected. The law on readjustments and salaries for workers was “deferred,” and then “forgotten.” The law on workers’ participation in factories was rejected. The law to set-up self-managing firms was rejected. 

Those and dozens of other progressive measures meant to aid working people lost their financing by opposition legislative action. The opposition also cynically promoted food shortages and strikes in an attempt to try to turn working people against Allende, although most saw through these gambits.

Allende’s victory convinced political opponents at home and in the Nixon administration that if democratic means “failed” to prevent this, then a coup d’état was “necessary,” which occurred in September 1973, with the aid of CIA-funded propaganda in the right-wing press, and unapologetically fascist groups like Homeland and Freedom who made it their “mission" to promote violence and social chaos:

 

The opposition parties in Chile claimed they wanted to “save” democracy from a democratically-elected president who had the support of most of the working class. What happened instead was the 17-year of dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, during which thousands of people deemed political “liabilities” were murdered—including by “death flights” in which victims were thrown out of airplanes or helicopters—and many more “disappeared.” Assassinations were conducted outside the country by the Chilean secret police agency DINA, which included the car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington DC.

Although democracy was reinstituted in 1990, and the  economy in Chile has improved insofar as GDP is concerned, the outcomes are little different than what they were pre-1970: income inequality has gotten worse, with the top one percent controlling half the country’s wealth, while bottom 50 percent have negative wealth, meaning their debts are more than their assets. Disposable income for working people has also decreased since “neoliberal”—meaning unfettered “free” market—economic policies were first instituted by Pinochet.

We can take as an example what happened in Chile (and Germans acceptance of Hitler's’ nationalist and racist dictatorship in 1933) when people who claim they are “for” democracy when in fact their actions (and votes) only lead to its destruction—“temporary” or not. We like to think we can “control” the worst in us, but Trump has shown that the opposite is true. We will know if at least some of those favoring Trump understand the consequences of making the wrong choice for the country in two days.