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.
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