1.17 Ben Affleck in EW: “Judge me for how good my good ideas are and not how bad my bad ideas are.”
1.15 The Bills beat the Patriots 47-17. All seven of the Bills’ possessions (except two kneel-downs as timme expired) ended in a touchdown–no field goals, punts or turnovers. This had never happened in the NFL Before.
1.15 John Connolly dies at 78. Carol Vinzant: ““I wanted to tell you one thing about John that I always noticed. Boy, did he love you. We’d be talking and your name would come up and he would just become really animated and smile. It was like someone remebering their high school glory days or a wonderful sports team. Only in John’s case, he was just remembering a favorite person.”
1.13 Bart Scott on ESPN, ob how players could keep warm in freezing temperatures: “VI-A-GRA. Take a Viagra before the game, baby. That’ll get that circulation going right. . . A lot of NFL players, at least in my day, took Viagra because it opened up the blood vessels,”
1.13 Prince Andrew renounces his military affiliations, royal patronages, and use of the title ‘His Royal Highness’ in any official capacity.
1.12 Ronnie Spector dies at 78.
1.12 Trump, on NPR: “Mitch McConnell is a loser,”
1.12 The Yankees introduced Rachel Balkovec as the manager of their Low-A affiliate, the Tampa Tarpons. , on Wednesday. The move makes Balkovec the first-ever female manager in the minor leagues.
1.11 Dr. Anthony Fauci, after Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas demanded that he release his (already released) financial statements: “What a moron! Jesus Christ!”
1.11 President Joe Biden, in a speech Tuesday in Atlanta, directly challenged the “institution of the United States Senate” to support voting rights by backing two major pieces of legislation and the carving out of an exception to the Senate’s 60-vote requirement. “Do you want to be … on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” (Passage reportedly written by Jon Meachum.)
1.11 Jessie Singer in the Washington Post: “While investigations are ongoing, it appears likely officials will classify the fire an “accident.” By that, they mean the event was not arson. But there’s a lot wrong with that word and its connotations of chance and unpredictability. If we take a closer look at who was killed in the blaze, and who is killed in “accidental” fires across the United States, it clearly not an accident at all. This is a failure of government officials and corporate landlords to ensure safe housing, especially for people of color. . . .The residents of the building are largely Black and Latino. This reflects a national pattern: In the United States, between 1999 and 2019, Black people were killed in “accidental” residential fires at more than twice the rate of White people. Fire Commissioner Nigro offered a simple explanation for the fire: It began with a malfunctioning portable electric space heater and spread because a resident left the door to their apartment open. If we accept this explanation, the only possible conclusion is that this was a failure of personal responsibility. But how could the apartment door have been left open if New York City law requires that apartment buildings be equipped with self-closing doors? Why did a resident need a space heater if the law requires that apartment buildings be kept at a comfortable temperature in winter? No one in the wealthiest nation in the world should be dying in a fire in 2022. Fires are not quantum physics; we know what causes fires, how they spread and what makes any given fire more or less deadly. Seventeen people in the Bronx died in a fire for the same reason that most Americans die in a house fire in 2022: Because the only housing accessible to them is housing that is unsafe.”
1.10 Helen Mirren in 1975 (age 30). Courtesy Greg Mitchell‘s blog.
1.10 Georgia defeats Alabama for NCAA championship.
1.10 Jesse Rhodes, Raymond La Raja, Tatishe Nteta and Alexander Theodoridis in The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage: ““”Divisions over racial equality were closely related to perceptions of the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol attack. For example, among those who agreed that white people have advantages based on the color of their skin, 87 percent believed that Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate; among neutrals, 44 percent believed it was legitimate; and among those who disagreed, only 21 percent believed it was legitimate. Seventy percent of people who agreed that white people enjoy advantages considered the events of Jan. 6 to be an insurrection; 26 percent of neutrals described it that way; and only 10 percent who disagreed did so, while 80 percent of this last group called it a protest. And while 70 percent of those who agreed that white people enjoy advantages blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6, only 34 percent of neutrals did, and a mere 9 percent of those who disagreed did.”
1.10 According to an investigation by The Washington Post, More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives. Enslavers in Congressrepresented 37 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states.
1.9 Terry Bradshaw on FOX, asked to give reasons Giants should be optimistic: “I can’t. There are none. It’s a bad, bad, bad job. It’s a bad coaching job by Joe Judge and a bad GM job by Dave Gettleman.”
1.9 Jonathan Malesic in the Times: ““”Researchers define burnout as a syndrome with three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism and a sense of ineffectiveness. According to a meta-analysis published in 2010, women on average scored higher than men on the exhaustion scale, but men scored higher on cynicism. Cynicism (also called depersonalization) is “emotional distancing” — in other words, it’s when you view your co-workers, clients or patients as objects or problems more than as people. . . . Yet cynicism is commonly taken as a sign of competence. As a result, the stern manager, the hard-boiled detective and the brusque physician are all male-coded cultural archetypes. Emotionally open male figures have not yet fully supplanted them. The fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso, all smiles and positive self-talk, is funny because he defies the paradigm. In reality, it’s the dour Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots, whose mantra is “Do your job,” who has won six Super Bowls. . . . When men encounter problems at work or elsewhere in their lives, they are much less likely than women to talk about it, in either public or private. Written accounts of male burnout are hard to find. Men are about 40 percent less likely than women to seek counseling for any reason.
1.7 Sidney Poitier dies at 94.
1.6 Max Boot in the Post: “In what may be the most powerful speech of his presidency so far, President Biden delivered a searing (and overdue) indictment on Thursday of his predecessor — never mentioned by name — for inciting a mob attack on the Capitol exactly a year ago. Biden identified the central truth of the insurrection: “The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election … because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”. . . . And most Republicans, it is now clear, seem just fine with that. A party that once stood for certain principles — lower taxes, traditional values, a strong defense — has been reduced to a cult of personality for a narcissistic television personality..”
1.6 Peter Bogdanovich dies at 82.
1.6 Sidney Poitier dies at 94
1.5 Emmanuel Macron, interviewed in Le Parisien: “I am not for pissing off the French … however, the unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. I’m not going to throw [the unvaccinated] in prison. I’m not going to get them vaccinated by force. … We put pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting their access to social activities as much as possible.”
1.5 Mike Tanier in the Times: The N.F.L.’s ultimate goal seems to be extending the regular season to 18 games, pushing future Super Bowls into Presidents’ Day weekend. Fans will then grow conditioned to accept wearying winter weekends of .500-caliber teams battering one another for the right to get routed by Tom Brady (yes, he will still be playing) in the first playoff round. The thought that a 17-game regular season was too long will someday seem as quaint and antedated as the Christmas Eve playoff matchups of the mid-1970s.No matter how long the league draws out its season, fans are sure to keep watching.
1.5 Toyota becomes America’s largest car maker, ending GM’s 90 year reign.
1.5 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: “ A frighteningly high percentage of Republicans remain in utter denial about the Jan. 6 insurrection, choosing to exonerate the president who instigated it and downplaying the violence that occurred. Still, let’s remember that a very large share of Americans have not lost their minds nor forgotten last year’s events. A new Associated Press-NORC poll shows results similar to other major polling. Some 57 percent say former president Donald Trump deserves “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of the blame; that number grows to 70 percent hold when we include respondents who think Trump was moderately to blame. Even 4 in 10 Republicans say he bears at least a moderate amount of responsibility. It’s still mind-blowing that 60 percent of Republicans say Trump bears little or no responsibility; that number, however, is 11 points lower than it was a year ago.
1.4 Topps sells its sports card business to Fanatics. The deal values Topps’s sports and entertainment division at slightly more than $500 million
1.4 Thomas L. Friedman Jr. in the Times: I think our last best hope is the leadership of the U.S. business community, specifically the Business Roundtable, led by General Motors C.E.O. Mary Barra, and the Business Council, led by Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella. Together those two groups represent the roughly 200 most powerful companies in America, with 20 million employees. Although formally nonpartisan, they lean center-right — but the old center-right, the one that believed in the rule of law, free markets, majority rule, science and the sanctity of our elections and constitutional processes. Collectively, they are the only responsible force left with real leverage on Trump and the Republican lawmakers doing his bidding. They need to persuade their members — now — not to donate a penny more to any local, state or national candidate who has voted to dismantle the police or dismantle the Constitution.
1.4 Sen. Ron Johnson: “Why do we assume that the body’s natural immune system isn’t the marvel that it is? Why do we think that we can create something better than God in terms of combating disease?. . . .There are certain things we have to do, but we have just made so many assumptions, and it’s all pointed toward everybody getting a vaccine.”
1.4 Bethany McLean, on Elizabeth Holmes, in the NY Times: “A jury’s verdict is black-and-white, but the real story is rarely so simple. We think of visionaries and fraudsters as polar opposites. In reality, just like Newton, many of today’s great entrepreneurs have some characteristics of both. “Scientists who fall deeply in love with their hypothesis are proportionately unwilling to take no as an experimental answer,” the scientist Peter Medawar said, according to the book “Free Radicals.” Today, you could swap out the word “scientists” for “entrepreneurs.” It’s a very American question about the price of success: What degree of dishonesty is acceptable, especially if the dishonesty is the result of a certain amount of self-delusion? As a society, we’re willing to tolerate this — to a point. Whether it’s technology companies making promises about products that don’t quite exist in their promised form to seduce customers or investors, or Elon Musk touting Tesla’s “full self-driving” cars that do not actually drive themselves, the line between the visionary and the fraudster can be less a bright slash than it is a blur of dots. If Ms. Holmes’s team had had a breakthrough right before Theranos’s technology was rolled out in Walgreens across the country and her devices worked, would anyone have cared about the initial set of lies? Where we draw the line can seem random, but there are a few constants. One is that we bring the full force of the law against the person who gets caught in the middle, awkwardly trying to straddle vision and reality. Those who are able to keep raising money get to keep trying, and sometimes, they go down in history as, well, visionaries. Those who run out of money also run out of luck. Enron got caught in the aftermath of the dot-com bust, when skepticism was back in style. If Enron existed today, when capital is nearly free, few questions asked, the company might have been able to continue raising the billions it needed to paper over the holes in its finances. Enron’s broadband business could have become Netflix. If years later someone had revealed all of the financial shenanigans Enron used to keep its stock price up, would anyone have cared about the deception it had taken to get there? What we’re willing to tolerate also comes down to who gets hurt. Those who fund the vision or fraud — the investors — aren’t always sympathetic characters, at least not in the eyes of the law.
1.4 Sports Illustrated: For two years, the Bucs sold us the fallacy that athletic success is a reflection of character and that [Antonio] Brown’s performance meant he had made personal progress. The two most important people in the organization, Tom Brady and Bruce Arians, both peddled that nonsense at times. The reality is that when the Bucs signed Brown, he was a great football player with a recent history of damaging and destructive behavior. For the entire time he played for them, he was a great football player with a recent history of damaging and destructive behavior. That’s not progress. The Bucs just reinforced that, as long as he was a great football player, the recent history of damaging and destructive behavior did not matter.
1.3 Apple’s market cap briefly tops $3 trilion
1.3 A jury in California finds Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty of four of the 11 fraud charges.
1.3 Hundreds of drivers were stranded for more than 24 hours after a snowstorm brought I-95 to a standstill near Washington, DC in Virginia
1.2 Liz Cheney on Face the Nation: “[T]he country needs a strong Republican Party going forward, but our party has to choose. We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both. And right now, there are far too many Republicans who are trying to enable the former president, embrace the former president. Look the other way and hope that the former president goes away, trying to obstruct the activities of this committee. But we won’t be deterred. At the end of the day, the facts matter, and the truth matters.”
1.2 Antonio Brown mets down, strips to waist as he leaves Bucs-Jets contest mid-game. Bucs cut him after the game.