Eagles

We pause from election coverage to ridicule the Eagles as they so richly deserve.

But never a team with so much talent, so much potential, so many accomplished players with gaudy resumes—Pro Bowlers, high draft picks, consistent multi-year starters—that just goes out there week after week and plays with no pride, no heart, no character.

Remember, this was a team picked by many experts to win 10 or 11 games, to make a deep playoff run, even to reach the Super Bowl by a handful of people.

And this? This is what we get? Seriously?

We’ve seen bad Eagles teams. Teams with terrible players, inept coaches, awful quarterbacks. Teams with zero chance.

This is worse. This is a team with huge expectations, a team that on paper should be very good, with a roster stocked with Pro Bowl players, that either doesn’t know how to win or just doesn’t care about winning.

Clinton Lectures Audience on Lying

Oh, the irony.

Campaigning for President Barack Obama in Philadelphia on Monday afternoon, former President Bill Clinton inadvertently struck a note of irony while attempting to criticize Mitt Romney’s campaign.

“You’re laughing, but who wants a president who will knowingly, repeatedly tell you something he knows is not true?” Clinton asked, after discounting a claim in a recent Romney ad that the Obama administration’s auto bailout hurt American workers.

“When I was a kid, if I got my hand caught in the cookie jar, where it wasn’t supposed to be, I turned red in my face, and I took my hand out of the cookie jar,” Clinton added.

Clinton was impeached in 1998 on one count of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice, after repeatedly telling Americans and a grand jury that he did not have sexual relations with a White House intern.

Ground Game

I’ll probably post some other stuff today, but will leave this post at the top for a while. What are you seeing out there? I’m told that the line to vote at the Town of West Bend was huge. The lines in the City of West Bend are reportedly long too.

The hardest college to get into

My column for the Daily News is online. It’s called, “The hardest college to get into.” A snippet:

Since our nation’s founding, Americans have never directly elected a president. The reason for this is quite simple. Our Founding Fathers knew the dangers of a direct democracy and the threat of mob rule. That is why they created a republic with extensive checks and balances on any power that may be able to gather strength enough to inflict tyranny on the people.

  As originally constructed, the only body of the federal government whose members were directly elected were the House of Representatives. Senators were elected by the states as represented by their legislators. Members of the Supreme Court were appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate (still are). And the president, as today, was elected by the Electoral College. For decades, the electors weren’t even chosen by voters in every state. Some states’ legislatures chose the electors. And some states’ citizens voted just for the electors and not the president.

  Lest you think that the Founders’ never envisioned the possibility that a president may be elected without the popular vote, the first time it happened was in 1824 when many of the Founders were still alive. In that year, the popular vote was split four ways between Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford and Henry Clay (in that order). As prescribed by the 12th Amendment, the issue was thrown to the House of Representatives to choose the next president from among the top three. In the end, the House elected John Quincy Adams – making him the only president elected with neither the popular vote nor the plurality of the electoral votes.

  Since then, Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush have all occupied the White House without having won a majority of the popular vote.

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While I, like most Wisconsinites, am looking forward to the blissful silence from the campaigns to come on the morrow, you have to admit that it is better than being ignored by the presidential campaigns. Regardless of how the election turns out, Wisconsin will have played a pretty huge part. We can thank the Electoral College for that.

For the record, columns like this tend to come out when I’m reading things like Henry Clay’s biography.