The night before the game, we dined at Morton’s steakhouse in North Miami. We loaded up on Midwestern beef and eschewed the local seafood offerings. We loaded ourselves into my rented black Escalade and set the GPS for the party at South Beach. Three hours later, we were still trying to make the 20-mile trip. Turns out we were riding in a black Cadillac Glacier. It would have been faster to walk to South Beach.
We made it to South Beach but were denied entrance to the party. Apparently the SoBe fire marshal is a stickler for legal occupancy limits. Things started to get ugly. Snoop Dogg-meets-South Beach is not somewhere you want to be when hundreds of wasted partygoers are being turned away. I promised the boys I would take them to a gentlemen’s club if they got back in the car. Instead I took them home to their mother.

See the full article from “Chicago Tribune”

Tampa is Hamilton to Toronto. The Edmonton to Calgary. It’s like Regina, but its name doesn’t rhyme with anything we like.
Then the economy falls through the floor. My first Super Bowl, and that damned Wall Street hands out so many bad mortgages that oil prices fall through the floor.
“There is going to be austerity at this Super Bowl,” they’re saying, as I land in Tampa expecting full-on debauchery. “No Playboy party this year. No Maxim Party. Corporate America is on the low down.”
A low key Super Bowl? It takes me 20 years in the business to get to a Super Bowl, and I get the one Super Bowl week put on by the same guy who does Stephen Harper’s hair.
How to say it? OK – a Super Bowl without excess is like a fully-clothed stripper.

See the full article from “Sportsnet.ca”

The Super Bowl is a pressure cooker
Ron Borges
Last Updated: February 02. 2010 8:08PM UAE / February 2. 2010 4:08PM GMT
Such is the overwhelming pressure of the Super Bowl that players have been known to lose their minds as it approaches.
One year an Atlanta Falcons safety was arrested trying to pick up an undercover police officer working as a prostitute the night before the game only hours after receiving a Christian Athlete of the Year award.
He was beaten for two touchdowns the next evening
A Cincinnati Bengals full-back whose importance in the game plan was paramount was found on the bathroom floor of his room the night before the game, overwhelmed by the pressure.He did not play.When a game can do that to you, NFL coaches have to try to balance preparation for an opponent against the pressure that surrounds the event. That is why the hardest part of the Super Bowl is getting ready for it.

See the full article from “National”

I like the take from Colts linebacker Gary Brackett, that, “if anybody can come back from an injury, it’s Dwight. He’s had all kinds of strange things this year. He’s supposed to be out 10 weeks, he plays seven days later. He’s not a guy I count out as far as playing Sunday. Dwight has Wolverine-type characteristics.”
Here are some more lunchtime topics to munch on:
. . . An agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told the Orlando Sentinel there will be bomb-sniffing dogs at the Super Bowl that “can detect almost anything.” Well then, in the interest of preserving the halftime show, they might want to keep them away from The Who.
. . . And with the millions being spent on security in south Florida how is it that 100,000 hookers are expected to flood the area this week, according to the Prostitute Diversion Initiative?

See the full article from “USA Today”

Special corporate interests already had American democracy on life support. The Roberts court has pulled the plug. This is not a threat to democracy, it is the end of it. Any American who hopes to return to anything resembling a democratic system needs to fight for that return.
If we continue considering a corporation as a “person,” we must also consider that any reasonable psychological evaluation of such a “person” would conclude that the “person” in question is a psychotic, sociopathic, rampant, insatiable omnivore. The fact that this sociopath employs thousands of well-meaning, even ethical individuals is irrelevant. The “person” cares only for the bottom line and will corrupt any elected official it needs or wants to, especially now that such prostitution is legally sanctioned by The Supreme Court of the United States of America.

See the full article from “Youngstown Vindicator”

Right-Wing Media Spin the Conservative Activist James O’Keefe’s Crime
Conservative media have not completely abandoned O’Keefe, despite his idiotic, criminal stunt.
February 1, 2010  |  
Back in September, right-wing activist James O’Keefe told Fox News host Glenn Beck that he was “willing to serve prison time” for his work.
That just may happen.
According to an affidavit from the FBI, O’Keefe and three others were arrested on Monday in connection with an alleged plot to “interfer[e]” with the phone system in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. O’Keefe is perhaps best known for the heavily edited and misleading undercover videos he and Hannah Giles shot of low-level ACORN employees while the right-wing duo were dressed as a pimp and prostitute, an escapade that itself may have violated state criminal statutes.
The New York Times reports that “the four men, two of whom were dressed as telephone repairmen, were charged with entering a federal property on false pretenses with the purpose of committing a felony. The crime charged is itself a felony that carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.”

See the full article from “AlterNet”

… It’s been a crazy week,” Breitbart had begun. “I murdered a child on Tuesday.”
“James O’Keefe was in jail for 28 hours without an attorney, even though he asked for an attorney, and during that period of time the prosecutor leaked the criminal complaint to the press, which concocted the ‘Watergate wiretap’ narrative out of whole cloth,” Breitbart told me about his daredevil employee, who last September became the Ashton Kutcher of the right with his now-famous punking of the progressive community group ACORN. O’Keefe’s antics—in which he and a young woman videotaped themselves impersonating a pimp and a prostitute seeking business advice from ACORN officials—powered the launch of Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com (one of his five web sites) to instant success and notoriety. Today he pays O’Keefe what he calls “a fair salary” for the rights to his work.

See the full article from “Daily Beast (blog)”

maximillio Ben Stein is a CLOWN. Between his various non-serious movie roles (which are all just him being a humorless jerk and thinking he’s a lot funnier than he really is) and his fact-free clowntastic turn in Expelled, to his prostitution of himself selling “Free” credit reports (in my humble opinion, all of those fake “free” credit report companies need to be charged with fraud), Stein has built a career doing whatever he needs to to make money. Other professions are known for this kind of open-ended approach to getting the business done, but most of them are illegal or at least looked down on as morally or ethically challenged.To accept Stein’s apples-to-quasars analogy, it’s just like standing around outside a polling place being intimidating, to falsely impersonate a service worker, use that false identity to gain entrance to the offices of a national-level elected official, and attempt to plant a listening device. Maybe Stein should give O’Keefe a call and …

See the full article from “The Washington Independent”

Both teams will arrive in South Florida today. The players will be in suits and ties, shooting video and pictures and tweeting as they get off the plane. Then they’ll go into lockdown at a hotel.
Caldwell has said the Colts will have a curfew every night this week, and the curfew will get earlier as the week goes on.
Contrast that with the Pro Bowl. Minnesota’s Bryant McKinnie was kicked off the NFC team Saturday after he skipped four of five team practices.
“We don’t know where he is,” an NFL spokesman was quoted as saying in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on Sunday.
A series of tweets from McKinnie’s Twitter account indicate he was in South Beach on Friday night and he might be headed to a strip club. He missed Saturday morning’s practice.

See the full article from “HispanicBusiness.com”

But does that mean should you care? Attend? Tune in tonight at 7? 
* This one matters to people. The Miami game is set to be the highest-attended Pro Bowl in 51 years. And as David Hyde wrote, you only have to look as far as dismissed former UM and current Vikings tackle Bryant McKinnie’s case — in which observers actually noticed and cared that a player had got lost in the nightlife — to confirm that this one matters.
McKinnie missed four of the five practices, a team meeting, and team photo; best of all, he left a trail of tweets that led from club Mansion to the North Miami strip club King of Diamonds. ”We don’t know where he is,” an NFL spokesman said Saturday. “All we know is he’s not playing the game. He’s dismissed from the team.”

See the full article from “NBC Miami”