In Appreciation of Peyton Manning

By Zak Kefer

http://www.indystar.com

February 3, 2016

He was different from the start, the privileged son of an NFL quarterback who scoffed at the idea of shortcuts. At times it felt like he was engineered in some sort of football laboratory, this 6-5, 230-pound quarterbacking machine with that laser, rocket right arm and the mind of an offensive coordinator to match, constructed to make all the right reads and all the right throws and when he was finished, say all the right things.

Hours after signing his first professional contract, the Indianapolis Colts’ rookie quarterback and newly minted $48 million man was asked what he planned on doing with all that money.

“Earn it,” he said.

How many 22-year-olds say that?

Peyton Manning did.

Of course he did. He was a throwback from the very beginning. Even a young Peyton Manning never seemed all that young. That he lived alone in a two-bedroom apartment those first few years in Indianapolis wasn’t an accident: He wanted nothing to go home to. He stayed at the Colts’ West 56th Street practice facility until 10 p.m. most nights during the season, poring through film with assistant coaches. Some nights he’d fall asleep, remote in hand.

Which, of course, left him ill-equipped to complete some of the most elementary of domestic tasks. According to a 1999 profile in Sports Illustrated, this included hooking up a DVD player to his TV and opening a can of soup. Imagine: Peyton Manning, athletic wunderkind who’d go on to carve up NFL defenses for two decades, had met his match. A can of Campbell's chicken noodle.

He lacked no such assurance on the football field, where he better resembled a general commanding his troops than a quarterback calling plays. Manning once grew so incensed at his offensive line after he was sacked in a game that he lit into them on the sidelines. “Come on, line, block!” he shouted. He was in the seventh grade.

How many junior high QBs yell at their offensive lines?

Peyton Manning did.

He was always in control. He arrived in control. Just days after the 1998 draft, he petitioned the league to allow him to start practicing with the Colts early. He was denied but undaunted — he arrived for the first practice he was allowed to take part in having memorized the entire offensive playbook. Ten minutes into the workout coordinator Tom Moore turned to incumbent starter Kelly Holcomb and told him, “You come over here and stand by me now.” Manning missed one snap over the next 13 years.

All he was doing was keeping his word. Months before, at that year’s NFL Scouting Combine, the Colts set up meetings with the top two quarterback prospects in the draft. Ryan Leaf missed his. Manning didn’t. He arrived 15 minutes early with a briefcase and a legal pad of paper that had 25 questions on it he wanted answered.

An hour later Bill Polian, the team’s new president, exited the meeting shaking his head. “He just interviewed us, didn’t he?” he asked a colleague.

Still, the uncertainty over whom the Colts would select at the top of the draft — Manning was tagged the safe pick, Leaf the sexy one — persisted into April. Weeks before the draft Manning sat for lunch with team owner Jim Irsay in Miami. There he made his final pitch. He looked Irsay in the eyes. He was succinct.

“You know, Mr. Irsay, I’ll win for you,” he told him. The owner would later admit those eight words sent shivers down his spine.

A week before the draft Manning still didn’t have his answer. So he sat in Polian’s office and pressed further. Polian told him he didn’t yet have an answer. Manning grew irritated. He got up to leave.

At the last moment, he turned to Polian, “If you draft me, I promise you we’ll win a championship,” he said, before adding a minor caveat. “If you don’t, I promise to come back and kick your ass.”

How many college quarterbacks have the audacity to say that?

Peyton Manning did.

He always has. He was the star who never took a practice off, never took a game off, never took the sport for granted. He was the cocky college quarterback who kept his promises to Irsay and Polian. He lifted a perennial loser into the league’s elite. He showed Indianapolis what winning football looked like. He had 12-win, 4,000-yard, 30-touchdown seasons on autopilot. He won with Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark. He won with Donald Brown and Blair White and Devin Aromashadu.

On Sunday in Santa Clara, Calif., he reaches Game No. 293. Super Bowl 50. The End. “This might be my last rodeo,” Manning admitted to Patriots coach Bill Belichick after the AFC Championship Game. He entered the league in 1998 handing off to Marshall Faulk; he’ll exit it in 2016 trying to stall the rise of Cam Newton. Sunday almost certainly marks the last time Peyton Manning will do what he was born to do.

It will mean more here, the city in which Manning saved and strengthened and carried an NFL franchise. Pro football grew up in Indianapolis just as Manning grew up in pro football. The city learned to keep quiet while Manning worked his line-of-scrimmage magic. It laughed at his commercials, from  “Cut that meat!” to his “laser, rocket arm” to, “Chicken-parm-you-taste-so-good.” It thanked him for putting his name on a children's hospital, for being the impetus behind the $720 million football palace that is Lucas Oil Stadium.

It stood by him while the “Can’t Win the Big One” critics roared, during those playoff flops to New York and New England and Pittsburgh. It reveled in his sweetest of triumphs, the monkey-off-the-back rally against the Patriots and the Super Bowl win against the Bears a few weeks later. It watched him grow from a prodigy to a Pro Bowler to a Hall of Famer. He became one of the most dependable athletes in history. He made the ridiculous routine.

That city? It never stumbled across his name in the police blotter, never heard him gripe about a contract dispute, never had to question his dedication to his craft, his team, his fans. He became a Hoosier, and he was damn proud of that. As far as role models go, there's no one better.

Which is why this city fought back tears, same as he did, on that still-surreal afternoon four years ago, the day he was forced to say goodbye. He made it all of nine words before his voice started to crack and the emotions began to swallow him. “This has weighed heavy on my heart,” he stammered. “Nobody loves their job more than I do. Nobody loves playing quarterback more than I do. There’s no other team I’ve ever wanted to play for.”

But football, as he said that day, isn’t always fair. March 2012 taught Indianapolis that.

So he started over in Denver, a legend not ready to give up on the game he loves. It has begun to crumble for him, his 39-year-old frame on the inevitable decline, his aging right arm firing far more wounded ducks than lasers or rockets or completed passes. At this stage his game was more guts and guile than anything else. His football life was expiring before our eyes.

Two months ago the NFL’s all-time leader in passing yards and touchdowns was leading the league in interceptions and being booed off his home field by his own fans. He was a backup quarterback with a sore foot. He was facing performance-enhancing drug allegations. He was done, they said.

Then he wasn’t. Then he was winning three straight. Then he was beating Ben Roethlisberger and Tom Brady in the playoffs, reviving a career that sat on its deathbed in late November, storming into his fourth Super Bowl two months shy of his 40th birthday.

How many 39-year-olds could have pulled off this miracle?

Because Peyton Manning did.

On Sunday, he’ll try to do what few before him could: Go out on top.

How does Indianapolis say thank you?

Dye the canal orange?

Plaster 18 in lights on Monument Circle?

Hang a Broncos banner from the Chase Tower?

A Colts town is a Broncos town for a few days. A Peyton Manning town, forever.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

http://www.indystar.com/story/sports/nfl/colts/2016/02/02/appreciation-peyton-manning/79662766/

Obama’s Growing Conflict of Interest in the Clinton E-Mail Scandal

By Andrew C. McCarthy — February 3, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at a Cabinet meeting on Nov. 28, 2012. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

The latest revelations regarding Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information are stunning. For example, several of the former secretary of state’s “private” e-mails contain national-defense information so sensitive that it is classified at the highest levels.

Moreover, classified information so pervades the thousands of pages of e-mails communicated through and stored on Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured, homebrew server system that the court-ordered disclosure process has ground to a halt. Remember, Mrs. Clinton reviewed her e-mails before finally surrendering them to the State Department, and she initially insisted there was no classified information in them. Now, it turns out they were so threaded with classified information that the State Department and intelligence agencies have fallen hopelessly behind the court’s disclosure schedule: The task of reviewing the e-mails and redacting the portions whose publication could harm national security has proved much more complicated than anticipated. Thousands of remaining e-mails, and any embarrassing lapses they contain, will be withheld from voters until well into primary season.

So egregious have the scandal’s latest developments been that a critical State Department admission from last week has received almost no coverage: Eighteen e-mails between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama have been identified, and the government is refusing to disclose them.

The administration’s rationale is remarkable: Releasing them, the White House and State Department say, would compromise “the president’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel” from top government officials.

Think about what this means. Not only is it obvious that President Obama knew Mrs. Clinton was conducting government business over her private e-mail account, the exchanges the president engaged in with his secretary of state over this unsecured system clearly involved sensitive issues of policy. Clinton was being asked for “advice and counsel” — not about her recommendations for the best country clubs in Martha’s Vineyard, but about matters that the White House judges too sensitive to reveal.

That explanation got me to thinking about General David Petraeus. Recall that the Obama Justice Department prosecuted Petraeus for mishandling classified information. His offense involved conduct narrower in scope than Mrs. Clinton’s systematic transmission and storage of classified information on her private system.

What is the relevance of Petraeus’s case? Well, in order to outline the factual basis for his guilty plea, the Justice Department filed a document describing the information involved. In the main, it was the classified contents of the general’s journals. Among the most significant of this information, according to the prosecutors, were notes of “defendant DAVID HOWELL PETRAEUS’s discussions with the President of the United States of America.”

In light of Mrs. Clinton’s numbing repetition of the legally irrelevant talking-point that the classified information found throughout her thousands of e-mails was not “marked classified,” it bears emphasizing that General Petraeus’s journals were not marked classified either. That did not alter the obvious fact that the information they contained was classified — a fact well known to any high government official who routinely handles national-defense secrets, let alone one who directly advises the president.

Moreover, as is the case with Clinton’s e-mails, much of the information in Petraeus’s journals was “born classified” under the terms of President Obama’s own executive order — EO 13526. As we’ve previously noted, in section 1.1(d) of that order, Obama directed: “The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.” In addition, the order goes on (in section 1.4) to describe other categories of information that officials should deem classified based on the national-security damage disclosure could cause. Included among these categories: foreign relations, foreign activities of the United States, military plans, and intelligence activities.

If the administration is refusing to disclose the Obama-Clinton e-mails because they involved the secretary of state providing advice and counsel to the president, do you think those exchanges just might touch on foreign-government information, foreign relations, or foreign activities of the United States — deliberations on which are presumed classified?

Will anyone in the press corps covering the White House and the State Department ask administration officials whether this is the case?

I believe some, if not all, of the communications between Obama and Clinton should be classified. To classify them now, however, would imply wrongdoing on both their parts since they knew they were communicating via private, unsecured e-mail. Essentially, Obama is invoking executive privilege because the effect of doing so — viz., non-disclosure of the e-mails — is the same as the effect of classifying them would be . . . but without the embarrassment that classifying them would entail.

Of course, Petraeus did not get executive-privilege treatment. His communications with Obama were deemed classified and he was prosecuted for failing to safeguard them.

To summarize, we have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president’s own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama.

From these facts and circumstances, we must deduce that it is possible, if not highly likely, that President Obama himself has been grossly negligent in handling classified information. He discussed sensitive matters on a non-government, non-secure e-mail system that could easily be penetrated by foreign governments (among other rogue actors). By doing so, he left an electronic- and paper-trail that was outside the government’s tightly secured repositories for classified information. He also personally indulged, and thus implicitly endorsed, Clinton’s use of private e-mail to do government business.

Law enforcement investigations are supposed to proceed independent of political considerations, but I’d wager few people believe the decision whether to indict Mrs. Clinton will be made by Attorney General Loretta Lynch alone. It will be the president’s call. In making it, he may face a profound conflict of interest. A prosecution of Clinton might expose that Obama engaged in recklessness similar to Clinton’s, albeit on a far smaller scale. Moreover, Clinton would likely argue in her defense that the president, who is ultimately responsible for safeguarding classified information, not only authorized Clinton to use private e-mail but knowingly used it himself in order to communicate with Clinton.

As we’ve observed, Obama is already under immense political pressure not to permit an indictment that would doom his party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Now, factor in the embarrassment a prosecution could cause the president personally. Many have asked why Hillary Clinton has not been charged already. We may have our answer.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is as senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

RELATED: Why the Justice Department Won’t Work with the FBI on Clinton’s E-mail Case

RELATED: How the FBI Could Force DOJ to Prosecute Hillary Clinton

RELATED: Ex-Spies Say That Clinton’s Illegal Server Triggered Widespread Devastation

RELATED: Hillary’s Latest E-mail Gambit: Tragedy, Comedy, or Low Farce?

Second-Degree Bern

By Mark Steyn

http://www.steynonline.com/

February 2, 2016

Thank God that's over. You don't have to be an Amtrak conductor to want to punch the next guy who says, "There are three tickets out of Iowa." In the end, Ted Cruz won eight delegates and Donald Trump seven. Which doesn't sound so bad for Trump. Except that Marco Rubio also won seven delegates. Had the caucus been held 24 hours later, Rubementum might have pushed Trump to third place.

There's no point pretending it wasn't a setback for the billionaire party-crasher. Who knows why it happened? Perhaps he should have taken his own advice and shot a guy on Fifth Avenue: That's gotta be worth a couple of points in Polk County. For over six months, each supposedly fatal misstep - from McCain to Muslims - only made him stronger. Now the first actual votes of this interminable process have made him weaker. For a candidate running on the platform that he's a winner and the other guys are losers, the aura of invincibility depended on the perception of invincibility. So it's not helpful to let five thousand hayseeds shuck Trump Tower like a corncob. Doing without consultants, doing without ads, doing without Fox News, doing without National Review, doing without debates ...great, great, love it. But doing without voters is a trickier proposition. This week the Trump campaign sent my 15-year-old kid, who lives in New Hampshire, a reminder to make sure he caucuses in Iowa.

Rubio did the usual caucus-night thing. He came third so he hailed himself as the most stunning victor since Wellington at Waterloo and then segued into the stump-speech bollocks about being the son of a bartender and promising a new American century. Ted Cruz followed with a victory speech that lasted most of the new American century. It was the kind of ruthless Canadian triumphalism older Americans haven't seen since the War of 1812, which, like Cruz's speech, went on into the following year. If he wins again next Tuesday, let's hope he cuts to the chase and burns down the White House.

Still it's a fact that both Cruz and Rubio outperformed the polls; Trump underperformed. In New Hampshire he has a bigger poll lead to underperform against ...but a week is a long time in a small state. By comparison with Rubio and Cruz, he gave the most human speech of the night: instead of doing the customary loser shtick of claiming that your surprise 9th place finish showed all those naysayers who said you'd never break the critical two per cent barrier and then shoving in random bits of stump-speech pabulum, Trump was secure enough to appear genuinely deflated, and offer only a line that no professional speechwriter would allow to pass his lips: He said he might buy a farm in Iowa. The question now is whether in Iowa Trump has bought the farm, or whether he can be - here it comes, ta-da! - the comeback kid next Tuesday in Concord. He has a 20-point lead in New Hampshire, but, if the post-Iowa perception is that Cruz is now the "conservative" choice and Rubio the "moderate" one, 20 points can bleed awfully fast.

It was a bad night for John Kasich. He's currently second-placed in New Hampshire, on which he's put all his chips - as his fellow moderates Jeb! and Christie have likewise done. The assumption by three of the four-man mod squad was that the Granite State would determine who'd get to be the "mainstream" standard-bearer. But Rubio decided to jump the gun and settle the moderate question a state early - and who dares wins, as the SAS say. The Cuban heel got almost four times as many votes as Bush, Kasich and Christie combined. Indeed, even the Carson campaign in its death throes outpolled Bush, Kasich and Christie combined, plus Fiorina and then some. Jeb may still have some piles of donor cash he hasn't yet thrown off the top of Mount Washington, but most of these other guys will be gone by next Wednesday.

In broader outsider/insider terms, it was a grim tally for the GOP "establishment". Rubio, Bush, Kasich and Christie got a combined 30 per cent of the vote. Cruz, Trump and Carson got 61 per cent. And the rest - Paul, Fiorina, Huckabee, Santorum - incline in varying degrees more to the outsider side of the track.

~On the Democrat side, I was rooting for Bernie, and have been for seven months:

He would be the oldest man ever elected president and 83 years old at the end of two terms - which we won't have to worry about because the entire country will have slid off the cliff long before then. But he's enthusing the base, and any base wants to be enthused. 

Hillary, by contrast, is in trouble not because she's a sleazy, corrupt, cronyist, money-laundering, Saud-kissing liar. Democrats have a strong stomach and boundless tolerance for all of that and wouldn't care were it not for the fact that she's a dud and a bore. A "Hillary rally" is a contradiction in terms: the thin, vetted crowd leave more demoralized and depressed than when they went in. To vote for Bernie is to be part of a romance, as it was with Obama. To vote for Hillary is to validate the Clintons' indestructible sense of their own indispensability - and nothing else. Hillary is a wooden charmless stiff who supposedly has enough money to be carefully managed across the finish line. But that requires Democratic electors to agree to be managed, too, and the Sanders surge is a strong sign that, while they're relaxed about voting for an unprincipled arrogant phony marinated in ever more malodorous and toxic corruption, they draw the line at such a tedious and charisma-free specimen thereof.

All of that was fully in evidence at last night's rally. The only personable Clinton stood behind Hillary looking like an emaciated wraith of the Slick Willie of yore. Decades of interns appear to have literally sucked all the life out of him, leaving only (one presumes from friend Epstein's Lolita Express flight records) his distinguishing characteristics with any flicker of vitality. Judging from her brief but disastrous intervention in New Hampshire the other week, young Chelsea appears to have inherited her mother's warmth and personal touch. That left Hillary barking across the midnight hour like a malign Speak-Your-Weight Machine with a jammed quarter.

As I wrote way back in early July:

So Bernie is a real danger to her. He will be nimbler, more fun and more human in the debates. And he enthuses the young in a way Hillary doesn't. He could win Iowa, and I know he could win New Hampshire, too... If Mrs Clinton's two down by South Carolina, Berniephobes will be begging any alternative (starting with Crazy Joe) to jump in the race.

Bernie was close, but, as Bill would say, no cigar. Hillary won by 24 delegates to 21 - and six of her delegates she got on a coin toss. Seriously. Nevertheless, given the demographic difficulties he faces in South Carolina and beyond, Sanders needed to inflict actual defeat on Hillary. He needed headlines saying: "BERNIE WINS!" And he didn't get that. She certainly felt the Bern, but it wasn't a third-degree Bern.

Insurgent-wise, the Bern took the high road and the Donald took the low road. And, unlike Trump, Sanders outperformed the polls. If he does that in New Hampshire, he'll utterly humiliate Hillary. And who knows what happens then?

~A lot of the commentary on the Trump phenomenon in the days before Iowa reiterated points I was making way back when, a month after he entered the race. See here and here:

The retort that Trump is not a "real" Republican or a "real" conservative would of course be a devastating criticism had "real" Republicans and "real" conservatives" in Washington managed actually to "conserve" anything during their time in office. Fiscal prudence? Constrained welfare? Private health care? Religious liberty? There's no point to a purity test for a party that folds more reliably than the White House valet. As I've said, for the Republican establishment the issue is Trump; for a large part of the base the issue is the Republican establishment.

So I have generally regarded Trump's presence in this race as a good thing. And I believe (for reasons I'll expand on later this week) that he would do better against Hillary than most other GOP candidates.

However, if I may rise on a point of personal privilege (as the parliamentarians say): As readers might have discerned, I wasn't happy about his approving Tweet appearing to take sides against me in the Michael E Mann "global warming" case (scroll down). I was even less happy by the blizzard of mail that followed from Trump supporters saying, well, we understand you're bugged about the particulars of your obscure law suit, but in the macro picture this guy is gonna save the country so quit yer bellyachin'. Actually, when this suit comes to trial, it will not only be a major landmark in terms of court-enforced climate-change compliance, but also the most consequential free-speech case in America in 50 years. So it's not about me personally: in that useful American expression, I don't need this in my life right now - and like the Conqueror of Iowa, I'm a subject of Her Canadian Majesty and can be well beyond the reach of the US courts in nothing flat. But it has a lot to do with the First Amendment, and things that ought to be of value to every American. And, having rebuked Senators Whitehouse and Markey in my testimony to the US Senate for their totalitarian approach to vigorous debate and the spirit of inquiry, I would be disturbed by any presidential candidate who appeared to be siding with the opponents of free speech.

I have been out of the country, and came back yesterday a few hours before the Iowa caucus. In the week I was gone, Donald Trump was invited to correct the impression his Tweet gave that he supported global-warming fanatics over free speech. I regret that he chose not to do so.

~Tomorrow I'll be back on the radio with Toronto's Number One morning man, John Oakley, live on AM640 at 8.30am Eastern. If you are in the vicinity of the receiving apparatus, I do hope you'll dial us up.

San Francisco icon Joe Montana knows what lies ahead in Super Bowl 50

Jarrett Bell, USA TODAY Sports

http://www.usatoday.com/

February 1, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO — Joe Montana laughed, flashing back to the pressures of Super Bowl week.

“Once everybody gets into town, you think you’re squared away,” Montana told USA TODAY Sports on Sunday, pondering family and friends that come for the show.

“But then it’s, ‘I don’t like my seat.’ Or ‘I don’t like the hotel.’ And ‘I want to go to that party.’

“Jennifer was a lifesaver,” the living legend added, referring to his wife.

With the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers arriving Sunday to ignite a week of hype, glory and anticipation leading to a milestone Super Bowl 50, there may be no better person on the face of the earth to put it all in perspective than the Bay Area icon also known as Joe Cool.

“It’s really another game,” he said. “The challenge is not to let the hype of the game affect the way you play. That’s a hard thing to do. There will be a point in the game where you have to draw on that.”

USA TODAY

How Joe Namath set the stage for Cam Newton

This is a great week for nostalgia. Montana guided the San Francisco 49ers to four Super Bowl titles, was named the game’s MVP a record three times and was voted by a panel of experts as quarterback for the NFL’s Golden Anniversary Super Bowl team.

Asked how the experience of playing in Super Bowl helped him, Montana quipped, “I learned not to get on the last bus.”

Before the Niners won their first Super Bowl at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich., on a frigid day in 1982, Montana was on a bus that was stuck in traffic to accommodate the motorcade for then-Vice President George H. W. Bush.

“Other than that, once you feel the excitement of winning a Super Bowl, it’s like being a kid in a candy store,” Montana said. “Once you get some candy, you want some more.”

Montana thinks that analogy is part of what drives Peyton Manning, still trudging along at 39 in a quest to win his second crown. The Old School vs. New School dynamic pitting Manning and Cam Newton, the presumptive NFL MVP, is not lost on Montana.

USA TODAY

10 surprising facts about Panthers, Broncos ahead of Super Bowl 50

“The game is exciting enough for both of them,” Montana said. “The difference is, people may say Cam is hungrier, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to win it. Peyton knows. Once you give him his candy, and he’s tasted it, you know what you’ve been missing.”

Montana figures the game will hinge on whether the Broncos’ No. 1-ranked defense can contain Newton, the sparkplug who ignites the NFL’s highest-scoring team.

Take it from Joe Cool — as prolific as offenses can be, defense still wins championships.

“People took our defense for granted,” Montana, who never threw a Super Bowl interception, said. “But that’s the real question for Denver’s defense: Can they stop Carolina from starting fast and set the pace of the game? Because I don’t think they can beat them in a shootout.”

In Super Bowl XXIV, the 49ers trounced the Broncos 55-10. With Montana and Jerry Rice going off, they overshadowed the job the defense did in dismantling John Elwayand crew.

“Same thing about the ’84 team,” Montana said, referring to the outfit that beat the Dan Marino-led Miami Dolphins 38-16 in Super Bowl XIX. “Everybody talked about our offense. Nobody talked about our defense. Ronnie (Lott, Golden Team safety andHall of Famer) to this day will tell you that was the best defense he ever played on.”

Montana has been a part of even more Super Bowl weeks over the years as a dignitary. On Sunday, he’ll be at Levi’s Stadium as the Golden Team is honored.

“If it’s raining, I’m leaving at halftime,” Montana declared. “You can never get to watch the game anyway. Even if you’re in a box, people are talking when I’d rather watch the game. That’s why I like to be at home, watching the Super Bowl with the kids.”

Of course, this one is a bit different.

“My only regret is that I’m not playing,” he says.

Montana is stoked that the big game is back on his home turf — 31 years after he outdueled Marino at Stanford Stadium, the last case when a team played a Super Bowl in its home market.

USA TODAY

Super Bowl 50 matchups: Panthers TE Greg Olsen vs. Broncos safeties

On Saturday, Jennifer (who will spend the week co-hosting a daily Super Bowl show for a local TV station) and Joe were on hand for the opening of “Super Bowl City” — the blocks in San Francisco dedicated to NFL-themed activities and entertainment — and had a blast. After dinner, they went back for the fireworks show.

“This is great for the city,” Montana said. “What better place could you have this particular game in? You might say New York City, but they’ve probably got two feet of snow. Or they did.”

After all of these years since he played on the big stage, one thing hasn’t changed: People still ask Montana for Super Bowl tickets.

“I tell them, ‘I don’t have access to tickets,’ Montana said. “They say, ‘Well, you should.’

“It doesn’t matter. Because even if you do, you don’t get a dollar discount. It’s the NFL.”

(Editor's note: A previous version of this story claimed the 49ers were the only team to play a Super Bowl in their home market. The Los Angeles Rams played Super Bowl XIV in Pasadena, Calif.'s, Rose Bowl.)

***

Follow NFL columnist Jarrett Bell on Twitter @JarrettBell

To 'Reaffirm the Importance of Religious Freedom,' Obama to Visit US Mosque With Extremist Ties

Leah Barkoukis | Jan 31, 2016

http://townhall.com/

U.S. President Barack Obama (right) and First Lady Michelle Obama are led on a tour by Grand Imam Yaqub at the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, Nov. 10, 2010. Obama plans to visit a Baltimore mosque Wednesday.PHOTO: PHOTO BY JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The White House announced on Saturday that President Obama will be visiting a Baltimore mosque on Wednesday—the first time he’s done so in the U.S.  The intended purpose, according to the White House, is to “celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.”

“The president will hold a roundtable with community members and deliver remarks, where he will reiterate the importance of staying true to our core values — welcoming our fellow Americans, speaking out against bigotry, rejecting indifference, and protecting our nation’s tradition of religious freedom,” a White House aide said.

But the choice of visiting the Islamic Society of Baltimore is raising eyebrows, given the mosque’s history of extremist ties.

The ISB is part of a network of mosques controlled by the Islamic Society of North America, “a Muslim civil rights group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror case. Several executives with that organization were convicted of sending money to aid the terrorist group Hamas,”The Daily Caller reports.

Furthermore, Mohammad Adam el-Sheikh, who served as the mosque’s imam on two separate occasions for a total of 15 years, was a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan during the 1970s. He also went on to co-found the Muslim American Society in Falls Church, Virginia, which is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. His shady history does not end there, however.

While in Baltimore, el-Sheikh served as a regional director for the Islamic American Relief Agency. That group’s parent organization is the Islamic African Relief Agency, which the Treasury Department saysprovided funds to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations.

After leaving Baltimore, el-Sheikh served as imam at the infamous Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church. That mosque has a lengthy roster of known terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Its imam during much of the 1990s was Mohammed al-Hanooti. He was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people.

Of all the mosques in the Washington area, this is the one chosen by the Obama administration to be the first the president visits in the states?

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said the choice is “insulting” to American Muslims.

“It’s disgraceful that this is the mosque he’s picked to be the first to visit,”Jasser said on “Fox and Friends” Sunday. “This mosque is very concerning … Historically, they are basically a radical, extreme mosque and not representative of the modern Muslims in America.”

Claws Bared as ‘Cats’ Plans a Return to Broadway

By 

JOE QUEENAN

http://www.wsj.com/

January 29, 2016

“Cats,” the legendary Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that ran for 18 years on Broadway,is returning to the Great White Way in July. For some of us, this is like hearing that smallpox is making a comeback.

In case you’ve forgotten, the musical features a bunch of creatures with names like Rumpleteazer and Grizabella, sporting leotards and whiskers, who jump around on stage to no great purpose for about 2½ hours. The show, loosely based on the work of T.S. Eliot, has something to do with reincarnation. Many who see it will wish to come back in their next life on a planet that has no musicals.

In the 1980s, every night on my way home from work, I would walk past the Winter Garden Theater, where “Cats” was playing now and forever. I knew that sophisticated theatergoers viewed “Cats” with contempt, but I was curious to find out if it was really as bad as people said. So one day I bought a ticket.

“Cats” was bad. It was the worst thing I ever saw, and still is. And I saw the 1971 St. Joseph’s College “Star Trek”-inspired production of “Julius Caesar.” I saw Deepak Chopra golf. I saw Columbia University students try to play football. None of them approached “Cats” for macabre schlockiness. “Cats” was pretentious and moronic and excruciating. It only had one decent song, the treacly “Memories,” which makes “Yesterday” sound like death metal.

I subsequently wrote a book about spending an entire year trying to find something worse than “Cats.” I never did. I saw “Lord of the Dance” at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, went all the way to Branson, Mo., to hear Tony Orlando and to sit through the Osmonds on Ice. I saw every Steve Guttenberg film and ate at the Olive Garden and spent a weekend in Cleveland and read every single Robert James Waller book. If something was appalling beyond belief, I gave it a rip. But nothing could go toe-to-toe with “Cats.” Only John Tesh at Carnegie Hall came close. Tesh—described, correctly, as the devil in an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”—gave it the old college try. But in the end, Andrew Lloyd Webber smoked him.

“Cats,” like Attila the Hun and Carly Simon, eventually went away. For a while it stayed away. But the popularity of ingenious, thought-provoking, trailblazing shows like “Hamilton” and “The Book of Mormon” beguiled the public into letting down its guard, confident that our long pop-cultural nightmare was over for good.

The return of “Cats” is devastating for those of us who finished grade school. It’s like finding out that the bubonic plague is coming back for round two. It’s like finding out that Mickey Rourke and Kathy Griffin are slated to appear in “The King and I.” It’s like finding out that Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban and Michael Bolton will be appearing inAndre Rieu’s production of “Rigoletto,” set on Long Island, with additional music provided by Billy Joel and Yanni.

Am I saying that “Cats” is the single cheesiest thing mankind has ever produced? I am. Nothing is as dumb, as annoying, as interminable as “Cats.”

What does its return say about mankind? It says that the price of eternal freedom from “Jesus Christ Superstar” is eternal vigilance against “Evita.” It says that those who cannot remember “Starlight Express” are condemned to a repeat performance of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” And it says that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.