When I visited NFL Films in Mt. Laurel NJ in 2004 for Videomaker magazine and Tech Central Station, they showed me their huge archives of video and film of NFL and some college games, and mentioned that there was one rather important, but still missing item.

Until now.

“For years, the Holy Grail of American sports video has been Super Bowl I — the championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Now, the Paley Center for Media in New York believes it has a tape of a mostly complete broadcast of the 1967 game. WSJ’s Lee Hawkins reports:”

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It’s time to unpimp your T.I.E. Fighter:

Nine more commercials to watch during Sunday’s Super Bowl, here.

Update: The Blaze has videos of additional Super Bowl commercials as well.

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“National Journal’s Hirsh: Time for a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word,” Jeff Poor writes at the Daily Caller:

National Journal’s Michael Hirsh wants to raise the bar on decorum to an entirely new level. On Thursday’s MSNBC airing of “Hardball,” Hirsh told host Chris Matthews certain “gun” terms should be stricken from political discourse and referred to instances where Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Republican Nevada senatorial candidate Sharon Angle used such off-limits language.

“Well we don’t want any more duels and thankfully that was the last one,” Hirsh said. “[B]ut the point I was trying to make is you can draw a line particularly in the use of certain kinds of metaphors. The use of gun metaphors – killing, murdering, taking out, which was another metaphor for a – Michele Bachmann used in one of her statements, Sharon Angle – the Nevada Senate candidate’s now infamous comment about quote, unquote, ‘second amendment remedies’ to deal with the problem Harry Reid, her opponent.”

His proposal? Make such language inappropriate in the same racial slurs are inappropriate.

That’s the kind of language I think we got to have a hard think about now,” Hirsh said. “Do we really want to continue to use that kind of language at these levels? Or, should there be kind of a social sanction, not a legal one, but a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word public forums. Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”

Why, there’s even a narrow-interest cable channel that reaches millions of viewers while using such hateful militaristic rhetoric 24 hours a day. Imagine how they are influencing impressionable minds, with language such as this:

• The Blitz
• The Bomb
• The Crackback
• The Red Zone
• The Special Teams Gunner
• The Shotgun
• The Suicide Squad
• Tackle
• The Trenches

I await Hirsh’s condemnation of the war and firearm-related language we are sure to hear throughout the day tomorrow on multiple network and cable channels.

Not to mention imagery such as this.

Related: “Seahawks fall to climate of hate in Chicago,” Donald Sensing wrote recently, and from 2006, another Iowahawk classic, “Seething Midwest Explodes Over Lombardi Cartoons.”

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I can only think of two periods when newspapers actually displayed any collective sense of fun. There was the 1920s and ’30s era of Hearst, Mencken, and the “yellow journalism” encapsulated in films like The Front Page and His Girl Friday. And the New Journalism of the 1960s, when Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and others temporarily revolutionized the style and tone of feature writing. Other than that, for the last 50 or 60 years, it’s been mostly a combination of just-the-facts-ma’am AP wire service reporting, and the increasingly grisly sort of “liberal” partisan snark on display this past week in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

At least the New York Post, whose owner has long been demonized as a Sith lord himself, had some fun at the end of the week:

So Mark Sanchez and Michelle Ryan are brother and sister? Who knew?!

More fun with the Jets here.

(H/T: Kyle Smith)

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Jim Geraghty spots this howler:

“I understand the idea that, even if Loughner had no idea who Sharron Angle is and even if he never saw Palin’s infamous cross-hairs map, it still makes sense to encourage political leaders to ditch violent rhetoric,” writes Salon news editor Steve Kornacki at the site’s War Room blog.

The first step in encouraging political leaders to ditch violent rhetoric? Stop calling your blog the WAR ROOM.

“Oh, the sweet sweet irony…” Bryan Preston adds, alongside a screencap of the blog, at the new PJ Tatler.

Speaking of irony, Michael Silver of Yahoo, and formerly of Sports Illustrated, like many sportswriters, has long been a wannabe political pundit; in recent weeks particularly after the midterm elections, one can count on a liberal sucker punch every week in his NFL column. Naturally, this week was no exception:

The attempted assassination of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of six others (including the 9-year-old granddaughter of former Philadelphia Phillies manager Dallas Green) at a political event outside a Tucson supermarket on Saturday. In a culture with increasingly vitriolic partisan rhetoric – including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s placing of Giffords in crosshair targets on a map she posted on her Facebook page – this was a terrifying reminder that our society is in need of a heavy dose of decency and perspective. Instead of arguing about whether there’s a basis for claiming a correlation, I hope that we’ll all take a step back and consider toning down the inflammatory extremism and address our disagreements with grace and mutual respect. And I ask that you join me in extending thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families.

Don’t you love that line, “Instead of arguing about whether there’s a basis for claiming a correlation,” immediately after smearing Palin?

I certainly do hope we’ll consider toning down the inflammatory extremism. For that reason, I hope to see Silver call for a ban on such language as:

• The Blitz
• The Bomb
• The Crackback
• The Red Zone
• The Special Teams Gunner
• The Shotgun
• The Suicide Squad
• Tackle
• The Trenches

The new standard of discourse among Silver’s fellow leftists is apparently “How will it affect the behavior of an obviously crazy person who may or may not hear it?” Therefore, please let me know when these elements of jingoistic warlike language are eliminated both from Yahoo’s NFL columns and the sport that they cover, and we can move on from there.

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“Jerry Jones takes over podium to announce Jason Garrett has full control,” the Dallas Morning News quips, a perfect summing up of the Cowboys’ post-Jimmy Johnson woes in a single headline.

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“Obama Should Keep Quiet About Football,” Tevi Troy writes at Real Clear Politics, noting that discussing America’s most popular professional sport (besides ladies beach volleyball, of course) has only gotten previous chief executives into trouble:

President Obama’s recent call to Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie has already caused the president some political headaches.

First, the Washington Post reported that Obama again steps outside the lines, weighing in on a controversial issue that is unrelated to his presidency. In addition, Obama has been hit by liberal blogger Ezra Klein for being somewhat disingenuous about the reason for the call, with the White House now claiming that he called Lurie to talk about efficient energy use and unspecified “other things.” And of course, animal rights advocates are understandably upset that Obama implicitly praised Vick, who has paid a significant debt to society for his sins against our canine friends.

Obama’s problem in this situation, however, may not be related to any of the above problems so much as making the cardinal presidential mistake of weighing in on or commenting about football. The football curse has plagued presidents for nearly a century, perhaps since Teddy Roosevelt famously intervened in 1905 to get college football teams to agree to use both helmets and more serious safety rules to cut down on injuries and deaths.

Even back in the 1920s, when gridiron great Red Grange visited the White House, the laconic Calvin Coolidge bizarrely said “Nice to meet you, young man. I’ve always enjoyed animal acts.” But Coolidge’s comment was relatively harmless to his presidency. Other presidents have made enough mistakes on football to populate an entire blooper bowl, particularly Richard Nixon.

Nixon’s poor judgment in sending failed football plays to Washington Redskins coach George Allen prompted the columnist Art Buchwald to write “If George Allen doesn’t accept any more plays from Richard Nixon, he may go down in history as one of pro football’s greatest coaches.”

As Troy notes, “Obama’s off-script efforts often get him into trouble in other areas as well, whether it be poor performances when he lacks a teleprompter, or off-key comments on race and police in the case of Louis Gates’ arrest. After two years in the White House, Obama needs to learn to stay far away from sports, especially football, and stick to his script.”

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Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose!

“Nuts. Far Left Senator Warns Santa About Dangers of Non-Existent Global Warming,” Jim Hoft writes:

Far left New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez wrote a letter to Santa this Christmas. He’s worried that Santa may have to move due to global warming climate change.

Unbelievable.

Huffington Post reported, via Michelle Malkin:

Dear Santa Claus,

I am writing out of concern, because you may have to move from the North Pole due to the dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice. The Navy’s chief oceanographer says that by the summer of 2020 the North Pole may not have summer ice and other scientists project that an ice-free Arctic is possible as soon as 2012!

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that polar ice is melting because of greenhouse gas pollution and I am working hard to reduce these emissions. But there is probably nothing we can do in time to save the North Pole. I am worried about your safety and your ability to deliver billions of Christmas gifts if the ice cap on the North Pole no longer stays frozen all year. What will happen to your house, your workshop, the elves’ houses and your reindeer barns?

The London Daily Mail today: “Britons awoke yesterday to the coldest Christmas Day on record.”

Meanwhile, back in the states, a local TV station reports that Georgia had its first white Christmas in a century; up north, fears of intense global warming have pushed the Eagles-Vikings game in Philadelphia from tonight until Tuesday.

(Headline from the London Independent of March 2000; photo via JWF, concept via SDA.)

Update: From the home office in the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, the “Top 10 Bad Developments For Global Warming Alarmists.”

That’s a lot of decline to hide.

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Wow, the New York Jets turned into a softcore porn channel so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

Update: You stay classy, Chicago Tribune.

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At Ace of Spades, Gabriel Malor writes, “Last week was an extraordinary week in politics…Next week’s scheduled activities will likely promote more of the same.”

If so, next week promises to be quite a barn-burner as well in DC. Click over for Malor’s rundown of what to expect.

In the meantime, the collapse of the Minnesota Vikings’ Metrodome Roof due to a massive excess of global warming has to be a metaphor for something…

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Don Meredith, the legendary Dallas Cowboys and SMU quarterback, and Monday Night Football icon passed away at age 72 yesterday, the Dallas Morning News reports:

Meredith died at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, a hospital spokesman confirmed this morning. The Meredith family’s attorney, Lisa Fine Moses, said his wife, Susan, and daughter Mary were at his side.

Meredith had battled emphysema in recent years and suffered a minor stroke in 2004.

He was the only living Cowboys Ring of Honor member unable to attend the franchise’s September 2009 inaugural game at Cowboys Stadium.

Meredith was the original Dallas Cowboy, signing a personal services contract on Nov. 28, 1959, two months before the franchise officially gained admittance into the NFL.

Meredith would play nine seasons with the Cowboys, but clashing frequently with head coach Tom Landry throughout the 1960s, which led to an early retirement from the NFL, arguably while still in the prime of his career. (And ultimately opening the door for Roger Staubach to lead the team to multiple Super Bowls in the 1970s.) But Meredith parlayed his career with the Cowboys into a major television presence in the 1970s, appearing in commercials, in occasional dramatic spots (he was married to the ex-wife of actor Keir Dullea, according to the IMDB), and most visibly as the longtime co-host of Monday Night Football.  Meredith’s southern twang made for a perfect contrast and great TV, even when the game itself was a dud, with Howard Cosell’s dulcet New Yawk tones and spectacular pomposity.

Between the expansion years of the Cowboys, and his stint in the broadcast booth, Meredith witnessed some of the most important moments in the NFL, but as he would sing at the end of many a ballgame, turn out the lights, the party’s over for many football fans who look back on that great era of pro football.

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Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose!

Celebrity gossip site TMZ today:

Sources close to the couple tell us … G&T placed an order with A-1 Christmas Trees and Lights in L.A. on Tuesday — purchasing two twelve-foot Christmas trees … and a whole mess of lights for their house … totaling approximately $7,500.

Tom and Giselle back in March:

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As the Professor would say, I don’t want to hear one more goddamned word about my carbon footprint.

(Concept H/T: SDA; more NFL-related incandescent hypocrisy here.)

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Derek Anderson of the Arizona Cardinals tonight:

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Denny Green, then head coach of the Cardinals, back in 2006 (language warning):

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How on earth was Kurt Warner able to take a team to the Super Bowl that could so crush other football mens’ souls?

(H/T: Andy Levy.)

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The Minnesota Vikings’ disastrous season summed up in a single photo:

Seeing as how the team has players on their roster with last names like Tahi, Kleinsasser, Shiancoe, DeGeare, Favre, Guion, Onatolu, Kluwe and Loeffler, the error is understandable. Yet it wasn’t any of those complexly-surnamed gentleman who wore the offending jersey. That belonged to Kevin Williams(notes), he of the third-most popular last name (and easiest to spell) in the country.

Williams is an eight-year veteran who has appeared in five Pro Bowls with Minnesota.

The Vikings lost to the Green Bay Packers, Brett Favre’s former team, in spectacular fashion, 31 to 3. During his press conference after the game, Favre seemed to oscillate between catatonia and holding back tears. A mispelled jersey was the least of the Vikings’ woes today, but it certainly sums it remarkably well.

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That’s what sports Website SBNation is reporting:

The Dallas Cowboys have reportedly done this week what everyone expected them to do: Fire Wade Phillips. Bill Jones of CBS-11 in Dallas reports the Cowboys head coach was fired on Monday after his team suffered a humiliating 45-7 loss to the Packers on Sunday Night Football.

This move was expected by many as multiple reports surfaced following the game that Phillips was unlikely to make it through the week. Phillips’ certainly deserved this fate after the Cowboys started the season 1-7.

Last week Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Phililps would remain on as head coach for the rest of the season but I’m not sure if others, Jones included, actually believed that at the time. Jones said after the Packers game that there would be people in the organization who suffered the consequences of failing so badly on expectations this year.

Offensive coordinator Jason Garrett will take his spot, according to the CBS-11 report. Garrett has been a head coaching candidate at multiple points in his career including interviews with the Broncos and Rams over the last two years. Garrett though is one of the NFL’s highest paid assistants and plenty of people expected him to be the next Cowboys head coach.

Phillips ends his Cowboys career with a 34-22 in the regular season record as head coach. This is by far his most disappointing season as he won 13, 9 and 11 games in his first three seasons. He also walks away from Dallas with a 1-2 playoff record with the Cowboys.

More as it comes it, including confirmation from other sources; as late as this morning, the Dallas Morning News was still running articles with headlines such as  “Why Cowboys’ Wade Phillips might not get fired today.”

Update: ESPN and CBS also appear to have early confirmation on the story.

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Say, look who’s playing the media bias card all of a sudden:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) accused the media on Thursday evening of being “easy” on his Republican challenger, Sharron Angle.

Reid accused Angle of speaking in “code words” in reference to some of her positions on entitlement programs like Social Security, and jabbed at the media for not fully probing her views.

“Never have I run against someone who speaks in code words that are not explainable,” Reid said during an appearance on MSNBC. “And I have to say, the press has given her a pretty easy go.”

Reid — who has skated by for years while journalists looked the other way at his penchant for clanging and at times racialist malapropisms — is suddenly complaining about media bias on the eve of the election? It’s Deja McCain all over again — or as his more ebullient cousin wrote in his pre-postmortem in early October of 2008:

I didn’t comment on it at the time, but I was shocked when Steve Schmidt lashed out at the New York Times on Sept. 22. Every word Schmidt said about the NYT being in the tank for Obama was true. But you don’t do that. Ever. Not in a campaign you have any hope of winning. It is one thing to criticize specific errors by specific reporters, but for a presidential campaign manager to call into question the fundamental integrity of a newspaper that more or less dictates news coverage at the three major broadcast networks? Uh uh. No way. Leave that work to surrogates. Then Wednesday, in an interview with the Associated Press, McCain himself got all hostile with the reporter. That is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

On the other hand, Harry can’t complain about this media titan supporting him:

The National Football League’s political action committee—Gridiron PAC—has weighed in on the hotly contested U.S. Senate election in Nevada that pits conservative Republican challenger Sharron Angle against Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.The PAC has given $10,000 to Reid—the maximum it can give in a single election cycle—and no money to Angle, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by OpenSecrets.org.

Despite all that, Angle is ahead in this poll as we head into the weekend, and Reid’s frustration, as evidenced by a media darling lashing out at his base of palace guard journalists, is palpable.

Update: This election is still well within the margin of ACORN, though.

Update: Or is it? Get a load of the polling trendline in this graphic.

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They told me that if I voted for John McCain, 21st century McCarthyism would be the law of the land…and they were right!

“I have one rule with athletes I know are gay,” ESPN and CNN journalist L.Z. Granderson is quoted as saying, adding, “I tell them ‘Look dude. If you don’t say dumb sh*t, I won’t out you. I catch you saying dumb sh*t, I am going to tell people about your business.’”

You stay classy, legacy media.

(H/T: 5′F)

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Coming clean in a somewhat similar fashion to former New York Times Ombudsman Daniel Okrent’s admission in 2004, Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general admits to the Daily Mail that his network swings to the left:

BBC Director General Mark Thompson has admitted the corporation was guilty of a ‘massive’ Left-wing bias in the past.

The TV chief also admitted there had been a ‘struggle’ to achieve impartiality and that staff were ‘ mystified’ by the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. [See also: Epistemic Closure -- Ed]

But he claimed there was now ‘much less overt tribalism’ among the current crop of young journalists, and said in recent times the corporation was a ‘broader church’.

He claimed there was now an ‘honourable tradition of journalists from the right’ working for the corporation.

His comments, made in the New Statesman magazine, are one of the clearest admissions of political bias from such a senior member of its staff.

Gosh, who knew?

Similarly, “This Just In: Washington Post’s Milbank Admits He’s a Lefty.”

Elsewhere in the annals of strange doings at the Post, “Washington Post sportswriter suspended for Twitter hoax,” AFP reports:

A Twitter experiment that went awry has landed a sportswriter for The Washington Post with a one-month suspension.Mike Wise, a respected Post columnist, was suspended by the newspaper on Tuesday, a day after he posted a fake report on his Twitter account.

“Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told,” Wise wrote on his Twitter feed, @MikeWiseguy, on Monday in a reference to the length of the suspension handed down to Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

In fact, Roethlisberger’s penalty for an offseason incident in a Georgia nightclub has not yet been determined.

Wise told the Post that he “tweeted” the made-up report as a social media experiment to to see how widely it would spread in the media, a move he said later was a “horrendous mistake.”

“I’m not a journalism ombudsman,” Wise told the Post. “And I found that out in a very painful, hard way. I need to take my medicine and move on, and promise everybody this will never happen again.”

Think of it as a miniaturized version of the Janet Cooke story, done in Twitter-style, in 140 characters or less.

Didn’t we learn anything from the Mary Tyler Moore Show?

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While Mad Men occasionally seems to think of itself as a period domestic soap opera that only tangentially focuses on advertising, invariably, its best scenes are in the office. “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” yesterday’s episode, pitted the firm’s founding owners, World War II vet Roger Sterling against office Japanophile Bert Cooper over their firm’s attempts to land the account of Honda, looking to break into the American motorcycle and car market in 1965. It certainly seemed like one of their more dramatic inter-office conflicts of the new season. (Language warning in clip below):

Mike Potemra of National Review wondered in the Corner last night if this episode was hastily rushed out as a metaphor for the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, but in actuality, it was probably written well in advance for this. (Certainly, Bert’s obsession with all things Japanese dates back to his debut early in the show’s first season, as does Roger’s WWII Navy background; no doubt the writers had planned to have the firm handle a Japanese account at some point in its run.)

While Roger’s actions may seem surprising to modern eyes, it took quite a while for many American businessmen who were World War II vets to forget the sting of the war. Witness this passage near the end of Skip Bayless’s 1989 iconclastic biography of Tom Landry, God’s Coach, describing former Dallas Cowboys owner (and former Army World War II vet) H.R. “Bum” Bright’s efforts to sell the team that year:

[Jerry] Jones simply was tap dancing as fast as he could, trying to find a way to put together a $140 million package that would keep him in the running with dozens of “big boy” bidders. Besides [Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss] there was a Japanese group said to be “price insensitive.” A source close to the sale says, “The Japanese were ready to make an offer with no real sense of how much the Dallas Cowboys were worth. To them it was like, ‘Oh, Dallas Cowboys! How much? Two hundred million? Three hundred?’ [Tom] Landry might have coached for another century if the Japanese had bought the team. But World War II had a profound effect on Bum. He just wasn’t comfortable with the thought of selling the Dallas Cowboys to the Japanese, whether or not the league would have approved it.”

And that was 1989. Meanwhile, even as tensions from World War II were still winding down in 1965, the Cold War was beginning to get hot. As Mad Men mentioned last night, in another ironic commentary with multiple modern connections, there were even the occasional Russian secret agents on American TV back then…

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Like the rumored disposition of Jimmy Hoffa’s remains, and Bruce Springsteen’s car from “Rosalita,” in the new issue of City Journal, Steven Malanga writes that there’s plenty of debt that’s stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey:

In the early 1970s, New Jersey officials decided to build a sports facility in the Meadowlands, the state’s wetlands just outside New York City. To help pay for it, they formed the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (NJSEA), a quasi-governmental agency with the power to issue debt. The authority floated $302 million in bonds, used the proceeds from the bond sale to construct Giants Stadium and a Meadowlands racetrack, and planned to pay off the debt in 25 years, largely with proceeds from the track but also with some help from the stadium. Horse racing proved a big hit, and the plan seemed bound for success.

But the pols couldn’t resist soaking the Meadowlands. They siphoned track proceeds into the state budget; repeatedly refinanced the NJSEA’s bonds, pushing repayment dates far into the future; and relied on the authority’s good credit rating to launch other building schemes, including a costly but unsuccessful aquarium in Camden. Today, 35 years after its first bonds, the NJSEA is $830 million in hock. Worse, it can’t repay that debt because business has cratered at the racetrack, still the Meadowlands’ principal revenue source. As for Giants Stadium, it was demolished this year, and its replacement won’t be contributing much to the debt repayments. The state, facing its own cavernous budget deficits, has had to assume the authority’s interest payments—about $100 million this year on bonds that now stretch out to nearly 2030. “The sports authority is paying the consequences for politicians using it for their pet projects,” observes Steve Lonegan, former mayor of Bogota, New Jersey.

Read elsewhere for similar horror stories from across the country, and what can be done about them.

Related: Some residents of the now-infamous small California town where the city manager makes a hefty $800k a year(!) and retired city employees will reportedly bring home seven digit (!!) pensions are sporting T-shirts saying “My city is more corrupt than your city.”

Though, I can think of plenty of other cities that would beg to differ.

Meanwhile, in other related economic news, great moments in Friday night document dumps: “Obama WH gives its economic policies a good, solid F+.”

Did they grade on a curve?

Related: “Can NJ keep its pension promises? No way, many officials concede.”

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