You may not believe this, but in the United States there are more weeks without football than with it. Considering only the contests that count—preseason games in the pros are inconsequential, as are spring games in college—each year has 23 weeks with football compared to 29 weeks without it. So savor the upcoming curtain call of this eventful season, and hope both contenders, the Eagles and Patriots, honor sports lore by saving the best for last.
Years ago, during the long-forgotten administration of George H.W. Bush, I looked in on a friend of mine who had been “tasked”— the military jargon was just then creeping into civilian life – with writing the president’s State of the Union address. The speech was a few days off, and my overworked friend looked glum. He sat at his huge desk in the Executive Office Building surrounded by stacks of briefing papers that had been shipped in from every corner of the government. When I made a sympathetic comment, he waved it away. “You have no idea,” he said.
The reality is that, on economic matters, Trump’s neo-mercantilism has been wedded to Trump’s neoliberalism, and the latter has been more consequential by a long shot. In fact, according to Trump’s supporters, his two most significant accomplishments in year one—after the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, of course—have been passing tax reform and rolling back Obama-era regulations. Both of which the globalist elites at Davos loved. Trump's love of populism and view of America as a carnage-strewn wasteland has been replaced by a sunny view of America and the elite institutions the president controls.
Tuesday night is Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, the annual event where the president speaks to a joint session of Congress with lofty rhetoric about where the country is and where he wants it to go. The Constitution doesn’t require the chief executive to deliver the State of the Union in person, but for decades the speech has been a major television event.
Unfortunately this is one political tradition President Trump doesn’t seem inclined to buck. Here’s what I’ll be watching for once he takes the rostrum in the House chamber.
The state of our union is divided and anxious.
We’re sure President Trump will use different descriptors at the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. We’re equally sure that ours will be more accurate. Consider Monday.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted Monday to release publicly a four-page classified memo detailing what they describe as “abuse” of the FISA warrant process. The president has five days to approve or disapprove the memo’s publication; all indications are that he’ll approve. The Intelligence Committee’s Democrats, meanwhile, have drafted their own memo to counter the Republican one.
Republicans and Democrats are at odds over the Trump administration's decision Monday to hold off on new sanctions that target Russia’s intelligence and defense sectors.
Lawmakers included the Russia sanctions in a bill signed reluctantly by President Donald Trump in August. The measures were meant in part to punish the Kremlin over 2016 election interference—but top Democratic lawmakers said the administration’s move to delay implementing some of the penalties failed to do that.
“The Trump administration had a decision to make whether they would follow the law and crack down on those responsible for attacking American democracy,” said Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign
As I said last week, it’s pretty clear that the Eagles are now America’s Team.
To reiterate: I am not a Patriot-hater. Far from it. I admire the franchise and am utterly fascinated by the Belichick-Adams axis. I mean, this is a team that went out and poached a kid from Silicon Valley and installed him as a “senior software engineer.” What does a football team do with an computer engineer? I promise you, he’s not updating the office network and working on Patriots.com.
No, from the best available evidence—which isn’t much—this kid is doing something with regard to scouting and Big Data and whatever it is, it’s probably awesome.
So no, I’m not anti-Patriots.

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