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The College Football Czar: Week 8 Week seven in review: The NCAA officially released its appointments to next year’s playoff selection committee, although the names had been leaked almost a week earlier. The only thing in the world that makes the committee a less awful idea than it might otherwise be is the fact that the list of committee members does not include Mark Cuban, who voiced interest in running a college football playoff last year. Just because a guy’s not guilty of insider trading doesn’t mean he isn’t still a buffoon. If the NCAA ever lets Cuban anywhere near...

The College Football Czar: Week 7 Week six in review: The NCAA has proceeded with its disastrous decision to appoint a college football playoff selection committee, and already, you can foresee the fabric of the game coming unraveled. Among the committee members who have been appointed to select the four semifinalists for the 2014 season is former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. Immediately, there came protests that Rice is unqualified, but then, what qualifications are there, really? If the idea is to make sure that the best team gets a shot at the national championship, then just about any fan...

The following is a correction to the Czar's pick on the Arizona State-Notre Dame game, which is being played in Arlington, and not in San Antonio, as is indicated in his original pick. Arizona State vs. Notre Dame The 3-1 Sun Devils stuck a fork in USC coach Lane Kiffin in a 62-41 runaway. Quarterback Taylor Kelly led the team in rushing with 79 yards on four carries, while also passing for 351 yards and three TDs. At 3-2, the Fighting Irish have lost to their first two ranked opponents: Michigan (41-30) and Oklahoma (34-20). Last week against OU, quarterback...

The College Football Czar: Week 6 Week five in review: Although the 2013 season has really just now gotten underway in earnest, there have already been two head coaches fired, and rightly so. USC finally tired of Lane Kiffin’s poor results and abrasive personality during his fourth season with the Trojans. The only reason Kiffin’s record at Southern Cal was as good as 28-15 was that he was fortunate enough to inherit QB Matt Barkley from his predecessor, Pete Carroll. It’s not just that Kiffin has only gone 10-8 since the start of the 2012 season, but the fact that...

The College Football Czar: Week 5 Week four in review: Predictably, the NCAA has wussed out and scaled back its penalties against Penn State, which will now be allowed to add five scholarships each year until its full complement of 85 is restored in 2016. Under the original sanctions, PSU’s scholarships would have been capped at 65 until then. The Powers That Be Stupid say that they made this decision in recognition of the Nittany Lions’ “continued progress toward ensuring athletics integrity.” … But wait a minute, the punishment was only contingent upon the university’s good behavior insofar as that...

The College Football Czar: Week 4 Week three in review: Everybody is convinced that the Pac 12 officials were at fault in last week’s Arizona State-Wisconsin fiasco, but nobody seems to know what they should have done differently. The strange scenario began when Badger QB Joel Stave grazed the turf with his knee, then popped back up and placed the ball on the ground with 15 seconds to play. One of the Sun Devil defenders, unable to see Stave’s knee touch the ground, jumped on what he thought was a live ball as the clock continued to run. By the...

Remember the endless stream of dire global warming predictions? Since the 1990s we have been insulted with lies and wishful thinking about how we had to turn off our air conditioners and park our cars or be complicit in causing the Northeastern states to be wiped away by tidal waves of melted ice caps. Wrong wrong, wrong! All of them, all but 3%, were lies as in Penn State and the University of East Anglia lies! Al Gore and his shrinking band of far left lunatics have now been proved wrong merely by comparing their claims to what has actually...

The College Football Czar: Week 2 Week one in review: If you thought you were watching the same game throughout the long weekend, that’s because it was everyone’s last chance to wear white before Labor Day. Watching highlights from around the nation, one might have thought that all the games had been sponsored by Sta-Puft marshmallows. One of the big story lines was the number of Division I-A teams that were upset in their openers by Division I-AA opponents. This is really nothing new, but viewers are more aware of it now, because so many of those games are being...

A computer program called The Predictalator created by Prediction Machine simulated the NFL season 50,000 times, says that the 49ers are the most likely team to win the Super Bowl this season, winning in 20.1% of the simulations. The Eagles won the Super Bowl in 0.5% of the simulations.

By the standards of “political time,” where in one day a candidate can go from frontrunner to underdog, the 2016 presidential election is decades away. But from this vantage point, all signs point to Hillary Clinton coasting to the Democrat Party nomination and winning the White House. As a lifelong Republican, I am not pleased with my own prediction—nothing would thrill me more than if a conservative were to win back the presidency. But my political reality instincts lead me to believe the following.(And I’ve been right before: in January 2011, I cowrote “12 Reasons Obama Wins in 2012.”) Unless...

Box Office Barfo! What with CNN soon to be producing the Shrill Hill Bi-op Flop, we honor hollywood with our Yahoo Pro Football Pick'em, Free Republic style. What you need to know to sign up the ID# is 7625 password is freeper What to expect: Confidence points 17 weeks of picks with 4 extra weeks of playoffs! In honor of sneaky box-office accounting methods, we'll be dropping the two lowest scores throughout the season. So if you carry your hangover into mid-Sunday afternoon, you'll thank me, America's Ripest Banana, for saving your season from your miserable hobby. Concise commentary and...

Real Doomsday: Earth Dead in 2.8 Billion Years The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jaggar crooned “Time Is On My Side” in the 1964 classic rock hit of the same title. Sadly, that’s not the case for habitable planets orbiting sun-like stars according to a recent computer simulation by astrobiologist Jack O’Malley-James of the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom. “A combination of slow and rapid environmental changes will result in the extinction of all species on Earth, with the last inhabitants disappearing within 2.8 billion years from now,” O’Malley-James predicts. He says that we’ve got about 2 billion years...

Ever since leading the Boston Red Sox to victory in the 2007 World Series, Josh Beckett had been a mainstay of the teamÂ’s pitching rotation. But when he hobbled off the mound with an ankle injury on September 5, 2011, the Red Sox faithful took the news in stride. After all, their team was the hottest in baseball. The previous winter, the Sox had acquired two of the sportÂ’s most sought-after players, outfielder Carl Crawford and first baseman Adrian Gonzalez. The acquisitions led the Boston Herald to declare the team the TOP SOX SQUAD OF ALL TIME before it had...

Rush Limbaugh: Same-sex marriage will be legal nationwide By Chris Moody, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 57 mins ago On his radio program on Wednesday, conservative host Rush Limbaugh predicted that same-sex marriage would eventually be made legal "nationwide," regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in cases on the subject later this year. From the show transcript: A lot of people have no personal animus against gay people at all. It's instead, you know, a genuine, I don't know, love/respect for the things they believe define this country as great. They get up every day and they see...

(CNSNews.com) – Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts’ cousin, a lesbian seeking to get married in California who will have reserved seating for relatives at two upcoming cases, wrote that she believes her cousin will rule in favor of same-sex marriage in an op-ed posted on the National Council for Lesbian Rights. A spokesperson for the court did not respond to questions about a potential conflict for Roberts. “I know that my cousin is a good man,” Jean Podrasky, 48, of San Francisco wrote. “I feel confident that John is wise enough to see that society is becoming more...

What futurists in 1988 imagined Los Angeles would be like in 2013 With the year 2013 a quarter of a century away, the Los Angeles Times in 1988 asked 30 futurists and other experts what they thought life in their city would look like in 2013. They may have overshot the sophistication of our robots, but many of those predictions for 2013 have come true—or at least come close. Reporter Nicole Yorkin wrote the futurism pieces for the April 3, 1988 issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, compiling the information from her various interviews. The articles include illustrations by...

Forget The Predictions… By Greg Guenthner 03/11/13 Predictions–both good and bad– are a huge part of the financial landscape. You’ve heard most of them. After all, they’re shouted out, chopped into sound bites, and then repeated ad nauseam in the media’s echo chamber almost every single day. But just in case you’ve forgotten to pay your cable bill since the financial crisis, I’ve got you covered. Here’s a brief history of every major stock market prediction over the past four years: 2009: The market continues to head sharply lower. But this is only the beginning. Even after a huge decline,...

"900-year-old Catholic prophecy says successor will be 'Peter the Roman'"Although a Roman Catholic pope had not stepped down in nearly 600 years, the startling resignation of Pope Benedict XVI was predicted by the co-authors of a book published last spring about a medieval prophecy that the next pontiff will be the last. In “Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here,” co-authors Tom Horn and Cris Putnam examine St. Malachy’s “Prophecy of the Popes,” said to be based on his prophetic vision of the next 112 popes, beginning with Pope Celestine II, who died in 1144. Malachy presented a description of...

I haven't been able to pilfer an advance copy of the president's State of the Union address, but I hereby offer some guesses as to what he'll say tonight. The president will assert, against the evidence, that the state of our union is strong. He will boast that during his first term, we averted another great depression, achieved history-making reforms of health care and banking, saved the auto industry and began to conclude two wars. He will caution though, that we face great challenges. Obama will acknowledge that our economy is not as vibrant as it could be and will...

People on both sides of tax issues often speak of such things as a “$300 billion tax increase” or a “$500 billion tax decrease.” That is fine if they are looking back at something that has already happened. But it can be sheer nonsense if they are talking about a proposed increase or decrease in the tax rate. The government can only raise or lower the tax rate. Whether the actual tax revenues that the government will collect as a result will go up or down is a matter of prophecy. And these prophecies have been wrong far too often...