Note to Stephen Harper: It’s not so easy cutting federal spending

By John Geddes - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 4:42 PM - 135 Comments

Federal spending cuts are coming. Prime Minister Stephen Harper promises them. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is to map out the strategy—though maybe not many specifics—in his March 4 budget. Stockwell Day, in his new job as Treasury Board President, is supposed to stare down any bureaucratic resistance.

But where will the Conservatives cut? Start anyplace, a jaded taxpayer might say. After all, federal governments haven’t exactly looked frugal in recent times. Even before last year’s massive deficit-financed stimulus injection to fight the recession, spending rose more than four per cent a year, under both Liberals and Tories, in six consecutive budgets.

Yet the notion that layers of glistening blubber are just waiting to be hacked off is only a comforting delusion. There must be fat, sure, but the federal books are well marbled—the less-than-unassailable spending tends to be finely integrated into essential programs. No use pretending that finding savings huge enough on their own to balance the books again is merely a matter of will.

In fact, some of those most experienced on the subject think the task impossible. Start with two key architects of the famously successful deficit-slaying strategy overseen by Paul Martin when he was finance minister: Scott Clark, who was Martin’s deputy minister from 1997-2000, and Peter DeVries, the department’s fiscal policy director from 1990-2005.

Now retired from Finance, Clark and DeVries shared with Maclean’s a draft version of budget analysis they recently co-wrote. In it they offer trenchant observations on everything from fiscal projections (“One certain thing about a medium-term deficit forecast is that it will be wrong…”) to the hot-button issue of appropriate tax levels (“…a credible budget will require that taxes be raised.”).

Where to cut, however, is the most pressing issue of the moment. But first, how much? Their starting point is that the Parliamentary Budget Officer is not far off when he estimates the structural deficit—how deeply Ottawa will remain in the red after the stimulus gush is spent and the economy is reasonably healthy again—at about $20 billion.

So $20 billion at least must be reduced from spending, assuming Harper and Flaherty mean it when they vow not to hike taxes. Overall program expenses run about $208 billion. But $108 billion of that is transferred to provinces and individuals, and the Tories promise not to significantly cut those payments. That leaves $100 billion to be sliced by a fifth.

And that might seem, while pretty tough, within the realm of the possible. Except in the real world the whole $100 billion is not on the butcher block, as the chart at the bottom from Clark and DeVries shows.

They point out that fully $18 billion pretty much can’t be touched. That includes, for example, more than $2 billion spent by Canada Mortgage and Housing, money which is subject to long-term agreements, and more than $3 billion in federal payments Ottawa must make to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia under offshore energy deals.

Which still leaves more than $80 billion to shrink by a quarter. However, Clark and DeVries subtract another $35 billion as “sensitive”—programs like Defence, First Nations, and student assistance. Armchair fiscal disciplinarians will scan down this portion of their table and exclaim, “Aha! These aren’t areas that truly can’t be cut, they’re just sacred cows.”

And there’s something to that. But at the very least the “sensitive” list reminds us that wide swaths of spending can’t be seriously cut without inflicting real damage. Canada still lags in R & D—so do we really want to whack research? In the post-Haitian earthquake era, and with our solemn commitments to Afghanistan and Africa, would we really contemplate deep foreign aid cuts? Does anyone believe we spend too much on the homeless?

So what’s left as the prime base for restraint? Clark and DeVries tally up only about $47 billion. Not even the most hard-nosed government is going to whack $20 billion from that total. Based on their experience of the program review imposed by the Liberals in 1994 to find savings, the two former mandarins suggest a five-per-cent reduction, or about $2.5 billion, is more reasonable.

Five per cent might sound like a pittance. After all, back in his landmark 1995 and 1996 budgets, Martin mapped out a fiscal austerity program that set a target of 22 per cent less spending across all federal departments by 1998-99 than in 1994-95. But that (and here I’m making my own observations rather than following Clark and DeVries) never happened. Instead, program spending declined six per cent in the key 1995-1999 period. So how did the Liberals balance the books? The answer: tax revenues soared by 26 per cent in those five years, thanks to steady, strong economic growth.

Growth of that sort, however, is not in anyone’s mainstream forecast for the next few years, so the Tories can’t credibly hope the fiscal problem will be solved that way again. That leaves the solution Clark and DeVries arrive at: increase taxes. More on that in a future posting.

Source: Public Accounts of Canada 2009

Taking the Ikea name to new heights

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 4:36 PM - 34 Comments

Shopping in an Ikea often feels like another world, with its faux living spaces, difficult-to-pronounce names and plentiful meatballs. But David Seger has taken the fantasy a step further. He’s made the Swedish furniture retailer a backdrop for a low-budget soap opera, complete with steamy love scenes, wooden dialogue and jarring plot twists.

It’s all filmed covertly inside a Burbank, Calif., store as unwitting customers browse the Ektorp sofas and Poang chairs in the background. At six episodes and counting, Ikea Heights has become a modest Internet sensation. The show, which appears on the website ikeaheights.com, traces the bizarre lives of a detective hunting a murderer (who smothers his victims with pillows from the bedding section) and two brothers, one recovering from amnesia, the other married to a cheating wife (who also spends a lot of time among the bedroom furniture).

Continue…

16 Canadians dead in Haiti

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 4:33 PM - 0 Comments

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon confirmed on Friday that 16 Canadians died as a result of the earthquake that struck Haiti earthquake last week. That number is up from Cannon’s original estimate of 13. At the same time, the number of missing Canadians has been lowered to 306. Cannon also confirmed that of the 1,892 Canadians who survived the quake, 1,765 have already been repatriated. Speaking in front of his causes on Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper referred to the 7.0 earthquake as “the greatest natural disaster in contemporary history in the Americas.” He also spoke of the work that must be done “in the months and years to follow… To rebuild Haiti [and] to transform its unimaginable grief into a sustained home for the future.”

Agence France Presse

Two convictions in British abuse case

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 4:31 PM - 0 Comments

Two British attackers were recently convicted of robbing, torturing, sexually abusing, and stabbing two youngsters in a secluded area. The catch? The attackers themselves are 10 and 11 years old. The two defendants are among the youngest ever in Britain to be convicted by a court of “causing grievous bodily harm.” [Initially, the children were accused of "attempted murder," but they agreed to plead guilty to this less serious charge.] According to evidence heard during the trial, the two attackers beat and stabbed their victims. One of the victims, age 9, was made to eat nettles. And justice Brian Keith said that sexual degradation also took place in both cases. “What it amounted to was torture,” the northern England judge explained. Detectives say that neither of the children showed remorse for the incident; allegedly, one claimed he acted out of boredom.

The Globe and Mail

How to go about this (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 31 Comments

Spoke to Ned Franks just now. Here’s the essential gist of our conversation.

Q: So if the NDP comes in and says, just lays out legislation that says, essentially, the Prime Minister cannot prorogue Parliament without a majority vote of the House of Commons, a majority of members, that effectively limits, from that points forward the Prime Minister can’t prorogue Parliament without a majority vote of the House of Commons?

A: Well, they wouldn’t say it that way. What they would say is the Prime Minister cannot advise the Governor General to prorogue Parliament unless a motion to that effect has been passed in the House of Commons. So it’s limiting the Prime Minister’s power to advise rather than the Governor General’s discretion … It would leave the Governor General open to prorogue without the advice of the Prime Minister.

Q: I thought it would require some sort of constitutional wrangling.

A: The Conservatives might argue that Parliament cannot legislate limiting the Crown’s discretion and reserve powers, but Parliament isn’t as long as it’s limiting the Prime Minister’s powers to advise. Advice within the meaning of the constitutional meaning of advice to the Governor General.

Rights and Democracy: For hire

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 17 Comments

The government of Canada posts notice of a vacancy in the position of President of Rights and Democracy.

Please stay on topic

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 3:15 PM - 24 Comments

Conservative MP Terence Young conducts pre-budget consultations in Oakville.

Young and his staff members kept the meeting firmly focused on budget issues, despite attempts by several members of the audience to question him about the decision of the government to prorogue Parliament. Questions on the topic were quickly cut off, with questioners told to make an appointment to talk to Young about the issue at another time.

“Somehow this issue has become really huge and I’m not really sure why except there wasn’t much else going on,” Young said, describing prorogation as “a normal administrative tool” used by prime ministers, including former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.

Putting Facebook and Twitter to the test

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 2:17 PM - 3 Comments

The ability of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter to relay news around the world at breathtaking speed has been well documented this past year, particularly when these sites first provided video of the Iranian election protests, and the outpouring of emotion and money for Haiti relief. But just how useful are the sites as news aggregators when used exclusively? Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to these two sites to test just that. They will spend five days—beginning Feb 1—locked away in a house in the southern regions of France. “Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources,” said one of the participants.

AFP

Praise the Lord and pass the ammo

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 2:14 PM - 11 Comments

The inscriptions on products from defense contractor Trijicon of Wixom, Mich., came to light this week in the U.S. where Army officials said Tuesday they would investigate whether the gunsights—used by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq—violate U.S. procurement laws. Australia said Thursday its military used the sights and was now assessing what to do, while New Zealand declared its intention to remove them. Trijicon said it has had such inscriptions on its products for three decades and has never received complaints before. The inscriptions, which don’t include actual text from the Bible, refer numerically to passages. The Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight rifle sights used by New Zealand troops, which allow them to pinpoint targets day or night, carried references to verses that appear in raised lettering at the end of the sight stock number. Markings included “JN8:12,” a reference to John 8:12: “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life,’” according to the King James version of the Bible. The Trijicon Reflex sight is stamped with 2COR4:6, a reference to part of the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” the King James version reads. A New Zealand army officer said his country has about 260 of the company’s gun sights, which were first bought in 2004, and will continue to use them once the inscriptions are removed because they are the best of their kind.

San Francisco Examiner

Earl Jones's wife wants properties and knick knacks

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 2:06 PM - 1 Comment

The wife Earl Jones suffered “mental cruelty” at the hands of the admitted fraudster, according to recently released divorce documents. In the petition, filed September 14, Maxime Jones, née Heayberd, reserves the right to claim proceeds from the sale of the couple’s three properties, which were seized following Jones’ bankruptcy last summer. She also asks for a handful of knick knacks. Among them: two painted duck lamps, Royal Doulton figurines, silver plate flatware, three fondue pots, three bibles and glass dessert bowls. Earl Jones is currently in police custody after pleading guilty last week  to two charges fraud after bilking his clients for tens of millions of dollars.

Montreal Gazette

Late Night War Explained by Jimmy "Ken Burns" Kimmel

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 2:02 PM - 3 Comments

Jimmy Kimmel’s explanation of the late night skirmishes — which pitted brother against brother, harmonica player against drummer — is as good as any, and allows him to do his Jay Leno lisp again. Have a look before ABC blocks the clip in Canada again:

[vodpod id=Video.2910324&w=560&h=340&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

White House eager to project image of competence

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 5 Comments

Obama is determined not to let Haiti become his administration’s very own Hurricane Katrina fiasco. That is why Obama, in the hours following the announcement of the earthquake in Haiti, ordered an aggressive relief effort and called an emergency meeting at the White House. We know this, in part, thanks to a three-page “ticktock” released by the White House, a minute-by-minute reconstruction of how events unfolded and how Obama responded in the hours and days following the earthquake. The White House has received praise for their response to Haiti, which includes a pledge of $100 million in aid and the deployment of 10,000 troops. Experts agree that disasters can be opportunities for presidents to show their compassion and competence, and the mishandling of the Katrina disaster was a PR disaster the Bush administration never fully recovered from, and a mistake the Obama administration wanted to avoid.

New York Times

This week's cover

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 1:48 PM - 36 Comments

The cover photo is from Gerald Herbert of AP. The design is by our Jason Logan. We usually pack the front page with “refers” to as many as a dozen different stories because we can never know which story will catch any individual reader’s attention. That strategy has now been rewarded with four consecutive years of increasing newsstand sales. But this week there was no need for that scattergun approach.

SCOTUS versus SCOTUS

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 1:13 PM - 60 Comments

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case on campaign-spending limits [PDF] is pretty extraordinary. The Court was presented with the problem that an earlier incarnation of itself had licensed the state suppression of corporate-funded political speech in the Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce decision of 1990. When I heard word of Citizens United I was curious to see how the Court had tried to make Austin fit more comfortably into the great jigsaw puzzle of First Amendment jurisprudence. Such farcical exercises in providing for the uglier offspring of stare decisis are always entertaining.

But the Court didn’t try to make it fit. They just said “Austin is a dud and we’re getting rid of it. Never happened. Off the books. Fuhgeddaboudit.”

The relevant factors in deciding whether to adhere to stare decisis, beyond workability—the precedent’s antiquity, the reliance interests at stake, and whether the decision was well reasoned— counsel in favor of abandoning Austin, which itself contravened the precedents of Buckley and Bellotti. As already explained, Austin was not well reasoned. It is also undermined by experience since its announcement. Political speech is so ingrained in this country’s culture that speakers find ways around campaign finance laws. Rapid changes in technology—and the creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression—counsel against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers. In addition, no serious reliance issues are at stake. Thus, due consideration leads to the conclusion that Austin should be overruled. The Court returns to the principle established in Buckley and Bellotti that the Government may not suppress political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity.

The “undermined by experience” bit is the key cheat, really. What experience has demonstrated should already have been apparent in 1990. (As it was to Justices Kennedy and Scalia, who dissented from Austin and have clung to the bench long enough to taste its gore.) Ilya Somin contributes an interesting reaction to Citizens United at volokh.com.

The Liberal foreign affairs critic has sung

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 12:32 PM - 20 Comments

If not for the demise of the 2008 coalition, a duet with Charlie Angus would seem inevitable.

The people of Canada have spoken

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 12:23 PM - 36 Comments

From the Prime Minister’s address to the Conservative caucus this morning.

The message from Canadians, broadly speaking is clear … First, we must stay the course for now.  The Economic Action Plan has been working and we must see it through.  Second, we have been told start planning now for deficit reduction when the recession ends.  And, third, continue the critical work of building Canada, especially building the future for jobs and economic growth in a globally competitive world.

When a Long-Running Series Does a Cheesy Clip Show!

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 12:13 PM - 4 Comments

Okay, so The Office came back last night with its first new episode in well over a month. And what they came back with was… a clip show. And not one of those clip shows that tries to pass itself off as a special or something; it was a full-fledged traditional clip show, where there is some kind of story that makes it look like a real episode, but the story is just an excuse for the characters to talk about past adventures. There’s something kind of charming about seeing this kind of thing again; there haven’t been a lot of clip shows on the big networks, because the competition is so fierce that a show usually can’t afford to write off an entire week like this. (That is, when there were only two other shows competing for attention in the same time slot, there was a greater chance that viewers would rather watch the clips than switch channels.) But it’s really not that charming to encounter this after a six-week drought; it’s like the time Moonlighting promised a “new episode next week” — at the end of a clip show, in fact — and the new episode turned out to be one that Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd didn’t appear in.

The Office has been doing some things this season that have annoyed its fans; I’ve liked some of what they’ve been doing, but enough people are P.O.’d at episodes like “Scott’s Tots” that even Ricky Gervais tossed off a joke about how the show has “jumped the shark a bit.” This probably isn’t the way to win the fans’ hearts again, unless the ‘shippers’ were pacified by the mushy Jim-Pam montage.

I should add, though, that the episode still did better than the rest of NBC’s fine but otherwise low-rated Thursday lineup. So perhaps there’s no truth to the idea that a hit show can’t get away with a clip show in the modern multi-channel universe.

Also, I wonder what it must be like for a writer to learn that his assignment is to write the clip show? Unless he’s thinking “yay, I get paid for a script despite writing less original material,” it’s probably not a happy reaction. The writer of this particular episode, Jason Kessler, got his first script assignment on this one, but it’s not always the junior writer who gets stuck with these things; The Simpsons assigned no less than three clip shows to one of its best writers, Jon Vitti, who wrote two of them under the name “Penny Wise.”

Another clip show tradition which this episode followed is to have an outsider come in to learn more about the workplace and/or family around which the show revolves. Many, many clip shows do this, often to create a fake sense of suspense or plot motion. For example, Night Court had a dude come in to the court to evaluate all the crazy damage claims he’d been getting from them, accusing them of filing fraudulent reports. Each clip was an attempt to explain away some insurance claim.

That particular clip show also included another clip-show trope: the “we’re all going to die!” framing device. Because in the second half of the episode, a killer clown played by Jack Riley held everyone at gunpoint. And you’d be surprised how many clip shows have the characters threatened with violence or otherwise about to be killed: they get trapped in a freezer, or kidnapped by a gun-wielding maniac, and they assure each other that they’ve been in much worse jams than this. South Park did a perfect parody of this kind of show in the episode where everyone is trapped on a teetering bus (“Now that’s what I call a sticky situation!”).

Finally, a clip show can be used to launch other shows or promote stuff that couldn’t be promoted in a regular episode. Happy Days used a clip show to promote another show from the same producers, the atrocious Blansky’s Beauties, which was just about to start on the same network. It wasn’t a spinoff, but Nancy Walker appeared on the Happy Days clip show before her show aired, so people would get introduced to her character. It didn’t work, but a year later they did the same thing with Mork (bringing him back in a clip show so they could set him up as a spinoff character).

Good news for smokers

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 12:01 PM - 0 Comments

People with early lung cancer, and who quit smoking, could double their chances of survival. A new study, published in the British Medical Journal, suggests that people who continued to smoke had a 29 to 33 per cent chance of surviving for five years, while those who kicked the habit had a 63 to 70 per cent chance of surviving five years. Some doctors have reported they do not suggest those with lung cancer to quit smoking, “that it adds up to feelings of guilt and takes away a lifelong comfort for the dying patient,” but researchers now suggest that patients and their families be told of the study results “because the potential benefit is great.”

CBC

Don't say they didn't ask

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 11:56 AM - 30 Comments

An earnest young organizer explains who’s been invited to Saturday’s prorogation protest in Ottawa.

Root said they will have speakers from various non-governmental organizations affected by various bills killed when Parliament was prorogued.

Organizers sent out invitations to all five federal parties to speak at the rally. Four have confirmed their participation. Root said they are still waiting to hear back from the Conservative party. “That’s one thing we’ve really been trying to push, the non-partisan aspect,” he said.

The people of Simcoe-Grey have spoken

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 11:42 AM - 28 Comments

And they are pleased.

“I am familiar with that, but that’s certainly not what I’ve heard when they (people) come into my constituency office and we have a conversation about taking a step back and recalibrating and taking a look at the global economic crisis,” said Guergis. “It is important that we take a step back and take a look at the agenda and make sure we are on the right track.”

Instead of outrage, Guergis said people are “pleased” with the shutdown. ”It’s a great opportunity to further consult with Canadians,” she said. “They are pleased with the direction of the government and the Economic Action Plan and they are pleased we are taking a step back.”

Brought to you by the federal government

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 11:41 AM - 52 Comments

According to a study out of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, Canada’s political parties have become more dependent on public subsidies than they ever were on the corporate and union donations the subsidy were meant to replace. In fact, the parties collect about 50 per cent more money from the government than they did before the change. Given the political hubbub that sprang from the Conservatives’ bid to cancel the subsidies last winter, it won’t go unnoticed that the new study’s authors are Tom Flanagan, a former Conservative campaign chair and one-time adviser to Stephen Harper, and his PhD student, David Coletto. Flanagan’s conclusion, that “this may not be the time to try and replace the system,” marks a significant break from the views espoused by the Conservatives, who have vowed to cancel the subsidies in the future. While Flanagan believes modifications to the $1.95 per vote subsidy—like reducing it, for instance—should be considered, he says changes should have the support of the opposition parties. “I think it’s bad policy to do any of these changes unilaterally. This is where the Liberals got us on the wrong track; the Liberals pushed through their changes.”

National Post

Haiti's orphans meet their new families

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 11:29 AM - 0 Comments

There were about 50,000 orphans in Haiti before the country was decimated by last week’s earthquake, a number that has surely skyrocketed. So in an effort to bring as many parentless children to safety as possible, the U.S., Dutch and Canadian governments are fast-tracking their adoption processes. The first plane carrying orphans touched down in the Netherlands on Thursday, bringing about 106 children to their new families. About 100 more children are expected to arrive in Canada this weekend. But there are growing concerns that the expedited process could break up families and cause more harm then good. SOS Children, the world’s largest orphan charity, says work must be done to prevent “stolen children,”—children who are put up for adoption but whose parents are still alive. A spokesperson for the organization says it’s easy for families to become separated during war and natural disasters, and that the governments providing aid in Haiti should shift their concentration from inter-country adoption to tracing children back to their living family members. The Haitian adoption system as a whole has also been criticized by UNICEF and the non-governmental organization Against Child Trafficking. They call it untransparent and say children are sometimes handed to orphanages by desperate parents that don’t understand the permanence of their decision, and don’t realize their children could be taken to other countries.

Al Jazeera

National Post

Women who want

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 10:34 AM - 1 Comment

A new study in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality explains the difference between “highly sexual” women and those who are less focused on or interested in sex. The researchers say it comes down to psychological factors: these women are more “confident about their sexual ability, think a lot about sex, and enjoy masturbating.” The highly sexual women in the study were not passive or uninterested in sex, they say, which runs contrary to the stereotype of women compared to men. The study also downplays the significance of behavioural factors: both highly sexual and less sexual women reported having sex for the first time at age 17, on average. And both groups reported having sex the same number of times per week (once/twice to three to five times). They also reported having had a similar number of committed partners (3.62 among highly sexual women compared to 2.56 among their counterparts). Highly sexual women did, however, report having had a greater number of casual sex partners compared to their less sexually interested sisters—on average, 7.96 versus 4.28, respectively.

Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality

NFL Picks: The Conference Championships

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 10:21 AM - 8 Comments

Scott Feschuk Last week 1-3 Playoffs 5-3 Season 131-127-6

Scott Reid Last week 3-1 Playoffs 4-4 Season 132-126-6

Permit us to take a moment to quietly celebrate the new contracts given to Wade Phillips and Norv Turner. Now if a few stubborn owners would just sign Andy Reid’s girth, Brad Childress’s beard and Tom Cable’s blank stare to five-year extensions, all our jokes for next season will have already written themselves.

OK, on to the games…

New York Jets (plus 7.5) at Indianapolis, Sunday, 3 p.m. ET

Reid: Are you like me? Have you had enough of the Rex Ryan love-in? Judging by this week’s media love-clench, you’d think he’d just been pushed out of his job by Jay Leno. He’s the George C. Chickenhawk of the NFL. Calling on all comers. Shooting his mouth off. Sticking out his belly. (Ok, that one’s not a put-on). Here’s the thing about this game: Indy cannot lose. Can. Not. Lose. And they will not lose. Rex Ryan’s team could barely beat some guy named Painter when the whole season was on the line. Against Manning, they’ll be fish food. Revis can only cover one receiver at a time and Manning is too fast off the blitz. By the end of the first half, Sanchez is going to look Bill Daily from I Dream of Jeannie: stumbling, stammering comic relief. (Although Daily did his best work on the Bob Newhart Show – much like Sanchez did his best work at USC). Pick: Indianapolis (by a mile).

Feschuk: This is no time for your precious “logic.” After Sunday, we’ve got two whole weeks until the Super Bowl – two long weeks of press conferences and media days, interrupted only by the three-hour patch of comedy relief known as the Pro Bowl (starring Vince Young and – by the time all the Super Bowl contenders and “injured” players drop out – JaMarcus Russell, Jim Plunkett and the chick who played Blossom). And who would you rather be stuck with for those two interminable weeks before the big game? The quick-witted, fast-talking, over-confident Rex Ryan or Jim “Someone Swears They Saw Him Blink Last Tuesday” Caldwell? I love Continue…