Happy Birthday, Drew

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By The Times-Picayune Editorial Board
Hey, Drew ... we owe you one.

Super Bowl XLIV was your gift to New Orleans. Today, in honor of your 40th birthday, New Orleans has a gift for you: Super Bowl LIII.

It’s going to take some more work this Sunday. But we’re going to make sure you get there.

It’s the least we can do.

In 2006, when we were a broken city, you gave us everything you had. You and Brittany made New Orleans home. You healed your shoulder while we healed our homes. You invested in local businesses. You grew your family and enrolled your children in our schools. You became one of us, and in so doing, made us feel better about ourselves.
While some had given us up for dead, you made a life here. You brought hope and built a champion, offering us escape and inspiration. And at every stop on your journey to the top of the NFL, you gathered your team around you and delivered the rallying cry that lifted up an entire city:

“WE … ARE … NEW ORLEANS!”

Nine seasons after that Super Bowl, New Orleans is back. We’ve still got our share of problems – serious problems – but the post-Katrina despair that greeted you 13 years ago has been replaced with optimism and resolve. We know the city’s best days are ahead.
Your best days are unfolding in front of us, as your NFL record-setting completion rate in 2018 makes clear. But as you yourself have said, you’re running out of chances to win another ring.

And no one deserves another ring more than you, Drew. Not only for the way you have played, but for the way you have carried yourself and represented us.

So, we’ll do what New Orleans does best: Will it.

Sunday when the Rams come to town, we’ll create an environment so hostile, the NFL will probably have to change the rules again, just like they did after we beat the Vikings in overtime the last time we hosted the NFC Championship Game in 2010.

Rams QB Jared Goff played here in November, so he thinks he knows what to expect.

He has no freaking idea.

There is regular season home field advantage, and then there is playoff Dome field advantage. Not the same thing. Not even close.
And that was just the divisional round. Wait till the NFC crown is on the line.

It’s not much, Drew, but we promise you this: We’ll bring the noise on first down. And second down. And third down. And fourth down. We’ll bring it when the momentum swings our way. And when it swings their way, we’ll bring it even louder, until the momentum swings back. For 180 minutes Sunday, we’ll occupy that third stage that few fans ever reach.

We’ll be lethal.

Goff – who has never played in an NFL road playoff game, and whose only college bowl appearance for the University of California was against the Air Force Academy in the Armed Forces Bowl – won’t know what hit him.

You’ll know. It’s the sound of New Orleans regifting what you gave us 13 years ago: Everything we’ve got.

Happy Birthday, 9. See you in Atlanta.

Love,

NOLA.

Source: https://www.nola.com/opinions/2019/01/to-drew-brees-from-new-orleans-on-your-40th-birthday.html

Monday Morning Smile

WHO DAT

20-14:  SAINTS WIN

THIS

Real Presidents vs drumpf

Charles P. Pierce of the Boston area on drumpf: This should be read, and read again, then reread, then read once more for good measure. This is different. "In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing "Amazing Grace" in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless. And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House. The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. Watch him again, behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now." – Charles Pierce is the creator of this letter. Pass it on spread the word. Very well said. Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

Happy Hump Day

Turn the audio on… someone made a compilation of every time Trump huffed and/or puffed during his address

Monday Morning Smile