Football Facts And More

All from Gregg Easterbrook.

It's been five years since the Super Bowl champion won a playoff game the following season.

If every pass an NFL quarterback throws clangs to the ground incomplete, his passer rating is 39.6. Matt Cassel's passer rating against the Ravens was 20.4.

The Eagles opened their season with a home loss to Green Bay and closed their season with a home loss to Green Bay.

Public lotteries, with their glitzy false promises of instant wealth, are a tax on poverty -- as David Brooks of The New York Times has noted, households with an income of less than $13,000 spend an average of $645 annually on scratch-off tickets.

Defenders of NPR have noted the Washington main organization -- local stations are the jewels of the public radio crown -- receives only $2.4 million annually in federal grants. The NPR president was paid $562,000 last year, and the year before that, NPR paid $2.4 million to its top two executives. So much of the federal tax money, derived by borrowing and handing the bill to our children, isn't funding newscasts or opera -- it's going into the pockets of NPR executives. Americans whose median income is about $50,000 are being taxed so that executives can live in luxury.