January 28, 2012
Blog by John Steigerwald
Bernie Powers, the first football coach at South Hills Catholic High School (Now Seton-LaSall) has died.
He was also one of the coaches featured in my book, “Just Watch The Game (Again)” who helped create one of the great football dynasties in Western Pennsylvania history at St. Bernard in Mt. Lebanon.
St. Bernard lost three games from 1949 to 1961.
There will be a lot of solid citizens at this guy’s funeral –all of them former players of his.
Today my guests on TribLive Radio will be:
12:30 Rob Rossi of the Trib from Ottawa where the NHL All Star game will be played on Sunday
1:00 Jerry DiPaola of the Trib. He covered the Paterno memorial service in State College yesterday.
1:30 Joe Rutter Trib College and Pro Sports editor.
I used to like Newt Gingrich.
I remembered him as the guy who put together the Contract for America and helped the Republicans clean a lot of corrupt Democrats out of congress.
I also liked a lot of ideas that I’ve heard coming from him over the years.
It turns out he’s a fraud.
He’s not a conservative and he’s not a Reaganite.
Ronald Reagan’s greatest accomplishment was helping to orchestrate the collapse of the USSR.
Democrats were calling him crazy and people on his own staff were telling him to tone it down.
He was advised not to use the “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” line.
Listening to Gingrich now, you would think that Gingrich was cheering Reagan all the way. During debates and in speeches, he’s been saying, “I helped Ronald Reagan bring down the Soviet Union.”
Bullshit.
Here’s what Gingrich said on the house floor:
“Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing and without a dramatic, fundamental change in strategy will continue to fail. … The burden of the failure frankly must be placed first upon President Reagan.”
I don’t care how many wives he has or how he treated them.
He shouldn’t be president.
The good news is that Romney has moved into an eight point lead in Florida.
(By the way, if Gingrich does run against Obama, I will hold my nose and vote for him.)
Here’s the lineup for my show today on TribLive Radio.
12:30 Former Penguins goaltender Ken Wregget.
1:05 Chris Hoke –retiring today from the Steelers
1:30 Darren Dreger TSN Hockey Insider
The country will be debating the role of the federal government a lot for the next nine months.
I’ll be interested to hear if a politician is asked during the campaign if he/she thought that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison ever envisioned the federal government being involved in what school kids eat for lunch.
Michelle Obama and the Secretary of Agriculture announced new guidlines for school lunches today.
While they fight over the budget in Washington, maybe they can have a conversation about how many federal employees it will take to ensure that the kids at Penn Hills High School are drinking skim milk and not whole milk.
When did lunch become so tough?
When I was a kid, I took a brown bag. Inside the brown bag was a baloney or chipped ham sandwich, another sandwich bag with a few Wise potato chips and a sandwich bag with three or four of my Aunt Gertrude’s cookies.
My mother would work an apple in there once in a while and I almost always threw it away.
I seem to remember the other kids having the same kinds of things in their lunch bags.
No leafy vegetables (now required by Michelle Obama).
When I got home I was allowed to eat a few more cookies and then it was nothing until we sat down as a family to eat dinner.
I realize things have changed, but here’s something else I realize:
Kids aren’t getting fat from the food they eat at lunch.
They’re getting fat from eating too many meals away from home.
Go to any restaurant and see how busy it is between 5 and 6.
My family wasn’t rich but we weren’t poor, either. We probably ate no more than 20 meals out the entire time I was growing up.
There were no restaurants to take a family other than Eat ‘n Park (interestingly enough founded by my mother’s brother — my Unlce Larry.)
People ate at home. Mothers saw to it that we ate our leafy and un-leafy vegetables.
I don’t know what Mamie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy were doing back then but they weren’t worrying about what kids were eating.
It’s not just the kids who are fat. Look around. Everybody is fat.
I’m fat.
You’re probably fat.
I’m losing weight now. Charles Barkley got me with those Weightwatchers for Men ads.
I’m 15 pounds overweight because I had been eating like a pig. And I don’t go to school.
The kids are getting fat because their parents are fat and the parents are fat because they eat out too much.
So, if Michelle and Barack really want to do something for the children, they should send out the National Guard and shut down about 90% of the restaurants in America.
Let’s hire federal agents to knock on people’s doors during the dinner hour and make sure that they’re eating home cooked meals. No take out. No pizza.
The scary thing is, I think they might consider that if they thought they could get away with it.
It would make as much sense as spending billions of dollars supervising school cafeterias.