We’ve made it to Week 16. It’s just a few days before Christmas and your Fantasy Championship Game. If you’re like me, you failed in every league but one. For my sake, I better win. My fantasy basketball team may be the worst squad ever assembled, and baseball is a long ways off.

All in all, these picks have been pretty successful all year. Hopefully you’ve followed along and made some extra Christmas money. If you didn’t… well then you’re a dickhole and I hope you enjoy whoring yourself out for some extra scratch to give your kids a good Christmas. Wrapping handfuls of Skittles and a bar of soap isn’t gonna cut it, my friend.

For those of you who spent all of our winnings on Christmas gifts – let’s try and win some of it back, shall we?


STEELERS (-14) over Panthers
The Panthers have been butt all year and Jimmy Clausen sucks. I can’t see them traveling on a short week, with absolutely nothing to play for, and putting up a fight. Hopefully I’m wrong, because I need Jonathan Stewart to go bananas in this game – my fantasy championship depends on it.

CARDINALS (+7) over Cowboys
Too many points for the Cowboys to lay here. John Skelton has been surprisingly mediocre. Granted, he’s completing less than 50% of his passes, but his receivers have dropped a ton of balls the last two weeks. More importantly, though, he only has one turnover this year. He’s playing smart football and now gets one of the worst pass defenses in the league.

Lions (+3.5) over DOLPHINS
Here are things I know: Miami sucks at home, they have a terrible record as a favorite of more than 3, and the Lions have made it their job to be pesky and hang around in games.

Redskins (+7) over JAGUARS
The Jaguars never seem to blow teams out. Their team just isn’t built that way. Seven points is a lot to give (even if it is the Redskins). I have a sneaking feeling the Skins will match up well against Jacksonville, and be in this game till the end.

49ers (+2) over RAMS
This will be a pretty close game. The 49ers have played a little better over the course of the last few weeks, while the Rams haven’t shown me much. Take the points and the team that’s had a few extra days to rest and prepare.

BILLS (+9) over Patriots
I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little scared going against the Pats here. The Bills haven’t beat the New England since Chingy was tearin’ up the charts with that lyrical masterpiece, ‘Right Thurr’. Seriously, it was 2003 the last time the Bills got a win in this series. But I’m thinking the Patriots might not give it their all in this game. It might as well be another preseason game for them. They’ve all but locked everything up for the playoffs. The Bills will certainly lose, but maybe a 30-23 backdoor cover is in order.

BEARS (-1) over Jets
Rex Ryan loves feet, National Geographic nipples, and watching his wife get plowed. He’s no less loveable in my book, but this is a pretty big distraction for the Jets. That big lug’s love of tootsies might’ve just sunk the Jets season. I wouldn’t bet on this game though - ESPN has an article titled, “Jay Cutler Won’t Avoid Darrell Revis”. Lots of opportunity for epic Jay Cutler picks!

Ravens (-3.5) over BROWNS
I’m pretty sure the Browns have given up this year, so Baltimore should continue their winning ways in the series. To beat the Browns, all you really have to do is stop Peyton Hillis. If they do that, the Ravens will win by 10.

Titans (+5) over CHIEFS
I shouldn’t even give an analysis on this game. We all know I’m getting it wrong. For some reason, I’m God awful at picking Chiefs games against the spread. Let’s more right along to the next matchup.

Colts (-3) over RAIDERS
This is probably a sucker bet, but you have to take Peyton Manning when he’s only giving 3. I mean it’s the Raiders. In what world does Pey-Pey not shit all over Al Davis’ corpse? Not the world we live in.

Texans (-2.5) over BRONCOS
Both of these teams suck. Don’t waste your time betting this game. If I had to choose, I’d go with the team that has more talent. It’s just a matter if they’ll actually care enough to use it.

Chargers (-8.5) over BENGALS
What an utter disappointment this Bengals team is. They’ve been forced to deal with a ton of injuries and a ton of bad coaching. This team is in shambles and is ready to clean-house. The Chargers should win in blowout fashion.

BUCCANEERS (-6) over Seahawks
I like the Bucs quite a bit here at home against Seattle. Do I have any statistical evidence to back that sentiment up? No. But trust me, I have a good feeling.

Giants (+3) over PACKERS
I really like the Giants to rebound this week and come out of Green Bay with a win. It was heartbreaking and humiliating to lose the way they did against the Eagles. Some teams would crumble and their season would essentially be over. I don’t get that feeling with the Giants. New York is a good team and had been playing very well. A loss like last week should bring the team together where each guy is giving 100% this week. Plus, the Giants lead the league in knocking out starting quarterbacks. Don’t think they won’t be gunning for Aaron Rodgers oft-shattered dome-piece.

EAGLES (-14) over Vikings
Fourteen points is a lot, but the Vikings are pushovers. The Viking locker room is mess. Adrian Peterson is hurting. The defense is a shell of what we’d become accustomed to seeing over the last few years. It’s a sad day when the question of starting Brett Favre or Joe Webb won’t even matter in the outcome of a game.

Saints (+3) over FALCONS
Look, I know Matt Ryan doesn’t lose at home and I know the Falcons are on a roll right now. I just think New Orleans wins this outright. The Saints have kind of flown under the radar lately and are a team I wouldn’t want to face come playoff time. This is a divisional game where both of these teams know each other very well. I think the Saints might finally be healthy enough to take on the Falcons and let everyone know they’re still the champs.



Happy Holidays!

The Shark

Meet the real-life Lisbeth Salander.

We live on a planet where it's a perpetual truism that truth, as Lord Byron famously observed, is stranger than fiction. Fiction, especially the kind that depends upon Coleridge's suspension of disbelief, needs to catch up with real life if it is to be taken seriously. Bestselling author James Patterson sagely observed recently that if someone penned a novel about an ex NFL player who murdered his wife and one other man then led the LAPD on a nationally-televised, slow motion chase down a California freeway and had done so before 1994, that person would've been laughed out of the publishing business. As a working novelist myself, I concur.

Therefore, it only follows that Susan Lindauer had to come around years before Lisbeth Salander, the waspish heroine of the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. And, as it so often happens, the real life case has been virtually ignored while the fictional Salander's fictional travails have been, justly, celebrated in both print and film.

I'm shamelessly stealing from journalist Michael Collins' "The Hornet's Nest Kicked Back", his review of Susan Lindauer's new tell-all autobiography, Extreme Prejudice. I've yet to read the book. But then again, this isn't a book review nor does it pretend to be. Let's call this, instead, a review of the Kafkaesque/Orwellian/Larssonian persecution undergone by Lindauer during much of the illegitimate Bush administration.

To anyone who's read Larsson's excellent book, the reasons for paralleling Lindauer's experience with Salander's are obvious. Both women are of Swedish extraction who were then charged with crimes they didn't commit, had their sanity questioned by the Powers That Be and were even illegally incarcerated. Both women had information that could take down their respective governments, which necessitated their disappearance a la Pinochet.

Here's the difference. Salander has celebrity journalist Michael Blomqvist on her side, as well as, eventually, several members of law enforcement.

Aside from her Protean legal team, Lindauer had no one but Michael Collins, a freelancer who hardly has the celebrity of Millennium's publisher and crusading financial journalist. Blomqvist, in Larsson's books, always found himself playing private detective and either insinuating himself into the official investigation into Salander or running his own parallel investigation with the laissez-faire freedom that only a crusading, nationally-known, therefore dangerous journalist of Blomqvist's stature can muster. Collins was virtually the only accredited journalist who consistently took up Lindauer's cause and still is and the mainstream media had hardly touched Lindauer. Salander, at least, was the source of tabloid fodder in Sweden and had ridiculous stories about being part of a "lesbian Satanic gang" circulated about her.

Salander, in the last two books, was essentially held prisoner from the age of 12 on and victimized by the evil Dr. Peter Teleborian. Lindauer's own Teleborian goes by the name of Sanford L. Drob, PhD.

Drob's diagnosis, if one were to honor his findings with such a dignified word, was to treat Lindauer, literally and figuratively, as if she was too incompetent to defend herself. In fact, Drob's contention was that the more Lindauer called for witnesses who could exonerate her of espionage charges, the more "proof" it was of her delusional structure and persecution complex. In other words, the more she demanded the trial that was forever denied her, the more they kept denying it to her. It was the first time that I'd ever heard of the prosecution claiming the defendant was too incompetent to stand trial.

For those of you just tuning in, the basic reason Lindauer was arrested, detained and accused of espionage was her opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq. She'd written at least 11 letters, some of them to her second cousin, then WH Chief of Staff Andy Card, vehemently advising against such a rash policy of regime change. Lindauer had prophesied, among other things, that invading Iraq would be used as a great recruiting tool for al Qaeda, a fact borne out a few years later when the Flypaper Effect became apparent and our troops found themselves fighting a new enemy called "Al Qaida in Iraq."

What happened to Lindauer, not a covert agent but a supervised intelligence asset, went in some ways even further than the much more publicized Valerie Plame outing. Plame, because of a now-infamous NY Times op-ed written by her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, had her career destroyed and her life put in jeopardy when the late Robert Novak, at the behest of senior Bush administration officials, outed her.

Lindauer was the Nexus phase of the paranoid Bush junta's persecution, losing almost everything in the process yet somehow falling between the cracks. It's impossible to fathom why she'd suffered the same fate as Sibel Edmonds, former translator for the FBI who'd also been vigorously shunned by the MSM.

2002 was not a good year for the Bush administration. That same year, Edmonds had been fired from her translation job at the FBI Washington, DC field office after threatening to make public revelations of federal impropriety that could've endangered national security. This was the exact same rationale used by that same government to persecute Lindauer.

Without going into details (read Lindauer's 466 page book for them. I trust it will make for riveting reading), the federal government:

Incarcerated Lindauer at Carswell Federal prison for women beyond the legally permissible time.

The prosecution, incredibly, tried to have Lindauer declared mentally incompetent to stand trial, a legal tactic exclusively used by defense attorneys, often in capital crimes cases.

Both the prosecution and the psychiatric "experts" who'd had, at best, middling contact with Lindauer, lobbied to have her forcibly drugged with Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic medication.

Valuable information, analysis and testimony that could've exonerated Lindauer or at least shed some doubt on her condition and even guilt was deliberately withheld from the court of Michael B. Mukasey, who would later become the Attorney General of the United States.

The case was later transferred to Loretta Preska, someone who'd been elevated to a federal court by none other than George W. Bush.

The case against Lindauer abruptly lost steam within days of Bush and Cheney, after a massive, self-satisfied burp, waddling out of the White House on January 20th 2009.

What's happened to Lindauer, who'd been denied her freedom and credibility and justice for years, her career ruined and sanity questioned, is, if anything, an even more egregious blow to her civil liberties than that endured by Valerie Plame. Yet, the mainstream media, except for followup filler blurbs on Lindauer's court dates, hardly touched it.

Lindauer's book promises to set the record straight, revealing much more detail about her experience and evidence of the coverup. However, it's telling that the book was published by the obscure CreateSpace and that Extreme Prejudice couldn't get the backing of a literary agent (who are as a whole, on top of being career-driven and greedy, also literarily moronic and cowardly).

That means we have to get the word out. Because Lindauer is not like Lisbeth Salander in the respect that her own persecution and false imprisonment does not have the massive, money-making PR machine as enjoyed by the estate of Stieg Larsson.