So far, 2017 has been a good year.

Except for the Big Fourteen football conference.

The Badgers kept up their end of the bargain by schooling the West Northeastern Michigan Community College Tadpoles, as predicted. Good golly, Troy Fumagalli!  But Ohio State bombed worse than Mariah Carey on New Year’s Eve. Michigan, Nebraska, Indiana, Maryland, and Iowa lost. Add Penn State to the loss column a Rose Bowl shootout that had everything, including a great performance by QB Trace McSorley. But Southern Cal’s Sam Darnold was even more magnificent for Southern Cal in an incredible 52-49 victory. Thank you, Northwestern Wildcats and Minnesota for holding up the side but the Big Fourteen was a sorry 3-7 in bowl games this season.

The Packers lived up to my prediction (34-24) with a 31-24 victory over the Lions for a satisfying New Year’s football orgy here at the Manor.

Happened to catch CBS 60 Minutes while awaiting the Packers on Sunday. The program led off with “Crisis in Chicago.” That would be the Democrat-operated sanctuary city where “children are afraid to go out of their house, of being shot and killed,” according to one parish priest interviewed. (An insufferable liberal, btw.) Here’s the nut graph that explains the show:

“Chicago experienced more gun violence than New York and Los Angeles combined in 2016. Yet, a 60 Minutes investigation reveals a decline in police activity. As killings rose, police stops fell — down 80% in one year. arrests off by a third. What we found was a police department on its heels as the city suffered its worst bloodshed in 18 years.”

Infuriatingly, the liberal network show comes close to Blaming the Police for not sticking their necks out and doing the pro-active policing that would prevent crime. 60 Minutes suggests the cause with an interview of a beat cop who, shot in the line of duty five years ago, now counsels stressed-out comrades.

Morale is the lowest it’s ever been, he says. “If you want aggressive patrol, looking for people, that’s not happening. Why would you expect them to be?”

Chicago police are now inundated in paperwork required for every stop, the result of ACLU-inspired consent decrees and continued harassment from Obama’s Justice Department. Who wants to be the next poster cop for Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department? Brought up on charges, a social media pariah, and a candidate for assassination?

The former superintendent of police told CBS that Mayor Rahm Emmanuel fired him after the fatal  police shooting of a certain Laquan McDonald. The police commissioner had referred the matter to an independent review, as required, but the matter was suppressed. When Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s cover-up was discovered, the mayor fired the top cop as a scapegoat. “Within six weeks of the shooting scandal, invesitgate stops dropped by 35,000 That’s when the violence began to surge,” the CBS report states.

One wishes that CBS had connected the dots with darker ink. Perhaps by quoting Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, who has written perceptively about the War On Police in the wake of the Black Li(v)es Matter myth born in Ferguson. See the sidebar at right.

The “Crisis in Chicago” segment leads off the podcast; it is 14 minutes.

Trump tweets today (01-02-17) that Democratic Chicago may need his help. At an event in September Trump had said, “I think Chicago needs stop-and-frisk.”  Story here.