William Saliba’s return by Dan Smith

If Mikel Arteta feels the need to rotate his squad due to three games in 8 days this festive period, then fine.

If our manager wants to play Rob Holding on to Boxing Day and save William Saliba for the two (on paper) tougher fixtures, okay.

If he wants to protect Saliba from the yellow card which would rule him out for the trip to Brighton, that makes sense.

What I don’t want to hear is that our defender is unavailable this Monday due to a ‘rest’.

Let’s hear it for the girls who are just like other girls. I still don’t entirely “get” Taylor Swift (although Anti-Hero still made my top five in Spotify Wrapped), but I have absolutely, undeniably fallen in love with Swifties. 

Swifties are punk rock. They couldn’t get tickets to the Eras tour? Looks like Ticketmaster/ LiveNation could get a blank space in their little monopoly after fans filed a lawsuit alleging Ticketmaster’s violation of California antitrust and unfair competition laws. These baddies caused such chaos trying to buy presale tickets that the Justice Department opened its own antitrust investigation. I wasn’t there, but apparently it was like Woodstock ‘99 in the ticket queue—true, utter madness. 

Also, there was the time they streamed her album so aggressively that they fully made history by making her the first artist to hold all top ten songs on the Billboard Hot 100, meaning there were no male artists in the top ten for the first time ever!!! While that is of course another big record for Swift, we have to give cred to the girls, gays, and theys that put her there. (I will own my place in this contingent. Midnights really bangs.)

It was a great year for holding artists accountable for the impact they have on cultural dialogue, and in this I cannot give credit to Swifties alone. Fans and fat-positive activists called on Swift to change to a fatphobic scene in her “Anti-Hero” video. The video has been edited, but Swift has not apologized—unlike Beyoncé and Lizzo, who were called out by their fans for ableist language in songs they released earlier this year. Both Queen Bey and Lizzo fully took accountability. 

I’m still on the fence about Swift herself. Her music is fun. I also think she’s made a career of white-woman victimhood and is typically late to use her cultural influence to speak up on issues like Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights. 

When the Biden administration announced in late summer that they would be cancelling $10,000 of student debt per borrower, Americans had thoughts. Some cried tears of joy on TikTok, others went off online with assorted criticisms: The administration should cancel more debt, or less debt, or tighten relief eligibility, or loosen it, and also deal with the root cause of the problem—skyrocketing college tuition. There were plenty of smart points and some not-so-smart ones, but in politics, you really can’t please everyone.

But here’s what these critics did not do: set out to sink the entire program, which would improve the financial lives of more than 40 million people, over their personal criticisms.

Enter a small right-wing group in Texas, and the two people they drummed up to sue the Biden administration to stop student debt cancellation. In a federal lawsuit that will be heard by the US Supreme Court this winter, these two claim that relief for tens of millions of indebted Americans is unfair because they’re not included. The entitlement runneth over.

In a federal lawsuit that will be heard by the US Supreme Court this winter, these two claim that relief for tens of millions of indebted Americans is unfair because they’re not included. The entitlement runneth over.

To understand their case, here is some background: The Biden administration devised the relief plan to target student debt cancellation towards borrowers who needed it the most. They limited the relief to borrowers making $125,000 or less, and then offered double the relief, $20,000, only to students from the lowest-income backgrounds, measured by whether they’d received Pell grants for college. (Pell grants are the federal grants expressly given to the poorest students; in 2020, the majority of recipients came from families with household incomes of $30,000 or less.)

One of the two plaintiffs—a Texas man named Alexander Taylor—does qualify for $10,000 in student debt relief. He earns less than $125,000 per year, and holds more than $35,000 in eligible federal loans. But he does not qualify for the extra $10,000 of cancellation because he didn’t get a Pell grant in college. So, over the perceived slight of having parents who were not poor, he has sued to deprive millions—and himself!—of any debt relief at all. If he wins, he will be $10,000 poorer. Give this man a medal.

Nearly two years after a pro-Trump mob unleashed a violent attack against the US Capitol, the House committee investigating the events of January 6th has released its final report documenting former president Donald Trump’s lead role in fomenting the mob, as well as his efforts to overthrow democracy. As my colleague David Corn wrote shortly after the panel hosted its final public meeting on Monday, the findings are at once obvious and nothing short of devastating for the former president, and will undoubtedly be pored over in the days to come. 

In the meantime, while our reporters unearth the most pressing details, you can read the full report below:

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who offered dramatic testimony at a January 6 Committee hearing in June, detailed her own lawyer’s efforts to keep her quiet in an explosive deposition made public Thursday. Now he’s taken a leave of absence from his law firm, in a swirl of controversy over ethics violations.

According to her deposition, attorney Stefan Passantino, who had previously worked as a White House attorney for Trump, told Hutchinson, who had been subpoenaed by the panel, to “downplay” her knowledge of the events leading to January 6 in her testimony and to also claim she could not recall other important details. Passantino offered to help her find work in what he referred to as “Trump world,” while making it clear he was considering the interests of the former president ahead of her own, she testified. The timing of the offers to “take care” of her financial needs, Hutchinson said, suggested they were linked to her offering testimony that did not hurt Trump or his allies. Passantino even warned her that Trump often read transcripts and bore grudges against witnesses who talked too much.

“We just want to focus on protecting the President,” Hutchinson said Passantino told her before her first interview with the panel. “We all know that you’re loyal.”

Passantino, who was, strikingly, formerly a top ethics attorney in the Trump White House, was paid by a Trump PAC called Save America, to represent Hutchinson. She didn’t know that at the time, because he refused to tell her who was paying him for the work, she said. She also said he shared details about her testimony with other lawyers working for Trump clients against her wishes.

Those actions represent gross violations of basic legal ethics and DC Bar rules governing conflicts of interest, ethics experts said. Those rules require lawyers from taking third-party payments that interfere with their “independent professional judgment,” and mandate that the attorneys obtain “informed consent from the client” for such arrangements. If Hutchinson is telling the truth that Passantino didn’t tell her who was paying him, she could not consent, noted Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies legal ethics. And Clark said that’s not the half of it.

Below is our list of heroes and monsters from 2022. For the last few years, we’ve taken inventory in this fashion—personal, idiosyncratic, and somehow when assembled a snapshot of yet another unsettled, strange, glorious 12 months. (You can read the full archive here.) At this point, it’s become something of a holiday tradition.

As always, our list is by no means exhaustive. Each entry reflects less the perfect distillation of the year than our personal obsessions. But if you take all of this together, we hope you have a pretty representative time capsule of 2022. If we missed one of your nightmares or loves, maybe we can pick that up next year.

We will be adding to this list over the holidays. And so if you do not immediately see some of the items it will feature—a German coup, a bot, Mike Davis, Eric Adams, cars, strikers, a flamingo—please, keep coming back. You may even discover a few more.

Top image credits: Plan B Entertainment/ZUMA; Tom Dorsey/Salina Journal/AP; Scott Garfitt/AP; Francois Nel/Getty

This year was filled with reactionary dorks. In Arizona, Blake Masters tried and failed to larp his way into the Senate by posting creepy videos of himself shooting his many guns. In Manhattan, a dozen-or-so people maybe turned a bit fascist and maybe a bit Catholic and writers tried to figure out why rich kids would do something like that. In cyberspace, the absolute monarchist blogger once known as Mencius Moldbug emerged on Substack under his own name, Curtis Yarvin, and got written up in Tablet and Vox.

All of these people had moments. But none of them really went it for like Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, the descendant of princes arrested earlier this month by German authorities, who stands accused of being the ringleader of a coup plot inspired by the ludicrous theory that Germany is not a sovereign state but a company set up by western powers following World War II.

It sounds like a Nathan Fielder episode of overthrow. The plan? To storm the Reichstag, execute Chancellor Olaf Schulz, and put Reuss in power.

From one angle, it was more than a bit unsettling. After fanning out across Germany, Austria, and Italy, three thousand law enforcement officials arrested 25 people and found weapons at more than 50 of the roughly 150 locations they raided. From another angle, it was a chance to laugh at perhaps the year’s most pompous man.

This is that version of the story. 

Nearly one year after Eric Adams was sworn in as New York’s 110th mayor, many of the same questions remain. How does Adams, against a plummeted approval rating and barely alleviated housing affordability crisis, still fit in all that partying? Is he sure about crypto? What’s the deal with those twin dudes?

The only general consensus that’s emerged seems to be bipartisan: Mayor Adams is a blabber. He’s all talk, few plans. But in the last quarter of 2022, Adams offered a proposal aimed at fixing one of the city’s most complex and enduring issues. And it has given us the first real window into what kind of mayor Adams aspires to be—and that’s a monstrous one.

That’s the only way to describe Adam’s headline-making plan to task police officers and emergency medical workers with removing people who appear mentally ill off the streets—even when a recent dangerous act has not been documented—against their will in order to enter a deeply broken, understaffed hospital pipeline, where doctors are overloaded and psychiatric beds are notoriously scant.

In his announcement last month, Adams appeared to be under the impression that the state’s commitment of 50 new beds for city hospitals would be enough to provide one for “everyone” who needed it. That, of course, is nothing short of a delusion; at least 60,000 people are homeless in New York, with thousands living unsheltered. A large majority of the unhoused suffer from mental illness. The number of respite care centers in the city—which offer alternatives to hospitalization by providing temporary shelters for the mentally ill—has been slashed in half in recent years. It’s unclear how a plan to make it easier for the homeless to be forcibly hospitalized—when the critical coordination between police officers and hospitals has yet to be determined—won’t lead to more bottlenecks for a system already at a breaking point.

What’s more certain is that the explosive directive will arm police officers with a dangerous expansion in latitude to detain people, leaving the city’s mentally ill population already in fear of police brutality and officers themselves blindsided by the chaotic order. 

Imagine you are the seventh of eight children born to poor, illiterate farmers in the countryside of northeast Brazil. You spend your early life in a house made of mud and sticks. When you’re seven years old your family sets off for the big city, and you find work as a shoe shiner. As a teenager, you become a metalworker. It’s a tough trade. You lose a finger in an accident when you’re 17. Your 18th birthday coincides with a United States-backed military coup, and a repressive dictatorship takes power. In response, you get involved in your union. As a labor leader, you lead the first mass strikes since the dictatorship took power. In fact, you lead general strikes that at their peak involve over twenty million workers. Your leadership helps bring democracy back to the country. Along the way, you are imprisoned. You lose your first wife and newborn baby to pregnancy complications.

You help found a political party hoping to bring dignity to the poor and working class. You spend the next twenty years leading this worker’s party. After many fits, starts—and perhaps one too many compromises—you finally win the presidency. During your administration, you implement some of the most successful social democratic reforms of the 21st century. You bring 40 million people out of poverty. The president of the United States calls you “the most popular politician on earth.” After two terms, you leave office with a staggering 87 percent approval rating. 

Then it all comes crashing down.

Your hand-picked successor is impeached. A nasty former Army captain and once-fringe politician nostalgic for the military dictatorship ascends. You announce a third attempt at the presidency, but you’re targeted by a massive corruption investigation that has enveloped the party you founded. You watch the neo-fascist win the presidency from a prison cell, where you’ve been sentenced to twelve years. The new president appoints the judge that convicted you as the country’s new justice minister. 

You learn, through leaked messages that the corruption investigation was a potential political hit-job to prevent you from running in 2018. The U.S Department of Justice was involved. Near the end of your second year behind bars, your conviction is reversed. You’re released to a country that’s been ravaged by an incompetent response to the pandemic. The far-right has grown stronger. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has accelerated.

In March 2020 the writer, scholar, and activist Mike Davis—who passed away earlier this year from complications from Esophageal cancer—addressed the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and what must be done to survive it, in an essay for Jacobin. It was titled “In a Plague Year.” As usual, he was prescient.

He predicted nursing homes as hot spots (they would be); he predicted workers would not want to endure such conditions and “stay home” (they did). Davis said that the coronavirus would enter as a “familiar monster,” even though the world felt radically new at the time. Within months, there would be analysis that followed Davis’s thoughts closely—of COVID as exposing cracks in our systems, like medical dye spreading in the body to find disease. But it was not “familiar” to most of us to think about a pandemic. It was to him because in 2006 Davis published The Monster at Our Door, a book-length warning about the threat of a global contagion stemming from zoonotic spillover, and how the lack of global public health infrastructure made the planet increasingly vulnerable to such a disaster. 

It has been typical of how many have mourned Davis this year to begin this way. After his passing, and during his time in hospice care—as pilgrimages were made to write profiles, conduct long interviews, and say goodbye—writers had to note that he was always ahead. Davis hated the “prophet” label that he was tagged with ever since his book City of Quartz was credited with predicting the 1992 Rodney King rebellion in Los Angeles. But it followed him for a reason.

One example has stuck with me this year. Nested within that 2020 essay was another prediction. Though it was tucked in parentheses, and easy to miss. After writing about the need for progressives to unite to push Biden left at the 2020 DNC in Milwaukee, Davis addressed the role of ordinary people. (Emphasis mine.)

The rest of us have an equally important role in the streets, starting now with the fights against eviction, layoffs, and employers who refuse compensation to workers on leave. (Afraid of contagion? Stand six feet from the next protester, and it will only make a more powerful image on TV. But we need to reclaim the streets.)

Abortion is healthcare, and no law prohibiting it can eradicate its necessity. That hasn’t stopped Republican legislators from trying. Fifty-five abortion restrictions were enacted in 2022. Many of these laws target doctors and healthcare workers, threatening them with fines and jail time for providing necessary and wanted care. But while this year may have been unprecedented, for many abortion providers, it was, at least, anticipated.

“We’re not shocked by any of it,” Dr. Christina Bourne, the medical director at Trust Women, which has clinics in Oklahoma and Kansas, told me earlier this year. “[We’re] just trying to figure out strategies and next steps.”

“You wake up every day to your fresh new hell.”

To continue providing this care in a climate so hostile to abortion it actually becomes personally dangerous is, frankly, too much to ask of anyone. But over the last year, Mother Jones has heard from providers all over the country continuing on anyway. For Trust Women, this has meant fighting to stay open no matter what. “Our day-to-day existence is about keeping our doors open and our day-to-day conversations involve that,” said Bourne. “It truncates our ability to grow and blossom and refine and be slow and intentional in the work we do when it’s just like, you wake up every day to your fresh new hell.”

Like Bourne at Trust Women, Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a physician who has spent the past 18 years providing abortion care in Texas, was dealing with the frustration of trying to practice under abortion restrictions even before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. Moayedi told my former colleague Becca Andrews about having to operate under the state’s Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions after six weeks, but made broad exceptions for extreme medical emergencies: 

We are in a state that has a high maternal mortality rate, a high maternal morbidity rate, a high infant death rate [among vulnerable populations]. Being pregnant in a state like Texas is a dangerous baseline. Being forced to be pregnant in a state like Texas can be catastrophic. My colleagues and I are having to deal with this extremely broad law that is being individually interpreted at each hospital, at each clinic, at every practice. And it’s really just about personal and system risk mitigation. How much risk is a hospital system or clinic willing to take? How can we really prove that circumstances were, in fact, life-threatening?

Andy is joined by Nicky Bandini and French football expert Jonathan Johnson to unpack an undoubtedly dramatic finale to the 2022 World Cup.

While all the talk is about Lionel Messi’s legacy, what does this final mean for Kylian Mbappé? They also explain why Zinedine Zidane seems to have been left so miffed and discuss their players of the tournament! 

But before all that, what’s the future for Morocco after a sensational run? And we remember a footballing great.

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

Jules, Luke and Jim convene at Ramble HQ with just one more sleep before the most exciting day of the year: the World Cup 3rd/4th play-off!

We hear your suggestions for replacing this fixture - including an Gianni Infantino vs Florentino Perez pillow fight. Speaking of which, Gianni’s been in front of the mic again and we re-launch a competition of our own: it’s Moore vs Breach in Jack’s Encyclopaedia!

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Marcus, Luke and Andy react to last night’s second semi-final, where Morocco threw the kitchen sink at France. But Antoine Griezmann is so adaptable he’s also probably a plumber now.

Elsewhere, the studio is split over how France and Argentina will match-up, we discuss whether the next England manager should be English, and we determine just what kind of dessert the third-fourth play-off is. 

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Dotun, Andy and David relive an extraordinary night for Lionel Messi and Argentina as they thwacked Croatia to reach the World Cup final.

While Messi summons the spirit of Zinedine Zidane in 2006, we discuss how Lionel Scaloni and the supporting cast have turned things around since defeat to Saudi Arabia.

We also explain why Portugal’s match-up with José Mourinho is a terrible idea and we preview the big one tonight! Can Morocco do it?

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

Now the dust has settled on another England exit, Jules, Luke and Andy reflect on the future of Gareth Southgate, England and – most importantly all – Dave the cat. STOP JACK, HE’S NOT A LOAF OF BREAD MATE!

We assess the reasonable and absolutely ridiculous options to replace Southgate and turn to our first semi-final: Argentina vs Croatia! If Lionel Messi is done with Wout Weghorst, that is…

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Marcus, Luke, Jim and Pete reflect on a heartbreaking night for England that both bodes well for the future and summons some very familiar ghosts of the past.

And bloody hell, Morocco! We ask whether they can ‘Greece it’ and go all the way.

Pete’s Film Club is back! Sign up for weekly episodes throughout the World Cup and much more here: patreon.com/footballramble.

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Veteran midfielder Elneny praises Arsenal youngsters in 3-0 defeat of Lyon in Dubai by Michelle

Arsenal started their mid-season training camp in Dubai with a confident 3-0 win over Lyon in the Dubai Super Cup on Thursday.  Young goalkeeper Karl Hein did a cracking job between the sticks, gaining a bonus point for the Gunners.

Watch the match highlights including all goals and saves in the penalty shootout here…..

Video highlights: Arsenal defeat Lyon in Dubai Super Cup friendly

Mohamed Elneny believes the squad’s performance was a due to the work being put in on the training pitches.  The Arsenal squad, minus the players involved in the World Cup, were given a good run out in the first game of the tournament, with some excellent goals Gabriel, Eddie Nketiah and Fabio Vieira capping the display.

1-0 to Arsenal Women – how do we break the theme and score more goals? by Michelle

After Arsenal suffered their first loss of the season to Manchester United at Emirates Stadium our Gunners have managed to get back to winning ways, with two 1-0 wins on the bounce, against both Everton in the WSL and mid-week against Juventus in the Champions League.

But.. early in the season, when Arsenal of course had a fully fit and uninjured squad, we were rolling out regular 4-0 wins against Brighton and even Tottenham, when Arsenal set a new WSL attendance record of 47,367.

Since those seemingly glory days Arsenal have suffered numerous injuries to highly valued players with Leah Williamson and Rafaelle Souza only just returning to the squad after being out with foot injuries for 2 months.  Captain Kim Little and summer-signing Lina Hurtig are still not available for selection though boss Eidevall is hopeful of their imminent return.  Perhaps the biggest blow to the squad was then losing Beth Mead to a serious ACL rupture which will likely keep her out for the rest of the season and has thrown her chances of playing for the Lionesses in next summer’s FIFA Women’s World Cup into serious doubt.

Arsenal boss Jonas Eidevall is of course happy with these wins as are we all, keeping us apace with Chelsea & Man United at the top of the WSL table and also keeping us at the top of our group in our UEFA Champions League campaign. But those wins really should have been a lot more pronounced, particularly where our Gunners had 33 shots which culminated in only one goal by back-on-form Miedema, against 8th place Everton.  Incidently, Miedema was the only goalscorer in both of those matches.. Hail the Miedema Magic!

First, it was Belgium. Then it was Spain. Today, it was Portugal. Morocco has defeated yet another European soccer powerhouse to become the first African and Arab nation to advance to the semifinals in World Cup history.

The final score was 1-0 with the only goal coming off a leaping header from Youssef En-Nesyri late in the first half.

What a moment

Morocco scores its first ever men's FIFA World Cup goal in the knockout stage pic.twitter.com/hGS7QoE3vV

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) December 10, 2022