Jesse Williams: NFL National Anthem Is ‘A Scam’ To Boost Military Recruitment
The actor spoke to MSNBC after a weekend of backlash against President Trump’s NFL protest remarks.
By Cavan Sieczkowski
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jesse-williams-nfl-national-anthem-s...
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 06:21 am
They’re marketing. They’re
They’re marketing. They’re pumping millions and millions of dollars into the NFL to get us to put on a pageant in front of the NFL football games to get you to go off and fight.”
While patriotic songs have been included at sporting events since 1862, Williams is seemingly referencing “paid patriotism” criticism documented in a 2015 Senate report that pointed to more than $12 million in contracts between the Defense Department and sports teams, CNN previously reported. Millions of dollars went to renting recruitment kiosks and staging patriotic and “heartwarming” tributes at games.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: charmskooldropout hounder
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 06:59 am
Dude, you're blowing my mind.
Dude, you're blowing my mind. I had no idea
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: skifurthur AMSaddler
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 07:17 am
Isn't all "advertising" meant
Isn't all "advertising" meant to boost whatever bottom line needs to be boosted?
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: skyjunk fabes
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 07:57 am
This is all about Trump
This is all about Trump wanting to get back at the NFL owners for not letting him have a team
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 04:08 pm
Can't blame Trump for this.
Can't blame Trump for this. Blame the Military Industrial Complex.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: An organ grinder’s tune Turtle
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 04:09 pm
dude isn't it cool when they
dude isn't it cool when they zip fighter jets over the stadium!?
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Bucky Badger On Wisconsin
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 04:10 pm
So the NFL was politicized
So the NFL was politicized even before Colin Kaepernick? Well I’ll be danged.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 04:46 pm
Another Famous Activist Also
Another Famous Activist Also Took a Knee, 50 Years Before Kaepernick—and He Too Was Called ‘Disruptive’ and an ‘Agitator’
Martin Luther King Jr. knelt to protest the treatment of African Americans several times throughout the 1960s.
By Liz Posner / AlterNet
September 25, 2017, 10:32 AM GMT
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/criticism-colin-kaepernick-sim...
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: That’s Nancy with the laughin’ face Nancyinthesky
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 04:59 pm
And Don the Con is a sore
And Don the Con is a sore loser
http://fortune.com/2017/09/24/donald-trump-nfl-usfl/
>..
This isn't the first time Trump has picked a fight with the NFL. And last time around, he lost spectacularly.
Trump’s football adventure began in 1984, when he bought the New Jersey Generals, part of the then-new United States Football League. The USFL, as chronicled in an excellent installment of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, was envisioned by founder David Dixon as a complement to the National Football League that would play in the spring, leaving fall to the NFL. For its first three years, the strategy seemed successful.
But it wasn't enough for Trump. He pushed hard to shift the USFL to a fall schedule, where the USFL – with less talent and less public awareness – would go head-to-head with the bigger league.
Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.
The decision to switch to fall play immediately crippled several USFL teams, who wouldn’t be able to compete directly with local NFL teams. The league even turned down a lifeline in the form of lucrative TV offers to broadcast spring games.
But Trump’s plan was typically audacious and risky. Rather than organically grow a new league, he hoped to force an immediate merger with the NFL, which would provide huge returns for surviving USFL team owners. That goal hinged in part on an antitrust lawsuit alleging the NFL was an unlawful monopoly.
But things didn’t go Trump’s way. While the USFL technically won the antitrust case, the jury concluded mismanagement was mostly at fault for its problems. There was no merger and no buyouts. By 1986, the USFL was finished.
Trump’s current beef with the NFL has little direct parallel with his USFL days, and most current NFL owners weren’t around back then. But Trump is more than able to hold a grudge, so you can bet the episode is on his mind.
Football fans should remember it, too — because if it weren't for Donald Trump, we might have pro ball year-round.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: nebulous nelly Orange County Lumber Truck
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 05:11 pm
What's up with Oh Canada
What's up with Oh Canada before NHL games? Should I be suspicious?
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: thinthread hillman
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 05:14 pm
smh
smh
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 05:28 pm
<<<<<What's up with Oh Canada
<<<<<What's up with Oh Canada before NHL games? Should I be suspicious?
eh
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Briank Briank
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 05:36 pm
I liked the USFL. My friend's
I liked the USFL. My friend's father was the Commissioner, and we got a to sit in the League box. They were actually shitty seats. I still saw a bunch of Generals games.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 05:47 pm
Pops got rid of Patriots
Pops got rid of Patriots season tickets for Boston Breakers season tickets in 1984...Fuck me!
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: An organ grinder’s tune Turtle
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 05:55 pm
he wasn't allowed at the big
he wasn't allowed at the big boys table.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: nebulous nelly Orange County Lumber Truck
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 06:13 pm
I don't know, Hillman?
I don't know, Hillman, ninety percent of Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. Invasion is inevitable.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/by-the-numbers-1.801937
My daughter was watching YouTube the other day and heard some Canadian guy say that Canada was named by picking letters out of a hat...
C eh N eh D eh
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 06:18 pm
Boston Bruins singer Rene
Boston Bruins singer Rene Rancourt sings a beautiful version of Oh Canada eh
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 06:49 pm
From Louis Armstrong to the N
From Louis Armstrong to the N.F.L.: Ungrateful as the New Uppity
By Jelani Cobb
September 24, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-louis-armstrong-to-the-nfl...
Sixty years ago, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, became a flash point in the nascent civil-rights movement when Governor Orval Faubus refused to abide by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Faubus famously deployed the state’s National Guard to prevent nine African-American students from attending classes at the high school. In the midst of the crisis, a high-school journalist interviewing Louis Armstrong about an upcoming tour asked the musician about his thoughts on the situation, prompting Armstrong to refer to the Arkansas governor as several varieties of “motherfucker.” (In the interest of finding a printable quote, his label for Faubus was changed to “ignorant plowboy.”) Armstrong, who was scheduled to perform in the Soviet Union as a cultural ambassador on behalf of the State Department, cancelled the tour—a display of dissent that earned him the scorn and contempt of legions of whites, shocked by the trumpeter’s apparent lack of patriotism. As the historian Penny Von Eschen notes in “Satchmo Blows Up the World,” a history of the American usage of black culture as a tool of the Cold War, students at the University of Arkansas accused Armstrong of “creating an issue where there was none,” and joined the procession of groups cancelling Armstrong’s scheduled concerts.
The free-range lunacy of Donald Trump’s speech on Friday night in Alabama, where he referred to Colin Kaepernick—and other N.F.L. players who silently protest police brutality—as a “son of a bitch,” and of the subsequent Twitter tantrums in which the President, like a truculent six-year-old, disinvited the Golden State Warriors from a White House visit, illustrates that the passage of six decades has not dimmed this dynamic confronted by Armstrong, or by any prominent black person tasked with the entertainment of millions of white ones. There again is the presence of outrage for events that should shock the conscience, and the reality of people who sincerely believe, or who have at least convincingly lied to themselves, that dissenters are creating an issue where there is none. Kaepernick began his silent, kneeling protest at the beginning of last season, not as an assault against the United States military or the flag but as a dissent against a system that has, with a great degree of consistency, failed to hold accountable police who kill unarmed citizens. Since he did this, forty-one unarmed individuals have been fatally shot by police in the United States, twelve of them African-American, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. The city of St. Louis recently witnessed days of protests after the acquittal of Jason Stockley, the former officer who, while still working for the city’s police force, fatally shot Anthony Smith, a twenty-four-year-old* African-American motorist who had led officers on a chase. Stockley emerged from his vehicle, having declared that he would “kill the motherfucker,” then proceeded to fire five rounds into the car. Later, a firearm was found on the seat of Smith’s car, but the weapon bore only Stockley’s DNA. The issue is not imaginary.
Yet the belief endures, from Armstrong’s time and before, that visible, affluent African-American entertainers are obliged to adopt a pose of ceaseless gratitude—appreciation for the waiver that spared them the low status of so many others of their kind. Stevie Wonder began a performance in Central Park last night by taking a knee, prompting Congressman Joe Walsh to tweet that Wonder was “another ungrateful black multi-millionaire.” Ungrateful is the new uppity. Trump’s supporters, by a twenty-four-point margin, agree with the idea that most Americans have not got as much as they deserve—though they overwhelmingly withhold the right to that sentiment from African-Americans. Thus, the wonder is not the unhinged behavior of this weekend but rather that it took Trump so long to exploit a target as rich in potential racial resentment as wealthy black athletes who have the temerity to believe in the First Amendment.
It’s impossible not to be struck by Trump’s selective patriotism. It drives him to curse at black football players but leaves him struggling to create false equivalence between Nazis and anti-Fascists in Charlottesville. It inspires a barely containable contempt for Muslims and immigrants but leaves him mute in the face of Russian election intervention. He cannot tolerate the dissent against literal flag-waving but screams indignation at the thought of removing monuments to the Confederacy, which attempted to revoke the authority symbolized by that same flag. He is the vector of the racial id of the class of Americans who sent death threats to Louis Armstrong, the people who necessitated the presence of a newly federalized National Guard to defend black students seeking to integrate a public school. He contains multitudes—all of them dangerously ignorant.
It has been convenient and politically profitable for Trump to paint the black athletes’ protests as an inane attack upon the symbols of the United States, but he is deeply implicated, and is increasingly aggravating the actual cause of this discord. It was Trump who urged police officers in Brentwood, New York, to treat the suspects in their charge with casual brutality. Trump’s Department of Justice has overseen the dismantling of the community-policing initiative, which was meant to encourage greater rapport between law enforcement and the neighborhoods they patrol. It is the President’s D.O.J. that has displayed disdain for the federal consent decrees that had been used to reform dysfunctional police departments.
A week and a half ago, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, assailed the black ESPN journalist Jemele Hill for referring to Trump on Twitter as an “ignorant white supremacist.” She asserted that Hill’s tweets were a “fireable offense.” Several days later, Trump attacked the sports network on Twitter and demanded that it “apologize for untruth.” After Trump rescinded his White House invitation to the Golden State Warriors, Hill tweeted, “Hey @stephencurry30, welcome to the club, bro.” LeBron James tweeted that Trump was a “bum”—which inspired criticism that he had crossed a line. (James was, it should be noted, considerably kinder than Louis Armstrong might have been.) The club of Trump dissidents grew larger on Sunday, when dozens of players from the Baltimore Ravens and the Jacksonville Jaguars took a knee, and Shad Khan, the owner of the Jaguars, locked arms with players and coaches who remained standing during the national anthem. All but one of the Pittsburgh Steelers opted to remain in their locker room during the playing of the national anthem ahead of their game against the Chicago Bears. Both the Seattle Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans decided to do the same for their game. If Trump’s intention was to stigmatize such displays, his words have had the opposite effect. He is perhaps the greatest example of the law of unintended consequences this side of the Darwin Awards.
Amid Trump’s nuclear brinksmanship and social-media provocation toward North Korea, amid the swollen gorges of water streaming through Puerto Rico, amid the craven and indefensible attempts to gut health care, amid the slower-moving crises of voting access, economic inequality, and climate change—amid all these things, Trump yet again found a novel way to diminish the nation he purportedly leads. He has authored danger in more ways than there are novel ways to denounce it. This is his singular genius. When this moment has elapsed, when some inevitably unsatisfactory punctuation has concluded the Trump era, we will be left with an infinitude of questions. But Trump, we will assuredly understand, is a small man with a fetish for the symbols of democracy and a bottomless hostility for the actual practice of it.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Thumbkinetic (Bluestnote)
on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 07:32 pm
Pee break/one hitter.
Pee break/one hitter.
Can't we all just honor America and/or protest in our own way?
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: El Nino kxela
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 05:52 pm
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Thumbkinetic (Bluestnote)
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 06:05 pm
Oh, yeah. And F Mike Ditka.
Oh, yeah. And F Mike Ditka.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: thinthread hillman
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 06:32 pm
dear god give it a rest
dear god give it a rest
nice point about pence. a sham from the get-go
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: thinthread hillman
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 06:32 pm
dear god give it a rest
unintended double post
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 06:43 pm
Dear god give the double post
Dear god give the double post a rest
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: thinthread hillman
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 06:56 pm
hey, that's my first one! i
hey, that's my first one! i don't post enough to double post. and i certainly don't need to copy & paste from alternet to make a post
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Oaksterdam Dan Nugstradamus
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 07:04 pm
Oh no not news copy and paste
Oh no not news copy and paste How will we all survive??
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: thinthread hillman
on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 – 07:09 pm
don't know there, guy. i don
don't know there, guy. i don't indulge much in copy/pasting any more. did a lot of it back in the day