“Dozens of current and retired officers from the New York Police Department rallied on Saturday morning in support of Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers player lionized and reviled for refusing to stand during the national anthem.
The gathering in Brooklyn Bridge Park was organized by Sgt. Edwin Raymond and attended by about 80 officers who wore black T-shirts emblazoned with “#IMWITHKAP.” Frank Serpico, a former officer who exposed corruption in the New York Police Department in the 1970s, attended. (Wow; take about an A-list of attendees!)
Speakers, including City Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, Democrat of Brooklyn, linked the backlash against Kaepernick’s gesture — no team has signed the quarterback for this season — to the violence last weekend during a white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Va., and more generally to issues of police accountability…”
For those unfamiliar with the personal histories of both this demonstration’s organizer and principle speaker, (1) Sergeant Raymond, as The Times reports, “joined 11 other officers in filing a class-action lawsuit against the Police Department for policing practices they said discriminated against minority communities”.
And (2) city councilman Jumaane Williams recently claimed Oscar Lopez Rivera, the Puerto Rican separatist convicted of complicity in the slaying of 5 innocent New Yorkers but still paroled by the President who never met a terrorist or tyrant he didn’t love, advocated non-violent activism.
Yeah…
By the way, a total of 80 people, including the incredibly influential Frank Serpico (like Sofia Coppola in The Godfather: Part III, even we were hoping Serpico died in the end!) and other retired NYPD officers, showed up for this “rally”. There are over 34,000 active officers in the NYPD, along with who-knows how many additional tens of thousands in the retired ranks; so, in the real world, why are 80 current and former cops demonstrating in support of a under-performing football player even a story?!?
Consider the case of Steve Blass, former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates. When Pittsburgh upset Baltimore in 1971, Blass pitched two complete-game victories against the defending-champion Orioles and finished second to Roberto Clemente as series MVP. In 1972, he notched 19 victories and made the All-Star team.
One year later, Blass was out of the majors, and the next completely retired as a player. And though he never made it to Cooperstown, the Pittsburgh great has achieved baseball immortality through the dubious distinction of having “Steve Blass disease” enter pro baseball lexicon as denoting a talented pitcher’s sudden and inexplicable inability to throw a ball in the strike zone.
The truth remains, had Colin Kaepernick not suffered a marked diminution in his skills as a quarterback, he’d be playing in the NFL today. Then again, in professional football’s equivalent of Catch 22, had Kaepernick’s quarterbacking skills not so sharply diminished, he’d likely never have found the need to kneel during the National Anthem to begin with!
And here’s an object lesson for Roger Goodell as he ponders his response to pressure from those who likely don’t watch his product in the first place:
In other words, if you’ll pardon our play on words “Cluck you, Mizzou”!
“Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets.But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.
“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.
He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises…”
So it is, unfortunately, with our alma mater:
And for those wondering when the insanity of this Progressive-promoted political correctness is going to end…
First up, courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson analyzes why, whether you love him or hate him…or, like us, fall somewhere in between…you’re likely stuck with The Donald for…
“The campaign to make Donald Trump president of these United States was a terrible idea.The campaign to drive him from office is a worse one…If Democrats had the numbers, they would impeach Trump — and if they get the numbers, they will.
But that isn’t Plan A.Plan A is anarchy.
As Trump prepared to take the oath of office, a group of sundry leftists of the anarchist variety declared their intention to “Become Ungovernable,” and they have made some progress on that front, from the violent protests surrounding the inauguration itself to the riots at Berkeley and on other college campuses. The Democratic establishment and its media allies — the Respectable Left — play a good-cop/bad-cop game with the blackshirts and rioters. The black bloc exercises a heckler’s veto, and the campus administrators and municipal authorities pretend to be saddened that they are obliged to bar conservative speakers from their campuses or restrict public discourse. The nice progressives in cardigans assure us that they deplore the violence of Antifa and similar goon squads, but they know who their friends are — and, more important, who they aren’t. Charles Murray can’t speak on a college campus without being physically assaulted, but the real danger, these progressives tell us, is that the NRA made a recruiting video.
Seriously?!?
Feed the churn, feel the burn.
If there’s a crisis, they’ll amplify it, even if they have to lie — e.g., CNN’s complete fabrication about a Google engineer “who argued women aren’t biologically fit for tech jobs.” If there isn’t a crisis or a scandal, they’ll manufacture one: Colin Kaepernick can’t get a job in Donald Trump’s America! Angels and ministers of grace defend us. Progressive talk radio is a sty of conspiracy theories, hysteria, and bigotry that makes right-wing talk radio sound like Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — which is not easy to do, because right-wing talk radio is bonkers. Cable-news commentary from the left is nearly as bad.
Institutional Democrats use the state and local governments they control as political weapons, and they have made great strides in politicizing business life. When the nation’s dairy producers declined to make a statement on the events in Charlottesville, Jesse Singal of New York magazine wrote: “You are either with us or against us, milk!” He was joking, but the joke is funny because it is so close to the facts.
Progressives have boycotted L.L. Bean because one of its board members made a donation to a political-action committee that supported Trump. That wasn’t the company using the company’s money to support a candidate, just a board member who has a life outside of being on the board of L.L. Bean.
And, of course, local “community organizers” take a sudden interest in monuments that have been sitting in local parks for a century.
Trump, being Trump, adds his own chaos to the mix: his petulant schoolboy tweeting, his Queeg-and-the-strawberries press conferences, his penchant for surrounding himself with nutcases like Steve Bannon and his gormless children and in-laws. If what you want is chaos, then Donald J. Trump — a retired game-show host who apparently believes there were “a lot of good people” at a neo-Nazi rally that ended with a political murder — is your man. You could hardly do better.
The Left has a short game and a long one here. The short game is paralyzing Trump if not driving him from office. The long game is using Trump to discredit the Republican party and the conservative movement, both of which have, to their discredit, embraced and defended Trump with various degrees of enthusiasm.
…We cannot allow the current state of affairs, in which the loss of a presidential election is met with ever wilder and more vicious attempts to immobilize the executive, to become the new normal. We cannot treat every lost election as an illegitimate one — which is precisely the direction in which the Democrats have us pointed at the moment. Our federal government already is dysfunctional, and that kind of banana-republic total-war opposition, carried on without rest or relief, will lead to a country that is truly ungovernable and not simply acting ungovernable for short-term political reasons. Driving Trump from office would hurt Republicans in the short term. It would hurt Democrats a great deal very soon after. And, much more important, it would do great violence to our constitutional order and our long and proud history of regular government. The Yorks wouldn’t have peace with a Lancaster on the throne, and vice versa, but the United States of America is a republic. Fortunately, the president is only the chief administrator of the federal government, not a personification of the national ideal.
There are two ways to come off a ledge, and Americans should choose carefully…”
From where we sit, the Dims have already jumped. Which means it now falls to the GOP to make the best of the rest of his tenure.
And as Charles W. Cooke suggests in this next bit of satire also courtesy of NRO, as regards the choice Kevin Williamson details above, here’s hoping it’s common Americans doing the choosing; ‘cuz as the Educated Idiots on The Left conclusively demonstrate below, they haven’t a clue as to what they’re even saying:
“In the New York Times, UCLA’s K-Sue Park proposes that “the A.C.L.U. Needs to Rethink Free Speech”:
After the A.C.L.U. was excoriated for its stance, it responded that “preventing the government from controlling speech is absolutely necessary to the promotion of equality.” Of course that’s true.(Evidently, only to a degree!) The hope is that by successfully defending hate groups, its legal victories will fortify free-speech rights across the board: A rising tide lifts all boats, as it goes.
While admirable in theory, this approach implies that the country is on a level playing field, that at some point it overcame its history of racial discrimination to achieve a real democracy, the cornerstone of which is freedom of expression.
I volunteered with the A.C.L.U. as a law student in 2011, and I respect much of its work. But it should rethink how it understands free speech. By insisting on a narrow reading of the First Amendment (i.e., “free speech” meansfree speech!), the organization provides free legal support to hate-based causes. More troubling, the legal gains on which the A.C.L.U. rests its colorblind logic have never secured real freedom or even safety for all.
Park is correct. It is high time that the ACLU moved onto the right side of History and abandoned the “narrow reading” of the First Amendment that is the result of 50 years of unanimous Supreme Court precedent.In lieu, it must focus on working toward more diverse and productive ends, such as giving Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump the robust censorship powers that they so richly and urgently deserve. The United States federal government is now run at every level by Republicans. So, indeed, are the lion’s share of the governors’ mansions, statehouses, and localities. If the ACLU really knuckles down, it can ensure that these figures — and not pernicious “neutral” principle — determine the edges and contours of America’s civil society.
Don’t bore me with your objections. Park is a smart woman, and she knows what “hate” is. We all do. Hate is hate. It is not speech; it’s hate. Sometimes hate is violence, even when no action is attached. How do I know, you might ask? I know because hate is, by definition, hateful, and that means it’s not speech. And why isn’t it speech? Because it’s hate, and hate isn’t speech. This is basic common sense, rejected only by haters.
The ACLU insists that “preventing the government from controlling speech is absolutely necessary to the promotion of equality.” But more sensible thinkers grasp that quite the opposite is true. As Park notes, any defense of the status quo “perpetuates a misguided theory that all radical views are equal.” They’re not, and, in consequence, an arbiter is necessary. At first, that should be the ACLU, which should simply let some censorship be – or, even better, start endorsing it. And eventually, having been freed up by the ACLU’s backing away from what Park notes correctly is “only First Amendment case law,” the government itself should assume that role. Then, and only then,will some space have been cleared for the wise…”
Living proof of the truth of Romans 1:22.
FYI, though Ms. Park,…
Any question K-Sue advocates accommodating the NoKos?!?
…Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA School of Law (Whatever TF THAT means!), has purportedly earned the following…
B.A. Cornell University, 2002 M.Phil. University of Cambridge, 2003 J.D. Harvard Law School, 2015 Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2015
…all it means these days is either (i) Educated Idiocy RULES, or (ii) advanced degrees aren’t worth the paper on which they’re printed.
We’re going with (iii): both of the above!
Meanwhile, again at NRO, Andy McCarthy offers some cogently connected (as opposed to random) thoughts…
“Susan Rosenberg was a terrorist in the early 1980s. Like her Weathermen comrades, she would have killed many people had she been a more competent terrorist. She was a fugitive plotting more bombings when she and a co-conspirator were captured in New Jersey, armed to the gills and toting over 700 pounds of dynamite. At her sentencing, she proclaimed, “Long live the armed struggle” against “U.S. imperialism.” Her only regret was that she hadn’t shot it out with the police who arrested her. A federal judge sentenced her to 58 years’ imprisonment.
I know her story well because, when she claimed she was being denied parole unlawfully, I spent over a year as the prosecutor arguing that the court should keep her in the slammer. Finally, the court ruled against her.
So..Bill Clinton sprang her.
Her commutation may have outraged most Americans, but it was celebratedby the nation’s “progressive” opinion elites, the same ones who were cool with President Clinton’s release of the FALN terrorists. Granted, Rosenberg didn’t get the hero’s welcome at New York City’s Puerto Rican Day parade received by Oscar Lopez Rivera — the FALN terrorist released by President Obama. The teaching gig the Left arranged for her wasn’t quite as prestigious and long-lived as the ones her fellow Weathermen — and Obama pals — Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn fell into. She’ll never be a t-shirt icon, like Che Guevara or Tupac Shakur. The campaign to pretend she was innocent won’t rival the Alger Hiss fairy tale. There will probably be no statue of her, much less a performing-arts center like the one in Princeton named for Paul Robeson.
But she hates America,…
…so she’ll be remembered fondly in the places where the cultural tune is called. Her books — such as An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country — will continue to be taken oh so seriously. Her Wikipedia entry does not describe her as a terrorist; it says Susan Rosenberg is a “radical political activist, author and advocate for social justice.”
That’s why you got Trump.
It has nothing to do with statues of the dead.It is about the status of the living.
You’re upset over President Trump’s idiotic remarks this week? Oh, right, I need to specify. Not the crackpot bit about General Pershing mass-murdering Muslim prisoners in the Philippines (well explained by David French, here). I mean the one about the “very fine people” in Charlottesville — the supposed “many” who joined neo-Nazis, KKK die-hards, and other white supremacists in a demonstration that could not have been more overtly racist and despicable.
Yeah, I’m upset about that, too.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t notice the anti-fa thugs were out there. It doesn’t mean I don’t see the hard Left’s seditionist shock troops, at war with the country, much like the Weathermen, the Panthers, and the Black Liberation Army back in the day.As we’ve seen many times now (and will, alas, see many times more), the radical Left doesn’t need tiki-torch twits to spur them to arson and mayhem.
…Anyone commenting on this ghastly event ought to be able to prioritize his righteous rage. Especially if that anyone happens to be the president of the United States.
You have good reason to be upset that this president couldn’t meet that modest standard. If you’re on the political right, moreover, you may be even more upset by a poll that says two-thirds of Republicans actually approve of Trump’s response. They believe he ascribed blame accurately.
Well, he didn’t. (A position with which we both agree anddisagree, as detailed by our Quote of the Day at the top of the page.)Does that make the poll result irrational?
I don’t think so. It is not that two-thirds of the Right really think “very fine people” make common cause with the KKK. (Which is not what Trump said or meant.)And it’s not that they really see two sides equally at fault.(Though it takes two to tango.) It is that, regardless of comparative fault, they know there were two sides out there. And they know the media has tried to obscure that fact. The poll is less indicative of settled belief than of gut reaction.
People are fed up. If you dare notice the radical Left, you are not an observer of objective fact, you are a neo-Nazi sympathizer. If you dare notice that many of the “peaceful protesters” were swinging batons and spraying chemicals, you need a re-education course in “unconscious racism.”
News about a radical leftist’s attempted mass murder of Republican House members that left Representative Steve Scalise on the brink of death faded quickly away — just a few days’ Kumbaya coverage along the lines of “Shaken Democrats joined Republicans in expressing outrage, etc., etc.” But on Thursday in Barcelona, when Muslim terrorists reverted to the car jihad they have been using quite notoriously for years, the media speculated that the terrorist killing of 13 people by careening a van along a crowded street might just be a Charlottesville “copycat” attack. You get it: Islamic terrorists are just like the Klan, are just like bourgeois Americans in the Age of Trump. Or, as they say in Virginia, “Allahu akbar, y’all…”
We’d remind Andrew McCarthy, along with Jonah Goldberg and a host of other Conservative NeverTrumpers we truly respect, America didn’t elect The Donald nearly as much as they voted against Hillary…and eight more years of Progressive politics as usual…which would far more likely than not have ushered in the fall of the Founders’ Republic.
Need we mention, seven months into the Trump Administration, The Left and their MSM shills have done nothing to convince those who cast their ballots for him they wasted their votes…ourselves included?!?
Can you say “Neil Gorsuch”?
We knew you could!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter:
This picture’s not only worth a thousand words, it says it all! For those still unconvinced of Brandy Lerma’s guilt, this video of her field sobriety tests should seal the deal:
We truly fear for her children…for they and she are the inevitable byproducts of Progressive policies.
Magoo
P.S. WTF is wrong…after 8 years of Obama and Ray Mabus…
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