It only makes sense, politically and, by the way, sensibly. Players et al. are acting unwisely and ought to be called on their foolish behavior. Bully pulpit used by politically wise and sensible POTUS.

The NFL’s Thanksgiving games were turkeys from a ratings standpoint, hitting multiyear lows in all three time slots, while three of the four national windows on Sunday also experienced drops from last year, according to Sports Business Daily.

Meanwhile, the number of players refusing to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” jumped from five to 19 in Week 12, according to the ESPN tally.

…………………………………..

“The NFL protesters are kneeling themselves out of a job,” said BizPac Review’s Samantha Chang in a Nov. 24 article.

Not that they are paragons of sensibility in the first place. Consider the inane end-zone antics post-touchdowns. Children, stop it.

via Donald Trump zings NFL as ratings dip, protests surge – Washington Times

Not even close. Unless self-hate, which could be white people’s doing. (Hey, I’m just trying not to offend, ok?)

via Cancel Those Hate Crimes: Black Man Arrested for Vandalizing Five Black NJ Churches | Jammie Wearing Fools

Classic example of liberal mindset aiming story at fellow comfort-zone inhabitants. Intended readers will not say “so what?” to this story.

None will question the mirror-the-population test. (What could be more obvious?)

None will question this assumption or wonder what the results are from judges who do mirror the population, what studies there are and what they show.

This AP story ran in Chi Trib and in dozens of other papers around the country lwho ike the Trib depend more than ever, in an age of shrinking budgets and newsrooms, on AP.

via Trump choosing white men as judges, highest rate in decades

Put another way: Never-Trump idol has clay feet.

Say it isn’t so, Special Counsel/Prosecutor, whatever, in whom the Republic has placed its confidence, putting you beyond reach of the law(s).

(When will we ever learn?)

via LA Times

. . . from Jonathan Haidt’s 2017 Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute on November 15 and featured in [11/24] Wall Street Journal as its Notable and Quotable item:

Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. . . .

The rest of it is here: Quotation of the day on the only lens given to today’s college students (power) and how it leads to intellectual impotence…. – AEI

Which they would if they understood how freedom to invest is the engine of job-creation. Instead, they play the usual pay-less-taxes game, which is not exactly a loser but which ignores the effect of corporate-tax-relief as freeing up money for what?

JOB CREATION.

via Republicans push hard on GOP tax plan, but voters just aren’t that into it – LA Times

[It’s] important to remember that a figure like Nigel Farage, the former leader of the populist UK Independence Party, did not bring about Brexit all by himself; he needed the backing of very established figures from the Conservative Party like Michael Gove.

It was Gove, after all, who, in the face of warnings about Brexit by many experts, announced that “the people of this country have had enough of experts.”

The irony was that Gove himself clearly spoke with the authority of an expert: He has always been seen as one of the Tories’ most prominent “intellectuals.”

It took nothing less than an expert to convince people that claims of expertise are overrated.

Such a leap. An “intellectual” recognizes a movement, and movement people take their cue. Nah.

via Blaming the People | The Nation

Venezuelan shortages of everything are widely acknowledged. But there is less recognition that strongman Nicolás Maduro is using control of food to stamp out opposition.

Hyperinflation has shriveled household budgets and the government has taken over food production and distribution. Most damning is evidence that access to government rations has become conditional on Maduro’s good favor.

Pope Francis is well known for taking Latin-American tyrants down a peg, right? Don’t cry for him, Venezuela. He’s on his way. (He is?)

via Venezuela Is Starving Its People – WSJ

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the use of race in Harvard University’s admissions practices and has accused the university of failing to cooperate with the probe, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The Justice Department is investigating complaints that formed the basis of a federal civil lawsuit filed in 2014 in Boston, according to the documents. That suit alleges Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted.

Well. Bastion of liberalism caught with its quota down. Tsk, tsk.

via Harvard Faces DOJ Probe Over Affirmative-Action Policies – WSJ

Tosses in a footnote and then what?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is unquestionably an innovator. But in method, before it can be seen in results.

He always introduces the innovations in little doses, on the sly, perhaps in an allusive footnote, as he did with the now-famous footnote 351 of the postsynodal exhortation “Amoris Laetitia,” only to say later with candor, when questioned on one of his equally famous airborne press conferences, that he doesn’t even remember that footnote.

And yet those few cryptic lines were enough to ignite within the Church an unprecedented conflict, with entire episcopates squaring off, in Germany in favor of the innovations and in Poland against, and so all over the world between diocese and diocese, between parish and parish, where what is at stake is not only the yes or no to communion for the divorced and remarried, but the end of the indissolubility of marriage and the admission of divorce within the Catholic Church too, as is already taking place among Protestants and Orthodox.

Twinkle in eye should have warned us.

via Bergoglio’s Revolution. In Little Doses, But Irreversible – Settimo Cielo – Blog – L’Espresso