When those repercussions are rarely expressed in a manner that isn't tacitly anti-constitutional, I'll go ahead and complain/point out the hypocrisy. It's a song that literally lionizes a war fought over the same types of issues that players are protesting over. I've yet to see a single person who can give an argument for why it's disrespectful that holds up to any scrutiny at all.

TBH, I don't see where you are going with this. Sorry if I missed any earlier posts that explains this. Can you refer me to something or elaborate more on how blackballing him is tacitly anti-constitutional?

He has shown more vitriol toward players kneeling before the national anthem than white supremacists who chanted about killing jews in Charlottesville.

If that is directed towards me ... I am not a Trump supporter and am not defending him. There are some things I agree with and many more that I disagree with.

I'm talking about Trump, not you. Sorry.

I have two synthetic flags in great distress that I need to dispose of. There is no manner to do so according to the flag code. Some groups recommend cutting the stripes individually from the blue field and then throwing it all away in a normal trash can. The flag code is clear that you shouldn't throw away a flag.

What happens if people see me cutting up a flag? What if I say I'm cutting it in protest of Trump? What if I say I'm cutting it in protest of our lack of Christian morals? What if I say I'm protesting the stupid things in the last season of GoT?

I've never seen anyone care about the flag stuff unless it involves labeling a minority as unpatriotic. It's a time-tested method by racists to try to differentiate themselves as "real Americans" opposed to those dark skin traitors.

Remember how much dumb shit came up with Obama and flag pins, left-handed pledges, office color schemes, and so on?

And I'm not defending Kap's beliefs or anything. I just don't think this should be a national story that the President has made his primary focus. Especially when we're dealing with a maybe nuclear North Korea, a maybe nuclear Iran, health care, national debt, a US territory knocked back to the dark ages from a hurricane, and a slew of other important issues that actually impact people's lives. We're talking about a national anthem before mostly meaningless football games that the DoD pays the NFL for marketing purposes.

It's the equivalent of complaining about your neighbors shingles not meeting HOA regulations when a hurricane is minutes away.

We know why the President has chosen it, just sad the public bites on it.

Well stated.

Wait, what? Are Kaepernick etc against impressment? The right of immigrants to control their destiny on this continent? The concept of a national bank? Francis Scott Key was kind of a racist dick, but I'm still pro War of 1812.

For all the people on here who think Trump is a buffoon (which he is) it's stuff like this he pulls off that amuses me. Nothing new at all had happened before this shitstorm but he completely shifted the narrative from his failure on health care again (and North Korea) back to an issue that he has all of his base (and then some) on. People can get mad at him all they want but they are the pawns in his game on this one unfortunately.

Or, it gives us something else to complain/question his sanity about over the weekend while allowing us to continue to make fun of him during the week for his failure to get anything done at his actual job.

Also, I like how the narrative is these players are pampered millionaires, while a good portion grew up in abject poverty and are literally the epitome of the American dream.

Meanwhile, his supporters support a guy who has almost certainly never driven a car before because he's grew up so rich.

Yeah I agree with you on this board as the political discussions tend to go deeper and even the disagreeements are mild. But completely disagree on other social media, tv, just general public. They are hook, line, and sinker on this one for sure. Again nothing happened to cause his tweet, not one thing, it's clearly calculated and absolutely working to perfection.

Agree. However Keapernick is generally the target of this criticism since he is the face of this movement and he grew up adopted upper middle class so there is a counter arguement to be had by someone that actually knows a little more than Merica don't tread on me!

Its mainly his twitter bots flooding everything. I feel of the "major" mainstream news sources, Fox is the only one that will continue to hammer it as the day progresses, unless there's some fluff they need to push about Graham/Cassidy's revision to their latest EP or they float more stuff about corporate tax cuts.

I worked out at the gym this morning (with the barrage of tvs) and all the outlets ran mostly this story. (In fact Trump was tweeting again today about it to keep it in the news) The sports networks were the only ones that weren't spending as much time on it. This story is red meat for them pretty sure it will be front and center for a whole.

So when you kneel before God, that is being disrespectul?

What about when you kneel before Zod?

Over three million U.S. citizens have no power, water or communications. The kneel story may dominate the news, but it certainly shouldn't.

He's been in office less than a year and Trump can't pass any legislation and his approval rating is @40%. The distractions aren't working.

So.... In exchange for a modest increase in short term support by his base of supporters, he gives the protesting players a larger platform and even more mainstream attention to their concerns. A platform that apparently runs against conservative desires. What a genius.

Never said his plans were well thought out :) however I guess I would counter that he realizes where his votes are coming from and the kneeling side is not a big part of his reelection focus.

Well the midterm elections are coming up in the not so distant future and somebody with failed policies and complete failure of leadership should get trounced. However running on "Rich NFL players or the common people" platform may end up winning again. Most intelligent people can see right though that but we kind of thought the same thing last November right?

Very true. Taking the "right side" in these pop culture/morality/facebook topic of the day debates is so much more important to Trump's base than Obamacare or North Korea or anything else. That's why Russia can impact elections with thousands of facebook posts. (Though the news that Russia actually was successful in breaching voting machine security in at least some states, and attempted to in many more, seems to really be flying under the radar. But again, what an NFL player decides to do during the national anthem is way more important than that too, I guess). If Trump finds the right controversy regarding a sitcom star he could ride that all the way to another election win in 2020.

I've always heard to give old flags to the Boy Scouts who can dispose of it appropriately. Never tried, my synthetic flag is still holding up great.

And the changes I mentioned earlier to the travel ban have been getting very little attention on the news channels while they all have seemingly given large segments to the NFL/NBA tweets. Be nice if they focused more on the real issues than stuff he brings up to cover up the real issues.

He takes shots at the NBA and NFL while praising Nascar. He couldn't possibly make his intentions more transparent.

Regardless of where you stand, don't think you can blame him for this.

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/...tional-anthem/

And related to all this - I notice the top story on CNN.com right now is Tom Brady's comments on Trump and the protests. With all the things going on in the world right now.....He's a football player, and by all accounts, not one who is particularly political or a deep thinker.

It's this weird mix of extremes. There's this tendency to define everyone by politics and their political beliefs, but we're doing it through this reality show/crappy journalism lens.

We were really building to this kind of thing as a country. But usually there's backlashes and we reset.

Anthony Weiner gets 21 months in prison for his "sexting case". I hope that is the last we hear of him in the political world.

I think his story is amazing. He was a TE, OT, DT, WR who couldn't get on anywhere:


He went from a 250lb DE to a 340lb OT in a year and got on with PIT. He's a truly amazing individual. The only think you can say is that he went against his coaches wishes to do something that he believe in. The coach is trying to keep a buffer between the players and the media by denying either to make a point. The team wasn't protesting. The coach wanted the team to stick together for the betterment of the team, and by removing them from the situation he didn't allow them to protest either. I love how the media is running with this like the entire team was sitting in the locker room playing jacks in protest, while this brave soldier stood out all alone. He was 15 feet from the rest of the team, who was also standing in the tunnel.

FFS, people, why isn't the President flying to Puerto Rico? Why didn't people get this mad when a Cleveland police officer blew a kid away from near point blank range after engaging him in less than 10 seconds? I don't get it.

This could escalate very quickly. NK has drawn a line it will be hard to step back from now.

North Korea accuses U.S. of declaring war, says can take countermeasures

Yes you do. Its pretty simple.

Also, do you think people buying his jersey know he's only American by birth and his parents are foreigners? These are exactly the type of people they don't want here.

It's possible to admire him and what he did and not be anti-immigrant. I mean, it's pretty clear from his last name that he's not a good old boy from the south.

And his statements about what he did, and about the protests, was all about being a minority and how he felt blanket protests of America were short-sighted exactly because they overlooked that minorities are part of America and have a stake in this too - not just as victims or as some separate entities, but as individuals who can shape things in their own right.

The one thing lost in this is that Dale Earnhardt, Jr., by far the most popular driver, has tweeted in favor of the kneelers (Junior tends to be Center Left on most social issues, I'd say - but a lot of folks don't realize it).

So it sounds like the steelers had a players only meeting and the reason they stayed in the tunnel was to accommodate Villanueva. The players wanted to be all on the same page and Villanueva said he didn't want to be singled out. The compromise was all players stay in the tunnel. Villanueva went against what was decided, to accommodate his wishes, and separated himself from the team to go out there.

If what's being reported is true, all of the praise he's getting is probably going to be accompanied by some locker room resentment.

Wait you mean you can have an intelligent argument on both sides of the debate without resorting to name calling? STFU

Who knew Trump was still this pissed about the USFL folding?

So in a way, maybe Villanueva was protesting the team's decision to collectively avoid individual decisions to protest or not protest and to instead, as a team, do neither. So basically it's the equivalent of if one Steeler decided to come out and sit down or take a knee while everybody else was in the locker room/tunnel. Which, is kind of how this whole thing started, one guy going against the norm and doing his own thing as a form of protest. Once the norm is protesting, not protesting starts to look like a protest.

I hope next week somebody comes out and protests Villanueva's decision not to participate in the collective decision of the team not to participate in the protest debate.

This..... 1000x this....

*raises hand*

FWIW, I'm still pissed he helped wreck the USFL.

What are the odds that Trump tries to use an executive order to do something against the NFL? I'm not sure what.

I am guessing this is one of those "stand in line, we will get to your issue as soon as we can" things.

I am sure they will get around to it at some point.

Never forget the only reason Trump bought into the USFL was because the NFL would not let him own a team. In fact, I think the NFL refused to consider any merger talks with the USFL because of Trump and the thought of having to absorb him as an owner. Trump hates the NFL almost as much as he hates black people.

They said they would get a relief proposal to Congress in a week or two today.

I'm hopeful the FEMA head will see the scope of the problem and things will kick into a higher gear over the next few days. He's been solid so far.

btw- More positions in the executive should have an experience requirement like FEMA head now has due to the Katrina disaster.

If true, lowers my opinion of him but its hard to believe he wanted to grand stand like that after agreeing. Likely more to that story.

If only there was a way to find out. Like a very simple way. Like a way that would've taken maybe 10 seconds to search and result in thousands of articles.

What is even more hilarious is the fact that NASCAR released a PR message shortly thereafter. I highly doubt they make the statement they did without Dale Jr. taking his position.

And yes, are we going to help out Puerto Rico anytime soon?

Just remember Obama brought us NCAA Football Playoffs.