Thursday, September 28, 2017
Stacy Washington: NFL players should hand a folded flag to a dead soldier’s family, then consider kneeling
The NFL has a choice to make and it’s
an easy one: political activism or sports. The American people will
only tolerate one of those so they had best choose wisely. There are
two prevailing perspectives here and both of them cannot coexist leaving
the NFL unscathed. On one side the NFL players enjoy a league minimum
pay of $465,000 a year while their fans earn a median household income
of $56,515. The players lead rarified lives that don’t appear to leave
room for understanding just who their supporters are.
Football devotees utilize their hard
earned money to buy $250 jerseys to wear at the expensively priced
games, or to purchase a cable subscription to Sunday Ticket or Red Zone
to enjoy the game at home with friends and family. This is can’t-miss
activity that some football enthusiasts attend with a regularity
resembling church fervor. But why are fans so devoted to the anthem and
flag? Aren’t they just symbols?
My experience with the flag gives a glimpse into why
the majority of Americans will never accept “taking a knee.” While on
Active Duty in the Air Force I had the privilege of serving on the Air
Force Honor Guard performing burial services on a team. The pallbearers
would retrieve the casket from the hearse and place it on a stand where
we would unfurl a brand new, crisp U.S. flag. We wore dress blues and
white gloves. As the folding commenced the only sounds were soft sobs,
birds chirping and the snapping sound of our gloves making contact with
the material of the flag. With each sweeping motion the sound of
mourning would increase a bit in time with the cathartic motions that
signified the end of the ritual.Sometimes the task of handing over the folded flag would fall to me, and I would cradle the triangle of cloth to my uniformed chest and glide over to the canopy where the family awaited. On one occasion I handed the flag into the tiny hands of a child of perhaps four or five. Another time I looked into the red-rimmed eyes of an older woman who thanked me through her tears. This ceremony takes place countless times around the nation on an almost daily basis as veterans, retirees and active duty service members killed in the line of duty are laid to rest. These people have a close connection to our flag through the service of themselves or their loved ones.Dishonoring the flag by making it the object of protest, no matter how great the cause, is repugnant and nonsensical.
Dishonoring the flag by making it the object of protest, no matter how great the cause, is repugnant and nonsensical to these people. Polling shows that 58 percent of NFL supporters lean to the right politically; Americans who revere both veterans and military service members. These people love America, making the NFL players' insistence on taking a knee during the national anthem a losing proposition. There are ways to sway a community; defiling a national symbol associated with honor, service, sacrifice and bravery isn’t one of them. If the NFL continues to indulge the players, declining ratings and lower attendance at games will become the norm. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the team owners must man up: choose the fans by ending the protests.
Stacy Washington is host of the "Stacy on the Right Show," broadcast on Urban Family Talk Monday through Friday from 2-3pm in St. Louis, Missouri. Click here for more.
Michelle Obama slams women who voted for Trump
Former first lady Michelle Obama
said, “Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their
own voice.”
(REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst, File)
Former first lady Michelle Obama
leveled harsh criticism Wednesday at women who voted for President
Trump, suggesting they voted against their own interests.
“Any woman who voted against Hillary
Clinton voted against their own voice,” Obama told the audience during a
talk at a marketing conference in Boston, according to Boston.com.
She went on to suggest female voters for Trump were just going with the pack.“It doesn’t say much about Hillary, and everybody’s trying to worry about what it means for Hillary and no, no, no what does this mean for us as women?” she asked, as reported by the Washington Times. “That we look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, ‘He’s better for me. His voice is more true to me.’ To me that just says, you don’t like your voice. You just like the thing you’re told to like.”
She was taking a swipe at a large swath of the population -- according to exit polls, 41 percent of women voted for Trump in November.
Obama, who campaigned for Clinton during the 2016 election, was speaking as a part of Inbound, a sales and marketing conference.
When talking directly about Trump, Obama took a different tone.
“We want him to be successful. He was elected,” she said, referring to her and former President Barack Obama’s hopes for the current president. “When you’ve been in that position, you have a different perspective.”
Her former president husband, though, has been stepping up his criticism of Trump lately, including taking to Facebook to blast the decision to roll back his DACA executive action for so-called "dreamers."
Alleged leaker hid NSA documents in pantyhose, report says
A former National Security Agency contractor has
reportedly told federal authorities that she smuggled classified
documents out of the NSA office where she worked by stuffing them in her
pantyhose.
The documents reportedly contained classified data on Russia’s alleged hacking during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a former Air Force linguist
with a top-secret security clearance, was asked by an FBI agent about
how she managed to get the documents out of the agency's Augusta, Ga.,
office.She responded: “Folded it in half in my pantyhose,” Politico reported, citing a transcript filed by prosecutors Wednesday.
Winner worked as a government contractor in Augusta until June, when she was charged with copying a classified report and mailing it to an online news organization.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps has scheduled a hearing Friday to reconsider releasing Winner on bond. He ordered her jailed in June after prosecutors said Winner may have taken more than a single classified report.
They said Winner had inserted a portable hard drive into a top-secret Air Force computer before she left the military last year.
Winner's defense lawyers argued in a court filing Saturday that prosecutors haven't accused Winner of any additional crimes more than three months later. They noted several other cases in which defendants accused of leaking multiple secret documents were freed on pre-trial bonds.
Jennifer Solari, an assistant U.S. attorney, warned the judge in June that investigators hadn't found the portable hard drive that Winner allegedly plugged into an Air Force computer and didn't know what might be on it.
Winner's lawyers included an email from Solari in their latest court filing in which the prosecutor noted that she was mistaken when she previously told the judge that Winner was recorded in a jailhouse phone conversation saying: "Mom, those documents. I screwed up."
Solari wrote that the recording shows that Winner actually told her mother: "I leaked a document."
Defense attorneys wrote that if Winner is released, her mother in Kingsville, Texas, would move to Georgia to live with her and ensure that she complies with all bond conditions.
Authorities haven't described the classified report Winner is accused of leaking or named the news outlet that received it. But the Justice Department announced Winner's arrest on the same day the Intercept reported it had obtained a classified NSA report suggesting that Russian hackers attacked a U.S. voting software supplier before last year's presidential election.
The NSA report was dated May 5, the same as the document Winner is charged with leaking.
Deep state? 78 Obama appointees 'burrowed' in gov't, report says
By the time Barack Obama's presidency ended in
January 2017, 78 of his political appointees had "burrowed" into
government jobs over the course of six years, a report says.
The report from the Government Accountability Office was obtained by the Washington Times.
"Burrowing" refers to a process in which political
appointees are appointed to career-level jobs to protect them from being
ousted once a new administration takes over.Of the 78 such appointees identified in the GAO report, seven had switched to career jobs without first receiving necessary approval from the Office of Personnel Management, the report says. Four were later denied the positions and three later resigned.
The department with the highest number of conversions was the Department of Homeland Security, with nine appointees burrowing in. The Department of Justice was second with eight conversions.
The process of burrowing is not an uncommon for administrations on the way out. President George W. Bush had at least 26 conversions approved in his final year in office.
Obama was warned in his final year against assigning political appointees to career jobs and was asked by Republicans to implement a hiring freeze to avoid keeping workers who opposed President Donald Trump's policies.
“Not only is ‘burrowing in’ unfair to applicants without an inside connection, it further contributes to the possibility that federal workers may attempt to undermine the policies of the new president,” Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., wrote to Obama, McClatchyDC reported.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
Tit for Tat ? ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — A statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass was ripped from its base in Rochester on the an...
-
NEW YORK (AP) — As New York City faced one of its darkest days with the death toll from the coronavirus surging past 4,000 — more th...
-
What's the role of government? To one award-winning academic, it's discrimination according to race. On February 9th, Mic...