Rush Limbaugh on NFL anthem controversy: 'The left has hijacked this game'

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh weighed in Thursday on the ongoing furor over NFL players kneeling during "The Star-Spangled Banner," telling Fox News' "Hannity" that "the left has hijacked this game."

Previously a devoted pro football fan, Limbaugh told Sean Hannity that he did not watch Sunday's slate of games after hearing of the planned protests by players and vowed "I'm going to be playing golf on Sundays now."

The act of taking a knee during the pregame playing of the national anthem was started by then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick last year. Kaepernick said his action was a protest of racial inequality and police brutality.
President Trump brought the protests back into the national spotlight Friday when he asked the crowd at an Alabama rally, "Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say 'get that son of a b---- off the field right now, out, he's fired?'"
Those comments were condemned by NFL owners and dozens of players took a knee prior to the weekend's games, which in turn brought a backlash from some fans.
On Thursday night, Limbaugh told Hannity that the league's owners "have to be scared to death" by the protests and their fallout.
"I don’t think they understand what’s happening to them. I don’t think they understand what’s going on," the veteran radio host said. "They think they’re relating to the majority of their fan base, they’re not! They’re driving them away.
"And I hate it," Limbaugh continued. "I don’t want the NFL to get smaller, I don’t want it to become insignificant, I don’t want it to be taken over by a bunch of wusses. I don’t want it to be taken over by left-wing social justice causes.
Addressing the player protesters, Limbaugh concluded, "Use something besides the NFL sideline, use something besides the flag, use something besides something that people use to escape."

John Stossel: The incredible threat to free speech that no one is talking about

FILE -- In this photo, people walk through Sproul Plaza near the Sather Gate on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif. The university suspended a class on Sept. 13, 2016, amid complaints that it shared anti-Semitic viewpoints and was designed to indoctrinate students against Israel.  (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

A third threat to free speech at University of California, Berkeley has led to more censorship than political rioters or college administrators.

Berkeley is expensive. Out of state students must pay $60,000 a year. But for five years, Berkeley generously posted 20,000 of its professors' lectures online. Anyone could watch them for free.
Then government regulators stepped in.
The Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates, "No qualified individual with a disability shall ... be denied the benefits of ... services."
As with most laws, people can spend years debating what terms like "denied," "benefits" and "services" mean.
President Obama's eager regulators, in response to a complaint from activists, decided that Berkeley's videos violated the ADA. The Justice Department sent the school a threatening letter: "Berkeley is in violation of title II ... (T)he Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit."
What Berkeley had done wrong, said the government, was failing to caption the videos for the hearing impaired. The ADA makes it illegal to "deny" deaf people services available to others.
Equality is a noble goal, but closed captioning is expensive.
Computers are learning to turn speech into text, but so far they're not good at it. A speech-to-text program transcribed a Harvard lecturer's comment "on our campus" as "hot Kampen good."
Captions that meet government's standards must be typed out by a person who listens to each word. Captioning Berkley's 20,000 lectures would cost millions. The school decided that, to be safe, it would just stop offering its videos. The administration even removed the existing videos from its website.
So now, instead of some deaf people struggling to understand university lectures, no one gets to hear them.
Politicians mean well when they pass rules like the ADA, but every regulation has unintended consequences. Most are bad.
In this case, fortunately, an angry entrepreneur came to the rescue. Jeremy Kauffman hates to see valuable things disappear, so right before Berkeley deleted its website, Kauffman copied the videos and posted them on his website, called LBRY (as in Library).
He says the Berkeley videos are just the start of what LBRY has planned. He wants the site to be YouTube -- but without the content restrictions.
LBRY uses a new technology that operates like Bitcoin. It's "decentralized," meaning videos posted are stored on thousands of computers around the world. That makes it nearly impossible for governments -- or even Kauffman himself -- to remove them.
"LBRY is designed to be much more decentralized, much more controlled by users" and "absolutely freer," Kauffman explains in a video I posted this week.
He acknowledges that with no censorship, his invention may end up hosting videos of bad things -- beheadings, child porn, who knows what else. But he argues that if he creates a system with censorship, "it allows us to keep the bad stuff out, which is great, but it also allows dictatorial regimes to keep content off. Do we want to make videos available to the people in Turkey, Iran and China? We say yes."
LBRY will let users flag videos depicting illegal actions. Those videos may no longer be shown on LBRY. However, other websites can show the illegal content using LBRY's technology, and Kauffman can't stop that.
Kauffman says he won't remove the Berkeley videos from his site even if he's sued because there aren't captions for deaf people.
"Is that a reason that content shouldn't be available to everyone?" asks Kauffman.
Government is force whether it is deliberately doing something cruel or just trying to solve one group's problems by imposing restrictions on others. "Do you want to put a gun to someone's face and say 'Caption those videos'? It's absurd."
It is absurd. What government does is often absurd.
Thank goodness for the internet and for people like Kauffman, someone willing to spend his own money to keep information free.
John Stossel is the author of "No They Can't! Why Government Fails -- But Individuals Succeed." Click here for more information on John Stossel.

Dershowitz mulls UC Berkeley lawsuit over possible 'content-based discrimination'

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said Thursday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that he is considering suing the University of California, Berkeley over a stipulation that would prevent him to speak on campus.

Dershowitz told Tucker Carlson that the school prevented him from speaking on Israel because he did not give the school eight-week advance notice.

He said the school, however, usually waives the stipulation for speakers who are invited by a department, but those speakers tend to be anti-Israel, liberals and radicals.
“If no department invites us, having invited people from the other side, we will sue them arguing that the eight-week rule is a cover for content-based discrimination against moderates, liberals, conservatives and supporters of Israel,” Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz, who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, said he was certain to find that Berkeley has already invited anti-Israel speakers from across the U.S. and that he would not receive an invitation.
“We’re testing Berkeley at this point to see if it happens there,” he said. “I wanted to speak at the school and I wanted to present to students the liberal case for Israel and if Berkeley won’t let me do it, I have a legal recourse in which I intend to take.”
Dershowitz said he hopes Berkeley will allow him to speak, whether it is a department inviting him or the school changing the rule.

NFL Player Cartoons

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.

Dishonoring the flag by making it the object of protest, no matter how great the cause, is repugnant and nonsensical.

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 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.