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It says the players can stay in the locker room during the anthem.

So who wants to bet how long until a team doesnt come out until after the anthem, and the drama that entails?

I am betting they will instead start using the raised fist salute (or other salute) either during or right after the anthem....Jesse Owens style.

The only problem I have with the protests is the lack of a clear endgame. At what point will the players stand and respect the flag/anthem? When no blacks are ever killed by whites ever again? When Chigao stops drowning in b vs b blood? When all cops just stop doing their jobs? There's no change that can be implemented to meet their loose demands. It's ridiculous.

Kneeling IS respecting the flag/anthem.

But the point is that blacks are seen as less human than whites, especially by police. Until that is fixed there is a problem.

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
The only problem I have with the protests is the lack of a clear endgame. At what point will the players stand and respect the flag/anthem? When no blacks are ever killed by whites ever again? When Chigao stops drowning in b vs b blood? When all cops just stop doing their jobs? There's no change that can be implemented to meet their loose demands. It's ridiculous.

largely its a "hey, this is a problem and we're trying to make people think more about it and not just dismiss or forget about it" than a "we want to see a defined and clear solution". Thats a pretty common thing.

It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.


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 Vaktathi wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
The only problem I have with the protests is the lack of a clear endgame. At what point will the players stand and respect the flag/anthem? When no blacks are ever killed by whites ever again? When Chigao stops drowning in b vs b blood? When all cops just stop doing their jobs? There's no change that can be implemented to meet their loose demands. It's ridiculous.

largely its a "hey, this is a problem and we're trying to make people think more about it and not just dismiss or forget about it" than a "we want to see a defined and clear solution". Thats a pretty common thing.

What’s the endgame for those yellow ribbons on peoples cars?

 d-usa wrote:
It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.

I would argue that demanding people respect the flag is probably one of the most unfree things anyone can say.

No one has any obligation to respect a piece of fabric, especially when they don't feel that all the things that fabric supposedly represents don't apply to them.

This is why free speech is a right. Now the NFL can of course as a private organization set whatever rules it wants for it's players, but honestly an entire team sitting out on a game sounds a lot worse than a few players kneeling so to me this just feels like doubling down on the stupidity. So a few players knelt during the national anthem because they want something to change. This entire issue has drawn far more attention than it ever warranted.

 LordofHats wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.

I would argue that demanding people respect the flag is probably one of the most unfree things anyone can say.

No one has any obligation to respect a piece of fabric, especially when they don't feel that all the things that fabric supposedly represents don't apply to them.

This is why free speech is a right. Now the NFL can of course as a private organization set whatever rules it wants for it's players, but honestly an entire team sitting out on a game sounds a lot worse than a few players kneeling so to me this just feels like doubling down on the stupidity. So a few players knelt during the national anthem because they want something to change. This entire issue has drawn far more attention than it ever warranted.

Making the "Kneeling" the story rather than the"Black Lives Matter movement" the story is a pretty amazing piece of Co-opting the intent. I really have to hand it to the Right-wingers on this one. They completely changed and controlled the narrative almost from day 1 on this.

Pretty terrifying really.

 Ouze wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
Is it still constitutional to slide into his DMs?

The right to send unsolicited dick pics.... shall not be infringed.

I mean according to stormy it looks like Alf so do you really want to get sent one?

That explains things...

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.

I would argue that demanding people respect the flag is probably one of the most unfree things anyone can say.

No one has any obligation to respect a piece of fabric, especially when they don't feel that all the things that fabric supposedly represents don't apply to them.

This is why free speech is a right. Now the NFL can of course as a private organization set whatever rules it wants for it's players, but honestly an entire team sitting out on a game sounds a lot worse than a few players kneeling so to me this just feels like doubling down on the stupidity. So a few players knelt during the national anthem because they want something to change. This entire issue has drawn far more attention than it ever warranted.

Making the "Kneeling" the story rather than the"Black Lives Matter movement" the story is a pretty amazing piece of Co-opting the intent. I really have to hand it to the Right-wingers on this one. They completely changed and controlled the narrative almost from day 1 on this.

Pretty terrifying really.

A valid point.

 Easy E wrote:
I am betting they will instead start using the raised fist salute (or other salute) either during or right after the anthem....Jesse Owens style.

That's. . . . . not Jesse Owens (no. . Jesse Owens was the one who single-handedly whipped the gak out of the 'superior' Nazis in 1936)

Pictured there is Tommie Smith (Gold), Peter Norman (silver, and an Aussie who, in talking with the American counterparts agreed with, and apparently campaigned in similar fashion for other groups in Australia), and John Carlos (Bronze)

In light of the recent SCOTUS ruling on arbitration:

https://newrepublic.com/article/148329/america-broke-economy

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I am betting they will instead start using the raised fist salute (or other salute) either during or right after the anthem....Jesse Owens style.

That's. . . . . not Jesse Owens (no. . Jesse Owens was the one who single-handedly whipped the gak out of the 'superior' Nazis in 1936)

Pictured there is Tommie Smith (Gold), Peter Norman (silver, and an Aussie who, in talking with the American counterparts agreed with, and apparently campaigned in similar fashion for other groups in Australia), and John Carlos (Bronze)

Also, Malcolm Jenkins did the fist salute all season long for the Eagles last year.

 Peregrine wrote:
I'm not really convinced on that. The numbers might be similar, but there are very different reasons for those numbers.

The numbers aren't similar, in 2006 to 2008 they were vastly better than they are now. Dems right now are tracking +7 or +8, about half the margins they had in 2006. Given how awful Trump is in so many ways, this shows how much more extreme conservative partisanship has become. In the back quarter of his presidency Bush hit 15% approvals, which was taken at the time to show that 15% of the voting public were willing to back a Republican no matter what. Now we've got a president who's even worse, and around 35% of voters are backing him no matter what, and another 5 to 7% don't seem to take much convincing to stay on board.

In 2006-2008 we had an unpopular republican president who was largely unpopular for policy reasons: tax cuts, a struggling economy, and an an unpopular war with no end in sight. It was certainly a favorable position for the democrats, but the republican party still had credibility left and wasn't all that far from power. In 2018 we have an unpopular president who is unpopular because he's a raging dumpster fire who doesn't even pretend to be a competent politician, backed by a party that has demonstrated that it has no plan or priorities or moral standards or really anything besides a desire to be in power. You can't even argue with Trump and the republican party over policy issues because the only thing they've managed to accomplish has been an unpopular tax cut for wealthy campaign donors. Everything else has been dumped or reversed the moment it looked like it would take any effort to pass something. The entire party has been revealed as utterly lacking in the ability to stand for something, anything at all. So where do you go in the post-Trump era? You're talking about a party that needs to completely reinvent itself and purge the failures before it can even think about competing, and that's a lot more difficult than waiting for the normal political cycle to come around again.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think we're largely on the same page. I agree with the dire state of Republican politics. Not only does their policy platform have no popular support, not even among their own base, but the party lost its intellectual base years ago, so now the only academics attempting to argue for its platform are grifters and idiots.

The difference is I no longer believe this will produce some kind of great electoral reckoning. It is near impossible to understate how broken American politics is right now, in so many ways. No matter how bad Republicans are, they'll get 40 something % in the mid-terms, and that makes them competitive in the House, and favourites to keep the senate. Now matter how obvious Trump's crimes become and how blatant the Republican cover up is, most conservatives will get a wholly different version of events, so even if Trump or Pence or whoever is slaughtered in 2020, Republicans will be in a position to resume blocking Democratic legislation out of spite. At which point Republicans will fall for a bunch of stupid lies about the new Democratic president, meanwhile the socialist puritans will start virtue signalling and drop out of support for the Democratic candidate, and the whole mess will play out all over again.

Maybe at some point the Republican party will be so undeniably horrible that not even partisan conservative media and blind tribal loyalty will be able to save them. But if such a point exists, why haven't we reached it in the last two decades of Republican failure?


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 whembly wrote:
Repeat after me... it's an outlier, it's an outlier, it's an outlier, it's an outlier, it's an outlier, it's an outlier, it's an outlier:
http://polling.reuters.com/#!response/TM1212Y17/type/week/filters/PD1:1/dates/20170601-20180523/collapsed/true

You know single polls are a stupid waste of time, we've discussed this many times, but you keep linking to ones that suit your narrative.

Meanwhile, in sensible polling aggregates, we see the generic lead for Dems has narrowed to about 5 points. The narrowing was to be expected, Republicans were always going to come home. Sure, they might hate the chaos and mess in the White House, think the only legislation passed by Republicans, the tax give away, was a bad policy, and be scared of Republicans plans to cut their health and social security, but they gotta stay with team red, because what's the alternative, vote for a Democrat?

The real question is what impact we'll see from turnout. Remember the position in 2010 looked good but not great for Republicans in 2010, but what polls couldn't capture is how many Democrat said they'd vote Democrat butt hen didn't show on election day, while the Republican turnout was crazy for a mid-term. It is not certain, but likely we might be seeing a similar phenomenon for Democrats this cycle.


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 whembly wrote:
Report didn't say it was "unsecured"... only that its good policy to swap it out (ala burner phone).

"President Donald Trump uses a White House cellphone that isn’t equipped with sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications..."

That is literally the first line of the article you linked to.

 d-usa wrote:
It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.


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 Vaktathi wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
The only problem I have with the protests is the lack of a clear endgame. At what point will the players stand and respect the flag/anthem? When no blacks are ever killed by whites ever again? When Chigao stops drowning in b vs b blood? When all cops just stop doing their jobs? There's no change that can be implemented to meet their loose demands. It's ridiculous.

largely its a "hey, this is a problem and we're trying to make people think more about it and not just dismiss or forget about it" than a "we want to see a defined and clear solution". Thats a pretty common thing.

What’s the endgame for those yellow ribbons on peoples cars?

I would assume getting a loved one home from a deployment. That's not really a form of protest though.

It's only a problem as long as the media scours the country for similar stories to run. Pretty much fallen off the radar after the election. Now gun control and mass shootings are all the rage.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I would only be surprised if the Dems failed to pick up the Senate. House is gerrymandered pretty hard, because, ya know, feth representing the people.

The senate is the tougher task. The Dems only have to pick up a couple of seats, but they only have a few realistic shots at what they can pick up, and they've got to defend a lot of seats in red states.

It isn't impossible, but winning the senate will likely take a strong Dem environment where retaking the house is close to inevitable.

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.


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 Vaktathi wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
The only problem I have with the protests is the lack of a clear endgame. At what point will the players stand and respect the flag/anthem? When no blacks are ever killed by whites ever again? When Chigao stops drowning in b vs b blood? When all cops just stop doing their jobs? There's no change that can be implemented to meet their loose demands. It's ridiculous.

largely its a "hey, this is a problem and we're trying to make people think more about it and not just dismiss or forget about it" than a "we want to see a defined and clear solution". Thats a pretty common thing.

What’s the endgame for those yellow ribbons on peoples cars?

I would assume getting a loved one home from a deployment. That's not really a form of protest though.

It's only a problem as long as the media scours the country for similar stories to run. Pretty much fallen off the radar after the election. Now gun control and mass shootings are all the rage.

It fell off the radar after the election? I forgot that candidate Trump said all those things on Twitter, and Vice-President Elect Pence made a trip to a game for the sole purpose of walking out of it.

What really happened: It fell off the radar after the NFL season was over, its back on the radar as the NFL season gets closer.

Weird how that happens.

Prestor Jon wrote:
It's got nothing to do with free speech rights. The players are current employees of the team, fulfilling job duties in their place of business therefore their employer, the team ownership group, can dictate standards of behavior for their employees while they're on the job. I can be fired or disciplined for speech or actions at work that violate my employer's code of conduct. Now, simply because the team ownership groups have the ability to enact this policy doesn't make it good policy but it's not un-American or a violation of free speech rights.

Close but not quite. There is more to free speech than making sure you stick just to its legal requirements. A country where all media is owned by friends of the president and they all deny any media time to his critics wouldn't be illegal, because free speech doesn't require you to give a platform, but we all know how stifling that would be to public debate.

No-platforming is a major element of free speech, and while companies are entitled to control the speech of their employees, things pretty clearly get very murky very quickly when those companies restrict some speech but not other speech. Imagine if athletes were taking a knee to protest the poor state of care for wounded veterans. Does anyone want to pretend the fan reaction would have been the same, and the NFL's eventual policy the same?

The plain reality is that despite the legal protections of the first amendment, speech will be denied certain platforms if it makes sufficiently powerful people uncomfortable. Claiming there's nothing wrong with that because it doesn't cross the first amendment is not the point.

 d-usa wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.


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 Vaktathi wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
The only problem I have with the protests is the lack of a clear endgame. At what point will the players stand and respect the flag/anthem? When no blacks are ever killed by whites ever again? When Chigao stops drowning in b vs b blood? When all cops just stop doing their jobs? There's no change that can be implemented to meet their loose demands. It's ridiculous.

largely its a "hey, this is a problem and we're trying to make people think more about it and not just dismiss or forget about it" than a "we want to see a defined and clear solution". Thats a pretty common thing.

What’s the endgame for those yellow ribbons on peoples cars?

I would assume getting a loved one home from a deployment. That's not really a form of protest though.

It's only a problem as long as the media scours the country for similar stories to run. Pretty much fallen off the radar after the election. Now gun control and mass shootings are all the rage.

It fell off the radar after the election? I forgot that candidate Trump said all those things on Twitter, and Vice-President Elect Pence made a trip to a game for the sole purpose of walking out of it.

What really happened: It fell off the radar after the NFL season was over, its back on the radar as the NFL season gets closer.

Weird how that happens.

It never fell off the radar. It was always about the over policing of African Americans. Right now people are talking about the Starbucks case and Sterling Brown getting tackled and tased due to parking in two handicap spaces at Walgreens at 2 am.

This goes back to the comment about effectively hijacking the narrative.

The over-policing (aka: what the kneeling is about) stayed in the news, and was joined by news about people calling 911 on AirBnB users, people grilling, and house inspectors doing their job.

The disrespecting the flag (aka: how the kneeling is being covered) comes and goes with the kneeling players being on TV.

 Ouze wrote:
I don't think Trump should be able to delete tweets since he has proclaimed them to be officially presidential statements, making them subject to various records acts. However I don't think the very act of a public official using a platform magically transforms said platform into a public space and that's actually opening the door to a really difficult area. They're essentially taking from Twitter, a private platform, the right to administer themselves as they see fit by dint of specific users that happen to use the service.

I am not sure if I agree with the ruling, and I would be amazed if it survives appeal, but note there is a difference between blocking and ignoring someone. If you place someone on ignore you won't see their comments. If you block them they are made unable to see your comments or post replies to them. It's the difference between sticking your fingers in your ears when someone is talking, and locking them out of the room so they can't hear you and no-one can hear their side. If Trump is going to use twitter for official business, then I can see how blocking people from hearing those official pronouncements and making it impossible for them to give response can be seen as a problem.

And everyone should go and read through the responses to one of Trump's tweets one time. Well, read at least for a little bit, because there'll be a few thousand replies there. It's wild. There's PR accounts glorifying Trump and tweeting bible quotes. There's this one Trump loyalist, Jacob Wohl, who is there tweeting within seconds of Trump's post, putting out cheerleading spam, including a picture of him with Trump. Jacob is only 20 and already has a conviction for financial fraud, so of course he loves Trump and has somehow found some kind of role in his social media operation. In between there's hundreds of tweet media operatives making blue wave rally calls and calling people to join their little movement, because that's a business model somehow. It's like the whole broken US democratic experience, broken down in to tiny, ultra-crazy 280 character slices.


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 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
The only problem I have with the protests is the lack of a clear endgame. At what point will the players stand and respect the flag/anthem? When no blacks are ever killed by whites ever again? When Chigao stops drowning in b vs b blood? When all cops just stop doing their jobs? There's no change that can be implemented to meet their loose demands. It's ridiculous.

There's never a clear end game to any civil rights position, because absolute equality is an impossible, ever moving goal. The civil rights era protests were equally unclear in their end game, they never did and never could achieve absolute equality between the races. But the point is they led to improvement, things weren't made perfect but they were made better.

And of course there are changes that could be implemented. Less black people shot when they were not endangering anyone, and more police properly held accountable for bad shoots.


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 Easy E wrote:
Making the "Kneeling" the story rather than the"Black Lives Matter movement" the story is a pretty amazing piece of Co-opting the intent. I really have to hand it to the Right-wingers on this one. They completely changed and controlled the narrative almost from day 1 on this.

Pretty terrifying really.

They do this all the time. The right wing media isn't so much in partisan support of the Republican party, as the two are both organically part of the same organisation. It is impossible to say where the Republican party stops and The Daily Caller or FOX News begins, because they all work in such close co-ordination.

What this means is when an issue like this comes up, most media assigns a small amount of time to it, because it's pretty minor, and the attention they do assign will look to make the issue as interesting as possible, which means focusing on the controversial element in a "he said she said" fashion. Meanwhile the conservative media will see this as a great red meat issue for their base and the culture war stuff they love, they'll give it hours of coverage, and it will be entirely from the conservative point of view. That view then ends up bleeding back in to mainstream media, it is given more attention and now comes with a lot of in-built assumptions from the coverage it received in right wing media.

And yes, this is exactly how that stupid nonsense about Clinton's emails came to be a dominant electoral issue, while things like Trump running a scam university were minor footnotes.


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 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
It's only a problem as long as the media scours the country for similar stories to run. Pretty much fallen off the radar after the election.

You somehow missed Mike Pence as Vice President making a show of flying to a match, to make a highly publicized walk out. Funny that.

Anyhow, your idea that this is a purely media driven exercise with no input from politicians really misses how politics works today.


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 d-usa wrote:
This goes back to the comment about effectively hijacking the narrative.

The over-policing (aka: what the kneeling is about) stayed in the news, and was joined by news about people calling 911 on AirBnB users, people grilling, and house inspectors doing their job.

The disrespecting the flag (aka: how the kneeling is being covered) comes and goes with the kneeling players being on TV.

I think its worth noting that while I think the reaction to players kneeling was pretty ugly and showed some real issues with the lack of honesty in many race issues in American politics, that doesn't mean the kneeling was a good idea. It was, ultimately, the idea of one player*, and was led more by his personal objection than any coherent political plan to force action.

Any kind of protest has to find a balance between symbolic acts that draw attention to the cause, and acts that distract from the cause or de-legitimise it. While I sympathise with Kaepernick's beliefs, I think his actions and the actions of the players that followed served mostly to give people a chance to pretend players kneeling was a big deal, and that let them ignore the real issues Kaepernick and the other players were trying to raise.



*And it was his second idea. At first he remained seated, it was only after conversations with veterans that Kaepernick instead switched to kneeling.


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 d-usa wrote:
In light of the recent SCOTUS ruling on arbitration:

https://newrepublic.com/article/148329/america-broke-economy

That's a really good article. I think the article is right on the money when it talks about the role of monopoly power (really oligopoly in most cases) flattening wages. An industry with 20 large companies will see wages spike when workers with the right skills are in short supply, when there's only 3 or 4 major players then companies won't start bidding wars for works because they have enough impact on the market that any increase in wages they offered wouldn't get them more and better workers, it would just raise the base industry rate. That said, I don't think that's a complete story of what's happened - because other countries have far more limited numbers of players just because they're smaller countries, and haven't seen the same wage stagnation. I think a large part of the issue is a cultural change - it's likely that a large part of more equal wages was cultural - people simply accepted more even levels of pay as how things were, and that idea has been lost, people now think fair is whatever you can command to be paid.

However, the article is wrong on its last point, about federal reserve reaction. No, the fed doesn't crank interest rates if wages increase. It reacts to inflation, and inflation isn't just raising wages, it is when wage increases are unconnected to productivity increases. A lot of the research in to what's gone wrong with wages in the last four decades has come from the fed reserve. Far from building policy to keep wages down, the fed is doing a lot of the work to find out what's really going on.

Anyhow, it was an excellent article overall.

Prestor Jon wrote:

 Steve steveson wrote:
Had it been a preexisting policy that might be the case, but unilaterally changing the policy to restrict speech or action you previously allowed because of political pressure stinks of censorship.

Private entities are entitled to censor their employees and dictate what product they produce. The NFL already has strict dress codes for game days which is perfectly fine because as the employer they can set uniform standards for their employees. Revising a policy that didn't exist previously because the issue it addresses didn't manifest until last year is a normal reaction. Do I have a right to express myself and lawfully protest an issue? Yes. Do I have a right to do that while on the job in my workplace without suffering any repercussions from my employer? No.

Are you for or against the players protesting?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Are you for or against the players protesting?

Why are you assuming that a post entirely about what the NFL is and isn't legally permitted to do requires knowing the poster's opinions about whether or not they should do it? You can be 100% in favor of the players protesting and still acknowledge that the NFL, as a private organization, has the legal right to set a code of conduct and fire employees who do not follow it.


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 sebster wrote:
If Trump is going to use twitter for official business, then I can see how blocking people from hearing those official pronouncements and making it impossible for them to give response can be seen as a problem.

This is the key point, and why the ruling is likely to stand on appeal. It only applies to a social media account being used for official business by Trump in his job as president. It isn't Trump's personal property, it's a function of the US federal government and the rights of freedom of speech and property ownership granted to individuals do not apply to it. If Trump had a separate personal account, used as a private citizen and not as a part of the government, he would be free to do whatever he wants with it and none of this ruling would apply.

Birtherism. Had flimsy evidence that Trump loyalists in the party and in the media twisted to produce a favorable narrative, only for it to finally fizzle out when the full facts were shown and it became clear there was never a sensible way to even pretend this story had legitimacy and it was a nonsense conspiracy theory from the beginning.

Voter fraud and the millions of fake votes for Clinton. Had flimsy evidence that Trump loyalists in the party and in the media twisted to produce a favorable narrative, only for it to finally fizzle out when the full facts were shown and it became clear there was never a sensible way to even pretend this story had legitimacy and it was a nonsense conspiracy theory from the beginning.

The unmasking scandal. Had flimsy evidence that Trump loyalists in the party and in the media twisted to produce a favorable narrative, only for it to finally fizzle out when the full facts were shown and it became clear there was never a sensible way to even pretend this story had legitimacy and it was a nonsense conspiracy theory from the beginning.

The Nunes memo. Had flimsy evidence that Trump loyalists in the party and in the media twisted to produce a favorable narrative, only for it to finally fizzle out when the full facts were shown and it became clear there was never a sensible way to even pretend this story had legitimacy and it was a nonsense conspiracy theory from the beginning.

The FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Had flimsy evidence that Trump loyalists in the party and in the media twisted to produce a favorable narrative, but could this be the one that doesn't turn out to be a stupid conspiracy theory?


No. It's another stupid conspiracy theory. I know this because I have the pattern recognition of at least a four year old.

 Ouze wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
Is it still constitutional to slide into his DMs?

The right to send unsolicited dick pics.... shall not be infringed.

Wait wait, can you really DM the President of the USA? Asking for a friend, NSA, get off my back!

 Dreadwinter wrote:
Wait wait, can you really DM the President of the USA? Asking for a friend, NSA, get off my back!

You can only DM someone on twitter if they follow you.

 sebster wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
Wait wait, can you really DM the President of the USA? Asking for a friend, NSA, get off my back!

You can only DM someone on twitter if they follow you.

Well, at least I have a few new pictures to regret.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Are you for or against the players protesting?

Why are you assuming that a post entirely about what the NFL is and isn't legally permitted to do requires knowing the poster's opinions about whether or not they should do it? You can be 100% in favor of the players protesting and still acknowledge that the NFL, as a private organization, has the legal right to set a code of conduct and fire employees who do not follow it.


... ...

Because I don't believe "it's legal" means "it's right".

Because I want to know people's political opinons.

Because this thread is about politics, not contract law.

What do you guys make of the story floating around about Donald Trump and Elliot Broidy, casting doubt about who's child it was that got aborted?

The default story has been that Michael Cohen had two clients (and also maybe Sean Hannity, but we'll leave that alone). When Cohen's office was raided the story quickly came out that Cohen had arranged for playmate Shera Bechard to have an abortion. Elliot Broidy was identified as the source of the $1.6m paid to Berchard, he was asked by reporters and Broidy admitted he had the affair and it was his child that was aborted. Broidy resigned from his Republican party appointments and everyone moved on, because with Cohen's office being raided there was a whole lot of other stuff to talk about.

But it's always been a bit funny that Broidy would turn to ninth rate lawyer and all around screw up Michael Cohen to handle this extremely sensitive thing. And when Cohen set up the NDA, why did he use the exact same name as he had used on Trump's NDA's, David Denison?

Because while Trump is the kind of guy who goes about sleeping with playmates and pornstars, Broidy is the kind of guy who bribes public officials. He's been convicted of straight up bribing a NY state comptroller (he avoided jail time by flipping on the people he bribed), and he's currently being investigated for other bribery schemes involving the Malaysian embezzlement scandal, the Ukraine Poroshenko scandal, and the Saudi/UAE scheme to isolate Qatar from its US alliance.

So it's a bit strange that for this one instance Broidy would suddenly become like Trump, having an affair like Trump, and then using Trump's lawyer with Trump's false name to pay her off. It seems a lot more likely that Trump was being Trump and sleeping around, and Broidy was being Broidy and working schemes to make money for clients by bribing public officials. And the known facts line up with the latter.

Broidy made the first payment to Berchard on November 30, 2017. Two days later Broidy met with Trump in a private meeting at the White House. Broidy then signed a deal for consulting work with the UAE for $200 million, and began building a $1 billion consulting deal with Saudi Arabia. Trump then suddenly shifted US position in the ME away from support of Qatar, where the US has a permanent military base, and allowed the Saudis and UAE to blockade Qatar.

I don't know. I hate start linking a pile of stuff together because it starts sounding very conspiracy theory very quickly. But the idea of Broidy using Trump's lawyer and Trump's false name to pay off his own affair is a pretty weak story. Whereas Broidy paying off Trump's mistress then collecting millions in consulting ME nations, while Trump shifts US foreign policy to suit those ME nations, that fits the facts and fits the historic patterns Broidy and Trump very neatly.

Also, we know Broidy was working on having the White House flip their ME policies to suit Saudi Arabia and UAE, because that's what George Nader told us he was getting Broidy to do. George Nader is a co-operating witness with the Mueller investigation. This all might be why Cohen was raided in the first place. Or maybe not. Maybe Michael Cohen is so dumb he can't think of a second pretend name.