Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

In after Baud. Damn.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / #BLM #M4BL / Late Night Sportsball Open Thread: Kaepernick Is Still Pissing Off All the Reicht Right People

Late Night Sportsball Open Thread: Kaepernick Is Still Pissing Off All the Reicht Right People

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The Guardian trolls the NFL:

Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer says his client still wants to play in the NFL, and believes he would fit in well at the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.

On Friday, Kaepernick and his former teammate Eric Reid settled a complaint of collusion against the NFL. Reid and Kaepernick claimed the league’s owners blackballed them because they had protested against social injustice by kneeling during the national anthem. The terms of the agreement are confidential.

Kaepernick has not played in the league since he left the San Francisco 49ers at the end of the 2016 season. In an interview with CNN on Saturday his lawyer, Mark Geragos, said the 31-year-old “absolutely wants to play” and said Kaepernick continues to stay in shape and is game fit.

Geragos said the Carolina Panthers would be a “natural place” for Kaepernick. They signed Reid last season, and their starting quarterback, Cam Newton, will have shoulder surgery this offseason. There was no significant backlash from Panthers fans when they signed Reid, who was a teammate of Kaepernick at the 49ers.

“I think you’re going to see … within the next two weeks that somebody is going to step up and do the right thing, and you want me to predict who?” Geragos said. “Besides the Panthers, it would not surprise me if [Patriots owner] Bob Kraft makes a move.”…

Not that I understand (American) football, either, but I seriously doubt Kaepernick will ever play on an NFL team again (assuming he actually wanted to do so, what with the CTE and the bodily trauma and all). NFL owners seem to have the power to punish lèse-majesté to a degree that Donald Trump can only covet, and Kaepernick’s offended their conception of ‘their’ players as dumb serfs to be treated the way they’d treat their prizewinning racehorses and pedigreed dogs, except it seems the ASPCA has more legal scope than the NFL Players Union.

But I think Jemele Hill’s take in the Atlantic is excellent — “Kaepernick Won. The NFL Lost”:

… The terms of the settlement, announced on Friday, were not disclosed. But it doesn’t matter how much money Kaepernick ultimately receives from the NFL; what matters is that he bested a league that has a long history of pummeling its opposition in court, especially players.

In a way, the NFL had no other choice. Last August, arbitrator Stephen Burbank rejected the NFL’s request to have the case dismissed. That meant he believed Kaepernick’s team had compiled enough receipts to present their case. With another hearing reportedly scheduled for next month, did the NFL really want to let Kaepernick’s legal team expose those receipts in court?…

That Kaepernick was the one to make the NFL eat crow is a special kind of karma. This is just punishment because the league incompetently handled the player protests, starting with Kaepernick’s, from the beginning. Had the league not been so heavy-handed in policing the protests, this issue likely would have abated sooner. Had the league ignored Trump instead of cowering to his bullying, appeasing Trump wouldn’t have become a priority. Had one league owner had the guts to sign Kaepernick, this collusion case would have been a nonstarter…

Though this legal battle with Kaepernick has been resolved, he isn’t going away either. The league will forever have to live with the fact that it was complicit in destroying someone’s career simply because he wished to bring attention to the injustices suffered by his people. If owners and Roger Goodell believe that they no longer will have to face questions about why Kaepernick isn’t in the league, they’re wrong. No matter what an arbitrator rules, how the NFL treated Kaepernick will always be the mistake they can never amend.

Reader Interactions

26Comments

  2. 2.

    Jerzy Russian

    I wonder how long that settlement can remain a secret. Suppose Mr. Kaepernick buys an island that costs $75 million with cash. It would be obvious where he got the money from. Would this be a violation of the terms of the settlement?

  3. 3.

    Brachiator

    Had the league ignored Trump instead of cowering to his bullying, appeasing Trump wouldn’t have become a priority.

    Trump has a strange power over dumb white people. And NFL owners are dumb, despite their money. Trump kept making it an ego thing, that the owners were weak if they tolerated any defiance.

    And conservatives never accepted any argument that the players were protesting injustice. They could only see ungrateful Negroes who hate America.

  4. 4.

    Duane

    @Brachiator: If there’s a bad decision to be made you can count on the NFL. They pay Commissioner Goddell 40 million a year and he produces one wrong move after another.
    They sided with Trumpov despite all evidence. Smart people would know better.

  7. 7.

    e.a.f.

    Sure wish that Man would come to Canada and play football. Our teams don’t pay much, but its a good game and he’d get to play and we’d love to have him here and see him play.

  8. 8.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    I take the same with was said about Martin Luther King back before King did that post death political ideology change to conservative thing they claim he did?

  9. 9.

    Amir Khalid

    @Duane:

    They sided with Trumpov despite all evidence. Smart people would know better

    They’re rich old white people, all but one of them. Were you really expecting otherwise?

  11. 11.

    hervevillechaizelounge

    This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion but Colin Kaepernick hagiography porn makes me ill.

    He didn’t bother to vote; he said Hillary belongs in prison. Instead of playing a child’s game for millions of dollars he got a million dollar Nike campaign and a settlement—is that supposed to be a tragedy?

    How concerned about black lives could he possibly be if he didn’t bother to vote? I know there’s a tendency to lionize people with superior athletic abilities but Jesus Christ we need better heroes.

  12. 12.

    Martin

    Kaepernick is probably too old for the Pats. Nobody is displacing Brady until he retires or gets injured, and that could be another 4 years. Kaepernick is 31 now, so he’d already be hitting the normal ‘too old to start building a team around’ age by that time.

  13. 13.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @OzarkHillbilly: Not enuf coffee.

    February is Black History Month. The Legislature’s black caucus had proposed a resolution honoring a number of black leaders, including Kaepernick. That didn’t go over well with the GOP. Republican leaders drafted their own resolution that didn’t include Kaepernick but did add Mandela Barnes, the state’s first black lieutenant governor, and Vel Phillips, the state’s first black secretary of state. Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, who is white, told reporters during a news conference Tuesday that Kaepernick was left off the list “for obvious reasons.” He later added that Kaepernick was a controversial figure.
    ……………………
    Wisconsin Republicans tried to bring their resolution excluding Kaepernick to the floor but fell short of the two-thirds majority they needed after all the chamber’s Democrats voted against the move. Republicans said they tried to honor black history and moved on to another bill. Rep. David Crowley, chairman of the Legislature’s black caucus, walked out of the chamber. He told a reporter in the foyer that black people should be allowed to choose the leaders they want to honor and Kaepernick is “making history.” Republicans later added the black caucus’ resolution to the agenda, then amended it to delete Kaepernick’s name on a 61-34 party-line vote. That put Democrats in an awkward position — deciding whether to oppose their own resolution or adopt it without Kaepernick.

    After that vote, Crowley said many see Kaepernick as unpatriotic without truly knowing him. He said deleting Kaepernick’s name is a “textbook example of white privilege” and that he shouldn’t need to get permission from white lawmakers to put together a list of black leaders.

    Telling black people who their leaders are, a “textbook example of white privilege” indeed.

  14. 14.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Martin: He’s not too old to back up Brady, or any other quarterback in the NFL. His skill set doesn’t necessarily measure up as first team, but change of pace or backup is definitely within doable for most teams.

  16. 16.

    Steve in the ATL

    @hervevillechaizelounge: he made a lot of mistakes, and

    @Martin: he’s not a starter-caliber quarterback, but

    He made a stand for something important, at great cost to himself, even if he didn’t do it entirely correctly (and I have vanishly little tolerance for pro-Wilmer and/or Never Hillary morons/Russian stooges).

    @hells littlest angel: it’s a grievance not a lawsuit, but yes.

  19. 19.

    West of the Rockies

    I’d like the Rams to sign him. LA could use a backup. A CA team could stick it to Trump.

  20. 20.

    plato

    Facebook needs far stricter regulation, with tough and urgent action necessary to end the spread of disinformation on its platform, MPs have said.

    A Commons committee has concluded that the firm’s founder Mark Zuckerberg failed to show “leadership or personal responsibility” over fake news.

    Untrue stories from foreign powers were risking the UK’s democracy, they said.

    Facebook welcomed the digital select committee’s report and said it would be open to “meaningful regulation”.

    MPs said that what was needed to deal with the proliferation of disinformation online and the misuse of personal data was a “radical shift in the balance of power between social media platforms and the people”.

    The inquiry into fake news, which lasted more than a year, was conducted by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, with much of the evidence focusing on the business practices of Facebook before and after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

    Meaningful to whom, fuckerberg?

  21. 21.

    Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.

    The most interesting part of this, which all of his critics overlook, is that he at first had a different form of protest (sitting in a bench IIRC), started taking flak for it, and *consulted a decorated veteran on a more respectful form of protest*, the result of which was the kneeling. And it didn’t make one lick of difference to his critics.

  23. 23.

    RobertDSC-Mac Mini

    His skill set would not strictly translate to the Pats’ system, and Brady isn’t going anywhere, thank dog.

    He would be better suited in Carolina where Cam Newton is of similar skills. I hope Kap ends up somewhere in the league and plays well. He’d be a damn sight better than some of the guys at QB these days.

  24. 24.

    catclub

    @hells littlest angel:

    If Kaepernick doesn’t get a job, can’t he just go ahead and sue them again?

    I suspect that in exchange for large cash payment the NFL gets what they called ‘future indemnification’ of the league. If I can think of that in two seconds, perhaps the NFL’s lawyers can, too.

  25. 25.

    feebog

    The timing was interesting. Testimony in the grievance hearing was completed. Just closing arguments (no doubt written briefs) were left. Arbitration cases settle at all stages, but much more commonly before hearing, not afterwards. I suspect the testimony did not go well for the NFL.

  26. 26.

    Mart

    Not a starting caliber QB? Career 72 TDs, 30 Int’s, 89 QB rating. 302 yds against tough Ravens defense in Super Bowl.

    There are more than a dozen cities where the fans should be suing there owners over putting piece of shit QB’s on the field instead of Kapernick.

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