Nike revealed on Monday that Colin Kaepernick — the out-of-work NFL quarterback who generated controversy for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality — would be one of the faces of its 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign.
“Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything,” read a teaser for an ad Kaepernick tweeted.
Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoItpic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO
— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018
Some Kaepernick critics took that to mean sacrificing their Nike products.
Immediately, some people began posting pictures of socks and shoes being defaced or destroyed, or declaring they would be soon switching allegiances to Adidas, Brooks or Converse. (Nevermind that Nike owns Converse.)
Minnesota Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison lost his bid to become the chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Saturday after a scorched-earth smear campaign targeting his religious faith, his affinity for the Nation of Islam in his youth, and his support for Palestinian rights alongside a secure Israel.
Instead, the majority of the DNC’s voting members chose former labor secretary Tom Perez to lead the party. After two rounds of voting in Atlanta, Perez netted 235 votes to Ellison’s 200.
Perez was widely perceived as being brought into the race by allies of President Obama, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and other members of the party establishment. One of the speakers who introduced his nomination, South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison, also works as a corporate lobbyist for the D.C.-based Podesta Group. After neither candidate reached a majority of votes in the first round of voting, Harrison was on the floor, whipping votes for Perez.
The phrase with which Nancy Reagan will forever be associated came out quite naturally, when the First Lady visited some schoolchildren in Oakland, California in 1982. “A little girl raised her hand,” she recalled, “and said, ‘Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ‘Well, you just say no.’”
After her “Just Say No” tagline caught on, she launched a high-profile, long-lived campaign by that name in 1982, traveling around the US and the world and across the airwaves to promote it. PBS noted, “The movement focuses on white, middle-class children and is funded by corporate and private donations.” She visited rehab and prevention programs and oversaw the formation of thousands of Just Say No clubs in schools and youth organizations, some of which still operate to this day.
Her don’t-do-drugs message, a reassuringly simple balm to a nation’s fears, was widely embraced. It can also legitimately be blamed for a huge amount of human misery.
The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.
It should be noted that, and I discovered this in reading Ian Haney Lopez’s excellent book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked The Middle Class, Toni Morrison did not mean “first black president” in the sense that has been portrayed in the media for years. Lopez explains that she argued that many aspects of Clinton’s biography connected to stereotypes of blackness such as single-parent, born poor, working-class, and, yes, saxophone playing.
The Fox Business Network announced on Monday it was inviting only seven Republican candidates to its prime-time debate later this week, relegating Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina to a preliminary session.
Image: AP via USA Today
The main debate in North Charleston, S.C., on Thursday night will feature businessmanDonald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov.John Kasich.
Paul, a Kentucky senator who has been on the main stage in five previous debates, told CNN he will likely skip the 6 p.m. ET preliminary debate Thursday:
“I won’t participate in anything that’s not first tier because we have a first-tier campaign.”
Paul and Fiorina were invited to the “undercard” debate along with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced Tuesday he is ending his presidential bid, saying “this is not my time.”
Image: Raw Story
Jindal had struggled to gain traction as he centered his campaign on Iowa, a state with a large pool of evangelical voters, to whom the governor aggressively sought to appeal. He often failed to poll at even 1 percent in some surveys and underwhelmed in the money race — he had less than $300,000 in the bank heading into October. His low standing in polls meant that he failed to qualify for any of the prime-time Republican debates and was forced to participate in the less-watched undercard debates.
“Going forward, I believe we have to be the party of growth and we can never stop being the party that believes in opportunity,” he added. “We cannot settle for the left’s view of envy and division. We have to be the party that says everyone in this country — no matter the circumstances of their birth or who their parents are — can succeed in America.”
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has participated in a keg stand. She has run this desperate ad. She lost an energy committee chairmanship that she often touted, when the GOP took the Senate on Nov. 4. She has clashed — in front of reporters — with a leader of her party. That same party basically abandoned her in her runoff campaign for a fourth term.
But on Tuesday, she suffered the biggest indignity of her 2014 campaign, and possibly of her political career.
Landrieu, reduced to a relatively pointless gambit to demonstrate her clout in Washington, failed to secure the 60 votes required to move forward with the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. She came up one vote shy.
This was basically Landrieu’s final play. With no party funding for her campaign, she has been drubbed on the airwaves — as in, exponentially so. And even before that, few gave her much hope in her runoff with Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).
