Hey, NFL, the customer's always right

When I first decided to write about the NFL/National Anthem issue it was before President Trump got involved with his opinion. Now, according to the left-wing media, it’s all his fault. He’s also been accused of making this a racial issue. It was Colin Kaepernick who made this a racial issue. Remember, he first sat for the National Anthem because he refused to stand “to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” 

It’s instructive to examine why he was protesting, other than trying to bring attention to himself as his career waned. He believes black people are being indiscriminately gunned down in the streets because of racist cops. The fact is twice as many white folks are killed by police than blacks. Now, the Washington Post and other liberally biased institutions say you have to adjust for population. That’s intellectually dishonest. If we used the same logic for the NFL we would have to determine that it’s a racist institution since blacks only make up 13 percent of the population but 70 percent of the NFL is black.

A fair analysis of the issue is to look at the percentage of whites and blacks who commit crimes. Whites make up about 61 percent of the population. Blacks make up about 13 percent. According to the FBI, blacks commit 52.2 percent of the murders. That’s a disturbing statistic. Well over 90 percent of the victims of those murders are black, so if Black Lives Matter had its way and we made the prison population look like America those murderers would be turned loose on the black community.

In every major category, blacks are way above their population percentage. Blacks commit 28 percent of total crimes, over double their representation in the population. That is the problem. Not racist cops. Not because of “a country that oppresses black people” as Kaepernick claims. Whites commit crimes at about their population percentage. That means twice as many crimes are committed by whites. And, ironically, we find that whites are twice as likely to be shot by cops. Makes sense now, doesn’t it? 

Don’t get me wrong. There are some trigger-happy cops and cops with anger management problems. Those bad seeds need to be weeded out. But obviously that affects both races equally.

My contention about the kneeling during the National Anthem is it’s bad for business. Know your customer. The NFL is dropping in the ratings all the while multi-million-dollar athletes claim it’s their right to express themselves. They do have that right, but not on the bosses dime. They’re harming the NFL brand and pretty soon the owners won’t be able to afford those multi-million-dollar salaries. When they get their pay cut I’m sure it’ll be racism.

I heard a commentator on CNN say that sports has enjoyed “social justice” protests dating back to Jackie Robinson. Robinson didn’t protest. He simply became the first black man to play Major League Baseball. You didn’t see Robinson taking a knee for the anthem, and if anyone had an excuse to it would be him. Jackie didn’t play the victim, and because of it he became the hero.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones took a knee with the team prior to the National Anthem on Monday Night Football. I’m sure he’s trying to make the players and the fans happy. I get that. The question is has the damage already been done. The customer doesn’t care if your colors are gray or orange or purple, theirs are red, white, and blue.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Cotton is no longer king, it's racist

It was only a couple of weeks ago, amidst the hue and cry over anything Confederate, that we were joking on the radio about how long it would be before cotton was considered racist. My producer, Johnny B, joked that aspirin would be regarded as racist since you have to pick cotton out of the top before you can relieve your headache. Absurdity is now reality.

The president of Lipscomb University in Nashville had some black students over to his house for dinner. It was ostensibly to give them a chance to discuss their experiences at school. That was a mistake. Instead of discussing their scholastic experiences they fixated on a centerpiece that featured stalks of cotton. My wife tells me cotton in arrangements is all the rage. Somehow I’m glad I didn’t know that beforehand. Anyway, apparently cotton is racist. The students complained loudly and angrily about this ‘microaggression’ and the university president offered a written apology.

Now, the apology wasn’t along the lines of “I’m sorry if these students took the cotton centerpiece the wrong way.” No, President Randy Lowry wrote in his apology, “The content of the centerpieces was offensive.” This is exactly why this political correctness has gotten way out of hand. First rule when you’re dealing with crazy people is you don’t recognize crazy as legitimate.

But this is how we’ve been dragged so far down this road. Students at universities all across the country go searching for things that offend them. When they go searching they always find something. Like the students at Ole Miss who saw a banana peel in a tree. They had to shut down a Greek Life retreat. “To be clear, many members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred at IMPACT,” wrote Ole Miss’ Interim Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Alex Lee Arndt to Greek leaders. I do hope this idiot is just interim and is terminated for kowtowing to these whiny babies. Oh, by the way, a student confessed to throwing the banana peel onto the tree because he says he couldn’t find a trash can. Didn’t matter. The ‘microaggression’ had been committed. Bring in the therapy dogs and the coloring books.

These so-called adults who choose to pander to these overgrown babies are doing them a huge disservice. They’re not always going to be there to shield these snowflakes from that mean ole world. Instead of powdering their backsides they need to be girding them for real life. Good Lord, can you imagine if these creampuffs had to storm Normandy? If we keep this up we’ll be ripe for the picking from any aggressor that wants its way with us.

So, how should the university president at Lipscomb have handled “Cottongate?” He should’ve pointed out the absurdity of cotton being racist. If it really is then we’re going to have to ban the Cotton Bowl, cotton candy, and cotton mouth. He should’ve pointed out that not only is the majority of our clothing made from cotton but so is our money, which features those white supremacists on the front. He should’ve pointed out that children are being used as slave labor in China, there’s ethnic cleansing in Darfur, there’s mass starvation in North Korea. In other words, there are far bigger problems in this world than some pandered cry baby college students getting their feelings hurt over a centerpiece.

This will never stop until sane people stop normalizing crazy. Stop acting like normal behavior is somehow racist. If you truly are not a racist then you have nothing to apologize for.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Don't fall for the hurricane hype

It was inevitable. You go through 12 years of a hurricane drought, the longest stretch of a category three hurricane hitting the U.S. in American history, and when we get hit the climate hysterics come out of the woodwork. See, they say, global warming caused these storms. Even the pope chided ‘climate deniers’ saying, “When you don’t want to see, you don’t see.”

Well, Francis at least got that right. Let’s see if we can see the facts.

Hurricane Harvey dumped a torrent of rain on Texas but it barely exceeded the downpour from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978. Back in 1979, Tropical Storm Claudette dumped 42 inches in just 24 hours near Houston, the amount it took Harvey three days to do.

So-called scientists like Michael Mann—who gave us the biggest hoax in global warming history, the debunked hockey stick graph—led with this headline: “It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly.” He claimed Gulf sea surface temperatures have increased by a degree over the past few decades which, he claims, cause 3 to 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere.

First of all, how does he explain the floods from Amelia and Claudette nearly 40 years ago? There are four major studies on sea surface temperatures according to Anthony Watts at the website WattsUpWithThat.com. Two of them show “weak warming” while the other two show cooling since 1998. This coincides with the land temperature warming “hiatus” that climate hysterics are having a difficult time explaining away.

And then there was the claim that Hurricane Irma was “the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.” Fox News alert: The Gulf of Mexico is in the Atlantic. This was another attempt to exaggerate a hurricane to score global warming points. In fact, if you judge the strength of hurricanes by maximum sustained winds then Irma was tied for second with three other hurricanes. The others were in 2005, 1998, and 1935. Yeah, I think I see a pattern, don’t you? 

If you judge a hurricane by its minimum atmospheric pressure then Irma was tied for 12th place. Again, the top hurricanes were all over the lot ranging from 2005 to 1988 to 1935. And keep in mind, this is only since we’ve had the capability to accurately measure different aspects of a hurricane which only dates back to 1924. That’s a blip in time.

And obviously hurricanes are not increasing in severity or frequency as Al Gore and his minions keep saying. If we’ve just ended the longest hurricane drought in history then that stat speaks for itself.

Climate hysterics have been predicting each year since 2005 was going to be a horrible year for hurricanes. We listened as they droned on about this each year for twelve years. Eventually they were bound to be right. After all, a stopped watch is right twice a day. This is their year to be right. What that means is they were wrong every other year for the last 12 years. They have no credibility whatsoever.

The irony is that Irma came through and blew the last vestiges of Al Gore’s summer flop out of theaters. The jig is up. The evidence is now overwhelming. CO2 continues to rise yet the temperatures have remained flat for 20 years. There is no correlation between CO2 and temperatures.

Oh, and by the way, there’s a new study out that shows plants are globally getting more efficient because of the rise in carbon dioxide. Hilarious. CO2 is not the boogeyman. It actually feeds the planet. I love it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Don't fall in love with a DREAMer

President Trump made the right decision on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was illegally created by Obama’s pen. What Trump did was kick this issue back to where it belongs, the United State Congress. They are the ones tasked with passing immigration laws and this was an unlawful usurpation of an already existing law. The question now is what will Congress do?

This is where it gets scary. They have six months to come up with a solution. Few people argue that children brought here through no fault of their own should be rounded up and sent back to a strange country they’ve never known. I questioned the wisdom of doing something about it on the front end. It should’ve been saved for last. DREAMers were not being rounded up and thrown out of the country. In fact, during the Obama years few illegals of any description were being deported. The problem with granting this class of people amnesty is doing so without securing the border only invited more people to come here illegally thinking they would get to stay. And they did come by the hundreds of thousands. Remember all the kids streaming across the border? It became a crisis overnight. Had the borders been secured then this nightmare wouldn’t have happened.

Congress is the place to settle this issue, but it’s imperative that anti-amnesty hawks keep a close eye on the process. The old Gang of Eight is still eager to pass comprehensive immigration reform, better known as amnesty. There’s no doubt they’ll take advantage of this opportunity President Trump has given them to pass a law much broader than simply solving the problem of children brought here by their parents.

Here are some of the things I can see the pro-amnesty crowd trying to pull. Giving full amnesty to not only children brought over here but their parents. That would be a huge mistake. Their parents knowingly broke the law as adults when they came and they should be sent packing. If they still have minor children in this country then they’re going to have to take them with them. If those minor children were born in America and, legally, are considered citizens then these parents are going to have to make a choice. They can either leave and take their children with them or they can leave the children here to be put up for adoption. If that sounds cruel, it’s not. The onus is on the parents. They’re the ones who put themselves in this predicament. I suspect most loving parents will choose to take their children with them. No matter their decision, if they broke into this country as adults they have to go.

The Gang of Eight is most certainly going to exploit this opportunity to push for a path to citizenship for illegals already in the country. The fact that they have no idea why Donald Trump was elected president is already evident. They see him as weakened by his response to Charlottesville (which has turned out to be spot on, by the way), and they will see this as their opportunity. The saner voices in Congress must step up and kill this effort before it begins. Not one member of that Gang of Eight should be allowed by senate leadership to have any say-so in crafting the DREAMer bill. If something that atrocious does break out of Congress on its way to the White House then President Trump should veto it immediately.

We all remember why Trump was elected. I hope he still does.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.