If you think you had a bad week,

[Chicken Dinner]

just be glad you're not Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson or Roger Goodell...

http://cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20140914&Category=ENT07&ArtNo=309140129&Ref=AR&MaxW=640&Border=0&Shocking-image-NFL-CoverGirl-model-black-eye-goes-viral

[quercus alba]

On the Texas tech message board after the Hogs took them out behind the woodshed, two of the comments that jumped out at me

1) They whooped us like Adrian Peterson

2) I feel like I just got off the elevator with Ray Rice

[LJ3]

Finally an online venue where I can say this:

Why the hell do we give a flip what these athletes do? Why does the NFL need a separate set of laws for this? We already have laws for this crap. give them due process and treat playing sports like what it is. It's a job. It's not a job that requires firing people for making human mistakes every other part of our society makes.

And don't give me the "role model" bullcrap. If any of these people were a role model to you or your kids, YOU should be prosecuted for being a parental dumbass.

[BarryBobPosthole]

Because it makes us feel better to get to have a say in what kind of person we decide to turn into an instant millionaire.

And plus its fun to see people like Roger Goodell and Ray Rice have a real life demonstration of karma.

As far as AD is concerned, I don't think he's done anything that needs our involvement or knowledge. Move along, nothing to see here.


You're welcome.

BKB

[Thumper]

Well, turn it around. If YOU owned a business ... a business that's very much in the public eye ... would you continue to employ someone like these jerks?

Maybe you would, I don't know ... me, nope ... they'd be kicked to the curb so fast it'd make their heads spin. I always figured my employees were a reflection on me as a business owner/employer and are a representative of my company. Maybe I'm "different".

[BarryBobPosthole]

Yes.

You are 'different'. In a short school bus sort of way.

BKB

[Thumper]

See if you can fill in the blanks here .... B _ _ _ M _ !! ;)

[Chicken Dinner]

The NFL cares, just like any business would, if it hurts their brand. Where I think the players have a legitimate beef is when the League takes action before the judicial system has run it's course. I also think the league is it's own worst enemy when it tests for recreational drugs. These guys aren't airline pilots for Christ's sake. Who cares what they do with their free time as long as they're smart enough to stay out of legal trouble. I do know that I'm tired of turning on Sports Center and having to explain this crap to my 11 year old.

[Big Skyz]

I with Thumper on this one.

[Tightline]

There ya go CD. 90% of them are recruited out of the "hood"; ok maybe less than 90% but it's a lot. They get to the NFL where they are made instant gazillionaires and are expected to be Mr Rogers. Im sorry but that ain't the hood they are from. Yea, who gives a shit if they smoke dope or whatever? Just shut up and play ball.

[Buckrub]

Oh what the heck. Y'all don't care much for me anyway. Here's another reason for y'all to get your sensitivities all askew...........

A tragic charade

Forget about Ferguson, and about Trayvon, too. Here are the most important facts about black America, courtesy of a recent column by economist Walter Williams.

In 1950, female-headed households represented only 18 percent of black households. They now comprise more than 70 percent of black households.

In 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 14 percent. It is now 72.3 percent.

The poverty rate among blacks as a whole is 28.1 percent. For married blacks the rate is only 8.4 percent.

Although blacks represent just 13 percent of the nation's population, they account for more than half of its murder victims, 93 percent of the time with the murderer being black.

Only the willfully blind could miss the correlation here between the collapse of the black family and the rise of illegitimacy on the one hand, and a host of pathologies, including crime and educational failure, on the other. All of this is well-known to anyone studying poverty in America, and just as studiously ignored by civil-rights "leaders" like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and by our highest black public officials, including President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Only the willfully blind could also miss how the trend line in these statistics almost perfectly tracks both the abolition of formal racism in America and the expansion of the modern welfare state in the form of the Great Society and War on Poverty initiated in the 1960s.

We thus have something of an historical mystery, albeit one in which much of the mystery disappears with a modicum of objective consideration: that the black family fell apart with disastrous consequences precisely over the same time period that manifestations of racism declined in American life.

The ever-predictable narrative coming out of Ferguson (and other places)--that white racism is still to blame for black problems in an incorrigibly racist nation--obviously becomes more difficult to sustain when examining such data and trend lines. As Williams sarcastically asks: "Is the reason the black family was far healthier in the late 1800s and 1900s that back then there was far less racial discrimination and there were greater opportunities? Or did what experts call the "legacy of slavery" wait several generations to victimize today's blacks?"

The questions answer themselves, and go as far as to suggest other ones: Was much of the progress toward racial equality brought about by the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s subsequently undermined by the well-intentioned expansion of the welfare state? And has our politically correct fixation on isolated instances of white racism diverted us as a nation from looking at the real (and growing) sources of black America's difficulties?

The importance of marriage and family structure for influencing the life success of children of all races and ethnicity has long been confirmed by social scientists, even if we are unsure of all the cause-and-effect linkages. For instance, do the children of married couples do better because those couples tend to have higher incomes or because they get better parenting from two parents than one?

But however marriage works to enhance the life prospects of kids, the point is that it works. And that true racial equality in an economic and social sense will not arrive until we figure out a way to put the black family back together, as a minimum but necessary first step.

The fear is that these obstacles may prove more difficult to overcome in the long run than even those flowing from segregation and Jim Crow. As political scientists have long known, it is easier to change laws, institutions, and public policies (and even the hearts of men) than it is to change cultures. More specifically, we have yet to come up with any effective means of encouraging marriage, although anyone with half a brain should have by now learned that you don't pay poor women to have kids out of wedlock. The "baby momma" culture has clearly been an unmitigated disaster.

Racism has precious little to do with any of this. And we do a disservice to black America and to American racial relations if we keep pretending that it does. Although the media spotlight might continue to shine vividly on increasingly rare instances of white racism, that isn't remotely where the action is.

And it is all becoming so utterly tedious--the racial passion play that routinely occurs every year or so in which a prominent white person lets slip the "N" word or a white man shoots an unarmed black man somewhere in ambiguous circumstances, but it is all also, in a real-world sense, entirely beside the point. Ferguson and Trayvon might make for great television in the age of 24/7 mass media and bring Jackson and Sharpton out of their lairs, and even provoke a visit by Holder (a race hustler with an official title), but it doesn't do anything to solve any of the real problems, does it?

This is because we all know deep down that the plight of black America at present has little to do with "White Hispanic" neighborhood watch guards or racist NBA owners or even trigger-happy white policemen. Rather, it has everything to do with far too few black husbands and wives.