Football Season is Almost Over!!!! Rejoice!!!!

Ah, yes, it's that time of year again. The time when football season is finally and blessedly coming to an end.

As you can tell, I'm not really a football fan. Unlike the vast swath of Americans whose lives seemingly revolve around football, it's just not my thing. America is obsessed with it, from the religious cult that is high school football every Friday night in Texas to the unceasing boasting of Alabama fans and other college football faithful every Saturday, and on Sunday it starts back up again for the pro games of the Almighty Machine that is the NFL. You have the Monday night game, and then all the lunatics prattling on about their fantasy leagues and the college rankings on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then maybe a Thursday night pro game or even an odd weeknight college game, and it's back to the beginning of the cycle.

It doesn't end, though. As soon as the Super Bowl is over and the Pro Bowl is over, then you have the drafts, and then the Wonderlic tests, and the combines, and signing day for the high school kids, and the summer camps, and then training camps, and the cycle just repeats itself, ad nauseum. An alleged 60-minute game that takes over four hours to play. I'll take hockey any day.

I've been critical of the NFL in the past. It's no secret, my disdain for the way the league operates. Last year I lambasted them for being a tax-exempt entity that rakes in BILLIONS without paying a dime in taxes, and boycotted the Super Bowl over their shitty treatment of Daniel Defense over their ad.

By and large the only reason I've watched the game the past few years at all was for the commercials, and most of those have been lacking as of late.

Each year the cost of doing these ads has gone up exponentially, to where a 30-second spot during this year's Super Bowl is going for a hefty $4.5 million. Yes, four and a half million for 30 seconds. That's $150,000 a second.

It's not exactly been a stellar year for the League, in my humble yet correct opinion. Back in February, Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens was busted for assault for getting into an argument in an elevator with his fiancee and punching her so hard he knocked her unconscious. The League botched it, initially suspending him for two games and then finally going back and suspending him indefinitely. They would have left it at two games had not the public lost their minds after TMZ released elevator camera footage of Rice punching her and then dragging her unconscious body out of the elevator. A judge called the suspension double jeopardy and forced the League to reinstate Rice.

Then it came out that the NFL, a tax-exempted entity that raked in over $25 BILLION last year, was actually expecting acts wanting to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show to pay the League for the show. Seriously. They tried to say some horseshit about how artists receive huge publicity and sales boosts from performing the halftime show and that the League should be able to wet its beak and be compensated for the exposure they give artists.

What utter crap. Last I checked, the halftime show was there to keep viewers at home from changing the channel and perhaps not coming back. The people in the stadium sure as hell ain't going anywhere, not with the ticket prices the NFL charges. The starting face value ticket prices for this year's game were $800, $1200, and $1500. Of course, scalpers and ticket brokers like StubHub have driven the prices up through the roof. As of around 6:30 PM Thursday evening there were fewer than 20 tickets to the game left on StubHub priced less than $10,000. The cheapest of those was $9200. For comparison, tickets to the first Super Bowl in January 1967 went for $6, $10, and $12.

It's no secret that most of the recent games have been blowouts that were over before the half. Most of the big blockbuster commercials are aired in the first half in case viewers tune out. So they stopped doing cheesey halftime shows with a college marching band and some dance number from Up With People and instead started booking major music acts who, let's face it, don't need the exposure like they were some starving artist hoping to get a record deal. The past few years we've had U2, Paul McCartney (who is kind of a big deal despite what Kanye West says), The Rolling Stones, Prince, The Who, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Beyonce. So for the NFL to say they're giving someone exposure is fantasy. More like they expect blood money as tribute for playing their gig, a gig that does much more for the League than for the artists.

This year it's Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz. Whatevs...

One can only pray for a wardrobe malfunction

And then there's DeflateGate. The Patriots, it seems, played their game against the Colts to get to the Super Bowl with balls that were under-inflated. They claim they didn't cheat. They claim magic effing Gremlins must have done it. The same team with a history of cheating by illegally videotaping the practices of opposing teams and the same team whose former player started a murder trial this week.

"This isn't ISIS; no one is dying..." Tom Brady. Oh hey, isn't that murderer Aaron Hernandez?

Movealong; nothing to see here. A team that's in its sixth Bowl since 2000 against the team that won it last year.

So yeah, I think I'm just gonna skip the Super Bowl again this year. I rented Fury instead. And I think I'll DVR the Blues vs Capitals hockey game and watch it after that.

Well, the Coke ad sure got people talking...

It'll rot your teeth and make you a fat obese slug in multiple languages and 200 countries.

Frankly, I'm kinda embarrassed that so many people who call themselves conservatives flooded social media with a torrent of negativity after Coke's Super Bowl ad aired. At best, you gave the Left more ammunition to use against Conservatives. Some of the comments generated were purely vile.

CLUE HAMMER: Not everyone here in this country started with English as a first language.

I'm the product of legal immigration. On my father's side, his father was conceived in Poland but born here, the last of at least ten kids. His parents asked to come over and came in legally. He married a girl from Wales during the war and brought her back in '45 after getting the proper permissions. My mother was born in Canada, and her parents asked for permission to emigrate and brought their four kids with them. Two of those kids served in the US Army as non-citizens. My mother eventually got her citizenship and I helped her study for the test.

Compared to some other folks I know whose families have been here since the 1800’s, I’m not that far removed from my immigrant roots. That said, I think it’s safe for me to sound off on immigration.

I have nothing against legal immigration. I perfectly understand the need and desire of people to come to America to build a better life for their families. Many of our immigrants come here from places with poor living conditions, civil war, wanton violence, oppression and corruption, and negligible healthcare. So hey, if you want to come here and start over, that’s great. But there’s gonna be some strings attached.

Ask. Yeah, ask if it’s okay. Apply for a visa. Get a green card. Register. Don’t sneak in here like a criminal. Don’t live under the radar, working under the table, not paying any taxes. If you want to live like an American, pay taxes like an American. Giving an inordinate amount of your hard-earned wages back to the government so they can waste it on $400.00 toilet seats is what makes our country great.

Try to assimilate into American culture. Learn the language. Like it or not, everyone, America is an English-speaking nation, and has been for the past 231 years. While I agree that more Americans should be multilingual and that it would certainly make your assimilation into our culture easier if more of us could communicate with you, don’t expect us to speak your language simply because you refuse to learn ours. I’m not saying to give up all semblance of the culture you grew up in; I celebrate aspects of my ancestral culture now and again, but I don’t live it every day. Don’t expect the United States to make Spanish our official second language just because half the country of Mexico has decided to come here looking for jobs. You could just as easily have emigrated to Spain; they have a vibrant economy too (or did until socialist policies effed it all up), and you already speak the language.

Don’t just expect to be handed American citizenship. Study a little, learn about the country, and pass the test. And when you do, I will proudly throw my arm around your shoulder and congratulate you as a fellow American citizen. My mom got her citizenship in 1993. Her only child was a US Army veteran, her husband was at the time still an officer in the US Navy, and she had spent the past 33 of her 41years living as an American, and she still had to be interviewed and pass a test before she could become a full citizen.

Perhaps we should make it a bit easier to become a citizen once you get here? I can see maybe dropping the time requirement to 3 years instead of 5 to apply for citizenship, but the rest of the criteria sound rational to me. These are the criteria, taken from nolo.com:

•you have lived in the United States as a lawful permanent resident for at least five years (with exceptions for refugees, people who get their green card through political asylum, spouses of U.S. citizens, and U.S. military personnel)
•you have been physically present in the United States for at least half of the last five years
•you have lived in the district or state where you are filing your application for at least three months
•you have not spent more than a year outside the United States
•you have not made your primary home in another country
•you are at least 18 years old
•you have good moral character
•you are able to speak, read, and write in English
•you are able to pass a test covering U.S. history and government, and
•you are willing to swear that you believe in the principles of the U.S. Constitution and will be loyal to the United States

NOTE: Serving in the US military does not grant you automatic citizenship. I think that should change. If you serve in our military, especially right now during times of war, you should be granted your citizenship automatically. People who are willing to fight for this country have proven themselves as far as I’m concerned, especially when so many of our own native-born citizens would rather occupy parks than serve the nation. And hey, it might actually boost recruiting numbers a bit. Serve at least 2 years and get citizenship. That sounds good to me. Two of my Canadian uncles served in the Vietnam War in the US Army as Canadian citizens. They weren't granted citizenship for their service. Neither of them opted to gain their citizenship afterwards, but both received full military honors at their funerals when they passed.

Despite our best efforts there’s always going to be people who want to come in illegally. When found, a hearing should be done to determine if they should be deported. There could be legitimate mitigating circumstances as to why this person had cause to fear authorities. But if you have no good reason for being here illegally, don’t let the doorknob hit you on the way out. And don’t expect to just apply to come back in; if you came here illegally, and we catch you, you’re banned. And I guarantee that instead of a fence along our borders, if we started sowing landmines and started shooting at people sneaking in, they’d take us a hell of a lot more seriously. Like I said, ask us if you can come over. Otherwise, you risk losing a leg or maybe more.

Yes, this sounds cold & harsh. I know I sound like a terrible person. But it’s also terrible to just let every swingin’ Richard cross into our borders at will. Lax, open immigration is why we have illegals sucking up our tax dollars, using up healthcare that causes my insurance rates to go up, and in some cases receiving scholarship grants that should go to legal immigrants and citizens. Why the hell are illegals able to get a driver's license and in-state tuition? Because unscrupulous governments and liberal learning institutions want their money. Illegals or not, it's revenue.

Am I against illegal, undocumented immigration to my country? Absolutely. Am I in favor of legal, documented immigration? You bet. I welcome you with open arms and I’ll even help you study for your citizenship test the way I helped my mother study for hers. Down the line, we all came here from somewhere else, except for the native Americans tribal nations.


But back to the Coke commercial. It was indeed weird to hear America The Beautiful being sung in languages other than English. I know that the CEO of Coke, a Muslim fellow who grew up partly in terrorist-sponsor hotspot Iran and partly in the same country as Barry Sotero (Um, I mean Barack Obama), in Indonesia, is in favor of blanket amnesty for illegals. This commercial is a blatantly political statement to gain favor with the immigrant population...or is it? It could be just a simple celebration of the Great American Melting Pot... geared to lure conservatives into making rash statements all over social media and hurt our cause.



I know full-well what it’s like to be in another country where you don’t speak the language. I lived in Germany for two years. I got by as best I could while making an honest effort to learn the language. Of course, I was there as a temporary guest of the German government and the locals made very courteous allowances for the language barrier. It really helped that most of the locals spoke excellent English. I realize that very few of us Yanqui gringoes habla Espanol. Mierda Resistente , ese.

Had I been planning on staying there in Germany as a local beyond my tour of duty, they’d have been fully within the right to expect me to spreche Deutsche and learn better German instead of expecting them to cater to my lack of fluency. So by the same token, if you’re gonna live here, make an honest effort to learn English and fit in instead of expecting all of us to just cater to you.

Of course, the Hispanic community creates that Catch-22 situation where it’s easy to skate by, having so many Spanish-language radio stations, newspapers, and TV stations that it becomes easy to slip between the cracks and maintain the underground existence.

I’m not saying you have to abandon your heritage and ancestry. Hell, look at me; I own a kilt. But face it. This is an English speaking country. That’s how we roll.

 And for you immigrants from the Muslim countries, this is also a predominantly Christian country where women can do pretty much whatever they want. We don’t do Sharia Law, we don’t wear burkas, and we don’t kill our women over perceived slights to our honor. Get over it.

And please, save the story about how the white Anglo-European invaders stole half of Mexico to make California, Arizona, and Texas, and then stole the rest of America from the native tribes. That story is a couple hundred years old now and frankly, I can’t change what people did generations before my people showed up here. This country was already well established before my people got off the boat from Poland in 1914, got off the plane from the UK in 1945, or drove here from Canada in 1960. While it's shameful what was done to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, I can't change it.

I think Coke could have avoided all the controversy by adding a simple sentence to the end of the ad. You spent four million bucks to place the ad, and who knows how much to produce the ad, and it takes me, a blue collar college dropout, to  figure out the missing piece to the puzzle. You should have added this:

The Beauty of America: We have many first languages, but only one first country.

Boom.

Boycott the NFL and the Super Bowl: Support Daniel Defense

Company founder Marty Daniel, a real American.

I'll preface this post by saying I'm not that big a football fan. I seldom watch more than one or two games a season. I really only watch the Super Bowl for the ads. And sadly, an ad that I'd like to see has been denied by the NFL, and for this reason, I'm skipping the Super Bowl this year.

Most ads for the Super Bowl cost advertisers upwards of a million bucks to place. Many cost even more. The average cost of a Super Bowl ad last year was $4,000,000 for a 30-second spot. That's in addition to the cost of making the commercial, and in general Super Bowl ads go for broke on the production value and special effects. Most Super Bowl ads never get aired after the Super Bowl; they're so expensive to make & place that some companies can't afford to keep running them after the initial investment, and in other cases it's more memorable for it to be a one-time only iconic ad.

Note: Yeah, I keep emphasizing the words SUPER BOWL, because the NFL likes to lord it over the media that they own those words and that no one can utter the words "super" and "bowl" together without getting sued and paying them through the nose. The media resorts to saying "the big game" because they fear the NFL and its goon squad of legal attack dogs. I, however, am not the press. I'm not the mainstream media. I don't get paid to author this site. I haven't monetized this site with ads for income and revenue generation because I refuse to be beholden to anyone as I give my opinions and spout my wrath and expose the truth that is the idiocy of the human condition. By & large this species is doomed, but I digress. Since I am a private citizen exercising my First Amendment rights, the NFL and its commissioner, one Roger Goodell, can pucker up while I drop my trousers.

The NFL is all about money. It's not about the football. Football is just the means to an end. The game is just the machination that makes them the money. The league has annual revenues of over $25 BILLION with a capital B. Hell, even Oprah doesn't make that much. The league is powerful, all powerful.  It can decide if you're cool enough to own a team; even if you have the money to buy it you have to kiss the ring (and the ass) to be approved to buy (or sell.). They get to tell team owners whether they can move to a new city or not (yeah, you own the team and pay the staff and players but you can't do anything with your team without our permission...) It's the football Mafia and Commissioner Roger Goodell is the Godfather. He hands out fines for any and all infractions whether real or perceived. If Goodell doesn't like your end zone celebration? Fine. A coach or player or owner expresses displeasure with a rule or the league or anything football related? Fine. You got in trouble off the field for something non-football related and someone out there might think football is bad? Fine. You broke the no cell phone rule to call your wife to tell her you were okay after receiving a possible concussion? Fine. You wore a different color sneaker to raise awareness for mental illness when the official party line was to wear pink for the breast cancer Mafia? Fine. The league makes more money per year from levying arbitrary BS fines than most players earn annually playing the game.

The actual letter fining Brandon Marshall

They'll fine you for throwing a ball into the stands after a touchdown but not if you just hand a ball to someone on the sidelines...they say they don't want people to to start fights in the stands over a ball, but then turn around & fire frikkin' tee shirts from air guns into the stands as if crazed fans already pie-faced from tailgating with a pony keg for 6 hours before the game and six $10 stadium beers by halftime aren't gonna fight over a free souvenir paper-thin too-small shirt that'll shrink to the size of a washcloth after the first run through the laundry? Please.

Oh, by the way...sit down for this one...try not to choke from apoplexy on this one...the NFL is a tax-exempt organization.

I'll wait a second while you digest that. Take a Zantac or two as you swallow the bile. Over twenty-five BILLION a year in revenues TAX FREE. I owed taxes last year and our combined income was less than fifty grand. 'Merica...

Like I said at the beginning, there's an ad I would have liked to have seen this year were I to watch the Super Bowl. The ad was from Daniel Defense, a company based outside Savannah, Georgia in Black Creek. Daniel Defense is a manufacturer but also has a brick and mortar store location nearby in the town of Ellabell. A second facility of the company is just down the road about 40 miles from me in the town of Ridgeland, SC. The company also sellsparts & accessories. The company wasn't trying to go global with the ad, but rather wanted the ad run in 8 regional markets, at a cost of $500,000. And the NFL denied their request. Because they're a gun manufacturer.

The ad features no guns yet Daniel Defense was denied due to the NFL's restriction on advertising of firearms, ammunition and other weapons. The league does allow ads from stores that sell guns and Daniel Defense does have a brick-and-mortar store, but the answer was still no, angering Daniel Defense's director of marketing Jordan Hunter, who said his company made sure no guns were shown in the ad.

"It was my intention to do a commercial that can run on mainstream TV,'' said Hunter, "and that shows we're your next-door neighbors, not fanatics as we're portrayed in the media.''

So, let's take a look at this hideously offensive ad, shall we?



According to the NFL, Daniel Defense cannot submit for commercial time during the Super Bowl because their products do not reflect the message that the NFL wants to send. According to their regulations… “Firearms, ammunition or other weapons are prohibited; however, stores that sell firearms and ammunition (like outdoor stores and camping stores) will be permitted, provided they sell other products and the ads do not mention firearms, ammunition or other weapons.” Despite the fact that the ad does not feature a weapon or a single round of ammunition, the NFL still denied their ad. The League even grasped at straws and pointed out  that the Daniel Defense logo was in fact a rifle, and when the company replied that they would take out the rifle and replace it with an American flag, they were still barred from giving the NFL half a million bucks to fill their coffers.

So we have a violent sport where huge men battle each other brutally, a brawl verging on fisticuffs, and often ending with broken men forced to retire after just a handful of seasons with debilitating injuries, including brain damage that the League has glossed over for decades without much in the way of helping the victims until recently when the media started calling them out on it...and they wanna bitch about an ad that focuses on self-reliance, and the responsibility of watching out for one's own family, THAT SHOWS NO GUNS.


Of course, whiny liberals will snivel as they so often do and cry about how guns kill people, like this whiny sports blogger who berates the ad as "implicitly selling guns", and that evil guns killed over 19,000 people in 2010. Instead, the NFL chooses to rely on ads for beer and soda and chips and candy, a talking baby encouraging you to risk your money playing the stock market and a website domain company that uses scantily-clad women as their gimmick.

If you look at the 2010 leading causes for death in the United States firearms does not even enter into the top 10. The top three are heart disease (597,689 deaths), cancer (574,743 deaths), and lower respiratory illness (138,080).

The leading cause of heart disease is inactivity, being a lazy lagabout sloth, and many Americans are guilty of such. Inactivity say from, watching football on TV all day on Sunday drinking beer and eating wings & pizza? Another cause of heart disease is say eating fatty foods, such as those served by the billions by NFL advertisers McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, and KFC. And beer ain't exactly a health food, despite those strong & virile Budweiser Clydesdales or the word "Light" after the word "Bud".

Soda consumption is also on the list of factors which contribute to not only obesity but heart disease and diabetes, both of which claimed over 650,000 lives in 2011. However, the NFL has granted PepsiCo extensive advertising time for the 2014 Super Bowl, despite the health warnings against soda consumption. It also does not help their case that both Butterfinger and Mars both have secured advertising space, because candy is also oh-so-good for you.

This guy will die from NFL approved diseases long before worrying about getting shot by a legal gun owner

There's always a lot of car ads during the Super Bowl despite the fact that motor vehicle accidents claimed the lives of 34,000 people in 2012, which is more than firearms are able to take credit for.

Yeah, pretty sure this wasn't caused by a gun.

How about Comcast, the giant national cable provider? They happen to own NBC Universal, who happen to be a big carrier of NFL games during the regular season. NBC, the National Barack Channel and parent of LeftWingNutjob network MSNBC, and employer of Bob Costas, the aging hack who likes to mouth off during games about social issues like, say, gun control...? Comcast, after acquiring NBC earlier in 2013, extended their newly acquired company's policy of banning the advertisement of firearms or ammunition in any program that goes through a Comcast box. Oh, and also they own Telemundo who also happens to be an NFL carrier, extending a liberal leftist message to our nation's burgeoning Hispanic population who prefer to be entertained in their native tongue instead of English.

Comcast also happens to have donated over $300,000 to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. And we all know how Presidizzle Obeezy feels about the 2nd Amendment and its application to modern day America, the America he wants to fundamentally change.

So perhaps Comcast, being the second largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue and a large carrier of NFL games, put the pressure on the NFL to deny Daniel Defense their air time to further their own liberal agenda, maybe even at the behest of The One Himself, Blessed Be His Name, Lord Messiah Obama the First? 

During last year's Super Bowl, a regional ad in the DC area was aired by uber-liberal former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a firearm-related ad. But Daniel Defense is being denied the same right with their ad. The big difference in the two ads is that Bloomberg's ad actually mentioned guns and the Daniel Defense ad does not. In fact, the Daniel Defense ad, as you saw above, does not even show a gun, save for the silhouette of one contained in their logo, which they offered to change. Furthermore, Daniel Defense also aired an ad in the Georgia television market during the 2012 Super Bowl without complaints from the NFL. Just sayin'...

The man in the Daniel Defense ad is portrayed as a man home from active military service, a chord that rings with millions of veterans, many of who aren't far removed from the war zones themselves. Wars though not started by the current President but have continued through his entire administration despite his campaign promises five or six years ago to end them immediately. More American troops have died under this President than died under his predecessor that he blames for everything he fails at. The same guy who left Americans to die in Benghazi and sold guns to Mexican drug lords, guns that killed a Border Patrol agent. The same guy who drone-strikes people all day as he shines his Nobel Peace Prize. The Left thinks all us veterans are murderous thugs and terrorists, so a commercial that ecourages you to be self-reliant and responsible and exercising you Second Amendment rights with a legally-owned weapon instead of cowering and waiting for the government to save you...save you from actual murderous thugs with illegal guns, thugs who voted for the current Leftist regimes...that commercial simply cannot be seen.

Support Daniel Defense. Boycott the Super Bowl and the NFL. Hit 'em in the wallet. And while you're at it, encourage your Congressional reps and Senators to look into why a $25 billion business pays no taxes.