As I’ve said many times, I’m not big on comparisons unless they’re awfully close parallels, and I fail to see any relationship between war and the name of a football team.
And here, I also agree very strongly with The Star’s longtime policy on this matter. I remain unconvinced by every argument I’ve ever heard that the name is not a racial epithet, plain and simple. And I’ll even break my usual rule about commenting on issues outside The Star’s journalism to say that I find it inconceivable that the NFL still allows such a patently offensive name and mascot to represent the league in 2012.
I almost always come down on the side of publishing a word when it’s the crux of a debate (as I did here in the first paragraph). It isn’t healthy for discourse to pretend any words or thoughts don’t exist.
But I see no compelling reason for any publisher to reprint an egregiously offensive term as a casual matter of course. As brighter minds than mine have noted, nobody would be surprised if a newspaper or website decided not to name a team that used any other racial slur. I don’t understand why this should be any different.
The paper is from a region that also has a team with Native American themes, the Kansas City Chiefs. Think this is a good policy? (ht USA Today)
This gets us back to the principle that the government must pay us what we are entitled to.Ramah Navajo Chapter President Rodger Martinez • Discussing the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to force the government to pay back Native American tribes for money they spent on federal programs. Back in 2000, Congress allocated a $1.6 billion payback to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but Congress had capped paybacks, so only $120.2 million has been paid back so far. ”We stressed that the government’s obligation to pay contract support costs should be treated as an ordinary contract promise,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her majority ruling, released Monday.
Watch this video. Feel good about Scott Brown. Then, after you’re done watching the clip of the Massachusetts senator draining a three pointer from half-court, know that Democrats in the state are using this as evidence that the Senator is improperly using taxpayer money to shoot campaign videos, as this video was shot by one of his staffers. Now the answer to that is “uh, of course not, because the congressional staffer was just lucky enough to catch Scott Brown shoot an underhand three pointer from half-court.” But Democrats in Massachusetts are facing trouble of their own, with Elizabeth Warren continuing to face questions about whether she improperly claimed to be Native American during her educational career. But maybe you don’t care about any of that. In that case, we recommend you just watch the video. source
» The worst part about the mess: The cases dragged on for much longer than they should have partly because the Senate could not get a majority vote on funding either of these settlements over a number of years. They passed the bill Friday. The House has to pass this still, but they’ve already done that twice, so it should be less of an issue.
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