Free Republic

Morgan went oversea to play for Olympique Lyonnais for precisely this reason.

Boycott I’m actually a little surprised by this, if only because it seems in recent years major league sports have been pretty intimidated by the forces of political correctness. Which is to say: They know who will scream and boycott if they don’t give them what they want, and all large, high-profile institutions want to avoid the bad publicity that comes with such things. Oscar Lopez Rivera is a terrorist responsible for more than 100 bombings, but that’s old news. The new news is that Barack Obama commuted his sentence on his way out the door, which makes Rivera a...

Priorities. I doubt they’ve lost interest in impeaching Trump, but I guess it says something about the American left that they can make other demands driven by pure ideology without any regard for the merit of the idea itself. The left - at least those who know what football is - has become convinced thaat Colin Kaepernick is being “blackballed” by all 32 NFL teams because he refused to stand for the national anthem last year. This has become such an article of faith that they are now getting ready to hold rallies in 15 different cities demanding that someone...

LOS ANGELES – Dodgers Hall of Famer Tommy Lasorda has been hospitalized for several days. Details of Lasorda’s illness are being kept private, but a number of Lasorda’s former players have been among those in contact with Lasorda, who has been in the intensive care unit at a Los Angeles hospital. Lasorda, 89, has a history of heart problems and was hospitalized following a heart attack as recently as 2012. Lasorda has been hospitalized multiple times in the past year, including after a fall while attending a memorabilia show in Atlantic City last August and then again for 10 days...

"Muhammad Alarefe, a prominent Saudi religious leader, has demanded that FIFA, the international soccer governing body, instruct players to stop making the Christian sign of the cross." For many Christians, their deep, personal and peaceful faith is inextricable from every aspect of their life. Making the sign of the cross — or any other religious gesture — should not pose a problem or threat to anyone, but to the Islamic supremacist leader Muhammad Alarefe and his ilk, any religious expression outside of Islam represents a threat, especially since FIFA is so prestigious. Let’s hope FIFA honors the religious freedoms of...

SIERRA VISTA — Two Sierra Vista Unified School District campuses were graced with a visit from an Olympic bronze medalist on Tuesday. Before the first school bell rang at Huachuca Mountain Elementary School, students rode side by side with Olympian Donny Robinson to the campus. His competitive sport is Bicycle Motocross, also known as BMX. At the Carmichael Elementary School campus, the cafeteria was at capacity with students, parents and teachers anxiously awaiting the Olympian’s arrival. “This week is about having an option to walk or bike to school safely,” preschool teacher Rachael Franks said. Franks is also the campus’...

Human shield. We love Tim Tebow here - even if he does play in the Mets organization - and we’re always happy to hear that something positive has happened in his career and in his life. So when ESPN re-upped with Tebow on his deal to be part of its college football studio offerings, we were nothing if not pleased. If Tebow wants to do TV while pursuing his baseball dreams, we’re all over it. But we couldn’t help but wonder: Does ESPN usually make such a big deal out of an existing talent re-signing? Because if one were inclined...

Can't figure out today's Kentucky Derby? This might help. (Sorry about the quality.)

Once again, it's Derby Day -- one of the highlights of the calendar. It looks like another great race! In honor of the occasion, I am posting this wonderful song from "Guys and Dolls". Enjoy!

This isn’t a fight for intolerance or exclusion. It’s a fight to return reality and mental health to mainstream America Conservatives were wrong when they said granting alternative lifestyle practitioners special rights would put the country on a slippery slope. It wasn’t a slope at all. America jumped off a cliff. Today sexual confusion isn’t concerned with whether a young adult should remain a virgin until marriage. It’s concerned with whether a young adult should remain a member of the sex into which they were born.

On this date in 1955, a new musical opened on Broadway called "Damn Yankees". I love this song and what it tells us.

FLORENCE, Ariz. (AP) - U.S. Customs and Border Protection is casting a wide net to recruit more Border Patrol agents and customs officers to protect the nation's borders. The agency is recruiting at events like massive music festival Country Thunder and the Professional Bull Riders rodeo....

TV ratings are "plummeting" and attendance is down more than 50 percent at some tracks: NASCAR has seen crowds shrink at virtually every track, many of which have removed seats, and its television ratings have plummeted. At Richmond, which once routinely seated more than 100,000 fans for races in the premier Cup series, only 60,000 seats remain and they were not close to full for Sunday's 400-lap race. "We're not isolated here," France said. "Every sport is trying to unlock the new consumption levels and fan interest by a younger demographic. Of course we love our core fan and everyone...

After enjoying the three day festival known as the NFL Draft, as well as the excellent picks made by my beloved Philadelphia Eagles, this seemed like a great time to weigh in on a few sports-related topics. The Conservasphere has been having a blast dancing on the soon-to be grave of ESPN. After a few years of increasingly obnoxious radical left wing politics being forced on its viewers, as opposed to sports reporting, ESPN is in an economic death spiral. The Nation's resident sports scold, David Zirin, dropped a surprisingly coherent summary:As Ley and others have explained, these layoffs...

Oops. The Callum Borchers of the world want “fake news” to mean only one thing: Crazy, sensationalist web sites with no journalistic credentials publish headlines like, “Obama born in Kenya, pledge loyalty to mosque there.” But fake news doesn’t always take that form. Sometimes fake news is 50 percent true, or even 90 percent true. But it’s the part they leave out, or fudge, or alter ever so slightly that not only makes it fake, but makes it so pernicious that someone reported it as fact.

Prepare to feel a little bit better about the world I’ve been to a lot of NHL games. When you’re born in Detroit, they slap your butt to get your lungs working, then they pretty much issue you a set of Red Wings tickets and a little jersey. That’s just how it works in Hockeytown. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, hockey fans are a different breed. There’s not a happier, nicer, more congenial crowd in professional sports.

Read these feminist poems while you clean out your desk! On Monday, ESPN announced it would be firing a gaggle of writers, on-air talent, and radio personalities. As subscribers and ratings decline, the former sports network has been forced (repeatedly) to trim its stable of on-air talent, writers, and radio personalities. Initially they claimed 40-50 jobs would get the axe. Yesterday, we learned ESPN’s employee bloodbath would involve over 100 people. Since they’ve announced no plans to alter their programming - other than to implement some kind of streaming service - we can only conclude that this is a temporary...

If you haven’t heard by now, ESPN is laying off 100 members of their journalist and on-air talent staff today. One of the biggest names to be let go so far include Ed Werder, who found out that his dog is dying about 45 minutes before he found out he was fired from ESPN after 17 years of reporting. Other big names include Trent Dilfer, Dana O’Neil, Jeremy Crabtree, and Danny Kanell (amongst others). A quick perusal of Twitter will and you’ll see that one big name is noticeably missing from the list of fired ESPN on-air talent: Jemele Hill....

The MSNBC of sports ESPN used to be the crown jewel in the Disney Corporation’s portfolio. It was thought to be the network cable subscribers couldn’t - and wouldn’t - live without, so it was a perennial cash-cow. Even if the movies, toys, and theme parks underperformed, ESPN could be counted on to generate mountains of Mouse-moolah. Maybe that’s why Keith Olbermann’s twice-former network thought infusing sports coverage with ever-increasing levels of left-wing political content was a good move. After all, if the ratings are bulletproof, why not let the biased, poorly-informed, political opinions fly?

You’d think the leading voices in the media and among pollsters would have learned their lesson after being so off the mark in their coverage of Donald Trump. They’re losing their grasp on both reality and their readers. But instead of correcting course, many of them are doubling down in the sanity. Just last week we saw this in play in the pages of – where else? – The New York Times. As if not content to let their November election night prediction that Hillary Clinton had a 92% chance of winning the presidency, the English-speaking world’s liberal paper of...