Posted on 02/12/2023 8:43:43 AM PST by george76
Whether you love or hate football, this is outrageous.
...
Nearly 100 million people will watch this year’s Super Bowl in Phoenix, Arizona. But most viewers will never know about a disturbing bit of backstory to this year’s event—how the NFL tried to collude with a local government to attack free speech.
A Phoenix city ordinance, likely lobbied for by the league, would have required local property owners to get the NFL’s approval for any advertisement they wanted to put up on properties in the downtown area. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the city dubbed this nearly two square mile area a “clean zone” and would’ve required business owners to get permits to display “posters, flyers, banners, pennants, flags, window paintings and even balloons” from January 15 to February 19. As a condition of that permit, they’d need to get permission from the NFL or Arizona’s Super Bowl Host Committee.
The idea was to give the NFL the ability to more closely control advertising in the area while tourism spikes for the event. For example, they could block anyone from displaying Coke ads, since the league formally partners with Pepsi.
FIRE blasted this measure as a “dystopian rule that violates the First Amendment.” Maricopa County Judge Bradley Astrowsky evidently agrees. He just heard a case brought by a local business owner who challenged the ordinance and said, “The city of Phoenix is letting the NFL decide what I can and cannot say on my own property. That’s not right.”
After hearing the case, the judge struck down the city’s ordinance on February 2 and called it “an unconstitutional delegation of government power” to a private entity.
Good riddance....
These kinds of laws are not new and have cropped up in localities that hosted past Super Bowls as well. But they’re absurd. The NFL has no right to control what other people can do on their properties. And local governments should be in the business of protecting the rights of their constituents, not catering to corporate interests and granting them special privileges in the law.
That’s crony capitalism at its very worst. And, unfortunately, it’s not the only way the government does special favors for the NFL. For example, many NFL teams receive billions in special tax exemptions and subsidies from local governments that force working taxpayers to subsidize a $17-billion-dollar sports league.
Whether you love or hate football, regardless, this is outrageous. It shouldn’t be too much to ask that the NFL pays its own way and plays by the same rules as everyone else.
Read a story once(true as far as I know) about a big baseball game where the vendors sold beer & some wiseacre discovered where the main water shutoff was for the ballpark. I guess that really caused problems! Word was that somebody finally researched some really old blueprints for the park & they eventually got the water back on. Use your imagination to figure out what may have occurred in the meantime!
Read a story once(true as far as I know) about a big baseball game where the vendors sold beer & some wiseacre discovered where the main water shutoff was for the ballpark. I guess that really caused problems! Word was that somebody finally researched some really old blueprints for the park & they eventually got the water back on. Use your imagination to figure out what may have occurred in the meantime!
“Raise Every Voice and Sing”? Or sometimes called the black national anthem?
If you read the lyrics on the Net, there is nothing racist about it. It’s a beautiful song with Godly lyrics.
So? It is not a National Anthem.
Calling it the black national anthem makes it racist as hell.
“If you read the lyrics on the Net, there is nothing racist about it. It’s a beautiful song with Godly lyrics”
Sigh
You think I’m an ignoramus? The lyricist was an avowed Republican
If anyone would look at the meaning of the national anthem- the defense of the constitution and point out to anyone protesting it and demand that our government stop trumping to divide us who have no problem with each other that would be good as well
So please look at the big picture, the presentation and the purpose of this and stop insulting me
I dvr most programs I watch, so I can skip over commercials and boring parts.
That wasn’t directed at you. It was just a comment.
As to the national anthem part, it would be nice if they did the national anthem too.
I was just commenting that the lyrics are just the way they should be, to my ear. Listen to it with the lyrics on YouTube. They acknowledge the past but are not bitter and they are full of worship, if you persevere to the end.
It has been called that. That’s why I used lower-case letters. I always forget that not everyone is a copy editor. To put it in quotes would have seemed snarky.
“ If you read the lyrics on the Net, there is nothing racist about it. It’s a beautiful song with Godly lyrics.”
Could yo be a little artistic. A little less linear?
How is it being presented and what is the purpose of that?
And don’t answer me I’m busy.
I wish you could block people on FR like you can on Facebook.
“I wish you could block people on FR like you can on Facebook.
Here’s how you do that on FR. Very straightforward and non passive aggressive, non wimpy, you know:
“Don’t answer me I’m busy.”
Yet the sailors on the US Naval ship were forced to wear the colors of the gay flag and align themselves at the flag- anyone just catch that?
They need their own nation to have a national anthem. Or is their a Black Nation we don’t know about?
THERE!?! ...is their a...
I’ve heard it called that, sort of like there is a nation within a nation—or maybe it is a global thing, but it doesn’t seem so from the lyrics. I don’t want to speak for black people, though. I’m just reporting what I’ve read and heard.
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