Posts Tagged ‘michael jordan’

The last three weeks have shown us that taxpayer-funded media is a terrible idea

Posted: July 14, 2024 by John Ruberry in internet/free speech, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Newspapers have been folding fairly regularly for decades. Unable to adapt to the rise of television in the 1950s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the marketplace has spoken. 

And it’s still speaking

Despite the rapid evolution of news consumption, the one finite resource is still time. If someone is scrolling X (Twitter), or worse, Facebook, then they’re not reading a newspaper, whether it’s an online edition or print. Sure, newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable networks, and local TV stations utilize social media to attract visitors, but most users only casually scan the headlines. 

As for the dead tree media, Chicago still has two major daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and both are bat sh*t crazy woke. Even in a deep blue city like Chicago, my guess is at best 30-percent of the population are members of the far-left. Once you include the suburbs, again it’s my guess, there’s a center-right majority. 

Even if I’m wrong, the greatest athlete ever to put on a Chicago professional sports uniform, Michael Jordan, proved he had more common sense than most left-wing Chicago journalists and publishers. “Republicans buy sneakers too,” he said decades ago.

Since the June 27 Joe Biden debate wipeout, the media, both nationally and here in the Chicago area, have been exposed as collection of liars and propagandists. Conservatives have known that for years, only now everyone else is aware, with possible exception of the dumbest person on the internet, pro-Biden brat Harry Sisson.

During the spring session of the Illinois General Assembly, the gerrymandered empowered Democratic supermajorities passed a series of bills–all first of its kind–that will offer taxpayer funded subsidies to dying newspapers and other media outlets. I covered this subject five months ago in this Da Tech Guy post: Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news.

Forbes offered a summary of this awful-offal bills in May:

Several of the new provisions [according to that legislation] aimed at shoring up local news outlets are written into the Illinois state budget as employment tax credits. They provide $25 million to newsrooms that hire or retain local reporters over five years. Specifically, newsrooms will receive $15,000 for each current reporter they employ and $25,000 for each new hire. The incentives are available to nonprofit and for-profit organizations alike, though there are limits on how much individual newsrooms and media companies can receive.

Separately, the Strengthening Community Media legislation, which passed both Illinois legislative chambers at the end of May and is awaiting signature by the governor, dedicates 50% of state advertising to local news outlets. It also requires that any newspaper in Illinois that intends to sell itself to an out-of-state company notify the public and its own employees 120 days before a sale occurs. The goal of this measure is to give in-state businesses and nonprofits the chance to bid on the outlet and increase the likelihood that ownership stays in state.

Terrible, terrible, terrible.

I’d like to say that it’s not up to Illinois to pick winners and losers, but the situation is worse than that. Illinois will be picking the losers.

For example, the headline of Sunday’s e-edition of the Chicago Tribune reads, “Trump ‘safe’ after gunfire.” A more accurate headline would be “Trump survives assassination attempt.” The Trib refuses to portray Trump sympathetically–it needs to placate its fellow wokesters.

After the very bloody July 4th weekend, Chicago’s far-left mayor and former Defund the Police advocate, Brandon Johnson, in a rambling press conference, blamed Richard M. Nixon, who resigned the president 50 years ago next month, for the carnage.

Okay, he didn’t flat out say, “Over 100 people were shot in Chicago last weekend–and it’s because of Nixon.” Again, Johnson didn’t utter those words.

Here’s what the mayor said:

Black death has been unfortunately been accepted in this country for a very long time. We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes. And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon.

So yes, Brandon Johnson blamed Nixon.

But the Chicago Sun-Times, in a laughably wretched fact-check, claimed he didn’t blame Nixon. As with the Tribune e-edition X post, the comments on X accompanying the Sun-Times fact-check are quite entertaining.

As Dan Bongino says so often, “The media wants to tell a story, not THE story.”

Understandably Chicago area readers, except for those wokesters, tune out the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

The rest of Illinois has other legacy newspapers that are equally rotten. Gannett’s Rockford Register Star, it’s deriders know it as “the Red Star,” immediately comes to mind.

The bills to offer taxpayer subsidies to these propaganda outlets are awaiting Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signature. I suspect Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a Chicago Democrat, will sign them.

Pritzker is a likely presidential candidate in 2028–if not sooner. He’ll want his story, not the story, to get out. He’ll want the Democrats’ story–subsidized by taxpayers– to be told, not the real story.

Again, I have to tell Illinois’ legacy media that it makes more business sense to reach out to a majority of people as opposed to a few. But ideologues don’t cope well with common sense.

One more thing: Both nationally and in Illinois, the media has been claiming that Trump is a threat to democracy. If that was true, of course, then why didn’t 45 set up a dictatorship after the 2016 election?

John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.

Nothing but net: When Nike fought back against a left-wing Operation PUSH boycott and won

Posted: April 2, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, nba, News/opinion, nfl, opinion/news, politics, Sports
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By John Ruberry

This week Air, an Amazon Studios film, opens in movie theaters nationwide. It tells the story of Nike’s development of the Air Jordan line of sneakers in the mid-1980s. The shoes were the expensive footwear of Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan, who still appears in Nike ads.

What you won’t see in Air is the failed boycott of Operation PUSH in 1990 of Nike. Chicago-based PUSH, now Rainbow/PUSH, was, depending on who you talk to, either a major civil rights power of the late 20th century, or a shakedown operation. I belong to the latter camp. 

PUSH was founded in the early 1970s by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, but he departed PUSH to be serve as a shadow senator for Washington DC–what does that entail?– and to lead a new group, the National Rainbow Coalition, which merged with PUSH in 1996. Leading PUSH during the Jackson-less interregnum was the Reverend Tyrone Crider. 

Jackson’s gameplan for PUSH followed this pattern: He’d smear a corporation as racist, call for a boycott, then demand that these corporations hire more Blacks and other minorities–as well as more minority contractors–and then declare victory. But often those hired were cronies and relatives of Jackson. Coca-Cola, some CBS television affiliates, and Anheuser-Busch were prior targets of PUSH.

Of the latter, Jackson said, “This bud’s a dud,” a play on the brewer’s slogan for Budweiser at the time. In 1998, two of Jackson’s sons, Yusuf and Jonathan, purchased a Chicago Anheuser-Busch distributor. 

Shortly after taking the helm of PUSH in 1990, Crider picked a new villain, Nike. Unlike past targets/victims whose founders were either retired or long dead, Nike’s founders, scrappy entrepreneurs Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, were still with the corporation in 1990. Knight was the chairman of Nike at the time, he was only a quarter-century removed from when he was selling running shoes at track meets from the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant. 

When PUSH declared its boycott of Nike–sorry, I can’t resist–the sneaker giant pushed back. Nike quickly announced it would appoint a Black board member and a Black vice president, and hire some Black department heads, but a Nike spokesperson said that those moves were already planned prior to the PUSH attack.

Next came a nothing-but-net three-pointer by Nike from midcourt. In an open letter, Nike turned the tables on PUSH, requesting that it turn over “the membership of PUSH by geographical location, age, sex and race.” It gets better. Nike asked in that same letter, “Has PUSH been the subject of review or investigation by any federal or state agency? If so, state the name of the agency involved, the nature of the investigation and the findings or conclusions of the investigation.” Guess what? PUSH had been the target of a federal probe.

PUSH demanded proprietary financial information from Nike, at the same time Reebok, a top competitor of Nike, purchased a full-page ad in the Operation PUSH magazine. That same open letter, according to a Chicago Tribune article, also called on “PUSH to supply details in 21 categories relating to how the organization made its decision to single out the athletic-wear industry.”

None of the celebrity endorsers of the time for Nike, whose ranks included Spike Lee, Bo Jackson, and His Airness, Michael Jordan, participated in the boycott. Georgetown men’s basketball coach John Thompson, a consultant for Nike who later served as a board member, also remained loyal.

By early 1991, PUSH laid off its entire paid staff, although other civil rights groups bailed it out a week later.

And what about Nike sales? “The boycott has had little apparent effect on Nike,” the Washington Post reported at the time, “whose earnings soared 58 percent last September, October and November over the corresponding period in 1989.”

Nothing but net.

Of course, now Nike is completely woke, Knight is retired and Bowerman died in 1999. Colin Kaepernick, a Nike endorser beginning in 2011, was featured in a series of Nike ads after he was handed his last NFL snap. In his last season as a professional football player, Kaepernick took a knee when the National Anthem was played before games. Kaepernick regularly speaks out in favor of various far-left causes, such as abolishing prisons and police departments.

For a time, Nike was gutsy. And the lesson for corporations today is clear. You can fight back against leftist threats and win.

Just do it.

When you stand up to bullies, they usually back down.

John Ruberry, who wore his first pair of Nike Waffle Trainer running shoes in 1977, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Five Reasons Why Tom Brady is Superior to Michael Jordan as the Sports Goat

Posted: September 9, 2021 by datechguy in nba, nfl, Sports
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There was a bit of a fuss on TV over Michael Irvin & Stephen A Smith over who is the overall Goat Jordan vs Brady.

In my opinion there is no debate at all. The nod is to Brady for these reasons

  1. Brady won championships and made finals all through his career Jordan did not

Michael Jordan career spans from 1984 at age 21 to 2003 at age 39 with one year off for baseball and three years off for retirement before returning with the wizards. Jordan won six championships during that period at ages 27-29 & 32-34.

Tom Brady’s career spans from 2001 at age 24 (in 2000 he appeared in one game and threw 3 passes completing one for six yards) and continues in 2021 at age 44. During this period he has won seven championships at ages 24,26,27, 37, 39, 41 and 43. He also made the finals three other times at ages 30, 33 and 40. Which is far superior to Jordan

  1. Brady won championships in a sport where it is harder to win a championship

In basketball playoffs it is very easy for the cream to rise to the top. Series are best of five or best of seven. So a single off game or hot game from your opponent or freak play might cost you a game but is unlikely to cost you a series.

In football it’s one and done. One bad throw, one off game, one supreme effort by an opponent or one freak catch off the top of Helmut can be the difference between a title and an also ran. Jordan had a margin of error, Brady does not.

Furthermore Football weighs a schedule based on your finish thus when he was regularly winning AFC East titles he was doing so when constantly playing a 1st place schedule. He succeeded against a system designed to make him fail.

  1. Brady has won championships with different lineups on different teams with different systems

Jordan won six titles in Chicago under Phil Jackson with a fairly consistent lineup around him. Tom Brady has not only won titles with two different teams with two different systems but even when he was with the Patriots over twenty years he managed to win titles and get to titles with a completely different cast of characters around him. None of the teammates from his first three titles played with him in his last two.

  1. Brady has taken a sub .500 team to a title not once but twice.

Michael Jordan’s did take a Chicago team with a losing record to the playoffs then later to the conference semis, then the conference finals and then at age 27 to the finals where he established the Bulls Dynasty. But while he was able to make a horrible Wizards team 20 games better then they were he was unable to get them even to the 1st round of the playoffs

When Tom Brady at age 25 started for the injured Drew Bledsoe in game 3 of the 2001-2002 season the Patriots’ were coming off a 5-11 last place season and were 0-2. He would lead them to their first superbowl victory. When he came in as the new QB for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at age 43, he took over a 3rd place team with a 7-9 record and took them to their first superbowl in almost twenty years.

  1. At age 44 Brady is favored to make it to the Superbowl AGAIN!

All of these previous points would, in my opinion be enough to close the case here, but if that wasn’t enough the icing on the cake is that at age 44 nobody is picking Brady and the Bucks to do any worse than the NFC title game and many are picking him to win yet another Superbowl. It’s true that both Aaron Rogers and Patrick Mahomes will likely be standing in his way with a big chips on their shoulders and nobody would be shocked if either Rogers kept Brady from another superbowl appearance or Mahomes kept him from his eighth ring.

But the fact that we are even having this conversation makes my point for me.

In conclusion with all due respect to Stephen A Smith there is no debate to have here. Brady is over Jordan. WAY over.

Full Disclosure: I don’t rate Michael Jordan as the GOAT of the NBA or LeBron, I give that to Bill Russell who in 13 years in the NBA made the finals every year but one and won the title every year but two and won two of those titles as a player coach.

He is the person Brady should be compared to and points 2-5 count in Brady’s favor, however Russell gets points for

  1. 2 titles as player coach (and as the 1st black coach in the NBA)
  2. Coming up in an era of segregation and STILL ruling the roost.
  3. playing in a smaller NBA where the talent was more concentrated

To me it’s a tough call, but if Brady goes to another Superbowl then I’d have to give it to Tom.

I think the LeBron stuff and LeBron himself is very overrated, however…

Posted: July 19, 2010 by datechguy in Sports
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we are going to hold not being Jordan against him? C’mon! Jordon at worst is the 2nd greatest player of all time (I’d give the nod to Russell) so I think we can forgive him for not having the same drive in some areas.

it is the media hype that has changed the expectations game on him, he has wisely used it to become even richer than his considerable skills would have made him. If we have unrealistic expectations of him it is our fault not his.