That Was The Week That Was In Links - February 21, 2025

Some stuff I’ve consumed and items of note…

• Parker Molloy on former NFL player Chris Kluwe, who engaged in civil disobedience this week and got arrested for nonviolent action, on what Democrats can learn from the act:

We're living in an attention economy where it's increasingly difficult to break through the noise. Yet Democratic leaders keep trying to fight an authoritarian movement with press releases and parliamentary procedure. It's like bringing a stack of memos to a knife fight.

Meanwhile, a former NFL punter just showed exactly how it's done: Make a principled stand, back it up with peaceful but dramatic action, and force the media to pay attention. The coverage writes itself: Former NFL player arrested protesting MAGA display? That's a story that travels.

• My reflex is to vehemently disagree with Jay Caspain Kang’s endorsement of a Stephen A. Smith presidential run, if for nothing else than Smith is actually too Joe Rogan-y. But Kang’s argument, which includes a Rogan discussion, isn’t without some merit:

In previous columns, I’ve written that the next candidate should be either a so-called radical centrist like Smith, who runs to the center of everything, or a Bernie Sanders-like figure who can energize young people and the working class on a platform of anti-oligarch economic populism. If establishment politicians accuse Smith or this still unknown left challenger of not being serious enough for the job, they should point out that the Democrats, the supposedly serious ones, tried to run a clearly diminished eighty-one-year-old and then swapped him with someone who didn’t even make it to Iowa when she ran for President a few years earlier. The ‘serious’ Party should produce a “serious” candidate before they start defining who is and is not serious.

I still don’t want one of two options to be Smith, but every day I am being shown that in this two-party system there is no attempt at a viable alternative from a party that is tearing all of its ligaments to stretch themselves in ways that communicate that they do not actually want to help anyone but themselves keeping their phony baloney jobs.  

• Hey, remember the Super Bowl? Good times, right. Hey, did you know that in preparation for this year’s Super Bowl, Louisiana state police forced over 100 unhoused men and women onto buses under threat of arrest and put them in an unheated warehouse (that the media wasn’t allowed access to) while confiscating (destroying) those people’s tents and belongings and that it cost $17.5 million?

That is about twice what Unity, the lead agency coordinating homelessness services, spends on program services over the same amount of time for all unhoused people in New Orleans. The price tag is also equivalent to a year’s rent for a one-bedroom apartment for 1,177 people, which would constitute roughly 80% of New Orleans’ unhoused population.

• The President of the TV jinxed the USA hockey team with an “awesome” phone call.
• While DOGE is laying off employees from important jobs daily in the largest scam in federal government history, it’s conveniently ignoring that the President of the TV has already cost over $10 million in his first month in office on golf trips, and he has spent about a third of his second term so far on the links. My favorite part about HuffPost’s investigation (emphasis mine):

The GAO calculated a total cost of $3,383,250 for each trip. About one-third of that was the flight cost of Air Force One for the round trip, with additional expenses for flying down vehicles, including two presidential limousines, for Trump’s motorcade and reimbursing the Coast Guard for stationing a gunship in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast and heavily armed boats in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Imagine joining the armed services with dreams of protecting your country and then having to tell loved ones that you spend your days parked in the water near a golf course in case a disgruntled pontoon rolls up with a 3-D printed rocket launcher.

• The alarms about the downsides of sports gambling’s ubiquity are popping up everywhere lately, but I found this recent discussion with Arif Hasan and Caleb Wilson on Ed Zitron’s podcast Better Offline to be the best I’ve encountered so far. 
• Another week, another increase in the number of massage therapists accusing Ravens kicker Justin Tucker of being a sexual predator (which brings the total so far to 16 accusers)
• Looks like this is the last year of MLB games on ESPN. Do Sunday night games–which I’ve heard players, coaches, and home radio broadcasters hate–go away then, too? Either way, brace yourself for more, “I don’t have that streaming service to watch this game” in your life, probably.
• An uncomfortable story about a tennis champ and the suspended coach who seems to have created an abusive relationship with her 
• Former Spanish football federation president Luis Rubiales, who has insisted he did nothing wrong, was found guilty of sexually assaulting player Jenni Hermoso for kissing her on the mouth without consent after the 2023 Women's World Cup final, but Rubiales received no prison time and a fine instead.
• Where do your baseball loyalties lie? With the Mumbai Cobras managed by Chris Sabo or the Arabia Wolves featuring Didi Gregorius and Robinson Cano? 

I know there's a big world out there
Like the one that I saw on the screen
In my living room, late last night
It was almost too bright to see
And I know that it's not a party
If it happens every night
Pretending there's glamour and candelabra
When you're drinking by candlelight

Weekend.