(Hat-tip to Frank R.) This will be a combination of two old posts along with new information. The New info first, and I will date the others. THE DAILY WIRE has the update:
While many have been celebrating the Washington Redskins’ decision to officially change the team nickname into something less triggering, not everyone is happy about the development, including the Native American family of the man who originally designed the NFL team’s logo.
The Redskins logo that America knows today was originally designed in 1971 by Native American Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, whose iconic image depicted John “Two Guns” White Calf, a Blackfeet Chief who also appears on the Buffalo Nickel.
“Wetzel grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and was eventually elected president of the National Congress of American Indians in Washington, D.C.,” WUSA9 reports. “He was instrumental in the Redskins franchise logo change from an ‘R’ to the current depiction of a Native American.”
Wetzel’s son, Lance Wetzel, said the logo evokes pride in Native Americans and should not be considered offensive. Though he understands the decision to change the team nickname, he believes the logo should stay.
“Everyone was pretty upset (about the change),” Lance Wetzel said. “Everyone understood the name change. We were all on board with that. Once they weren’t going to use the logo, it was hard. It takes away from the Native Americans. When I see that logo, I take pride in it. You look at the depiction of the Redskins logo and it’s of a true Native American. I always felt it was representing my people. That’s not gone.”
“The Native Americans were forgotten people. That logo lets people know these people exist,” Wetzel continued. “If it were changed and it removed any derogatory feelings toward any person, then I think it’s a win. I don’t want that logo to be associated in a negative way, ever.”
Earlier this year, the butter company Land O’ Lakes announced that it would be removing the famed “Butter Maiden” – a Native American woman named Mia – from its packaging, a logo designed by Native American artist Patrick DesJarlait. In an article for The Washington Post, DesJarlait’s son, Robert, said his father crafted the logo to “foster a sense of Indian pride.”…..
(June 24, 2014)
I am going to start this post with a very STRONGLY WORDED rant on the asinine political correctness found on the professional Left. Again, language warning, but you should be just as flabbergasted as these men (via THE BLAZE):
Jonathan Turley (via THE WASHINGTON POST) gets into the mix in his now patented warning from the left about the excesses of government size, growth, and overreach. Some of which I have noted in the past HERE. But here is the column from which Dennis Prager touches on, and Goldberg’s will follow:
…It didn’t matter to the patent office that polls show substantial majorities of the public and the Native American community do not find the name offensive. A 2004 Annenberg Public Policy Center poll found that 90 percent of Native Americans said the name didn’t bother them. Instead, the board focused on a 1993 resolution adopted by the National Congress of American Indians denouncing the name. The board simply extrapolated that, since the National Congress represented about 30 percent of Native Americans, one out of every three Native Americans found it offensive. “Thirty percent is without doubt a substantial composite,” the board wrote.
Politicians rejoiced in the government intervention, which had an immediate symbolic impact. As Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said Wednesday: “You want to ignore millions of Native Americans? Well, it’s pretty hard to say the federal government doesn’t know what they’re talking about when they say it’s disparaging.”
For the Washington Redskins, there may be years of appeals, and pending a final decision, the trademarks will remain enforceable. But if the ruling stands, it will threaten billions of dollars in merchandizing and sponsorship profits for NFL teams, which share revenue. Redskins owner Dan Snyder would have to yield or slowly succumb to death by a thousand infringement paper cuts.
The patent office opinion also seems to leave the future of trademarks largely dependent on whether groups file challenges. Currently trademarked slogans such as “Uppity Negro” and “You Can’t Make A Housewife Out Of A Whore” could lose their protections, despite the social and political meaning they hold for their creators. We could see organizations struggle to recast themselves so they are less likely to attract the ire of litigious groups — the way Carthage College changed its sports teams’ nickname from Redmen to Red Men and the California State University at Stanislaus Warriors dropped their Native American mascot and logo in favor of the Roman warrior Titus. It appears Fighting Romans are not offensive, but Fighting Sioux are.
As federal agencies have grown in size and scope, they have increasingly viewed their regulatory functions as powers to reward or punish citizens and groups. The Internal Revenue Service offers another good example. Like the patent office, it was created for a relatively narrow function: tax collection. Yet the agency also determines which groups don’t have to pay taxes. Historically, the IRS adopted a neutral rule that avoided not-for-profit determinations based on the content of organizations’ beliefs and practices. Then, in 1970, came the Bob Jones University case. The IRS withdrew the tax-exempt status from the religious institution because of its rule against interracial dating on campus. The Supreme Court affirmed in 1983 that the IRS could yank tax exemption whenever it decided that an organization is behaving “contrary to established public policy” — whatever that public policy may be. Bob Jones had to choose between financial ruin and conforming its religious practices. It did the latter.
There is an obvious problem when the sanctioning of free exercise of religion or speech becomes a matter of discretionary agency action. And it goes beyond trademarks and taxes. Consider the Federal Election Commission’s claim of authority to sit in judgment of whether a film is a prohibited “electioneering communication.” While the anti-George W. Bush film “Fahrenheit 9/11” was not treated as such in 2004, the anti-Clinton “Hillary: The Movie” was barred by the FEC in 2008. The agency appeared Caesar-like in its approval and disapproval — authority that was curtailed in 2010 by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.
Even water has become a vehicle for federal agency overreach. Recently, the Obama administration took punitive agency action against Washington state and Colorado for legalizing marijuana possession and sales. While the administration said it would not enforce criminal drug laws against marijuana growers — gaining points among the increasing number of citizens who support legalization and the right of states to pass such laws — it used a little-known agency, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, to cut off water to those farms. The Bureau of Reclamation was created as a neutral supplier of water and a manager of water projects out West, not an agency that would open or close a valve to punish noncompliant states….
Here is the article from THE NATIONAL REVIEW — in part — that has Jonah Goldberg likewise raising alarm about the bureaucracy that Turley speaks to in the above article.
…Now, I don’t believe we are becoming anything like 1930s Russia, never mind a real-life 1984. But this idea that bureaucrats — very broadly defined — can become their own class bent on protecting their interests at the expense of the public seems not only plausible but obviously true.
The evidence is everywhere. Every day it seems there’s another story about teachers’ unions using their stranglehold on public schools to reward themselves at the expense of children. School-choice programs and even public charter schools are under vicious attack, not because they are bad at educating children but because they’re good at it. Specifically, they are good at it because they don’t have to abide by rules aimed at protecting government workers at the expense of students.
The Veterans Affairs scandal can be boiled down to the fact that VA employees are the agency’s most important constituency. The Phoenix VA health-care system created secret waiting lists where patients languished and even died, while the administrator paid out almost $10 million in bonuses to VA employees over the last three years.
Working for the federal government simply isn’t like working for the private sector. Government employees are essentially unfireable. In the private sector, people lose their jobs for incompetence, redundancy, or obsolescence all the time. In government, these concepts are virtually meaningless. From a 2011 USA Today article: “Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.”
In 2010, the 168,000 federal workers in Washington, D.C. — who are quite well compensated — had a job-security rate of 99.74 percent. A HUD spokesman told USA Today that “his department’s low dismissal rate — providing a 99.85 percent job security rate for employees — shows a skilled and committed workforce.”
Uh huh.
Obviously, economic self-interest isn’t the only motivation. Bureaucrats no doubt sincerely believe that government is a wonderful thing and that it should be empowered to do ever more wonderful things. No doubt that is why the EPA has taken it upon itself to rewrite American energy policy without so much as a “by your leave” to Congress.
The Democratic party today is, quite simply, the party of government and the natural home of the managerial class. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the IRS, gave 94 percent of its political donations during the 2012 election cycle to Democratic candidates openly at war with the Tea Party — the same group singled out by Lois Lerner. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents the VA, gave 97 percent of its donations to Democrats at the national level and 100 percent to Democrats at the state level…
(June 27, 2014)
I was honored to be called an “ultra-rightest” and “racist” by an extremely liberal blogger, So That The Peoples May Live (STTPML). Here is a clipping from the site to my post:
The post referenced my excellent post, Thin-Skinned Over the Redskins ~ Warnings of Government Overreach. So I asked this blogger (we will see if I get a response) the following:
Please tell me how I am an racist? A leader of the Navajo Code Talkers who appeared at a Washington Redskins home football game said Wednesday the team name is a symbol of loyalty and courage — not a slur as asserted by critics who want it changed.
Is this Navajo leader a racist?
Are the 90% of Native-Americans who are not maligned by the name racist? I am sure many of them vote Democrat… would that mean they [Democrats] are “ultra-leftists/racists”??
Maybe next you can push to rename Oklahoma ~ which is Choctaw, “okla humma,” which literally means “red people.”
I will let Napoleon Dynamite finish off my thoughts of your post:
Since most Native-Americans vote Democrat (as linked in the above text), and most of them support the Redskins name, thus, making them [Democrats] racist… are they not also racist for supporting Obama in the general election[s]?
June 29, 2014
(See HotAir for more) The Washington Times reports:
Veterans aren’t happy with a recent op-ed by the Washington Post, which charged that the Apache, Comanche, Chinook, Lakota, Cheyenne and Kiowa military vehicles were a “greater symbolic injustice” than the NFL’s Washington Redskins’ name.
“Even if the NFL and Redskins brass come to their senses and rename the team, a greater symbolic injustice would continue to afflict Indians — an injustice perpetuated not by a football club but by our federal government,” Simon Waxman of the Boston Review wrote for the Post on Thursday.
He added that the helicopter names were “propaganda” that needed to end, because Native American life expectancy statistics indicate the “violence is ongoing, even if the guns are silent.”
Readers at the popular military news gathering website Doctrine Man reacted Friday.
“I suspect that the author is less unhappy that our choppers have Indian names, and more unhappy that there is a U.S. military,” wrote Alex Kuhns.
(August 13, 2014)
More at HOTAIR:
- A palate cleanser via Time, which notes that the “Redskins Facts” site is behind this and that the team itself is apparently behind “Redskins Facts.” (The anti-Redskins ad that inspired this rebuttal is also embedded [at link].) This is really just a taste of what they’ve got cooking; go to their YouTube account and you’ll find interviews with individual Native Americans defending the name. It’s an understandable counterattack — if your critics claim you’re victimizing a group, the natural response is to find members of the group who don’t feel victimized — but realistically we’re past the point of argument on this subject. It’s already reached litmus-test status. If you’re a Democrat, social justice demands that the name be changed lickety split; if you’re a Republican, the line must be held against political correctness. (Dan Snyder, for one, is obviously not giving in.) If you’re an average low-information voter, you probably don’t mind the name but don’t care much either way and will eventually be badgered into grudgingly accepting the bien-pensant position just to make this farking issue go away already.
