KAEPERNICK SACKED IN END ZONE, OPPOSITION SCORES SAFETY: Nike Makes Kaepernick Face Of Brand, Nike Shares Fall.

On Monday, the new face of Nike’s 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign was unveiled, and NFL fans will have no problem recognizing him: Colin Kaepernick, who started the protest movement back in 2016, when he declared, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”

In early trading Tuesday, Nike’s shares dropped by nearly 4 percent, “the biggest intraday slide in five months,” Bloomberg reports. “Nike shares slipped as much as 3.9 percent to $79 as of 9:31 a.m. Tuesday in New York — the biggest intraday slide in five months. They had climbed 31 percent this year through Friday’s close.”

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Yahoo Sports’ Charles Robinson reported Monday that despite Kaepernick having a deal with Nike since 2011, prompted by “interest from other shoe companies,” Nike worked out a new, far more extensive contract with Kaepernick. The deal is a “wide endorsement,” Robinson reported, a “star” deal, which will include royalties. The former QB will have “his own branded line,” including shoes, shirts, jerseys, and more.

Hey, what about socks?

In the crowded marketplace of athletic apparel, presumably Nike’s overnight transformation from selling an apolitical product to “woke sneakers” for the SJW set is a brand strategy similar to the reason why late night TV aims hard left, as described by Robert Tracinski of the Federalist:

This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.

What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.

And no doubt, as with ESPN’s own descent into a collective of SJWs with an occasional passing interest in sports, Nike decided to listen to the loudest voices on social media, rather than football fans at large:

Clay Travis’s new book, Republicans Buy Sneakers Too, is due out on September 25. Note the football player on the cover.

UPDATE: Kaepernick won’t stand for the flag but he’ll bow down to the Nike dollar? So much for ‘sacrificing everything.’

BREAKING: Explosion Outside U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

Patrick Poole has the early details, with updates on the way.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Sen. John McCain’s funeral put Washington’s vicious political hypocrisy fully on display. “Though some operatives tried to walk it back the next day, the McCain funeral was, despite his absence, all about our current president. As someone said on Twitter, they came not to praise McCain, but to bury Trump. And yet, despite solemn encomia to civility, honor, and integrity from the likes of Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger, amplified by the press’s Greek chorus, the notion that we used to live in some golden age of civility and bipartisanship exemplified by the career of Sen. McCain is belied by, among other things, the career of John McCain.”

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Conservatives Burn Shoes after Nike Makes Colin Kaepernick Face of ‘Just Do It’ Campaign.

Related: Nike shares dip as Kaepernick ad spurs boycott.

ELIZABETH PRICE FOLEY: Dems can’t ‘Bork’ Kavanaugh, and have only themselves to blame.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Claire McCaskill Said Hillary Clinton Was ‘Phony’ During 2000 Interview.

K.C. JOHNSON: Arne Duncan’s Untruthful Attack on Megyn Kelly.

Megyn Kelly is of the few journalists to have consistently raised concerns about the fairness of campus Title IX tribunals. She did so at Fox, bringing attention to the egregious case at Amherst College. And she did so last week at NBC, noting that while conditions once were unfairly tilted against the accuser, “the Obama administration overcorrected the problem, and swung the pendulum too far back over against the accused, completely eroding their due process rights.”

Kelly’s comments hardly should have been controversial. After all, every substantive change from the Dear Colleague letter (2011) and the 2014 guidance (standard of proof, double jeopardy principles, training, discouraging cross-examination, hastening the adjudication) increased the likelihood of a guilty finding. The President and Vice President both spoke publicly about the need for colleges to crack down on sexual assault; neither ever even hinted at the importance of due process. Nor did OCR head Catherine Lhamon in her public comments—though she did threaten to pull funding from any schools that didn’t do her bidding.

That the Obama-era OCR believed that colleges needed to adopt more accuser-friendly procedures is beyond dispute. The only dispute revolved around the wisdom of those policies.
That was before the intervention of former Education Secretary Arne Duncan. He could have ignored them. Duncan could have explained why his subordinates demanded guilt-tilting procedures. Instead, almost incredibly, he lashed out at Kelly, in sharply personal terms—accusing her of having “lied,” and calling her an outright “liar.” The administration, Duncan asserted, “didn’t just fight to protect their [accused students’] due process, we investigated colleges, & held them accountable for Title IX violations when they failed to protect the rights of the accused.”

What was his evidence for this assertion? Not OCR’s 2011 or 2014 guidance—which applied to every school in the country, but whose terms Duncan didn’t even mention in his attacks on Kelly. Not the public remarks of either Obama or Biden—which he didn’t mention. Not other administration initiatives, such as “It’s On Us”—which, again, he didn’t mention. Not Lhamon’s threats to pull funds—which he didn’t mention.

Instead, Duncan denied Kelly’s claim (that “the Obama administration overcorrected the problem, and swung the pendulum too far back over against the accused, completely eroding their due process rights”) by citing a few throwaway passages about due process in two (UVA, Minot State) of the dozens of resolution letters between OCR and various universities. This is nothing short of an Orwellian rewrite of the Obama administration’s record.

No less than I expected.

“UNEXPECTEDLY”: South Africa Unexpectedly Slides Into Recession For The First Time Since 2009.

LIGHTEN UP, FRANCIS: Kavanaugh Will Be ‘Illegitimate Supreme Court Justice,’ Trump Is a ‘Dictator in the Making.’

BUT OF COURSE: Maryland gubernatorial candidate wants free college tuition for DACA students.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Sen. John McCain’s funeral put Washington’s vicious political hypocrisy fully on display. “Though some operatives tried to walk it back the next day, the McCain funeral was, despite his absence, all about our current president. As someone said on Twitter, they came not to praise McCain, but to bury Trump. And yet, despite solemn encomia to civility, honor, and integrity from the likes of Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger, amplified by the press’s Greek chorus, the notion that we used to live in some golden age of civility and bipartisanship exemplified by the career of Sen. McCain is belied by, among other things, the career of John McCain.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: It’s KavaNOPE Week and Much, Much More. “Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s selection to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, is facing confirmation hearings this week. There’s really no way to stop him from getting confirmed, but the left will do as much collateral damage as possible.”

These days, the collateral damage is the point.

TWO CARRIER STRIKE GROUPS: The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group and the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group transit the Atlantic Ocean in formation.

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN: Ivanka emerges as Trump’s jobs czar, focus on ‘forgotten men and women.’

Ivanka Trump never planned to become her father’s jobs czar.

But as she traveled on his winning 2016 presidential campaign that stopped in many once-thriving industrial cities, she heard first hand about the plight of “forgotten” workers who saw hope in Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda.

“She would meet moms who wanted to support their family but didn’t either have a skill set or wanted to go back into the workforce and weren’t sure how, weren’t sure how to find a job. She met dads who wanted to earn wages where they could support their family but didn’t have the right skills,” said a senior administration official.

The first daughter also heard from highly educated friends in the same boat. She recently cited pals who graduated from Princeton University with “no skills to actually compete in the workforce.”

And as the economy has boomed, she also heard from companies seeking skilled workers.

In a way, the role she now has in leading the administration’s effort to boost jobs training for preschoolers to retirees picked her.

Indeed.

PRIVACY: US among consortium of nations calling for encryption back doors.

HMM: China’s ‘Silk Road’ project runs into debt jam.

During a visit to Beijing in August, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said his country would shelve three China-backed projects, including a $20 billion railway.

The party of Pakistan’s new prime minister, Imran Khan, has vowed more transparency amid fears about the country’s ability to repay Chinese loans related to the multi-billion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Meanwhile the exiled leader of the opposition in the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, has said China’s actions in the Indian Ocean archipelago amounted to a “land grab” and “colonialism”, with 80 percent of its debt held by Beijing.

Sri Lanka has already paid a heavy price for being highly indebted to China.

Last year, the island nation had to grant a 99-year lease on a strategic port to Beijing over its inability to repay loans for the $1.4-billion project.

“China does not have a very competent international bureaucracy in foreign aid, in expansion of soft power,” Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder and research director at J Capital Research, told AFP.

“So not surprisingly they’re not very good at it, and it brought up political issues like Malaysia that nobody anticipated,” she said.

Tom Rogan opined last week that China’s “new aircraft carrier is all about political prestige, not military power.” But I have to wonder if Beijing isn’t dreaming of a little gunboat diplomacy.

THE HILL: McCarthy leads GOP charge against Silicon Valley. Don’t regulate their businesses; break ’em up.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales.

LIAWATHA: Boston Globe unintentionally proves Elizabeth Warren’s ethnic fraud. “Spends 3,000 words trying to cover for her, but facts revealed destroy her claim to be Native American.”

The story, which had the cooperation of the Warren campaign, comes just days before the first debate in Massachusetts’ Senate race. Clearly, the Warren campaign is worried after even Native Americans who are Democrats criticized Warren at the DNC in Charlotte, and is attempting to put its story out there through a friendly source.

The article is a masterpiece of distraction, weaving stories from people completely unrelated to Warren as to their own experiences with Native America family lore or growing up as Native American in the 1950’s and 1960’s with bits and pieces of Warren’s story. The end result is an attempt to paint Warren as a victim of circumstance and the times she grew up in, as a means of explaining away the many inconsistencies in her story.

We now have the Boston Globe Corollary to Costanza’s Law: It’s not a lie if no one believes it.

WEIRD HOW THIS NEVER-ENDING STREAM OF ERRORS ALWAYS GOES THE SAME DIRECTION: Facebook ‘Employee Error’ Responsible for PragerU 99.9999% Drop in Reach.

THERE IS NO GREATER SIN: Doctor Tells Truth About Gender Pay Gap In Medicine. Then He Was Forced To Apologize.

Telling the truth – albeit not in the best terms – about why women in any particular field earn less than men in the same field will automatically trigger an online rage mob screaming “sexism!’ as Plano, Texas doctor Gary Tigges learned this past week.

Tigges was interviewed (he says he didn’t know his statements would be published) for the Dallas Medical Journal and gave a reason for why female doctors earn less than male doctors.

“Female physicians do not work as hard and do not see as many patients as male physicians. This is because they choose to, or they simply don’t want to be rushed, or they don’t want to work the long hours. Most of the time, their priority is something else … family, social, whatever,” Tigges told the Journal. “Nothing needs to be ‘done’ about this unless female physicians actually want to work harder and put in the hours. If not, they should be paid less. That is fair.” . . .

The Washington Post, which just reported on the outrage surrounding Tigges’ comments, admitted that everything the doctor said was true, but still found a way to describe it as discrimination.

“Many female doctors do work fewer hours and see fewer patients, but not because of laziness or lack of drive, according to studies from the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American Medical Association. Female physicians shoulder more of the burden at home; those with kids work an average of 11 fewer hours a week than ones without, according to a 2017 study by JAMA Internal Medicine,” the Post wrote. “Their extra burdens at home are used against them — to justify their lower pay and elevate men’s higher pay, according to Kim Templeton, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City.”

Templeton is then quoted as saying there’s an assumption that male doctors “should make more because they are taking care of the family.”

The Post first ignores that Tigges never claimed female physicians are lazy or not driven. It then referred to children twice as “burdens.” I imagine most women with children don’t see them as a “burden.”

This is something purveyors of the gender-wage-gap myth love to do. They describe children as nothing more than a drag on one’s career, completely ignoring the fact that most women love their children and want to spend more time with them, and if they are in a position to do so – through working fewer hours – they will. Men, on the other hand, earn more after having a child if they have a wife who decides to work less to care more for the child. Men tend to be viewed then as cash machines rather than parents.

So much sexism.

A RADICAL PROPOSAL THAT WILL NEVER BE IMPLEMENTED: Public sector unions need to serve their members, not the Democratic Party.