If You Don't Believe In Second Chances, Jeff Lurie, You Don't Believe In Second Downs

"If you don't believe in second chances, you don't believe in second downs."

This was lifted straight from the comment section of a web article about Michael Vick going to Philadelphia - I wish I could take credit for such a pithy, right on the money phrase, but to who ever wrote this originally, all I can say is "thank you".

I actually had another post, a more congratulatory one, that compared Vick to Ray Lewis, who went from a murder trial, where he wasn't found guilty of murder but was shown to have legions of questionable associates, to Super Bowl MVP - because in America, we are supposed to believe in second chances.

We are supposed to be able to put the past behind us, especially when the crime in question DID NOT go unpunished.

But yesterday, I know my blood pressure went off the charts when I read the comment by Jeff Lurie, the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, regarding his meeting with Michael Vick before he signed off on his contract.

"I needed to see a lot of self-hatred in order to approve this," Lurie said.

Excerpted from "With Eagles, Vick gets second chance"
ESPN Online

Self hatred?

Are you serious, Jeff Lurie?

The quote above, the one that I started this post with, Jeff Lurie, is for you. "If you don't believe in second chances, Jeff Lurie, you don't believe in second downs."

More importantly, sportswriters at ESPN and SI, why aren't you calling the Eagles front office in droves to see just what generated this kind of attitude from a team owner?

What the hell kind of statement is "I needed to see a lot of self-hatred"? Why does Vick, who is nothing more than a very good football player who has had off the field legal problems, need to hate himself before you can sign him to potentially quarterback your team, should injury befall McNabb, your starter, and Kolb your backup?

Any grade school teacher will tell you that they teach children to despise the bad acts they may commit, not themselves.

Does Michael Vick have to jump off the Empire State Building and rise again from the dead in order to move on from the sordid segment of his life that he just finished paying almost two years of his life for?

Will you pay him in crumpled up dollar bills every week to prove your point, Mr. Lurie?

Your coach Andy Reid can't keep his heroin and meth addicted thug sons out of jail for more than ten minutes at a time, an OFF THE FIELD distraction that has to have affected his decisionmaking.

Your fans are so nasty and rowdy during your home games that the Philadelphia police have a jail IN THE STADIUM.

In a redemptive society, where we believe that HUMAN BEINGS have the capacity to change, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE SO YOUNG, to write off an entire person means you don't really believe in whatever religion you claim to espouse, Mr. Lurie.

Pretending to possess a choir boy level of sanctimony in a business where you pay grown men to knock the snot out of their opponents every forty five seconds is beyond hypocrisy.

But more than that, what I want to know is why Michael Vick has to play the role of the sub-human negro in order to MAKE YOU RICHER.

In order to help your team get over the hump to GET TO THE SUPER BOWL.

Will you refuse to accept the Lombardi Trophy if Philadelphia can somehow make it through the playoffs this year and notch a victory in the big game if Michael Vick's hands touch the ball during regulation play?

I won't hold my breath for your answer, Jeff Lurie.

But I will be watching you in your owners box when Vick scores his first touchdown for your team.

Audio Of Brown Man Thinking Hard's FIRST EDITION Interview with Sean Yoes

My father told me he missed the radio interview I did with Sean Yoes that aired on WEAA last Sunday night.

So I tooled around the vast internet for an hour tonight, until I figured out how to make the audio that the station has graciously made available to me easily available to others. Now my father, and anyone else who wondered what it sounded like, can access the interview portion of the show at the touch of a button.


Audio Of FIRST EDITION Interview with Sean Yoes




While I'm working on polishing and revising my real post for tonight, which is liable to be the lunchtime ditty I whipped out on Tony Dungy's interview today on The Tom Joyner Morning Show about his recent work with Michael Vick, especially since I haven't seen the podcast yet of the healthcare townhall President Obama had earlier today, you can see what all the hullabaloo was about.

I swear I don't sound like this in real life - I always thought my voice had a sharper pitch than it seems to here - but it really doesn't matter.

Now I know how those rappers who used to sell their CD's out of the trunk of their car felt.

Well, not really - this is free.

Sean Yoes Interviews Kris Broughton On NPR Affiliate WEAA

Last Friday I did a thirty minute radio interview with Sean Yoes, who is the host of "The WEAA/AFRO First Edition", an hour-long political talk show on Baltimore's WEAA-FM (88.9 FM), which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m.

I didn't know who Sean Yoes was, but when I mentioned to one of my buddies that he had played on the HBO drama "The Wire", you would have thought I was being interviewed by Barack Obama himself.

"Who did he play? Was he Omar?" my buddy from Alabama asked me.

"Man, I've never seen the show."

My buddy was undaunted. "What'd you say his name was again?"

"Sean Yoes." I heard my buddy shuffle around. "What are you doing - looking him up on the internet?"

"There's this little thing called On Demand that I've got on my cable service-"

The next thing you know he has an episode playing. We found out that Mr. Yoes played Lieutenant Brent Hoskins - what season he was on I couldn't tell you.

The radio interview process itself was something new to me. I have been known to talk until the cows come home, but when no one is recording you, and your audience may or may not be paying attention, you have a whole lot of leeway when it comes to the facts or even actually making sense.

So I was more than a little nervous when the sound engineer called my phone a few minutes before the taping was to begin. Something wasn't working right, so he had to call me back a minute or so later. When he called back, Sean appeared on the line a few seconds later and introduced himself.

"We're on in twenty seconds," he said.

This was it. The last few seconds before-

"Oh yeah," Sean said. "We need to do a mic check real quick, Kris."

I said "one-two one-two" the way I'd heard the old school rappers do it.

Sean laughed. "A-ha. There is a brown man at Brown Man Thinking Hard. Whenever I ask a brother to do a mic check, I always get the same thing: 'one-two one-two'."

And just like that, seconds before we were going to record the show, I felt like I knew him. The next thing you know, Sean was smoothly segueing into his introductory patter a split second after the engineer opened our connection.

It was the fastest thirty minutes I've ever had. I have no idea how it really went, other than a point somewhere towards the end when I forgot the question and began to ramble a bit before struggling to rein myself in. I would also imagine, over the course of the whole time, that my voice was all over the place.

But the interview is in the can, and tonight, at 8 pm, it will be broadcast on WEAA 88.9 FM in Baltimore. You can click this link, and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

My radio rope-a-dope might be a little rusty, but it doesn't matter.

I'm hooked.

Truthers, Birthers And Town Hall Terrorists

Since President Obama said Sergeant Crowley acted "stupidly" when he arrested Professor Gates, what do you think he is thinking about the "truthers", the "birthers", and the "town hall terrorists" who are all coming out of the wood work these days?

I'll go with "these mother******'s are stupider than I thought!"

Because the TRUTH is, all this manufactured outrage about where OUR (as all the citizens of the United States) black president was born has got me thinking about is the old D.W. Griffith movie BIRTH OF A NATION - then again, maybe some studio is remaking it, because these people TERRORIZING the healthcare town hall meetings could stand in as extras for the mob scenes without any coaching at all.

I've been meaning to get around to doing a piece on the absurdity that is the Glen Beck phenomenon, whose presence on CNN FOX is so negative, the cable news network CNN could run "Black In America" specials five days a week and it wouldn't balance it out what has to be the "stupidest" son of a biscuit eater on the air.

Beck makes Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh look like the right wing actors they are as they join the fray, whipping the herds of town hall terrorists out there into a frenzy, directing their followers in the art of creating pandemonium...

...all so they can keep ALL OF THE PEOPLE, including themselves, from getting a better health insurance deal than they have now.

If we can all agree that our nation's insurance companies are peeing on our heads and telling us it's raining - then why is anyone who is NOT a CEO in the healthcare industry or major shareholder in one of these companies even thinking about keeping things the way they are?

If the president is able to get health insurance companies to actually do what they claim to be doing, and less of the denying of coverage to the people who pay the premiums that keep these insurance company doors open, while providing an alternative source of health care coverage for those of us who would throw off the statistics in any actuarial pool, an alternative source that will drastically cut back our emergency and trauma center costs - which seems from most angles to look suspiciously like something right out of the pages of the old Good Book my Christian citizens are ready to raise in the air whenever their motivations are questioned - why is this seen as such a terrible apostasy?

Doesn't the phrase "promote the general Welfare" come right out of the Preamble to our own Constitution?

I mean - what would Jesus do?

I don't remember Jesus standing with the money changers or the "wealth creators".

As a matter of fact, I believe he is best known for feeding the hungry and healing the sick.

Healing the sick was seen as a miracle two thousand years ago.

Today, we call it "modern medicine".

I can guarantee it would cost us less - much, much less - to "heal the sick" than the trillions we've spent keeping those "wealth builders" in Connecticut and Westchester and Ossining rich.

Just think about this. There was a time, years ago, when the effort to make seatbelt usage mandatory was just beginning, when some of us protested that too.

Amazingly, with all the disorderly conduct that has been going on at these town hall meetings - the charge of disorderly conduct, we have learned in the last two weeks, covers most kinds of public unruly or disturbing behaviors which act to provoke a disturbance - not one of these non-professorial, non-Harvardites has been arrested.