TASK DEFINITION: Given a document, find the main entity about whom the author is writing. Write the full name if mentioned in the text. Note that URLs in the text have been replaced with [Link].
PROBLEM: Vince Staples  Believes  He  Deserves All The Grammys  But  He  Isn't Holding  His  Breath
 Vince Staples  is impossible to categorize. A Southern Cali MC who prides himself on his Long Beach bona fides while eschewing the prototypical gangsta rap tag with which he's often mis-labled  he's a natural at bucking the status quo. Yet he also sees clear divisions between art and commerce that lead him to question how institutions choose to define â or fail to distinguish â the two.
So when  Staples  found himself the subject of a recent Grammy campaign â initiated by Uproxx hip-hop editor Aaron Williams  who likened the EDM sonics of  Staples ' 2017 LP Big Fish Theory to "a post-apocalyptic pinball machine" â he was less interested in discussing whether or not his album is Grammy-worthy than he was in questioning the very construct upon which the Recording Academy recognizes and rewards genre-bending artists of color.
But  Staples ' argument is bigger than hip-hop. It's a critique rooted in the racial dynamic that has kept black artists in the industry categorically separate and unequal since the inception of "race music."
In a sense   Staples  is the kind of artist the academy tends to clamor over â a major-label signee who subverts mainstream convention. While his peers chase after collaborations with bankable trap producers  his album credits are filled with left-field collaborators Kilo Kish and Zack Seckoff  a young unknown producer largely responsible for Big Fish Theory's industrial-driven electronics.
No doubt   Staples  prizes his creative idiosyncrasies: "Hitchcock in my modern day / Where the f*** is my VMA? / Where the f*** is my Grammy?" as he raps on Big Fish Theory's "Homage."
The message is the easiest part of this whole thing. The hard part of music is designing the product and marketing the product â figuring out what it looks like  what it sounds like  what it feels like    who to sell it to and how to get  them  to believe that it's more important than  themselves . When you've figured that out  that's when you become a star.
But  yeah  let's really talk about it. If we really want to have a Vince Staples Grammy campaign  someone tell me why I can't be in every genre that my music is kind of reminiscent of? Because the argument within hip-hop is that my music doesn't sound hip-hop enough.
My only request is that it be broadened  because it's no reason I shouldn't be nominated for everything we just spoke about. It's no reason I shouldn't be nominated for a packaging Grammy. It's no reason because the conceptual nature of my cover and the way that it looked is a great idea for a compact disc. Usually people go all out and put 50 pictures and give you a suitcase full of stuff to win a packaging Grammy. But it's not really about the design of it itself. It's no reason I shouldn't be nominated for that. It's no reason I shouldn't be nominated for electronic and alternative and Rap Album of the year  because if we're pushing creativity and we're doing it get to be creative and to create new things  I don't know what's newer than what Vince Staples is doing. And that's my only conversation.

SOLUTION: Vince Staples

PROBLEM: It was a gamble  but polling suggested it might be working. His opponent  Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam  saw his lead over Gillespie erode over the past few weeks.  Trump  weighed in for Gillespie in a series of tweets and with automated Election Day phone calls encouraging turnout.
.@EdWGillespie will totally turn around the high crime and poor economic performance of VA. MS-13 and crime will be gone. Vote today  ASAP! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7  2017
 Trump  wasted no time in distancing  himself  from Gillespie  enjoying the spaciousness of  his  now-280-character tweets.
Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget  Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats  and with the economy doing record numbers  we will continue to win  even bigger than before! —  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8   2017
We’ve noted before that  Trump  has an insurance premium against any calls for  his  impeachment.  His  popularity with Republicans has slipped since the beginning of  his  presidency  but  he ’s still very popular with them  particularly more conservative members of  his  party. (Per Gallup  more than 9 in 10 conservative Republicans approve of  Trump .) Because Republican Party primaries see an overrepresentation of conservatives  that meant that Republicans eager to win reelection to Congress were less likely to turn on the president.
 Trump’s  tweet distancing  himself  from Gillespie sugarcoats the election in a way that may make  Trump  feel better but probably isn’t fooling anyone on Capitol Hill.  His  claim that the GOP won four of four federal races misses a few important points. The first is that those races were in Republican-held districts. The second is that the Democrats saw big gains in most of those races relative to past elections. The third is that the figure is actually four of five;  Trump  likes to ignore a race in California won by the Democrats.
But it also does something very dangerous for  Trump  right now. It shows  yet again  that  he  isn’t loyal to  his  political partners.
We’ve seen this before. When  Trump  backed the House effort to repeal and replace Obamacare (having no plan of  his  own)   he  responded to  its  passage by declaring the bill to be “mean” — as though  he  hadn’t previously claimed it was nearly without flaws. (It was health care  not immigration  that was the big issue in Virginia  according to exit polls. Northam won among voters concerned about health care by a more than 3-to-1 margin.) Even before Election Day in Alabama earlier this year   Trump  began to distance  himself  from  his  preferred candidate Republican Senate primary  Luther Strange  hinting that  he  had perhaps made a mistake — a shift that was certainly informed by polls showing a likely Strange loss. When that happened   Trump  deleted some of  his  tweets of endorsement.
Strange’s campaign  unlike Gillespie’s  didn’t embrace Trumpist politics such as the threat of the gang MS-13.  He  tried to win as a more typical establishment conservative  to no avail. Gillespie tried to more directly embrace  Trump  politics — and lost badly. And then saw  Trump  turn on him.
Think of the message that  Trump  has sent to Republicans. Stand with him on policy and have him bad-mouth what you passed. Embrace his endorsement and see a loss followed by  Trump  playing down his support. Embrace his endorsement and his politics  and see a loss followed by actual criticism. These are all one-offs — but politics generally suffers from a small sample size from which to draw conclusions  and no one spends more time trying to draw conclusions than politicians.
Bannon’s track record in electoral politics? He helped  Trump  lose the popular vote and win the electoral college in 2016. He embraced Luther Strange’s opponent after Strange was trailing. And now he watched the “Trump-Stewart talking points” lead nowhere.
On its home page  Breitbart also championed  Trump ’s argument that Gillespie should have embraced him more robustly. That’s a flawed theory.  Trump  is very unpopular in Virginia  and Northam won among those who disapprove of  Trump  by a 7-to-1 margin  according to preliminary exit polls. A third of voters said their vote in the race was meant to send a message of opposition to  Trump  — twice as many as said it was a message of support.
What’s more   Trump  made  his  feelings clear. Those who wanted to vote for  Trump’s  candidate knew who that candidate was. As in Alabama  voters went in another direction.
It’s critical to remember that Democrats were supposed to win this race  albeit not necessarily by as wide a margin as they did. Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and Hillary Clinton won by five points last year.  Trump  could have congratulated Gillespie on a hard-fought race and noted the uphill battle. Instead   he  decided to try to spin the loss to  his  advantage.
It’s unlikely that many Republicans worried about next November will be convinced by  Trump ’s argument. Instead  they’re likely to take another lesson:  Trump  can’t deliver a victory for you when you’re trailing  and neither can Trumpism. (In fact  there’s every reason to think that  Trump  was the liability that  his  poll numbers would suggest  with Gillespie doing fine in western Virginia but getting beaten badly in more-Democratic Northern Virginia.) Nor will  Trump  stand with you should things go south.
If  next summer  the question of  Trump ’s fate as president is raised  how might Republicans in center-right districts be expected to evaluate that decision?

SOLUTION: Donald J. Trump

PROBLEM: (CNN) The President has excoriated football players who have joined a protest movement by former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as unpatriotic. But the President is overlooking history -- which shows athletes now lauded as heroes  like  Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali   raising  their  voices (or taking a seat) in protests similar to Kaepernick's.
 Jackie Robinson   rightfully celebrated for showing enormous grace under pressure while breaking baseball's color line  refused to stand for the National Anthem after  his  playing days.
Jackie Robinson as a Brooklyn Dodger.
As  he  described in  his  1972 autobiography   Robinson -- like contemporary NFL players --  was protesting against institutional racism.  He  was expressing  his  feelings of alienation from America's system of racial apartheid.
 Robinson 's pugnacious brand of civil rights activism set the stage for succeeding generations of black athletes. Eleven-time NBA champion Bill Russell emerged as one of the most outspoken civil rights advocates of the 1960s  at a time when the city he played in  Boston  represented one of the most racially segregated cities in the North.
Above all  black American athletes are citizens  fathers  brothers  husbands and sons who have a right and responsibility to continue a long struggle for dignity exemplified by Jackie Robinson  Bill Russell and many others.

SOLUTION:
Jackie Robinson