One of the great mysteries surrounding the controversy over San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's decision to sit (or kneel) through the National Anthem at the beginning of his team's games (while wearing socks during practices depicting police as pigs) has been the National Football League's nonchalant response. 

Perhaps the league thought that the matter would blow over in a week or two if it indulged Kaepernick, which it certainly did with its "it's his right" response, accompanied by no visible reminder that his actions and the actions of other players have the potential to damage the league's standing, reputation and popularity.  The league also must have thought that Kaepernick's protest wouldn't be imitated by other players.  This was a major miscalculation, and it's showing signs of hurting the league where it really counts — in the pocketbook. 

Another major employer has decided to join the long list of companies moving jobs from California to more business-friendly states.  This time, it's $12 billion titan Jacobs Engineering, which is moving its "corporate operations," almost definitely meaning its headquarters, from Pasadena to Dallas, Texas.  Press reaction, especially outside of business-oriented outlets, has ranged from nonexistent to muted to, in the case of the Los Angeles Times, a bit snarky. 

Americans For Prosperity won a huge court victory in California Thursday against that state's hard-left vindictive attorney general, Kamala Harris.  Naturally, the national press is doing what it does when it doesn't want to cover a story: letting the Politico cover it and then pretending that this suffices. 

Harris demanded that AFP provides the section of its not-for-profit Federal Form 990 identifying its donors.  Anyone with an ounce of sense knows, despite Harris's lip service to confidentiality, that her motivation is to have the names leak out so that donors are subject to the kind of public intimidation to which those who supported the pro-traditional marriage Proposition 8 in California were subjected in 2008.  Judge Manuel L. Real in the California District Federal Court forcefully denied that demand (HT Powerline).  Deceptive headlines at two of the state's largest newspapers betrayed clear displeasure with the result. 

I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver." 

The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago.  The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U.S. cities.  To those who have been unaware of the issue up until now and are thinking that all of this must be a joke — it's not.  It's just that the press, which not coincidentally has a higher percentage of union members than the private sector as a whole, has barely noted it. 

In a speech at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in West Virginia earlier this week, Murray Energy Corp. founder and CEO Robert Murray decried the Obama administration's determination to, as described at the financial news site SNL.com (to be clear, no relation to Saturday Night Live), "bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U.S. EPA in charge of the nation's electric grid." 

In the establishment press, Murray's speech was only covered in a single snarky paragraph by Darren Goode at the Politico titled "Don't Hold Back Now" — obviously attempting to paint Murray as unreasonable and extreme — and a writeup at the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer.  After all, what does Murray know?  He's only the head of the largest company in an industry which is still responsible for fueling 39 percent of America's electrical grid, and the majority of it in many states.  Who would want to give him any visibility, as if he has anything valuable to say?  Well, I do. 

On May 5, PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson kept with the alleged "fact-checking" web site's actual role as pack of leftist hacks by issuing a fundamentally dishonest "Half True" ruling on a statement made by CarlyFiorina.org's cybersquatter.  I raise the matter now because the web site's critics, while raising most of the relevant points, haven't gone far enough in tearing apart Jacobson's work. 

As his headline states, the cyberquatter "accuses Carly Fiorina of wishing she'd laid off 30,000 employees more quickly" during the Republican presidential candidate's tenure as Hewlett-Packard's CEO which ended a decade ago.  The squatter is lying.  She didn't make that statement in connection with H-P's layoffs.  That should have been the end of it, but Jacobson still pretended that the lie is "Half True" in his evaluation. 

Some of the nation's most influential newspapers sympathetically broke out the euphemisms for Obama as he prepares for unilateral executive action to "shield" some illegal immigrants from the rule of law, which they call "deportation relief."  He's "cheered by reform advocates." 

This "choice" thing with abortion is really the narrowest of one-way streets. 

Seven robed men decided in 1973 that a woman has a "privacy" right to "choose" to take the life of a pre-born baby she is carrying, the God-given right to life of the baby be damned.  But the radicals in Jerry Brown's government in the State of California have now mandated that all employers in that state, even those with religious affiliations, do not have a choice as to whether they will cover abortions in their health plans.  It's funny, but certainly not in a humorous sense, how certain states' attempts to limit the practice routinely make national news, while this blatantly coercive dictate by California has barely been noticed. 

When the government pushes to destroy America’s biggest source of energy, you can certainly trust the media to jump on board. 

On June 1, the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled drastic new limits on carbon emissions, mandating steep emission cuts within 16 years.  It’s a move that may cost hundreds of thousands of jobs each year, but only 13 of the 20 major United States newspapers discussed the issue in editorials.  Eleven of those papers actually promoted the new regulations with editorials or official endorsements – from their editorial board. 

Picking up on the new survey of journalists nationwide conducted for the School of Journalism at Indiana University, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders offered two amusing takes on it in her Tuesday column:

> “The profession that dubbed the Republican Party a refuge for ‘angry white men’ is teeming with angry white men.” 

Craig Bannister at CNSNews.com reports that the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted how House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi helped an Episcopal bishop in San Francisco wash the feet of two children on Holy Thursday to "honor the dignity and work of immigrants," and push legislation for “an earned pathway to citizenship." 

MRC president Brent Bozell was appalled at this political display as an abuse of her putative Catholic faith:

On Friday morning, Richard Pollock at the Washington Examiner (HT Ed Driscoll at PJ Media) broke an important story about the the large number of doctors choosing not to participate in Covered California, the state's Obamacare exchange. 

The odds that the agenda-driven press in the formerly Golden State of California was already aware of this problem and chose not to report on it would seem to be pretty high — and they're still ignoring the story, despite its obvious impact on the availability of medical services once Obamacare kicks in on January 1.  Excerpts from Pollock's report follow the jump (bolds are mine):

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