Biden can’t do a softball one-on-one interview on CBS just before the Super Bowl but does a silly commercial complaining about shrink-flation on snacks and soda that he caused by the inflation his own Bidennomic policies created.
Shrinkflation: Reduction of quantity/quality of a good without corresponding price reduction
In economics, shrinkflation, also known as the grocery shrink ray, deflation, or package downsizing, is the process of items shrinking in size or quantity, or even sometimes reformulating or reducing quality, while their prices remain the same. The word is a portmanteau of the words shrink and inflation. Joe Biden is against it and wants to blame greedy corporations. Nice try, Joe.
Don’t let President Biden gaslight you. ‘Shrinkflation’ is not the problem, Bidenomics is. Businesses are trying to stay competitive in the market by limiting how much they raise prices to offset the cost increases they’ve encountered thanks to Biden’s economic policy decisions. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Biden is too busy to visit East Palestine Ohio, shut down the border, or give press conferences, but has plenty of time to hang out at the beach. It’s reported that Biden has declined an interview before the Super Bowl for the second year in a row. Is he not up for the task?
Biden Skips Super Bowl Interview for Second Year in a Row
For the second year in a row, Joe Biden declined to be interviewed before the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is scheduled for Sunday, February 11th, and will air on CBS. The matchup will be the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. After CBS recently discussed it with the White House, Biden decided against the interview. This would have given him a very large viewing audience, considering it is the biggest TV event of the year.
There has been a long-time tradition of the President being interviewed by the station airing the big game going back to 2009 with Barack Obama. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
As much as leftists should be hated for agitating racial conflict and violence, there’s something kind of sad, in a pathetic way, in witnessing the disillusionment of true believers finding out they’ve been conned by the very movement they helped push forward.
Such has been the case in recent weeks, between Rihanna’s “sellout” half-time performance at the Super Bowl and the muted response (i.e. no deadly rioting) to the death of Tyre Nichols, leaving some of the Black Lives Matter faithful with heavy hearts.
The Washington Post’s resident race hustler Karen Attiah on Monday bemoaned Rihanna’s “selling out” by performing at the Super Bowl. The ungrateful immigrant singer had said in 2019 that she turned down a previous invitation from the NFL because, “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler.” She was presumably referring to the league’s punishment of Colin Kaepernick and others who protested by kneeling during the national anthem on game days.
“With Rihanna’s performance and her silence on the issues she claims to have stood for, the true winner of the night was the NFL,” wrote Attiah. “She has shown them, and all racist institutions, that if they can withstand Black protest and outrage for a few years, put on some cool shows and donate to charities, then everything will be hunky-dory…”
Charles Blow wrote similarly in The New York Times last month after a national story about a young black man who died in police custody, following his attempt to flee arrest. Arrests were made of the officers involved, all of them black, and they’ve been charged with the death of Tyre Nichols. This is formerly known as “the judicial process,” but because Nichols’ death didn’t result in another round of calls for reparations and the eternal subjugation of whites, Blow was miffed.
“It was more snuff porn with Black victims, in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume,” he wrote. “America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won. … What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.”
Wait a second. You mean to tell me the 2020 summer of horror was a manufactured hysteria for political purposes and that once its goal was achieved — the unseating of Donald Trump as president — it all seemed to disappear? No way!
Cold reality is finally setting in. Santa isn’t real after all.
Blow and Attiah might be the last people in America to realize that BLM as a national entity is nothing but a scam — even in the literal sense of the word, as endless stories have come out since 2020 exposing the group’s leaders as frauds and money embezzlers using innocent donations to enrich themselves with expensive homes and private jet travel.
And celebrities like Rihanna who promoted the notion that black athletes, who are paid millions of dollars, are also victims of white supremacy aren’t serious and should never have been taken seriously. Is the NFL in any way noticeably different today than it was in 2020? Of course not. But Democrats have the bulk of the power in Washington, so that put Rihanna and others in a much better mood.
It’s too bad Blow and Attiah had to find out this way.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
“He Gets Us” is spending upwards of a billion dollars on an advertising campaign to expose millions of people, including those who tuned in to the 2023 Super Bowl, to Jesus. But its attempt to win over the world with a modernized version of Christ failed to endear some of those it sought to engage. The first commercial flipped through a series of black-and-white photos of children helping others in need. The 30-second clip ended with the tagline “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults,” a reference to Christ’s teaching about childlike faith in Matthew 18.
“If I could see the world through the eyes of a child, what a wonderful world this would be,” the song narrated.
These commercials offer the vaguest and most inoffensive and uncontroversial picture of Jesus possible, even to people who already have a distaste for Christianity. In fact, they are part of a larger campaign known for making radical comparisons between Jesus and the U.S. border crisis, which is harnessed by corrupt cartels for profit, and bold conflations of Jesus and his disciples with groups who roam the streets today, “challeng[ing] authority” and “ma[king] a lot of people uneasy,” in an attempt to appeal to current culture.
“We look at the biography of Jesus through a modern lens to find new relevance in often overlooked moments and themes from his life,” the campaign’s website states.
The hope in running these eyebrow-raising ads, campaign representatives disclosed, is to use an updated portrayal of Christ to sympathize with the plights of people who “are spiritually open, but skeptical” of organized religion.
In other words, the ads were deliberately designed to look, walk, and talk like the social justice agenda that has found its way into every American institution in the last decade in a last-ditch effort to appeal to a worldly culture.
Yet the universal messages communicated by these videos were still broadly rejected and smeared.
“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” progressive darling and Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped on Twitter shortly after the second “He Gets Us” ad aired, with her tweet garnering nearly 200,000 likes and more than 20,000 retweets as of this writing.
No matter how hard Christian campaigns — especially evangelical ones — like He Gets Us try to win over the world by twisting the Gospel to fit our culture’s standards, they will fail.
Jesus said, 19 “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” John 3:19-21 (NIV)
Do Not Conform to This World
It should come as no surprise that even the tamest of ads that barely mentions Jesus was doomed from the start. Christian campaigns like He Gets Us operate under the premise that repackaging the Gospel to make our society think Christians and Jesus are cool entices people to consider following Jesus. Oftentimes, they go to great lengths to trash their own — faithful Christians — to be viewed and accepted by the same world that despises Christ-followers who hold Biblical views about marriage, sex, family, and life.
He Gets Us was born out of the idea that the Christians of today are not good enough at marketing Jesus. After all, an alarming number of Americans are abandoning church.
“How did the story of a man who taught and practiced unconditional love become associated with hatred and oppression for so many people?” organizers ask on the campaign’s website. As a result, they claim “many of us simply cannot reconcile the idea of that person with the way our culture experiences religion today.” They say:
Whether it’s hypocrisy and discrimination in the church, or scandals both real and perceived among religious leaders, or the polarization of our politics, many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions.
Anyone who reads his Bible, however, knows our society will never welcome the Good News with open arms. That’s because the Gospel, in its truest form, is offensive to the world. It announces unequivocally that every person is a vile sinner who deserves death and that even the so-called good works we do are tainted by self-interest and are filthy in the eyes of a holy God. It tells of a loving Father who gave up his only Son Jesus to live a perfect life and die the most brutal death imaginable as a sacrifice for the same sort of people who murdered Him. It proclaims that this Jesus miraculously rose from the grave, and it demands that anyone who follows Him must lay down his own comfort and desires and even his very life every single day.
Nothing about this offensive message conforms to our culture. In fact, the written Word of God demands that we “do not conform to the pattern of this world.”
Dressing up the Word of God to appeal to the masses is the exact opposite of what Jesus and the apostles did and what Christians are commanded to do. We are told to sow the seed of the Gospel everywhere and to everyone, to preach Christ crucified — not water down the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate God, who detests sin, into someone who perfectly embodies the modern culture.
Jesus Doesn’t Need Rebranding
There is nothing wrong with bringing Jesus to the masses — it’s what we’re commanded to do — but we have to do it well.
Jesus’ mission from God to die for the sins of the world cannot be reduced to a few choice words he said. We care about what Jesus said, but we can’t separate that from what He did. Jesus didn’t just preach love your neighbor or love your enemies or have childlike faith. He rebuked sin, cast out demons, and promised eternal life for those who repent.
That alone is great news that doesn’t need editorializing or tweaking or watering down. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
He Gets Us sends a different message: that maybe the pure Gospel is something to be ashamed of because maybe the power of God, absent fresh aesthetics and modern social justice narratives, isn’t enough to save.
That doesn’t mean we stop sharing the Good News on whatever platforms we can. There’s certainly a space for Christians to share the love of God — and the gift of new life by grace through faith in Jesus Christ — to the millions watching the biggest sporting event of the year and everyone else. But let’s not squander that opportunity by peddling convenient narratives.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
If you’d forgotten how great Gladys Knight was, Super Bowl Sunday was a reminder of why she’s known as the “Empress of Soul” — and you don’t get royal monikers without earning them. It wasn’t just that the Atlanta-based R&B legend was singing the national anthem. It was she nailed it, absolutely nailed it. I may be suffering from a bit of recency bias, but I’d easily put it in the top five of Super Bowl album renditions. It wasn’t Whitney Houston in 1991 or Jennifer Hudson in 2009 — but for me, anyhow, it was close.
Sadly, even singing the national anthem is a political statement in a Super Bowl where every major performer was asked by protesters to stay away due to the fact Colin Kaepernick isn’t in the league. We could debate the merits of Kaepernick’s absence from the NFL endlessly, but the idea that every musician of note should boycott the game is a rather farcical request.
Knight had already been less apologetic and dithering than halftime headliner Maroon 5, which made her even more of a target for social justice warriors to take out their Kaepernick-related frustrations on musicians. On Friday night, she appeared on “CNN Tonight” with host Don Lemon to explain her reasoning, and it was almost as good as her version of the anthem on Sunday.
The show can be risky territory for anyone, particularly since Lemon is fond of taking the SJW line on almost anything. And yet Knight handled it perfectly.
Lemon, who’s made no secret of the fact he doesn’t really buy that Kaepernick isn’t in the NFL because of his talents and other problems he presents, hit Knight with a quote from Kaepernick attorney Mark Geragos, who’s been vociferously attacking any musical act that dared appear at the big game.
In an interview after Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine discussed his decision to perform, Geragos accused him of being an ideological scab: “If you’re going to cross this ideological or intellectual picket line, then own it, and Adam Levine certainly isn’t owning it,” Geragos said.
Lemon played another clip of Geragos discussing that ideological picket line and what she thought about it.
“People are going to have their opinions. You know, about whatever,” Knight said, smiling.
“And all I can deal with, all I can deal with right now is what my heart says,” she continued. “I believe in fairness. I believe in truth. I believe in all of those things, and as far as this is concerned, I grew up with the national anthem.
“We used to sing it in school before school started. We used to say prayers in school before school started, and we just don’t have that anymore and I’m just — I’m just hoping that it will be about our country and how we treat each other and being the great country that we are.”
When asked if the criticisms could hurt her professionally, she was similarly dismissive.
“You know what? Nothing good comes easy,”Knight said. “And I would hope that they will understand, as I do, that we have a better way to do this than to be angry and why is he doing this or why ain’t she doing that, you know?.
“For me, it’s just for me about respect. If we start denying the anthem, there are so many people that have died for our country and there are so many people in my family that are still part of, you know, just standing for the country, they are in the services and that kind of thing, and just to not say that if you really listen to the lyrics of the beginning, you’ll understand that. We have fought hard for a long time and not just in wars. I have protested myself.”
Knight went on to discuss her personal experiences during the civil rights era — in other words, disavowing the idea that protest need involve disrupting the Super Bowl.
In short, she absolutely schooled Lemon — both on his questions and the real meaning of social justice. Knight had made a similar defense of the anthem in January when the pressure to boycott was at its most intense.
“I understand that Mr. Kaepernick is protesting two things, and they are police violence and injustice,”Knight said in a statement then.
“It is unfortunate that our National Anthem has been dragged into this debate when the distinctive senses of the National Anthem and fighting for justice should each stand alone,” the statement said.
“I am here today and on Sunday, Feb. 3 to give the Anthem back its voice, to stand for that historic choice of words, the way it unites us when we hear it and to free it from the same prejudices and struggles I have fought long and hard for all my life, from walking back hallways, from marching with our social leaders, from using my voice for good — I have been in the forefront of this battle longer than most of those voicing their opinions to win the right to sing our country’s Anthem on a stage as large as the Super Bowl LIII.”
In the end, she sang the anthem beautifully and didn’t use it to make a political statement against America or the flag. When grilled by Don Lemon — including the implied threat that her career could suffer — she was pitch-perfect, just as she was on Sunday.
Our hats are off to you, Gladys Knight, and may future Super Bowl performers evince even a fraction of your grace and talent.
With all the sports media’s reporting on misconduct in the National Football League, it often gets missed that many NFL players have a deep abiding faith in Christ that guides them. Players and staff from one NFL Team, the NFC Championship bound Seattle Seahawks, may have their mind on the big game, but their hearts are with Jesus. “Jesus is better than anything we could ever hope for, even better than the Super Bowl, better than an NFL career,” said pass defense coach Rocky Leto to interviewer Pastor Mark Driscoll of the Mars Hill Church. Who are you pulling for in the Superbowl? Does this interview change your mind?
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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