West Coast, Messed Coast™ – 'The Grinch Who Stole College Football' Edition

Welcome to the West Coast, Messed Coast™ Big Game edition where we discover that the plank-by-plank takedown of college football will soon result in a heap of refuse at the 50-yard line. Other than that, how has your week been?

Yard Line, Picket Line

For a couple of decades, I’ve thought that college football players should receive stipends or at least be allowed to work outside of school and otherwise be treated like a person rather than a scholarship servant with great skills and work ethic and boffo biceps. But leave it to the West Coast, Messed Coast’s™ worst offender – looking at you California – to ruin everything by allowing football and basketball players to form unions at the University of Southern California.

I know, I know, you’re thinking, well, Victoria, the NFL has a players’ union and that has served them well. You may be right, but until this week, college football players were considered students and not employees.

The National Labor Relations Board may change that.

BREAKING: In a major development for college athlete labor rights, @NLRB region finds that @USC, @pac12 *and* the @NCAA are all employers (or joint-employers) of USC football and basketball players.https://t.co/GBVsWDvn1y

— Daniel Libit (@DanielLibit) December 15, 2022

“The National Labor Relations Board’s Los Angeles region has found ‘merit’ in an unfair labor practice charge seeking employee recognition for USC football and basketball players,” Sportico reported.

“In a statement Thursday, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said the region’s findings were based on a determination that the private university, the Pac-12 and the NCAA have collectively ‘maintained unlawful rules and unlawfully misclassified scholarship basketball and football players as mere ‘student-athletes’ rather than employees entitled to protections under our law,” [emphasis added] which means the entire Pac-12 and college football, in general, aren’t far behind and neither is the specter of crossing picket lines on game day.

If you thought boosters and hucksters were bad for college sports, just wait until the teams become like the unions running teachers, nurses, and the SEIU.

Nurses Unions Only Care About …

The answer to the above fill-in-the-blank is supposed to be you, of course. But things are not going according to plan in the Oregon Gulag, where outgoing stalag mistress Kate Brown has been spoiling for a renewed battle over keeping you “safe” from the TripleDemic!

To that end, the outgoing governor has funded a phalanx of travel nurses to help the allegedly overwhelmed hospitals, which aren’t overwhelmed, but stop talking, you grandma killer!

“The allocated $25 million would come from the Oregon Health Authority, as well as other agencies, and bring more nurses to the state at this time of crisis,” reports KOIN6News. And that’s where the trouble begins with those caring nurses and their union.

“However, the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals released a statement on Monday, saying they believe the governor’s efforts are counterproductive and ‘could further exacerbate the staffing crisis,'” the nurses complained. Huh? Oh, we get it. “What we need are solutions that increase our staffing levels so we can more sufficiently care for the community who needs us,” said one of the nurse shop stewards.

We see. Hire temps and dissipate the union’s bargaining power when they decide to strike during a pandemic again. And besides, they don’t like the competition, natch.

What patients? What TripleDemic?

Oregon’s Dead End Trail

As I reported this week at PJ Media, Oregon Governor Kate Brown decided to wait until her penultimate moment in office to plant a stink bomb before she gives way to the state’s next elected woke droid.

I wrote:

The governor just abolished the death penalty by fiat. She didn’t ask voters. She didn’t talk to victims. One of her last acts as governor was a throat strike to victims.

Though Kate Brown has spent her years in office winnowing down the number of death row inmates from 34 to 17 and releasing violent murderers and rapists from prison, she chose this week to abolish the death penalty entirely in Oregon and “dismantle” a death chamber in Oregon that hasn’t been used in decades. And here’s why: she’s bugging out of office in mere days and handing over this time bomb to the newest woke governor to deal with. She did all of it without the consent of Oregon voters.

If she felt so strongly about it, perhaps she could have done this earlier in her tenure.

Print it or Else

The rich and fertile soil around Newberg, Ore., where the finest pinot noir grapes are crafted into the nectar of the wine gods, also cultivates crops of woke kooks.

According to a local news website called the Yamhill Advocate, the local Newberg High School woke mob went after a local printing company for refusing to print the Gender Bread Person.

Allegra Printing in Newberg, Oregon was the primary vendor for the printing needs of the Newberg public schools district, producing paper, envelopes and other items stamped with the letterheads of the school. However this relationship changed rapidly last year.

The kindly-sounding lady who runs the printing business left a voice mail apologetically explaining that the people running the machine refused to print their Gender Bread Person poster. The Gender Bread Person is used to teach kids that the sex they were born with can change based on how they feel.

Before too long, local Democrats, LGBT… activists, the winery organizations, the state Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI), the ACLU, local media, and lobbying groups launched an all-out assault on the local business with which it had done business for years. BOLI is the state agency that targeted, fined, and drove Sweetcakes by Melissa out of Oregon for refusing to create a same-sex wedding cake for one of their customers.

We’ll keep you posted on this one.

Cop Wins in Summer of Love Land

If you want to read the feel-good story of the week, look no further than my PJ Media piece on Pierce County, Wash., Sheriff Ed Troyer.

From the very first, it was clear that after the Summer of Love, BLM, Antifa, and their friends in government would make an example of newly elected Sheriff Ed Troyer. A lawman who confronted a black man for acting suspiciously at 2 a.m. fit the narrative so perfectly, and so soon after the Antifa and BLM riots, it was too good to pass up. The media attacked, the mobs came for him, he refused to resign, and then was subjected to, as his attorney put it, a “Kafkaesque” weeks-long court battle, and won a unanimous jury not guilty verdict.

The tale is wild, and the trial was wilder, as his Fox News legal analyst attorney put the state attorney general on blast. Go read it. Heh.

Wait, There’s a Border Crisis?!

Democrat pollsters must have discovered that their voters are concerned about the border. And what’s not to notice? If Germany moved a division of fighting-aged men across our borders in World War II, like the rest of the world has been doing at our Southern Border, we’d send people with guns to protect it.

BREAKING: A huge migrant caravan of over 1,000 people crossed illegally into El Paso, TX last night, making it the largest single group we have ever seen. The city of El Paso reports Border Patrol now has over 5,000 in custody & has released hundreds to city streets. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/ewUQX757Lt

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) December 12, 2022

Until now, it’s been verboten for Democrats to speak of the invasion, but Gavin “Put Me In Coach!” Newsom has been tasked with being the Democrat point man. He visited the border this week, announced it was a crisis, and then blamed Republicans for it.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom made a high-profile trip to the border with Mexico days after President Joe Biden declined to visit the area in a move that fuels speculation about the Democrat's national ambitions, according to a report. https://t.co/wl2ZUxIG1U

— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) December 13, 2022

And that’s it for your West Coast, Messed Coast™ update. Next week it’s our Worst of the West Coast, Messed Coast™ List of 2022.

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