Redskins/NFL The team and NFL should change the Redskins name, not the federal government!

SALLY JENKINS

Follow @sallyjenx

June 18

Now that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has struck a governmental blow against commodified ethnic insults, I’m nervous, because I may have “disparaged” somebody this morning when I buttered my toast. After I put away the Land O Lakes butter with that Indian maiden logo on the box, I bit off a chew of Red Man tobacco and climbed into a Jeep Cherokee.

The Washington football club ought to ditch its slur of a trademark, voluntarily. It ought to do so on the grounds of basic decency and good taste, and, you’d hope, with an intelligent sense of history, context and place. If they won’t do it willingly, then the rest of us and their colleagues in the NFL ought to embarrass, jeer and cajole them into it. But the method currently being employed, the mobilization of the U.S. government in favor of a correct sensibility, is wrong.

The split decision, 2-1, by the U.S. Patent and Trademark panel to cancel the Washington football club’s trademark registration is hollow for three reasons. First, team management again failed the decency and intelligence test in response to it. Second, the practical effect isn’t that they have to stop using the name, only that they might have trouble successfully barring others who use it. Third, and most important, government coercion is a lot more harmful than a lousy word.

Nobody would like to see a name change more than me, and no one has made more fun of owner Daniel Snyder on this subject. But the USPTO decision came in a political climate that is queasy-making. It came after months of various Feds leaning on the team in ways that make it hard to feel a sense of victory. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) has threatened to examine the NFL’s tax-exempt status. The Federal Communications Commission has threatened to bring a criminal charge against the club for “indecency.”

The trademark case is indirectly about policing speech. Denial of a trademark registration is not the same as banning the use of a word, no. But it came in concert with several other forms of government pressure, and that fact is concerning enough to put the ACLU and Fox’s Megyn Kelly in the same camp over its free speech implications.

“At first blush, it might seem obvious that the USPTO should have the ability to deny registration to racist or vulgar trademarks,” wrote Gabe Rottman, a legislative counsel for the ACLU, last December in an essay considering the team’s trademark question. “But, as with all things free speech, who gets to decide what’s racist or vulgar? That’s right, the government, which is just ill-equipped to make these kinds of determinations.”

You don’t really want government agencies to become the arbiter of acceptable words and images. You really don’t. The main reason you don’t is because, like it or not, what’s offensive is subjective. It creates “a morass of uncertainty,” Rottman wrote. Consider how many offensive violations someone could find in one episode of “The Family Guy.” Or “Game of Thrones,” or “Orange Is The New Black.”

“Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home,” Fran Lebowitz wrote. She added, “I do not like after-shave lotion, adults who roller skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs.”

In his dissent from the trademark decision, USPTO panelist Marc Bergsman observed that “the context” in which a word is used “changes the perception of the term.” For some people the word “Redskins” has lost all of its vicious old meaning and represents their beloved Sonny Jurgensen and Billy Kilmer; for others it’s a hate term. Personally, I find it distasteful in all contexts. But how is a bureaucracy supposed to effectively arbitrate its “real” meaning without a lot of unintended consequences and restrictions?

Trademark law prohibits the registering of names that “may disparage” individuals or groups, or “bring them into contempt or disrepute.” But in actuality American Indians are constantly treated with contempt by corporate America, and we don’t even notice it. As Thomas King observes in his withering book, “The Inconvenient Indian,” “Sometimes you can only watch and marvel at the ways in which the Dead Indian has been turned into products.” Indians have been turned into cars, and underwear brands, and Crazy Horse malt liquor. The football trademark case hardly rectifies the problem King identifies, which is that Americans have no respect for their own antiquities, and don’t recognize how badly they continue to junk and trash them.

“Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed,” King writes. “And dead. Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past. The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise.”

That’s got the ring of absolute truth to it. But no governmental traducing can put that epiphany into the heart of a team owner or the league commissioner, or a fan. There are competing priorities here: anti-disparagement vs. absolute free speech. Trouble is, if you over police the latter you might stifle King’s ability to write so powerfully about the former. He actually toyed with entitling his book “Pesky Redskins.”

For more by Sally Jenkins, visit washingtonpost.com/jenkins.

More Redskins and NFL coverage

Obama's West Point Speech.

Photo: Getty Images

COMMENTARY BY

James Carafano

@JJCarafano

James Jay Carafano, a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges, is The Heritage Foundation’s Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies.

President Obama’s West Point speech proved telling in ways he probably didn’t plan. The commander-in-chief tried to use the commencement address to quell concerns over a foreign policy that has produced nothing but controversy and setbacks since the debacle in Benghazi.

But the president scored more misses than hits with the audience, pundits and the press. Even The Washington Post acknowledged that the speech did little more than mow down a field of “straw men.”

As far as policy goes, the speech may have been a clarion call for little more than muddling through. But for prospectors of presidential rhetoric, it is a gold mine. And the biggest nugget is the paradox of an administration mimicking the caricature of the foreign policy it created to discredit the previous administration.

Every administration must define the enemy from which they are protecting us. During the Cold War, that was easy. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s often been less self-evident.

That can be problematic. Strategy, after all, is a competitive practice: the art of besting somebody—the Trojans, the Red Coats, the Nazis, whoever’s on the other end of the spear, the sword or the gun. “It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest,” Lawrence Freedman declares in his new book, Strategy: A History. “It is the art of creating power.”

And then, slapping the other side over the head with it.

During the Cold War, the enemy was in Moscow. The big challenge was to make neither too much, nor too little of the threat. George Kennan always argued for a tempered, measured threat assessment. On the other hand, the drafters of NSC 68, led by Paul Nitze, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg wanted to “scare the hell out of the American people.”

Getting the threat right was critical. It was the main selling point to the public about how much was enough to defend us.

But America’s long-time selling point for strategy crumbled with the Wall. No self-evident replacement arose until 9/11. From the rubble of the World Trade Center, a strategy for fighting a “global war on terrorism” (GWOT)—the “Long War”—emerged.

Then came Obama. He not only shortened the long war and banned GWOT from the rhetorical locker room, he actively participated in a campaign to delegitimize the whole endeavor. That crusade continued into the West Point speech. “[A] strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naive and unsustainable,” the president told the Corps of Cadets and their assembled loved ones.

Of course, the Bush administration had made exactly the same point again and again, post 9/11. Bush, for example, passed on taking on a number of transnational terrorist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah, all sorts of Pakistani groups with lots of initials and most of the nascent groups in North Africa.

Bush invaded exactly two places—Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama invaded one—Libya, and he tried to bomb his way into another war—Syria. So, at least numerically speaking, the score on invasions is pretty even. Obama’s critique of GWOT is an embarrassment of oversimplification.

But while treating the terrorist threat dismissively, Mr. Obama went on to identify an alternative “enemy” on which to pin a grand strategy. Unfortunately, his chosen enemy is just as far removed from a pressing threat to national security as his caricature of the Bush Doctrine was divorced from the real Bush Doctrine.

The “enemy” chosen by Obama to animate America’s grand strategy is climate change. The nation’s existential goal, therefor, is “to energize the global effort to combat climate change, a creeping national security crisis that will help shape your time in uniform,” the commander-in-chief told his new troops at West Point. Apparently, the new second lieutenants will spend their careers fighting the weather.

Weather may seem an odd foe for the military. But for a progressive president, it’s the perfect choice.

Obama can’t be accused as a warmonger because he doesn’t want the military to fight anyone—he wants the military to help people.

Weather isn’t a person or a country. He risks offending almost no one.

Making climate change a national security matter also helps a president to press for other statist agenda items—from pet green energy projects to adopting the right-to-protect doctrine.

Unfortunately, as an organizing principle for national security, climate makes a terrible “enemy.” It is enormously complex and unpredictable. The unpredictability of how climate change will play out on the global stage ought to dissuade any strategist from regarding it as an organizing principle around which one can practice what Freedman calls “the art of creating power.” Basing strategy on climate would be the ultimate march of folly.

Mr. Obama may well know that. The reference to climate may be just like the rest of the address: knowingly empty rhetoric. But it does lead to a conclusion devoid of complexity and unpredictability—this speech and the vapid ideas in it will soon be forgotten.

Originally appeared in The National Interest.

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Gasoline Prices Rise As U.S. Refineries Send More Fuel Overseas

by MARILYN GEEWAX

April 25, 2014 1:51 PM ET

With so much fuel headed elsewhere, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline is now $3.69, compared with $3.53 a month ago, according to AAA.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP

The weather is warming and vacation season approaching.

And, just as predictably, the price of gasoline is rising. It does that every spring as refineries switch to more expensive summer blends.

But this year, the seasonal price bump is getting an extra bounce. Gasoline is costing consumers about 5 percent more than last year at this time, even though oil supplies are abundant. Why?

Experts say U.S. retail prices are nudging higher in large part because Gulf Coast refineries are sending more gasoline to other countries.

"We think there's definitely an impact on gasoline prices, especially coming from the exports to Latin America," said John Galante, an analyst with Energy Security Analysis Inc., a consulting firm.

Parallels

U.S. Taps New Energy Sources, And Potential Geopolitical Clout

In Mexico, Brazil and other countries to the south, customers are thirsty for U.S. gasoline and diesel fuel, he said. "If there were no pull coming from Latin America, then prices would be really favorable" for U.S. consumers, he said.

The Energy Information Administration says total U.S. petroleum exports, which consist mostly of gasoline and diesel, are running about 25 percent higher, compared with last year.

With so much fuel headed elsewhere, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline is now $3.69, compared with $3.53 a month ago, according toAAA's Daily Fuel Gauge report. The average price is about 18 cents a gallon more than it was at this time last year.

This year's inflation is frustrating for independent gas station owners who say their profit margins don't benefit much when retail prices rise. They are paying a higher wholesale price, and getting hit with higher bank fees for customers' use of debit and credit cards.

"The credit card fees are 3 percent, so the higher the gas prices, the higher the fees we pay," said Amy Williams, general manager at AJ's One Stop in Branson, Mo. She was reached by phone.

"We're breaking even" on gas sales at the family-owned business, she said.

Remembering The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Why Oil Drilling Is Both Safer And Riskier Since Exxon Valdez

Williams is worried that high gas prices could dent the summer tourist season, which brings customers into the store for beverages, packaged foods and other items.

When fuel is expensive, "we have people who tell us that they have to cut back," she said. "They don't get out on the lake as much because that's more for their boat."

But even if increased gas exports boost prices for U.S. consumers, Gulf Coast refiners can't be blamed for expanding their global customer base, Galante said. "Refiners are making logical decisions, based on profits available to them in different markets," he said.

He notes that earlier this year, TransCanada Corp. opened up the southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, which allowed oil to flow more readily from stockpiles in Oklahoma to refineries in the Gulf. That steady supply is spurring refineries to seek out even more customers in other countries.

Other factors might also affect gas prices in coming months. For example, prices could go higher if U.S. demand were to take off amid a strengthening economy. On Friday, the University of Michigan index of consumer confidenceshowed a 7 percent rise in the gauge of economic expectations this month.

Science

Slashing Fossil Fuel Consumption Comes With A Price

Also, cabin fever could be a factor. Many Americans were stuck in the house during a long, cold winter. Once the weather turns hot, the urge to take a long drive may prove irresistible, further boosting demand for gasoline.

Another potential factor is Russia, an oil-producing giant. If tensions between Russia and Ukraine worsen this summer, it could have an impact on fuel supplies headed from Russia to Europe. And that could boost prices global oil prices.

On the other hand, surging U.S. oil supplies could nudge prices down again in coming weeks. The EIA says in its 2014 Summer Fuels Outlook that it expects Brent crude oil prices to hold this summer at around $104 a barrel, about $2 lower than last summer.

But the EIA also hedges its bets, saying "uncertainty over crude oil price forecasts remains high."

NPR business desk intern Tanya Basu contributed to this report.