The article you posted is selective in its use of data and completely irrelevant to the points I made. That there's no evidence yet of a statistically significant increase in risk for Parkinson's and other physically debilitating diseases has no bearing on the very real increase in risk for learning disability, memory deficit, and other neuropsychological impairment.

It's not being trendy to pay attention to such things. It's being a good parent. Can people take it too far and isolate their kids too much? Sure. But that's certainly not what Obama did, and only the Glenn Becks of the world would interpret it as such.

By the way, maybe I missed it, but where did Obama express "grave concern" anyway? And where did he say about his hypothetical son that "he shouldn't play"? All I have seen him quoted saying was "I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football." If he didn't do think long and hard about it then, yes, he'd be a crappy father.

As you probably know, Cris Collinsworth, Terry Bradshaw, Kurt Warner, and many other NFL players have expressed the same concerns about their own kids. Some have expressed this concern for years. Perhaps they even expressed "grave" concern. Were they just being trendy, too?

Just for the record, here's the question and Obama's complete comment from the interview:

Q: "Sticking with the culture of violence, but on a much less dramatic scale: I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players."

A: "I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much.

I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they're grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That's something that I'd like to see the NCAA think about."