Last Call For League Of Their Own (Hell)

Just a reminder that the National Football League management and ownership are all repugnant, hyper-rich assholes who destroy lives on a daily basis.

The National Football League has been ordered to return what its union calculates is more than $100 million to the pool of revenue that it shares with its players.

The ruling, handed down last week by arbitrator Stephen Burbank, found that the NFL owners had mischaracterized what Players Association officials say is roughly $120 million of ticket revenue during the past three years by creating an exemption that had the effect of keeping about $50 million in salary out of players’ pockets. The NFL Players Association, which discovered the discrepancy during an ongoing audit of league finances, filed a grievance on the matter in January.

“They created an exemption out of a fiction and they got caught,” saidDeMaurice Smith,executive director of the NFLPA.

NFL officials would not confirm the figure. In an email, Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the NFL, referred to the ruling as the resolution of a “technical accounting issue under the CBA involving the funding of stadium construction and renovation projects.” He stated that the main effect was one of timing.

The ruling is the latest in a series of legal victories for the NFLPA over the league, including last year’s U.S. District Court ruling that overturned Tom Brady’s four-game suspension in the controversy known as “Deflate-gate.”

This dispute stemmed from provisions of the collective bargaining agreement that allow NFL teams to exclude certain money from the pool that determines its players’ share of revenues. Players receive 40% of local revenues, which mainly come from tickets sales, 45% of sponsorship money, revenues from the post-season and NFL Ventures, such as NFL.com and the NFL Network, and 55% of the revenues from media deals.

Teams can exclude money from the sale of personal seat licenses, premium seating, and from mega-deals with corporations to put their names on stadiums. The NFLPA agreed to these exclusions because teams often use these funds to help finance renovations and the construction of new stadiums, which significantly increase revenue and the amount of money that gets shared with the players.

Say what you will about the NFL players all being millionaire scumbags, and for the most part they are spoiled, rich hyperbros who wreck everything in their paths in the name of fleeting glory and fame.

But they will never hold a candle next to the burning sun that is the hell of billionaire NFL owners, arguably among the most rancid human excrement on earth.  Not content with their own billions, they sought to steal even more from their employees, tens of millions of dollars.

And in the end we pay them all to light up our televisions and tablets with glorified violence at the costs of cities, bodies, and souls.

They can all burn in hell, frankly.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS, Con't

Well, ol' Mitch the Turtle is certainly playing to form as the villain of our little show.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday morning reiterated that Senate Republicans will block President Obama's nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, regardless of who the president puts forward. 

"Presidents have a right to nominate just as the Senate has its constitutional right to provide or withhold consent. In this case, the Senate will withhold it," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter after the American people finish making in November the decision they've already started making today."

In his speech on the Senate floor, McConnell said that the confirmation process for the next Supreme Court justice should wait until after the 2016 election. He argued that voters should be able to select the next president to nominate a justice to the Supreme Court. He said that senators have a choice. 

"Will we allow the people to continue deciding who will nominate the next justice or will we empower a lame duck president to make that decision on his way out the door instead?" he asked.

Your move, Mr. President.

Seriously, this is unprecedented obstruction...but is there anything President Obama can honestly do until voters decide to punish the GOP?

Post-Racial America Update

It's a good thing overt racism is a thing of the past, as Chief Justice Roberts keeps telling us. Things like "getting lynched after a country music concert in Pittsburgh" are relics of America's barbarous past and in no way represent the America of 2016.

Right?

Outside, people were streaming into the nearby subway station. Among them was Kevin Lockett, an African American man who walked along the platform pulling a cooler in one hand. 

That’s the last thing he can remember with absolute certainty. The rest, according to court testimony reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, only comes back to him in bits, pieces and violent flashes. 

He thought he heard a racial slur from a group of men, and the next thing he knew, he was being thrown onto the train tracks. 

After Lockett lifted himself back onto the platform, surveillance footage shows, 21-year-old Ryan Kyle started beating him. Another 21-year-old, Matthew Laplace, pulled his cooler away. 

“I knew we’d find this [n-word],” he recalled someone saying. Then an onlooker called the police. 

The attack was brief, but its impact has stayed with Lockett. According toWTAE Pittsburgh, he has undergone four costly reconstructive surgeries since the assault, but still suffers from impaired vision. More therapy awaits. 

Four men involved in the incident — Laplace, 22, Kenneth Gault, 22, David Depretis, 21, and Christopher Laplace, 23 — were variously charged with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation, theft, reckless endangerment and criminal conspiracy. 

All four are white, as is Kyle. He is the only one who touched Lockett and the only one who could face prison time, as a result of plea deals. 

Gault and Depretis pleaded no contest and were sentenced to six months probation, WTAE reported; Matthew LaPlace pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months probation. All are required to perform 100 hours of community service to benefit a minority community. 

Christopher LaPlace, Matthew’s brother, will be sentenced on Thursday. 

“There’s no punishment,” Lockett told WTAE with a shake of the head, calling the sentences “slaps on the wrist.”

Surely this is all President Obama's fault, we all know that black people can't be anywhere near Kenny Chesney concerts.  It's in the same place in the Constitution as "Black presidents can't nominate Supreme Court justices in their final year of office."

StupidiNews!

• Pope Francis is calling for a one-year global moratorium on the death penalty, ushering in what the Catholic Church has deemed the Holy Year of Mercy.
• Pentagon officials will present an official plan today to Congress to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and to deal with the 91 detainees still there.
• The government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has agreed to the joint US-Russian cease fire starting Friday, but several terrorist groups are vowing to continue operations in Syria.
• Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates says the world needs a "miracle" on climate change in order to deal with its effects, in a letter to the world's young people asking them to help.
• Microsoft has quietly ended Skype Qik, the messaging service that even the company admits it never needed to roll out in the first place.