Tag Archives: sports

Here Is the Audio of LA Clippers Owner Donald Sterling’s Deeply Insane Racist Rant

by Shenna42Zne Posted on April 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Donald Sterling is an awful racist. This is a well-established fact. However, up until Friday he was most famous not for being an awful racist, but for being an awful NBA owner. That all changed last night when TMZ published audio of the Ciippers owner telling his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, not to post photos of her and Magic Johnson to Instagram because Magic Johnson is black.

Donald Sterling owns the best NBA team in the second largest city in America in 2014.

Yeah, racism is totally dead.

Listen:

Original post:  

Here Is the Audio of LA Clippers Owner Donald Sterling’s Deeply Insane Racist Rant

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Is the Audio of LA Clippers Owner Donald Sterling’s Deeply Insane Racist Rant

Here Are Baseball’s 2 Least Loved Teams

by Lucile2956 Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at The Upshot, a crack team of researchers has put together an interactive map showing which baseball teams are preferred in which regions of the country. The overall results are pretty predictable, of course, but the authors make a few interesting points about exactly where the geographical dividing lines are between traditional rivalries. I thought the most interesting part was which teams were left out completely. Here’s the map:

There is not a single zip code in the entire country that favors the New York Mets. Even in 11368, the home of Citi Field, fans prefer the Yankees by 53 to 25 percent.

And the Oakland A’s have it even worse. In 94501, the home of the Oakland Coliseum, fans prefer the San Francisco Giants by a whopping 59 to 18 percent. This is spectacularly embarrassing. The Mets, after all, are at least in the same city as the Yankees, so divided loyalties are natural. The A’s are in Oakland, a different city with a culture of its own. Sure, maybe there’s no there there, but that’s a culture! And yet, even the working-class East Bay has apparently been so taken over by yuppified San Franciscans escaping sky-high rents that the A’s can’t get any love even after being canonized by Michael Lewis and Brad Pitt as the champions of Moneyball. Sad.

(The Toronto Blue Jays aren’t on the map either, but I assume that’s because the map doesn’t include Canada. I draw no conclusions about Toronto’s fan base, though I suspect we can assume it’s pretty minimal too.)

Link to original:

Here Are Baseball’s 2 Least Loved Teams

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Are Baseball’s 2 Least Loved Teams

Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

by FelixHuddleston Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Jared Diamond didn’t start out as the globe-romping author of massive, bestselling books about the precarious state of our civilization. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, he at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world’s foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder.

But then in 1987, something happened: his twin sons were born. “I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world,” remembers Diamond on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050.”

The result was Diamond’s first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. It’s the book that came before his mega-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it very much lays the groundwork for that work, as well as for Diamond’s 2005’s ecological jeremiad Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a sense, The Third Chimpanzee ties together Diamond’s thinking: It’s a sweeping survey of who we humans are—evolutionarily speaking, that is—and what that says about whether we can solve the “various messes that we’re making now,” in Diamond’s words. And this month, The Third Chimpanzee has been released in a new, shortened and illustrated edition for young adults, underscoring Diamond’s view that our entire future now depends on “enabling young people to make better decisions than their parents.”

In other words, if you want to boil down Diamond’s message these days to its essence, it would be something like this: Go forth, young chimpanzees, and clean up the mess we made. (Or else.) For Diamond, the story of who we are is also the story of what we must do. The younger among us, anyway.

Jared Diamond’s new edition of The Third Chimpanzee is directed at all the young chimpanzees out there, who had better be wiser than their parents. GlobalP/Thinkstock

So who are we? From the perspective of genetics, we are clearly the third species of chimpanzee. Our DNA is only 1.6 percent different from that of either chimps or pygmy chimpanzees (today more commonly called bonobos). “The reason why you and I are talking, and we’re not locked up in cages—whereas chimpanzees are not talking, and are locked up in cages—all that lies in 2 percent of our DNA,” explained Diamond on Inquiring Minds.

In fact, as Diamond emphasizes in his book, we are more genetically similar to chimps than many other closely related species are to one another. Gorillas and chimps, for instance, are 2.3 percent different, which means that chimps are considerably closer to us than to their other nearest primate relatives. Or, consider two very closely related songbird species: the red-eyed and white-eyed vireo. They are 2.9 percent different, notes Diamond.

So what makes humans so seemingly special? Until pretty recently, we weren’t. All the way up to 80,000 years ago, we were just “glorified chimpanzees,” in Diamond’s words. But then, something changed. Diamond calls it the “Great Leap Forward.” “The first art appears, necklaces, pierced ostrich shells,” says Diamond. “There’s rapid invention of tools, implying that even though our brains had been big for hundreds of thousands of years, we were not doing much interesting with these big brains—at least nothing that showed up preserved in the fossil record.”

We’re still not sure what brought on the Great Leap Forward. There wasn’t any big environmental change that drove us to adapt; all this happened in the middle of an Ice Age. Diamond’s hypothesis is that it was the development and perfection of spoken language that catapulted us forward, making possible teamwork, collaboration, planning, long-distance trade, and much more. Whether for lack of vocal capacity, brain development, or some other reason, chimps never made this leap. “A baby chimpanzee that was brought up in the home of a clinical psychologist couple, along with their baby, by age two, the chimpanzee could pronounce only four consonants and vowels, and it never got better,” says Diamond. “But if all you can say is, bi, ba, di, do, that doesn’t get you Shakespeare, and it also doesn’t let you discuss how to construct atomic bombs and bows and arrows.”

7 Stories.

In this view, the downstream consequences of language acquisition are, basically, everything that stands out about human civilization. That ranges from the highly beneficial—the dramatic growth in life expectancy—to the mixed: technologies that have significant benefits but also huge costs (like, say, devices to exploit fossil fuels for energy). And most of all, it includes environmental despoilment and resource depletion. “At present, we, humans, are operating worldwide on a non-sustainable economy,” says Diamond. “We’re exploiting resources, water, energy sources, fisheries, forests, at a rate such that most of these resources will get seriously depleted within a few decades.”

As a result, Diamond believes that our big brains are now setting us up for a major fall—a Great Leap Backward, if you will. “We are now reversing our progress much more rapidly than we created it,” writes Diamond in the new The Third Chimpanzee. “Our power threatens our own existence.”

In our interview, host Indre Viskontas asked Diamond where he thought humanity would be 100 years from now. What’s striking is that he wasn’t positive that the modern world, as we know it, would be around at all. It all depends, he says, on where we are at 2050:

DIAMOND: Either by the year 2050 we’ve succeeded in developing a sustainable economy, in which case we can then ask your question about 100 years from now, because there will be 100 years from now; or by 2050 we’ve failed to develop a sustainable economy, which means that there will no longer be first world living conditions, and there either won’t be humans 100 years from now, or those humans 100 years from now will have lifestyles similar of those of Cro-Magnons 40,000 years ago, because we’ve already stripped away the surface copper and the surface iron. If we knock ourselves out of the first world, we’re not going to be able to rebuild a first world.

In 2005’s Collapse, Diamond provided a great deal more detail on how ecological despoilment led to the collapse of other societies, such as the Easter Islanders, who cut down all their trees. The difference now, however, is that globalization causes our peril to be more widely distributed, kind of like a house of cards. “In this globalized world,” says Diamond, “it’s no longer possible for societies to collapse one by one. A collapse that we face, if there is going to be a collapse, it will be a global collapse.”

And yet despite all of this, Diamond says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the future of humanity. What exactly does that mean? “My estimate for the chances that we will master our problems and have a happy future, I would say the chances are 51 percent,” explains Diamond. “And the chances of a bad ending are only 49 percent,” he adds.

Not everybody agrees with Diamond that we’re in such a perilous state, of course. But there is perhaps no more celebrated chronicler of why civilizations rise, and why they fall. That is, after all, why we read him. So when Diamond says we’ve got maybe 50 years to turn it around, we should at least consider the possibility that he might actually be right. For if he is, the consequences are so intolerable that anything possible should be done to avert them.

Which brings us back to his book for young people—or, perhaps more accurately, for young chimpanzees. “This is the spirit in which I dedicate this book to my young sons and their generation,” writes Diamond in the new edition. “If we learn from the past that I have traced, our future may be brighter than that of the other two chimpanzees.”

To listen to the full interview with Jared Diamond, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the science (and superstition) behind this week’s “blood moon,” and the case of K.C., the late amnesiac patient who taught us so much about the nature of human memory.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Mindsvia iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

View original article: 

Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

As UConn Celebrates, State Legislators Look to Help Players Unionize

by SheenaSwader Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

The University of Connecticut men’s basketball team may have beaten Kentucky in the national championship last night, but star guard Shabazz Napier immediately turned his attention to a bigger foe: the NCAA. Napier used his postgame interview to take the NCAA to task for banning the Huskies from postseason play last season due to poor academic standing. Two weeks ago, after calling the Northwestern unionization efforts “kind of great,” he said players sometimes don’t have enough money for food.

Connecticut legislators were listening. Some state lawmakers are exploring ways to make it easier for athletes at public schools to unionize, in response to the regional labor board ruling in favor of Northwestern football players as well as Napier’s comments. “When you look at the issues, they really look like employees,” Democratic state Rep. Pat Dillon said. “And employees have the right to unionize.”

The NCAA banned UConn from the 2013 postseason when the team’s academic progress rate—a measure of academic eligibility that predicts graduation rate—from 2007 to 2011 did not meet league standards. Dillon said it’s hypocritical for the NCAA and others to ban a team for academic reasons while defending the billion-dollar system that has players practicing and playing full-time. “You work them like horses and then you bad mouth them if their academics aren’t any good,” she said. “The team is punished if they try to make sure these kids get a good education. Of course, they’re punished if they don’t either.”

UConn responded to Napier’s comments about not having enough to eat with a statement saying that all scholarship athletes are “provided the maximum meal plan that is allowable under NCAA rules.” An athletic department spokesman said the university has no comment about potential unionization.

This wouldn’t be the first time Connecticut legislators took on NCAA athletics—the state passed a law in 2011 requiring schools to fully disclose all athletic scholarship terms, including expected out-of-pocket expenses for athletes, details about who’s responsible for medical expenses, and the renewal process for scholarships that only last one year. A step forward on unionization, though, might be harder to pass, Dillon said. “Starting to do the right thing can actually hurt you with the NCAA,” she said. “Lawmakers would be worried it would hurt UConn’s recruitment. They wouldn’t say it, but I’m sure they would.”

See original article here:  

As UConn Celebrates, State Legislators Look to Help Players Unionize

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on As UConn Celebrates, State Legislators Look to Help Players Unionize

Fox News Confuses NAACP and NCAA 2 Days After SNL Joked About It

by Charlie Smith Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

On Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends First host Heather Childers referred to the UConn Huskies as “NAACP national champs.” This is funny, because what she meant was “NCAA national champs.” The NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which, among other things, mounted anti-lynching campaigns in the United States. The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which didn’t.

So we all had a brief chuckle at Childers‘ expense, and were ready to move on—until we noticed that her on-air mix-up was predicted by a Saturday Night Live sketch that aired just last weekend.

In SNL‘s latest lampooning of Fox & Friends, the cohosts start by blasting the Obamacare enrollment numbers. “It’s tough to sign up for things, I’ve tried for years to join the NAACP,” Brian Kilmeade (played by Bobby Moynihan) says. “Brian, why would you do that?” Elisabeth Hasselbeck (Vanessa Bayer) responds. “Well, I just loved college basketball,” Brian says.

The SNL writers room is full of time travelers. Watch the sketch here:

(H/t Ben Dimiero)

View original: 

Fox News Confuses NAACP and NCAA 2 Days After SNL Joked About It

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fox News Confuses NAACP and NCAA 2 Days After SNL Joked About It

Rutgers Athletic Director Wishes Critical Local Newspaper Would Die

by AdriannaMoncrie Posted on April 7, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Rutgers University athletic director Julie Hermann told a journalism class that athletes at the school receive plenty of benefits and that it would be “great” if the Star-Ledger, the New Jersey newspaper that just laid off 167 staffers, would die completely, according to a report by Muckgers last week.

When a student in the class said the Star-Ledger might go under, Hermann responded, “That’d be great. I’m going to do all I can to not to give them a headline to keep them alive because I think I got them through the summer.” The paper dedicated a great deal of coverage to Hermann after she replaced former AD Tim Pernetti, who resigned last year when it was revealed he allowed men’s basketball coach Mike Rice to keep his job after being presented video evidence of Rice pelting his players with basketballs and shouting insults and gay slurs at them during practice. Hermann came with her own baggage—the women’s volleyball team she coached at the University of Tennessee 17 years ago wrote a letter to the athletic department accusing her of “mental cruelty,” including referring to athletes as “whores, alcoholics, and learning disabled.”

Hermann has denied treating her players that way, and in a statement from Rutgers to the Star-Ledger, said she was just speaking to the class “in an informal way and out of the glare of the media spotlight” and “had no knowledge of the impending reorganization of the Star-Ledger.” (Hermann’s talk, which came before the most recent layoffs were announced, was recorded by a student in attendance.)

The classroom conversation also touched on the college athlete unionization movement. “What of those 1,000 institutions that sponsor college sports—who can sustain the kids unionizing?” Hermann asked the class. “Who can do that? Most of them are barely making it as it is.” Hermann, it should be noted, has a base salary of $450,000. She went on to extol the benefits Rutgers athletes are already getting (especially now that that no one is throwing basketballs at them during practice, one assumes):

By the time we go recruit a football player, sign him, bring him to campus, do all of their care, provide all of their medicine, all of their travel, all of their gear, all the things we’ve got to provide—by the time we’re done with him, here at Rutgers, we’ve spent over half a million dollars on him minimum…so, technically, what we’re providing for them is a value, it’s about $100,000. How many of you are going to walk out of here and get jobs that pay you $100,000?

What’s amazing is that Hermann’s description of what Rutgers provides athletes is the exact legal argument that allowed Northwestern University football players the right to unionize. (Not to mention that one of players’ largest grievances is that universities don’t “do all of their care,” since many health effects from playing football don’t crop up until later in life.) And while many recent Rutgers grads may not be pulling in $100,000 salaries, their employers will be paying them in real money—not scholarships, shoulder pads, and concussion treatments.

This article is from:  

Rutgers Athletic Director Wishes Critical Local Newspaper Would Die

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rutgers Athletic Director Wishes Critical Local Newspaper Would Die

Washington NFL Team’s New Native American Foundation Is Already Off to a Great Start

by CarriNDQ Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The CEO of the Washington football team’s recently unveiled Original Americans Foundation also runs an organization that was criticized in a federal investigation for wasting nearly $1 million and providing “no benefit” after receiving a Bureau of Indian Affairs contract.

Gary Edwards, who was announced as head of the team’s foundation this week, is CEO of the National Native American Law Enforcement Association. In 2009, the NNALEA won a contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to “recruit for and hire critically needed law enforcement officers (police, corrections, and criminal investigator positions) to work in Indian Country.” According to a 2012 investigation into the contract, first reported by USA Today, NNALEA produced 748 applicants for law enforcement positions—only about 4 percent of which were Native American. Even worse, not a single applicant was qualified, meaning the $967,100 in funds amounted to absolutely nothing.

The investigation mostly comes down hard on Bureau of Indian Affairs officials for allowing Edwards to negotiate the terms of the contract into something essentially useless. While the contract’s original language called for “500 qualified Native American law enforcement applicants,” according to the investigation, it was later modified to “500 pre-screened potential applicants,” effectively removing the requirements that the NNALEA provide applicants who are Native American and qualified for law enforcement jobs. In its invoices to the Bureau, NNALEA reported holding a recruiting event at the 2009 Crow Fair Celebration and placing ads in South Dakota’s Aberdeen News, though according to the investigation an official who attended the fair saw no recruiting booth or NNALEA representatives, and the Aberdeen News had no record of NNALEA ever ordering the ads.

“The NNALEA believes it met and exceeded all of its obligations under the contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Office of Justice Services, and subsequently was paid after the contract was completed,” Edwards said in a statement released Thursday night.

See the full investigation below:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1098339-nnalea-contract-investigation.js”,
width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1098339-nnalea-contract-investigation”
);

NNALEA contract investigation (PDF)

NNALEA contract investigation (Text)

Original post:

Washington NFL Team’s New Native American Foundation Is Already Off to a Great Start

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Washington NFL Team’s New Native American Foundation Is Already Off to a Great Start

GIFs: The Big Dance’s Best Dances (So Far)

by ChristiBriley Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

You toss the ball into the air as time runs out, falling to the court as your teammates rush over from the bench. Your school—which half of America just Wikipedia’d to figure out what state it’s in—just pulled off a miracle victory against a better-ranked, better-funded, big-name opponent. What are you going to do next?

You’re going to dance, of course. You’re going to dance on the sideline, you’re going to dance in the locker room, and you’re going to dance behind your coach while he tries to give a TV interview. These Cinderellas came to the ball prepared—we’d put them in a bracket and rank the best dances, but we have no idea how the winners would celebrate.

For example, here’s Kevin Canevari, a senior for new national treasure Mercer University, who capped off the Bears’ victory over third-seeded Duke with this gem:

CJ Fogler

Not to be outdone, fellow senior Anthony White Jr. did the robot while his coach was interviewed:

gifdsports

Jordan Sibert, Devon Scott, and Devin Oliver danced in the locker room after proving Dayton’s dominance in THE state of Ohio. Or maybe they’re just happy that someone ordered pizza:

gifsection

North Dakota State’s overtime victory against favored Oklahoma was impressive. The locker room choreography between Carlin Dupree, Kory Brown, and Lawrence Alexander afterward was even better:

Athlete Swag

Continued here: 

GIFs: The Big Dance’s Best Dances (So Far)

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GIFs: The Big Dance’s Best Dances (So Far)

Can These College Football Players Actually Unionize?

by DaneLabynm Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last month, football players at Northwestern University took formal steps to organize a labor union and bargain for benefits like guaranteed multiyear scholarships and medical coverage for concussions and other long-term health issues. The first of what will likely be many battles for the unionization effort came this week, with an hearing before the Chicago regional National Labor Relations Board.

The proceeding, which will continue at least through the end of the week, has pitted the proposed College Athletes Players Association and former Northwestern quarterback (and NFL hopeful) Kain Colter against Northwestern. While the university reacted much less strongly than the NCAA when the unionization efforts were unveiled—the official university statement made sure to say that Northwestern is “proud” of its students for being “leaders and independent thinkers”—it is still the theoretical employer of Colter and the other players and thus must face off against them before the labor board. (Head coach Pat Fitzgerald is expected to testify Friday.) Here’s what you need to know about the hearings and what they mean for college football:

What does the union need to prove to win? The College Athletes Players Association, with the help of star witness Colter, is arguing that football players are employees of the university. The group has some strong arguments in its favor, according to University of Illinois law professor and sports labor expert Michael LeRoy. For one, the players work long hours equivalent to a full-time job. Colter testified that football-related activities take up 40 to 50 hours a week during the season and 50 to 60 hours a week during training camp in the summer. The players’ efforts also benefit the university—an economics professor who testified on the union’s behalf said that Northwestern’s football revenue totaled $235 million between 2003 and 2012, while its expenses added up to just $159 million during that time. “It’s a financial benefit, and that’s putting it mildly,” LeRoy said.

What does Northwestern need to prove? The university’s argument is that the players are student-athletes and nothing more. The players receive scholarships worth about $60,000 a year, a university athletics official testified, and a lawyer for the school noted that players also get “a world-class education, free tutoring services, core academic advice, and personal and career development opportunity.” While some of Northwestern’s other counterpoints lacked substance—school lawyers grilled Colter on whether leadership and other skills learned from the football team helped him get a prior internship at Goldman Sachs, a line of thinking LeRoy called “fairly irrelevant” to whether or not college football counts as labor—perhaps its strongest point is that players signed a scholarship contract, agreeing to their amateur status and therefore waiving their collective bargaining power.

What happens now? No matter which side the Chicago labor board takes, the loser will probably appeal that decision to the national board in Washington, DC. That ruling will likely head to a federal appeals court. The entire process could take years, LeRoy said, which presents a unique challenge for union organizers: There’s a chance all the players who signed union cards will have graduated and moved on by the time a final decision comes down. One big question is how other schools and teams will react—while teams at private schools like Northwestern can try to unionize, teams at public schools must adhere to their states’ collective bargaining laws. If players at some schools are able to negotiate benefits that players at other schools are not, LeRoy said, it could fundamentally change recruiting, realign conferences, and lead to swaths of state legislation addressing the matter. “It’s a huge can of worms,” he said. “It’s a showstopper.”

Who’s going to win? LeRoy said he thinks the regional and national labor boards will rule in favor of the players due to the boards’ liberal slant, but that the courts will rule against Colter & Co. That won’t mean the movement was pointless, though—LeRoy expects the NCAA to compromise on many of the union’s core issues by that point. Vitally, the Northwestern players aren’t asking for pay for play, meaning the university and the NCAA could provide them with the scholarship and medical benefits they’re calling for and still maintain its structure and concept of amateurism. Even a formal union doesn’t hold up legally, LeRoy said, we may see a “union substitute” in which the threat is credible enough that the NCAA provides players with more voice and benefits. “I don’t think we’re going to have collective bargaining,” he said. “But I think this is a necessary step.”

Link: 

Can These College Football Players Actually Unionize?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can These College Football Players Actually Unionize?

It’s Time to End the Cable Sports Tax

by Napoleon6794 Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With spring training in the air here in Los Angeles, the saga of Dodger baseball is entering the ninth inning. Until last year, Dodger games were split between a broadcast channel and a basic cable sports channel. Total cost for the rights was about $50 million. Then Time-Warner signed a deal to run a 24/7 Dodger channel and paid a whopping $210 million for the 2014 rights. They have to make back that money, of course, and their plan for doing it is twofold: (a) charge a lot for the channel, and (b) insist that cable and satellite companies put it in their basic subscriber packages, where everyone has to pay for it:

Many distributors are upset about being pressured to carry a new sports network in a region that already has several similar channels, including not only Prime Ticket but also Fox Sports West, Pac-12 Los Angeles and Time Warner Cable’s SportsNet and Deportes.

“It is really hard to understand why everyone needs their own channel when they didn’t need one before,” said Andy Albert, senior vice president of content acquisition for Cox Communications.

“Time Warner Cable has unilaterally decided to pay an unprecedented high price and now wants all of their own customers as well as those of their competitors, none of which who had any say in the matter, to pick up that tab,” said Dan York, DirecTV’s chief content officer….”Given the high price that Time Warner Cable is seeking, it would be reasonable to ask that only those families who truly want to pay for the Dodgers actually pay for it,” said DirecTV’s York, whose company has 1.2 million subscribers in the region.

SportsNet LA’s response: A la carte is “not really on the table,” Rone said.

Of course it’s not. If it were a la carte, Time-Warner wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of earning back its $210 million. But I say: tough luck. It’s time to put a stop to this madness. The Dodgers (and the Lakers, who signed a similar deal) seem to think that every cable household in the LA basin should pay a head tax of $60 per year to support them. Why? Beats me. Because it’s sports. No other private enterprise is able to demand an explicit tribute like this from every consumer in a region, whether or not they happen to buy their products. For most companies, the best they can do is finagle a few tax breaks here and there—which, of course, sports teams do too.

This is basically a tax on everyone with a TV. There’s no excuse for it, and our local tea partiers should all be up in arms about it. Here’s hoping that Cox and DirecTV and all the other cable companies hold out and force the Dodgers and Time-Warner to cry uncle. Someone needs to set an example.

Excerpt from:  

It’s Time to End the Cable Sports Tax

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It’s Time to End the Cable Sports Tax