Righteous

Drew Magary on Roger Goodell:  FIRE THIS ASSHOLE

Goodell is a fraud, someone who has spent his career diving under his father's halo in the hopes that some of the light will shine on his dumbass, too. For years now, he has been little more than an eager hatchet man, doing all the shameful things that owners are too chickenshit to do themselves. The worst part was that he would cloak all this in the kind of faux nobility that suckers like Peter King always fall for but makes the rest of us want to shit on our rugs.

Saints fans to America: "Welcome aboard, everybody! No no.. no problem at all.  We're pretty used to being the canary in the coal mine around here anyway." 

Update: More from TBogg who references this Huffpo report on the the referees' contract negotiations. The refs are arguing with the league over their pensions.  The NFL wants to freeze the refs' defined benefit and replace it with a cheaper 401k

In facing a pension freeze, the NFL refs have plenty of company. Corporations across the country have been trying to switch their employees from traditional defined benefit pension plans to cheaper, less reliable defined contribution plans. Just one example is Con-Ed, which recently locked out workers as it tried to phase out employees' traditional pensions and move them to 401(k)s.

A lockout, it should be noted, is different from a strike. The workers do not elect to stop working -- they are forced to do so by management, putting them on the defensive. (Writing at The Nation, Dave Zirin and Mike Elk compared locking out 119 referees to "using an Uzi on a field mouse.") The prevalence of lockouts during labor disputes has soared in the weak economy.

But in this case, employees are squaring off with an ownership that doesn't pretend to be under financial duress. According to Forbes, the average NFL team is now worth $1.1 billion, up 7 percent over the previous year. To draw a blue-collar parallel, the league is a bit like the manufacturer Caterpillar, which has been pressuring its workers to bend to concessions despite the company's record profits.