You may kibitz and such and such about the Super Bowl here…

With a disgraceful and relentless disregard for America’s social fabric, Republicans around the country are doing what they can to destroy public education.

Last night’s Lingerie-League-rejects refereed game between the winning Seattle Sea Hawks and the favored Green Bay Packers threw the legal betting industry into a tizzy.

As we wait for the outcome of the most high-profile labor dispute currently happening in America, the Chicago Teachers Union strike, I want to call attention to the other big labor action out there. National Football League referees have been locked out of the job since the beginning of the year. Four weeks of preseason and two weeks of the regular season have been officiated by scabs, replacement referees from college and even high school. The NFL had to remove one referee from a New Orleans Saints game after he was outed as a fan of the team; another scab was recruited from the Lingerie Football League.

Since the collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Referees Association expired on May 31, the regular NFL officials have been locked out. Taking the place of these officials with a combined tenure of roughly1500 years of NFL experience are people whose last refereeing jobs were in the lingerie football league.

Welcome to Labor Day, NFL style.

Since last November, when the Jerry Sandusky saga propelled Penn State into the headlines, I’ve wondered about Penn State’s former president, Graham Spanier. After reading the Freeh Report in its nauseating detail, I did more than wonder — I started digging for Spanier’s own words on what it means to be a university president.

What I found does not make for a pretty picture.

Mary Bell, the President of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, just announced that teachers across the state will return to work on Monday, instead joining protests at night in their communities. Teachers, and in many cases their students, have been at the forefront of the protests in the state capital, Madison. Local school districts have been shut for up to three days as teachers demonstrated against a measure to strip their collective bargaining rights.

In just six weeks, Arizonans will vote on Prop 203: an initiative that will bring medical marijuana to Arizona. But not if the Arizona Cardinals have anything to do with it. The NFL football team donated $10,000 of the team’s money last week to opponents of Prop 203 and medical marijuana in Arizona. We need to fight back the Cardinals’ attacks on cancer patients. Click here to sign Just Say Now’s petition condemning the Cardinals for standing between Arizona patients and their doctors.

I am a lifelong sports fan. I learned the language of Baseball probably before I could even walk and the language of Basketball soon thereafter. I’m fluent in American Football and can make myself understood in Hockey. I also have varying degrees of fluency in a number of the “minor” sports here in the US, such as Bowling (though I’m not as fluent in speaking Candlepin or Duckpin as I am in the more conventional Tenpin most of us are familiar with.

In their book Gaming the World, Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann use the languages of sports to offer a unique perspective on globalization. This is not a book that will be used to settle arguments on sports performances at the neighborhood pub. However, I can see it being used as the foundation of a Sociology class on Sports in Society, as part of a Cultural Anthropology class, or as part of an elective Political Science course work. (in all cases with some necessary supplemental information)