Come on, pervs: Get your name in before it's too late!

('Course, this also means time is running out on Cheap Seats Daily's ability to run everybody's fave photo.)

(AFTER THE JUMP: Does Dan Snyder's vacation choice mean he's met his Waterloo? Elba is nice this time of year? Somebody wrote something nice about Dan Snyder? Really? Was it accurate? Not really? Where'd David Donovan learn to fib? Dan Snyder's poster confiscating binge was all a prank? Will anybody get a "Goofus and Gallant" reference?)

I read in the Washington Times yesterday that Dan Snyder is in France. How Freudian a vacation choice, considering the sort of slurs thrown his way these days. (Writer David Covucci got me chuckling with a piece posted at the hit-or-miss site Bleacher Report, saying Snyder' failings have been so epic that "scholars now refer to Napoleon as having 'Snyder Complex.”')

If Snyder stops at Elba, would he be allowed to leave?

***

Nothing nice has been written about Dan Snyder for years. Three years, to be pretty exact. That's when "The Dan Snyder You Don't Know," Harry Jaffe's profile of Snyder, showed up in Washingtonian magazine. Jaffe's story has over the years been regularly posted on Snyder's message board, ExtremeSkins.com, when the Skins owner's getting the crap beat out of him. It was posted again there yesterday.

Snyder was talking only slightly less to the press then than he does now, so Jaffe must have worked incredibly hard to get a sit-down. But the story, which came out in the September 2006 edition was an Instant Classic — for all the wrong reasons. Reading it now, you wonder what date-rape drug Snyder snuck into Jaffe's tea before he started typing.

Jaffe's Dan Snyder was a Dan Snyder we didn't know, all right. His Dan Snyder is "not even close" to being a "spoiled, greedy, power-hungry rich" guy like other NFL owners.  He's "playful, and shockingly normal," a guy who goes to "Ben’s Chili Bowl in DC at 1 am with his buddies."

And, ethical? Read on!

No one has questioned Snyder’s corporate dealings. He likes to say he has never been in court.

“I am a goody two-shoes,” he says. “Business ethics are important to me.”

Jaffe had somehow missed or forgotten about the FCC's reports about Snyder's pre-Redskins business, Snyder Communications, and all the million-dollar shenanigans it pulled through "slamming," or switching consumers' phone companies without their consent. In one of the investigations into his company's shenanigans, investigators for the State of Florida found that Snyder "forged the signatures of hundreds of customers on letters of authorizations purporting to authorize a change of customer's resubscribed interxchange carrier." (The Washington Post's investigation into the Redskins relationship with scalpers, remember, included charges that Snyder's employees were forging folks signatures on season ticket contracts.)

The hits just keep coming from Jaffe. Snyder, we learn, was actually patient with Norv Turner after buying the team in the summer of 1999.

"Snyder stuck with Norv Turner through the 1999 season, which was lackluster," Jaffe wrote.

"Lackluster"?

Well, actually, 1999 was the best season that the Skins have had under Snyder. That team won the NFC East and hosted the only playoff game ever played at FedExField. Yet Snyder somehow stuck by Turner throughout the year! Bravo!

Snyder, were also told in Jaffe's piece, began charging admission to training camp "in 2003."

Well, actually Snyder charged $10 admission and $10 parking fees in 2000 — the very first training camp he hosted. The date change is important, because it shows that as soon as Snyder could gouge the fan base, he did gouge the fan base.

To be fair, there are some enlightening parts of Jaffe's tale. As Jaffe relates an anecdote that's meant to show how much fun Snyder is, we learn where David Donovan, now the Redskins Chief Operating Officer and Fibber-in-Chief learned that honesty ain't a policy with Skins management.

Take the time Redskins general counsel Dave Donovan went to his first away game at the St. Louis Rams’ domed stadium. Snyder and [minority Skins owner Dwight] Schar saw him calling his wife and family on his cell phone to say how cool it was to be in the stadium before the game. They called the head of security and asked him to send two cops and “arrest” Donovan, saying it was illegal to use a cell phone in the stadium.

Donovan was escorted across the field. It wasn’t until he got to the other sideline that they told him it was a joke.

“We were laughing so hard we almost peed in our pants,” says Snyder.

Well, we can only hope Snyder was wearing Depends when Donovan went on WJFK earlier this week to say that there weren't many Philly fans at FedEx for the Eagles game, that the Redskins don't sue their fans, that only a few posters were confiscated by security at FedEx on Monday, etc. Though, come to think of it, Donovan says he's in charge of game-day operations now, so maybe when the Redskins had their security guards escort all those people out for wearing anti-Snyder t-shirts or anti-Snyder bags or carrying anti-Snyder posters, it was all a practical joke! Donovan was just funnin' with everybody! You got Punk'd, Skins fans!

And, Jaffe quotes Snyder associate named Mark Jennings describing Snyder as somebody who won't do anything "to get the next great article written about himself.”

Ain't that the truth.

I wonder if Jaffe would write anything differently if he could.

***

By now, all that's left is for Highlights to crush Snyder, and then every magazine on the rack, and every magazine off the rack, will have crushed him. Everybody who never wrote about the Skins owner has pounded him these last couple weeks.

After the New Yorker, you'd figure most publications would figure: Why bother?

But this morning, the Huffington Post still bothered. The online pub gives Bob Franken digital column inches to come at Snyder like he took Franken's money — which, in a disclosure contained in the piece, Franken says Snyder did (as a ticketholder).

Franken goes mega macro, comparing Snyder and the Redskins to Wall Street and the U.S. economy. At least that's what I think Franken did.

You be the judge:

So consider Dan Snyder and his Redskins a metaphor...a metaphor for heartlessness and incompetence that has brought things to ruin with little hope that next season will be much better since the same people will still be running things. No wonder so many are angry. A few have played the game terribly, but it's everyone else who has lost.

So I'm not the only one screaming that this is bigger than football to the point of foolishness? Cool!

Actually, I'd like to hear Highlights take on Snyder. He's providing teachable moments for all the children. And if Art Rooney was put forth as Gallant, you-know-who would make a great Goofus.

***

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I heard again last night from Stephette Hogette. He's the guy who stands accused of being a bogus Hogette.

He sent along a photograph, shown above, which he says was taken years ago at a Redskins game and, he says, proves that Stephette Hogette used to be accepted by the same folks who are now calling him a counterfeit.

While Stephette Hogette's disheveled drag ensemble—he's the one in the middle—does indeed blend with the garb of the folks he's with in that photo, he couldn't name the other Hogettes he's hanging with in the shot.

Perhaps they're unsanctioned Hogettes also! I don't know which Hogette to trust anymore!

(AFTER THE JUMP:Where will the real Hogettes be tailgating come Sunday? WTEM tones down its Redskins Cheerleader pride giveaway? D'Anthony Batiste ain't worth a D'amn? D'Anthony D'Ances with D'An D'Aly? Nobody told the Washington Post that "Remember the Titans" was a load of crap?)

The biggest news from his latest Exclusive Interview™ with Cheap Seats Daily, however, came when Stephette Hogette, a Brooklynite who along with his Hogette name also goes by Steve Rasnikov (real name!) and Snow Rap G (rap name!), told me that because of the vigilante mood among Redskins fans created by evidence-free accusations from other Hogettes of untoward behavior toward women and children, he now wants to be known as "Carmine Fischetti."

By whatever name, he promises, however, that Stephette Hogette's going to show up at FedExField on Sunday for the Kansas City game in his regular gameday costume, and that he'll work the tailgates with his standard bottle of booze and rapped pickup lines.

Meanwhile, the folks claiming ownership of the Hogettes brand are still out to get Stephette to shed his snout.

"We don't want a turkey like this guy running around and accosting people and claiming that he's one of us," Hogettes founder Michael Torbert told me last night. "You can tell by his hat that he's not a real Hogette." (Well, to be honest, Mikey, while Stephette Hogette's hat tells me a lot, it doesn't tell me whether or not he's a real Hogette.)

Torbert says that he and the other real Hogettes will also be tailgating before the KC game in their normal spot in the Green Lot, by the A-65 pole.

***

Dan Snyder's cheerleader pride giveaway has gotten a little less demeaning. Snyder's sportstalk station, WTEM, is now running a sleazy contest for listeners in which winners will get their cars washed by Redskins cheerleaders. Original radio ads for the contest featured two pervy dudes and all sorts of talk about getting Redskins cheerleaders to come rub them down.

The new spots, however, have one guy just asking listeners if they want a car wash, without any of the masturbatory innuendo.

Wonder why the commercials changed. Hmm.

***

AP writer Joseph White verbally nutshelled the mess in Ashburn:

"But here's one more fact," White wrote in a column yesterday, "that pretty much sums up the current state of the Washington Redskins: On Sunday, they had a guard playing tackle, and a tackle playing guard."

And The Great Dan Steinberg™ visually nutshelled the 2009 Redskins with a photo he took from his lo-def TV of D'Anthony Batiste, the guard playing tackle, not only missing his assignment, but turned around 180 degrees looking for the guy he's supposed to block.

D'Ang, D'Anthony!

***

TGDS's co-worker and fellow multimedia maven Mike Wise told his WJFK audience yesterday about being an earwitness to a postgame locker room scuffle of some sort between D'Anthony Batiste and D'An D'Aly of the Washington Times, that ended with the lineman telling the reporter that the requested interview "Ain't happenin'!"

The reporter was then heard telling the lineman, "You ain't happening!"

(Things are gettin' D'Angerous!)

***

Sherm Lewis isn't good for nuthin'. He's already been good for giggles.

The Mr. Irrelevant clothing store offers simply brilliant "Another Set of Eyes" t-shirts. And over at the Washington Post, there's the headline to today's Tracee Hamilton column: "Another Set Of Black Eyes."

***

Greg Paspatis continues fighting the myth of Remember the Titans. Paspatis is an alum of T.C. Williams, the Alexandria school featured in the Denzel Washington movie about a how the desegregation of a high school inspires its football team to win the 1971 Virginia state championship.

T.C. Williams really did win the 1971 state championship, but pretty much everything else in the movie, save the players' and coaches' names, is made up.

Because of the film's box office success, however, the celluloid fiction now supersedes the school's reality. A lot of folks around town have given up their real biography and instead promote the life stories of the scripted characters, and some people whose names were used in the movie, including former T.C. Williams head coach Herman Boone, have profited incredibly from the acceptance of the fairytale version.

Paspatis, who played for Boone in the late 1970s and is not a fan of the real-world coach, has been on a one-man campaign to correct the record for several years now. His latest target is the Washington Post, for a story last month about new Alexandria sheriff Earl Cook. In the piece, Cook, the first black police chief in the city's history, is described as a player on the Remember the Titans football team from 1971 who had started out as a student at George Washington High School but "transferred to T.C. Williams High School after it was integrated." As Paspatis knows, the racial integration of T.C. Williams only happened in the movie.

In reality, T.C. Williams was racially integrated when it opened in 1965.

The only integration T.C. Williams enjoyed in 1971 was an influx of a couple thousand more students, black and white, after the closing of the city's other similarly desegregated high schools, George Washington and Hammond High.

That enrollment boom made T.C. the biggest school in the entire state, which is why its football team was everybody's preseason pick to be a powerhouse.

So when Paspatis saw the Post's Earl Cook piece, he did what he always does in these situations: "I wrote to the editors and asked for a correction," Paspatis says. "I wrote to a lot of people there."

And?

"Nothing," he says. "No response. No correction. They don't want the truth."

***

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Yesterday, in this very space, we blew the lid off the latest listener contest for Dan Snyder's sportstalk station, WTEM-AM, in which the Redskins owner promises to send his cheerleading squad over to winners' houses and make them wash cars.

And in this week's analog edition, we blow the lid off Dan Snyder's cheerleader past, from his 2000 rackumentary "Beauty on the Beach," all the way up to his latest scheme, which tells the cheering crew to put down their pom poms and pick up sponges and service his 25-54 male audience.

And, as promised, throughout all this lid-blowing we've run the same photograph of all those sudsy blondes, again and again and again.

That's the shot that got The Great Dan Steinberg so lathered up he rudely barged into the comments section to pooh-pooh our Snyder/T&A expose. TGDS basically accused Cheap Seats Daily of hypocrisy and of being as exploitative as Dan Snyder!

Just because we ran this photo of sudsy blondes!

That hurts.

What kind of message does that contest (and this photo) send to the Little Ladies of Football? Think of the children, Dan and Dan!

(AFTER THE JUMP: Could Snyder's layoffs at Redskins Park have helped this car wash debacle along? Is it Sherm or Sherman? Dan Steinberg reveals Lewis' bingo past? Dan Steinberg conceals reveals his own bingo past? How loaded is the Skins' 2009 schedule with Snyder humiliatees? Yankee Stadium ain't the only ballpark in use this October? Nationals Park gets loaded with readers?)

Butt seriously, this new low/high in Snyder's cheerleader marketing schemes might have something to do with personnel changes.

Donald Wells, the longtime director of the Redskins cheerleaders who predated Snyder, got fired a few months ago. Wells is now director of marketing for Sweethearts for Soldiers, a cheerleader-centric charity based in San Diego.

Wells' replacement as Redskins cheerleader director, Stephanie Jojokian, told me on Tuesday that she wasn't aware that any of her cheerleaders were going to be washing cars. Melanie Treanor Coburn, the Redskins Cheerleaders director of marketing, did not return phone calls. Jojokian says Treanor Coburn is on maternity leave.

***

While there is no agreement on whether to call him "Sherm Lewis" or "Sherman Lewis," everybody agrees the Redskins hiring of an "offensive consultant" is going to do nothing other than humiliate Jim Zorn.

But only TGDS took time to write up Sherm Lewis's past as a bingo caller this morning.

For whatever reason, the ever-humble Bogger leaves out his personal past with the churchy game. In 2002, when he was Just Plain Dan Steinberg, JPDS blew the lid off DC bingo queen Vanessa Woodland in a fabulous City Paper cover story. Read it here.

***

Zorn isn't the first guy Snyder's humiliated here, of course. We've already heard Jon Jansen gloating over the greatness of taking part in ending the Lions losing streak with a win over Washington.

But there's a lot of Snyder haters on the schedule this year.

Mike Nolan is doing better than OK in Denver. Nolan's the guy who Snyder kept delivering vanilla ice cream to during the 1999 season just after buying the Redskins,  a super twerpy way of saying that he thought the Redskins defense was bland.

Snyder had  started at middle linebacker for the Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers during a stellar NFL career and therefore was quite qualified to render such judgements never played a down of foootball at any level in his life but still felt qualified to render such judgements.

From the San Franciso Chronicle's telling of the Nolan/Snyder ice cream tale, which has been told a billion times but not enough:

"It happened twice," Nolan said of the ice cream deliveries. The first time, rapidly defrosting gallons of extravagant flavors were placed outside Nolan's office door with a note saying, "No more vanilla."

"I wrote him a note, saying that my kids would enjoy the ice cream and that the advice was well taken," Nolan said. "(I was) thinking he was kidding. Then I found out he wasn't kidding."

When Nolan stayed conservative with his defenses, Snyder went industrial. Nolan showed up one day to find a hand cart parked at his desk with melting 5-gallon drums of ice cream.

Fast forward to 2009...From an AP story that appeared on washingtonpost.com yesterday titled "Once dismal Broncos defense thriving under Nolan," a different image of Nolan's abilities as a manager of men emerges. As in this quote: "In this defense, I see pride, I see hunger, I see a battle for respect," linebacker Mario Haggan said.

Has anybody said any of those things about this year's Redskins? Well, when I look at Albert Haynesworth, I guess I do see hunger. But that's another story.

Denver's 4-0, and Nolan's defense is given as the reason. The Skins play Denver at Denver FedExField on Nov. 15.

Gregg Williams is doing ok, too. Dan Snyder rejected and humiliated Williams after a Gitmo-esque interview process that had the Skins former defensive coordinator shacking up at Snyder's Potomac mansion, the one with a good view of the River. No sensible explanation was ever given for bypassing Williams for Jim Zorn as head coach.

(My fave rumor out of Redskins Park, still being told, has Williams getting blackballed as head coach by Joe Gibbs because he wasn't godly enough, which would explain why Snyder ended up with Zorn, who appends a biblical proverb  to every autograph. Geezus Chrysler!)

But Williams is now with 4-0 New Orleans, and is getting a lot of kudos for the undefeatedness of his team. Michael Wilbon, who has taken to putting Williams' name in his columns about as often as Charles Barkley's or Michael Jordan's, credited the defensive coordinator with Sunday's big win over the previously undefeated Jets in a Tuesday story:

Okay, we knew the New Orleans offense was great, but how about Gregg Williams's defense? Yes, Gregg Williams. That guy. Getting it done. The Saints harassed the Jets all over the field and forced Mark Sanchez into some killer INTs.

Skins play New Orleans at home on Dec. 6.

Norv Turner ain't doing that great. Turner, the last head coach Snyder fired midseason, has his Chargers at 2-2. But San Diego's .500 seems a helluva lot stronger than the Skins' .500.

Washington plays at San Diego on the last weekend of the season in what will surely be a meaningless game for at least one of the teams.

***

Major League Baseball's playoff series are all on as of today. But Nationals Park is always available in October. So a literacy group decided to book the big room today to try to get publicity.

This morning, a crowd in the hundreds, or what a typical Nationals/Marlins game would draw, was expected to show up for "Read for the Record," which organizers claim will be an attempt to set the record for "largest one-day shared reading experience ever." Representatives from the Nationals, including Stan Kasten, did some reading.

The book everyone will be sharing is called "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Too bad Dmitri Young wasn't around for this one.

***

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Somebody posted a notice on Dan Snyder's message board, Extremeskins, alerting fans that a fundraiser will be thrown in Arlington next week to help pay medical bills for Chief Zee (real name Zema Williams).

Time was, such a post in these friendly confines would elicit nothing more controversial than "How much does he need?" But these days, even wins are booed. So the thread immediately disintegrated into an interrogation of the original poster, with some folks wondering why Williams needs another fundraiser—"He can afford season tickets, but not medical bills?" huffed the poster brianm23—and others asking why give money to a guy Chief Zee's age, since he should have all his health care covered by those socialist programs, Medicare and Medicaid.

(AFTER THE JUMP: That blogger called Chief Zee WHAT? Would Justice Scalia cringe at Chief Zee's costume? WJFK's crushing WTEM? It's a good time to unaffiliated with Dan Snyder? The last Guaranteed Win Night of 2009?)

I've met and talked to Chief Zee, and he's a real pleasant, happy old guy. To longtime Skins fans desensitized to the offensiveness of his caricatured costume, Chief Zee is the football fan equivalent of a combat vet: He had his leg broken by Eagles fans in the parking lot of Veterans Stadium after a 1983 Skins/Philly game. Williams described the beating to me a some years ago:

"They treated me like chopped meat," he says. "They ripped off my costume, smashed my eye socket so my eyeball was just hanging out, snapped my leg like it was a twig, and yelled, 'You won't be jumping up and down in this stadium anymore!' They left me lying in my underclothes."

But to pretty much everybody without allegiance to our NFL team, Chief Zee is a feather-and-moccasin-wearing symbol of everything wrong with having a franchise named "Redskins."

As a blogger from stuffblackpeoplehate.com explained last year:

For people who aren’t from the Washington D.C. area, Zema Williams (a.k.a. Chief Zee) is the racist asshole who throws on a warbonnet and beaded warshirt at Washington Redskins games and proceeds to dance around like an unmitigated fucktard. He has become the unofficial de facto mascot of the Redskins, despite the fact that he’s basically Native America’s Al Jolson in blackface.There isn’t enough space on this blog to list everything that’s wrong with what he’s doing, nor is there enough space to explain how offended Native people and I, as a Native person, are offended by this assclown. What possibly sticks in the craw the most is the fact that November 7, 1985 was declared ‘Chief Zee’ day in Washington D.C. – right smack in the middle of American Indian Heritage Month. Fuck you very much whoever’s idea that was.

Now on to the much shorter and more easily explained reason why this, and indeed the very fact that a team called the ‘Redskins‘ is even allowed to exist, bothers me as a black man:

Black people are next.

Perhaps stuffblackpeoplehate.com will present an amicus brief if the Supreme Court hears Harjo v. Pro Football Inc., the lawsuit that challenges the trademark protections enjoyed by Dan Snyder with his Redskins merch.

Or maybe the lead plaintiff in the case against Snyder, Suzan Harjo, should just rent Chief Zee for a day if her case comes up, and just have him walk around the Supreme Court entrance in costume. Even Antonin Scalia would admit have to admit "Redskins" is offensive after a glimpse at Zee's gameday getup.

***

Update on the sportstalk war: DCRTV reports that the Dan Snyder-owned WTEM is getting grounded and pounded by non-Dan Snyder-owned WJFK in the key demographic of 25-54 year old males.

The latest ratings book includes the NFL preseason, which would figure to be the high holy days for Snyder's frequency, what with its total access to the Redskins. But according to a radio industry source, WJFK beat WTEM in every time slot in the Erectile Dysfunction demo they both are going after.

WJFK boss Chris Kinard admits it's a good time to not be affiliated with Dan Snyder.

"Our goal has always been to provide a platform for the fans for whatever they want to get off their chest," says Kinard. "The way things have gone in the last 10 years for the most beloved franchise in Washington, D.C., that frustration was apparent in the stadium last weekend, and that frustration has been apparent on our airwaves."

The WTEM/WJFK feud has already produced off-air entertainment. WJFK brilliantly hired the Redskins cheerleaders to work the press party announcing the station would be flipping to a sports station and challenging WTEM, meaning Snyder's favorite play-toy was used to sell the opposition.

Snyder rebounded from the cheerleader stunt by using backdoor channels to crush WJFK's attempt to open the FanZone, a tailgate friendly parking lot near FedExField that was planned as WJFK's first marketing extravaganza after the flip to sports talk.

Another big chapter in the stations' rivalry will come with the next ratings book, scheduled for release Oct. 8, which will be the first book to include numbers from Tony Kornheiser, who came back to local airwaves after being kicked out of the Monday Night Football booth. If WJFK continues winning that time slot with Mike Wise, it'll be turn out the lights, the party's over for Snyder and Kornheiser as sportstalkers.

***

The Nationals get bombed by Los Angeles, 14-2.  That puts Washington at 51-99.

One tick away from the century mark!

It's been a while since we had an R²D²™ Update! L.A. has now outscored the opposition by a Major League-best 179 runs on the season; Washington has been outscored by a Major League-worst 164 runs.

So, let's take a look at the big board, just returned by Jerry Lewis: The Nats now have a negative-343-run-run-differential-differential with the Dodgers, or an R²D²™ of -343!

Wow! The Nats are to R²D²™ as Hussein Bolt is to the 100 meters, only opposite! Vegas can't be surprised they got blown out by 12 runs last night!

But all bets are off with the squad teetering on still another 100 loss season.

All bets except one, that is! It's time for Cheap Seats Daily's famous Guaranteed Win Night™! That's right, for the last time of 2009, put the mortgage on the Nats to win tonight at Nationals Park!*

And remember, if the bet doesn't come in, the rest of the season is free!

*Don't really put the mortgage on the Nats, dumbass....UNLESS YOU GET PLEASURE OUT OF WINNING LARGE SUMS OF COLD, HARD CASH!

***

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