So over that on WRC, Lindsay Czarniak did her sports report Sunday night without ANY visible Skins logos on her person. (Fact.)

So over that Sonny Jurgensen didn't tussle with Jim Zorn in his postgame interview. (Fact.)

So over that starting this week, the Virginia Lottery has changed first prize for its $20 Redskins scratch tickets to two (2) Redskins season tickets, and second prize to four (4) Redskins season tickets. (Fiction!)

Butt seriously:  What kind of buffoon is going to pay $20, the most heinous sum in the history of lotteries, for a chance to win Skins season tickets that pretty soon won't be worth $20? Commercials for the scratch tickets ran throughout the Redskins radio broadcast yesterday, and the uglier the game got, the more absurd the prizes  seemed. Who wants ANYTHING associated with the Redskins right now?

Coming soon to a courthouse near you: Dan Snyder sues lottery winners who turn down their Skins season tickets. (Fiction.)

But, good god, are the 2009 Skins over. (Fact.)

(AFTER THE JUMP: Skins' suckage is the lead local story? The national newspeople take break into Tiger Woods coverage to dump on the Skins? Jurgensen takes it easy on Zorn? Sam Huff can't stomach Albert Haynesworth? Will Haynesworth make everybody forget Dana Stubblefield? Bad news is good news for extremeskins.com? Who is this "Synder" fella? Nats get swept again? The Nats Tragic Number is down to what? It's hockey season?)

"There's no way to overstate just how bad this is," said anchorman Craig Melvin to open the evening news broadcast at WRC, a place where news employees actually work for Dan Snyder and are known to wear their fealty to the Skins owner on their shirtsleeves. (Czarniak told the Tony Kornheiser Show last week that somebody above her, either station management or Dan Snyder, forced her to wear Redskins clothing on the air.) Several minutes of doom and doomer about the loss in Detroit followed on WRC.

Fox 5 also led off its 10 o clock news with the Skins: "Disappointment, anger frustation..." said anchor Will Thomas. "Keep going!" co-anchor Maureen Umeh chimed in.

Earlier in the day, Jurgensen also seemed at a loss for words during his post-game locker-room interview with Zorn. The Hall of Fame QB dropped the attack-dog style he'd used on the Redskins coach in recent weeks. There was no fight left in Zorn.

"We must change," Zorn told Jurgy.

At the exact moment that Zorn and Sonny were moping it up on Dan Snyder's radio station, WTEM, the Detroit Lions players were being shown on national TV walking around the perimeter of Ford Field accepting fans' congratulations like they'd all just broken Cal Ripken's streak.

***

The Redskins are a national cause for concern, too: NBC interrupted its FedEx Cup golf tournament broadcast to alert viewers that the Lions had won for the first time since 2007.

"It'll be a long week for the Redskins," said the NBC anchorwoman.

***

There were some fantastic radio moments between Skins play-by-play man Larry Michael and color commentator Sam Huff during yesterday's WTEM game broadcast when the neo-Stubblefield, Albert Haynesworth, made his first sack of the season and stayed on the Detroit turf. Huff is tired of the $100 million man's slothful demeanor on gamedays.

Michael: Haynesworth is down!

Huff: He's tired...

Michael: And he has not moved!

Huff: Tired

Haynesworth was eventually taken off the field by medical personnel on a cart.

***

Drama can be good for business: Dan Snyder's message board, extremeskins.com, is claiming its all time record for traffic was broken after the game by a factor of 1 and a half.

As soon as a thread expressing all the bad feelings was closed, another one was started. Typical was one titled: If You Shared an Elevator With Dan Snyder Tomorrow...........What would you say to him?

"I'd fart," said the poster Arkawi, the only guy to get in before moderators shut down the thread.

The traffic flow at Snyder's web site was no doubt helped by the traffic tie-up at Snyder's sports talker, WTEM-AM. For whatever reason, host Al Galdi took a paltry amount of callers in his two-hour or so post-game show, despite running out of ways to say that the Redskins had lost early into the program. One of the few listeners who managed to override WTEM's filibuster and get on the air railed against the owner and tagged Vinny Cerrato as Snyder's "personal sock puppet."

WJFK, meanwhile, didn't even have a postgame show to let fans decompress. Instead, the area's newest sportstalker aired a live broadcast of the Pittsburgh Steelers/Cincinnati Bengals game.

Via email, WJFK boss Chris Kinard explained his station's programming choice: "By contract with Westwood [One, an NFL syndicator], we have to carry their late afternoon game. It's part of the deal to carry Sunday and Monday Night Football. We had a postgame last week when the Ravens game was blacked out locally, and will do expanded pre and post coverage whenever possible."

Kinard, who says he also noticed how few callers were allowed on WTEM after the game, promises to let fans vent to their heart's content today.

"We're going to open the phone lines all day," he says. "Should be interesting."

***

The Washington Post dealt the Redskins owner the lowest of blows yesterday. From an introduction to Michael Wilbon's Sunday column in support of not firing the coach: "Jim Zorn is Daniel M. Synder's sixth coach."

"Synder!"

Somewhere along the way, for reasons I'm not sure of, "Synder" became the go-to nickname for hardcore Redskins fans when mocking the team's owner.

"Schottenheimer" was spelled correctly in Wilbon's piece.

***

Nats lose! Nats lose!

Swept away...again. This time by the Atlanta Braves. At 52-103, the Road to 100 Losses is but a memory.  If I'm carrying the one correctly, the Nats' Tragic Number, guaranteeing the team the worst record in the Majors, is down to two -- any combination of Washington losses or Pittsburgh Pirates wins, and our team's got the top draft pick all over again.

Good thing it's hockey season!

***

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Not only is this argument a silly one -- the overtime exemption covers folks like lifeguards and greenskeepers -- but, it's guaranteed to be a loser, too: As Steinberg reports, it's already been litigated at the federal level in a case involving employees of an NBA team.

So Snyder's going to lose here, surely as he lost a wage/hour dispute with his nanny. In that case, Snyder's legal case seemed to be no more complex than that she wasn't paid because he didn't want to.

But even if he weren't gonna get poleaxed legally in the sales staff case, the question remains: If Snyder's really got a waiting list of 200,000 people desperate to buy tickets for his football team, which he says often, why would he have  even one ticket seller, let alone an entire staff of ticket sellers, working overtime?

In any case, good to see that the move from urbane, aware Petworth to rural, la-dee-dah Silver Spring hasn't sapped Steinberg of his special powers.

Yet...

***

The Washington Post's Jason Reid blogs that the Redskins will no longer let anybody but their own employees Twitter from practice anymore.

(AFTER THE JUMP: Will the Twitter ban on non-Redskins employees affect WRC sports staff? How come football Hoyas stink? Lou Dobbs fiddles as the Asian Bias™ in golf comes home to roost? Stephen Strasburg should hold out til tomorrow? The Tom Boswell Curse wasn't real?)

Reid's readers aren't all upset by Snyder's latest control-the-flow move.

In reaction to the Twitter story, the commenter going by "talent_evaluator" posted: "My own take is that the tweets that have been up here have been pitiful. Chris Larry's brother was better at it than WaPo. No information at all, and you're better off watching practice than trying to frame your cutesy tweets. The Redskins are saving you from yourselves."

While the new rule will take Reid's thumbs out of action, since those on Snyder's payroll can still Twitter, the WRC news staff should still get the green light.

***

Alex Buzbee, the guy who was going to end Georgetown's decades-long streak of not putting any players into the NFL, might not be the streak breaker. Buzbee, a defensive tackle, likely would have made the Redskins last year were it not for a knee injury during training camp.

This year, Buzbee's chances of sticking aren't so swell. As of the Ravens' exhibition, Buzbee was listed on the Redskins' official depth chart as the fourth-team defensive tackle. And among those he's behind is Jeremy Jarmon, a rookie who is guaranteed to make the team so as not to make Vinny Cerrato look bad for using next year's third-round pick to grab him in the NFL's odd supplemental draft.

As of now, the last Hoya to play in the big leagues was Jim Ricca, a lineman who signed with the Redskins in 1951.

***

Cheap Seats Daily hyped the crap out of the Asian Bias™ in golf, even during that long lunch while everybody else was celebrating Post-Racial America™.

But for all our hate-mongering, nobody got incited. Even Lou Dobbs sat on his hands.

And so it's come to this: Two Asians, Woods and Yang, leave the rest of the world behind in the PGA Championship.

I hope you're happy, America!

***

Pay-up-or-shut-up day in the Stephen Strasburg soap opera. I can't help but side with labor in these squabbles, despite the silly sums involved. The way I see it, the rationale for why the team should play hardball with draft picks -- because chances are they won't make it -- is the exact same reason why the draftees should hold out for the last dollar. If history holds, Strasburg will never have this sorta bargaining clout again. So why not milk it til it bleeds?

'Course, if he doesn't end up taking the Nats final offer, he's a dumbass. Everybody knows that.

***

Update on the The Tom Boswell Curse: It's considerably weakened, at best.

Nats’ record with Boswell on vacation: 14-6. Nats’ record since Boswell returned from vacation: 3-3.

The "What?" we know: The Nats win three of four in Cincinnati, so the Boswell Curse that looked so sturdy last week while the Nationals went into a losing skein the day the Post columnist came back from vacation is on life support.

The "Why?" will require further study.

Good thing it's football season, to give us time to look into the matter!

***

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Let's get right to the issue of the day. The winners of the first three AT&T National events at Congressional:

2007 --- KJ Choi

2008 --- Anthony Kim

2009 --- Tiger Woods

The liberal media doesn't want you to know: There's an Asian bias to Tiger's tournament!

***

Woods exploited this bias to beat a field that included upstart white guys Hunter Mahan and Bruce Boudreau. (What? The Capitals coach wasn't in the AT&T National? I coulda sworn I read 10 stories about him playing Congressional, saw some video even. My bad.)

AFTER THE JUMP: Another Nats fireworks snafu? Why do tennis players carry their own sweaty shit? Is Manny Acta the new Norv Turner?

***

To assist in filling digital inches, let's continue pretending it's not Post-Racial America! I spent much of my Fourth of July weekend watching two Asian Americans in the final pairing of a golf tournament in DC and two grown up black kids from Compton win another Wimbledon doubles crown, after battling each other for another singles crown.

These ain't your father's country club sports!

One of many things I love love about tennis over golf. Will MacKenzie, the dude who finished last in the AT&T National and missed the cut by 14 strokes, had somebody carrying his bags all day on the golf course. But yesterday I saw Roger Federer, just crowned the Best Player of All Time with his 15th Grand Slam win, stuffing his own sweaty shit into a bag. And Andy Roddick, seeming tragic even though he just played a match for the ages, not having time to mope or rest his bones, because he had to stuff his own sweaty shit into a bag. The Williams sisters? Yup, a day earlier they stuffed their own sweaty shit into bags and carried 'em.

In tennis, no matter who you are, or what you've been through, you stuff your own sweaty shit into a bag and carry it!

***

How good was Wimbledon to DC tennis? Let's look: Serena Williams won the women's final. She's the assigned star player of the Washington Kastles, the World Team Tennis squad that starts its 2009 season this week. Serena beat sister Venus Williams in the final. Venus is the assigned visiting female star for the Philadelphia Freedoms, and is (as of NOW, anyway) supposed to face the Kastles here tomorrow night. John McEnroe announced all the Wimbledon matches and got scads of face time. He's the featured male visiting player for the Kastles this season, and will be in the lineup when the New York Sportimes come here on July 16. Andy Roddick is the one big name that always comes to the Legg Mason, with this year's tourney beginning August 1 at Carter Barron. Hope his hip flexor, which he might have hurt while stuffing his own sweaty shit into a bag and carrying it, is better by then.

***

With two outs and the Braves having the tying run at the plate, batter  Chipper Jones took a low outside pitch. But the Nationals Park fireworks operator, probably a new guy -- pushed the hot button on what he thought would be a game-ending called third strike. It was a ball. The game wasn't over. Jones stepped out of the batters box and laughed as the smoke cleared.

Then Jones walked. A hard grounder to first base later, and the game, and the button-pusher's job, was saved.

Enough with the fireworks, Nationals. They don't add a damn thing to a day at the stadium. But let Charlie Slowes keep his home run and victory call: "Bang Zoom go the fireworks!" I love that.

***

Speaking of saving jobs: A guy on Nats postgame show on WFED 1500-AM after Friday's 9-8 loss to Atlanta nailed the team's coaching situation pretty good: "Manny Acta is the new Norv Turner."

***

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Here's how it'd work: Lobbyists would pay big money to the Post for the chance to hobnob with Washington players in a given area---you know, government officials and Washington Post reporters.

In other words, pay to play, or exactly the sort of business that the Post itself has slammed in one investigative feature after another. Media types and subscribers are busy right now voicing their outrage over the proposed scheme, the first installment of which has been canceled. The Post newsroom, too, is up in arms about the get-togethers, and there's some disagreement as to whether editors were adequately briefed on this biz-side program.

Sure, it looks bad. But whenever these conflict-of-interest brouhahas pop up, I wonder why media watchdog types ignore it when a newspaper's sports department is involved. Pretty much every sports department at every newspaper plays the game.

The Washington Post, the only daily I subscribe to and care about (and, full disclosure, freelance for), sponsors every major team in the city in some fashion, and pretty much every gathering of athletic superstars.

It's always been that way. Here's a reference to Washington Senators/Washington Post ads from 1926 saying the newspaper is "as dependable as the Big Train." The company is listed as a "Bronze Sponsor" of this week's Tiger Woods' golf tournament in promo materials, just as the paper was going to disclose sponsorship of the Salons in programs for those events.

Does sponsorship change the paper's coverage?

Well, would The Great Dan Steinberg™ (TGDS®)* have been tasked to do a multi-platform package about Bruce Boudreau, coach of the Post-sponsored Washington Capitals, playing a round at Congressional, mentioned again and again in the package as the site of Woods' tournament, if the company weren't a major benefactor? Would Congressional have given TGDS® access to the prissy course and the coach to do the package? And would Woods' people have at least spelled the company's name right on the sponsors page ("Wasington Post Digital"?) if it'd kicked in enough dollars for silver or gold status?

Who knows?

And, while hockey ain't health care, and Bruce Boudreau ain't in the executive branch, I read more about the Capitals than UHC, and he's gotten as much ink this year as anybody who would show up at the Post's tea parties. (Then again: Would Rep. John Boehner, Woods' playing partner in yesterday's pro-am, have gotten favorable mentions here, here, and here, heading into the health care debate?)

Again, this is just one paper and one town. The same thing goes on everywhere. But what I want to know about those whining about the Salons: How come conflicts of interest don't matter on the sports page?

* Would I mention The Great Dan Steinberg™ so often if he weren't my neighbor and hero? We're all conflicted...