White Passport Cover

Ultimate Fighting Is Ready For Its Close-Up

22.02.12

, It was January 2005. Their current heavyweight champion was in his first year of wrestling at Arizona State University. They could not have been further away from getting paid a reported $90 million per year to air their fights on network television; in fact, UFC owners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta had to use the profits from their Las Vegas casinos to pay for the production costs of their new television show. After a famously exciting fight between Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin at the Palms casino produced an incredible climax to the end of that first season, Spike network executives met with UFC president Dana White in an alley next to the casino to sign a contract for future seasons, presumably with production costs included. Now that their television partnership is ending, the jilted folks at Spike will be counterprogramming against the live UFC show on Fox by airing a marathon of classic UFC fights that they still have the rights to air. Oh, and after their casino chain went into bankruptcy proceedings in 2009, the Fertitta family undoubtedly used some of the profits from the UFC, by then valued to be a billion-dollar company, to prop up their casino business. A lot has changed in seven years.

Source: Grantland

How The GOP Will Again Try To Hijack The White

22.02.12

President Obama and national and GOP officials agree on one thing. The battle for the White House in 2012 will likely again come down to who wins the handful of election deciding battleground states. At the top of that list are Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Virginia. These are the states that have swung back and forth between the GOP and the Democrats for the past quarter century. Florida arguably and very dubiously put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000. Ohio did much to put Bush back in the White House in 2004. In 2008, both switched party hands, and along with the other three Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Virginia did much to put Obama in the White House. The GOP is bound and determined to make sure that doesn't happen again in 2012. It has for the most part dumped the crude stuff to suppress votes that got a lot of media attention, a slew of legal challenges, and stirred public outrage. That included making sure there was an absence of polling places in minority neighborhoods, ballot and vote machine irregularities, using lists of foreclosed homes to challenge voter's residences, rigid time lines for filing voter applications, the lack of information, misinformation or deliberate disinformation about voter registration forms and materials. Courts ruled that these blatant and naked efforts to torpedo minority voting were illegal, and Democratic Party officials were vigilant and aggressive in challenging these ploys.

Source: OpEdNews