The USA Today is now the clear frontrunner for the 2012 Happiest Story of the Year award, with today’s report that Skechers has dropped Kim Kardashian from its Super Bowl ad in favor of a French bulldog. The ad will also feature Mark Cuban, but the main point is that we’re finally taking a step in the right direction, not only by realizing that all Super Bowl ads should feature adorable dogs, but by kicking Kardashian’s well-insured butt to the curb.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a social statement. It’s just business.

“Kim got us more attention than we ever dreamed,” says Leonard Armato, president of Skechers Fitness, who notes that Skechers is launching a high-tech running shoe business. “We have to establish Skechers as more than a lifestyle company.”

Also, Kardashian’s contract with Skechers expired at the end of 2011, so the company is probably trying to save some cash as it drops $3 million on the Super Bowl spot. In case you’re unfamiliar, Kardashian was one of the spokespersons for Skechers’ Shape-Ups, the shoes that are supposed to help women get in shape just by walking around, but have since become the focus of a class action lawsuit alleging that the shoes cause hip injuries.

Geez, at least Reebok got Kelly Brook to shill for its fake workout shoes.

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Back in August, Linda Hogan went on just about every hacky radio show that would listen to her about her book, “Wrestling the Hulk: My Life Against the Ropes”, and eventually that took her to Matty P’s Happy Hour, which is a show that has featured such celebrities as Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite and that swastika-tattooed girl that Jesse James slept with. A “caller” asked Linda if it was true that her ex-husband, Hulk Hogan, and Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake had a homosexual relationship, and she was totally surprised that someone asked her about something she wrote about in her book that she was promoting. So of course she said yes, while trying to be coy about it so she didn’t “end up getting a lawsuit.”

*record scratch*

As reported earlier, the wrestling icon, 58, filed court papers last week accusing his ex, 52, of defamation, after she accused him of brutal physical abuse and cheating on her with a male wrestler.

Clarified Hogan about Linda’s charge that he had a sexual relationship with fellow wrestler Brutus Beefcake: “If any of that was true, I would admit it, and I was a homosexual I would embrace it. It’s just so crazy to hear, so I have a real problem with it….If you’re going to say I’m something that I’m not to try to ruin my career and my livelihood….I have to answer her back.”

(Via MSNBC)

It is being reported that Brutus (real name: Edward Leslie) is also suing Linda for defamation, and I’m quite eager to see the judge’s response to a man who spent the 80s dressed as a flamboyant, shirtless barber in a bowtie, with the last name Beefcake. But damn straight, pun mildly intended, that’ll show the woman who just took 70% of everything Hogan had. Now he can get some of that money back and spend the rest of his life trying to get this picture off the Internet…

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Hey there, With Leather reader, were you one of the lucky, forthright individuals who thought a hologram-embedded band could be scientifically proven to enhance balance, flexibility and strength because Shaq and Drew Brees and some tennis players said so? Did your brain trick you into thinking someone would sell super-human strength for only $29.99? Do you play those Nigel West Dickens missions in Red Dead Redemption and think, “hey, this guy’s onto something”? Then you’ll love this quote from TMZ, which you probably already read:

Power Balance — the company that allegedly duped athletes into believing its bracelets could provide super-human strength — is about to take a $57 million dollar hit in a lawsuit filed by people who called BS on the product … TMZ has learned.

Now, sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell TMZ … the company has reached a settlement worth $57.4 million, intended to compensate all those who were misled into buying the product.

And it gets worse for PB — we’re told the company will be declaring bankruptcy and plans to fold up shop altogether.

You can order a Power Balance Bracelet today via Amazon for $2.60, a 91% discount. And hey, just because there’s no scientific evidence to back it up and the phrase “holograms which are embedded with frequencies” is meaningless doesn’t mean those 33 five-star reviews are invalid. Right? Uh, right? Sh*t, now what am I gonna tell my friend at the mall kiosk?

Everything’s a placebo, though, isn’t it? Eventually we’re going to find out we don’t even need food, we’ve just convinced ourselves that we’ll starve to death if we don’t have it. If I can’t trust a Shaq-endorsed mega bracelet, what can I trust?

In today’s sports legal lesson news, the United States Olympic Committee has warned the organizers of the Redneck Olympics that they must change their event’s name or they will be subject to a lawsuit. The USOC, thanks to our friends in Congress, holds the rights to any use of the word Olympics, including variations like Olympians, Olympiad, and, presumably, Olympia Dukakis.

But the folks behind this year’s Redneck Olympics in Maine are saying, “Heck naw,” claiming that since the Olympics have been around for thousands of years, they have every right to use the term. Guess how that’s going to work out for them.

“We have no interest in being the big bad guy that comes in and ruins everyone’s fun, [but] it’s important for us to protect this intellectual property,” Mark Jones, a spokesman for the U.S. Olympic Committee, told the Law Blog. “If someone calls themselves the Olympic Dry Cleaners or calls their sporting organization the Olympians – anything like that, those rights are ours.” (Via The Wall Street Journal)

OK, that’s pretty F-ed up, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the law. The WSJ also points out that in 1982 the Gay Olympics went through the same ordeal and they changed their name to the Gay Games. Even the Laff-A-Lympics went off the air in 1979, one year after the law was passed. Coincidence? Snagglepuss and Jabberjaw think not. The Special Olympics are the only exemption from this law, and there’s a big difference between differently-abled and redneck. OK, maybe it’s not that big of a difference.

Now I’m no big city slicker lawyer, I’m just a simple folk puttin’ mah overalls on one rolled up leg at a time. But iffn’ them fellas down there in East Dublin, Georgia can host their Redneck Games each summer, then I’m sure we can all help the South rise again, just under a different name, I reckon. It ain’t worth fightin’ with them Yankee white collar carpet baggers to ruin our fixins. Just think of all of the redneckitty goodness we’d be missin’ out on…

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NBA referees are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore, and it has nothing to do with them being the worst at their jobs of any professional sports officials, but rather their frustrations with the leagues refusal to negotiate. The NBA Referees Association, according to Yahoo!, has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, on the grounds that league leaders refuse to negotiate on issues like race, sex, and weight, among others.

And you just know that David Stern is handling this like a mature adult.

The memo and filing to the National Labor Relations Board also includes details of an alleged “obscene expression” by commissioner David Stern directed at union negotiators in a Jan. 24 meeting, referee sources said.

According to the memo, Stern – referred to as “one of the league’s negotiators” – got angry when the union attorneys sought to include what the union called “standard language found in many collective bargaining agreements” on discrimination.

“One of the league’s negotiators reacted to it with hostility and resorted to the use of an obscene expression in describing its effect,” the memo said. “When the NRBA representatives declined his demand to delete the obscene expression from their notes, this negotiator abruptly left the room.”

I want to know what the obscene gesture was. It could have been a throat slash, maybe a dismissive wank. Did he go with old faithful and give the room the double bird? Did he bend one of his underlings over a chair and pantomime sodomy? Or did he just go for the grand slam with the air machine gun hip thrust with one leg on a chair? I only hope that our government doesn’t close down tomorrow so that Congress can get involved.

The latest fiascoes with Super Bowl XLV have perfectly validated my point that there’s absolutely no redeeming aspect of attending live sporting events any more. Consider the plight of the “Founders,” Dallas Cowboys fans who spent $100k on PSLs for their Cowboys season tickets, with the promise of first crack at Super Bowl tickets.

Some of those fans were in temporary seats under overhangs and couldn’t see the giant video board above the field, “which defendant Jones and the Cowboys routinely claim is one of the most unique and best features of Cowboys Stadium,” the lawsuit said. They could see the field, and extra TVs were installed in those areas.

“You were effectively in a bat cave,” Avenatti said. “You don’t take your 400 best customers and treat them like that.” The lawsuit alleges the Cowboys have offered no compensation to their ticket holders for “their obstructed and illegitimate seats.”

The NFL has said the roughly 400 fans without seats have two options. The first is a ticket to next year’s Super Bowl and a cash payment of $2,400, three times the face value of the ticket. The second is a ticket to any future Super Bowl, along with round-trip airfare and hotel accommodations.

–NewsChief.

The stories of displaced NFL fans–Super Bowl patrons that had paid money to travel to the game, book accommodations, visit North Texas and watch the game–are coming almost faster than one could keep up with them. One fan has already launched a class-action lawsuit against the NFL and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

“No one told us anything,” she said. “It was in line where you learned from other (fans) about the seats, that the (original tickets) were temporary seating sections and that we were all in the same boat.

“We all talked to each other about how much money they paid for the tickets and what section their tickets were. But there were no representatives from the stadium, from the NFL, nobody was there while we waited in that line explaining anything to us.”

–Pro Football Weekly.

Serious question here: why does a billion-dollar stadium have obstructed view seats? I don’t blame anyone for suing the league, although there’s one pompous writer that does. When’s the last time that jerk took out a second mortgage to make a Super Bowl trip? Exactly.