Getting close to the NBA season so...

Here's the first salvo at Mark (asshole) Cuban:

DENVER – Denver Nuggets forward Kenyon Martin(notes) is accustomed to being heckled on the court. But at his house, too?

Martin said Dallas Mavericks fans drove by his home in Arlington, Texas, at least six times this summer shouting insults.

“Some people still think I’m a thug,” Martin said. “My house is the biggest house in the neighborhood. People drive by … saying stuff like, ‘Mark Cuban was right.’ Me and my partners will be sitting by my pool or barbequing and we’ll just laugh at it.”

Photo Nuggets forward Kenyon Martin said Mavericks fans heckled him at his home.
(AP)

The heckling is just the latest incident in an ugly feud between Martin and Cuban, the Mavericks’ owner. During the Nuggets’ second-round playoff series in Dallas, Mavericks fans taunted Martin’s mother. After a fan allegedly called the Nuggets thugs, Cuban admitted to saying, “And that includes your son.” The situation grew worse in Game 4 when Martin threatened and cursed at some fans he thought had hassled his mother. Security also was called to address separate incidents between fans and the girlfriends of Martin and Carmelo Anthony(notes). After the game, Martin cursed out Cuban.

Mark Cuban = asshole.

I'm not a Kenyon Martin fan (he doesn't play for the Spurs) but he sure ain't no thug.

From Larry O'Dell at the ASSociated Press:

A federal appeals court on Thursday tossed out a $5 million verdict against protesters who carried signs with inflammatory messages like "Thank God for dead soldiers" outside the Maryland funeral of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the signs contained "imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric" protected by the First Amendment. Such messages are intended to spark debate and cannot be reasonably read as factual assertions about an individual, the court said.

Imaginative and hyberbolic rhetoric, eh? OK, let's try this...

Judge Robert King is a child rapist who secretly drinks the blood of large animals that he kills at the local zoo. He also has Jeffrey Dahmer-like fantasies of rape, murder and cannibalism.

Hey, this Imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric stuff is FUN!

I'm all for free speech, but at a funeral for a fallen soldier?

Better not show up here. Westboro would be rendered off-planet.