|
 |
|
|
April 25, 2006
Welcome Back Gregg
After a lengthy exile at NFL.com, Gregg Easterbrook and his famed Tuesday Morning Quarterback column have made a triumphant return to Page 2 at ESPN.com. And there was much rejoicing in the land. For a moment, anyway. Like me, Easterbrook has a long and well documented problem with fleecing taxpayers to pay for sports stadia where teams of millionaires owned by billionaires get to play. And, like Easterbrook, I've got a boatload of concerns over the publicly-financed ballpark the city plans to build the ownerless Washington Nationals for an estimated $535 million. But after taking the city's politicians to task for their fiscal folly, Easterbrook can't resist taking a pot shot at a preferred target: George W. Bush, the most baseball-obsessed president since William Howard Taft, has allowed this tax-subsidized pocket-picking directly under his nose, while making no attempt to pressure his pals in the corporate suites of Major League Baseball into building the stadium the free-market way. Maybe the naming rights should be sold to Halliburton. ... Welcome to Halliburton Field, where hot dogs are $6,000 and all overhead costs are billed to the defense budget. Last I looked, nobody held a gun to the District's head when it came to bringing the team here and passing legislation to pay for the park. As for interfering with that process, the second the President got involved, city politicians would have turned him into a convenient target whenever anything went even a little wrong. One last note: One common theme about D.C. politics over the two decades I've lived in the metro area has been the issue of "Home Rule": The idea that the folks in the District can govern themselves without Congress meddling in the city's affairs. Well, now that the city's Control Board has passed into memory, the most overt symbol of outside influence is long gone. So if the District wants to drive itself into insolvency again, they've got the freedom to do it, and not even the President of the United States can stop them. POSTSCRIPT: I have to admit to feeling a bit chagrined at this post. After all, for the length of its run at Slate and ESPN.com, I was an incredible fan of TMQ. But toward the end of its run at ESPN.com, I kept finding little nuggets like this one that rankled me.
Eric
11:17 PM
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsPost a commentThanks for signing in, . (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |