Okay, just one dig at the hypocrites of the right wing:
There is talk in Washington about taking away Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption.
Because of all that steroid stuff? No.
Because of MLB’s heavy-handed approach to financing new stadiums? No.
Because of the possibility of liberal financier George Soros buying the Washington Nationals.
Soros is a critic of President Bush, the former Texas Rangers part-owner.
“It’s not necessarily smart business sense to have anybody who is so polarizing in the political world,” Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.) told the Washington Post. “That goes for anybody, but especially as it relates to [MLB] because it’s one of the few businesses that get incredibly special treatment from Congress and the federal government.”
And incredibly special publicity for those threatening to end incredibly special treatment.
“Why should politics have anything to do with who owns the team?” Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) said. “So Congress is going to get involved in every baseball ownership decision? Are they next going to worry about a manager they don’t like? I’ve never seen anything as impotent as a congressman threatening the baseball exemption. It gets threatened a half-dozen times a year, and our batting average threatening the exemption is zero.”
“America’s pastime should be protected from the rhetoric of partisan politics,” Washington entrepreneur Jonathan Ledecky, the head of the group that Soros is part of, said in an e-mail. “It’s unfortunate that the negativism that permeates national politics today is infecting Major League Baseball and the Washington Nationals.”
That’s funny — no one threatened to yank MLB’s exemption when the incredibly partisan George W. Bush was one of the owners of a baseball team… and I’d hazard a guess that the vast majority of baseball owners, being pretty rich, are Republicans.
I don’t understand. The politicos that come up with this crap are just complete idiots and time wasters. Or perhaps they think that having a left-leaning owner of a team in Washington is just one indignity too many, considering that something like 95% of the electorate in DC voted for the other guy. No wonder Dubya spends so much time away from the White House, he’s surrounded!
Nope.
Being an avid baseball fan I should tell you that this is most defiantly NOT the first time that this has come up. As a matter of fact, it comes up about once every 3 years, usually in a big way. It’s a little knee-jerkish to blame this on conservative pondering, it’s just that having a major enterprise (with a strong union to boot) not fall under anti-trust laws gets a little hairy. Do some searches on free-agency and owner collusion and it’ll make more sense to you , historically speaking that is. A good source, ironically enough is George Will.