2006-05-03

Nats Sale Almost Done

MLB is about to announce the sale of the Nats to the Lerner Group, and DC is already pissed off. Convicted crack smoker (and city councilman) Marion Barry is upset that the new ownership has "rented black people" to use in its group. As Steven Pearlstein points out, this is "a pathetic attempt to play the race card."
Of course, Barry's credit is about zero in the eyes of most of the people from Northern VA who brave SE to go to the Nats games. Not to mention the city bent over to MLB's demands to use just about 100% public financing for the stadium.
Both sides could have done two things to prevent this situation:
1. Public ownership of the team, Packers style. Sell nice looking, commemorative, non-transferrable shares to people for $100-200 each. People would eat those up, even non-Nats fans. You could easily raise the $450M cost of the team this way.
2. Sell things like engraved bricks to pay for the stadium. You pay $250, you get your name on a brick that goes in the stadium. Old school idea, but quite effective.
At any rate, I'm just happy I live on the free side of the Potomac and that I don't have to pay for any of this mess, other than tickets.

HFCS?

A recent study comparing the health of middle aged Brits to Americans has some strange results: Americans are much sicker than Brits, even when factors such as race, obesity, and standards of living are adjusted. The richest Americans are only about as healthy as low income Brits.

Personally, I think when they look closely they'll find that the problem is the HFCS that's replaced all of our sugar (sidenote: sugar tastes better, if you can ever get your hands on some coca-cola from Mexico, I recommend you try it, it usually outsells domestic coke when its on the shelves). Better start short selling ADM. Then again, they get more welfare than a city-slum full of crack smoking single mom's, since they control almost all the ethanol production in this country... oh well.