Reason Magazine - Topics > Sports

For It Before They Were Against It

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:01:00 EST

In an effort to get out of a stadium lease so they can skip town, the NBA's Seattle Supersonics are arguing in court motions that the team has no economic and little social impact on the city. Odd, since the team argued precisely the opposite when it was trying to get the city to foot the bill for a new stadium. Now that they want to leave, everything's topsy-turvey.

The team and league are also making the opposite argument in Oklahoma City, where they're pushing a $100 million tax package to move the Sonics from the Northwest.

Why Cities Decline, Case Study No. 1,223 (Idiotic Streetcar Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:25:00 EDT

Officials in Cincinnati, a city that's been in decline for decades (maybe a century), have finally hit on a way to pull re-enthrone the Queen City (a.k.a. Porkopolis) as urban royalty: Build a $100 million, 4-mile streetcar route with the money they don't have.

Yeah, that's the ticket. To rub salt in the wounds of taxpayers, officials are claiming that the project will add $2 billion to the city's economy and revitalize a long-unrevitalizable section of town.

Cincinnati today will unveil plans on how to pay for a four-mile, $100 million downtown streetcar line that advocates believe will contribute $2 billion to the city's economy and transform [the] Over-the-Rhine [section of town].
The plan's cheerleaders include politicians, transit activists and urban developers. So far, it seems to have no enemies, although that could change when the city explains where it will get the money to fund the plan.

More here. The project is a fantastic example of how city officials delude themselves into thinking that whipped cream and sprinkles--or a goddamn transit technology that is one of the most frustrating, underperfroming rides imaginable--can save cities. What is it about trains? Or light rail? Or streetcars? Is there a Freudian analysis that's relevant here?

Why won't cities such as Cincinnati do far more basic things to lure people back into their craptacular clutches? The list might include: Generally reducing taxes and regulation so that it's relatively cheap to live and easy to do business in an area; creating a safe climate with regards to crime; reforming a public school system so people who don't have kids (a majority pretty much everywhere) don't have to worry about school issues and people with kids have some decent measure of choice; not spending billions of dollars on the owners of jerk-off sports teams.

Somehow I don't think building a 4-mile streetcar from point Y to point Z is going to help.

Back in 2001, as Mr. Mxyzptlk at Suck, I wrote about Cincinnati's woes as a way of talking about the plight facing many other mid-sized (for now) cities.

Cincinnati's leaders (if you can call them that) are predictably holding up Portland, Oregon as a model. Here's Randal O'Toole in reason on why that is totally off-target. And here's Dan McGraw on why sports welfare is destructive of just about everything it touches, except the wallets of fatcats.

O'Toole (named after his father, perhaps [scroll down]), wrote a good piece for Cato cleverly titled "A Desire Named Streetcar."

Now that You Mention It...

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:08:00 EDT

Fark headline:

Minnesota Twins postpone groundbreaking for new $1.1 billion stadium due to I35 bridge collapse. Apparently up until this week they didn't have any more pressing construction projects on which to spend that money.

Two-thirds of the stadium is publicly funded. The land was acquired through eminent domain.

Here's One Cuban Worth Celebrating (Real Winners Do Use Drugs Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:42:00 EDT

Via AOL comes news that Mark Cuban, bazillionaire owner of the NBA Mavericks, gives a high-five to performance-enhancing drugs in pro sports in an imminent issue of Men's Health:

If it's not bad for your health and it'll enhance your performance, why should you not be allowed to take it?
It makes the game more interesting. It just makes sense. But it doesn't make sense in the context of the current controversies over drugs in sports.

More here.

That's something to think about as supercharged Barry Bonds approaches Hammerin' Hank Aaron's home run record in baseball--and Cuban's own heavily favored Mavs deal with the fact they sucked ass in the playoffs this year.

A couple of years back, I noted, with reference to baseballer Rafael Palmeiro, that it's a thin line between steroids and Viagra.

And Aaron Steinberg defended steroid use in Reason here.

And Matt Welch stood up for Barry Bonds here.

It's a March Madness Madhouse! A Madhouse[*]

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 07:24:00 EDT

Read this commentary in the Cincy Enquirer on the devious impact of the NCAA basketball tournament and then ask yourself: Is this a Thomas Pynchonesque parody or an unironic comment on the lack of news devoted to "serious" topics? Or maybe just one more disappointed University of Dayton Flyers fan?

Absorption in sports hurts our democracy. The media contribute to the problem with endless front-page stories and 16-page special sections in the Enquirer and endless bloviating broadcasts on the airwaves. This precludes adequate coverage of taxes, immigration, government spending, Iraq and the like.
Thus some can talk only of "the game" and care nothing about what is important in the world. There are so many issues that need our attention, issues that affect our lives and our future - but they get pushed aside for whatever sport is in season. Those not swept up cannot escape - short of becoming troglodytes - and can only shake our heads and worry, as Juvenal did two millennia ago, about the peril of "bread and circuses."

The author, Michael Eshelman, is a law student at Univ. of Dayton and he encapsulates perfectly a mentality that scoffs at other people's tastes without bothering to understand them (this happens all the time in cultural contexts, where critics, rather than trying to understand the popularity of a particular work simply sniff at it). "What is the attraction that enthralls so many?," he writes, without bothering to, I don't know, ask anyone. It seems to me that, when talking about sports, or art, or politics, for that matter, the onus to explain is really on the side of the person asking the questions, not the audience.

Eshelman does make one solid point: The true cost of sports in America is wrongly--and mightily--subsidized by taxpayers.

More here.

And go Ohio State. And assuming everything happens the way it should, beat Florida (this time).

[*] Obscure headline explained here.

Super Bowl Weekend Open Thread

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 15:01:00 EST

While real sports fans turn their eyes this weekend to an epic battle of cellar-dwelling college basketball teams--the rest of us will be killing time tomorrow evening watching overhyped TV commercials get interrupted by the occasional forward pass and muffed field goal.

So have at it, Hit & Run's weekend warriors: Which team of latter-day warriors will emerge victorious when the final gun sounds in Super Bowl XLI? Put on your best John Facenda and offer up a hypothetical highlight reel for tomorrow: Will Peyton Manning rise to the call like a champion or simply secure his birthright as a high-performance, second-generation NFL loser? Will Johnny Unitas and his squadmates from Baltimore haunt the Colts like Banquo's ghost at an all-you-can-eat buffet, damning the Indianapolis squad to also-ran status? Will the Monsters of the Midway pay honest tribute to the legacy of Mike Ditka and his '86 winners, or will they end up the girdiron equivalent of the inedible Chunky Beef Soup a pre-coronary Ditka used to pitch as readily as a sideline fit?

You get the picture. And while you're discussing Super Bowl's past and present, for god's sake, think about the policy implications of corporate welfare for filthy stinking rich team owners, the signal economic role played by one Joe Willy Namath and other sports free agents in the coolification of America, and whether Black Sunday scenarios are legitimate excuses to curtail civil liberties.

Stadium Welfare: More Baseball Bashing

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 18:19:00 EST

When baseball players aren't using steroids, their bosses are robbing polite Minnesotans of millions so that they can have nice new locker rooms in which to use the aforementioned steroids. A new ballpark is being built for the 2007 season of the Minnesota Twins at the low, low price of $522 million:

On Monday, an additional 0.15 percent sales tax -- 3 cents per $20 purchase -- kicks in. Over time, it is expected to generate enough money to pay for three-quarters of the stadium.
Hennepin County Commissioner Mike Opat, who helped steer the stadium plan through the Legislature, said he hears complaints "from time to time" about the new tax. The county won permission to enact it without a voter referendum.
"I'd imagine there are people who are going to see that appear on sales receipts and continue to gripe about it," Opat said.

Legislation limited the county's spending on infrastructure to $90 million, so they're also planning court action to condemn some of the properties on the site of the proposed ballpark or take them with eminent domain:

"It's going to be a challenge. We're not in this to pay any price," Opat said. "The land needs to be purchased at a fair and not unreasonable price because the public is in for a defined amount and that's as far as we go."

Welfare Reform Comes to Key Arena

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:10:00 EST

One vote that didn't get a lot of attention last week: Seattle passed an initiative, sponsored by a group called Citizens for More Important Things, to end public subsidies for pro sports.

Sense on Stadiums

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 13:40:00 EDT

A sports team can always hire consultants to claim that if only the city or state would help them build a new stadium, there would be a multi-million dollar payoff in tax revenues, jobs, and other public goods. Independent economists, on the other hand, have generally found such projects to be more boondoggle than home run.

According to a recent study by the economists Bruce K. Johnson of Centre College in Kentucky, Michael J. Mondello of Florida State University, and John C. Whitehead of Appalachian State University, the public recognizes this as well. The researchers used the "contingent valuation method," which surveys people to estimate economic values for things they aren't directly buying themselves. Many economists argue that this method often overstates people's willingness to pay for public goods such as sports team spillovers. Yet the study discovered in the case of Jacksonville's Jaguars—won by the Florida city at the cost of at least $121 million in stadium renovations—that the locals value the presence of the team and the alleged public goods it generates at only $25 million.

Other economists have conducted similar studies of hockey in Pittsburgh and football in Minnesota, and found similar gaps between what governments are willing to spend on the people's behalf and what people would really want to pay to gain or keep a pro team. Some cities seem to be following this sentiment and rejecting subsidized stadiums: Both the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Jets have recently failed to get the public funds they demanded.

Tech Delusions and The Trouble with Christmas

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST

Last month, The World Summit on the Information Society, a UN gathering meant to promote "information access for all," held a major conference in Tunisia—a country infamous for heavy-handed internet censorship, run by a man who consistently captures 99.9 percent of the vote. Yet the conference headline-grabber turned out not to be its odd location, nor the howls of protest from press freedom groups, but a digital prototype, unveiled to the expectant masses like an infant savior destined to redeem the digital have-nots: The $100 laptop.

The Linux-based prototype, equipped with four USB ports and wireless broadband capability, sports a full-color display, flash memory, and a 500 MHz processor. More importantly, it's adorable: Bright green, encased in chunky plastic, and powered by a yellow hand crank, the computer blurs the line between PC and plaything. The project is the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, whose One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative wants a "green machine" in the hands of every poor kid in the Third World.

Negroponte calls the laptop a "way for children to 'learn learning'" The machines have been praised by Kofi Annan, Bill Gates, and Rupert Murdoch. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney wants $54 million to equip every middle and high school student in the state with one.

That's quite a marketing blitz, but First Worlders who want to buy one of their own are out of luck. OLPC is still tinkering with the finished product, but when it does deliver, the laptops will not be stoking shopper hysteria at Wal-Mart. Explains the MIT Media Lab Web site: "Please note that the $100 laptops...will not be available for sale. They will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives."

For now, OLPC plans to sell only to governments of poor countries, not individuals here or anywhere else. (The minimum order for the stripped down computer is a hefty 1 million machines.) The laptops will thus be sold at $100 a pop to cash-strapped governments and distributed for free, which is as top-down a way to deliver the internet to kids as has ever been proposed.

Gifting, we discover every Holiday Season, is an incredibly inefficient mode of exchange. The first week of January is a customer-service-line filled nightmare, our collective attempt to correct judgments people who love us make about what we really want: sweaters two sizes too big, gadgets we have no use for, toys too uncool to engage in public. The developing world, too, has a closetful of gifts it never asked for and couldn't use: Free food diverted to feed the militias responsible for hunger in the first place, anti-malarial bed nets turned into wedding dresses, newly dug wells abandoned because no one knew how repair them.

Any development guru has internalized this, and few projects get funded without at least a pretense of community feedback. Yet OLPC doesn't question that cheap laptops, dropped into homes unbidden from bureaucratic Santas, will be welcomed. The picture of a raggedy poor kid banging away on a green laptop is nothing if not alluring, and the vision comes wrapped in warm anecdotes. News accounts are filled with a story Negroponte tells about distributing the machines in Cambodia, where, he says, parents wouldn't let their children use them at first for fear they would break. But upon discovering that the laptops, when opened, were the "brightest light source in the house," they came to love them.

Consider for a moment, how bizarre and condescending a story this is: Do poor parents really think of computers as souped-up nightlights? And if they valued them too much to let their kids use them before they discovered the light-producing wonders, why do they value them less when they discovered this added capability? Then consider how little it accords with what we know about technology adoption in the developing countries. It wouldn't be any surprise at all, in Vientiane or Phnom Penh, to find a hut, devoid of plumbing and windows, with a functional DVD player at the center of the home (and a pile of pirated DVDs beside it). This situation is often used to decry a lack of proper priorities, but you certainly can't say that adults aren't willing to pay for electronic toys.

Michael Robertson, Chairman of Linux-distributor Linspire, is among the laptop's critics; he says the company's research indicates poor families will "not buy the cheapest computer available to them, but instead insist on getting a fully functioning computer." They're willing to take out loans and make sacrifices for the real thing rather than settle for a cheap imitation. Other critics point to numerous design limitations that wouldn't fly if OLPC were dealing with individuals spending their own cash rather than with governments spending other people's. The computer has no hard drive; it's sluggish; CNN reports that the crank must be turned for an arm-straining 10 minutes to run Internet on the thing for a half hour. As Kofi Annan attempted to demonstrate the laptop's ease of use at a conference in Tunis, the crank snapped off into his hand.

Negroponte has actually managed to spin the laptop's weaknesses as part of its mystique. The stripped-down green machine is "svelte," he says; your laptop is "obese." But he hasn't had much to say about the most persistent criticism: It's connectivity, not hardware, that is the biggest barrier to putting kids online. And every dollar that a poor government spends on a substandard laptop will be a dollar less to spend on the infrastructure needed to support a network.

The laptop wasn't welcomed with complete uniformity in Tunis; as CNN summarized some complaints: "What people in the developing world really need are water, food, jobs, decent healthcare and sanitation." But perhaps what people in the developing world really need is for bureaucrats to stop telling them what they really need. As Americans tear open a host of well-intentioned, slightly-off presents this week, the good people at the OLPC might consider the familiar plea of cash-strapped people everywhere: Please just send a check.

Kerry Howley is an assistant editor of Reason.

D.C. Stadium DÃ©jÃ Vu

coates@umbc7.umbc.edu (Dennis Coates) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST

When Yogi Berra said, "It's like déjà vu all over again," he might as well have been describing this week's D.C. City Council vote on the deal negotiated by the city and Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Washington Nationals' stadium.

Last year around this time, Mayor Williams and the council acquiesced to the league's demands by agreeing to build a brand new, baseball-only stadium to be financed largely by a new tax on local businesses. Now the council is being asked to agree to a stadium lease that keeps MLB from having to pay more than $20 million of the cost of the stadium. At the same time, costs have ballooned in just one month from an original estimate of around $440 million. Today the stadium is projected to cost approximately $667 million.

Supporters argue that this will bring economic development to D.C. That's gotta be worth something, right? Thomas Boswell, in a recent Washington Post column, suggest that the Mayor "promised baseball a sweet deal because he thought Washington would eventually get back far more in return." He points to construction that has already begun along South Capitol Street as evidence of the "return" on throwing taxpayer money at a multi-million dollar operation like MLB. For stadium supporters, no price will ever be too high for the promise of economic development.

But it's very unlikely that economic growth will occur as a result of building a stadium for the Nationals. Economist Brad Humphreys and I analyzed the impact of professional sports teams (football, basketball, and baseball) on economic growth of cities from 1969 to the present for the Cato Institute in 2004. After accounting for all the other factors that economic theory suggests will affect income and growth, the presence of professional sports has, in the best case scenario, no effect on economic growth. In the most likely scenario, professional sports actually reduce income per person and they have no effect on overall economic growth in a metropolitan area.

In fact, some sports insiders have acknowledged this. Jerry Bell, point man for the Minnesota Twins' attempt to get a new stadium, was quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune last June as saying of the argument that stadiums do not generate economic development, "At some global level they are obviously correct." He also said, "I don't think the economic argument turns it one way or another, so why go there? If there are side benefits, great. If not, so what?"

Yet, D.C. has fallen for the myth. And the costs are going to be huge. Under the new agreement, Major League Baseball will contribute $20 million toward the cost of stadium construction. Never mind that costs overruns are likely to continue—the league's contribution will stay at $20 million. Even if you accept the mayor's claim that the stadium won't actually cost more than $535 million, the league would pay less than 4 percent of the overall cost of the stadium, one of its most significant pieces of capital. This is corporate welfare, pure and simple.

The deal also says the city would, over the course of the lease's term, give MLB $20 million in non-game-day parking revenue. What looks on the surface like a contribution to defray the cost of building a stadium basically amounts to the league giving a $20 million loan to the city.

In addition, MLB has refused to agree to let the Nationals keep Robert F. Kennedy Stadium as their home field two years from now, even though doing so would be cheaper by about $60 million. In other words, in the best case scenario, Mayor Williams basically agreed to hand over more than $500 million of money from a tax that soaks many D.C. businesses to a multi-million dollar operation that refuses to make the sort of cost-conscious concessions they would make if they were footing the bill themselves. And now he's asking the D.C. Council to rubber-stamp the agreement.

Little has changed in Washington over the past year. The argument that subsidizing the stadium would lead to job and income creation is no more valid now than it was then. That Major League Baseball is getting a sweetheart deal is as true now as it was last year. And a Council vote against the lease now would be just as good this week as a vote against the overall stadium deal would have been twelve months ago.

Dennis Coates is professor of economics at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is co-author of the Cato Institute report, "Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for D.C. Baseball."

The NFL's Two-Hand Touch

mwupi@aol.com (Mark Weisenmiller) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

On October 27, a 60-year-old Florida high school civics teacher faced down the National Football League and won a temporary injunction stopping pat-down searches of football fans at Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

A lawsuit against the Tampa Sports Authority (TSA) brought by Gordon Johnston, who is also a Bucs season-ticket holder, challenges the NFL's policy of having all game attendees patted down by security personnel at all stadium entrances. Granting the injunction, Hillsborough County Circuit Judge Perry White declared, "The right of the public to be free from unreasonable searches is within the public interest."

Johnston was aided in his suit by the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Rebecca Steele, Regional Director of the Florida ACLU and one of three attorneys working on the suit, argues that the policy violates Article I, Section 12 of the Florida Constitution, which deals with unreasonable searches and seizures. Police, after all, must have "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing before they conduct such searches. Since a government agency runs the stadium and hires the security guards who staff it, the ACLU argues, they should be subject to the same rules.

With the Florida lawsuit and a fight against NFL pat-downs in Cincinnati, both citizens and state government agencies are fighting back against a security policy that, in addition to being useless and intrusive, may be illegal, either under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (which deals with governmental searches and seizures) or under state constitutions.

The Tampa Sports Authority, the target of Johnston's suit, is an 11-person board which oversees the day-to-day running of Raymond James Stadium (which seats close to 65, 600 people). Think of it as the landlord to the tenant "RayJay" (as the stadium is nick-named). So TSA owns and operates the place, and on September 13 of this year, it approved the NFL's pat-down security policy. But not everybody on the TSA board agreed with that move: TSA Chairman Patrick Manteiga has repeatedly told reporters that the searches provide a false sense of security.

Manteiga has a point. NFL pat-down searches on football fans, at least as they are currently being conducted, are mostly useless. Joe Durkin, spokesman for the Tampa Police Department, notes that since RayJay's opening in 1998, not one person has been arrested trying to sneak into the stadium with a gun, knife, or any material that could be made into an explosive.

This indicates that even fired-up Bucs fans aren't idiotic enough to try such a stupid stunt. But then, rowdy fans may not be what the NFL is worried about. Though the NFL didn't return repeated requests for comment, Hamilton County Ohio Prosecutor Joe Deters explains: "They (the NFL) told me that the reason they started the pat-down policy was that they had a number of affidavits from many security experts stating that an NFL game in a stadium full of fans was a prime target for a terrorist attack."

In an early October meeting, Deters told NFL attorneys that their security policy was going to cost Hamilton County taxpayers about $10,000 a game—the NFL has no intention of paying for these searches—and that Hamilton County simply wasn't going to comply. Deters complained that no government county employees should be doing these pseudo-searches. (As they stop above the waistline, they're not even full-body searches; nor does the NFL's adults-only search policy include metal detectors or other scanning technologies that might pinpoint weapons without subjecting each fan in the stadium to a quick grope.)

Deters laughs that "if we would have one of our county departments doing these searches, there would have been about 67,000 civil rights violations." In the case of Cincinnati, the hometown Bengals are responsible for security inside the stadium, and Hamilton County is responsible for security outside the stadium. So, continues Deters, "in the most likely scenario described in some of the affidavits of the security experts that the NFL used—a bomb exploding in or near a stadium, killing dozens, and then hundreds of people dying in the mad rush to exit the stadium—how would you ever fairly divide up, in a legal manner, the responsibility?" In Cincinnnati, the pat-down policy is on hold while a judge decides just what to do about this unclear division of legal responsibility.

No doubt the NFL intends only to protect its fans' safety. It's easy to imagine the horror that would ensue if someone—whether a lone nut or a terrorist team—detonated a bomb at an event like the Super Bowl. But security pat-downs manage to be intrusive without providing much security as compensation.

Mark Weisenmiller is a Florida-based reporter for The Economist and Global Radio News.

Reason Express

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

In this issue:

1. The Latest French Fashion
2. Two Days and Three Sleepless Nights in Baghdad!
3. Libby's Fibby: A Motive?
4. Quick Hits
5. New at Reason Online - Casey at the Bench
6. News and Events

1. The Latest French Fashion

One tiny positive to flow from almost two weeks of rioting in Paris and across France is that maybe, just maybe, would-be city planners from America will pause for a second before simply assuming that Euro-style living is the best thing ever. Or to put it bluntly, would some front-load garages come in handy when the New Urbanist, pedestrian-friendly on-street parking is just a bull's-eye for a firebomb?

The occasional three-day trip to the French countryside is probably responsible for more bad ideas about zoning and land-use than all advanced degrees put together. The ugly images of the past few days should not be more persuasive than common sense, but they might puncture Euro trendiness among America's planner set all the same.

That might at least balance out the truly senseless violence that was met by an almost Katrina-esque response from French officials. Presumably Jacques Chirac had a reason for waiting 11 days to comment on the riots, but needing time to come up with great oratory surely was not among them. The situation seems ripe for some real leadership to bubble up from below the ossified political structure and point France back toward sanity.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/sns-ap-france-rioting,0,2062000.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

Reason Express is made possible by a grant from GlobalDrive, the world leader in globally-accessible data storage. Want to share files with co-workers or friends? Don't want to shlep your laptop to Europe? Worried about a safe place to store your computer's backups? Give GlobalDrive a try! Privacy. Protection. Security. Sharable. And from only $40/year.

2. Two Days and Three Sleepless Nights in Baghdad!

Running a close second to events in France in the "most bizarre reaction to a crisis" category must be plans to turn Baghdad into a destination location, complete with a ritzy hotel and a theme park in Tikrit. In fact, the grab for tourist dollars suggests nothing so much as those same trendy land-use dreams of America's central planners run amok.

Ignoring basic needs like roads and police in favor of convention centers and sports arenas is the bread-and-butter of modern city planning in the U.S. Most every city of any size has an under-utilized, publicly funded convention center in its midst. Iraq is just applying this notion slightly more aggressively. Not only is the public infrastructure ignored, it is non-existent in places. Not only is public safety an afterthought, tourists are advised to travel with their own armed body guards.

Come to think of it, maybe American cities have a thing or two to learn from the Iraqi way of running municipal services. Build the attractions, and to hell with civil society.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article325277.ece

3. Libby's Fibby: A Motive?

Watergate principal John Dean, a man who presumably knows his way around a White House cover-up, fisks the Scooter Libby indictment and advances the ball a little, but does not quite score. Call it a nice first-down pick up for Nixon's former lawyer.

Dean follows the "protect Cheney" meme popular among lefties searching for an explanation, but does so with a great deal more detail than most. Dean posits that Libby lied to Patrick Fitzgerald in order to obscure exactly how he came to have the knowledge that Val Plame worked for the CIA. The claim that journalists were in the loop along with the VP, although easy to disprove via the journo testimony that allowed for that perjury charge, nevertheless builds a "firewall" around Cheney as far as possible violations of the Espionage Act go. Or so Dean believes.

But to bring charges on Espionage Act grounds, Fitzgerald would have to show that not only did Cheney discuss Plame with Libby, he directed him to leak her name in a truly Tricky Dick move. It just can't be a violation of the law for two people with the proper clearances to discuss secret stuff without having a good reason to, or half of D.C. would be guilty of breaking the law. Dean doesn't seem to get that, and he thinks a Cheney indictment is in the cards.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051104.html

4. Quick Hits

Quote of the Week

"The grenade struck two decks above and about four rooms further forward. I could tell the guy firing the bazooka was smiling." —Charles Supple, one of the passengers aboard the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit that was attacked by RPG-toting pirates about 100 miles off of the Somali coast.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1105AP_Seychelles_Pirate_Cruise.html

The Supremes on Tribunals

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case brought by Osama bin Laden's supposed driver on the legality of the military tribunals set up by the Bush administration to try accused terrorists.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/11/07/scotus.gitmo/

Wi-Fi Police

Officials in Westchester County may ban operating a wi-fi network without securing it first with a firewall and encryption. Otherwise "somebody parked in the street or sitting in a neighboring building could hack into the network and steal your most confidential data," County Executive Andy Spano explains.

http://news.com.com/Unsecured+Wi-Fi+would+be+outlawed+by+N.Y.+county/2100-7351_3-5934194.html?part=rss&tag=5934194

Grokster, RIP

Killed dead by Hollywood and music industry, with a big assist from U.S. courts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmusic/story/0,,1636939,00.html

5. New at Reason Online

Casey at the Bench
Samuel Alito's controversial abortion ruling. Cathy Young

Freedom Riders
How motorcyclists won the right to feel the wind in their hair. Jacob Sullum

Democrats--Not for Free Speech Anymore!
Once again, the party that thinks it's pro-expression demonstrates that it's not. Matt Welch

And much more!

6. News and Events

An Evening with Milton and Rose Friedman

Please join the The Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in celebrating 50 Years of an Idea. This 50th Anniversary Gala Dinner on December 5, 2005 at the Regent Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, California will honor Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who first proposed the school voucher idea in 1955.

The Friedmans will participate in a Q&A session, answering questions submitted by the audience. The Friedman's will be joined by several honored guests, who will be announced in the coming weeks. For more information on the dinner and how to attend, visit here.

Get liberated with Ronald Bailey's brave new book for a brave new world!

In his new book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, Reason's Ronald Bailey examines the scientific and ethical controversies surrounding everything from stem cell research to therapeutic cloning to longer life spans to genetically modified food.

Buy Liberation Biology in hardcover from Amazon for just $18.48!

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Torts Deformed

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Creators' Syndicate

When the House of Representatives voted to prohibit lawsuits that blame gun manufacturers for crimes committed with their products, only four Republicans opposed the bill. Three of them were reliable supporters of gun control, but the fourth, Ron Paul of Texas, is a self-described "firm believer in the Second Amendment" who has received high ratings from the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America.

What led Paul to join his anti-gun colleagues in voting against the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act? The same thing that led to accolades from groups that defend the right to keep and bear arms: his respect for the Constitution.

As Paul explained in a 2003 speech, he is unambiguously opposed to lawsuits that demand compensation from the firearms industry for the damage caused by gun crimes. But he concluded that federal pre-emption of such suits cannot be reconciled with the Constitution's limits on congressional power, which leave the writing of tort law to the states.

Paul seems to be the only member of Congress who took this position on the bill, which President Bush signed into law on Wednesday. In fact, it's so rare for legislators to draw a distinction between their personal policy preferences and their constitutional responsibilities that Paul's stand must seem quaint, if not downright puzzling, to most Americans.

The strongest argument in favor of federal limits on gun lawsuits was that legal costs and the threat of a ruinous judgment might push gun makers into a settlement that included nationwide restrictions on sales, impinging on the authority of state legislatures and the right to armed self-defense. But this danger never materialized.

Of more than 30 government-backed lawsuits filed since 1998, all but a few were dismissed before Congress acted, at which point 33 state legislatures had passed similar laws. In short, there was no constitutional emergency to justify congressional meddling in state tort law--a fact reflected in recent statements from the leading supporters of federal pre-emption.

Press releases from the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the main industry group, said the new law will foil frivolous lawsuits, protect law-abiding businesses, and save American jobs. There was no mention of the Constitution or the Second Amendment.

This casual attitude regarding the constitutional legitimacy of federal tort reform is even clearer in the case of the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, which the House approved by a wide margin the day before it voted to restrict gun lawsuits. The "cheeseburger bill" would bar lawsuits in which portly plaintiffs seek to blame food sellers such as McDonald's for making them fat, unless the defendant can be shown to have violated an express warranty or a state or federal law.

As with the gun lawsuits, state legislatures (about 20 at last count) already have acted to stop this sort of litigation, which in any case represents a less serious threat to the companies it targets. Only one such lawsuit is still pending (based on statutory claims that would not be barred by the proposed federal law), and the food industry has much deeper pockets than gun manufacturers do. Even if purveyors of fast food and other calorie-dense comestibles were in imminent peril, advocates of congressional intervention would have a hard time locating a constitutional right to buy cheeseburgers.

Instead the bill notes that "the activities of manufacturers and sellers of foods and beverages substantially affect interstate and foreign commerce." This justification relies on a reading of the Commerce Clause so broad that it erases the distinction between state and federal powers.

How can anyone who claims to respect the Constitution sign onto such self-serving nonsense? Bob Barr, the former Republican congressman from Georgia, says opposing federal pre-emption of gun lawsuits on constitutional grounds amounts to "unilateral disarmament." Yet failing to do so amounts to dismantling our defenses against those who believe Congress can and should bend the Constitution to its will.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use. Sullum's weekly column is distributed by Creators Syndicate. If you'd like to see it in your local newspaper, please e-mail or call the editorial page editor today.

The Deadly Bigotry of Low Expectations?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EDT

All along Hurricane Katrina's Evacuation Belt, in cities from Houston to Baton Rouge to Leesville, Louisiana, the exact same rumors are spreading faster than red ants at a picnic. The refugees from the United States' worst-ever natural disaster, it is repeatedly said, are bringing with them the worst of New Orleans' now-notorious lawlessness: looting, armed carjacking, and even the rape of children.

"By Thursday," the Chicago Tribune's Howard Witt reported, "local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge...were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized."

The only problem—none of the reports were true. "The police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter," Witt reported. "There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes." Yet the panic was enough for Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden to impose a curfew on the city's largest shelter, and to warn darkly about "New Orleans thugs."

Even before evacuees could get comfy in Houston's Astrodome, rumors were flying that the refugees had already raped their first victim, just like that seven-year-old in the Superdome, or the babies in the Convention Center who got their throats slit. Not only was the Astrodome rape invented out of whole cloth, so, perhaps was the case reported 'round the globe of at least one pre-pubescent being raped and murdered in New Orleans' iconic sports arena.

"We don't have any substantiated rapes," New Orleans Police superintendent Edwin Compass said yesterday, according to the Guardian. "We will investigate if the individuals come forward." The British paper further pointed out that, "While many claim they happened, no witnesses, survivors or survivors' relatives have come forward. Nor has the source for the story of the murdered babies, or indeed their bodies, been found. And while the floor of the convention centre toilets were indeed covered in excrement, the Guardian found no corpses."

As Katrina wiped out New Orleans' communications infrastructure, and while key federal officials repeatedly expressed less knowledge than cable television reporters, panicky rumors quickly rushed in to fill the void. Many of them have shared the exact same theme—unspeakable urban ultra-violence, perpetuated by the overwhelmingly black population.

St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis issued a statement yesterday that "Rumors are flying and being repeated occasionally in the media that describe supposed criminal actions in St. Tammany Parish. These rumors are NOT true." Police superintendent Compass yesterday had to fend off accusations yesterday that his beleagured force "stood by while women were raped and people were beaten."

The truth, whatever it may be, is clearly horrific enough, with just about every eyewitness account from New Orleans mentioning the palpable menace from crazed gangs of looters and ne'er-do-wells, especially after nightfall. Compass himself told reporters on Thursday that 88 of his cops were beaten back into a retreat by angry Convention Center refugees, forcing Mayor Ray Nagin to suspend rescue operations in favor of restoring a semblance of order.

But the lies matter too. If federal government officials can't even get their ass-covering justifications straight, let alone such non-trivial, easy-to-discern matters as whether there are indeed thousands of water-deprived refugees massed at a Convention Center, those stranded near the epicenter will likely be starved for information that could literally save their lives.

"Complaints are still rampant in New Orleans about a lack of information," NBC Anchor Brian Williams wrote on his weblog yesterday, echoing one of the most familiar complaints from the city. "It's one of many running themes of the past week: There were no announcements in the Superdome during the storm, none to direct people after the storm, no official word (via bullhorn, leaflets or any other means) during the week-long, on-foot migration (and eventual stagnation) that defined life in the downtown section of the city for those first few days. One can't help but think that a single-engine plane towing a banner over the city would have been immeasurably helpful in both crowd and rumor control."

And it's entirely possible that, like the chimeric Baton Rouge hordes, exaggerations about New Orleans' criminality affected policy, mostly by delaying rescue operations and the provision of aid. Relief efforts ground to a halt last week after reports circulated of looters shooting at helicopters, yet none of the hundreds of articles I read on the subject contained a single first-hand confirmation from a pilot or eyewitness. The suspension-triggering attack—on a military Chinook attempting to evacuate refugees from the Superdome—was contested by Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown, who told ABC News, "We're controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on." What's more, when asked about the attacks, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff replied: "I haven't actually received a confirmed report of someone firing on a helicopter."

I don't begrudge any helicopter pilot erring on the side of caution; the vehicle is dangerous enough without a razor-thin margin for error. But a razor-thin margin is precisely what the wretched residents of New Orleans have had for nearly 10 days now, and too many of them have already succumbed. Incoming National Guard troops, steeled for urban warfare, have been surprised to instead encounter mostly docile and relieved stragglers.

Try as we might, it's almost impossible to avoid seeing any major event through the lens of our own prejudices and worldview. France-bashers were ready to slam Paris for being stingy about hurricane aid even before, you know, actually checking to see whether it was true (it wasn't). My prior antipathy toward the Department of Homeland Security has now hardened into something approaching activism. As we cast about for blame to lay, and lessons to learn for the next catastrophe, it's worth asking whether our haste to confirm our suspicions by believing the worst prevented us from doing our best.

Lucky Paris

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EDT

You may have thought the Olympics were about athletic achievement, national pride, or global cooperation. Actually, they're about urban planning.

At least that's the impression you might get from the debate over which city should host the 2012 games, a battle that ended Wednesday with London taking the prize (and then vanished from public discussion Thursday, as terrorist attacks in the same city seized our attention). Paris promised to undertake new urban renewal projects. New York offered a brand new stadium in Manhattan and, when that fell through, a brand new stadium in Queens. London won with a proposal to "regenerate" the city's East End, a plan that's expected to cost at least $15.8 billion.

Visit the London 2012 website, and you'll find enough promises to fuel a dozen New Hampshire primaries: 12,000 new jobs! 9,000 new homes! With the Olympics, the site argues, "the regeneration would be quicker and on a far larger scale; it would mean great new sports facilities for the whole community....London would also have the one of the largest new urban parks that Europe has seen for two centuries incorporating many revitalised canals and rivers. Finally, hosting the Paralympics, and its thousands of athletes, would improve the way the city and its infrastructure functions for all people with disabilities."

These aren't just offerings to the Olympic committee. They're supposed to silence domestic critics as well. Like other highly touted mega-events, the Olympics frequently cost more in public spending than they produce in new revenue, a fact that might dampen local support. So the boosters' backup argument involves the purported long-term advantages for the city. The Greek government shelled out approximately $12 billion for the 2002 Olympics in Athens—more than twice the initial estimate—and the spectators' Euros weren't nearly enough to make up the difference. Some Greeks did pretty well, especially in the construction industry, but the rest of the country was stuck with a steep bill. Still, when the Associated Press went searching for a benefit beneath the economic disaster, it managed to conclude that the games were "a reason and deadline to fix the messy and ill-planned urban sprawl under the Acropolis." That, and the city got some new public transit.

Britons may feel wary accepting such promises from a government whose best-known urban improvement project is the Millennium Dome, the most infamous white elephant in Europe. (Built to mark the year 2000, the Greenwich money pit received barely half the expected visitors and became an immense political embarrassment.) But even if the rosy predictions turned out to be true, there would be something puzzling about them. Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that hosting the Olympics is worth the price tag, that it will create more jobs than it destroys, and that the money involved is better spent on the government's projects than on whatever the individual taxpayers would have bought. You still have to wonder: If the games had gone to Paris instead, is there any reason London still couldn't give itself a new park, a new stadium, and handicap-accessible facilities? If publicly financed "regeneration" is such a great thing, why does it require a sports event to unleash it? Boosters love to call the Olympics an "opportunity"—but how are they an opportunity to do something the government could do anytime?

They're an opportunity because they come with their own momentum. A city tapped to host the Olympics is like a nation-state operating under wartime conditions: It has a license to do things that might otherwise be blocked. While the U.K. was still campaigning to host the event, Martin Samuel of the London Times observed that the London Development Agency was dithering on a plan to fully compensate the small businesses that would be displaced by the new facilities. (Such problems eventually led the Marshgate Lane Business Group to formally oppose London's bid for the games.) "Right now," Samuel wrote, "there remains a battle for hearts and minds, but if London wins, the hoopla will begin and the LDA will be able compulsorily to purchase land without respect for local sensibilities." Industrial policy always has winners and losers. The Olympics are an "opportunity" for the victors to claim their winnings.

The Athens experience might seem to cut against that: There was plenty of cronyism in awarding the construction contracts, but the builders' plans were sometimes held up by local opposition in the courts. (They also had an unfortunate habit of stumbling on archeological treasures while they were building, creating still more delays.) But as the deadline neared, construction went into overdrive; budget limits were forgotten, safety standards were ignored, many workers died, and the Olympic Village arrived as planned. The government then swept up anyone who might look unsightly or dangerous, from homeless people to asylum-seekers and refugees.

Of course, there's more to hosting the Olympics than government spending and grand urban makeovers. You get to be the international capital of nationalist furor for a few weeks, and you get a security apparatus so tight it makes an airport look like a free country. Everything you need to be a world-class city!

The historian Nigel Spivey has described the ancient Olympics as "war minus the shooting." When the U.S.-Soviet rivalry defined the games, the modern Olympics were essentially the same thing. But even in the absence of a grand geopolitical rivalry, the Olympics have something in common with warfare. They both strengthen the state.

Balance Sheet

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Assets

Ephedra Case

The FDA's ban on ephedra lasts barely a year, as a federal judge in Utah directs the agency to rewrite its April 2004 rule. A dietary supplement maker challenged the FDA finding that ephedra was dangerous, citing years of safe and effective use.

Opening Hey!

Members of the D.C. Public Schools Full Funding Campaign protest at the Washington Nationals' home opener, citing the city's misplaced priorities. The Nationals are slated to get a new $535 million ballpark underwritten by the cash-poor district.

Freedom Drive

Women in the Afghan city of Herat test the local tolerance for female drivers. A new governor for the region means driver's education classes are now open to all.

Connected Costs

Researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry dampen fears about the effect of pot on productivity. A study of 1,100 volunteers finds that cell phones and e-mail have a similar, perhaps more debilitating, effect on attentiveness, I.Q., and...uh, stuff.

Neander Porn

Archaeologists in Germany find 7,200-year-old figurines fashioned to resemble a copulating couple. This is hard to square with the view that human sexuality is an instinctually taboo topic.

Screen Gems

The Government Accountability Office finds that private security did a better job than the Transportation Security Administration's in-house screeners. The exact findings are classified, of course, but the private screeners discovered test threats more often than the TSA did.

Liabilties

Beer Wimps

Anheuser-Busch frets that if genetically modified rice is grown in Missouri, consumers the world over will refuse to drink "contaminated" Bud. A-B's solution? Boycott Show-Me State rice.

Poppy Cocked

Don't look now, but an elite strike team of Special Forces�trained DEA agents is roaming Afghanistan in search of opium fields. The chances of this ending well are slim to none.

Clothing Optional

The Bush administration does not bother to wait for U.S. clothing and textile makers to petition for help; it just goes ahead and starts drawing up plans for quotas on imports from China. This comes despite evidence that American manufacturers who focus on quality do just fine against the Chinese.

Frequent Crier

Airlines try to police consumer swaps of frequent flier miles, suggesting that the miles are given with the expectation that many will be rendered unusable due to cut-off dates and other restrictions. Fliers fight back by swapping vouchers for sports tickets and other goodies.

Board Teens

Classic generational conflict hits Arizona as cities try to find ways to regulate motorized skateboards, scooters, and other kiddie transport. Maybe if kids hook golf carts to skate decks and wear white loafers, no one will care.

Crime Records

Investigators in New Jersey crack an ID theft ring that stole some 500,000 bank and personal records to sell to bill collectors and law firms. Bank employees and branch managers are alleged to be part of the
multimillion-dollar racket.

Owners Get the Skinny on Steroids

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Mon, 23 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Knowing it would drive me insane, I managed to ignore Congressional grandstanding on steroids in pro sports until the other day, when our whizz-banging pols received testimony from a basketball player whose only possible connection to steroids would be the "before steroids" picture. I'm not saying Washington Wizard guard Juan Dixon is skinny, but when his 6'3", 164-lb. body turns sideways, he disappears.

Even more divorced from reality was the accusation leveled by Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) that the NBA's on-court dust-ups the past year might be evidence of a serious, heretofore unknown 'roid rage problem, precisely because the NBA does not a have a rigorous steroid testing regime in place. I'm not saying Lynch's ravings are the product of syphilis-addled brain, but how do we know he does not have syphilis unless the House institutes a strict random syphilis-testing policy?

That Dixon and various NBA officials and reps were even called before Congress to testify about steroids was more evidence that members are convinced this issue is political gold, devoid of any real downside no matter how far they stray into bizarre territory. What if they are right?

Although it may seem to us limited-government types that Congress is making a huge overreach into wholly private matters like mandatory drug testing for highly-paid entertainers, the sports leagues who employ them have deliberately fudged the public-private distinction when it suited them. Decades spent accepting state subsidies in the form of cash, land, and tax-favored financing—much of it explicitly tax-exempt thanks to the alleged "public purpose" of the sporting enterprise—have made the government a partner. Now the other cleat is dropping.

More importantly, sports fans have mostly cheered on these kinds of deals and firmly cast sports as the pinnacle of civic and social life. It should not surprise us, then, that politicians have noticed this state of affairs and are now acting to harness the energy and emotion tied to sports. There has been no great outcry from sports fans for Congress to leave their beloved leagues alone. In fact, there seems to much vicarious enjoyment of seeing all-powerful league commissioners like Bud Selig and David Stern squirm before vituperative interrogators. Sports journalists have been even more useless than normal, actively cheering for Congress to "clean up" pro sports in America as if every hit, shot, or pass is tainted without federal intervention.

Still, the leagues will surely do whatever they can to head off federal legislation mandating steroid testing regimes like those in place for international Olympic athletes, which prescribe lifetime bans as the ultimate punishment. Short of that, though, there will be plenty of room for dealmaking in Washington. So if the leagues will not push back on principle, and the fans and sports media are indifferent to or amused by it all, that leaves the players themselves to challenge any new testing requirements. Will they? A few might, but the recent history of pro sports labor matters says the league owners hold the high cards.

Recall (if you noticed in the first place, that is) that the NHL just bagged an entire season because owners wanted to pay players less. The NBA is ramping up for a summer of labor unrest with a new collective bargaining agreement due. The current agreement was forged in 1998, when the owners clearly had the upper hand: The players union basically collapsed as soon as the multi-million dollar paychecks stopped. With that precedent in mind, NBA owners only want more concessions this time around. The NFL, the one league that got anything like praise from Congress for its steroid policy, has long since seen management gain the advantage in labor disputes with players, with firm salary caps in place and an absolute, ruthless dedication to protecting the bottom line of each franchise. Only MLB went into the congressional arena with a player's union stance leery of more testing, but that was promptly swatted into the cheap-seats by ex-slugger Mark McGwire's disastrous performance before Congress. Since then, commissioner Selig has steadily ratcheted up the pressure for more testing.

So it certainly looks like Congress is only going to get heat from the leagues if legislation starts moving that obviously goes too far in the context of short pro careers—multi-year bans for a first offense, perhaps. But, short of that, some uniform, federally-designed steroid testing plan for pro athletes seems there for the taking.

I nominate movie stars to be next.

Subsidies and Lies

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Few corporate welfare tales are filled with as many tawdry lies as the return of professional baseball to the nation's capital.

On April 14, the Washington Nationals, who have spent the previous 36 seasons as the Montreal Expos, will play the first Major League game in D.C. since the hapless Senators limped off to Arlington, Texas, in 1971. The game and season will take place at RFK Stadium, which was renovated for baseball over the winter with $18 million in taxpayer-backed bonds. Starting in 2008, the team will play in a new waterfront stadium projected to cost as much as $584 million, paid for by a cash-strapped and notoriously mismanaged city council, which swears that it will get private investors to pay for up to half of the costs.

The publicly financed stadium boom of the last 15 years may be drawing to a merciful close, but the Nationals' history of mendacity is a textbook case of billionaire shamelessness that could inflict serious damage for years to come on a city that can hardly afford it. As always with Major League Baseball, lying in the defense of leeching hundreds of millions of dollars is no vice.

Lie #1: Baseball is hemorrhaging money and needs to downsize. In November 2001 Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced that the 30-team league was too large to be financially sustainable and needed to be pared down to 28 to enhance "competitive balance." MLB, he testified to Congress, lost more than half a billion dollars in 2001 alone. The likeliest stragglers to be culled were the Expos and the Minnesota Twins, franchises that generated "insufficient local revenues" to compete.

All of Selig's statements were false. In fact, league profits had grown 17 percent a year since 1995, according to baseball economist Andrew Zimbalist, with franchise valuations increasing by 250 percent in just half a decade. Attendance and television revenue were at all-time highs. Small-market teams, far from being unable to compete, actually thrived in 2002, with the tiny-revenue Oakland A's making the playoffs for the third of four consecutive years. Even the contraction-targeted Twins won their division for the first of three straight seasons.

Most important, there were myriad contractual and legal barriers to downsizing the league, making it likely, as Zimbalist wrote in his recent book May the Best Team Win, that the talk of contraction was a gambit through which "the owners were seeking leverage in the stadium and players market." By threatening to reduce the number of Major League cities, Selig increased the likelihood that anxious taxpayers would approve subsidies to remain in--or join--the baseball club. When contraction inevitably fell through, the Expos became lame ducks in Montreal, and the new cities competing to land them were put on notice that the most generous public financing package would win.

Lie #2: Major League Baseball won't take over management of the Expos. That's what Selig said on November 26, 2002. On December 6, Expos owner Jeffrey Loria bought the Florida Marlins from John Henry, who went on to buy the Boston Red Sox for $750 million. On December 23, MLB took over management of the Expos, which it has yet to relinquish (though sales talks were intensifying at press time). Running the Expos gave baseball maximum control in conducting a relocation bidding war.

Lie #3: Teams can't compete without a publicly financed stadium. Selig has maintained this, repeatedly and with great success, for a decade. It remains rubbish. The San Francisco Giants have thrived in the standings and at the gate with a handsome, revenue-generating stadium that was 100 percent privately financed. Across the bay, the A's have excelled in one of the sport's crappiest stadiums.

Still, the commissioner made it clear early on that the Expos' new home would be selected based on the size of local subsidies. Washington, D.C., won the booby prize in September 2004 after offering to fund a $400 million park. For one thrilling week in December, the D.C. Council threatened to scotch the deal unless private financing covered half the costs. Once again, Selig threatened to move the franchise away, and by the end of the month the council approved an astonishing $535 million in municipal bonds to bring baseball back to the capital.

As in the 1950s and '60s, the Washington team will probably stink. But this time around, overtaxed locals will be left holding the bag for decades to come.�

Editor's Note: Good Sports--and Bad

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

As a longtime, slightly obsessive, and wide-ranging sports fan--as a kid, I maintained basement shrines to an international all-star team that included the likes of baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Murray, NFL placekicker Garo Yepremian, French cyclist Daniel Morelon, Olympic decathlete Nikolai Avilov, and soccer immortal Pele--I'm especially happy to introduce this issue of reason, which contains a couple of great stories about the intersection of athletics, politics, and American culture.

In "Locker-Room Liberty" (page 46), Associate Editor Matt Welch (reportedly a former Little League All Star) surveys recent books by and about football legend "Broadway" Joe Namath, baseball slugger Dick Allen, and basketball superstar Oscar Robertson. Welch argues persuasively that Namath, Allen, and the Big O deserve "credit for encouraging individual freak flags to fly," for helping America to become a looser, more tolerant, more libertarian place. In very different ways, they represented something new and exciting in the stultifying world of professional sports: mavericks who played to the beat of a different drum.

Welch zeroes in on the generally ignored reason they were able to do what they did: economic power. All negotiated record-breaking contracts early in their careers, and they leveraged their ability to win games and put fans in the seats to play by their own rules. (Robertson went further still, waging the court case that eventually brought free agency to the National Basketball Association.) More than that, says Welch, they and others like them forced "reluctant and occasionally hostile audiences to confront issues of race, war, and free expression, and we are all better for their efforts."

Daniel McGraw focuses on a different aspect of professional athletics in "Demolishing Sports Welfare" (page 32). Well-heeled and well-connected team owners have long colluded with willing and delusional politicians to broker sweetheart deals that pick the public's pockets in every possible way.

From 1990 to 2003, reports McGraw, "there were 66 major construction and renovation projects for professional sports stadiums and arenas in the U.S., costing $17.3 billion." Sixty percent of the funding--over $10 billion--came from taxpayers whose concerns were either ignored completely or simply brushed aside. The good news? Two court cases--one about eminent domain and one about the National Football League's monopoly power--may signal the end of stadium welfare as we know it.

Let's hope so. One of the things that has always bothered me about professional sports is that they typically take place not in houses that Babe Ruth built but palaces for which fans and non-fans alike pay through the nose.

Demolishing Sports Welfare

info@reason.com (Daniel McGraw) — Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

When Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones asked Arlington, Texas, voters to pay for a fancy new stadium last November, he did not call the classic plays from the sports welfare handbook. He could not say that America's Team needed a state-of-the-art facility to compete, since Texas Stadium (in the Dallas-adjacent suburb of Irving) has more luxury suites than any other in the National Football League, and the Cowboys won three Super Bowls in the 1990s. He could not say he was financially strapped, since his franchise ranks sixth in the NFL in profits and second in revenue, according to Forbes magazine. Most important, he did not use the team owners' favorite and most effective threat--to move to a new city--because the Cowboys have always had very strong local fan support; the Dallas�Fort Worth media market is the fifth-largest in the country, and Dallas Cowboys is a powerhouse global brand name.

But Jones had three key deadlines to beat. His lease in Irving was scheduled to run out in 2009, so a new stadium deal needed to be done quickly. Electorally speaking, there was no better time to pass a tax increase than during the high-profile presidential vote of 2004; special elections usually draw low turnouts, and the anti-tax older folks show up in droves. But perhaps the most important deadline of all loomed in 2005, when the window for public financing of sports stadiums in the United States may be slammed shut by two court decisions expected to be handed down during the year.

Kelo v. New London, which the Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on by summer, could decide once and for all when or even whether governments have the right to use eminent domain to acquire private property for the benefit of private businesses. Meanwhile, Hamilton County v. Cincinnati Bengals Inc., which is being heard in federal court in Cincinnati, is challenging football's federal anti-trust exemption, forcing all NFL teams to open their closely guarded books, and arguing that the Bengals' demand of build-it-or-we-can't-compete is tantamount to fraud.

Jones' P.R. people swear the lawsuits were not on his radar screen. But sports business specialists around the country say these two cases could bring the taxpayer-financed stadium-building boom of the last 15 years to a merciful halt. For whatever reason, the Cowboys' flamboyant owner convinced the Arlington City Council in August 2004 to rush hikes in sales, rental car, and hotel taxes onto the November 2004 ballot. He then unleashed a mass media blitz starring old Cowboys heroes such as Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman, spending more than $5 million in all--an extremely high amount for a local election, even in the high-stakes stadium game.

The tax hikes passed 55 percent to 45 percent, and the Cowboys will move into a new retractable-roof stadium in 2009. But it could be the last deal of its kind. On the same day Jones received his gift, voters in Kansas City and St. Louis rejected similar measures to fund sports facilities. Since then, Washington, D.C., has agreed to build a new stadium for the relocated Expos baseball team (now the Nationals), but its city council insisted that it be financed with a significant amount of private money. Public sentiment may finally be turning.

From 1990 to 2003 there were 66 major construction and renovation projects for professional sports stadiums and arenas in the U.S., costing $17.3 billion, according to the League of Fans, a sports welfare watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader. Sixty percent of the funding, or an estimated $10.3 billion, came from the public purse. With the economy and stock market no longer booming, and with the public becoming more skeptical about the rosy economic claims of billionaire team owners, the era of easy money already was drawing to a close. Now the two court cases are poised to determine whether the fund-raising tactics of professional sports teams and their local boosters are even legal.

The Right to Take

Technically, the eminent domain case before the Supreme Court has nothing to do with sports. The high court is hearing a lawsuit involving a New London, Connecticut, real estate project, in which the city agreed to tear down a neighborhood so developers could build a condominium complex and office park. No claim of blight was involved. The city said the development was a "public use," as required by the U.S. and Connecticut constitutions, because it would generate new tax revenue. Several property owners refused to sell. The Supreme Court will decide if they have to.

The Court has rarely visited the eminent domain issue. In 1954 the justices ruled that a neighborhood deemed "blighted" could be torn down and redeveloped if the local government had a better use for it. There have been several more decisions since then, but most have been very narrow in scope.

Meanwhile, the use of eminent domain has mushroomed. The Institute for Justice, the nonprofit law firm that is arguing the New London case before the Supreme Court, has documented more than 10,000 cases between 1998 and 2002 in which local governments have transferred or threatened to transfer property from one private party to another. Blight is no longer the issue; the question now is simply whether the deal helps the local economy in some way.

Sports owners have long used eminent domain as a way to acquire property cheaply. Sports economists estimate that half of the post-1990 stadium and arena construction has involved eminent domain--and even when it wasn't invoked, it was understood that condemnation could be a last resort if the teams encountered stubborn landowners.

One of the most famous eminent domain cases involved the Cowboys' future home of Arlington, where baseball's Texas Rangers, at the time owned by George W. Bush, convinced local voters to approve a 1991 tax increase that helped build a new $191 million stadium. The city of Arlington used eminent domain to acquire the property from hundreds of private owners, claiming that the stadium was a "public use," just like highways, schools, or government buildings. Several property owners were lowballed, and court decisions increased their take. (The city, not the team, was responsible for the larger payments. The compensation for one 13-acre plot was increased from $877,000 to $5 million, for example.)

The stadium clearly benefited the Rangers' owners more than anyone else: Bush turned his initial $600,000 investment into $15 million when the team was sold in 1999. But it has produced little of the promised economic benefit to Arlington, and there has never been a real "public use" factor aside from baseball fans' paying their money to see games.

Opponents of stadium deals argue that teams and local governments are getting around the public use issue by placing the stadium or arena in the ownership of a "public sports authority." The property is then tax exempt, and the teams pay nominal rent that is often less than they would have owed in property taxes. The lease arrangements are often lopsided in favor of the teams; many, for instance, allow the franchises to move after a certain time if revenues do not hit projections. This threat to pull stakes and run gives teams strong leverage to renegotiate. If the sports facility were privately owned, there would be no lease to haggle over, and the team would be less willing (and able) to leave.

Without eminent domain, acquiring enough property for a stadium could become expensive. A handful of property owners could hold up an entire complicated deal. "If the court makes the ruling that this is not a valid use of eminent domain, there will be some problems," says Scott Powe, a law professor at the University of Texas. "Huge problems. No doubt, there will be lots of litigating."

In resolving the Connecticut case, the Supreme Court is expected to decide whether the promise of local economic benefits is enough to justify the use of eminent domain, and whether local governments have to prove such benefits are likely. If the Court requires such evidence, stadium boosters will be in serious trouble.

During the last 15 years, economists such as Stanford's Roger Noll, Smith College's Andrew Zimbalist, and Cleveland State University's Mark Rosentraub repeatedly have shot down the claim that new stadiums benefit local economies. "There is no dispute in the economic community about who gets the primary benefit from the subsidy," says Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for the Washington-based Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council and an expert on sports facility financing. "It is very clear a ruling against how eminent domain is now used will change some of the issues used by local government and teams in making their case for public financing of sports facilities."

Rosentraub estimated Arlington would lose roughly $235 million over 30 years as a result of the new Cowboys stadium, a far cry from the city's (and team's) projected $7 billion gain over the same period. (The raised taxes for the stadium would actually take spending money out of the local economy.) Local businesses tend to be largely unaffected, Rosentraub has found, because teams attempt to control almost all of their fans' entertainment spending, including shopping and dining. This leaves little room for the promised spillover growth around the stadium.

"The reason you build new facilities is to bring in that consumption," Rosentraub says. "That's why in the absence of a plan for an overall development of any district, the 'Disneyfication' aspect works against you. People drive to games, and those that don't eat at the ballpark usually eat at their favorite restaurant--not necessarily in the city where the stadium is located--and have generally well-defined consumption patterns."

Without a spillover effect on the neighborhood, owners and cities would have to scramble to justify using eminent domain. "They would have to prove a defined public use and benefits that go to the community," Keating says. "Obviously the clear benefits go to the team owners and the players."

Kelo v. New London could have a sweeping impact not just on sports but on how local governments arrange deals for shopping malls, big-box retail outlets, housing developments, and more. If the Supreme Court restricts the use of eminent domain, private developers and sports owners will have a much harder time acquiring land and negotiating sweetheart leases with quasi-public landlords. If the high court decides a flimsy promise of economic benefits is enough to justify condemnation, it may signal a new building boom. Or the whole question could be tabled until another, more definitive lawsuit comes along.

Monopoly Powers?

The Cincinnati Bengals case is simpler. Basically, the Hamilton County commissioners claim the team they built a stadium for--and the league that oversees the team--cheated them out of $600 million. One of the most controversial pieces of evidence is the Bengals' win-loss record: The team said it needed more money to be more competitive, but the Bengals still stink.

The Bengals moved into their new publicly funded facility in 2000. Local voters had approved a half-cent county sales tax hike in 1996, and the stadium complex--one for the Bengals, one for baseball's Reds--cost $750 million. There was a $210 million cost overrun, which the county was forced to pay.

The new address did not produce the promised improvement on the field. In the five seasons prior to moving in, the Bengals' record was a lousy 29-51. For the first five seasons after, it was an even worse 28-52. The Hamilton County commissioners say the team told voters they would have to pay for a new stadium if they ever wanted a Super Bowl championship, an assertion the lawsuit claims violated anti-trust laws. Because the number of professional football teams is artificially limited, Hamilton County argues, the NFL and the Bengals improperly used monopoly powers by threatening to move to another city unless the stadium was built. Because the NFL has the most shared revenues of any professional sports league--and a hard salary cap that limits pay for players--every team is theoretically profitable and should be equally competitive.

The lawsuit is designed to drive the Bengals and the league back to the bargaining table. Like most stadium deals, the Bengals have a tiny annual lease payment (about $1 million), and they keep all revenues, even for nonfootball events. Because sales tax receipts have declined, the county's bond repayment, initially scheduled to take 23 years, is now expected to take 35. According to sources close to the lawsuit, the county wants the Bengals to pay about $200 million to keep the bond payments more in line with the original plan.

"You can't use your monopoly status purely for driving up your profits," says Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune. "That was the business plan of the NFL, and they have used their monopoly status illegally, we believe. All the evidence we have since uncovered shows that false statements were made by both the team and the league. The team was financially stable. There was no real talk behind the scenes of moving the team to another city. But the Bengals and the NFL perpetuated these lies to take money from the taxpayers and...to make lots of money for a private business."

That, Portune contends, was illegal. "Congress has laws in place that prevent the public from being taken advantage of by private businesses by using their monopoly powers," he says. The Bengals, he concludes, should "come back to the bargaining table and remedy how disproportionate the benefits were to the team and the league, vs. the cost to the taxpayers."

Neither the Bengals nor the NFL would comment on the case. But the suit is already having effects on teams. U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel has ordered the NFL and all its teams to show their financial books to Hamilton County's lawyers. The NFL has long avoided opening up its books, and the possibility of having municipalities around the country be privy to the league's real financial health would almost certainly make it harder to sell stadium deals in the future.

Still, the Hamilton County case is fraught with problems for the plaintiffs. The Bengals and the NFL can claim that since voters properly approved the bond, it is not open for renegotiation. The league also argues that teams with more revenues from luxury boxes can sign better players by having the funds for signing bonuses. And the NFL has always maintained that it is not 31 separate businesses but a single, 31-branch business--one that can't be a monopoly because it competes for entertainment dollars in every market.

"With all these cases, it just depends on the decision," says Jeffrey Kessler, a New York lawyer who specializes in antitrust cases. "If the decision is that the league violated laws, and the league is punished for it, it could have a huge impact. But I seriously doubt that a court ruling in a case like this would do things like open the door for unlimited franchises. However, a decision against the league and the teams might change how teams deal with cities and local government in setting up their stadium deals."

The Turning Point?

The stadium deal for Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys is weighted heavily on the side of the team. The Cowboys emphasized during the tax initiative campaign that they were putting up half the money for the stadium--$325 million--but that isn't quite true. While the city will use the new taxes to retire its side of the debt, Jones will be able to slap his own 10 percent "tax" on tickets and a $3 tax on parking to retire his side. This will amount to about $10 million a year, or $300 million over 30 years.

But that's hardly the limit to Jones' new revenue streams. He'll also get 95 percent of the corporate naming rights revenue for the new facility, which could be worth $250 million to $350 million. That's extra money, since the team's current home, Texas Stadium, has no corporate naming contract. Jones could also earn more than $100 million by selling personal seat licenses (priority rights for buying season tickets), and the NFL is giving the Cowboys a $100 million loan they don't have to pay back.

So before he even sells a ticket or luxury box or hot dog or beer, Jones will be up about $800 million. Take away the $325 million, and he is still ahead $475 million. Since studies have shown NFL teams usually double their profits in new digs, Jones' estimated annual take of $40 million could balloon into an additional $1.2 billion over the life of the 30-year deal.

The city of Arlington never asked to see the Cowboys' books before deciding to put the issue before voters. As with the Texas Rangers stadium before it, eminent domain likely will be invoked to assemble land for the football stadium; the Arlington City Council already has threatened to use it if any property owners decide to hold out. The city has claimed the area where the stadium will be built is blighted and full of crime, neither of which is true; the local housing prices and crime rates are about average for the city.

Such spurious claims in the service of forcing small property owners to sell to larger ones have become all too common. If the Supreme Court requires the justifications to be even slightly more rigorous, and if Hamilton County succeeds merely in publicizing the NFL's notoriously secret finances, then the balance of power will shift away from the teams. And if the judges take decisive action, 2005 could be the year the public stopped lining the pockets of billionaire owners and millionaire players by paying for the places where they earn their living.

A Shrinking Wasteland

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

I'm tempted to turn on a television out of sheer cussedness. But the truth is, as TV Turnoff Week draws to a close, my eyes remain unblemished by cathode ray. That's not a measure of my sympathy for the warmed over ideology of self-satisfied Guy Debords manqué who are determined to save us all from the insidious predations of the corporate media. It's a small measure of just how irrelevant Howard Beale–style rage against the "idiot box" has become.

I have consumed plenty of media this week: A few dozen RSS feeds and National Public Radio kept me up on the news, while streaming video of Strong Bad Email and The Old Negro Space Program kept me amused. Maybe this weekend I will fire up the tube to order a cheesy horror movie from my cable company's On Demand service or watch a TiVoed episode of Battlestar Galactica with a friend, or pop in a DVD of my favorite TV series of recent years, Joss Whedon's sci-fi western Firefly, which (as it happens) I never got to see on the air before the bright minds at Fox cancelled it.

Some of that media consumption sounds like a lot like "watching TV," of course. But a closer look—close enough for the rays from the screen to burn out your eyes—shows how dramatically our relationship to media has changed.

For one thing, we're shifting to more participatory media, like the Internet. American teens and young adults already spend less time watching television than they do online, and the people with the most experience using the Net spend several hours fewer each week watching TV than do their less-wired counterparts.

But the way we watch TV programming has also changed. Where past generations gathered 'round the vacuum tubes to listen, absorbed, to the latest adventures of Lamont Cranston, we tend to consume radio as background while driving, jogging, or working. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that younger Americans are increasingly doing the same kind of multitasking: The TV may be on as background while we surf the Web, but only as one more pane to ALT-TAB to as we graze in our pixellated pastures.

Anti-TV screeds such as Jerry Mander's TV-phobe cult classic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television seemed a little silly even when they were first published. Now they read quainter than Ozzie and Harriet. It's increasingly not the case, for example, that we "watch television, not television programs," as a common critique had it, letting the undifferentiated manifold of spectacular images sear themselves into our retinas. Mechanisms for more precise choice in programming, like TiVo, are caught in a feedback loop—camera pointed at its own output screen—with smarter, more sophisticated, and more intellectually demanding of viewers. It's now common to find whole seasons of popular shows offered on DVD soon after they've aired; that means it's less necessary to hold viewers' hands through each episode—miss something? You can probably get last week's installment on demand—which in turn makes it more appealing to view the shows in a format that makes it possible to run back and see what you've missed.

The Internet also means that TV isn't an alternative to meaningful interaction with a vibrant community of human beings, but a prelude to it. Devotees of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer gather in online fora to dissect the fine points of plotlines and review their favorite (or least favorite) episodes. Even the most niche shows have an online water cooler around which to gather.

All that may explain why the turners-off have had to goose publicity for Turnoff Week by converting an innocuous voluntary exercise into a campaign of public obnoxiousness, encouraging sympathetic "culture jammers" to shut off televisions in public places using a keychain-sized device called TV-B-Gone. Adbusters puba Kalle Lasn claims in an interview with Salon that the purpose of this is to free us from the tyranny of airports and bank managers who "force us to watch TV in public places." But even granting that—let's call it idiosyncratic—definition of force, Lasn's strategy doesn't comport with his rhetoric. He recounts leaving on an airport TV because it was tuned to a nature show—good thing it wasn't Fox News, huh?—and then recalls having to flee a sports bar after shutting off a television there. The folks who'd gathered explicitly to share the experience of watching a game must not have appreciated their liberation. Ingrates.

Sometimes, of course, TV does retain that "narcissus as narcosis" numbing effect critics complain about —when there's a screen hanging in a bank for people waiting in line, as in an anecdote Lasn cites in his Salon interview. But then, that's why it's there: precisely because most of us don't especially want a precious human moment with the person behind us in a bank line. How many of us actually want to deal with, say, a stranger's unsolicited views about our soul-crushing corporate culture on the way to cash a check? For the most part, though, the standard critique of TV now lands like a Gilligan's Island pratfall in a Simpsons world, a world in which we're participatory co-creators as much as passive consumers.

Maybe surreptitiously switching off a set allows the TV-haters to squeeze a few last drops of frission out of a dated activist passion. But me, I'm as bored as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Jock Sniffing

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Does your urine belong to Congress? Should private citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing be hauled up to Capitol Hill and grilled under oath, on live TV, about what substances they've put in their bodies?

Congressman Henry Waxman sure thinks so. The Los Angeles Democrat is convening hearings March 17 on the pressing National Security issue of ballplayers using performance-enhancing steroids. Last Wednesday, subpoenas were sent out to seven current and former Major League Baseball players to testify about their hormones in front of the oxymoronic House Committee on Government Reform.

Only one player, paroled ex-felon and recent retiree Jose Canseco, has enthusiastically accepted the committee's invitation, though he's lobbying hard for immunity. By crazy coincidence, the former Bash Brother has a new, factually challenged and universally panned bestseller on the market, titled Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big.

"Canseco's allegations about steroid use by Mark McGwire and other baseball players have received enormous media attention," an apparently envious Waxman wrote in his Feb. 24 letter requesting the hearings. "Many of the individuals have denied the accusations. Mr. Canseco insists his information is accurate... There is a simple way to find the truth in this matter... [H]ave them testify under oath."

Using the enormous power of the federal government to arbitrate literary disputes seems a little much. We wouldn't dream of forcing George W. Bush to swear on the Holy Bible just because Kitty Kelley reported that he snorted coke at Camp David, yet a private citizen's alleged use of a substance that's actually legal (with a prescription) is enough for Washington to set the wheels of publicity-masquerading-as-justice in motion.

And this isn't just a case of arrogant athletes getting their comeuppance—it potentially affects half the national labor force. Besides dragging Sammy Sosa and Jason Giambi on camera to recite the Fifth Amendment, the committee has issued a subpoena to Major League Baseball that, according to the L.A. Times, requests "results of drug testing since 2003," and "the names, disciplinary action taken and reason for suspension for all drug-related violations since 1990."

In other words, Congress is asserting its right to your drug tests, even if they were conducted based on a private agreement between employer and union, and even if the results—including disciplinary action—were understood at the time to be secret. About half of all employers test for drugs, and an estimated 50 million tests are performed each year. Should the federal government have the right to subpoena your private medical records?

That's hardly the only power-grab in this show trial. Waxman's committee (which is chaired by the equally distasteful Virginia Republican Tom Davis), literally believes it can investigative anything and everything it wants to. "Under the rules of the House," Davis and Waxman wrote Major League Baseball on Thursday, "'the Committee on Government Reform may at any time conduct investigations of any matter.'"

Interestingly, baseball may end up mounting the first sustained attack on the committee's license to conduct fishing expeditions. Historically at each other's throats, team owners and the players union have joined forces under the same lawyer, Stanley Brand, who has vowed to fight the subpoenas on jurisdictional and constitutional grounds, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

"That would be limitless jurisdiction," Brand told told reporters after receiving the Davis/Waxman letter. "There would be nothing they couldn't look into... If that is the case, they don't have to have rules on jurisdiction because these guys can do whatever they want."

Cracks have already appeared in baseball's tenuous solidarity. Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling (who has no idea why he was subpoenaed) and White Sox slugger Frank Thomas have already said they'll testify. But Brand is at least talking a tough game about chalking a line in the sand.

For once, the urinalysis enthusiasts in the nation's sports pages are not joining as one to cheer on the feds. Epithets like "witch h unt" and "grandstanding politicians" are being tossed around, and for the first time in my memory, sportswriters are expressing concern about privacy rights and the long reach of Uncle Sam.

"I think they feel empowered to do whatever they want," Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Randy Wolf said last week, while emphasizing that he opposes steroid use. "You look at what they did with the 'confidential' drug tests that we had... They said, 'Eh, we don't care if it was confidential or not. We're going to do what we want with it.'

"It's kind of a 1984 deal where basically, they want to know everything you're doing at all times, and because we're in the public spotlight our civil liberties are flushed down the toilet. It's chemical McCarthyism."