Daily Stadium Swindle Update is link-rich, and available from Off Wing Opinion. My late today estimate: chances that Cropp sells out and a deal gets done - rising! Also check out liberal blogging legend Charles Dodgson, who takes issue with an aspect of yesterday's item. I think his version of a "principled" take is really a pragmatic take, but I don't expect he'll care. Meantime, he reminds me of something I've been considering for a couple of days now, the honor roll of professional sports team owners who built their own stadiums with their own money. My immediate list:

Robert Kraft, New England Patriots
Jack Kent Cooke, Washington Redskins
Abe Pollin, Washington Wizards and Capitals
Daniel Snyder, Washington Redskins ("improvements" to FedEx Field)
New Boston Garden Corp, Fleet Center (Celtics and Bruins)

There have to be at least some others. To qualify, the owner has to have bought the land and built his building on his own dime. Municipal/state spending on "infrastructure improvements" (roads, sewage and so on) permitted. For better or for worse, such things are universally accepted as government functions.

And if you needed a sex angle to keep you interested in the story, we've got one.

Baseball Diamonds are a Corporate Welfare Queen's Best Friend - First, to Eric McMerlain: Sorry, I was just feeling testy. Eric was fighting the good fight on the stadium issue when I was writing it off as a lost cause. See a June 2004 piece for just one example.

Matt Welch, a baseball fan who has also tackled this issue from time to time, writes to note that he worked on his college paper with Steve Czaban, our villain of last night, and that the same school's radio station nurtured Czaban, Sean Hannity and Jim Rome.

"And this," Matt notes, "was a very liberal school, mind you . . . "

That's certainly the effect liberal schools have on me.

I got a nice note from Skip Oliva of Citizens for Voluntary Trade! Skip blogged about the stadium deal for the Mises Institute a couple weeks ago. He quotes Washington Times columnist and Sportstalk980 Sports Reporters regular Thom Loverro's report on a Cato Institute conference:

The pencil-neck geeks who write economic reports and participate in panel discussions, such as the one held Monday by the CATO Institute, have no clue about that identity or the economic benefits - or much else for that matter.

My emphasis. Thom, you are far from the first guy who ought to go insulting people's physical appearance, as the top left picture on this page will make clear. Also, you have a high sissy voice.

NB: You started it, buddy. And either Gene Healy or Radley Balko could kick your ass. Hell, I'll bet Brooke Oberwetter could kick your ass. (I'll give you 6:5 against Wilkinson.)

Thomas Nephew has an amusing exchange from last night's evening news:

Yglesias has an interesting post and comment thread, including some fairly determined advocacy by liberals who support the deal. Heaven knows I can't construct a principled liberal objection to stadium subventions myself - it seems to me that if you believe in the welfare state it's hard to oppose corporate welfare, at least in concept. I think this is why almost all of these deals end up going through - a critical mass of a legislature's liberal opponents eventually roll over. That's how Maryland passed the stadium deal that "gave" us the Baltimore Ravens - the Montgomery and PG County delegations swooned once enough pork was waved under their noses.

Speaking of liberals and cool folks to their left, Max Sawicky wonders if Linda Cropp isn't simply playing her part in a pageant:

Our corrupt, incompetent, vacationing mayor, errand boy for the elite, makes the basic deal. The taxpaying citizens (including yours truly) protest the impending picking of their pockets, so we need some kind of kabuki exercise to provide the illusion that democracy is functioning and some brake on fiscal insanity and malfeasance in governance is in play.

So after Linda Cropp gets a little something something -- headlines attesting to her pull and her fiscal responsibility -- she rolls over and buys some fig leaves on the original arrangement. The financial details are lost on the public. Lo and behold, the day is saved, baseball is coming to the nation's capital, and the taxpayers get reamed for the cost of the stadium and associated public expenses.

Hey, could be! It would fit the general pattern for these deals: Executive agrees to pointless, illegitimate expense. Earnest liberal legislators whine about "the children." Executive/legislative leadership buys them off with a separate pointless, illegitimate expense: end result, the taxpayer gets boondoggle with extra fleece.

The DC deal could still go that way. History even favors it. But today's developments give me added confidence that Cropp, cagey fake-dumb as she's acting, really wants to kill this deal dead. In the Yglesias thread, commenter Violet notes that they already tried the "extra money for schools and libraries" compromise. She says Cropp hived that off into a separate bill to be considered in January. The (literal) 11th hour maneuvers Tuesday seem calculated to maximally discommode and even insult MLB and the Mayor. And today, Cropp suggests, in an aside, that it would be a "gesture of good faith" if Baseball were to extend the approval deadline past the end of the year. The offhand manner in which she broached the possibility is bravura. The woman is wicked good at this shit.

Cropp knows and MLB knows and I know that not only is MLB ill-disposed to make concessions to anyone, especially the District; any deadline extension puts the stadium bill before the new Council, which will replace three pro-stadium members with three antis.

I am in awe. No, I am in love. I hope Mrs. Offering will agree to share.

A final note: Linda Cropp is no one's idea of a libertarian. I have no reason to suspect she's being driven by praiseworthy motives. If she thought supporitng the stadium deal would make her the City's next mayor she'd probably hold up our medium and large businesses at gunpoint herself. That's too harsh. She's a politician. She has people for that. But like I always say, you know what it's called when a politician does the right thing for the wrong reasons? A nice change of pace.

Yet More Stadium-Deal Blogging - "Libertarianism in One Lesson," at The Agitator.

More Stadium Inanity - Metro columnist Marc Fisher has a particularly odious column about the stadium vote. Cropp is dishonest for playing her cards close to the vest, like any canny pol facing a big vote. And he feints in the direction of addressing the obvious objection to the pro-holdup side's mantra that "A deal is a deal," then jukes the other way:

A deal is a deal. Ah, you say the council should be able to inspect and judge any deal that comes before it. But the mayor's job was to keep the council in the loop and with the program at every stage of the process. And the council members knew, as Evans reminded them at every turn, that however greedy and voracious baseball's owners may be, what brought us a team was one simple promise: We will build a new stadium.

Buried in there, seemingly to be addressed by the rest of the paragraph, is the core and basic civics lesson at work here: at just about any level of American government, the executive can propose any spending plan or law he wants subject to constitutional review, but only the legislature can authorize it. This is Schoolhouse Rock-level civics. "We" did not have a deal. The Mayor's Office had a deal. The City did not "have a deal" until said deal was voted into law. At that point, a deal exists. No approval? A deal does not exist. (On the other side, if the MLB owners had not voted to approve Bud Selig's proposal to them, "we" would not have a deal.)

You will notice that nothing that follows Fisher's Sentence Two disqualifies it as the entirely sufficient refutation of his Sentence One. He wants to complain about the Mayor; to suggest darkly that the Council must realize that it is killing "the deal"; but he can't gainsay the core local-constitutional truth embedded in "the council should be able to inspect and judge any deal that comes before it."

There's some real ugliness elsewhere in his column.

Now, Cropp expects to capitalize on the revulsion of baseball fans and ride the joy of the anti-baseball crowd straight into the mayor's office.

"The anti-baseball crowd" is a fancy way of saying an apparent majority of District voters and taxpayers.

This city is pathologically averse to change, captive to deep anxieties about race, class and the urban-suburban and District-federal divides. Baseball was an opportunity to rise above those strains, to reach for world-class status, to lure suburbanites back into a view of Washington as the center, a place of pride.

Perhaps all these pathologically anxious darkies are also averse to handing $650+ million in taxpayer money to a bunch of out-of-town billionaires too. Ya think?

The District's job was quite simple: Prove baseball and assorted other doubters wrong.

I would think the District's job was to allocate its resources prudently, and with due regard for who was earning them, and who was looking for a windfall. The flip thing one says here is "But that's just me." Apparently it isn't, though. It happens rarely enough that local columnists might appropriately celebrate it.

Linda Cropp's late-night bombshell eviscerating the deal with Major League Baseball immediately restores Washington's status as America's laughingstock.

Speaking of "world-class" cities, they have a saying in Paris: Au contraire, mon ami. In fact, this vote may, may you understand, mark the turning of the tide against professional sports-league boondoggles. That would give the District an unfamiliar spot on the honor role of fiscal sanity and political rectitude.

A Breath of Sanity - Deft political maneuvering by a Linda Cropp-led alliance on the DC City Council may have killed the stadium giveaway Mayor Anthony Williams negotiated as part of the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals relocation deal. The local sports "journalism" establishment has disgraced itself in the matter, from the hysterical Tom Boswell at the Post to the Sportstalk980 regulars, whose biased coverage makes CBS/FoxNews on politics (pick your villain) look like a model of probity. Steve Czaban's evening national show reached such a level of repulsiveness I actually switched it off - Linda Cropp is a politician and a big girl, but repeated references to her as "Bizatch," faux Sopranos voice or no, are simply too ugly to abide. There's a lot of barely suppressed sexism in the coverage of Cropp's maneuvering, including numerous references to her being out of her depth. Well guess what, fellas - she won! That's some depth she's out of.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Dayn Perry's article on Foxsports.com last week is a welcome relief from the admixture of Stockholm Syndrome and class interest most sports media brings to coverage of corporate welfare for the people they make money covering. It's national, not local media, mind you, but the sports fan who nevertheless opposes sports-driven fiscal lunacy takes what he can get.

Now Calling Bullshit On . . .

Country singer Chely Wright, whose "true story" behind her chart-climbing pro-war number, "The Bumper of my SUV," beggars belief.

Juan Cole, who credulously and approvingly cites dark and baseless mutterings about the authenticity of the blogging brothers at Iraq the Model. It doesn't take a secret cabal to try to make propaganda value out of a couple of guys who hold what are, for their society, fringe views. They are also guys who, by participating in Iraqi political life, are showing a measure of physical courage none of us blogging stateside has shown.

President George W. Bush, for awarding the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to: a military man for the performance of his military duties (we have military medals for that); a hack who was by no means solely responsible for the mess in whch our Iraq policy finds itself, but never saved the place either; and a cashiered spook who made "slam dunk" a laugh line and couldn't even win a bureaucratic cage match with the White House. I tend to hold the FBI more responsible for failing to prevent the atrocities of September 11, 2001 than the CIA, but still: not helping.

The Scott Peterson jury. Grant two things: Scott Peterson is a convicted murderer and I'm a death penalty squish. But isn't there something . . . creepy about "We'll be back to deliver our sentence of death once we've had lunch?"

So much bullshit, so little time.

Not Abandoning Libertarianism, Reason 5,271,009 - Barbara Boxer:

Boxer said she agreed with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that Congress might have to intervene if baseball owners and players did not require more sophisticated and regular steroid testing of athletes.

"I don't like to see Congress getting involved in the sports arena ..." she said, "but if developments lead us there, we'll have to go there."

-- In another sports-related issue, Boxer said congressional oversight may also be needed to get answers from college football's Bowl Championship Series after the failure of UC Berkeley's team to be selected to the Rose Bowl despite a 10-1 record and a No. 4 ranking.

In a letter to Kevin Weiberg, the coordinator of the Bowl Championship Series, Boxer suggested that the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees interstate commerce and sports, might require more information about the process regarding the way teams were picked for bowl games.

Isn't there a housing association somewhere this woman could terrorize?

(Hat tip: Mrs. Offering.)

Gimme an A! Over on the Agitator, I do some sportsblogging. Perhaps, just perhaps, somewhat tongue in cheek.

A Fanboy's Voicemails - Sometimes, particularly in the commercial arts, a creator "phones it in." Perhaps even bloggers do this from time to time. Inevitably we're dealing with lesser work when that happens, by that creator's standards. You'd still rather have a call from Dashiell Hammett than face time with Robert B. Parker or, dare I mention the name? Brad Meltzer. By coincidence, I got two comics last week, and both of them showed creators giving less than their best. Was I rooked? Let's see.

Hulk Thing Hard Knocks #4 of 4 is by Bruce Jones, late the writer of the regular Hulk series, and Jae Lee. Jones is phoning it in here, but what he's phoning in is Waiting for Godot, and that ends up making it worthwhile. Marvel's four-decade-old monster characters star as Estragon and Vladimir, and take turns playing Pozzo and Lucky too. (Neither gets an erection - that I can see - but then, they don't hang themselves, so what can they expect?)

This is one eccentric story, and it took me all four issues to realize I liked it. The Thing approaches Bruce Banner in the desert, riles him up enough to bring out the Hulk and - strikes up a conversation, about the first time the two of them met. The story moves back and forth between flashbacks to the events of Fantastic Four #12 (vol. 1) and what passes for Today. Now and then one of the two gets mad enough to pop the other good, but they always end up back on the stools of the decreasingly lapidated coffee shop where the tale begins.

Like Godot itself, there's a lot of vaudeville here. It's - absurd. Absurdist, even. It's as metafictional as any Grant Morrison script, but sneakier about it. The oddly timeless present of the framing sequences speaks to the mandated inertia under which the corporate comics scribe labors. I suspect it speaks to Jones' own frustrations with the editorial directions of the last months of his stint on the ongoing series. (Forced Iron Man crossover, anyone?) What we end up with is a far more agreeable swan song than the rushed wrapup of his long conspiracy storyline. And also weirdly, the pleasures of the miniseries are not the pleasures of Jones' years on the main title at all. What was terrific about that book was that Jones made Bruce Banner a likeable, sympathetic guy. Banner didn't spend his days whining about his curse. He took purposive action and he cared about other people. That Banner is hardly even glimpsed here. Go figure. As for artist Jae Lee, I hated his arc on Captain America. But here he's an asset. His storytelling is a lot better, and the fight scenes fit the theme: they look like an Ultimate Fighting match between a couple of skin condition cases. The faces, a weakness in Lee's Cap issues, are a strength here.

When the trade comes out, buy it.

Michael Moorcock's Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer #1 of 4, by Michael Moorcock and art by Walter Simonson, is a prequel to the first Elric prose stories, available in the US under the title Elric of Melniboné. The five original books of the Elric saga, ending with Stormbringer, are probably my favorite sword & sorcery novels. (Unless you want to count Wolfe's Book of the New Sun as sword and sorcery. Silly! It's science fiction.) Since Elric's world ends in the fifth volume, all of Moorcock's subsequent returns to the character have been filling in ever-smaller gaps in the character's history, often illuminating areas where craggy, doom-haunted shadows were better left to fall. There were some enjoyable stories in Elric at the End of Time, written by Moorcock, and at least one good short, by Brad Lineaweaver, in the "tribute" anthology, Michael Moorcock's Elric: Tales of the White Wolf. On the other hand, the late novels Fortress of the Pearl and Revenge of the Rose both stink. I'm not interested enough to tell you why, though I'll mention that Rose bored me to the point of leaving it aside unfinished.

The comic under discussion (really! I'm discussing it right now!) takes place just before Elric's ascension to the throne. "Some say [Melniboné] is unvulnerable and will rule for another ten thousand . . . " Others that we've already read the books and the place is going down! Down, I tell you! But early captions to prequels make easy targets.

It'll probably piss PNH off if I invoke a concept as hoary as "pulp vitality" to describe what's missing from Moorcock's writing here that was present in the original stories. Instead, let's say that the original Elric stories were fevered in a way that this isn't, and Pearl wasn't, and Rose wasn't, and fever is what made the saga proper so compelling. It's not bad that Moorcock should ever be urbane, measured, recollecting in tranquility; it's not bad that fantasy should be urbane, measured, recollected in tranquility. It's only bad that Elric should be. It's not like Moorcock is attempting to satirize Victorian England here or anything, as he did in Rose. (Oy.) It's stripped down storytelling. But the clay lives not in his hands. The form set decades ago and the best he can manage is a little polishing.

On the other hand. Walter Simonson is not phoning in the art. The design of the book is a mashup of bog-standard Nordic fantasy and - American Indian motifs. It seems to fit poorly with known Melnibonean continuity. As a longtime Elric fan, I experienced considerable cognitive dissonance with the notion of Elric as Dreamtime hero "White Crow," " . . . learning wisdom . . . controlling his powers . . . defending life . . . " But it's a visual treat, and it beats another parade of helms and hauberks. I have always suspected that the Norse Loki, who can take the shape of a raven, and the Trickster bird of the Northern Tribes were related by more than coincidence anyway.

Flip through it. If you find the art as compelling as I do, buy it.

A Fanboys Notes - The new Batman Begins trailer is up on the official website. Pretty. Freaking. Cool.

Don't Blame ME, It's YOUR Petard - Charles Dodgson finds a bizarre appeals court decision and, in noting all the strange, simulataneously anti-liberal (as currently defined) and counter-federalist implications, finds himself mired in a swamp for which he has no name. That would be the Wickard v. Filburn Bog, the rare New Deal-era public works project that added to our nation's wetlands (metaphorically, at least) rather than subtracting them.

The Commerce Clause had its Abu Ghraib Experience decades ago now. The poor thing hasn't been the same since.

A noteworthy aspect of state and local government tax break deals to entice or retain specific businesses is that both Republican and Democratic politicians engage in them. Another is that the Democrats who do so are implciitly acknowledging that lower taxes are a contributor to job growth and business retention. However, no way are they going to let everybody in on such a deal. There's more job security and glory, not to mention sheer fun, in working highly-publicised deals with specific companies. Everybody gets the dinners, press conferences and ribbon cutting ceremonies - and very possibly a leg up on one's next job. Beats hell out of quietly providing everybody with some measure of tax relief and regulatory easement, if your goal is a) make sure you give yourself plenty to do, and b) make sure you get seen doing it.