Partisan wild pitch

[question everything]

Partisan wild pitch - (CA) Press Enterprise

09:44 PM PDT on Thursday, July 7, 2005

Buy me some peanuts and partisan politics? There is a war in Iraq, a $400 billion budget deficit and a host of imploding federal entitlement programs. Yet some members of Congress think they have time to micromanage the ownership structure of Major League Baseball.

Reps. Tom Davis, R-Va., and John Sweeney, R-N.Y., last week said baseball owners might regret letting left-wing billionaire George Soros become a minority investor in the Washington Nationals franchise. See, Soros gave more than $20 million last year to groups vying to defeat George W. Bush, from the Democratic Party to MoveOn.org.

Davis is chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, which through the spring held tough congressional hearings on steroid abuse in professional sports. The congressman hinted last week that Major League Baseball might lose its antitrust exemption if Soros owned a piece of the team. (Davis later retreated from those statements.)

Meantime, Sweeney, vice chairman of the subcommittee that doles out subsidies to the District of Columbia, intimated that Congress might withhold funding for a new D.C. ballpark for the Nationals if Soros bought a stake in the club.

Congress would do well to stick to legislating issues that affect large segments of America -- and not settle partisan grudges. If baseball can thrive with eccentrics Ted Turner, Peter Angelos and George Steinbrenner running clubs, the national pastime will do fine with George Soros steering the Nationals.

Online at: http://www.pe.com/localnews/opinion/editorials/stories/PE_OpEd_Opinion_D_op_08_ed_baseball2.142a06.html

[tk2kewl]

1. They're afraid Soros will piss in the beer served in their luxury boxes.

[acmejack]

2. Isn't it wonderful that they have nothing better to worry about?

Ever since they addressed all the major pressing issues confronting us as a nation and the world as a whole, they have a lot of spare time to worry about picayune matters such as this.

[tk2kewl]

3. unfortunately it's not picayune, its fascist intimidation

[KC21304]

4. No we must not have any taint of politics in MLB.

What about the son of the VP and then the Pres. being gifted, that's what it was, part ownership of the Texas Rangers, and then allowed to make 14 million on his ill gotten gains from his insider trading of Harken stock ?

I know this is kind of convoluted, but you get the idea.