Originally posted April 18th, 2010
By Michael Konik
When a metropolis wishes to attract a professional sports team to their precincts, the City (obstensibly with the blessing of a majority of voters) offers the team owner attractive financial incentives. These enticements often include newly built stadiums (with copious luxury boxes available for rental) and substantial tax breaks. Does this situation best exemplify…?
Answer: Redistribution of wealth to the people who really need it, billionaires. Hey, as long as America is addicted to sports and spectacles we’ll keep throwing money at our dealers even if they’ve got plenty of it already. So I guess it’s none of your 4 choices. It’s #5: Pitiful.
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
Author James Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during the Nixon era. His new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles,” outlines our government’s pernicious (and ongoing) threat to media freedom. Some prescient authors get all the luck: Every morning it seems we’re greeted to [...]
When a metropolis wishes to attract a professional sports team to their precincts, the City (obstensibly with the blessing of a majority of voters) offers the team owner attractive financial incentives. These enticements often include newly built stadiums (with copious luxury boxes available for rental) and substantial tax breaks. Does this situation best exemplify…? 
Still wondering…
Answer: Redistribution of wealth to the people who really need it, billionaires. Hey, as long as America is addicted to sports and spectacles we’ll keep throwing money at our dealers even if they’ve got plenty of it already. So I guess it’s none of your 4 choices. It’s #5: Pitiful.
Nice! Does anyone know more about this than you?
I’m a smiling visitant here to share the love (: btw great design.