July 01, 2004

WaPo publishes good stuff!

There's been some good material in the WaPo over the past few days. First the appalling: The Bush campaign has requested church directories from religious volunteers around the country. If that's not skirting the edges of church/state separation...

Milton Cerny, a tax specialist in the Washington office of the law firm Caplin & Drysdale who formerly administered tax-exempt groups for the IRS, said there is nothing in the campaign instructions "that on its face clearly would violate" the law.

"But these activities, if conducted in concert with the church or church leadership, certainly could be construed by the IRS as the church engaging in partisan electioneering," he said. "The devil is in the details."

Much less seriously, unless you care about taxpayers' money, if you're either a baseball fan or a metropolitan DC resident, here's a series of articles for you.

This series will examine the relocation process, [Commissioner Bud] Selig's role in it, and what they reveal about the insular culture that is Major League Baseball, the official name for the business entity that is the national pastime.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

It isn't a pretty tale. It's got corporate welfare in the guise of a taxpayer-funded stadium in Milwaukee, a dictator with nearly absolute power over where teams may move (or not move), and a cabal of like-minded owners who want no infringement on their right to coin money by virtue of the antitrust exemption baseball has.

Posted by Linkmeister at July 1, 2004 02:02 PM
Comments

::boggle:: Just let them try to request my church directory (which I just had to revamp, and wasn't that a massive and horrible project). I'll tell them where to stick it, indeed.

Posted by: Sue at July 2, 2004 10:50 AM

Use the same excuse DOJ has: "It'll crash the system if I try to copy those." (See July 2 post)

Posted by: Linkmeister at July 2, 2004 11:39 AM