The politics of baseball - and, uh, other stuff

Rivka may be right that the most surprising thing about the Congressional take on Nationals ownership is the sense of entitlement.

You'd think that I could no longer be shocked. But I am utterly astounded by this unashamed, on-the-record threat to prevent a private business from conducting a legal transaction with a private citizen. Davis and his colleagues make no attempt to cover this naked exercise of brute power with even the thinnest veneer of a pretense to legitimate governmental interest. They don't even seem to be aware that this kind of petty bullying is the sort of thing that people usually try to hide.

They simply believe that Congressional Republicans are entitled to demand that every aspect of American society, from great to small, be ordered as they wish. They simply display the two-year-old child's astonished outrage that anyone has the temerity to thwart their will.

My only caveat to that is that baseball is not precisely a private interest; as a legal monopoly, I'm sure MLB is quite used to Congressional meddling in its affairs. Still.

(Rivka has more here.)



In other news...

The always-interesting Teresa Neilsen-Hayden gives tips for an apocalypse. (It's sort of sad that we're learning how to do this stuff, isn't it?)

I've been collecting architecture blogs lately. Where else can you learn stuff like this?

Brownstone, a type of sandstone, was readily available from quarries located in New Jersey and Connecticut. A form of sedimentary rock which frequently contains fossilized footprints of prehistoric animals, it owed its unique dark brown color to high concentrations of iron, which turned color with exposure to water..

(Well, ok, if you bothered to look it up, probably lots of places, but I don't usually get around to doing that, do you? It's more fun to read Brownstoner instead.)

A couple of other architecture-related weblogs:
The Frank Lloyd Wright Newsblog
Hewn and Hammered (who just published their own list of renovation blogs)