Check out David Sullum’s today in which he contemns (subjects to withering contempt) tax-funded stadiums. Yes, many the taxpayer, even those rooting in person for the home team, will say yea to that, what with Reinsdorf and friends getting hundreds of million from Mother Illinois for that new thing at 35th & Shields.

But would it not be better if the goateed, bespectacled, earnest-looking (and well-informed) Sullum, a doughty libertarian, had NOT opened with the damning admission that he has gone just once in his life to a major league game and found it boring? Is there no libertarian editor who could have told him, I know what you mean, but you have friends out there for whom this admission constitutes a self-damning admission of unreliability?

Jacob, don’t do it, they would have said. Skip the confession about almost never going to a ball game and being bored when you do. It’s not worth it.

That said, Jacob makes hash of the publicly funded stadium, with special attention today to the imminent rise of the baseball Senators. Its 41,000 seats will cost a half billion-plus in public money raised by a new tax on business, that source of all wealth whom we love to hate. Not to worry, says DC Mayor Anthony Williams, 364 new jobs averaging $260,000 will supply the deficit. (But how many of those jobs are popcorn vendors, how many pouty superstars?)

Furthermore, cruddy Anacostia, where the stadium would be built, will rise with the new Senators, or Nationals or whatever. Yes, with baseball-season in-stadium eateries, etc. Stadiums are a bonanza for parking lot owners and people with big back yards they can pave over or rooftops from which paid spectators can watch the game if the team owners have not blocked their view with various devices. And bars to which game-maddened fans can repair afterwards, yes. This is neighborhood revitalization?

80 economists don’t think so, Sullum tells us. Nothing notable will come of a new stadium, they told the mayor, who almost certainly pitched their letter forthwith into the nearest spittoon. Spending just moves around, they said, citing “a vast body of economic research.” And it normally takes a very strong man to withstand that kind of pressure. In fact, 37 cities were hurt by presence of pro teams 1969-96, according to a Cato Institute paper that had something to say about “significant negative impact on the level of real per capita income.” That sort of talk may go with spectacles and goatees and people who don’t go to games, but should we ignore it?

Meanwhile, in DC Sullum wonders what other effects there will be, thanks to the expected tax on large businesses (whose owners are outnumbered at the pools by owners of small businesses and owners of no businesses) and its expected lowering of wages and raising of prices.

WLS’s Don & Roma raised, dodged issue about 100 lb. female cop overpowered and disarmed by 230 lb. carjacker whom she had pursued into a vacant lot. Made whole issue the dumb one about who�s right, mother who says he�s a good boy or cops who tell bad things he did. Callers immediately raised the other issue, whether this cop was the man for the job. These (male) callers, some of them apparently cops themselves, raised the not-ready issue gingerly and secondarily at first. But it soon became top item, with Don saying several times he didn�t want to talk about it.

Eventually a man called saying he�s a veteran of eight (not nine or seven) bar fights, saying a good small woman or man can get the better of a much bigger guy with the right punch administered quickly. And Roma chimed in to say there are 65 male cops who would also have been disarmed by this big guy. So Chicago�s hot conservative couple dodged the obvious.

What were they thinking when they brought it up in the first place? Tiny female cop easily bested by big offender, and nothing is to be said about lack of physical parity? Callers are put off, Don not wanting to go there, Roma getting defensive? What�s up in Don & Roma Land, newly repopulated by them after long contract-fight hiatus? They sell well and are worth a lot, but was what they say on air part of the dispute? How big a part?

(Yes, these are not newspaper performers, but radio talkers are people too.)

Notice, please, this in today’s Chi Trib, by deputy edit page editor John McCormick, once of Newsweek, about “the press” missing a story because of its insularity. He shows (diplomatically) how Chi Trib ran stories that did not miss the story, in this case how the nation was veering towards “exercised values” vote orientation, while articulating nicely the beef vs. mainstream media — MSM in blogger parlance. Yes, Virginia, Chi Trib is quoting National Review Online, and Newt Gingrich too.

WISE GUY . . . In a Sunday 8/22/04 Chi Trib column, markets writer Bill Barnhart reflects conventional wisdom among newsies in a series of subordinated phrases that demonstrate disaffiliation from Bush:

“Bush must overcome his mess in Iraq.” His was an “ill-fated adventure into military conquest.” He counts on “terrorism hysteria . . . as a political strategy.” The nation is “already made skeptical by the 9/11 Commission report.” The U.S. is in “low esteem” with “other nations.”

Bush has “economic ideologues in his administration.” There have been “record deficits under Bush.” A source says the war is “not going well” and “favors Kerry,” even if he’s “not in the lead now” because of it.

None of this was argued, just taken for granted.

FOLLOWING ONE’S LEAD . . . 8/20/04, Chi Trib finally reported on Swift Boat Vets v. Kerry – when Kerry brought it up. Was not news fit to print before that. Too yucky. Or a vampire requiring stake in heart, as Trib reporter Frank James told E&P. Was result of “too many” news sources out there, said Trib managing editor James O’Shea. Oh the trouble CT has seen, forced by raggedy-ass competition to cover this quite unseemly story about the candidate’s tangled web.

Hey, did NYT cover it? No. So what’s the problem?

A LEAGUE OF HIS OWN . . . And wasn’t it grand the way Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn referred hard-copy readers of his conventional stuff to his really interesting web-site stuff the other day, featuring reader reaction to something or other? Z. has dropped one of his columns to have more time for his web site, whose readership he compared (modestly) to hard-copy Chi Trib circulation but not to Instapundit or other performers in the blogosphere, in whose league he does not play. Not to mention Drudge Report, whose circulation exceeds Chi Trib’s. Nonetheless, Z. should continue trying his hand at blogging. He’s prolific. We have to give him that.

One of his problems, however, is he’s heavy-handed. Tin ear and all that, a sort of Al Gore-like bombs-away delivering of facts on top of facts. Has no sense of merely suggesting, in part because he’s still caught in the hard-copy mode of either plodding recitation or zany fun and games and in part perhaps because of his being a campus brat, which is not to say word one about his parents as persons but to point out the peculiar wordiness and head-tripping into which campus people fall more than your average person. Talking heads come to mind, but more a matter of mind going lickety split and leaving communication behind. Do I make myself clear?

Contrast Z., for instance, with the aforementioned ABC News’s The Note, in which Mark Halperin et al. pull lots of stuff together daily, summarizing and shorthanding pungently and wittily. There’s a knack to that. It beats James Taranto’s Best of the Web, I think, which also gets a bit complicated at times, even while performing indispensably.

ERNIE PYLE? . . . World War II battle reports in Chi Trib and other papers routinely led with numbers dead and wounded, driving home the losses incurred, the better to discourage the home front, as our world was called. Not quite. Instead, the news was about victories or setbacks, with emphasis on the first. But battle reports from Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly about casualties. Why?

FDR DONE IN . . . Point made by MSM (Main Stream Media) reporter in an email to Instapundit about Iraq coverage published 10/21:

It’s frankly impossible to imagine what might have happened to FDR’s presidency if WWII was covered the way the various news media do the job right now. Someone in the blogosphere recently pointed out that 750 American troops died in a training accident during preparations for D-Day. Can you imagine that? Today such an occurrence would have an almost apocalyptic impact in this country, if you consider the way it would be conveyed to the public through television.

HIGH-PRICED . . . The hit man was offered $20G and a city job, says Sun-Times head 10-14-04. The man wanted more than money, he wanted his license to steal.

WE CARE, WE CARE . . . 10/17/04 Sunday Chi Trib featured big in-your-face p-1 color pic of black victim (what else is new?) with story attacking reliability of finger-printing and other forensics measures. Trib Mag cover story same day was on gung-ho pacifist – ahem, peace activist – by the infamous Don Terry, whose story praising former terrorist and current advocate of terrorism William Ayers ran in the Mag on the Sunday after 9/11, requiring a trademark run-of-paper apology by Trib apologist-in-chief (who whines a lot), Don Wyclif. Chi Trib and Terry just can’t stay away from parlor-radical causes. The 10/17 piece even quotes that old parlor radical Studs Terkel – who shot off his mouth after 9/11 about U.S. airmen being terrorists, by the way – who thought highly of the pacifist in question, needless to say.

WE HAVE TO WONDER . . . Chi Trib’s lead business section story, “Anemic profits hurt vaccine supply: Development process deters makers: shortages could persist for decade,” raises questions. It’s all about the flu vaccine business not being profitable enough to justify investing in better technology that would solve mfg.-&-distribution problems. But the demand is huge; why can’t supply meet it? The story hints at a reason:

Companies have difficulty raising prices [essential to making the business attractive] because the government and public health agencies that buy much of the product would create a political stir.

Oh? What’s that all about? New products cost more until mass consumption brings them down, but that’s not allowed in this case?

Companies, though, say the federal government could go a long way to spur more interest in vaccine development.

Oh again. Spurring interest usually means making it profitable. The first move in that direction would be to cancel artificial inhibitions, one would think. Tax break maybe?

Has any Chi newspaper picked up on this bit of business history, from The Scotsman? I don’t think so.
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FACT OF THE DAY
Today in 1887, American inventor Dorr Eugene Felt of Chicago patented the world’s first adding machine, named the comptometer . The machine, made from a macaroni box, staples, elastic bands and meat skewers, resembled a weird xylophone – but it proved both reliable and accurate. Click here to read today’s news on science and techonology.