An open letter to Rush Limbaugh

Pretend for a moment that you have no emotional attachment to the game of football. Look at a professional football team as just another business that might want to locate a factory in your city.

Do you think that it is fair that a billionaire team owner and his millionaire players should receive government funds (tax money taken not only from "the rich" but from middle and working class citizens) to build the facilities in which to conduct their business?

If it is morally wrong for the government to take the money of one private citizen and give it to another private citizen for that citizen to pay his or his families health care costs (and make no mistake it is morally wrong for the government to do that) then in what universe does it become right to take taxpayer's money and use it to build or upgrade a sports stadium in order to attract or keep a major league franchise?

After all the success you have had as a champion of conservative ideas do you really what to throw away every last trace of your moral authority by becoming a corporate welfare queen?

Because as a team owner that is exactly what you would be, just another bloated parasite sucking on the government tit.

If you became a team owner you could never again condemn misappropriation of taxpayer funds without labeling yourself as a rank hypocrite.

The NFL can't even claim that professional football couldn't survive without government subsidies because we have witnessed in recent years the explosive growth of NASCAR whose facilities are all financed entirely with private money.

The argument made by governments looking to justify taking taxpayer money and and using it as corporate welfare to lure a sports franchise to their city is that a team is a big boost to the local economy.

A number of economic impact studies which were not paid for by governments looking to justify spending public money on a sports team have shown that the true effect on a cities economy from a sports franchise is at best minimal and at worst slightly harmful.

Until the NFL and the NBA and Major League Baseball all reform their business practices so that they are no longer detestable parasites using government force to partially finance their operations no conservative ought to have anything whatsoever to do with them.

Sad, just sad

Here is an interesting editorial from The Washington Post:

MIKHAIL Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, is now one of Russia's best-known political prisoners. Having committed the unpardonable sin of considering a political challenge to President Vladimir Putin, Mr. Khodorkovsky has languished in a Siberian prison camp since 2005, and Russian authorities want to keep him there. With a diminished but nevertheless sizable fortune, not to mention moral capital because of his refusal to bend to Kremlin pressure, the former oil baron might still hope to have some influence after his release, particularly if he is freed before the uncertain 2008 presidential contest. That is one likely reason that he and a business associate face additional charges -- just months before they would be eligible for parole. If convicted, he would have to wait out the next presidential election and a lot more.

The charges are magnificently implausible. Mr. Khodorkovsky is alleged to have embezzled and then laundered $32 billion through affiliates of his oil company, Yukos. Inconveniently for the government, PricewaterhouseCoopers was vouching for Yukos's books throughout the period in question.

More convenient for the Kremlin, the auditor last month suddenly disowned and withdrew a decade's worth of Yukos audits, helping to neuter Mr. Khodorkovsky's defense. Before the announcement, the firm had insisted that its work was sound. After the announcement -- surprise, surprise -- a Moscow court ordered new hearings on a $9 million tax case against PricewaterhouseCoopers that, until then, had not been going the company's way.

A spokesman for PricewaterhouseCoopers insisted that its decision to withdraw the audits had nothing to do with the months of harassment it received from Russian authorities -- including a police raid, the tax lawsuit and threats that its license to operate in Russia could be revoked. At the same time, the company declined to publicly detail its reasons for withdrawing the audits.

It's just one more tawdry example of the difference between rule by law and rule by Mr. Putin.

That Vladimir Putin is corrupt and evil should not come as a surprise to anyone around here. He is after all a former officer of the KGB. What should be at least somewhat shocking is the corruption of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Anyone out there who might ever be thinking of hiring an accounting firm needs to keep in mind that this one can be intimidated or bribed into selling out their clients. Even to the point of perjuring themselves in a court proceeding.

Just as Arthur Andersen went down because of its role in the Enron blowup I think Pricewaterhouse just doomed itself. As a rule corporations which do not enjoy the trust of their clients simply do not survive this is especially true for an accounting firm.