Baseball is back in our nation's capital, and the team is actually in first place. I updated my reading/listening links this week, and I have included a book by George Soros, who "heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies." I was rooting around on the webpage for New Yorker magazine today (Lisa wanted me to see an article about Guantanamo, but it is not on the web), and came across an article about Soros wanting to buy the Washington Nationals, which has apparently been met by opposition from several ranking republicans. Below is a small exerpt of an article that is quite telling of the level of partisan attitudes currently paralyzing the institutions of this nation - from Congress to Major League Baseball and beyond. Paul Krugman summed it up best in his column, "Karl Rove's America" when he asks, "How did our political system get to this point?"

Major League Baseball, which has owned the team since 2002, is currently considering bids for it from eight syndicates. One of them includes George Soros, and this has brought certain politicians charging out of the dugout, bats swinging. “I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes,” Tom Davis, the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, which oversees the District of Columbia, among other entities, told Roll Call, a Capitol Hill weekly. Baseball teams, he added darkly, “enjoy all sorts of exemptions,” notably from antitrust laws. “We finally got a winning team,” he elaborated in a chat with the Times. “Now they’re going to hand it over to a convicted felon who wants to legalize drugs and who lives in New York and spent five million dollars trying to defeat the President?”