How Not To Insult the Intelligence of Conservatives

I just watched a preview for the upcoming Aaron Sorkin HBO series, The Newsroom. The clip features a scene where a news anchor defends himself against charges of liberal bias with the line (at about 1:10 in):

“I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage.”

Uh, Mr. Sorkin, conservatives actually believe that hurricanes are characterized by LOW barometric pressure. If you are going to insult our intelligence, at least get your facts right.

I should probably cut Sorkin some slack until I see the entire show – maybe the anchor is based on Don Shelby.

All The News That We Find Fit To Print

The mainstream media has been obsessed as of late with the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. They, along with the usual race baiting suspects, have turned this unfortunate incident into a rallying cry to fan the flames of racism, give people the opportunity to call white people crackers and make it fashionable to wear hoodies in public.

It's unquestionably clear that the shooting (which People magazine described as "An American Tragedy") is the latest focus of the national media swarm whores because it was a black man killed by a non-black man. Despite the lack of facts or evidence, the media has stormed ahead with allegations and accusations and insinuations (and all sorts of other things that end in -tions) that automatically label shooter George Zimmerman as a racial profiling, bigoted Neanderthal.

Unfortunately, the Martin shooting is not an isolated incident. It's not even an isolated incident on February 26, 2012, as this story explains:

Cincinnati homicide detectives have made an arrest in the shooting of a Sycamore Township man last month. 18 year old Neron Coston Jr. is now charged with murder for the shooting on February 26th.

Coston was arrested yesterday by officers from the Southern Ohio Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team and Vice squad cops.

Officers say Coston Jr. shot 23 year old Michael Callahan around 8:30 a.m. on that day. Callahan's car then crashed into a parked vehicle at the corner of Foraker Avenue and Alms Place in Walnut Hills.

When police arrived they thought they were investigating a fatal car crash. Then coroner's officials discovered the man in the driver's seat -Callahan- had been shot before the car crashed.

Police haven't said why Callahan was on Foraker Avenue. Callahan did not own the car he was driving at the time of the crash.

Was this just another shooting on the streets of Cincinnati? That could be. No national news outlet has even mentioned the incident so we don't know the story. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson haven't made angry television appearances to condemn the inherent wickedness of the shooter. The left wing spin machine hasn't worked themselves into a foam spewing lather blaming the Callahan's death on Paul Ryan, Ann Romney and George W. Bush.

No, this shooting, which occurred on the same day as the Trayvon Martin shooting, has flown under the radar of our supposedly responsible national media. How could that be, you ask? I think this story ought to give you a clue. Bottom line...the shooter is black and the victim is white prompting reporters everywhere to shamelessly say with their silence "Nothing to see here, folks. Move along and pay attention to the stories that WE think you need to hear".

Where's the media curiosity on the Michael Callahan murder? Where is the People magazine cover story declaring this "Another National Tragedy"? Predictably, they are nowhere to be found. The Callahan killing doesn't fit their agenda so it does not merit coverage. This story further exposes the media for the race baiting cowards that they are.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think either the Martin or Callahan killings are deserving of national media attention. This sort of thing happens daily in every major city and hardly a word is even written about it locally. But for the national media to turn the Martin killing into a racial crisis while completely ignoring incidents like the Callahan killing is grossly irresponsible and completely reprehensible. In other words, it's exactly what I've come expect out of them.

Beer of the Week (Vol. CXLII)

Another edition of Beer of the Week sponsored as always by the playful folks at Glen Lake Wine & Spirits who can help find the wine, whiskey, and beer that best suits your game.

This week’s beer hails from Tallgrass Brewing Company in Kansas. Like all their beers, it comes in cans and this offering has a unique angle:

Just like those classic video games we all grew up with, 8-Bit Pale Ale is spectacularly simple at first glance yet remarkably fun and complex when you get into it. Our Hop Rocket infuses the character of Australian grown Galaxy Hops into an American Pale Ale, giving a unique tropical, almost melon aroma in a classic American style.

The Tallgrass site is currently running a poll asking “Which of these classic 8-Bit games was your favorite?”:

Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt
The Legend of Zelda
Mike Tyson's Punch Out
Metroid (spoiler: Samus is a girl!)
Super Tecmo Bowl

That’s a good list, but for me it’s gotta be Super Tecmo Bowl. Anthony Carter on the reverse was unstoppable. Now the question is whether the beer itself lives up to the reputation of the classic games it gets its name from.

A four-pack of 16oz cans goes for $8.99. Perfectly executed retro video game design on can. The colors, the shapes, and the font are all spot on.

STYLE: American Pale Ale

ALCOHOL BY VOLUME: 5.2%

COLOR (0-2): Light gold color with a bit of haziness. 2

AROMA (0-2): Delicious aromas of hops with a little bit of honey and mango. 2

HEAD (0-2): Bright white color. Lots of volume off the pour. Good lacing. 2

TASTE (0-5): Like the smell, the taste mostly features hop flavors with more muted bready malt and a bit of sweet and citrus touches. The hops are well-moderated and the result is a smooth, pleasantly bitter beer that goes down remarkably well. Creamy mouthfeel with a medium body. 4

AFTERTASTE (0-2): Clean finish with lingering, but subtle bitterness. 2

OVERALL (0-6): In some ways this pale ale reminds me more of a bitter than anything else. In a good way too. While pale ales are ubiquitous, bitters are harder to come by, especially good ones. 8-Bit is a very good beer from a can and I can only imagine that it would be awesome on tap. To relive the good old days in style, fire up your NES, pop in classic cartridge, and pop open a Tallgrass 8-Bit Pale Ale. And with the moderate alcohol, it's a beer that can carry you deep into a night of gaming. 4

TOTAL SCORE (0-19): 16

Lines in the Sand

Daniel Henninger on how the left's efforts to destroy Paul Ryan only seem to make him more willing to take the argument to them. Demolishing Paul Ryan:

What Mr. Ryan actually said is worth quoting, because it should revive the debate over the proper relationship between individual citizens, including the poor, and the national government:

"A person's faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private. So to me, using my Catholic faith, we call it the social magisterium, which is how do you apply the doctrine of your teaching into your everyday life as a lay person?

"To me, the principle of subsidiarity . . . meaning government closest to the people governs best . . . where we, through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities, through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community, that's how we advance the common good. By not having big government crowd out civic society, but by having enough space in our communities so that we can interact with each other, and take care of people who are down and out in our communities.

"Those principles are very, very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don't keep people poor, don't make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life. Help people get out of poverty out onto a life of independence."

Subsidiarity—an awful but important word—attempts to discover where the limits lie in the demands a state can make on its people. Identifying that limit was at the center of the Supreme Court's mandate arguments.

The first major use of subsidiarity as a basis for public policy was in Pope Leo XIII's famous 1891 encyclical "Rerum Novarum" (though the word itself doesn't appear). Leo was seeking a way to protect the dignity of human beings caught during those years in the tension between unfettered capitalism and unfettered government. "The State," he wrote, "must not absorb the individual or the family." Arguments over where the balance sits have raged since.

The American left thinks this debate is settled. So, for example, any hint of Supreme Court dissent from settled doctrine justifies questions about its "legitimacy."

Paul Ryan insists the debate isn't over and that its locus is the federal budget, which isn't just numbers. The budget is the national government's formal justification for the scale of the demands it makes now and unto eternity on the nation's citizens.

This is the debate Barack Obama hopes mockery and rhetorical carpet-bombing can kill before the fall campaign. It's only a guess, but I'm betting his opponent is looking forward to forcing the president to come up with a better argument for establishing a government in the U.S. that is subordinate to no one.

This is exactly the debate that we should be having right now and one that I believe many Americans hunger for. It would be helpful if Democrats, especially President Obama, would honestly and openly engage and argue the substance of the matters instead of talking about the latest "war on ___" that Republicans have launched. I'm not holding out much hope for that, but I am confident that regardless of how they respond, Paul Ryan is going to continue to push forward and present the American people with clear choices about what path forward we wish to take. I'm actually beginning to think that Mitt Romney might (a big might) start consistently doing the same thing.

Lord Stanley's Strap

A piece in today's WSJ called NHL Playoffs: Hockey Night in...America? detailed how this year's playoffs may afford the NHL the best chance to capture national interest in the US for many years:

The 10-year, $2 billion deal the NHL signed with Comcast Corp.'s NBC Universal unit last year gave the league both much-needed capital and a partner with both the will and the ability to take the NHL as seriously as it takes itself. For the first time in the NHL's 95-year history, every playoff game will be televised nationally, with most of the games appearing on networks that are available in at least 80% of homes with cable TV. And the league may be ripe for growth. NHL telecasts on NBC's channels reached 14.9 million viewers this year, up 14% from last season.

That exposure will give hockey its first legitimate chance to be followed nationally throughout the playoffs, instead of being a tribal affair which even devout fans tune out once their favorite teams are eliminated. As the league's chief executive, John Collins, said Monday, it allows "hockey fans to act like hockey fans"—something they haven't always done. "When there was no national broadcast, a lot of fans really didn't have an option," said the NHL's often dour commissioner Gary Bettman, who was downright giddy during a news conference Monday in New York. "Now they do."

Few sports experience the up-tick in quality the NHL does when the playoffs begin. Fighting virtually stops, skating speeds up, hits at center ice intensify and goals become precious. "Nothing has the pace or the urgency of playoff hockey," said Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports, which will show games on its broadcast network and cable channels NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus) and CNBC. In the first two rounds, the NHL Network, the league-owned cable channel, will also show a handful of games.

First off, that Lazarus guy is on to something: there is nothing better in sport than the NHL playoffs. And while I would prefer to see the local squad still playing, whether the Wild are in or not, I will be watching as much playoff puck as I can.

Second off, it's a great relief to all us diehard hockey fan to not only see the NHL playoffs more available for viewing than ever before, but to also no longer have to suffer the indignity of watching them on something called "Versus." Sometimes the name does matter and NBC Sports Network sounds a hell of a lot better than Versus.

So far, the opening night is living up to expectations. We had Philly’s dramatic rally to erase a three-goal deficit and win in overtime in Pittsburgh. We had the Predators of Nashville turning away the hated Red Wings. And early in the second, the eighth seeded Kings and top seeded Canucks are tied at one. The puckering of the Canuck’s fans, which was deafening in last year’s Finals, is already apparent. They’re scared and so far their team is playing that way. Long live the Kings.

Get to Know ‘Em

Many people claim there was nothing on the field worth watching during the Twins - Orioles opening series last week. I beg to differ. As this video from the opener shows, there was plenty of fancy footwork, good defensive instincts, and couple of solid hits at the end.



Given the Twins .165 batting average for the entire team so far this year, this guy is definitely the top batman we’ve seen in 2012.

True, this did nothing to help the Twins performance, but it did give Dick and Bert something to get indignant about, which they love to do five or six times a game.

Deadspin synched up multiple the Youtube videos of the Batman streaker with audi from the radio and TV broadcasts of the game for this entertaining summary. I just hope fear Dick Bremer’s quote “We have an idiot on the field” doesn’t become the slogan for this year’s squad.

Not to Save But to Savage

Pascal Bruckner on The Ideology of Catastrophe:

First you break down all resistance; then you offer an escape route to your stunned audience. Thus the advertising copy for the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" reads: "Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced—a catastrophe of our own making."

Here are the means that the former vice president, like most environmentalists, proposes to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions: using low-energy light bulbs; driving less; checking your tire pressure; recycling; rejecting unnecessary packaging; adjusting your thermostat; planting a tree; and turning off electrical appliances. Since we find ourselves at a loss before planetary threats, we will convert our powerlessness into propitiatory gestures, which will give us the illusion of action. First the ideology of catastrophe terrorizes us; then it appeases us by proposing the little rituals of a post-technological animism.

But let's be clear: A cosmic calamity is not averted by checking tire pressure or sorting garbage.

Another contradiction in apocalyptic discourse is that, though it tries desperately to awaken us, to convince us of planetary chaos, it eventually deadens us, making our eventual disappearance part of our everyday routine. At first, yes, the kind of doom that we hear about—acidification of the oceans, pollution of the air—charges our calm existence with a strange excitement. But the certainty of the prophecies makes this effect short-lived.

We begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to warn us so much as to condemn us.

Beer of the Week (Vol. CXLI)

Another better late than never edition of Beer of the Week sponsored as always by the bright-eyed folks at Glen Lake Wine & Spirits who can help find the wine, whiskey, and beer to perk up your day.

Coffee and beer are two of the building blocks of civilization. For many of us, life without these two essential fluids would be unimaginable. And if they’re both so satisfying separately, imagine what they would be like together? Over the year, craft brewers have teamed up with coffee producers to seek to find that nirvana.

Our Beer of the Week is fruit of one of those efforts, Lagunitas Brewing Company’s Cappuccino Stout:

Big, Dark and Scary Imperial-esque Stout Brewed With Plenty of Dark Malts and Roast Barley And Loads of Sebastopol’s Hardcore Coffee for Deep Roasty Flavors and that Extra Krunk.

22oz brown bottle. Familiar Lagunitas label with tan background and the mascot mutt who appears often on their limited release beers. Goes for $4.99 a pop.

STYLE: Imperial Stout

ALCOHOL BY VOLUME: 9.0%

COLOR (0-2): Dark black. 2

AROMA (0-2): Malty with a hint of vanilla. Pretty light. 1

HEAD (0-2): Off white color. Minimal volume which fades pretty quick. Laces the glass nicely. 2

TASTE (0-5): Rich roasted malt flavors up front with a bitter coffee bite at the end. A little nutty and a hint of chocolate as well. Surprisingly smooth with a thinner mouthfeel that’s also somewhat creamy. Medium bodied and fairly drinkable. You don’t notice the alcohol at all. 4

AFTERTASTE (0-2): Lingers very nicely. 2

OVERALL (0-6): A well-balanced and ultimately satisfying mash up of stout and coffee. The flavors are strong and sharp, but play nicely together. Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout is a good choice to kick start your day or as a night cap to end it. 4

TOTAL SCORE (0-19): 15

Pitch to Contact

Peter Funt on The Lost Art of the Live Interview:

Interview questions should come quickly and cleanly. Yet on a recent broadcast of CBS's "Face the Nation," Bob Schieffer began two questions of Newt Gingrich with the extraneous phrase, "Let me ask you," and then he asked consecutive questions of Ron Paul that began, "Let me ask you this question." On CNN's "State of the Union," Candy Crowley asked six questions during one program that all began with forms of "Let me ask . . ."

The best interviewers do their homework, put their own opinions aside, keep questions brief, and listen closely for possible follow-ups. Live interviews are among the few elements in journalism not significantly affected by technology; they can't be replaced by blogs or tweets. But TV hosts too often fall short.

Amen. Too many TV interviews are all about long wind ups from the hosts with no pay off.

Baseball Matters, Part 1

On this day after Official MLB Opening Day a few baseball related notes, broken into three posts due to length.

Deadspin carried a review of the shiny new Marlins ballpark, featured in the unofficial opener on Tuesday. It’s all neon and steel and glass and fish tanks, and everyone seems to like it. I see it also has a variation of that sliding retractable roof originally planned (and thankfully abandoned) for Target Field.

Overall, the design is a decided departure from the traditionalist model in vogue for the last 20 or so new stadiums built for MLB. The retro ballpark trend was started by Camden Yards in Baltimore, a stadium that still seems new to me. As Deadspin notes, it’s not new and for some, it’s starting to show its age:

Oriole Park at Camden Yards somehow turns 20 this week, and there are sports fans reading this who weren't born when it opened to great fanfare and sold-out crowds for years and years.

Now it's just another ballpark. The 10th-oldest in baseball, in fact. … the O's have reverted to being terrible and you can walk up to the ticket window and buy $10 seats most every night. Camden Yards hasn't lost its charm, it's lost its uniqueness. In the wake of Camden's success, ballpark designers HOK (now Populous) went on a building spree. Texas and Colorado and Atlanta all got their retro parks, as did San Francisco and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Metropolis Magazine features the design critic’s perspective on all these stadiums being built by the same company, with the same retro motivation:

With its ballparks, Populous has transformed the experience of attending a baseball game. Traditionalists lament that what the firm has created is not so much ballparks as “mallparks,” where the game itself is of secondary importance, something more like dinner theater.

“It’s just so contrived,” says Jay Jaffe, a writer for Baseball Prospectus. “It drives me crazy.” The dimensions of the classic ballparks on which the Populous stadiums are modeled (such as Ebbets Field) were the product of their constrained urban lots. But Citi Field was built in the middle of a parking lot. And therein lies the strange paradox of the Populous stadiums: though they are painstakingly manufactured to appear idiosyncratic, the willfulness of their design is inescapable; and now that there are nearly 20 of them around the league, their heterogeneity has come to seem altogether homogenous.”

Target Field in Minneapolis is another Populous creation, though one that doesn’t tend to bear this type of criticism, in part because it was actually built on a constrained urban lot, making its idiosyncrasies requirements rather than affectations. Beyond that, the Populous design team has received credit for not simply replicating what has been done elsewhere:

Nationals Park built off of Cincinnati's design direction 5 years later and in 2010, Target Field followed suit in Minneapolis. Similar to Cincinnati and D.C, the classical interior still feels familiar but its complex and dramatic exterior gives it arguably the edgiest appearance of any MLB stadium.

I remember when the Target Field design was first unveiled, some decried the fact that it wasn’t traditional enough, in the spirit of Camden Yards. Not enough bricks, not enough exposed piping, not enough old funk. In retrospect, those people were design Neanderthals, and by ignoring them we have successfully avoided the withering scorn of effete architectural critics everywhere.

It’s just too bad we don’t have anybody here on the Fraters Libertas staff who could provide some architectural expertise and first hand knowledge of building Target Field to provide some perspective here. Maybe one of the summer interns can throw something together.

Baseball Matters, Part 2

CBS Sports’s "Eye on Baseball" interviewed Hold Steady front man, and Minneapolis expatriate, Craig Finn about his love of all things Twins related. It includes this exchange about the music played before games and between innings at Target Field:

EOB: I'm assuming you've been at a Twins game at least, where they've played one of your songs, but what was it like the first time you heard your own song at a baseball game?

CF: It was at the Metrodome. The music guy there got in touch with me and knew I was going to be at the game and he played eight Hold Steady songs during the Twins game. And the other music he played was Bruce Springsteen and the Replacements. So I felt like I was being serenaded by my own mix, so it was pretty amazing. I feel like my relationship with Minneapolis is strong. I sing about it a lot and we get good crowds there. There are times where I always feel like I'm really accepted by the city and that was one of them. I've heard (the Hold Steady) once in Target Field. Unfortunately they let that guy go and they used to have amazing music at the dome, they'd play smart music, stuff you don't always hear at the ballpark. I was disappointed they let him go and they got some sort of Top 40 DJ, playing Lady Gaga.

The blazingly bright ego necessary to characterize the music choices of those playing your music as “amazing and smart” is a thing to behold (steady).

EOB: That's terrible when you have a place like Minneapolis that's so rich in music history.


CF: You want the park to be connected to the city both architecturally and vibe-wise. I thought when I'd go to a game and hear the Replacements, this is what makes our city different. That we really understand what we have musically and honor that. I thought that was unfortunate that it's gone away. But whatever.

I like the Replacements, the favorite band of my college and post college years. But I also understand the limits of their appeal. Their music barely exceeded cult status in its heyday. 25 years later, it is narrowcasted nostalgia for me and those exactly like me (white, male, early 40s, Twin Cities reared, college rock appreciating, intelligent, good looking, punctual, excellent driving skills, etc.), and for a few fellow traveling hipster doofuses. Anyone outside of this slender demographic slice will not have their game experience enhanced by the presence of Replacements music. As for the playing of Hold Steady music at Twins game, the reach of their appeal is less than 1% of the reach of The Replacements. Sounds to me like they got rid of that Metrodome music coordinator for good cause. Baseball is entertainment for the masses, and it’s natural for the music to reflect that. You’ve got to play the hits. I can do without the Lady Gaga songs, as well. Maybe a steady Prince soundtrack is the happy medium for the local music mavens and the other 99.9%.

It’s just too bad we don’t have anybody here on the Fraters Libertas staff who could provide some music expertise and first hand knowledge of the local music scene for some perspective here. Maybe one of the summer interns can throw something together.

Baseball Matters, Part 3

Deadspin also had an interesting article addressing the source of the vast, ever expanding amounts of money MLB owners seem to have on hand these days. Recent examples include a small market team like the Reds paying Joey Votto $225 million, the Angels recently signing two players (Albert Pujols and CJ Wilson) for a third of a billion dollars, and the Dodgers getting sold for a cool $2 billion (nearly three times as much as any previous MLB franchise sale). Where is all this money coming from?

The surprising answer - cable TV subscribers. The new windfall for baseball is not based on the hundreds of millions in public subsidies for ballparks or $60 tickets and $10 beers sold to fans, the BIG money is in the broadcast rights sold to regional sports networks.

The Reds don't yet have a giant television deal, not like the Angels' 20-year, $3 billion contract. Instead, they extended Votto with a theoretically big TV payout in mind. Because TV is going to make everybody rich.

Right now, there are two kinds of regional sports networks (RSNs). Some are team-owned, like the Yankees' YES Network, and some are independent, like most Fox Sports Net and Comcast Sports Net channels. They make their money by charging a monthly per-customer fee to cable and satellite providers in the team's market, and the providers pass that fee onto their customers. All of their customers: nearly everyone with a cable subscription in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut paid an average of $33.60 to the Yankees' network and $28.56 to the Mets' network last year. And those networks get to sell advertising on top of those fees.

It's a great scam. So far, TV networks have provided their teams with tremendous cash flow—as with the Angels' deal—or equity. The Wilpons have borrowed $450 million against the value of SportsNet New York, the channel that carries Mets games.

The Twins’ regional broadcast network is Fox Sports North. They announced a new contract last year, though both sides refuse to reveal the financial details. One of the immediate consequences though was the ending of any free TV broadcasts of Twins games, as they had been doing since their inception, most recently via Ch. 29 on Sunday afternoons. The business model, forcing all cable TV subscribers to pay extra for access, demands a monopoly on supply. So if you want to watch the Twins you’re going to pay.

The Twins rationalize all of this as a natural outcome by forces out of their control:

Twins president Dave St. Peter said that the organization was sensitive to fan reaction, but that cable exclusivity in local markets was "inevitable." At least 16 teams have already gone that route, he said. The Detroit Tigers, for example, will air 152 games on its FSN affiliate with nine national games on Fox. Every team will have a similar setup by 2014, he predicted.

If it’s inevitable, I guess we should just relax and enjoy it. Thanks for being sensitive to our feelings though, Twins.

Another inevitable consequence of these deals is increased monthly bills for cable TV. The experience from other markets has not always been obsequious compliance:

According to reports (because none of this is transparent), Madison Square Garden wanted Time Warner customers to pay a 53 percent increase on its $4.65-a-month fee. That's $7.11 a month—or $85.32 a year, from every Time Warner subscriber in New York—for the Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, and Devils. Time Warner naturally balked, and might have held out longer if not for Jeremy Lin. In San Diego, Fox Sports San Diego is reportedly seeking a 400 percent fee increase from Time Warner Cable. Time Warner wisely has said no.

How will this all end? Something’s got to give, and Deadspin posits a worst case scenario:

But this rights-fees boom is premised on the assumption that cable and satellite providers will forever squeeze their customers at the whims of RSNs, and that the customers will forever tolerate it, and that the FCC will forever endorse it. All that happening seems highly unlikely.

The cable-riches scheme is quite fragile because of the already-big fees charged to people who don't care about sports. And the networks that carry MLB's teams are asking everyone in that system to pay more and more. The cable companies are fed up with it, and every fee increase they condone will further vex their customers, perhaps leading to revolt or desertion.

But the cable-riches scheme needs those unfettered giant fee increases, just like Wall Street relied on ever-increasing housing prices. Once the blips start, the whole scheme's doomed to collapse. And then this apparently good story, of the homegrown Votto getting a deserved payday from a beloved, old small-market franchise, will become the darker and more familiar one, of middle America making a financial promise it couldn't afford.

Will the Twins someday declare bankruptcy because they can’t pay Joe Mauer’s contract? Unlikely. As long as we have public servants RT Rybak and the Hennepin County Commission around, there’s probably always another hundred million or so tax payer dollars available for professional sports.