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The people of Oakland went into mourning this week while those in Las Vegas celebrated the news that the National Football Leagues Raiders were abandoning the East Bay and heading to Sin City. But while any sports fan understands the sadness felt in Oakland and the happiness in Las Vegas, the reaction from taxpayers in the two places should be quite different. Those of Oakland should be cheering their governments refusal to be shaken down by the NFL, while the people of Nevada ought to be up in arms about the way they are about to be fleeced by billionaires.

The iconic franchise was lured to Nevada by the state legislatures approval of $750 million in financing toward the building of a $1.9 billion domed stadium where the team would play. While the city of Oakland offered to donate 55 acres to be used for building a new stadium for the Raiders as well as infrastructure improvements that would benefit the team, the NFL preferred the more lucrative bribe from Las Vegas. That means the Raiders will be lame ducks in Oakland for the next two seasons until their current lease expires and they can fly to the desert where by 2020 they will be playing in what will presumably be a state-of-the-art stadium designed to produce far more revenue for the team than their current abode, which was renovated by the city for their benefit in the 1990s.

Teams do provide cities and regions with an almost tribal identity that provides an intangible boost to morale when they win and a sense of shared grief and solidarity when they dont. The tragedy here isnt the decision of the Davis family that owns the Raiders to pull up stakes and move their property someplace they can make more money. In theory, thats capitalism and the fans can always find other forms of entertainment. But the process by which the Raiders and many other professional teams have extorted tax breaks and public financing for their private businesses isnt free enterprise at work. Its crony capitalism at its worst.

Sports leagues argue that new stadiums boost local economies and that the money showered on their owners is a good investment since games provide employment and tax revenue that would go elsewhere if teams were to move. But economists from those at the left-leaning Brookings Institution to the libertarian Cato Institute have consistently debunked these claims for decades. The money most fans spend attending games both at the stadiums and the surrounding neighborhoods has been shown to be merely transferred from other leisure activities. There is also no net uptick in employment, and most of the jobs that are created by ballparks tend to be part-time and low-paying. As for tax revenue, studies have shown that even the most successful examples of new stadiums built with public money that are intended to anchor neighborhood development such as the Camden Yards ballparks positive effect on Baltimores Inner Harbor havent earned enough to justify the investment of public money. Almost all have failed to be self-financing and require substantial ongoing subsidies.

Los Angeles will soon have two new NFL teams (the Rams, who returned last year from St. Louis and the Chargers who are fleeing San Diego), but does anyone think the citys economy was substantially worsened because it functioned without a pro football team for two decades? There is also is no reason to believe Nevadas problems will be erased by the arrival of the Raiders. Las Vegas was the focus of a foreclosure crisis in recent years and Clark County where the city is located voted to increase class sizes and close a school for at-risk students because of budget shortfalls. Yet the state still found three quarters of a billion to spend on a stadium that will increase the profits of a private business.

While the people of Nevada may feel a certain pride about Las Vegas becoming a big league city with the addition of an NFL franchise as well as the one the National Hockey League has awarded it for the 201718 season, thats all they will get out of the transaction. By contrast, Raiders owner Mark Davis and his fellow NFL franchise holders will make a fortune out of a stadium whose design will be geared toward generating increased income from luxury boxes, restaurants, and other bells and whistles that the teams current home lacks. Taxpayers pay the bill for the stadiums, while almost all the benefits go to private interests. This is a Robin Hood in reverse system that amounts to nothing less than socialism for sports team owners.

Why do cities and states consistently do something that is not in their financial interests?

One can trace the political advantages of governments providing their people with bread and circuses back to ancient Rome. The appeal of team sports in our own day is also undeniable. No mayor or governor wants to be remembered as the person who lost a beloved team the way New York City let Major League Baseballs Giants and Dodgers depart for the West Coast in 1957, leaving behind legions of disillusioned fans. By contrast, politicians who agree to even the most egregious deals in which teams are provided new stadiums virtually free of charge (as, for example, was the case in Pennsylvania when the state agreed to finance two new parks for baseball and football in both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia at the start of the new century) that will make them incomparably richer are lionized even if the net impact on taxpayers is overwhelmingly negative.

At a time when Oakland faces a variety of devastating economic and social problems with limited resources, Mayor Libby Schaaf deserves credit for refusing to be intimidated by the NFLs shakedown. The NFL is a $14 billion business with television contracts that ensure that even their most poorly run teams are immensely profitable, while impoverished Oakland still owes $83 million on a deal that lured the team back from Los Angeles two decades ago.

Schaafs example should also inspire other state and municipal leaders who will face the same kind of blackmail in the future to stand firm. The real villains here are the politicians like the Nevada legislators who mortgage the future to build stadiums. As for the team owners who happily accept bribes from states that amount to public subsidies for successful private businesses, if they want new stadiums that will help make them more money, they should pay for them on their own.

Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review Online. Follow him on Twitter at: jonathans_tobin.

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Socialism for Sports Team Owners - National Review

The Art of the Deal didn't work.

The Trump White House tried simply commanding the intransigent conservatives on healthcare. The conservatives didn't follow orders. Trump tried heckling the resisters on Twitter, but that just alienated them. Trump repeatedly, though indirectly, threatened to work against the re-election of no votes. This hardened opposition. And in the end, as White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said on Sunday, Trump just expected "loyalty" from these members of Congress, a baffling idea.

House Speaker Paul Ryan may have been even clumsier in his attempts to build a majority in the House. He crafted the bill behind closed doors with nearly no consultation. He told the rank-and-file there would be no negotiation, calling it a "binary choice" between voting for his bill or keeping Obamacare. Both Ryan and Trump tried the "take-it-or-leave-it" tactic, claiming they would simply walk away from reform if their bill didn't pass.

None of this worked. Nobody should have thought it would work, because Republican leaders haven't figured out any way to run Congress, not since the Bush years.

"Since I became speaker," Ryan said Tuesday, "I have talked about the need to go from being an opposition party to being a proposition party and a governing party. It may take a little bit more time, but we are certainly listening and we're going to get there." It will take both time and innovation on the part of leadership.

Some Establishment Republicans say the entire problem is unprecedented stubbornness from the likes of the House Freedom Caucus. That's a partial explanation that misses the root causes.

Here's the basic problem:

Republican leaders haven't figured out how to lead in the Tea Party era. The two most relevant changes since the Bush era are: (1) The social media-driven decentralization of information and money and (2) the death of earmarks.

Earmarks were the easiest way for leaders to win votes and influence conservatives. If a member is undecided on a bill, just promise him $11 million for a new athletic center in his district, and bam, he's on board.

Also from the Washington Examiner

"We had a great day with the president," Paul said. "We talked about a little bit of healthcare."

04/02/17 5:29 PM

But after the Tea Party, conservatives fought to end the practice of earmarks, which had proven itself to be fertile for corruption. Indeed, the Jack Abramoff scandal and the Duke Cunningham scandal were both made possible by earmarks.

So after the 2010 elections, the Republican House and Senate caucuses passed party rules banning earmarks. That coincided with the dawn of the Tea Party era, when many Republicans had beaten establishment-backed Republicans in primaries before winning the general election. Suddenly, controlling a majority became much harder.

That's the lesser of the handicaps John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell have experienced. The worse problem is that they lost their monopolies on the dissemination of information and fundraising.

Consider the question of whether the American Health Care Act counted as "repealing Obamacare." Ryan stated that with the bill, Republicans were "Keeping Our Promise to Repeal ObamaCare." Donald Trump spoke the same way. Ryan, being the speaker, had the megaphones of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, and CNN to declare that his bill was an Obamacare repeal. Once upon a time, that would have been enough to establish his bill as a repeal of Obamacare. Any member who had campaigned on repealing Obamacare would have felt overwhelming pressure to vote for the bill.

But party leadership can no longer control the message. Through Twitter, Facebook and conservative media came the argument that AHCA wasn't really a repeal of Obamacare because it didn't repeal Obamacare. It left in place the most substantial and costly regulations of that 2010 law. Meanwhile, conservative groups like Heritage Action and the Club for Growth were able to bombard the grassroots with emails and tweets opposing the law, and explaining that it didn't fully repeal Obamacare.

Also from the Washington Examiner

"It is ironic that all of the real evidence of real money and real influence-buying relates to Democrats."

04/02/17 5:24 PM

A bigger deal than the end of the information monopoly is the end of the money monopoly. It used to be that the only place for Republican members to get big injections of campaign cash was by hosting fundraisers with lobbyists their corporate clients who could cut $10,000 checks from a company's political action committee.

Lobbyists formed a symbiotic relationship with committee chairmen and party leaders. Rank-and-file members had to be in the good graces of their chairman or the Speaker and the majority leader if they wanted one of these fundraisers. You couldn't buck leadership without your cash drying up.

No more. Citizens United and Internet fundraising have decentralized campaign cash. If you piss off the party leadership, you can turn to a national network of grassroots ideological donors to fund your re-election. In this fight, it was crystal clear: While the Chamber of Commerce backed the AHCA, the billionaire Koch brothers and the Club for Growth opposed it.

The result: Any Republican who disliked the bill and feared losing the Chamber's fundraising support could simply turn elsewhere for financial support. The Koch network specifically promised to help anyone who voted "no."

Absent the fundraising monopoly, the information monopoly, and earmarks, it will take new methods to lead the GOP. Cajoling, trolling and declaring "take it or leave it," didn't work.

Maybe next time whether it's tax reform or Obamacare again Ryan and Trump will try different methods, such as deliberate, participatory consensus building. There's no guarantee that that would work, but it can't do any worse.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.

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Republicans haven't learned how to govern in Tea Party era - Washington Examiner

In the last couple of months, a new political group has emerged in the Rochester area as part of a nationwide resistance movement.

Borrowing tactics once used by the Tea Party, Indivisible Rochester seeks to effect the same political earthquake as its conservative predecessor, but in a progressive direction.

Its handiwork can be seen locally in various ways: at town hall meetings where activists coordinate their questions in advance; on Facebook where daily action lists are posted to instruct activists which legislators and members of Congress to deluge with calls; in rallies held outside DFL lawmakers' Rochester offices at the Northgate Mall urging resistance to President Donald Trump's agenda and policies.

Many of these Indivisible Rochester activists describe themselves as casual or even indifferent observers of politics until the last several months. They indulged in the usual political rituals. They voted. They followed the news. But few imagined or saw themselves as activists until they were jolted out of their political passivity -- several said by the election of President Trump, whose policies and behavior they saw as an assault on their values.

At one Indivisible Rochester meeting, 80 percent of hands flew up when an Indivisible leader asked how many people had never been politically active before, one member said. There are more than 400 people listed on Indivisible Rochester Facebook.

They view the current moment as a historical turning point. They see the totality of Trump's and GOP lawmakers' agenda the Muslim travel ban, the crackdown on undocumented workers, the proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood, the cutting of Meals on Wheels and a health care proposal that would have led to millions losing their health insurance as a fundamental challenge to the way they see the country.

Laura Zumbrunnen, a Rochester entrepreneur who runs a biomedical startup company, said she was never an overtly political person until she joined Indivisible. Today, she attends forums and rushes to legislative hearings in St. Paul. She confesses to being scared at the prospect of being labeled an activist, "yet, I'm willing to do that," she said. Indivisible appealed to her because she saw it more as offering a plan of action than an ideological platform.

"For me, it was important that it wasn't an extreme group because I'm someone who hasn't been active, and I'm leery of that kind of thing," Zumbrunnen said. "The fact that this was so practical and not particularly ideological appealed to me a lot."

Agitated and fearful, uncertain what to do next, several said they gravitated to Indivisible because it offered a guide, a step-by-step manual crafted by former congressional staffers who had observed the Tea Party and distilled its lessons.

These staffers gleaned two strategic lessons from the the Tea Party's rise and success in thwarting former President Barack Obama's agenda. One was that small, locally based groups could be powerful agents for change.

And two, their efforts were almost entirely defensive. They avoided any attempts at policy development that might fracture their ranks. And instead they focused on resistance.

Practical knowledge, combined with Facebook's ability to connect, has allowed Indivisible to grow, as well as coordinate and mobilize.

That action plan is what drew people such as Suzanne Peterson, a Rochester attorney, to Indivisible.

"Some of us were itching to do something," Peterson said. "We didn't want to just post, not just Facebook and commiserate. We wanted to be active."

It's difficult to say how many Indivisible chapters there are, but Rochester activists believe they are part of a growing nationwide groundswell. They describe Indivisible as loosely organized, a work still in its infancy. Its lack of structure allows people to gravitate to the issues and concerns that interest them.

For some, the cause has become all-consuming.

"I gave up my life, really," said Deb Duffy-Smet, a Rochester mother and grandmother. "It's like a full-time job. The thing is for me: I have five kids spread across the U.S. I have four grandkids and growing. And I'm scared to death what kind of world that we're leaving for my children."

Indivisible members believe the group's efforts have begun to pay off. They cite the failure of House Republicans to pass legislation last week that would have repealed and replaced Obamacare as one sign of the movement's impact.

The conservative Freedom Caucus has been assigned much of the blame for torpedoing the bill, but moderate Republicans opposed the bill, too. And that moderate opposition, they argue, was stiffened and reinforced by Indivisible members and other activist groups, who flooded Washington switchboards.

At the state level, an Indivisible Rochester group has focused on tracking bills at the state Legislature. For most of these Indivisible members new to the legislative process, following the progress of a bill is like peering into tea leaves.

"I have to say: Anyone who wants to track these bills, they could not make it any more difficult," one Indivisible Rochester member said at a recent meeting.

Of particular concern to the group have been redistricting bills authored by GOP Rep. Sarah Anderson and Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer.

Indivisible members say the bills would lead to gerrymandered districts and an unfair playing field because they would disallow an independent commission or the state Supreme Court from drawing congressional and state legislative districts.

On Feb. 24, after a 24-hour Facebook notice went out, Indivisible activists and other opponents of the bill packed a hearing room in St. Paul to oppose the bills.

Recently, it was discovered that a Senate omnibus bill had been changed. It no longer containing language that confined redistricting to the state Legislature only.

"This is indeed a HUGE victory!" DFL Rep. Jennifer Schultz, of Duluth, wrote in an email. Shultz is authoring a bill that would delegate redistricting to a nonpartisan independent commission. "I think the activists did play a role, with so many testifiers, emails and phone calls."

But she noted the redistricting language still could be introduced in conference committee, "so we are a long way from over."

Asked if she was aware of Indivisible at the Legislature, Sen. Carla Nelson, a Rochester Republican, said she has held five town hall meetings since the legislative session started, all of them well-attended.

"As in the past, I receive a high volume of emails daily," she wrote in an email. "I read them all and try to respond to as many constituents as possible. While there have been more town halls than usual, the volume of email is usual hundreds per day."

Activists point out that Indivisible is not the only resistance movement in Southeast Minnesota. Other groups include Minnesota Southeast Progressives and Stand Up, Minnesota. Given the welter of such groups, concerns have been raised by some that the groups overlap to the point of redundancy. The groups have been talking among themselves about ways in which to better differentiate themselves.

Sarah Hocker, a member of Indivisible Rochester and chair of Rochester United Now, another grassroots group, sees value in the diversity of activist groups.

"I've heard that concern from a lot of different people. 'Why are there so many groups?" Hocker said. "I tend to strongly disagree. I think people need to work where they are and where they feel most comfortable. These different groups have formed for a reason, and it also makes it more grassroots."

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Local progressive group adopts Tea Party tactics - Post-Bulletin

Ukraine Embroidery Exhibit at Selby Library WWSB ABC 7 19 framed works of Ukrainian embroidery will be on display. Beside each embroidery, there will be a write up about where it comes, from what type of stitches it uses, what are the motifs and the symbolisms. And where in Ukraine it actually comes from.

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Ukraine Embroidery Exhibit at Selby Library - WWSB ABC 7

As the FBI and Congress continue investigating whether Russia meddled in the presidential election, protesters called Sunday for a special prosecutor to investigate Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and his ties to Ukraine and Russia.

The protesters held handmade posters in front of the entrance to Central Connecticut State University, which includes a sign designating nearby Paul Manafort Drive, named after the late New Britain mayor and Manafort's father.

About 20 members of the Ukrainian-American community and their supporters criticized Manafort for his work for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who has had close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Manafort "wanted to fill his pockets with the Russians' money against the Ukrainian people,'' said Valerie Menditto of East Berlin, a Ukrainian-American who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. "Unfortunately, New Britain is where he was born, and it's a stain on New Britain's legacy. I think the election was corrupt. ... I'm sick of hearing stories that he was a good guy, a good student.''

Manafort, 68, learned the political trade under his father, a Republican who won three elections as mayor in Democratic-dominated New Britain starting in the mid-1960s. The young Manafort started working in President Gerald Ford's White House and eventually became one of the nation's top lobbyists at the powerhouse firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. He joined Trump's campaign in 2016 to corral delegates when Trump's nomination was in doubt, and led the campaign through the convention in Cleveland.

After The New York Times reported that Manafort had multiple contacts with Russian intelligence agents while Trump was running for president, Manafort responded that it was "absurd'' and that he had "never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers.''

But the crowd Sunday had no sympathy, and they want the United States to continue enforcing sanctions against Russia until Putin withdraws Russian troops from Ukraine.

"Manfort is the kind of guy who likes to operate behind the scenes, so we think it's important to out him,'' said Alex Kuzma of Glastonbury, who helped organize the protest. "We're urging the Senate to call him out and to come home and come clean. Our founding fathers warned us about people that have a stake in the success of an enemy of the United States. Putin clearly has an agenda to undermine democracy in Europe and in the United States and to disinform the public.''

He added, "We're afraid there's going to be undue influence on the U.S. government from Putin and from Manafort. It's hard to tell what is not known, but as Sen. [John] McCain said a few weeks ago, 'There's a lot more shoes to drop off of this centipede.' We do think there's a lot more to this story. This is a trail of blood and a trail of tears.''

Manafort has not spoken much publicly about exactly what he did in Ukraine, but he provided details last year in an interview. He has been criticized for being a political consultant for Yanukovych, who had close ties to Putin. Trump has repeatedly traded compliments with Putin, a former KGB officer who has clashed on major issues with the United States at times during two terms as prime minister and two terms as president.

"When people say that I was involved in a pro-Putin administration, number one, they don't understand that Yanukovych and Putin were enemies for most of the four years of his term,'' Manafort told The Courant. "Number two, the main accomplishment of Yanukovych was to set the stage for Ukraine to be in Europe, which is pro-American and pro-Western, not pro-Russian.''

While he was still working for Trump, Manafort said he had been unaware of a previous protest against him in New Britain and laughed upon being told about it.

"The narrative of my involvement has gotten very politicized, not just in the West versus Russia context, but also in the Ukrainian context, which is a very fragmented and divisive community,'' Manafort told The Courant. "You've got a religious division and regional divisions, meaning western Ukraine versus eastern Ukraine. You've got political divisions. It makes U.S. politics look very simple. It was within all of those divisions that narratives get created that are not necessarily true.''

He added, "The role that I played in Ukraine ended up resulting in Ukraine becoming part of the European community. The kind of work I did when Yanukovych was president was to get the IMF deal to put the financial solvency of the country in balance, and then for the rest of that term I worked really as a back channel with the European Union negotiators on the terms of the agreement that ultimately was signed that got Ukraine into Europe. It was a Nixon-goes-to-China kind of situation. There weren't too many people who could have gotten that agreement done, and Yanukovych was one of them. I was the point guy in getting it done."

Manafort emphasized that he has never represented clients against American interests.

"There are a lot of campaigns in Western democracies that I've done that you don't read about," Manafort said. "They were always in concert with U.S. foreign policy, never contrary to it. That's what gets lost in the media messaging."

But Roma Romaniv, a 21-year-old University of Connecticut senior who was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States at age 7, said Americans still don't know the whole story.

"I hope there's a full investigation that is completely transparent,'' Romaniv said. "This is a huge scandal. There's still a lot that's unknown.''

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Ukrainian-Americans Protest Manafort's Ties To Russia - Hartford Courant