Colbert King continues to be on fire.... (and more on baseball)

Fred Malek was partners with George W. Bush in the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Colbert King is the deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post. He writes a once-per-week column on Saturdays, that is uniformly excellent. The two previous weeks had been devoted to the odiousness of the "Growth Machine" as realized within the person of John Ray, ex-City Councilmember, now lobbyist-lawyer. Today's column continues on and provides some discussion of Fred Malek, leader of the Washington Baseball Club, the organization which has pushed the hardest and mostest to bring major league baseball back to DC, and is one of the finalists in the competition to purchase the Washington Nationals baseball team from Major League Baseball.

Malek is well known as an old operative under the Nixon Administration. Since then, he's been a venture capitalist, maybe had been an employee of the Marriott Corporation(?--I don't remember the details). The Marriott Family is staunchly Republican. J.W.'s wife's father was Senator Smoot (of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that contributed to the development of the Recession of 1929).

Mr. King's excellent column today, "Fred Malek, Then and Now," ends on this note:

The Post reported that in 1971 Malek had ordered the FBI to conduct an investigation of then-veteran CBS correspondent and Nixon critic Daniel Schorr. It was also in 1971, The Post reported, that Malek was given a patently anti-Semitic order from a paranoid Richard Nixon to count the Jews in high-ranking posts in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Instead of refusing, Malek set about compiling a list of 13 of 35 top BLS employees who, he believed, were Jewish. Less than two months later, two senior BLS officials who were Jewish were moved out of their jobs to less visible posts. Malek acknowledges carrying out the disgusting hunt for Jews, but he denies having anything to do with the transfers.

Disclosure of his role in counting Jews cost him his job as deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1988, just as the responsiveness program had wrecked his postal nomination six years earlier. All that is now considered ancient history. Malek, his friends and supporters vigorously maintain, has atoned for his actions. Now more than ever, he eschews anti-Semitism and adores good government.

In an interview on Thursday, Tony Williams said that longtime baseball advocate Malek has put together a group of investors who are well-anchored in the city and are generous supporters of D.C. schools and other socially useful activities. Malek, the mayor said, is prominently involved in positive community activities and is a key contributor to social causes.

"People also change as they get older," the mayor said. "Don't you think a person deserves a second chance?" Of course I do. Even a rich, politically connected public figure who abused the public trust and had a major hand in polluting the political culture of this city deserves redemption -- provided, of course, that he (or she) has truly repented.

But that's not for me to judge. Leave it to the owners of Major League Baseball and to area sports fans in whose name Fred Malek seeks to become Washington's new baseball Caesar.
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I can't remember the name of the song that has the chorus "This is how they do it to you." If I ever take up podcasting, I'll hum it (although I talk too slow to sound good aurally from a broadcasting sense--although, when I talk about urban revitalization issues I tend to talk plenty fast).

One of my colleagues argues that Mayor Williams is basically a good sort who relies too much on the people around him to do the right thing. In some respects, I think this is true. The people around him on the baseball thing gave Mayor Williams bad advice on how much to give to baseball. DC offered so much that it is a major step backwards in the advances municipalities have made wrt the constant battle between professional sports teams wanting free stadia and balancing this avariciousness on the part of elected and appointed officials. (For more on MLB's attitude towards providing money towards stadia, see this article from the Post, "Nats Bidders Told Not to Offer Funds.")

See this Post article, "Beyond Washington, Most Teams Cover Stadium Overruns," for more on this (as discussed in these blog entries, "When you don't believe you're really 'world class,' you make bad deals" and "Maybe DC can learn that it has something that developers want").

Although, I'd argue that the repercussions of this contract, the fact that DC City Council is having a hard time mustering the will to vote in favor, and that a goodly portion of the populace continues to be appalled by the contract so much so that there is a major campaign against signing the agreement, probably communicates to other professional sports leagues (but not baseball, not yet) that being so greedy is likely to anger too many people and is ultimately counterproductive.

In keeping with this belief, the 12/21/05 issue of themail featured a post by John Hanrahan that disclosed that the law firm that employs Mark H. Tuohey, chairman of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, one of the city's negotiators for the baseball lease, has extensive ties with Major League Baseball, and that a case for conflict of interest could be made. (According to themail, last week Councilmember Cantania has called for an inquiry into the contracts for the city's baseball consultants.)

(Also see "Official Promises To Deliver Stadium: Council Criticizes Giveaways in Deal.")

On Thursday, I complained to the Office of the Inspector General that the Washington Convention and Tourism Corporation, as a recipient and steward of DC tax monies, should not be lobbying for the baseball stadium contract in advance of a vote on the matter by the DC City Council.

I think that an ethics complaint to the DC Bar Association wrt Mr. Tuohey should be considered.

That being said, I wish we could just move on. It'd be a lot easier to move on if Major League Baseball didn't continue to be so avaricious. I mean, who cares about $250,000 a year for supporting youth baseball and other activities, when they managed to get the DC Government to agree to provide MLB with 42.5% of the profits from ancillary development on the stadium site--said site being bought by the DC Government and basically given to MLB for some middling rent...
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I am not very interested in sports, well the politics and business of sport intrigue me, but there clearly is the grist for more than one dissertation here on the baseball side of the growth machine thesis.

Index Keywords: baseball; growth-machine