Brodsky played a big role in the congestion pricing plan to reduce car traffic and emissions in Manhattan. His objection of course had nothing to do with his connections to various parking garage interests who stood to lose considerable business if congestion pricing was successful.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/07/09/richard-brodsky-working-for-the-public-or-the-parking-industry/

As little credibility as Bud Selig may have had, members of the NY State legislature probably come in a peg or two lower.

That said, the ticket prices at the new stadium are outrageous. Plus there will be fewer seats than the current stadium. While the new building looks much better than the current one, the average fan loses here big time. Of course, if the Yankees plan to field teams with records comparable to the 08 squad, I don't see prices staying so high once the bloom is off the rose of the new building.

Wonder why she didn't try to get a "No Elitists!" statement into the party's platform.

I thought she didn't "blink" when asked to accept the nomination. I guess she kept her eyes open for the time it took to make travel arrangements, get the kids from Alaska to Ohio an and then take the family vote. Pretty good.

Of course what we're really looking at here is a candidate who will say one thing in an interview with Gibson and another in an interview with Hannity.

This plan will allow all of us who are so accustomed to living beyond our means to continue to do so for some slightly longer period of time. This includes the companies that borrowed more than they could cover. Consumers who spend more than they earn, not just on houses but everything else. This includes politicians who spend on projects, programs and services more than they are wiling to tax. This plan just extends the game we are all playing just a little bit longer.

You either agree with the notion of the government spending all this money on troubled assets or you don't. There should be no negotiations about getting something in return. The idea that curbs on executive compensation in exchange for Democratic support of this measure is a farce. However cathartic it may be to see some executives stripped of their inflated compensation packages, $700 billion is a lot to pay for that brief moment of victory. It would be only a matter of time before these companies figure out new ways to hansdsomely reward their top executives.

Reasonable people can disagree on the value of giving the treasury secretary $700 billion to spend to solve this crises. But throwing in a 20 minute press conference with Barney Frank on the steps of the Capitol declaring that he has helped reduce compensation for a couple of CEOs by a couple million dollars shouldn't make the $700 billion any easier to swallow.

This is just window dressing and a sign of what happens when elected officials get their hands on anything. Let's focus on the big issues here.

As some comments here have stated the Volt is a significantly different technology. However, what we learn from the post and other comments is that not everybody is interested in actually learning about this stuff and that's where the Volt's challenge lies. As of today the Prius is really the only great success story to date in this "green" space of the market. Is the Prius a technological achievement? Yes. But the Prius' success is as much a product of its image as anything. The 2010 Volt will be "greener" than the 2009 Prius. The first question is whether people will know this. That the Prius is a hit while other hybrids that built off of other cars (Civic, Accord, Camry, Altima) are less successful is evidence that people want their neighbor to know they are in a hybrid. For the Volt to succeed, people will need to perceive its "greenness"...the facts will be secondary.

Of course, the 2010 Prius and future Honda Insight may outclass the Volt too.

I've been waiting for someone to do an anti-anti-Jeter column for a long time. He's great. That's it. For the past 15 years I've had to hear people talk about how this or that shortstop is better than Jeter. But if you're the guy that more than a generation's worth of great shortstops are compared to, you must have had a damn good career. I think that's what we'll all be saying once Jeter takes his place in Cooperstown.

Note: Jeter may also benefit from the fact that the only shortstop with greater production over the arbitrary period of time defined by Jeter's full career is playing next to him at third.

Why do so many (any) news organizations continue to commission national polls and then publish/report on the results? They are meaningless when it's the electoral count that matters. The press did the same thing when reporting on how many states Obama and Clinton had in the primaries when it was the delegate count that mattered. Electoral counts and delegate counts are not particularly complex concepts yet the media prefers to report these meaningless poll results. That Obama or McCain are trading leads of a few percentage points in national polling tell us nothing with regard to who leads in the state by state count of electoral votes.

The following are two equally informative reports on the presidential campaign.

"As the presidential race enters it's final weeks, Obama leads in national polls by 2 percentage points."

"As the presidential race enters it's final weeks, the Sand Diego Chargers beat the New York Jets 48-29."

Inevitably, in some percentage of these cases, people will end up losing their homes. Under this plan, it could end up that it's the government who will have to kick them out. Is that ever going to work politically? If the government owns these assets, there won't be any greedy corporations to fill the roll of the bad guy.