Miami-Dade County is paying billions for their new ballpark

People complain about government spending, right? How half of the country is on food stamps and sucking the other half down because they refuse to work, right? Costs need to be cut! Local governments need to stop giving these handouts that only help lazy people!

Then you read a story like this and realize that the needy might be the cause of the problem, it might be the rich people. Public financed stadiums are the biggest farce in all of sports. We pay billionaires to build these palaces designed to charge us more money so we can go watch our favorite baseball team play. The public doesn't get the money back, it goes back to the rich owners. Owners that worth billions of dollars themselves.

Now Miami is on the hook for BILLIONS of dollars for their new ballpark. That's right, they are going to have to pay back billions of dollars so people can go to a privately owned ballteam's game. Good lord.

FROM DEADSPIN:

The county chipped in $500 million for the construction of Marlins Park. The county did not have $500 million, but construction needed to start and be paid for immediately. So Miami-Dade borrowed the money by selling bonds on Wall Street, a loan which won't come due for decades.

When it does, it's going to hurt. The Miami Herald does the math on just one set of those bonds, which raised $91 million. Payments begin in 2026, and quickly skyrocket. By 2048, when the last payment is due, the total reaches $1.18 billion.
....

this $1.2 billion is only on one set of bonds. The total payments for all of the $500 million borrowed by the county will eventually come in at a whopping $2.4 billion. Not only did Jeffrey Loria get taxpayers to buy him a stadium, but they bought him the most expensive stadium ever built.

One thing I noticed is that they'll be paying in 2048. Anybody think that the stadium will still be around by that time? The owner will probably be clamoring for a new state-of-the-art ballpark that actual pickpockets fans as they walk through the concourse far before the date.

Now since it was voted that the county had to build the stadium, they had to find the money somewhere because they just didn't have that kind of cash laying around. Apparently we're more concerned about our cool new stadiums then the local government actually serving some public good.

(If you want to waste money, buy this Marlins hat.)

It's Gametime Baby!

It's finally here! I've been waiting since February for this moment. The day football finally begins again. We have to wait a little longer for the pros to hit the field, but college ball started tonight. And what a way to start!

I have a cousin that goes to the University of South Carolina, and he had been hyping this game between the Gamecocks and North Carolina State. He was pretty excited for the national spotlight for his school. And as the game wore on, he deserved to be. The Gamecocks won handily at 34-0.

Another big opening day match up came within the PAC-10. Oregon State (not wearing their sport bra uniforms much to Brandon's disappointment) got started on wrong foot. Loosing to...wait for it...wait for it...yes, the Beavers dropped this game to Stanford 36-28. Stanford of all schools! They're supposed to be the team PAC-10 teams get excited to play, cause they know it will be a win. Wait, that's now Washington State or Washington. Sad day.

The University of Miami won. But nobody cares.

Number 23 Wake Forest lived up to the hype that's been building around the Demon Deacons with a 41-13 crushing of Baylor. The team looked very good, but don't get too excited. Cause it was the Bears of Baylor and Baylor never wins. The only football team worse than them could be Duke. And Duke doesn't even know where the endzone is.

Georgia Tech beat Jacksonville State (which is lead by quarterback Ryan Perrilloux) HAHAHA. Sorry. Anyway, Tech won 41-14.

UConn beat Hofstra. Who the heck is Hofstra? Is this a made up place? Kinda like Oz? Allow me to visit the most trusted Wikipedia.

Hofstra University is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational institution of higher learning located in Hempstead, Long Island, New York (USA) founded in 1935 on the basis of the estate of wealthy lumber magnate William S. Hofstra (1861-1932) and his (second) wife Kate Mason (1854-1933). The school began as a college of New York University and in 1937 became an independent school called Hofstra College,^[1] later changing its name to Hofstra University in 1963.

In other words, a bunch of rich, preppy kids. Way to go UConn. Really soak this one in.

And lastly, Vanderbilt beat the other Miami (the one in Ohio with out all the bikini clad women) 34-13. But their quarterback Chris Nickson looked great doing it. On the way to the win he rushed for 166 yards, two touchdowns and threw in another one. Not a bad first day.

Man I'm glad it's fall.

Alright, I'm off to join Shaggy and Scooby for another zaney adventure in the Mystery Machine. No seriously though. I'm off on an adventure. I'll keep you posted.

And you thought Total Recall was fiction

Remember watching Total Recall and thinking how cool the X-ray vision glass was. Well it's just become a reality, only a little more perverted.

BALTIMORE — Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation's busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York's Kennedy airport.

Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport in Washington starts using a body scanner today. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks.

"It's the wave of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.

Schear said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation's 2,000 airport checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who need extra screening. "We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with whole-body imaging," Schear said.

Great, wonderful, how fantastic. That creepy airport security guard with the Brett Hart hair and food-stained uniform gets to see the full monty, all in the name of national security.

For the full story head on over here.

"Oh, excuse me miss, it looks like you'll have to go through the scanner again. Whoops, there it goes again you're going to have step through once again."

"You're holding your car keys in the scanner, sir."

"So I am, good catch."

Don't be that intramurals guy...

Man, who doesn't love college intramurals. You've got a quarter of the people taking the game way to serious to the point where fisticuffs break out, a quarter of the people who belong to the frat that refs are a part of and get all the calls and then about half of us that remain are mildly sane.

Then there are these people

1. The Sweat Monkey

Covered in a wonderful sheen of his own mucus, the sweat monkey is always the toughest player to guard on the court because nobody wants to catch Hepititis from the guy's sweat. He also smells like someone mixed together raw tuna and a buffalo hide.

2. The guy that has absolutely no business being on the court or field

Forget playing high school sports, you're contemplating if this guy has even left his room in the past five years. He wears accents such a hiking boots with his shorts and an X-files t-shirt that says "Scully is a hotty". Now while we here at JSON think Scully is indeed a hotty, we don't play intramural sports anymore, so we're off the hook. However, we're pretty sure that our love for a fictional FBI agent is why Harry Potter fans laugh at us.

3. The Miami Fan

Never quite got this one. Despite the fact that they're from Ohio, the insist on wearing their Ricky Williams jersey during flag football and Dwayne Wade threads during bball. If that wasn't weird enough, he actually makes references to Don Shula and Marino when he's playing.

4. The old dude

Fresh off his flashback from Nam, this guy had decided to come back to school to get a degree and the full college experience, which would be fine except when he snaps people's necks with his special forces moves when somebody fouls him hard.

5. The Ringer

We're pretty sure Adam Morrison doesn't go to college any more so we're still wondering why he's listed as one of the other team member's distant cousin from Brasil in a late minute substitution. However, true to his NBA career, he has a poor shooting night and finishes with 10 points.