Bob Gets the Spirit Award on this One

Jeter is awesome, but it's hard to argue with Abreu's 4 RBIs (and there's no good Wes Anderson quotes about going 5/5). Did Kyle Farnsworth get into a groove at the end of the 8th there? How many times did McCarver call Detroit, "Chicago?" Can I have more man-love for Giambi at this point? Is that water, sweat, or pure grease in his hair? Dare I go to a game in Detroit this weekend? Where can I get a bullet-proof vest for such an outing? Will I ever see Wang pitch without thinking, "This place is exclusive Wang, so don't tell them you're Jewish?" Was anyone surprised when Myers gave up that homer? Is the guy with the 3rd best batting average in the AL, the weakest link in the Yankees' starting lineup?

As the Yankees provide more questions than answers, I'm moving on...

Having missed two TNDCs (Thursday Night Drinking Clubs), coughed my way all around town, called a friend that once had mono to ask him whether the symptoms I had sounded like mono, scared away friends and colleagues, and made two trips to the student health center, finally my sickness has subsided. I didn't take any cough drops, Nyquil, Dayquil, Sudafed, or Advil for most of the day today. Progress!

In addition, I drank some of the best beer in the world (free beer) at an Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and Private Equity Club gathering in Ida Noyes Hall, which is the pub conveniently located next door to the business school here in Chicago. You can't spell "raging party" without EVP. Ok, so you can, but who cares when the EVP is providing free beer, nachos, and fried cheese?

Speaking of Chicago, Job prospects are looking good at this point.

With that I yield the floor to Barney Frank, and one of my favorite quotes of his. It's basically him calling out the Republicans for being the party of empty rhetoric (the context is over an agricultural appropriations bill):

Mr. Chairman, I am here to confess my reading incomprehension. I have listened to many of my conservative friends talk about the wonders of the free market, of the importance of letting the consumers make their best choices, of keeping government out of economic activity, of the virtues of free trade, but then I look at various agricultural programs like this one. Now, it violates every principle of free market economics known to man and two or three not yet discovered.

So I have been forced to conclude that in all of those great free market texts by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and all the others that there is a footnote that says, by the way, none of this applies to agriculture. Now, it may be written in high German, and that may be why I have not been able to discern it, but there is no greater contrast in America today than between the free enterprise rhetoric of so many conservatives and the statist, subsidized, inflationary, protectionist, anti-consumer agricultural policies, and this is one of them.

In particular, I have listened to people, and some of us have said let us protect workers and the environment in trade; let us not have unrestricted free trade; but let us have trade that respects worker rights and environmental rights. And we have been excoriated for our lack of concern for poor countries.

There is no greater obstacle, as it is now clear in the Doha round, to the completion of a comprehensive trade policy than the American agricultural policy, with one exception, European agricultural policy, which is much worse and just as phony.

Sugar is an example. This program is an interference with the legitimate efforts at economic self-help in many foreign nations. So I appreciate the leadership of the gentleman from Arizona [Jeff Flake] and the gentleman from Oregon [Roy Blumenauer]. Here is a chance for some of my free-enterprise-professing friends to get honest with themselves, and now maybe we will see some born-again free enterprisers in the agricultural field.