Deregulator: Alive since '85!

Stress test The surprising resignation of UNLV basketball coach Charlie Spoonhour for stress-related health reasons has the school and its boosters scrambling for a successor. Finding a coach with the bona fides to meet the expectations of the boosters in advance who can then deliver a top-tier program on the court may be impossible. Spoon did a fine job restoring the program -- if not to prominence at least to respectability. After all, when he took over, the team was under NCAA sanctions and scholarship limits, and now the program appears to be clean for the first time ever. And each of his two teams won 20+ games. But fans who think a return to the glory years of Tark and the Shark Tank are a mere hire away are fooling themselves. Listen, the Mountain West Conference is awful. It was lucky beyond belief to have landed and kept coaches of the caliber of Utah's Rick Majerus (who also resigned earlier this year for health reasons) and Jerry Tarkanian. The schools aren't good en

Moneyball goes Hollywood If you're a Dodger fan (I'm not), the team's hiring of Paul DePodesta as general manager should be cause for celebration. DePodesta, as this Rob Neyer column suggests, was the brains behind the wildly successful Oakland front office the past few years, when the team consistently made the postseason, even though it had one of the sport's smaller payrolls. (Take that, Mr. Steinbrenner.) DePodesta and his former boss, Billy Beane, are honor students from the Bill James school -- where numbers rather than hunches (provided by tobacco-chewing scouts) offer the best measure of on-field talent. Beane won with tightwad owners; fellow sabremetrician GM Theo Epstein won at Boston with deep pockets; DePodesta should also have a liberal budget in L.A. In a way, DePodesta is the latest extension of the longtime Dodger tradition launched more than a half-century ago by Branch Rickey, who ran the sport's first "scientific" front office. DePodest

Da trade So A-Rod's going to the Yankees. As a card-carrying Yankee-hater who really likes a lot of the players on that club, I actually think this deal is pretty cool. I mean, only baseball would allow this sort of transaction to take place -- allowing the game's highest-paid player, who may end up being the best at any position of all time, in the prime of his career, to go to the team with the biggest payroll. This could happen in no other major professional sport. The all-consuming obsession for "parity" shared by basketball and football -- and the accompanying necessity for salary caps to make that happen -- is ruining those sports, leading to the constant roster churning which causes fans, as Jerry Seinfeld put it, to "root for laundry." Not in baseball. If The Boss wants to spend six times as much in player salaries as the owners of the Brewers or the Pirates, so be it. And the beauty part is, there's no guarantee the Yankees will actually win any

Weasel alert A story in today's Review-Journal reports that, surprise, surprise, the record-setting, $833-million tax increase enacted by last year's Legislature is causing banks and small businesses to scramble. Non-banking businesses are chafing at the 0.7 percent payroll tax (which replaces the $100 annual per-employee "head tax"). Banks are reeling from both the new 2 percent payroll tax and the new $7,000 per-branch licensing fee. Hit particularly hard are Nevada's smaller, private banks, some of which may have to lay off employees or close branches in the more-isolated hamlets in the state. While no one who lives in this universe should be shocked, the response of pro-tax Democrats (sorry, I repeat myself) to the news is downright disgusting. Assembly Taxation Committee Chairman David Goldwater and Senate Minority Leader Dina "Cross of Gold" Titus are feeling the pain of hard-hit businesses ... a little. Both lawmakers say the taxes they preferre