AFF's Doublethink

For as long as I can remember, my parents have listened to Rush Limbaugh on a semi-regular basis. This permeated my consciousness with conservative inclinations and rendered me fundamentally incapable of harboring liberal views. Though I am indebted to Rush for making me inherently right-of-center, I am perhaps most grateful for his ability to make freakishly accurate predictions about the political Left.

Today Time Magazine reports that, though one of Rush’s predictions deterred from a usual topic of politics, it looks as though he retained his accuracy. Limbaugh, who has been referring to the Gulf Oil Spill as “the leak,” may have been right about the impact it has had on the southern United States:

“Yes, the spill killed birds – but so far, less than 1% of the birds killed by the Exxon Valdez. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins – but, so far, wildlife response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of any mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And, yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes – a real slow-motion ecological calamity – but, so far, shorelines assessment teams have only found about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. [...]

Marine scientist Ivor Van Heerden, another former LSU prof who’s working for a spill response contractor, says “there’s just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good – I think they lied about the size of the spill – but we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts,” says Van Heerden, who, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid out of BP’s spill response funds. “There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it.”

If only Time would cover El Rushbo’s cries against collectivism.

My favorite show, Mad Men, had its fourth season premiere on Sunday. I have found that people either love or hate the show, so I have some food for thought on both camps:

Hate: Okay, fair enough. You might be in the Jeffrey Tucker school of Mad Men criticism, or maybe you just don’t like the various crazy antics of the ad agency. However, I ask you to read this impressive Vanity Fair profile of the show and it’s creator, Matthew Weiner. Perhaps you will give it a second look or a shred of admiration for their attention to detail.

Love: Slate magazine has a running blog that accounts the episodes with various commentary from a variety of perspectives. It is my favorite running critique (and that is saying something).

Personally, I like to relish in the days before the Johnson and Carter administrations since I did not have the privilege to do so firsthand. Roger Sterling has a knack for making it entertaining, too.

Jeffrey Tucker, editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is quickly becoming one of my favorite commentators on pop culture. Lately, I’ve read portions of his book, Bourbon for Breakfast, and come across his postings on Mises.org. Tucker usually writes to observe messes the government makes by implementing frivolous rules to every facet of our lives. While this is his area of expertise, I came across an article he wrote about menswear entitled ‘How To Dress Like a Man’ that I feel I should forward to many of my male friends.

You see, there are two types of clothing in this world, those for public consumption and those that exist for functionality. As Tucker explains, “The great dressing error of our time is to confuse the two. Or more precisely: people think that it is perfectly okay to present yourself to others in clothes which serve a purely functional purpose. They say this is fine because it is comfortable – as if the only thing that matters in life is comfort. Well, it is also comfortable not to shave and not to bathe, and we have a word for people like that: slobs. If you don’t want to be a slob, you have to live with a bit of discomfort.” Tucker proceeds to give a very concise explanation of what a basic wardrobe should entail, but I think it’s worth noting that women can always tell when men put extra effort in their appearance. Tailors are your friend, boys.

A Google search of the phrase “American middle class” brings you to a .gov website about the “Middle Class Task Force” that displays a quote from Vice President Joe Biden, director of the initiative. This is perhaps the most blatant sign that the U.S. middle class is doomed.

Confidence in Joe Biden aside, I saw a recent article in Business Insider that gave me twenty-two more reasons to grow nervous for the comfort of my fellow Americans.  After all, the middle class in any country is at the forefront of consumption and leads business trends.

Among the most frightening:

The average federal worker now earns 60% more than the average worker in the private sector.

The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

21 percent of all children in the US are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.

36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.

The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income. This is a nice contrast to the forty-seven percent of this country that does not even qualify to pay a federal income tax.

Dan Mitchell of CATO believes that things will only get worse for the middle class. “[Politicians] that want to tax the middle class hope to soften opposition among ordinary people by first punishing society’s most productive people. We already know that tax rates on the so-called rich will jump next January thanks to higher income tax rates, higher capital gains tax rates, more double taxation of dividends, and higher death taxes. Now the politicians are preparing to drop the other shoe.” Particularly since there are not enough rich people to finance big government.  Uhh ohhh.

Although Sonny made the case for busting up teachers’ unions, the very same issue of the Weekly Standard describes one industry in which unions were a great force for social justice: Major League Baseball. [subscription only]

In 1965, players earned an average of $14,000. Today, the average is $3 million. What happened?

There is no doubt, however, that before their union was formed, players were little more than chattel. Team owners colluded to sign every player to a contract containing the so-called reserve clause that bound him to a single team until it chose to release or trade him. Years of turmoil produced the current system—too complex to summarize here—that allows players with a certain seniority to become “free agents” and shop their talents around. Hence the multiyear multimillion-dollar contracts.

Dang.

Service is its own reward, a but an $800,000 salary isn’t bad either, especially if you’re the city manager for Bell, California. The LA Times reports:

A local official in California earning close to $800,000 a year as the manager of a city with nearly a quarter of its population in poverty has quit following a public uproar, the mayor said on Friday…

[Robert] Rizzo’s $787,637 salary was nearly twice that of U.S. President Barack Obama, a considerable expense for a city of 37,000 people operating its own food bank for impoverished residents.

Both the attorney general’s office and Calpers, the California public pension system, are investigating the situation.

Calpers has an interest in the compensation Bell provided because of the pension payments it must make.

Rizzo could amass pension payments of more than $30 million in retirement if he lives until age 83, according to an analysis by the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a group calling for an overhaul of the state’s public pension system.

I was perusing the Foreign Policy blog today, something I do far too infrequently. I came across an article that has smacked me with a degree of sobriety towards the impending cultural doom we are facing….

In China, Pabst Blue Ribbon is $44. There is something wrong with this picture. I really do not want them buying up our debt if PBR can pass for 88x it’s value.

What does purchasing gold have to do with healthcare?

Don’t worry; the government probably doesn’t know either.

Yet, “[starting] Jan. 1, 2012, Form 1099s will become a means of reporting to the Internal Revenue Service the purchases of all goods and services by small businesses and self-employed people that exceed $600 during a calendar year. Precious metals such as coins and bullion fall into this category and coin dealers have been among those most rankled by the change.

 This provision, intended to mine what the IRS deems a vast reservoir of uncollected income tax, was included in the health care legislation ostensibly as a way to pay for it. The tax code tweak is expected to raise $17 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.” David Galland went as far as to speculate that “[the] implications of this move transcend just the precious metals. Rather, this is a deliberate step in the direction of implementing a VAT – once the government has everyone reporting essentially every transaction, taking the next step is a snap.”

With American policies decimating the value of the dollar, it makes sense for anyone with some insight to invest in gold. President Obama’s behemoth bill has ensured that this will not go without punishment either.

We still miss Sonny here at CF, but he does have a great article in the new Weekly Standard, about how liberal filmmakers have turned against teachers unions. You heard me right. Davis Guggenheim, the director of An Inconvenient Truth, has a new documentary out, entitled Waiting for “Superman”:

Guggenheim and the reformers he interviews come back to the troubling aspects of teacher tenure. Like its cousin in higher education, tenure is a guarantee of employment for life. Unlike in higher education, however, tenure is handed out to virtually every public school teacher after a short wait, typically two to three years. When layoffs occur, school districts are forced to operate on a “last hired, first fired” basis instead of deciding who to keep based on merit. The one-two combo of tenure and seniority has made it almost impossible to fire poor teachers.

Consider Chicago. Only 28.5 percent of Chicago Public School students met or exceeded expectations on the composite Prairie State Achievement Examination in the 11th grade. In science and math, those numbers were even more dismal; a mere 23.7 and 26.9 percent, respectively, met or exceeded the standards expected of them. But the teachers responsible for these outcomes are virtually untouchable. According to Newsweek, the percentage of Chicago teachers dismissed for poor performance between 2005 and 2008 was 0.1 percent. In a district where only one in four students is proficient in math and science, how is it possible that less than one in one thousand teachers is worthy of dismissal?

Why have liberal filmmakers — and liberals more broadly — started to turn against unions? I don’t have a great answer, but I think that at least some credit should go to Teach for America, the government program that places top college graduates in rural and inner-city public schools to teach for two or three years. I have several friends who did the program in Washington, DC. They see the problems there first hand, so they don’t fall back on the teachers unions’ old saw that the only problem is not enough money.

For three years, a few hundred liberal journalists engaged in an off-the-record internet email group called JournoList, which often plotted stories and ways to portray news to help the political left. It was finally closed down last month. Thankfully, JournoList continues to leak information from its archives so that we can see the farce that the American news media has become. In the WSJ Political Diary newsletter, John Fund writes, “[some] of the comments will no doubt revive conservative allegations of a liberal news media conspiracy. Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent, now at Wired, urged fellow journalists to kill the story of Mr. Obama’s ties to the controversial Revered Jeremiah Wright by going after some of his critics. ‘Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists,’ he urged. ‘What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.’”

For many months, the media campaign against Fox News, and related organizations, has looked like a Saul Alinsky smear campaign. Of course, it has been very hard to articulate this with some credible evidence. Finally, though, much like the “Climategate” emails put a hole in the IPCC ‘consensus,’ there is some tangible evidence that there is reason to be skeptical of the mainstream approach to covering politics.