Blue Collar Muse

Former US Senator and VP cum pseudo-scientific alarmist Al Gore has been in the news a fair amount over the last week or so. Mostly for winning The Nobel Peace Prize. As the Selection Committee didn’t ask me for input, I wasn’t able to suggest that he be awarded a Prize more fitting for his contribution to society - say, the Nobel Meteorological Prize or the Nobel ‘Risky Scheme’ Prize. Absent my input, they awarded Mr. Gore the Nobel Prize for Peace. Did I mention Al hasn’t done a lot of work in that field? How then did he win?

But, win he did. I wish him well. Still, a quick browse through my blogroll last night yielded two VERY interesting posts.

For those of you wondering whether or not Mr. Gore is really and truly committed to the discipline that earned him his prize, please check out ‘Inconvenient and Inconvenienter’ at Ft. Hard Knox. It’s not new info but it bears repeating given the explosion of Gore-dmiration washing over certain parts of the nation.

For those of you wondering about Mr. Gore’s competition for his **Peace** prize, please visit Karl’s post ‘Do You Know Who Irena Sendler Is? You Should!’ at Leaning Straight Up. We used to give the Peace Prize to men like Dr. Martin Luther King (1964). However, since Mahatma Ghandi never won The Nobel Peace Prize, it seems odd that we award it to men like Yassir Arafat and now Al Gore.

If anyone has any additional interesting observations on the irony or inappropriateness of Mr. Gore receiving this award, please leave them in comments.

Thinking that the Committee needs some refresher courses on the clear meaning of words …

Blue Collar Muse

Popularity: 26% [?]

Earlier this year, when the Dukies were finally cleared of the charges against them, one journalist took a particularly interesting road when describing the media’s meltdown in coverage on the story. James Taranto penned a quick recap in his ‘Best of the Web’ for July 18th, 2007:

Rachel Smolkin of the American Journalism Review, in a post-mortem on the Duke rape hoax and journalists’ credulity in reporting it, relays a damning quote:

Perhaps the most complex lessons about the media coverage of the Duke case involve issues of narrative. Unquestionably, the media too readily ran with a simplistic storyline, sacrificing a search for truth. Not only were the accused innocent of rape, the allegations of racial taunts that received so much media attention appear to have been exaggerated.

“We fell into a stereotype of the Duke lacrosse players,” says Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. “It’s complicated because there is a strong stereotype [that] lacrosse players can be loutish, and there’s evidence to back that up. There’s even some evidence that that the Duke lacrosse players were loutish, and we were too quick to connect those dots.”

But he adds: “It was about race. Nifong’s motivations clearly were rooted in his need to win black votes. There were tensions between town and gown, that part was true. The narrative was properly about race, sex and class. . . . We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place. . . . We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”

If the facts are wrong, though, why explore the narrative at all? Is it fair to use the Duke lacrosse players to tell a larger story of athletes run wild–a theme that appeared not only on sports pages but also was splashed, repeatedly, on the front pages of major newspapers and amplified on cable shoutfests? Says [KC] Johnson [an early skeptic of the case]: Once the facts are “proven not to be true, you certainly have to consider whether the narrative is relevant.”

“The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.” This is reminiscent of the “fake but accurate” defense of CBS’s Bush National Guard hoax. If Thomas were giving a plainer account of what happened, he would have said something like this: Our reporting was guided by our prejudices, and even though the story turned out to be false, we stand behind our prejudices.

The money quote that will likely survive most of us, of course, was “The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong!”

You’d think after the Dan Rather reaming and the Dukies debacle, Left leaning broadcast media would be on high alert. But you’d be wrong. In an incredible example of inability to learn from previous blunders, yet another Left leaning commentator, Air America radio personality Jon Elliott, brought more deserved disdain on their cause. Elliott reported that a fellow Air America host, Randi Rhodes, had been mugged while walking her dog and that she had sustained some fairly serious injuries. He went on to speculate that it was the work of Conservatives who were seeking to silence the Left’s voice on the radio. Unfortunately, neither Mr. Elliott or anyone else at Air America bothered to call Ms. Rhodes to find out what happened and the story turned out to be completely and decidedly not true! No word yet on where Elliott, Rhodes or Air America plan to go with this. Captain Ed at Captain’s Quarters Blog has the entire story!

Thinking Air America hosts could open their shows with “Factses?! We don’t NEED no stinking factses!” …

Blue Collar Muse

SEE ALSO:

Nothing Happened to Air America Host at Wake Up America
Liberal Host Mugged, Right Wing to Blame at Liberty Pundit
Air America’s “Emily Litella” Moment at bRight and Early
Randy Rhodes Not Mugged at NeoCon News

Popularity: 26% [?]

Hat tip to Adam Graham over at Adam’s Blog for pointing me to this report.

The National Tax Foundation released their state rankings for 2008 and included the state rankings for 2003 through 2007 as well. Tennessee, by virtue of its lack of a state income tax, shows in the mid teens for all 6 years. We ranked either 15, 16 or 17 in these years and are currently at 16th in the nation overall.

I thought I would look at the numbers for the last couple of years and examine the top and bottom of the country’s state rankings. 2005 data is not listed. I don’t know why.

2004 2006 2007 2008

#1 WY WY WY WY
#2 SD SD SD SD
#3 NV NV NV AK
#4 AK AK AK NV
#5 FL FL FL FL

TX #6 #6 #6 #8
TN #17 #15 #17 #16
IL #25 #29 #27 #28

#46 VT CA CA OH
#47 NJ OH NJ CA
#48 OH NJ NY NY
#49 RI NY OH NJ
#50 NY RI RI RI

At first glance, the observation that comes to mind is that the top 5 states listed have no income tax. According to Right Mind, 7 of the top 10 do not have an income tax. The Red State/Blue State comparison is interesting as is the geographic breakdown. Evidently, the bluer one gets the higher ones taxes. Only Florida is out of the NW or Northern Plains area for the best ranked states and only Vermont and Ohio are not one of the original 13 colonies. Evidently these states are farther down the road from Faith, Courage, Liberty and Abundance to Complacency, Apathy, Dependence and Bondage. I hope I don’t live long enough to see th rest of the country follow that road.

The study takes into account a variety of taxes for each state. This contributes to the different rankings. The taxes used to evaluate a state are:

Corporate Taxes
Individual Income Taxes
Sales Taxes
Unemployment Insurance Taxes
Property Taxes

Thus while a state may rank high in the Income Tax category, such as Tennessee, our other taxes bring our overall ranking down. But the overall rankings are still interesting to see how the states wash out. For instance, TN is comfortably in the top third overall for 2008 due to being 8th for Income Tax while 48th for Sales Tax. While it is bad being 48th, the state must still raise revenue for its budget. That it does so via a Sales Tax as opposed to an Income Tax is not only good for rankings but good for Tennesseans! We could be living in NY which enjoys its bottom of the barrel rankings due to being 41st in Income Tax and 49th in Sales Tax. NY citizens get hammered on both counts. In fact, NY ranks in the bottom 10 for every tax category except its 23rd showing in Corporate Tax. The rankings for OH, RI and NJ share similar influences. They are the worst in virtually every category of tax. The final rankings for those states involve better Unemployment Tax rates.

Population density seems to play some sort of role. NY and CA have the country’s two largest cities and they fare poorly. CA has several of the cities in the top 100 cities ranked by population by the Census Bureau in 1990. By contrast, the 4 states at the top of the rankings only have 2 cities in the top 100, Anchorage and Las Vegas. Both of those cities rank in the 60s with populations a little over 250,000 each.

The bottom line is that the worst tax situations for citizens come from heavily Democratic states and the best come from traditionally Republican states. Those states that deem high taxes are a good thing generally apply that opinion to most of the taxes they collect.

For Tennessee, we could improve our rankings by lowering 3 taxes – Sales (48th), Property (35th) and Unemployment (31st).

I’d love to see lower rates in all three areas. It would make our state even more attractive to business and manufacturing which would be good for job growth. It would expand our population base as people move here to enjoy lower taxes. Hopefully it would change the state’s makeup enough that the Democrats would lose even more influence even in traditionally Democratic strongholds like Nashville and Memphis. Of course, we’ll need to make sure the folks gaining influence are Conservatives who will maintain the low-tax, less government, more personal freedom approach that will provide such a change. Time will tell.

Thinking that being Sweet 16 in the rankings leaves us just 6 slots from the Top Ten …

Blue Collar Muse

Popularity: 21% [?]