“It is extremely unfortunate that this incident took place on what was otherwise a great day at Dodger Stadium…”
This obtuse statement by Dodger management after the brutal beating of Giants fan Bryan Stow in the stadium parking lot is reminiscent of the cruel joke about Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater: “Mrs. Lincoln, aside from the shooting, how was the play?”
Meanwhile, Stow remains in a coma, and his two children are uncertain if their father will ever be able to give them another hug.
Dodger damage control includes appointing former L.A. police chief Bill Bratton as a security consultant, reviewing policy on alcohol sizes and prices, and offering a $25,000 reward for information about the two thugs responsible for the beating—a figure currently increased to $150,000 by others..
A question seldom raised in the various articles about this incident is why hundreds of security officers should be needed at a baseball game—a question that suggests answers most folks would rather ignore.
Mayor Villaraigosa speaks nostalgically of the days when he watched the “Boys in Blue play at Chavez Ravine,” then laments obliquely that “our stadium environment has become something we can no longer be proud of”—as if the problem concerned shabby restroom facilities and not the number of individuals in cities like Los Angeles whose link to civilized behavior has become tenuous.
I can recall the days when fans often wore sportcoats and even ties to baseball games—a time when the use of crude expletives was viewed with all the disdain now reserved for smokers. It was an era prior to the cultural revolution that viewed obscene language as a badge of honor and chunked “meaningless” behavioral restrictions into a dustbin labeled “Don’t trust anyone [or anything] over thirty.”
The ultimate result of those sixties innovations is that residents in San Diego and Riverside County now have to ponder seriously the security implications of attending a major league baseball game—especially at Dodger Stadium.
A typical response to any criticism of modern American culture is that virulent discrimination existed in the past. This rationalization forges a link between the decadence of a Charlie Sheen and the just treatment of all individuals—as if progress in civil rights would have been impossible absent the abolition of traditional standards of dress, speech and deportment.
Apparently the beating of a few innocent fathers at baseball games is the price we pay for a more just society—or so the “logic” goes.
Only profound decadence, however, could seriously believe that social justice and barbaric behavior belong on the same team.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Friday, April 01, 2011
TEXAS, TAXES, AND GOVERNOR BROWN
In the Texas of my youth there was an ongoing verbal jousting match between the Lone Star State and California. One native joke had a West Coast visitor disparaging a puny Texas watermelon—only to be informed that he was eyeing a Texas-size grape. Californians responded with similar estimates of the Golden State.
In February an outsider to this interstate rivalry, journalist Mark Hemingway, composed a series of articles for the Washington Examiner that again compared Texas and California. “The result,” said Hemingway, was that “the only thing that isn’t bigger in Texas is the government.”
He also might have added that Texas’ unemployment isn’t nearly as large as California’s. Despite similarly-sized Hispanic populations (about a third) and borders with Mexico, unemployment in the Lone Star State last month was a seasonally adjusted 8.2 percent. California’s rate, by contrast, was 12.2 percent—a figure exceeded only by Nevada’s 13.6 percent.
The other side of those statistics, of course, is that employment has been growing more in Texas than in any other state. Hemingway observes that in 2008 “70% of all the jobs in the country were created in Texas” and that in the first half of 2010 the state “added 178,000 jobs—twice as many as any other state.” Meanwhile, California “lost more than 113,000 jobs from August 2009 to August 2010.”
The primary reason for this radical economic disparity, according to Hemingway, is Texas’ business-friendly climate, a state whose low-tax, right-to-work, low-regulation environment contrasts sharply with California’s environmental- and union-driven regulatory regime.
California’s Board of Barbering and Cosmetology provided Hemingway with a poster-girl example of regulators-gone-wild by “requiring African hair-braiding businesses to undergo 1600 hours of training and (to) pay $5,000 in licensing fees”—mandates so onerous that a San Diego federal judge in 1999 sided with “locktician” and SDSU Professor, JoAnne Cornwell, and struck down the requirements.
The cosmetology kerfuffle of ’99 is nothing compared to the new state cap-and-trade regulations that were recently put on hold by a state judge—not for economic reasons, mind you, but because they might cause disproportionate pollution in poor neighborhoods.
Hemingway also notes that California’s per capita state and local government spending is over 46% more than in Texas and that much of that money goes to extravagant public pensions (now underfunded by $535 billion) and to government jobs that average $90,000 a year—a third above the national average.
No wonder that California, from 2000 to 2009, “had a domestic outflow of 1.5 million people,” while 850,000 moved to Texas from other states.
And Jerry Brown’s solution to California’s chronic budget deficit? Raise taxes.
In February an outsider to this interstate rivalry, journalist Mark Hemingway, composed a series of articles for the Washington Examiner that again compared Texas and California. “The result,” said Hemingway, was that “the only thing that isn’t bigger in Texas is the government.”
He also might have added that Texas’ unemployment isn’t nearly as large as California’s. Despite similarly-sized Hispanic populations (about a third) and borders with Mexico, unemployment in the Lone Star State last month was a seasonally adjusted 8.2 percent. California’s rate, by contrast, was 12.2 percent—a figure exceeded only by Nevada’s 13.6 percent.
The other side of those statistics, of course, is that employment has been growing more in Texas than in any other state. Hemingway observes that in 2008 “70% of all the jobs in the country were created in Texas” and that in the first half of 2010 the state “added 178,000 jobs—twice as many as any other state.” Meanwhile, California “lost more than 113,000 jobs from August 2009 to August 2010.”
The primary reason for this radical economic disparity, according to Hemingway, is Texas’ business-friendly climate, a state whose low-tax, right-to-work, low-regulation environment contrasts sharply with California’s environmental- and union-driven regulatory regime.
California’s Board of Barbering and Cosmetology provided Hemingway with a poster-girl example of regulators-gone-wild by “requiring African hair-braiding businesses to undergo 1600 hours of training and (to) pay $5,000 in licensing fees”—mandates so onerous that a San Diego federal judge in 1999 sided with “locktician” and SDSU Professor, JoAnne Cornwell, and struck down the requirements.
The cosmetology kerfuffle of ’99 is nothing compared to the new state cap-and-trade regulations that were recently put on hold by a state judge—not for economic reasons, mind you, but because they might cause disproportionate pollution in poor neighborhoods.
Hemingway also notes that California’s per capita state and local government spending is over 46% more than in Texas and that much of that money goes to extravagant public pensions (now underfunded by $535 billion) and to government jobs that average $90,000 a year—a third above the national average.
No wonder that California, from 2000 to 2009, “had a domestic outflow of 1.5 million people,” while 850,000 moved to Texas from other states.
And Jerry Brown’s solution to California’s chronic budget deficit? Raise taxes.
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