Today in 1963, ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand” moved from every weekday afternoon in Philadelphia to Saturdays in California:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Doors’ “Waiting for the Sun,” their only number one album:
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:
Over the past few years, many organizations have promoted “fact checkers” by making them writers, or perhaps demoted writers by making them fact checkers. No, it’s more the former, because other writers have been bowing to the “fact checkers” as submissively as Barack Obama upon meeting some anti-American dictator. …
Perhaps the reason other journalists are so deferential toward the “fact checkers” is that these fact checkers, unlike the traditional ones, don’t check the facts of journalists but of politicians. By and large, they aren’t actually checking facts but making and asserting judgments about the veracity of politicians’ arguments.
The quality of their work is generally quite poor. “The MSM’s [‘mainstream’ media’s] fact-checkers often don’t know what they’re talking about,” notes Mickey Kaus, who cites an example on a subject he knows well:
The oft-cited CNN-“fact check” of Romney’s welfare ad makes a big deal of HHS secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius’ pledge that she will only grant waivers to states that “commit that their proposals will move at least 20% more people from welfare to work.” CNN swallows this 20% Rule whole in the course of declaring Romney’s objection “wrong”:
“The waivers gave ‘those states some flexibility in how they manage their welfare rolls as long as it produced 20% increases in the number of people getting work.’ “
Why, it looks as if Obama wants to make the work provisions tougher! Fact-check.org cites the same 20% rule.
I was initially skeptical of Sebelius’ 20% pledge, since a) it measures the 20% against “the state’s past performance,” not what the state’s performance would be if it actually tried to comply with the welfare law’s requirements as written, and b) Sebelius pulled it out of thin air only after it became clear that the new waiver rule could be a political problem for the president. She could just as easily drop it in the future; and c) Sebelius made it clear the states don’t have to actually achieve the 20% goal–only “demonstrate clear progress toward” it.
But Robert Rector, a welfare reform zealot who nevertheless does know what he’s talking about, has now published a longer analysis of the 20% rule. Turns out it’s not as big a scam as I’d thought it was. It’s a much bigger scam. The merits of the argument are beyond the scope of today’s column. It is quite possible that there are people whose knowledge of the subject is as deep as Kaus’s and Rector’s but whose honest interpretation is more favorable to the Sebelius position. An appeal to their authority could carry as much weight as our appeal to Kaus’s and Rector’s.
But an appeal to the authority of “independent fact checkers” carries no weight at all. In case you’re skeptical of this assertion, let’s look at some other examples of their output from the past week.
Here’s an excerpt from an Associated Press “fact check” of Paul Ryan’s convention speech:
RYAN: “And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. . . . So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.”
THE FACTS: Ryan’s claim ignores the fact that Ryan himself incorporated the same cuts into budgets he steered through the House in the past two years as chairman of its Budget Committee. . . .
RYAN: “The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.”
THE FACTS: Ryan himself asked for stimulus funds shortly after Congress approved the $800 billion plan.In both of these cases, the AP neither disputes nor verifies the factual accuracy of Ryan’s statements. Each of these is simply a tu quoque–an argument against Ryan. Under the guise of fact checking, the AP is simply taking sides in a partisan political dispute.
The most disputed portion of Ryan’s speech involved the closing of a General Motors plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wis. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal Friday defended Ryan’s account against “the press corps ‘fact checkers’ and the liberals who love them.”
But even the so-called fact checkers can’t agree on the facts. PolitiFact rated Ryan’s account “false,” while CNN.com called it “true but incomplete.” Anyone who really believes in the authority of “fact checkers” has a liar’s paradox problem. …
Sometimes the “fact checkers” are ignorant even of facts that, in contrast with the welfare material above, require no special expertise to know. This is from a CNN.com “fact check”:
In a new policy paper, his Republican rival for the White House, Mitt Romney, says, “President Obama has intentionally sought to shut down oil, gas, and coal production in pursuit of his own alternative energy agenda.” . . .
Obama has, for sure, angered some oil and coal producers by steering federal money to alternative energy sources. But there is no evidence that he is trying to “shut down” traditional energy industries.No evidence? How about Obama’s own words? “So, if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” …
Among “fact checkers,” the worst of a bad lot may be the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. On Thursday afternoon he actually wrote a post called “Previewing the ‘Facts’ in Mitt Romney’s Acceptance Speech.” With those scare quotes, he declared the Republican nominee a liar before Romney had even opened his mouth. …
Obama may yet eke out an ugly victory, but the decline of the MSM’s authority seems inexorable. And it’s not only “fact checkers” who are acting like out-and-out partisans. Time’s Joe Klein is “the Pope of American political journalists” according to the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur. RealClearPolitics notes an ex cathedra pronouncement he made the other day when he granted an audience to the New York Times’s Helene Cooper:
Cooper: Four years of covering Barack Obama, he does not play the race card. Not in a negative way. He does not do that.
Klein: He hates it. He hates it. He probably should, though. He probably should address it because the bitterness out there is really becoming marked.Some may dispute Cooper’s claim that Obama doesn’t “play the race card.” But Klein’s assertion that he “probably should” is really quite stunning. It’s almost certainly bad advice. Indeed, we’d say following it in 2008 would have been one of the few ways he could have lost to John McCain. Successful or not, the attempt to foment racial division would be as repugnant coming from a black leftist as from a white conservative.
Above all, though: What in the world is a journalist doing offering such rancid advice? In general terms, the same thing all those “fact checkers” are doing. Also the same thing journalists did when they slandered the Tea Party as racist, and when they wrote puff pieces about ObamaCare and insisted the public would learn to love it, and when they falsely blamed conservatives for the Tucson massacre.
Reason.com chronicles “5 Stupid Government Interventions in Sports,” including:
5. The Feds Tackle Steroids in Baseball
Congress’ first foray into investigating steroid use in America’s pastime this century came in2005, when the House Government Reform Committee (seriously) hauled in Mark McGwire, who broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record in 1998. McGwire initially refused to answer questions about steroid use, but in 2010 he admitted to having used steroids during his record-breaking season. ..
The highly publicized hearings led to no action by Congress, though pitching ace Roger Clemens was brought up on felony perjury charges for lying to Congress. He was acquitted earlier this year.
4. Washington pushes college football toward a playoff system.
In 2009, Congress turned its attention from professional baseball to college football. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) targeted the Bowl Championship Series, a post-season system for college football that involves 10 teams playing five post-season games, including the BCS National Championship Game between the two teams selected as the best in the country. Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Barton likened the BCS system to “communism”. It was a bipartisan affair, though, with President Barack Obama stepping in to use the bully pulpit to get college football to dump the BCS and adopt a playoff system. …
2. Europe’s sports ministries
If the idea of state-level athletic commissions isn’t statist enough, in Europe they have entire national ministries dedicated to it. The all-encompassing project of Europe does not exclude the realm of sports. Even — or maybe especially — in the midst of economic crises, European sports ministers declared “[a]lthough we live in an age of austerity measures [ed. note: they don’t], it would be symbolical in the present poor economic situation to succeed in establishing a European framework programme by 2014, which could provide financial support to sports.” …
1. Title IX and Regulatory Overreach
When what’s known as Title IX went into law in 1972, it prohibited educational institutions that received federal assistance to exclude women from or deny them the benefits of educational programs. … While Title IX has often been credited for the rise of female athletes in sports, it’s also invited regulators and judges to influence the decisions of athletic programs, sometimes leading to schools limiting athletic opportunities for males to meet compliance.
And just a few years ago, Title IX was responsible for a court ruling that cheerleading, dominated by women and sometimes identified as a sport, is actually not.
The point in this list is not whether the current playoff system is the best way to decide college football’s national champion (it isn’t) or that women shouldn’t have sports opportunities (they should).
The number one single in the U.K. todayyyyyyy in 19677777777 …
Today in 1968, the Beatles recorded Eric Clapton’s guitar part for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” making him the first non-Beatle on a Beatle record:
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1975:
7The Wall Street Journal weighs in on U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R–Janesville) and his daring to repeat what 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama said:
How dare he so much as mention the Wisconsin assembly plant that President Obama promised to keep open but didn’t?
The claim is that there was nothing the White House could do, because the General Motors facility in Mr. Ryan’s hometown of Janesville was already starting to idle production and slated for closure when Mr. Obama took office. Therefore the empty production lines are George W. Bush’s fault, like everything else in the last four years.
But so what? Mr. Ryan made the factual statement that “we were about to lose a major factory” (our emphasis). Basic comprehension of human language didn’t deter Obama campaign functionary Stephanie Cutter from claiming on MSNBC Thursday that “There’s no delicate way to put this, but he lied. He blatantly lied—and brazenly.”
Coming from a specialist in the form, perhaps that was meant as a compliment, but then again all this is an enormous exercise in missing the point. Mr. Ryan wasn’t saying Mr. Obama should have saved this particular plant, as if it were akin to the sea levels that he promised to command in his inaugural address. Mr. Ryan was mocking the President who promised on the record and apparently believed he could save the plant.
At a campaign event at the Janesville factory in 2008 on “a clean energy economy,” Mr. Obama praised its workers for “how many hybrids and fuel-efficient vehicles you’re churning out.” He added: “And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to retool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”
In October of the same year, when Mr. Obama paid another visit, he promised that “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”
In other words, this is another familiar Obama adventure in industrial policy: The government will tell auto makers what kind of cars they should manufacture, even if they’re not the kind of cars consumers want to buy. For the record, all that talk of “retooling” is because the Janesville plant used to make the trucks and SUVs that are being driven from the market in part by $4 gasoline and rising fuel-efficiency standards.
Several additional points come to mind. The aforementioned trucks and SUVs were some of GM’s actually profitable products. GM has been unable to make profitable small cars for decades, whether they tried to build them itself (does the Chevrolet Citation ring a bell?) or import them from one of its subsidiaries (anything with an “Isuzu” or “Geo” label on it), and even the late joint venture with Toyota that produced the last Nova. The federal government has been spending more than a decade legislating popular cars out of existence (for instance, the large station wagon), and there is no question the Obama administration is doing the same thing right now with its 54.5-mpg standard, which will kill everything smaller than a Chevy Spark, including pickup trucks and SUVs.
What happened to GM’s Janesville plant demonstrates that Wisconsin got no benefit at all from the GM and Chrysler bailouts. To assert that GM or Chrysler would have gone out of business without the bailout ignores the fact that companies have reorganized under federal bankruptcy laws for decades (for instance, seemingly every major airline) and stayed in business. To say that not bailing out GM or Chrysler would have hurt auto industry suppliers (for instance, Johnson Controls) ignores the fact that the American auto industry is far bigger than GM or Chrysler, including not just Ford but six Japanese manufacturers, three German manufacturers, and South Korea’s Hyundai.
The bailout was primarily for the benefit of the United Auto Workers, certainly not for GM’s bondholders or its white-collar employees. (Interesting additional fact: None of the Japanese, German or Korean carmakers have UAW-member workers in this country.) Of course, none of the Janesville UAW workers benefited either.
The St. Norbert College iOMe Challenge would like your opinion of national and personal financial issues. (The correct answer to at least one: Horrid.)
The iOMe Challenge is a financial education effort of St. Norbert and its sponsors. Which means they’re not trying to sell you anything.
To participate, click here.
The number one song in Britain today in 1954 was the singer’s only number one hit, making her Britain’s first American one-hit wonder:
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1964:
Today in 1967, the Beatles probably felt like they were the walrus (goo goo ga joob) after needing 16 takes to get this right:
The Democratic National Convention begins today. (You’re welcome for the warning.)
The Republican National Convention one week ago was cut to three days because of Hurricane Isaac. The DNC was scheduled for just three days (which, in both cases, is three days too many) because unions cut back their DNC contributions because the DNC chose North Carolina, a right-to-work state, for the convention.
The Washington Post reports the Democrats’ weak rebuttal to “You didn’t build that”:
On Sunday, senior Obama advisers suggested that they will not address the anti-business allegations directly but will instead try to turn the tables on their GOP rivals by accusing them of being dishonest about what Obama meant. David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser, said in an interview Sunday on ABC News that Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign is engaged in a broader pattern of dishonesty and is “built on a tripod of lies.” Plouffe cited accusations that Obama has gutted the work requirement for welfare and “raided” Medicare to pay for the nation’s new health-care law as other examples of untruths coming from the GOP.
The Obama team thinks that it has effectively dealt with the “build that” attacks and that the issue is overblown — the “drill, baby, drill” of 2012, a rallying cry for the right but ultimately one with limited appeal in the broader electorate.
Nevertheless, there are signs that they see a vulnerability. Obama has not repeated the words that sparked the controversy, and he has toned down the broader argument — that government help is essential to business success — in the six weeks since he ad-libbed the line near the end of a long campaign swing. His speeches have been shorter, with fewer references to wealthy Americans. He is more cautious about portraying the choice that he quite forcefully described that night between Romney’s worldview and his own.
Adviser David Axelrod, traveling with the president in Colorado on Sunday, said the public will come away from the convention “with a very clear sense” of Obama’s values, including his faith in private enterprise.
(I’ll pause here while you recover from those last five words.)
Jerry Bader points out how well the “build that” attacks are working:
“You didn’t build that” has been anything but an “empty hole” for Republicans. It has resonated with small business people, and many of those who work for them, all over the country. What hasn’t stuck is the defense by “fact-checkers” and the liberals they serve is the defense that the quote was taken out of context. Whether President Obama was referring to infrastructure and not small businesses when he said “you didn’t build that” is entirely irrelevant and the left knows that.
What is relevant is that Mr. Obama sees government more noteworthy in the growth of small business than the people who take the risks. It’s clear when you hear the entire quote that he is being dismissive of those who are proud of the businesses they built because they don’t give government enough credit. That’s why those four little words, as Kimberly Strassel called them in the Wall Street Journal, “you didn’t build that,” do strike fear into Axelrod and company.
I didn’t watch the Sunday morning talk shows, but apparently they didn’t go so well for the Democrats, as Bader further reports:
Team Obama now says Americans ARE better off than they were four years ago.David Axelrod whiffed on this, badly, on the Sunday Morning talk shows where he was unwilling to directly answer the question as to whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago.
ABC’s Jake Tapper Reports that the Obama campaign has decided to fix that debacle by taking a do over. If Republicans are smart, they can turn this about face to their advantage. After seeing how devastating yesterday’s barrage of evasion was they’ve now decided to simply change their answer. This is a target rich envrionment for Team Romney to exploit. Just ignore the second round of responses and use the video from the first, because that was when they caught not knowing what to say.
Well, let’s see. Unemployment is higher than it was four years ago. Personal incomes are lower than they were four years ago. Despite the weak economy, gas prices are double what they were four years ago. Those are the answers to this question:
Today is the first day of classes in almost every Wisconsin school.
The website Education Outrage claims that the next 180 weekdays will be a waste of students’ time:
The other day an article written by me appeared in the Washington Post saying that algebra was useless and shouldn’t be taught in high school.
The hate mail that followed (written mostly by math teachers) was unbelievable. Mostly accusing me of being irrational and incapable of thought, and stating that math teaches people to think. This is pretty funny because if math is supposed to teach one to think, as they argue, they might have looked me up and discovered that not only was I a math major in college, but I was also a professor of computer science.
Of course, it is not only high school math I am against. I believe that every single subject taught in high school is a mistake. What I write here will infuriate teachers, but teachers are not my enemy. It isn’t their fault. They are cogs in a system over which they have no control. I believe there are many great teachers, and I believe that teaching and teachers are very important.
That having been said, in honor of the coming school year, I have decided to give students some ammunition. Here are most of the subjects you take in high school, listed one by one, with an explanation about why there is no point in taking them.
Chemistry: a complete waste of time. Why? Do you really need to know the elements of the periodic table? The formula for salt? How to balance a chemical equation? Ridiculous. Most of the people who take chemistry in college by the way intend to be doctors and while there is chemistry a doctor should know, they don’t typically teach it in college. …
English: this is a subject which has its good points. There is exactly one thing worth paying attention to in English. Not Dickens (unless of course you like Dickens.) Not Moby Dick, or Tennyson, or Hawthorne, or Shakespeare (unless of course, you like reading them.) What matters is learning how to write well. A good English teacher would give you daily writing assignments and help you get better at writing (and speaking). By writing assignments I don’t mean term papers. I mean writing about things you care about and learning to defend your arguments. Learning to enjoy reading matters as well but that would mean picking your own books to read and not having to write a book report. Lots of luck with that.
Biology. Now here is a subject worth knowing about. Too bad they won’t teach you anything that matters. Plant phyla? Amoebas? Cutting up frogs? It can’t get any sillier. What should you be learning? About your own health and your own body and how to take care of it. But they don’t teach that in biology. They teach some nonsense part of it in health class which is usually about the official reason that you shouldn’t have sex, whatever it happens to be this year.
Economics. This subject in high school is beyond silly. … What should you be learning? Your personal finances. How to balance your check book. How much rent and food costs. How you can earn a living. What various jobs pay and how to get them. A high school student needs economic theory like he needs another leg.
Physics. Another useless subject, that could in fact be quite important if the right things were taught. To hit or throw a baseball a knowledge of physics is required. Ooops. I meant the mind has to have an unconscious knowledge of physics. The formulas they teach in high school physics won’t help. To drive a car one needs knowledge of physics. Same deal. Nothing they teach in a physics course will help. But it really does matter that you understand why tires skid in the rain or how a brake works or why looking at your target will help you throw a ball more accurately. We use physics every day of our lives, but the formulas they make you memorize and facts about that the earth’s rotation, and names of planets? Not so much. The Wright Brothers did not have any theory of flight by the way. They simply tinkered with stuff until their plane flew. That is called engineering. Trying stuff to see what works. The physicists came later and explained it. It didn’t help the Wright Brothers. Why don’t they teach engineering in high school? Because engineering wasn’t a subject at Harvard in 1892. (You could look it up.)
French. Another complete waste of time. Why? Two reasons. The first is that you cannot possibly learn a language any way other than being immersed in it and talking and listening and talking. In school they teach grammar rules and nonsense to memorize so that they can give you a test. My daughter could not get an A in English when we lived in France despite the fact that she was the only kid in the class who spoke English. Why? Because she didn’t know the grammar rules of English. The same thing happened when we came back to the U.S. She could speak perfect French (a year in France will do that) but still couldn’t get an A in French. Grammar is like physics formulas, nice in theory but useless in practice, because the practical knowledge we use is not conscious knowledge.
The second reason is more subtle. School happens not to teach the French that people actually speak. No one says “comment allez-vous?” in France. They say “ca va?” But we don’t teach speaking so who cares how people actually speak? The same is true in the opposite direction as well. The French learn to say “good-bye” which no one actually says in English. We say “bye,” “see you,” and a million other things but rarely say goodbye (except maybe on the phone.)
If you want to learn a language, immersion is the only way. …
So, my advice. Know what matters to you. Learn that. Temporarily memorize nonsense if you want to graduate but have a proper perspective on it. Nothing you learn in high school will matter in your future life.
Well, that’s his opinion. (The comments beg to differ, you might say.) I don’t think I’ve used anything from geography (sophomore year) or trigonometry (junior year), and I didn’t take calculus. I did learn a lot from my high school journalism and political science classes. (Journalism is the opposite of math.) In retrospect, I would have taken Spanish instead of French in high school, but given what I retained from French, perhaps I wouldn’t have retained much in Spanish either.
Blogger Penelope Trunk believes education needs to be an individual endeavor, which is why she supports (and claims an increasing number of parents support) home schooling. Learning by doing isn’t really accomplished by sitting in front of a lecturing teacher, either, regardless of grade level. Of course, given the trillions of dollars over the past couple centuries that we have collectively spent on education, the idea of pulling the plug on public schools seems at least impractical.
This ignores the issue of what education is supposed to accomplish. Teach facts? Learn to think? Learn marketable skills? (Remember: What is taught in school is mandated by Congress and state legislatures.) The liberal arts touts itself as teaching how to learn, assuming that, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we don’t know what we don’t know, and for that matter we don’t know what we need to know in the unknowable future.
On that note, happy school year.
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1961:
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded “Love Me Do,” taking 17 takes to do it right:
Three years later, the Beatles had the number one single …
… which referred to something The Who could have used, because on the same day the Who’s van was vandalized and $10,000 in musical equipment was stolen from them while they were buying … a guard dog:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 