Some good stuff from the WSJ today, including a piece on Charlie Rangel’s hypocritical stance on taxes.  As you may know, Rangel is promoting a 5.4% income tax surchage for America’s highest earners as the “moral thing to do”.  Meanwhile, the dude has been cheating plenty on his own taxes, gaming the system at every turn and apparently lying about it along the way.  Most of his shenanigans stem from a luxury villa he owns down in the Dominican Republic, but it sounds like he’s also having fun bending housing rules in NYC and DC.  My favorite part:

Mr. Rangel said last fall that “I never had any idea that I got any income’’ from the villa. Try using that one the next time the IRS comes after you. Equally interesting is his claim that he didn’t know that the developer of the Dominican Republic villa had converted his $52,000 mortgage to an interest-free loan in 1990. That would seem to violate House rules on gifts, which say Members may only accept loans on “terms that are generally available to the public.” Try getting an interest-free loan from your banker.

Another piece highlighted the shitty job unions have done in managing their own pensions, pointing to the folks at the top as the primary culprits, fat and happy as they are.

Poor management probably deserves a lot of the blame for the union decline, but the exact causes are a mystery. An even bigger mystery is that the unions do a far better job with funds created for their officers and employees than for mere workers. The SEIU Affiliates, Officers and Employees Pension Plan—which covers the staff and bosses at its locals—was funded as of 2007 at 102.2%. The plan for the folks at SEIU international headquarters was funded at 84.8%….Union officer benefits are also far more generous than anything dues-paying workers enjoy. Consider again the SEIU, probably the country’s most powerful union. Their officers and employees get a yearly 3% cost of living increase, but SEIU members get none; officers qualify for an early pension at 50 or after more than 30 years of service, but workers can’t retire early with a pension; officers qualify for disability retirement after a year’s service, but workers need 10 years. In the land of union retirement, some workers are more equal than others.

Finally, the paper provides a solid treatment of the outlandishly stupid Gates-Crowley affair in a writeup called “Reverse Rosa Parks“.  For the record, after reading about the event and listening to the tapes, I’m in agreement with the idea that Gates massively overreacted in this particular situation and ended up trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, as they say.

But Gates went beyond asserting that he was the victim of racial discrimination. In an interview last week with The Root, an online magazine of which he is editor in chief, Gates claimed: “There haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America. . . . The only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” That is the address of the White House, official residence of President Barack Obama, who is black…Notwithstanding the problems that continue to affect black communities in America, two things clearly have changed enormously for the better: white attitudes and the structure of our legal system. If a bus driver today behaved the way James Blake did in 1955, almost everyone would view his actions as freakishly deviant. He would likely be fired and sued, maybe even arrested.  Gates, who directs the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, is one of the most distinguished scholars of race in America. Yet in this incident, he saw individual racism where it was absent and failed to acknowledge the enormous social progress that America has undergone in his own lifetime.

I’m not naive enough to believe that race relations are perfect in America and profiling doesn’t occur.  I’m sure it does.  But the Gates situation was quite different and he was way off base in making the above statement.  I mean, the man lives in a country with a black president, a state with a black governor, and a city with a black mayor.  And the guy who arrested him is held in extremely high regard by his colleagues and superiors, black and white alike.  The guy actually teaches a class for incoming cadets on racial profiling(!) and the arrest tapes caught him referring politely (and calmly) to Gates as “gentleman”, certainly not the type of language one would expect from someone bent on exacting some sort of racial injustice.  Sure, one could say that Crowley didn’t have to arrest Gates for mouthing off, but where does he get off saying the things he did to provoke the arrest?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve always known that police officers are to be respected, not put down in condescending fashion.  If only for threat of force and/or arrest, it’s probably better to zip it until in the presence of legal counsel, don’t ya think?

It’s a shame this Gates character holds the professorial position that he does because he’s obviously incapable of exercising the type of judgment one presumes would befit an expert on race relations.  And the fact that Obama, without knowing all the facts, immediately jumped to the defense of Gates by calling Crowley’s actions stupid strikes me as entirely unfair (I won’t call it reverse racism because that’s a misnomer; it presupposes that whites are the only ones capable of being racist, which is most certainly not the case; whether subtle or overt, racism is racism, pure and simple).  Obama “profiled” the situation and assumed that the white guy must be to blame, not that it could actually be possible that his black friend might overreact when agitated and end up crying wolf.

And now America is fixated with this pointless dribble and there are calls from the easily offended among us that America needs to have another discussion about race, as if we aren’t already massively obsessed with the idea.  Just stupid.

In a wonderfully sarcastic take on what I’ll call white trash attire, some customers over at Amazon.com have had a field day with the above shirt.  Called the Mountain Men’s Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee, it has come to represent the satirical equivalent of the mullet, at least in wardrobe terms.  I highly recommend that you follow this link to the shirt’s page on Amazon and scroll down to the comments section.   It’s quite the joyride.

Here’s a little taste of what you’ll find there:

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

h/t Don for the link.

The view from a newly-constructed glass box viewing platform on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago, 1,353 feet up.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Garrison Keillor is a great writer.  Witty as all get-out and poetic in an everyman sort of way.  His weekly pieces on Salon.com are worth following.  They’re easily digestible and usually provide a brief moment of thoughtful and artistic wordsmithing, which makes for a nice break from my business- and politics-minded routine.

One recent piece put words to a character trait of mine that I’ve always struggled to justify – the need for occasional periods of solitude.

There is nothing odd about wanting to be alone.  It doesn’t mean that I am spray-painting Nazi slogans on the walls and fantasizing about getting even with them what done me wrong. It doesn’t indicate male menopause. It only means that I am experiencing Personal Male Secrecy Syndrome (PMSS), the urge common to all men to climb a tree and sit on a high limb for a few hours…It is crucial in any loving relationship that the partners know when to leave each other alone without having to fill out a privacy application (Reasons for Needing Solitude, Goals of Solo Period, Estimated Time of Reunion). Don’t ask, don’t tell. Just go in the room and close the door. So long, see you later.

In another piece, Keillor paid homage to homemade potato salad.  He claimed, among other things, that children not being taught the process of creating something like a good potato salad are missing out on a key educational moment.

A child served yellow slop from a bucket is being told that it’s OK to plagiarize a term paper off the Internet just so long as it’s poorly written.

He ended that piece with the following flourish:

Attend to the details. Teach your children manners. Write cogent paragraphs. Drive carefully. And make a good potato salad, one with some crunch, maybe accompanied by a fried drumstick with crackly skin — the humble potato and the stupid chicken, ennobled by diligent cooking — and is this not the meaning of our beautiful country, to take what is common and enable it to become beautiful? All our beautiful young people — so diligent and focused and powered by hope — you can’t tell me those kids didn’t have parents who took time to chop the celery and onions and experiment with the ratio of mayo to mustard to achieve a potato salad that is worthy of our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

How can you not love that?