class warfare

Let's take a second and imagine a hypothetical Major League Baseball Team:

Said Team's best hitter missed the first month of the season...

Said Team's marqee free agent signings got off to slow starts...

Said Team's #2 Starter and Starting Catcher are currently hurt...

Said Team lost the first five VERY close games to it's main rival...

Said Team has issues with it's bullpen...

Said Team is playing in the toughest division of the wild card era...

and, finally, said team has a new staduim with quirks it must get used to.

Given the adversity listed above, one might logically conclude said team was mired in last place, 10 games under .500 and 15 or so games out of first place.

What if, instead of that happening, said team was actually 2 games over .500 and only 4.5 games out of first place (2.5 in the wild card).  Under the circumstances, any fair minded person would have to conclude that said team had actually weathered some pretty serious storms was in a good position considering that it's only May 17th.

Of course, if you're a fair minded person, that means, by definition, you can't get hired as a drive-by journalist.

What does the drive by media (even in said team's hometown) have to say about said team:

- Their New Stadium Will Fail (when it's barely a month old and everyone I know, including myself, who's been there has LOVED it.)

- Their Lefty Free Agent Pitcher is a Bust

- Said team is a National Shame

- Their New Stadium is Too Rich for It's Own Good

- Said Team's General Manager is Incompetant

- Forget the stadium, the very survival of America requires the Team to Fail

- And, finally, an unsubstantiated, hit-piece, book on Said Team's Best Hitter.

What are we to make of this Media Corruption?  To be sure, this sort of coverage is par for the course for the drive-by media.  Part of it is probably laziness, considering that class warfare and class envy are the easiest storylines to peddle.  Drive-by journalists rarely make more than $75,000 a year.  At the same time, given their own self-rightousness, they can't handle it when someone else makes real money for performing a real job. 

Still, that's not good enough.  While said coverage, as it relates to baseball, isn't the end of the world, it epitomizes a deeper threat the corrupt drive-by media poses to America's core values.  Class envy and class warfare poison American society against successful achievers.  When the corrupt drive-by media is allowed to trash America's most successful baseball team, should we be surprised when the President of the United States threatens a private company with the wrath of the the White House Press Corps?  Should we be surprised when the President of the United States wants the successful to bailout the mortgages of people who shouldn't have been given mortgages in the first place?  Should we be surprised when the President of the United States wants to raise our taxes in order to ration our Health Care?

Whatever your feelings on Baseball, we all have a stake in allowing the successful to be successful.

UPDATE: Make that 3 games over .500

UPDATE II: Make that 1.5 Games out in the Wild Card

I hope this helps.

That is all.

Cahnman out.

When there are a lot fewer rich people to soak?

The number of American households with a net worth of $1 million or more, excluding the value of their primary residence, fell 27% to 6.7 million in 2008 from an all-time high of 9.2 million the year before, according to a report from market research firm Spectrem Group

Notice this occurred before we had a whole bunch of rich folks "going Galt"   This was just due to the drop in equity and real estate values.

Message to Obama and co. If you want to have rich people to soak in order to pay for all your fun stuff, hmmm, maybe that means we need to have....hmmm ...rich people.

Maybe letting the Bush tax cuts hang around until there's , a hmmm a recovery  might work better than getting rid of them in the middle of a economic crisis?

Of course, if income equality is the new holy grail, don;t bother. The one way to ensure income equality is to enact policies that make sure no one has any money.  And some people think you've done a splendid job on that front already.