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The Public Policy
Random Thoughts
Switch-hitting is overrated, like the current administration.
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.
Economist Edward Lazear has cut through all of Barack Obama’s claims about “creating jobs” with one plain and inescapable fact — “there hasn’t been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office.” Whatever number of jobs were created during the Obama administration, more have been lost.
How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
The know-it-all smirks and condescending laughs of Vice President Joe Biden, when Congressman Paul Ryan was speaking during their debate, were a little much from an administration presiding over economic woes at home and disasters overseas — and being caught in lies about both. Like Barack Obama, Joe Biden has all the clever tricks of a politician and none of the wisdom of a statesman.
If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.
One of the most foolish, and most dangerous, things one can do is to take love for granted, instead of nurturing it and safeguarding it as the prize jewel of one’s life.
Whenever you hear people talking about “a living Constitution,” almost invariably they are people who are in the process of slowly killing it by “interpreting” its restrictions on government out of existence.
Do either Barack Obama or his followers have any idea how many countries during the 20th century set out to “spread the wealth” — and ended up spreading poverty instead? At some point, you have to turn from rhetoric, theories and ideologies to facts.
I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal — instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
Whatever happened to Julie Banderas of the Fox News Channel? She had brains, looks, wit and personality. Has she met with foul play? Or has some zillionaire married her and taken her off to his own private island?
The question to be asked of people in the media, and that they should ask themselves, should be: “Is your first loyalty to your audience or to your ideology?” The same question should be asked of educators, especially those who see themselves as “agents of social change,” even though that is not the job description under which they have been hired and paid.
People who complain about “negative” campaign ads miss the point. It is perfectly legitimate to criticize your opponent. The question is whether the ads are about serious things that matter to the future of this country, and whether they are telling the truth or lying.
If you believe Barack Obama and others who oppose what they call “tax cuts for the rich,” you might want to consider what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” If you want to see some documented facts about tax rates and tax revenues, there is a box titled “Tax Cuts” on my website. Click on it.
In baseball, switch hitters are said to have an advantage. But the highest lifetime batting average by a switch hitter (.319 by Frankie Frisch) is more than 30 points lower than the highest batting average for either left-handed hitters or right-handed hitters. The highest batting average in a season by a switch hitter (.365 by Mickey Mantle) is more than 50 points lower.
About the Author
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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JudithAnn| 10.16.12 @ 6:18AM
It is always uplifting to read one of Dr. Sowell's columns. His clear-thinking gives me hope that my liberal friends will one day see the light. I know that when I pass this on to them, they won't read it. It's a pity.
Von Mises Jr| 10.16.12 @ 10:11AM
You should find some new friends.
Appleby| 10.16.12 @ 6:43AM
I think the strongest point is the last one. My boss at the Education Board, who was a Black man of retirement age, said frequently that neither Black children nor White children reaped any reward by being arranged in a classroom like squares on a checkerboard. Before I left Atlanta, the schools were -- o horrors! -- resegregating themselves as when Black people were given the choice of schools, they opted for schools near their homes, regardless of the colour of the students. Oh, and they chose to live in segregated neighbourhoods too. Much to the horror of the White Liberals who continued to try to force them onto school buses and into "diverse" neighbourhoods for their own good.
Frank Drackman| 10.16.12 @ 8:58AM
I spent a year in the Atlanta Pubic Schools...
Then that jerk Nixon pulled out of Vietnam and my Dad got to come home and make my life miserable instead of North Vietnamese...
And I don't wanta say he's gotta mean streak, but for years he had a "Naked Vietnamese Girl Running after Napalm Attack" Screen saver...
And it was a tough School, real tough School,
one day the teacher asked "What comes after a Sentence"
Kid yelled back, "You make an Appeal"
WHOA!!!!!
Frank "Dice-man" Drackman
CJW| 10.16.12 @ 4:15PM
That is a Rodney Dangerfield joke.
Rhoetus| 10.16.12 @ 8:38PM
I miss Rodney as he was funny, Obama is a joke and he's a tragedy.
Robert Nowall | 10.16.12 @ 7:52AM
I thought the point of being a switch hitter was that you could be in the field on either platoon, whether you faced a left-hander or a right-hander...
Frank Drackman| 10.16.12 @ 8:45AM
Did you ever play ball?
Baseball I mean, not your own.
Just bustin balls, it's the American way...
The point of pitch hitting, is even if your average is .000000000000000000000000001
You never have to see a curve ball coming at your head.
You know, the curve ball, Uncle Charley, the Hook, Yakker, Mister Misty, Chunky Monkey, Jerry Garcia, Cleveland Steamer, Kansas City Twizzler,
wait, those are Ben & Jerry flavors.
And even though I was a natural lefty, I experimented with switch hitting(no Homo) for a few years,
Y'see my Hero was Pete Rose, in his Mod Phase, with the sideburns, you remember, in between the Unitas-ish Crew Cut but before the Moe Howard-ish Bowl Cut on Crank...
And I did every thing Rose did, run to first on walks, Crouch like you were (Redacted) barbed wire, head first fullback slides(Ray Fosse's still looking for his clavicle) placing side bets on the other team...
Until one particular game, where the Coach said,
DRACKMAN!
"I need to see you behind the bleachers"
Yeah, that Coach Sandusky was a Ball Buster..
but then he said I was only playing if I batted lefty..
So I did what Pete Rose would do,
put 10 gs on the under...
Frank "Lets Play 1 and say we Played 2" Drackman
Albert Constantine Jr.| 10.16.12 @ 9:02PM
"So I did what Pete Rose would do,
put 10 gs on the under..."
Arnold Rothstein and Shoeless Joe Jackson would be proud (at least Arnold would have before they made him an HBO TV character).
Pecos Pete| 10.16.12 @ 8:35AM
Dr. Sowell has more common sense in his little finger on any given day than any liberal/progressive has in a lifetime. Proof: our Village Idiots on this site.
Von Mises Jr| 10.16.12 @ 10:16AM
I sense that the trolls have not just changed names again, but that they are not showing up for work. Perhaps Perp and D'Red are traveling with the ObamaPhone gal trying to disrupt Romney Ryan events.
Problem is that they can't find enough stupid people to make a difference when Romney Ryan is said to be drawing thousands at most every event. Perp and D'Red probably think the Koch Brothers paid all those people?
Al Adab| 10.16.12 @ 11:48AM
Dr. Sowell, who should be President, has it right. The Social-Welfare State no longer has any moral claim whatever its good intentions may once have been. We know know the Truth of the old saw regarding where that road leads. The entire foundation of Statism is immoral and baseless.
Anthony| 10.16.12 @ 9:10AM
Dr. Sowell, are you being deliberately edgy this morning with your double entendre?
Switch hitting is overrated? I would take exception to your Mantle analysis, but if you were speaking tongue in cheek about the imposter in the White House, yes indeed, our switch hitting commander-in-chief is indeed overrated.
Besides being a little light in his cleats, have you seen Obozo throw a baseball? My dear departed mother had a better arm, and she was 5 ft 1'.
Frank Drackman| 10.16.12 @ 10:23AM
Oh yeah, well Meine Mutter was 1.8 meters, grew up on the mean streets of Meissen, DDR, and wasn't shy about bringin some high and inside chin music, even for BP...
You're right though, EICOTUS(Evolver in Chief of the United States)'s Sissy-Boy throw probably caused the Ben-Ghazi attack.
Now PUTIN, thats a real man, chopping wood bare chested, whens the last time A-rabs pulled anything in Russia??
I mean except for that whole Theater thing..
Frank
JD| 10.16.12 @ 11:33AM
The switch-hitter comments might be the dumbest I've ever seen from Sowell. Scratch that - they are, because nothing else comes close.
He compares the top switch-hitter ever to the top regular hitter ever, without considering more meaningful numbers like the mean or median. Moreover, he ignores that many non-switch hitters end up at least somewhat platooned, so they keep their averages up by getting fewer at-bats (dodging the pitchers who throw from their side). More valuable is the hitter who stays in the game no matter who's on the mound.
JimH| 10.16.12 @ 1:04PM
For elite hitters, going up against both right and left handed pitchers from one side of the plate doesn’t matter much. In fact, if would give them a consistent view of the strike zone. For lesser hitters switch hitting could help. Best probably, is to be a natural left handed hitter. There are more right handed than left handed pitchers and you have about a step advantage towards first. Ted Williams, to me the best pure hitter, batted left handed. He did field right handed. I don’t know which his natural side was. I suspect it was left and that he learned to field right handed because it was easier to come by a glove when he was a kid.
Rich Rostrom| 10.16.12 @ 6:13PM
I've just read Williams' autobiography, and surprisingly, I can't find a thing about that. He grew up semi-poor in San Diego, and probably he started with a left-hand fielders' glove because that was what his mother got him. (It was a "Bill Doak" glove; Doak was a Cardinals pitcher who in 1920 suggested to the Rawlings Co that they should add a leather web between the thumb and forefinger.)
She also gave him his first shotgun.
As to elite hitters - this year, the top ten batters in MLB had an average "platoon differential" of .030 in batting average, .040 in on-base, and .086 in slugging.
Anthony| 10.16.12 @ 1:48PM
JD, Not if "The Mick" was a metaphor for Obozo, as our first switch hitting president.
Obozo is the biggest 0/fer going, except for ARod, who is playing blind man's bluff at the plate.
88gpa| 10.16.12 @ 10:23AM
TS and VDH, et al at Hoover. Has there ever been a brighter, more humane, more realistic group group of people in one place at one time ? They all have in common a life of adventure, struggle, and a genuine liberal education. Trying to bring up our family with the same exposures
Jobe| 10.16.12 @ 11:20AM
I have found that it is futile to explain reality to the obama lemmings. They reject it in toto. When an obama kool-ade drinker begins to bloviate, I disengage from the conversation by telling that person that I no longer seek discussion with him/her because "you have not paid attention". Although this tends to irritate the person involved, it relieves me of the need to explain the last 4 years over and over again.
JD| 10.16.12 @ 11:28AM
"Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced"
False, Dr. Sowell. The earth's population only hit the 1 billion mark around 1900, meaning there were under 1 billion people in the world during the time of slavery, and the slaveholders were a small percentage of that population. With hundreds of billions of entitled people in today's western world alone, there are more now than ever.
Dave Williams| 10.16.12 @ 11:32AM
As an academic, I am saddened that "diversity" has become a synonym for "liberals with different color skins." When I am on the market, I am often tempted to address the question in my cover letter by saying something like "adding an unreconstructed Reagan Republican like me to your department would be guaranteed to increase your diversity." It'd cost me the job, but oh, the fun of imagining all those air-filled liberal heads exploding....
JD| 10.16.12 @ 11:38AM
I actually did this, and not that many years ago. While applying for the nation's top graduate program in computer science, which was at Stanford, I found that the application required an essay on how I would bring diversity to their campus.
I was tempted to quit the application on the spot, but I decided to have fun with it. I wrote an essay about how, as a Midwestern conservative Christian, I would bring a type of diversity rarer than any race into their environment.
I can't say for sure whether the essay helped or hurt, because my academic credentials were extremely strong, but I got accepted. I did not, however, choose to attend.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 10.16.12 @ 5:33PM
On a fateful day in 1986, during a job interview where I learned the starting salary was so pitiful that despite my underemployment, it was hardly worth my while, I was asked what my career goal was. Since I didn't care what they thought, I answered "My career goal is to lay on a beach in Thailand and drink beer all day, but I haven't found anybody who will pay me for it. As a result, I'm willing to work for you guys for a while until I can afford to do it on my own."
As fate would have it, that apparently was the correct answer; I got the job, and I'm still there (and still can't afford to do that laying on the beach all day on my own).
JD| 10.16.12 @ 11:34AM
Sowell is quoting me again:
"People who complain about "negative" campaign ads miss the point. It is perfectly legitimate to criticize your opponent. The question is whether the ads are about serious things that matter to the future of this country, and whether they are telling the truth or lying."
Your opponent won't tell the public what's wrong with him. You have to. What matters is whether ads are true or false.
Rhoetus| 10.16.12 @ 9:06PM
How can you tell if Obama is lying?
His lips move, he exhales and sound comes out.
JD| 10.16.12 @ 11:44AM
"I have never known a word to become absolute dogma, without a speck of evidence, the way "diversity" has."
It's true. There is no merit whatsoever to "diversity", except that it serves as evidence of non-discrimination. But to value it as that evidence is to imply that any group that lacks a certain diversity is discriminating, when it's far more likely that the makeup of the group is coincidence or logical, or both (for example, a group of liberal friends likely excludes conservatives both because they shun conservatives and because conservatives want nothing to do with them).
To say diversity is a merit is to say that a group that is half black and half white is better than a group that is all white. It also implies that it's better than a group that is all black, though diversity advocates rarely note that.
In any case, this claim implies that there are things that blacks bring to the table that whites cannot, and vice versa, so that the group only receives the benefits of both by having both. But the idea that beneficial abilities can only be found in certain races is terribly racist.
Which is why those who call diversity a merit are racist.
Rich Rostrom| 10.16.12 @ 5:18PM
Julie Banderas got married in 2009 and had a baby in April 2010. She was on maternity leave until the end of 2010, and has been a "general news correspondent" since then.
Her husband, Andrew J. Sansone, is wealthy, but not a zillionaire. He runs "Old Rock Media" and "Big Apple Channel".