| |
Sunday, December 28, 2003
This article is undeniably the worst bit of political analysis I have read this year. Consider the following:
"That may be why no unchallenged front-runner has emerged for the party's presidential nomination."
Dean may not be unchallenged (actually, he is quite challenged imho), but he is clearly running away with the nomination.
"But Kucinich is a cut above the other "second-tier" contenders, someone with a realistic chance to break through, as his runner-up finish in last summer's MoveOn.org preference poll proved."
Kucinich is the darling of the far-left, but he has NO realistic chance to break through. He has consistently polled in the 1-3% range both nationally and in state polls. His standing in the MoveOn poll simply reflects how out of touch that organization is.
As for Dean,
"The former Vermont governor would draw well among independents - his real role model is John Anderson - but, if elected, would soon be warring with fellow Democrats over domestic policy."
This is just plain silly. Dean is not going to be strong among independents, and John Anderson was supported in his 1980 run mostly by radical leftists who were burned out on Jimmy Carter. I know because I was one of them (back before I became a Republican). Anderson got 15% in Massachusetts, managing thereby to hand the state to
Ronald Reagan. I believe that is the highest percentage Anderson got in any one state.
Hilariously, he concludes:
"In the meantime, do you suppose the new, improved Al Gore might reconsider?"
Not sure how Al has improved, but his endorsement of Dean would seem to take him out of the race.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Proof Dean is the Democrats' Worst Candidate
I have been debating my liberal friends on the issue of Howard Dean's electability. They quite reasonably ask why they should listen to me, since I make no bones about my desire for George W. Bush to be re-elected. Why would I tell them something that would decrease the odds of Bush winning?
My response to that is, a) there is the credibility issue--if I'm wrong too many times about what is going to happen, nobody will pay attention to anything I say about politics and b) Although Dean's nomination helps Bush (IMHO) it increases the downside if the Republicans get caught in a perfect storm next year, if there's a sluggish economy and continuing problems in Iraq. I don't want a Gephardt or Lieberman administration, but I'd HATE to see a Dean administration.
But of course liberals still tend not to believe me. So I wondered if there was some way to demonstrate that Dean is the worst candidate in an objective fashion. So I went to the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM). The IEM are run by the University of Iowa business school, and what they do is provide a trading opportunity for shares of Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, George Bush, etc. The way it works is that you send them an initial investment (say $50) and then you can trade in a political futures market.
The market is designed so that the payoff is based on particular candidate matchups and their vote total. For example, suppose you wanted to invest in Wesley Clark today, and say that shares of Clark Preferred are running about 4 cents apiece (as they are today) and you intend to hold onto the shares. You get paid off if Clark is the nominee of the Democrats, and the amount you receive is determined by the vote share Clark gets--i.e., if Clark gets 45% of the vote, you get 45 cents for every share of Clark you purchased. Similarly if you wanted to invest in President Bush against Clark, you might pay 4 cents for those shares as of today, and if the general election is Bush against Clark, those shares will pay off at Bush's popular vote %--if Bush gets 55% of the vote, you would get 55 cents for every share of W Preferred you owned. (Note: the IEM only does the percentages between the two major party candidates; in other words Bush's percentage would be Bush's popular vote divided by (Bush's popular vote and Clark's popular vote).
The IEM provides some data at its website on the current market for each of the respective shares. For the record, there are 14 different contracts based on 7 possible matchups : Bush versus Clark, Clinton, Dean, Gephardt, Kerry, Lieberman and Other Democrat.
As you might expect, the IEM is strongly anticipating a Bush-Dean matchup, with those shares by far the most valuable in the market. But the interesting thing is to look at the relationships between the values of the various shares. On average, shares in Wesley Clark's campaign have sold for 3.4 cents today, while shares of Bush/Clark have also sold for 3.4 cents today. In other words, the market is saying that if Clark is the challenger, his shares are worth about as much as Bush's shares. Gephardt does even better, with his shares running 4.6 cents apiece today, while shares of Bush/Gephardt were trading at an average of 4.5 cents. In other words, the market sees Gephardt as a very slight favorite over Bush.
And Dean? Well, Dean is the weakest candidate in terms of the value of his shares compared to Bush over him. Dean's shares are running 34.1 cents today, while Bush/Dean shares are running 40.9 cents today. Bush is clearly a strong favorite to win according to the market if his opponent is Dean. Let's assume that the market is rational and that the investors in each of the candidates wants to make the same return. What percentages in the general election would give Dean investors and Bush/Dean investors an equivalent return? The answer is that if Bush wins by 54.5% to Dean's 45.5%, both investors will receive an equal % return on their money (about 33%).
All the other Democrats are pretty much on an even footing with Bush. Hillary's shares are currently worth 4.1 cents while Bush/Hillary is worth 4.2 cents, indicating the market sees this matchup as 50.6% Bush-49.4% Clinton.
The market also sees John Kerry and Joe Lieberman as having virtually no chance of winning the Democrats' nomination next year. Kerry's shares are down to 0.8 cents apiece, while Lieberman's are worth only half a penny. The market sees stronger chances for for Gephardt at 4.6 cents and Clark at 3.4 cents.
Conclusion: The participants in the Iowa Electronic Markets perceive Dean to be the weakest choice to beat Bush among the Democrat field. Note: The Iowa Electronic Markets are constantly changing, so by the time you click on the link there may have been some small changes compared to the data presented here.
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Thought today I would get some information out on football statistics that should be known to anybody interested in doing basic football analysis:
1. Passing statistics are crucial to NFL teams. The #1 passing statistic that correlates best to wins is touchdown passes (which is not really surprising). The NFL's passer rating system correlates very well to wins.
2. Offenses of teams and defenses of teams exist independently of each other for the most part. You will frequently hear announcers say that team y's offense is so explosive that it leaves their defense on the field far too long. In fact, it is well-established that there is a correlation between most points scored and *fewest* points allowed, so that if your favorite team is scoring lots of points and allowing lots of points, you can bet its because your defense sucks. However, the correlation this season is only 28%, which says that most of the difference in points allowed is actual difference on defense, not an artifact of the offense's performance. And that is a high number compared to recent history--the correlation in 2002 (which is after all the last complete year) was only 14% and in 17% in 2001.
3. Football statistics can be adjusted for era and when you do this many of the acknowledged best players from history come to the fore despite seasons that might seem poor by today's standards. For example, quarterback passer ratings jumped in 1978 and 1979 to the point where all the announcers were commenting on how vastly different the game had become. They were right. League-wide passer ratings had hit a cyclical low of about 60 in 1977; if that sounds amazing, consider that Tampa Bay's alleged quarterbacks combined for a total of something like 3 TDs and 36 INTs that season. The next year they jumped to like 68; they had never been so high before; they have never been so low since
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
I've been enjoying visiting the Football Ousiders' website. They are the new home of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, Gregg Easterbrook's excellent weekly column of observations on the football weekend.
They rate the teams via a method that involves analyzing play by play data. I happen to think this is a great method, for reasons that I will get into later. However, for whatever reason, their rating system seems to be currently flawed, as best as I can tell with a limited amount of data. It may be that time will prove their system right, and my system wrong.
Let me start by explaining my system. Each game for every team is adjusted to an equivalent score against an average NFL team on a neutral field. For example, the week before last San Francisco beat the Rams at home by a score of 30-10. The spreadsheet notes that St. Louis has scored 1.281 times as many points in all its games as an average NFL team. Therefore, San Francisco's giving up 10 points to the Rams is like giving up 7.8 points to an average NFL team (10/1.281). Since the game was in SF, we add an additional point for the home field advantage and say that San Francisco's defense performed equivalent last week to giving up 8.8 points to an average opponent on a neutral field. St. Louis’s defense has given up .956 times as many points this year as an average NFL team. Therefore San Francisco's 30 points scored is equivalent to scoring 31.4 (30/.956) points against a normal team, adjusted to 30.4 points on a neutral field... to be continued...
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Amusing little toy at bookblog. Enter a bunch of text and the Gender Genie will tell you if the writer is male or female. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds got a female score of 777 and a male score of 931, which he joked made him a metrosexual, apparently a term coined by Howard Dean to describe men (like Howard Dean) who are in touch with their feminine side. I thought it might be fun to run a couple of Howard Dean's speeches through the Gender Genie to see how in touch he was; the answer turned out to be that it depends on the subject.
Howard's speech on restoring rural communities and preserving the family farm grades out at 2246 female, 3473 male, or about 39.3% female, 60.7% male. Dean's speech on environmental policy was more feminine, scoring 3726 for female and 4385 for male, or about 46% female. Dean's speech on Job Creation turned out to be more male, with a 3231 female score and a 4430 male score, or 42% female.
I spent a fun half hour copying and pasting columns into the Genie; while it's amusing I did feel that it's skewed towards answering "male" at least in terms of the political columns I copied. The latest two Ann Coulter columns graded out as male, as did the latest two Molly Ivins columns. Michelle Malkin came out as barely female in one column (discussing the strange bedfellows against the Patriot Act) and solidly male in another (on the New York Times' treatment of minority conservatives). Ellen Goodman comes out male in columns about Terry Schiavo and General Boykin. Indeed, the Malkin column was the only column that I could find that graded out as female.
Monday, September 29, 2003
Tigers Update: The Tigers closed their season with a roar, winning five of their last six games to avoid tying or surpassing the 1962 Mets' record of 120 losses, including one incredible comeback from 8 runs down. They ended the season with 591 runs scored, which was only the 15th worst total for an AL team in the DH era in a non-strike year. They allowed 928 runs, which was the ninth worst total of any AL team in the same era. Their run differential of -337 runs was the worst since 1932, when the Boston Red Sox allowed 349 more runs than they scored, and is third all-time in the AL (the Philadelphia Athletics of 1915 are second with 333). Oddly enough, all three teams ended their seasons with 43 wins.
Amusing article by Matthew Miller in the Boston Globe yesterday. It is summarized (by the Globe) as follows:
"Republican icons Milton Friedman and William J. Bennett acknowledge the link between the birth lottery and poverty. Can their conservative brethren learn from them?"
Now, the first thing that strikes me is the "birth lottery" comment. This is a natural fallacy of childhood that many people never outgrow. Those of us fortunate enough to be born with loving, caring parents, often contemplated in our youth how lucky indeed we were.
Of course, from our parents' standpoint luck had nothing (barring the occasional "accident") to do with it. They got married, settled down, engaged in the necessary (and enjoyable) preliminary calisthenics and nine months later, a baby was born as a result.
Indeed, the whole notion of a "birth lottery" is silly when one thinks about it hard for a moment as an adult. The image is of babies waiting around for the stork to take them to their new homes when their number to come up. Baby #100223757 is flown to the Gottbucks' family, while baby #100223758 is dropped off at the Trailerfolks' clan. But of course a simple understanding of biology reveals that it has nothing to do with a lottery, it has to do with a sperm and an egg. We are NOT lucky to have had our parents, no matter how wonderful they may have been in that role. I could NOT have been born just as easily to any other set of parents, and to argue so is silly.
Miller assumes that Bill Bennett and Milton Friedman agree with him on the notion of the lottery (in fairness, Bennett does appear to agree). Friedman appears to be acknowledging that his own success is due to luck, but of course this could simply be modesty, since the alternative is admitting that you are fortunate because you deserved it--you worked hard, and were intelligent and took advantage of the opportunities that are offered to everyone in our society.
The point of the article appears to be that "look, a couple of conservative icons agree with me on the birth lottery, so let's propose some policies based on our mutual agreement". The first policy he proposes is the expansion of EITC to "millions of workers who do not receive the EITC", via a federal guarantee of $9-$10
per hour.
"The "grand bargain" here requires the left to stop trying to place the full burden of a living wage on employers while the right accepts the need to have government fund the rest -- to the tune of a fresh $85 billion a year."
This is grand "bargain" indeed. The left gives up trying to place the full burden of a living wage on employers, while the right gives up $85 billion. Such a deal!
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Tigers Update: The worst season in the history of the Tigers is finally approaching its end. The Tigers have already become the first team to lose more than 110 games since the 1965 New York Mets; the only remaining question is whether they will end up with the most losses in modern baseball history (120, by the 1962 Mets). The odds look pretty good right now, as they would need to go 5-7 the rest of the way to avoid tying the Mets and 3-9 (roughly their seasonal average) would give them the record.
Mike Maroth has already become the first 20-game loser in the majors since Brian Kingman in 1980; Jeremy Bonderman would have surely joined him had the Tigers not ceased sending him out to the mound every five days.
The Tigers have scored 524 runs, which means they are on pace to score 565 runs, which would be the fourth lowest amount of runs scored for an AL team in a non-strike year since the advent of the designated hitter rule in 1973. On defense, they have given up 851 runs, a pace that would indicate 919 runs allowed by the end of the season. That would be the twelfth most runs allowed by an AL team in the same time frame. The difference between their runs allowed and their runs scored (354) would be the worst in American League history, beating out the 1932 Boston Red Sox, who were outscored by their opponents by 349 runs.
Friday, September 12, 2003
Krugman's off his meds again.
"Meanwhile, the crudity of the administration's recent propaganda efforts, from dressing the president up in a flight suit to orchestrating the ludicrously glamorized TV movie about Mr. Bush on 9/11, have set even supporters' teeth on edge."
No, Pablo, it's this nonsense from you that sets my teeth on edge.
"Maybe it was the pressure of other commitments that kept Mr. Bush from visiting New York yesterday; but one suspects that his aides no longer think of the Big Apple as a politically safe place to visit."
Perhaps he missed it, but Mayor Bloomberg specifically requested that VP Cheney not attend because the security procedures would interfere with the families of the victims. Obviously security would not be any easier with the President there.
"Four months ago it seemed that the 2004 campaign would be all slow-mo films of Mr. Bush in his flight suit. But at this point, it's likely to be pictures of Howard Dean or Wesley Clark that morph into Saddam Hussein."
I don't get the fascination with Clark among the left; surely he is not likely to win in the primaries entering at this late date. And I'm sure Krugman is horrified at the prospect of Howard Dean morphing into Saddam. Tough.
Monday, September 08, 2003
Are You Ready for Some Football? During one of the games this weekend, Fox Sports asked fans to log onto their website and vote on the question of whether winning the first game was important in the NFL. This may seem obviously so; after all there are only 16 games in the season, so that one game is the equivalent of 10 games in baseball.
However, a different picture emerges if you look at the record of teams winning their first game. In 2002, 16 teams went 1-0 to start the season. Their combined record was 137 wins and 119 losses. If you take away the 16 opening day wins, they combined for the remainder of the season to go 121-119; basically .500 football.
Oddly enough, the picture was even worse for teams starting the season 2-0. There were eight teams that went 2-0 to start the 2002 campaign; they combined for a record of 66-62. After removing the 16 wins, the 2-0 teams were a combined 50-62 from week 3 on, substantially worse than .500 ball.
This does not appear to be a one-year fluke. In 2001, 15 teams that started off 1-0; for the remainder of the season they went 111-114. There were eight teams that started out 2-0; for the rest of the season they were 52-60.
What's going on here? I suspect that the schedule-meisters at the NFL have been making an effort to have the good teams play the good teams and the bad teams play the bad teams early in the season. Note the Raiders-Titans game last night and the Philly-Tampa Bay matchup tonight for examples of the former, and the Arizona-Detroit game for the latter.
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Listened to several of Dean's stump speeches in the last couple days. The Seattle one is quite amusing, mainly because they left in the warmup speakers. Professor Hubert Locke (sp?) felt compelled to denouce "that psalm-singing fascist in the Justice Department," (about 6:40 into the clip, note the wild applause this comment brings). Professor Locke is a little weak on the English language however. He says "... thank you for enabling we ordinary citizens...". Take out the "ordinary citizens" and it is obvious that he means, "thank you for enabling us...."
The other speakers are funny mostly because they deliver applause lines at the wrong time.
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Tigers Update: The Tigers now have two 14-game losers in Mike Maroth and Jeremy Bonderman. Expect Brian Kingman, the last man to lose 20 games in a season, to be celebrating on The Best Damn Sports Show, Period, soon.
I don't understand the people who are claiming we need more troops in Iraq now. If our forces were losing battles, that would be a good argument. As it is, they are being killed in ambushes and bombings, which a greater force would be largely powerless to stop.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Robertson Morrow (jeez, what a GREAT name) has an cover article in the American Conservative about the decline of the dollar that just demands a thorough fisking, so here goes.
Morrow starts out with an anecdote from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the basic point of which is that 79% of the people are useless. The only worthwhile people are "the best and brightest... scientific researchers and key executives", and "those who do the actual work, such as manufacturing". The rest, "Hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name it," are "useless ballast".
Now in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this is told in a rather humorous way and thus it's not quite as hate-filled as I've managed to portray it. But Mr Morrow apparently feels that Douglas Adams was right. Interestingly, Mr Morrow himself is described as a financial analyst, which would surely qualify as "useless ballast" under this schema.
The article is filled with questionable conclusions and assertions.
"But foreigners have had their fill of lending us dollars."
Oh, really? Then why are interest rates at or near historic lows in this country? Funny, the traditional supply and demand model would indicate that if the supply of lenders dried up, the price (interest rates) would rise.
"In the six worst years of the ’80s trade crisis, 1984 to 1989, the cumulative current account deficits totaled 16 percent of GDP. At that time, the dollar declined by half."
This is ridiculous. The dollar did not decline by anywhere near half from 1984 to 1989. It declined about 20% against the British pound, and about 30% against the French franc, and these declines were from historic highs for the greenback. In 1984, the French franc had hit 8 to the dollar, which a French newspaper summarized with the simple headline Huit! (Eight!). By grabbing a year when the dollar happened to be high and comparing it to a year when it was low, you can prove anything. The current account deficits have continued to rise, but the dollar is now worth a little over 10% more than it was against the pound. We did decline about 50% against the Japanese yen, from 1984-1989, but you would have a hard time proving ill effects from that on the American side (it does seem to have hurt Japan quite a bit). The current account deficit with Japan has not changed much and yet our currency is roughly where it was in 1989 against the yen.
His explanation for the dollar's value is entirely based on trade. But there are lots of other factors, as should be obvious from the fact that the US dollar has appreciated against the yen since 1993, while our trade deficit with Japan has remained high. In fact, most currency traders blame the dollar's woes on the low rates prevailing in the US, which causes investors seeking higher returns to send their money to alternative markets. Indeed if you look at the low point of the dollar against the yen in 1993, it coincided with another period of very low short-term interest rates in the US.
Monday, June 09, 2003
Tigers Update: Can Mike Maroth become the first 20-game loser in the big leagues since Brian Kingman in 1980? Maroth is 1-11 with less than 40% of the season gone He'll probably get 20 more starts, which means he's only got to lose 45% of his total starts to get there. Although Maroth's ERA is a full run over his team's, he should continue to get the nod every fifth day as he still ranks third in that category among Tiger starters.
Thursday, May 29, 2003
What's So Bad About Feeling Guilty?
That's what Michelle Cottle wants to know.
To which I can only respond: Exactly what the hell is so wrong with a little liberal guilt--or guilt in general, for that matter? In recent years, personal guilt has fallen tragically out of vogue as psychotherapists and self-help quacks have implored us to love ourselves just as we are, regardless of the hurtful, selfish things we do. Come to think of it, it's odd that "liberal guilt" has emerged as such a common slur since Republicans in particular profess disgust over the "If it feels good, do it" mentality. Moreover, the Judeo-Christian belief system that conservatives so adore is all about guilt. We're supposed to feel bad about the terrible things we do--or those that we sit back and watch others do. Without guilt, there can be no redemption.
Of course what she misses here completely is that Howell Raines does not feel guilt (as far as I know) for things he actually did. That is NOT part of white liberal guilt. White liberal guilt is about what others did, and not just stuff that they allowed to happen, but stuff that happened before they were born. White liberals feel guilty about slavery, they feel guilty about stealing the land from the Native Americans, lord knows they probably feel guilty for the Spanish Inquisition and the Dark Ages if you press them on it.
The New York Times is reporting a story " Linking Guns and Gun Violence" from a couple days ago. It's a classic liberal bias piece, lazily reported by Eric Nagourney. Although it's only 7 paragraphs long, it's brimming with startling factoids like "people with guns are 16 times as likely to commit suicide using guns". (And people with sleeping pills are 20 times as likely to commit suicide using sleeping pills).
But what really made me swallow my gum was this floater:
The study also found that women were significantly more likely than men to be victims of gun homicides. "This likely reflects the singular danger faced by women in abusive relationships," Dr. Wiebe wrote.
This is nonsense. In point of fact, women are FAR less likely to be murdered than men. In 2001, for example, over three times as many men (10,503) were murdered as women (3,214). An estimated 8,719 people were murdered with firearms in 2001. Unfortunately, the FBI does not break out the data by weapon and gender, but even if we assume that 100% of the women murdered in 2001 were murdered with firearms, that leaves 5,505 people murdered with firearms in 2001 who were NOT women. Since we can generally assume that those who are not women are men, that means that even under the most generous assumption, women make up about 37% of firearm murder victims, while men account for 63%.
This is a classic Liberal Media Bias error--one that suits the prejudices of the New York Times. Mort Sahl used to joke that if the world was ending tomorrow, the headline in the New York Times would be "World To End: Women and Minorities Disproportionately Affected". New York Times' readers now believe that women are more likely to be victims of gun homicides.
Note: I have assumed for the purposes of this argument that women=females and men=males, so children are included in each category. However in all probability if we excluded children the effect would be that men are even more disproportionately killed by firearms than women. For example, although females make up 23.4% of murder victims, women over 20 make up only 23.1% of murder victims over 20. Using 17 years as the baseline figure, women over 17 make up only 22.1% of murder victims over 17. However, the FBI does not provide a breakdown of murder victims by age and weapon, so we cannot do the calculation I used above.
Saturday, May 24, 2003
The Chris Hedges speech continues to make ripples. The conservatives who feel the need to be consistent have mostly been disapproving of those who shouted him down, remembering the situation in the 1980s when the left did that to virtually any speaker of the right.
That's a legitimate point, but suppose in 1999 a Republican speaker had stood up at a graduation, and said "Today I want to talk to you about why Bill Clinton should have been convicted in the impeachment trial", is there any doubt that he would have been met with a chorus of boos? Is there any doubt that his mike would have been turned off well before he got to, "Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broddrick; this we know."
And I would say that's totally appropriate, as was the reaction to Hedges.
Annika Update: As predicted she did not make the cut, or finish last. Her finish was about the best result the LPGA could have hoped for. They didn't want her to be totally embarrassed, but they certainly didn't want her up there on the leaderboard either, because then the LPGA would be just for the women who can't compete with the men. Still no word on whether the LPGA will allow men to compete in their events (hah!).
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Tigers Update: The Tigers are now on a 9-game losing streak. Their current record is 9-35. In order to lose more than 120 games (the record, held by the 1962 Mets), the Tigers would have to go 32-86, for a .271 winning percentage.
Annika Update: Although CNNSI gushed about Annika's round of 71, calling it "One Over on the Guys", the fact remains that as of this moment she's tied for 63rd in the tournament, and that ranking will probably decline before the end of the day as there are still players out on the course and they are shooting under par on average.
Listening to Chris Hedges' idiotic speech at Rockford College. It's bad on so many levels that it's really hard to believe this guy won a Pulitzer.
Early on, he says "we are embarking on a occupation". It's "an" surely?
As usual he blames terrorism on low wages. "and this rage, in a world where almost 50% of the planet struggles on less than $2 a day". However, Atta's father was a lawyer, and Bin Laden's was a billionaire contractor.
There is an air of pronunciamento about the whole speech, almost as if the heavens had parted and Chris Hedges was there, letting us know the word from on high.
"And remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem". Gee would you include yourself in that statement?
He compares war to a "vast video arcade game". Of course there is still very little evidence of this, unless you want to make the claim that bombing targets from the air has a video game feel. Personally I think real video games are NOTHING like war--they are much cooler.
"War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause..." A more perfect summary of how the left feels so superior to the rest of society would be hard to imagine.
He talks about suddenly not feeling alienated. Of course this was the "two-week liberal patriot phenomenon". For two weeks after 9-11, the left felt like Americans. Since then of course they have gone back to hating America.
BD
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Predictably, there is a dust-up brewing over Vijay Singh's remarks about Annika Sorenstam. Here's my take. It's bad for the LPGA. There is NO way Annika can compete against the men from the back tees. Women cannot hit the ball as far as men, which means they are playing 3 irons from the fairway while the men are playing wedges. Annika is the best women's player in the world. That means that there are thousands of men better than she from the back tees.
Prediction: Annika fails to make the cut. She will probably not have the worst score (somebody will blow up), but she will be close.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Baseball musing this morning. Although the focus for the last few days has been on Palmeiro's breaking 500 home runs, A-Rod has managed to set the record for a major leaguer for most home runs by the age of 28. A-Rod has 309 homers as of yesterday. The prior record holder was Mel Ott, with 306 dingers, with Eddie Mathews and Hank Aaron close behind at 299 and 298 respectively. Here's the best part: A-Rod is NOT yet 28, in fact in terms of baseball age he won't be 28 until next season.
Some of this is certainly due to the juiced ball, lack of pitchers, or bandbox ballparks, depending on which reason you believe has caused the sudden upsurge in home runs in the majors over the last decade. But how can we adjust for this?
Fortunately, there is a reference source which contains every baseball statistic since 1871 in Microsoft Access format, so you can create your own queries. I decided to take a look at the home run rate in Aaron's time versus that which applies today. Aaron played from 1954-1976; during that time hitters (excluding American League pitchers, who have not been hitting in A-Rod's time), averaged 1 homer for every 45.6 plate appearances. A-Rod has played since 1994; during that time hitters averaged 1 homer for every 35.1 plate appearances. This indicates that about 23% of A-Rod's homers are due to current conditions, which would be about 69 homers entering the 2003 season, knocking him down quite a bit from the top at age 28. Still all he has to do to get it back would be to hit 75 homers over the balance of this season and the next, a task which he seems quite capable of achieving.
Note: I am not really suggesting that we do this sort of adjustment for everybody's stats like this; God knows if we did Roger Connor would probably rank as the greatest home run hitter ever. Just pointing out that even if you do make these adjustments, A-Rod still ranks up there near the top. It's not all an illusion, just some of it.
There has been some comparison of the NY Times' Jayson Blair scandal to the infamous Janet Cooke story. Cooke, a reporter for the Washington Post, concocted a story about an eight-year-old junkie in 1981. The initial story caused a sensation, with Cooke winning a Pulitzer Prize. However, eventually it was discovered that she had made the boy up and she was fired and had the prize rescinded.
The interesting thing to me is that if the story had been written in the mid-late 1980s, there would have been no controversy at all about it. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine by then that the story about an eight-year-old junkie would have been passed on by editors as the equivalent of dog bites man.
Monday, May 12, 2003
An interesting and generally favorable review of Sid Blumenthal's new book in the New York Times today:
"Sidney Blumenthal, journalist turned Clintonist, has written a deeply reported, deeply partisan book about his time as a senior White House aide. Scores are settled, both petty and portentous, and the book is being passed around Washington, samizdat-style, so the various players can check the index for their names."
I confess to not understanding the "deeply reported" bit, but the "deeply partisan" seems obvious. Samizdat refers to "The secret publication and distribution of government-banned literature in the former Soviet Union." It's a current political buzzword, and seems poorly applied here. I doubt very much that there's a secret cabal [aren't all cabals secret?-- ed] of Washington insiders passing the book around.
"The book... evokes a dangerous, salacious political epoch that has been obscured by a period of terrorism and war."
Lord only knows how the reviewer thinks the late 1990s were "dangerous". "Salacious" of course is the word that David Kendall used to describe the details of Clinton's sexual activities with the hired help contained in the Starr Report.
I could Fisk the rest of the review, but it's not worth the effort. The reviewer manages to get quotes from people who both like and despise Blumenthal, but his objectivity ends there. About the worst he can say about Blumenthal is that he is partisan. On the other hand, he uses words like "exhaustively annotates", and "to his credit...", "comprehensive", "history will no doubt find Mr Blumenthal's account useful", and similar blather.
More important is this bit noted in passing:
" In the book Mr. Blumenthal takes particular satisfaction that after his own subpoenaed appearance in February 1998 before the independent counsel about his contacts with the press, Mr. Starr's "favorable rating sank to 11 percent, one of the lowest ever recorded for any public figure."
That may have had something to do with the fact that Blumenthal appears to me to have LIED to the New York Times' Anthony Lewis about some of the questions he was asked in front of the grand jury. Particularly, Lewis reported two questions that Blumenthal was never asked, according to the grand jury transcript: "Does the President's religion include sexual intercourse?" and "Does the President believe that oral sex is sex?".
A hat tip to Drudge for pointing this out on his webpage. The Times is in the middle of a controversy about a lying reporter, but apparently it has no problems with helping to promote a lying source's book.
Note: I was unable to come up with independent confirmation of the two questions mentioned above, or a complete transcript of Blumenthal's grand jury testimony. In contemporaneous accounts of Blumenthal's press conference after the testimony, the focus was more on Blumenthal's claim that he had been asked about his contacts with the media. Other sources have concluded that Blumenthal was at best exaggerating this claim.
Later note: It is not surprising that the media would focus on the aspect of Blumenthal's charges that applied to THEM. The navel-gazing media always think they are the story.
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Ruy Teixeira and John Judis published a book last year entitled "The Emerging Democratic Majority". The title echoed Kevin Phillips' 1969 bestseller, "The Emerging Republican Majority", as well as Lanny Davis' lesser-known 1974 opus "The Emerging Democratic Majority".
Davis at least had the advantage of seeing his book published in a watershed year for Democrats. Teixeira and Judis had the misfortune of being published just before the 2002 midterm elections, in which the Democrats were pretty soundly trouced. Fortunately, hope springs eternal, and Teixeira has written an article for the Washington Monthly to show that the Democratic majority is still emerging despite the fact that for him, the 2002 election "wasn't my ideal outcome".
Teixeira throws a fair amount of percentages at the reader in the hopes that nobody will bother to look at them too hard. However, he makes no attempt to put these numbers into real context. For example, he says:
"The Denver-Boulder area as a whole voted for Democrat Strickland by a 6-point margin; that's larger than the 3-point victory Gore won in 2000, which in turn improved on Michael Dukakis's 1-point loss in 1988."
That makes it sound like a pretty straight line of improvement from Dukakis' 1-point loss to Gore's 3-point win to (US Senate candidate) Strickland's 6-point win. But of course it does not mention that when Dukakis lost by 1 point in Denver in 1998, he was losing by about 7.5 percentage points nationally, so that his 1-point loss in Denver was about 6.5 percentage points better than he did overall, while Gore's 3-point win in Denver only bettered what he was doing nationally by about 2.5 percentage points. That sure does not sound like an area getting more Democratic, and the inclusion of the Senate candidate is clearly a red herring.
The rest of the article contains oodles of the same sort of proof:
"Arapahoe voted for Reagan in 1980 by 39 points, for Bush I in 1988 by 22 points and for W. in 2000 by only eight points. In the same period, Jefferson favored Reagan by 34 points, Bush by 15, and his son by just eight."
Arapahoe certainly does seem to have gotten more liberal by the stats provided... but Bush II still won it by eight points, which hardly makes it a Democrat bastion. Jefferson however seems to have stayed about the same from Bush I to Bush II despite the slide indicated in the results. Bush I won by 15 points, which was about 7 points better than he did nationally. Bush II won by 8 points, which is about 8-1/2 points better than he did nationally.
"Maryland's gubernatorial election is an even stronger refutation of the exurban thesis. To begin with, Democrats picked up two House seats in the 2002 election, and Gore beat Bush by 17 points in the last presidential election."
Well, yes, but more to the point in 2002, they lost the governorship. To cite that gubernatorial election as a refutation of the exurban thesis (that as suburbs become more Democratic, as they have, that simultaneously exurbs are becoming populated disproportionately by Republicans) is pretty silly. And in fact, notice that he immediately tries to divert attention from that loss with two completely unrelated issues--the individual election results in congressional elections, and Gore's vote total in 2000.
"So the GOP was clearly the turnout party in 2002. But it's unlikely to be able to repeat this. To begin with, Democrats won't be caught napping again. They've launched their own version of the "72-Hour Project" called "Project 5104"--shorthand for winning 51 percent of the vote in '04."
As usual, an explanation for 2002 that does not require admitting that the voters preferred Republicans over Democrats. Instead, the Democrats were just caught napping, but they've got a plan for '04--to get 51% of the vote.
Now that may not sound like an ambitious plan. That is, until you look back over the last 14 presidential elections and realize that the Democrats have managed to achive that 51% goal exactly ONCE. That's right. LBJ got 61% of the vote in 1964. NO other Democrat candidate for president has gotten 51% of the vote. Carter in 1976 got a bare majority with 50.06%; he was the only one to break 50%. Truman in 1958, Kennedy in 1960, and even Clinton in 1992 and 1996 were NOT majority presidents. In that same period of time, Eisenhower (twice), Nixon, Reagan (twice) and Bush I have all gotten more than 51% of the vote.
Friday, May 09, 2003
Break up the Tigers! After a four game winning streak, the team is now batting .207. They have closed to within a game and a half of the Cleveland Indians. They aren't quite reminding people of the 1961 Yankees, but they're also bearing less resemblance to the 1962 Mets.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
The State Department is reporting apparent good news in the war on terrorism--the total number of terrorist incidents was at its lowest level since 1969.
This appears to be a generous reading of the statistics at best. As someone else pointed out, having a better year against terrorism than 2001 is not exactly setting the bar very high. I went to the State Department's webside and checked the data for myself. Although the paragraph above cites deaths from terrorism, I was not able to find that statistic. I did find casualties, which clearly includes the wounded, and there the numbers were not positive. There were 2738 casualties in 2002. While that was down substantially from 2001's 5,431, it is higher than 2000's 1,391 and 1999's 940.
All these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt of course. For example, the report lists 1,440 Americans killed by terrorists in 2001 (I guess the rest killed on 9-11 were citizens of other countries?), but only 90 wounded, which seems an extremely low number to me.
And a higher casualty rate in 2002 as compared to 1999 and 2000 is not necessarily unexpected or a negative. When you go after the terrorists they frequently move their plans up, so it may be that we have taken casualties that would otherwise have been taken in 2003 or 2004.
Monday, April 28, 2003
Tigers Update: CNNSI gives the top 50 in every offensive statistic for each league. There are NO Detroit Tigers in the American League's top 50 in Runs, Hits, Doubles, Homers, RBI, Batting Average, On-Base Percentage or Slugging.
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Detroit Tigers update: After 18 games (and 17 losses), the Tigers are, as a team, batting .179. Their combined at-bats total 577, roughly the total that a player would accumulate in a season. This is what their batting line would look like: AB--577; Runs--39; Hits--103, with 17 doubles, two triples and 6 home runs. A bad year for Mark Belanger, in other words. The Tigers are so bad that they have only five players hitting above .200. Their designated hitter (Dean Palmer) is batting .091 with NO extra base hits. It is hard to believe they could be worse off sending up the pitchers to bat.
On the pitching side, they have a 5.08 ERA and have given up 24 home runs (four times as many as they've hit). This could be one of the worst teams in the history of baseball.
The Great Pretender
Will Potter has an article at Counterpunch entitled "It's Not Just Protesters Anymore--When Police Attack Journalists". Here are the first two paragraphs:
"I have reported on mass protests where police attacked protestors, but I tended to accept- and even wrote in some articles- statements by police that protestors provoked this violence. The crowd got out of control, I thought. Surely, someone threw rocks, threw punches, or did something to instigate these assaults. The police would not attack people for no reason.
After witnessing, and feeling, attacks by multiple baton-wielding officers during the permitted anti-war march in the capital on April 12, I realized I have made a mistake. As a reporter, I have mistakenly placed the burden of proof on the protestors, rather than the police. And now, as I see coverage of the protest where I was beaten, I see other journalists doing the same."
And here is the last paragraph:
"For white, upper-middle class reporters like me, it may come as a shock that police can do these things, and get away with it. I would like to believe that freedom of speech is protected in our country, and that the police exist to protect such freedoms. I hope that, unlike me, other journalists do not need to endure attacks by police to begin reporting critically on police conduct. We have a civic responsibility to stop accepting police statements and start holding these people accountable."
This, to me, is a classic example of how the anti-war movement became "mainstream"--by saying they were mainstream. What is your impression of Mr Potter from this article? The impression I got was of a middle-aged reporter who has tended to go along with the powerful in the past, but suddenly saw the light when he himself was assaulted.
That impression is dead wrong, as I discovered after doing a little googling.
First, let's cover his claim to be an "upper-middle class reporter". Here's a picture of Will from 1998. That was five years ago, and he doesn't look like he could have been shaving at the time. Here's an article Will wrote for the Texas Observer in 2001, where his one-sentence bio was as follows: "Observer intern Will Potter is an activist and writer living in Austin." Here's his capsule bio from an article Will wrote for ZMag in February of this year (two months ago): "Will Potter is an intern for a national newspaper based in Washington, D.C. He has written for the Texas Observer, the Chicago Tribune and the Dallas Morning News. In his spare time he pays attention to politics and the state of American media. He can be reached at will.potter@lycos.co.uk"
Now, I'll admit, I don't know what "national newspapers based in Washington D.C." pay their interns, but I would hazard a guess that it is NOT sufficient income to consider the person "upper-middle class". It may be that Will considers himself in that light due to his upbringing, but the fact remains that it is a substantial social promotion. My read is that he's a year or two out of college, probably living in a small apartment with a roommate to help share expenses.
Second, consider Will's expressed shock at the indignities visited upon his upper-middle class journalist's body (he claims to have been hit a total of three times by police batons, and pushed once), and his professed prior belief "The police would not attack people for no reason". The Texas Observer article, which was written a full year and a half ago is headlined "The New Backlash" with a subhead of "From the Streets to the Courthouse, the New Activists Find Themselves Under Attack". Among other things, the article claims "Demonstrators have been beaten, attacked with rubber bullets, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, falsely arrested, infiltrated and—in Genoa, Italy last July—even killed." There is no mention in that particular article of "statements by police that protestors provoked this violence", or that "[t]he crowd got out of control". I don't know about you, but I find it hard to believe that he could write that, and then be shocked a year and a half later when he gets whacked a couple of times with a billy club.
Also note that the Texas Observer bio mentions that he's an "activist". Indeed, it is not hard to find evidence for that. In 2002, he was introduced by PBS as "a representative for UT Students Against Cruelty to Animals". In June of 2001 he wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Texan (The University of Texas' student newspaper", in which he defended the Earth Liberation Front, claiming "ELF is not "destroying the American way of life," as [the writer of a prior article] said. They're protecting it."
So overall, we can see how Mr Potter has managed to "mainstream" himself. He passes himself off in the Counterpunch article as an "upper-middle class reporter", when in reality he is a lowly intern just out of college with a history of activism. Quite a different picture than he manages to convey.
Friday, April 11, 2003
How bad are the Detroit Tigers? After eight games (all losses), the team's batting leader is Gene Kinsale, at .238. Ouch!
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
A hilariously silly and handwringing article headlined "Mood changes as America finds war is not a video game," in the Independent today. My favorite bit is this:
Across Los Angeles, the mood was overwhelmingly one of consternation and just a little dread. "I have a sick feeling about where this is all heading. They made us believe this would be a cakewalk, and now look what is happening," another woman, a writer married to an entertainment lawyer, said. "This can only make the world hate us Americans more." In what is perhaps a sign of the times, she did not want to be identified by name.
There is an awful lot of sillyness in that one paragraph. First, consider the words "Across Los Angeles, the mood was overwhelmingly one of consternation and just a little dread." The writer quotes just two people (both women) in the entire article, and from that he deduces what things are like across Los Angeles? Second, the argument of the woman quoted here makes no sense. The fact that the war is not turning out to be a cakewalk is going to make the world hate us Americans more? Why? Would they be happier if we had won it in two days, but killed 10 times as many civilians? Third, who is the "They" who made her believe the war would be a cakewalk? Fourth, why in the world is it relevant that the woman being quoted is married to an entertainment lawyer? Is this an attempt at legitimizing her job as a writer or making her sound a little more mainstream? The other woman quoted in the article is identified as a nursery school teacher, with no mention of her husband's c.v.; apparently no resume bolstering is required in her case. And finally, I can't help but chuckle at the last line about it being a sign of the times that the writer did not want to be identified by name. Just red meat to the folks who see McCarthyism under every bed.
Lawrence Kudlow, in an otherwise fine editorial in the New York Post says:
Equally problematic for Democrats is the apparent popularity of antiwar presidential candidate Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, who is absorbing the political oxygen from more responsible candidates like Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman.
Dean is constantly being mentioned as surging in popularity among Democrats. Indeed, the phrase Howard Dean boomlet came up with 115 hits on Google, a fair number of which are relevant:
Jonah Goldberg: There will be major Howard Dean boomlet next summer.
Blooger Charles Donefer: I was excited to see a little media boomlet around Vermont Governor Howard Dean.
Hugh Hewitt: The Dean boomlet will be fun to watch, as will its collapse when people study the state of Vermont with its 617,000 people, its eight murders in 2002, and its 3,000 African-Americans.
There is only one problem with the Dean boomlet: There is no evidence that it is happening. According to the latest CNN/USA Today poll, if Hillary Clinton does not run, Dean is three points behind Carol Moseley Braun, and tied with Al Sharpton at five percent. We can take it as read that anybody who gets less support than Carol Moseley Braun is a fringe candidate.
David Gelernter points out that it is unlikely that the Iraqis will love us while the bombs are dropping. That will be far more likely to happen after the war.
If you want information about tank warfare, or other technical aspects of the war, Gregg Easterbrook has been posting stuff that reads like it could be in the next Tom Clancy novel.
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
CBS News reports:
House cafeterias will be serving fries with a side order of
patriotism Tuesday with a decision by GOP lawmakers to replace
the "French" cuisine with "freedom fries."
The main problem I see with this policy nationwide is that it would take months to teach the liberals how to say "You want freedom fries with that?"
Friday, February 28, 2003
Krugman's off on another rant about the economy.
The conventional wisdom among business forecasters now calls for growth of a bit more than 3 percent over the next year. Growth at that pace is barely enough to keep up with rising productivity and an expanding labor force, not enough to make a serious dent in unemployment.
Gee whiz, and what was the growth rate during the Clinton years? A little less than 3%.
Then there's the effect of the worst fiscal crisis in the 50 states since World War II. Iris Lav of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests that tax increases and spending cuts at the state level could drain $100 billion from the national economy over the next year. Aid from Washington is an obvious answer — but the Bush administration refuses to provide a penny.
He's smart enough NOT to rag on Bush about the budget deficit in this column--after all it would be a little silly to suggest $100 billion in new spending by the feds, and in the same breath complain about the budget deficit. But he sneaks it in:
Why is the administration so uninterested in helping the economy? Here's my theory: The depressed state of the economy provides a convenient if bogus rationale for the huge, extremely irresponsible long-run tax cuts that, after Iraq, constitute this administration's principal obsession. To do anything else to help the economy would suggest that it's possible to create jobs now without putting the country's future solvency at risk — and that's not a message this administration wants to convey.
The country's future solvency is of course a roundabout way of talking about the deficit.
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Atrios claims
Opposing the War is Not Anti-American
It's the people who claim it is who are.
I responded in the comments section that his formulation amounted to "Free speech for me, but not for thee".
Boiled down to its essence, his claim is, "It's alright for me to exercise my rights to free speech by protesting the war, but it's not alright for you to exercise your right to free speech by calling me anti-American." Of course this is quite silly. I agree with the first part of his formulation and not the second. And I even defend his right to call those who call the war protesters anti-American, anti-American in turn. But I disagree with his statement nevertheless.
And he's wrong on another level. Most of the people who are saying the war protesters are anti-American are confining their comments to that segment of the war protesters who ARE actually anti-American. Most people, if they were to look at the folks who are organizing the movement, would conclude that a high percentage of the people behind this movement are in fact anti-American. Don't take my word for it, take David Corn's.
The WWPers in control of ANSWER are socialists who call for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, who support Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong Il, who oppose UN inspections in Iraq (claiming they are part of the planning for an invasion aimed at gaining control of Iraq's oil fields), and who urge smashing Zionism.
I would say that you could call those folks anti-American. May not summarize them completely (after all, they are so much more than that), but then calling me a football fan does not summarize me completely, either. So the question becomes, are conservatives calling ALL the protesters anti-American, or are they just calling some of them anti-American?
Here's Michael Kelly:
But doubtless, hundreds of thousands of marchers--and many more millions who did not march--believe quite sincerely that theirs is a profoundly moral cause, and this is really all that motivates them. They believe, as French President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, ``war is always the worst answer.''
Here's Bill Murchison:
Some, it was clear, came out of sincere if misguided attachment to the principle that once you have given peace a chance, you have to give it another chance, then another and another, and so on.
And David Horowitz:
It is true that some of the marchers were well-intentioned or at least not so blind yet that they could look past the evil that is the regime in Iraq.
Sorry, I don't buy the notion that anybody is calling all of the antiwar crowd anti-American. Useful idiots, yes, but that is another issue.
Is this guy for real or is he a clever parody? Currently I'm leaning towards the clever parody theory.
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Krugman's column is only moderately dishonest by his own low standards. He starts off wondering why Europe and the US see things differently on the war. He concludes it is the difference in the media:
I'm not mainly talking about the print media. There are differences, but the major national newspapers in the U.S. and the U.K. at least seem to be describing the same reality.
Most people, though, get their news from TV — and there the difference is immense. The coverage of Saturday's antiwar rallies was a reminder of the extent to which U.S. cable news, in particular, seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media.
What would someone watching cable news have seen? On Saturday, news anchors on Fox described the demonstrators in New York as "the usual protesters" or "serial protesters." CNN wasn't quite so dismissive, but on Sunday morning the headline on the network's Web site read "Antiwar rallies delight Iraq," and the accompanying picture showed marchers in Baghdad, not London or New York.
There are two little diversionary tricks in there. He moans that most people get their news from TV and segues into the cable TV news channels. But of course, most people do NOT get their news from FoxNews or CNN; their combined audience is dwarfed by CBS, NBC and ABC News. And second, while supposedly griping about how the cable TV news channels handled the protests, he cites CNN's Website.
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Eric Alterman has the first chapter to his new book, What Liberal Media? online. I will cover the first part of the chapter now (dealing with Anne Coulter's " Slander") and hit the second half (dealing with Bernard Goldberg's " Bias") a little later.
The first chapter mostly fulminates over the enormous success of two recent books alleging the liberal media really exists, " Bias" by Bernard Goldberg and " Slander" by Anne Coulter. Alterman believes the Liberal Media is "a myth to be certain but a useful one. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the nation." One wonders just how a "liberal media" would accomplish that, but it's a quibble.
As evidence, Alterman provides this backup:
'And even William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America, has come clean on this issue. "I admit it," he told a reporter. "The liberal media were never that powerful and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
Alterman tries to pull a clever switch here. He tells us that a prominent conservative (Kristol is nowhere near as influential as Alterman makes him out to be--surely Rush Limbaugh and a dozen or so other talk show hosts are more powerful) has owned up to the fact that there is no such thing as the liberal media. And yet what does he provide? A quote where Kristol says the liberal media are not all that powerful. That is not quite the same thing as saying they don't exist.
Alterman goes on to attack both " Slander" and " Bias". It is apparent that on the one hand he thinks both books trivial, but "I do not think they can go unanswered." Examples of how trivial he thinks the two books are abundant. "...both books are so shoddily written and "researched" that they pretty much refute themselves" "In fact, barely any of the major allegations in either book stands up to more than a moment's scrutiny" "Although I abhor the methods of both authors..."
Of course he does not really answer the books or their allegations. Instead he proceeds with some fairly snarky comments about Coulter. She's "a blonde bombshell pundette", a former "right-wing congressional aide" with "a mouth so vicious...", who appeared "on air in dresses so revealing they put one in mind of Sharon Stone in the film Basic Instinct. She's "malevolent" an "alleged constitutional scholar", and "has been accused of plagiarism". When comes time to actually mention the problems with her book, he suggests that we check his website (!) for appendix one-- Fact-checking Anne Coulter. Okay, so I went there and the first criticism seems valid--if Jeffords in fact voted against Clinton's tax increase and in favor of Bush II's tax cuts, then she should not be claiming that he did the opposite.
But the second criticism is so silly, that even the American Prospect, which compiled the list, admits that it is not really fact checking. Coulter notes that in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, criticism of President Bush was muted. "This bipartisan lovefest lasted precisely three weeks. That was all the New York Times could endure. Impatient with the national mood of patriotism, liberals returned to their infernal griping about George W. Bush -- or "Half a Commander in Chief," as he was called in the headline of a lead New York Times editorial on November 5, 2001. From that moment on, the left's primary contribution to the war effort was to complain." As they point out it is closer to two months than three weeks from 9-11 to 11-5.
Coulter should have chosen an article to back up her "precisely three weeks claim", but it also seems obvious to me that she could have found those articles; indeed, in many of the political newsgroups on Usenet the bipartisanship of the left died within a week or two.
The third criticism isn't of something from the book, but of a comment she made on Crossfire. (So much for fact-checking the book, I guess). She guessed that the judges who ruled the Pledge of Allegiance were appointed by Democrats and not by Republicans. Note that she did not say that she knew this, she was just making a guess. As it turned out, only one of the judges had been appointed by a Democrat; the other was appointed by Nixon.
The fourth criticism reads as follows: FACT CHECK ANN COULTER!: LEXIS-NEXIS ABUSE. On page 15 of Slander, she writes: "In the New York Times archives, 'moderate Republican' has been used 168 times...There have been only 11 sightings of a 'liberal Republican.'" Coulter does not footnote her methodology in "discovering" this nugget, but we checked using both the Times's own free search page and Lexis-Nexis. Our results? Our Times search reveals twenty-two hits for "liberal Republican" since 1996 -- that is, in just the last seven years. For Lexis, we searched for "liberal Republican" in The New York Times over "all available dates" -- and got 524 documents. Coulter's claim is obviously false.
Okay, the New York Times lets you search their database, so I did. I found 149 articles by searching for "liberal Republican" since 1996, which is quite a bit more than either Coulter (11) or the American Prospect (22). I was unable to search all available dates. However, note what the American Prospect does NOT tell you--how many articles they found by searching for "moderate Republican". I got 835 articles. Thus, Coulter's essential point, that the NY Times uses the term "moderate Republican" far more often than "liberal Republican" is true. Just for fun, I tried "moderate Democrat", which only appeared in 184 articles. Apparently Democrats require the "moderate" or "good doggy" label far less often than Republicans. The term "liberal Democrat" also appeared far less often (388 articles) than "conservative Republican" (926) mentions.
There are more "errors" that the American Prospect claims to find, but these are presumably the strongest points they could make against " Slander". Pretty weak beer in my opinion.
Alterman goes on to attack Bernard Goldberg's " Bias", which I will cover in a later posting.
|
|
