Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Sharing Toys

26 Comments

[Thursday morning bump]

What a stupid analogy Obama made today.

The McCain campaign’s response should be, “No, Senator. If you shared your toys and sandwich in kindergarten, we’d call you generous and selfless. If you forced another child to share his toys, that would make you a communist.”

[Update on Thursday morning]

John Hood elaborates:

…in this passage Obama revealed precisely why he is vulnerable to such charges: he can’t seem to tell the difference between a gift and a theft. There is nothing remotely socialistic or communistic about sharing. If you have a toy that someone else wants, you have three choices in a free society. You can offer to trade it for something you value that is owned by the other. You can give the toy freely, as a sign of friendship or compassion. Or you can choose to do neither.

Collectivism in all its forms is about taking away your choice. Whether you wish to or not, the government compels you to surrender the toy, which it then redistributes to someone that government officials deem to be a more worthy owner. It won’t even be someone you could ever know, in most cases. That’s what makes the political philosophy unjust (by stripping you of control over yourself and the fruits of your labor) as well as counterproductive (by failing to give the recipient sufficient incentive to learn and work hard so he can earn his own toys in the future).

Government is not charity. It is not persuasion, or cooperation, or sharing. Government is a fist, a shove, a gun. Obama either doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t want voters to understand it.

I think he does understand it. He just hopes that we don’t, at least long enough to put him in power.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Man Bites Dog

10 Comments

AP:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.

That’s not news, of course–he’s been doing that since the campaign began. What is news, and shocking news, is that the AP reported it. Better late than never.

[Update early afternoon]

Wow. Has something gotten into (or out of) the MSM water? CBS is criticizing The One’s proposals as well.

If he closes every loophole as promised, saves every dime from Iraq, raises taxes on the rich and trims the federal budget as he’s promised to do “line by line,” he still doesn’t pay for his list. If he’s elected, the first fact hitting his desk will be the figure projecting how much less of a budget he has to work with – thanks to the recession. He gave us a very compelling vision with his ad buy tonight. What he did not give us was any hint of the cold reality he’s facing or a sense of how he might prioritize his promises if voters trust him with the White House.

If he can’t do what he promises, what will he do?

Not that McCain is a lot better in that regard, of course. But unlike Obama, who has a consistent leftist philosophy, McCain is ideologically incoherent, so there’s at least a chance that he won’t screw us over.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Fondling Balls

7 Comments

Iowahawk breaks out the calculator on poll reliability:

So if the sample size is 400, the margin of error is 1/20 = 5%; if the sample size is 625 the margin of error is 1/25 = 4%; if the sample size is 1000, it’s about 3%.

Works pretty well if you’re interested in hypothetical colored balls in hypothetical giant urns, or survival rates of plants in a controlled experiment, or defects in a batch of factory products. It may even work well if you’re interested in blind cola taste tests. But what if the thing you are studying doesn’t quite fit the balls & urns template?

  • What if 40% of the balls have personally chosen to live in an urn that you legally can’t stick your hand into?
  • What if 50% of the balls who live in the legal urn explicitly refuse to let you select them?
  • What if the balls inside the urn are constantly interacting and talking and arguing with each other, and can decide to change their color on a whim?
  • What if you have to rely on the balls to report their own color, and some unknown number are probably lying to you?
  • What if you’ve been hired to count balls by a company who has endorsed blue as their favorite color?
  • What if you have outsourced the urn-ball counting to part-time temp balls, most of whom happen to be blue?
  • What if the balls inside the urn are listening to you counting out there, and it affects whether they want to be counted, and/or which color they want to be?

If one or more of the above statements are true, then the formula for margin of error simplifies to
Margin of Error = Who the hell knows?

I think that the disparity among the polls is pretty good evidence of this. A lot of it, particularly the weighting is guess work, educated or otherwise. There’s only one poll that matters (though with all of the chicanery going on, even that one is going to be in doubt, particularly if it’s close on Tuesday). What a mess.

Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Doing The Math

11 Comments

The Obama campaign has been lying about its donor base:

If, as Obama says, most donations are grassroots and in small amounts, the numbers do not match up. If this many people donated to his campaign he would be polling at well over 50%.

In a grassroots movement, you smell the green. He’s raised $600 million, as you say, in small donations. So divide it by ten bucks apiece and there’s 60 million donors. If 120 million people vote on Tuesday, and he gets 50% that equals …60 million voters! Honestly, you cynical rightwing losers, what’s so suspicious about that math?

On Fox Newswatch on Saturday, Jane Hall said that many of her (journalism) students couldn’t even calculate a percent. Of course, in this case, they’re not motivated to figure it out, even if they know how.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Aren’t There Any Editors Left?

10 Comments

Sarah Palin is righteously demanding that the LA Times release the tape, but look at this transcript:

…she saved her hardest criticism for the newspaper that currently holds the tape, saying they was refusing to release it to aid Obama.

“It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking after his best interests like that,” Palin said. “In this case, we have a newspaper willing to throw aside even the public’s right to know in order to protect a candidate that its own editorial board has endorsed. And if there’s a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in cow-towing, then the L.A. Times, you’re winning.”

I’m pretty sure that the paper has never towed a cow. And she didn’t say that it did. She said that they kowtowed. But I guess neither the writer or editor (if there was one) knew what that word meant or at least how it was spelled.

Political Commentary

A Duty To Not Vote

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John Stossel says that there are a lot of people who shouldn’t be voting:

Economist Bryan Caplan, author of “The Myth of the Rational Voter”, points out, “the public’s knowledge of politics is shockingly low.”

He scoffs at the idea that “it’s everyone’s civic duty to vote.”

“This is very much like saying, it’s our civic duty to give surgery advice,” Caplan said. “We like to think that political issues are much less complicated than brain surgery, but many of them are pretty hard. If someone doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it really is better if they say, look, I’m going to leave this in wiser hands.”

Isn’t it elitist to say only some people should vote?

“Is it elitist to say only some people should do brain surgery? If you don’t know what you’re doing, you are not doing the country a favor by voting.”

Nope. You’re only doing the demagogues a favor.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Prove Me Wrong, LA Times

37 Comments

OK, since we’re apparently free to use our imagination, here’s what I think happened at that party.

There are PLO and Hamas flags decorating the room, along with Che and Mao posters. Khalidi, Ayers and Obama are slapping each others’ backs, raising their glasses and toasting the upcoming destruction of the racist Zionist entity, all the while laughing at the thought of the final Final Solution. Obama says, “You know, when I take over, the first thing I’ll do is withdraw all aid from those fascist kikes, and I’ll give the Palis a couple nukes.” Then he turns to Ayers, and asks him if he’s come up with any fresh schemes for mass murder of the millions of recalcitrant capitalists, so that they can be implemented in the first one hundred days. After dessert, they get out an American flag, crumple it up on the floor, and jump up and down on it, shouting “Death to Capitalism, Death to America.”

No?

That’s not how it went down? Well, prove me wrong, LA Times. Show the tape.

[Late morning update]

Doug Ross writes that he has gotten a tip from a person who claims to have viewed it:

Reason we can’t release it is because statements Obama said to rile audience up during toast. He congratulates Khalidi for his work saying “Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine” plus there’s been “genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis.”

It would be really controversial if it got out. Tha’s why they will not even let a transcript get out.

Yes, don’t want to have a little controversy disturb an upcoming coronation.