South Dakota Politics

Headlines Worth Noting

Film Sometime After Midnight

Glamorous Russian spy could be stripped of British passport

Let's hope it's not menopause.

Greenspan Says Economy May Be Undergoing a `Pause'

They always told me that masturbation would lead to this.

Our obsession with sexuality may be blinding us

That explains the 839,499 year old fish and chips wrapper.

Human ancestors lived in Britain 840,000 years ago

File under "unclear on the concept".

Total solar eclipse fans chase a moment in the sun

This is no reason to be suspicious of shape shifters.

Buffalo man admits role in mortgage fraud case

The second and third Pirates movies still would have sucked.

What if Jack Sparrow had been captain of the Titanic?

If a body hits a body, should a body sue?

Anglican Body Hits Impasse on Women

It sure did drive the Obama Administration crazy.

Mental Health A Growing Concern After Gulf Spill

To make war, all you need is intelligence. But to make shoes, you need leather.

Hemingway's son approves new footwear line

Iowa joins Dumbledore's Army

State will handle possible charges in attack on Potter

Low Voltage at GM

File under: You have to pass it to see what's in it. We now have a glimpse at what the billions of tax dollars invested in General Motors has purchased. It's the Volt. Edward Niedermeyer at the New York Times looks under and behind the hood.

GENERAL MOTORS introduced America to the Chevrolet Volt at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show as a low-slung concept car that would someday be the future of motorized transportation. It would go 40 miles on battery power alone, promised G.M., after which it would create its own electricity with a gas engine. Three and a half years — and one government-assisted bankruptcy later — G.M. is bringing a Volt to market that makes good on those two promises. The problem is, well, everything else.

For starters, G.M.'s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks ... but after billions of dollars of government loans and grants for the Volt's development and production. And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius. It also requires premium gasoline, seats only four people (the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench) and has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze, which is more or less the non-electric version of the Volt.

Now let's get this straight.

1.    GM is producing its own version of the Prius. Except that GM's version costs $41,000 whereas the 2010 Prius starts at $22,750. Okay.

2.    If you purchase a Volt, you get "a vehicle that costs $41,000 but offers the performance and interior space of a $15,000 economy car."

3.    Tax breaks make the Volt less expensive to the buyer, which means that wealth is shifted toward GM through tax policy.

4.    Billions of government loans and grants were invested in the development of the Volt, which means that it is in fact much more expensive than the $41,000 that appears on the cute sheet in the window.

That is what GM has produced while it was managed by the Obama Administration. I can't wait to see how the health care reform works, now that we have passed it. Niedermeyer tries to be fair. It isn't all Obama's fault.

The Volt appears to be exactly the kind of green-at-all-costs car that some opponents of the bailout feared the government might order G.M. to build. Unfortunately for this theory, G.M. was already committed to the Volt when it entered bankruptcy. And though President Obama's task force reported in 2009 that the Volt "will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term," it didn't cancel the project.

That doesn't help Obama much, does it? GM was going broke while designing a car that no one in his right mind would buy. The President steps in to save GM and, instead of suggesting that they build cars that might actually sell, he encourages them to continue developing the Volt. Green Jobs! Of course, all the green comes from the taxpayers.

It's true that Obama saved a lot of jobs by continuing the GM bailout that was George W.'s idea. Each of those jobs probably didn't cost more than three or four jobs in the private sector (such as remains private). The result is the Volt. Welcome to the future.

Mary Francis Berry Explains How the Race Card is Played

Back a few posts ago, intrepid and cherished reader, Bill Fleming, accused me in these terms:

KB, when you downgrade true acts of racism into a buzzword (playing the race card) and say it's all politics, you are denying the problem.

Bill was objecting to my point that the Left was using the race card in its attacks on the Tea Party Movement, just as Breitbart was trying to use the race card to attack the enemies of that movement (in this case, the NAACP).

In fact I thought this whole story was not about racism at all, but about the political use of the race card. I now have my suspicions confirmed.

Professor of Political Poker at the University of Pennsylvania, Mary Frances Berry, explains at Politico how the race card is played.

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one's opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.

I am not as sure as Professor Berry that this charge is proving effective, over the long run. But I am sure she is right that "There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans." I couldn't have put it better. It is politically safer, however, to accuse a smaller group of racism than to make that same accusation against the opposite party as a whole, let alone most Americans.

Professor Berry lets the cat out of the bag. The Tea Party people are no more and perhaps less racist than Americans in general. The charge of racism, like the equally bogus charge of encouraging political violence that was the last card played against them, is a purely cynical strategy. It puts the Tea Party folks on the defensive, and distracts readers and viewers from the economy.

That's politics, and I am not particularly offended by it. It's hypocritical and dishonest but reasonably benign if, that is, racism is really not a serious problem anymore. I fervently hope that's true. If it isn't, using the race card in this way is surely analogous to crying wolf when there is a real wolf out there.

Either way, Professor Berry has, for reasons beyond my comprehension, exposed the cynicism and dishonesty of the Democrat's strategy against the Tea Party.

No Christians Need Apply

 Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are legal concepts. They were invented to protect something that is more than a legal but a natural right: the right to make up one's own mind about things without fear of reprisal if one does not agree with the orthodox view.

Jennifer Keeton has filed suit against Augusta State University in Georgia, claiming she has been denied that right. I found no reference to this tale at the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the LA Times, though it is for many reasons an important story. It is on Fox, and the Daily Caller. To be fair, the story is covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Huffington Post and ABC News. Here is a bit from the legal complaint:

ASU faculty have promised to expel Miss Keeton from the graduate Counselor Education program, not because of poor academic showing or demonstrated deficiencies in clinical performance, but simply because she has communicated both inside and outside the classroom that she holds to Christian ethical convictions on matters of human sexuality and gender identity. Because Miss Keeton will not agree to undergo an ideological remediation program that requires both (1) that she submit to an extended supplemental curriculum of sources hostile to her belief-system, and (2) that she "alter her beliefs" (as the faculty put it) and agree to affirm the propriety of behaviors she believes immoral, the faculty has stated it will dismiss her from the graduate counseling program at ASU.

One problem here is that ASU seems to be maintaining scrupulous silence on the case. We are only getting one side of the story, from Ms. Keeton and her lawyers. But the complaint includes text from the "remediation program" that the university is requiring of her. From ABC:

The remediation plan, according to court documents, included attending three workshops on diversity, a monthly two-age reflection on what she has learned from research into LGBT counseling issues, and increased exposure to gay populations. The latter action came with the suggestion that she attend Augusta's gay pride parade.

This does look rather like a Chinese-style reeducation program. It is, apparently, complete with accusations from the neighbors.

"Faculty have also received unsolicited reports from another student that [Miss Keeton] has relayed her interest in conversion therapy for GLBTQ populations," the lawsuit's quotation of the plan continued, "and she has tried to convince other students to support and believe her views."

Ms. Keeton denies this.

I gather that Ms. Keaton believes that "male and female" are not social constructs but are fixed by nature. She believes that homosexuality is not "a state of being" but a lifestyle choice. I happen to agree with her about the one but not the other. It seems that the ASU counseling program regards her beliefs and the fact that she expressed them in class and out of class as a disqualification. The remediation program seems designed to correct her beliefs.

Should a person who believes that homosexuality is wrong be allowed to be a counselor, when some of her clients may be homosexual? That is not an unreasonable question. Should a Palestinian immigrant who believes that Israel is an abomination be allowed to be a counselor when some of her clients may be Israeli immigrants or Jews sympathetic to Israel? Ditto.

The only way to deal with this problem without infringing on the most basic freedoms is to focus solely on professional conduct. If there is any evidence that Ms. Keeton refuses to treat any client according to the rules of her profession, that would be one thing. It looks like she is being corrected because she refuses to sign on to the party line. That is something else.

The distinction between beliefs and conduct is one of the most basic principles in modern liberal democracy. If Ms. Keeton's complaint is accurate, everyone who believes in freedom of thought should be on her side.

Three Stooges Man the White House Switchboard

Okay, now I'm worried. Consider this exchange between White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and a reporter, at a press conference last Thursday.

Q Is it clear why the President was unable to reach her yesterday? Apparently he tried and -- she's been all over TV -- why wasn't she reachable?

MR. GIBBS: It may have been because she was all over TV. The White House operator tried on at least two occasions last night and was both unable to reach her and unable to leave a voicemail.

Are you worried yet? If not you should be. The New York Times has what might be the most devastating piece I have yet seen on the Obama Administration, and it is largely about Secretary Gibbs thirty-five word response.

[T]he White House has 14 operators, and fields about 4,000 calls a day during the week, and about 2,500 a day on the weekend. The operators serve as part secretary, part diplomat, part gatekeeper (screening prank calls, among other things), and part detective. And, of course, they can usually get just about anyone on the line.

"I could pick up the phone and say, 'God, I don't remember this guy's name, but he was here at the White House, he's in Hollywood and he works on such and such and he came to see the president one time,' and they'd come back with him on the phone for you," said Gerald Rafshoon, President Jimmy Carter's communications director. "They could find anybody, and they were so great to work with."

Mr. Kennedy seemed particularly fond of the operators, and often showed off their skills as a parlor trick. Once, he ordered them to track down a staff member who, unknown to them, was standing next to him in the Oval Office. They found him minutes later.

The article also describes how the White House Switchboard managed to get Truman Capote on the line for JFK. Capote had an unlisted number and was staying with a friend who also had an unlisted number. It took them thirty minutes.

There are obvious reasons why the President needs such an office as this. He needs to be able to reach anyone at a moment's notice in a crisis. Fifty years later, we presumably have much more sophisticated technologies. And yet…

According to Gibbs, the President tried to reach Ms. Sherrod the previous night. The press conference was at 1pm in the afternoon and the best switchboard in the world still hadn't reached her. Even if you rule out bed time, that's gotta be close to 10 hours. But wait! It gets better.

An especially surreal moment occurred at a briefing Wednesday, when Ms. Sherrod watched, via a split screen on CNN, as Mr. Gibbs chronicled Mr. Vilsack's struggles to get in touch with her.

"Apparently, she's watching this briefing, Shirley Sherrod, on CNN right now," said Jake Tapper of ABC, to the amusement of the press corps. "Is there anything you want to say to her?"

Kennedy's switchboard could find someone standing right next to the President in minutes. Obama's people can't find someone who is on cable television at the same time as their own press secretary? CNN knew where she was. Jake Trapper of ABC, sitting in front of Gibbs in the James S. Brady Briefing Room, knew where she was. Sherrod knew where Gibbs was. The White House was clueless.

Now there are two possible explanations for this. According to the NYTs article, several historians find Gibbs story unbelievable. Once again the Administration was telling a lie. That looks most likely to me. It was an especially incompetent lie, though, as it made the Administration look especially incompetent.

The other explanation is that this Administration couldn't find its own ass if both hands were duct taped to it. I was I was certain that that is not true.

JournoLism

From Michael Ramirez:

Senator Jim Webb’s Negative on Affirmative Action

The Sherrod Affair, which has consumed most of the oxygen in the media and blogosphere, was not in fact about race. It was about the use and abuse of race as a political weapon. It is a bit refreshing to turn to a story that is about race.

Jim Webb, Senator from Virginia, has a piece at the Wall Street Journal that is about race. More specifically, it is a call for the end to affirmative action. Or at least I think that is what he is calling for.

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

That last bit is rather dramatic, and one might wish that Senator Webb had presented more evidence. Perhaps his conclusion is clear by logic. Affirmative action must be understood in contrast to what one might call negative action. The latter was the great work of the Civil Rights Era: removing legal and quazi-legal barriers to racial integration.

Unfortunately, abolishing segregation in education, government hiring and contracts, and elsewhere, did not automatically raise the fortunes of African Americans. Affirmative action was intended to expedite progress by discrimination in favor of African Americans. Given two applicants for a job or a spot in law school, one of whom belonged to the previously disfavored group and the other of whom did not, preference would be given to the former. That's discrimination even if, as Webb acknowledges, it was discrimination for a very laudable purpose. It remains the fact that discrimination in favor of someone means discrimination against someone else.

The original argument for affirmative action turned on compensatory justice. This group has been discriminated against in the past, so it is fair to discriminate in their favor now, at least for a while. However, when the Supreme Court examined such policies in light of the 14^th Amendment Equal Protection Clause, they did so on the basis of a second argument: the virtue of diversity. State Universities, for example, have a compelling interest in creating a diverse student body. For that reason, they are allowed to discriminate between student and faculty applicants on the basis of such criteria as race, ethnic background, and gender.

The diversity argument opened up affirmative action benefits to many groups that had not been subject to the same kind of discrimination as African Americans whose family history traces back through segregation and slavery. Hispanics, Eskimos, Pacific Islander, and others have benefited from affirmative action policies. To be sure one could make a compensatory justice argument in favor of all such groups.

It is not so easy, however, to target the groups you have in mind with nice legal categories. A study published in the American Journal of Education in 2007 found something rather interesting. From Inside Higher Education:

The study -- by sociologists at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania -- used the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen to look at the black students enrolled at 28 selective colleges and universities. Of all black people aged 18 or 19 in the United States, about 13 percent are first- or second-generation immigrants, but they made up 27 percent of black students at the selective colleges studied. The proportions of immigrants were higher at the private colleges in the survey than at publics, and were highest among the most competitive colleges in the group, hitting 41 percent of the black students in the Ivy League.

More than a quarter of Black students at the most competitive colleges were recent immigrants, but presumably enjoy affirmative action benefits. Harvard Professor Lani Guinier had this to say:

If you look around Harvard College today, how many young people will you find who grew up in urban environments and went to public high schools and public junior high schools?" she said. "I don't think, in the name of affirmative action, we should be admitting people because they look like us, but then they don't identify with us.

That's the targeting problem on the beneficiary side. Do East Indian Black immigrants deserve compensatory preference? I don't know, but Professor Guinier thinks she does.

Senator Webb is worried about the targeting problem as it affects those who are penalized by affirmative action policies. Does a White woman fresh out of the trailer park with two kids in tow really deserve to be discriminated against because she is the wrong color? I would add: what about an Irish American whose great grandfather was told that no Irish need apply?

Senator Webb doesn't mention, but I will, the plight of Asian Americans. A young woman of Chinese or Japanese descent must score better than White Americans to gain get a place in a competitive university. That's because such groups are "over-represented" in these institutions. That is what diversity means.

I think that Senator Webb is right. No one should be discriminated against because he or she is the wrong color or comes from the wrong place. Maybe, if we care about equal protection, the time has come to actually practice equal protection.

Breitbart, Obama, the NAACP, and Fox

It is true, as my friend and reader A.I. points out, that "Fox went to air without fact checking and with bias guns blazing as they covered the Sherrod story." It is also true that Fox comes in fourth in culpability here. First place has to go to Breitbart, as I think I have shown that his initial post of the edited clip was intentionally misleading. That action created the story.

Second place goes to the Administration for firing Ms. Sherrod without doing any fact checking. That action turned Breitbart's misleading clip into a national story, and put the prestige of the Agriculture Department, and hence of the Administration as a whole, behind Breitbart's clip. The USDA did something that none of the other players could do: it actually disgraced Ms. Sherrod by giving her the boot.

A distant third place goes to the NAACP, for backing the Administration without bothering to view the whole speech. The NAACP had the entire Sherrod speech on video, and many of the organizations members and officers, including, I believe, the President, were present at the speech. Did nobody remember anything they heard?

Fourth place goes to Fox for failing to do what the Administration and the NAACP failed to do: check the facts. But as A.I. acknowledges, Fox waited until the Administration acted to go with the story. Here is a summary of Fox's actions from the LA Times:

Both Sherrod and the NAACP – which first condemned her remarks, then reversed itself -- put the blame in part on Fox News for hyping the story, a charged the cable news channel rejected.

Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news editorial, said the network's news programs reported the story with caution. "When I heard about this Monday morning and saw it on Breitbart's website, I said, 'OK, could be a story, let's check it out,' " Clemente said. "We did the normal fact-finding we would do on any story."

At an afternoon editorial meeting Monday, Clemente urged the staff to first get the facts and obtain comment from Sherrod before going on air, according to internal notes from the meeting that were provided to The Times. "Let's make sure we do this right," he said.

Sherrod ended up resigning Monday afternoon, hours before O'Reilly broke the story on his show. The first reported piece on Fox News, by correspondent James Rosen, aired on Tuesday morning, and included a second video clip that added context to Sherrod's comments.

But Fox's commentators showed less restraint. O'Reilly continued to condemn Sherrod's comments on his show Tuesday night, saying she made a mistake, even after it had emerged that her words had been misrepresented.

Yes Fox should have checked the story out better, and yes they exploited it for all it seemed to be worth; but on Monday night Fox had something to go on. It had the firing of Ms. Sherrod and the NAACP's condemnation. That certainly seemed like an unbiased and informed confirmation of Breitbart's story. Or at least it did if one were to believe that the Administration had any idea what it was doing.

Criticizing Fox News for its coverage is fair. Blaming Fox News for this debacle is a product of the same kind of bias with which the story is awash. Breitbart and the Obama Administration are the culprits here. They together are solely responsible for this mess.

Judging Breitbart

I have seen two defenses of Andrew Breitbart for his role in instigating the Sherrod Charade, and both of them fail. One is that Breitbart did provide the proper context in the text accompanying his video excerpt. As commenter George Mason notes on my previous post, Breitbart himself offers this defense.

This fails because, as far as I can tell, it's false. Here is what Breitbart said in his original post:

Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn't do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind". She refers him to a white lawyer.

This accurately describes the clip he provides. What the text and the clip leave out is essential. Ms. Sherrod did eventually come around to personally aiding the White farmer when she saw that he was not being adequately served by other, presumably White, bureaucrats. He says she saved his farm. It also leaves out the punch line: Ms. Sherrod says that this incident taught her that her job was not about race but about alleviating poverty and misfortune.

The second defense is offered by commenter South Dakotan:

I haven't seen one pundit get this correct. Breitbart's point was the NAACP's reaction to Sherrod's initial racism. His clip showed and his point was that the NAACP crowd ate up the racism - laughing and nodding in agreement as Sherrod said she brought the white farmer to "one of his own kind' and "didn't give him the full force of help" that she could. This was the NAACP crowd's reaction LONG BEFORE her story turned to one of redemption. This is THE story. This is what Breitbart is trying to say. Pundits and readers alike are missing it. Everyone is running around, "acting stupidly" without the facts and assigning blame, including conservatives.

I don't believe Breitbart intentionally deceived anyone. Like Team Obama, we sure seem to easily throw our own under the bus.

This is a possible interpretation of the reaction of the NAACP audience to Ms. Sherrod's tale, but it is clearly the wrong interpretation.

Sherrod's speech follows a script familiar to anyone who has witnessed a tent revival or AA meeting, or any similar gathering of crusaders. Someone stands up and tells her tale. This is where I came from. This was my moment of crisis. This is how I overcame it. The audience knows the script as well as the speaker. At various points they laugh, nod their heads, and murmur agreement. Yeah, been there, done that. This was a moment of communal confession and mutual support. Given the horrific experiences of African Americans during the Civil Rights era, it would be astonishing if Ms. Sherrod's story were not in fact a common story. I am certainly not in a position to judge anyone harshly for this and neither, I dare say, is Mr. Breitbart.

When Ms. Sherrod tells of overcoming her worse instincts and doing the right thing, the audience was with her all the way. So I cannot but conclude that Breitbart's post title, "Video Proof: the NAACP Awards Racism, 2010", was a falsification. This is pernicious mischief when the Left does it, and it is just as pernicious when the Right does it.

I took issue with Powerline (my second favorite blog) in my last post over their defense of Breitbart. I note that Powerline has come around to my view.

Andrew Breitbart shouldn't have posted the video excerpts of Shirley Sherrod's speech with the comment that "the NAACP awards racism." It was a mistake to do so. He was had.

Others including ourselves should not have followed suit. It was a mistake to do so. We extended our apologies to Ms. Sherrod as soon as the unedited video of the speech was made available…

The shafting of Shirley Sherrod came to an end within something like 24 hours. As I see it, she was owed apologies by those from whom she has received them, in addition to one from my friend Andrew, from whom she has not. She has become a celebrity and an advertisement for racial redemption.

Perhaps the only reason I am not now apologizing to Ms. Sherrod is that I was traveling during the first phase of his story.

Sherrod Charade

Once you have convened a circular firing squad, I believe the standard procedure is for the executioners to shoot each other. In the curious case of Shirley Sherrod, everyone seems to have turned his gun on himself.

In case you missed the mess, allow me to reconstruct it. Conservative gotcha artist Andrew Breitbart posted clips edited from a speech before the NAACP by Ms. Sherrod, "head of the United States Department of Agriculture's rural development office in Georgia." In Richard Cohen's words:

Sherrod was caught on video supposedly telling an NAACP meeting last March that she had not given a certain farmer the service he deserved because he was white.

Well, she didn't "supposedly" tell the NAACP that. She did say that. Transcript from Powerline:

[T]he first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm he took a long time talking. ... But he had come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. [Laughter from the NCAAP group.] I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land. And here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn't give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough .... I took him to a white lawyer that had attended some of the training that we had provided.... So I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.

Breitbart and Powerline and, I gather, Fox News, reported that as evidence of reverse racism and it echoed about the net.

In short order the Obama Administration fired Ms. Sherrod, and the NAACP applauded the decision. Of course, the Obama people didn't bother to read the whole speech. Not reading the whole thing is more or less their MO.

There was only one problem. The Breitbart clip was taken altogether out of context. The first half of Ms. Sherrod's speech was in fact a splendid piece of rhetoric (not that I agree with everything she says). She is a pious woman who has come through a lot, and if I am to be judged one day, I hope I don't have to meet her standard. Here is the complete speech. 

She begins with the story of her father who was murdered by a White man who was not indicted, because at that time in that place, he could not be indicted. She tells the above story to explain what she herself had to overcome. The point of the story, she clearly insists, is that "it's not about race it's about poverty." In her telling, she ended up helping the farmer. I heard the man himself on NPR. He says she saved his farm. Within hours the USDA and the NAACP were both back-tracking, complaining that they had been snookered by Breitbart. They were, but it wasn't hard, was it?

It's good to have people like Breitbart around. They are the watchdogs of democracy, looking for any hint of mischief on the other side. But to do that job effectively, they have to be scrupulously honest. Breitbart wasn't honest in this case. He cooked the books and distorted the meaning of Sherrod's words. He has done serious damage to his reputation. Powerline is one of the best and most responsible conservative blogs, but they haven't come clean on this either.

Why did the Obama Administration and the NAACP act so quickly to throw Ms. Sherrod under the bus? The Administration was concentrating on its financial reform bill, and surely didn't want this to crowd it out. It did anyway.

That wasn't the primary motive, however. The Administration and its allies, including the NAACP, have been waging a full court press against the Tea Party Movement. The claim that the Tea Party people are racists, presented in the recent NAACP condemnation of the extremist elements in the movement, is a big part of that campaign. An example of reverse racism would have undermined their propaganda. It was the campaign against the Tea Party Movement that the Administration and the NAACP were acting to protect when they decided to sacrifice the reputation and career of this fine woman.

Everyone here has egg on his or her face, excepting Ms. Sherrod. Breitbart should not have posted such as misleading clip. He should be smart enough to know that, Obama Administration officials excepted, everyone would sooner or later read the whole thing. Ms. Sherrod should certainly not have been fired so quickly, and she should have been fired at all. The moral here is that you shouldn't use the race card to score political points. It just doesn't work anymore, for the right or the left.

Vaccines and Antibodies Against Prejudice

Jeffery Weiss at Politics Daily has an excellent column in praise of a bad bunch of folks.

There surely aren't many more famous religious institutions in America than Westboro Baptist Church or many more famous church leaders than its founder, Fred Phelps. Even if you don't immediately recognize the names, I bet you'll immediately recognize a three-word clue: "God hates fags."

Yup. It's the folks who carry their hate in the name of Jesus across the nation, to synagogues and churches, Holocaust museums and public schools, community centers and state capitals. Most notoriously, they picket the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan with signs reading "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" -- because they believe that as long as America countenances sin, American soldiers deserve to die.

Westboro Baptist Church I'd like to offer a limited but real defense for the Phelpsists: They're an attenuated virus vaccine for the American body politic.

Weiss argues that the Phelpsists are like a vaccine in this way: they are so manifestly despicable and embarrassingly goofy that there is zero danger their message will spread; but they are visible and loud enough to remind us of the darkness that dwells in every human heart. Maybe that will encourage the right kind of antibodies.

For that same reason, the NAACP's recent charge of racism against the Tea Party movement was pernicious.

Today, NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn extremist elements within the Tea Party, calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.

The resolution came after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches using vile, antagonistic racial slurs & images. In March, respected members of the Congressional Black Caucus reported that racial epithets were hurled at them as they passed by a Washington, DC health care protest. Civil rights legend John Lewis was called the "n-word" in the incident while others in the crowd used ugly anti-gay slurs to describe Congressman Barney Frank, a long-time NAACP supporter and the nation's first openly gay member of Congress.

Missouri Representative Emmanuel Cleaver was spat on during the incident, and so it was particularly appropriate that the resolution was passed as NAACP delegates gathered in Kansas City for our 101st Annual Convention.

The problem with those passages is that, for the most part, they are entirely unfounded. The famous confrontation between the Congressional Black Caucus and the Tea Party protesters was recorded on dozens of devices. No one has produced any evidence of racial slurs. Representative Cleaver was yelled at. It's on film. Even he declined to actually say he was spit on.

Likewise with the photo evidence produced on the NAACP website. Comparing Obama to Hitler and the American Taxpayer to Jews during the Holocaust is ridiculous rhetoric, and suggests idiocy on the part of some of the protesters. Yet the same charges were made against George W. How can they be interpreted as evidence of racism?

The pitiful weakness of the "Tea Partiers are racists" propaganda in fact says something very good about America. We are at this moment remarkably resistant to racism. Even the most hysterical critics of the President recognize that racism is bad. Those are the antibodies Mr. Weiss alluded to.

Racism is very bad. False accusations of racism as a political ploy are almost as bad.

She Voted Against It Before She Didn’t Vote Against It

Powerline has a post on Stephanie Herseth Sandlin's advertising. Here is the SHS ad that the post discusses.

I thought this was pretty good. SHS reminds us that she has always campaigned by putting distance between herself and her political party. The only thing of substance in this ad is her vote against bailouts and "the trillion dollar health care plan".

Powerline notes the problem:

… she seems to be saying, is an insupportable monstrosity. So Herseth Sandlin must support repeal of such impossibly costly legislation? Actually, no. According to Herseth Sandlin, "repealing it wouldn't be a productive way forward."

Representative Herseth-Sandlin is in a tight spot, to be sure. She has to sell herself as an independent, and she uses her vote against health care reform to that effect. She also has to hold on to a much Democratic support as possible. Perhaps she judged that she couldn't afford to vote for repeal. That means she voted against it before she didn't vote against it.

All this resolves to a simple calculation. If you are a South Dakotan in favor of all the things that Obama/Reid/and Pelosi had been doing, you certainly ought to vote for Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin regardless of how she votes on health care. You will still more of what you want than you would from Kristi Noem. If you lean in the other direction, you certainly ought to vote Noem.

This explains, I think, my friend Cory Heidelberger's fascinating series of anti-Noem, pro-SHS posts. See here for the latest installment. Cory reads the bottom line as I do above.

On the other hand, there is this press release from the Noem Campaign:

South Dakota Republican U.S. House Candidate Kristi Noem announced today that her campaign raised more than the three-term incumbent, Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in the most recent reporting period. Noem raised $332,462 from May 20th to June 30th. Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin raised $297,168 during that same period.

That fund raising deficit suggests that Heidelberger's uncomfortable enthusiasm for SHS is not infectious.

The Front Fell Off

I am on family business right now and that means travel into realms where internet connections are not a given. Blogging may be sparse. That will especially be true when I am cooling my butt in Sylamore Creek.

Sitting in my hotel room, I notice that Survey USA has Fiorina leading Boxer 47% to 45% in the California Senate race. I think that is the first poll in which Boxer is behind. Oh frabjous day, says I. The same poll for the governor's race shows Whitman seven points ahead of the once and maybe not so future Brown. I have noted Survey USA is one of the few polls with a better recent record than Scott Rasmussen.

Of course my friend Cory Heidelberger continues to doubt the Rasmussen poll, except when he doesn't. A few days ago he made a pitch for Stephanie Herseth Sandlin on the grounds that she is as almost as irritating to Cory as Kristi Noem, but not quite as irritating. He and I jousted over that. Now he reminds us that the Rasmussen polls are suspect, and uses R to show that SHS is someone Republicans can support. Don't think for a moment that I am belittling my friend. To the contrary, I think we are in the presence of greatness.

I went to some trouble to show that, where it counts, Rasmussen has been very reliable. If he is using the same methods now and they work as well as they did in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts, Democrats in South Dakota and California have good reason to be in denial. That's where I would be if I were them.

In that spirit, I offer this video clip.

There is nothing wrong with the Democratic party in particular or the American Left in general, except that the front fell off.

Judicial Activism & DOMA

Judicial Activism means using the judicial power to serve political, as opposed to judicial opinions. It is most tempting when one fails to persuade constituencies or congresses to do what one damn well knows that they ought to do.

As textbook examples of this, see the District Court decisions in Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. U.S. Dep't of Health and Human Services? In these cases the District Court struck down the Federal definition of marriage in The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Now I am on record as being in favor of legal, same sex marriages. That is a political opinion. I am also on record as opposing the use of judicial fiat to impose such opinions. I think that the laws have to be changed the old fashioned way: by legislating.

Here is Eugene Volokh's summary of the Gill case.

The court reasons that, at least as to various benefits provided by the federal government, the distinction that DOMA draws between opposite-sex married couples and same-sex couples married under the laws of those states that recognize same-sex marriage is irrational, and thus violates the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause.

It is true that a law must be rational to be legitimate. That's the so called rational basis test. But all that is required is that the law has some reasoning behind it. It doesn't matter whether you think the reasoning is sound. There is a perfectly rational basis for restricting benefits to opposite-sex married couples. The historical reason for benefit extension under marriage was to provide for children and mothers who share a greater responsibility for the birth and rearing of children.

To be sure, many heterosexual marriages do not involve children, and some same sex couples adopt. However, since heterosexual couples account for almost all the births and rearing of children under marriage, it is perfectly rational for a state or the Federal Government to favor that arrangement. I am not saying the state or Federal Government should make such a distinction. I think it best not to. I am just saying that it passes the rational basis test.

There are no big surprises in that. But look at what the District Court did in the Massachusetts case. From Jack Balkin:

Massachusetts v. HHS holds that federal programs that deny benefits to married same sex couples violate the Tenth Amendment because they intrude into a function exclusively reserved to states, namely the definition and regulation of marriage.

Wow. The District Court has suddenly struck a blow for states' rights, and affirmed one of the sacred (if untenable) arguments of conservatives. Let's look at the Tenth Amendment. From ePublius:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The trouble with that is that it is coherent only if you adopt a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. In that case, the Federal Government could do only what it is more or less explicitly authorized to do under the Constitution. It could for example issue coins but not paper currency. Meanwhile, the states could do anything they are not more or less explicitly forbidden to do.

For better or worse, and probably for the better, that is not the Constitution we have or one that we have ever had. The Federal Government is limited only by Constitutional prohibitions. The state governments are limited by that, and the Federal Government. In that context the Tenth Amendment is void because it gives us no idea which rights are which. How in Heaven's name do we know that the definition and regulation of marriage are exclusively reserved to the states? I missed that part of the Constitution.

I think that District Court Judge Joseph Tauro's approach to his job is reasonably clear. Whenever a state or Congress acts in a way that offends his politics, that is a violation of the Constitution. Whenever a state acts in a way favored by his politics, that action is protected by the Constitution. If you look up "Judicial Activism" in the dictionary, you should see his picture.

The Bad Conscience of the MSM Costs Two Reporters Their Jobs

For a nation so deeply committed to freedom of speech, it is surprising how easy it is to get fired for saying something that is politically incorrect or politically embarrassing. It has happened before to a lot of sports and media figures. It happened recently to two journalists. Octavia Nasr, a twenty year veteran and senior editor at CNN was fired for this comment:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah ... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot.

Well, having a lot of respect for a "Hezbollah giant" and Holocaust denier does suggest questionable judgment. Likewise, David Weigel was fired from his job as a blogger for the Washington Post because of some very unfriendly things he said about conservatives on a supposedly private listserv. Weigel was hired to blog about conservatives, and one may wonder if he was capable of fair reporting.

If you are going to hire someone to comment on conservatives, and you want to produce a fair product, it isn't necessary to hire a conservative. You might however want to hire someone who has at least some sympathy for the people he is going to report on. That is a question about who to hire. Firing someone because of an opinion he or she expressed is something else.

It would be very unusual, and probably a bad sign, if a reporter had no biases. Every opinion is a bias, a leaning one way or another on a matter where knowledge is unavailable. A person without biases would be a person without opinions. Of course, a journalist may want her readers to believe that she is fair and that the accuracy of her reporting is as little distorted by bias as possible. The best way to do that is for the journalist to scrutinize her own opinions and try as best she can to see things from the other side.

It is a good thing rather than a bad one when readers have some idea what the journalist really thinks about conservatives, or Hezbollah, or anything else they report on. That way we can better be on the lookout for distorted reporting. It is an even better thing, I think, that reporters should enjoy the same freedom of speech as the rest of us, at least in a venue where that is appropriate.

Nasr and Weigel were not fired because their employers found some reason to suspect their competence or honesty as journalists. They were fired because they allowed their biases to become publically known. This suggests a bit of bad conscience on the part of the MSM. Nasr and Weigel careless let the rest of us see behind the veil. Neither should have been fired. This make journalism less honest rather than more honest, and it is an offense against freedom of speech.

Noem Leads Herseth Sandlin by 5 Points

I might not be doing Kristi Noem any favors by pointing out that she ranks number one at Politics Daily among "The Next 10 Women to Watch in Politics." PD's Capitol Hill Bureau Chief, Patricia Murphy, might or might not be doing Noem a favor with this comparison:

One look at Kristi Noem's biography makes it tough not to compare her to fellow frontierswoman Sarah Palin. The 38-year-old mother of three is a Republican trying to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, for South Dakota's at-large House seat. When Noem isn't running for office, she breeds Angus cattle and runs a hunting lodge with her husband on her family's ranch. (Can't we just assume she can field-dress a moose?)

Well, maybe an elk.

I wrote previously that Kristi Noem's 12 point lead in the first post-nomination poll seemed unrealistically high, even as a bounce. Well, the bounce has subsided. Rasmussen has a new poll out for the South Dakota race.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in South Dakota shows Noem with 49% support, while Herseth-Sandlin picks up 44% of the vote. Four percent (4%) favor some other candidate in the race, and three percent (3%) are undecided.

Given the power of incumbency and the fact that four months remain until Election Day, these figures indicate the race is clearly in the Toss-Up category.

Rasmussen is being responsible here. A five point lead is indeed a tossup, probably not much outside the margin of error. Still, when an established incumbent is five points behind in July, that usually means she's in big trouble.

That impression is confirmed by these numbers:

Herseth-Sandlin picks up 76% of the Democratic vote while Noem wins 74% of Republicans. Noem now leads among voters not affiliated with either major party by a 50% to 35% margin.

I think that's a little weak for Noem, and about what I would expect from Democrats who are not all so enthusiastic about SHS. But there are more Republicans than Democrats in the Rushmore State, so three quarters of the former wins on its own.

If SHS is really fifteen points behind among the "unaffiliated", she is very unlikely to survive this election. Unfortunately for my friends who comfort themselves by dismissing the Rasmussen polls, these numbers are in accord with the recent Gallup poll showing President Obama's approval rating at 38% among independent voters. I make no predictions. But I am guessing that my friend the Election Shaman, when he gets back from lecturing at his old alma mater Shaman U, will call this one.

2010 Report: Administration Strategy

 

A more interesting bit of strategy comes out of the White House. The Justice Departments suit against Arizona over the latter's immigration law makes little sense in terms of law. To be sure, state governments cannot nullify Federal Law, nor can they act on matters that are exclusively entrusted to the Federal Government by the Constitution. Arizona's law does neither of those things. Is it really illegal for a state to enforce federal law when the Federal Government is failing to do so? The Justice Department is, in effect, asking the Courts to block enforcement of duly enacted Federal Law that the Fed doesn't want to see enforced.

It turns out that Rhode Island of all places has had a similar law on the books for some time. From the Boston Globe:

Rhode Island State Trooper Nuno Vasconcelos was patrolling Interstate 95 a few months ago when he came upon a two-car accident in heavy traffic. The trooper pulled up, stepped out of his cruiser, and asked one of the drivers for his license.

The man said he did not have a license, and under questioning, confessed that he was here illegally from Guatemala.

If the accident had happened 15 miles north in Massachusetts, the man would probably have been arrested for driving without a license, which carries a fine of up to $1,000 and 10 days in jail, then released pending an appearance in district court.

But in Rhode Island, illegal immigrants face a far greater penalty: deportation.

No one seemed to be bothered by this before. Maybe it's okay when a blue state does it. The Administration is trying to shore up its support among Hispanics, who were formerly a very solid voting bloc. But Hispanic voters are dispirited of late, as the Administration has done nothing to push immigration reform (see: amnesty). The President's recent speech urging such reform is part of that strategy. Typically, the President neglected to actually offer any actual legislative text.

I think the President and his people are more worried about 2012 than 2010. The President may be able to win Hispanics back, but right now the peril is felt by Western Democrats. The Justice Department lawsuit is not going to do them any good. From the Politico:

The suit could, of course, help boost turnout among Hispanic voters in key areas across the West. And stridently anti-immigrant rhetoric could turn off independent voters. Yet many foresee a midterm electorate featuring an energized Republican base — for whom the immigration issue has emerged as a priority — prompting moderate white Western voters who are concerned about jobs to decamp to the GOP at least in the short term, political observers said.

"This is a tough issue for Democrats," said former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, a Democrat who is co-director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver. "Politically, I just can't think of any place in the West where this is going to play well."

But at least one thing is going well for the Democrats: public support for the health care reform legislation has never been higher. Right now approval and disapproval of the plan are dead even! Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that almost no one has been talking about it for several months. That insight, in turn, might have something to do with this decision, reported in the New York Times:

President Obama will bypass Congress and appoint Dr. Donald M. Berwick, a health policy expert, to run Medicare and Medicaid, the White House said Tuesday.

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said the "recess appointment" was needed to carry out the new health care law. The law calls for huge changes in the two programs, which together insure nearly one-third of all Americans.

This step avoids the nasty business of Congressional scrutiny, which will help keep the reform out of the papers and away from the public consciousness.

Well, there are two pieces of the Administration's 2010 election strategy. It's hard not to think that the Democrats think that the first two years of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, have been a political disaster.

2010 Report: Democratic Strategy

I keep thinking that, at some point, the President's slide in the polls has got to bottom out. So far, however, the steady decline in his approval rating that began roughly a year ago continues. Perhaps the worst news is the recent Gallup Poll, which has the President's approval rating among independent voters at 38%. Good Heavens, he is down in George W. territory.

Of course in overall approval he is only three or four percent in the hole (about 49% disapproval to 45% approval). That's better than BP, I bet! Independent voters, however, at the voters who usually decide elections. That sort of disgruntlement usually weighs heavily in off year elections. It also seems likely that the President's overall numbers are buoyed by his near perfect approval among African American respondents.

Well, we have some idea of the Democrat's strategy in this moment of peril. They have launched a YouTube like site in the hopes of finding more "Macaca Moments".

It probably can't be considered a surprise that Democrats are on the lookout for the next "macaca" incident.

With George Allen's famous phrase in mind, the Democratic National Committee is starting up "The Accountability Project," a Web site that will showcase recordings of Republican candidates and other campaign documents collected by regular folks.

God bless regular folks. This of course means looking for gaffs. I am not sure there is anything dirty about this, but I wonder what my colleagues in the blogosphere who regularly decry character assassination, ad hominem attacks, and the politics of personal destruction will say about this. No, I know what they will say. Either nothing, or they will say it's okay because it's the Democrats doing it.

This is the kind of thing you do when your only hope is that the voters somehow forget who you are and what positions and actions you have taken.

Does Strict Gun Control Reduce Gun Homicides? No.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence ranks states according to the severity of their gun control laws. South Dakota, for example, ranks poorly.

South Dakota has weak gun laws that help feed the illegal gun market and allow the sale of guns without background checks. In the 2009 state scorecards released for all 50 states by the Brady Campaign, South Dakota earns just four points out of a total of 100.

"Since South Dakota does not require Brady criminal background checks on all firearm sales, including those at gun shows, gun traffickers don't need to leave the state to funnel illegal guns to felons and gang members," said Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign.

Well, like other South Dakotans, I am used to seeing my state ranking low on something. But it does occur to me to ask whether weak gun laws lead to more gun violence. I assume that the whole point of "strong" gun laws is to keep people from being shot out of their socks.

As it happens, this information landed in my email queue just this week, sent from a colleague. The following graph was prepared by a third year law student.

He compares gun homicides per 100,000 (that's the Y axis) with the Brady ranking of state gun control laws (that's the X axis). So up means more gun homicides, and further to the right means looser gun control laws. Here is what the chart actually shows:

Now what you look for in a chart like this is a more or less smooth line from bottom left to top right, or vice versa. If homicides were low where gun control was strict, and vice versa, that would tell you that gun control laws reduce gun violence. If the line tilted opposite, so that homicides were highest where gun control was strictest, one might think that gun control causes gun violence. Of course, all the chart can show is correlation, not causation.

What the chart in fact shows is that there is virtually no correlation between gun control laws and gun homicides. Hawaii, at the strict gun control end, has the lowest gun homicide rate. But Maryland, which rates slightly stricter on the Brady Scale, has the second highest gun homicide rate. Louisiana, with the second loosest gun laws has the highest gun homicide rate. North and South Dakota, ranking far to the right in laws, are at the bottom in gun violence.

Of course, gun violence is probably correlated with a lot of socio-economic factors. There are lots of reasons why Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nebraska, South and North Dakota, are gun safe states. But if gun control laws really did any good, one would expect a lower left to upper right line to appear here. None does. On the contrary, if Louisiana, with the social chaos that resulted from Katrina, were taken off the chart, one would get a very gentle slope from high left to lower right.

There is in fact virtually no evidence that gun control laws reduce gun violence. This is one more thing that the American left knows for sure that isn't true.

The Finality of the Declaration

Following the lead of Powerline, I will celebrate the occasion by posting an excerpt from one of the great speeches on the Declaration of Independence.

Here is the best part from Calvin Coolidge's 1926 speech, celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the Declaration.

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Happy Fourth of July.

Darwin v Hitler

File this one under strange bedfellows. The Left Wing Huffington Post has a piece by David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute. The D.I. is an organization dedicated to saving the world from Charles Darwin. Klinghoffer gives us the standard moral/political argument against Darwinism. Nazism and Eugenics are the malignant but altogether legitimate offspring of Darwin's theory.

Hitler's ideas, [David Berlinski, another Discovery fellow] carefully notes, "came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin." A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology "weren't reading the Gospels."

Well, if no honest account of Hitler's ideas would omit Darwin, one wonders why Hitler omitted Darwin. If the Fuhrer ever mentioned Chuck in his speeches or writings or his dreadful book, I have not seen the quote. Hitler certainly did have a concept of evolution and of genetics, but his grasp of the science was about as close to real science as astrology is to astronomy. He was a largely ignorant man.

There are two problems with Klinghoffer's screed. One is that misunderstandings of genetics were as much responsible for the atrocity of forced sterilization in the U.S. and elsewhere as Darwinian evolution. If the latter is discredited by the atrocities, should we abandon genetics?

Worse is the fact that Nazi racist mythology is wildly inconsistent with Darwinian biology. Let me count the ways.

First, Nazi racial mythology is progressive in structure. Human beings are superior to vermin, just as the higher races of man are superior to the lower races, let alone the vermin race. By contrast, Darwinian biology supports no theory of progress. In terms of reproductive fitness, bacteria are superior to cockroaches, and cockroaches to Catholics. But that is true only on the most speculative of grounds, as in "which species would survive an asteroid strike?" For purposes of real science, each species is surviving comfortably in its own ecological niche, and that is a kind of equality.

Second, Nazi mythology takes race seriously. Darwinian biology does not. There is as much or more genetic diversity among Black Africans as there is between Zulus and Norwegians. Race is not a scientific concept and it is no part of modern Darwinian Theory.

Third, Nazi mythology treasures racial purity. If both mom and dad had blond hair and blue eyes, you will be stronger for it; and a large population of pure Aryans is stronger than one that is tainted with the blood of the lesser kinds. By contrast, Darwinian biology points toward genetic diversity as an utterly essential factor. A population that is genetically uniform is prey to any pathogen or environmental change (climate change, or a change in the food supply) that may come along. What allows populations to roll with environmental punches is genetic diversity. That's why sexual reproduction is a good thing (it keeps changing the genetic code), and why inbreeding is a distinctly bad thing.

Fourth, Nazi mythology ranks races according to their nobility. Aryans are bolder, more musical and more brilliant, more warlike, etc. Darwinian biology has nothing to do with ranking races, in which it does not believe, or populations, or individuals. But if you tried to get a ranking out of it, the only thing it would tell you is that any group of animals or human beings is more likely to stick around longer if it has more babies. I am guessing that that standard wouldn't have favored early twentieth century Germans over their Chinese counterparts.

Darwinism is not a theory of human history. It is not a theory of human progress, or human virtue, or human ethics. It is a biological theory that tries to understand how the various forms of organisms emerged and by what forces those forms are sustained. It gives no support, none at all, to racist mythologies. Those who say that it does either do not understand the biology, or are not honest in their interpretation.

Herseth-Sandlin as Woman of Blue Steel

The Madville Times/Badlands Blue tag team has added a novel item to their playbook. They are urging South Dakotans to vote for Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin as a "counter-weight" to Nancy Pelosi!

Badlands Blue notes that a Roll Call article throws a wrench in the Kristi Noem propaganda machine. The D.C. press spotlights our own Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin as a counterweight to Speaker Nancy Pelosi's power and a real force in focusing Congress's attention on fighting the deficit (you know, that big ugly thing caused by President Bush)

Ah, it seems like only yesterday that Cory Heidelberger was all starry eyed about Dr. Kevin Weiland, who almost but not quite mounted a primary challenge to SHS. Cory was appalled that the media didn't notice when Weiland was picking up Facebook fans faster than SHS. Cory's readers were, about 60% of them, eager to send Weiland to Congress. When Weiland surrendered in advance of battle, Cory was sad. And so was Steve Hildebrand. Here is an excerpt from a letter Hildebrand sent to the Madville Times:

Sadly, Representative Herseth Sandlin talks a good game, but consistently takes a walk on some of the most important issues facing our country. She says we need to curb the harmful effects of climate change, but then votes against the most important energy reform legislation of our time. She says she has worked for reforming health care since she got into office, but when sweeping and historic health care reform legislation had a real chance for passage, she not only voted against it on multiple occasions, she actually advocated for its defeat.

Well, now Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin has gone into the phone booth and come out in her red, white, and blue outfit, complete with cape. Cory tells us that

Fellow Dems view SHS as a woman of steel in her own right... and not just planless sloganeering obstructionist as her Republican challenger would likely be in Washington.

That was a costume switch. From talking a good game to woman of steel! I don't want to be unfair here. I know full well that politics frequently requires changes in tactics and strategies; and I can hardly blame my friends for supporting SHS now, whatever they may have done back in April.

I have to wonder, however, what it means that they choose to defend Rep. Herseth-Sandlin on the grounds that she will use her super powers to oppose the Democratic Speaker of the House. Can it mean anything but this: Cory realizes that the only things that South Dakota voters might like about SHS are the very things that Cory and Hildebrand didn't like about SHS?

I also have to wonder how this sales pitch could possibly work. Yes, Rep. Herseth-Sandlin was an occasional thorn in the side of the Democratic majority in Congress. But Cory admits that she that acted in this capacity only on very occasions.

Of course, the Honorable Congresswoman from South Dakota does vote with Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic majority 92% of the time, as she did Wednesday evening on the financial sector reform reconciliation bill.

If, as Cory obviously thinks, South Dakota voters want a representative who will act as a counter-weight to Pelosi, wouldn't they be smart to vote for someone who supports Pelosi less than ninety-two percent of the time? Wouldn't they want someone who would vote against Ms. Pelosi when the House is choosing its next speaker?

Madville Times and Badlands Blue aren't the only South Dakota Democrats who think that they only way they can win is to pretend to be Republicans. Scott Heidepriem ran a now infamous commercial promising to reduce government spending and government hiring. Great! But that's like a Republican promising to stop global warming. If you want a Republican, shouldn't you vote for a real one?

Rasmussen Reliability & Wishful Thinking

My friend A.I. bad mouthed the Rasmussen poll in a recent comment, something I noticed because my friends at Badlands Blue and Madville Times recently did the same. Here is A.I.'s comment:

Does this mean you will stop quoting Rasmussen, create-a-positive-Republican-narrative, robo-call polls as though they are worth more than a pitcher of warm spit?

Here's Travis at BB:

Rasmussen's not credible for a couple of reasons. Most notably, he worked for George W. Bush and the Republican National Committee. He'll also be joining Karl Rove and other conservative big shots as a featured speaker for a National Review post-election cruise in November. So, it's not surprising that after a thorough analysis of a number of Rasmussen's polls, Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com finds that Rasmussen's "polls have tended to show substantially more favorable results for Republican candidates" than other surveys.

Here's how it works…In order to publish as many "polls" as possible that show Republicans in the lead, and therefore convince the electorate that the Democrat doesn't stand a chance (credit to the Daily Kos for that analysis), Rasmussen does them on the cheap.

That's an ad hominem, followed by an unsupported accusation involving a contradiction. Lots of professional and respected pollsters have party affiliations, and anyway you can't discredit a poll by telling us the pollster is biased. You have to show the poll was biased. And surely the Daily KOS is just as biased as Scott Rasmussen, so how can that site confirm Travis's accusation?

To be sure robopolls are controversial, but it isn't at all clear why they are unreliable. Are people less likely to answer recorded questions? Are they more or less likely to fudge when talking to a real human being?

Let's do what Travis did not, and take a look at recent elections and Rasmussen's record.

	Contest		Final Rasmussen Poll		Actual Results
Mass. Senate	Brown	Coakley	47%	49	52%	47
New Jersey Gov	Christie	Corzine	46	43	49%	45
Virginia Gov	McDonnell	Deeds	54	41	59	41
2008 Pres	McCain	Obama	46	52	46	53

 

In the Massachusetts special election, Rasmussen's last poll still showed a Coakley lead. However, the difference between that one and previous R polls clearly showed a strong surge for Brown. R underestimated the surge by bit with a week to go. In the case of the New Jersey Governor's race Rasmussen gets it about right (a three point win for Christie) while overestimating, perhaps, the third party candidate. Rasmussen's last poll in Virginia is a bit low on McDonnell's final tally, but right on Deeds' number.

In all three cases, Rasmussen's polls were about as accurate as good polls tend to be. Only Survey USA, I think, did consistently better. In none of these polls did Rasmussen exaggerate Republican support or the gap between the winning Republican and the losing Democrat. The same is true of the 2008 President election, which Rasmussen nailed.

In short, Rasmussen looks to be a very reliable poll in recent elections, and there is no evidence at all in these cases of a Republican bias. But I can see why A.I., Cory Heidelberger, and Travis Dahle all want to believe that the R polls are unbelievable. Rasmussen has Daugaard leading Heidepriem 52% to 36%. We won't know how accurate this polling is until we can compare the last R poll with November's result, but gentlemen: isn't this what South Dakota gubernatorial elections look like?

	2006	2002	1998	1994	1990	1986	1982	1978	1974
Rep	62	57	64	55	59	52	71	57	46
Dem	36	42	33	41	41	48	29	43	54

 

R's 52/36 fits comfortably into that series. If anything, Daugaard's advantage looks a bit low in comparison. South Dakota Democrats haven't won the state house since 1974. If I were a betting man, I wouldn't bet on it happening this year.

Finally, there is Rasmussen's post-primary polling showing Kristi Noem leading Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin 53% to 41%. That twelve point lead looks surprising to me, even as a post victory bounce. It is hardly outside the range of probability. We live in a largely Republican state. All the polls, even the "legitimate ones," Travis, are showing a strong advantage in enthusiasm among Republicans. I can't help but point out that, not too long ago, my friend Mr. Heidelberger was rooting for a Democratic challenge to H-S.

Moreover, other polls show a dramatic shift in support to the GOP, especially among independents. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, whom Travis cites approvingly, backs up the NPR poll.

A new poll from Public Opinion Strategies and GQR for NPR, which shows Democrats performing badly in vulnerable House seats, is making a lot of waves this morning. It certainly contains bad news for Democrats -- however -- it is the same bad news that was already implied by generic ballot polling.

So far as I can tell, Herseth-Sandlin's seat has been considered vulnerable by most analysts all year. And then there is the recent Gallup poll showing independent voters favoring Republican candidates by a good ten percent. Considered together with the enthusiasm gap and the Republican advantage in South Dakota, Rasmussen's last House Race poll was hardly unbelievable.

I am not making any predictions here. My only point is that Scott Rasmussen has a good record and his current polling in South Dakota is supported by a lot of additional evidence. I can understand why my friends on the other side of the aisle want desperately to believe otherwise.

Fraudulent Polling Exposed. Update!

File this one under "eternal vigilance."  The Daily KOS has been running weekly polling results for about a year and a half. They recently parted company with the polling firm, Research 2000 (R2K), when FiveThirtyEight found that R2K had a very poor record. If you want to know which polls are reliable, click the previous link.

Perhaps the most famous R2K poll found that large numbers of Republican voters believe outlandish things, such as the birther myth.

Yesterday DKOS announced that there were much graver problems with some of the R2K polls than mere inaccuracy.

A bit over two weeks ago, a group of statistic wizards (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman) approached me with a disturbing premise -- they had been poring over the crosstabs of the weekly Research 2000 polling we had been running, and were concerned that the numbers weren't legit.

I immediately began cooperating with their investigation, which concluded late last week. Daily Kos furnished the researchers with all available and relevant information in our possession, and we made every attempt to obtain R2K's cooperation which… was not forthcoming.

The wizard's report makes for fascinating reading. It is a brilliant example of how an expert, and maybe even a layman, can determine that a statistical summary is bogus without any access to the underlying data. Consider this one sample from R2K:

Approval of:	Favorable		Unfavorable		Undecided
	Men	Women	Men	Women	Men	Women
Obama	43	59	54	34	3	7
Pelosi	22	52	66	38	12	10
Reid	28	36	60	54	12	10
McConnell	31	17	50	70	19	13
Boehner	26	16	51	67	33	17
Cong. (D)	28	44	64	54	8	2
Cong. (R)	31	13	58	74	11	13
Party (D)	31	45	64	46	5	9
Party (R)	38	20	57	71	5	9

 

This is a pretty simple polling question: do you have a favorable view of X, an unfavorable view, or are you undecided. However, there is something very wrong with those numbers. Can you see it? Look carefully. I would like to think that I would have seen it if I had looked long enough, but I'll never know because I skipped ahead to the explanation. Give yourself a few minutes, and if it doesn't jump out, then…

Overall, the results are unsurprising. Men are more conservative than women. Adjusted for that, everyone thinks that both parties and both houses aren't worth a pitcher of warm spit. Now let me give you a clue.

Approval of:	Favorable		Unfavorable		Undecided
	Men	Women	Men	Women	Men	Women
Obama	43	59	54	34	3	7
Pelosi	22	52	66	38	12	10
Reid	28	36	60	54	12	10
McConnell	31	17	50	70	19	13
Boehner	26	16	51	67	33	17
Cong. (D)	28	44	64	54	8	2
Cong. (R)	31	13	58	74	11	13
Party (D)	31	45	64	46	5	9
Party (R)	38	20	57	71	5	9

 

Now do you see the problem? I've highlighted all the even numbers. In every male/female comparison both numbers are even or both numbers are odd. There isn't a single case where the stat for men is even and that for women is odd, or vice versa. That is statistically all but impossible.

Consider a double coin toss. You either get Heads Heads, TT, HT, or TH. If you do it 27 times, you get about six or seven of each result; if, that is, the game is fair. If you get all HH and TT, something is very wrong. If you get all HH, you're using double headed coins.

Of course the numbers above are rounded off, but rounding has a fifty/fifty chance of turning an even number into an odd one or vice versa. No random sampling would have produced the even and odd pairs in the table above. It's not just 27 examples, unfortunately (for R2K).

Were the results in our little table a fluke? The R2K weekly polls report 778 M-F pairs. For their favorable ratings (Fav), the even-odd property matched 776 times. For unfavorable (Unf) there were 777 matches.

Common sense says that that result is highly unlikely, but it helps to do a more precise calculation. Since the odds of getting a match each time are essentially 50%, the odds of getting 776/778 matches are just like those of getting 776 heads on 778 tosses of a fair coin. Results that extreme happen less than one time in 10²²⁸. That's one followed by 228 zeros. (The number of atoms within our cosmic horizon is something like 1 followed by 80 zeros.) For the Unf, the odds are less than one in 10²³¹. (Having some Undecideds makes Fav and Unf nearly independent, so these are two separate wildly unlikely events.)

The authors of the report were reasonably cautious in drawing conclusions, but I won't be. Research 2000 was reporting manifestly fraudulent results. This isn't a matter of distorting data, or asking misleading questions. It is a matter of making the data up.

There is no political scandal here. The Daily KOS, to its credit, exposed the fact that its own polls were compromised. I suspect that this is probably a simple case of professional incompetence followed by fraud. R2K, or someone in that firm, for whatever reason, couldn't deliver a genuine product on schedule. So they delivered a fake one. If you own R2K stock, I'd sell. Now.

It is a good reminder that you should always be suspicious. It is also really cool to look at something bogus and see it for what it is.

Update!  The Politico is reporting that R2K polls were among the reasons that Blanche Lincoln was expected to lose the Arkansas Primary.  If so, and these polls were fraudulent, that would be a major scandal.