Raging Red

Well done, Charleston Daily Mail. You managed to publish an article all about how supposedly “anti-gun” candidates don’t do well in West Virginia without mentioning one word in the entire article about what the candidates’ policies on guns actually are. Bravo.

Okay, so the various permutations of caucuses and primaries across the country are confusing. Clinton won New Hampshire last night, according to the percentage of the vote. But according to CNN’s breakdown of New Hampshire delegates, Obama has 12 to Clinton’s 11. Since it’s the delegates that count, doesn’t that mean Obama won New Hampshire? I was watching the news coverage all evening and I didn’t hear anyone mention that (not saying it didn’t happen, I just didn’t hear it). CNN was the only network I saw that even displayed the number of delegates that each candidate in both parties has amassed so far.

To be clear, this isn’t a post complaining about Clinton unfairly being declared the winner or anything like that. I’m just trying to sort things out. The way we elect people in this country is kind of strange.

As for what happened last night, at first I was pretty disappointed when it became clear that Clinton was going to win New Hampshire. I don’t dislike her, in fact I think she would probably be a good president. (It’d be nice to see the I.Q. points in the Oval Office go up significantly.) But on the issues, she doesn’t represent me. I don’t necessarily trust her to make it her number one priority to look out for the interests of the American people. But this whole notion of a couple or a few states effectively choosing the nominee is patently unfair. I especially hate how the media coverage drives the outcome. Edwards came in second in Iowa, then he was practically ignored going into New Hampshire. The media decided that anything but first place for Edwards would count him out of the race entirely (see Greenwald’s Update III), so they just didn’t bother to give him any coverage. That’s so messed up.

So while I’m still hoping for an Edwards or Obama win (and I realize the chances of it being Edwards are slim), I’m glad the primary season isn’t over after just two states. Because that’s messed up too.

Oh, and for the trifecta of things that are messed up, it’s also messed up that if you’re a woman running for president, you just can’t win (figuratively speaking). If you’re not emotional, the media’s conventional wisdom goes, the voters will be turned off by your cold personality. If your voice barely cracks and there’s a glint of a tear in your eye, again according to the media’s conventional wisdom, the voters might think you aren’t tough enough for the job of Commander in Chief. So as a woman, it was satisfying to see Clinton blow all of those talking heads’ expectations.

The Daily Mail has published an editorial today that says the following about the six people arrested for the crimes against Megan Williams:

Racists? Possibly.

I’m not sure what it would take for The Daily Mail to be certain that these people are racists. Apparently shouting racist epithets while beating, torturing, and raping a black woman whom you have locked up in a shed next to your home isn’t enough for them — maybe if they’d been wearing white robes during the commission of their crimes, or maybe if they’d just come back from burning a cross on someone’s lawn, then that would be enough. Unbelievable. They’re possibly racists? This is what the editorial staff at The Daily Mail came up with in its first editorial about this crime? Way to stick your heads in the sand.

The Charleston Gazette wrote three editorials about this case today, including one entitled, simply, “Racism.” In it they discuss the situation in Louisiana regarding Jena High School, where six black students were charged with attempted murder for beating up a white student. I mentioned this in a post yesterday, but if you don’ t know anything about that case, there’s a much longer back story that starts with three white students getting in-school suspension for hanging nooses on a tree at the school.

Don Surber’s column today is entitled “Canada’s violent crime rate is double ours.” When I read that, I knew it couldn’t be true. Hey, I’ve seen Bowling for Columbine, after all. Turns out my instinct was correct. Not only is that headline wrong, the exact opposite is true: the violent crime rate in the U.S. is more than double that of Canada. His statistical analysis (i.e., his reading of simple tables on the internet) contains an egregious error that renders the title of his column a complete falsehood. Surber states that Canada’s violent crime rate is 9.5 per 1,000 people, while the violent crime rate in the United States is 4.7 per 1,000 people. I followed the source links provided in the web version of his column and quickly spotted a huge error in his claim. Canada’s violent crime rate is calculated using a far broader definition of “violent crime” than the definition that’s used to calculate the United States’ violent crime rate. To truly compare the two countries, one would need to compare the same list of offenses. In the U.S., the F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program includes only five crimes in its definition of “violent crime”:

1. murder
2. non-negligent manslaughter
3. forcible rape
4. robbery
5. aggravated assault

By contrast, Statistics Canada (Canada’s National Statistical Agency) uses a definition of violent crime that includes all five of the offenses listed above, plus many more. In addition to the five that the F.B.I. includes, Canada’s violent crime rate includes:

1. all homicides (not just murder and non-negligent manslaughter)
2. attempted murder
3. all types of assault (not just aggravated assault)
4. all types of sexual assaults and other sexual offenses (not just forcible rape)
5. abduction

It’s plain to see that using a vastly more inclusive definition of “violent crime” will result in a much higher crime rate. This is especially true in this instance, because the most common offense by far in Canada’s list of violent crimes is Assault 1 (simple assault), which the U.S. excludes from its list. The inclusion of that one crime alone greatly inflates Canada’s violent crime rate compared to that of the U.S.

If you only consider the offenses of homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, and robbery committed in Canada — which is still more inclusive than the list of offenses used by the U.S. — Canada’s violent crime rate drops significantly, from 9.5 per 1,000 people to 1.7 per 1,000 people, which is less than half of the violent crime rate in the U.S. (4.7 per 1,000 people). If one were to compare the exact same list of offenses (which is not possible using Surber’s linked sources, because not all of the categories are broken down in the same way), Canada’s rate would be even lower.

It’s highly irresponsible (and really pathetic) for the Daily Mail to allow one of its columnists to make claims that are so quickly and easily proven false. I figured this out in just a few minutes by simply checking the sources cited by Surber himself. And tough luck for any print readers of the Daily Mail (which I understand is not a great number of people) — they have no sources to fact-check.

I don’t think he was intentionally trying to mislead people, I think it was just ideological blindness. He found some numbers that he thought supported his views and he didn’t bother to look at those numbers carefully to see what they really mean.

Continue reading ‘I Guess Don Surber Thought it Was Opposite Day’

In honor of the holiday, I’d like to post this clip of Mika Brzezinski’s recent act of independence while on air on MSNBC.

I’ll drink a sour apple martini in her honor today while making potato salad.

(Via.)

While lying in bed this morning after having hit the snooze button a few times, I was roused from my state of semi-consciousness by the sound of someone yelling at Scott Finn on West Virginia Public Radio. It’s not often that people yell on public radio; that’s the purview of cable television news. The person Scott Finn had angered was Russell Sobel, an economics professor at West Virginia University who has written a book called Unleashing Capitalism: Why Prosperity Stops at the West Virginia Border and How to Fix It. Sobel was apparently mad that Finn had the audacity to ask him tough questions about the basis of the conclusions reached in his book. “Nobody has ever treated me this way!” he practically screamed.

My favorite part was when Sobel, objecting to the notion that his economic views might be politically biased, said [paraphrasing from memory]: “There’s nothing political in this book! It doesn’t discuss gay marriage or abortion or the war in Iraq — those are political issues.” This prompted Finn to ask whether there are economists who would disagree with him, and Sobel scoffed: “Sure, there might be some Marxist economist somewhere, but most of them are gone now that the Soviet Union has collapsed.” I was nonplussed. How dare you accuse me of being political! Only a Marxist would disagree with me! Too funny.

It seems that Sobel believes economics is above politicization, which is positively stupid, especially coming from someone with a Ph.D. in economics. Issues like tort reform, tax policy, and government regulation of, say, the coal industry are apparently apolitical, which is of course absurd. These are core political issues. Sobel insists that his conclusions are based not on politics, but on sound scientific research, as if nobody could possibly do similar research and come to different conclusions. As one of his critics pointed out, economics isn’t like physics; there isn’t One True Answer. And as the “debate” on global warming illustrates, even when there’s virtually no disagreement within the scientific community an issue can still be highly politicized.

I don’t really understand what Sobel was so upset about, since later on in the interview he said that he wishes lots of other people would write books about how to improve West Virginia’s economy, because we need to have a debate about these issues. Earlier on, he seemed to be saying that there is no room for debate. It’s based on scientific research, it’s not my opinion!

They only played a few minutes of the entire Sobel interview on the radio this morning, but the whole thing is posted on WVPB’s web site. (Click here to listen to the mp3.) I’ll have to wait until this evening to listen to it, then maybe I’ll post an update. I haven’t read the book (it’s available online), but it sounds like Sobel advocates for a return to the Lochner era, questioning whether we need the Americans with Disabilities Act, the minimum wage, or mine safety laws. Go ahead, ask the people of Sago about that last one, and we’ll see if there’s room for debate.

Nerd that I am, this evening I’ll be staying in to watch Bill Moyers. (Yikes, it’s suddenly sinking in that I really am in my 30’s.) Jon Stewart and Josh Marshall are going to be on — how can I miss that?

You can watch a preview here. If you’re as much of a Jon Stewart fangirl (or boy) as I am, you can also watch Bill Moyers’ interview with him from 2003. In that appearance, Stewart brought up the absurdity of the press conference President Bush gave thirteen days before the Iraq war began. The press played along with the farce by raising their hands and waiting to be called on, even though Bush himself wasn’t trying to hide the fact that he was just reading their names from a predetermined list sitting on the podium in front of him. In fact, they all had a good laugh about it.

This is the same scene that lead off another Bill Moyers Joint, “Buying the War,” which aired on PBS Wednesday evening. While the 90-minute show didn’t necessarily reveal any groundbreaking new information, it was the best encapsulation I’ve seen (in any form) of the media’s actions from 9/11 to the beginning of the Iraq war. Liberal bloggers have been writing about this stuff for years, but what made “Buying the War” so compelling was hearing it from the journalists themselves. (The ones who weren’t too chicken to answer Bill Moyers’ questions.)

In that 2003 interview with Moyers, Jon Stewart said that he and the other writers on his show see themselves as very serious people doing a very unserious thing, while the government and the media are very unserious people doing a very serious thing. While watching “Buying the War,” that statement rang very true. The overall impression of the media that I gleaned from the program was that, generally speaking, they are (1) quite fearful and (2) anti-intellectual and/or lazy.

Dan Rather said that he and others in the media didn’t go after the Bush administration too hard out of fear that the right-wing slime machine would accuse them of being unpatriotic and anti-American. Erik Sorenson, former MSNBC president (who cancelled Phil Donahue’s show because he presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war“), said: “Any misstep and you can get into trouble with these guys and have the patriotism police hunt you down.” Hunt you down? Rather said they’d “hang a sign around your neck.” What they both really mean is “get you fired.” Job security was more important than actually doing the job.

In Office Space, Peter tells the Bobs:

That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Maybe it’s that mentality that explains why two reporters from Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) were nearly alone in actually doing the work of real journalists — you know, like picking up a phone or reading a primary source. While Tim Russert sat back and waited for people to call him, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay contacted sources who were experts on terrorism and/or the Middle East who provided them with information that ran contrary to the Bush administration’s claims. While Peter Beinart of The New Republic did “a lot of reading of other people’s reporting and reading of what officials were saying,” Strobel and Landay had the novel idea of actually reading the National Intelligence Estimate themselves and investigating the evidence it contained that the Bush administration claimed justified the Iraq war.

What Strobel and Landay did wasn’t extraordinary. Well, it was extraordinary in the sense that not many other journalists were doing it, but not in the sense that they were doing anything beyond the basics they learned in journalism school.

And the saga continues. Bill Moyers will be talking to Josh Marshall tonight, who has been fairly instrumental in pushing stories like the U.S. Attorney firings into the mainstream press. And Jon Stewart is still providing some of the best political commentary. From the preview of tonight’s show, this is how Stewart describes President Bush’s statement that Attorney General Gonzales’ testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee “increased [his] confidence” in Gonzales, when the absurd message of his testimony was: “I wasn’t involved, but I can assure you we did nothing wrong.”

It’s sort of like, you remember in Good Fellas? When Henry Hill got arrested for the first time, and Robert de Niro met him at the courthouse and Henry Hill was really upset ’cause he thought Robert de Niro would be really mad at him, and de Niro comes up to him and he gives him a hundred dollars and he goes: “Ya got pinched. We all get pinched. But ya did it right. You didn’t say nuthin’.”

Great analogy. Somebody ought to give that guy his own show.

Did Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert just completely ignore the Coultergeist haunting that occurred over the weekend? Good move, gentlemen. Let’s face it, the newest flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is a much more interesting topic.

Regular readers know that I’ve got an unhealthy level of interest in Don Surber’s blog. I just can’t help myself; he’s my local Limbaugh. He’s such a perfect specimen of the lizard brain mentality — you know, that hard core one-third of the population that still professes undying support for President Lame Duck no matter what — that I often check in with him just to see what twisted logic the lizards are currently employing to support their irrational take on the world.

Yesterday I was amused to see that The Surb posted a direct link to a porn site that has a video clip of a couple (the site claims it’s Britney Spears and Kevin Federline) engaged in a certain sexual act that Justice Scalia thinks the government should be free to criminalize. What is so amusing to me is not the fact that Surb linked to the latest faux* celebrity sex tape, but that in the very post in which he provides a direct link to the X-rated site, Surb says the following:

Drunken Stepfather has a clip of the Britney Spears sex tape. I’ll link it, but first, we really should not be watching. We should all move along. Nothing to see here.

Except we will all look. What kind of degenerates has society become whem [sic] a woman has sex with her own husband and we are shocked?

And then this:

Pretty odd how we use this wonderful technology we’ve been given with the satellites and computers to show something that happens a billion or so times a day. What a crass society. I seriously doubt George Mason, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had this in mind when they crafted the First Amendment.

The hypocrisy, it burns! Since I’m unable to let things like this go unremarked upon, I left this comment:

Oh please, Don. You’re so concerned about our crass, degenerate society that you go ahead and link to the Britney sex tape (a fake one, at that). Why not just admit you love blogging about T&A, since you do it every week?

To which Surb responded:

Let’s see, 2K+ posts and I once posted about a girl who was fired for staring at her own breasts oh and about that guy who sought hits for his site for a 3some only to have it backfire

Yea, it’s a regular porn site I’m running here

That he missed my point entirely is unsurprising (he always does), but that he would claim to have only made two posts that could be categorized as “T&A” was indeed a shocker. As a regular reader, I have noticed that the Surb is a boob man. So I decided to do a quick search through his archives because just off the top of my head I could think of more boob posts than just the two he noted. (Should I have done something more worthwhile with my time yesterday? Absolutely. But when you get the day off because your office building caught on fire, I say you’re coasting on free time that’s just begging to be spent frivolously.)

I only had to scroll through a few months’ worth of Surb posts looking for boobs to amass almost a dozen links to prove Surb wrong. In a hilarious turn, after I painstakingly cut & pasted these links into a rather long comment on Surb’s blog, I got the following message from Haloscan:

Your comment contains too many links and will not be added

I laughed pretty hard at that. I couldn’t post the links to Surb’s T&A posts (an incomplete list, at that) because there were just too many of them! Kinda proves my point, doesn’t it? I clogged up Surb’s comment section in trying to break up my comment into parts, so it got all mangled and the whole effect was lost. I’ll recreate it in all of its glory here:

Yes, “every week” was a bit of hyperbole, and I’m not arguing that you run a porn site. I honestly don’t care how often you blog about T&A, though

it’s
more
often
than
you
think.

I just think you should own up to it instead of lamenting our crass, degenerate society and then linking to a porn site while claiming it’s newsworthy.

Apparently

certain
stories

are
so

newsworthy
that

you
blog

about them twice. Why not just admit that you like to post titillating pictures because you think it’s fun? The contortions of logic that some people have to go through to claim moral superiority over others is amusing to me.

Surber’s modus operandi when it comes to blogging about sex is the same as Bill O’Reilly’s m.o. for discussing sex on his show — presenting sexually titillating content under the guise of news. It has been said of O’Reilly: “He sells sex, even as he condemns it.” I’m reminded of the Parents Television Council’s web site, which used to post a collection of the “Worst TV Clips of the Week.” It was one-stop shopping for video of the most provacative scenes on television every week. (Apparently the PTC got wise, because they don’t have video clips there anymore.)

I know you don’t want to click all of those Surber links listed above (and I don’t recommend it), so I’ll just provide you with an overview in pictorial form. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so I guess my comment can be summarized thusly (all photos from Surb’s blog):

* I say “faux” because I’m pretty doubtful that the tape is authentic. Why, you ask? Well, because the “source close to Federline” quoted in the article that Surb linked to said that during their honeymoon, Britney and Kevin “did nothing all day but have sex—and play the odd game of chess.” Chess? Britney & Kevin? On their honeymoon? Riiiiight.

Incidentally, the article that got the ball rolling here is from a British tabloid called News of the World, which Richard Dawkins calls “Britain’s most disgusting newspaper.” I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that this tabloid is one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers. News of the World, along with many of Murdoch’s other media endeavors, is another perfect example of something that sells sex, even while condemning it.

Um, who the hell let Don Surber take up an entire column in the Daily Mail by quoting comments he read at Fark.com? Anyway, mention Fark and you get Fark’d. For all you Surb fans out there, this thread is a must read. Do be sure to scroll down and enjoy the Photoshopping. I wonder if anyone at Fark noticed that he gave his blog photo the title “goodlooking?”

And hey - be sure to keep an eye out for Raging Red’s new column in the Daily Mail, in which they let me write all about the funny shit I read on Go Fug Yourself last week!