Thursday, September 17, 2009

Current Events Thursday

Massachusetts flip-flops on Senate vacancies (WSJ)
Peaceful pro-lifer gunned down (Christian Post)
Memorial held for pro-life protester (NYT)
Obama gets it right in Somalia (Investor’s Bus. Daily)
Should gayness be changed? (Christianity Today)
The rights of gay employees (NYT)
60 Minutes softballs Obama on speech (CBS News)
Million maybe at Tea Party (Daily Mail)
Get real on health care (NYT)
Fact-checking the President on health insurance (WSJ)
Mexico’s hopeless drug war (WSJ)
Toy safety law hurts business (WSJ)
Why Hyundai is a hit (WSJ)
Obama and the space program (LA Times)
CA courts shut for a day a month (LA Times)
Walt Whitman’s answer to Joe Wilson (LA Times)
Joe Wilson’s a racist (Maureen Dowd)
New homes near Luke AFB? (AZ Republic)
Policy and sacrifice (Thomas Friedman)
The body count at home (NYT)
Muslims press NYC to close schools on holy days (WSJ)
Health reform and the Constitution (WSJ)
Gov’t health care vs. the elderly (WSJ)
NYC considers outdoor smoking ban (NYT)
Man credited with feeding a billion people dies (Christian Post)
The man who defused the “population bomb” (WSJ)
Teen denied US citizenship over Gardasil refusal (Christian Post)
Darwin film still lacking US distributor (Christian Post)
Acorn runs off the rails (WSJ)
Acorn live! (WSJ)
Solar support in US embarrassingly lacking (NYT)
House rebukes Joe Wilson (NYT)
Rapping Joe’s knuckles (Maureen Dowd)
Carter calls Obama opponents racists (Wash Post)
45% of doctors consider quitting under Obamacare (Investor’s Bus Daily)
1 million sold, no NYT/LAT review for Levin (CNS News)
If sports ruled the world (WSJ)
The stimulus didn’t work (WSJ)
Following trash on its journey (NYT)
Proposed Mormon temple causes dispute (AZ Republic)
Study: spanking bad (CNN)
CA lawmaker targets soda (Yahoo News)
Gays angry about liberation summit (Austr. Herald)
US shelves missile shield in Europe (WSJ)
Public option lite (WSJ)Is golf unethical? (NYT)

6 comments:

Naum said...

Come on now, let's wade out of wingnuttery land and into reality based reporting…

9/12 March 'Tea Party' Photo: False Image Spread By Anti-Reform Activists

Size Matters; So Do Lies
But yesterday, someone told a real whopper. ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol. By the time this figure reached Michelle Malkin, however, it had been blown up to 2,000,000. There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That's not a twofold or threefold exaggeration -- it's roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.

Sorry, but Michelle Malkin is not a credible journalist, whatever your belief about NY Times (who unlike Fox News, did not argue in court in defense of a 1st amendment "right to lie")

Naum said...

The spread of the two million protestor myth

washingtonpost.com

9/12 crowds: Hello, Michael. Thanks for taking questions. What is the best and most educated guess about the size of the crowds in DC on Sept. 12? There is quite a discrepancy between 60,000 and 2 million. Why is it so hard to get a good estimate?

Michael A. Fletcher: Both of those sound high, and clearly the second number is way, way high. My colleagues say it was in the tens of thousands, probably around 20,00 or 30,000 although it is hard to tell and police did not release an estimate.

Andrew Tallman said...

Thank you, Naum, for correcting me on this. Man, I hate getting stuff wrong, especially when I think I've actually done enough research to verify something!

Naum said...

That's the danger of lifting stuff from blogs (that goes for both Malkin and the lefty blogs).

It can be painstaking and a time sink (and google is growing increasingly useless in these sorts of endeavors) to scan all the news feeds and "fact check" sites…

Of course, 1500+ feeds in my RSS reader makes it easy to see.

Worse, though, are those news organs that try to bridge the extremes and strive hard not to alienate supporters from either side and straddle the middle instead of pursuing the truth.

Could not listen to WWYS other than I knew you'd do the Jimmy Carter clip.

While I'm sure that you and most of your audience are not "racist", I'd say that a good bit of "intensely demonstrated animosity" toward Obama is indeed rooted in racism.

It's been part and parcel of Republican electoral strategy since Nixon — the "Southern Strategy" confirmed by Kevin Phillips (and others), a Nixon campaign strategist — where "dog whistles" are made to that segment of voters.

Joe Wilson served as a loyal assistant to Strom Thurmond, who was a segregationist (and also raped and impregnated his 16 year old maid). Wilson also belongs to a neo-confederacy group.

I don't know that it's unanimous, but there sure are lots of confederate flags at those teabagger rallies.

Naum said...

The Investors' Business Daily poll purporting to show widespread opposition to health care reform among doctors is simply not credible. There are five reasons why:

1. The survey was conducted by mail, which is unusual. The only other mail-based poll that I'm aware of is that conducted by the Columbus Dispatch, which was associated with an average error of about 7 percentage points -- the highest of any pollster that we tested.

2. At least one of the questions is blatantly biased: "Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less money and th quality of care will be better?". Holy run-on-sentence, Batman? A pollster who asks a question like this one is not intending to be objective.

3. As we learned during the Presidntial campaign -- when, among other things, they had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 -- the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they're doing. I mean, literally none. For example, I don't trust IBD/TIPP to have competently selected anything resembling a random panel, which is harder to do than you'd think.

4. They say, somewhat ambiguously: "Responses are still coming in." This is also highly unorthodox. Professional pollsters generally do not report results before the survey period is compete.

5. There is virtually no disclosure about methodology. For example, IBD doesn't bother to define the term "practicing physician", which could mean almost anything. Nor do they explain how their randomization procedure worked, provide the entire question battery, or anything like that.

This is the same news organ that also that committed the egregious error of stating how Stephen Hawking would not get any health care in the UK.

Naum said...

Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option