Category Archives: Politics

Politics

Tuesday Night Linkorama

  • Raise your hand if you are surprised that the Dems are abandoning PAYGO. Obama’s first test will be showing fiscal restraint.
  • PJ gets depressed about how conservatives blew it. I’m so fed up with the GOP these days.
  • Criticizing Obama for lying is like criticizing him for breathing. He’s a politician; it comes with the territory. What did you expect? Change?
  • A great article from Sowell about the difference between seeming to be intellectual and actually being intellectual. I blog with a sharp skilled writer who never went to college. I work in an environment filled with “intellectuals” with fancy degrees, little common sense and, often, an inability to navigate the English language. I couldn’t agree more with Sowell. Almost everything important I learned in life; almost all my knowledge of economics, history, sociology, politics and science — came after I got my fancy degrees.
  • Hitch takes some of the starch out of the Obameuphoria. You know, we woke up on Wednesday with the same problems we went to bed with on Tuesday.
    • Politics, War on Terror

    Taxi

    I just watched the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, which documents the Bush Administration’s relentless support for torture and their willingness to cut low level grunts loose when it blew up in their face. It reminded me of reading Cobra II, about the planning of the Iraq War. A few minutes in, I was angry. Halfway through, I was livid. By the end, I was numb.

    If Obama stops this shit, his administration will already be worth it.

    Politics

    Friday Morning Linkorama

  • I can’t begin to express my frustration and anger with the endless bailouts are Congress is engaging in. At some point, there is going to be a revolt by the taxpayers. This is fucking insane.
  • Did Congress create the derivate mess? Probably.
  • High fructose corn syrup: just remember that the only reason we consume this ecological and health menace is because of subsidies and import quotas that protect Big Sugar.
  • Iraqis support McCain. Of course, that’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement.
  • Cracked, whose standards of journalism now exceed that of the MSM, point out how stupid and hypocritical our “green” celebrities are.
    • Politics

    It’s All True

    As we finally, fucking finally stumble into the last week of the political campaign, one blogger hits why the Right Wing Echosphere and the McCain campaign in particular is exhausting:

    It’s not just the McCain campaign’s problem – although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable – it’s a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from – wait for it! – the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It’s a jumble sale of fears and scary associations from 50 years of wingnut witch hunts and smear campaigns, a flea market of pre-owned and antique resentments, and if one does detect a semi-consistent 1960’s motif running through it all, that’s because that’s when most of these ideas were coined. While it is great fun for wingnut yahoos to relive the glory days when National Review was still taken more seriously than liberal blogofascists by the people who matter, most of this stuff is obsolescent (or at least unfashionable), and people suffering from the material problems caused by 50 years of right-wing ascendancy aren’t going to drop everything to listen to fuguing conservatives spin disjointed yarns about how much better everything was back in their day. Nobody gives a fuck.

    Every conservative blog in my RSS feed has been like this for the past month. Every day, there are six stories about how Obama is something I’m afraid of. It’s exhausting, even for this political junkie. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even bring myself to read the stories anymore. I just hit the headline and my brain automatically says, “Next!”.

    It’s to the point where, when something serious is discussed, such as Obama’s healthcare plan which will socialize medicine through the back door, no one is paying attention.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation, War on Terror

    Tuesday Night Linkorama

  • A woman is fighting jail for a converted garage. Oh, it was converted 30 years ago.
  • Nice. A TSA agent has stolen hundreds of thousands from passengers.
  • Stop me if you’ve heard this before: nappies don’t benefit the environment. And the British government is trying to bury the report. I thought it was only right-wingers who politicized science?
  • I’m sorry. One of the dangers of being a kid is that if you throw your ball onto a neighbor’s lawn, you may not get it back.
  • Moynihan on disaster socialism.
  • Here’s the real problem with a study of the measurements of Playboy playmates and the correlation to the economy. They are assuming that those measurements are accurate and not ginned up by the magazine.
  • Someone needs to tell Joe Biden to shut up.
  • Turns out — here’s a surprise — the Democrats aren’t the only one responsible for the Freddie/Fannie Disaster. When are we going to break up these companies and sell of their assets?
    • Politics, Science and Edumacation

    School Choice

    Cato opens full bore with not one, not two but three good posts on voucher systems in response to Obama’s debate answer and the “fact check” that vouchers don’t work.

    The study found that students in the program did generally score higher. The reporters were confused by the fact that the findings for the whole group of students were not statistically significant at the prescribed cut-off. The researchers were only 91 percent certain (statistically) that the better performance of voucher-program students was due to the program rather than chance, and they had to be 95 percent certain. They did find statistically significant positive findings for some subgroups of students.

    Compounding this error, the reporters then quote an education researcher saying, “We have no evidence that vouchers work.” This too is incorrect.

    There have been ten analyses of random-assignment voucher program experiments (random-assignment being the gold-standard of testing treatment effects). All ten demonstrate positive voucher effects, 9 out of 10 find statistically significant effects for at least some subgroups, and 8 out of 10 find statistically significant effects for the whole voucher group.

    And the parents involved are extremely happy with it and think their kids are safer. And the vouchers cost a third or less than what is spent in public schools. Oh, and these programs are all small and some highly regulated, which limits their effectiveness.

    But if we use vouchers, we can’t hire more union members!