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Glenn Reynolds gets in line with Samizdata, bridging the gap between your humble poster’s musings on big media and the current kerfuffle over Kerry’s account of his adventures in Vietnam.
But this story seems to me to be absolutely fascinating in that it reveals just how in the tank for the Democrats the mainstream media are, and how little the vaunted Cronkitean claims of objectivity and research and factual accuracy really mean when the chips are down.
To me, that’s a bigger deal than the underlying issue or even, in some ways, the election itself. Elections come and go, politicians come and go, and pretty much all of them turn out to be disappointments one way or another. But the “Fourth Estate” is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians.
Glenn does more than any professional journalist that I know of to bring together the public information on stories that catch his eye. His work on the Kerry “Christmas in Cambodia” story has been first-rate.
This article from the Washington Post, on the application of the little known Data Quality Act to hobble the regulatory leviathan, is full of unintentional insights. The Data Quality Act is, well, let the Post tell it, and let the insights begin!
The Data Quality Act — written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate — is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable.
The first insight is, of course, the clonking great pro-government, pro-regulation bias that the Post brings to this story. Note the disparaging terms applied to this piece of legislation, which has a genesis and a pedigree that is totally ordinary – most legislation is the product of interested parties, and most finds its way onto the books via massive omnibus bills that no one reads. However, these routine facts of Washington life are given ominous prominence only when the media outlet is opposed to whatever was done. The rest of the story is riddled with similar bias – in the Post’s world, regulation is always good, always to protect the people, never fails a cost-benefit test, always supported by the preponderance of the scientific evidence, etc.
The next set of unintentional insights comes to us when the relatively innocuous purpose of the Act collides with the prerogatives of the regulatory state.
But many consumers, conservationists and worker advocates say the act is inherently biased in favor of industry. By demanding that government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, these critics maintain, the act dismisses scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.
First, of course, note who the Post asks for their opinion. Of equal interest is the rather revealing admission that, in the past, regulation was apparently handed down on the basis of information that was, how to put this, of less than adequate quality. Declining to regulate because the data isn’t there is, of course, a Bad Thing.
These final comments surely need no elaboration.
“It’s a tool to clobber every effort to regulate,” said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. “In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment.”
. . . .
Yet Steinzor, the Maryland environmental lawyer, and other critics complain that the OMB’s involvement politicizes the process. The expertise of the handful of scientists hired by Graham, they say, cannot match that of the thousands of experts on agency staffs.
History is a flexible commodity. More like therapy really:
John Kerry started his acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic convention by giving a military salute and saying, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” He was introduced, very movingly, by a veteran who lost both legs and one arm fighting in Vietnam. On stage were other Vietnam veterans who served with Kerry on one of the so-called swift boats going up the Mekong river. That swift boat provided the metaphor for Kerry’s whole speech. Evoking “our band of brothers” he said: “We may be a little older, we may be a little greyer, but we still know how to fight for our country.”
There is plenty of this kind of eulogising in the Guardian.
Stange is it not? The very same people who would have been spitting at John Kerry and calling him a “fascist baby-killer” in the 1960’s are the same ones who are now getting all misty-eyed and choked up over his Vietnam war record.
I am past due to put on the record my prediction about the outcome of the US Presidential election. I know, I know, I should have posted this before the polling started to come out showing that Kerry, rather than getting the traditional post-convention bounce in support, may have actually lost ground during his big showcase last week. Actually, though, my views on how this race will turn out have been pretty well set for the past month or two. Honest.
The following should be taken with the enormous, bone-snapping, soul-crushing caveat that it is subject to events such as a major terrorist attack, aliens (the extraterrestrial kind) landing on the White House lawn, or the like.
In spite of lunatic Democrat optimism and polling that has shown Kerry with a small but consistent lead for months now, I think George W. Bush will be reelected. He will carry a (very small) majority of the popular vote, will lose no more than one state that he won in 2000, and will pick up a handful of states that he lost in 2000.
The Dems and their allies in the press have thrown everything they have at W, beginning in the 2000 election, through the Florida recount, and right up to the present day. They have nothing new left to attack him with, I am quite confident. The persistently partisan and anti-Bush media has managed to inure the public to bad news from Iraq or elsewhere. The Bush campaign has not really activated yet, on the theory that nothing they do before Labor Day will really matter. In short, Bush has tested the bottom of his market for approval and votes, and it is somewhere in the mid to high 40 percent range.
By contrast, Kerry and Edwards are still pretty unknown to non-political-junkie Americans, and the Republican attack machine has (wisely, from a tactical point of view) held its fire on these two. They have enjoyed months of positive coverage and a showcase convention. However, their support even among Democrats is not particularly strong – Edwards never won a primary, and Kerry is notable for not exciting the Democratic base. The Democrats, in short, have tested the top of their market for votes, and it is somewhere in the high 40 percent range.
With the race statistically tied, Bush has nowhere to go but up, and Kerry has nowhere to go but down.
Senator John Kerry had one of those moments the other night.
For reasons best known to themselves, the Democrats have decided to hold their presidential nominating convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Two findings have emerged from this decision. First, that Americans outside the North-East are being reminded that the Democrats have a liberal New England candidate, with limited appeal outside his backyard. Second, that the traffic chaos caused by the Convention is very unpopular with the inhabitants of that town.
Conspiracy theorists claim that the Republican Governor of Massachusetts has deliberately botched up the arrangements.
So in front of thousands of baseball fans, Sen. John Kerry was introduced to throw the first pitch of the match between the Boston Red Socks against the New York Yankees on Sunday.
First, the fact that the Democratic Convention was happening in Boston was booed by virtually the entire 36,000 crowd. Then most of the crowd booed again (although there were cheers) when Kerry was introduced. Then the macho-man threw the ball short, and the catcher missed. Cue mirth, giggles and fun on the George W Bush blog.
Memo to politicians and actors: never work with babies, animals or baseball fans.
Bill Clinton’s former national security adviser, Sandy Berger, is being investigated for trying to steal classified documents that tend to make him and his boss look a little cavalier in their handling of the Islamist terrorism threat.
Berger’s home and office were searched earlier this year by FBI (news – web sites) agents armed with warrants after the former Clinton adviser voluntarily returned some sensitive documents to the National Archives and admitted he also removed handwritten notes he had made while reviewing the sensitive documents.
However, some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration’s handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are still missing, officials and lawyers told The Associated Press.
Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket and pants, and also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio.
Funny how the documents still missing are the very ones that make Clinton and Berger look like feckless idiots, no? Not only did Berger steal the first copy of the embarrassing reports, when Archive staff made a second copy, he stole that one, too!
Needless to say, Berger is a lying sack of crap:
“In the course of reviewing over several days thousands of pages of documents on behalf of the Clinton administration in connection with requests by the Sept. 11 commission, I inadvertently took a few documents from the Archives,” Berger said.
He “inadvertantly” stuffed top secret documents into his pants? Suuure, Sandy. Although I have to admit this is an interesting twist on the usual pants-related Clinton administration scandal, it still doesn’t pass the smell test.
The punchline? Berger is one of John Kerry’s advisors. Since he also has Joe Wilson on his team, Kerry seems to be playing collect-the-set with lying sacks of crap. The Bush team can truly prove their incompetence by giving Kerry a pass on the fact that he is relying on both these clowns for advice on how to beat the Islamists.
But hey, a former national security honcho who repeatedly steals top secret documents by stuffing them down his pants? Give the man a job! He’s obviously plenty good enough for government work.
Attentive libertarians know, of course, that statists routinely lie in the pursuit of their objectives. A couple of revealing posts show how they lie about economic reality in pursuit of a multitude of policies that boil down to the state taking your stuff and giving it to others via various redistribution schemes, just as the need for redistribution is left on the dust-heap of history.
First, Mickey Kaus takes long-time lefty and temporary NYT columnist Barbara Ehrenreich to task for falsely claiming that it is impossible for a single mom to escape poverty by marrying a productive blue collar worker (implying that we therefor need greater transfers of your wealth to single moms and blue collar workers). The annoying facts:
Even at the current minimum wage, a full-time worker earns $10,700 a year and an Earned Income Tax Credit of $2,500 (three person family) to $4,200 (four person family). Add in $4000-5,000 of food stamps and subsidized Medicaid or CHIP health care for the children, and you’re well above the poverty line even with a single breadwinner and a stay-at-home mom.
Next, Arnold Kling posts more annoying facts to rebut the commonly heard mantra from the redistributionists that wage earners have lost ground since the ’70s. This is, of course, obviously and intuitively absurd, but its nice to have some numbers. While most of the essay defies excerpt, one of the long-term trends is particularly striking:
One of the most important trends of the past century is the reduction in the average work week. Contrary to another popular myth, Americans are working much less than they used to. Fogel writes:
“in 1890, retirement was a rare phenomenon. Virtually all workers died while still in the labor force. Today, half of those in the labor force, supported by generous pensions, retire in their fifties.”
Furthermore, Americans work many fewer days than they did a century ago. Using as a benchmark a 365 day work-year, Fogel calculates that in 1880 on average male household head worked 8.5 hours per day, but only 4.7 hours per day in 1995. With less time spent working and somewhat better health, total leisure available has more than tripled, from 1.8 hours per day to 5.8 hours per day.
The policy implications should be obvious: Wealth frees a society from any need for the state to mandate minimally acceptable outcomes (to insure that no one starves or freezes), and so a wealthy society should be able to dispense with the redistributionist state.
However, the incredible wealth generated by the American economy has had the opposite effect, because people with more disposable income are not nearly as sensitive to taxation. One of the many things they can afford more of, in short, is taxes. With no shortage of people willing to take your money and spend it as they see fit, taxes and redistribution have increased just as any arguable need for them has all but disappeared. In the final irony, the most enormous wealth transfer scheme of all (Social Security and Medicare) transfer money from the poorest segment of society (wage earners) to the wealthiest (the elderly).
Last post for awhile on US Presidential politics. I promise. Having set the table on the domestic side below, a post came along from Mr. Bevan at Real Clear Politics (an invaluable site for US political junkies, by the way) which does a nice job of framing the choice facing American voters this fall on the foreign policy side:
[N]o Democrat, with only one or two exceptions in the entire elected party, would have looked at the exact same intelligence Bush looked at with respect to Iraq after 9/11 and done much of anything – even though they agreed with Bush at the time that Hussein was a serious threat.
And:
Indeed, far more damning than Bush acting on evidence almost everyone in the world believed to be true is to look at a hypothetical in reverse: What if all of the WMD intelligence on Iraq had been spot on and John Kerry were President at the time and chose not to act because of pressure from his party or the objections of allies? I think most Americans would find that prospect deeply disturbing.
Kerry and his fellow Democrats are, for the most part, transnational progressivists committed to having international institutions to deal with bad actors like Saddam. Mr. Bevan provides a useful reminder of how such institutions actually fared, in the real world:
Saddam played cat-and-mouse with the U.S. and the U.N. for nearly a year before finally booting UNSCOM out of Iraq altogether in August 1998.
The response? On September 9, 1998 the UN Security Council passed yet another resolutioncondemning Iraq’s lack of cooperation with inspectors.
On December 16, 1998 the U.S. launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day [ineffectual] bombing campaign against military targets in Iraq.
[On December 21, 1998, the NYT reported that:] Sunday in Paris, President Jacques Chirac of France called for a prompt lifting of the oil embargo. His country’s major oil companies have for years been eager to return to work in Iraq, although record low oil prices make this less attractive now.
In fact, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (France, Russia, & China) responded to the limited use of military force against Saddam for his continued violation of UNSC resolutions by calling to lift the economic sanctions against Iraq and disband UNSCOM completely. And that was basically the end of the whole affair.
Americans tend to prefer leaders who take decisive and effective action against known threats. The media, of course, favors Kerry, and is trying to obscure Kerry’s catastrophic weakness as a leader with the side issue of whether the universally accepted intelligence on Iraq from several years ago was any good.
No leader can afford to wait for perfect information before acting – in the real world, where inaction has consequences, you have to do the best you can with what you have. It is pretty clear that the best Kerry can do, even with the kind of international consensus that existed on Saddam Hussein two years ago, is look around for someone else to take charge.
The often intemperate Jesse Walker lists 10 reasons to throw Bush out of the White House. I tend to agree with the majority of his complaints, but his last one really points up the dilemma posed to libertarians by the US major parties.
The Democrats have nominated a senator who—just sticking to the points listed above—voted for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold, and the TSA; who endorses the assault on “indecency”; who thinks the government should be spending even more than it is now. I didn’t have room in my top ten for the terrible No Child Left Behind Act, which further centralized control of the country’s public schools—but for the record, Kerry voted for that one too. It’s far from clear that he’d be any less protectionist than Bush is, and he’s also got problems that Bush doesn’t have, like his support for stricter gun controls. True, Kerry doesn’t owe anything to the religious right, and you can’t blame him for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Other than that, he’s not much of an improvement.
Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I’m sure he’ll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry isn’t the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it’s the offense that I take most personally.
So the loathesome (second post down) John “interesting” Kerry has chosen John “even less interesting” Edwards as his running mate. This is obviously a bad move as people will confuse them, and maybe even vote for someone else called John Nondescriptname instead, but on the other hand, their policies seem to be mostly about saying whatever crowd-pleaser pops into their heads at the time, so perhaps it is a deliberate ploy to make people so confused they can’t keep up with all the turnarounds, and surrender their powers of reasoning altogether (unless that happened already).
Here are some of the things they said about each other in the past. Notice the recurrence of the word “different”. Now see if you can spot which statement belongs to which John. Answers on Fox News.
[John’s policies would run the country] deeper and deeper into deficit.
This is the same old Washington talk that people have been listening to for decades.
I think he’s said some different things at different points in time … So I think there’s been some inconsistency.
[John] and I have very different positions on the issue of trade
This one is easy:
No. No. Final. I don’t want to be vice president. I’m running for president.
And my personal favourite (remember, John is criticising John here)…
I think that the world is looking for leadership that is tested and sure. And I think that George Bush has proven that this is not a time for inexperience in the White House.
How very unintentionally right he is.
I recently wrote about Belinda Stronach’s Conservative Party candidacy in Canada. Reader Jim Bennett reports:
“Don’t know if you noticed, but Belinda Stronach did win her seat in Canada. She’ll probably be shadow International Trade minister — a good place for her.”
Canada could use the touch of an Iron Lady. It will be interesting to see if Belinda can grow enough to fill those shoes.
One way to guarantee Bush’s reelection.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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