Internet Scofflaw

Time’s Joe Klein, writing on the IRS scandal, says:

The President has been very proud of the absence of scandal in his administration, and rightly so.

Oh please. You mean, except for Gunwalker, Benghazi, Solyndra, Black Panthers, NEA propaganda, DOJ hiring, HHS campaigning, Lightsquared, and Americorps, just from the first page of hits for Obama+scandal?

What he means is:

The President has been very proud of his ability to squelch reporting of his administration’s numerous scandals, and rightly so.

I don’t expect much from Mother Jones, an unrepentant far-left rag, but I thought that the Atlantic was supposed to be a respectable magazine. This story makes me question that. There’s a lot here that could be debunked, but I want to look at just one statement:

“Not one of 62 mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years has been stopped this way [by an armed civilian],” reported Mother Jones’s Mark Follman, adding that the majority of mass shooters killed themselves. . .

It’s true that most mass shooters kill themselves in the end, but what about the first part? There are at least three problems with it.

The first is a logic error. Yes, mass shootings are rarely stopped by an armed civilian. Of course. Because when an armed civilian stops the incident, he stops it promptly, before it becomes a mass shooting. The civilian, you see, is already there, while the police are minutes away, at best. Those minutes are what gives the shooter the chance to become a mass shooter.

Second, armed civilians avert mass shootings not infrequently. For example, there were two instances the very same week as the Newtown shootings: one in San Antonio and one in Clackamas, Oregon. And there are plenty of others.

Third, mass shootings always take place in gun-free zones (with only one exception in the last half-century). Mass shooters deliberately seek out places where guns are not permitted. Thus, they aren’t very many armed civilians at such places.

In short, Mother Jones’s claim — echoed by the Atlantic — might be narrowly true (although I don’t know that), but it certainly doesn’t demonstrate anything like what they suggest it does.

No one ever accused Ed Schultz of being well-informed, but this really takes the cake:

For the record, the truth is the exact opposite of what Schultz says: Chicago has the most draconian gun laws in the country.

Is he really so absurdly misinformed, or is he just lying? I would guess the former; most people don’t deliberately make themselves look like fools.

Fox News reports:

Reformed crooks say the New York newspaper that published a map of names and addresses of gun owners did a great service – to their old cronies in the burglary trade.

The information published online by the Journal-News, a daily paper serving the New York suburbs of Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties, could be highly useful to thieves in two ways, former burglars told FoxNews.com. Crooks looking to avoid getting shot now know which targets are soft and those who need weapons know where they can steal them.

“That was the most asinine article I’ve ever seen,” said Walter T. Shaw, 65, a former burglar and jewel thief who the FBI blames for more than 3,000 break-ins that netted some $70 million in the 1960s and 1970s. “Having a list of who has a gun is like gold – why rob that house when you can hit the one next door, where there are no guns? . . . What they did was insanity.” . . .

Frank Abagnale, who was portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 film “Catch Me if You Can,” and is perhaps the most famous reformed thief to ever earn a legitimate living by offering the public insight into the criminal mind, called the newspaper’s actions “reprehensible.”

“It is unbelievable that a newspaper or so called journalist would publish the names and addresses of legal gun owners, including federal agents, law enforcement officers and the like,” said Abagnale, who noted that he grew up in the suburban New York area served by the Journal-News. “This would be equivalent to publishing the names of individuals who keep substantial sums of money, jewelry and valuables in their home.”

UPDATE: More:

Law enforcement officials from a New York region where a local paper published a map identifying gun owners say prisoners are using the information to intimidate guards.

Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco, who spoke at a news conference flanked by other county officials, said the Journal News’ decision to post an online map of names and addresses of handgun owners Dec. 23 has put law enforcement officers in danger.

“They have inmates coming up to them and telling them exactly where they live. That’s not acceptable to me,” Falco said. . .

Ezra Klein (of Journolist fame) is running a list of “facts” about guns in America. Most of them are nonsense, but for most of those showing so requires some analysis that I will leave to other commentators. I want to focus on just one, this chart:

The chart shows the US with a significantly higher rate of assault deaths than all “other OECD”. Klein adds: “We are a clear outlier.”

Now, you can’t tell with them drawn atop each other, but there are 24 graphs on that chart. (They are shown separately here.) But there are 34 OECD members. If you include those (which the graph’s author did later, after being questioned on the point) you get a very different picture:

Not so much of an outlier with eight more countries put in — particularly if you look at 2010 and not the late 1970s – are we? The original graph left out all the countries with a higher or similar rate.

But wait, eight more countries? Weren’t we missing ten? If you peruse the list, it is still missing Iceland and Turkey. I wonder what’s going on in those two. The author (who does not study violence, by the way) says he couldn’t get data for Turkey. He doesn’t mention Iceland at all.

Finally, I should mention that other measures of violence paint a very different picture (see number 6, here), but that gets into the realm of analysis, so I’ll stop here.

This is a real op-ed in the New York Times:

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

The author doesn’t quite say what should replace the Constitution, but makes it clear that the purpose is to eliminate the obstacles it poses to his liberal agenda. The rights and institutions he likes would be kept, the rest scrapped.

POSTSCRIPT: Don’t bother saying that this is just an op-ed, and doesn’t express the NYT’s position. From an important person, the NYT might run an op-ed they didn’t agree with, although rarely. (They wouldn’t even run John McCain’s op-ed in 2008.) From a little-known law professor, the NYT won’t run a piece with which they disagree.

It is a popular pastime on the left to prepare and promote studies that purport to show that conservatives and libertarians are stupid, insane, or otherwise mentally defective. (“It’s science! You can’t argue with science!”) Some of them are outright hilarious, like a recent study claiming to show that Fox News viewers have an IQ of 80.

The study is a complete fake, of course:

So there you have it. A four-year study sparked by the outcome of the recent election, from an institution that’s admittedly a fake, from a company that won’t identify itself, supposedly funded by a Republican PAC trying to “cut off” the Tea Party like a cancer, using a sample that was chosen with a particular result in mind, with a contact number that’s an anonymous free Google Voice number.

But what’s really hilarious is the irony: credulous leftists being taken in by a fake study on intelligence.

I don’t really blame the Houston Chronicle for being taken in by an ill-conceived anti-Obama flyer that turned out to be fabricated. After all, these people are liberals, and it’s consistent with their world view when Republicans seem to be acting stupidly. But these people are also supposedly journalists. Why didn’t they even ask the flyer’s purported producers for comment before running with the story?

One leftist meme that I first heard this election year, but apparently goes back at least to 2008, is the racism inherent in observing — or merely “dog-whistling” — that Barack Obama is not like most Americans. Obama may have been raised in Indonesia and mentored by radicals upon his return to the United States, but none of that is a legitimate subject for discussion.

On the other hand, “otherizing” (not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s not really a word) is central to Obama’s campaign against Mitt Romney. The centerpiece is Romney’s Mormonism of course, but it’s dangerous to be too overt about that, so they use his vocabulary as stand-in.

The vocabulary line of attack was one of the very first that Obama adopted when Romney became his presumptive opponent:

President Obama is not only starting to cite Mitt Romney by name, he is seeking to link his likely Republican opponent to at least two things. One, the Republican budget developed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Two, the word “marvelous.” . . .

Obama said Romney is “very supportive of this new budget, and he even called it ‘marvelous’ — which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget.”

“It’s a word you don’t often hear generally.”

The New York Times is chiming in with a piece on Romney’s quaint, clean vocabulary. A sample:

At a campaign stop in Rockford, Ill., not long ago, Mitt Romney sought to convey his feelings for his wife, Ann. “Smitten,” he said. . .

It was a classic Mittism, as friends and advisers call the verbal quirks of the Republican presidential candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get off airplanes, they “disembark.” People do not laugh, they “guffaw.” Criminals do not go to jail, they land in the “big house.” Insults are not hurled, “brickbats” are.

But is his vocabulary really so unusual? Byron York looked into it and found that the New York Times itself likes those same words:

Anyone check frequency with which those words appear in NYT? ‘Smitten’? 707 times in past five years. ‘Guffaw’ 109 times. ‘Brickbat,’ 63.

So all that stuff about vocabulary is really just cover. They’re really just talking about his odd refusal to use profanity, which points directly back to Mormonism.

Now, the left is always fabricating racist connotations out of whole cloth. But we can be sure I’m committing the same error here — drawing a connection to Romney’s religion that isn’t there — because they make it explicit:

His Mormon faith frowns on salty language, and so does he. A man of relentless self-discipline, he made clear to lawmakers in Boston and colleagues in business that even in matters of vocabulary, he “held himself to a high standard of behavior.”

In the end, it’s a strange line of attack. There’s a lot wrong with Mormonism, theologically speaking, but attacking Mormons’ commitment to personal morality is fundamentally wrong-headed. More than that, it’s telling. The Democratic ticket has lately been flaunting their vulgarity, and clearly they think America is with them.

Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s deranged anchor, says it’s unconstitutional for people to refuse to let the president interrupt them:

I don’t think [Romney] understands the Constitution of the United States. He’s the president of the United States.  You don’t say, ‘You’ll get your chance.’

Here’s the exchange that got Matthews so upset:

ROMNEY: How much did you cut them by?

OBAMA: I’m happy to answer the question.

ROMNEY: All right. And it is — I don’t think anyone really believes that you’re a person who’s going to be pushing for oil and gas and coal. [Gestures.] You’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.

Matthews seems to think that the Constitution makes the president a king, to whom Americans must show deference. Certainly someone misunderstands the Constitution here, but it’s not Romney.

The New York Times says that Republican cuts to the State Department’s budget are to blame for the Benghazi consulate attack. We are to believe that the State Department just didn’t have the money for competent security!

The ugly truth is that the same people who are accusing the administration of not providing sufficient security for the American consulate in Benghazi have voted to cut the State Department budget, which includes financing for diplomatic security. The most self-righteous critics don’t seem to get the hypocrisy. . .

ASIDE: Oh, I get the hypocrisy all right. . . The New York Times is saying that it’s wrong to criticize security and also cut advocate cuts to spending on security, a surprising position given the NYT’s positions on the war in Iraq.

Of course, the NYT doesn’t mean a word of it. They just want this thing to go away. And they’re doing their part by keeping it off the front page, which was too much even for the NYT ombudsman.

The Congressional hearings on Benghazi resulted in major revelations, such as (1) contrary to the administration’s story, there was no protest at all before the attack, (2) Benghazi security relied on a local militia that hadn’t been paid in months, and (3) Washington wouldn’t even respond to requests for more security.

All this, and more, the NYT editors deemed insufficiently newsworthy: “I didn’t think there was anything significantly new in it,” and “There were six better stories.” Those better stories included Lance Armstrong (the lead story), taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and a woman who died of meningitis.

Back when Benghazi looked like a negative for Romney, they weren’t so reticent. The editors who were “wary of the political nature of the hearing,” had no problem running a front page story attacking Mitt Romney’s remarks on Cairo and Benghazi.

It’s only news if it’s bad for Romney.

(Previous post.)

Oh, good grief:

President Barack Obama was a guest at the 1991 wedding of ABC senior foreign correspondent and vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz, The Daily Caller has learned. Obama and groom Julius Genachowski, whom Obama would later tap to head the Federal Communications Commission, were Harvard Law School classmates at the time and members of the Harvard Law Review.

After first trying to stiff-arm the Daily Caller, ABC ultimately admitted that Obama attended. They then resorted to the standard response of a political organization: spin. They claimed that “nearly the entire Law Review” attended the wedding. However, the Daily Caller, pressing the point, found that that was implausible:

When pressed further on Tuesday for a specific number of Harvard Law Review employees in attendance at the wedding, [ABC Spokesman David] Ford could offer none, despite circulating the same unverified approximation . . .

Ford also could not provide The Daily Caller with a specific number of Harvard Law Review employees who worked with Obama and Genachowski during that year. A photo taken of the Harvard Law Review during Obama and Genachowski’s final year of law school contains 70 people.

It doesn’t seem very likely that they would invite 70 people from the law review to their wedding, does it?

My question is, what is the Commission on Presidential Debates about, anyway? This is supposed to be a bipartisan organization, but they can’t pick even a single moderator who is even a centrist, much less right of center.

(Via Instapundit.)

After Obama’s drubbing in the first debate, David Axelrod begs for the media’s help:

And so today, as the day after, I think the question for you [the media], for the American people is really one of character and whether or not a candidacy that’s so fundamentally rooted in hiding the truth and the facts from the American people and deception is the basis of trust on which you assign the presidency to a person.

So that is what we are going to focus on moving forward. We’re going to hold Governor Romney accountable for the things that he said last night and we’re going to make him justify those claims – as I hope you will make him justify those claims.

This would be pathetic, if it weren’t so likely to work.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, notice Axelrod’s chutzpah here. Everyone who watched the debate now knows that Romney is nothing like the caricature in Obama’s attack ads. Clearly Romney is hiding the truth about himself.

(Via Jim Treacher.)

Obama speaks to a campaign rally of 18,000 people, in an area that accommodates only 5,000. It turns out that the media uncritically repeats any count the Obama campaign gives them, without doing even the modicum of fact-checking that would show that the number is impossible.

This is a truly nasty pattern. Anything a Republican says is aggressively “fact-checked” (and usually ruled false even though it was true), while anything from Obama is accepted at face value. This has been going on for a long time.

I haven’t commented on Mitt Romney’s 47% “gaffe” because I don’t think it matters (and the tracking polls seem to bear this out), but there is one aspect of the matter that strikes me as interesting. Whenever Obama says something politically damaging, the legacy media always informs us that his words were taken out of context, even though that’s almost never true. On the other hand, in Romney’s they never say any such thing, even though the far-left magazine Mother Jones really did edit his remarks.

Once taken to task on this, Mother Jones released the whole video, sanctimoniously proclaiming:

Romney says we posted “snippets” & not full answers in the secret videos. Uh….no. See for yourself. The full tape: . . .

Except that it turns out they didn’t release the whole video. The “full tape” is missing an unknown amount of time (probably several minutes, based on changes in the lighting). Not only that, the missing material is from Romney’s 47%-don’t-pay-taxes remarks.

Despite their snarky “Uh….no”, their defense is simply untrue; they did not post the full remark.

It gets worse. Originally Mother Jones did not even acknowledge that the middle of the recording was missing. Once called on it, they inserted a disclosure:

Update: According to the source, the recording device was inadvertently turned off between these two segments. The source noticed quickly and began to re-record, resulting in an estimated a one-to-two minute loss of tape.

But it still gets worse: Even the belated disclosure seems to be untrue.

Recording devices are not designed to turn themselves off after 36 minutes and 39 seconds. If one does, it means that the device has somehow failed. Such a failure would nearly always be due to a dead battery, but it could be because of some sort of software error. In any case, you’re not going to fix the problem without picking up the device.

Yet somehow the person who illegally recorded the meeting was able to correct the problem without even touching the recorder. You can see this from an animated picture comparing the final frame of the first segment and the initial frame of the second, at the end of this post at Not Yet Europe. The camera’s positioning is essentially identical in both frames, with no more difference that one would expect from the waiter bumping the table.

I can imagine one way that this might legitimately happen: if the camera had a remote control. But it’s clear from the fussing and clattering at the start of the video that the source was not using a remote control. In any case, Mother Jones has not offered any such explanation.

It’s not entirely conclusive, but almost certainly the video was edited after-the-fact and someone is lying about it. We can’t know whether the liar is Mother Jones or their source, and it doesn’t really matter. Moreover, either way, Mother Jones certainly lied about releasing the full video. They did not.

If there’s one message we’re getting from the legacy media, it’s that Romney has blown this election. It’s all over, Obama has won, and we really all ought to stay home and accept that government will be running our lives from now on.

In the past, I’ve resisted the temptation to deny the polls are wrong. Basically, that strikes me as loser talk, and I don’t want to indulge in it. In a rout like 1996 or 2008, I’d rather just accept reality. But this election is different. If you look at most of the polls, they simply don’t reflect reality.

The thing is, pollsters don’t simply ask people who they will vote for and report the results. After polling, they reweight the results to some desired balance of Democrats, Republicans, and independents in the sample. That weight is not determined by polling; they simply make it up. And that weight is the single greatest factor in the result of the poll. So despite all the talk of scientific polls, they aren’t.

If they guess the turnout correctly, weighting makes the polls more accurate, but the weights that most polls are using are simply insane. In 2008, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the electorate by 7%. Anyone who thinks that the electorate is more Democratic now than in 2008 is just crazy, but most polls are overweighting Democrats by more than 7%, often even in double digits. Basically, they’re lying.

In fact, according to Rasmussen’s poll of party identification, Republicans actually outnumber Democrats by 4.3% now (37.6% Republican, 33.3% Democrats, 29.2% independent). That’s roughly a ten-point difference from the targets that most polls are using, which corresponds to roughly a ten-point swing in the polls. The website Unskewed Polls takes the major polls and reweights them with Rasmussen’s party numbers and finds that every one of them puts Romney ahead, by an average of 7.8 points.

Now I would caution against taking too much comfort in those numbers. I doubt that things are going that well. Rasmussen was the most accurate poll in 2008, and they have the race dead even. (Today they have Obama up by one.) We’re not where we want to be, but I think our chances are better than even.

The other reason I discount the polls that show Obama taking a big lead is they are completely at odds with the tracking polls. The great thing about tracking polls is they use the same methodology all the time, so even if you don’t believe their bottom-line result, they are effective at tracking movement. Here’s the Rasmussen tracking poll:

Except for a fleeting convention bump for Obama (nobody tells tall tales quite like Bill Clinton), the state of the race hasn’t moved much. Obama may have improved his standing by about 2 points.

And here’s the Gallup tracking poll for the last month, which has supposedly been a disaster for Romney:

All of Romney’s imaginary gaffes of the last month have amounted to essentially nothing.

So why are the media lying about the state of the race? Of course they want Obama to win, that’s a given, but how do they expect skewed polls to help make that happen? One theory is that they want to depress Romney voters into staying home. I’m skeptical of that theory. Here’s the problem: The polls today are gimmes; they can say whatever they want because there’s no benchmark to compare them against. The important poll for their credibility is the final poll before election day. Between now and then they have to de-skew their polls, and when they do, it’s going to look like a big shift toward Romney. That will help his turnout, not hurt it.

I think this is all about fundraising. No one wants to contribute to a losing cause, but everyone loves a winner. I think they are trying to depress Republican donors and — especially — to encourage Democratic ones. (Romney and his allies have much more money on hand than Obama.)

And sure enough, last night I accidentally watched about ten seconds of 60 minutes and what was Steve Kroft asking Romney about? How Romney can convince his donors that he hasn’t already lost the race.

(Via PJ Tatler.)

UPDATE: I’ve been reading elsewhere that, contrary to some accounts, most polls do not weight for targets for party identification. But then I don’t understand how they come up with such outlandish numbers. Even if we stipulated that Democrats somehow will increase their turnout from 2008 — despite Democrats’ lessened enthusiasm and despite the observed shift in party identification from Democratic to Republican — the number ought not be all over the map. If the skewed populations are not deliberate, then these polls have some fundamental methodological problem.

A very interesting poll result from Gallup:

Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Distrust is up from the past few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior to 2004.

The poll finds that 31% of independents and 26% of Republicans trust the media, compared with 58% of Democrats. The poll also finds that Republicans and independents, despite distrusting the media, pay much closer attention (48% and 39%) than do Democrats (33%).

It would be interesting if there were a way to tease out cause and effect. Do Republicans and independents come to distrust the media because they also listen to alternative sources that show how bad it is? Or is it that people who believe the media’s pro-Democrat line naturally become Democrats? I can see a role for both.

(Via Newsbusters.)

The so-called fact-checkers, which is the to say the opinion police, seem to have finally gone too far. Their recent performance has been so egregious, at a time when people are paying close attention, that everyone on the right and many in the center are realizing that the “fact-checkers” are worse than worthless.

The latest is moderate Democrat Mickey Kaus, who counters the bogus fact-checks of Romney’s ad attacking Obama for gutting welfare reform. In truth, the ad is neither fact nor falsehood, but opinion. Moreover, it is opinion firmly grounded in fact. The “fact-checkers” who grade it false based on the administration’s counter-argument are (at best) being misled.

The fact-checkers cite Sebelius’s pledge to issue waivers only to states that get at least 20% more people off welfare. Kaus points out that (1) that pledge was issued only after Republicans starting attacking the new policy, and (2) the easiest way for states to attain that 20% “improvement” is to increase the number of people on welfare by about 20%, at which point simple math will provide the 20% increase in people getting back off welfare. So Sebelius’s pledge doesn’t improve the new policy — it may make it even worse.

Okay, first the chuckle. Obama was caught misspelling OHIO:

Then comes the media failure: The Washington Post quickly reported that the photo was a fake. (Down the memory hole now, but you can see a Washington Post tweet to that effect halfway down the page here.) That reporting was based on, apparently, nothing whatsoever. The Post later retracted.

What happened, it seems, is that the Obama campaign sent out a second photograph of him spelling the word correctly, and the Post reporter jumped to the conclusion that the first photograph must therefore have been fake. (Since no one ever respells a word correctly after making a mistake.) You can only make this kind of mistake when you’re in the tank.

Even after retracting, the reporters still held out the possibility that it might have been fake, writing “I don’t know if the first one is photoshopped.”