Teamsters Back Hynes
ArchPundit
In an unsurprising move, the Teamsters back Dan Hynes for the Democratic Primary in the US Senate Race. He may well have close to a sweep of union endorsements.
May 2003
EPA Finally Takes Action On Zonolite
After trying to avoid declaring it dangerous, the EPA declares Zonolite dangerous to human health. The Post-Dispatch appears to be the only major paper covering the story in detail. SCLM.
What Al From Really Wants
is for Howard Dean to play the roll of Bill Bradley-the intellectual candidate that refuses to rise to the bait of the bullying front runner. Perhaps Dean can roll his eyes when Kerry sends the attack dogs after him and remember he is only a sacrificial lamb.
Or maybe he can fight. Dean is a centrist on nearly every issue, but he isn’t going to take it lying down. And he is a hell of a lot like another centrist governor who played hardball in the primary and got the nomination. If you want to criticize all of the candidates for attacks on other Dems–fine. A few comments by Dean make me uncomfortable, but don’t single him out and not the clown who hired Lehane as his flak.
The most vacuous complaint comes from The New Republic argues he should have risen above the fray. Yeah, that worked well for Bradley. And um…would the advice to stay above the bad blood start with From who started the little catfight?
Next you know, From and TNR will be calling him shrill…
The Officer Returns to Duty
Is up at Political State Report. Of course I’m referring to Carl Officer, former and current Mayor of East Saint Louis.
Washington Park Follies
Apparently the don’t really know if they have a budget problem or not–well there is a budget problem in that there really isn’t one and city officials spend more than is authorized.
Rational government at work. I’m sure more strip clubs will solve the problem.
High School and Civil Liberties
One of the great ironies I learned in high school was that while one was being taught civics, participating in the civic process was often not a popular action with the high school administration. For some reason the very places that are supposed to teach students to be risk takers and thoughtful citizens shun students actually practicing those skills. Challenging a principal gets you about the same reaction that challenging a police officer does–a lot of grief even if one is correct. I had some specific teachers who pointed out that while they didn’t like it, get used to it and fight it. I went to college and found those skills quite helpful in outperforming students not prepared to challenge professors on a daily basis and professors who enjoyed having someone interested.
Glenbrook North is often cited as an exception to the above, but this week they fail miserably by backing down and trying to suspend students for non-school conduct. Eric Zorn does a bang up job arguing why the school has no business being involved in punishing these students.
Stubborn facts, all of them. And they lead to the conclusion that District 225 officials are making up policy as they go along in a public relations effort that’s nearly as disgraceful, though not as messy, as the event that prompted it.
This is not to say that the drunken girls in yellow shirts seen in all those home videos beating and throwing ick on girls in white shirts should not be punished. They should be. First by their parents, and then by the criminal courts.
The closed-fist pummeling, kicking and striking with objects that resulted in bloodshed look an awful lot to me as though they meet the definition of simple battery, a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Prosecutors should charge the worst of the offenders.
It was an appalling incident. But it wasn’t a school matter, no matter how much figurative slime it has since tossed upon the school’s image.
Schools do not and should not have anytime-anyplace authority over students. What students do on their own time is the business of their families and of the legal system, not of red-faced educators who can’t even understand their own rules and, when they get desperate, will do such things as try to apply an anti-fraternity law to an annual and non-exclusive ritual.
Schools have a responsibility to teach about civil liberties and the rule of law. The best way to teach in this case is through practice.
The teenagers involved should be punished, but by the law. In fact, allowing the school to handle this case may result in far less serious of punishment than they deserve.
SBC Bill Buried
And unfortunately I buried it too, with too many other committments while it was making its way in through the lege. John Kass covers the negligent news coverage of the issue today.
Over four short days in the General Assembly in Springfield last week, the Daleys of Chicago were on one side and everyone who pays a phone bill in Illinois was on the other.
Guess who won.
SBC President Bill Daley, brother of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, brother of Cook County Commissioner and Political Insurance Duke John Daley, and brother of de facto Zoning Czar Supremo Michael Daley, got what he wanted:
Bill Daley got everything.
He received legislation allowing for a virtual SBC telephone monopoly in Illinois, legislation that bypassed the state regulatory process and allows SBC to raise rates on competitors that use its local phone network.
My only complaint about the above is that Kass’ criticism is far too mild. This was nothing but a screw the consumer bill based on the organized political pressure SBC could provide over that of other companies, but most importantly consumers. This bill had no business being handled in the lege–it was a regulatory issue for which the process had not been fully pursued.
Who’s fault is it? While both sides of the combine jumped up to whore themselves out, Bill and Richard Daley are responsible. Bill shoved and Richard winked when he made his visit last week. Deregulation means creating more choices and this bill decreases choices and sets rates based upon SBC’s shareholder’s interest, not necessarily on the balancing of interests between competition and line maintenance.
But I didn’t write about Bill Daley, clout and SBC, figuring I’d like to try different subjects, and now I’m sick about it.
Their clout was mentioned in both newspapers, but not prominently, only alluded to, almost an afterthought, with Bill Daley’s name buried in the Tribune and the Sun-Times accounts.
And none of the stories put Bill Daley in the first paragraph.
From May 2, when the politics on SBC became public, through Wednesday’s editions, the Tribune published 15 stories on the legislation. Nine happened to mention Bill Daley’s name.
There were also two Tribune editorials, including one before the vote, and neither mentioned Bill Daley.
The Sun-Times ran seven stories on SBC in that period. Bill Daley’s name was mentioned five times, including once in an editorial after the SBC deal was approved.
And TV political news? There are capable TV reporters in Chicago, but TV news directors are afraid of politics. There is no Len O’Connor on TV these days to offer tough and consistent analysis about who gets what and how.
We failed you. I failed you.
And now we can all reach for our checkbooks.
I don’t get enough traffic to have mattered, but if I did–I would have failed you as well. While Pat Quinn finally let out a peep that this was a bad idea, the Democratic Party could and should have stopped this bill. I live in Missouri and the same bad bill will be passed here. So I’m just as screwed as Illinois residents. But in Illinois the alarm bells didn’t even ring because Daley shut them down.
St. Clair County HiJinks
St. Clair County has some interesting scandals brewing, two of which I report at the Political State Report
Lotta Nonsense
Get caught up on the Lott Affair over at Tim Lambert’s.
A couple interesting points, Lott has not responded to the data miscoding. This fits a pattern with him where he is questioned about something and attempts to change the subject. It happened to me in discussing his surveys. I tried to get him to answer the question of what the point of the surveys were if they had margins of error that were so large they were unuseful. Lott got angry over some side issues and never answered the question claiming he was being misrepresented.
The irony is that he serially misrepresents other’s work.
Reynolds is also playing both sides of the fence claiming he isn’t qualified to evaluate the statistical work while slagging on ‘antigun’ research methodology. I’ll agree that much of the popular stats thrown around to support gun control are deceiving, but I’m qualified to comment on all of the statistics. Of course, Tim Lambert points out that many of the criticisms of the work Reynolds seems to be reffering to are inaccurate.
Fundamentally, Reynolds misunderstands social science. He attacks two methods of proxies for determing rates of gun ownership as wanting.
What’s most striking to me, though, is another study, by antigun researchers, that tries to measure gun ownership by suicide rates. (And it’s not mentioned here, but I believe there was another that tried to use subscriptions to gun magazines as a proxy.) This seems rather bogus to me, and I can only imagine the general derision if this kind of proxy were employed by researchers whose work supported gun ownership.
As Lambert points out, Kleck uses the suicide rate in a published paper. Is a proxy perfect? No–pretty much by definition a proxy is used to represent another variable that is unavailable, but highly correlated. Some of the time we find great proxies, other times, we try proxies and they turn out not to work. Testing them for effectiveness is a part of the social scientific process. In the case of the Duggan paper, the use of gun magazine subscriptions as a proxy was a reasonable attempt. It failed and later it was found to be non-robust (IIRC). So we throw it out and move on to better proxies. That is the social scientific process.
Reynolds seems to want to see social science as a one-time shot in which all of a sudden we find the evidence in a Eureka! paper and simply accept the findings. This is not representative of social science, or for that matter the natural sciences. Findings are tenatively accepted until they are confirmed, extended or falsified. They aren’t set in stone. Some treat them that way, but the process eventually wins out.
Ridiculing an attempt that was tried and discarded is a bit strange because it demonstrates the process working. Instead of having an argument about whether a proxy would work, people tested it. Maybe this is an extension of the problem Reynolds has understanding the difference between advocacy in the legal academia versus testing hypotheses in social science. Ultimately, whether a proxy is good or not is an empirical question. Reynolds seems to view it as common sense when few people actually have the knowledge to understand what common sense would determine to be a good proxy if they do not have a fairly strong understanding of statistics. Despite his self-professed lack of understanding of statistical analysis, Reynolds makes strong claims about the accuracy of specific proxies without understanding what the process of how a proxy came to be.
One of the jokes about a prominent political scientist, William Riker, is that one knows he is important because every major finding of his was disproved. There is not a single magic bullet paper in social science, though there are papers that set the research agenda. Assuming that any single paper settles the questions as Reynolds wishes Lott’s research to do is a terrible misunderstanding of science. And it points to the ultimate problem with Lott–he doesn’t think he could be wrong. Instead of taking the criticisms of his data and methods and working to make them stronger based on those criticisms, Lott declares victory unilaterally.
Who’s In, Who’s Out
Over at the Political State Report with the announcement that Jack Ryan is in