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Daily Dolt: Fran Eaton, Lying Liar

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Eaton tries to lie herself out yesterday’s lie. She claims the below proves that Ginsburg thought the ERA would eliminate survivor benefits for women who choose to stay home.

“Congress and the President should direct their attention to the concept that pervades the Code: that the adult world is (and should be) divided into two classes – independent men, whose primary responsibility is to win bread for a family, and dependent women, whose primary responsibility is to care for children and household. This concept must be eliminated from the code if it is to reflect the equality principle.”

Of course, this is directly contradicted by the text of page 45 in which the recommendations for Social Security changes include making the language gender neutral so that men and women have equal access to survivor benefits regardless who who works and who might stay at home.

But what is even more telling is how she uses the quote above that doesn’t even make the argument she claims it makes.  It talks about making the code gender neutral, not eliminating benefits for women who didn’t work outside the home.

What Fran cannot do is cite the next paragraph that demonstrates just how much of a liar Fran is:

Underlying the recommendations made in this report is the fundamental point that allocation of responsibilities within the family is a matter properly determined solely by the individuals involved.  Government should not steer individual decisions concerning household or breadwinning roles by casting the law’s weight on the side of (or against) a particular method of ordering private relationships.  Rather, a policy of strict neutrality should be pursued.  That policy should accomodate both traditional and innovative patterns.  At the same time, it should assure removal of artificial constraints so that women and men willing to explore their full potential as human beings may create new traditions by their actions.

Combine this with the recommendations on page 45 and what is clear is that Ginsburg argued for expanding benefits to widowers as well as widows, not to eliminate benefits to widows.

Why Eaton feels the need to lie about the report is beyond me, but she clearly did.  And the Southtown Star helped her in that endeavor.

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Daily Dolt: Illinois Review

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Entertainingly Silly 

Earth to Ted, Caroline, Patrick and others who are marketing Sen. Barack Obama as the new JFK.  Kennedy family, get over yourselves.  If you really think Sen. Barack Obama is the new JFK, then maybe you didn’t know the record of the real JFK from 1947 to 1963. Let’s review the bidding.

If you live in Illinois and voted for JFK or Nixon in the 1960 election, I am sorry to be the one to do the math but even if that was your first vote you have at least passed your 68th birthday and are on your way to the “gettin up there” stage of life. So what? So that’s a very long time to hold on to a myth that was never real to start with and expect that it will impress people whose only knowledge of JFK comes from fawning historians and aging journalists.

During 1962, Jack Kennedy was alive and well. Everyone called him Jack.  No one ever called him “John Fitzgerald” in that mournful patter until after he was murdered by a communist in 1963.  If you still doubt that and are an honest person, read Gerald Posner’s book, Case Closed, and set aside your doubts for all time.

Yes, the Kennedy family doesn’t know anything about the history of their own family.  But Illinois Review will correct that for them.  And throw in a Assassination Conspiracy theory to boot.

Daily Dolt Obama Presidential Race

Daily Dolt: Bob Kerrey

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WTF:

After the event, he mused about her chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama.

“The fact that he’s African American is a big deal. I do expect and hope that Hillary is the nominee of the party. But I hope he’s used in some way. If he happens to be the nominee of the party and ends up being president, I think his capacity to influence in a positive way . . . the behavior of a lot of underperforming black youth today is very important, and he’s the only one who can reach them.”

Kerrey continued: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

He returned to Clinton: “She does inspire my confidence. She can do the job. In my view, she’s the complete package.”

Now, Kerrey says dumb things all the time, but what’s really weird out of this quote:

Kerrey continued: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

Not something that appeals to him? WTF?

Daily Dolt Illinois Congressional Races

Daily Dolt: I Thought Abortion Rights Groups Were Too Divisive?

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Laesch and his people attack the Planned Parenthood endorsement of Bill Foster:

Down the thread:

The endorsement that we worked hardest for was the AFL-CIO’s and that means a lot to our campaign.

Additionally, I did have words with PP in 2006 that dated back to a 2004 race.

When I worked for Dr. David Gill in 2004, Planned Parenthood endorsed, but was nowhere to be seen when it came to real support.

I couldn’t believe that they didn’t want to fight to get a progressive, single-payer Doc who actually volunteered for Planned Parenthood elected.  During my first run, I didn’t feel the need to chase an empty PP endorsement.

Beltway thinking will get you beltway results.  Main Street thinking and campaigning will get you results that benefit Main St.

John

But let’s remember this quote:

Laesch is making his own campaign more difficult by depriving it of some of its traditional channels of support. Even though Laesch says he is pro-abortion rights, he refuses to accept donations from pro-abortion rights political action committees.

“It’s too divisive,” he said.

Errr…pissing on someone’s leg and telling them it’s rainiing….

Daily Dolt Illinois Congressional Races

Daily Dolt: John Laesch

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Just make it stop:

John Laesch, of Yorkville, said he supports the carbon-free and nuclear-free plan put forth by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research at www.ieer.org. He said that while he is in agreement with Foster on several points, he disagrees that money should go to more research. Laesch believes the technology for environmentally conscious energy is already available.

Instead, he said, consumers should be given incentives to buy electric and hybrid cars, solar panels and wind turbines, or to hook up to public power grids. And Laesch said the government could easily afford such subsidies by reordering some priorities.

The ‘plan’ he links to is absurd.
1.  This bans corn based ethanol.  A position I agree with, but I’m not running in the 14th District.

2.  This would require the retrofitting of all houses with gas heating and cooking.

Let me make this very simple.  While we need to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions, we do not need no CO2 emissions.  In fact, any reasonable energy plan will incorporate cleaner fuels like natural gas, especially since it is an accessible source for fuel cell hydrogen.

3 and Oh My God is John Laesch a fucking moron:

Adopt vigorous research, development, and pilot plant construction programs for technologies that could accelerate the elimination of CO, such as direct solar
hydrogen production (photosynthetic, photoelectrochemical, and other approaches), hot rock geothermal power, and integrated gasification combined cycle plants using biomass with a capacity to sequester the CO

The plan John likes so  much includes more money for research because the technology is not developed.

Daily Dolt

Daily Dolt: Bob Novak

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Nice newspaper ethical standards 

Agents of Paul Krugman are spreading the word in journalistic circles that he has scandalous information about his principal opponent in the profession , Bob Novak, but has decided not to use it. The nature of the alleged scandal was not disclosed.

This word-of-mouth among journalists makes Novak look vulnerable and Krugman look prudent. It comes during a dip for Krugman after he refused to take a stand on the Time’s editorial policy.

Experienced journalistic operatives believe Krugman wants to avoid a repetition of 2004, when attacks on each other by journalists Hunter Thompson and Judy Miller were mutually destructive and facilitated  Fox News’ rise.

I hear Novak likes to eat puppies.  What are you hearing? Feel free to be as outlandish as you like.  Put it in comments and I’ll then forward the rumors to the Sun Times which presented that piece of garbage column in their paper.  And have allowed him to out CIA agents in a story of no value, perhaps someone will start to think about, you know, editing him.

Micky Kaus rumors are encouraged to. It would be irresponsible not to after all.

And, of course, time for a blogger ethics panel!

Finally, the HRC campaign might think about it’s habit of using right wing mouthpieces like Matt Drudge. It makes their denials sound like crocodile tears.  And even if true in this case, why shouldn’t Obama react as if it’s true given the history?

Daily Dolt

Daily Dolt: Treason in Defense of Slavery Yankee, Potentially the Stupidest Boycott Ever

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Treason in the Defense of Slavery Yankee is calling for a boycott of The New Republican because it is published Scott Beauchamp:

We know The New Republic attempted to stonewall their way through obvious, blatant, and grievous breaches of journalistic ethics. In so doing, they have attacked the service, integrity, and honor of an entire company of American soldiers serving in a combat zone to avoid taking responsibility for their own editorial and ethical failures.

I’ve never quite understood the big deal over the Beauchamp story–at worst it told the story of some people stuck in the middle of a civil war being cruel to a dog in the street.  Other than by Michael Vick rules of dogs are the most holy thing ever, is that shocking.  Anyway, Treason in the Defense of Slavery Yankee is claiming it is stabbing troops in the back and even left a classic over at Yglesias’ place.

The knives are being swung at the back of our soldiers comes from the hand of Franklin Foer.

It is unclear to just about everyone, but Treason in Defense of Slavery Yankee why a pro-war magazine that continues to cheerlead the Iraqi War and a publisher who is all a twitter at the thought of attacking Iran would want to undercut the troops, but a guy who calls himself Treason in Defense of Slavery Yankee is short a few marbles for pretty obvious reasons.

Anyway, he wants to boycott the TNR’s advertisers.  Yeah, for those who have actually read TNR, that’s pretty funny. Here’s a sample of the advertisers:

Alfred A. Knopf Allstate Amazon.com American Gas Station
American Petroleum Institute AstroZeneca Auto Alliance
Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (current issue) BP (current issue) Chevron (current issue) CNN
FLAME (current issue) Federal Express The Financial Times Focus Features
Ford Motor Company Freddie Mac GM Grove Atlantic
HBO Harvard University Press History Channel Hoover Institution (current issue)
MetLife Microsoft Mortage Bankers Nuclear Energy Institute
The New School New York Times Novartis Palgrave Macmillan (current issue)
Simon & Shuster John Templeton Foundation (current issue) University of Chicago Press University Press of Kansas (current issue)
U.S. Telecom Visa (current issue) The Wall Street Journal Warner Brothers
Warner Brothers Home Video W.W. Norton Wyeth Laboratories Yale University Press (current issue)

TiDoSY wants to boycott pharmaceutical companies, think tanks, academic presses, and interest groups.  Even in the cases of Ford and GM or Chevron and BP their advertising in TNR is oriented towards issues or corporate reputation more than actually selling products.  Oh, and insurance companies….like Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

There are virtually no products to boycott unless one is an academic.  Most of the advertisers aren’t there to sell things so much as to reach a very particular audience about issues.

But the comments are the best:

tilting at windmills…

the advertisers are there because they’re interested in giving money to a liberal magazine and because they’re interested in the readers.

So….American Gas Station, Chevron, BP, the American Petroleum Institute, the Farging Hoover Institution,  FLAME, the Bleeping Nuclear Energy Institute, US Telecom, and Big Pharma are all interested in giving money to a liberal magazine.  Of course.

Never mind that the New Republic is not the New Republic of old, but pretty much a neo-con publication on foreign policy and DLC on domestic policy.  But whatever, these conservative stalwarts are backing the TNR because it is a ‘liberal’ magazine?

TNR, probably far less than it used to be, is a place to reach very specific policy audience with ideas, not sell televisions or cars and that is why this is probably the dumbest consumer boycott ever.

Daily Dolt Fundie Fun

Daily Dolt: Dennis “GET OFF MY LAWN” Byrne

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Seriously, someone at the Trib smack Dold over the head for allowing this crap in his paper.

The problem with dismissing the Carroll study because it is epidemiological is that you’ll also have to dismiss a multitude of public health studies, including ones claiming a link between radon and lung cancer. These are the same epidemiological studies that alarmed millions of Americans, frightening them into buying radon detectors and creating a huge radon mitigation business. No study is perfect, and Carroll’s shortcoming is that his data do not allow comparisons of individual women over time. But other major studies have, and according to one unchallenged compressive analysis of those studies, they show that a pregnant woman who has never had a child before and aborts in the first term increased her chance of breast cancer by 50 percent.

Let me offer up the model from the paper

Two explanatory variables are selected for modeling: (abortion)and (fertility).The trends for abortion and fertility are shown in Figures 8 and 9 for countries considered. The Mathematical Model is then:

Yi = a + b1x1i + b2x2i + ei

where Y represents cumulated cohort incidence of breast cancer within a particular age group; a is intercept, b1 and b2 are coefficients, and e is random error.

That creates a guffaw from those who know statistics at all.

He has a correlation Coefficient of .98.

Figure3.jpg

Those who understand correlation coefficients are shooting liquid through their nose if they were drinking anything right now. I had to look at it about 20 minutes to understand this moron was trying to sell a .98 correlation coefficient.
What he has done is take mass data that shows one factor increasing (abortion) and another decreasing (fertility) and then regresses it upon a variable that is increasing-incidence of breast cancer.

So if I were to regress the number of abortions and the fertility rate on the number of televisions sold per person, I’d get about the same result over this period of time. So I can, according to this dumbass, claim credibly that television leads to breat cancer. Or, as the Orac points out, the reduction in the number of pirates has led to global warming.
There’s a variety of problems in this study starting with he throws out independent variables well established by other studies. In the case of linear regression, the problem is that if you do not include other variables, you cannot control for those variables and so not are just theoretical variables excluded, but well established variables demonstrated over and over are excluded from the analysis. To say the least, this is an underspecified

A regression model is underspecified if the regression equation is missing one or more important predictor variables. This situation is perhaps the worst-case scenario, because an underspecified model yields biased regression coefficients and biased predictions of the response. That is, in using the model, we would consistently underestimate or overestimate the population slopes and the population means. To make already bad matters even worse, the mean square error MSE tends to overestimate ?2, thereby yielding wider confidence intervals than it should.

No one accepts a .98 coefficient. No one. That is essentially regressing one variable on itself and in this case, it’s the regressing less restrictive abortion laws with a number of factors that have led to an increase in breast cancer. Some cancer patients even need Home Care Assistance.

Ecological inference is not an acceptable means of imputing causation on individuals from macro level data and this study violates the principle. One might use it to explore potential causes and whether there is a gross correlation, but not to determine causality. For that one requires cohort information or some other way to address individual observations.

It’s junk science. Yet the Chicago Tribune keeps publishing a clown who insists there is a link, but is wholly unqualified to judge that and uses crappy studies to do it. Why?

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