McCardle v. McCardle

May 15, 2011:

VELSHI: Megan, I think Matt wants to see somebody from Goldman arrested or charged with something. What do you think has to happen?

Because clearly whether or not you think Goldman broke any laws, any of us who followed this got the impression that they were perhaps not dealing in the best interests of some of their clients.

MCARDLE: I think they probably aren't, just like most vendors aren't always -- look to their own interests before the interests of their clients.

But here's the thing. I think there is a real desire to have a sense of closure on this, a desire to track down a villain, figure out who did this to us.

And I think that really underweight the power of human stupidity and poor system design. It can produce terrible results even without anyone doing --

October 22, 2009:

Restricting bonuses only at the companies in which we now have a gigantic stake is emotionally satisfying, but bankers aren't just talking their book when they complain that talent is getting poached from bonus-limited firms. I know it's fashionable to believe that traders are all a bunch of lucky, arrogant idiots, but there is some skill involved, and firms that lose their top people will probably underperform.

In other words, the banksters are too stupid to be held accountable for their actions, but two years ago were too smart to not get paid huge, taxpayer-backed bonuses.

I've been seriously, earnestly trying to back out of caring about politics so much (the lack of posts to this blog should prove that) but, good God! How does Megan McCardle get paid a dime for her B.S., partisan tap-dancing?

Megyn Kelly argues with Megyn Kelly

Today:

Plenty of conservatives are pretty upset over a campaign by the Society of Professional Journalists to convince reporters to stop using the terms "illegal aliens" and "illegal immigrants" in favor of "undocumented immigrant." But none are as livid as perpetually outraged Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who on Wednesday afternoon asked if journalists were going to start calling rapists "non-consensual sex partners" next.

Kelly also expressed frustration over the politically correct language dominating American culture.

"You know, we did a segment earlier in the year on how little people find the term midget offensive, and so you can't say that anymore," Kelly lamented. "There's so many words that are suddenly becoming hurtful, and part of the group thinks it's hurtful, and the other group doesn't, and you're left as a journalist saying, I don't know what to do."

But back in May, Kelly was so mad she nearly soiled her skirt when she heard Barack Obama may have casually used the term "teabagger."

Law Enforcement and Privilege

Jim here.

Avram Grumer, over at the NielsenHayden's blog Making Light, opens a short (but powerful) post with:

"[T]he past few days have drawn a very clear diagram of in modern American law-enforcement privilege pyramid."

Read it and weep.

Best,
Jim

NPR spreads a falsehood

Jim Here:

On Sunday's "On The Media", NPR's Brooke Gladstone interviewed Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics. Dubner recounts a story from the book:

[Levitt] began to notice a pattern, which was that there were quite a few instances in which the two same candidates ran against each other repeatedly.

And what Levitt found was that if you looked at the Congressional races where the same two candidates ran each other repeatedly, well, the appeal of the candidate presumably didn't change a whole lot – you'd have to control for incumbency and things like that – but what often did change was the amount of money that was spent.

And what that allowed him to do was to try to isolate the causal effect of the money itself. How important is it to spend a lot more money? And the result was ... you can double the amount you spend and raise your share of the vote by about one percent.

Similarly, if you’re winning an election and you cut your spending in half, you'll lose only about one percent of the vote.

So, the original study showed that the amount of money spent in a second (or subsequent) match-up between two candidates did not substantially change the outcome from that which occurred in the first election. In other words, campaign spending has limited effectiveness in rematches between two candidates. The study says nothing about the role of campaign spending in the original matchup -- it can't, for those are the baseline used to measure the effect of spending on the rematches.

This result seems plausible -- there exists what we know as "brand loyalty", and, having once selected one candidate from a pair, it is reasonable to expect voters to have some brand loyalty that keeps them voting for the same person election after election given the same match up. So, to the degree the composition of the voting public is static, we would expect campaign spending to have limited ability to sway voters from the choices they had already made between two candidates.

However, in the first election between the pair, a significant number of voters will not have made up their minds, and thus be more open to influence from many sources--including campaign ads. So, there is reason to believe that campaign spending can be important in the initial campaign between a particular pair of candidates (e.g.: Angle v. Reid; McMahon v. Blumenthal; O'Donnell v. Coons, etc.), and Levitt's study, of course, says nothing on the matter.

And so, Dubner sliped one past Ms Gladstone when he then turned around and made the far broader -- and unjustified -- claim that: [I]f you look over the long stretch, you just don't find a causal relationship between spending and electoral outcome. Dubner knows nothing of the sort. Most elections are not rematches, and Levitt's study gives no insight into the role of campaign spending on initial matches.

Am I asking too much to expect the reporters to catch such errors? Your thoughts are appreciated!

Best,

Jim Bales

New (right wing) rule: YCOMTUAD

Do you remember when the right believed (wrongly) that arguing against the airing of a "docudrama" featuring admittedly invented scenes was "trampl(ing) the First Amendment"?

Now they're peeing their pants about a film featuring similar "smears" against Margaret Thatcher.

I probably won't see Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher "biopic" myself, but it would be nice if those on the right could be a tiny bit consistent about the need for truth in film. I guess the rule is you can only make things up about Democrats.

Started a new job

So please excuse the lack of posts.

I disagree with Carl Nyberg

I’ve said it many times: There’s no reason to doubt that Mark Kirk performed his duties admirably as Naval Reserve officer. However, he didn’t choose to simply highlight his service as an officer during his political campaigns. He chose to lie again and again about his service, including lies about those lies and lies about how his service gave him access to special knowledge that proved Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Those lies can't take away the honors and medals Kirk has earned, but neither can anything in his service record change the fact that Mark Kirk lied many, many times about that service and continues to obfuscate about it to this day.

In my opinion, he did great things for the Navy, but then he took that record of achievement and pissed on it.

I smell Caldecott...

Perhaps they'll call this book, The Little Governor Who Couldn't (Complete Her First Term as Governor).