Inconvenient News,
       by smintheus

Monday, June 29, 2009

  Questions about the Ricci ruling

Does anybody seriously believe that New Haven's mayor, or the CSB he appointed, would have taken a stand against certifying the firefighter exam results if minorities had performed disproportionately well on it? That New Haven politicians would have argued, for example, that oral examination boards constituted so as ensure that minorities made up 2/3 of each board created a disparate impact against white applicants?

If not, then it makes a mockery of the city's professed concern that Title VII's provision on disparate impact required it to throw out the results.

The judgment handed down today by SCOTUS' conservative bloc in Ricci v. DeStefano actually was a remarkably liberal ruling. It's altogether too rare for the Scalia wing to stand up for the common man who's been kicked in the teeth arbitrarily by the powerful.

In this case, it was the Ginsburg wing of the Court that proved to be reactionary. The firefighters who did well on the exam, she said, "understandably attract the court's sympathy"... but nevertheless the Court ought to tell them to bend over again just because it can. The reason it can is that the grandiosely flawed (and unevenly enforced) law on disparate impact permits the Court, if it chooses, to join in treating job applicants as fodder in ideological jousts.

For what it's worth, I suspect that if New Haven had tossed out exam results in which minorities performed disproportionately well, the two blocs of the Supreme Court would have taken the opposite views of Title VII than the ones they adopted here.

crossposted from unbossed.com

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Sunday, June 28, 2009

  WaPo on health-care reform 'centrism'

The Post publishes a typically silly look at Democratic activists who are pushing their party's conservative Senators to stop undermining the 'public option' (the very mildest reform proposal that has any chance of substantially improving America's health-care disaster). But in the Post's view, the Democratic obstructionists are 'centrists' and the liberal activists are, well, pointy-headed fools of course.

The rising tensions between Democratic legislators and constituencies that would typically be their natural allies underscore the high hurdles for Obama as he tries to hold together a diverse, fragile coalition. Activists say they are simply pressing for quick delivery of "true health reform," but the intraparty rift runs the risk of alienating centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill.


Pity the poor 'centrists', who almost alone in Washington it seems must submit to listening to constituents' views. What makes these Senators' views 'centrist'? Evidently it's because they oppose reform that 76% of the public strongly backs (PDF), and side instead with the tiny minority of Americans who oppose a public plan.

The Post eventually gets around to acknowledging this inconvenient fact - however in a fashion utterly characteristic of this Tory paper.

"Democratic senators are taking millions of dollars from insurance and health-care interests and getting lobbied by those donors and coming out against a position that 76 percent of Americans agree on," said Adam Green, interim chief executive of Change Congress.

While recent polls show high initial support for a government option, the number declines if told the insurance industry could fold as a result.


In other news today, the Post reports that a large majority of the American public supports the safe disposal of used batteries but support falls away when people are told that as many as 23 states may need to be evacuated and turned into colossal landfills.

I don't know which polls the Post is referring to, but the recent NBC/WSJ poll (linked above) does not posit such a dire consequence as: 'The insurance industry could fold if you get your pesky public plan, so what do you think of it now?' It did ask people whether they thought employers might drop their health care plan if a public plan were created; and whether a public plan might limit access to doctors and medical treatment options. But that's very different from the dire scenario that the Post claims pollsters are putting to the public. Maybe it's only those damned elusive 'centrist' pollsters who are asking such questions.

The rising tensions between Democratic legislators and constituencies that would typically be their natural allies underscore the high hurdles for Obama as he tries to hold together a diverse, fragile coalition. Activists say they are simply pressing for quick delivery of "true health reform," but the intraparty rift runs the risk of alienating centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill.


Pity the poor 'centrists', who almost alone in Washington it seems must submit to listening to constituents' views. What makes these Senators' views 'centrist'? Evidently it's because they oppose reform that 76% of the public strongly backs (PDF), and side instead with the tiny minority of Americans who oppose a public plan.

The Post eventually gets around to acknowledging this inconvenient fact - however in a fashion utterly characteristic of this Tory paper.

"Democratic senators are taking millions of dollars from insurance and health-care interests and getting lobbied by those donors and coming out against a position that 76 percent of Americans agree on," said Adam Green, interim chief executive of Change Congress.

While recent polls show high initial support for a government option, the number declines if told the insurance industry could fold as a result.


In other news today, the Post reports that a large majority of the American public supports the safe disposal of used batteries but support falls away when people are told that as many as 23 states may need to be evacuated and turned into colossal landfills.

I don't know which polls the Post is referring to, but the recent NBC/WSJ poll (linked above) does not posit such a dire consequence as: 'The insurance industry could fold if you get your pesky public plan, so what do you think of it now?' It did ask people whether they thought employers might drop their health care plan if a public plan were created; and whether a public plan might limit access to doctors and medical treatment options. But that's very different from the dire scenario that the Post claims pollsters are putting to the public. Maybe it's only those damned elusive 'centrist' pollsters who are asking such questions.

Update: Ok, the Post itself did conduct a (single) poll in which it posited this silly question:

What if having the government create a new health insurance plan made many private health insurers go out of business because they could not compete? In that case would you support or oppose creating a government-run health insurance plan?


As the Post's own blogger Ezra Klein pointed out, that question is arbitrarily alarmist.

Meanwhile at Open Left Adam Green describes the foolishness of the line of questioning he endured from the Post reporter, Ceci Connolly.

crossposted from unbossed.com

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Friday, June 26, 2009

  NPR: It's 'liberals' who think imprisonment without trial is unAmerican

From NPR's report this morning on a radical proposal to give the government the power to lock people up indefinitely without trial, we learn that it is only 'some liberals' who object:

Some conservatives say it will turn the battlefield into CSI: Afghanistan, requiring soldiers to collect evidence as they're being shot at. Some liberals say holding people without trial is fundamentally un-American.


Evidently conservatism has no view at all about upholding the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution:

No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [...].


Nor the Sixth Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial...


The proponent of this legislation, Benjamin Wittes, a faux-liberal pundit now lodged at Brookings, has been pushing all manner of national security 'reforms' that undercut fundamental American liberties. Wittes wants to see a parallel system of justice created, 'national security courts', to make it easier to convict people by stripping away rights and due process protections.

His current proposal, what purports to be a draft of legislation to create a 'system' of 'preventive detention' (i.e. indefinite imprisonment without trial), tries to help Barack Obama dig himself out of the ditch he drove into with his pronouncement last month that he wishes to have the power to pick and choose from a variety of courts and military tribunals in which to put certain terrorism suspects on trial. The venue will be chosen to favor conviction, and if conviction is insufficiently certain then any prisoner deemed dangerous will continue to be held without trial indefinitely. In other words, the Obama proposal is to create a specious facsimile of due process for terrorism suspects.

Wittes is happy to pitch in to help foist a law for imprisonment without trial upon the US because, as he helpfully explained to NPR, it's effectively what George W. Bush had been doing as president.

Those concerns lead many to ask why Wittes is pushing for indefinite detention at all. We already have it, he says. Detainees have been held at Guantanamo for years. Thousands more are imprisoned in Afghanistan. The Supreme Court has said the United States can detain some terrorists for the duration of hostilities against al-Qaida and the Taliban. So, Wittes says, "There's no question that we're detaining people outside of the criminal justice system. The question is what the rules are for that detention and who makes those rules."


Next month, perhaps Wittes will also get around to drafting helpful legislation to legalize the forms of torture that the Bush administration inflicted on terrorist suspects.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009

  America, here is your neoconservative

Neocon Gary Schmitt is in a snit over the US soccer team's unprecedented victory in the FIFA confederations cup semifinals against Spain. His rant at the American Enterprise blog perfectly embodies the neoconservative philosophy that knowledge is an impediment to understanding.

Schmitt formerly devoted his vast abilities to cheerleading for an invasion of Iraq at the Project for a New American Century. Fresh off that resounding success, he's now taking on the threat posed by the rise in popularity of soccer inside the US. A veritable dagger aimed at the soft underbelly of the American heartland.

He denounces the US victory because the Spaniards had more shots on goal but still lost the match.

As someone who didn’t play soccer growing up, but had a dad who did and whose own kids played as well, I can say unquestionably that it is the sport in which the team that dominates loses more often than any other major sport I know of. Or, to put it more bluntly, the team that deserves to win doesn’t. For some soccer-loving friends, this is perfectly okay. Indeed, they will argue that it’s a healthy, conservative reminder of how justice does not always prevail in life.

Well, hooey on that. And, thankfully, Americans are not buying it. In spite of the fact that one can drive by an open field on Saturdays and usually see it filled with young boys and girls playing soccer, the game’s popularity has not moved anywhere toward being a major sport here in the United States.


Had this super patriot ever bothered to learn how to play soccer (as I once did), he might have figured out that the whole point of the game is to shoot the ball into the back, not just the front, of the net.

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Monday, June 22, 2009

  Fouad Ajami, tutor to presidents

Almost everything that neocon Fouad Ajami writes is good for a laugh. Typically he serves up a preposterously incoherent mix of half-digested stray facts, heavily larded with a peculiar kind of incomprehension and preening about his own brilliance. His op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal is no exception. Perhaps I've already said too much about this once influential ninny, but it's hard to resist taking a stick to Ajami's latest excretion.

The central point, if there is one, appears to be that Ajami is smarter than Barack Obama, whose Iranian policy he considers to be weak and naive. He wants the President to be confrontational with the Iranian leadership. Ajami holds up Ronald Reagan as the model for clear-minded and hard-nosed foreign policy in the Middle East. Apparently Ajami forgets that Reagan sent that Bible and cake to the mullahs in Iran – oh, yeah, and a whole bunch of arms too. Hmmm...maybe it was Reagan's support of Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran, or perhaps his alleged October Surprise, or the Lebanon debacle, that impressed Ajami so much.

But that's just one of the many inconsistencies that render his 'argument' incoherent. Ajami can't decide whether Mousavi actually won the election, or was defeated by a popular Ahmadinejad. Even so, though he can't quite bring himself to say so explicitly, Ajami seems to think that Obama needs to take a strong stance against the Iranian regime and support the street protesters. Obama, he thinks, is subject to delusions about the possibility of a new detente with Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted -- just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power.


I wonder how many people in Washington are unaware that Iranian hardliners employ anti-Americanism to their own advantage? Anyway, try to reconcile the foregoing with this:

We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.


If the struggle in Iran will be decided by the Iranians themselves, as of course it will be, then how could supportive rhetoric from an American president be of much assistance to the demonstrators? What's more, since Ajami admits that whipping up anti-Americanism helps the hard-liners to hold onto power, wouldn't it be counter-productive for Obama to declare that the demonstrators have US backing?

Yet Ajami dares to complain about "the administration's incoherence".

A final point: Ajami descibes President Carter as having "lost" Iran, as if that country ever belonged to the US. It's the same arrogance he displayed in the spring of 2003 when Ajami declared that "We are now coming into acquisition of Iraq". Ajami is so damned confused that he can't even distinguish between "ours" and "theirs".

crossposted from unbossed.com

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Saturday, June 20, 2009

  Election fraud by the numbers

Two graduate students at Columbia University, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, have published a compelling statistical demonstration that the disputed Iranian vote counts are fraudulent. For example, focusing on the final digits in the vote tallies reported province by province for each of the four presidential candidates, they point out that some numerals are significantly over- or under-represented. The numeral 7 appears 17% of the time as the final digit, whereas the numeral 5 appears only 4% of the time (when on average a numeral should appear 10% of the time). Since the final digit in a large vote tally can be treated as a random occurrence, it's possible to calculate the probability that such large divergences in final-digit frequencies would arise in authentic vote tallies. The authors put that probability at just under 4%. A professional statistician once remarked to me that when an occurrence has a calculated probability of no more than 3 to 4%, it's pretty safe to conclude that the event in question was not random.

The authors also describe a second (unrelated) test of probability, which makes it that much less likely that the reported Iranian vote tallies are authentic (random) rather than generated through fraud.

I'll simply note that that authors could have performed a third test, with similar results: Some numerals are significantly over- or under-represented when you look at the second-to-last digit in the vote tallies (i.e. the "tens-column"). The numerals in this column as well ought to be randomly generated in an authentic election. But the numeral 7 once again is greatly over-represented (16%), while the numeral 3 is significantly under-represented (5%). I won't bother to crunch the numbers to demonstrate that this result, too, is rather improbable. To quote Beber and Scacco:
As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.


Thus the frequencies with which the numerals 7 and 3 appear as the penultimate digits of the Iranian vote tallies further reduce the already slim probability that those results are authentic.

crossposted at unbossed.com

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