Why doesn’t the real media ever do anything like this? Why is it that the Daily Show does a better job of holding pundits & politicians accountable than the “real” media? It seems that politics has become a “say-it-whether-it-is-true-or-not” game, where distortions, falsehoods, and mispresentations are the rule more than the exception. In fact, most pundits seems to assume that no they can say whatever they want and no one will ever look back at their past comments or, in some cases, even fact check what they say. Well Jon Stewart does a good job of cutting through the BS in this case.
The McCain campaign has continued their slow descent into madness with their latest approach of basically saying “Don’t blame us, blame the media” for the Palin scandal.
Sarah, Sarah, you barely even let me get done writing about what a horrible VP pick you are, and then you are at it again.
Great, another “Christian Conservative” selling war as a “mission from God”. Speaking as a Christian myself, this kind of thing is just appalling on so many levels, and perhaps what is even more infuriating to me is that I used to buy this kind of crap. This might turn into a bit of a rant, so bear with me or move on, if that kind of thing ain’t your bag.
John McCain sent shockwaves through the political world last Friday when he announced little known Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his runningmate. When the initial shock was in effect Friday, the move was heralded as “game-changer”. Today, it appears that the pick might be a game-changer alright, but, perhaps not in the sense that GOP pundits intended when they said it.
Since the time of the announcement, quite a bit of information has been uncovered about Governor Palin.
So, I am sure the media will spend the day fawning all over the idea of a woman becoming a Republican nominee for Vice President today, much like they have with Obama becoming the first African American major party nominee.
But, the elephant in the room is this: in an election in which McCain has relentlessly hammered Obama as “not experienced enough”, particularly on national security & foreign policy issues, and in an election where John McCain is the oldest major party nominee ever, how can John McCain really pick a Vice Presidential candidate with a grand total of 1 1/2 years as the governor of Alaska and a few years as a mayor of a small town as her political resume?
Palin might be a great lady, I don’t know much about her (and, quite frankly, it seems, that not many people do much about her, even in Washington), but, this choice certainly seems to take away, or the very least it minimizes, McCain’s greatest attack on Obama - experience.
Now the Obama camp can say, “Okay, all you folks who are voting for John McCain because he is such a wonderful national security guy with so much experience… what are you going to do when McCain - who would be the older President ever, by the way - has another health problem, and Sarah Palin becomes your President?”
Given Palin’s lack of any substantive experience, and McCain’s insistence on the importance of experience, the choice is a strange one for sure. To be honest, it appears to be a politically motivated publicity stunt, a borderline desperate play for winning over female voters, particularly Hillary Clinton supporters. Of course, the irony here is that even though Palin is a female, she and John McCain actually have a much worse stance on women’s issues than the all-male Obama/Biden ticket.
One thing is certain, the choice definitely shakes the race up. The real test will come once the “Wow” factor of Palin’s gender wears off and Palin hits the road to campaign, and faces off with Biden in VP debates.
So, apparently, Glenn Beck has never received much schooling in the idea that correlation does not equal causality.
In this piece, he attempts to construct an argument that there is some link between the fact that 8 of America’s ten cities with the highest poverty rates have elected almost entirely Democrats in recent history and implies that these cities need to make a “change” to Republican leadership to fix their poverty problems. He states that:
Over the past 50 years, the eight cities listed above have had Republican leadership for a combined 36 years. The rest of the time — a combined 364 years — they’ve been led by Democrats.
There is a problem with this argument. As so many bad & misleading arguments do, it leans heavily on common logical fallacies. The most significant fallacy is that he does nothing to show that Democrats are the cause of this poverty. In fact, it is a pretty well known fact that people below the poverty line tend to vote Democrat, just as those in the high income brackets tend to vote Republican. It isn’t a hard and fast rule, but, it isn’t hard to see that Democrats would have an easier time getting elected in city with high poverty levels. But, this doesn’t mean that the Democrats & their policies are somehow putting people in poverty or that Republicans would fare better.
In fact, I suspect that if you found a primarily wealthy community, you would find that Republicans are getting elected left and right. But, this doesn’t suggest that Republicans being in office leads to people getting rich.
Beck also piles up numbers, like 50 years, 36 years, 364 years to support his argument. But, the fact is that, again, these numbers do nothing to show causality. People presenting baloney love to use this method of piling up relatively meaningless numbers to make their argument sound well-thought out and researched.
What would have been meaningful would have been looking at how Democrat policies in these cities have actually contributed to poverty. And, if they did, are Democrats today still espousing the same policies? Would Republican policies fare better? This is the line of thinking required to make the point that Beck comes up woefully short of.
But, even more noteworthy in the commentary piece is Beck’s apparent misquote of Benjamin Franklin. Beck says that Frankline wrote that:
“We should make the poor uncomfortable and kick them out of poverty”.
Let’s set aside for a second the fact that this quote is, at best, out of context with Franklin’s overall philosophy to point that this is another common argumental fallacy. Beck is executing the “appeal to authority” ploy… by quoting a “founding father” he hopes that you will be impressed. That you will think that he must know what he is talking about, because Ben Franklin is on his side, right?
Anyway, I have yet to find this alleged Franklin quote, but, I did find some others (that were nicely summarized here):
But poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue: ’tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright.
The Poor have little, Beggars none; the Rich too much, enough not one.
The church the state, and the poor, are 3 daughters which we should maintain, but not portion off.
Yep, sure sounds like Ben Franklin really wanted to “make the poor uncomfortable”.
Go back to the drawing board, Mr. Beck. This is as weak a piece of argument as I have found from a major news personality in a long time.
The McCain camp continues to show a day-after-day disconnect with reality. Around the start of August, Barack Obama had commented that ensuring proper tire inflation could reduce gas consumption by up to 15 percent and help reduce national oil use. The McCain camp quickly jumped on this, mocking Obama’s comment and handing out tire gauges that were labelled “Obama’s energy plan”.
Just one problem with all of this - Proper tire inflation does reduce gasoline consumption.
Even the Governator (California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger) broke from GOP ranks today to speak of the benefits of the idea of proper tire inflation and announcing his participation in a new partnership between the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the American Automobile Dealer Association called EcoDriving. EcoDriving is an organization that is pushing for numerous fuel efficiency tweaks, including tire inflation and others, to improve fuel efficiency.
I’m thinking that the genius in the McCain campaign that came up with the tire gauge idea should be - dare I say it? - Terminated. Awful joke, I know, but, what is a blog without awkward puns and terrible jokes?
I found this an interesting and pretty much on-target commentary piece by Jack Cafferty of CNN. I found myself thinking the same things on Saturday night as McCain took the stage and spouted simplistic one-liners to get “cheap pops” from the crowd, even on very complex questions. Meanwhile, Obama offered deep & thoughtful answers on the complex questions that he was asked, and didn’t talk down to the crowd or pander to them. He offered the kind of open, refreshing, and serious thoughts that you would expect a serious individual with high intelligence.
It does beg the question - is McCain even that intelligent? Or is he just another likeable political figure, like George W. Bush, who has little deep intellectual understanding of issues, but, is simply capable of telling stories, cracking jokes, and otherwise appealing to the average Joe?
And, at what point in America did being an intellectual become a bad thing? At what point did the discussion move away from serious discussion of issues and move to over-simplifications, one-liners, and humor? At what point did some of us decide that we didn’t want our President to be the smartest guy on the block, but, rather, we wanted our President to be a guy that we would like to have a beer with?
One area where I have seen a lot of confusion and misinformation in this 2008 election is the area of taxes. With Senator John McCain running ads that proudly proclaim that Obama stands for “higher taxes” and with right-wing pundits throwing out the “tax-and-spend liberal” term with regularity, most Americans assume that Senator Barack Obama wants to raise their tax bill. This is actually not the case for the majority of Americans, but, before we get into specifics, let’s take a look at a side-by-side comparison of the two proposed plans by Obama & McCain.
As you can see from this analysis, which can be found in its entirety at CNN.com, John McCain wants to cut taxes for all tax brackets. Barack Obama wants to cut taxes for everyone making less than $227,000 per year and Obama wants to cut the taxes of those who make $112,000 per year or less by significantly more than John McCain. In short, under Obama’s plan, if you make $35,000 per year, you could get a tax cut that isroughly 8 times larger than under McCain’s plan. However, under Obama’s plan, if you make over $600,000 per year, you would see a significant tax raise.
But, perhaps more importantly than looking the mere numbers, we should take a look at why the candidates are making these proposals and the philosophies behind them. I will be taking a broad brush look at these, as things can quickly get very complicated and I want to this be somewhat understandable by the average person.
