Charles Blow, the NYT, and some egregious misrepresentation of the statistics

The NYT's Lame Chart

Charles Blow cited a stat from the Southern Poverty Law Center in his poorly sourced and argued defense of Sonia Sotomayor:

Hispanics are the largest and the fastest-growing minority group in the country. And, in recent years, they have increasingly been the victims of racial discrimination. It will be hard to paint the victims, as personified by Sotomayor, as the offenders.

A report entitled “Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South” that was released last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found “systemic discrimination against Latinos” that constituted “a civil rights crisis.”
…
This finding is borne out by the F.B.I.’s hate crimes data, which show that the number of anti-Hispanic hate crimes have increased by half since 2003, while all other hate crimes have increased by 6 percent.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report blames this on the “relentless vilification” of Latinos in the media. I blame it on cherry-picking of the hate crime data.

Look at the chart at the upper right: I lopped off the top of the chart that was in the NYT article (click on the chart to see the whole thing at the NYT’s site) to zoom in on the “Anti-Hispanic” line. You can see the SPLC’s point ==> there was been a terrible increase in the number of hate crimes against Hispanics over that 5-year span.

But 5 years is too short to get a real sense of the trend. What do the hate crimes against Hispanics look like over a longer period? Well, they look like this:

(the SPLC uses the “Offenses” statistic, though I think “Incidents” is probably more useful)

Goodness, it looks like the peak in 2006-2007 is accompanied by similar peaks in 1996 and 2000. That makes it seem like this terrible recent increase in violence is neither unique nor a “civil rights crisis.” And it certainly doesn’t serve as any sort of defense for Sotomayor (not that it would have even if the trend had remained true).

But the real story is that the SPLC and the New York Times picked 2003, the all-time minimum in anti-Hispanic hate crimes, as their point of reference.

That’s cheating, plain and simple.

It’s bad enough that the SPLC and Charles Blow are proclaiming that increasing hate crimes against Hispanics are a current problem, even though they’re using 2-year old data, and even though that data shows that the hate crimes were leveling off in 2006 and 2007. And it’s bad enough that they touted a 5-year span as a trend of significance. These are both instances of sloppy statistics.

But it’s apparent that they also deliberately picked the time span that would make their point.

That’s not careless statistics, that’s outright lying.

Barack Come Home!!

So here we are, what with our economic woes, staffing problems in the administration, huge domestic policy changes, and Congress running rampant and often contra to the wishes of the President. And where is President Obama? Planning more trips to foreign lands.

It’s usually the Republican presidents who neglect domestic policy, but in the present case I think we can safely say that our current President has decided quite consciously to set his sights abroad. He sure does seem to like to get out of the US:

And that’s not counting his domestic travel – in particular his ill-timed fund-raising trip for Harry Reid and the like. With unemployment scheduled to break 9% this month, I think I’d prefer that he keep his fanny in Washington and start giving us some of that oversight of government spending that he promised.

On the other hand, it will be fun to watch him visit the Saudi king again. He’ll be so stiff trying to avoid looking like he’s prostrating himself that it should make for great video footage.

And maybe his time abroad will slow down his poorly considered health care reform nonsense.

When the credit crunch strikes close to home

Just got this from Advanta, where I have a business credit card:

Your Advanta Business Card account is funded by an independent trust which owns the balances you owe on your account and provides funding for new transactions. We expect the trust to stop funding activity on our accounts. The trust also restricts our flexibility to fund activity on your account. Unfortunately, as a result, effective May 30th all Advanta Business Credit Card accounts, including your account, will be closed.

This means that you will not be able to use your card or account for new transactions, including purchases, checks and balance transfers beginning on May 30th.

I don’t use it much anyway, but it’s a little creepy not to have the choice.

Cheney sez: “I told you so”

North Korea’s recent nuclear test is the result of last years’ agreement to lift sanctions on NK in exchange for NK dismantling its plutonium program. That left NK’s uranium program intact, which bugged many conservatives; among them, Dick Cheney.

Mr Cheney was so angry about the decision to remove North Korea from the terrorism blacklist and lift some sanctions that he abruptly curtailed a meeting with visiting US foreign experts when asked about it in the White House last week, according to the New York Times “I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision. You need to address your interest in this to the State Department,” he reportedly said before leaving the room.

The surprise deal was condemned by both neoconservative hardliners and mainstream Republicans who argued that it left North Korea with nuclear weapons and rewarded Pyongyang’s intransigence.

…and John Bolton:

“This is a sad, sad day,” said John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a leading critic of the new American negotiating stance. “I think Bush believes what Condi is telling him, that they’re going to persuade the North to give up nuclear weapons, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think we’ve been taken to the cleaners.”

Some libs are now arguing that the Agreed Framework was the only thing stopping the weapons program in the first place. That’s ignoring a bit of history:

Even as the nations were debating implementation of the Agreed Framework, North Korea, the United States argued, was breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of the pact. Within months of signing the framework, North Korea and Pakistan reportedly cut a deal to trade missile technology for Pakistan’s uranium enrichment techniques — the Agreed Framework had banned plutonium enrichment programs.

For more than three years, the North Koreans worked quietly on their uranium project while urging the United States to fully implement the Agreed Framework. The Clinton administration apparently learned of the secret program in late 1998 or early 1999, and by March 2000, President Clinton informed Congress he could no longer certify that “North Korea is not seeking to develop or acquire the capability to enrich uranium.”

Reports claim that Condi persuaded President Bush to accept the agreement because it would improve his legacy. Bad call.

A few comments on the torture debate

Struck by a few points which don’t seem to have made their way into the “dialogue” on enhanced interrogation.

1. There is a gap between “interrogation” and “torture” defined as “coercion.” The techniques at issue are coercive, but not torture.
2. This difference is exemplified by the use of these enhanced interrogation techniques in training our own personnel, where we stop short of actual torture when exposing them to coercive interrogation techniques. Waterboarding thus represents the upper bound of techniques that fall short of torture.
3. The Bush administration authorized the use of waterboarding in 3 special cases, but the request for authorization came from the CIA to the administration. The CIA personnel felt that they needed to use waterboarding in order to extract time-critical information from subjects who were intractable using other methods.

   So when the Obama administration makes vague claims about “other methods would have worked,” perhaps what they really mean is that they know how to do the CIA’s job better than it does; that the CIA is just a pack of morons. If that’s the case, I suggest that Intelligence Director Blair immediately begin teaching classes on proper, effective forms.

In regard to the last point, I imagine the following conversation:

CIA Liaison: Director Blair, we have 3 high-value detainees who have information regarding immediate major attacks against US population centers. Nothing we’ve tried will get them to talk, so we feel we need to try waterboarding.

Intelligence Director Blair: Other methods will work.

CIA Liaison: Other methods?

Intelligence Director Blair: Other. Methods.

CIA Liaison: Uhhh…OK….uhhhh…which ones would those be?

Intelligence Director Blair: You know, the ones that work.

CIA Liaison: But we’ve tried everything else, so I really don’t think…

Intelligence Director Blair: Idiot!! TRY THE ONES THAT AREN’T WATERBOARDING THAT WORK!!!

CIA Liaison: {backing slowly away} Ohhhh. Those techniques. Riiiigght.

The real point being: the CIA didn’t ask for permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques because they enjoyed using them, or because they thought it would be cool. They asked for permission because all of the other things they tried, including everything that every second-guessing pundit has suggested, did not work.

Now we’re finding that without the enhanced interrogation techniques, we’re getting nowhere with detainees. And the Obama administration is considering the CIA’s request to start using some of those techniques again. The fact that they’re even considering reinstating some of them obviates all of the arguments by those who are calling for Bush’s head. If coercive techniques are lawful candidates for use in the current administration, then they were lawful candidates for use under the previous administration.

There is a legitimate question as to whether the moral price of waterboarding a subject for 2 1/2 minutes outweighs the potential tragedy of a 9/11-scale attack. There is a legitimate question as to how far the protections of the Geneva Conventions extend to those who are really international mass murderers, rather than conforming members of a signatory military. But the debate has wandered into hyperbole and hypocrisy, if not outright idiocy.

The CIA and the previous administration deserve better.

One question answered…

Saw this screencap over at Hot Air:

All I could think was: “Now we don’t have to wonder what Olbermann would look like if he had a sex change.”

Bob Herbert muddles his “Jack Kemp (stick-it-to-the-GOP) eulogy”

The NYT has been printing some wretched op-eds over the past few days. I wish I’d had time to hit them all, because they are truly terrible. Seems like the woes of the newspapers are inspiring their staffs to let all their inner liberal demons out to romp around in print.

Anyway, though I couldn’t get to all of them, I did have time to get to Bob Herbert’s stinker, dated yesterday. Bob was talking about Jack Kemp’s political career, lauding his attempts to bring minorities into the GOP. But then:

Australia starts thinking about the threat from China

Well, at least the Prime Minister is thinking about it:

The snark comes back to bite

Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane, going back to May March 11 (thanks, ND) of this year. A Boston Globe columnist wrote a snarky piece on those dumb conservatives who were worrying about Obama’s economic policies:

CNN and Karpinski, sittin’ in a tree…

You may recall the unimpressive Brig. Gen. Janet Karpinski, who was demoted to Colonel after the Army found her negligent in the Abu Ghraib case. CNN took up her cause yesterday with an exceptionally empty-headed article, claiming that the recently released Bybee memo vindicated Karpinsky:

Unhappy trend in Iraq

It seemed like I was hearing more and more reports of violence in Iraq lately, so I thought I’d plot it up and see if I was imagining it or not. Apparently not:

As you can see from the trendline, the casualty rate is up almost 50% since the beginning of the year. I do hope we have a better plan to address this than:

“It is time for us to transition to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty.”

Words to die by.

[Data from Iraq Body Count]

Christine Todd Whitman proclaims herself queen of GOP, scolds bloggers

Christine gives us what for

Christine Todd Whitman chews us out today:

As was to be expected, the blogosphere is full of people saying that Arlen Specter was always a Democrat and now he’s simply proved it.

In reality, until Tuesday, Arlen Specter caucused with the Republicans, and he voted with his party 70 percent of the time in the 110th Congress. It is a sure bet that his voting record will now change. I fail to see the satisfaction in that.

In fairness, the blogosphere’s been saying that Arlen Specter is a Dem for years and years. And note that she doesn’t tell us how many times Specter voted with the Dems in the 110th Congress. I decided to add it up myself, but since many Congressional votes are trivial BS, I used the Washington Post’s list of key votes from the 109th Congress to the present (plus, it was a much shorter list). The result?

What is it about “last resort” that Obama doesn’t get?

The POTUS imagines a world where magical, completely benign interrogation techniques exist:

We could have gotten information in ways that are consistent with our values, with who we are.

Not really, said a CIA guy who was not part of the interrogation team, but was the leader of the team that originally brought Abu Zubaydah in:

Kiriakou said the feeling in the months after the 9/11 attacks was that interrogators did not have the time to delve into the agency’s bag of other interrogation tricks.

“Those tricks of the trade require a great deal of time — much of the time — and we didn’t have that luxury. We were afraid that there was another major attack coming,” he said.

And was useful information obtained quickly enough to make a difference?

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

The President plays to his strengths:

Worry about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban? Naw.

Worry about social services in Pakistan? Oh yass.

“I am more concerned that the civilian government right now is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services,” like health care and the rule of law, Mr. Obama said. “As a consequence,” he added, “it’s very difficult for them to gain the support and loyalty of their people.”

Beyond trivializing the reasons that the country is so unstable, I guess I’d really, really appreciate it if the POTUS would place American security and stability ahead of Pakistan’s social services. I’m pretty sure he read the job description before he applied, didn’t he?

Michelle’s garden: maternal or manipulative?

Thinking back on Michelle Obama’s first 100 days has set Nia-Malika Henderson of Politico to ovulating:

In the East Wing, the talk sometimes turns to Michelle Obama’s legacy.

Nearly 100 days in, Obama’s aides look 100 years out and see a signature achievement they believe will last — the kitchen garden at the White House.

It might not seem like much, a small patch of earth to grow some vegetables. But aides say Obama wanted the garden because it signifies more — from the importance of healthful eating, to getting schoolkids outdoors to help, to making the White House seem more accessible. Those are some of the themes — practical, sensible, maternal even — that Obama has embraced in her new role.

But was this really a sign of “practical, sensible, maternal” themes, or just a photo-op?