May 2007 Archives

When your name is John McCain and Mitt Romney edges past you in a national poll, your campaign is over.

Over the course of a few days last week and into this weekend, I debated a poster (Chris Chang aka dogofjustice) on Paul Phillips' blog about whether environment or genetics plays a bigger role in determining differences amongst races in performance on things like standardized tests and IQ tests.

If you know me at all, you know I'm firmly in the environmental camp, but reading the full thread on Paul's blog will give you a sense of how deeply entrenched some people are in the genetic/hereditarian camp. It's frustrating to me because it seems so clear that the overwhelming weight of evidence points towards environmental explanations, yet so many people cling to genetic explanations.

One paper that is worth reading is "Testing for Racial Differences in the Mental Ability of Young Children" by Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt. Here is the abstract:

On tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. Relative to Whites, children of all other races lose ground by age two. We confirm similar patterns in another large, but not nationally representative data set. A calibration exercise demonstrates that the observed patterns are broadly consistent with large racial differences in environmental factors that grow in importance as children age. Our findings are not consistent with the simplest models of large genetic differences across races in intelligence, although we cannot rule out the possibility that intelligence has multiple dimensions and racial differences are present only in those dimensions that emerge later in life.

One other paper that I highly recommend is "Thin Ice: 'Stereotype' Threat and Black College Students" by the Stanford psychologist Claude Steele (brother of Shelby Steele).

You can file this under wishful thinking, blog hearsay edition:

Gore at GWU: I'm thinking about running

Here's to hoping!

Let's all wish Senator John McCain a happy 73rd birthday! We're less than three months away and we need to start planning the party.

Wait, this just in...he won't be turning 73 in August...we're getting confirmation now...he will be 71, not 73...but what the hell, bigger is better, right? Let's stick with 73! Plus, he's losing his mind anyway, so he won't be able to tell the difference. It seems that the doddering septuagenarian is forgetting how to spell even the simplest words, like flack.

Actually, from what I hear, Senator McCain is aging so quickly that when he was in Iraq he couldn't even tell the difference between his flack jacket and his Depends underwear!

Clearly America's crotchetiest grandfather is just getting crochetier and crochetier with age. (Find those words in Merriam-Webster, Batman.)

I think we owe it to him to throw a big birthday celebration in August when he turns 78 years old. (Wait, sorry, it's 71, not 78.)

Seriously, though, if by some miracle, some great gift to the Democratic party, the elderly McCain does get his party's nomination, we should all throw a huge 72nd birthday bash for him in August 2008.

We definitely can do better than his 68th birthday party at which America's media elites celebrated the life of His Holy Greatness, Senator John McCain.

Guests included NBC's Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert, ABC's Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel and George Stephanopoulos, CBS's Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer, CBS News President AndrewHeyward, ABC News chief David Westin, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, CNN's Judy Woodruff and Jeff Greenfield, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, CNBC's Gloria Borger, PBS's Charlie Rose -- pause here to exhale -- and U.S. News & World Report publisher Mort Zuckerman, Washington Post Chairman Don Graham, New York Times columnists William Safire and David Brooks, author Michael Lewis and USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this hilarious report from MSNBC on spelling-gate. Play the clip all the way to the end. Sweet vindication baby!

This is a bizarre story about how an inaccurate and poorly written "news" article found its way into postings from three prominent bloggers. Here's the article:

Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance

A quick look at the lengths of children's index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on SATs, new research claims.

Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the study was conducted on 75 British 6 and 7 year-olds.

They're taking the SAT at age 6 and 7 in the UK? My gosh, I thought. I didn't take the SAT until I was 17! I wonder how old they are when they graduate from college. (Wait, aren't they called universities there?)

Then I did something stupid. Instead of just reading the LiveScience account of the research paper (which fails to mention that only 75 kids were studied), I actually went to the researcher's university and found this press release about his study. (I couldn't find the actual paper.) You know what? It turns out that the UK has something called an SAT, but it's not our college entrance exam. They call it the National Curriculum assessment, but it is also known as the standardised assessment test (SAT).

In other words, this study of 75 kids in the UK was did not say anything about our college entrance exam. It was about the British SATs.

Meanwhile, everybody in the States who had heard about this news seemed to be comparing their index and ring finger ratios trying to find out what their SAT scores were. (Hint, you can probably get the actual score from your college and maybe even from the College Board.)

In any event, it says something when a press release is better than an article.

So what are are Important bloggers saying about the study? Here's three comments, in increasing order of lameness and gullibility.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg calls it "exciting news about correlation". (Assuming that I'm understanding him correctly, I think that's pretty funny, and Goldberg wins the least gullible award.)

Award-winning economist Dr. Steven Levitt says the research is "So Strange I Actually Believe It."

Steve Sailer says it is a "a good reminder that what really makes people in the media mad about stereotypes is not when they are wrong, but when they are right. Essentially, feminism, multiculturalism, and PCism are wars against knowledge." He also adds: "My ring fingers are longer, but my Verbal SAT score was higher than my Math score."

(Gee, Steve, I thought you were an American. I didn't realize you went to school in the UK! Either that or you too were taken in by a false report in the media.)

Last week, the minority population of the United States crossed the 100 million mark for the first time.

That fact alone explains why the Bush Administration and other right-wing elites have worked so hard to portray efforts to increase minority electoral participation as vote fraud even though their claims have no basis in fact.

Why are they doing this?

It's simple math:

• 75% of minorities who voted in 2006 chose Democratic congressional candidates
• 1 in 5 Americans who voted in 2006 were minorities
• Yet 1 in 3 Americans are minorities
• With proportional turnout, 67% more minorities would have voted

Therefore, with proportional turnout, Democrats would have received 56% of the 2006 vote instead of 52%, winning by a gigantic 14-point margin instead of a 7-point margin.

Conservative Republican elites are understandably scared witless about this frightening (for them) fact of life. They know that if minority turnout increases, the Republican Party won't be able to win elections without appealing to minority voters.

The last thing these elites want is to do is moderate their hard line conservative views, so their response has been to establish a myth of rampant voter fraud perpetrated by Democrats and minority voters. The prominent Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund even wrote a book on the topic. He says:

Democrats are far more skilled at encouraging poor people — who need money — to participate in shady vote-buying schemes.

His sentence is a sufficiently idiotic attempt at propaganda that I need not offer a critique, just 4 digits followed seven letters: 2000 & Diebold.

Today's conservative elites may be less overtly racist than the white supremacists of the past, yet they still execute their political agenda with Orwellian precision. For example, Bush understands the symbolic importance of having a diverse cabinet -- yet his DOJ Civil Rights Division hasn't hired a single black attorney in four years and his administration has steadfastly pursued a racist vote-suppression agenda.

Far from being marginalized, racist ideology is fully integrated into the modern Republican Party machine.

On the airwaves, Fox News is a cheerleader for racist hosts and guests (see the clip below). Rush Limbaugh happily calls Barack Obama a "magic negro," yet Dick Cheney is a regular guest on his show. Online, Steve Sailer, a popular conservative columnist for the white nationalist web site VDARE.com contributor calls Obama a "wigger" and is praised as a "genius" by National Review's John Derbyshire. The Bell Curve's 1994 argument that the intellectual abilities of minorities are genetically inferior to whites is now a widely accepted truism amongst conservatives; indeed, one of its authors, Charles Murray, was rewarded with a plum post at the American Enterprise Institute, a mainstream Republican think-tank.

As bleak things may seem, there is cause for hope. Some brave leaders in the Republican Party are willing to stand up to their racist colleagues. Perhaps most notable among them is Florida Governor Charlie Crist who recently reformed Florida's ineffective and draconian ban on ex-felon voting, a ban which disenfranchised non-felons as well as ex-felons.

For all of us, let's hope the Crists of the GOP manage to reclaim their party from the grips of racist conservative elites.

On Wednesday Glenn Greenwald took Joe Klein to task for journalistic improprieties. Greenwald distills the issue brilliantly:

the very idea of granting anonymity to government sources to do nothing other than repeat pro-government claims is both manipulative and moronic on its face. What possible journalistic value could there ever be in cloaking someone with anonymity in order to say something that Tony Snow would happily say, and does say, every day from the White House Press Briefing Room?

Amazingly, most journalists in Washington, DC don't agree with Greenwald.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my recent return to the poker tournament ring.

Since then, nothing much has changed – I've been playing better with each tournament, but still not cashing.

Until Wednesday night, that is. On Wednesday, my streak finally ended.

I played a bad tournament. But on the bright side, I still didn't cash.

The Las Vegas City Council is persecuting patriots:

The council's vote last week to order a Hummer dealership to take down a 100-foot flag pole flying the Stars and Stripes has garnered attention across the country and overseas, inundating the city with e-mails and phone calls.

Almost all the writers vehemently disagreed with the council's decision, and some declared boycotts on Las Vegas.

"No more messing around with people who order flags removed. No more Vegas for me!" wrote Terrill Groetken, a Minnesota resident. "Our family reunion will have to be held elsewhere, Reno, Laughlin or at a Indian casino somewhere."

A writer identifying himself as Art Wallace of Escondido Calif., wrote: "I just cancelled my reservations at New York-New York and I told them why. I don't want to stay in a city that will not let a business fly the USA flag. I find you all disgusting."

The city had received more than 100 e-mail messages by Tuesday afternoon and scores of phone calls, all protesting the order that would have Towbin Hummer remove the flag and flagpole within 60 days.

Some of those unhappy with the city's decision changed their minds after the city responded to their messages.

"Have the good people of Las Vegas lost their collective minds?" asked Robert Paterniti in his first e-mail. He said he and his wife were canceling a fall vacation.

But after the city wrote back with its side of the story, he responded: "See you in September."

In its response, city officials stated their patriotic pride and love for the U.S. flag. The response also pointed out that some had said Towbin Hummer was exploiting the flag for commercial purposes because the dealership had not built a memorial as promised.

Well I'll show that car dealership how to be really patriotic. I'm gonna' build a 500 foot tall flag poll!

A bird took a dump on President Bush today during his news conference warning Americans about the growing terrorist threat (from Crooks and Liars):

The latest NYT poll has 53% of Americans with a positive view of Democrats and 38% with a positive view of Republicans.

These will be interesting numbers to remember over the next few months as the Democrats continued support for the war in Iraq sinks in with the general public.

Do you think their numbers will get better or worse?

p.s.: Here's another benchmark to remember by Rasmussen.

These are some pretty bleak numbers for the housing market (I think).

The hero of my novel worked for a U.S. Senator from Nevada loosely based on Paul Wellstone. I had initially named the fictional senator David Paul, but that didn't sound right. Monday night, I decided to name him Paul Davidson.

Wellstone was killed in a plane crash a little less than five years ago. It was October, 2002, and he was in the closing days of a tough re-election battle.

Before Wellstone's death, he had begun to pull away from his opponent, Norm Coleman, in the polls. This came as a surprise to many because Wellstone had voted against the Iraq War Resolution, a vote which many assumed would cost him his election. Instead, it appeared to rally his campaign, even though at that time the war was popular with both Republicans and Democrats alike.

Wellstone was and will probably always be my political hero because he was not only capable of speaking truth to power, but he was capable of gaining -- and using -- power to advance the causes he believed to be true.

I still remember the day he died. My boss -- one of Wellstone's senatorial colleagues -- called me. It was a Friday and I was working from home. My boss was at home as well and had just seen the news on the television. She was in tears. I was speechless. After we ended our conversation, I called my Uncle Roger, who had taken a course from Wellstone at Carleton years ago, to tell him the news. I started crying. I don't cry very often. In fact, I can only think of five times that I have cried in the last fifteen years. I certainly can't think of another political leader who has in life or death moved me to tears. Fortunately, I managed to hear Roger invite me to his house for dinner, and that evening we reminisced about Wellstone's career.

I think of Paul Wellstone often. His death is still one of the saddest events in our nation's political history, but his life and career and is one of its most uplifting and encouraging stories.

This is a perilous time for our nation; our current leadership has weakened our country in ways that I never could have imagined possible. Whenever I start to think that things are just so screwed up that there's no way out, whenever I start to think that there is no way that we can ever overcome the powerful inertia of our political system, I try to think about Paul Wellstone and his career.

It can be done.

Mark Kleiman:

If you think, as I do, that the #1 problem is the existence of a large undocumented population, then the proposed bill is probably a good solution. Since we're not in fact going to expel 10 million people, the alternative is to give them documents.

Matthew Yglesias on how to stop illegal employers:

all you need to do is establish a hefty incentive for illegal immigrants to rat out people who illegally employ them. Mark Kleiman has proposed a "poetic justice" version of this where an illegal who rats his employer out gets a green card in exchange. More prosaically, a ratter out could get a one-way ticket back to his home country plus a big fat check financed through employer fines. An enforcement system like this would be cheap to administer since you mostly wouldn't need to administer it at all -- illegal immigrants looking for a bonus, and potential employers of illegal immigrants afraid of being caught in a sting, would do the vast majority of the work.

I'm no expert on immigration policy, but it seems like these two comments would form the basis of a pretty damn good policy. There's no way in hell that we're going to expel everybody who isn't a legal resident, nor should we. And going forward, we need to stop illegal employers from their rampant lawlessness.

The focus of the immigration debate has largely been on immigrants and the cultural impact of their presence in the United States. Yet those immigrants moved here because American citizens have offered them jobs.

It's hard to fathom that we forget this obvious fact: without illegal employers, there would be no undocumented workers in the United States.

Illegal employers are the problem -- undocumented workers are the symptom.

So let's figure out a way to document the workers who are here and rationalize the system going forward, beginning with illegal employers.

National Review's John Derbyshire offers his immigration plan at The Corner. My favorite part?

(2d) Impose draconian penalties on visa overstayers, including lifetime exclusion from the U.S.

If Derbyshire gets his way, we'll have to deport the Englishman. Sad (sic), but true.

You see, in the 1970s, Derbyshire overstayed his B-2 visa. In 2003, he wrote:

In spite of having committed gross and wilful violation of U.S. immigration laws, I had paid no penalty, done no time, suffered no inconvenience.  None of the various Americans to whom I had confessed had conveyed the faintest disapproval, none had told me I ought to be ashamed of myself.  In the 1970s, I can report, the normal reaction of an American on learning that the person sitting across from him was “undocumented,” was puzzlement.  They knew, of course, that there was such a thing as illegal immigration.  The word “wetback” was then current.  It was just that they didn’t associate the phenomenon with well-spoken middle-class types with office-worker skill sets.

I am bound to report that I see little difference in attitude between the native-born Americans of today and those of thirty years ago.  Nations, like individuals, have their own ineradicable quirks of personality.  It is a peculiarity of Americans that they cannot be brought to think seriously about immigration.  The two best immigration-restrictionist books of recent years have been by Peter Brimelow, who is an immigrant from England, and Michelle Malkin, daughter of recent Filipino immigrants.  If you have been through, or sufficiently close to, the immigration experience, you think about it a lot.  Otherwise, you don’t think about it at all, and can’t be made to.  Take it from me, a sometime illegal immigrant:  getting this nation to concentrate on immigration reform is going to be hard work all the way.

So forty years ago, Derbyshire was an undocumented worker -- an "illegal alien" as he would say. Now he not only proposes a lifetime ban on travel to the U.S. by visa overstayers, but he also suggests hiring more cops to hunt down and deport people in this counary who are not here legally. Can you say pogrom?

Here's what I say to Mr. Derbyshire: you and your white nationalist buddy Peter Brimelow can take your British attitudes about immigration and shove 'em where the sun don't shine! This is America, damn it, and we don't roll like you do. If you don't like it, you and your boy can swim back to England for all I care. I hear the water's cold. Hypocrisy sucks, especially when it bites you in the ass.

For years, it was well-known that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich engaged in vaginal intercourse with one of his assistants while he led the impeachment of President Clinton for lying about oral sex.

At the time, Gingrich was married to his second wife, who he had married in 1981, a few months after divorcing his first wife -- his high school geometry teacher.

In March, he admitted that the rumors were true. The 63 year-old Gingrich began sowing his fertile oats with the assistant when she was in her 20s. To his credit, I suppose, she is now his third wife.

I guess Newt Gingrich just can't get enough of that whole marriage thing.

Now he's claiming that "a growing culture of radical secularism" is causing discrimination against people of faith.

What the in the hell is he talking about?

Is he still upset that evolution is taught in schools instead of creationism?

The strange thing is that Newt Gingrich is considering a run for the President, hoping to position himself as a the standard bearer or conservative values.

I guess Newt Gingrich has lost his mind. Or maybe he's always been delusional?

You ever see that bit on Jay Leno's show called Jay-walking? He cruises L.A. asking random people easy questions about geography, history, current affairs, and then plays the stupidest answers on tv. (For example, Q: Where is Paris? A: London.)

Well, I just stumbled across an especially hilarious example of Leno himself doing a bit of Jay-walking.

You might remember that earlier this year, comedian George Lopez took a swipe at Leno, calling him "two-faced" and "the worst interviewer on TV." Then this happened:

Leno hadn't forgotten Lopez's attack when he walked into the recent Laugh Factory memorial for comic Richard Jeni. Spotting comedian Paul Rodriguez, Leno brought up the dig.

"He said, 'Listen, maybe you and I should sit down and work this out,'" Rodriguez recalled when we phoned him yesterday. "He said, 'We shouldn't be airing this stuff in public.' He was going on like that. At first, I thought he was putting me on. Finally, I said, 'Jay, It's Paul! I'm not George! I'm the other Beatle.'

"Jay apologized. He said, 'I'm sorry. I don't have my contacts in.' I said, 'Hey, it's understandable. We Mexicans all look alike."

Kinda' sheds light on Leno's propensity towards making offensive jokes about Mexicans, doesn't it?

100% of Republicans choose spouses capable of bringing a child into the world, while a full 25% of Democrats choose spouses incapable of bearing children. Moreover, Republicans understand the importance of a younger, fertile spouse: the average Republican spouse is younger than the average Democratic spouse even though the average Republican is 10 years older!

As you can see from this table, Republicans are far more likely to get remarried than Democrats! In fact, no Democrats get remarried at all, but 80% of Republicans get remarried! And even though the Democrats commitment index is higher, all that means is that the Republicans have given their commitment to more people!

As you can see, Republicans love marriage much more than Democrats. In fact, for every one marriage the Democrats have, the Republicans have 2.2. That means Republicans are 120% more likely to get married than Democrats!

Until today, I thought that the configuring Windows Vista Media Center to watch networked locations required going into the registry and manually setting the WatchedFolders key to point to the UNC path of the share.

It turns out there's an easier way to accomplish the same thing -- and you don't have to muck around in the registry at all!

It seems like whenever the subject of impeaching President Bush arises, the debate centers on which party would reap the political benefits. Since Democrats would lead the impeachment, the issue then becomes whether or not impeachment would boost Democratic electoral prospects.

Thus, the obvious -- and far more important -- question of what impeachment would mean for the country and the world gets overlooked.

There are two reasons for criminal law: punishment and deterrence. Criminal law, as witnessed by the U.S. attorneys scandal, is not something that should be used to make a political point.

All but the most extreme political hacks agree that the impeachment of President Clinton was about politics, not criminal law. And all but the most extreme political hacks agree that Democrats shouldn't impeach President Bush as revenge for the impeachment of President Clinton.

Most of us agree that we should never again impeach a President for political reasons. But at the same time, we should never fail to impeach a President for political reasons.

Democrats may fear that impeaching President Bush would look like revenge for impeaching President Clinton. But if he deserves impeachment, letting him walk to avoid that appearance would be just as bad.

Electoral politics is the short-term battle for power. Over the long-run, the differences between Democrats and Republicans are not nearly as large as they seem in any given campaign.

Iraq, the biggest issue of the day, reflects this reality. The war was started with widespread Democratic support, and now that it has become clear that we must withdraw, Republicans are jumping off Bush's ship. Let us not forget that a Democratic president bears the primary responsibility for Vietnam; many more Americans died in that conflict under LBJ than under Nixon.

Generally speaking, I prefer Democrats to Republicans, but I have a greater preference for freedom, justice, peace, and sustainable growth than I do either party.

Therefore, I believe that President Bush should be impeached if he has established a clear and consistent pattern of lawlessness and abuse of power.

Think about President Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon. Quite likely, the short-term impacts of that decision were positive for the country: Nixon left office and the Watergate scandal instantly became history. But if Nixon had actually faced impeachment and then criminal responsibility for his actions, might not the long-term impacts have been better for the country? Instead of sending a message that the worst possible scenario for a President is losing his job (something that will happen anyway), wouldn't it be better to declare that a President who believes he is above the law will go to jail?

At some point, we need to put our foot down and say that if a President continually and habitually and intentionally violates the law, that President should be removed from office and sent to jail. For some, whether or President Bush rises to that level is a matter of debate. But that's the debate that we should be having, not a debate about poll numbers.

In thirty years or sixty years or one hundred years from now, when children learn about this presidential administration in grade school, do we want them to learn that the Constitution is more important than politics, or that politics is more important than the Constitution?

Joe Conason is a terrific writer: he never shows fear, he's always well-informed, and his words are a joy to read.

But even the best screw up from time to time, and apparently today is Joe Conason's turn, as he takes John Edwards to task for encouraging anti-war demonstrations on Memorial Day.

Conason is worried that Edwards might offend "the sensibilities of everyone who believes the holiday should be solemnly commemorative rather than politically noisy." He says:

Whether Democrats and progressives can win back the respect -- and the votes -- of soldiers, veterans and their families is a critical question for the future of American politics. It will never happen if they believe that the left devalues or ignores their sacrifice.

Conason is wrong.

Take John Kerry, for example. In 2004, he spent Memorial Day honoring his fellow Vietnam veterans. As far as I can tell, he didn't utter a single critical word about Iraq. In fact, later during the campaign he said that he didn't regret his vote for the war. And we all know what happened to him.

There's no doubt that if Kerry had protested the Iraq War on Memorial Day, he would have outraged the American right. In fact, they probably would have created an organization devoted to distorting his military record. They might have even made up a story about him attacking a fellow veteran.

Wait a second. They still did those things And you know what? Kerry didn't fight back quickly enough. Perhaps if he had been in fighting posture all along -- maybe even starting with protests on Memorial Day -- he could have won.

We'll never know for sure.

But one thing we do know: Democratic presidential candidates like Dukakis and Kerry followed the appeasement strategy recommended by Conason. They both lost.

Let's try something different this time, eh?

For all the debate we have in this country about welfare spending, we sure seem to focus on the programs focused on reducing poverty. In general, conservatives find them to be wasteful theft from taxpayers, liberals see them as part of a strategy to expand the middle class. And almost everybody forgets that illegal immigrants pay taxes too!

You can see how easy it is to forget about corporate welfare.

Well, you can rest assured: corporate welfare is alive and well. It's thriving, really, in the Bush Administration.

A report prepared in 2006 by the House Committee on Government Reform, provides a detailed look at federal contracting, one component of the corporate welfare state. (Other components include things like special tax breaks, expansion of anti-consumer intellectual property laws, and the use of public resources for private gain.)

Here's the reality of the federal contracting piece of the corporate welfare state, through 2005:

• Under Bush, contracting spending increased from $203.1 billion in FY2000 to $377.5 billion in 2005, an average annual increase of 13%
• Nearly half of the increase in spending under Bush was spent on federal contracts
• In 2005, 39% of the discretionary federal budget was paid to private contractors
• More than 90% of the increase was consumed by the Department of Defense, which now accounts for 70% of contracting spending

Ah, but isn't this an example of reinventing government by infusing entrepreneurial spirit into the public sector?

Unfortunately, no. It's more like an example of reinventing graft.

• The U.S. Government Accountability Office, agency inspectors general, Defense Contract Audit Agency, and other government investigators identified $745.5 billion in problem contracts
• The top five federal contracts received 21% of all federal contracting spending
• The type of agency you'd expect to benefit for outsourcing, the Department of Transportation, has actually had a 29% reduction in contracting
• Contracting out services like intelligence actually makes it harder for the government to hire its own employees!

Theists can be evil:

Navy vet: Chaplains tried converting me:

Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.

Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.

He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.

Miller, an Iowa City resident and former petty officer third class who spent four years in the Navy, outlined his complaints at a news conference in Des Moines on Thursday. The event was sponsored by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an activist group based in Albuquerque, N.M.

The Seattle Times reports that single women are increasingly being priced out of the booming condo market in Belltown, where prices jumped 23% in 2004 to a median of $360,000.

"A decade ago, single men and single women each were about 25 percent of the market" but today "a third are single men" and "17 percent are single women."

This trend is an important impact of the income gender gap, which is alive and well -- even in Seattle, one of our nation's most progressive cities.

According to the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey, in 2005 the median male full-time worker who lived in Seattle earned about $50,007, 18% more than the median female full-time worker. The gap was 31% between men and women with college degrees.

Another way of thinking about the gap: an income of about $66,000 is enough to purchase a $270,000 home. Among full-time workers living in Seattle, 35% of men and 26% of women earned more than $65,000 (2005 ACS).

These statistics don't prove that men are sexist pigs (hey, I'm a man!) any more than they prove that women like work for less money (at least that's what I hear).

What they do prove is that for whatever reason there is a fundamental economic power disparity between men and women.

It's a disparity that we should eliminate sooner rather than later.

From the NYT:

President Intervened in Dispute Over Eavesdropping

Even if Bush did ultimately bring the program into compliance with the law, it's clear that for quite some time it was operating outside the bounds of his law -- with Bush's knowledge -- and that it was not until Comey, Ashcroft, and others intervened that Bush changed the policy.

Update: Glenn Greenwald has an excellent analysis of the issue.

The Bush Administration said one of the reasons it fired U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, who led the Duke Cunningham prosecution, was that she did not prosecute enough gun cases.

Are you kidding me?

The Bush White House has all but replaced George Washington's picture on the one dollar bill with a mug of Wayne LaPierre, and they're going to try and argue that Carol Lam wasn't tough enough against guns? Like anyone would ever believe that the Mayberry Machiavellis would care about something like that.

Not only was it a stupid, unconvincing excuse, it wasn't even right, according to both Lam's testimony and that of Jay Comey, the former Deputy Attorney General (who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald special prosecutor in the Libby case).

Dear lord. They are not only the sorriest bunch of criminals ever to disgrace the White House, but they are also some of the stupidest people ever to have served there.

I'm starting to wonder: if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, would Bush be doing a better job as president?

Turns out that it was all a misunderstanding. Vista Media Center still sucks!

Chris Lanier posts that Softsled could be coming to a PC near you.

For the unitiated, Softsled isn't an actual product, it's the a code name for a supposedly cancelled Microsoft project to allow PCs to become software-based Media Center extenders. Basically, this means that a standard Windows box would have all the media extender features of the Xbox 360.

It's baffling that Microsoft hasn't delivered this obvious feature yet, but it hasn't.

Today, however, it seems that Bill Gates is announcing a that Softsled will finally be integrated into Windows. I've got my fingers crossed that it comes sometime soon! Vista Media Center will suck substantially less with Softsled!

I wonder if Fox will ask Mitt Romney about this during tonight's presidential debate? Meanwhile, in case you were wondering what his favorite book is:

Even though the mainstream media -- and congressional Democrats -- are dropping the ball by not investigating the public corruption angle of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, Josh Marshall and TPM are keeping the pressure on.

The Bush administration has suddenly -- and without explanation -- withdrawn its nomination of the lead Jack Abramoff prosecutor (and top DOJ public corruption official) to the federal bench.

Debra Wong Yang is the former U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles who was hired by Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, the law firm representing Congressman Jerry Lewis, the subject of a corruption probe by Yang's office.

In the last five years, Gibson Dunn has only announced hiring three new attorneys directly from government jobs out of 58 total announcements. Yang was one of those three; the other two also worked for her office. Each of the remaining 55 hires were either from private sector jobs or returning to the firm after working for Republican officials.

The L.A. Times, however, reports that:

Whatever officials in Washington might have intended, Yang and Lam's departures had no effect on the investigations, which continue unabated, sources close to the inquiries said this week.

Gee, you think their sources might have said that? Perhaps the sources are the new hacks the Bush Administration has installed over there. Then again, the sources could be right. Regardless, the real issue is what the Bush Administration's intent was, because if anyone in the DOJ or White House was aware of an attempt to move Yang out of the way to make life easier for Congressman Lewis, that's what we call obstruction of justice.

"You have so many players involved, it's ridiculous that you could make an investigation disappear, especially one that is high profile — because those are the ones all the assistants want to work on," she said.

Levenson said there are subtle ways, however, to let a case "die a slow death."

Supervisors could assign the prosecutors other matters to work on or divert resources away from the case. They could balk at issuing subpoenas or seeking approvals of various sorts from Washington. And when it comes time to seek an indictment, particularly if the case is not a slam-dunk, the U.S. attorney or even the Justice Department in Washington could waver and tell the prosecutors that they need to do more investigating.

Yet even this scenario is more likely to happen in a John Grisham novel than in real life, Levenson said.

I would have thought that lots of things were more likely to happen in novels than in real life -- until I started writing novels and the Bush Administration took power.

I actually find it laughable to dismiss claims that the Bush Administration would try and apply political pressure to U.S. Attorneys, especially in the midst of a huge scandal in which it is very clear that they did just that!

I do give credit to the L.A. Times though -- at least they've followed up on this story, which is worth more attention than the press has given.

Seattle Times:

The Mariners placed Weaver on the 15-day disabled list on Friday, his first ever DL stint...to take Weaver's place on the roster, the Mariners recalled LHP Ryan Rowland-Smith from Class AAA Tacoma.

You gotta' be bad to be replaced by a guy with a 5.68 ERA at AAA.

Last week, Michael Barone offered his thoughts on what describes as "The Realignment of America." In his view, the dominant feature of this realignment is a domestic migration from large coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles (he calls them "Coastal Megalopolises") to newer inland cities like Phoenix and Atlanta (which he calls "Interior Boomtowns"). In a nutshell, he says:

The native-born are leaving "hip" cities for the heartland.

Barone offers a theory explaining his "realignment" theory:

High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.

Ah. Now I see. It's those damn rich liberals (housing), Democrats (taxes), and foreigners (burgeoning immigrant populations). Those right-wing hacks are so predictable.

The thing that Barone doesn't mention is that foreign-born non-citizens are joining the native-born in leaving his "Coastal Megalopolises," which kind of puts a damper on his theory.

Not surprisingly, however, Steve Sailer lapped up Barone's article. Sailer is eager to embrace and extend Barone's thesis, arguing that the native-born are fleeing coastal cities because:

[The native-born's] old cities are filling up with immigrants who outbid them in the housing market—typically, because the foreigners don't mind living with an entire extended family  under one roof

Sailer is dismayed that foreigners are pushing Americans out of coastal cities, especially Southern California. He trashes the government for choosing "to turn over much of this thin strip to foreigners."

Let's do quick reality check, why don't we?

It's true that Barone's Coastal Megalopolises have larger foreign-born populations than his Interior Boomtowns, 26% to 15%. It's also true that Coastal Megalopolises lost population between 2000 and 2005, while Interior Boomtowns gained.

But do the reasons have anything to do with immigration, particularly illegal immigration?

It doesn't appear likely:

• In Coastal Megalopolises, both the native-born and foreign-born non-citizen populations declined from 2000 to 2005, by 8% and 2%. (Many foreign-born non-citizens have documentation and are in this country legally, so don't confuse that category with illegal or undocumented immigrants)
• In Interior Boomtowns, both populations increased, native-born by about 8% and foreign-born non-citizen by about 28%.

In short, it's not just native-born that are leaving Coastal Megalopolises. It's also foreign-born non-citizens. And the foreign born non-citizens are going to Interior boomtowns at three times the rate of native-born Americans! One out of three new residents in Interior Boomtowns was born abroad.

Clearly, then, the native-born Americans that are moving to these cities are not trying to avoid foreigners as Barone and Sailer argue. In fact, the two groups have a lot more in common than either Barone or Sailer allows. First of all, everybody is human, something that is all too easy to forget. Second, they are moving to Interior Boomtowns in search of cheaper housing and economic opportunity. The facts don't support Barone's or Sailer's claims about immigrants.

But who needs facts when you have an ideology?

Jury acquits Spanaway man of bestiality charge:

TACOMA — A Pierce County jury has acquitted a man accused of having sex with the family dog. ...

He said he believes his wife made up the story because she is seeking to end their marriage.

[She] contacted police and told them she'd caught her husband engaged in sexual intercourse with their pit bull, Sara, last October. ...

The case generated outrage among animal welfare advocates across the globe, many of whom called for McPhail to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Where's Ann Coulter now? I thought she was supposed to be outraged when political activists try to influence the criminal justice system.

Here's a very interesting post on building a distributed, open source Google. I think it's a neat idea, but building a simple clone of Google is not that much of a value add. However, if there were a way to use web surfing activity without compromising privacy, I could see a quantum leap in the quality of search results. You'd have something of a mixture of social bookmarking like Digg and vast quantities of web pages like Google.

I recently started playing poker tournaments around Vegas again. So far, no success, but it goes that way sometimes. The thing that's been bothering me is that I haven't been playing my best, but I suppose that's not all that unusual after taking several months away from tournaments.

Tonight, I finally played a good tournament, start to finish. Unfortunately, luck wasn't on my side -- I flopped two pair three times and lost each time.

Brian Williams should be our poet laureate. He brings his unique creative genius to NBC every evening, eager to share with us the matters of fact.

For example, his take on the Fort Dix six. (You have to sit through an ad, but it's worth it.) Here's a snippet of what he had to say:

Good evening. A lot of government officials from the president on down have hinted over the years that if we ever really knew about all the unsubstantiated national security threats that are out there, we'd never leave our homes in the morning.  Of course most of those threats pass without us ever knowing about them, but this morning as millions of Americans were leaving home for work they heard about this story...six young men in their twenties, accused of planning to shoot up...Fort Dix in New Jersey. The FBI says this was a case of home grown terrorism inspired by the internet and thankfully foiled.

Man, he's good. Bush and Cheney should take lessons.

But you really appreciate what a spectacular artist Williams is when you learn that the Fort Dix six were pretty much in the same league as the Seas of David cult, who, armed with a blackjack, a knife, and paintball guns, plotted to take over the entire world.

Steven Levitt, who might not be as great a poet as Williams, makes a lot more sense:

If your goal is to kill people other than yourselves, I cannot think of a worse plan than having six people conduct an armed assault against a military base.

Williams would have been wise to begin his newscast with a bit less poetry, and a bit more thought.

Then again, maybe he's just trying to scare us into watching NBC Nightly News more often. That's how he pays his bills, after all.

Cox Communications (cable) disables fast-forward for some on-demand programming. Cox is effectively using a sledgehammer to punish its paying customers and save broadcasters from developing new business models for new technology. How many other industries are able to get away with threating their customers like criminals?

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/pterosauria.html:

Ranging from the size of a sparrow to the size of an airplane, the pterosaurs (Greek for "wing lizards") ruled the skies in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and included the largest vertebrate ever known to fly: the late Cretaceous Quetzalcoatlus.

I get a kick out of watching morons get excited about silly issues. Maybe they realized that our immigration problems have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism it would actually be possible to have a rational discussion.

Going into the season, I didn't have high hopes for Mariners starting pitcher Jeff Weaver. After all, his career ERA was 4.72 and with a record of 86-107. He had a great post-season last year though, so Bill Bavasi ponied up $8.3 million for a one year deal. Even though it was obvious Bavasi had overpaid, more attention in Seattle was focused on Gil Meche's multi-year contract from the Royals which averages $11 million. The consensus was: we'll take Weaver for one year and the Royals can have Meche for five.

Well, no one could have imagined Weaver would be as bad as he has been this year.

He's pitched 22 innings, allowing 35 earned runs and 57 hits and walks. His ERA is 14.32. He is 0-6 and is averaging under four innings per start. He gave up 6 earned runs and pitched 5.2 innings in his best start of the year.

Opponents are hitting .581 against Jeff Weaver. Their OPS is 1.510, higher than Babe Ruth's career best.

Meanwhile, former Mariner Gil Meche is having a great season in Kansas City. He's 3-1 with a 2.15 ERA, holding opponents a to .656 OPS. Weaver has better control, though, giving up walks at half the rate as Meche. But all that proves is that a hit is better than a walk (but a walk is still much better than an out).

I hope Meche continues to do well. I've pretty much lost hope with Weaver -- the Mariners should release him when Felix Hernandez returns to the rotation, if not sooner.

As I posted yesterday, the law firm representing Congressman Jerry Lewis hired the U.S. attorney responsible for investigating and possibly prosecuting corruption charges against the powerful Republican. The firm, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, reportedly offered U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang a $1.5 million signing bonus.

It starts to get really interesting when you learn that Yang wasn't the only attorney from her office hired by Gibson Dunn. There were two others: Douglas Fuchs, the Deputy Chief of Major Frauds, and Maurice Suh, who had served as the Deputy Chief of the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section during President Bush's first term.

I did some digging, and it turns out that these three lawyers were the only government lawyers hired by Gibson Dunn in the past five years who did not have a prior employment relationship with the firm. That fact should set your alarm bells ringing. (I do not think that this has been reported before. It is based on my research, explained below.)

You already know that U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was fired after putting Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham behind bars. Last fall, White House counsel Harriet Miers also considered firing Yang, who was conducting a similar probe into Lewis. Instead, Yang was offered $1.5 million to join the law firm representing Lewis, and within months a former colleage from the Public Corruption section (Suh had taken a job with the city of Los Angeles) and the Deputy Chief of the Major Frauds section were hired by the same firm.

Now that smells really fishy. But it gets worse when you start thinking about how unusual it must be for a major firm like Gibson Dunn to hire three government attorneys within four months?

I thought it seemed strange. But I haven't seen much media coverage of this angle on the U.S. attorney's scandal, so I had to do some digging on my own.

What I found shocked me. Gibson Dunn has announced hiring 58 attorneys on its web site over the past five years (there is nothing more boring than reading five years of press releases from a law firm). Of these 58 attorneys:

• Yang, Suh, and Fuchs were the only government attorneys hired by Gibson Dunn with no prior relationship to the firm
• Every single other attorney either came from another firm (51) or were returning to the firm after public service (4, including Ted Olson and Eugene Scalia)

This bears repeating. Other than these three hires, over a five year period, Gibson Dunn has not announced the hiring of a single government attorney, let alone one from a U.S. Attorney's office, with the exception of the four lawyers who had previously worked for the firm.

Another way of putting it:

The only government lawyers Gibson Dunn have hired in the past five years worked in the very same U.S. Attorney's office investigating one of their highest profile clients.

I do not think these facts have been reported anywhere by any media outlet.

But so far as I can tell, they are true facts. And I think they are quite important.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven.

It's time for some real reporters to get their act in gear. If I can figure this out in an evening of web surfing, imagine what someone who does this for a living could do.

(Here's a summary of what we know.)

The law firm of Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher is close to the White House and represents a Congressman being investigated for corruption. Last fall, Gibsun Dunn hired the U.S. attorney investigating the corruption case, paying her a $1.5 million signing bonus. Here's what we know:

(1) Gibson Dunn has close ties to the Bush Administration

• Ted Olson, Bush's lawyer in the 2000 recount battle and was Solicitor General during Bush's first term, is a Gibson Dunn partner

(2) Gibson Dunn represents embattled Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis who is under investigation for public corruption

• As of last October, Lewis' legal bills had surpassed $800,000

(3) Carol Lam, the U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of California who successfully prosecuted a similar case against Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, was fired in January

(4) Last fall, before Lam was fired, White House Counsel Harriet Miers considered firing Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California responsible for the investigation into Congressman Lewis. Lam ended up being fired.

(5) Debra Wong Yang resigned from the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office in October, 2006

• Gibson Dunn hired Yang immediately, offering her a reported $1.5 million signing bonus
• Yang promised to recuse herself from any involvement in the Lewis probe because her new employer represented the target of her investigation

(6) During the past seven months, Gibson Dunn hired three attorneys from the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office, including Yang

• Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, responsible for the investigation into Congressman Lewis
• Douglas Fuchs, the Deputy Chief of Major Frauds for the Central District of California
• Maurice Suh, who had served as the Deputy Chief of the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section during President Bush's first term

(7) Gibson Dunn's decision to hire three lawyers from the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office is remarkably unusual. During the past five years, according to press releases on Gibson Dunn's web site, the firm has announced hiring 58 attorneys. Of these:

• 95% of the attorneys Gibson Dunn announced hiring were either hired from directly from other private sector jobs (88%) or had previously worked for the firm (7%)
• Yang, Suh, and Fuchs were the only government attorneys hired by Gibson Dunn with no prior relationship to the firm
• The four attorneys who had worked previously for Gibson Dunn were hired from a government agency were Ted Olson, Bush's 2000 recount lawyer and Solicitor General, Eugene Scalia who was Solicitor General for the Department of Labor, M. Sean Royall who worked for the FTC, and James C. Ho, a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former counsel for Senator John Cornyn of Texas
• The remaining 51 attorneys were hired from private firms

This weekend, The New York Times included a cute story entitled "The U.S. Attorney, the G.O.P. Congressman and the Timely Job Offer" on its opinion pages.

The story is about Debra Wong Yang, a U.S. Attorney from California who resigned last October. Prior to her resignation, Yang was leading the corruption investigation of U.S. Congressman Jerry Lewis, a powerful California Republican.

Through last October, Lewis' legal fees had already reached $800,000 -- and he hadn't even been indicted yet. In other words, the investigation was a big deal. His friend, former U.S. Congressman Duke Cunningham, was already in jail.

So what law firm does a guy like Lewis turn to? A powerful one with ties to the Bush administration: Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher.

Now remember Ms. Yang, mentioned at the top of this post? She was the U.S. Attorney leading the Lewis investigation. Who do you think hired immediately after her resignation?

That's right. Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher. The same law firm representing Jerry Lewis, the guy who she had been investigating. And they are paying her a $1.5 million signing bonus.

Guess who Yang's working for at Gibson? Theodore Olson, the lawyer who represented President Bush in Florida and served in his administration as Solicitor General.

Now why is it that a story like this is buried on the opinion pages of the New York Times? Everything that I've written up until now are facts, not opinions. There was a time when a scandal much less important than this would qualify as news!

It's outrageous that the New York Times considers a story like this a matter of opinion.

It's even worse that no other major media outlet has covered the story since the Times published its piece.

It's exactly what's wrong with our nation's media.

The Washington Monthly has a fantastic article on the DC power couple phenomenon. It's great insight into to the people who run our country, the culture that they have created in our nation's capitol, and how that culture functions as dead weight on our democracy.

I wonder if they would continue to thrive if we reformed our political system, beginning with term limits and public financing of political campaigns.

By the way, I support public financing because the only thing I hate more than paying taxes to fund political campaigns is paying taxes to pay for the favors politicians owe their corporate contributors. And I support term limits because I can't think of a politician who has served in Congress longer than 18 years who I'd truly miss.

The LVRJ has an article about the American Gaming Association's 2007 State of the States gaming survey. Americans wagered $32.4 billion in non-tribal casinos, which employed about 365,000 people. In other words, about 1 out of 400 workers in the civilian labor force work at a casino. Wow.

Interesting numbers about poker:

• The rake totaled $238 million in Nevada and New Jersey, a 15% increase over 2006 (and about 150% over the pre-poker boom levels)
• 15% is still solid growth, but it is a big drop in the rate of growth. In Nevada, growth rates for the past few years:
  • 2003: 18%
  • 2004: 45% (first full year after Moneymaker's WSOP win)
  • 2005: 42%
  • 2006: 15%
• The four states that track annual card room revenues reported $1.1 billion in 2006, up 7.8% from 2005

I don't think there's any question that the poker boom is over. The question is whether poker is maturing and will sustain its current levels with smaller but steady growth or whether it will contract.

According to the survey, fewer American adults are playing poker:

• 2003: 12%
• 2004: 18%
• 2005: 18%
• 2006: 14%

Since that data is based on a poll, it could just be random variance, but it's extremely unlikely the numbers of poker players are growing faster than the population.

I think we'll learn a lot from the upcoming World Series of Poker, but probably even more from how much the media – and the public –  likes whoever wins. Poker's popularity is TV driven, but TV can't control who wins. Some years they can get lucky with a great story (Chris Moneymaker) and other years they get lucky with a great ambassador (Greg Raymer). In more recent years, TV hasn't gotten quite as lucky.

I suspect the question about how many players enter the main event this year won't be whether there will be more than last year's 8,000+, but how much smaller. I haven't been following it closely enough to venture an educated guess, but maybe I'll take a stab at one soon. Here's the yearly entry totals for the $25,000 WPT Championship:

• 2003: 111
• 2004: 343
• 2005: 452
• 2006: 605
• 2007: 639

What about the circuit tournaments? Take the L.A. Poker Classic $10k buy-in WPT event:

• 2003: 136
• 2004: 382
• 2005: 538
• 2006: 692
• 2007: 791 (even though the rake quadrupled!)

It will be interesting to see what the coming couple of years have in store for poker. Hopefully poker will be able to sustain its growth – and casinos won't keep on increasing the rake.

Think Progress has video of WJLA's investigation revealing that the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has not hired a single black attorney in four years. Only two of their 50 lawyers are black.

What's hilarious about this? Obviously, nothing, at least not directly. But it reminds me of Bill Maher's extremely funny riff a month or so ago on Regent University, the Pat Robertson / Christian Broadcast Network school that has placed 150 of its graduates in the Bush Administration, including Monica Goodling.

I've been following the web sites of some extreme right wingers recently. It's scary -- I had no idea that that the white nationalist movement was as sophisticated as it is. And when you see what's happened with the Bush Administration's DOJ you realize that these guys are serious about winning the battle.

With such intense stuff, it's nice to have comic relief, and Maher's monologue provides it.

(Note: Coming soon, I'll post a longer, more complete analysis of Sailer's freeslinging theory.)

Steve Sailer has been beating the drum, shouting from the rooftop, screaming at anyone who will listen: baseball has a hidden ethnic bias. And you'll never guess who the victims are! As he writes:

The most numerous victims of baseball's traditional statistical myths have been white American players.

How could that possibly be? Well, he summarized his theory quite nice in a comment on Matthew Yglesias' blog:

The much bigger example of ethnic bias in sports is how baseball managements were long biased against black and white American players and in favor of Latin American players because -- before the Bill James / Billy Beane / Moneyball statistical analysis revolution -- they overrated batting average and underrated on-base percentage, and thus statistically overrated Latins on average.

This biased baseball in favor of Latin-born players, he says, because they have a "patience gap" (his words, not mine) that is reflected in a decreased tendency to walk. He offers statistics to defend his claim that Latin-born players are "freeswinging Latins" (again, his words, not mine):

In 2002, Hispanics had a combined batting average of .264, while everyone else together hit .260. On the other hand, the Hispanic "walk average" was 0.060, while the non-Hispanics' bases on balls ratio was 0.069, a significant 14 percent higher, leaving the non-Latinos with a better on-base percentage.

Now hold on a minute there Stevie-boy. Why aren't you giving us the actual on-base percentage? Instead, you're just telling us it's higher, and citing a "walk average" statistic which nobody ever uses.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to figure out the on-base percentage from Sailer's numbers.

Hispanic OBP is (264 + 60) / 1060 = .306

Non-Hispanic OBP is (260 + 69) / 1069 = .308

An OBP of .308 is just 0.7% higher than .306, a meaningless difference, especially when you consider that two-thirds of shortstops – historically a weak hitting position – are Latin-born. Even more importantly, the standard deviation for the entire league's OBP was .006 between 2000 and 2006. A variation of .002 of a subpopulation is just random.

In other words, by his own numbers, Steve Sailer is full of shit.

By the way, taking Sailer's thinking to absurd levels, in 2006, the average Hispanic shortstop walked 8 additional times per 162 games than the average white non-Hispanic shortstop. Meanwhile, the average black non-Hispanic shortstop walked eleven times additional times than Hispanics. But does that mean GMs should give up on white non-Hispanic shortstops? Hell no. They should get whoever can play the position the best. Sailer's way of slicing and dicing up humanity based on race, ethnicity, and place of birth is complete bullshit.

You just gotta' love Jordan Babineaux if you're a Seahawks fan, from his interception of Drew Bledsoe in 2005 to his tackle of Tony Romo in the playoffs last year and everything in between. He's playing in the NFL even though the experts overlooked him in the NFL draft and this year he showed up for mini-camp without a contract, although he has now signed a tender offer.

For all the attention paid to the 2007 NFL Draft last month, it's easy to forget that some great NFL players have emerged from the ranks of the undrafted, including Antonio Gates, Priest Holmes, Kurt Warner, and Rod Smith. I wouldn't recommend that teams withdraw from the draft, but it would be just as dumb for them to eschew the rookie free agent market. Just a little reminder for those who think that predicting human potential is a precise science.

From "A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin" in the New York Times:

Evolution has long generated bitter fights between the left and the right about whether God or science better explains the origins of life. But now a dispute has cropped up within conservative circles, not over science, but over political ideology: Does Darwinian theory undermine conservative notions of religion and morality or does it actually support conservative philosophy?

Well, I guess anything that gets our friends on the religious right to move in the general direction of science isn't a bad thing. Unsurprisingly, they seem mostly interested in applying evolutionary theory to morality and other social constructs. I'll bet my bottom dollar that if creationists embrace evolution, it will only be because they decide that natural selection controls abstract thought, in the process denying our capacity to think (which apparently they don't do much of anyway). Perhaps soon we'll read about the evolutionary theory of the anti-gay marriage amendment, or the evolutionary theory of why women should not have the right to choose. I'd like to hear President Bush's theory on the evolutionary roots of the Iraq War. (Okay, fine. Lingering high levels of testosterone and too much cocaine in his youth made President Bush especially susceptible to launching a war that has made him the biggest moral failure in Presidential history. But he still could and should have known better.)

The most sensible comment of the entire article was in the last paragraph:

As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.”

True, that.

Earlier this week, a business school professor and an economics graduate student released preliminary results of a study on whether there is racial bias in NBA refereeing. The study, which is very interesting, has also stirred up quite a controversy.

The study, which analyzed every game from 1991 to 2004, using box scores to determine the racial composition of the refereeing crew and players on the court, found that:

the rate at which fouls are earned by black players is largely invariant to the racial composition of the refereeing crew. By contrast the rate at which fouls are earned by white players responds quite strongly to referee race. Further regression-based tests yield a similar pattern (see in particular the coefficient on %white referees in Table 4), suggesting that the impact of the biases we document is on white players, who are either favored by white referees, or disfavored by black referees.

The study argues that this referee bias largely explains why white starters have a higher winning percentage than black starters (51.8% versus 49.7%) and why teams give that blacks more playing time than their opponents win games less frequently (48.6%).

The study's authors don't provide an explanation for the referee bias, although they point to economic theory that suggests unconscious discrimination exists. It could be that black referees are penalizing whites; it could be that white referees are rewarding whites. Regardless, they argue, the net result has a discriminatory bias against teams which are more likely to play black players.

It's almost comical watching the media cover this story, which has been mostly panned. The most amusing thing to witness is when they interview current NBA players about the study. What NBA player in the world is going to criticize refs? That's a big no-no in the world of sports. Second of all, most NBA players probably aren't experts in statistical analysis. Finally, according to the study, black referees are actually more likely to call fouls on black players. It's just that they are even more likely to call falls on whites (or whites less likely to call fouls on whites). The study's argument is that since most NBA referees are white, the bias works against teams that plays more blacks.

Whatever the reasons for and effects of the disparity, it is indisputable that they exist, and it is extremely unlikely that they are due to random chance. The study is an interesting and important contribution to the study of implicit biases.

It is clear that the study has identified a set of facts which have made some people very uncomfortable. But the fact that it makes them uncomfortable does not mean we should ignore the study. In fact, perhaps it increases the study's importance. Discomfort, after all, need not be a permanent condition. Things do change, and sometimes for the better.

One blogger showing signs of such discomfort is Steve Sailer, a proponent of the genetic roots of income (and other) inequality who argues that race determines athletic success, particularly in basketball. (He should be surprised to learn that teams that play more blacks are less likely to win than teams that play whites – a fact that does not bode well for his theory that athletic success is rooted in genetics and can be explained by biodiversity.) After a somewhat rambling refutation of the New York Times' coverage of the study, Sailer resurrects one of his favorite myths:

If you are interested in a blatant example of old guard stupidity in sports having a disparate impact by ethnicity that the media relentlessly ignored for decades because it was benefiting a minority group, here's my 2003 article "Baseball's Hidden Ethnic Bias."

Sailer sees the study and its media coverage as yet more proof of bias against whites. I have to give the man credit for being consistently obsessed, yet it seems sometimes that there is little room in his world for dispassionate analysis, a fact which is disappointing because the topics that interest him are so very important to our nation.

(By the way, the short reply to Sailer's baseball essay that it is completely full of bullshit. He's a man without facts on this issue. And I'll be posting on this site in the next few days the facts that prove my case. Hopefully, he'll see the mistakes he made in his analysis. Although he's a guy with strong opinions, my optimistic sense of human nature hopes that he's a guy who can see his mistakes and might one day be able to play a role resolving rather than escalating racial and ethnic problems.)

I hope there's more studies like this one on the NBA. Professional sports provides a common frame of reference for so many Americans, so it is hardly surprising that we often discuss national issues within the context of its playing fields. It's not just race. Sure, you have Rush Limbaugh and Jimmy The Greek on race, but you also have Tim Hardaway and Jon Ameci on homosexuality, and Pat Tillman and Mohammed Ali on politics. And the more we engage with each other as a nation on these types of issues, the better all of our lives will be.

Well, this is enough to make me want to head straight to the nearest house of worship and pray!

Seriously, it's a reflection of the best quality of George W. Bush. He's done unspeakable damage to the rest of the world, but he does seem truly blind to race, ethnicity, and creed when it comes to who he hires.

It's also proof that tolerance, while necessary, is not sufficient.

A few days ago, I posted that you can't share recorded TV between Media Centers using Windows Vista Home Premium because the genius product planners at Microsoft decided to remove gpedit.msc (the group policy editor) from the Home Premium sku. A Microsoft program manager hinted that I was wrong, but since it was an unsupported feature, she said she couldn't help me.

Well, I've finally figured out what you need to do to be able to share recorded TV using Media Center on Vista Home Premium. Here's the scoop:

• FIRST: Share your recorded TV folder with anonymous login permissions. Here's instructions for how to do that. Return to this page once you get to the step requiring gpedit.msc.

• SECOND: Next, you need to make changes to your computer's local policies to allow other machines to see recorded TV. To do this, you'll need to be familiar with regedit. Be careful with regedit if you've never used it before. I'll assume that you have, though. So after opening regedit:

• First, make sure that anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts is turned off. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa and find the restrictanonymoussam REG_DWORD. Sit this to 0.
• Second, you need to allow anonymous access to your recorded TV share. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters. If there is a NullSessionShares REG_MULTI_SZ, add the name of your share. Don't add the path! Just the name of the share, like "Recorded TV". If NullSessionShares doesn't exist, create a new multi-string value, name it NullSessionShares, and put the name of the share in.
• If you don't use passwords, you _might_ need to find the "LimitBlankPasswordUse" DWORD at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa and set it to 0. I don't think you need to change this unless you're having problems, though.

Now you're done with step 2!

• THIRD: Now you need need to enable the Media Center you want to watch the shared TV on to be able to see the newly shared TV folder. On the machine that you want to watch TV on (not the one sharing it!), find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording. If there isn't a REG_MULTI_SZ called "WatchedFolders", create it. Now type in the UNC path to the share (like \\htpc-tv\recorded tv). Uses spaces if there are spaces. (Note that this also works with XP Media Center.)

You're done! Recorded TV should be up and working. Thanks to JackLuminous at The Green Button who pointed me in the right direction.

This blog entry examines a recent posting by Steve Sailer, a moderately influential and extremely conservative commentator on race, gender, and immigration issues. Although Sailer's post is a commentary on the Iraq War (which he opposes), it is representative of the same types of logical and factual mistakes he makes in many of his other more inflammatory musings about race and genetics. Since this post is about a comparatively sedate topic, it presents the opportunity to critique Sailer's intellectual abilities without allowing allegations of racism or sexism to cloud a dispassionate assessment of his thought process.

In his post, Sailer begins by noting that both Rice and Rumsfeld offered misleading accounts of post-WWII Germany to justify their troubles in post-Saddam Iraq. (Rice and Rumsfeld’s assertions have been thoroughly debunked.)

The origin of Rice's and Rumsfeld's "Werewolves" theory: Back in August 2003, National Security Advisor Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that we shouldn't worry about armed guerilla resistance in Iraq, because we had to deal with the same thing in Germany in 1945-47, and look how well that turned out.

Sailer then wonders how Rice and Rumsfeld could be so wrong:

So, where did the speechwriters of the Bush Administration luminaries come up with this idea? Apparently, they misread a lame pro-war fictitious satire written on July 28, 2003 by Rand Simberg as being real! Simberg blogged:

Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire

August 12, 1945

WASHINGTON DC (Routers) President Truman, just a few months into his young presidency, is coming under increasing fire from some Congressional Republicans for what appears to be a deteriorating security situation in occupied Germany, with some calling for his removal from office.

Over three months after a formal declaration of an end to hostilities, the occupation is bogged down. Fanatical elements of the former Nazi regime who, in their zeal to liberate their nation from the foreign occupiers, call themselves members of the Werwolf (werewolves) continue to commit almost-daily acts of sabotage against Germany's already-ravaged infrastructure, and attack American troops. They have been laying road mines, poisoning food and water supplies, and setting various traps, often lethal, for the occupying forces. …

Here's the problem I have with what Sailer said: there is no evidence that Rice, Rumsfeld, or anyone else in the administration took what Simberg wrote literally. For starters, on his blog, the news agency is "Routers" not "Reuters." Moreover, when Fox News published the piece it was offered with the following preamble:

If today's journalists were sent back in time to cover World War II, a Reuter's dispatch dated Aug. 12, 1945, might look something like this:

I don't agree with Simberg's take on the situation, but it's pretty clear that he is making a point about the media and political environment in 2003. Moreover, it's clear that Simberg was hardly original in trying to link post-war Germany with post-war Iraq. Simberg says:

There was plenty of discussion of the Werwolf at the Command Post and other sites before I wrote my piece (and in fact, such discussions were what partially inspired the piece). We know that CNN and Fox were monitoring that site, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if the White House and Security Council were as well. There's no reason to think that my piece was the only, or even the first time that they had heard of the situation in the ex-Third Reich.

I'm not attacking Simberg as a plagiarist, I'm just saying that he wasn't the first person to publicly compare the two situations. It should have been immediately obvious that the comparison was badly flawed, but then again, Simberg is not a historian. And it is admittedly much easier to see just how wrong the comparison was now that another four years have passed.

I hold Rice and Rumsfeld to higher standards of truthiness than Simberg. Not only should they have known more about World War II history, they probably actually did, and they certainly knew enough about what was happening on the ground in Iraq to know their historical analogy was false.

Simberg's blog posting was not the only potential source of the Rice-Rumsfeld distortion. Given the availability -- at an earlier date -- of many similar such theories, there is no particular reason to believe that Simberg is the root of what Rice and Rumsfeld said. As even Sailer admits:

We don't know for sure that this influenced Rice and Rumsfeld, but it's the likeliest source I've heard of.

So after several hundred words, Sailer ultimately takes back most of what he has previously written. Yet I wonder how many casual readers will realize that he has taken five steps forward and four steps back?

But, almost like magic, Sailer continues his dissertation as if he had never taken those four steps backwards, asking what he now offers as the central question:

Now, Rice is supposed to be an academic expert on the Soviet Union, so the history of Central Europe in 1945-47 shouldn't be such terra incognita to her. (And Rumsfeld, who was born in 1932, is old enough to know better.)  So, why were they so credulous (besides, of course, wanting this to be true to make their policy look less disastrous)?

Even if you hadn't taken the time to research Sailer's initial claim that Simberg's piece informed Rice's and Rumsfeld's speeches, alarm bells should be going off. First, Sailer claims that Rice and Rumsfeld's statements were based on a "misreading" of Simberg. Second, Sailer admits that he doesn't know if his first claim is true. Next, he wonders why they would have ever believed that you could draw a parallel between WWII and the war in Iraq.

But he never addresses the question of whether Rice and Rumsfeld actually believed what they were saying. Given the tendency of political figures to optimize for winning arguments rather pursuing truth, I would not by default assume that when a political figure says something that he or she believes it. While it's almost always true that they believe that what they are saying will help them get what they want, that does not mean that they believe that what they are saying is true.

But if he hasn't lost you so far, here's where Sailer really goes off the deep end:

As usual, I see an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities as a source of ignorance among decision-makers. One of the basic generalizations that anybody who looks around at the real world with open eyes quickly comes up with is the reverse correlation between organized violence and disorganized violence. Groups that are competent at organized violence in wartime, such as the Germans and Japanese, tend to be orderly during peacetime. And groups that tend to be anarchic during peacetime also tend to be incompetent at organized violence during wartime, with the Iraqis being perhaps the most notorious example of this.

There are many exceptions to this, but it's still one of the most obvious patterns in 20th Century history. However, if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy.

So, to recap, Sailer is arguing that:

1. Rice and Rumsfeld's speechwriters saw a satirical blog posting comparing post-war Germany and post-war Iraq and used a clearly ahistorical news article intended to parody today's media and politicians as their primary source material.
2. He might be wrong about #1. (Sailer is wrong; he fails to mention that even the blog's author notes he was inspired by other sources.)
3. Rice and Rumsfeld actually believe what their speechwriters wrote, even though they should know better.
4. The reason why they believe what they said is "an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities."

Ultimately, Sailer's article is another bizarrely constructed defense of what I'll call his "ostrich theory" that "if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy." When he says "morally opposed to noticing patterns" he means patterns about race and ethnicity, which he generally believes are rooted in genetics, or what he calls "biodiversity."

In this case, he builds support for his "ostrich theory" with casual disregard for the evidence and with giant leaps of faith. Normally, the targets of his scorn are white liberals, but this article is sort of an equal opportunity smear. It's quite ironic then that Slate provided one of the very first critiques of Rice and Rumsfeld. Perhaps more ironic is that the Washington Times, a conservative paper that is the antithesis of Sailer's hated New York Times, provided a defense of Rice's comments:

"SS officers called werewolves engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today's Ba'athist and Fedayeen remnants" in post-Saddam Iraq, Miss Rice told a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in San Antonio last month.

Historians point out, however, that the Nazi Secret Service officially disbanded the werewolves shortly before Germany surrendered.

Nevertheless, other radicals who viewed Adolf Hitler as a martyr — many of them associated with the Hitler Youth — continued to call themselves "werewolves" and engaged in violence up to a year after the war ended.

The werewolves were blamed for the assassination of the mayor of Aachen, Germany, in May 1945.

So if we are going to take Sailer's argument seriously -- and I don't think we should -- then I guess we have to conclude that conservatives are too focused on being political correct. After all, its liberals who were the leading forces in debunking Rice and Rumsfeld. Meanwhile, conservative voices supported them.

The level of absurdity to which this line of thinking must descend captures the essence of Steve Sailer's thinking. Despite his excellent rhetorical skills, he's not the greatest analyst, and all too often it turns out that things that he thinks facts are in fact false, and things that he thinks are logical are in fact illogical.

It's hard to take Sailer, who has an obvious chip on his shoulder, terribly seriously. If it weren't for the fact that so many people do take the time to read what he has to say, I'd find it hard not chuckle while reading him. (Actually, he still makes me laugh, I just can't help it.)

Sailer is the type of guy who many will simply dismiss as a racist nut and move on. But even though I disagree with his views on race, I wouldn't put him in the same category as David Duke. At the very least, Sailer is much smarter than racists like Duke. And although Sailer has occasionally voiced opinions that even commentators from the National Review say are disgusting, his rhetoric is normally quite disarming, and to the casual conservative reader, probably quite convincing. Hopefully, any of Sailer's fans who have made their way all the way through this long blog post will be better equipped to analyze what he says -- and the mistakes he is likely to make -- when they read him next.

Thank dear leader that we're keeping people like this out of our country:

Born in Hungary to Jewish parents as the Nazis were rising to power, Feldmar was hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust when he was three years old, after his parents were condemned to Auschwitz. Miraculously, his parents both returned alive and in 1945 Hungary was liberated by the Russian army. Feldmar escaped from communist Hungary in 1956 when he was 16 and immigrated to Canada. He has been married to Meredith Feldmar, an artist, for 37 years, and they live in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33, who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for work and to see his family five or six times a year. He has worked for the UN, in Sarajevo and in Minsk with Chernobyl victims.

It's even better that we're keeping the ideologically unpure away from our precious minds:

'Ideological exclusion provision'

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

I am just so proud of our nation, finally showing the courage to stand up for what we really believe in after having been forced to live through so many years of tyrannical notions of freedom and limited government.

Thank heavens that the media and our politicians have finally kicked into high gear to protect us from crazed rampaging killers. From the New York Times:

Virginia Ends a Loophole in Gun Laws

By IAN URBINA
Published: May 1, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 30 — Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia closed a loophole Monday in the state’s gun laws that allowed a mentally disturbed Virginia Tech student to buy the guns used in a shooting rampage that left 33 dead at the university on April 16.

And this weekend, 60 Minutes aired a story hammering home the point that there are 2.7 million people with mental illnesses who should not be allowed to buy guns. Hooray for 60 Minutes bravely tackling an issue that only a media whore desperate for ratings would dare touch! But I have to admit that I grew a bit concerned about the merits of their story when I noticed that the 2.7 million statistic came from a New York Times article published seven years ago. That's right, the cracker jack fact checkers at 60 Minutes are using data that is (technically speaking) from the last millennium.

The article that CBS cribbed its facts from was part of a multi-part series on rampage killers. From the article:

That is the profile of the 102 killers in 100 rampage attacks examined by The New York Times in a computer-assisted study looking back more than 50 years and including the shootings in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.,  and one by a World War II veteran on a residential street in Camden, N.J., in 1949. Four hundred twenty-five people were killed and  510 people were injured in the attacks. The database, which primarily focused on cases in the last decade, is believed to be the largest ever compiled on this phenomenon in the United States.

Though the attacks are rare when compared with other American murders, they  have provoked an intense national discussion about crime, education and American culture. The Times found, however, that the debate may have largely overlooked a critical issue: At least half of the killers showed signs of serious mental health problems.

If you detect a tinge of glibness in my tone, please understand that it is directed at the media and politicians. These rampage killings, including the recent one at Virginia Tech, are all horrible tragedies, and no one can ever minimize their impact. But the extent to which the mass media and politicians are now obsessing over preventing another such tragedy completely misses how these killings fit into the larger picture of intentional killing in the United States, including both homicide and suicide.

From 1976 to 2004, there were over 550,000 murders in the United States. 96.4% of those victims were killed in single-victim homicides. In other words, only 3.6% of all homicide victims were killed along with one or more other victims. And 83.6% of those victims were killed in slayings with just two victims. In fact, only 0.6% of all murder victims were killed in incidents with three more more victims. And of the 552,156 murders during that time period, just 384 occurred in incidents with 5 or more victims. I didn't learn how to compute percentages that small during my time in college, but I'm pretty sure it would be a minuscule one.

The media has spent a great deal of time focusing on the need for the government to protect "us" from "them" (the mentally ill). Clearly, the threat of random rampage killings from mentally ill people is extremely small by any standard when you look at the larger picture.

For example, from 1976-2004, 64,329 people were killed by intimates (spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends). 63.5% of those victims were female. You were 132 times more likely to be killed by your current or former husband, wife, girlfriend, or boyfriend than in a rampage killing!

But as long as the media is going to discuss the dangerous nexus of mental illness and violence, why don't they talk more about suicide? Suicide is, after all, twice as common as homicide. Heck, statistically speaking, you were more than 2,300x more likely to kill yourself than to be killed in a rampage killing with five more victims! Roughly two-thirds of all intentional deaths in the United States are suicides, and the overwhelming majority of suicide victims are male with white men having by far the highest suicide rate of any demographic group.

From 2001 to 2004 alone, more than 100,000 people committed suicide. In fact, more college students around the country have already killed themselves since the massacre at Virginia Tech than were actually killed on that horrible day.

One fact that is obvious is that the most effective weapon used in suicide is a gun. 86% of self-harm cases involving a gun are fatal. Just 5% of self-harm incidents not involving a gun are fatal. It's no surprise that 54% of all suicides involve a gun.

Although I'm not in favor of draconian gun bans, I do think it's reasonable to have discussions about what kinds of gun policies we should have in this country. It seems quite likely that sensible improvements in our laws can save lives. Probably even more important is educating people about the risks involved with gun ownership, particularly in households with an occupant at risk of suicide. But most clear of all is that the media's obsession with Virginia Tech has almost nothing to do with solving real problems facing our nation. To put it in statistical terms, when it comes to gun violence and mental illness, they are spending 95% of their time talking about 0.6% (or less) of the problem. But as long as more people are watching their broadcasts, they can charge more for advertising, and at the end of the day, that's all they really care about.