Month: August 2012

Vote stealing in Wisconsin

Asked commenter Maggie M. to clarify something a while back, and she did so, offering this which stands by itself and explains itself.  Make it by Maggie and me; I couldn’t resist adding here and there:

 I’d like to know what the real election results are minus the fraud that the Democrats have perfected over the decades.

For instance, Bush lost Wisconsin in 2000 by 10,000 votes — they have same-day registration, where you can present any kind of bill for an address and get registered; it was reported that college kids were being bussed around to vote multiple times.  ACORN had been registering phony names, etc. 
 
2008 At least 33,000 ACORN-submitted registrations in Milwaukee have been called into question after it was found that the organizations had been using felons as registration workers, in violation of state election rules. Two people involved in the ongoing Wisconsin voter fraud investigation have been charged with felonies.
 
2004 The district attorney’s office investigated seven voter registration applications Project Vote employees filed in the names of people who said the group never contacted them. Former Project Vote employee Robert Marquise Blakely told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had not met with any of the people whose voter registration applications he signed, “an apparent violation of state law,” according to the paper.
As we heard and read during the recall, the Racine County vote was filled with enormous discrepancies.
 
Wisconsin passed a Voter ID law in 2010 to go into effect for the 2012 election.  A [Democrat-led] Dane County Circuit Court judge has blocked the law and will not bring it up for judicial review until after the Nov. election.  [italics added]
 
So much for knowing the will of the people.
Thank you, Margaret.

Chickens home to roost on new religious egg

What we have here is the start of a new state religion, replete with doctrinal imperatives:

Dogma #1: A woman has the right, the unrestricted right, to make arrangements for the killing of her unborn child whenever such course of action is convenient. [I would add that abortion thereby becomes a sacrament.  Shades of Moloch.]

The others have to do with:

social recognition for romantic attraction . . . the people’s hero, Barack Hussein [as sovereign pontiff] . . . Christian faith [and especially the] Catholic Church [as new prime enemy] . . .

It’s from a St. Paul MN pastor.

 

Was Romney jiving us, as Obama said?

On July 17 in Cincinnati, Obama took as a talking point, without denying it had been said, the question of Romney as felon, offering in the process a malapropism of some magnitude:

When asked whether he thought Romney’s actions were criminal as a top aide implied a few days earlier, the president steered away. “I think that the issue here is simply for Mr. Romney to talk about his business background in a way that jives with the facts,” he said. [italics added]

Jibes.

Moreover, discussing in this interview what makes the economy work, he opposes Romney for saying if big investors do well, everyone does well, offering his position that if middle class does well, everybody does well — probably a fair capsule statement of supply-side vs. consumption-side economics. 

Question is, however, what makes middle class do well?

The Sgt. Friday approach to knowing things

Have been wondering about fact-checking operations, which claim to have the strict facts when it’s often a matter of argument threads, as opposed to spelling a name or getting a date right — except, of course, when there’s argument about a name or a date. 

Hence, I much support this from Red Statesman Erick E. in piece about Rep. Todd Akin’s rape comments.  (And is E.E. sure about spelling of his first name?) 

Erick (sp?):

Politifact disagrees with the statement about Obama and infanticide, but as is often the case, Politifact is obfuscating what Barack Obama said to help a Democrat. Politifact is, after all, the Walter Duranty of fact checkers complete with a Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, and would Sun-Timeswoman Lynn Sweet, recommender of Politifact, take note?  Thank you, Lynn.  And Lynn, please broaden your list of resources.  Better recommend rabid promoters pro and con any position, keeping in mind Norman Mailer’s comment to Chicago 7 judge Julius Hoffman many years ago, “But Your Honor, facts without nuance are nothing.”  

Another point, Hegel, and Plato long before him, had it right about dialectics.  It’s a jungle out there, full of charges and counter-charges.  You have to be good at sifting things.  These fact-checkers claim a lot for themselves but sometimes offer a cookbook approach, comforting to some, indeed a naive approach. 

What we have here is a problem of communication, true, but more specifically one of epistemology. 

Think about it.

Argument detective caught in act

Faulty principle proposed by faulty-argument detective:

. . . why does the rarity of the issue have any sway in this debate? Especially when we’re talking about rape victims? Your justification for controversial action should not be: “Well, it only affects a very small minority of the population.” Instead, you should stop dodging the question and give a firm answer with rationale justification. Otherwise you are just using extremely faulty logic which shouldn’t be taken seriously . . .

Rarity-sway matters often, as when rarity-threatened public funds are allocated to prevent occurrences of a problem or even to remedy effects of bad thing.  Which is where big problems deserve more attention.

It’s a public-policy question that should not be dodged.

Chi Trib, please, be clear about the Servites

You’re a Chicago reader.  You’re a Catholic.  You have some idea of who’s who among priests and nuns.  You think Chi Trib does its homework when it prints a story.  Well not always!!!

Story today about mail theft of donations, a dastardly act that does more than steal money.  It steals trust in the U.S. Postal Service, one of the pillars of society. 

But what of the newspaper that leads off with “The letters to the Servants of Mary were mailed from across the country” by which it means “the Servites, headquartered . . . at Our Lady of the [sic] Sorrows Basilica.”  The Sorrows?  It’s not how people talk!

Reporter is Annie Sweeney, who’s not a new arrival in town, as are not the copy deskers at her newspaper.  It’s been many years since Ed Eulenberg of Chi Daily News chewed me out for getting a standard Jewish term wrong in a story — and he the cheeriest and gentlest of men.  Time was . . .

Anyhow, in this case, we have Servite sisters, headquartered in Ladysmith,Wisconsin, who are called Servants of Mary, and Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, Kansas City-based, founded in 1851 in Madrid, Spain.

Just a bit of Internet searching turns them up.  It’s easier than finding lost mail, that’s for sure.

A mere bagatelle for smutty Tribune

Trib writers Rick Pearson and Monique Garcia having fun in story about Gov. Quinn and pension reform:

Back in the 1970s, Quinn was a populist organizer known for launching petition drives to cut the size of the Legislature and starting tea-bag protests over legislative pay.

And:

Perhaps in an era of tea party politics helping to drive Republicans in the national debate over the size and cost of government, the Democratic governor and his tea-bag protests may be back in vogue after all.

Urban dictionary definitions?

Tea bag:

(v). To lower your body as to dip the testicles into her mouth as the woman is tonguing the scrotum.
And:
(n. or v.) To place testicles in someone’s mouth and proceed in a up and down motion.
And:
Placing your testes inside someones mouth and raising and lowering them to look like you are making tea.
As in:
I proceded to tea bag the homeless man.
Enough.  You get the idea.  Nice going, Chicago Tribune.

How to be a great anything

First, consider what great ones do. For instance:

Flannery O’Connor wrote: “Vocation implies limitation.”  In other words, if you want to be good at something, there are other things that you have to give up.  You can’t have it all, unless you want to be average or mediocre at everything you do.  O’Connor wanted to be a great writer, so after morning Mass and breakfast, she spent the next three hours of every day, writing, with no interruptions.  She said “no” to appointments, to visits, and even to reading before lunchtime, so that she could devote her entire self to writing, in order to become a great writer.  It worked.

Limit yourself.  You can neither be nor have everything.

Illinois issues, please, front and center

This is good reporting of Gov. Quinn’s bad day at the fair on Wednesday, but the lede is in the middle, I think.  Namely:

“I inherited a lot of problems that I didn’t create, but I’m here to repair and resolve them, reform them. And there may be some people perhaps in this audience even who aren’t pleased with some of those decisions, but I want to ask the people of Illinois today: Do you think it’s right that in 1992, some state worker who retired on a $60,000 pension — that’s 1992 and a $60,000 pension — that 20 years later, under the current pension rules that need to be reformed, that very same person is getting $120,000 from the taxpayers?

“I think most taxpayers and parents in Illinois, particularly those who are concerned about education, want to make sure we invest more money in education of our children and our students in Illinois than we put into the pension piggyback for retired state workers,” he said.

To be followed by an adaptation of the actual lede, noting that what he said was rendered inaudible to his live audience by the heckling and available only later only to sound-feed recipients among the press:

Union members heckled him while he ate his State Fair favorite for lunch: pork on a stick. A plane flew overhead towing a banner blasting him as anti-worker. A labor leader was stumped on whether he was a better governor than the disgraced Rod Blagojevich.

My lede would have put focus on issues rather than (in this case) bully-boy and -girl tactics by public-employee unions AFSCME, teachers’ Ill. Ed. Assn., state AFL-CIO, and others — which I find disgusting, but that’s another matter.

To get it straight, go to some other paper, says Sweet of Sun-Times

Lynn Sweet bemoaned dirty campaigning yesterday, offering odd advice to her readers: Go somewhere else to get things straight!

I am imploring you in the months ahead to do some homework. Do some reading up on what’s at issue in the now red-hot future-of-Medicare debate — and not on websites that masquerade as nonpartisan.

For starters, the folks at two independent fact-check operations — the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact.org and FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center — sort out the political debate in thoughtful and simple language, and they have the guts to make the call.

Why wouldn’t she recommend her own newspaper, the Sun-Times?