Lies, damned lies and the Daily Kos poll

Back in February, when Daily Kos released a poll showing that nearly a quarter of all Republicans believe their state should secede from the Union, I scoffed:

I’m no expert on polling, but: nearly a quarter of Republicans think their state should secede from the Union?* Really? Something doesn’t add up here. It makes for a rather convenient narrative from a liberal-Democratic point of view, but is it actually true? Sorry, but I can’t imagine that it is. And if that’s not true, then the rest of the poll results are questionable, to say the least. I’d like to believe the GOP is this crazy, but I don’t.

Turns out I was right:

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas announced today he will file a lawsuit against MD-based pollster Research 2000, alleging that polls Research 2000 was conducting for the liberal blog were fabricated.

Moulitsas today published a report by three readers he describes as "statistics wizards" that he says shows "quite convincingly" that Research 2000 was manufacturing the results of weekly national polls.

"Based on the report of the statisticians, it's clear that we did not get what we paid for," Moulitsas wrote on his website today.

"We were defrauded by Research 2000, and while we don't know if some or all of the data was fabricated or manipulated beyond recognition, we know we can't trust it. Meanwhile, Research 2000 has refused to offer any explanation."

As I said in February: Beware polls that too neatly confirm your biases. I knew that. It's too bad that Kos didn't.

Those out-of-touch elitists at the New York Times don't know a 'Blazing Saddles' reference when they hear one

In a story about RNC chief Michael Steele's visit to San Francisco, reporter Jesse McKinley offered up this quote-and-observation about Steele:

And, of course, he quoted Cole Porter. Sort of.

“It’s time to let you do that voodoo that you do very, very well,” he said.

It's true that those lyrics originated in the Cole Porter song "You Do Something To Me." But seriously: Almost every American male under the age of, oh, 50, probably knows the line a little better from this.

One more thought about the Weekly Standard piece about Tea Parties

One has to give credit to Matthew Continetti for appraising Glenn Beck's ideas thusly:

This is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin. The philosophical foundations of progressivism may be wrong. The policies that progressivism generates may be counterproductive. Its view of the Constitution may betray the Founders’. Nevertheless, progressivism is a distinctly American tradition that partly came into being as a way to prevent ideologies like communism and fascism from taking root in the United States. And not even the stupidest American liberal shares the morality of the totalitarian monsters whom Beck analogizes to American politics so flippantly.

Maybe there's hope for rational civic dialogue, yet.

Tea Partiers look just like America. Except they're richer.

Matthew Continetti's piece about the Tea Party movement replays -- like so many similar pieces before it -- Rick Santelli's famous CNBC rant from 2009. But this quote leaped out at me like it hadn't before:

In Santelli’s opinion, American elites had neglected the people surrounding him, the commodities traders who made up “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority.

We already know that Tea Partiers are wealthier than most Americans, but it's worth pointing out that the median income for a commodities trader in 2008 was $68,680. The median household income nationally the same year was $52,029.

Now: $68,000 a year doesn't put silver spoons in your mouth. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with having a good income. But the Tea Partiers aren't a "good statistical cross-section of America" -- and the commodities traders who surrounded Santelli that day aren't either. Let's not pretend otherwise.

The myth of liberals hating Sarah Palin's motherhood

At the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker repeats a bit of business that I see often on the right, but have never seen much evidence for:

The reason Palin so upsets the pro-choice brigade is because she seems so content with her lot and her brood. One can find other reasons to think Palin shouldn't be president, but being a pro-life woman shouldn't be one of them.

The idea is that Sarah Palin's fecundity -- particularly with regards to Trig, her special needs child -- is part of what makes her an object of particular scorn on the left. But -- the fevered speculations of Andrew Sullivan aside -- where's the evidence for this charge? I've never seen anybody say: "I'd like Sarah Palin ... but damnit, she's given birth waaaaay too often." I think conservatives have convinced themselves that the liberal contempt for Palin is born out of hoity toity cultural snobbishness. But it's not.

Guess what? Liberals have kids too. Maybe not as often as conservatives. But still.

There are lots of reasons I dislike Sarah Palin's presence in public life, but her motherhood choices have no bearing on them. There's her aura of perpetual grievance. There was her manifest lack of preparation for the job she sought at John McCain's side in 2008. There's her origin of the "death panels" myth during the health care debate -- which revealed her to be either deeply misinformed or incredibly cynical. I could go on ... but honestly, I don't need to. It's going to be a weird universe the day I ever cast a vote for Sarah Palin.

Like I said, her motherhood has no bearing on my dislike of Palin. Except in one sense: I kind of dislike how she and some conservatives think her motherhood is a reason liberals don't like her. That's kind of irritating.

The Weekly Standard doesn't think BP loves oil nearly enough.

If you read this Weekly Standard article, you might think it a shocking expose -- shocking, because it's in the Weekly Standard -- of BP's longstanding laxness with regards to safety issues. But what develops is something else entirely: An exercise in schadenfreude that a company that tried so hard to brand itself as "green" has enmeshed itself in one of history's more notorious environmental disasters.

The game is given away when describing Oberon Houston, an engineer who left the company a few years back after narrowly avoiding death on a BP rig. Andrew Wilson's article presents a litany of safety-related reasons for Houston's departure, but tacks this on:

And finally, he told me over the course of several interviews, he was distressed by an abundance of rhetoric—coming from the CEO—about BP going “beyond petroleum” and joining the environmental activists in campaigning for reduced carbon emissions. “To me and everyone I knew, it didn’t make any sense. We were a petroleum company. That wasn’t going to change any time soon, and it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, either. All the talk about windmills and solar power was just PR and a lot of nonsense.”

In short, Houston no longer trusted the company to do the right thing.

The article hints that BP's "greenwashing" campaign is linked to its atrocious safety practices, but never really makes the case. (And couldn't, unless BP's PR department ran the company's maintenance operations.) Instead, what the piece reveals is the extent to which "oil now! oil forever!" might be more deeply embedded in conservative ideology than actual free-market capitalism. It seems not to matter that BP undertook its environmentally friendly push in order to sell more oil; all that matters -- and is worthy of contempt -- is that BP paid any deference at all, even rhetorically, to the environmental movement. That is the sin that cannot be forgiven. At least, not now that BP's sins can be hung on a Democratic president.

Late in the piece, Wilson mocks BP for paying scientists at Berkeley to research energy alternatives:

Thanks to BP sponsorship, 300 researchers in white lab coats at Berkeley are busily searching for ways to make green fuels that will reduce our dependence on oil. In 2007, BP set up the Energy Biosciences Institute, saying it would spend $500 million over the next ten years to support research into plant-based fuels at Berkeley and two other universities. This is the largest corporate donation ever for university research.

Broken down, though, that amounts to $12.5 million per quarter over the next 10 years -- barely a dent in the company's earnings. Even then, it doesn't seem to occur to Wilson that an energy company might consider the cost a prudent bit of R&D -- if not for a post-oil future, then at least to cater to the segment of the market that would rather avoid oil.

Like I said, though, market considerations don't really matter here. Any acknowledgement that massive oil consumption might have a downside, or that alternative energy sources might even be possible or even necessary, is heresy. Conservatives pride themselves on their realism about oil: It's cheap and it's available and we're not going to abandon it because of those qualities. There's something to that argument. But the contempt for BP -- as revealed in the Weekly Standard -- reveals that there's more than admirable realism at work here. It's calcified, closed-minded ideology.

The Nook and Kindle drop below $200

So sayeth the New York Times. And that sounds like great news -- I have the Kindle and Nook apps for both my iPhone and my netbook; I'd really love to own a dedicated e-reader. On the other hand: If the price is coming down this much, this quickly, does that mean dedicated e-readers are about to become extinct? Choices, choices.