Obama’s well-qualified cabinet: Conservatives hoaxed by “J. P. Morgan” chart that verifies prejudices

November 26, 2009

Barack Obama’s cabinet is highly qualified on almost every score.  It’s the first cabinet to feature someone who has already received a Nobel prize in the field (Teddy Roosevelt as head of his own cabinet excepted).  Obama pulled highly qualified people from a lot of important positions, from both major parties, and from across the nation.

Conservatives, religiously believing Obama’s administration cannot be allowed to succeed, erupted in bluster this past week when a chart mysteriously cited to an unfound (by me) “J. P. Morgan study” claimed Obama’s cabinet has less that 10% who have private sector experience.  [See updates at bottom of post.]

“No business people!” the bloggers splutter.  “However can the government function?”

Chart claiming to be from J. P. Morgan, hoaxing experience of Obama cabinet, underestimating by 7 times

Chart claimed by American Enterprise Institute to be from J. P. Morgan, hoaxing experience data of Obama cabinet, underestimating by 700%

Gullibles rarely ask good questions, so we don’t need to bother with an answer to the question, if it’s a stupid question.  And in order to determine whether it’s a stupid question, we ought to ask whether the chart has any resemblance to reality.

According to the White House website:

The Cabinet includes the Vice President and the heads of 15 executive departments — the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Attorney General.

Six others have “cabinet-rank” status:  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, OMB Director Peter Orzag, U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer.

Vice President, plus 15 executive department heads, plus six others:  22 people.

If only 10% had private sector experience, that would be 2.2 of them.  Each of the 22 people comprises about 4.5% of the cabinet.  Two of them with private experience would be 9% of the cabinet.  Three with private experience would reveal the chart to be in error.  Would it be possible to create a cabinet of 22 people and have only two of them with private experience?

The bullshit detectors in the bloggers’ minds should have been clanging like crazy when they saw that chart.

No one has cited any methodology for the chart, so I figure it was created on a napkin by interns for the American Enterprise Institute at lunch, and it took off before anyone could check the claims made for accuracy.  I’m a bit reluctant to blame it on J. P. Morgan, but maybe AEI can provide the interpleader to pin the blame on that private sector organization — which would be one more demonstration that private sector experience may not be all that AEI tries to crack it up to be.  Before counting, I guessed that Obama’s cabinet has more like 50% with private sector experience; it turns out to be more like 80%.  So the question now becomes, how and why did the chart originator discount real private-sector experience?

The “J. P. Morgan” chart from AEI is a hoax.  Here’s the cabinet, listed in succession order, with their private sector experience; members were listed from the White House website; biographical data were taken from Wikipedia, supplemented by official departmental biographies:

  • Vice President Joe Biden – Private experience:  Yes.  4.5% of the cabinet.  Biden’s father worked in the private sector his entire life — unsuccessfully for a critical period.  Biden attended a private university’s law school (Syracuse), and operated a successful-because-of-property-management law practice for three years before winning election to the U.S. Senate.  (I regard a campaign as a private business, too — and Biden’s first campaign was masterful entrepreneurship.)
  • Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton – Private experience:  Yes, significant.  9% of the cabinet.  Extremely successful private practice lawyer in Arkansas for the Rose Law Firm, one of the “Top 100 Lawyers” in a classically dog-eat-dog business.
  • Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner – Private experience:  Yes, significant.  13.6% of the cabinet (The chart’s error is established in the first three people checked — surely no one bothered to make a serious count of the cabinet in compiling the chart.) Geithner traveled with world with his Ford Foundation-employed father.  He graduated from private universities, with an A.B. from Dartmouth and an M.A. in economics from Johns Hopkins.  Starting his career, he worked three years in the private sector with Kissinger Associates.  After significant positions at Treasury and State Departments, he again ventured into the private sector with the Council on Foreign Relations; from there he moved to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — in what is at worst a semi-public organization.  Running a Federal Reserve Branch is among the most intensive jobs one can have in private sector economics and management.   If an analyst at a bank named after J. P. Morgan didn’t understand that, one wonders just what the person does understand.
  • Secretary of Defense Robert Gates – Private sector experience:  Yes, at high levels.  18% of the cabinet.  Bob Gates spent a career with the Central Intelligence Agency, finally as Director of Central Intelligence, an executive level position with no equal in private enterprise.  He retired in 1993, and then worked in a variety of university positions, and joined several different corporate boards; in 1999 he was appointed interim Dean of the George W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, and was appointed President of Texas A&M in 2002, where he served until his appointment as Secretary of Defense in 2006.
  • Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr – Private sector experience:  Yes, significant.  23% of the cabinet, total.  After a sterling career in the Justice Department, as a Ronald Reagan appointment to be a federal judge, as a U.S. Attorney, and again at the Justice Department, Holder spent eight years representing high profile private clients at Covington  &  Burling in Washington, D.C.  His clients included the National Football League, the giant pharmaceutical company Merck, and Chiquita Brands, a U.S. company with extensive international business.
  • Secretary of Interior Kenneth L. Salazar – Private sector experience: Yes.  27% of Obama cabinet.  Besides a distinguished career in government, as advisor and Cabinet Member with Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, Salazar was a successful private-practice attorney from 1981 to 1985, and then again from 1994 to 1998 when he won election as Colorado’s Attorney General.  As Senator, Salazar maintained a good voting record for a Republican business-supporting senator; Salazar is a Democrat.  Salazar’s family is in ranching, and he is usually listed as a “rancher from Colorado,” with life experience in the ranching business at least equal to that of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner.
  • Secretary of Agriculture Thomas J. Vilsack – Private sector experience:  Yes, significant.  32% of Obama cabinet.  Vilsack spent 23 years in private practice as an attorney, 1975 to 1998, while holding not-full-time elective offices such as mayor and state representative.  He joined government as Governor of Iowa in 1998, and except for two years, has been in employed in government since then.
  • Secretary of Commerce Gary F. Locke – Private sector experience:  Yes, significant.  36% of Obama cabinet.  As near as I can determine, Locke was in private law practice from 1975 through his election as Executive in King County in 1993 (is that a full-time position?).  He was elected Governor of Washington in 1996.  After leaving office in 2005, he again worked in private practice with Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP, until 2009.  22 years in private practice, three years as Executive of King County, eight years as Governor of Washington.
  • Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis – Private sector experience:  Yes, but I consider it insignificant.  36% of Obama cabinet with private sector experience, 4.5% without.  Solis’s father was a Teamster and union organizer who contracted lead poisoning on the job; her mother was an assembly line worker for Mattel Toys.  She overachieved in high school and ignored her counselor’s advice to avoid college, and earned degrees from Cal Poly-Pomona and USC.  She held a variety of posts in federal government before returning to California to work for education and win election to the California House and California Senate, and then to Congress.
  • Secretary of  Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius – Private sector experience:  Yes, significant.  41% of Obama cabinet with private sector experience, 4.5% without.  Former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius worked in the private sector for 12 years, at least nine years as director and lobbyist for the Kansas Association for Justice (then Kansas Trial Lawyers Association).  One might understand why the American Enterprise Institute would not count as “business experience” a career built on reining in insurance companies, as Sebelius did as a lobbyist and then elected Kansas Insurance Commissioner.
  • Secretary of  Housing and Urban Development Shaun L.S. Donovan – Private sector experience:  Yes, only 4 years, but significant because it bugs AEI analysts so much.  45% of cabinet with private sector experience, 4.5% without.  With multiple degrees from Harvard University in architecture and public administration, Donovan was Deputy Assistant Secretary of HUD for Multifamily Housing during the Clinton Administration; and he was Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).  In the private sector, he worked for the Community Preservation Corporation, a non-profit in New York City, and he worked for a while finding sources to lend to people to buy “affordable housing” in the city, a task perhaps equal to wringing blood from a block of granite.
  • Secretary of  Transportation Raymond L. LaHood – Private sector experience:  No (not significant); school teacher at Holy Family School in Peoria, Illinois.  [As a teacher, I’m not sure that teaching should count as government experience, but it’s not really private sector stuff, either.  Education isn’t as wasteful as for-profit groups.]  45% of cabinet with private sector experience, 9% without.  Ironically, it is the Republican former Representative who pulls down the private sector experience percentage in the Obama cabinet.
  • Secretary of Energy Steven Chu – Private sector experience:  Yes, extremely significant.  50% of cabinet with private sector experience, 9% without.  Chu worked at Bell Labs, where he and his several co-workers carried out his Nobel Prize-winning laser cooling work, from 1978 to 1987.  Having won a Nobel for private sector work, I think we can count his private sector experience as important.  Chu also headed the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is seeded by a government contract to a university but must operate as a very highly-regulated business.  (I’ll wager Chu is counted as “no private sector experience,” which demonstrates the poverty of methodology of the so-called “J. P. Morgan” study AEI claims.)
  • Secretary of Education Arne Duncan – Private sector experience:  Yes, significant.  55% of cabinet with private sector experience, 9% without.  Duncan earned Academic All-American honors in basketball at Harvard.  His private sector is among the more unusual of any cabinet member’s, and more competitive.  Duncan played professional basketball: “From 1987 to 1991, Duncan played professional basketball in Australia with the Eastside Spectres of the [Australian] National Basketball League, and while there, worked with children who were wards of the state. He also played with the Rhode Island Gulls and tried out for the New Jersey Jammers.”  Since leaving basketball he’s worked in education, about four years in a private company aiming to improve education.
  • Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki – Private sector experience:  Yes, but to give AEI and “Morgan” a chance, we won’t count it.  55% of cabinet with private sector experience, 13.6% without.  Shinseki is a retired, four-star general in the army, a former Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  While Shinseki served on the boards of a half-dozen corporations, all of that service was in the six years between his official retirement and his appointment as Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
  • Secretary of Homeland Security Janet A. Napolitano – Private sector experience:  Yes, significant.  59% of cabinet with private sector experience, 13.6% without.  After a brilliant turn in law school at the University of Virginia, and a clerking appointment with a federal judge, Napolitano joined the distinguished Phoenix firm Lewis & Roca, where she practiced privately for nine years before Bill Clinton appointed her U.S. Attorney for Arizona.  AEI probably doesn’t want to count her private sector experience because, among other irritations to them, she was the attorney-advisor to Prof. Anita Hill during her questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the issue of Clarence Thomas’s nomination to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
  • White House Chief of Staff Rahm I. Emanuel – Private sector experience:  Yes, significant.  64% of cabinet with private sector experience, 13.6% without.  Emanuel’s major private sector experience is short, but spectacular.  “After serving as an advisor to Bill Clinton, in 1998 Emanuel resigned from his position in the Clinton administration and became an investment banker at Wasserstein Perella (now Dresdner Kleinwort), where he worked until 2002. In 1999, he became a managing director at the firm’s Chicago office. Emanuel made $16.2 million in his two-and-a-half-year stint as a banker, according to Congressional disclosures. At Wasserstein Perella, he worked on eight deals, including the acquisition by Commonwealth Edison of Peco Energy and the purchase by GTCR Golder Rauner of the SecurityLink home security unit from SBC Communications.”  J. P. Morgan and AEI wish that Emanuel had not had such smashing success is such a short time.
  • Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson – Private sector experience:  No, significant.  64% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without.  Despite a brilliant career cleaning up environmental messes, with EPA and the New Jersey State government, Jackson has negligible private sector experience.  She was a brilliant student, valedictorian in high school and honors graduate in chemical engineering.
  • Office of Management & Budget Director Peter R. Orszag – Private sector experience:  Yes, short but significant.  68% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without.  Orszag is the youngest member of the cabinet, but he had a brilliant academic career (Princeton, London School for Economics) and a series of tough assignments in the Clinton Administration.  During the Bush years he founded an economic consulting firm, and sold it, and worked with McKinsey and Company, mostly on health care financing (he’s a member of the National Institute of Medicine in the National Academies of Science).
  • U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Ronald Kirk – Private sector experience:  Yes, long and significant.  73% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without.  Son of a postal worker, Ron Kirk used academic achievement to get through law school.  He practiced privately for 13 years, interspersed with a bit of political work, before being appointed Texas Secretary of State in 1994 — the office that most businesses have most of their state regulatory action with.  About a year later he ran for and won election as Mayor of Dallas, considered a major business post in Texas.  Re-elected by a huge margin in 1999, he resigned to run for the U.S. Senate in 2002.  After losing (to John Cornyn), Price took positions with Dallas and then Houston law firms representing big businesses, especially in government arenas.
  • U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice – Private sector experience:  Yes.  77% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without.  Rice was a consultant with McKinsey and Co., sort of the ne plus ultra of private sectorness, for a while before beginning her climb to U.N Ambassador.
  • Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer – Private sector experience:  Yes, but academic.  We won’t count it to make AEI out to be less of a sucker.  77% of cabinet with private sector experience, 23% without significant private sector experience.  Dr. Romer’s chief appointments have been academic, and at a public university, though her education was entirely private.  A specialist in the Great Depression and economic data gathering, she’s highly considered by her colleagues, and is a past-president of the American Economic Association.

All totaled, Obama’s cabinet is one of the certifiably most brainy, most successful and most decorated of any president at any time.  His cabinet brings extensive and extremely successful private sector experience coupled with outstanding and considerable successful experience in government and elective politics.

AEI’s claim that the cabinet lacks private sector experience is astoundingly in error, with 77% of the 22 members showing private sector experience — according to the bizarre chart, putting Obama’s cabinet in the premiere levels of private sector experience.  The chart looks more and more like a hoax that AEI fell sucker to — and so did others (von Mises Institute, Wall Street Blips, League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Volokh Conspiracy, Econlib).

Others bitten by Barnum’s Law:

  • Coyote Blog — stepped right into the punch:  “Ever get that feeling like the Obama White House doesn’t have a clue as to what it takes to actually run a business, make investments, hire people, sell a product, etc?”
  • Say Anthing
  • [Update — when did this guy erupt?] The Daily Mush, mushing the name of the author here, among nearly almost everything else.

Important update:  Thanks to the comment of Jake, below, I found this article in Forbes, by J. P. Morgan Michael Cembalest, chief investment officer for J. P. Morgan. In notes to the article Cembalest reports on his methodology:

A variety of sources were consulted for this analysis, including the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. In the rankings, I did not include prior private-sector experience for the following positions: Postmaster General; Navy; War; Health, Education & Welfare; Veterans Affairs; and Homeland Security. In the rankings, private-sector experience at a law firm counts for a 33% score, which I think is very generous. My wife strongly suggested raising this to 50%, but I refused.

Cembalest doesn’t reveal much.  Does he include all cabinet-level posts outside the few he excluded?  Why did he exclude Navy and War, but not Defense?  Why would he exclude Homeland Security, with such obvious and extensive hits on private enterprise (think airlines and rail and ships)?  If no Homeland Security, why not exclude Transportation, too?

I’m particularly perturbed by his exclusion of lawyers.  If lawyers are excluded, why not investment bankers?  Lawyers are more directly engages in day-to-day competitive enterprise — and certainly most lawyers have more experience in hiring, firing, and as a commenter notes, “product placement” and advertising, than investment bankers.

In the end, Cembalest doesn’t provide enough details of his methdology, but we can see it’s a quick-and-very-dirty count, not much different from a SWAG.  I’m dying to see how Cembalest dealt with Energy Secretary Chu’s winning a Nobel from his work at Bell Labs, a bastion and symbol of private enterprise power and strength — or rather, how I suspect it was discounted in Cembalest’s counting.  And I wonder how his method dealt with the academic careers of George P. Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and the law career of James P. Baker III.  [end of update]

Update #2, March 16, 2010: I failed to post this last fall, for which I owe an apology to you, Dear Reader, and to Michael Cembalest.

About a week after I posted this I got a late afternoon call from Michael Cembalest.  It was a courtesy call.  He said he was striking the chart and the post from his website and recalling the newsletter.  We had a pleasant discussion, he explaining that it was originally, as he had said in Forbes, a Thanksgiving dinner table conversation.  He wrote about it on a slow investment week, meant to be a humorous barb to thought.  The experience and outlook of cabinet secretaries is indeed a good topic of conversation (how different would history have been had Herbert Hoover had anyone other than the filthy rich Andrew Mellon as his Secretary of Treasury, someone who hurt with the Depression and might not have had the personal wealth to survive any downturn no matter how long).  Mr. Cembalest explained that he had intended to count only those secretaries with a dog in the jobs fight — so Sec. of State Clinton wouldn’t count, for example — but he agreed that any methodology should be more clear than he indicated, and not so dodgy as it had become in internet discussions.

At that point, he felt, any serious point was irretrievable.  So he took the post down.

I’ve left this one up because I think it had spread too far by that time to call it back.  See the stories of Mencken’s hoax about putting a bathtub in the White House, and you may understand my reasoning.

Astounding update, July 23, 2010: Neil Boortz spread the hoax on his blog this morning. There is no end to a hoax, once, it’s out of the bag.

Help the truth catch up to the hoax:

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127 Comments | Barack Obama, Business, History, Hoaxes, Politics, President Obama, Presidents | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Mau-mauing the gullibles: Sirkin on DDT (again)

November 26, 2009

The hard core uneducables who make of the hard knot at the center of the anti-science and anti-environmental movement just refuses to jettison their adored myths about science, regardless how many times those myths are shown to be false.

It’s a religious exercise with them, and their faith in error and bad applications of science won’t be shaken.

Have you ever read Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers? Claiming Ruckelshaus an enemy of Africans and Rachel Carson a mass murderer is the new Radical Chic, and constant writing about it the new Mau-mauing.

Natalie Sirkin writes screeds for newspapers in Connecticut, I understand from an odd blog that collects these misdeeds, Don Pesci’s Connecticut Commentary:  Red Notes from a Blue State.

(Pesci has a particular fetish for DDT myths, and Sirkin’s been there, too.  He’s hard-core — no amount of information can sway him.)

Sirkin’s latest screed is “Myths for Fun and Profit,” and includes as one of the myths DDT’s ban in the U.S.  Her complaint is badly worded, but from the brief and grossly wrong explanation, we can see she thinks that DDT shouldn’t have been banned, and that map and calendar challenged, she thinks the ban on using DDT on cotton in the U.S. in 1972 somehow led to a rise in malaria in Africa in the 1980s. (Mosquitoes don’t travel that far, generally, either across the ocean from the U.S. to Africa, nor in time, from 1972 to 1980, nor the other way around.)

Sirkin wrote:

8….DDT, the most wonderful chemical ever. “It is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable,” concluded the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the year before EPA head William Ruckelshaus banned it. Thanks to Ruckelshaus, Rachel Carson, environmentalist extremists, and the WHO, millions of Africans including children are dying or disabled today.

Why, these irrational policy errors?

So I responded:

Banning DDT from agricultural use was an extremely rational act, as vouched for by the summary judgment against the DDT manufacturers in both of the cases brought against EPA for the ban, and as vouched for by the removal of the bald eagle and brown pelican from the Endangered Species List.

Sirkin wrote:  “DDT, the most wonderful chemical ever. ‘It is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable,’ concluded the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the year before EPA head William Ruckelshaus banned it.”

EPA relabeled DDT in 1972, not 1971, effectively banning the use of DDT on cotton.  Under that rule, DDT could be available to fight malaria in the U.S., and DDT was manufactured in the U.S. for export to anyone who wished to use it.  There has never been a ban on using DDT to fight malaria.

But DDT ceased to work well against malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the 1960s.  Africans are not stupid.  Had DDT been a panacea, I’m sure they would have used it.

But while I worry about your implicit denigration of Africans and Asians in suggesting they are somehow incapable of deciding for themselves to use an effective weapon against disease, I am more concerned at your erroneous characterization of DDT’s value.  The National Academy of Sciences made an editing error, so part of your error is understandable.  DDT was never credited with saving 500 million lives.  During the entire time DDT has been available to fight malaria, from 1946 to today, the death rate worldwide from malaria has never exceeded 4 million a year, and since the 1960s the death rate has been about a million year.  At 4 million deaths per year, to save 500 million lives, DDT would have had to have been used for 125 years prior to now.  Insecticidal properties of the stuff were discovered only in 1939, 70 years ago.

At about a million deaths per year, to save 500 million lives, DDT would have had to have been used for 500 years.

Clearly there was an error in math, or confusion in citations.  About 500 million people are afflicted with malaria annually, noted earlier in that NAS book, which is where I think the 500 million figure came from.

But let’s leave that aside for a moment.  That 1970 publication by the National Academy of Sciences was an evaluation of chemicals in the environment.  That sentence crediting DDT with saving so many lives, erroneous as it was, was in a call to ban DDT as quickly as possible, and to increase research to find alternatives to DDT in order to get DDT use completely stopped.

NAS recognized the value of DDT, but said it was too dangerous to keep using.

Don’t cite NAS’s credit to DDT without noting they said we must stop using it, because its dangers outweigh the benefits.

You can find a more thorough discussion of the NAS report at this blog. [You should go see, Dear Reader — neither Sirkin nor Pesci will likely ever bother.]

Sirkin wrote:
“Thanks to Ruckelshaus, Rachel Carson, environmentalist extremists, and the WHO, millions of Africans including children are dying or disabled today.”

With the great assistance of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and continued efforts of the World Health Organization, several African nations have cut malaria rates by 50% to 85% with the use of bednets and “integrated vector management” (IVM), usually known as integrated pest management (IPM) in the U.S.

Anyone who reads Carson’s astoundingly accurate book knows that she did not call for a ban on DDT, but instead called for the use of an integrated program of pest management.  Had we listened to Rachel Carson in 1962, we could have saved several million children from death, in Africa, from malaria alone.  It is scurrilous, calumnous, and inaccurate to the point of sin to blame Rachel Carson for deaths caused by failure to listen to her and heed her words.

Ruckelshaus acted with full knowledge of the National Academy of Science’s calling for an end to DDT use due to its harms, known and then unknown.  It is foolish to blame people for acting with hard evidence and careful, rational thought.  It’s particularly ungraceful to then accuse them of acting irrationally.

I doubt that either Pesci or Sirkin will ever change their tune.  They’d have to concede that science works, that scientists are not all evil, and that sometimes environmentalists, and even liberals, get things right.  More importantly, they’d have to concede they erred — and that would be like Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West taking a shower.

4 Comments | Accuracy, Africa, Cost of Green, DDT, Green Politics, History, History of Science, Rachel Carson, Reason | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The unbearable lightness of Palin groupies

November 24, 2009

I’m not sure what to make of this.  No amount of dopeslapping or head:desk banging is going to help these people get a clue.

And while I haven’t read Sarah Palin’s book, I’ll wager they won’t get a clue there, either.  Listening to the interviews one wonders whether they would be able to read Palin’s book.  Most of the kids who work hard to fail my classes look like geniuses next to these people.

And then a horrifying thought bubbles up:  Dear God, these people might actually vote!  They probably view Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” sequences with astonished looks and great confusion.  They can’t tell what’s wrong with the answers, and they miss the humor.

I found this piece at Canadian Cynic (from whom I stole the headline) — he confessed he could only stand just under two minutes of this torture.

For Palin groupies, here are a couple of issues to consider while watching this video:

  1. While it’s done by New Left Media, it’s astonishing that anyone could find so many babbling idiots at one gathering, anywhere in America.  This was Ohio?   Yeah, Columbus; I know people in Columbus.  I fear for their lives, now.
  2. Palin has never made any particular defense of the First Amendment, nor of any of the five freedoms it enumerates.  When people say she stands for “freedom to speak,” or “freedom of religion,” they are making stuff up.
  3. “Realness” is not a policy.
  4. Tax cutting isn’t generally a great policy when people aren’t making enough to pay any taxes at all.  Tax cutting contributed to our current mess.
  5. Socialism is not “giving away money.”
  6. Obama’s two books do not portray Marxism in a good light.  They don’t mention Marxism as a potential path for any American, anywhere.
  7. “Czar” is a shorter word for a headline than “Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,” or “Special Assistant to the President for Energy Policy.”  People who are called “czars” by headline writers do not have any special powers beyond being right when they speak to the president (among many other advisors).  The real power is held by agency heads, like the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Treasury.  The President’s Cabinet is not a wooden device in which he keeps his dinnerware.
  8. One may always question motives, but on the issue of Obama’s “liking” the military, consider:  He’s appointed many former military people to important positions, including U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, to get good advice from people who know the military well; Obama is the only president since Johnson, maybe since Lincoln, to go meet victims of war as their caskets come back to their families; Obama is the only sitting president ever to visit the graves of victims of a current conflict at Arlington National Cemetery.  The lives and welfare of our men and women in uniform has been a singular focus of this president.
  9. Talk of martial law?  Not from Obama.  Not in the administration.  Not in any agency.  Not in Congress.  Only in wingnut dens.
  10. Illegal aliens cannot be naturalized under current law.  No illegal aliens are being naturalized.  When found, they are being deported.
  11. Obama is an American citizen; even the courts are getting testy about that, tossing the crazy lawsuits out with harsh comments for people who are so gullibly dumb.
  12. It’s 700 miles from Sarah Palin’s home to the nearest point in Russia.  “Seeing Russia from the backyard” is a figure of speech, and not accurate in any way.
  13. The Governor of Alaska is not the first defense against any attack from a foreign nation on the U.S., coming through Alaska.  The U.S. Air Force has jurisdiction, and still patrols that area, along with satellite and radar surveillance.  In an attack, the official role of the Governor of Alaska is to duck and stay out of the way.
  14. The Governor of Alaska has no special security clearance that no other governor has.  I’m not sure that any governor has a security clearance as governor.
  15. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is not a player in the protection of polar bears, nor any other animal on listed as threatened or endangered.
  16. No proposal is before Congress to change current law on “partial birth” abortion.  Since there is a law on the topic, it would take a new law, passed by Congress, to change current law.  Obama can’t touch it without Congressional action.  (This is basic civics, you know?)
  17. Are you afraid of what’s happening in America?  After you listen to these yahoos, you may have cause to fear what would happen if their views were to carry an election.

Are people still lining up for lobotomies?  Do they directly from the operating table to a Sarah Palin book signing?

We can hope New Left Media edited out all the cogent, intelligent remarks.  I have this nagging fear that they didn’t have to edit at all.

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11 Comments | Geography - Physical, Government, Humor, Politics, Rampant stupidity | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Palin: Ignore the woman abusing the flag and look at those gams!

November 18, 2009

Newsweek features Sarah Palin on the cover this week, a couple of weeks after featuring Al Gore.  I thought the Gore cover was interesting, but could be interpreted to make him look sinister.

Palin on the cover of Newsweek

Sexist? Or sac-patriotic?

Palin, on the other hand, is featured in a full photo she posed for Runners World last year.  A flattering photo, it also features a U.S. flag, which we’ll get back to in a moment.

Palin complains that the cover is “sexist.”

Yahoo! News has the story, featuring Palin’s Facebook complaint.

“The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this “news” magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant. The Runner’s World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness — a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention — even if out of context.

But look at the cover.  Newsweek brands Palin as a problem — for Republicans. Is the sexism charge designed to divert attention from what Newsweek is saying, editorially?

Look at the display of the flag.  Clearly out of flag code on all scores, it appears as if she’s using the flag much as an athletic towel.  Now think of the rage the right worked up to when candidate Obama didn’t wear a flag lapel pin.  Can you imagine the rage had any Democrat posed for a picture, leaning on the flag like that?

The photo reveals Palin and her handlers as ill-informed on the flag code, and willing to do almost anything to get a camera.  I find it interesting that now, more than a year after she posed for the picture, she’s concerned about her showing of leg and not about the political issues raised by Newsweek.

Almost no one worries about the disrespect for the U.S. flag.

_____________

Update: Good commentary at Obsidian Wings — and note the first five or so comments.  Smart readers there!  Much the same at Majikthise.

2 Comments | Flag etiquette, History, Patriotism, Politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The birth of death panels in the unprincipled opposition to improving health care in America

November 16, 2009

Heckuva story.  Earl Blumenauer is the man responsible for the language in H.R. 3200 that Sarah Palin erroneously claimed created “death panels.”

He’s a Congressman from Oregon.

In Saturday’s New York Times he detailed how critics hijacked the debate with false claims.  Fascinating story.

A very odd result:  Because of the false claims, a provision to help people plan to avoid death panels was stricken from health care reform proposals.  More citizens will face death panel-like decisions as a result.

Previously I thought Orwell was convoluted.

2 Comments | Death Panels, Health care, Hoaxes, Journalism, Political Smear, Politics, Propaganda | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Greater depression

November 15, 2009

Musing on a short break from grading:  Is it possible to read Eschaton without getting horribly depressed at the incompetence and meanness in the White House — up to Obama?

And then one thinks of the challenges facing Obama.  The Great Depression was more psychological than economic.  Mine is, anyway, right now.

1 Comment | Afghanistan, Health care, Politics, President Obama, Presidents | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Stealth malaria promotion in favoring DDT over brown pelicans

November 14, 2009

Another blogger decided to take some potshots at the environmental protection success that banning DDT was is.

edwinleap.com laments that the brown pelican flew off the Endangered Species List this week.  “Brown pelicans 1, brown human beings 0,” the headline reads.  The piece claims that banning DDT use in America has somehow increased malaria, or prolonged it, in Africa and Asia.

Clearly the writer can’t didn’t read a map, or figure distances, and knows nothing knew little about the migratory habits of mosquitoes.  Stopping the spraying of DDT in Arkansas didn’t stop the use or manufacture of DDT in Africa nor Asia, anywhere.  Nor did mosquitoes not killed in America fly to Africa to infect kids.  Someone who has decided to rail against wise science probably isn’t interested much in the facts, though.

I responded there:

DDT has never been banned in Africa, nor Asia.  Today, China and India together manufacture thousands of tons of DDT for use around the world.

Odd — in the nations where DDT was banned (for use on agriculture, never to fight malaria), malaria is eradicated or all but eradicated.  In those nations where DDT is still legal, still manufactured, and still used in great quantities, malaria runs rampant.

Perhaps a lack of DDT doesn’t have anything to do with the spread of malaria.

There are very few, if any, serious malaria fighters asking for DDT.  Improved medical care is the basis for beating malaria in humans.  Malaria is a parasite that must live for part of its life cycle in mosquitoes, and for part of its life cycle in humans.  If your goal is to wipe out malaria, you could do it more effectively by wiping out the humans that harbor the parasite.  That would be stupid and cruel, and very expensive.

Fortunately, DDT is not a powerful acute poison to use against the mammals where malaria breeds.  Perhaps unfortunately, it’s no panacea against malaria, either.

Why did African malaria fighters stop using DDT in the middle 1960s?  Mosquitoes had become resistant and immune to DDT.

Ronald Reagan once said for every serious problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong.  DDT is that simple, easy and wrong solution for malaria.

Why is this man so bigoted Let’s hope it’s ignorance of the issue and not bigotry against brown beings that he thinks leads anyone to think the brown pelican should have been sacrificed, and that  he thinks brown Africans are too stupid to figure out how to fight malaria with DDT, if DDT would in fact save them?  [See Mr. Leap’s comment below. Not stupid at all, he just didn’t have the facts.  Great to find someone willing to admit error.  Clearly, I was wrong assuming he knew better — see edits throughout the post.  It’s actually pleasant to discover one was wrong in a case like this.]

Rachel Carson was right: We should have restricted the use of DDT to save wild populations of animals, and to have preserved its efficacy for fighting malaria in carefully planned and delivered programs to fight malaria and other insect-borne diseases around the world.  Carson proposed we use integrated pest management (IPM) to fight disease, and this is the program and process Africans and Asians have turned to over the past decade as other slap-dash methods of fighting disease faltered.

In diverting attention from improving medical care to fight malaria, to a hopeless campaign to reintroduce DDT where it would not work the miracle claimed, edwinleap.com favors too many people favor  malaria over the kids in reality.  Odd position for a health professional to take, and we can be relatively certain that he’s responding to political hackery, and not basing his views on any sound science or history.

The brown pelicans‘ migration from the Endangered Species List pays high tribute to Rachel Carson’s views on saving life in the wild, and verification once again that she was right.  Perhaps its time more people paid attention to her accurate and effective ideas about how to fight human disease, without trying to poison all of Africa.

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2 Comments | Africa, Asia, DDT, Environmental protection, Natural history, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Wildlife | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Rep. Pete Sessions: Being a woman is “pre-existing condition”

November 10, 2009

When I first joined the Dallas Bar I quickly met a delightful woman who had some experience from which she spoke:  Louise Raggio.  On a few occasions I was fortunate enough to sit with her at a continuing education session and benefit from her explanations of how law really works in Texas.

I was interested to get an e-mail from her this morning, in which she complains about Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions’s vote on the health care bill that passed the House of Representatives Saturday.  You might enjoy it, too:


A Message from Louise B. Raggio
(a.k.a. the Texas Tornado)

This is an outrage.

As our Members of Congress debated health care reform legislation late into the night this weekend, our incumbent Congressman Pete Sessions likened the insurance industry’s practice of charging higher rates to women to their practice of charging higher rates for smokers.  According to Sessions, being a woman is a pre-existing condition – and it merits higher insurance rates (read it here).

Hey Pete, are you serious?

Rep. Sessions’ blatant disrespect for women is precisely why we need a change in Congress.  Will you contribute now to help bring new leadership to Washington?

Give online today at Act Blue!

When I first became a lawyer in the 1950s, Texas women could not buy or sell their own property, could not sign contracts, and could not have control over their own paychecks or open their own bank accounts without their husbands’ permission.  I decided to devote my career to changing those laws so I helped write legislation that secured legal equality for married women and became the Texas Family Code.

Now my son Grier is running for Congress.  I couldn’t be prouder to see him carry on our family’s legacy of public service.  After hearing about Rep. Sessions’ remarks pushing gender inequality, I am more determined than ever to do whatever it takes to send my son to Congress and to stand up for women.

Can you help Grier with his campaign?  We have to send a message to Pete Sessions and his allies in Congress when they try to turn the clocks back on women’s rights – we can’t let this stand.

Please help by contributing today!

Thanks for all you do to support my son and his campaign for Congress.

Sincerely,

Louise B. Raggio

PS:  Grier is traveling to Washington, DC tomorrow to meet with DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen to discuss his efforts to unseat Rep. Sessions.

Please help Grier show Chairman Van Hollen that he has the support and commitment of Democrats like you.

Donate today!

It came to me as a message paid for by Raggio for Congress.  There’s no cash floating in the Bathtub; I pass it along for the entertainment and information value.

Leave a Comment » | Campaigns, Elections, Health care, Politics, Texas | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Al Gore shows how green investing works

November 3, 2009

Then Vice President Al Gore campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, November 25, 1999.

Then Vice President Al Gore campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, November 25, 1999.

Among the more amusing about-faces in conservative knee-jerk politics is conservative criticism of Al Gore for being a successful investor.

No, I’m not kidding.

Back in April, Gore testified to a House Energy and Commerce Committee in April — one of the committees where Gore was a shining star when he was a Member — and he ran into a challenge from Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blakburn who tried to play bad cop in grilling Gore about his investment work.  Since leaving politics Gore has worked to put his money where his advocacy is, backing green industries and energy efficiency projects. Blackburn is a Republican representing Tennessee’s 7th District. Blackburn appears not to understand how cross-examination works.

In most discussions I’ve had on warming issues over the past two months, advocates for doing nothing almost always bring up Gore as as “profiteer” for investing in green businesses.

It’s as if conservatives and Republicans have forgotten how business works in a free-enterprise system, and they think that free enterprise is tantamount to communism.

T. Boone Pickens used to be a favorite witness for Republicans to call at Congressional hearings.  Pickens was, and still is, a staunch advocate of free enterprise, and he advocates a lot less regulation than most Democrats want.  Then Pickens’s investments, especially his vulture investments in dying companies where he’d sell off the assets and put the company out of existence, were touted by Republicans as indication that Pickens is a genius.

A hard look at Gore’s investments shows him to be nothing more than a free-enterprise advocate who leads the way in green investments.  He has made huge gambles in businesses that warming skeptics claim won’t work — and his investments have tended to pay off, to the great consternation of warming do-nothings who understand markets.

This story in the New York Times suggests just how well Gore has done, and how much his leadership in investing might benefit us.  It’s worth bookmarking for your next discussion on what we should do about global warming — because you know somebody will try to make it about Al Gore.  It just galls the heck out of conservatives and anti-science folks that Gore is right so often, and that he is such a practitioner of the Scout Law.

Anti-pollution is good business.  Reducing the dumping of poisons into the air and water makes sense, and it makes a better economy in the long run.  Sometimes it makes a better economy in the short run, too.  Gore stepped into the marketplace, a very capitalist act.  His investments paid off, demonstrating that markets do work, and demonstrating that green business is smart business.  What are Republicans and conservatives thinking in taking after Gore’s business success?

Oh — Boone Pickens? He used to have an office in Trammell Crow Tower when our offices at Ernst & Young LLP were a floor or so away.  We shared elevator rides many times, and he is in person as gracious and smart as he appeared in those Congressional hearings years ago.

His money today?  He’s investing in wind power, because he thinks we need to act now to reduce dependency on oil imports.

Maybe Republican anti-green politics is coming home to roost.

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4 Comments | air pollution, Business, Business Ethics, Capitalism, Climate change, climate_change, Free market economics, Global warming, Politics, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Does Michelle Obama have the largest staff of any First Lady? No . . .

October 27, 2009

You probably have gotten the e-mail that claims Michelle Obama has the largest staff of any First Lady.  Either you dismissed it as great sour grapes, or you may have given it a moment’s consideration before hitting delete.

Did you wonder whether the charge is true?  Mudflats, the great blog from Alaska, tracked down the sources.  Mudflats’ discoveries are well worth the read.  You may want to bookmark that site for the next time you get the e-mail.  You know there will be a next time.

Wall of shame:  Sites that pass on the gossip as fact

Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. Bumsted.

4 Comments | Accuracy, Hoaxes, Political Smear, President Obama, Rampant stupidity | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Democrats take solid South

October 25, 2009

Bob Moser says they can.  He’s talking about how to do it at SMU this week.

Can’t make it?  Buy the book.

The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies
and the Geurin-Pettus Program in the Department of Political Science
at Southern Methodist University
invite you to



Bob Moser, editor of the Texas Observer and an award-winning political reporter for The Nation, has chronicled Southern politics for nearly two decades.

In Blue Dixie he argues that the Democratic Party needs to jettison outmoded prejudices about the South if it wants to build a lasting national majority.  With evangelical churches preaching  a more expansive social gospel and a massive left-leaning demographic shift to African Americans, Latinos, and the young, the South is poised for a Democratic revival. Moser shows how a volatile mix of unprecedented economic prosperity and abject poverty are reshaping the Southern vote. By returning to a bold, unflinching message of economic fairness, the Democrats can in in the nation’s largest, most diverse region and redeem themselves as a true party of the people.

Books will be available for purchase.

THURSDAY, October 29, 2009

Noon to 1 pm
Texana Room, DeGolyer Library
6404 Hilltop Ln. & McFarlin Blvd
Bring your own brown bag lunch!

Better, make it to the lecture, buy the book, listen to Moser and let him autograph it for you.

For more information, please call 214-768-2526 or email carberry AT smu DOT edu

Invite a friend to a brown-bag lunch:

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3 Comments | Books, Elections, Politics, Polling and Public Opinion, Texas | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

What’s a journalist’s duty? Limbaugh ignores warning signs, punks himself

October 25, 2009

Millard Fillmore’s bathtub came out of a hoax story written in 1917 by one of America’s greatest cynics and writers, H. L. Mencken. Mencken lived to regret that he ever wrote the piece, after it was cited as fact by encyclopedias and critics of Fillmore’s presidency.

Mencken’s story holds a moral, a lesson for all critics of the American scene, and especially anyone who comments on political figures:  Verify everything.

Ernest Hemingway put it best, if crudely:   “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”*

If a writer or reporter doesn’t have one of those devices built-in, he is likely to find himself up to his chin in it after having failed to detect it in time to avoid the plunge.

Rush Limbaugh is in it up to his chin right now, after following Michael Ledeen off the dock.

Faithful readers here — all dozen of ’em — may remember last January when we spotlighted a hoax at a blog called Jumping in Pools; the author claimed President Obama had ordered members our armed forces to take an oath of allegiance to Obama in place of their regular oath to the nation.

Orson Welles was on to something with his “War of the Worlds” broadcast.  In fact, after that first night of panic, the same script was used on other occasions, and people still got suckered in.  (Listen to the RadioLab feature on this phenomenon — it’s wonderful.)

It’s almost as if people were going around with signs on their backs that say “Lie to me, baby!”  Only, the people put the signs on their shirts and blouses themselves.

For whatever ill-thought, malicious reason, somebody invented an absolutely unbelievable hoax that President Obama asked the Pentagon to have military people swear allegiance to him, instead of the nation. Jumping in Pools posted it.

Jumping in Pools also listed it as satire, in tags.

But the hoax sucked in the gullible all over the web.

Limbaugh?  Ledeen?  Y’all would do well to read this blog, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.  You might have recognized the name of the blog, Jumping in Pools, that carried that phantasmagorical story about Barack Obama’s student essay, finally being released in part to Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.

Yahoo!’s Buzz Up explained the story, with links you ought to check out:

It must have seemed so perfect. An obscure blogger unearths some pages of President Obama’s college thesis. The report supposedly comes from big-time journalist Joe Klein of Time magazine. And the thesis has some real gems: like Obama’s disdain for the Constitution.

The whole thing was nothing more than a satirical post on a humor blog. But Rush Limbaugh, who quoted from the supposed thesis on his radio show, sure wasn’t laughing. Here’s how it went down.

An unknown blogger picked up on a made-up post meant as a joke, which claimed that Joe Klein had gotten his hands on 10 pages of student Obama’s college thesis. Rush Limbaugh jumped on it, which immediately sparked Web searches on “obama thesis.”

Supposedly titled “Aristocracy Revisited,” the excerpt revealed the president had “doubts” about the “so-called founders.” Juicy. Except not true. Limbaugh discovered halfway through his show that he’d been had, but defended himself by saying basically the thesis felt true. Listen in to Rush’s mea sorta culpa.

Joe Klein finally jumped in, and called the report “nonsense” on his Swampland blog, and the blogger who thought the hoax was real also apologized.

Michael Ledeen writing at Pajamas Media was that “blogger who thought the hoax was real.”

Ledeen had the good grace to apologize (and in doing so reveal that he really should have been much more en garde):

The hoax/satire was written in August, so it’s not connected to any current event.  I cam across it on Twitter, read the blog, found it interesting, and posted on it.  I failed to notice that one of the tags was “satire.”

So he got me, and lots of others. It worked because it’s plausible.  I’ve done satirical pieces myself, and I know how they can take off.  I once wrote one that said that Bill Casey did not die, and was hiding in a bunker under the St Andrews golf course from which he was running Mikhail Gorbachev.  I thought it was obviously satirical, but it went like wildfire all over the world.  And that was in the days before the Internet.

So I should have picked up some hint, but I didn’t.  Shame on me.

But Limbaugh?  He railed on for more than half an hour on the evils of Obama revealed in the completely fictional essay; and then when he was alerted to the fact that it was a hoax, he didn’t apologize.  He said he was suckered in because the hoax was plausible, and Obama might have done such a thing.

“I know Obama thinks it,” Limbaugh said, purporting to channel the guy he despises only too openly.

I’m trying to suppress it, but Limbaugh’s actions remind me mightily of an old Cheech and Chong routine.  One wonders what Obama’s more rabid critics would not grant credence to.

Wall of Shame

What would Hemingway have reported?

Other thoughts:

  • Jonathan Last’s article for the Templeton Foundation’s In Character Journal wonders about how we choose what to believe, and whom.  The Dallas Morning News carried the article in the “Points” section this morning, but it’s not up on their website; look at the article at the Templeton Foundation site.

________
* I’m convinced he said it. I’m relying here on Elizabeth Dewberry’s contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, “Hemingway’s Journalism and the Realist Dilemma,” on page 25.  She cites to an interview, but I’ve misplaced the rest of that note for the moment, and for some odd reason the page with the citation isn’t included on Google Books (the pain of internet research, to get to the information you need out of the haystack, and find that particular needle has been intentionally removed).  Read Dewberry, though, for a much longer and informative discussion about hoaxes and fakery in journalism, which is the problem discussed in this post.

Don’t let your friends be bamboozled, pass the word:

 

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8 Comments | Accuracy, Barack Obama, Ethics, History, Hoaxes, Journalism, News, Politics, President Obama | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” opens to thunderous silence

October 24, 2009

It’s the air conditioning one hears, not applause.

Did your local newspaper review the movie?  Odds are the movie didn’t play in your town (did it play anywhere other than local Republican clubs?).

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” promoters and producers appear to have abandoned hopes for a wide-scale debut of their film on October 18, instead choosing direct-to-DVD release in order to salvage something from the effort.

Well, they can take solace in the fact that the John Birch Society, itself trying to rise from the dead, liked the film according to the comments in The New American.  But even the Birch Society reviewer watched it on DVD, not on a big screen.

At the Birch Society site I responded, and will be astounded to see if it stays (in three parts).  The review started out noting that if one asks a friend to explain the cap-and-trade system of controlling carbon air emissions, one is not likely to find that one’s friend fully understands the ins and outs of government regulation of air pollution, commodities markets, and deep economics (why should they?).

Ask a friend or associate, “Can you explain ‘cap and trade?’” More than likely you will be astounded at what a poor grasp (if any) he or she has of the subject, even though the future of our economy and even our country hinges to a large extent on whether or not cap-and-trade legislation passes or not.

I said:

Ask a friend to explain the right to bear arms, and you’re likely to get a bad explanation, too.

Does that mean the Second Amendment is evil?  I don’t think so.

This movie [“Not Evil, Just Wrong”] is greatly riddled with errors, and it presents a false portrait of science, history, and government.

For example:

In one scene that made one want to throw bottles at the TV set, a well-to-do environmentalist showed no concern to a Ugandan mother, Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes, over the loss of her child to malaria, a disease that was almost eliminated by the use of DDT, but then resurged when the EPA banned DDT’s exportation and insisted other countries adopt the same policy.

When DDT was heavily used in Africa, about two million people a year died from the disease.  Today?  About one million die.  The rates aren’t low enough, but does the movie need to lie about history to make a point?  Why?

Malaria was never close to being eliminated with DDT.  Most of the nations that got rid of malaria did it with the combination of better housing (with screens), better health care, and concentrated programs to attack mosquitoes to hold populations down long enough that the pool of malaria in humans could be wiped out.  Mosquitoes get malaria from humans — if there is no malaria in humans, mosquito bites are benign.

DDT was never used in an eradication effort in most nations of Africa, because the governments were unable to get a campaign to fight the disease on all fronts as necessary.  Do we know whether DDT was used in Uganda prior to 1967?

And if it was, are we really supposed to believe that Idi Amin refused to use DDT out of respect for little birdies and fishies, while killing and [it is often said] personally eating his countrymen?

I don’t think that environmentalists are the root of the problem in today’s malaria rates in Uganda, and any perusal of history suggests a dozen other culprits who could not be considered lesser threats by any stretch.

Now the death toll of malaria victims worldwide, but mainly in Third World countries, mostly young children, is estimated by the World Health Organization to be one million per year.

Near the lowest in 200 years.

Recently the World Health Organization, under strong pressure from human rights organizations, particularly in Africa and Asia, rescinded its ban on the pesticide that has been shown in test after test to be harmless to humans and animals, including birds.

WHO never had a ban on the use of DDT.  DDT didn’t work well.  It’s foolish to require malaria fighting agencies to use tools that don’t work.  [Ooooh.  I forgot to note the junk science claim that DDT is harmless to humans and animals — were it harmless, why should we use it?  It’s odd to see the John Birch Society organ campaigning so actively to kill America’s symbol, the bald eagle.  Are they really that evil, or just that poorly informed?]

The environmentalists continue to push to overturn this ruling, regardless of its toll in human misery and death.

[Gee. I should have responded, “The environmentalists continue to push this goal even as malaria deaths and infections drop — regardless the improvement in human health and reduction of misery and death.”]

Environmentalists have been lobbying since 1998 to allow DDT use in extremely limited circumstances, with controls to protect human health (the National Academy of Sciences notes that DDT, though among the most useful substances ever created, is more dangerous than helpful, and must be eliminated). [I should have noted here, “Opposition came from the George W. Bush administration.”]  In the past three years opposition to DDT use in Uganda has come from large agricultural companies, tobacco growers and unnamed groups of “businessmen” who sued to stop DDT use.

Africans have been free to use DDT since the substance’s discovery, and some nations used it extensively throughout the period since 1946.  Interestingly, they also experienced a resurgence of malaria anyway. If Africans want to use DDT, let them use it.

In the interim, tests across Africa demonstrate that bed nets are more effective than DDT, and cheaper.  DDT alone cannot help Africa much; bed nets alone help a lot.  But eradicating malaria will require great improvements in the delivery of health care to quickly and properly diagnose malaria, and provide complete treatments of the disease in humans to wipe out the pool of disease from which the little bloodsuckers get it in the first place.

This film is not interested in helping Africans, however.  The film’s producers are interested in trying to make hay besmirching the reputations of people who campaign for a clean environment.

How long is this film?  90 minutes, IMDB says.  UNICEF notes that a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds.  So while you watch this film, 180 children will die from malaria, and you will have done absolutely nothing to stop the next one from dying.

Send $10 to Nothing But Nets instead.

Look at it this way:  Every sale of the DVD of “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” deprives Nothing But Nets of a donation of two more life-saving bed nets.  So every sale of this DVD more than doubles the chances that another kid in Africa will die from malaria.

Help ban ignorance about world affairs:

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4 Comments | Africa, Cost of Green, DDT, Disease, Environmental protection, Green Politics, Health care, Public health, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science, WHO - World Health Organization | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Anti-Gore film’s producer tries tantrum to get publicity

October 13, 2009

Phelim McAleer, one of the producers of the anti-Al Gore film “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” sneaked into a Gore press event and threw a tantrum the other day.

Why is this relevant?  Oh, the tantrum was rude, but if you’re a hack film producer with a political screed whose film looks like a flop, you’ll do anything to get publicity for the film.  Perhaps we should not be too critical of publicity whores.

It’s not relevant because of that.

It’s relevant because one of the charges against Gore by the fruit-and-nut brigade is that Gore refuses to talk to the press.  How can they complain about Gore’s treatment of them when any mention of this event makes the Gore critics appear untruthful?

6 Comments | Climate change, Conservation, Cost of Green, DDT, Environmental protection, Global warming, Politics, Rachel Carson, Rampant stupidity, Reason, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Apocalypse already come

October 4, 2009

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Rod Dreher, the conservative editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News, notes at his BeliefNet.com blog, Crunchy Con:

This just in from an irate reader:

I just finished reading your article regarding Glenn Beck. … What a joke. Your article should be associated with Hitler’s Communist Manifesto.

If you ask me, what this country needs are better educated cranks.

If the political fellow travelers with the cranks notice these people are cranks . . . is that a good sign, or a bad sign?

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Leave a Comment » | Humor, Poe's Law, Politics, Rampant stupidity | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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