There is an interesting piece of Scripture that I have been considering for a while. It is found in Matthew 7:16, and in one of its many translations, it is the one you are most familiar with as reading "By their fruits you will know them."
While the verse starts out warning us against false prophets, the ultimate, metaphoric point is that good trees produce good fruit, and bad trees produce bad fruit.
This piece, of course, is about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has several children from his three marriages, and given the situation of a very wealthy man, multiple marriages, multiple children, the stereotype would almost have to apply, wouldn't it? That would be where the kids are a handful, they go off and get into trouble, insist on pampering, that sort of thing.
So admit it -- at some point in this political campaign, you took a second look at the eldest three grown children, 38, 34 and 32, out on the campaign trail, doing interviews for their father's campaign on their own. You looked a bit more on their positions of responsibility as executive VPs over the Trump businesses, and the fact that they are given that responsibility -- Donald Trump almost casually says that when he is president and has to detach himself from the businesses, the kids will run it.
You look at all that, and you startle yourself into thinking, "You know what? Those are three incredible children!" You think that, given the stereotypical outcome of fathers of such wealth and prominence, it would be enough if one of them turned out OK. But apparently, they all did. And while they were given access to work up to their positions because of their family, they clearly have succeeded in them, and no one would question their ability.
Listen to them speak. They are highly intelligent, very capable of making their points and supporting them, possessed of a clear understanding of their world. And they are equally clearly devoted to their father, which is not a trivial point.
Someone asked Donald Sr. which of his children would be in charge of the business when he becomes president. In an answer unmellowed by "I hope" or "We'll see how it works", Trump pointed out that they would run the company together, as each one had leadership over a specific part of it and, as the children themselves then agreed, they work together without argument. None seems to be trying to one-up the others.
"By their fruits you shall know them."
Certainly I have been up and down as far as the support for Donald Trump for the presidency, although I will just as certainly vote for him in November. Part of that is assessing the different Donald Trumps that are presented to the USA -- the different faces, the different facets, the different roles. It isn't which one is real; they are all real in their own way. The composite of what we see is what we have to evaluate.
But I cannot get past seeing those children, mature, intelligent, confident, competent and devoted to their father. I see them and realize that, of all the different ways of looking at Donald Trump, at all the ways he presents himself, none -- none is a shred more important than Donald Trump the father. And as his grown children clearly portray, he was really good at that.
"Good trees produce good fruit", the verse in Matthew reads. And while he has my vote regardless, I am willing to upgrade my opinion of Donald Trump several notches, on realizing that there has to be something exceptional about the man to have the result he did, and what those children tell us about the father and the man.
And that's a message we all should read.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob
at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving
new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at
bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, June 13, 2016
Friday, June 10, 2016
Gender and Track Meets
In the current odd political year that 2016 has been, and surely will continue to be, we find that transgender individuals appear to have a curious lock on the headlines as they try to get us to rewrite rules for everyday living.
And, as if on cue, here we go with the story of a high-school student who was born a male and has all the male parts, but "identifies as female" and was allowed to compete in the Alaska state girls' track championships, placing third in the event the student (pronouns fail me a tad here) entered.
Here is my all-too-familiar disclaimer: I know and am close friends with such individuals, and certainly am sympathetic to the difficulty that they have navigating daily life with an affliction that complicates some percentage of their existence. They are not innately "bad", or "evil"; they are fellow Americans with a medical/psychological issue to deal with.
I also believe that the psychological community has generally failed them, as it has with others with issues of sexual and gender abnormalities, by starting from a point of trying to regard it as some type of "normal" rather than attempting to treat it. End of disclaimer.
What is relevant here is something else entirely. At some point, people who are born with one set of chromosomes but "identify" with the other set, stop being able to operate in their gender of choice, as it were, and begin to affect others.
Here is one of those cases.
Males and females are different from birth. Aside from the differing body parts and other distinctions, for the purpose of this specific case, males are bigger and stronger as a gender, with greater muscle mass and its attendant strength. This becomes quite distinctive in athletics, and we can see it quite evidently at the extremes of performance.
Can you imagine, for example, if a 55-year-old retired female tennis pro were to take on any of the leading 25-30-year-old men who are touring pros now? There would be no contest at all. Yet Bobby Riggs, at 55, easily defeated Margaret Smith Court, at the time the #1-ranked female player, in two lopsided sets in such a challenge in 1973.
There are a lot of things that transgender females (born male) can do that no one really cares about, live and let live, what happens here stays here, that kind of thing. Where there is no impact on anyone else, well, heck, it's America -- have at it.
But this high-school track competition is a horse of a whole different color. This doesn't just affect the transgender runner; it affects everyone running against the transgender runner. Males and females are not the same, and if you strip away the part about how the person "feels like a female", which doesn't negate their innate male strength, you are left with a boy competing in an athletic event against a field of only girls.
Had this specific individual been a better athlete, or competed in an event more biased toward the genetic strengths of males, we would be looking at first place, and an even bigger issue.
In a competition where physical gender distinctions don't really matter (i.e., muscles are not involved), it's not a big deal. Academic competition? Have at it.
Athletics? Whoa, folks. That is a very different playing field.
When boys start competing with girls in girls' athletic events, we eventually have to acknowledge that the physical differences introduce an immense unfairness to those actually born female. I'm perfectly willing to support transgender people portraying themselves as the opposite sex in a certain set of situations, sure. But once you start depriving genetic females of fair competition among themselves to accommodate stronger, faster and larger people with a psychological disorder, you have simply gone too far.
I think it's ironic that Hillary Clinton is beginning her "glass ceiling" tour trying to become president, if she is not in prison by then, celebrating that a woman is actually running for the office. How do you think she feels about this issue and the specific track meet?
Ask yourself two questions:
(1) What would Hillary say to the transgender person who ran the meet as a girl, although actually male, and finished third and got whatever award was given for third place in the state?
(2) What would Hillary then say to the girl who finished fourth, and was deprived of that bronze medal, or whatever they give you in Alaska for third, because a boy entered the meet effectively disguised as a girl?
Hillary Clinton has plenty to say about jobs that have been exclusively the province of males forever, and how great it is when a woman does that job. Why in God's name would she look at a competition that is initially made fair by constraining it to girls, and then introducing a right of boys to compete in it? It is essentially reintroducing a glass ceiling where none had existed. I can't fathom how she would answer those questions to the two girls above -- one real, one not a girl -- with them sitting together, and somehow not drip hypocrisy all over the stage.
You keep pushing the envelope, friends, and eventually it rips. I think it did here.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
And, as if on cue, here we go with the story of a high-school student who was born a male and has all the male parts, but "identifies as female" and was allowed to compete in the Alaska state girls' track championships, placing third in the event the student (pronouns fail me a tad here) entered.
Here is my all-too-familiar disclaimer: I know and am close friends with such individuals, and certainly am sympathetic to the difficulty that they have navigating daily life with an affliction that complicates some percentage of their existence. They are not innately "bad", or "evil"; they are fellow Americans with a medical/psychological issue to deal with.
I also believe that the psychological community has generally failed them, as it has with others with issues of sexual and gender abnormalities, by starting from a point of trying to regard it as some type of "normal" rather than attempting to treat it. End of disclaimer.
What is relevant here is something else entirely. At some point, people who are born with one set of chromosomes but "identify" with the other set, stop being able to operate in their gender of choice, as it were, and begin to affect others.
Here is one of those cases.
Males and females are different from birth. Aside from the differing body parts and other distinctions, for the purpose of this specific case, males are bigger and stronger as a gender, with greater muscle mass and its attendant strength. This becomes quite distinctive in athletics, and we can see it quite evidently at the extremes of performance.
Can you imagine, for example, if a 55-year-old retired female tennis pro were to take on any of the leading 25-30-year-old men who are touring pros now? There would be no contest at all. Yet Bobby Riggs, at 55, easily defeated Margaret Smith Court, at the time the #1-ranked female player, in two lopsided sets in such a challenge in 1973.
There are a lot of things that transgender females (born male) can do that no one really cares about, live and let live, what happens here stays here, that kind of thing. Where there is no impact on anyone else, well, heck, it's America -- have at it.
But this high-school track competition is a horse of a whole different color. This doesn't just affect the transgender runner; it affects everyone running against the transgender runner. Males and females are not the same, and if you strip away the part about how the person "feels like a female", which doesn't negate their innate male strength, you are left with a boy competing in an athletic event against a field of only girls.
Had this specific individual been a better athlete, or competed in an event more biased toward the genetic strengths of males, we would be looking at first place, and an even bigger issue.
In a competition where physical gender distinctions don't really matter (i.e., muscles are not involved), it's not a big deal. Academic competition? Have at it.
Athletics? Whoa, folks. That is a very different playing field.
When boys start competing with girls in girls' athletic events, we eventually have to acknowledge that the physical differences introduce an immense unfairness to those actually born female. I'm perfectly willing to support transgender people portraying themselves as the opposite sex in a certain set of situations, sure. But once you start depriving genetic females of fair competition among themselves to accommodate stronger, faster and larger people with a psychological disorder, you have simply gone too far.
I think it's ironic that Hillary Clinton is beginning her "glass ceiling" tour trying to become president, if she is not in prison by then, celebrating that a woman is actually running for the office. How do you think she feels about this issue and the specific track meet?
Ask yourself two questions:
(1) What would Hillary say to the transgender person who ran the meet as a girl, although actually male, and finished third and got whatever award was given for third place in the state?
(2) What would Hillary then say to the girl who finished fourth, and was deprived of that bronze medal, or whatever they give you in Alaska for third, because a boy entered the meet effectively disguised as a girl?
Hillary Clinton has plenty to say about jobs that have been exclusively the province of males forever, and how great it is when a woman does that job. Why in God's name would she look at a competition that is initially made fair by constraining it to girls, and then introducing a right of boys to compete in it? It is essentially reintroducing a glass ceiling where none had existed. I can't fathom how she would answer those questions to the two girls above -- one real, one not a girl -- with them sitting together, and somehow not drip hypocrisy all over the stage.
You keep pushing the envelope, friends, and eventually it rips. I think it did here.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
Is It THAT Historic?
Hillary Clinton, if she is not in prison by then, will be the first female to be a major-party presidential candidate on an Election Day. She clearly thinks that it is a big deal, and historic, and that it is so important that people should vote for her because she has a uterus and no Y chromosomes.
I certainly discount the historic aspect of the whole thing, and I think that I have a strong position in doing so. She certainly isn't the first female to run for the presidency, that's been done before -- shoot, she did it herself in 2008. Carole Moseley Braun, Margaret Chase Smith, they ran for the major party spot. Michele Bachman ran in 2012, Carly Fiorina this year, and that's just a few, dating back to Victoria Claflin Woodhull in the very distant past.
That's just the presidential side, of course. Two women have already been on the major party ballots in November in the past, one on each side, as vice-presidential candidates. We certainly recall Sarah Palin, who ran as the vice-presidential candidate with John McCain in 2008 when she was governor of Alaska. And Geraldine Ferraro, who was in the House at the time, was on a Democrat ticket, also as VP, with Walter Mondale in 1984.
Both, as you will recall, lost.
The difference between Hillary and those other female candidates is stark and profound. And it bears repeating, and repeating loudly, every time Hillary tries to make it sound like she is some kind of crusader for women everywhere, and not just Hillary being out for the advancement and self-adulation of Hillary.
That difference is that Sarah Palin was governor because she wanted to be governor, competed to get known widely enough up there to get elected, and got elected on her own prior record and accomplishments. Geraldine Ferraro was a teacher, then a lawyer, a prosecutor and was then reasonably qualified to run for the House of Representatives. Having never served in office herself, and having only been a lawyer in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton would never, ever, not on your tintype, lady, have been a candidate for the Senate from New York had she not been married to Bill Clinton.
Think of it this way. She was married to the president of the United States, then moved to New York (where she had not previously lived) for the purpose of running for a Senate seat that was going to be open in her preferred time frame. She ran with exactly zero experience in elected office, zero experience in government, having not really worked for a living since before hubby Bill was governor of Arkansas.
Unlike the other candidates, who had risen to being considered as a major-party candidate because of their own lives, Hillary Clinton rose to her lowest level of incompetence by capitalizing on name recognition associated with the person she married -- not on her own accomplishments, of which there had been none.
And the people in New York who voted for her because she was married to Bill Clinton, and the part of the country who voted to make Barack Obama the president and applauded as he appointed her as Secretary of State, got exactly what they deserved. They got a track record of nothing in the Senate, and a track record of failure after utter, epic, USA-threatening failure, corrupt act after corrupt act as Secretary of State -- Russia, Libya, Syria, Iran, email servers, FOIA obstruction, foreign nations buying influence with contributions to the Clinton Foundation. The list goes on and our suffering goes on.
So what do you think about the historic importance of her nomination? Me, well, I think it is ironic that the first major-party presidential candidate with a uterus got there having failed miserably in her previous position, one she got only for whom she was married to. After all the "glass ceiling" crap over the years, instead of the first female presidential candidate being someone of accomplishment who earned her way to consideration, we have someone who married her way into public consciousness.
And was then a spectacular failure and a model of corruption, when she got there.
I have great faith in the ability of Donald Trump and his advisors to blunt any speechifying that Hillary tries to do to overstate the story of her "rise." Supposedly he will not wait past next week to start putting forth example after example of her corruption and making sure everyone is aware. Trump spends a lot of time defending things he has done or said, but he is one tough bird when he is going after someone, and he is not going to let go.
Hillary will not look very good trying to defend millions of corrupt foreign donations to her family foundation while she was Secretary of State, if she pulls out that woman card in her defense.
Corruption and incompetence in office know no gender.
This is is simply not the historic milestone Hillary fervently wants us to believe it is.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
I certainly discount the historic aspect of the whole thing, and I think that I have a strong position in doing so. She certainly isn't the first female to run for the presidency, that's been done before -- shoot, she did it herself in 2008. Carole Moseley Braun, Margaret Chase Smith, they ran for the major party spot. Michele Bachman ran in 2012, Carly Fiorina this year, and that's just a few, dating back to Victoria Claflin Woodhull in the very distant past.
That's just the presidential side, of course. Two women have already been on the major party ballots in November in the past, one on each side, as vice-presidential candidates. We certainly recall Sarah Palin, who ran as the vice-presidential candidate with John McCain in 2008 when she was governor of Alaska. And Geraldine Ferraro, who was in the House at the time, was on a Democrat ticket, also as VP, with Walter Mondale in 1984.
Both, as you will recall, lost.
The difference between Hillary and those other female candidates is stark and profound. And it bears repeating, and repeating loudly, every time Hillary tries to make it sound like she is some kind of crusader for women everywhere, and not just Hillary being out for the advancement and self-adulation of Hillary.
That difference is that Sarah Palin was governor because she wanted to be governor, competed to get known widely enough up there to get elected, and got elected on her own prior record and accomplishments. Geraldine Ferraro was a teacher, then a lawyer, a prosecutor and was then reasonably qualified to run for the House of Representatives. Having never served in office herself, and having only been a lawyer in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton would never, ever, not on your tintype, lady, have been a candidate for the Senate from New York had she not been married to Bill Clinton.
Think of it this way. She was married to the president of the United States, then moved to New York (where she had not previously lived) for the purpose of running for a Senate seat that was going to be open in her preferred time frame. She ran with exactly zero experience in elected office, zero experience in government, having not really worked for a living since before hubby Bill was governor of Arkansas.
Unlike the other candidates, who had risen to being considered as a major-party candidate because of their own lives, Hillary Clinton rose to her lowest level of incompetence by capitalizing on name recognition associated with the person she married -- not on her own accomplishments, of which there had been none.
And the people in New York who voted for her because she was married to Bill Clinton, and the part of the country who voted to make Barack Obama the president and applauded as he appointed her as Secretary of State, got exactly what they deserved. They got a track record of nothing in the Senate, and a track record of failure after utter, epic, USA-threatening failure, corrupt act after corrupt act as Secretary of State -- Russia, Libya, Syria, Iran, email servers, FOIA obstruction, foreign nations buying influence with contributions to the Clinton Foundation. The list goes on and our suffering goes on.
So what do you think about the historic importance of her nomination? Me, well, I think it is ironic that the first major-party presidential candidate with a uterus got there having failed miserably in her previous position, one she got only for whom she was married to. After all the "glass ceiling" crap over the years, instead of the first female presidential candidate being someone of accomplishment who earned her way to consideration, we have someone who married her way into public consciousness.
And was then a spectacular failure and a model of corruption, when she got there.
I have great faith in the ability of Donald Trump and his advisors to blunt any speechifying that Hillary tries to do to overstate the story of her "rise." Supposedly he will not wait past next week to start putting forth example after example of her corruption and making sure everyone is aware. Trump spends a lot of time defending things he has done or said, but he is one tough bird when he is going after someone, and he is not going to let go.
Hillary will not look very good trying to defend millions of corrupt foreign donations to her family foundation while she was Secretary of State, if she pulls out that woman card in her defense.
Corruption and incompetence in office know no gender.
This is is simply not the historic milestone Hillary fervently wants us to believe it is.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
The Deadly Unemployment Numbers
I suppose you saw the numbers on Friday. The USA economy added all of 38,000 jobs in May. This was far, far short of the well-over-250,000 needed to make a dent in the actual unemployment numbers, and a low fraction of the projected number, of over 150,000. Someone was really off in those projections.
Here is even CNN giving up on putting lipstick on this pig.
A worthwhile note -- the "unemployment rate" that the Labor Department puts out, which Barack Obama usually waves around as some kind of sign that he is actually doing something good, fell from 5.0% in April to 4.7% in May. Now, normally he would be coming off the eighteenth hole to make a speech telling us how wonderful it is that the unemployment rate dropped so much.
But not a peep was heard from Obama or his lackeys. Why? Because it was quite evident that the reason the published rate, useless though it be, had fallen, was that upwards of 500,000 Americans had stopped looking for work.
Percentages change when either a numerator or a denominator changes, and in this case the addition of such a paltry number of new jobs wasn't what dropped the rate, it was because the number of unemployed, available workers -- the numerator -- nosedived. Oh, they were still unemployed, for sure -- they just weren't "available", such as the numbers are counted. They had simply quit the work force and given up looking.
Barack Obama may have gotten to a point where he thinks he can say almost anything and the press will shout "Hooray!". But even he cannot celebrate a "4.7%" unemployment rate when the reports are based on such incredibly depressing numbers. And so we are peepless as far as the current administration goes. Nothing to see here; just move on.
So the real, understandable numbers that came out were really horrible, none so bad as the half-million workers no longer regarded as actively seeking employment. This drives the workforce utilization number to new depths.
But we should really ask in more depth about the figure of (only) 38,000 new jobs created. This tells us that the economy is not creating new jobs and, in fact, is likely removing positions from the roster of good, tax-generating spots.
Hmmmm. Why would they do that?
Ah. let us look at the ways. And not just the actual laws or regulations that are hamstringing employers, but the upcoming ones and the attitude behind them.
None of these, I expect, is having as big an impact on those execrable new-jobs numbers as the minimum wage proposals. There are places in the USA where the minimum wage is actually now $15 per hour, and others -- many others -- where the local laws are on a track to get the minimum wage to $15 per hour. The District of Columbia, which had already scared away Wal-Mart from building there, just passed a $15/hour minimum.
I have written multiple times about this; I am clearly not a fan of a minimum wage of any kind. But clearly, when you are talking about an effective doubling of the minimum wage with zero offset to the hiring business, your situation becomes rife with unintended consequences. And none of those is really good for the average employee -- or the average business.
You see, businesses which have any minimum-wage employees in the current, $7-8/hour range, are quite likely to have others who are making more -- but less than $15 an hour. There's a lot of space between $7 and $15, if you get the idea.
That means that not only does a business have to raise the minimum-wage employees, but raise everyone between $7 and $15 up to $15. So the guy who was making $15 an hour now has a bunch of minimum wage earners -- most likely doing much less, having less responsibility -- making the same thing he is making.
The business owner, of course, has to deal with all that -- not just figuring out where all the extra cash for once-affordable labor is going to come from, but how to deal with the employees who now all make the same, with quite varied roles and duties. Because in most cases there's not cash to raise up the $7 guys, let alone boost the already-$15 guys to keep them happy.
And who are we talking about? Mostly franchisees of places like fast-food restaurants, might own one or two sites, almost everyone at minimum wage. That is, after all, where the minimum-wage employees actually work. As the above-linked article notes, it is not heads of households who are earning the $7, it is teens and part-timers, people bringing additional cash into a household.
In the bridal shop we owned until 2013, nobody, including the owners, was making $15 an hour. And we couldn't make the shop profitable. How is a fast-food franchisee supposed to deal?
Let's ask that ... what does a franchisee like that do when the government threatens to double his labor cost without any productivity change to offset it? He does not what the government wants him to do, but what it unconsciously told him to do.
His costs go up, there is no revenue or productivity gain to compensate, so he does the next logical thing. He can't raise prices, because he'll lose customers. So he looks to cut costs. And that cost-cutting has to come from where his costs went up without gain -- labor.
The government tells you that labor has to cost more, tells you that you have to provide things like health insurance, and you respond appropriately -- you cut the expense by hiring fewer workers, selecting for the most productive ones, paying them more, and automating wherever you can. Instead of five employees at minimum wage and maybe each one costing health insurance, you cut to three really good ones, pay them more, and automate where you can.
There's your unintended consequence right there -- more people out of work, those remaining making more but fewer of them, and more robotics of whatever kind installed wherever feasible. Certainly in manufacturing that will be an exciting option.
So if you are looking at the May unemployment figures and wondering where all the new jobs went, look no further than the Federal government and those of the poorest-run states (California, Illinois) and cities (Seattle) and the disincentives to hire that they have created. Where the business owner sees ability to survive threatened by a rampaging government, he stops doing exactly what the government has unknowingly disincentivized -- hiring and continuing the same level of employment.
But in typical fashion, the do-good liberals will have already moved on to their next attempt at a good deed.
And they never look back to see what they have wrought.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Here is even CNN giving up on putting lipstick on this pig.
A worthwhile note -- the "unemployment rate" that the Labor Department puts out, which Barack Obama usually waves around as some kind of sign that he is actually doing something good, fell from 5.0% in April to 4.7% in May. Now, normally he would be coming off the eighteenth hole to make a speech telling us how wonderful it is that the unemployment rate dropped so much.
But not a peep was heard from Obama or his lackeys. Why? Because it was quite evident that the reason the published rate, useless though it be, had fallen, was that upwards of 500,000 Americans had stopped looking for work.
Percentages change when either a numerator or a denominator changes, and in this case the addition of such a paltry number of new jobs wasn't what dropped the rate, it was because the number of unemployed, available workers -- the numerator -- nosedived. Oh, they were still unemployed, for sure -- they just weren't "available", such as the numbers are counted. They had simply quit the work force and given up looking.
Barack Obama may have gotten to a point where he thinks he can say almost anything and the press will shout "Hooray!". But even he cannot celebrate a "4.7%" unemployment rate when the reports are based on such incredibly depressing numbers. And so we are peepless as far as the current administration goes. Nothing to see here; just move on.
So the real, understandable numbers that came out were really horrible, none so bad as the half-million workers no longer regarded as actively seeking employment. This drives the workforce utilization number to new depths.
But we should really ask in more depth about the figure of (only) 38,000 new jobs created. This tells us that the economy is not creating new jobs and, in fact, is likely removing positions from the roster of good, tax-generating spots.
Hmmmm. Why would they do that?
Ah. let us look at the ways. And not just the actual laws or regulations that are hamstringing employers, but the upcoming ones and the attitude behind them.
None of these, I expect, is having as big an impact on those execrable new-jobs numbers as the minimum wage proposals. There are places in the USA where the minimum wage is actually now $15 per hour, and others -- many others -- where the local laws are on a track to get the minimum wage to $15 per hour. The District of Columbia, which had already scared away Wal-Mart from building there, just passed a $15/hour minimum.
I have written multiple times about this; I am clearly not a fan of a minimum wage of any kind. But clearly, when you are talking about an effective doubling of the minimum wage with zero offset to the hiring business, your situation becomes rife with unintended consequences. And none of those is really good for the average employee -- or the average business.
You see, businesses which have any minimum-wage employees in the current, $7-8/hour range, are quite likely to have others who are making more -- but less than $15 an hour. There's a lot of space between $7 and $15, if you get the idea.
That means that not only does a business have to raise the minimum-wage employees, but raise everyone between $7 and $15 up to $15. So the guy who was making $15 an hour now has a bunch of minimum wage earners -- most likely doing much less, having less responsibility -- making the same thing he is making.
The business owner, of course, has to deal with all that -- not just figuring out where all the extra cash for once-affordable labor is going to come from, but how to deal with the employees who now all make the same, with quite varied roles and duties. Because in most cases there's not cash to raise up the $7 guys, let alone boost the already-$15 guys to keep them happy.
And who are we talking about? Mostly franchisees of places like fast-food restaurants, might own one or two sites, almost everyone at minimum wage. That is, after all, where the minimum-wage employees actually work. As the above-linked article notes, it is not heads of households who are earning the $7, it is teens and part-timers, people bringing additional cash into a household.
In the bridal shop we owned until 2013, nobody, including the owners, was making $15 an hour. And we couldn't make the shop profitable. How is a fast-food franchisee supposed to deal?
Let's ask that ... what does a franchisee like that do when the government threatens to double his labor cost without any productivity change to offset it? He does not what the government wants him to do, but what it unconsciously told him to do.
His costs go up, there is no revenue or productivity gain to compensate, so he does the next logical thing. He can't raise prices, because he'll lose customers. So he looks to cut costs. And that cost-cutting has to come from where his costs went up without gain -- labor.
The government tells you that labor has to cost more, tells you that you have to provide things like health insurance, and you respond appropriately -- you cut the expense by hiring fewer workers, selecting for the most productive ones, paying them more, and automating wherever you can. Instead of five employees at minimum wage and maybe each one costing health insurance, you cut to three really good ones, pay them more, and automate where you can.
There's your unintended consequence right there -- more people out of work, those remaining making more but fewer of them, and more robotics of whatever kind installed wherever feasible. Certainly in manufacturing that will be an exciting option.
So if you are looking at the May unemployment figures and wondering where all the new jobs went, look no further than the Federal government and those of the poorest-run states (California, Illinois) and cities (Seattle) and the disincentives to hire that they have created. Where the business owner sees ability to survive threatened by a rampaging government, he stops doing exactly what the government has unknowingly disincentivized -- hiring and continuing the same level of employment.
But in typical fashion, the do-good liberals will have already moved on to their next attempt at a good deed.
And they never look back to see what they have wrought.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Hillary Mendoza
Spoiler alert: This piece is not about baseball.
If you are a baseball fan, though, you will be passingly familiar with a former major league player by the name of Mario Mendoza Aizpuru, most familiarly known simply as "Mario Mendoza." Mendoza played for three teams in nine completely undistinguished big-league seasons from 1974 to 1982. He was a shortstop and sometime second and third baseman.
That he is at all remembered today is for his rather weak bat, the one that left him with a .215 career batting average. If you don't follow baseball, let me explain that a .215 average is very poor indeed, the kind that makes you wonder how he could possibly even be in the majors for nine seasons.
Mendoza's hitting was so poor, in fact, that he is remembered as a ".200 hitter" (baseball tends to round when it exaggerates for effect). He is remembered in a way he can't be proud of -- the average of .200, below which one is regarded as truly awful, or as having had a truly awful streak, is now known throughout the game as the "Mendoza Line" in his honor.
I said this piece was not about baseball, and it is not. Mendoza was only a league-average defender at shortstop and a very poor hitter over his career, yet today, at 65, he is hauling down a major-league pension and has at least nine years worth of bubble-gum cards as a tribute to his presence in the majors. He reached the top 1% (or better) of his profession, and when he got there, he showed that we rise to our lowest level of incompetence. Being in the majors did not make him "good."
And so we look at the 2016 presidential campaign, and how that lesson applies to one Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. If you read me often enough, you know exactly where this is going.
Last night I got a call from a polling service from a phone number in Tomball, Texas. The caller had ten minutes worth of questions, and they were heavily about the presidential campaign. There were a number of "Do you strongly agree, just agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement ..." type of questions.
Those questions then gave one of a reasonably balanced (left-right) set of statements such as whether Donald Trump was too this or that to be president, or whether Hillary Clinton's scandals meant this or that. You get the idea.
One such question led me to the baseball analogy. I don't recall the exact question, but it was a bit tough to give a proper answer, because it referred to Hillary's "experience." Now, she has some experience as a senator, and some experience as Secretary of State. As to whether that is a good thing, well, see, that's a very different story.
Hillary is not a stupid woman, but her time as Secretary of State had some very stupid activities for which she is responsible to this day -- the Iraq withdrawal allowing that nation to collapse and ISIS to rise, the Russia "reset" that allowed the problem in Ukraine and the rise of Russia as a greater world power, the Libya policy that left an ungoverned nation, letting four Americans die in Benghazi, that sort of thing.
And that's without all the corrupt stuff regarding her thwarting of the FOIA laws with a private email server.
So when you ask if she has "experience", per se, well, she has some. In a different candidate, it would probably be enough to run for president, and not have anyone think that they weren't experienced enough.
But the real question is not experience but competence. If you are Secretary of State for a few years and all your most critical foreign policy initiatives failed, and you cannot point to a single major successful effort, then you might just as well not have ever served.
Or been ... Mario Mendoza.
How are they different? Mario Mendoza managed to gain nine years of major-league service time by simply being associated with teams at the right time, teams who needed someone to plug in at short and not field badly, whether or not they could hit above the Mendoza Line.
Hillary Clinton got to be senator and Secretary of State not by any indication of competence but by virtue of being married to a former president. Once in office herself, she showed herself not competent to serve, able to put the country at risk while digging a hole for our foreign policy that it will take a true leader to get us out of. At the same time, she operated with true contempt for the rights of the people she served -- the taxpayer -- and the transparency we expect and, by law, are entitled to.
In other words, her experience is worth about what Mario Mendoza's experience was worth -- a pension and not much else. In her case, a pension is not warranted, having not served in office for 20 years or more like most people need to. She'll get one, but that's the relative unaccountability of government.
Hillary Clinton can plead all she wants to, and her acolytes, sycophants, Stephanopouloses and other assorted toadies can plead all they want to, that she has the experience needed to be president. But if her experience was poor, and her performance not competent for the position entrusted to her, then how exactly is that experience worth anything.
And that's why as I answered the poll question, I thought of Mario Mendoza.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
If you are a baseball fan, though, you will be passingly familiar with a former major league player by the name of Mario Mendoza Aizpuru, most familiarly known simply as "Mario Mendoza." Mendoza played for three teams in nine completely undistinguished big-league seasons from 1974 to 1982. He was a shortstop and sometime second and third baseman.
That he is at all remembered today is for his rather weak bat, the one that left him with a .215 career batting average. If you don't follow baseball, let me explain that a .215 average is very poor indeed, the kind that makes you wonder how he could possibly even be in the majors for nine seasons.
Mendoza's hitting was so poor, in fact, that he is remembered as a ".200 hitter" (baseball tends to round when it exaggerates for effect). He is remembered in a way he can't be proud of -- the average of .200, below which one is regarded as truly awful, or as having had a truly awful streak, is now known throughout the game as the "Mendoza Line" in his honor.
I said this piece was not about baseball, and it is not. Mendoza was only a league-average defender at shortstop and a very poor hitter over his career, yet today, at 65, he is hauling down a major-league pension and has at least nine years worth of bubble-gum cards as a tribute to his presence in the majors. He reached the top 1% (or better) of his profession, and when he got there, he showed that we rise to our lowest level of incompetence. Being in the majors did not make him "good."
And so we look at the 2016 presidential campaign, and how that lesson applies to one Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. If you read me often enough, you know exactly where this is going.
Last night I got a call from a polling service from a phone number in Tomball, Texas. The caller had ten minutes worth of questions, and they were heavily about the presidential campaign. There were a number of "Do you strongly agree, just agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement ..." type of questions.
Those questions then gave one of a reasonably balanced (left-right) set of statements such as whether Donald Trump was too this or that to be president, or whether Hillary Clinton's scandals meant this or that. You get the idea.
One such question led me to the baseball analogy. I don't recall the exact question, but it was a bit tough to give a proper answer, because it referred to Hillary's "experience." Now, she has some experience as a senator, and some experience as Secretary of State. As to whether that is a good thing, well, see, that's a very different story.
Hillary is not a stupid woman, but her time as Secretary of State had some very stupid activities for which she is responsible to this day -- the Iraq withdrawal allowing that nation to collapse and ISIS to rise, the Russia "reset" that allowed the problem in Ukraine and the rise of Russia as a greater world power, the Libya policy that left an ungoverned nation, letting four Americans die in Benghazi, that sort of thing.
And that's without all the corrupt stuff regarding her thwarting of the FOIA laws with a private email server.
So when you ask if she has "experience", per se, well, she has some. In a different candidate, it would probably be enough to run for president, and not have anyone think that they weren't experienced enough.
But the real question is not experience but competence. If you are Secretary of State for a few years and all your most critical foreign policy initiatives failed, and you cannot point to a single major successful effort, then you might just as well not have ever served.
Or been ... Mario Mendoza.
How are they different? Mario Mendoza managed to gain nine years of major-league service time by simply being associated with teams at the right time, teams who needed someone to plug in at short and not field badly, whether or not they could hit above the Mendoza Line.
Hillary Clinton got to be senator and Secretary of State not by any indication of competence but by virtue of being married to a former president. Once in office herself, she showed herself not competent to serve, able to put the country at risk while digging a hole for our foreign policy that it will take a true leader to get us out of. At the same time, she operated with true contempt for the rights of the people she served -- the taxpayer -- and the transparency we expect and, by law, are entitled to.
In other words, her experience is worth about what Mario Mendoza's experience was worth -- a pension and not much else. In her case, a pension is not warranted, having not served in office for 20 years or more like most people need to. She'll get one, but that's the relative unaccountability of government.
Hillary Clinton can plead all she wants to, and her acolytes, sycophants, Stephanopouloses and other assorted toadies can plead all they want to, that she has the experience needed to be president. But if her experience was poor, and her performance not competent for the position entrusted to her, then how exactly is that experience worth anything.
And that's why as I answered the poll question, I thought of Mario Mendoza.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Yep, Mr. Mayor -- Must be Trump
The left has gone unchecked for so long now that its members, from political people to the press, must feel incredibly empowered. Only from that interpretation can we possibly explain much of what they do and say.
The "say" part is not just the outrageous content itself, but the hypocrisy with which it is delivered.
Exhibit A goes back to Thursday, when Donald Trump, presumptive nominee for president on the Republican side, gave a speech at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. The "California" part may have tipped you off to the fact that something nutty was on tap.
And it wasn't the speech.
About 300 storm troopers from the Clinton and Sanders campaigns (if they're paid by them it's OK to call them part of the campaign, right?) broke into full riot mode outside the venue. At one point, they surrounded a woman with a Trump shirt on and backed her into the glass door of the Marriott hotel there which, while the hotel people were slow to open the door to save her, left her open to being pelted with food, including eggs.
Finally the Marriott opened its doors and let the now egg-haired woman into the lobby. The rioters were ultimately taken care of by police, and the woman ... well, I didn't hear what ended up happening to her, but presumably she was made safe at some point. At the same time, thousands were safely listening to and enjoying the speech by Mr. Trump.
Now, when you hear that there is a riot at a political speech, it is almost assumed that it is leftists rioting. Admit it, goes without saying, right? Why did none of the media accounts on Friday point out that it was Bernie and Hillary supporters who are always the ones rioting, and it is never conservatives doing the damage?
We know the answer -- the media (who are the left) don't want anyone to differentiate the left and its riotous default position with the right and their, well, lack of rioting. Might make someone look bad, y'know.
As if on cue, the left-slanted Associated Press made a phone call to San Jose's mayor, the (dis)honorable Sam Liccardo -- a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, to see what he thought. Liccardo criticized Trump for "coming to cities and igniting problems that local police departments had to deal with."
“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” he told the AP.
Do we not have to look at that statement and wonder how deep in his cocoon Liccardo is to have thought he could just -- well, say that and get away with it? I mean really -- Trump comes to San Jose and gives a speech, 300 paid leftists riot and cause Liccardo's police force to have to intervene, and Trump is to blame? The "irresponsible behavior" deserving blame is not that of the rioters?
What does that even mean? OK, we know what he meant. But if he thinks Trump is that riot-inciting, then why didn't he just invoke some kind of power and stop the speech in the first place? We know why -- that would have turned San Jose into Brown University, where conservatives are not allowed to speak to the little precious snowflakes who might be hurt by new ideas. And that might work for an Ivy League campus (it doesn't, but they think it does), but not so much for an actual city where free people live including people who vote for mayors.
All of which leads me to a separate point. You know how there's a big issue about people saying that rape victims -- actual ones, not the liars like "Jackie" at the University of Virginia (who really needs to be named now that she's been exposed for her lying) -- "brought it on themselves" by provocative clothing and the like. You've heard that.
I'll tell you right now -- there is no justification, none at all, for rape. No woman who is attacked should be accused of "inviting it by virtue of what she wore." Can I be more clear?
But there are media accounts of the incident in front of the Marriott that point out that the woman who was hit was arguing back with the rioters in defense of her candidate, and this was presented in such a way as to appear to defend the actions of the rioters. This was last week, but I certainly recall seeing such coverage and the odd slant to it when describing her actions.
What happened was not rape, but it was a gang attack on a woman, by a rioting crowd. Even while watching the attack on TV, I was immediately thinking "How can the newscast try to portray this as something she brought on herself, even just by implication -- and there was certainly implication?
Is it not hypocritical of the left to say, out of one side of their mouth, that there is no defense for one kind of attack on a woman by saying she dressed provocatively, but out of the other side that it is OK to defend another kind of attack because she allegedly spoke provocatively? I know I was thinking of exactly that analogy as I watched the coverage.
In both parts of this piece, it is clear that the left believes it can say whatever it jolly well pleases, no matter how ridiculous. No one will take them to task for their hypocrisies. No one.
OK, I will. I had nothing better to do anyway.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
The "say" part is not just the outrageous content itself, but the hypocrisy with which it is delivered.
Exhibit A goes back to Thursday, when Donald Trump, presumptive nominee for president on the Republican side, gave a speech at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. The "California" part may have tipped you off to the fact that something nutty was on tap.
And it wasn't the speech.
About 300 storm troopers from the Clinton and Sanders campaigns (if they're paid by them it's OK to call them part of the campaign, right?) broke into full riot mode outside the venue. At one point, they surrounded a woman with a Trump shirt on and backed her into the glass door of the Marriott hotel there which, while the hotel people were slow to open the door to save her, left her open to being pelted with food, including eggs.
Finally the Marriott opened its doors and let the now egg-haired woman into the lobby. The rioters were ultimately taken care of by police, and the woman ... well, I didn't hear what ended up happening to her, but presumably she was made safe at some point. At the same time, thousands were safely listening to and enjoying the speech by Mr. Trump.
Now, when you hear that there is a riot at a political speech, it is almost assumed that it is leftists rioting. Admit it, goes without saying, right? Why did none of the media accounts on Friday point out that it was Bernie and Hillary supporters who are always the ones rioting, and it is never conservatives doing the damage?
We know the answer -- the media (who are the left) don't want anyone to differentiate the left and its riotous default position with the right and their, well, lack of rioting. Might make someone look bad, y'know.
As if on cue, the left-slanted Associated Press made a phone call to San Jose's mayor, the (dis)honorable Sam Liccardo -- a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, to see what he thought. Liccardo criticized Trump for "coming to cities and igniting problems that local police departments had to deal with."
“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” he told the AP.
Do we not have to look at that statement and wonder how deep in his cocoon Liccardo is to have thought he could just -- well, say that and get away with it? I mean really -- Trump comes to San Jose and gives a speech, 300 paid leftists riot and cause Liccardo's police force to have to intervene, and Trump is to blame? The "irresponsible behavior" deserving blame is not that of the rioters?
What does that even mean? OK, we know what he meant. But if he thinks Trump is that riot-inciting, then why didn't he just invoke some kind of power and stop the speech in the first place? We know why -- that would have turned San Jose into Brown University, where conservatives are not allowed to speak to the little precious snowflakes who might be hurt by new ideas. And that might work for an Ivy League campus (it doesn't, but they think it does), but not so much for an actual city where free people live including people who vote for mayors.
All of which leads me to a separate point. You know how there's a big issue about people saying that rape victims -- actual ones, not the liars like "Jackie" at the University of Virginia (who really needs to be named now that she's been exposed for her lying) -- "brought it on themselves" by provocative clothing and the like. You've heard that.
I'll tell you right now -- there is no justification, none at all, for rape. No woman who is attacked should be accused of "inviting it by virtue of what she wore." Can I be more clear?
But there are media accounts of the incident in front of the Marriott that point out that the woman who was hit was arguing back with the rioters in defense of her candidate, and this was presented in such a way as to appear to defend the actions of the rioters. This was last week, but I certainly recall seeing such coverage and the odd slant to it when describing her actions.
What happened was not rape, but it was a gang attack on a woman, by a rioting crowd. Even while watching the attack on TV, I was immediately thinking "How can the newscast try to portray this as something she brought on herself, even just by implication -- and there was certainly implication?
Is it not hypocritical of the left to say, out of one side of their mouth, that there is no defense for one kind of attack on a woman by saying she dressed provocatively, but out of the other side that it is OK to defend another kind of attack because she allegedly spoke provocatively? I know I was thinking of exactly that analogy as I watched the coverage.
In both parts of this piece, it is clear that the left believes it can say whatever it jolly well pleases, no matter how ridiculous. No one will take them to task for their hypocrisies. No one.
OK, I will. I had nothing better to do anyway.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, June 3, 2016
Where In the Heck Is John Kerry?
You recall that last week I did a piece reminding all who would read that the esteemed Department of State under the less-esteemed John Kerry, who serves the totally-unesteemed Barack Obama, had a bad week. This was after someone at State pulled a major Rose Mary Woods and sliced an embarrassing question out of a video transcript of a 2013 press conference and from State's YouTube site.
"A glitch", they called it last week.
"Not a glitch but an intentional deletion", it is now reported they have admitted.
"Oops, caught in a lie", I say.
Jen Psaki, who was the former State Department spokesman, was the one who answered the threatening question from James Rosen of Fox, who had asked if it was State Department policy to lie about negotiations of treaties, in this case Iran, and to lie about whether they were or were not ongoing. There is no good answer to that, especially when you are indeed lying about it.
John Kirby, the former Navy admiral and now spokesman for the State Department, actually went on Fox News this morning to be interviewed after the story broke yesterday, that someone at State not only had deleted the specific offending questions, but had done so intentionally -- and the internal investigation was essentially over with no one accountable. No glitch, no accident.
Here's what we know, and we're probably only knowing that because something in John Kirby's makeup and officer's honor makes it hard for him to countenance that sort of deception within the office of the State Department spokesman. Of course, Kirby was not in that job when this deception happened; but he has to defend his office now. And the people who did this, or at least the management of those websites, fall under that office.
We know this now, because Kirby appears reasonably credible and was at least willing to talk to people at Fox (as opposed to Obama, who regularly disinvited Fox News for certain press events, and Hillary Clinton, whose last news conference was in 2015). Kirby said explicitly that the cuts were made, they were made by a female staff member, and that she did so on direction from someone which was given second-hand.
You know that passive-voice kind of thing? Someone -- she conveniently can't recall who that was exactly, and Kirby didn't share her identity -- told her that someone else had said for the deletion to be made. You know, kind of like the role of the consigliore in the Cosa Nostra, taking care of things so there is no credible connection to the mob boss because he never gives direct orders to anyone but the consigliore, who gets lawyer-client privilege that insulates the boss.
So Kirby is saying that -- follow this -- Person X told Person Y to tell the editing lady to cut out the embarrassing question and answer. The editing lady did as she was told, but forgot who had told her to do it (Person Y), which conveniently prevents us, the public paying their salaries, from being able to ask Person Y who Person X is and whether Person X's name maybe starts with a "Ps".
This, of course, raised the logical question -- why would she, the editing lady, not recall who had asked her to do it? Either she is lying about it (which is plausible since she is part of the Obama Administration and works in the department until not long ago run by Hillary Clinton, who only rarely brushes against the truth), or she actually doesn't remember. And the only reason for not remembering such a thing is that it happened too often, and too many different people asked for such editing, to remember a specific request.
The Fox hosts who interviewed Kirby, to their credit, asked him pretty much that question -- how often must that deceptive editing have been done if the editing lady couldn't even remember who had asked? He tried, I guess, to be forthcoming in the sense of saying that he couldn't answer that because the investigation wasn't done, but it was not clear if editing lady had even been asked that. Kirby stepped around that question.
But I do have a couple questions. I know that editing lady says she can't recall who relayed the order to chop the offending piece of video. But how many people could have even relayed that request? I mean, the office of the State Department press secretary can't be that big, or at least I hope it isn't, if we taxpayers are paying for it. What are there, two, maybe three people who could possibly have asked her to do that to whom she would have promptly obeyed? Were all of them asked?
Kirby is the boss of that unit, and as a former flag officer is probably a pretty tough fellow. Is Kirby not calling in everyone from that office and grilling them, maybe "no one leaves the room until I get an answer", until someone 'fesses up? I mean, with even a shred of integrity I certainly would do so if I were Kirby. And then when the 'fesser 'fesses, their job depends on their remembering who told them to do it. Now that's something I'd like to see in government. I'm pretty sure that a Donald Trump-led government would do that -- accountability to the taxpayer and all.
And last, but certainly not least ... all of this took place under the watch of the current Secretary of State, one John F. Kerry. I know he's busy running around the world making horsecrap deals and selling us out to Iran and all. But here we are talking about actual corruption in his department. Is anyone, anywhere, going to make him answer the question about what happened and how it could have under his watch, or is Kirby the only one willing to talk?
Let's face it, the wolves are released by the press against CEOs and Republican governors for things that go on in their organizations that they couldn't have done anything to instigate. "Happened on their watch, so they have to go", you know. I'll bet Chris Christie knows what I'm talking about.
So let's ask for Mr. Kerry to explain how something like that could have happened.
Or we can call a different set of wolves, y'know.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
"A glitch", they called it last week.
"Not a glitch but an intentional deletion", it is now reported they have admitted.
"Oops, caught in a lie", I say.
Jen Psaki, who was the former State Department spokesman, was the one who answered the threatening question from James Rosen of Fox, who had asked if it was State Department policy to lie about negotiations of treaties, in this case Iran, and to lie about whether they were or were not ongoing. There is no good answer to that, especially when you are indeed lying about it.
John Kirby, the former Navy admiral and now spokesman for the State Department, actually went on Fox News this morning to be interviewed after the story broke yesterday, that someone at State not only had deleted the specific offending questions, but had done so intentionally -- and the internal investigation was essentially over with no one accountable. No glitch, no accident.
Here's what we know, and we're probably only knowing that because something in John Kirby's makeup and officer's honor makes it hard for him to countenance that sort of deception within the office of the State Department spokesman. Of course, Kirby was not in that job when this deception happened; but he has to defend his office now. And the people who did this, or at least the management of those websites, fall under that office.
We know this now, because Kirby appears reasonably credible and was at least willing to talk to people at Fox (as opposed to Obama, who regularly disinvited Fox News for certain press events, and Hillary Clinton, whose last news conference was in 2015). Kirby said explicitly that the cuts were made, they were made by a female staff member, and that she did so on direction from someone which was given second-hand.
You know that passive-voice kind of thing? Someone -- she conveniently can't recall who that was exactly, and Kirby didn't share her identity -- told her that someone else had said for the deletion to be made. You know, kind of like the role of the consigliore in the Cosa Nostra, taking care of things so there is no credible connection to the mob boss because he never gives direct orders to anyone but the consigliore, who gets lawyer-client privilege that insulates the boss.
So Kirby is saying that -- follow this -- Person X told Person Y to tell the editing lady to cut out the embarrassing question and answer. The editing lady did as she was told, but forgot who had told her to do it (Person Y), which conveniently prevents us, the public paying their salaries, from being able to ask Person Y who Person X is and whether Person X's name maybe starts with a "Ps".
This, of course, raised the logical question -- why would she, the editing lady, not recall who had asked her to do it? Either she is lying about it (which is plausible since she is part of the Obama Administration and works in the department until not long ago run by Hillary Clinton, who only rarely brushes against the truth), or she actually doesn't remember. And the only reason for not remembering such a thing is that it happened too often, and too many different people asked for such editing, to remember a specific request.
The Fox hosts who interviewed Kirby, to their credit, asked him pretty much that question -- how often must that deceptive editing have been done if the editing lady couldn't even remember who had asked? He tried, I guess, to be forthcoming in the sense of saying that he couldn't answer that because the investigation wasn't done, but it was not clear if editing lady had even been asked that. Kirby stepped around that question.
But I do have a couple questions. I know that editing lady says she can't recall who relayed the order to chop the offending piece of video. But how many people could have even relayed that request? I mean, the office of the State Department press secretary can't be that big, or at least I hope it isn't, if we taxpayers are paying for it. What are there, two, maybe three people who could possibly have asked her to do that to whom she would have promptly obeyed? Were all of them asked?
Kirby is the boss of that unit, and as a former flag officer is probably a pretty tough fellow. Is Kirby not calling in everyone from that office and grilling them, maybe "no one leaves the room until I get an answer", until someone 'fesses up? I mean, with even a shred of integrity I certainly would do so if I were Kirby. And then when the 'fesser 'fesses, their job depends on their remembering who told them to do it. Now that's something I'd like to see in government. I'm pretty sure that a Donald Trump-led government would do that -- accountability to the taxpayer and all.
And last, but certainly not least ... all of this took place under the watch of the current Secretary of State, one John F. Kerry. I know he's busy running around the world making horsecrap deals and selling us out to Iran and all. But here we are talking about actual corruption in his department. Is anyone, anywhere, going to make him answer the question about what happened and how it could have under his watch, or is Kirby the only one willing to talk?
Let's face it, the wolves are released by the press against CEOs and Republican governors for things that go on in their organizations that they couldn't have done anything to instigate. "Happened on their watch, so they have to go", you know. I'll bet Chris Christie knows what I'm talking about.
So let's ask for Mr. Kerry to explain how something like that could have happened.
Or we can call a different set of wolves, y'know.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Vetting the Vets -- and Wetting the Press
It happened during the day, so you may or may not have heard all of it live, but on Tuesday Donald Trump held a press conference. The purpose was to address some accusations from the Hillary Clinton flacks and the press (but I repeat myself), to the effect that his pledge to donate millions to veterans' charities in late January had not been done.
In case you forgot, Trump bypassed a Republican candidates debate in January to address a fund-raising event for veterans' charities. When it was done, he had announced that he had raised $6 million in total for those charities. It was assumed that he was personally donating a large sum as part of that.
So the Hillaryites, spurred by a reporter's investigative piece that suggested that nothing had been donated, made a splash by accusing Trump of not having made any donations and exaggerating the amount in any case.
I'm kind of thinking that if Hillary underestimates Trump that much, though, as to leave a big fat opening for him to charge through, she is an even weaker candidate than any of us thinks.
Trump took the first question in the news conference, which in effect asked him about the donations (we knew that was the topic of the press conference anyway). He brought out a list of the charities and read them off, along with a list of amounts to which each of them was given. The total was a bit over $5.5 million, of which $1 million came from Trump himself, who also noted that some of the pledges had not been consummated yet, and there would be over $6 million when all was said and done.
He also went on to note that raising money for a variety of such charities is not exactly an instantaneous activity. Two big things get in the way of a quick donation. First, you actually have to collect the money from those who pledged, funds which likely trickled in over time. It's one thing to pledge $100,000; it's another to get to where the check clears, if you know what I mean.
The second thing was a bit bigger -- sure, you can collect for "veterans' charities" in a kind of lumped, hypothetical way, which works OK for donating through Donald Trump (i.e., that you know your donation will go where it is intended, as opposed to the guys who call you unsolicited asking for your money for some nicely-named "charity"). But given the relatively short lead-up to the event, no one, understandably, had developed a list of which charities would get the donations.
According to Trump, that process of deciding took quite a while in some cases. When you are talking about that kind of money, you're not just handing it over to anyone with "veterans" in their title. You have to ensure they are legitimate, Government-certified entities allowed to receive donations in the first place. You have to do the research to make sure that an adequate percentage of its donations actually go to the purpose of the charity and not excessive administrative waste or extra-high salaries.
Like, say the Clinton Foundation, if you know what I mean.
Trump made it a point to note that exactly "zero dollars" of the $5.5 million had gone for the administrative cost of collecting the money. All the charities got all the money. None of it went for anything other than the actual donations straight to the charities. And some of it -- not "none" as he was accused -- was given to them early in the process, to charities which were already known to the Trump people as legitimate and had worked with him previously.
As Trump explained it, as far as the timing (and he said much had been paid out fairly early on) this all seemed to me perfectly reasonable. Since no one connected with him would have thought there was any particular need to rush the vetting process for the charities, they would get their money in due time (he noted that he had little input into which charities received donations) . And no one would have expected, save in hindsight, that anyone in the press or the Clinton campaign -- but I repeat myself -- would be trying to show that little money had actually been sent.
So Trump took the podium and, in the course of the new conference, proceeded to rip the press up one side and down the other, calling them dishonest, in the case of one reporter, "sleazy", and noted that only Donald Trump could arrange for millions to be given to veterans' charities, get applauded universally by veterans' groups, and then have the press tear him apart for not having done so immediately (or, more factually, taking a while to get some of the checks cut, but that isn't what they implied).
The poor press might have had a better case, had they not shown their true colors in the news conference by asking truly stupid questions -- and I'm quoting verbatim: "It seems like you are resistant to scrutiny" ... "Why do you continue to attack the press" ... "Do you need a thicker skin to run for this office?" ... "Are you a little out of sync?" ... "Is this a prime example of you [exaggerating the truth]?" (That one was for having raised just $5.5 million so far as opposed to $6 million) ...
Can you imagine, say, them asking Bill Clinton any of those questions about the Clinton Foundation's peculiar approach to "doing good"? Me either. Right there on display for the nation and the world, the American press tried to attack Donald Trump for the way he raised $6 million for charity. Does the press not believe or understand how ridiculous they looked doing that? On its surface, it is beyond contemptible.
Donald Trump legitimately threw cold water over the press for over a half hour -- or maybe more accurately, the press wet themselves, and Trump just showed them up for, in his own words, the sleazy pack they are. He won this round with the press by, oh, about five and a half million dollars.
And how are we expected to go into a presidential campaign and expect there to be equivalent, fair treatment of the Republican candidate by the press, when he can't even raise -- and, by the way, give -- a ton of money to charity without being asked to justify the process used, and answer a bunch of questions that would never be asked of a Democrat, and certainly not Hillary Clinton.
Oh yeah ... How much did Hillary donate while she was sending people to picket Trump's news conference? Hillary was actually asked that question by Jake Tapper of CNN, and gave an incredibly crap-filled answer which essentially said that as a carpetbagging senator from New York, she voted for legislation that raised compensation for veterans' survivors. So we're supposed to equate her voting for using taxpayer dollars and funds borrowed from China involuntarily, to Donald Trump personally donating $1 million and getting other people to donate, personally and voluntarily, another $4-5 million?
Sure we are. And, by the way, when is Hillary actually going to have a news conference, with actual reporters and actual unvetted questions?
Inquiring minds, as they say, want to know.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
In case you forgot, Trump bypassed a Republican candidates debate in January to address a fund-raising event for veterans' charities. When it was done, he had announced that he had raised $6 million in total for those charities. It was assumed that he was personally donating a large sum as part of that.
So the Hillaryites, spurred by a reporter's investigative piece that suggested that nothing had been donated, made a splash by accusing Trump of not having made any donations and exaggerating the amount in any case.
I'm kind of thinking that if Hillary underestimates Trump that much, though, as to leave a big fat opening for him to charge through, she is an even weaker candidate than any of us thinks.
Trump took the first question in the news conference, which in effect asked him about the donations (we knew that was the topic of the press conference anyway). He brought out a list of the charities and read them off, along with a list of amounts to which each of them was given. The total was a bit over $5.5 million, of which $1 million came from Trump himself, who also noted that some of the pledges had not been consummated yet, and there would be over $6 million when all was said and done.
He also went on to note that raising money for a variety of such charities is not exactly an instantaneous activity. Two big things get in the way of a quick donation. First, you actually have to collect the money from those who pledged, funds which likely trickled in over time. It's one thing to pledge $100,000; it's another to get to where the check clears, if you know what I mean.
The second thing was a bit bigger -- sure, you can collect for "veterans' charities" in a kind of lumped, hypothetical way, which works OK for donating through Donald Trump (i.e., that you know your donation will go where it is intended, as opposed to the guys who call you unsolicited asking for your money for some nicely-named "charity"). But given the relatively short lead-up to the event, no one, understandably, had developed a list of which charities would get the donations.
According to Trump, that process of deciding took quite a while in some cases. When you are talking about that kind of money, you're not just handing it over to anyone with "veterans" in their title. You have to ensure they are legitimate, Government-certified entities allowed to receive donations in the first place. You have to do the research to make sure that an adequate percentage of its donations actually go to the purpose of the charity and not excessive administrative waste or extra-high salaries.
Like, say the Clinton Foundation, if you know what I mean.
Trump made it a point to note that exactly "zero dollars" of the $5.5 million had gone for the administrative cost of collecting the money. All the charities got all the money. None of it went for anything other than the actual donations straight to the charities. And some of it -- not "none" as he was accused -- was given to them early in the process, to charities which were already known to the Trump people as legitimate and had worked with him previously.
As Trump explained it, as far as the timing (and he said much had been paid out fairly early on) this all seemed to me perfectly reasonable. Since no one connected with him would have thought there was any particular need to rush the vetting process for the charities, they would get their money in due time (he noted that he had little input into which charities received donations) . And no one would have expected, save in hindsight, that anyone in the press or the Clinton campaign -- but I repeat myself -- would be trying to show that little money had actually been sent.
So Trump took the podium and, in the course of the new conference, proceeded to rip the press up one side and down the other, calling them dishonest, in the case of one reporter, "sleazy", and noted that only Donald Trump could arrange for millions to be given to veterans' charities, get applauded universally by veterans' groups, and then have the press tear him apart for not having done so immediately (or, more factually, taking a while to get some of the checks cut, but that isn't what they implied).
The poor press might have had a better case, had they not shown their true colors in the news conference by asking truly stupid questions -- and I'm quoting verbatim: "It seems like you are resistant to scrutiny" ... "Why do you continue to attack the press" ... "Do you need a thicker skin to run for this office?" ... "Are you a little out of sync?" ... "Is this a prime example of you [exaggerating the truth]?" (That one was for having raised just $5.5 million so far as opposed to $6 million) ...
Can you imagine, say, them asking Bill Clinton any of those questions about the Clinton Foundation's peculiar approach to "doing good"? Me either. Right there on display for the nation and the world, the American press tried to attack Donald Trump for the way he raised $6 million for charity. Does the press not believe or understand how ridiculous they looked doing that? On its surface, it is beyond contemptible.
Donald Trump legitimately threw cold water over the press for over a half hour -- or maybe more accurately, the press wet themselves, and Trump just showed them up for, in his own words, the sleazy pack they are. He won this round with the press by, oh, about five and a half million dollars.
And how are we expected to go into a presidential campaign and expect there to be equivalent, fair treatment of the Republican candidate by the press, when he can't even raise -- and, by the way, give -- a ton of money to charity without being asked to justify the process used, and answer a bunch of questions that would never be asked of a Democrat, and certainly not Hillary Clinton.
Oh yeah ... How much did Hillary donate while she was sending people to picket Trump's news conference? Hillary was actually asked that question by Jake Tapper of CNN, and gave an incredibly crap-filled answer which essentially said that as a carpetbagging senator from New York, she voted for legislation that raised compensation for veterans' survivors. So we're supposed to equate her voting for using taxpayer dollars and funds borrowed from China involuntarily, to Donald Trump personally donating $1 million and getting other people to donate, personally and voluntarily, another $4-5 million?
Sure we are. And, by the way, when is Hillary actually going to have a news conference, with actual reporters and actual unvetted questions?
Inquiring minds, as they say, want to know.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Gorillas That Are Missed
Crap happens. That was pretty much my initial reaction to the story about the unfortunate shooting of an adult male gorilla in the Cincinnati, Ohio zoo.
I'm not sure that anyone has not heard the story at this point, since it seems to be one of those things that everyone has an opinion about, whether or not they should. A little boy of three or four managed to get into the gorilla exhibit at the zoo, whereupon one gorilla decided to play with the toddler as if he were a toy, dragging him around the pool in which the gorilla typically played.
Children are not toys, and the zoo personnel did what they could -- which was pretty much nothing; there was nothing realistic available given the threat -- to resolve the problem. They followed their protocol and shot and killed the gorilla before he could hurt the child further.
No one wanted that to happen. The zoo certainly did not want to lose this rare and beautiful animal which was part of their exhibit. Who would want a gorilla to die? But a gorilla is also a huge, powerful animal capable (this one was over 400 pounds) of inflicting fatal damage to a small child, or maybe an NFL player.
The last couple days, my God, it is as if everyone has to come down with an opinion, whether it is PETA or the press or the Twitterverse or, well, apparently, me. Just yesterday morning I heard some animal-rights activist (does that actually pay a wage?) be asked how the gorilla could have been saved. He rambled an answer about how gorillas shouldn't even be in zoos, the typical evasion of someone who knows he is wrong.
And boy, have we learned things we didn't need to know. We have discovered that, for example, the child's father has a long rap sheet including a year's jail sentence for a variety of offenses, as if that somehow matters (hint: it doesn't). We learned that zoos, specifically this one, have a pretty limited array of options when someone is so careless as to wander into a gorilla cage.
We also learned that some people, surely with nothing better to do, are trying to push through a law in the state that forces a level of responsibility on parents with punitive consequences, beyond what may already exist. That would be in honor of the gorilla, but extrapolates to be the threat that nanny-state actions -- remember the Maryland "free-range parents" -- pose as unintended consequences.
But children do wander into gorilla cages. They dart into traffic. They fall. They do the things that little children do and, in this case, it cost the life of an endangered animal. We don't yet know the details of how the child got in the cage in the first place, but unless anyone can say for sure that the parents were not paying attention to him (as opposed to the child dashing off while in their watchable neighborhood), all we can go with is that he simply ran into the fenced gorilla space.
I helped raise a couple sons, and I can assure you, not that you didn't know already, that little boys will indeed suddenly run somewhere. You can't handcuff them to you and (almost) nobody tries to do that.
It would seem that, unless we discover something that tells us there was a much higher level of situational neglect than anyone is saying there was, this is simply a terrible outcome of children doing what children do. After all, the parents were taking their kids to the zoo. I don't care what the father's rap sheet looks like, how much neglect do you impute to the parents if they're taking their kid out to the zoo?
Crap happens. In this case, it happened with the loss of a priceless animal. But Lord, do we have to keep forcing there to be fault and blame and punishment when something bad happens? Earthquakes -- must be that bad fracking. Tornado hits Kansas -- must be that evil global warming. A gorilla has to be shot to save a child who wanders into a gorilla cage -- those parents should have had him on a leash.
You know what? Bad things happen without malice. And they ever will.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
I'm not sure that anyone has not heard the story at this point, since it seems to be one of those things that everyone has an opinion about, whether or not they should. A little boy of three or four managed to get into the gorilla exhibit at the zoo, whereupon one gorilla decided to play with the toddler as if he were a toy, dragging him around the pool in which the gorilla typically played.
Children are not toys, and the zoo personnel did what they could -- which was pretty much nothing; there was nothing realistic available given the threat -- to resolve the problem. They followed their protocol and shot and killed the gorilla before he could hurt the child further.
No one wanted that to happen. The zoo certainly did not want to lose this rare and beautiful animal which was part of their exhibit. Who would want a gorilla to die? But a gorilla is also a huge, powerful animal capable (this one was over 400 pounds) of inflicting fatal damage to a small child, or maybe an NFL player.
The last couple days, my God, it is as if everyone has to come down with an opinion, whether it is PETA or the press or the Twitterverse or, well, apparently, me. Just yesterday morning I heard some animal-rights activist (does that actually pay a wage?) be asked how the gorilla could have been saved. He rambled an answer about how gorillas shouldn't even be in zoos, the typical evasion of someone who knows he is wrong.
And boy, have we learned things we didn't need to know. We have discovered that, for example, the child's father has a long rap sheet including a year's jail sentence for a variety of offenses, as if that somehow matters (hint: it doesn't). We learned that zoos, specifically this one, have a pretty limited array of options when someone is so careless as to wander into a gorilla cage.
We also learned that some people, surely with nothing better to do, are trying to push through a law in the state that forces a level of responsibility on parents with punitive consequences, beyond what may already exist. That would be in honor of the gorilla, but extrapolates to be the threat that nanny-state actions -- remember the Maryland "free-range parents" -- pose as unintended consequences.
But children do wander into gorilla cages. They dart into traffic. They fall. They do the things that little children do and, in this case, it cost the life of an endangered animal. We don't yet know the details of how the child got in the cage in the first place, but unless anyone can say for sure that the parents were not paying attention to him (as opposed to the child dashing off while in their watchable neighborhood), all we can go with is that he simply ran into the fenced gorilla space.
I helped raise a couple sons, and I can assure you, not that you didn't know already, that little boys will indeed suddenly run somewhere. You can't handcuff them to you and (almost) nobody tries to do that.
It would seem that, unless we discover something that tells us there was a much higher level of situational neglect than anyone is saying there was, this is simply a terrible outcome of children doing what children do. After all, the parents were taking their kids to the zoo. I don't care what the father's rap sheet looks like, how much neglect do you impute to the parents if they're taking their kid out to the zoo?
Crap happens. In this case, it happened with the loss of a priceless animal. But Lord, do we have to keep forcing there to be fault and blame and punishment when something bad happens? Earthquakes -- must be that bad fracking. Tornado hits Kansas -- must be that evil global warming. A gorilla has to be shot to save a child who wanders into a gorilla cage -- those parents should have had him on a leash.
You know what? Bad things happen without malice. And they ever will.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Oh, Those Wacky Independents
If you watch the right news programs, you will surely have seen a particular tool used by the campaign consultant folks trying to analyze what is, you know, "resonating" with various target audiences who are likely to vote.
That tool consists of a video replay of a candidate saying something, while three tracks, sort of like EKGs except without the pulse, glide along the screen in front of the candidate. The tracks are red, blue and yellow, and they represent, in order, Republican voters, Democrat voters, and independents (who have to vote for somebody, which we will get back to.
The three tracks move along in a scale which ranges from zero to 100, and that scale represents instantaneous reaction to what the candidate is saying. Everything starts at "50", which would be a grade of "C", and then each track moves up or down practically with every word out of the candidate's mouth. You can easily see what phrases go over well and which do not.
Last week, during the dust-up over Donald Trump's words of years back hoping for a real-estate crash so he could buy in, one of the consulting firms' representatives was on TV showing some of the tracking. The videos were of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren castigating the Donald for actually wanting to buy low and sell high (the horror!), followed by Trump himself explaining (as if it were needed) that that's what real-estate developers do!
You can imagine how the red and blue tracks went; the Democrats loved Hillary and Mrs. Warren and hated Trump; the Republicans gave Trump a "B" and utterly failed the two Democrats with a big "F." We are not surprised, of course; Democrats would not understand the business cycle if it ran over them.
But the yellow line, ah, the yellow line. Those wacky independent voters who are insanely necessary to woo and to get out to vote for you if you want to win, well, they were an interesting lot. Whatever you might have expected, they tracked quite tightly -- to the Republicans. Liked what Trump was saying, flunked both Democrats.
Having been watching the same person from the same polling firm come on the same shows for a number of months, I can tell you two things.
First, if they somehow imputed bias into their work, they would never get hired, because their results would be unusable. But this tracking methodology removes bias, since no questions are asked and it is only an evaluation of the candidates' own words.
Second, the results of last week, wherein the independents tracked with the Republicans and decidedly not with the Democrats (or at least not with Hillary), is the overwhelmingly consistent outcome of almost all these instant-polling surveys. Constantly. They may not track as high or as tightly some times, but they certainly identify with what Trump is saying, whether on business, the border, ISIS or space exploration.
There is a presidential election coming up here in about five months. Hillary Clinton, if she is not in prison by then (which is, incidentally, looking a bit more plausible now), will be running against Trump in that race. And as unpleasant a candidate as she is, as grating to listen to, as ineffective a campaigner and as generally untrustworthy as everyone regards her, Hillary does indeed need every vote.
These surveys are devastating to her. Already she is polling mostly behind Trump, and that's before the State Department's independent Inspector General, appointed by the Obama Administration, nailed her in a scathing finding regarding her use of a private email server. She has nowhere to go but down, because we already know who Hillary Clinton is.
The only place she can find a big pile of votes is with the self-declared independents. But these surveys, month after month, are finding that the appeal is not with the former first lady, but with the guy who has spent one-tenth as much in the campaign as she has. Perhaps they feel that kind of fiscal responsibility might live well in the White House. Slash a few departments, cut the bloated Federal payroll to only those people actually delivering Constitutionally-mandated services, perhaps.
Those wacky independents appear to be finding an electoral home, and it isn't Chappaqua, where it looks like Mrs. Clinton is going to return come November.
Or prison. I'm good either way.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
That tool consists of a video replay of a candidate saying something, while three tracks, sort of like EKGs except without the pulse, glide along the screen in front of the candidate. The tracks are red, blue and yellow, and they represent, in order, Republican voters, Democrat voters, and independents (who have to vote for somebody, which we will get back to.
The three tracks move along in a scale which ranges from zero to 100, and that scale represents instantaneous reaction to what the candidate is saying. Everything starts at "50", which would be a grade of "C", and then each track moves up or down practically with every word out of the candidate's mouth. You can easily see what phrases go over well and which do not.
Last week, during the dust-up over Donald Trump's words of years back hoping for a real-estate crash so he could buy in, one of the consulting firms' representatives was on TV showing some of the tracking. The videos were of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren castigating the Donald for actually wanting to buy low and sell high (the horror!), followed by Trump himself explaining (as if it were needed) that that's what real-estate developers do!
You can imagine how the red and blue tracks went; the Democrats loved Hillary and Mrs. Warren and hated Trump; the Republicans gave Trump a "B" and utterly failed the two Democrats with a big "F." We are not surprised, of course; Democrats would not understand the business cycle if it ran over them.
But the yellow line, ah, the yellow line. Those wacky independent voters who are insanely necessary to woo and to get out to vote for you if you want to win, well, they were an interesting lot. Whatever you might have expected, they tracked quite tightly -- to the Republicans. Liked what Trump was saying, flunked both Democrats.
Having been watching the same person from the same polling firm come on the same shows for a number of months, I can tell you two things.
First, if they somehow imputed bias into their work, they would never get hired, because their results would be unusable. But this tracking methodology removes bias, since no questions are asked and it is only an evaluation of the candidates' own words.
Second, the results of last week, wherein the independents tracked with the Republicans and decidedly not with the Democrats (or at least not with Hillary), is the overwhelmingly consistent outcome of almost all these instant-polling surveys. Constantly. They may not track as high or as tightly some times, but they certainly identify with what Trump is saying, whether on business, the border, ISIS or space exploration.
There is a presidential election coming up here in about five months. Hillary Clinton, if she is not in prison by then (which is, incidentally, looking a bit more plausible now), will be running against Trump in that race. And as unpleasant a candidate as she is, as grating to listen to, as ineffective a campaigner and as generally untrustworthy as everyone regards her, Hillary does indeed need every vote.
These surveys are devastating to her. Already she is polling mostly behind Trump, and that's before the State Department's independent Inspector General, appointed by the Obama Administration, nailed her in a scathing finding regarding her use of a private email server. She has nowhere to go but down, because we already know who Hillary Clinton is.
The only place she can find a big pile of votes is with the self-declared independents. But these surveys, month after month, are finding that the appeal is not with the former first lady, but with the guy who has spent one-tenth as much in the campaign as she has. Perhaps they feel that kind of fiscal responsibility might live well in the White House. Slash a few departments, cut the bloated Federal payroll to only those people actually delivering Constitutionally-mandated services, perhaps.
Those wacky independents appear to be finding an electoral home, and it isn't Chappaqua, where it looks like Mrs. Clinton is going to return come November.
Or prison. I'm good either way.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, May 30, 2016
Turn in Your "J" Card, Katie
I expect that conservatives would scream a great deal less about left-leaning media bias if, to be honest, the media were less biased. Every indication seems to bear the fear out; the media are as corrupt as Donald Trump says, and journalistic integrity has long since given way to journalistic license.
As presented in this piece in CNN, a documentary called "Under the Gun" was recently released, including an interview by the former journalist Katie Couric, with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
"If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorist from walking into, say, a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?", Couric asks the League members.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable question to which members of a pro-firearms and pro-2nd Amendment group would be able to reply immediately. In reality, they did reply immediately, and raw, unedited audio recordings of the interview plainly show that.
Of course, that did not fit the liberal, anti-gun views of the producer, the director and Katie Couric. So they did what leftists do -- they changed the content to fit their narrative. Instead of letting the video run and showing the answers that the League members gave in the timing with which they were given, the final cut show them looking down, silently, as if they did not know how to answer the question.
The "looking down" content, eight seconds worth, not only did not represent nor present the League members' actual reaction time or answer to the question; it was grafted into the final edit from footage of when they were sitting and waiting for the interview to start.
I don't know what school of journalism in the USA teaches its students that it is OK to do that. It is generally accepted to edit, as was in fact done with Couric's actual question, to delete extra words as long as they don't alter the context of the unedited version. And having heard the raw tape of the question, it is fine as edited; they took out some of her words that did not change the meaning or tone of the question.
But it is certainly eleven kinds of unethical to insert content in a place where (A) it didn't exist in the first place, and (B) is inserted to foster the questioner's political narrative (not to mention embarrassing the people who actually answered).
Stephanie Soechtig, the piece's director, claimed that she herself had editorial control. As she stated in a non-apologetic response to being caught, "My intention was to provide a pause for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before presenting the facts on Americans' opinions on background checks."
But even that is a crock -- the piece went to a commercial break after the eight seconds of grafted non-response. If you ask a question, you kind of have to show the answer in its original context.
Couric, for her part, issued one of those leftist non-apologies, saying something like "I'm sorry if the intent of the edit was misinterpreted" or something like that -- she's not sorry she tried to manipulate the facts to fit her politics; she's barely sorry she got caught -- in other words, it's our fault for being such cretins that we can't understand the artistic license she took.
Journalism, as I have written recently, has taken plenty of body blows over the decades of its declared freedom in the USA, mot all of them self-inflicted. Katie Couric, if she ever could be called a journalist, has forfeited her right to be considered one of the fraternity.
She is entitled to her own version of topics of contention. She is entitled to vote for whomever she wants to in the privacy of the election booth. She is entitled to go on TV and advocate explicitly for causes that she has those opinions on.
What she is not entitled to do is to misuse the platform of journalism by altering the facts on which that opinion is based. Argue with the interviewees, sure. Misuse her position by altering their response? Well, no. That is criminality in the world of true journalism.
Katie Couric spent plenty of time at NBC, the same people who did a totally misleading edit of the 911 call by George Zimmerman, in 2012 when he was watching Trayvon Martin, whom he later shot to avoid having his head banged into the sidewalk more than it was. NBC at least fired the producer who did the editing. They had to get caught first, but they did fire the guy.
Katie Couric didn't have the integrity to man up and confess to manipulating the facts -- in the case, the video -- to suit her own narrative.
Give up your "J card", Katie. You've forfeited your right to be called a journalist.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
As presented in this piece in CNN, a documentary called "Under the Gun" was recently released, including an interview by the former journalist Katie Couric, with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
"If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorist from walking into, say, a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?", Couric asks the League members.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable question to which members of a pro-firearms and pro-2nd Amendment group would be able to reply immediately. In reality, they did reply immediately, and raw, unedited audio recordings of the interview plainly show that.
Of course, that did not fit the liberal, anti-gun views of the producer, the director and Katie Couric. So they did what leftists do -- they changed the content to fit their narrative. Instead of letting the video run and showing the answers that the League members gave in the timing with which they were given, the final cut show them looking down, silently, as if they did not know how to answer the question.
The "looking down" content, eight seconds worth, not only did not represent nor present the League members' actual reaction time or answer to the question; it was grafted into the final edit from footage of when they were sitting and waiting for the interview to start.
I don't know what school of journalism in the USA teaches its students that it is OK to do that. It is generally accepted to edit, as was in fact done with Couric's actual question, to delete extra words as long as they don't alter the context of the unedited version. And having heard the raw tape of the question, it is fine as edited; they took out some of her words that did not change the meaning or tone of the question.
But it is certainly eleven kinds of unethical to insert content in a place where (A) it didn't exist in the first place, and (B) is inserted to foster the questioner's political narrative (not to mention embarrassing the people who actually answered).
Stephanie Soechtig, the piece's director, claimed that she herself had editorial control. As she stated in a non-apologetic response to being caught, "My intention was to provide a pause for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before presenting the facts on Americans' opinions on background checks."
But even that is a crock -- the piece went to a commercial break after the eight seconds of grafted non-response. If you ask a question, you kind of have to show the answer in its original context.
Couric, for her part, issued one of those leftist non-apologies, saying something like "I'm sorry if the intent of the edit was misinterpreted" or something like that -- she's not sorry she tried to manipulate the facts to fit her politics; she's barely sorry she got caught -- in other words, it's our fault for being such cretins that we can't understand the artistic license she took.
Journalism, as I have written recently, has taken plenty of body blows over the decades of its declared freedom in the USA, mot all of them self-inflicted. Katie Couric, if she ever could be called a journalist, has forfeited her right to be considered one of the fraternity.
She is entitled to her own version of topics of contention. She is entitled to vote for whomever she wants to in the privacy of the election booth. She is entitled to go on TV and advocate explicitly for causes that she has those opinions on.
What she is not entitled to do is to misuse the platform of journalism by altering the facts on which that opinion is based. Argue with the interviewees, sure. Misuse her position by altering their response? Well, no. That is criminality in the world of true journalism.
Katie Couric spent plenty of time at NBC, the same people who did a totally misleading edit of the 911 call by George Zimmerman, in 2012 when he was watching Trayvon Martin, whom he later shot to avoid having his head banged into the sidewalk more than it was. NBC at least fired the producer who did the editing. They had to get caught first, but they did fire the guy.
Katie Couric didn't have the integrity to man up and confess to manipulating the facts -- in the case, the video -- to suit her own narrative.
Give up your "J card", Katie. You've forfeited your right to be called a journalist.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, May 27, 2016
Mom, Apple Pie and the Girl They Can't Find
I was watching an interesting piece on the news on Wednesday, and it got me thinking about some things that had occurred to me, only in a lot more depth than I had ever considered them.
Apparently, for the first time, the most common residence situation for people aged 18 to 34 is living with their parents. As in "home", like, "never left" or "came right back." Second place was "living with a romantic partner", which had always been first.
I know a lot of people probably watched the show and were thinking that it had everything to do with the part about the parents, the parents' home, the lack of the job needed to make money, or the actual "living with the parents" aspect.
That was not my reaction, though it is not wrong. It's pretty obvious why, given their specific situation, the 18-34 crowd ends up in their parents' home rather than living independently elsewhere.
What needed the thought was why they were not living with a romantic partner. And that's where my mind went.
The vast majority of people would like to be living with a romantic partner. They just can't find one, or haven't found one, or found one and lost one. But there's a basic essential to finding someone, and that, to me, is the ability to communicate with a member of the opposite sex.
Granted, that shouldn't be hard, but let's think about what makes millennials different from previous generations. I think we'll find a thread here.
First, they are enslaved by technology -- their iPhones, their tablets, their video games. Lots of texting, lots of playing, lots of Internet searching dominates their lives. It is an artificially sheltered environment in many senses of the word. But the tools of technology are distractions from humanity.
Second, they don't read. Ever try to sell a bunch of used books? There is zero market for books anymore, and one wonders how Barnes & Noble, and the other big book retailer whose name escapes me, even survive, unless it's mainly by selling Kindle versions. No reading for pleasure means losing the mind-expanding world that books provide -- and it means losing the vocabulary-expanding value that reading a lot offers.
Third, it's too freaking loud when they assemble in social situations, to have a conversation. I realize that this is not necessarily a new phenomenon; I graduated college in 1973 and the parties were too loud even then. But I have a lot of memories of the kind of interaction where you want to talk to (in my case) a girl and have to figure out where to go to have a conversation BECAUSE IT WAS TOO LOUD. I went to a cousin's daughter's wedding not that long ago (she was in her twenties) and spent most of the reception out in the lobby to keep my head from hurting from the loud "music."
By now you may have gotten what that thread is. Millennials never put themselves in the kind of situations that facilitate communications with the opposite sex, and even when they were in such situations, they never honed the communication skills needed, because they were simply not trained and practiced to have a conversation. Too distracted. Too loud. Too little mastery of the spoken word.
That was my supposition regarding the study. Sure, millennials all over are moving back with their parents, or not leaving, because they don't have jobs and can't afford to live on their own, and this excuse and that excuse. And because the parents don't do their jobs and kick them out, or set a deadline for them when they will be evicted. I get that.
But it's the relative lack of relationships that lead to marriage (or cohabitation) that I find more troubling -- but equally explicable. Millennials are less -- in some cases, far less -- able to conduct a civilized discussion with each other than previous generations, that were obliged to learn the skill. No communication, no relationships. No relationships, no process that ends up sharing a home.
We look at TV family sitcoms and think that maybe I'm completely wrong. But those sitcoms have two things real millennials don't have -- a script by a professional writer, and a low maximum background volume. I think the trend reflected in the study is here for the long haul, because neither technology nor ambient volumes in bars and clubs will change any time soon.
If you're a parent, you had better concentrate on your 15-year-old learning to communicate with the opposite sex and getting them in environments where they can. Or you can expect your home's consumables budget to be pretty high in another ten years.
You heard it here first.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Apparently, for the first time, the most common residence situation for people aged 18 to 34 is living with their parents. As in "home", like, "never left" or "came right back." Second place was "living with a romantic partner", which had always been first.
I know a lot of people probably watched the show and were thinking that it had everything to do with the part about the parents, the parents' home, the lack of the job needed to make money, or the actual "living with the parents" aspect.
That was not my reaction, though it is not wrong. It's pretty obvious why, given their specific situation, the 18-34 crowd ends up in their parents' home rather than living independently elsewhere.
What needed the thought was why they were not living with a romantic partner. And that's where my mind went.
The vast majority of people would like to be living with a romantic partner. They just can't find one, or haven't found one, or found one and lost one. But there's a basic essential to finding someone, and that, to me, is the ability to communicate with a member of the opposite sex.
Granted, that shouldn't be hard, but let's think about what makes millennials different from previous generations. I think we'll find a thread here.
First, they are enslaved by technology -- their iPhones, their tablets, their video games. Lots of texting, lots of playing, lots of Internet searching dominates their lives. It is an artificially sheltered environment in many senses of the word. But the tools of technology are distractions from humanity.
Second, they don't read. Ever try to sell a bunch of used books? There is zero market for books anymore, and one wonders how Barnes & Noble, and the other big book retailer whose name escapes me, even survive, unless it's mainly by selling Kindle versions. No reading for pleasure means losing the mind-expanding world that books provide -- and it means losing the vocabulary-expanding value that reading a lot offers.
Third, it's too freaking loud when they assemble in social situations, to have a conversation. I realize that this is not necessarily a new phenomenon; I graduated college in 1973 and the parties were too loud even then. But I have a lot of memories of the kind of interaction where you want to talk to (in my case) a girl and have to figure out where to go to have a conversation BECAUSE IT WAS TOO LOUD. I went to a cousin's daughter's wedding not that long ago (she was in her twenties) and spent most of the reception out in the lobby to keep my head from hurting from the loud "music."
By now you may have gotten what that thread is. Millennials never put themselves in the kind of situations that facilitate communications with the opposite sex, and even when they were in such situations, they never honed the communication skills needed, because they were simply not trained and practiced to have a conversation. Too distracted. Too loud. Too little mastery of the spoken word.
That was my supposition regarding the study. Sure, millennials all over are moving back with their parents, or not leaving, because they don't have jobs and can't afford to live on their own, and this excuse and that excuse. And because the parents don't do their jobs and kick them out, or set a deadline for them when they will be evicted. I get that.
But it's the relative lack of relationships that lead to marriage (or cohabitation) that I find more troubling -- but equally explicable. Millennials are less -- in some cases, far less -- able to conduct a civilized discussion with each other than previous generations, that were obliged to learn the skill. No communication, no relationships. No relationships, no process that ends up sharing a home.
We look at TV family sitcoms and think that maybe I'm completely wrong. But those sitcoms have two things real millennials don't have -- a script by a professional writer, and a low maximum background volume. I think the trend reflected in the study is here for the long haul, because neither technology nor ambient volumes in bars and clubs will change any time soon.
If you're a parent, you had better concentrate on your 15-year-old learning to communicate with the opposite sex and getting them in environments where they can. Or you can expect your home's consumables budget to be pretty high in another ten years.
You heard it here first.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Gaaak ... It's For Profit!
You probably saw clips of the latest contretemps of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump arguing in their respective stump speeches about real estate. Without recreating the whole thing, in essence Hillary complained that Trump was rooting for the real estate crash in the late 2000s so that he could buy property cheaply.
This incensed the soon-to-be-indicted and this-week-disgraced Mrs. Clinton, who herself has profited from buying low and selling high in the past, with some nefarious implications of funky options trades and unethical stock tips in her Arkansas days. She was really upset -- imagine, she said, wishing for real estate to lose value so he could buy it low and sell it high. No really, imagine! How dare he?
The Donald, for his part, was incredulous. "Gee, a real estate developer wanting to buy at a lower price", I paraphrase him as saying. "Who the [heck] wouldn't?", he said.
I don't know about you, but I immediately read a lot into the differing responses. Hillary Clinton has been married into government for decades and, for part of the last 15 years, actually working in government. OK, maybe "working" is an exaggeration since a lot of that time was as a senator. Let's go with "paid a government salary."
She has been associated with government, by marriage or by salary, for so long that she has been insulated from things like payrolls, and running a business, and profits. The economy is not run for the benefit of the government, but she has long since forgotten that. Profitability and, for that matter, business decisions in general, are out of her ken. As long as she and her husband can give speeches at a few hundred grand a pop, and get the private jets and first-class hotels and the other demanded perks, then why would she care about actual job-creating businesses?
When Donald Trump said what he did a few years back about hoping the real estate market would crash, we might have not been hoping for the same thing, but it was patently obvious why he would have hoped for it. He was, as he is still, not a government employee but a businessman, a real estate developer looking to create value for his company.
He thought real estate was generally overvalued, demand driven up by a few things like Barney Frank-era mandates about lending to people who ultimately couldn't afford their mortgages. As a developer, that was not a good situation for a buy low, build up and add value, and sell high business.
Donald Trump was speaking to, and operating from, the reality of the situation and the time relative to his own businesses. A crash wasn't good for a lot of people, but it would be good for him. Him. Donald Trump, head of the company for which it would also be good. I'm sure he would say the same thing today; in fact, he did. Tuesday.
It's hard to understand the insular world that Hillary Clinton inhabits. She has been forced into the business-bashing left even further by the Bernie Sanders campaign and its relentless nature vs. her relentless unlikeability. Accordingly, even when she is hollering at Donald Trump, she has to use language and make points that simply don't resonate with people with at least a few toes dipped into the reality pool.
Hillary really, really wants to be president of the United States. But wouldn't it be really helpful if, somewhere along the line, she had been president of something else, like maybe a company that employed actual private-sector workers? She still probably could have gotten someone to drive her around, but at least she would understand a lot more about how businesses operate than she learned back at Wellesley.
Because she obviously hasn't learned about it since.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
This incensed the soon-to-be-indicted and this-week-disgraced Mrs. Clinton, who herself has profited from buying low and selling high in the past, with some nefarious implications of funky options trades and unethical stock tips in her Arkansas days. She was really upset -- imagine, she said, wishing for real estate to lose value so he could buy it low and sell it high. No really, imagine! How dare he?
The Donald, for his part, was incredulous. "Gee, a real estate developer wanting to buy at a lower price", I paraphrase him as saying. "Who the [heck] wouldn't?", he said.
I don't know about you, but I immediately read a lot into the differing responses. Hillary Clinton has been married into government for decades and, for part of the last 15 years, actually working in government. OK, maybe "working" is an exaggeration since a lot of that time was as a senator. Let's go with "paid a government salary."
She has been associated with government, by marriage or by salary, for so long that she has been insulated from things like payrolls, and running a business, and profits. The economy is not run for the benefit of the government, but she has long since forgotten that. Profitability and, for that matter, business decisions in general, are out of her ken. As long as she and her husband can give speeches at a few hundred grand a pop, and get the private jets and first-class hotels and the other demanded perks, then why would she care about actual job-creating businesses?
When Donald Trump said what he did a few years back about hoping the real estate market would crash, we might have not been hoping for the same thing, but it was patently obvious why he would have hoped for it. He was, as he is still, not a government employee but a businessman, a real estate developer looking to create value for his company.
He thought real estate was generally overvalued, demand driven up by a few things like Barney Frank-era mandates about lending to people who ultimately couldn't afford their mortgages. As a developer, that was not a good situation for a buy low, build up and add value, and sell high business.
Donald Trump was speaking to, and operating from, the reality of the situation and the time relative to his own businesses. A crash wasn't good for a lot of people, but it would be good for him. Him. Donald Trump, head of the company for which it would also be good. I'm sure he would say the same thing today; in fact, he did. Tuesday.
It's hard to understand the insular world that Hillary Clinton inhabits. She has been forced into the business-bashing left even further by the Bernie Sanders campaign and its relentless nature vs. her relentless unlikeability. Accordingly, even when she is hollering at Donald Trump, she has to use language and make points that simply don't resonate with people with at least a few toes dipped into the reality pool.
Hillary really, really wants to be president of the United States. But wouldn't it be really helpful if, somewhere along the line, she had been president of something else, like maybe a company that employed actual private-sector workers? She still probably could have gotten someone to drive her around, but at least she would understand a lot more about how businesses operate than she learned back at Wellesley.
Because she obviously hasn't learned about it since.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
There Has to Be a Headline
Every morning my wife and I wake up, turn on the TV and watch the news. News in the morning is relatively interesting -- or it might be dramatic. Since it may be 18 hours since that we saw anything other than a recorded show on TV, we'll usually learn that something of interest has happened, somewhere.
But there's a spectrum here in terms of the newsworthiness of what is actually presented, a spectrum that makes me glad that I have never been part of the news section of a medium in my life. It goes from one really newsworthy event -- a coup, an election, a natural disaster, a crash, a terror attack -- all the way down to virtually nothing happening more than the release of a poll, or a cat being rescued from a tree.
And yet, the news programs and the newspapers as well, don't have the luxury of just saying "Oops, nothing to report on here. Try a magazine, or watch the Kardashians or something."
Nope, they actually have to fill defined hours of content, and put something on the front page that looks like a headline, in time for the paper-boy to do his 5:00 AM thing. In fact, by virtue of its presence on the front page and looking like a headline, it is defined by that paper (or if it's a lead story, defined by the news program on TV) as the most important thing that has happened in the last 24 hours.
Sometimes, of course, it is not just the, I don't know, "least unimportant news story." No; it is usually actually "important." But there are days when, by any standard of newsworthiness, nothing happened. That doesn't stop the presses, though; there are subscriptions to be filled for the print medium, and there are hours of presence on TV to fill.
Now, TV news programs can just plug in puff pieces and features and all that, and you can watch and be entertained as the networks hope you won't be thinking, "Dang, must have been a slow news day." I don't think the same applies to newspapers, though. Here's the thing -- on Sunday, the paper as likely as not will not have a serious front-page headline story, and might only have a feature that some reporter has been assigned to cover. They really don't want, say, the Tuesday paper, to look like Sunday, if you know what I mean.
So that's kind of the point. The media need for you to think that their lead story, or front-page headline, is not only the most important thing that happened in the last day, but that it is actually newsworthy. And since something has to be that lead story, whatever it is then achieves a status of imputed interest or newsworthiness that may not be connected to its reality.
I want us all to be aware of that. I want that awareness not just because we should have a built-in wall that protects us from thinking something is a bigger deal than it really is, but because the news media's ability to make something far more important than it really is, is a power. It means the media hold the power to lie to us about events (in this case, their importance) and, in fact, are forced to do so every time there is a slow news day.
I respect the Constitutional protection of a free press. One has only to look at the media in dictatorships to realize that a free press is best appreciated when it doesn't exist. Of course, our press has been free for over 220 years, and has a pretty checkered history of playing fast and loose with the facts on occasion.
So the point, as I finally get to it, is this. While the press may be the last defense of a nation against dictatorial government, the last defense of a free nation against a Constitutionally unfettered press is our own understanding of its limits and a clear appreciation for what it can get away with. If we don't believe a story, we are free to call out the medium on it, because we understand that it may indeed be false.
And if we believe that a story on the front page is far less important than its positioning would lead us to feel, we're free to diminish its importance in our mind. Because we, as free Americans, know that the press can manipulate with the best of them.
We are free to know that there are actually slow news days.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
But there's a spectrum here in terms of the newsworthiness of what is actually presented, a spectrum that makes me glad that I have never been part of the news section of a medium in my life. It goes from one really newsworthy event -- a coup, an election, a natural disaster, a crash, a terror attack -- all the way down to virtually nothing happening more than the release of a poll, or a cat being rescued from a tree.
And yet, the news programs and the newspapers as well, don't have the luxury of just saying "Oops, nothing to report on here. Try a magazine, or watch the Kardashians or something."
Nope, they actually have to fill defined hours of content, and put something on the front page that looks like a headline, in time for the paper-boy to do his 5:00 AM thing. In fact, by virtue of its presence on the front page and looking like a headline, it is defined by that paper (or if it's a lead story, defined by the news program on TV) as the most important thing that has happened in the last 24 hours.
Sometimes, of course, it is not just the, I don't know, "least unimportant news story." No; it is usually actually "important." But there are days when, by any standard of newsworthiness, nothing happened. That doesn't stop the presses, though; there are subscriptions to be filled for the print medium, and there are hours of presence on TV to fill.
Now, TV news programs can just plug in puff pieces and features and all that, and you can watch and be entertained as the networks hope you won't be thinking, "Dang, must have been a slow news day." I don't think the same applies to newspapers, though. Here's the thing -- on Sunday, the paper as likely as not will not have a serious front-page headline story, and might only have a feature that some reporter has been assigned to cover. They really don't want, say, the Tuesday paper, to look like Sunday, if you know what I mean.
So that's kind of the point. The media need for you to think that their lead story, or front-page headline, is not only the most important thing that happened in the last day, but that it is actually newsworthy. And since something has to be that lead story, whatever it is then achieves a status of imputed interest or newsworthiness that may not be connected to its reality.
I want us all to be aware of that. I want that awareness not just because we should have a built-in wall that protects us from thinking something is a bigger deal than it really is, but because the news media's ability to make something far more important than it really is, is a power. It means the media hold the power to lie to us about events (in this case, their importance) and, in fact, are forced to do so every time there is a slow news day.
I respect the Constitutional protection of a free press. One has only to look at the media in dictatorships to realize that a free press is best appreciated when it doesn't exist. Of course, our press has been free for over 220 years, and has a pretty checkered history of playing fast and loose with the facts on occasion.
So the point, as I finally get to it, is this. While the press may be the last defense of a nation against dictatorial government, the last defense of a free nation against a Constitutionally unfettered press is our own understanding of its limits and a clear appreciation for what it can get away with. If we don't believe a story, we are free to call out the medium on it, because we understand that it may indeed be false.
And if we believe that a story on the front page is far less important than its positioning would lead us to feel, we're free to diminish its importance in our mind. Because we, as free Americans, know that the press can manipulate with the best of them.
We are free to know that there are actually slow news days.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
How Many Does It Take to Be Offended?
I have a vague memory of having written in passing in a not-recent piece that the left never apologizes, and never says that it was wrong about anything.
That makes it a bit hard to reconcile the front-page story in the Washington Post last week about the local NFL football team, the Washington Redskins. In what was doubtlessly intended to have a different result, the Post had surveyed a statistically significant number of Native Americans across the country and with many different tribal origins.
The result? Some 90% of the respondents identifying as "Native American" had no problem with the Washington football team being called the "Redskins", and a healthy number thought it to be a good, as in complimentary, thing. This, of course, flies squarely in the face of a bazillion editorials and published letters to the editor in that paper complaining of the name and insisting it be changed -- including one this morning.
In an interesting turn, the 90% figure appears to be virtually identical to the results of a similar survey about 12 years ago that also polled the same population. The separation of time, and the fact that the 2004 survey was done by a different organization, suggests that the data is pretty sound, and the results are usable for however a user may want to, well, use it.
I'll use it myself here, but only briefly. In terms of how much offense to glean from a poll of an affected group, I start with the fact that there is a spectrum -- from no one being offended all the way to everyone being offended. I believe that 1% of people taking offense for the perceived slur does not make it a slur. Obviously at 100%, it is a slur; in fact, I would pretty much say that you get as low as 50% and most people would agree that we should not use the term.
But I also feel that you get down to 25% and it's in the noise range, as far as actually asking people to change their actions. If three people out of four have no problem with a word or phrase referring to their group, or ethnicity or religion, then it seems to me it's the "one in four" who are overly sensitive.
And in this case, nine out of ten do not have an issue. So for my two cents, the issue of whether the football team -- whose nickname is shared, among others, by some high schools on reservations -- is resolved. Next issue, thanks. Move forward. The loud will not out-poll the numerous.
Which gets us to the point.
For the Washington Post, a very leftist paper which hates the name "Redskins", even to have printed the results of such a survey on the front page, with pictures even, is startling. It's startling not just because it flies in the face of what the paper's editorial board stands for, but because it makes the case that the concerns voiced by a loud minority, and the PC police who support them, are grossly misplaced -- and fundamentally unrepresentative of the alleged offended. And, of course, it's startling because the left never apologizes.
So why is was it even published?
I'm going to be speculating, because I don't know, and never will. But I think there are probably a few distinct elements at work here.
First -- even though an overwhelming percentage of journalists are leftists, and the reporting of events frequently has slant and even a stated opinion or two, the Post still recognizes that the editorial and news parts of the paper are separated by a nominal firewall. That's Journalism 101. Maybe 201, but at least it's fundamental. Send a reporter out on a story, especially when it's your own darned poll, and you had better print it.
Second -- had the paper squashed the story when it learned the results, all that had to happen was for one employee of the Post to have let the word get out that the polling was remarkably in contrast with the editorial staff's biases, and the proverbial stuff would have hit the fan. One thing a paper does not want to have happen is for it to be seen as letting bias affect the actual running of stories.
Third -- and this is the only FTM (follow the money) aspect I could come up with -- since the survey did not proactively target Native Americans, but rather asked the question only if they so identified, there must have been a lot of people polled, and a lot of work accomplished. The photographs alone suggest that some serious travel expense went on this story, meaning that it didn't get spent on alternative content. One way or the other, there has to be a headline (a piece for another day).
Finally, I do not doubt that someone back in the newsroom was so convinced that he or she was right on the issue, if not the facts, that the order was issued to run the story. "We'll get people talking about it", I suspect was the order, "and once they talk they'll see that the name is offensive." No matter what the polls actually say. It's the infernal pomposity and self-righteousness of the left.
OK, I don't know if any of the above is true, although the first one almost assuredly came up at some point. If so, it would be heartening to know that at least someone at the Post has a shred of journalistic integrity.
But it doesn't change the outcome. The name is not offensive, and now we have concrete evidence that it is not.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
That makes it a bit hard to reconcile the front-page story in the Washington Post last week about the local NFL football team, the Washington Redskins. In what was doubtlessly intended to have a different result, the Post had surveyed a statistically significant number of Native Americans across the country and with many different tribal origins.
The result? Some 90% of the respondents identifying as "Native American" had no problem with the Washington football team being called the "Redskins", and a healthy number thought it to be a good, as in complimentary, thing. This, of course, flies squarely in the face of a bazillion editorials and published letters to the editor in that paper complaining of the name and insisting it be changed -- including one this morning.
In an interesting turn, the 90% figure appears to be virtually identical to the results of a similar survey about 12 years ago that also polled the same population. The separation of time, and the fact that the 2004 survey was done by a different organization, suggests that the data is pretty sound, and the results are usable for however a user may want to, well, use it.
I'll use it myself here, but only briefly. In terms of how much offense to glean from a poll of an affected group, I start with the fact that there is a spectrum -- from no one being offended all the way to everyone being offended. I believe that 1% of people taking offense for the perceived slur does not make it a slur. Obviously at 100%, it is a slur; in fact, I would pretty much say that you get as low as 50% and most people would agree that we should not use the term.
But I also feel that you get down to 25% and it's in the noise range, as far as actually asking people to change their actions. If three people out of four have no problem with a word or phrase referring to their group, or ethnicity or religion, then it seems to me it's the "one in four" who are overly sensitive.
And in this case, nine out of ten do not have an issue. So for my two cents, the issue of whether the football team -- whose nickname is shared, among others, by some high schools on reservations -- is resolved. Next issue, thanks. Move forward. The loud will not out-poll the numerous.
Which gets us to the point.
For the Washington Post, a very leftist paper which hates the name "Redskins", even to have printed the results of such a survey on the front page, with pictures even, is startling. It's startling not just because it flies in the face of what the paper's editorial board stands for, but because it makes the case that the concerns voiced by a loud minority, and the PC police who support them, are grossly misplaced -- and fundamentally unrepresentative of the alleged offended. And, of course, it's startling because the left never apologizes.
So why is was it even published?
I'm going to be speculating, because I don't know, and never will. But I think there are probably a few distinct elements at work here.
First -- even though an overwhelming percentage of journalists are leftists, and the reporting of events frequently has slant and even a stated opinion or two, the Post still recognizes that the editorial and news parts of the paper are separated by a nominal firewall. That's Journalism 101. Maybe 201, but at least it's fundamental. Send a reporter out on a story, especially when it's your own darned poll, and you had better print it.
Second -- had the paper squashed the story when it learned the results, all that had to happen was for one employee of the Post to have let the word get out that the polling was remarkably in contrast with the editorial staff's biases, and the proverbial stuff would have hit the fan. One thing a paper does not want to have happen is for it to be seen as letting bias affect the actual running of stories.
Third -- and this is the only FTM (follow the money) aspect I could come up with -- since the survey did not proactively target Native Americans, but rather asked the question only if they so identified, there must have been a lot of people polled, and a lot of work accomplished. The photographs alone suggest that some serious travel expense went on this story, meaning that it didn't get spent on alternative content. One way or the other, there has to be a headline (a piece for another day).
Finally, I do not doubt that someone back in the newsroom was so convinced that he or she was right on the issue, if not the facts, that the order was issued to run the story. "We'll get people talking about it", I suspect was the order, "and once they talk they'll see that the name is offensive." No matter what the polls actually say. It's the infernal pomposity and self-righteousness of the left.
OK, I don't know if any of the above is true, although the first one almost assuredly came up at some point. If so, it would be heartening to know that at least someone at the Post has a shred of journalistic integrity.
But it doesn't change the outcome. The name is not offensive, and now we have concrete evidence that it is not.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, May 23, 2016
Maybe Bill SHOULD Have a Job
Maybe a year ago, after Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for the presidency (but before we all discovered that she was possibly going to be running from a Federal prison), I did a piece contemplating what it meant for Bill. He was not a fan of her running for president, I speculated, given the disaster it would make of his life.
It would put a serious damper on his social life, limit the jetting around giving paid speeches and using the Clinton Foundation as a front for raising oodles of cash. He could still play golf, but more at Joint Base Andrews than at TPC courses. A few months back, I also noted that Hillary could do some serious damage to his legacy as president and to how he would be remembered, years after he had managed to rehabilitate that legacy ... somewhat.
Now, however, he has a chance to screw up his legacy all by himself. Yep, in an effort to resuscitate her dolorous candidacy with the fact that her husband is more popular than she is, Hillary has pronounced that Bill will be put in charge of "revitalizing the economy." Oh, yes, I'm serious, except you probably already had heard the story.
Oh, dear. Let's think about why that is a hugely terrible idea.
First, it is a terrible idea because it is a terrible idea, and Hillary does not need to float things out there that even the leftist Time magazine thinks are stupid. She has a reputation as a bit of a policy wonk (and a few other things) and someone who "gets things done." There isn't anything actually to point to as examples, but at least she repeats it a lot.
So what does it say when she says that she is going to put her husband in charge of fixing the economy? Well, a lot of things, and none of them is good. First and foremost, it's the economy, stupid! Remember that? It was a message Bill left for himself to remind himself constantly that the economy is the most important thing to the people who go to the polls, not to mention those who don't.
But evidently the economy is not important enough for Hillary Clinton to think she should be the one to worry about it. No, it gets pushed across the table to her husband. I don't care who her husband is, including that he used to be president himself. If she is going to do something like that, then it means we are voting for a couple to share the presidency -- and that's a couple with a, let's say, "spotty" relationship involving the throwing of ash trays and kitchen utensils.
Bill: "Well, sweetie, we need to adjust these tax rates here to stimulate the energy sector to hire ..."
Hillary: "$%^%^&# you, you filthy philandering #$%^&$%!!!"
Get the idea? I thought you might. Now, I have worked with my wife at six different places, including twice operating our own business, once primarily hers and once primarily mine. There are times -- rare in our case -- when we might be disagreeing about something and you could see where it might affect our judgment on the other's opinion. We managed -- but we don't have a throwing-utensils type of relationship.
This is the economy we're talking about. Bill Clinton used to be president of the United States. He is surely going to think his recommendations are really good, and will not take kindly to wifely criticism.
More than that, though, there is a huge potential for differing opinions on what would work. Suppose that Bill recommends a tax cut as a stimulus? Suppose that he thinks another trade deal like NAFTA would stimulate jobs? Bill was a big proponent of NAFTA, while Hillary has gone from supporting it one upon a time to opposing it now. Bill Clinton is not going to be just another senior staff member, whose research and recommendations can be simply ignored if the president doesn't agree.
So whose opinion rules when Bill wants to balance the budget, as he was forced to do by the 1994 Republican takeover of the House, but Hillary insists on a big-government tax, borrow and spend approach? Hint -- only one of the two can say that they have their current job because the voters put them there.
I mean, I can't even get past the part that says something else is more important than the economy. We are $20 trillion in debt and rising; fewer people work now than were employed when Barack Obama became president. There are no jobs, and the poor trying to get the few that are there have to compete with illegal aliens flooding over a nonexistent, unenforced border.
The economy should be the direct concern of the president. Not a past president, not a husband. The president of the United States. And that is assuming that Hillary Clinton has even a clue about how to create jobs (assuming that she even sees "jobs" as what the problem with the economy actually is).
It's a terrible idea. There is no accounting for what goes on in Hillary Clinton's mind, except that she is finally being convinced that the presidency, that she thinks herself entitled to, is slipping through her fingers (the polls are not being kind to her). She has forgotten that it was an extremely unpopular move when Bill had her put together a health-care proposal in his first term -- she wasn't elected, she wasn't popular, she had no experience in the area, and her proposal was socialism.
Hillary Clinton needs fewer terrible ideas, not more. This one is a real stinker. But I suppose that if Bill has a job, it will at least keep him at arms length for her. If the country is silly enough to give her enough votes.
Oh, yeah, and if she is not already in prison by then.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
It would put a serious damper on his social life, limit the jetting around giving paid speeches and using the Clinton Foundation as a front for raising oodles of cash. He could still play golf, but more at Joint Base Andrews than at TPC courses. A few months back, I also noted that Hillary could do some serious damage to his legacy as president and to how he would be remembered, years after he had managed to rehabilitate that legacy ... somewhat.
Now, however, he has a chance to screw up his legacy all by himself. Yep, in an effort to resuscitate her dolorous candidacy with the fact that her husband is more popular than she is, Hillary has pronounced that Bill will be put in charge of "revitalizing the economy." Oh, yes, I'm serious, except you probably already had heard the story.
Oh, dear. Let's think about why that is a hugely terrible idea.
First, it is a terrible idea because it is a terrible idea, and Hillary does not need to float things out there that even the leftist Time magazine thinks are stupid. She has a reputation as a bit of a policy wonk (and a few other things) and someone who "gets things done." There isn't anything actually to point to as examples, but at least she repeats it a lot.
So what does it say when she says that she is going to put her husband in charge of fixing the economy? Well, a lot of things, and none of them is good. First and foremost, it's the economy, stupid! Remember that? It was a message Bill left for himself to remind himself constantly that the economy is the most important thing to the people who go to the polls, not to mention those who don't.
But evidently the economy is not important enough for Hillary Clinton to think she should be the one to worry about it. No, it gets pushed across the table to her husband. I don't care who her husband is, including that he used to be president himself. If she is going to do something like that, then it means we are voting for a couple to share the presidency -- and that's a couple with a, let's say, "spotty" relationship involving the throwing of ash trays and kitchen utensils.
Bill: "Well, sweetie, we need to adjust these tax rates here to stimulate the energy sector to hire ..."
Hillary: "$%^%^&# you, you filthy philandering #$%^&$%!!!"
Get the idea? I thought you might. Now, I have worked with my wife at six different places, including twice operating our own business, once primarily hers and once primarily mine. There are times -- rare in our case -- when we might be disagreeing about something and you could see where it might affect our judgment on the other's opinion. We managed -- but we don't have a throwing-utensils type of relationship.
This is the economy we're talking about. Bill Clinton used to be president of the United States. He is surely going to think his recommendations are really good, and will not take kindly to wifely criticism.
More than that, though, there is a huge potential for differing opinions on what would work. Suppose that Bill recommends a tax cut as a stimulus? Suppose that he thinks another trade deal like NAFTA would stimulate jobs? Bill was a big proponent of NAFTA, while Hillary has gone from supporting it one upon a time to opposing it now. Bill Clinton is not going to be just another senior staff member, whose research and recommendations can be simply ignored if the president doesn't agree.
So whose opinion rules when Bill wants to balance the budget, as he was forced to do by the 1994 Republican takeover of the House, but Hillary insists on a big-government tax, borrow and spend approach? Hint -- only one of the two can say that they have their current job because the voters put them there.
I mean, I can't even get past the part that says something else is more important than the economy. We are $20 trillion in debt and rising; fewer people work now than were employed when Barack Obama became president. There are no jobs, and the poor trying to get the few that are there have to compete with illegal aliens flooding over a nonexistent, unenforced border.
The economy should be the direct concern of the president. Not a past president, not a husband. The president of the United States. And that is assuming that Hillary Clinton has even a clue about how to create jobs (assuming that she even sees "jobs" as what the problem with the economy actually is).
It's a terrible idea. There is no accounting for what goes on in Hillary Clinton's mind, except that she is finally being convinced that the presidency, that she thinks herself entitled to, is slipping through her fingers (the polls are not being kind to her). She has forgotten that it was an extremely unpopular move when Bill had her put together a health-care proposal in his first term -- she wasn't elected, she wasn't popular, she had no experience in the area, and her proposal was socialism.
Hillary Clinton needs fewer terrible ideas, not more. This one is a real stinker. But I suppose that if Bill has a job, it will at least keep him at arms length for her. If the country is silly enough to give her enough votes.
Oh, yeah, and if she is not already in prison by then.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, May 20, 2016
Bernie's Real Damage to Hillary
After Tuesday's primaries in Oregon (won handily by Bernie Sanders) and Kentucky (splitting the delegates down the middle), Sanders committed again to compete with Hillary Clinton all the way to the Democrats' convention in Philadelphia. He is now also chasing those "super-delegates" that the Democrats put in place to ensure that Hillary would be the nominee, if she is not in prison by then.
Most of us have the gut reaction that the "big deal" this is, for Hillary, is that she has to burn up lots more of her super-PACs' money going after primary wins against Sanders (which themselves are getting pretty rare for her any more) rather than saving it for the general campaign against Donald Trump. And that is truly a big deal, no argument there.
It is also true that the further along primary season goes, with Sanders seemingly winning every contested primary but not getting the nomination, the angrier his supporters get. And they are indeed pretty angry. That anger is directed toward Hillary and the Democrat establishment that wired the whole process for her to win -- and that should translate into a lot of voters who may stay home in November. Donald Trump is actually courting those voters, and it's even worse for Hillary if they cross over to Trump than if they stayed home.
But I want to touch on a different aspect of the difficulty that Sanders causes for Hillary.
Bernie is, as we all know, an extremely left-wing fellow. He is an avowed socialist, and it is not an editorial opinion but obvious fact that he regards property as belonging to the government, and that private property is simply an annoyance to a huge government, the one he favors. You see that in proposed 92% tax rates, government control of health care and education, that sort of thing.
Yet he is winning the primaries. So, to compete with him, Hillary has to keep pushing to the left, further and further. Now, because she has completely lost credibility with the public after years of lies, planned deceptions and multiple changes to stated positions (NAFTA, gay marriage, Iraq, immigration, etc.), we don't know what her actual, look-in-the-mirror positions are on anything. She may be moving in the direction of what she (as opposed to the less-leftist fellow she married) actually believes. Who knows?
That pushing to the left, though, is a big problem, precisely because of, you guessed it, Bill Clinton himself. Hillary is inextricably linked to her serially-philandering hubby, the former president. But his policies were nowhere near as leftist has the ones that Hillary is having to declare now. And because she was "married" to Bill during his presidency, she had to make repeated public statements then in support of those not-so-left policies.
Got it now? Because of Bernie, Hillary has to state positions on a series of issues that conflict with public statements she herself made way back ... well, not all that long ago. And those public statements by Hillary, not to mention those by Bill that caused her to say what she did then, are sitting out there on video for all to see.
So now we get things like the famous "13-minutes of Hillary lying" video (at this site, in case you hadn't seen it) that juxtaposes opposite sentiments out of the same mouth. We get the airing of Bill, as president, declaring that we needed to secure our borders, and threatening businesses that hire illegal aliens -- juxtaposed with Donald Trump saying pretty much the same thing. And there will be plenty more; it is a blessing and a curse that every famous person has archives full of video out there to be searched.
Hillary Clinton has one problem with the voting public that trumps all the others (pun intended) -- she has no credibility. She is a serial liar, and all this video content shows it for all to see. The more Bernie sticks around, the further left she is pushed -- meaning "the further she is pushed away from views she once espoused, for which there is plenty of evidence." Each leftist policy statement generates plenty of searches for where she has said the opposite thing in the past. And they're easy to find.
It is not fun for her that she is having to blow money on a primary campaign that she might not get or have later. It is not fun that the long campaign, and the persistent losing of primaries, is agitating Bernie supporters into the anger that will keep them from voting for her.
But most of all, it is not fun for Hillary Clinton that she is being forced into advocating for issues on which she is blatantly in the public record opposing in the past. Others can't really get away with that too easily; when you have a public perception already of being corrupt and a serial liar, there's no way that she can recover from that.
Except, of course, to deflect. Look for a dirty, dirty campaign.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Most of us have the gut reaction that the "big deal" this is, for Hillary, is that she has to burn up lots more of her super-PACs' money going after primary wins against Sanders (which themselves are getting pretty rare for her any more) rather than saving it for the general campaign against Donald Trump. And that is truly a big deal, no argument there.
It is also true that the further along primary season goes, with Sanders seemingly winning every contested primary but not getting the nomination, the angrier his supporters get. And they are indeed pretty angry. That anger is directed toward Hillary and the Democrat establishment that wired the whole process for her to win -- and that should translate into a lot of voters who may stay home in November. Donald Trump is actually courting those voters, and it's even worse for Hillary if they cross over to Trump than if they stayed home.
But I want to touch on a different aspect of the difficulty that Sanders causes for Hillary.
Bernie is, as we all know, an extremely left-wing fellow. He is an avowed socialist, and it is not an editorial opinion but obvious fact that he regards property as belonging to the government, and that private property is simply an annoyance to a huge government, the one he favors. You see that in proposed 92% tax rates, government control of health care and education, that sort of thing.
Yet he is winning the primaries. So, to compete with him, Hillary has to keep pushing to the left, further and further. Now, because she has completely lost credibility with the public after years of lies, planned deceptions and multiple changes to stated positions (NAFTA, gay marriage, Iraq, immigration, etc.), we don't know what her actual, look-in-the-mirror positions are on anything. She may be moving in the direction of what she (as opposed to the less-leftist fellow she married) actually believes. Who knows?
That pushing to the left, though, is a big problem, precisely because of, you guessed it, Bill Clinton himself. Hillary is inextricably linked to her serially-philandering hubby, the former president. But his policies were nowhere near as leftist has the ones that Hillary is having to declare now. And because she was "married" to Bill during his presidency, she had to make repeated public statements then in support of those not-so-left policies.
Got it now? Because of Bernie, Hillary has to state positions on a series of issues that conflict with public statements she herself made way back ... well, not all that long ago. And those public statements by Hillary, not to mention those by Bill that caused her to say what she did then, are sitting out there on video for all to see.
So now we get things like the famous "13-minutes of Hillary lying" video (at this site, in case you hadn't seen it) that juxtaposes opposite sentiments out of the same mouth. We get the airing of Bill, as president, declaring that we needed to secure our borders, and threatening businesses that hire illegal aliens -- juxtaposed with Donald Trump saying pretty much the same thing. And there will be plenty more; it is a blessing and a curse that every famous person has archives full of video out there to be searched.
Hillary Clinton has one problem with the voting public that trumps all the others (pun intended) -- she has no credibility. She is a serial liar, and all this video content shows it for all to see. The more Bernie sticks around, the further left she is pushed -- meaning "the further she is pushed away from views she once espoused, for which there is plenty of evidence." Each leftist policy statement generates plenty of searches for where she has said the opposite thing in the past. And they're easy to find.
It is not fun for her that she is having to blow money on a primary campaign that she might not get or have later. It is not fun that the long campaign, and the persistent losing of primaries, is agitating Bernie supporters into the anger that will keep them from voting for her.
But most of all, it is not fun for Hillary Clinton that she is being forced into advocating for issues on which she is blatantly in the public record opposing in the past. Others can't really get away with that too easily; when you have a public perception already of being corrupt and a serial liar, there's no way that she can recover from that.
Except, of course, to deflect. Look for a dirty, dirty campaign.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
It's NEVER a Coincidence with the Left
I don't pretend to understand Twitter all that well, but I'm smelling some corruption in their hallowed halls.
Each morning when I post this column, I send out about 25 tweet messages to various public figures in politics and the media, with a short descriptive phrase for the topic and a link to the essay. Often links to my postings have gotten picked up by various media and online newspapers as a result. Then I send a public Tweet, same descriptive phrase and the same link. To that public Tweet, I add a few "hashtags" so it will get read by people who are searching for specific, popular hashtags.
That pretty much exhausts my knowledge and understanding of Twitter.
The 25 messages daily are made a pain by Twitter, because after about 12-15 of the same message it forces me to change the phrase, lest I be thought to be "spamming" -- even though I have sent 25 messages to the same people for over a year, every weekday. And there is no Twitter support line, so that's a daily pain.
The hashtags have generally been the more popular candidates' names on the Republican side, but over time they have evolved. For example, now there's only one candidate left. So I'll use, among others, #trumptrain and #trump2016, given that I'd like to be read by any searching Trump supporters, where I used to add #cruz2016 and #rubio2016 and that sort of thing. OK, you get it.
Lately, though, with only one candidate, I've tried to go with the tide. So I started adding two popular ones, #neverhillary and #hillaryforprison2016. You have to love that second one.
Now, I'm sure you know if you do use Twitter that, as soon as you start typing your Tweet, and hit the # sign to start typing a hashtag, Twitter senses that's what you are doing. It starts to suggest popular hashtags in a brief pull-down type list, so that you can just click on a choice instead of all the keystrokes. Popular, as in "used a lot."
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Hashtagland. People are Tweeting all over the place with #neverhillary hashtags, right? It's a very popular one. So I was surprised on Tuesday when I started typing "#neverhillary" and the previously-suggested #neverhillary hashtag no longer appeared in the list. No problem, I thought; I'll just type it out. And I did.
Then on Wednesday, I thought I'd slowly type the letters and see what came up. Sure enough, after I got as far as "#neverh" and the suggestions came up, I was startled to see that there was indeed a suggestion, but it was the oddly-spelled "#neverhilliary", with the extra "i", not "#neverhillary."
That makes no sense whatsoever. We are supposed to believe that (A) not enough people are sending tweets with the correct "#neverhillary" hashtag for it to be a popular suggestion; but (B) people are misspelling Hillary's name in the hashtag so frequently that it does show up in the list, and they're doing so in far greater numbers than those who spell it correctly. Seriously.
Think about it. You want to do that #neverhillary hashtag with your Tweet, and as soon as it suggests the very similar-looking misspelled version, you click it and probably don't notice it's the wrong one. People then searching for, or counting, Tweets with the correct #neverhillary hashtag get far fewer numbers than they would have otherwise, and the Clintonistas can say that it is not as popular a message.
Yeah, I don't think it was an accident either. We are faced with Facebook blatantly selecting news stories to choose stories from leftist news entities and not those from Fox, CNS, Newsmax, Breitbart, The Blaze and the like. That wasn't an accident, either. Neither is this.
I now wonder if anyone at all is seeing this and making a stink with Twitter. I'm not exactly on a first-name basis with anyone over there; I can't even get a response when I try to get some kind of tech support from them, so I don't have to retype my last ten Tweets each morning. But surely someone sees this.
Twitter, you are carefully and intentionally manipulating data in your system to deceive the populace and minimize the perceived size of the opposition to Hillary Clinton. You should be ashamed.
But I suspect you're simply proud of what you see as a #jobwelldone.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Each morning when I post this column, I send out about 25 tweet messages to various public figures in politics and the media, with a short descriptive phrase for the topic and a link to the essay. Often links to my postings have gotten picked up by various media and online newspapers as a result. Then I send a public Tweet, same descriptive phrase and the same link. To that public Tweet, I add a few "hashtags" so it will get read by people who are searching for specific, popular hashtags.
That pretty much exhausts my knowledge and understanding of Twitter.
The 25 messages daily are made a pain by Twitter, because after about 12-15 of the same message it forces me to change the phrase, lest I be thought to be "spamming" -- even though I have sent 25 messages to the same people for over a year, every weekday. And there is no Twitter support line, so that's a daily pain.
The hashtags have generally been the more popular candidates' names on the Republican side, but over time they have evolved. For example, now there's only one candidate left. So I'll use, among others, #trumptrain and #trump2016, given that I'd like to be read by any searching Trump supporters, where I used to add #cruz2016 and #rubio2016 and that sort of thing. OK, you get it.
Lately, though, with only one candidate, I've tried to go with the tide. So I started adding two popular ones, #neverhillary and #hillaryforprison2016. You have to love that second one.
Now, I'm sure you know if you do use Twitter that, as soon as you start typing your Tweet, and hit the # sign to start typing a hashtag, Twitter senses that's what you are doing. It starts to suggest popular hashtags in a brief pull-down type list, so that you can just click on a choice instead of all the keystrokes. Popular, as in "used a lot."
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Hashtagland. People are Tweeting all over the place with #neverhillary hashtags, right? It's a very popular one. So I was surprised on Tuesday when I started typing "#neverhillary" and the previously-suggested #neverhillary hashtag no longer appeared in the list. No problem, I thought; I'll just type it out. And I did.
Then on Wednesday, I thought I'd slowly type the letters and see what came up. Sure enough, after I got as far as "#neverh" and the suggestions came up, I was startled to see that there was indeed a suggestion, but it was the oddly-spelled "#neverhilliary", with the extra "i", not "#neverhillary."
That makes no sense whatsoever. We are supposed to believe that (A) not enough people are sending tweets with the correct "#neverhillary" hashtag for it to be a popular suggestion; but (B) people are misspelling Hillary's name in the hashtag so frequently that it does show up in the list, and they're doing so in far greater numbers than those who spell it correctly. Seriously.
Think about it. You want to do that #neverhillary hashtag with your Tweet, and as soon as it suggests the very similar-looking misspelled version, you click it and probably don't notice it's the wrong one. People then searching for, or counting, Tweets with the correct #neverhillary hashtag get far fewer numbers than they would have otherwise, and the Clintonistas can say that it is not as popular a message.
Yeah, I don't think it was an accident either. We are faced with Facebook blatantly selecting news stories to choose stories from leftist news entities and not those from Fox, CNS, Newsmax, Breitbart, The Blaze and the like. That wasn't an accident, either. Neither is this.
I now wonder if anyone at all is seeing this and making a stink with Twitter. I'm not exactly on a first-name basis with anyone over there; I can't even get a response when I try to get some kind of tech support from them, so I don't have to retype my last ten Tweets each morning. But surely someone sees this.
Twitter, you are carefully and intentionally manipulating data in your system to deceive the populace and minimize the perceived size of the opposition to Hillary Clinton. You should be ashamed.
But I suspect you're simply proud of what you see as a #jobwelldone.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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