Daniel Friedland sounds a lot like me, about seven or eight years ago. We’re happy to have him and the other 98 — I can’t even tell you how happy.

This is a shorter version of my recent rant about why Paul Krugman’s likely defense of his recent “Gore won two out of three undervote recounts” is still dishonest. I thought a quick summary might be a nice idea, since some readers said my earlier post was just too long to slog through.

I am assuming your familiarity with the controversy, and with Tom Maguire’s suggestion as to Krugman’s likely defense. Briefly, in an April 4, 2005 Miami Herald article that I found, Maguire found language that seems on its face to support the “two out of three” claim — if a full statewide recount were conducted, including new recounts in counties that had already done recounts. But in truth, the article doesn’t help Krugman — it just reveals new deceptions on his part.

To get the full background, or the detail regarding any of my arguments, please read my earlier comprehensive post on the topic. This is just the skeletal version.

Why is Krugman still wrong, even given the article found by Tom Maguire? Several reasons:

1) Krugman pretends that an unrealistic afterthought buried within the articles is really the study’s major finding.

2) Krugman claims that the study shows what would have happened if all undervotes were counted, but the study itself acknowledges that it didn’t necessarily examine all the undervotes.

3) Krugman collapses two standards where Bush was the winner into one, using cleverly deceptive language. The original study actually examined four standards, not three — and Bush won two, not one.

4) Krugman claims that the standard under which Bush won was unreliable and “almost certainly wouldn’t have been used in a statewide recount.” But the Miami Herald described it as “the standard most commonly used nationally.” Krugman claims this standard “would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear.” But his reference is to dimpled ballots, and dimpled ballots are far from clear — as I point out in my comprehensive post with numerous quotes, which are certain to bring up painful flashbacks of the 2000 post-election circus.

Interestingly, Don Luskin has independently picked up on my point number 3 above, and did some legwork of his own to confirm that there were indeed four standards, not three, even in Krugman’s hypothetical statewide recount. Krugman clearly owes yet another correction.

Although Erwin Chemerinsky initially appears to be smarter, repeated exposure to his opinions confirms that Beavis is actually the more intelligent of the two. Discuss.

(Part One here. Latest Chemerinsky whining here.)

Via Orin Kerr, this video from a helicopter gives you a good feel for the devastation caused by this hurricane.

Although Butthead initially appears to be smarter, repeated viewings confirm that Beavis is actually the more intelligent of the two. Discuss.

UPDATE FROM THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL: Sentiment seems to be running against me. But answer me this: who has the imagination to be Cornholio?

A friend of mine told me that Rush Limbaugh read from my recent “Outside the Tent” piece on his radio show last week, either Tuesday or Wednesday. If anyone knows a way to get a clip of that, I’d appreciate it.

Here is a good example of why I read Xrlq. Two completely bizarre facts/stories, related in a humorous way — in one economical sentence. Brilliant.

Tom Maguire thinks he has come up with an explanation for Paul Krugman’s recent assertion that two of three recounts of undervotes would have given the 2000 election to Al Gore. If Maguire is right, then Krugman’s assertion is still dishonest — but in a slippery and underhanded fashion, rather than a blatant and easily disproved fashion.

That sounds more like the Krugman we know and love! Which makes me think Maguire is on to something.

Warning: the following post contains some painful resurrected details of the 2000 post-election brouhaha. If reading those details stressed you out then, re-living them today may have similar effects. Pregnant mothers and those with weak hearts are warned that they proceed at their own risk.

(more…)

A transcript of Tim Rutten’s interview with Hugh Hewitt is available here. I am hoping to hear the interview itself, since transcripts often contain some inaccuracies and don’t necessarily convey the flavor of particular exchanges. But there’s some interesting stuff there. If you want to understand how the people at the L.A. Times can be as blind to their own biases as they so obviously are, go read it.

P.S. One of my favorite parts of the interview: Rutten considers himself a “pretty conservative guy” because he goes to church, has remained married to the same woman his whole life, and takes care of kids. In the world of the L.A. Times, I guess that makes you pretty conservative.

P.P.S. Recall that Rutten is also the guy who once wrote, without a trace of irony, of the “mythology of liberal Hollywood.”

P.P.P.S. Another favorite part is the part where he bemoans the lowering of our public discourse:

And you notice, that’s the thing about our public discourse now? That whether it’s in the blogosphere, whether it’s on talk radio, whether it’s just two guys shouting or two people shouting at each other on TV, nobody’s every wrong anymore. They just…they’re liars.

Thank goodness Tim Rutten eschews such words when describing conservative bloggers — preferring instead the high-flown terms “[m]alice, mendacity, and misrepresentation.”

I’ll likely have more comments once I have heard the interview. Hopefully Hugh will run it during the 5:00 hour.

When the news was announced that a vacancy was opening at the Supreme Court, I was thrilled to be a blogger and to have the chance to take part. But things haven’t gone the way I thought they would. Oh, sure, there has been plenty of unfair trashing of John Roberts and his record. But it seems clear to me that none of it is going to stick. The man is going to be confirmed, and he is going to be a solid Supreme Court Justice — and he certainly doesn’t need my help for any of it.

Which is not to say that I’m entirely bowing out of commentary on this nomination, or that we should be complacent. When the hearings begin, in particular, there should be plenty of grist for the blogging mill. But right now, I’m just sitting back and watching the radical left dribble away its last remaining drops of credibility opposing a man most Americans see as solidly within the conservative mainstream.

The saying goes something like this: “when your enemy is destroying himself, shut up and get out of the way.” That seems like good advice right now.

P.S. A hearty “kudos!” from Patterico to the first reader who can correctly identify and source that saying.

Here is Tim Rutten’s column about talk radio, including his interview with Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt says he was quoted accurately — but when we hear the interview itself on Monday, we’ll be surprised at what Rutten left out. Looking forward to it.

UPDATE: I have now read Rutten’s column and have time to comment on it. Rutten is apparently incapable of taking on conservatives’ complaints about bias in news media, so he constructs a blatant strawman instead:

You know this particular argument like a mantra: All humans have personal beliefs, including political ones, which inevitably bias anything they write or broadcast. Therefore, everyone who reports or analyzes the news must publicly declare everything they believe and all their personal associations so that their readers or audience can — to borrow Hewitt’s phrase — “correct” for the journalist’s bias. The notion that the former — all people have biases — might be true, but not the latter — they always determine absolutely everything you say or do — never is considered. Nor is the possibility that personal discipline and the conventions of the craft already accomplish that “correction” among journalists who observe them. It’s simply not an admissible idea here. (Let’s not even touch the common-sense proposition that it’s the normality of the mainstream media’s workaday, unbiased journalism that makes the biased stuff stand out so clearly — and offensively — when it occurs.)

(My emphasis.)

Few people are harsher critics of the Los Angeles Times than I am — so if Rutten is right, his cartoonish description of the conservative case against Big Media ought to fit my views to a T. But it doesn’t.

I do not argue that journalists’ biases “always determine absolutely everything” journalists say or do. Much of the mainstream media’s workaday journalism escapes the influence of their bias. It’s only when the subject matter touches on a pet issue of the liberal elite that the biases come into sharp relief.

The mainstream media reveals its bias most clearly in its coverage of issues like taxes, social welfare benefits, environmental regulation, racial preferences, universal healthcare, criminal justice, immigration, war, Israel, gun control, abortion rights, sexual conduct, assisted suicide, religion, and campaign finance reform. Stories that don’t relate to these or related pet issues are often covered, if not entirely competently, at least without screaming bias.

Also, the idea that “personal discipline and the conventions of the craft” already filter out most of the bias is certainly an “admissible idea” — just one we reject. Do we have any evidence to back up that viewpoint? I’ll let readers of this blog be the judge. Have you ever read this blog, Mr. Rutten?

Rutten’s column concludes, hilariously, with his assertion that talk radio’s audience is shrinking because its practitioners are narcissistic blowhards:

Political talk-show hosts see everything through the prism of their partisan politics and insist, as an article of faith, that everyone else is always doing the same. In this sense, their approach to current affairs is less a conservative one and more a creature of that most powerful of American vices: narcissism.

The controlling assumption is: I look at the world in this fashion and, therefore, everyone else does too.

Anyone who’s ever been trapped sitting next to that greatest of dinner party bores, an unrestrained narcissist in full cry, knows that the only coherent thing that comes to mind is escape.

Maybe that’s what’s happening to political talk radio’s audience. As the physicists say, the simplest explanation is always the most elegant.

Yet not once in the column does Rutten mention the lemming-like escape that subscribers have accomplished from the Los Angeles Times itself. Might the financial woes of The Times have anything to do with the liberal bias of its writers, as evidenced by the unserious arguments Rutten advances in this piece?

Mr. Rutten? What would the physicists say about that?

You remember that study that said fetuses don’t feel pain until 29 weeks? Turns out that some of the folks who conducted the study have connections to abortion and the abortion lobby.

Didn’t you kind of suspect that already?

The L.A. Times reports: Report on Fetal Pain Sparks Debate on Disclosing Authors’ Affiliations:

A controversial research article about when fetuses feel pain is sparking a heated debate about the nexus between science and politics and what information authors should disclose to scientific journals.

The report, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., analyzed previously published research and concluded that fetuses probably don’t feel pain until 29 weeks after conception because of their developing brain structures.

Undisclosed was the fact that one of the five authors runs an abortion clinic at San Francisco’s public hospital while another author worked temporarily more than five years ago for an abortion rights advocacy group.

Whoops!

I find this interesting:

Several ethicists said they considered those points regrettable omissions that left readers without important information. Other experts consider the authors’ backgrounds irrelevant.

Who do you think we actually hear from in the article? The several who think the omissions were regrettable? Or the ones who think it’s irrelevant that folks conducting a study like this are in the pocket of the abortion lobby?

If you guessed that the first quote comes from someone who is undisturbed by all of this, you’re right. In fact, we never hear the actual words of any of the “several” ethicists who had a problem with hiding this information. When the article gets around to printing a quote that condemns the omission, it comes from the abortion lobby.

I believe that the late David Shaw (who ran an entire series on media bias on abortion) would have seen this for what it is: blatant liberal bias.