Patterico's Pontifications

6/19/2012

Racist Interrupts President

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 10:21 am



This wouldn’t have happened if Reagan had been white.

Background here. Via Ace. First highlighted by JD here.

P.S. In case you hadn’t noticed, JD has agreed to post interesting items here to try to keep content fresh. Thank JD for doing this when you get a chance.

33 Responses to “Racist Interrupts President”

  1. Racists

    Patterico (906cfb)

  2. There is only one reason for a white reporter to have the temerity to ask a black politician a question.

    RAAAAAACISM!!!!!!!

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  3. Did anybody else hear the word “boy” at the end of Munro’s questions?

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  4. I have a copy of Sam Donaldson’s autobiography. It’s titled “Hold On, Mr. President!”

    The guy titles a book about himself proudly reminiscent of how he’d rudely question a president, then goes on TV proclaiming that only a racist would act now like he once did.

    Again, I say if you had to associate with the Obamas and the Bidens and the WaPo/NYT press pool as a profession, can you blame the Secret Service for associating with honest whores when they can get away to Colombia?

    Steve57 (c441a6)

  5. rude rude rude with a side of insolence is what that is… the White House Correspondents Association must have been apoeffingplectic

    C-SPAN host and political editor Steve Scully, a former WHCA board member and former president, told Media Matters that Munro’s actions were unusual.

    “Anytime the president is delivering remarks from The White House, there has been a long standing tradition for the POTUS to make his statements, almost always followed by questions by the press corps,” Scully said in an email. “It was indeed unusual for the president to be interrupted by a reporter during the middle of his remarks and clearly it caught President Obama off-guard, simply because it doesn’t happen that often.”

    happyfeet (a55ba0)

  6. That was Sam Donaldson! I thought about Sam Donaldson when I heard about this interruption. ABC News’s Sam Donaldson always used to shout questions at President Ronald Reagan as he walked by (often to a helicopter) and sometimes he answered them.

    Sam Donaldson interrupted the president there because he knew that otherwise he wouldn’t get a chance to ask questions. It looks like it was the sme thing here. (Obama did not take any other questions)

    Except that Obama got a more hostile, argumentative question while Reagan got a “how is this consistent with your point of view? – Does this mean you made a mistake? question. Obama got a straight out argument on the policy.

    Q What about American workers who are unemployed while you import foreigners?

    The correct answer is that this is the “lump of labor” fallacy, which no economist holds to, and besides also, it is not correct to say they are now being imported. But very few people know how to articulate that, although it is clear he doesn’t subscribe to this kind of thinking. . Talk about contributions of course implies this doesn’t hurt other people, but you have to say that. That that whole idea is a paradox, a fallacy.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  7. “It was indeed unusual for the president to be interrupted by a reporter during the middle of his remarks and clearly it caught President Obama off-guard, simply because it doesn’t happen that often.”

    But it does happen occasionally, especially when a president announces something controversial and it looks like nobody is going tio be able to ask a question.

    A less hostile question would have been about the legaility of this or “Didn’t you say this was outside of your powers not too long ago”

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  8. Political hostility DOES NOT equal racism, and lack of decorum or respect is not caused by racism.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  9. Political hostility DOES NOT equal racism, and lack of decorum or respect is not caused by racism.

    Comment by Sammy Finkelman — 6/19/2012 @ 11:00 am

    I take it you don’t work for CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et al.

    Steve57 (c441a6)

  10. Wee lil’ Barack is just lucky Munro didn’t have an extra pair of shoes with him.

    Dave Surls (46b08c)

  11. “Except that Obama got a more hostile, argumentative question…”

    Not nearly as hostile as this.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W_eZ6d1e6M

    You’ll notice that Ms. Rude Britches, after making her absurd accusations (framed as questions), then proceeds to interrupt President Bush (who ignores her rudeness, because he has more class in his little finger than our current POTUS has in his entire metrosexual body), thus proving to the entire world that she’s a racist.

    According to Sam Donaldson’s definition of racism.

    Dave Surls (46b08c)

  12. Comment by Dave Surls — 6/19/2012 @ 11:35 am

    Wee lil’ Barack is just lucky Munro didn’t have an extra pair of shoes with him.

    That would really be stepping out of protocol.

    That was an Arab thing (throwing a shoe at president Bush)

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  13. Ms. Rude Britches interrupting the New Messiah.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q15Y1Z4YxgQ&

    No howls of outrage from the Washington Press Corps, even though she’s clearly engaging in racist acts.

    Go figure.

    Dave Surls (46b08c)

  14. Comment by Dave Surls — 6/19/2012 @ 11:44 am

    You’ll notice that Ms. Rude Britches, after making her absurd accusations (framed as questions), then proceeds to interrupt President Bush (who ignores her rudeness, because he has more class in his little finger than our current POTUS has in his entire metrosexual body)

    She only interrupted him a bit right at the beginning. It was more argumentative, and detailed (and had wrong factoids piled upon wrong factoids) but it was less hostile in tone than what Obama got.

    According to Sam Donaldson’s definition of racism.

    People don’t quite have the proper persepective. This is just politically hostile, and more on the issue actually. It’s the real third rail of American politics, after all.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  15. Finkelman, are you deliberately being obtuse?

    SPQR (26be8b)

  16. “The correct answer is that this is the “lump of labor” fallacy, which no economist holds to, and besides also, it is not correct to say they are now being imported. But very few people know how to articulate that, although it is clear he doesn’t subscribe to this kind of thinking. . Talk about contributions of course implies this doesn’t hurt other people, but you have to say that. That that whole idea is a paradox, a fallacy.”

    Sammy – Can you please translate the above into intelligible points?

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  17. Sam Donaldson had his own MICROPHONE in that video, hooked into the AV system. Maybe if Munro had been of the Illuminati like Sam, it would be OK and not racist.

    Kevin M (bf8ad7)

  18. “…but it was less hostile in tone than what Obama got.”

    I guess it’s just a matter of opinion…but, she seemed much more hostile to me.

    Dave Surls (46b08c)

  19. Q (from the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro)

    What about American workers who are unemployed while you import foreigners?

    SF: “The correct answer is that this is the “lump of labor” fallacy, which no economist holds to, and besides also, it is not correct to say they are now being imported. But very few people know how to articulate that, although it is clear he doesn’t subscribe to this kind of thinking. . Talk about contributions of course implies this doesn’t hurt other people, but you have to say that. That that whole idea is a paradox, a fallacy.”

    Comment by daleyrocks — 6/19/2012 @ 3:21 pm

    Sammy – Can you please translate the above into intelligible points?

    It looks like I tried to be too brief, and gave people homework which they might not even be able to do. It’s like when people write poems and try to get as many allusions into them as possible.

    OK. Lump of Labor fallacy (or what I call the “jobs paradox)

    The following may be too long. But it’s just the idea that the number of jobs or amount of work needed to be done is fixed at any given time.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

    In economics, the lump of labour fallacy (or lump of jobs fallacy) is the contention that the amount of work available to labourers is fixed. It is considered a fallacy by most economists,[citation needed] who hold that the amount of work is not static. [*] Another way to describe the fallacy is that it treats the demand for labour as an exogenous variable, when it is not. It may also be called the fallacy of labour scarcity, or the zero-sum fallacy, from its ties to the zero-sum game.

    Historically, the term “lump of labour” originated to rebut the idea that reducing the number of hours employees are allowed to labour during the working day would lead to a reduction in unemployment. In modern times, economists often use the term in other contexts – often to highlight errors of reasoning when ceteris paribus assumptions are counterfactual.[clarification needed] The term has also been used to describe the commonly held beliefs that increasing labour productivity and immigration cause unemployment. Whereas some argue that immigrants displace domestic workers, others believe this to be a fallacy, arguing that such a view relies on a belief that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed, whereas in reality immigration increases the size of the economy, thus creating more jobs.[1][2]

    [*] Of course the amount of goods isn’t fixed either, and therefore printing money does not cause inflation. My note. (It could cause a loss of confidence in the currency. But during the late twentieth century it was inflation that caused the printing and the electronic creation of money and not the other way around.

    Another source:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760701635809

    Abstract
    The lump-of-labor fallacy has been called one of the “best known fallacies in economics.” It is widely cited in disparagement of policies for reducing the standard hours of work, yet the authenticity of the fallacy claim is questionable, and explanations of it are inconsistent and contradictory. This article discusses recent occurrences of the fallacy claim and investigates anomalies in the claim and its history.

    the argument there is taht maybe nobody has actually really proposed this fallacy. But it does go on any time you argue employing people takes away jobs from others.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  20. “It looks like I tried to be too brief, and gave people homework which they might not even be able to do.”

    Sammy – Thank you for trying to explain. I don’t believe the situation looks at all like the lump of labor fallacy you describe. With the youth unemployment rate significantly higher than the rate for many other population subgroups, giving work permits to 800,000-1,200,000 people who otherwise could not legally work in this country is an increase in labor supply at a time as the questioner indicated, rather than the potential alternative of deportation.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  21. Should read – At a time when it is not needed

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  22. It took a little while till I remembered “Lump of Labor Fallacy” I was thinking “Jobs L*” ? The shorthand didn’t come to mind.

    Still talking about the first half of my first sentence, there was a New York Daily News op-ed piece yesterday which pretty much outlines the same argument.

    http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/immigrant-labor-helps-article-1.1098733?comment=true

    It was written by Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the department of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, from 2001 to 2009.

    Every day he writes a letter to the editor of sopme newspaper about some stupidity he thinks he read in the paper and now he put together a book called “Hypocrites & Half-Wits: A Daily Dose of Sanity from Cafe Hayek” that is based on these letters which you can get on AMAZON.COM.

    The online comments to the Daily News article are kind of predictable. They try to find fault with it and even accuse him of being a paid shill foir the Koch brothers.

    Now the article isn’t perfect, and mentions one or two separate points, (the number of jobs isn;t fixed and the type of job isn’t fixed) but what he says on this is more or less as follows:

    If you argue this you have to argue this in general. If you argue this you really should argue this about technology. They used to complain or worry about automation in the early 1960s.

    Innovation has certainly eliminated many more jobs. It used to be that 90% of all people worked on farms. Since then there’s been a massive destruction of agricultural jobs. But people are better off. Or take even the polio vaccine. Didn’t that eliminate a lot of jobs involved in building wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces and iron lung machines?

    Or you could add the introduction of a lot of women into the labor force. Or the eliminattion of discrimination againmst blacks – shouldn’t that, by the same logic, have lowered the aevrage wages if whites?

    This is really just a version of the broken windows fallacy. http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm

    Now if breaking windows doesn’t help the economy by creating jobs, neither does the economy lose by not avoiding the elimination of unnecessary jobs. And if a jib is eliminated by machinery or by the filling of jobs by new people it’s the same thing. The economy is a circle.

    Now President Obama – he’s not the one to knock this down, because he applied the same falalcy himself when he talked about the number of ATM machines. There he was doubly wrong, as there weren’t even fewer jobs as bank tellers! (There are more bank branches now. Tellers overall, I suppose, I suppose are less efficient in handling money

    This kind of thinking is very popular among labor unions.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  23. “Now the article isn’t perfect, and mentions one or two separate points, (the number of jobs isn;t fixed and the type of job isn’t fixed) but what he says on this is more or less as follows:”

    Sammy – It does not matter whether we assume the the number or type of jobs is fixed or not. What is currently demonstrably true is that we have an excess supply of labor relative to the demand for labor compared to say six or seven years ago. The higher unemployment rate, lower labor force participation rates and high food stamp usage all support that conclusion. Obama just unilaterally further increased the legal supply of labor. Those are the lumps that need to be swallowed.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  24. “The correct answer is that this is the “lump of labor” fallacy, which no economist holds to,

    Which you can pretty much determine for yourself. Only labor unions talk this way, and people seeking Taft-Hartley injunctions.

    and besides also, it is not correct to say they are now being imported.

    The young people being given the possibility of weork permits, are of course not being imported now, because the terms are that they have to have already been here for some time. And calling them “foreigners” probably dopesn’t really describe them well.

    But very few people know how to articulate that

    They don’t attack the premise. I mean, listen, this has gone uncontradicted on talk radio since 1974.

    although it is clear he doesn’t subscribe to this kind of thinking. <

    He doesn’t really, although he has occasional lapses into it like he did with the ATM machines.

    And everybody said it was nonsense even though they didn’t explain why. That’s why I called this a paradox – the jobs paradox. A paradox is something that is not true but it is difficult to explain why it is not true.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  25. Talk about contributions of course implies this doesn’t hurt other people

    I was referring to the fact that in his answer, Obama spoke about economic contributions:

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/15/remarks-president-immigration

    … Here’s the reason: because these young people are going to make extraordinary contributions, and are already making contributions to our society.

    I’ve got a young person who is serving in our military, protecting us and our freedom. The notion that in some ways we would treat them as expendable makes no sense. If there is a young person here who has grown up here and wants to contribute to this society, wants to maybe start a business that will create jobs for other folks who are looking for work, that’s the right thing to do. …

    That would show he doesn’t subscribe, at least here, to what can be called the lump of labor fallacy.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  26. but you have to say that. That that whole idea is a paradox, a fallacy.”

    If you want to answer the question properly, you have to say we are dealing here with a logical fallacy.

    But then you have to understand what is going on.

    I call this “The Paradox That Rules the World”

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  27. Finkelman, you appear to be making absolutely brilliant points about an argument that isn’t going on here.

    SPQR (73c3cf)

  28. Comment by daleyrocks — 6/21/2012 @ 2:18 pm

    Sammy – Thank you for trying to explain. I don’t believe the situation looks at all like the lump of labor fallacy you describe. With the youth unemployment rate significantly higher than the rate for many other population subgroups, giving work permits to 800,000-1,200,000 people who otherwise could not legally work in this country is an increase in labor supply at a time as the questioner indicated, rather than the potential alternative of deportation.

    It’s not really an increase in the labor supply so much as an increase in the numbe of people eligible for certain jobs, because the lowest payingh jobs exist anyway off the books.

    But the point is actually this does not make a difference. In the long run, and the long run cannot be longer than a year or two, the number of jobs proportional to the number of people seeking them, if the economy is functioning at all, and if it is not functioning things are really not good.

    Economists believe that there is a limit to the speed at which an economy can grow. That’s because theer are physical constraints and also the problem of raising money to start or expand a business.

    Now there ares ome other things to mention. What the unempoloyment rate really measures is how long it takes for someone to find work (except for people really really discriminated against, which we call structural unemployment. By the way, Obama wanted to create a new category of discrimination – the long term unemployed and/or give tax credits, but this was far too bureaucratic)

    When the average length of time of unemployment is longer, even though all other things are really the same, the unemployment rate will look higher.

    I don’t believe that by exlcudinmg people from working you can reduce unemployment among the people allowed to work.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  29. Now youth unemployment has anotehr cause – the fact that the minimum wage is way too high , (or taqht too many jobs arw covered by the minimum wage) It doesn’t lety people get a start.

    Newt Gingrich spoke about this a littkle bit.

    A high minimum wage makes every hiring decision momentous. This doesn’t work.

    Now what I would favor is a high minimum wage if someone is paid only once a week or once every two weeks.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  30. Comment by SPQR — 6/21/2012 @ 2:46 pm

    Finkelman, you appear to be making absolutely brilliant points about an argument that isn’t going on here.

    That’s mostly true. Nobody was actually saying that the import of the question Munro asked was right. Not here anyway.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  31. Another point is that generally we find that wages are higher in cities. I think a doubling of population increases wages by about 15%.

    There are more jobs to find, therefore better pickings.

    The same thing would go for increasing the population of a country.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  32. “Finkelman, you appear to be making absolutely brilliant points about an argument that isn’t going on here.”

    SPQR – I agree.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  33. “Finkelman, you appear to be making absolutely brilliant points about an argument that isn’t going on here.”

    Sammy – You raised the issue of the “Lump of Labor Fallacy” in connection with the question Neil Munro asked Obama but failed to address why it has any relevance or connection to the question Munro asked. Instead you refer to articles which do not even mention the lump of labor fallacy, which as far as I can tell originated some time within the last decade or so.

    Sometimes it seems your comments consist of arguments you are having with yourself.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)


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