[guest post by Dana]

As you know, MLB made the decision to move pull the All-Star game out of Atlanta after Gov. Kemp signed the new voter law, which President Biden has mischaracterized as “Jim Crow 2”. Now it appears that Colorado’s Coors Field will host the game:

The 2021 MLB All-Star Game is coming to Colorado, a league source confirmed Monday night.

Just days after Major League Baseball decided to move the game out of Atlanta, the source says MLB is expected to officially announce Tuesday morning that the July 13 game will be moved to Denver’s Coors Field.

“We are excited about the possibility of hosting the All-Star Game and are awaiting MLB’s decision,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said in a statement released to The Denver Post on Monday night.

Gov. Jared Polis echoed Hancock’s hopeful statements when contacted by The Post.

“Like so many Coloradans, I’m excited and hopeful that Major League Baseball makes the best decision and formally chooses to play the 2021 All-Star Game in Denver,” Polis said in a statement. “It would be good for baseball and good for Colorado.”

Contrast and compare:

Atlanta, Georgia, is 51% black and 40.9% white, U.S. Census data from 2019 showed.

Denver was 80.9% white and 9.8% black in 2019, according to U.S. Census data.

Numerous sources reported that the MLB’s decision to move the 2021 All-Star game could cost black-owned businesses. Nearly 30% of businesses in Atlanta are black-owned, and Georgia will face an estimated lost economic impact of more than $100 million due to the MLB’s boycott of Atlanta, according to the president and CEO of Cobb Travel and Tourism Holly Quinlan.

As a reminder, political activist Stacy Abrams and Sen. Jon Osshoff warned that a boycott of Georgia would kill jobs and ultimately end up hurting mostly the poor and people of color:

“I absolutely oppose and reject any notion of boycotting Georgia,” said Ossoff.

“Don’t boycott corporations over voting rights yet,” Abrams said in an op-ed.

In a pre-emptive strike, Mitch McConnell has “warned” CEOs not to get involved in the Georgia voter law debate:

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell lashed out at corporate America on Monday, warning CEOs to stay out of the debate over a new voting law in Georgia that has been criticized as restricting votes among minorities and the poor.

In a sign of a growing rift in the decades-old alliance between the conservative party and U.S. corporations, McConnell said: “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”

McConnell warned companies there could be risks for turning on the party, but he did not elaborate.

“Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” McConnell told a news conference in his home state of Kentucky…

Coca-Cola Co. Chief Executive James Quincey called the law “unacceptable” and a “step backwards.” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election.”

Independent reviews have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is rare in the United States, and state and federal probes found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election which the Republican Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Corporate America has long thrown its political muscle behind Republican candidates and officeholders, often funneling more campaign contributions to conservative candidates than Democratic ones.

Meanwhile, other Republicans – including you-know-who – are pushing for Americans to boycott…Major League Baseball.

You can read a comparison of Georgia’s new voting laws and Colorado’s voting laws here.

Batter up!

UPDATE: Five days ago, President Biden on pulling the All-Star game out of Atlanta:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday said he would “strongly support” moving the MLB All-Star game out of Georgia, citing the state’s controversial new voting law that includes a provision banning volunteers from delivering food or drinks to voters in line.

“I think today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly,” Biden said to ESPN’s Sage Steele during an interview. “I would strongly support them doing that. People look to them. They’re leaders.”

Biden was critical of the divisive Georgia voting law…“Look at what’s happened across the board. The very people who are victimized the most are the people who are the leaders in these various sports, and it’s just not right,” Biden said. “This is Jim Crow on steroids, what they’re doing in Georgia and 40 other states.”

Today, when asked about moving the Masters Golf Tournament out of Georgia, it was a different story:

WOW — major flip on moving sporting events out of Georgia.

While he “strongly encouraged” MLB to move the All Star game, he’s changed his tone when asked about the Masters. Notes that it will hurt the people who need the most help.

A week too late, Joe.pic.twitter.com/etJvUL4rYB

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) April 6, 2021

“I think that’s up the Masters…I think it’s a very tough decision for a corporation, or a group, to make.”

Democrats need to decide on their messaging and stick to it. While they seem lockstep in identifying the new Georgia voting law as the “new Jim Crow,” pulling any perennially popular sporting event out of Georgia is either economically harmful to its residents or it isn’t. You don’t get to flip-flop within the span of a few days just because we’re talking about a different event and expect to be taken seriously. Also, if you believe that these so-called “new Jim Crow laws” are unacceptable in Atlanta where the All-Star Game was going to be held, then certainly they are just as unacceptable in Augusta, where the Masters Tournament is due to be held next week.

–Dana

In my L.A. Times op-ed about Friday’s firings at RedState, I concluded with this statement:

No one media outlet is crucial to the conservative movement, but RedState did represent a rare place where conservatives were still allowed to express negative opinions about Trump in a freewheeling and robust manner. Now it’s a safe space for Trump supporters. The site is still there, but the ideal is gone.

If I had written the op-ed today, I would have used the term “safer space” and not “safe space.” That’s more accurate, and more fair to the people who still work there.

I wrote the op-ed Friday morning, two hours after learning the news that six of the most vocal critics of Trump at the site had been fired. It was a criticism of management, not of the remaining writers. The point was that management has a goal of making the site a safe space for Trump fans, and by firing a crop of loud Trump critics all on the same day, in a rude and unexpected fashion, they sent their message loud and clear. (As for the “rude and unexpected” part: according to The Atlantic, editor Caleb Howe “got the news while driving from his home in North Carolina to Washington to meet with Townhall Media, the arm of Salem Media which owns RedState, about Facebook strategy.” That’s cold.)

There has been some pushback on Twitter from some of the remaining writers, who point out that there are still Trump critics at the site. That is true. Since the firings, a few pieces critical of Trump have been published. For example: No, President Trump Does Not Deserve The Nobel Peace Prize; Don’t Get Angry About Mean Insult Comics If You Helped Put One In The Oval Office; and President Trump Continues To Walk Back Campaign Promises Regarding Wall’s Funding And Planned Parenthood. I’m very pleased to see that and I have shared the pieces on social media.

However, let’s not pretend that the firings weren’t designed to send a message. The people purged on Friday were some of the loudest critics of the president. And some of the defenses of Salem that I have seen — that the firings were based on traffic, or on the cost of the contracts — are just not true. The people let go included a mix of traffic earners; some were consistently the highest traffic earners, some posted more sporadically and were not. I’ve also learned more about the cost of the contracts, and there are definitely people who remain who get paid more per click than people who were let go.

Nor is it true that Trump criticism killed the site. Ben Domenech made that charge in his newsletter yesterday, but his analysis was laughably wrong. For example:

internet, how does it work? pic.twitter.com/3BqWdfTyvY

— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) April 30, 2018

No, this was an ideological purge. They just didn’t get everyone. But they did get most of the loudest voices, and sent a message to the rest.

In short, if the people at RedState are feeling defensive, it’s understandable — but any defensiveness results from the decisions made by management. Management had every right to make those decisions, but the way they did it was (in my view) unwise, and had a lot of collateral consequences that they didn’t think through. One of those consequences was a very public perception that the site has made a sudden lurch in a pro-Trump direction. If the remaining writers are hurt by that perception, they should blame management’s decision to purge the loudest Trump critics in one day, not the people who pointed it out.

With one exception (a poster who goes by the moniker streiff) I respect the remaining writers at RedState. Some of them are among my favorite writers on the Web, after Dana and JVW. Folks like Kimberly Ross and Jim Jamitis have consistently written pieces opposing hyperpartisanship — and it was pieces like that, more than anything else, that made me proud to be associated with RedState.

Two things are true at the same time. The remaining writers are people of integrity who won’t knuckle under to threats. At the same time, management has sent a shot across the bow: vigorous criticism of Trump is not welcome at RedState. How that tension resolves remains to be seen, although signs since Friday are positive.

Some may think that no message has been sent by management. If so, I think that’s naive. But at least some of the remaining writers seem to understand that the message is to get in line — and they are saying they’re not going to do it.

Good for them. I wish them luck.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

[Posted by Karl]

Jonathan Chait disagrees. He’s wrong, as he is about many things.  But he’s wrong in ways worth discussing.

Chait’s target is the recent Third Way poll of independent voters, which he doesn’t like because “Third Way is an intra-party lobbying group that urges Democrats to adopt moderate, pro-business policies” and its poll tends to support its positions.  He notes that if you frame poll questions differently you can get findings like those from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (taken for the Center for American Progress), such as 81% agreeing that “[r]egular people work harder and harder for less and less, while Wall Street CEOs enjoy bigger bonuses than ever.”

To be sure, the wording of poll questions matters.  However, Chait does not bother to quote the questions in the Third Way poll.  It appears he does not like questions such as:

I’m going to name some topics that have angered some people in America.  For each one, please tell me if it makes you very angry, somewhat angry, not too angry, or not angry at all.

The poll then asks about: Congressional gridlock; the national debt; Wall Street bailouts; America falling behind its global competitors; the wealthy not paying enough in taxes; the next generation’s ability to achieve the American Dream; corporate profits; and China’s economic rise.  Another question that seems to bother Chait is: “What do you think would be the most effective way to strengthen our economy?”, giving reducing the deficit, reducing taxes and regulations, and reducing income inequality as options.  Had Chait actually quoted the poll’s questions, it might have occurred to his readers that those questions sound much more neutral than the GQR questions he did quote.  Indeed, the basic Third Way findings on economic opportunity vs. economic fairness are not much different from those of Gallup and Pew.

However, the issue of question neutrality goes to a larger problem with Chait’s general concept of “real” public opinion polling:

Pollsters understand that very slight differences in the wording of a question, or even in the ordering of questions, can produce dramatically different results. Polls that are actually designed to measure public opinion take great precautions to avoid tilting answers one way or another. They try to frame questions in as neutral fashion as possible, and when they do ask questions that gauge people’s ideological views, they measure it by looking at changes.

So, for instance, a poll might ask if you prefer a larger government with more services, or a smaller government with fewer services. That is a classic polling question. It’s not an accurate snapshot of public opinion, though, because even though it’s posed in a completely neutral way, in frames the question in abstract terms rather than specific terms. Its value as a measuring tool is simply that polls as the same question in the same way every year, and the changes in response to the same question can help tell you how public opinion is changing.

This is a wildly reductive view of public opinion polling, and especially reductive of political polling.

The information gathered from the sorts of polling Chait describes is valuable — even if the polls generated for the establishment media and by entities like Gallup and Pew often fall short of the ideal.  However, it does not logically follow that “advocacy” polls are not “real” polls.  The issue is the quality of a given poll for its purpose.

For example, another poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner — this time for Democracy Corps — looks at several of the messages Pres. Obama and Democrats have been putting out and tests them against hypothetical GOP messages (which are debatable, but beyond my scope today).  It is not remotely neutral, but highly informative about public opinion for those actually conducting campaigns.  It is advocacy polling like this (which the White House or the DNC surely conducts internally) that explains why Obama is mostly attacking the GOP instead of leading with claims that America is back or has made progress on job creation.

Election campaigns are not waged solely in the editorial bullpens of the New York Times and Washington Post, or the offices of Gallup.  Rather, beyond the fundamentals of peace and prosperity, they are driven by candidates and their messages.  The candidates, their supporters and their messages are not neutral.

In short, to suggest that advocacy polling is not “real” is in some senses exactly backwards.  And to compare the recent Third Way poll to the Center for American Progress poll is laughable.  Indeed, Third Way’s “advocacy” here rests primarily on the general, neutral approach of its poll.

–Karl

[Guest post by DRJ]

The Next Right looks at BP’s Democratic bedfellows:

“One of the top media consultants for British Petroleum gave free rent to a politician who became White House Chief of Staff.

And, no, this was not Karl Rove giving a freebie to Andy Card.

No, the recipient of the favor was Rahm Emanuel and the benefactor was Stanley Greenberg.

Stanley Greenberg is an interesting guy. He is married to CT Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Grrenberg is the principal of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a large polling and public relations firm. They do both political campaign work and “corporate communications” work.

The DCCC has paid Greenberg’s firm in excess of $500,000 during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. They are also Dick Blumenthal’s pollster.

But let’s look at the corporate side, where Mr. Greenberg promises to “help corporations increase competitiveness and profitability, improve reputation, and take advantage of global trends.”

Who are they helping? British Petroleum.”

Read the whole thing.

— DRJ

The Terri Schiavo case is over, but it continues to have importance to the looming battle over judicial confirmations. For example, in a commentary titled Latest Assault on Judges Threatens Rule of Law, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein argued:

The problem, as the legal battle over Terri Schiavo demonstrated, is that whatever their politics, judges are unlikely to ignore the law. In that case, the law clearly did not authorize federal judges to order Schiavo’s feeding tube reinserted — but some Republicans are outraged that the judges did not have it reinserted anyway.

Sunstein is wrong. The law clearly did authorize federal judges to order Schiavo’s feeding tube reinserted. The courts got it wrong.

The courts’ fundamental error was brushing aside the Schindlers’ meritorious argument that the Due Process Clause of the Constitution requires a showing of clear and convincing evidence for the withdrawal of a feeding tube under these circumstances.

If the Constitution requires a clear and convincing evidence standard, that changes everything. It means that the question whether that standard was met is a federal issue rather than a purely state law issue. And that means that the federal courts were required to take a fresh look at whether the evidence was sufficient under that standard.

I do not believe this means a new evidentiary hearing was required. But, at a minimum, such a determination would require the federal district court to comb through a mountain of transcripts from various proceedings — something Judge Whittemore could not possibly have done in the few hours that he allowed himself to decide the Schindlers’ final claims.

The extended entry discusses the Schindlers’ claim that the federal Constitution requires “clear and convincing evidence” of the patient’s wishes in a case like that of Terri Schiavo. It analyzes how that claim was cavalierly dismissed by the federal courts. It also explains why this was, indisputably, a solid claim that justified the reinsertion of the feeding tube while the merits of the claim were reviewed.

[NOTE: This post is about a legal issue. I welcome any comments about the soundness of my arguments. But any comments that revisit tired arguments about the facts of the Schiavo case will be unceremoniously deleted. You have been warned.]

(more…)

Here you can read Judge Greer’s order explaining why he found “clear and convincing evidence” that Terri Schiavo would want to be starved and dehydrated to death. The finding of “clear and convincing evidence” was based in part on a mistake by the judge.

Greer explains in the order why he rejected testimony from Diane Meyer, who corroborated testimony from Terri’s parents that Terri had said Karen Ann Quinlan should be allowed to live. Greer wrote:

A witness [Meyer] called by Respondents testified to similar conversations with Terri Schiavo but stated that they occurred during the summer of 1982. While that witness appeared believable at the offset [sic], the court noted two quotes from the discussion between she [sic] and Terri Schiavo which raise serious questions about the time frame. Both quotes are in the present tense and upon cross-examination, the witness did not alter them. The first quote involved a bad joke and used the verb “is”. [Patterico notes: the joke in question was: “What is the state vegetable of New Jersey?” Answer: Karen Ann Quinlan.] The second quote involved the response from Terri Schiavo which used the word “are”. The court is mystified as to how those present tense verbs would have been used some six years after the death of Karen Ann Quinlin [sic].

In other words, although this witness originally seemed credible, the judge decided that she was not credible largely because he believed that Karen Ann Quinlan had already died in 1982 — while the witness had Terri Schiavo saying Karen Ann Quinlan was alive. But Karen Ann Quinlan died in 1985, not 1976 as Judge Greer appears to have believed.

Based largely on this mistake in dates, Greer rejected the testimony of Meyer in favor of that of Michael Schiavo, his brother, and his sister-in-law, who apparently testified that Schiavo had said she wouldn’t want to be “hooked to a machine” (is a feeding tube a “machine”?).

It’s hard to admit you’re wrong, and when this was pointed out to Judge Greer five years later, he wrote that it made no difference to his credibility analysis when Quinlan had died. As I read the language quoted above, it made a big difference to him. Greer just didn’t want to admit it.