Libertarian Librarian

• The Racine School Board has decided to RE-submit a referendum on increasing taxes to cover their 9 million dollar shortfall in June. This despite the fact that the referendum was shot down by a substantial margin, 10,188 to 8,492 back in April. Lucky, lucky us-- the School Board has decided in their infinite wisdom that the public was just too stupid to know what the right thing to do was last time, so we'll let you try again. Mulligan!
• The Republican state congress sends the Voter ID Bill to Jim Doyle after fixing all of Doyle's "substanative objections" and yet Doyle has "vowed to veto it." Can anybody give me a good reason why the Voter ID bill is a bad idea? Before you answer, realize that the new version has provisions for those that can not afford the $7-$9 for the card and makes an exception for those that normally vote absentee because they are homebound/disabled.
• I find out that the Democrats and AARP have done their job, as private accounts appear to be dead, yet the Senate is going to figure out how to fix the problem. Most likely solution? TAX US SOME MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Look, Bush's proposal is OPTIONAL people. If you don't want to participate, DON'T! What the fuck is so wrong with letting me take my own fucking money and invest it in a government approved T-Bond or Money Market where it can earn a historical average of 3-7% which is WAY more than Social Security's rousing 1%? Stupid, stupid old people. Young people, too. Stupid people. All over the place. Sigh.
• On top of all that, TC is doing some sort of voodoo with statistics to make the case that the Washington Post poll wasn't really flawed:

First off, the (supposed) skew in that poll is not 7%. First, you remove the 5% of other (which is usually an unintelligible or unreadable response) leaving 95%. Now you can approach the reaminder two ways: split it three ways (which is what you seem to be suggesting, since your complaint seems to be based around the poll showing fewer Republicans than Democrats). So each of the Repubs, Democrats, and INdependents should be 31.67%. Thus At 35% and 25%, the sampling would be 3.33 % off, which is less than half of what you were claiming, and approximately the MOE of the poll.

Which doesn't make much sense to me, since I see no reason to expect 31.67% democrat, 31.67% republican and 31.67% independent. Independents are irrelevant-- the point is that given studies like this and the obvious trend in the last decade to elect more republicans, I see no reason to think that the % of self-identified democrats or republicans shouldn't be equivalent or nearly so, not seperated by 7 percentage points in favor of democrats. Indeed, if you factor out the Others and Independents, the skew is even more striking. Let's dump the 50 Others from our pool of 1007 and the 32% of Independents from our pool, leaving 635 individuals that identify themselves as one party or the other and might reasonably be expected to answer most of the poll questions along party lines. Of the remaining pool--635 remember-- 352, or 55.4%, of respondents identified themselves as democrats, compared to 283, or 46.6%, identifying themselves as republican. A skew of 8.8 and well beyond the MOE of the study. Ain't statistics grand?

And yes, I know the questions I proposed were biased-- my point was that the question that actually WAS asked has an inherent bias against republicans rather than being value neutral. By way of comparison, I offered alternatives that were clearly biased against democrats. And not having the word filibuster is also prejudicial as that is the term the argument has been framed with in nearly every piece I've read on the dispute-- that's what people associate with the argument, should we or shouldn't we get rid of the filibuster. Leaving it out, takes the whole thing out of context and leaves people with some sort of theoretical "should we change the rules" question rather than asking the actual question they want studied.

Finally, while filibusters have been in use for nearly 200 years, they have never before been used to stop up and down votes on sub-Supreme Court nominees, and only once for a Supreme Court nominee. And changing the rules on cloture is certainly no new addition to senatorial conduct, either, no matter how many times the democrats call it the nuclear option. But whether the democrats are justified in their use of the filibuster (I don't believe they are-- if the nomination makes it out of committee, the nominee should be, and always has been, allowed an up or down vote) was not the point. The point was that the question was misleading, but touted as significant despite this, by the Washington Post and ABC News.

Labels: Politics

Posted by: Nick W. / 9:24 PM