Posted 2:29 PM by Floyd

A headline on today's Drudge Report: REVEALED: KERRY ADVOCATED GUTTING AGRICULTURE DEPT...

Michael Kinsley once quipped that the definition of a "gaffe" is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. A corrolary, during primary and caucus season: A "scandal" is when voters discover that a politician has attempted sound policy.

Which illustrates why governors are elected to the presidency and senators are not -- at least in the modern era, where all behavior and activity is either prohibited or subsidized. A governor rarely has the opportunity to advocate for his state on the national stage; when a governor is in the news because he is pleading for funding, it is usually in concert with the nation's other governors. A senator, by contrast, is perpetually jostling with other senators from different regions with differing interests. I'm surprised that this is the worst thing that Iowa has found out about Kerry -- or, to put it another way, that this is the best thing that Kerry ever did.

Posted 1:21 PM by Floyd

Colby Cosh criticized Gregg Easterbrook's contention that if the illegal immigrants are given amnesty, "Working conditions will almost surely improve for the millions of illegals who take the restaurant, lawn-service, cleaning, and other jobs that most Americans simply do not want." Colby's response:

All together now: at any price? ... The most entertaining recent rebuttal of this idea that some jobs won't be performed by Americans for any wage whatsoever can be found under the byline of Kate O'Beirne:

According to the 2000 census, 87 percent of illegal immigrants are in 15 states, with about 80 percent in only 10 states. California ranks number one. About 6.5 percent of its total population of 33.9 million is estimated to be illegal aliens. Texas, New York, Illinois, and Florida rank in the top five states. But, 40 states have relatively insignificant illegal-immigrant populations.

Californians (with over 30 percent of all illegal aliens), Texans, (with 15 percent) and New Yorkers (with 7 percent) might understandably wonder who will take undesirable jobs if a willing pool of illegal aliens weren't available. They should check with Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or any one of the majority of states to see how they cope.

[Emphasis mine.] What they'd find if they looked, of course, is a whole passel of economies that have never come to depend on undocumented migrant labour in the first place. No one can expect the economies of California and Texas to transform into their like overnight, but the incentives provided by the federal government will determine which way the wind blows.

The rebuttal is superficially plausible but wrong. There is a fallacy which holds that increasing the minimum wage raises low-paid workers' wages, when all it does is to price the labor market out of their reach. "Americans could be found to perform grunt labor if the wages were higher" is just the flip side of this fallacy. If you raise the price of a cleaning job from $7 per hour to $10 per hour, the result will not be that an American worker takes that job. The result will be that the cleaning job does not exist.

Also, O'Beirne and Colby treat states as isolated economic entities. There are immigrants who work in service jobs, which necessarily have a local benefit. But many illegal immigrants work in agriculture; more specifically, in "truck farming," which is labor-intensive harvesting of fruits and vegetables. An American farmer in Nebraska uses a combine to harvest wheat; a Mexican laborer in California picks grapes or lettuce. California produces 90% of America's grapes and half its lettuce, and it's hard to imagine that it could still do so in the absence of cheap migrant labor. Wages are 30 to 60 percent of the cost of producing oranges, strawberries, and grapes, according to a paper from the Center for Immigration Studies.

Therefore cheap migrant labor means cheap fruits and vegetables for all Americans, whether their states have an immigrant population or not. How did Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts "cope" with their lack of a cheap labor pool? By letting migrants in other states like California do the work of harvesting their food for them.

Posted 8:32 PM by Floyd

While we're on the subject of obnoxious race-mongering, check out this article that was on the Merc's home page today:

Diversity lags in S.J.'s top posts
CITY'S SENIOR-LEVEL STAFF POSITIONS REMAIN LARGELY WHITE
By Edwin Garcia
Mercury News

San Jose touts itself as a diverse place to live and work, becoming one of the first cities in the nation without a racial or ethnic majority. But you wouldn't know it by looking at the top officials hired to run city government, who remain overwhelmingly white.

It's almost a daily event for the Merc to print some handwringing article about insufficient multiculturalism, which 99% of the readership could care less about. Today's homage to diversity was well-sourced, in that it allowed you to see for yourself just how "overwhelmingly white" the council was. The Merc published mug shots of all the top San Jose city officials.

I'm surprised there wasn't a Flash application that allowed you to turn the officials black or Asian.

Posted 3:23 PM by Floyd

Can we put ESPN sports writer Ralph Wiley in a home or something? I dislike all race-mongers, but at least people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton care -- or pretend to care -- about minorities who have real problems such as crime and poverty. Wiley moans about racism in the world of sport, where white millionaires and black millionaires compete on a level playing field.

Wiley has always been weird, rambling, and self-aggrandizing, but in his latest column he crosses the line into full-blown lunacy. Wiley rates the quarterbacks of the four NFL teams left in the playoffs. Wiley likes Peyton Manning, because he has run the Colts' offense so well that they have not punted in the postseason.

No, I lied. Wiley likes Peyton -- I'm sorry, "Peyt" -- because he's not a "wink-wink bigot." How does Wiley know this? Damned if I know. See if you can figure it out for yourself:

I think also Peyton is not a wink-wink bigot; he's not among the vast majority that are susceptible to being beak-fed from the talons of the great conversative birds of prey, which include my friend Rush.

Peyton doesn't need to go there.

Charlie P., from up Beantown way, hit me up on e-mail and stuck up for Archie, Peyt, Eli and the House of Manning. Charlie P. had done a piece on them for Esquire or some such, and said they were cool, and down, although they were from Drew, Mississippi, home of an infamous oppressive penal colony, Parchman Farms.

Little did my old friend and contemporary Charlie P. know. I'm nearly a contemporary of Archie's. He's much older; but when he was at Ole Miss, me and my boys were living in segregation, a hundred or so miles up the road, playing football for the Memphis Melrose high school Golden Wildcats, where we had an equal football tradition and history to that of Ole Miss. If you doubt this, check your local NFL rosters. There are at least four or five Memphis Melrose alumni playing in the NFL even today, including Jerome Woods, the All-Pro safety of the Chiefs, Dwayne Robertson, the Jets' No. 1 draft pick last year, and Ced Wilson, the 49er wideout.

Quick fact-check: Archie Manning played at Ole Miss from 1968 to 1970. School segregation in Mississippi came to an end with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a few years I expect to read about how Wiley slaved at his master's plantation picking cotton.

As a kid, I was hooked on Friday nights, watching Bobby Smith play wide. When later he changed his named to Bingo Smith of the Cleveland Cavs, I felt it was a comedown for him. One of my good old instructive high school coaches, Jesse Wilburn, was also an old Golden Wildcat. He had to be cut out of his uni after his Tennessee State team beat a Florida A&M team featuring Willie Galimore. You may never have seen Galimore play. If not, it is your loss.

We practiced from eight to five in 100-degree heat for the entire month of August. Back then, when I was there apprenticing on the game, we all had a good feeling about this Archie Manning, even though we never met him and he played in the lily-white SEC. I can't explain this to you. You could just feel he didn't need the advantage of any prejudice and bigotry. He didn't have to keep us down to lift himself up. He was just a great player. Simply great.

Frankly, I wish I could've played with the man. It was something about his manner, the way he moved, acted.

To summarize ... Wiley played high school football in the same state at the same time, temperature, and humidity that Peyton's father Archie played college football. (Pointless anecdote deleted.) And the voices in his head told him that Archie was a good guy. (More pointless anecdotes deleted.) Therefore Peyt must be too. Have you got that?

Hell, after reading that drivel I think I might need to be placed in a home.

ESPN is the network that dropped Rush Limbaugh after he said that Eagles Donovan McNabb QB was overrated because he was black. ESPN canned Gregg Easterbrook from its web site after Easterbrook made comments on his (non-ESPN) blog that were construed as anti-semitic.

And ESPN employs Ralph Wiley, who last summer wrote these words:

It is usually the American-born blacks' records and place that are resented instead of celebrated. For example, it's the stolen base that is denigrated as a weapon by baseball sabermetricians like Bill James, at precisely the time when a Rickey Henderson steals 130 bases in a season.

Repeat after me: "Political correctness is just a right-wing fantasy."

Posted 4:24 PM by Floyd

I don't usually link to stories I find on Instapundit, as I figure that everyone has seen them already. But this idiocy is so jaw-dropping that I will make an exception:

THIS PIECE BY JOE CONASON may be the dumbest bit of oil-based conspiracy-theory yet. First he recycles the already-debunked Paul O'Neill Iraq oil-memo story, but then he suggests that Bush's Mars plan is all about Halliburton getting oil from Mars, an idea that could only occur to someone utterly ignorant of the laws of physics ...

Boy, I'll say. Martian oil must be extracted by human astronauts, or advanced robots, which were sent tens of millions of miles from Earth. Either alternative involves enormous expense -- either a base must be constructed to house humans, or significant advances will have to be made in artificial intelligence.

And even after all the infrastructure is built, each shipment of Martian oil must be accelerated to ten thousand miles an hour to reach interplanetary transfer orbit, decelerated when it reaches Earth, landed, and recovered. And this is supposed to be competitive with oil obtained by staying on Earth and drilling a few hundred feet?

Posted 7:42 PM by Floyd

You'll have to excuse me if I don't join in the general tut-tutting and hand-wringing over this Pew Foundation study:

Cable news networks are the most frequently cited source of campaign news for young people, but the Internet and comedy programs also are important conduits of election news for Americans under 30. One-in-five young people say they regularly get campaign news from the Internet, and about as many (21%) say the same about comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show. For Americans under 30, these comedy shows are now mentioned almost as frequently as newspapers and evening network news programs as regular sources for election news.

There's no very good reason why I should believe this. What is more likely: That one-fifth of young people get their campaign news from comedy shows, or that one-fifth of young people are smart asses? It's not hard to imagine someone getting a call from a Pew poller and thinking to himself: "These political pollers are just as annoying as telemarketers. I bet it would really bug them if I told them I heard about Howard Dean from SNL."

Of course we could extrapolate from this specific criticism to the more general: Most social science studies involving polls or interviews are probably bullshit because there's no reason to believe that their subjects tell the truth. Note that the typical study will ask us to believe almost anything: that most women will be rape victims at some point in their lives, that many young people are cretins who learn about politics from television comedies. But of course we are never asked to believe that a person who is asked intrusive questions by a stranger will lie about them.

How did I come by my skepticism about polling? When I was sixteen years old our class took PSATs (which are kind of a practice SAT test), which had multiple-choice questions that were answered by filling in ovals. The class clown made his answers in the shape of a Christmas tree.

(Via Jeff Jarvis. I also heard it on the radio news while driving home.)


Update: Here's some evidence that my skepticism is justified. The judge in the Scott Peterson murder trial said that Peterson could not get a fair trial in his home town of Modesto, California. The judge cited a California State University-Stanislaus professor's study claiming that 70% of locals surveyed thought Peterson was guilty.

Students who performed the survey are now claiming that they made up results.

The students said they were given the assignment, which required them to make time-consuming long-distance phone calls they had to pay for, a week before finals -- and that it was 20 percent of their grade.

Slave labor: It's worth what you pay for it!

Posted 1:33 PM by Floyd

This Email Could Change Your Life XYFGXZ

A Sunnyvale man was about to go to bed, but decided to check his email. This was a good decision:

a speeding car crashed through the front wall of his house and landed on his bed about three feet away as he sat at his computer.

Somehow, the four people in the house, their five pets and the sleepy driver were all OK, if shaken. Matthew Wahlgren, the 22-year-old college student who was checking his mail as the gray Pontiac Grand Am slammed into the two-bedroom house, suffered nothing but a few scratches on an arm and his face.

...

`He was in the only 3-foot square area of the living room that wasn't destroyed,'' said his relieved father, Clay Wahlgren, 50. The family lives on Cypress Avenue, across the street from Fair Oaks Park.

Why did the driver go straight into the house? Was he drunk?

Wahlgren said his sons told him that the driver eventually woke up and went out in the front yard where the young men were.

``He dropped to his knees in a praying stance and said, `I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' '' Wahlgren said.

Police were on the scene quickly. ``We checked him for DUI and he was released,'' said Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety Capt. Byron Pipkin. ``He had been working a lot lately and was really tired.''

Oh, he was just tired, so they let him go. This is nonsense: It should be unacceptable to drive while impaired for any reason, whether due to alcohol, drugs, or lack of sleep.

Posted 5:43 PM by Floyd

To all the people who have come to this blog via Google searches for Tim Bueller:

1. I don't know anything that Tim Bueller has said or done;
   
2. I don't know how to contact Tim Bueller;
   
3. This is not a cynical ploy to get even more hits at your expense.