“Polling Error”

An “expert panel” claims it has figured out the polling errors the industry has made over the last several election cycles—all the way back to the Eisenhower election cycles, in fact.

Pollsters oversampled one party or the other.

NSS.

The “experts” missed the real problem, though, or they chose not to mention it (which elision, if that’s what they’re doing, would be consistent with polling behavior).

Regardless of the cause of their oversampling (and this panel suggested a number of them), the pollsters—in every poll—knew they were oversampling one party or the other by the time they’d closed each poll and begun going over their data. The pollsters then made the decision to make no effort to correct for that oversampling, or to say in their published results that they were oversampling and had no reliable method of correcting for that.

They chose, instead, to masquerade their results as valid without caveat of any sort.

That’s the dishonesty of the pollsters.

And this: the number of polls examined may be too small to indicate whether the apparent bias toward Democrats/Progressive-Democrats is valid, but the appearance should be investigated in its own right.

Inflation is Upon Us

…or is it?

The editors at The Wall Street Journal worry that the current rise in inflation might not be as “transitory” as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell thinks it will be. It’s a concern worth taking seriously. As the editors cite Milton Friedman as saying,

inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon

and the Feds—and the Fed—have been pumping lots of tons of cash into our economy.

Couple of things, though, on this inflation…spike.

The current inflation is impacted by all the “stimulus” checks coming from the Federal government, and money is the source of demand, not how much folks want things. It’s money that pays the prices, not folks.

The current inflation also is impacted by the return to more normal pre-Wuhan Virus situation demand levels being faster than producers can ramp back up to meet that recovering demand.

That slower production ramp-up is itself impacted by producers’ inability to get employees back to work. So much of the value of those “stimulus” checks makes not working more valuable than working, and recipients, far from being lazy, are making the economically rational decision to not return to work yet.

Underlying all of this is that 2020 was an aberrational year. The economic drop was caused by politics, not a confluence of economic forces, and the present interference with recovery also is politically caused; a slowing unwinding of that confluence isn’t a factor. Inflation comparisons with 2020 are themselves distorted.

A better inflation measure would be against 2019.

Bipartisanship Progressive-Democrat Style

President Joe Biden (D) and his Co-President Kamala Harris (D)—it is, at Biden’s behest, the Biden/Harris administration—held an infrastructure meeting last Wednesday with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) in which he pushed for acceptance of his $2.3 trillion version of an infrastructure bill along with his commensurately large tax increase plan with which he claims he’ll pay for his infrastructure plan.

Shortly after the meeting, Biden gave an interview to MSNBC, in which he said,

I want to know what we agree on and let’s see if we can get an agreement to kick start this, and then fight over what’s left, and see if I can get it done without Republicans if need be[.]

Since he’s going to pass his stuff along strictly party lines, anyway, what was the point of the meeting?

Plainly, Biden Bipartisanship—Progressive-Democratic Party Bipartisanship—means Republicans go along quietly or be kicked to the curb.

It’s Party’s version of republican democracy: Progressive-Democracy.

Necessary Corrections

Two, in fact, for a recent Wall Street Journal article concerning the blacklisting of People’s Republic of China smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi Corp. The blacklist barred US investors from investing in Xiaomi, and Biden is backing away from that.

The first correction is the article’s headline. Pentagon Backs Off Xiaomi Blacklisting After Legal Challenge s/b Biden’s Pentagon Backs Off Xiaomi Blacklisting After Legal Challenge.

It’s misleading to imply that the Pentagon did this on its own, without President Joe Biden’s (D) instruction, especially with the body of the article making it plain that the Pentagon, in its original action, was acting on then-President Donald Trump’s (R) instruction.

The second is this one. The retreat comes two months after Xiaomi won a key victory in a federal lawsuit challenging the listing… s/b Biden’s retreat comes two months after Xiaomi won a key victory in a federal lawsuit challenging the listing….

Biden didn’t even have the courage to challenge the DC trial court’s ruling in the DC circuit or, potentially, the Supreme Court. Overruling the trial court, even at the circuit level, would have been a distinct possibility.

Self-Serving

The World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus set up an inquiry board to look into efforts to deal with the Wuhan Virus situation as the virus was beginning go out from the People’s Republic of China.

The Tedros’ WHO board has made a couple of very unsurprising findings.

The World Health Organization should be given the power to swiftly investigate threatening pathogens in any country….

National sovereignty be damned. A supranational entity should be able to go where it pleases. Especially WHO.

The second finding centers on these:

The panel’s report, however, doesn’t directly criticize [the People’s Republic of China] and instead praises it….

Never mind that the world first learned of the virus from the Republic of China (which the People’s Republic of China continues to block from participating in any WHO proceedings). The board’s report also spikes

mention [of PRC] authorities’ efforts to prevent medical staff and health officials from sharing information on the emerging disease.

This against the backdrop of PRC…influence…over the WHO and over Tedros in particular.

Nothing self-serving here. Not a bit.