Tag Archives: ethics

A Couple of Questions

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t often cite PowerLine, but here’s a statistic that wants a little discussion.

It wasn’t easy for the Times/Siena poll locate its sample of 800 likely voters. The poll made 51,983 calls in search of those 800 likely voters.

This is what The New York Times said about the sample—absent the hype:

Can Democrats turn Texas blue? We made 51,983 calls, and 800 people spoke to us.

Hyped or blandly reported, this is a statistic without context, and so it’s meaningless.

Is the list called actually a randomly drawn sample?  That’s the only way the 800 can be considered random and so representative.  The NYT, well down in their description, admits their sample is not random.

People who respond to surveys are almost always too old, too white, too educated and too politically engaged to accurately represent everyone.
…
Pollsters compensate by giving more weight to respondents from under-represented groups.
…
But weighting works only if you weight by the right categories and you know what the composition of the electorate will be.

There’s a hint in that last, too.

Is getting 800 respondents out of 52,000 tries typical?  What’s the trend over the last, say, dozen or so elections, both Presidential and mid-terms considered separately as well as together?  NYT chose to be silent on that.

Is telephoning really a good way to get a random sample?  Sure, things have changed since the Harry Truman polling debacle, but….  We’re out and about a lot more today, too, and it’s easier to just ignore incoming calls from numbers we don’t recognize.

 

Aside: what’s not being talked about in the NLMSM (I wonder why…) are these two statistics from the same Times/Siena poll, carefully ghosted so as to be made less noticeable: Beto O’Rourke’s Approval/Disapproval rating

41% favorable rating; 44% unfavorable; 15% don’t know

compared with Ted Cruz’ Approval/Disapproval rating:

51% favorable rating; 42% unfavorable; 7% don’t know

A Thought on Reason

Posted on by
Reply

Peggy Noonan had some thoughts on reason, centered on the just concluded confirmation process for Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Senator Susan Collins’ (R, ME) analysis of her reasons for voting for his confirmation.

I have a couple of thoughts on a couple of Noonan’s thoughts.

Susan Collins put on a clinic in thoroughness and justice. Democrats need to stand up to the screamers.

Noonan needs to understand: the Progressive-Democrats are the screamers.

A word on the destructive theatrics we now see gripping parts of the Democratic Party. … Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated?

It sounded perfectly normal to those of the Progressive-Democratic Party. First, hear the deafening silence of the remainder of Noonan’s parts of the Democratic Party: not a word in demurral of that behavior. Second, hear Hillary Clinton’s rejection of civility and Eric Holder’s threats of violence. Third, recall Spartacus Booker’s “come up in Congressmen’s face;” Clinton’s statement that millions of Americans are irredeemably deplorable racists, homophobes, and misogynists; Barack Obama’s dismissal of millions of Americans as nothing more than bitter Bible-clinging, gun-toting denizens of flyover country; Maxine Waters’ incitement to harass Republicans wherever they are; the NLMSM’s dismissal of Kanye West as just a token negro and a negro who doesn’t read.

That’s the danger we face this fall.

Future Nominations for Judgeships

Posted on by
Reply

A denizen of flyover country—Jan Graham of Nebraska, in fact—had a thought in her Letter to the Editor of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal:

Every one of those Harvard and Yale law students protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment should have their names written down and kept in case they want to be a judge someday. At that point their college-age record can be used to show that they don’t believe in due process and shouldn’t ever be considered for the bench.

Nor can they be considered, legitimately, for any prosecutorial office, Federal, State, or count/parish.

Full stop.

The ABA and Judicial Ratings

Posted on by
Reply

Judge, now Justice, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court and hearing cases.  The American Bar association is still looking for relevance here.  The ABA, after first giving Kavanaugh glowing marks as a judge wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was “reopening” its evaluation—timing its letter for 5 Oct, just before the Senate’s floor vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The ABA was ignored when Kavanaugh, et al., were being evaluated for a Supreme Court nomination and again when Kavanaugh was nominated. That prior ABA endorsement was simply the association’s jumping on the band wagon.

Now its irrelevance is manifest, and the ABA is squalling and trying to get back in the game.  That’s all this is.  That’s all that lately letter was all about.

Now the chairman of the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, Paul Moxley, is claiming he’s being bullied by Association President Robert Carlson, and that lately letter was an example.

[I]f he’s [Paul Moxley] being bullied by Mr Carlson or Democrats on his committee, he ought to resign and say so publicly.

That’s what the worthies on the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal claim.

No. Bullies only have the power their putative victims choose to give them. If Moxley thinks “Carlson or Democrats” are trying to bully him, he should have the integrity to stay put and call them out publicly.

In the meantime, the ABA needs to figure out what it means when it says something, and stick to it.  That’s the road back to relevance.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Posted on by
Reply

The tentacles reach far—even into the origin of Western concepts of individual liberty.  A British court has ordered

the wife of a jailed Azerbaijani banker to explain how she and her husband could afford their multimillion-pound London mansion or face having it seized.

Government does not have to prove the illegal origin of the money.  No, the holder of the money must prove her innocence.  Here is the outcome of the British government’s legislation ostensibly aimed at allegedly dirty money held by people with political connections or suspected of serious crime.

Think about that: someone with the wrong political connections in the eyes of someone in government, or someone whom somebody in government decides is behaving suspiciously, now must prove his lack of guilt.

Money laundering might seem a perfectly fine excuse for invading individual liberty in this way: truly laundered money does indeed have origins that are inimical to safety.

But so are individual liberties critical to the safety of each of us.  What is the government’s limiting principle here?  Where does the tradeoff between security and liberty naturally end?

Innocent until proven guilty is a concept that must protect even the unsavory, or apparently unsavory, among us because that protection is critical to our own safety.