Archive for 2012
October 31, 2012
MI SUPREME COURT SHOWDOWN: Two conservative Michigan Supreme Court justices are facing tough elections this November– Steven Markman and Brian Zahra. A lot of union money is being spent to unseat them. I knew Markman from my early days on the law faculty at Michigan State. He’s a super smart guy, an strong originalist, and deserves to be reelected.
THE OBAMA ECONOMY: STILL NOT RECOVERED: The economy is not even back to where it was when the recession began, Tom Blumer writes.
Of course, for John Kerry and Claire McCaskill, that’s a feature, not a bug.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Gender Pay Gap Is A Media Myth.
Last week, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) released a study on the gender pay gap, the claim that women are paid less than equally-qualified men. The AAUW study limited itself to new college graduates, hoping to show that a pay gap exists even before women marry and bear children, which most academic studies find to be the main drivers of gender pay differences. The AAUW study generated the headline result – the only one that really matters – that new female college grads are paid only 82 cents for each dollar of male earnings.
To its credit, AAUW went further by factoring in male/female differences in college major, hours worked, etc. Having done that, the pay gap shrinks to less than 7 percent. This indicates that, at most, discrimination lowers female wages by 7 percent.
But in preparing for an NPR program discussing the study, I ran some quick numbers using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. I limited myself to full-year private sector workers with a bachelors degree who were ages 21 to 26 in 2009-2010. Within this group I controlled for age, race, Hispanic and immigrant status, detailed geographic location, weekly work hours, college major and occupation. Controlling for college major accounts for the fact that men tend to choose majors that lead to higher earnings later in life. Controlling for occupation captures “compensating wage differentials” for positive or negative aspects of the job. For instance, dangerous or unpleasant jobs may pay more, while jobs offering flexible hours or more generous benefits might pay less. Including all these controls, the gender pay gap for young college grads drops to around 1 percent.
Even then, do my results mean that discrimination reduces pay by 1 percent? Hardly.
Well, that hardly fits the narrative.
TEN THINGS THE MSM CAN CELEBRATE IF OBAMA WINS: “Hooray! There are still JUST enough people left in the country who think we’re telling the truth,” Andrew Klavan quips. And don’t miss Drew’s video on “Picking Losers, Why Cronyism Isn’t Capitalism:”
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POLITICIZING DISASTER RELIEF: Totally predictable, of course, but still utterly ignoble. The editors of the Wall Street Journal document the Obama campaign’s–and its surrogate, the lamestream media’s–panicky attempt to capitalize on Hurricane Sandy by implying that Romney and Republicans are opposed to disaster relief. Uh, yeah, whatever.
But seriously, here’s how inane the Democrats’ efforts are:
As for Mr. Romney and FEMA, the liberals are excavating remarks from one of the early GOP debates. CNN’s John King asked if “the states should take on more” of a role in disaster relief as FEMA was running out of money.
Mr. Romney: “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.
“Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut—we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in.”
This isn’t an argument for abolishing FEMA so much as it is for the traditional federalist view that the feds shouldn’t supplant state action. As it happens, the response to Hurricane Sandy has been a model of such a division of responsibility.
Exactly. Word of the day for our liberal/progressive friends out there: FEDERALISM. It’s part of this thing called the “Constitution.” You should check it out some time.
LUCY STEIGERWALD: Putin vs. Punk.
GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS DO THIS: Outcry In Japan Over Diversion of Tsunami Aid Funds. “Japan has funneled much of the money it promised to disaster-ravaged communities into an array of unrelated projects, recent independent audits have shown, setting off outrage among a public already wary of the government and its response to last year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami and the nuclear crisis that followed.”
ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Chris Matthews: Global Warming Deniers Are “Pigs.” Video at link:
Well Professor [Michael] Oppenheimer, back in the 60s, we called such people pigs. Pigs. No, really. They don’t care about the planet, they don’t care about the destruction of war. All they want is what they got, their stuff, and they want more of it.
The reference to “stuff” and wanting “more of it” is an odd remark from a man who is reported to make five million dollars a year, but setting that aside, when Chris calls half the country “pigs,” (and it’s not the first time he used the p-word in reference to global warming) he must know that in the context of the 1960s, it reminds many viewers of some rather unsavory historical connotations.
RELATED: Rand Simberg on The Climate-Change Ambulance Chasers.
CONTINUE ASKING QUESTIONS: What Did He Know and When Did He Know It? The Shadow Knows…
PAVED WITH HUBRIS: Two for the road.
October 30, 2012
CHOOSE WISELY: Markets or government: Whom do you trust?
MICHELLE OBAMA’S MARXIST/CRITICAL RACE THEORY TIES: The Blaze has a thorough report detailing Michelle Obama’s (nee Michelle Robinson’s) ties to Marxist/Critical Race Theory groups while an undergraduate at Princeton.
Her husband’s ties to this radical ideology is well documented.
HIDDEN-CAMERA PRANK: Have An Obama-Style Halloween!!
EVEN MORE MITTMENTUM: N.H. NASHUA TELEGRAPH ENDORSES ROMNEY: Add New Hampshire’s largest newspaper to the growing list of papers that endorsed Obama in 2008 but are abandoning him in droves now. The editors stated:
So the basic question facing The Telegraph editorial board when it met last week came down to this: Did the former Illinois senator do enough to live up to those admittedly high expectations to warrant a second term?
After several hours of spirited debate, not unlike conversations taking place in kitchens and living rooms across America, we reached a consensus that he had not. Perhaps more importantly, when we identified the key challenges facing the nation – jobs, the economy and the national debt – we concluded he was not the best candidate to meet them.
That person is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and we hereby endorse him to become the 45th president of the United States.
But don’t get cocky, y’all.
BLOOMBERG TO OBAMA: STAY AWAY: Breitbart reports that Obama wanted to visit NYC to pose for more photo-ops. Mayor Bloomberg’s office rejected Obama’s offer, saying, “We’d love to have him, but we’ve got lots of things to do.” Obama’s basically the pesky little brother who wants to follow big brother Bloomberg around and act cool and grown up. Go play with your State Department or CIA friends, Obama. Oh, that’s right: They’re mad at you right now.
FLORIDA SUPREME COURT JUSTICES– ORIGINALISTS? Absolutely, unequivocally not. I get the chance to set the record straight on a report I authored, commissioned by the Federalist Society, about 3 Florida Supreme Court Justices– Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente, and Peggy Quince–who are facing retention election this November. Early media reports put their liberal “spin” on my report, claiming I had concluded these three justices were “not activist.” WRONG. I assiduously avoided using the “activist” word because I think it’s vastly overused and accordingly difficult to make stick. But my report made abundantly clear two things:
1. These 3 justices do have a discernible pattern of voting in accord with their (liberal) ideology; and
2. It is perfectly acceptable for voters in Florida to cast their retention vote based on their belief that the justices’ ideology is “wrong” or out-of-step with Floridians.
Is that clear enough for everyone?
JENNIFER RUBIN: All those attacks did Obama no good.
It is worth recollecting the array of attacks from the Obama camp that failed to carry the day. Romney’s approval rating is now higher than Obama’s and the Obama team tried portraying Romney as: 1) the “vulture” capitalist; 2) a tax evader and/or a felon for signing (or not signing) Bain documents after he left to run the Olympics; 3) killer of Joe Soptic’s wife; 4) outsourcer of jobs to China; 5) determined to take contraception away from women; 6) ready to give a tax cut to the rich and hike middle-class taxes; 7) egging on the auto industry’s demise; 8) willing to throw granny over the cliff on Medicare; 9) President George W. Bush’s political twin; and 10) Big Bird terminator.
In big and large assaults, some petty and some sweeping, Obama and third-party groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make Romney an unacceptable alternative. It seems to have failed, spectacularly so. You can attribute a great deal of that wipeout to Romney’s outstanding debate performances. You can give him and his campaign staff credit for (belatedly) focusing on the beleaguered middle class and his positive agenda to restore them to prosperity. And you can even credit some in the mainstream media — and many more in conservative media — for debunking the attacks.
But you do have to wonder if Obama’s throw-the-kitchen sink approach was ever going to work. The Obama team’s arrogance, I suppose, did not allow for the realization that the truth might be an impediment to its negative onslaught or that voters would be able to judge Romney for themselves.Obama only made himself look crabby and desperate.
Indeed.
STACY MCCAIN reports from Ohio.
AND AGAIN, IF YOU LIKE BEING TREATED AS A CHILD: The President’s Insulting Campaign.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Yes, We Should Cut FEMA: The agency has managed to waste truly shocking amounts of money.
Also, the heroic first responders you saw last night were mostly NYPD and NYFD, and their counterparts in New Jersey, etc. With the exception of the Coast Guard, nearly all the rescuing was being done by state and municipal employees, not by FEMA. The Democrats’ FEMA-worship is an insult to the people who are shouldering the greater part of the load, and the danger.
DEAD MEN’S CRIES DO FILL THE EMPTY AIR:More on Benghazi. And, of course, Welcome Back, Carter.
I ALREADY HAVE A DADDY: But I’ve lately started wondering if the current Democrats aren’t in some odd way trying to capitalize on the wounded children of the shattering social revolution. Two Democrat presidents with absentee dads in a row might be just a coincidence, but it doesn’t feel that way. Obama’s “weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism”. As we used to say, when I was a hardcore Libertarian: We don’t want to be your mommy, we don’t want to be your daddy. We want you to move out of the basement and get a job. (Getting adults to take responsibility would be good too to avoid more wounded children.) Wonder if that could be a winning electoral message? We shall see.