Corey Booker, our newest idiot Senator, Tweeted this:

Could that possibly be true? Half of all students -- which means half of all children, period, given that school is compulsory until age 16 or so -- are in poverty?

No. It's not possible. Booker should have realized that half of all children in America were not living in poverty. It's such an outrageous stretch it defies imagination that a halfway reasonable man could have believed such a thing is true.

So where did he get this? Let me explain. And as I do, keep two things in mind:

1. These are supposedly our "elite," who do the thinking about policy that we can't do.

2. That "studies" are offered by various quarters on the left which are then taken as proof that we need to Do Something! These should be discounted.

Booker should have realized something was wrong with his claim from his own "cite" for the proposition. Because early in the piece, it offers a much lower estimate of student poverty. Not half, but almost 25%.

Poverty is the most relevant factor in determining the outcome of a person's educational journey, and in Finland, the child poverty rate is about 5%. In the U.S., the rate is almost five times as high.

So that's around 25%. Does that bother Senator Booker? No, because later on there's a "half" figure cited. He doesn't read it very carefully, and doesn't check the citation to see if it's legit. He just seizes on it.

Here comes the "half" nonsense:

But here's the really bad news. Two new studies on education and poverty were reported in Education Week in October. The first from the Southern Education Foundation reveals that nearly half of all U.S. public school students live in poverty.

Two errors in Booker's claim, then: First, this says nearly half. More importantly, it specifies that nearly half of children in public schools "live in poverty." Public schools presumably service a generally-less-wealthy cohort, so we'd expect to find higher poverty rates there.

Booker just clips that "public" limitation out of his claim.

But still-- half? Doesn't that seem a mite high? What "study" determined this?

Well, if Booker had clicked the link, which he obviously did not do, he would have found out that the USAToday contributor misrepresents the "study," as did Edweek.org, which reported on it. Because while this article does indeed make that claim, it gets there by a crooked path:

Nearly half of all American public school students now live in poverty, and in broad swaths of the South and Southwest, state supports have not kept pace with significant and rapidly rising majorities of poor students in classrooms, a new report finds.

The report says that nearly half are "living in poverty"?

Ummm... not quite. Let's read this carefully.

In 17 states spanning nearly all of the South, Southwest, and West Coast, a majority of public school students qualified for free or reduced-price meals in 2011, according to the analysis released last week by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation.

So the study does not claim that they're "living in poverty," but rather that they receive either free or reduced price lunches through the schools.

So that must mean the free and reduced lunches are only offered to students "living poverty," right?

Wrong:

Students are entitled to free lunches if their familiesÂ’ incomes are below 130 percent of the annual income poverty level guideline established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and updated annually by the Census Bureau (currently $21,756 for a family of four)...

Students with family incomes below 185 percent of poverty are eligible for a reduced price lunch. Schools cannot charge children who receive reduced price lunches more than 40 cents per meal, but each school food authority sets the exact student contribution level independently.

Okay, so let's see how EdWeek.org misrepresented this study, which was then misrepresented by USAToday, and then by Cory Booker:

It claims that anyone receiving free or reduced-price lunches is "living in poverty." Not true. Free lunches are offered to children of families at 130% of the poverty line -- 30% over it -- and reduced-price lunches are offered to families at up to 185% of the poverty line, nearly double the poverty income level.

But Edweek.org takes "130-185% of the poverty line" as "the poverty line."

The actual study EdWeek.org purports to be faithfully reporting doesn't say that half of students are "living in poverty." The actual study calls them "low income students" -- a perfectly accurate description, but not grandly Dickensian enough claim to be useful for purposes of political agitation.

So that gets edited to "living in poverty."

Note what's going on here. The left is essentially running an information-laundering operation. Rather than laundering money, they're laundering information. At each step of the process, the claim is changed ever so slightly, to allow the next lefty to change it slightly more.

So that we start with something like:

a majority of students in public schools are eligible for free or reduced price lunches, which are given to anyone under 185% of the poverty line

and we end up with:

Half of all students live in poverty

And all we had to do to get there was define "the poverty line" as "the poverty line plus another 85% again of the poverty line."

At each step, the claim is cheated and distorted just a little bit more, deformed and tweaked bit by bit until a not-particularly-breathtaking claim is turned into a Ready For Public Consumption Alarmist Factoid, a hot new false new meme spit-polished to a high shine and ready to be bandied about in every Democratic stump speech from now until January 2017.

All I needed to debunk this obviously false claim was four things:

1. A functioning bullshit detector and a basic working knowledge of what "half" means
and what it couldn't possibly mean
2. A willingness to click through to source material -- even the thrice-laundered original study this crap was based upon

3. The twenty minutes of time required to do so

4. An internet connection

Apparently Corey Booker, USAToday, and EdWeek.org are missing one or more of these things.

Whatever we do, we should listen more to "wonks," because they're Johnny-on-the-Spot with "studies" and "facts" and really know what they're talking about and have no deceptive agenda at all.

And we should trust the media's multiple layers of painstaking fact-checking editorial oversight, of course.

I will ask USAToday to correct its misrepresentation of the Souther Education Foundation study. Despite my being right about the study and their being wrong, they will, of course, refuse.

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (364)
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I think the big headline is justified, but bear in mind the first word: Claim.

The program, supposedly, began in the year 2000.

An investigation by El Universal has found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs in exchange for information on rival cartels.

I didn't mention that part in the headline, the part about "allowing the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs." The Fast and Furious inducement is more outrageous (if true).

...

Zambada-Niebla also alleged that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the cartel in exchange for information used to take down its rivals. (If true, that re-raises the issue regarding what Attorney General Eric Holder knew about the gun-running arrangements.)

A Mexican foreign service officer told Stratfor in April 2010 that the U.S. seemed to have sided with the Sinaloa cartel in an attempt to limit the violence in Mexico.

True? Bullshit? I don't know. As far as partisan/presidential blame, the narrative goes like this: The agreement (about permitting Sinaloa drugs to get through to the US in exchange for tips on rivals) is struck by Clinton. It "peaks" under Bush, in 2006, through Obama, in 2010, but at that point we seem to still be talking about laying off Sinaolo drug deliveries. I'm not sure if there is anyone blamed for the "arming the narcogangsters" by this narrative except for Holder and Obama.

It strikes me as hard to believe... and yet the government does things which are hard to believe.

Posted by: Ace at 12:48 PM | Comments (239)
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Your Medicare dollars at work.

Taxpayers paid nearly $175 million for vacuum erection systems (VES), commonly known as “penis pumps,” from 2006 to 2011, according to an inspector general report released on Monday.

The federal government paid more than double the retail price for VES, the Department of Health and Human Services IG found. Medicare prices for the systems, the report said, “remain grossly excessive compared with the amounts that non-Medicare payers pay.”

Medicare paid 473,620 VES claims during calendar years 2006 through 2011, according to the IG report.

Health care policy experts said the revelations in the IG report are a troubling indication of what they describe as wasteful spending in federal health programs.

Posted by: Ace at 06:21 AM | Comments (221)
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The left observes its own rule: Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto Caesar what is not Caesar's.

They're not your children, you know. They are Future State-Owned Taxable Economic Units. You just have limited temporary at-discretion custody of them.

The Romeike family was granted asylum in the United States because the German government was intent on wresting away the children and putting the parents in cages for the crime of homeschooling their children, which is verboten in Germany, a legacy of the country’s totalitarian past. The Obama administration, which in other notable areas of immigration law has enacted a policy of “discretion” regarding deportations, took the Romeike family to court to have its asylum protections revoked, and succeeded in doing so. The family has appealed to the Supreme Court, which has ordered the Obama administration to respond to the Romeikes’ petition, but the administration has so far refused to do so.

As the Romeikes’ story unfolds, another German family is being held in the country against their will, also for the crime of homeschooling their children — or intending to do so, at least. The Wunderlich family had their children kidnapped by the German government — the agents of which came crashing through their door with battering rams — as retaliation for their homeschooling. They complied with the government’s demands regarding their children’s education and, understandably enough, began the process of relocating to France, where attitudes toward family life are more civilized. The Germans responded by refusing to reinstate their custody of their children, with a judge determining that the desire to homeschool presents an “endangerment” to the children.

That is the environment into which the Obama administration intends to send the Romeike family.

Why?

The institutional Left hates homeschooling, hates it with a remarkable intensity....

Kevin D. Williamson is just getting started. Also just getting started is Roger Kimball, quoted by Instapundit:

What brought me up short today, however, was a news story from a friend about a worrisome development in Germany. The homeschooling movement is a vibrant and growing force in this countries. Leftists donÂ’t like it, because it presumes to challenge the indoctrinating powers of the state with the civilization imperatives of parents, informed by churches, local communities, and moral commitments foreign to the left-liberal narrative.

...

Things are different in the Fatherland of Germany, where a judge recently ordered that parents may not have custody of their children because “the family might move to another country and homeschool, posing a ‘concrete endangerment’ to the children.”

...

In August, 20 armed police, equipped with a battering ram just in case, arrived at the door of this Darmstadt family and forcibly took four children, ages 7 to 14.

Was there anything wrong with the children? Nope. The judge — whose name, by the way, is Marcus Malkmus, in case you have a voodoo doll handy or wish to burn him in effigy — the judge admitted that the children were 1) academically proficient and 2) well adjusted socially.

He just didnÂ’t like homeschooling.

Why? Pay attention now: this takes us deep into the heart of a leftist: because he feared that “the children would grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue with those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.”

The invocation of “tolerance” is especially cute, don’t you think?

Monopolies do not like competition, and will engage in underhanded practices to squash such would-be competitors.

When the monopoly is armed with guns, it doesn't feel obligated to resort to subtlety.

And monopolies don't have to deliver good products, so they deliver awful ones. If you don't believe me, read this.

Incredible. Incredible.

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (323)
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He claims here -- and I don't think this is on the level; I think it's a jokey stunt -- that his mom worked at 30 Rock in 1993 but was fired after she became pregnant, working just three floors under Conan O'Brien's offices and studios.

Again, I don't think this is real. I don't think you'd go about this in this way.

That said, the guy's resemblance to Conan O'Brien is... well, judge for yourself.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:53 AM | Comments (294)
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This isn't the Hillary Rodham Clinton I know.

This is from a book called HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton:

For Hillary, whose loss was of course not the end of her political career, the spreadsheet was a necessity of modern political warfare, an improvement on what old-school politicians called a “favor file.” It meant that when asks rolled in, she and Bill would have at their fingertips all the information needed to make a quick decision — including extenuating, mitigating and amplifying factors — so that friends could be rewarded and enemies punished.

...

There was a special circle of Clinton hell reserved for people who had endorsed Obama or stayed on the fence after Bill and Hillary had raised money for them, appointed them to a political post or written a recommendation to ice their kidÂ’s application to an elite school. On one early draft of the hit list, each Democratic member of Congress was assigned a numerical grade from 1 to 7, with the most helpful to Hillary earning 1s and the most treacherous drawing 7s. The set of 7s included Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), as well as Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Baron Hill (D-Ind.) and Rob Andrews (D-N.J.).

Yet even a 7 didnÂ’t seem strong enough to quantify the betrayal of some onetime allies.

So, how does MSNBC spin this?

I'll give you a little time to guess. Answer below the fold.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:48 AM | Comments (264)
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While the Constitution permits the President to make temporary appointments to executive positions when the Senate is in recess, Obama, get this, violated the Constitution by claiming the Senate was in recess when the Senate itself said it wasn't in recess. His appointees -- illegal ones -- made some rulings on the National Labor Relations Board which should be nullities, as men with no right to sit on the NLRB did in fact sit there.

Obama claims, get this, that his Constitutional powers grow when he decides a coequal branch of government is being "intransigent" and failing to give him everything he wants.

The argument did not seem to persuade most of the Court. Even the liberal members seemed wary of the claim:

The court battle between the Obama administration and Senate Republicans is an outgrowth of the increasing partisanship and political stalemate that have been hallmarks of Washington over the past 20 years, and especially since Obama took office in 2009.

Indeed, Justice Elena Kagan seized on the political dispute to make the point to Verrilli that "congressional intransigence" to Obama nominees may not be enough to win the court fight.

Kagan, Verrilli's predecessor as Obama's top Supreme Court lawyer, suggested that it "is the Senate's role to determine whether they're in recess."

More:

Perhaps the most unfortunate moment for presidential authority was a comment by Justice Stephen G. Breyer that modern Senate-White House battles over nominations were a political problem, not a constitutional problem. Senators of both parties have used the Constitution’s recess appointment provisions to their own advantage in their “political fights,” Breyer said, but noted that he could not find anything in the history of the clause that would “allow the president to overcome Senate resistance” to nominees.
...

Second, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., commented that the Senate has “an absolute right to refuse” to approve any of a president’s nominees, whether or not the president thinks that such a refusal is “intransigence.” Roberts also sought to explore how far the Senate could go to frustrate a president over recess appointments, wondering if it could simply decide never to take a recess.

...

The lengthy argument, taken as a whole, seemed to go considerably better for those opponents than for the defender of presidential authority, U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. The Solicitor General made little headway in arguing that the Constitution meant the president to have significant power to make temporary appointments, and that deferring to the Senate would, in effect, destroy that power. He seemed to startle even some of the more liberal judges when he said that, if it was a contest between historical practice and the words of the Constitution, practice should count the most.

Only Ruth Bader Ginsburg seemed to support the Administration's power grab.

Via @charlescwcooke.

Posted by: Ace at 10:05 AM | Comments (273)
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Wait, Christie's in trouble in BridgeGate for using the machinery of government to punish his political enemies, right? Right, that's what I thought.

Obama does this every single day.

In the new probe, federal auditors will examine New Jersey's use of $25 million in Sandy relief funds for a marketing campaign to promote tourism at the Jersey Shore after Sandy decimated the state's coastline in late 2012, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone told CNN.

In an August letter, Pallone asked the Department of Housing and Urban Development inspector general to look into how Christie chose to spend the marketing money approved by the department.

The inspector general's office has replied to CNN's request for comment on the investigation.

So a bitter political rival asks Obama to dig dirt on a potential GOP presidential nominee and Obama's gangster government says "How high, sir?"

Obama is investigating whether money was improperly spent for Sandy relief in Christie's campaign. Not, say, his own.

Apparently Christie proposed the ads to the feds... and the feds approved them. (Warning: Autoplay ad.)

“The Stronger Than The Storm campaign was just one part of the first action plan approved by the Obama Administration and developed with the goal of effectively communicating that the Jersey Shore was open for business during the first summer after Sandy,” Christie spokesman Colin Reed said Monday.

...

The action plan that ChristieÂ’s office said was approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development included language calling for a media campaign to draw tourists back to the beaches.

It is a common practice for politicians to use taxpayer money to cut ads which simultaneously advertise the state or program they want to boost and advertise themselves as much. As much as we get annoyed by them doing this, it has long been done.

And it's hard to argue too hard against it: Why wouldn't, say, Rudy Guiliani show up for a NYC tourism ad in the year 1999? He was a fairly popular and famous figure. Who's to say he's not a good spokesman for the ad?

But now apparently we're going to pretend this might be a criminal matter. This investigation will of course not result in any charges. It exists simply so that the Democrats can say "Christie was investigated for misusing taxpayer funds."

Posted by: Ace at 07:06 AM | Comments (259)
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From Because @BenK84 judges his self-worth by his number of Twitter followers (so help him out), he links Tabloid Trash like this in the news dump-- trash I would never, ever dignify with a full post just because I'm lazy and looking for easy posts.

Michelle ObamaÂ’s extended absence from Washington and a flurry of renewed speculation about the state of the first coupleÂ’s marriage are threatening to overshadow her 50th birthday party at the White House on Saturday.

..

Yet its so-called bombshell Obama report was based on nothing more substantial than the vague allegations of an unnamed “Oval Office insider” who claimed the first couple “are now sleeping in separate White House bedrooms"...

There's not much here, but what the heck. I'm extremely tired of the Thrill Up the Leg Hero narrative and it's good to have the corrective of negative stories about this pair of socialist climbers.

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (428)
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Came across this in French, which I'll translate to keep my hand in.

DEAD: The father of the legendary Soviet assault rifle AK-47, Mikhail Kalachnikov, was asked, before his death last December, about the consequences of his invention. He opened up about it to the Orthodox church.

"My sadness is unbearable... if my rifle had ended the life of people, am I, Mikhail Kalschnikov, son of a peasant, Orthodox Christian, am responsible for the death of humans, even if they were enemies?" he asked himself in a letter dated April 7 and quoted by the daily paper Izvestia.

"Mikhail Kalachnikov had indeed written a letter to the Patriarch Kirill (head of the Russian Orthodox church) in which he expressed his preoccupation over the consequences of the use of his weapon," the spokesman for the Patriarch, Alexandre Volkov confired to AFP. "The Patriarch had responded in a private letter," he added without comment.

The AK-47, symbol of the Revolutionary army

"He invented his weapon for defending his Motherland and not for the terrorists of Saudi Arabia to use," according to Mr. Volkov, quoted by Izvestia.

The assault rifle Kalachnikov, conceived in 1947, had been produced, according to some estimates, into 100 million copies in the world. This weapon, robust and inexpensive, famously become the symbol of the guerrilla army for independence, and adorns a number of flags, including those of Mozambique and the Lebanese Shi'ite faction of Hezballah.

Born in 1919 in a village in Siberia, Mikhail Kalchnikov had been buried with the nation's highest military honors near Moscow.

...

Okay, so that was a waste of your time. That was just some easy homework for me. So here are some Open Thread links:

The Untold Legal Battle of the Defective & Dangerous Products Case of Wile E. Coyote vs. Acme Corporation;

Rumor has it that Kate Upton was photographed in zero-g for a bikini shoot, as if those zeppelins need more loft;

Chuck Todd, whose job it is to read the newspaper and then talk about it on TV, believes, strangely, that there have been no bad stories about Obamacare the past two weeks;

only 24% of those signing up for Obamacare are young, a far cry from the 39% they were hoping for to make the system solvent (and, note, that it's not just that they need young -- they need healthy, a point mentioned in my first post of the day, below);

CNN actually troubles itself to note that Obama's "four million have signed up for Medicaid under Obamacare!" claim is nonsense (though they caveat it as probably nonsense);

Iran's quasi-official news service FARS reports that Edward Snowden has blown the lid off the "alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda," reporting that an alien species called "Tall Whites" engineered Hitler's rise to power and currently controls the US;

and in Amsterdam, they have a novel welfare plan for unemployed alcoholics -- sweep the street, and get a government beer.

And, of course, This Guy:

Posted by: Ace at 02:41 PM | Comments (499)
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