One of the features of any election cycle are the numerous polls conducted. These polls paint a narrative about how well a candidate or party is performing at a point in time or over time. And despite the fact that we love to complain about the undue influence of polls, it’s the “horse race” aspect to it that makes polls so popular, especially if “your side” is winning or coming from behind.

Because of the pervasive influence of polls on any election, the great unasked question is: can I trust the polls? At its very essence, a poll is a snapshot of voter opinion at a particular point in time. And the contents of that snapshot can differ depending on who takes the picture due to variables like the quantity of questions asked, the time the poll was conducted, the tone of voice used to ask the questions, which voters are selected for the poll, and how many voters are selected for the poll.

As an illustration of what we are saying, we’d like to analyze data available on the “Generic Congressional Ballot” question. In the past 28 days, this poll question was asked 18 times, and the weighted average of these 18 polls was a 45-42% Republican preference. The detail beneath this number, however, reveals widely divergent results. Rasmussen asked this question three separate times, and the result came back 45-37% Republican. Gallup’s four polls on this very subject yielded a result, however, that was 47-45% Democratic. And FOX News asked this question on three separate occasions, and the result was 43-38% Republican.

Now that we see an example of how polls can produce different results, how can we effectively assess a poll?

(1) Whenever a poll is released, the most important thing is to determine who conducted the poll – was it a candidate/interest group (business, labor, etc) releasing numbers favorable to his/her campaign, or was it a media outlet (newspaper, TV station, magazine) paying for the poll ? And if the media outlet paid for the poll, which polling firm conducted the poll ?

(2) When the poll was conducted is just as important. A poll conducted two days ago is a very good assessment of a candidate’s strength/weakness. A poll conducted in July and released the day before Election Day would pretty much be useless, because (a) of the “staleness” of the data, and (b) the fact that after Labor Day, the tempo of a campaign speeds up as voters traditionally begin to pay more attention than they would right now, and opinions can and do change over time – the 2008 Presidential campaign is a good example of that.

(3) Trends are important: A single poll in itself doesn’t paint as vivid of a picture as a series of polls taken over a period of time, especially if it’s by the same pollster. For example, a Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper poll released yesterday shows Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) with a 43-42% lead over his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle. A casual observer would conclude that this race is neck and neck, with a very slight edge to Harry Reid. That is technically a true statement today, but if you look at the historical data, you’ll realize that the last poll conducted by the Review-Journal two weeks ago showed Reid leading 44-37%. Furthermore, in the four times Rasmussen has polled this race since the Nevada primary, Reid’s share of the vote started off at 39%, and increased 2% each time Rasmussen polled this race.

From this detail data, we can make the following assessment of this race: (1) Harry Reid’s use of his considerable campaign war chest to shine the light on his opponent’s statements/beliefs/gaffes has turned the race around for now, and (2) while he has fought his way back, it appears that he has hit a ceiling of support, according to the two Review-Journal polls. Obviously, Sharron Angle will have to change the way she presents her campaign/beliefs to Nevada voters so she can retake the lead before November.

(4) No two polls are created equally - for a poll to be an accurate representation of the electorate, the polling firm must consider the demographic makeup of those who answered the poll and be willing to make adjustments. Let’s look at the Louisiana electorate as an example. The most recent voter registration data shows that 31% of Louisiana voters are black. And while black turnout can and does differ from election to election, a statewide poll taken with a sample that is only 10% black (or only contains respondents from higher income suburbs) could not and should not be considered a representative sample.

Similarly, there is a world of difference between a poll taken of random names in a phone book, a poll taken of registered voters, and a poll taken of “likely” voters (those on the voter rolls who are shown to take an interest in most elections). In the high turnout 2008 Presidential election, for example, 33% of registered Louisiana voters didn’t vote. Meaning that random calls to  anyone in the phone book would have been a waste of time with regards to those not even on the voter rolls, much less the 33% of those on the voter rolls who didn’t vote. In fact, we’d like to bring up a statistic about voter turnout that is generally not mentioned to the public: in a sample of suburban East Baton Rouge Parish voters, 15% of those registered have never voted, and another 13% did not vote in the 2008 Presidential election.

(5) How we analyze polls - When we provide poll analyses for House, Senate, and Governor’s races, we scour the political websites every day to retrieve all relevant polls. Once we load those polls into a database, we assess each race based on a weighted average of polls for the last 28 days. We currently use 28 days for two reasons: (a) it’s relatively early in the election season (22 states, including Louisiana, still haven’t held their primaries), so we don’t have a continuous stream of poll data yet, (b)voters aren’t fully engaged in the election right now. Once Labor Day has passed, trends can and do emerge, so we will shorten the “look back” of the polls we examine to 7-14 days, because  we want to be able to detect trends on a more timely manner..

(5) Finally – As a final illustration of what we’ve talked about, we’d like to provide a sample of polls taken for U.S. Senate races, and show you the results within the last 14 and 28 days:

Senate Polls

John is a political consultant and blogger with JMC Enterprises with expertise in poll sample development and analysis, development of targeted voter files for phone canvassing or mail outs, campaign strategy and demographic consulting, among other things. See his site at WinWithJMC.com for more information.

Has there ever been a local newspaper more out of touch with the market it represents than the Baton Rouge Advocate?

It’s a question worth asking, and it has been for some time. Today’s assault on the tax relief granted to Louisiana’s citizens in 2007 and 2008 in that paper’s editorial pages brings to light another example of glaring economic illiteracy and sharp divergence from the majority of its readership which is all too familiar these days.

Two prior examples of this divergence in the past year come to mind. The first was last year’s failed (for the second time) bond issue in the capitol city. Mayor-President Kip Holden had attempted to smash through a billion-dollar bond to fund a wish list of public-sector projects, including a riverside theme park on land the city didn’t have title to, in the midst of a recession. Despite a month or more of articles in its own pages on shenanigans by the mayor to rig the vote to his favor, the controversy over the Audubon Alive site and access to it, the lack of candor by public officials in addressing questions about the plan and other issues, the Advocate came out with full throat to support the bond.

And it wasn’t just beaten. Despite a 50-1 advantage in spending by the mayor compared to the Tea Party groups in town who rallied to defeat the bond, it was drummed by a 65-35 count. It seems the voters in East Baton Rouge Parish did a better job reading up on the bond than the paper’s editorial board did.

A 65-35 shellacking is highly uncommon for a candidate or proposition supported by a local paper. Ask around and you will not find many examples of such a divergence between the only newspaper in town and its target readership.

Another example of the out-of-touch Advocate came in April. This was less noticeable in the public eye, as the paper’s coverage of it didn’t include anything which would tip the readers off. But on April 12, I was invited to a small news conference put on by Rep. Bill Cassidy at his Baton Rouge district office to meet Joe Barton, ranking Republican on the House Energy & Commerce Committee, who was making a tour of energy states to talk about Cap & Trade legislation. When I say small, I mean “intimate” – there were only four media types there – myself, David Jacobs from the Baton Rouge Business Report, someone from the Livingston Parish News, and Ted Griggs, the Advocate’s business writer.

Now, you would expect that the business writer for the newspaper in Baton Rouge would be very attuned to the economic issues surrounding cap and trade. Enormously so. Baton Rouge has been described as The Chemical City, and within our area lies the beating heart of the nation’s petrochemical sector. No industry seems more susceptible to cap and trade legislation’s effects than petrochemical does – the refineries, processing plants, factories and other facilities which turn crude oil and its assorted components into household products and industrial ingredients depend on a stable regulatory regime for their very viability. And since before I launched the Hayride as an alternative news commentary medium I was a corporate recruiter working with engineers and construction managers, I had seen first-hand the damage that the mere suggestion of cap and trade in Congress had done.

The recession certainly had something to do with the slowdown in the petrochemical sector, but plant managers up and down the Mississippi had told me that they were neither hiring new people nor engaging in expansions. You see, while the larger facilities typically will spend $5-10 million per year (or more) in updating their physical plants – which incidentally keeps engineering firms and industrial contractors in the Baton Rouge area in business – there was little motivation to continue those upgrades and expansions when the owners of the plants foresee massive tax and regulatory burdens coming down the line. All those plans were shelved. And the result was devastating to the engineering business throughout South Louisiana. Ford Bacon & Davis laid off over 100 engineers. Wink did the same. Jacobs had a bloodbath. Spectrum all but went out of business (and I think they actually did go under).

But after Barton launched into his discussion of why cap and trade was such a bad idea and it became time for questions, Griggs asked him “what about global warming?” And when Barton responded that after 20 years of beating that drum its proponents had yet to show any real evidence it was happening, not to mention the fact that the East Anglia fraud had damaged any claim there was real science behind global warming theory, Griggs didn’t seem like he could have been more shocked had Barton slapped him with a fish.

I found that amazing. If the Advocate’s business writer isn’t covering the petrochemical industry inside and out and isn’t aware of that industry’s point of view – and if Griggs is interested I can supply him with Dan Borne’s contact information and Borne’ will be more than happy to educate him on alternative viewpoints to Al Gore’s on climate change – then what on earth does he do all day?

And now we have yet another example of the Baton Rouge newspaper being scandalously out of touch with the market it serves. The Stelly Plan was a hugely unpopular idea from the time it was passed in 2002 to the time the legislature started chopping it down in 2007; it did real damage to job creation in Louisiana because it assaulted the income of the business class. Stelly accelerated the exodus of college graduates out of Louisiana – to states like Texas, which has no state income tax – and made Louisiana increasingly uncompetitive in the South. One reason we’re about to lose a congressional district  after reapportionment is that we’ve gained practically zero population in the past decade. And while part of that trend is due to the effects of Katrina, we were losing population even before the hurricane came. Any population gains we’ve had in the past decade have come since the legislature took the axe to Stelly – which the Advocate is now saying was a bad idea.

Louisiana’s tax receipts are down a little since the recession began, but what has really caused the state’s budget problems is a complete abdication of fiscal discipline. Our state budget has tripled in 15 years. We have more state employees per capita than practically any state in the country. We have more six-figure state employees than any state in the South. We have a licensing board for florists, for crying out loud. We’re carrying an overabundance of four year public colleges which in good times prevented us from funding the truly important ones on a nationally competitive level and now prevents us from funding any of them at a merely acceptable level. We’re holding on to an antiquated Charity Hospital system when that model has been proven as inefficient in delivering services in a cost-conscious and effective manner.

And on, and on.

This entire controversy can be laid at Gov. Bobby Jindal’s feet for failing to show the kind of fiscal discipline that a Chris Christie has shown in New Jersey. Jindal has been admirable in his insistence upon balancing the budget without a tax increase, but he isn’t pushing to alter the state’s constitution to aim at the waste – instead, we’re still doing the ridiculous dance of slashing higher education and health care every time there’s a shortfall rather than do something about all the protected spending which goes on unabated – and he’s not taking the steps needed to break down our outmoded governmental models to replace them with something more efficient and effective. So perhaps a lack of decisive leadership by the governor offers an opening for economic illiterates at the Baton Rouge paper to print revanchist editorials decrying “tax breaks for the rich” as the unemployment rate inches upward.

But that’s no excuse. Stelly was done away with because that’s what the people of Louisiana wanted. In fact, what the people of Louisiana really wanted was to do away with the state’s income tax in the first place, and that could have passed through the legislature in 2008 had Jindal jumped aboard the proposal when it was made. Would our budget deficit have been made worse had he done so? Probably, but our economy would have been better, our property and sales tax receipts would have been stronger, our job creation would have benefited and perhaps less Louisianians would have needed the government services which necessitate a large budget in the first place.

These things don’t apparently impact the Advocate’s editorial board, since they fail to grasp the concept that government doesn’t have a higher claim to the product of an individual’s time and effort than the individual does. They think that if the government has a deficit it’s somehow “responsible” to increase revenues to resolve it – and thus it was a mistake to roll back the Stelly tax increases. This is bad economics, bad philosophy and – at a time when some 31 percent of Louisiana’s “likely” voters (meaning the folks most attuned to current events and most likely to actually read the newspaper) call themselves Tea Party members and 52 percent say they’re Tea Party sympathizers – incredibly bad politics.

How much longer can the paper continue to stand at odds with its readership before it pays the price on the bottom line? There are newspapers dying all over the country. Dumb editorials like the one today will likely be the death of this one.

The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is sacrosanct. This truth is beyond self-evident. We hold it as immutable and undeniable. But, whose truth are we talking about here?

H.L. Menken said: “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Truth is a matter of perception and direction as to how, when and why you say it. Mark Twain said there are many ways to not tell the truth. There are: “lies, damned lies and statistics”. It’s an interesting quote considering there are at least three other people accredited with speaking the words earlier than Twain. Then there’s exposing the kernel of the fact and extrapolating it out until it no longer even resembles the way it really happened. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is an example. There were vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin but the exact level of interaction, antagonism and combat between the participants is still arguable. But, the resultant effect of the incident is recorded at Arlington National Cemetery as well as countless others across America, Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Any media organization operates along a business model. Its sales are susceptible to the whims and appeal it has to its audience. Its survival is based on how many copies are sold regularly. The stories sell the paper and the paper sells the stories. Failing to regularly “grab” the reader’s attention decides the lifestyle of the press and its longevity in the world. This is how papers sell advertising.

“Fair and Balanced” reporting isn’t a constitutional mandate. The morals, ethics and personal integrity of the writer, editor, and publisher are NOT job specific; nor are they job requirements. The morals, ethics and integrity of the people involved (and the rag itself) are irrelevant to the production and recordation of news in the world. There was once a “newspaper” (better called a publication than a hard news outlet) that recently, quietly died. It was “The News of the World”.

It was the paper you might have seen on the rack proclaiming: “Alien has president’s love child!” “Martians inhabiting senate. Threaten House of Representatives as well!” “BILL CLINTON caught in affair with water buffalo! Water Buffaloes do NOT understand the concept of dry cleaners!” are all examples of headlines displaying the possibility of truth but NO real evidence to confirm or deny through extended research.

Sensationalism sells. Death, destruction, debasement and derision of anybody available at the moment sell. And they sell millions of square feet of advertising each day across the world. You can print a piece guaranteed to create an eye-puddle concerning a child caring for some innocent injured animal. You can sell a hundred times more copies if the innocent animal gets scared, bites the kid and the kid suffers the pain of extended rabies inoculations over time. People love controversy and are titillated by their witnessing the horrors of the human condition. They feel their personal trials are diminished. That’s also why soap operas are so popular.

There’s a timeless dictum in the press fraternity: “if it bleeds, it leads.”

But, that “lead” must be approached from a particular angle. The presentation will have an easily understood attitude about it. Viewpoints become apparent. The agenda of the publisher, editor, writer and later, the reader are all determined by what’s read and sells. Time Magazine is different from Newsmax. The Republic is different from Newsweek. The New York Times challenges The New York Post.

The angle of the attack is decided by the agenda of the press concerning the issue at hand. The energy of the moment decides the manner of coverage and the direction the writer will try to move the reader to consider what he reads. Then the agenda garners continuing support from the readers and the readers constitute the market.

So when you’re reading a fine editorial entrée such as this or sampling the cerebral appetizers offered by another equally revered news outlet remember: there are many facets on the gem we call The Press. Sample the viewpoint from as many angles as possible.

It’s much more honest that way.

After this episode on Fox News Sunday, in which former Democrat presidential candidate, DNC chairman and nutroots impresario Howard “Yeeaaaarrrgghhh!” Dean gets a faceful of poo from Chris Wallace for trying to smear FNC as a bunch of racists…

…it brought to mind some of the all-time great rejection scenes from motion picture history.

Like for example this one from As Good As It Gets…

As is the case all over the country today, the story of Shirley Sherrod, a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee fired yesterday after video surfaced of her describing at an NAACP event a lack of motivation for helping a white farmer on racial grounds, made the list of topics being discussed on Baton Rouge AM talker WJBO. The afternoon drive host, Michael Castner, had apparently decided on a narrative he was going to operate from this afternoon.

It seems that on the morning show Castner does at WJBO’s sister station Rush Radio WRNO-FM in New Orleans, he had launched into the racial angle on Sherrod pretty heavily, but as more about that story surfaced during the day and it appeared some of Sherrod’s “racism” on video may have been taken out of context he decided he needed to backtrack and call for everybody to calm down.

But there’s more to the Sherrod story than just race. A good deal more. And Castner blew a good opportunity to smoke a lot of it out.

First, the Andrew Breitbart BigGovernment.com piece which first broke the Shirley Sherrod story wide open posted two videos of Sherrod. The first, which has attracted all the attention this week, is the one you’ve seen:

Was it a bit unfair? Probably. After all, Sherrod does later in her speech talk about how she began to realize “it’s not about race, it’s about haves and have-nots” – which moves her from the realm of race-hustlers into more of a garden-variety wealth redistributionist (and the presence of those in the federal government is something of a scandal in and of itself given the track record of that philosophy).

But Breitbart posted another video of Sherrod as well, and in doing so claimed the second video was the one which actually mattered:

He introduces that clip this way:

The second video affirms the real reason there is tension between the Democratic Party and a growing mass of middle Americans — and it’s not because of race.

The NAACP which has transformed from a civil rights group to a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and social-justice politics, supports a new America that relies less on individualism, entrepreneurialism and American grit, but instead giddily embraces, the un-American notion of unaccountability and government dependence. Shirley Sherrod, a federal appointee who oversees over a billion dollars of federal funds, nearly begs black men and women into taking government jobs at USDA — because they won’t get fired.

But it turns out that Sherrod’s attitude toward race or government employment practices might not be the only item of interest in the wake of a lightning-fast firing once she surfaced in the public eye. In fact, she’s only been in government since last year. Prior to that, Sherrod had a history as a community organizer among rural African-Americans in southern Georgia – a history which makes her employment in the Obama administration interesting for more reasons than just the fact that she used to hate white people.

In fact, today the Washington Examiner, which is a newspaper based in the nation’s capitol with a roster of well-respected journalists on staff – among them Michael Barone, Mark Tapscott, Mark Hemingway, David Freddoso and Byron York – had a piece on the Sherrod kerfuffle entitled “Shirley Sherrod’s Disappearing Act: Not So Fast” which brought out several interesting questions about Sherrod’s history and tenure within the USDA.

The piece, by freelance writer Tom Blumer, opens like this:

Within hours of the video’s release, USDA Director Tom Vilsack announced Sherrod’s resignation, and in the process issued an exceptionally strong condemnation (“We are appalled by her actions … Her actions were shameful … she gave no indication she had attempted to right the wrong she had done to this man”).

The NAACP, at whose Freedom Fund Banquet Sherrod spoke of her discriminatory posture, and at which the audience seemed to indicate approval of her outlook, followed a short time later, virtually echoing Vilsack.

So I guess we’re supposed to forget about Shirley Sherrod from this point forward.

Not just yet. Luckily, she’s not going away quietly, and is complaining about Fox News and the Tea Party causing her dismissal. Keep it up, ma’am, because you and the USDA both deserve further scrutiny.

Ms. Sherrod’s previous background, the circumstances surrounding her hiring, and the USDA’s agenda may all play a part in explaining her sudden departure from the agency. These matters have not received much scrutiny to this point.

A further reading uncovers the fact that before Sherrod worked at the USDA, she was suing the USDA. It seems that Shirley and Charles Sherrod had operated a land trust called New Communities, Inc., which had been involved in a suit against the Department for alleged mistreatment of African-American farmers going back decades, and just days prior to her appointment as Georgia Director for Rural Development last year that claim was settled for some $13 million. Sherrod and her husband Charles received $150,000 each in the settlement for “pain and suffering,” plus they along with other plaintiffs apparently also scored an unspecified forgiveness of debt from the federal government.

New Communities’ settlement is only part of a billion-dollar lawsuit, Pigford v. Vilsack, which has been going on for a very long time and which is being settled slowly and expensively by the federal government. The story then references a May 27, 2010 piece from Agri-Pulse:

As part of a April 14, 1999 class action case settlement, commonly known as the Pigford case, U.S. taxpayers have already provided over $1 billion in cash, non-credit awards and debt relief to almost 16,000 black farmers who claimed that they were discriminated against by USDA officials as they “farmed or attempted to farm.” In addition, USDA’s Farm Service Agency spent over $166 million on salaries and expenses on this case from 1999-2009, according to agency records.

Members of Congress may approve another $1.15 billion this week to settle cases from what some estimate may be an additional 80,000 African-Americans who have also claimed to have been discriminated against by USDA staff.

… Settling this case is clearly a priority for the White House and USDA. Secretary Vilsack described the funding agreement reached between the Administration and advocates for black farmers early this year as “an important milestone in putting these discriminatory claims behind us for good and in achieving finality for this group of farmers with longstanding grievances.”

However, confronted with the skyrocketing federal deficit, more officials are taking a critical look at the billion dollars spent thus far and wondering when these discrimination cases will ever end. Already, the number of people who have been paid and are still seeking payment will likely exceed the 26,785 black farmers who were considered to even be operating back in 1997, according to USDA. That’s the year the case initially began as Pigford v. (then Agriculture Secretary) Glickman and sources predicted that, at most, 3,000 might qualify.

At least one source who is extremely familiar with the issue and who asked to remain anonymous because of potential retribution, says there are a number of legitimate cases who have long been denied their payments and will benefit from the additional funding. But many more appear to have been solicited in an attempt to “game” the Pigford system.

Obviously, some questions the Obama administration might not be too keen on answering arise from all this, as Blumer mentions. First, was Sherrod’s USDA appointment a quid pro quo to settle the suit? Second, why is it that New Communities was able to get so generous a settlement when appears the average for plaintiffs among the 16,000 in the original suit was one-quarter their figure? Third, what kind of debt forgiveness was involved in that settlement? And of course, those questions lead to the fairly obvious one – was firing Sherrod an attempt to make her disappear from the public eye before anyone could delve into the circumstances of the lawsuit and her hiring in the first place?

This is all fairly juicy stuff, and given the constant use of race as a smoke screen to hide more substantial issues within this administration it seems like the sort of subject a talk show host might seek to mine for material to produce interesting radio.

So while listening to Castner (which might have been a mistake in its own right, I’ll admit), I noticed that the deeper issues surrounding Sherrod were getting no attention. As such, I sent him this e-mail:

Michael,

 

Before you go too far on the Shirley Sherrod thing, while it does appear that BigGovernment.com did something of a hit job on her there appears to be a LOT more to this woman.

 

Check out this link: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/Examiner-Opinion-Zone/Shirley-Sherrods-Disappearing-Act-Not-So-Fast-98846149.html

Castner actually mentioned the e-mail on his show. Unfortunately, he didn’t take the time to read the link. You can find the segment here beginning at the 17:26 mark, but a transcript of what he said follows:

CASTNER: First of all I want to say hey to Scott, publisher of The Hayride. He just wrote me an e-mail, “Michael, before you go too far on the Shirley Sherrod thing,” – you mean me being fair? - “while it does appear that BigGovernment.com did something of a hit job on her there appears to be a lot more to this woman.” And then he says to check out this link. I’ll tell you what Scott, I’m going to check out major news sources, and that includes Fox News. Obviously, we’re a Fox News affiliate.

I’m not going to go off and, and this is not saying anything to you at the Hayride, but I’m not going to go off to do some blog. Because I think a lot of times – and that still came off wrong. I DIDN’T MEAN IT THAT WAY. I’m going to go off to a major news source with a lot of, uh, RESOURCES available.  CNN being one of them because they’re pulling up video of her giving the same speech from before. And what a concept too, I know that not a lot of hosts will come on and say “Hey, I was wrong this morning.”

Because one thing I am correct about, Scott, and so is Mary Matalin, is the race-baiting has got to stop on both sides. And saying “Yeah, but they did it” is a first-grade answer. You wouldn’t accept that of your child and you shouldn’t accept it out of your fellow citizens. Just because the NAACP is running around calling the Tea Party racist doesn’t mean you have to lob a salvo on the other side.

Keep talking about the issues. If you’re a member of the Tea Party and you believe in what you’re doing, keep talking about the issues. That’s how you’re going to be heard. People in both parties act like a bunch of children, screamin’ and yellin’, doing hit jobs on this woman who lost her job, and from all accounts THAT I TRUST, did not perform – nobody has come out with one incident at the USDA that required her to lose her job. Not one.

I’d be stunned if somebody that runs the Hayride is supporting President Obama. I’d be really blown away. I was wrong on this. The White House is wrong on this. The NAACP was wrong on this. An organization that is there for people to jump to conclusions – and yet they jump to conclusions and they’ve now retracted their criticism of this woman.

I’ll tell you what we were doing. What we were doing was playing a bite that was provided to us, playing it out of context, and then villifying this woman and when we finally get the story and they interview this white farmer, that she supposedly didn’t want to help and didn’t help, well she did wind up helping him and became friends with him. And if you think I’m going to continue playing the race-bait card, that ain’t happening on this show. You can get it on other shows, you’re not going to get it here.

There is virtually no mention of race in the Washington Examiner piece other than that the plaintiffs in Pigford were black. The piece describes an entirely alternative reasoning for Sherrod’s treatment which is, like Castner drones on about, much more substantial than the tired question of black-vs-white.

So exasperated, I sent a follow-up e-mail to Castner when he was wrapping up the above. Entitled “Nice Work,” it reads as follows:

Had you hit the link you would recognize there is a lot of substantial information on Shirley Sherrod which has NOTHING to do with race and has a great deal with why once she became a household name the USDA couldn’t wait to get rid of her. It involves billions of dollars and lawsuits and a potentially corrupt appointment which might be a nice scandal in its own right.

 

The link is not to the Hayride, which you obviously have little respect for and have never even bothered to look at, but to the Washington Examiner – by no means “some blog” unworthy of reputable attention.

 

That’s fine. You missed the story. Somebody else will pick it up.

Castner’s response is at the end of the linked audio file, and it’s not friendly. I won’t go into the trouble of transcribing it because it contributes little to the substance of the exchange. But it’s clear that the host never read the piece in question – even after it was explained what was discussed in it. Instead, he got huffy. He also chose not to read the second e-mail, as he had the first, though he began to. Perhaps Castner realized that the first paragraph of the second e-mail would invalidate virtually everything he said in response to the first; who knows.

The point of this? Baton Rouge’s major talk station has as its afternoon drive-time host someone who doesn’t seem to be very curious about the stories he’s discussing on the air. That’s unfortunate, as it’s another example of how a failure to get to the bottom of the important issues of the day by media people consume in mass quantities lead to an uninformed public.

There might be nothing more to Shirley Sherrod than a series of unfortunate video clips. But there are real questions to be asked about the circumstances of her employment, and they have nothing to do with whether she hates white people or not. Castner hammered away for a whole hour about how folks need to get off race, and then he refused to even consider something much more important when it was served to him on a silver platter.

The listeners to his show weren’t well served by that decision.

UPDATE: The background behind the Shirley Sherrod hiring and firing has the potential to be a gigantic story – and potentially a major scandal in its own right. It’s anything but crazy to suggest she was run off as a means of attempting to put a lid on the Pigford settlements.

For example, here’s a story from last year, when the Obama administration first proposed a $1.25 billion fund to pay claims under Pigford, by NBC affiliate WALB-TV in Albany, GA…

Black Farmers filed the Pigford Class Action Lawsuit in 1997 against the USDA for discrimination in loan practices. Now advocates say the Obama settlement offer is good news, but still not enough money to make up for what it cost.

“One point 25 billion is not enough,” said Shirley Sherrod, Georgia Director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. ”So now we’re scrambling to see what we are going to do.”

In 2008′s Farm Bill the offer was $100 million. Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack says he wants to correct past errors by the USDA and move forward with a new civil rights program.

Now black farmer groups will meet to decide if this offer will be accepted, and how it will be distributed, to finally bring the long fight to a close.

“So we don’t have to deal with discrimination from this point on. We can just deal with the business of farming and development in the rural area,” Sherrod said.

The Obama administration increased the settlement offer in Pigford cases, including the one Sherrod was involved with, TWELVE TIMES over what the previous administration had budgeted with a Democrat Congress. No wonder Sherrod and her group agreed to a settlement.

There’s more. It seems that, as you may have read above, you’d qualify for a Pigford settlement if you fit the class of plaintiffs and could credibly allege that you’d even thought about farming prior to the instigation of the suit. Naturally, that made Pigford cases ripe for abuse…

However, the seeds of a vast scam were sown: with only a simple affidavit signed by someone who alleged he had applied for a loan or merely that he had “attempted to own or lease farm land,” $50,000 (tax free no less) would be paid out. Upon a slightly greater showing of proof (“a preponderance of the evidence”) even more money could be claimed.

Claimants did not need to prove that they ever actually farmed — or ever applied for a loan, only that they “attempted to farm” explains USDA’s General Counsel Marc Kesselman. Could someone sitting on their couch get money by saying they thought about farming in the 1990’s? Kesselman says that “folks have to sign an affidavit with sufficient detail” to describe how they attempted to farm. Well, people wouldn’t lie, would they?

What happened next was an extraordinary example of fraud on a massive scale. The USDA did its job under the consent decree. It provided notice to potential claimants and took steps to advertise the class settlement. Nearly a half a million dollars was spent to advertise on cable TV and in newspapers, with special attention to African American press.

The consent decree which ended the lawsuit provided that farmers who had suffered discrimination could come forward to present claims and receive compensation.

Within the original time period for claimants to come forward some 22,440 claims were made. Only 1420 of these were actual borrowers. Employees of USDA and others privy to the details of the settlement are blunt: they consider the vast majority of the claims to have been fraudulent. They suspect that so-called civil rights activists and by class action lawyers eager to sign up as many potential claimants as possible simply rounded up as many individuals as they could find, even if they never farmed, never applied for a loan and never seriously pursued farming. With the minimal proof needed for a $50,000 settlement 67% of the claims were approved by an independent arbitrator.

Wait, there’s more…

After the initial time period for the settlement ran out in October 1999 the consent decree provided for another period of eleven months whereby claimants upon “extraordinary circumstances” could still file claims. More than 65,000 additional claimants stepped forward to file claim requests. Another 8000 then came forward with their late claims. (So in a universe of 18,500 farmers in 1997, 96,000 individuals managed to make claims.) But there had been a court-imposed deadline. Wasn’t this the end of the road? Not by a long shot.

Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) is one of the few legislators who has attempted to question this boondoggle. He terms this a case of “significant fraud.” King contends that at least 75% of the claims are fraudulent, the work of plaintiff’s counsel and activists who spread the word in African American communities that individuals, many of whom had never even farmed, were entitled to these monies. Asked if any of his colleagues seem inclined to rock the boat and challenge this give away, he says bluntly, “No.”

Although the evidence is plain, the fear of being labeled as “insensitive” or “opposing civil rights remedies” has kept most every legislator from stepping forward to challenge the gravy train of cash give away. After all, it’s only your money.

Bear in mind, the staggering numbers from the Human Events piece referenced above were 2008 numbers – we’re talking about a situation where it appears massive fraud and waste was occurring and had been for 11 years at that time. The 2008 Farm Bill had $100 million set aside to finish off the remaining claims, after countless millions had already been spent on cases the USDA and others knew or had good reason to suspect were fraudulent.

And along came Obama, who turned that $100 million into $1.2 billion. Which Shirley Sherrod, prior to her USDA appointment, said wasn’t enough. Then Sherrod hit the jackpot with a $13 million settlement for her group and a plush federal job from which she said she couldn’t be fired – until all this started tumbling out into the media, at which time she was run off so rapidly her head is still spinning.

Let’s ask this again – should Michael Castner maybe have had a look at that Washington Examiner piece?

Long time readers of Lincoln Parish News Online (LPNO) know of our time-tested theorem of how more information often can be gleaned by things that ARE NOT revealed, rather than by what IS revealed. Who WASN’T at the meeting; what WASN’T said in the interview; who DIDN’T run for office; what the news article DIDN’T say – and so forth.

We have as the tagline of our newsblog: “What isn’t in the newspapers is often more newsworthy that what is.”

That theorem was again proved yesterday when Shira Toeplitz of Politico.com posted her hit piece on Sen. David Vitter.

What WASN’T in Toeplitz’s Article

This past Tuesday afternoon we received a call from Ms. Toeplitz wanting to interview us about the Louisiana Senate Race. Sure, we said. We’re in the news and opinion business and would be happy to oblige.

Her first question involved the so-called birther movement and the fact that Vitter mentioned the issue at a recent campaign event. We told Toplitz that we didn’t have any particular problem with Vitter’s comments and that many people felt that there was a “there” there on whether or not the President was a natural-born citizen.

She asked were we supporters of Vitter. We said, sure he had one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate and that he very much reflected our view on smaller government and less taxes.

Next, our conversation touched on the primary challenge of Vitter by former State Supreme Court Justice Chet Traylor. We told her that in our opinion Traylor was not known outside the relatively sparsely populated area of Northeast Louisiana and that he had little chance of success.

We noted that Traylor’s campaign manager is Lev Dawson, a close political ally of notorious State Sen. Francis Thompson. And that’s a lot of political baggage to tote, we said.

We also mentioned that if Traylor tried to make an issue of Vitter’s alleged marital problems of a decade ago, then Traylor would open himself up to the same charges.

Toeplitz told us she had an on-the-record interview with State Rep. Noble Ellington earlier, where Ellington went into detail about that very issue.

Toeplitz chose not to write about that in her article.

Toeplitz also failed to include in her article any mention of her interview with Bibb Franklin of Rayville, a long-time conservative activist. Franklin told Toeplitz much the same thing we did – in his opinion, Traylor wouldn’t get much support and that Vitter had his base pretty much sewed up.

We called Toeplitz and Poltico’s Executive Editor Jim VandeHei to see if they wanted to comment on this news story. Neither had returned our phone call by post time.

Who Gets to Say What is News

Used to, when big-city newspaper or the TV networks did a story and told only part of the story, we conservatives just had to sit and stew. We had no way to correct the record.

That’s all changed with this new interweb thingy.

Appropriate here is this quote from New York Times columnist David Carr from a couple of years ago:

“I was taught when I was a young reporter that it’s news when we say it is. I think that’s still true — it’s news when ‘we’ say it is. It’s just who ‘we’ is has changed.”

UPDATE: We’re not going to break our arms patting ourselves on the back, but less than a day after we posted this piece out comes a poll by James Carville and BP’s Stan Greenberg with some numbers which more or less confirm what we were saying. Specifically, that 55 percent of likely voters think Obama is a socialist.

That’s up from 40 percent in March, when those holding that opinion were demeaned and lampooned as cranks and “wingnuts.”

ORIGINAL POST: Back in March, amid the debate over the impending passage of Obamacare, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) caused a major stir by using the “M-word” to describe our President. Bachmann compared the tactics and governance of the Barack Obama-Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid trio to Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela and called for an “orderly revolution” in November to break up that band.

Bachmann’s rhetoric scared the dickens out of the GOP establishment, as House Minority Leader John Boehner had just a few months before denied calling Obama a socialist during a Meet The Press appearance on NBC and followed that denial up with an emphatic statement that he didn’t think the president was one. After Bachmann’s statement, there was a considerable amount of tut-tutting and tamping down of the rhetoric.

But the conservative base from which the GOP draws its sustenance has always believed Obama is a socialist, just as conservatives have long believed the politicians atop the Democrat congressional leadership were socialists. There’s only so much socialism a Nancy Pelosi can practice through legislative action and campaign rhetoric before what quacks and walks like a duck actually is termed one. When it first became apparent that a large segment of the American population identified the President with extreme left-wing ideology, that was chalked up to rabble-rousing by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity – not a reflection that many Americans recognized the Democrats’ policies for what they are.

Fast forward to July, and what used to be relegated to the discussions of “wingnuts” in the conservative blogosphere and the “far-right talk radio crowd” is now beginning to gain acceptance in more “respectable” circles – namely, that Bachmann was right, Obama is a Marxist, so are his people in the White House and so is the Democrat leadership on Capitol Hill.

Jon Ward has a piece in today’s Daily Caller which aims short of the Marxist mark, declaring that an “anti-business” moniker is gaining acceptance for the president:

The Cato Institute recently published a superb piece illustrating the budget policies of the immediate post World War II period and the 80th Session of the US Congress that was elected in 1946.

The newly installed Republican Congress, led by Senator Taft of Ohio, continued to reduced federal outlays considerably, as had been done when the war came to a close in August of 1945. The study found that these budget actions did not cause a renewed economic downturn but actually paved the way (along with other actions like Taft-Hartley) for robust private sector economic growth.

However, one need not look this far back in history but to the actions of the 104th Session of Congress for further proof that cutting spending and taxes leads to economic growth. The 104th Congress famously ended 40 years of Democrat dominance of the Congress and was installed at a time of much uncertainty regarding the economy.  Coming off the mild regional recession in the early 1990s and tax increases of the new Clinton Administration, it was by no means thought that brisk growth was on the horizon. 

Beginning with a rescissions bill to pay for earthquake damage in California that cut two dollars for every new dollar spending, the GOP controlled Congress began to reduce actual outlays in discretionary spending for the first time in decades. The projected baseline increases even after President Clinton forced some concessions in the spring of 1996 were reduced substantially.  Although the categories are somewhat difficult to compare over time, domestic discretionary spending rose half as much during the 1990s as in the first decade of the 21st Century under President George W. Bush.

These battles over spending were coupled in early 1997 with a budget agreement between Clinton and the GOP Congress, which cut a variety of taxes, including the capitol gains tax and other pro-growth measures.  These spending and tax changes, along with NAFTA (passed with GOP votes in 1993 over the loud objections of organized labor and liberals) and the historic welfare reforms in 1996 placed the US economy on sound footing and helped pull the global economy through Central and South American debts crises, along with portions of the Pacific rim. 

One need not be a credentialed economist to search in vain for any Keynesian policies implemented in the mid-1990s. In fact, the left in the US routinely criticized President Clinton for cementing largely Reaganite ideas until impeachment, perjury and obstruction of justice pushed the left back into the Democrat fold.

Although it is coming at a very painful cost, the historical narrative of the New Deal historians is being dismantled before our very eyes.  Cutting taxes, reducing government spending, increasing trade and lowering the burden of government regulations are what lead to private sector economic growth. No amount of media cheerleading for President Obama can obfuscate these basic historical facts.  Unfortunately, this generation must learn the lessons that all who came before it did. The key question is how much structural damage will the American republic endure this time around?

Yikes.

The Daily Caller features Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) in its latest “Double-Take” installment, in which it matches politicians with “celebrity lookalikes.” And Landrieu is tagged with “Miss Piggy” of Jim Henson’s Muppet fame.

In describing its justification, the site offers this: