Reuters doesn’t exactly elide that: but neither does it really push too much the minor detail that the two seats that Mike Bloomberg poured his money into replaced a retiring Democrat and Republican with… a Democrat and Republican. Indeed, it’s almost as if Bloomberg needn’t have put in any money at all. Although I don’t mind if Democrats and/or liberals throw a lot of money into the electoral process and never get anything back. In fact, I think that they should double down…
This is a reproduction of some fairly epic ranting that I did on a remarkably heavy-handed Bloomberg National Politics poll that apparently dropped today. The short version: if there is a better example of how blatantly slanted questions can get the results that you want out of a poll, it is not immediately coming to mind. I don’t know who commissioned this particular survey, but whoever he or she was, he or she did the pollster no professional favors by demanding that particular wording. It’s pretty bad.
Continue reading Bad Poll Questions on Display, Bloomberg National Politics edition.
Megan’s showing some dislike for free trade* in this Bloomberg piece; but it was this that stood out for me.
A disability check is a poor substitute for a job, from both the recipient and the taxpayer’s perspective. The sort of person who prefers a disability check to a decent job is the only person we don’t want to help.
Megan needs to define that ‘we.’ The federal government is apparently ready, willing, and able to subsidize people who prefer disability checks to decent jobs; and she also knows as well as I do that if you want more of something, you subsidize it. More to the point, so does the federal government – or, more accurately, the political party running the government’s executive branch. Some day I’d like to hear why LBJ hated poor people this much…
Via Instapundit.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*What do I think about free trade? To mangle Ghandi: I think that it’s a great idea; we should try it some time. From where I’m sitting we’ve got far too many regulations, carve-outs, and extraneous checks on manufacturing** as it is; and this administration is apparently driven to throw as many anvils on the back of business as it can possibly manage.
**Careful use of the adjective, there. I like clean water, air, and soil as well as the next person – particularly when I’m living on the same planet as my society’s manufacturing base.
Glenn Reynolds, while noting just how bad it’s getting out there under Bloomberg for New York City residents who don’t happen to be mega-rich, offers this invitation:
You’re welcome to move [to Tennessee], so long as you don’t start agitating for the same policies that drove you out.
I’m wondering if any state legislatures might decide to try to back up that sentiment with appropriate legislation. Probably not; it’d be hideously inappropriate and probably unconstitutional. But remember, Blue state transplants: your new Red state neighbors were smart enough to create the safe place that you’re currently fleeing to. Learn some humility, Sparky.
…and I had an epic rant set up for the lede on this getting buried, until I noticed that Bloomberg did more than one story on the poll.
Good thing I double-checked, huh?
Moe Lane
PS: A note to Bloomberg, though. You can’t actually ‘fire’ Rush Limbaugh: he’s an owner-operator, self-employed, and has no boss. He could have his distributors pressured into not renewing their distribution contracts with him, but when you put it that way the whole thing stops sounding like a need for corporate responsibility, and starts sounding like a free speech issue. Which is why I think Bloomberg didn’t put it that way.
Well, that’s going to be my guess:
Last week, Bloomberg implied it was only a matter of time before the city tried to put an end to the protests, but offered no hints on when that would be.
“The one thing I can tell you for sure,” he said, “is if anybody in the city breaks the law we will arrest them and turn them over the district attorneys.”
He said people charged the police a few nights ago, adding, “that is just not something we’re going to tolerate, period.”
You may have missed said police-charging – it happened the same night as Sarah Palin announcing that she wasn’t running for President, and Steve Jobs passing away – but the Occupy Wall Street people certainly didn’t, and they were not really what you’d call happy about the fact that the cops un-apologetically used pepper spray and police batons on the would-be Jacobins. Or that the rest of the world more or less shrugged at the news, once the meda got around to reporting it. Or that the entire thing is largely – and accurately – seen as a Democratic party establishment stalking horse. Continue reading Mayor Bloomberg schedules Saturday night for #OWS crackdown.
To give you an idea of just how laughably bad this Bloomberg hit piece (short version: the Koch Brothers are icky small-government people who have this big corporation that doesn’t give money to causes that the authors like is a evil lobbying corporation and here’s a list of bad things that they’ve done, including selling stuff to IranIranIranIRANIRANIRAN) was: not only did the notoriously neoconservative* house organ The Atlantic rip its allegations to shreds – Bloomberg probably didn’t want to see sentences like “Ironically, Koch Industries’ response to the article does a better job of laying out these allegations than the article itself.” – but the Bloomberg piece can’t even count on its own affiliates to have its back. To give just one example: Bloomberg Businessweek’s editorial board felt obligated to point out that the supposedly most damning portion of the original article – a subsidiary’s involvement in selling oil drilling equipment to Iran – concedes that Koch Industries was engaged in perfectly-legal activities that the company voluntarily ended when made aware about them. They also felt obligated to note that companies like General Electric – Hi, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt! Having fun working for the Obama administration? – and Caterpillar have also engaged in similar activities. Continue reading Today’s Bloomberg’s Two-Minute Hate: The Koch Brothers!
