For most of us, we have a drivers license, we know you can get a license-like ID even if you don’t drive, and we wonder what the big fuss is about. NPR has a lucid story on who doesn’t have ID’s and why. Generally, the elderly and young adults, and because they may live far from a state agency or paradoxically, may lack the ID required to get an ID.
I know two people who had difficulty getting IDs after loosing vital records. It’s not always as easy as a lot of us think it is.
This afternoon I was trying to merge into one of the lanes for the Downtown Tunnel out of Norfolk. Nobody was letting me in. Eventually some woman in an SUV let her attention lapse long enough to give me a space, and I took it. Then she blew her horn and I was about mad enough to beat her to death and put in on YouTube. What is it about driving?
Update: Politifact changed their rating of the President’s statments on jobs from “half” to “mostly” true.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Our original Half True rating was based on an interpretation that Obama was crediting his policies for the jobs increase. But we’ve concluded that he was not making that linkage as strongly as we initially believed and have decided to change the ruling to Mostly True.
That said, the rest of my post is still mostly true.
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Jared Bernstein expresses his disappointment with Politifact’s lame reasoning for giving President Obama a “half-true” rating on his statements that “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs.”, and “Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.”
Mr. Bernstein says:
This is not half true or two-thirds true. It is just true.
So why, I ask you, why do they go where they go? Because of this:
In his remarks, Obama described the damage to the economy, including losing millions of jobs “before our policies were in full effect.” Then he described [sic!] the subsequent job increases, essentially taking credit for the job growth. But labor economists tell us that no mayor or governor or president deserves all the claim or all the credit for changes in employment.
Really? That’s it? That makes the fact not a fact? I’ve seen some very useful work by these folks, but between this and this, Politifact just can’t be trusted. Full stop.
Politifact seems to use “half-true” most of the times a politician makes claims about jobs, based on that advise from their “labor economists”. That’s a pretty weak policy, but at least it’s fair. Politifact would be even more fair if they simply used “half true” for everything.
When Romney said “More Americans have lost their jobs under Barack Obama than any president in modern history.”, they rated it as mostly false. It should have been pants on fire. Romney compared Obama’s unfinished term against previous presidents’ final tallies. If you use a fair measurement, by their own words:
So by this measurement, Obama doesn’t have a net loss of jobs at all — in fact, the only president who does is George W. Bush.
Additionally, Romney counts jobs losses that Obama can’t be responsible for, in the beginning of his term before his policies took effect. I don’t think “mostly false” covers it.
But Politifact has policy of aiming for the middle whenever a politician makes a claim about jobs.
So what good are they?
I have a habit of solving problems that have already been solved better by someone else, and I may be guilty of this here, but I wrote my own command prompt script because I didn’t like the default command prompt in Unity. A more sane way to solve the problem might be to install and setup gnome-shell, as described here, but I still like my script.
The script presents a list box with [type command] as the first choice and your command history as all the other choices, with the most recent on top (your command history is blank the first time).
Using Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity, after creating your script with the listing below, save it in an appropriate location and make it executable.
Then choose system settings > keyboard > shortcuts > custom shortcuts, as detailed here: Click the gear in the upper right corner of your screen and choose System Settings. From there, find the keyboard widget (not the keyboard layout widget), choose the shortcuts tab, and click custom shortcuts.
Click the + sign at the bottom, and add the path name of the script file. Then click on the shortcut field (it probably says “Disabled”) and click again if necessary until it says “New shortcut”. Then press the keystroke that you want to assign. You probably want alt+f2.
You may have to disable alt+f2 elsewhere to avoid conflicts, but I didn’t disable it for the Unity plugin in CCSM and I’m not having any problems.
Below is the script.
#!/bin/bash
#Filename: launch (or whatever you want to name it)
#Command Launcher
#Brings up a dialog box from which you can choose a command from your history
#Also has a choice to type in a command
#Works in Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity
#Requires zenity
#Make this file executable.
#You can create a hotkey in the "Command" section in CCSM
#You can directly edit this history file
HISTFILE=~/.launchhistory
TEMPFILE=~/.launchtemp
# Setting the field separator to be newline, to preserve whitespace
OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
# Populating the list box with commands
# The first command to appear in the least box is [type command], which brings up a text box
echo "[type command]" > $TEMPFILE
# The remaining commands in the list box come from the history file
for hist in `cat $HISTFILE`; do {
echo "$hist" >> $TEMPFILE ;
} ; done
# Setting the field separator back to normal, to run the command properly
IFS=$OLDIFS
#calling the zenity list box to bring up a choice of commmands
runthis=`cat $TEMPFILE | zenity --list --column='choose' `
#If user chose [type command], bringing up the zenity text box
if [ "$runthis" == "[type command]" ]; then {
runthis=`zenity --entry --text="run"`
} fi
#Running the command, and if successful adding the command to the history file
$runthis && {
# Setting the field separator to be newline, to preserve whitespace
OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
#Putting the new command at the top of the tempfile
echo "$runthis" > $TEMPFILE
#Putting the old commands from the history file into the tempfile
for hist in `cat $HISTFILE`; do {
#But not repeating the newest command
if [ "$runthis" != "$hist" ]; then {
echo "$hist" >> $TEMPFILE;
}
fi
} ; done
#Saving the tempfile as the history file
cat $TEMPFILE > $HISTFILE
#Setting the field separator back to normal before exiting
IFS=$OLDIFS
} ;
While I was commenting on a Washington Post article, another commenter wrote something like “… doubled Bushes death toll in Afghanistan”. I wish I could get the exact quote but three thousand comments later, I can’t even find my own comment.
I had to look up that statistic and indeed it’s true, at least according to icasualties.org. This statistic is featured prominently on anti-war sites as well as right wing blogs such as The Blaze, where possibly retarded members of that blog’s readership theorize that the increase in casualties is due to Obama’s allegiance to Islamic forces.
But focusing on the death toll in Afghanistan misses the withdrawal from Iraq. These numbers are based on the tables in icasualties’s home page:
| U.S. Death Tolls | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Afghanistan | Iraq | Total | |
| 2001 | 12 | 0 | 12 |
| 2002 | 49 | 0 | 49 |
| 2003 | 48 | 486 | 534 |
| 2004 | 52 | 849 | 901 |
| 2005 | 99 | 846 | 945 |
| 2006 | 98 | 822 | 920 |
| 2007 | 117 | 904 | 1021 |
| 2008 | 155 | 314 | 469 |
| 2009 | 317 | 149 | 466 |
| 2010 | 499 | 60 | 559 |
| 2011 | 418 | 54 | 472 |
| Total 2002-8 | 618 | 4221 | 4839 |
| Total 2009-11 | 1234 | 263 | 1497 |
| Monthly Avg 2002-8 | 88 | 603 | 691 |
| Monthly Avg 2009-11 | 411 | 88 | 499 |
Since Obama took office, the U.S. casualty rate dropped significantly due to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, even as the toll increased in Afghanistan as Obama stepped up operations there.
To ignore the Iraq withdrawal in an effort to suggest that twice as many Americans are dying under Obama’s leadership is miserably dishonest. To speculate that it’s because Obama is a Muslim is stupid.
Thanks for mpbulletin for sending me This link to a CNN report on the jobs recovery. It’s an important read but contains a misleading statement:
But only about half of those job losses — or 4.3 million — happened under his watch.
The statement is true enough, but it should come with an explanation that most of that “half” was lost while the economy was still in the same free-fall it was in at the end of the Bush years, and the jobs loss started to turn around when Obama’s plans had a chance to take effect.
It reminds me something Al Franken wrote in Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, that it was Clinton’s military who won in Afghanistan even though Bush was president at the time. That’s because none of Bush’s military policies were in place by then. Similarly, a statement which suggests Obama’s responsible for the millions of jobs lost before his economic policies were in place is misleading.
I say in my ‘about’ page that I don’t just parrot other people’s writings, but this is exactly something that I’ve been thinking lately:
(Ezra Klien via Keven Drum )
Because a recovery is likely within five years, whichever party wins the White House in 2012 is likely to get the credit, and so too will its policy agenda. You can see how this will work. If Romney wins the presidency and the economy begins to rebound, Republicans will argue, and America’s experience will seem to show, that they were right all along: The stimulus was useless and the regulatory uncertainty the Obama administration created with its health-care plan and its talk of cap-and-trade and all the rest kept businesses from investing.
I believe that the economy will recover. I believe that we would have recovered eventually no matter what fiscal policies we pursued, but the President’s policies have kept us from crashing much harder than we already have. It would be a shame if credit for the recovery goes to people who tell us that the thing to do during an economic crisis is slash taxes for the wealthy and cut services for the poor.
I get a feed for the most popular headlines on Fox News. Today, one of those headlines is High school basketball players beaten for ‘Tebowing’. This fight happened after a game between Wando and West Ashley high schools in Charleston County, South Carolina. These schools have a history of after-game violence, and an even worse fight broke out last year. There is a real problem with these high schools that should be addressed. Thankfully the injuries were not serious.
But even though the violence-prone rivalry between these two schools is newsworthy, I don’t think this story would be in the most popular list if it wasn’t for the misleading “War-on-Christians” slant that the headline implies. The fight didn’t break out because of an act of Christianity. It was triggered by a display of celebration. Excessive celebration is against the rules in most leagues today.
I can’t get into the head of Tim Tebow, who might be genuine is his need to pray openly in front of an audience of billions, in defiance of Mathew 6:6, but I think for most young athletes, Tebowing is the new ass wiggling. Try to stop it though, and you’ll be up against a national army of Christians with a persecution complex.
The story of the fight between Wando and West Ashley students is a story about sports related violence and violence in high schools, which are important topics. But a story about a basketball fight that didn’t result in any serious injuries, involving two schools with a history of fighting, doesn’t rake in the advertising dollars as well as a headline about Christians getting beaten up for praying.
The main thing Romney has going for him is electability. I think Gingrich’s plan is to hand a load of Kryptonite to the Democrats, then turn around to Republican voters and say, “Look, Romney’s unelectable because of all that Kryptonite that the Democrats have to use against him in the general election”. I think it’s genius.
In response to Mitt Romney’s boldface lie that Obama is a “job destroyer”, Greg Sargent has been calling on Romney to explain himself. The truth is, as soon as the stimulus took effect, the hemorrhaging of jobs that occurred as a result of deregulation and lack of oversight started to turn around, and jobs have been created; not destroyed. How can so many people be fooled when the numbers are readily available and how can pathological lier like Mitt Romney be hailed as the Republican candidate most likely to beat Obama?
Take a look at these two charts:
Series Id: LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Series Id: LNS12000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Employment Level
Labor force status: Employed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Both are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One was pointed to in a Hot Air article to suggest that Obama’s policies, specifically health care reform, destroyed jobs (The article is titled “ObamaCare, the Job Destroyer”). The other is similar to a chart in Paul Krugman’s blog demonstrating that Obama has created jobs.
How can two charts about employment data look so different? Because only the second chart, “Employment Level”, shows whether jobs have been created or destroyed after the President’s fiscal policies took effect.
The other chart represents a problem and is concerning, but it does not indicate what Hot Air wants you to believe and does not undermine the fact that after the stimulus passed, the job decline turned around and our economy created over two million new jobs.
What the first chart, titled “Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate”, shows is the percentage of U.S. population who are either employed or looking for work. Employed or looking for work means you’re part of the labor force. How does a person fail to be counted as employed and also fail to be counted as looking for work? Certainly, when someone gets fed up after weeks of not finding a job and becomes discouraged, that person drops out of the labor force. Like I said, it’s concerning. But also people who stay in school rather than finding a job, stay at home parents, and retirees are not in the labor force.
The baby boomers are retiring, and that’s having a real effect on labor force participation, as are discouraged workers.
To get a feel for the meaning of employment level vs labor participation, and whether a drop in labor force participation makes Obama a “job destroyer”, imagine a group of 10 people. 8 are working, and 2 are looking for jobs. One new job appears and one of the job-seekers snatches it up. The other gets discouraged and stops looking. Has employment improved or have jobs been destroyed?
When someone says that Obama is a Job Destroyer, they are mistaken or lying. And you cannot trust any news source or presidential candidate that promotes such a fallacy.
Update: I had the first chart labeled incorrectly, and incorrectly referred to the second chart in the text when I was talking about the first chart. I had mislabeled it “(Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level” instead of “Civilian labor force participation rate”
