Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Pundits ignore Rudy’s 9/11 worker gaffe

From the Horses Mouth:

So—which pundits have talked about this? With the help of crack TPM intern Benjy Sarlin, here is the full list, according to Nexis and Google:

1) Margaret Carlson criticized it in passing on MSNBC,

2) Paul Krugman addressed it in a Times column

3) Local Daily News columnist Mike Lupica wrote a column about it

4) Chris Matthews made passing mention of it on Hardball, without criticizing it as a misstep

...and that’s it. A grand total of two pundits mentioned this on the networks, one critically, and one national columnist. We’re perfectly happy to acknowledge that we may have missed other examples; if you find any, email us at .

Rudy’s misstep did get a good deal of traditional news coverage, some critical. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the extent to which the shapers of insider conventional wisdom declared Rudy’s comments a mistake that risked hurting his campaign. Such things matter—they have an impact on fundraising and on mainstream news coverage of the candidate, for instance. And in this case, virtually no one in the punditocracy has yet bothered to say word boo about what is clearly his worst political misstep yet.

Just for the fun of it, we put together a list of some of the national pundits and columnists who laid into Edwards in the aftermath of his haircut—and this list doesn’t do justice to the extraordinary outpouring of contempt and scathing criticism directed towards him:

Pundits:

Chris Matthews

Jack Cafferty

Tucker Carlson (repeatedly)

Glenn Beck

Bill O’Reilly

Neil Cavuto

Brit Hume

David Gregory

Norah O’Donnell

Columnists:

Maureen Dowd

Richard Cohen

Derrick Z. Jackson (The Boston Globe)

It’s only been a week since Rudy’s misstep, so the punditry still has time to catch up.

I won’t hold my breath.

If you missed it - and with that kind of coverage you can be forgiven for it - here’s the video.

Kos & Ford on Meet the Press.

Check out the word count:

Me: 1,757
Ford: 1,758

That from Kos’s post-show observations.

I thought he was absolutely terrific on that show. The more I hear him speak the more I respect and admire him and what he has to say.

This exchange, for just one example:

MR. GREGORY: For, for both, for both of you, if you could advise the party’s nominee to say top three issues, and these are what your positions should be, what would they be?

MR. MOULITSAS: Well, you know, you’re starting talking about issues. What I want that candidate to do is to not be afraid to talk about who they are, to be authentic and to tell us who they are so that we can actually make a decision. And not me. I’m not going to make this decision. It’s not my job to decide who the nominee’s going to be. I want these candidates to speak to regular Americans. And for too long they’ve been speaking to the pundits, they’ve been speaking to shows like this one. They haven’t been really communicating to the base because they had to go through this media filter and this political filter, and now we’re destroying those filters. We’re saying go straight to the people, talk to them, make your case.

Oh, what the hell. Here’s another. I liked this too:

[After Ford objects to Kos’s expansive view of the consequences from Senator John Breaux’s role as “an architect of George Bush’s tax cuts."]

MR. MOULITSAS: Well, what do you think, you’re going to cut taxes and not pay for the priorities in our nation. I mean, obviously, there has to be a way to pay for these things. And to come out and say, “Well we’re going to cut taxes, and we’re going to let these deficits run up, and we’re going to let our infrastructure crumble,” clearly it’s the wrong way to go.

Bravo Kos!

Disney pledges to cut smoking (Update)

Golly I was snookered by Disney a few weeks back. Then I blithely quoted - this is a big deal - a BBC story that Disney had pledged to cut out smoking from its family oriented films.

Last week I learned from an On The Media report that the “announcement” was old news:

BOB GARFIELD: Well, let’s talk first about what the Walt Disney Company has done. They seem to be the most aggressive among the studios.

STANTON GLANTZ: Well, that’s actually not true. What Disney did was announced a policy they adopted three years ago, in 2004, of, quote, “discouraging smoking” in their films and said they would get it out of their Disney-branded films.

Since they adopted the policy three years ago, we’ve actually been able to look at the movies they’ve released since then, and there’s been essentially no change in the amount of smoking in the Disney films.

The most thorough policy so far was actually adopted by General Electric’s Universal, which put in place a fairly systematic review, all the way from script approval through production, of smoking that’s in their movies. That was adopted last April.

It’s too early to tell how much difference that’s going to make, but it still doesn’t do the - none of the studios have done the simple thing of just saying, we’re not going to make or distribute any films to kids that have smoking in them.

Glantz is a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. He wants movies with smoking to get an ‘R’ rating (with an exception for historical figures and an allowance for smoking if the film also shows the negative health effects), an antismoking ad shown before any movie, an end to all brand identification and a certification of no payoffs.

He’s not looking to digitally doctor old films, “We actually think doing that could actually cause harm. We’re trying to solve the problem moving forward.”

All of it sounds reasonable to me.

SEE ALSO: Cigarettes: the real gateway drug and the Europeans get serious about smoking.

An OS for autos

We’re moving right ahead with automated driving. Says CNet:

One of the hottest areas in automotive technology is the development of a standard “car operating system.” Just as computer operating systems, such as Microsoft’s Windows Vista, allow multiple applications to communicate with one another, an automotive operating system enables different driving systems--from fuel injection to brakes to power steering to power windows--to work together.

A standard operating system that pervades multiple car brands would make it easier for developers, component manufacturers and automakers to incorporate more-sophisticated driving systems, like self-parking, into multiple car models. [...]

A comprehensive telematics infrastructure in the U.S. could allow all cars, regardless of manufacturer, to communicate where they are in a lane, and warn others when they’ve hit a patch of ice and where they’ve gotten into an accident.

Automotive telematics is currently estimated to be a $9 billion industry and is expected to grow to about $40 billion during the next 10 years,” according to a December 2006 report (PDF: Vehicle Technology Trends in Electronics for the North American Market; Opportunities for the Taiwanese Automotive Industry) from the Center for Automotive Research.

We’re not in the lead:

American automakers may already be falling behind. Japanese carmakers like Toyota and Honda are already ahead of U.S. automakers in terms of the complex driving systems they offer Japanese drivers, according to ABI’s Alexander.

RELATED: I am very much in favor of the new Nissan concept car with anti-drunk driving technology built in (though I would be interested to learn more about the passenger seat). And I’m no MADD suck-up. Let’s license 18-year-olds to drink.

Italian pol calls for “ethnic cleansing” of gays

pinknews.co.uk:

The northern Italian city of Treviso has witnessed mass demonstrations after the deputy mayor called for the ethnic cleansing of homosexuals.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the city hall at the weekend demanding his resignation.

Giancarlo Gentilini, told a local television station on Wednesday: “I will immediately give orders to my forces so that they can carry out an ethnic cleansing of faggots.

“The faggots must go to other (cities) where they are welcome. Here in Treviso there is no chance for faggots or the like.”

The clip was posted on the website YouTube.com - click here to view.

Via Gay News Blog.

Sexual math

I was never very good with numbers:

In Sunday’s New York Times, science writer Gina Kolata took on studies suggesting that men tend to have more sexual partners than women do. This CDC study, for one, shows that American men between the ages of 20 and 59 report accumulating a median of seven female bedmates, while for women the corresponding figure is just four. The problem, Kolata writes, is that these numbers present a mathematical contradiction. “It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women,” she explains. “Those survey results cannot be correct.” Kolata even quotes a theorem to this effect, backed up by mathematician David Gale of Berkeley: The average number of partners has to be the same for men and women.

It’s not every day I get to read a mathematical theorem in the New York Times, so I hate to complain. But Kolata isn’t quite right here. The problem is hiding in the distinction between the median (the number reported by the CDC study) and the mean (the number Gale was talking about). The mean is what people usually call the “average.” To calculate the mean number of sexual partners among a group of men, you add together each man’s sexual partners, then divide by the total number of men. The median, on the other hand, is the number you’d get if you line all the men up in order of their number of partners, then ask the man in the middle to state his count.

Whatever. The bottom line is that when it comes to sex partners “the reported difference between men and women is an anomaly that can’t be taken at face value.”

The reason studies show that man have more and women fewer? It’s simple: social norms. We celebrate men for their conquests and women for their virtue.