Category Politics

Political opportunists exploit Ground Zero, and not in a good way

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

September 11 is right around the corner, and this year it is likely to spike the hysteria over the planned construction of a community center two and a half blocks from the World Trade Center site.

Doesn’t that sound a lot less creepy and threatening than “a mosque at ground zero”?  That’s the gist of the problem.

A Muslim group in New York City wants to build a community center, including space for religious observance, at 45-51 Park Place in lower Manhattan, a site near the hole in the ground where the Twin Towers stood.  Google the address to see the distance between it and the pit.  There have been complaints from people who find the idea of a mosque at ground zero appalling and insensitive, and in some cases a symbolic victory for the people who carried out the September 11 attacks (and who are, it is true, still at war with the United States and plotting our destruction).  It’s not been made clear (to me) if there are objections to the swimming pool and meeting rooms in the plan, or just that there would be areas for Muslim religious activity.

I don’t follow how building a community center shows insensitivity to the victims of a terrorist or criminal act, unless you blame the builders of the center for the attack.  The man behind the Cordoba House has some questionable beliefs, but no associations with Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda.  If the people behind this proposal aren’t directly connected to the 9/11 hijackers, is the objection some sort of guilt by association?  I’d like to believe that association with Islam is not the cause of the opposition, since Islam didn’t attack us—that was done by some people with a perverted interpretation of Islam.  They’re no more representative of Islam than the (insert name of your favorite religious fringe group here) are of Christianity.

People who commandeer passenger jets and use them as missiles deserve our attention.  The last president let his administration turn that attention into fear, and enough of the fear became irrational enough to be exploited as a wedge to grab power and start a war that had nothing to do with finding the people who attacked us, merrily ignoring civil liberties along the way.  It’s not too big a leap to say that irrational fear, and political opportunism, are pumping up the volume in this case.

Charles Krauthammer makes a compelling point about preserving sacred ground, although he doesn’t say how far away would be far enough, and Ross Douthat has an interesting column about how the constitutional America and the cultural America are in conflict on this issue, and I see his point.  But I’m no culture warrior: no one’s made an argument that the proposed construction is illegal, the necessary governmental authorities have approved the plan, neighborhood and business groups approve, we’re not religious bigots…and it’s two blocks down and around the corner, for crying out loud.  Let’s move on.

Want more?  William Saletan does a skillful job taking down the anti-mosque arguments on their face, and their proponents with them.

How about a joke?  This is ridiculously close to a real news item:

The Statue of Liberty was briefly evacuated today after a faulty sensor in an elevator shaft falsely indicated smoke. While there were no immediate reports of injuries, the very idea that someone might build a Muslim community center just across the water from the site of that undamaged sacred ground was compared to a stab in the heart by a bunch of racist yahoos.

The gentleman from Pearland yields…

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

…to the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist from The Washington Post, Tom Toles:

Toles on Citizens

Friday rant, Declaration of Incoherence edition

Apparently now we not only hold SOME truths to be self-evident, but also just about ANY POSITION we happen to prefer. It’s pretty self-evident that Obama is not a U.S. citizen because we don’t like him. It’s clear that he wants to take everybody’s guns away because that’s what a president who isn’t a real citizen would do. He’s somehow against white people because he just MUST be. The economic rescue package didn’t do any good because it was Democrats spending money. It’s Democrats who are the worse deficit offenders because Republicans keep saying so. Tax cuts pay for themselves because we don’t like taxes. Climate change is a hoax because we don’t like the implications.

Even the most cursory examination of evidence is now too much to ask. Climate change deniers continue to send me their strange little clutch of misleading factoids and sly questions as if I had never seen that stuff before. But it’s pretty clear that they have not themselves read the overwhelming case for climate change, or simply are unable to evaluate or even grasp the concept of PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE. It’s not that the political spectrum drifts left or right, it’s that’s it is cascading into absolute fantasy. It is impossible to engage in debate with these strange fevers, because they emanate from HOT HEADS. Excuse the cold water, but all opinions are NOT created equal.

Somewhere (perhaps in Miami) Leonard Pitts, Jr. is smiling.

Lying numbers, the people who use them, the people who count

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The trouble with reporting numbers in the news is that the people who provide the numbers have an agenda and the people who write the news don’t pay enough attention to what they’re being fed.  We have a great example here in Texas—great in the sense of being a good example, because in fact children and taxpayers are being hurt.

100714_PRESS_JournalismByNumbers Last week I ran across a piece from Jack Shafer in Slate praising a new book that reminds us to be skeptical of the numbers.   “No debate lasts very long without a reference to data, and as the numbers boil their way into the argument, you must challenge them or be burned blind by them,” warns Shafer, and he highlights some of the authors’ examples of cases in which funny figures are used for moral and political suasion.  He’s reminding us all to be vigilant; he reminded me of a case that makes the point.

This came to my attention earlier this month in a column by Rick Casey in the Houston Chronicle.  He wrote about  Houstonhochberg state representative  Scott Hochberg, regarded across Texas as the man with the best understanding of our school finance system, and his discovery that the Texas Education Agency was manipulating statistics to show dramatic improvement in the number of schools with better student performance on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the standardized test of primary and secondary students’ mastery of basic skills.

How could they do that?  Through use of a statistical tool called the Texas Projection Measure, which was developed by a national testing company.

Hochberg asked…how many correct answers a fourth-grader with barely passing math and reading scores at Benavidez Elementary in Houston needed to be counted as “passing” the writing test.

The unbelievable answer Hochberg had reached himself was confirmed…The child needed zero correct answers for his or her teachers and administrators to get credit for his or her “improvement.”

That’s right: zero.

Under questioning by someone they couldn’t bullshit, the TPM developers had to admit the tool considers inappropriate data to come up with this remarkable result.  That made news (here and here and here), and not just because the state’s education commissioner failed to attend the hearing.  The governor’s appointee sent staff to defend the use of a statistical tool which, we now know, translates the reality of continuing poor performance by students on standardized tests into the appearance of improved performance by schools and the bureaucrats who run them.

And all just months before the governor stands for re-election.

So there’s no real surprise that the education chief now opens his mouth (via e-mail), resorting to one of the favorite tactics of the governor himself: accusing anyone found not to be in lockstep with the powers that be of trying to harm the state and the little skoolchirrun of Texas.  He also says he’s considering new ways to use TPM: maybe use it less, or leave it up to the independent school districts to decide if they want to use it.

What?!  The TPM is flawed; it’s designed to let school administrators pad the TAKS results to make it appear that their schools—and they themselves—are doing a better job.  Casey sums it up well:

That the commissioner would allow a system such as the TPM to be put into place without serious evaluation, and then defend it as “reliable and accurate,” tells me that neither he nor the governor who appointed him take seriously the most daunting and vital challenge facing Texas: building up Texas by educating our children.

Pompous is funny—Fox News proves it

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Talk about looking for excuse to pile on!  Fox News Channel found one and did, and Jon Stewart was there to skewer them.

On last night’s The Daily Show Stewart used the coverage of a recent contretemps involving NASA (full disclosure: I work for a NASA contractor) to ridicule Fox’s anti-anything-Obama  attitude and its religious intolerance.

Yeah, yeah, I know, “We report, you decide,” and the news shows versus the opinion shows, but still…(and don’t bail out before he cracks America’s News Mommy, too.)

image

I once thought Fox just hoped the rest of us weren’t paying attention, but now I realize they don’t care about that.  They have faith, my friends—faith that eventually, each of us loyal, God-fearing, right-thinking Americans will come around and agree with them, and the lack of fairness and balance won’t matter.  In the meantime, cha-ching!

(All in all, sort of the same attitude that ESPN has, as demonstrated by having finally put their last shard of editorial integrity into a blind trust.)

USA 234, HIPRB! 1

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Happy 4th of July, all you American patriots…the rest of ya, too.  I’ve got a gift for you, even though you’re not the one turning 234 years old: I invite you to remove your shoes and stroll barefoot among the new tabs at the top of the page, up there under the site title (I gotta get a better title).

For almost a year I’ve been using this page to show off my ideas, but mostly to practice putting one word in front of the other on a regular basis again.  When I discovered that there can be more than one page here, I knew how I wanted to use them.

For years I’ve been saving quotations that appealed to me.  Some I saved just because they were so well written but most of them are ideas I agree with, expressed more ably and eloquently than I am capable (of).  (See.)

Choose from ideas about American law and government and politics, thoughts about my first post-college profession, a section of funnies, and a collection of philosophical takes on life.  I hope you enjoy them, and offer your comments pro and con.  I’ll be adding to the sections as new material is discovered.

So, what did you get me?