Facts Don’t Matter in the Republican Presidential Primary

Vice has a nice story on the new GOP mindset

Facts Don’t Matter in the Republican Presidential Primary

In case there had been any doubt, the past 72 hours have solidified that facts are not a priority in the current Republican presidential primary race. Despite making a stream of proven false statements in recent days, “outsider” candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson are still at the front of the GOP pack — suggesting the candidates’ disavowal of facts could actually be helping more than hurting them in this race.

On Donald Trump

Trump insisted for the fourth day in a row, at a campaign rally in South Carolina yesterday, that Muslims really did cheer and celebrate in the streets of New Jersey after the September 11, 2001 attacks. On Sunday, when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos questioned Trump about his claims, citing numerous reports from police and officials who were there said that this simply did not happen, the reality television star doubled down, insisting that, “It did happen. I saw it.”

On Ben Carson

The only other candidate who seems to be saying whatever they want as much as Donald Trump is Ben Carson. The former neurosurgeon mistakenly claimed on Sunday that Thomas Jefferson helped “craft” the Constitution. Jefferson was not on this side of the Atlantic when the Constitution was written, something that Carson himself acknowledged in his own book on constitutional theory, A More Perfect Union. Another of his tomes, the autobiography Gifted Hands, has also endured multiple false fact accusations.

Then on Monday, Carson agreed with Trump and said he saw a video showing crowds of Muslims cheering in New Jersey after September 11 attacks. Hours later, his campaign issued a statement saying that Carson was actually mistaken and “he wasn’t really thinking about New Jersey.”

Arggh… The crazy-making part is that while these guys are leading the pack, all the GOP candidates are misleading and lying. Hard to believe this is what the GOP electorate deserves.

 

 

Donald Trumps Imaginary World

Donald Trump tweeted some made-up statistics which coincide with his scary world view, but which are entirely fabricated.  In actuality the percentage of whites killed by blacks is 14% compared to the 81% shown in his tweet.

Think Progress has a good analysis and here is a link to the actual FBI data from 2014 shown below.

Think Progress has a good followup post here on the media response

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/11/23/3724989/trump-tweets-fabricated-murder-stats-from-a-neo-nazi-and-this-is-how-the-media-reported-it/

Daily Kos has a much more detailed article with more accurate stats as shown below

 

 

 

 

 

Conservative Logic

Radical Muslim Terror and Syrian Refugees

Well I guess this is the biggest unfounded claim going around after Paris. It’s not fair to muslims  and more specifically it’s dangerous and calls for a response which will only make the problem worse.

The danger is not just the threat of going to war again for revenge. It’s unfairly tarring muslims as terrorists, isolating them from western society and preventing them from getting the help they desperately need. Long term, this bitter divisiveness is a making the world unsafer – not safer.

Is Islam a violent religion?

Like any Islam is a religion which has a lot of contradictory stuff in it. Are there jihadist scriptures? Yes. But Islam is not practiced that way any more than the christians follow the bible’s call to violence against non-believers.

If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. Your hand shall be the first raised to slay him; the rest of the people shall join in with you. Deuteronomy 13:7-12

Here is a nice summary which compares the violence of the Quran to the Bible.

Are Muslims violent people?

First some simple analysis from a facebook post which says no:

There are 6,000,000 Muslims living in France. If just 10% were radical jihadist, then there would be 600,000 attackers. If only 1% were radical jihadist, 60,000 would be attacking Paris. If ONE TENTH OF ONE PERCENT were radical jihadists, that would be 6,000 terrorists. This wasn’t a Muslim ‘terrorist’ attack, this was a handful of psychopaths using religion as an excuse.

Next  here are some chilling statistics from Juan Cole:

Juan’s summary quote

It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.

I think in fact, Juan’s got it correct, when he calls out ISIS as a modern pirate/raiding state rather than a return to the muslim caliphate.

Here is an excellent analysis from Graeme Wood which I find really illuminating. ISIS is a literal return to a medieval caliphate.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

 

Will allowing Syrian refugees into the US spawn terrorism?

All of this lead to the regrettable posturing against taking in Syrian refugees. This is particularly cruel because these are the very people who are being hurt by ISIS brutality.  The facts are, the likelihood of islamic immigrants committing terrorist acts in their adopted countries is  particularly low.

Lets look at some facts:

Terror attacks are not particularly islamic in the EU from Wikipedia, (but they are more deadly)

More statistics from Interpol

Add to this the fact that refugees are particularly uninvolved is terror. According to Stephen Bauman, the president and CEO of World Relief, (one of nine national agencies authorized by the U.S. State Department to resettle refugees in the United States)

“if you look at the 35 years of refugee resettlement in our nation, over three million since the mid to late 70s, and there has been no one from that group of people that are terrorists or have carried out a terrorist attack.

Democratic response

Barak Obama knows what is going on here

“When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful,” said Obama in a Monday press conference in Turkey. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

“I think it is very important for us right now — particularly those who are in leadership, particularly those who have a platform and can be heard — not to fall into that trap, not to feed that dark impulse inside of us,” Obama added.

Or consider this surprisingly rational rejection of tarring muslims with the terror label from the recent democratic debate

 

DICKERSON: Just to interrupt. He didn’t say all Muslims. He just said radical Islam. Is that a phrase you don’t…

CLINTON: I think THAT you can talk about Islamists who clearly are also jihadists, but I think it’s not particularly helpful to make the case that Senator Sanders was just making that I agree with, that we’ve got to reach out to Muslim countries.

We’ve got to have them be part of our coalition. If they hear people running for president who basically shortcut it to say we are somehow against Islam, that was one of the real contributions, despite all the other problems, thatGeorge W. Bush made after 9/11 when he basically said after going to a Mosque in Washington, we are not at war with Islam or Muslims.

We are at war with violent extremism. We are at war with people who use their religion for purposes of power and oppression. And, yes, we are at war with those people. But I don’t want us to be painting with too broad a brush.

…

DICKERSON: Just quickly, do either of you, radical Islam, do either of you use that phrase?

SANDERS: I don’t think the term is what’s important. What is important to understand is we have organizations, whether it is ISIS or Al Qaida, who do believe we should go back several thousand years. We should make women third-class citizens, that we should allow children to be sexually assaulted, that they are a danger to modern society.

…

O’ MALLEY: I believe calling it what it is, is to say radical jihadis. That’s calling it what it is. But John, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that all of our Muslim American neighbors in this country are somehow our enemies here. They are our first line of defense.

And we are going to be able to defeat ISIS on the ground there, as well as in this world, because of the Muslim Americans in our country and throughout the world who understand that this brutal and barbaric group is perverting the name of a great world religion. And now, like never before, we need our Muslim American neighbors to stand up and to — and to be a part of this.

 

GOP response

In light of the reality regarding islamic terror, lets look at some quotes from the GOP. They are really going off the rails on this –

Donald Trump – how is this even true in his world?

Three days after Islamic State terrorists attacked Paris in a series of coordinated shootings and bombings, Trump lambasted German Chancellor Angela Merkel for accepting Syrian refugees. “I think what she did to Germany is a disgrace,” he said, adding that those same refugees “have destroyed all of Europe.”

“Is this a Trojan horse?” Trump said he asked his wife of the plans for Syrian refugees to enter into the United States.

Marco Rubio

The bottom line is that this is not just a threat coming from abroad. What we need to open up to and realize is that we have a threat here at home — home-grown violent extremists. Individuals who perhaps have not even traveled abroad, who had been radicalized online. This has become a multi-faceted threat. In the case of what’s happening in Europe, this is a swarm of refugees, and as I’ve said repeatedly over the last few months, you can have 1,000 people come in, and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence, but one of them is an ISIS fighter. If that’s the case, you have a problem, and there is no way to vet that out. There is no background check system in the world that allows us to find that out, because who do you call in Syria to background check them?
Read more at http://redalertpolitics.com/2015/11/16/rubio-cant-take-syrian-refugees-impossible-real-screenings/#KSIiQtSbErTi42Cx.99

Ben Carson

‘While many of us were troubled by the President’s decision at the time, given the events in Paris Friday night, there can be no disputing the fact that the United States cannot, should not, and must not accept any Syrian refugees, let alone the dramatically larger number President Obama volunteered to host,’ Carson said

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3321084/Ben-Carson-tells-lawmakers-not-accept-Syrian-refugees-House-Speaker-says-Congress-looking-options.html#ixzz3rnHkg38T

Ted Cruz from the New Yorker

President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America—it is nothing less than lunacy…

Cruz spoke even more openly about those whom he considers to be the good people in the world. He told reporters that we should accept Christians from Syria, and only Christians, because, he said, “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.”

GOP governors are piling  from CNN

More than half the nation’s governors say they oppose letting Syrian refugees into their states, although the final say on this contentious immigration issue will fall to the federal government.

States protesting the admission of refugees range from Alabama and Georgia, to Texas and Arizona, to Michigan and Illinois, to Maine and New Hampshire. Among these 31 states, all but one have Republican governors.

argh…

I think Bernie has the right take on it:

Bernie Sanders “Disturbed” by GOP Response to Paris Attacks

Or consider Elizabeth Warren’s observation

“[Syrians are] terrified that the world will turn its back on them and their children. Some politicians have already moved in that direction, proposing to close our country to people fleeing the massacre in Syria,” Warren said. “That is not a real plan to keep us safe.”

 

 

Horrible

The recent attacks on Paris are horrible, terrible events. For the american GOP however they were fodder for news cycle. The real tension here is between rights and safety. The GOP uses the fear and willingness of scared people to trade rights for safety to promote it’s agenda of electing GOP leaders and increasing spending on war.  Unfortunately, this  rush to war has only spawned more instability and suffering.

I will post a bit more here later

 

Debate Round up from Politifact

It’s useful to compare the debating style of the two parties. Politifact has a great summary of the week’s debates fact wise.

GOP debate

• Carson – Minimum Wage hike vs Unemployment – False
• Marco Rubio – Welders vs Philosophers Pay – False
• Donald Trump – Deportation – Half True
• Ron Paul – Income Equality in Dem cities – Half True (I disagree as Paul was laying the blame on dems)
• Ron Paul – Rubio’s welfare plan – Mostly True
• Donald Trump – China – Mostly False
• Donald Trump – TPP – Pants on Fire
• Ted Cruz – Tax Code size – True
• Carly Fiorina – Health care – Pants on Fire
• Ben Carson – Benghazi – Mostly False

 

Dem Debate

• Bernie Sanders – Military spending on Terrorism – Mostly False (I think this was unfair to Bernie) 
• Bernie Sanders – PTSD in returning troop – Mostly true
• Martin O’Malley – Immigration has leveled off – Mostly true
• Hillary Clinton – Wage stagnation – Half true (Also unfair)
• Bernie Sanders – Taxes under Eisenhower – True
• Bernie Sanders – Health Care in developed countries – Half true

The pattern is clear.  The dem debate was a pretty substantive discussion and the facts presented were generally valid. The GOP debate was pretty much a shouting match of scary stuff and chest beating.

 

 

 

 

Ben Carson makes up stuff about China

Ben Carson thinks that China is involved in Syria. Unfortunately this seems to have come directly from Ben’s fertile imagination. This is what he said at the debate

We also must recognize that it’s a very complex place. You know, the Chinese are there, as well as the Russians, and you have all kinds of factions there.

When asked about it on Friday White House Press secretary was taken by surprise

“Maybe it violates my job description as a spokesperson to be speechless, but I think in this case I am,”

Later today – Ben’s team said they were only discussing Chinese weapons.

“As many members of the media clearly do not understand Dr. Carson’s comment properly and have not done the requisite homework to learn about China’s presence in Syria, we offer additional clarification here,” one of the campaign documents reads.

It goes on: “China has had longstanding and well-documented security ties to Syria, and has provided various military weapons and equipment that Syria is using in the current conflict.

This is like saying the Japanese are there because ISIS drives Toyotas

I think this is pretty instructive as a process

1. Candidate says something which clearly implies X
2. Fact checks reveal X to be untrue
3. Candidate says no way I didn’t say X – I actually said Y
4. Y is contrived to be marginally true or untestable
5. Candidate claims media bias for asking about X

Here is a nice summary from CNN

GOP debate candidates confusing attempt to blame inequality and TBTF banks and ‘Big Government’

Polling data from Gallup

It was pretty clear that the GOP candidates were trying to pin the blame for big out-of control-banks on ‘big government’. Polls show that ‘Big Government’ is very unpopular, even among democrats, so it make sense to try to pin all the bad stuff going on on ‘Big Government’. But this really makes no sense and the arguments were all over the place and also quite contradictory. Wall Street on Parade has a good summary of several of the issues.

http://The Republican Debate: Almost Every ‘Fact’ About Wall Street Was False

There were so many incorrect statements its hard to even summarize them, but you can be sure its all the fault of “Big Government”

Interestingly this is a more recent phenomena even for republicans, but its also applies to democrats.

Unfounded Speculation on Minimum Wage Impacts in GOP debate

First – Here is a good article regarding the impacts of raising the minimum wage

REPuBlican Candidates agree – don’t raise the minimum wage

Here is a transcript of the Nov 10, 2015 GOP debate from Amy Goodman

NEIL CAVUTO: Mr. Trump, as the leading presidential candidate on this stage and one whose tax plan exempts couples making up to $50,000 a year from paying any federal income taxes at all, are you sympathetic to the protesters’ cause, since a $15 wage works out to about $31,000 a year?

DONALD TRUMP: I can’t be, Neil. And the reason I can’t be is that we are a country that is being beaten on every front economically, militarily. There is nothing that we do now to win. We don’t win anymore. Our taxes are too high. I’ve come up with a tax plan that many, many people like very much. It’s going to be a tremendous plan. I think it will make our country and our economy very dynamic. But taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard, and they have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.

NEIL CAVUTO: So do not raise the minimum wage?

DONALD TRUMP: I would not raise the minimum.

NEIL CAVUTO: Dr. Carson?

DR. BEN CARSON: As far as the minimum wage is concerned, people need to be educated on the minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases. It’s particularly a problem in the black community. Only 19.8 percent of black teenagers have a job, who are looking for one. You know, and that’s because of those high wages. If you lower those wages, that comes down.

NEIL CAVUTO: Senator Rubio.

SEN. MARCO RUBIO: If I thought that raising the minimum wage was the best way to help people increase their pay, I would be all for it. But it isn’t. In the 21st century, it’s a disaster. If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.

What they Claim will happen

The clear assertion here is that raising the minimum wage will not be a good for either the country or the job seekers. But does this assertion have any real evidence or are they just making things up to justify the not raising the minimum wage?

• We can’t do anything anti-business
• Increasing the minimum wage will eliminate jobs
• People will be replaced by machines

None of these claims hold water

The Actual Impact of Minimum Wage increases

The US department of Labor has a nice summary of the current research

Myth: The federal minimum wage is higher today than it was when President Reagan took office.

Not true: While the federal minimum wage was only $3.35 per hour in 1981 and is currently $7.25 per hour in real dollars, when adjusted for inflation, the current federal minimum wage would need to be more than $8 per hour to equal its buying power of the early 1980s and more nearly $11 per hour to equal its buying power of the late 1960s. That’s why President Obama is urging Congress to increase the federal minimum wage and give low-wage workers a much-needed boost.

Myth: Increasing the minimum wage will cause people to lose their jobs.

Not true: In a letter to President Obama and congressional leaders urging a minimum wage increase, more than 600 economists, including 7 Nobel Prize winners wrote, “In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front.”

What seems to happen following a raise in the minimum wage is the following:

• Minimum wage earners see a dramatic improvement in their standard of living. See this summary from the Washington Post which concludes that raising the wage to $10/hr would pull 4.6 Million people out of poverty. This would also reduce the need to subsidize minimum wage workers with food stamps and other programs.
• Unemployment is unaffected because these jobs really cant migrate away. Minimum wage jobs are overwhelmingly local workers whose jobs cannot be moved overseas.
• The economy is unaffected because the actual small loss of jobs is balanced by the greater spending from minimum wage workers
• Consumer prices go up slightly because the added employment costs must be passed on.

Consumer price increases

This sounds scary – How much will prices increase? Well one way to estimate it is to assume that all of the cost is passed in price increases. This would increase the cost of burgers, cleaning and other minimum wage industries, but little else.

An article in the Restaurant Finance Monitor concludes that most fast food restaurants spend about 20% on minimum wage labor. So increasing the total labor cost by 2x would increase the cost of a $4 burger to $4.80 and that this would have a significant negative impact on sales.

Consider what happened to Dan Fransisco Restaurant workers as documented in this Seattle Times article

Australia already has a $14.50 minimum wage and guess what – McDonalds is doing just fine.

This is exactly the point, individual companies will not raise wages individually, but a minimum wage law will require ALL restaurants to increase wages so that no individual restaurants are penalized.

Summary

Forbes  states that minimum wage workers account for 1.25% of the USA GNP and then comment:

Even though it’s true that raising the minimum wage would result in more money for those who receive it, because it is so low (hence the word minimum), it would have very little effect on the U.S. economy.

Thats it in a nutshell. A huge impact on the lives of minimum wage workers, minimal impact on the economy. The only reason not do it is meanness. 

NYT calls out GOP contempt for truth

Carly at the the CNN debate

Here is a nice article from the New York Times which observes the contempt for the truth present in our new political discourse.

Deep disregard for the news media has allowed candidates to duck, dodge and ridicule assertions from outlets they dislike and seek the embrace of those that are inclined to protect them.

Today, it seems, truth is in the eyes of the beholder — and any assertion can be elevated and amplified if yelled loudly enough.