Month: September 2006

Surprise — not: The Pew Research Center offers a summary of a study by a couple of political scientists that found that members of Congress tell the truth only about 25 percent of the time when debating major legislation on the House and Senate floor.

Gary Mucciaroni of Temple University and Paul J. Quirk of the University of British Columbia sought to see how truthful America’s lawmakers were in debating three major bills: welfare reform in 1995-96, the estate tax in 1999-2000 and telecommunication deregulation in 1996.

They meticulously sifted through the Congressional record to identify key claims made by each side to support its own case and to rebut the assertions of its opponents. Then they compared the claims with available data to see if they were true, false or somewhere in between. In all, they examined the accuracy of 18 claims made in 43 separate House and Senate debates.

How did the nation’s lawmakers do?

Not so well. In all, these researchers judged the claims made in only 11 of the 43 debates to have been largely substantiated by the facts. Another 16 were deemed to be “unsubstantiated” — a polite way of saying they were misleading, mostly false or flatly wrong. An additional 16 were judged a politically artful mix of fact and fiction. In all, as reported in their new book, Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress, the researchers rated the quality of the debates somewhere between “fair” and “poor” — a C-, at best.

Does one party tell whoppers more often than the other? It’s hard to tell, Mucciaroni said. “The Republicans performed worse than the Democrats in the welfare reform and estate tax debates, but not as much in telecommunications. We feel that this is probably due to the Republicans controlling Congress, especially the House. We might expect Democrats to do as poorly if they were in control…because majority status emboldens the majority to make more extravagant claims and they feel pressure to deliver ‘results.'”

The researchers stopped short of claiming that members of the House and Senate told deliberate lies to advance their positions. “We don’t pretend to know whether they are lying, are ignorant, or misperceive the facts and informed opinion on an issue,” he said. “Instead of using ‘flatly lying,’ we prefer ‘flatly incorrect’ or ‘flatly inaccurate’.”

We say call a lie a lie and a liar a liar, and be done with it.

According to a new book, when Karl Rove moved into his office in the White House, he held an exorcism conducted by three clergy members to cleanse the place of evil spirits.

Whose spirit had the big bad bully spooked? That of the office’s previous occupant, First Lady Hillary Clinton:

“I talked to Karl; he said it’s not true and, beyond that, he will have no comment,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Clinton smiled and shook her head in disbelief Wednesday when asked about the tale, which appears in “The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power,” by James Moore and Wayne Slater. “I’m speechless,” she finally said, heading toward a Senate elevator.

Later, Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines quipped, “If the story is true … they sure did exorcise any lingering competence right out of the building.”

Trish has more on Rove’s White House exorcism here.

If you read the complete AP article, the assertion that Southern women are turning on Bush appears to be based on anecdotal evidence. There are upwards of 40 million women in the states of the Old Confederacy, roughly a third of whom are African American. I think the authors are talking about a group that we might call “NASCAR wives” — and if that group has started to wise up about Bush, that is good news.

President Bush’s once-solid relationship with Southern women is on the rocks. “I think history will show him to be the worst president since Ulysses S. Grant,” said Barbara Knight, a self-described Republican since birth and the mother of three. “He’s been an embarrassment.” In the heart of Dixie, comparisons to Grant, a symbol of the Union, is the worst sort of insult, especially from a Macon woman who voted for Bush in 2000 but turned away in 2004.

In recent years, Southern women have been some of Bush’s biggest fans, defying the traditional gender gap in which women have preferred Democrats to Republicans. Bush secured a second term due in large part to support from 54 percent of Southern female voters while women nationally favored Democrat John Kerry, 51-48 percent…

The movement of some Southern women away from the Republican Party tracks with national poll results showing that women have become more disillusioned with the war and were more likely than men to list the conflict as the important issue facing the country.

Nationally, the AP-Ipsos poll found that only 28 percent of women approve of Bush’s handling of the war. Bush did better in the South, but only slightly — just 32 percent of women in the region said they approve of his handling of the war.

On September 6, 1901, a Michigan-born man with a foreign sounding name, Leon Czolgosz (“shol-gosh”), an adherent to the anarchist cause, shot and killed President William McKinley:

McKinley was shot twice by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at 4:07 p.m. on September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

The newly-developed X-ray machine was displayed at the fair, but no one thought to use it on McKinley to search for the bullet, which might have saved his life. Also, ironically, the operating room at the exposition’s emergency hospital did not have any electric lighting, even though the exteriors of many of the buildings at the extravagant exposition were covered with thousands of light bulbs. Doctors used a pan to reflect sunlight onto the operating table as they treated McKinley’s wounds.

McKinley’s doctors believed he would recover, and the President convalesced for more than a week at the home of the exposition’s director. But McKinley eventually went into shock. He died from his wounds at 2:15 a.m. on September 14, 1901, in Buffalo. He was buried in Canton, Ohio. Czolgosz was later found guilty of murder and electrocuted.

McKinley’s vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, was hiking in the Adirondacks where he was sworn in as president when McKinley died.