CNN Also Mistakes Victory for Violence

NRO's Stephen Spruiell recently noted the Washington Post's use of passively constructed leads to turn major Talibani defeats into lamentable generic violence. CNN joins in with today's story titled "Afghan fighting: Another 29 killed":

At least 29 people have been killed in the latest bloodshed in the escalating conflict in southern Afghanistan, according to the U.S.-led coalition. The coalition command in Kabul said Wednesday that 24 insurgents, four Afghan National Army soldiers and one Afghan National Police officer were killed late Tuesday in the Tarin Kowt District of Uruzgan province. This six-hour fight began "when a joint combat patrol of Afghan and coalition forces returned fire against several enemy fighters who were hiding in a compound shooting at them." The troops responded "with heavy machine gun fire and forced the attackers to retreat. Enemy fighters then attempted to reinforce with additional militants from two nearby compounds." Six Afghan soldiers and three Afghan police were wounded. Heavy fighting between troops and Taliban-aligned fighters has claimed dozens of lives in recent weeks.

In case you missed it, the real story is that a patrol of Afghan soldiers was attacked by Taliban terrorists and the Talibanis were slaughtered with minimal losses to our allies. The final highlighted paragraph refers to another battle where most of the "dozens of lives" were also our enemies. UPDATE: Spruiell compares CNN's Afghan "reporting" with the more informative style of StrategyPage (Thanks for the link).

Your Data or Your Cash!

Early last month, in keeping with my recent habit of occasional repartee with leftish bloggers, I took Can't Take it Any More to task for his hyperventilation over President Bush's so-called leak of classified information. The entire "leak" presscapade was so singularly silly I didn't comment beyond one short and sarcastic post. But my conversation with CTAM left me somewhat disturbed because he managed to both accuse President Bush and Vice President Cheney of frequently lying and abdicate responsibility for demonstrating a single instance of their prevarication:

And my apologies if I intimated that GW has lied in the past. I meant to state it clearly: GW has lied often to the American public; Dick Cheney has lied more often and more baldly; and they both continue to do so.

...

Two things I definitely do not plan to do as a blogger is 1) to engage in endless circular arguments about with fellow bloggers; and 2) to conduct endless research to back up my arguments.

Today the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson promises to resolve CTAM's dilemma with "An Easy Call: Lying", concerning the NSA's data-mining of telephone records. As James Taranto points out, this story was reported by the New York Times back in December. There's no reason to re-break the story except to once more undermine the Bush Administration, no matter the cost to national security.

To judge how thoroughly the media has confounded this issue I asked my wife, who normally does not pay close attention to politics, to summarize in one sentence her impression of today's media coverage of the NSA story. Her answer was that "the NSA is recording the conversations of American citizens", and that is exactly Robinson's conflation when he accuses the administration of having lied by denying listening to domestic telephone conversations.

So why does the NSA need this database? Phone calls within a terrorist network may exhibit distinctive pattern characteristics (or they may not, but you can't know that ahead of time). The patterns could involve duration, location, chaining, etc., and the NSA needs this data to search for them.

Pattern searches typically take one of two approaches. The first involves searching for specific patterns known in advance. For example, a grocery store chain might mine sales data to discover how often people buy milk and eggs when they also buy wine. The NSA, on the other hand, is likely searching for unknown patterns. This involves using phone records from known terrorist rings to "train" a complex computer program. The program then searches for similar sets of records in NSA's giant database. A side advantage of the database is that pre-assembling these records will speed the process of rolling up any new terrorists networks discovered in the future.

As to why the NSA's anonymous database should concern us, there are two arguments. The first is the implication of illegality on the part of the administration. Most news sources have been careful not to claim this explicitly because the NSA's actions are simply not illegal. (UPDATE: John Hindraker of Powerline discusses the legality of the NSA's program in more detail. He doesn't reach a firm conclusion that would apply in all circumstances, but summarizes the relevant statutes.) The second point of concern is that the government can easily circumvent the current anonymity of the phone records it maintains. As Robinson says, "No names are attached to the numbers. But a snoopy civilian with Internet access can match a name with a phone number, so imagine what the government can do." Or as the Post's William Arkin says:

Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent Americans, their sheer scope, the number of "transactions" being tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real time.

But these concerns amount to little more than paranoid presuppositions of government malice. Consider Robinson's worry that the NSA could easily re-link the anonymous phone numbers with names and addresses. Well, so what? If the concern is that a rogue NSA employee might do this and somehow misuse the information, then why is this more likely than a rogue phone company employee doing the same thing? If the concern is that the NSA itself might use these records in an authorized investigation, then is there any doubt the NSA could easily obtain the same information and more by other means? If Robinson is concerned this data might be used in illegal investigations without proper court orders, then our concern should be the fact of the illegal investigations, not the particular data used!

Arkin's concern seems to be the speed with which the NSA can investigate targeted individuals. But why is investigative speed a problem? If the target is innocent we would rationally want their innocence speedily determined. If the target is guilty we would rationally want them swiftly apprehended. It seems the non-anonymous income, employment, and address information we send the government each April should be far more worrisome in this respect than anonymous telephone billing records.

Another possible worry is that the NSA's pattern-matching software might wrongly spotlight, say, football-team phone-trees rather than terrorist cells. But anyone who denounces the program for this reason must also demonstrate why other such imprecise suspect searches used in law enforcement, such as those based on physical characteristics or vehicle descriptions are not similarly problematic.

If data-mining bothers you: get over it. Every major company you do business with "mines" your records to improve sales and profit margins; it's ridiculous to rule the same useful techniques out of bounds for intelligence agencies. I note with interest that many of today's hand wringers are liberals who believe we should raise taxes! To that I say--take my data, I'll keep my cash!

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Related Washington Post stories: Phone Calls Are Just the Start; NSA Program Further Blurs Line on Privacy; Lawyer: Ex-Qwest Exec Ignored NSA Request; GOP Duo Back Hayden for CIA; Is Bush Overreaching?; Bush Defends Scope of Domestic Spying; The Right Call on Phone Records

None of the [Incumbents]

Brewster's Millions is one of those silly, B-comedies you must learn to love young, or not at all. Still, there's some ageless charm in the tale: it's been remade at least five times since young Cecil B. DeMille's original 1914 encelluloidation. In the 1985 version, "Monty" Brewster (Richard Pryor) is a minor-league baseball pitcher who discovers he's sole heir to a long-lost (white) uncle's $300 million fortune. But there's a catch: Brewster must blow $30 million in 30 days, with no tangible assets to show for the money, to inherit the full fortune.

Brewster finds some clever ways to waste the money, such as buying a rare stamp for several millions and using it for postage. But my favorite gag is when Brewster declares himself a last-minute candidate for mayor of New York City, runs television commercials around the clock in every state declaring his opponents foolish and corrupt, and adopts the campaign slogan "Vote None of the Above".

Until the United States Congress adopts term-limits, I plan to follow a slightly modified strategy and vote "None of the Incumbents". I've almost written this post a half-dozen times over the past couple of years as I've grown more and more frustrated with the legislative fecklessness of Republicans. I won't rehash their foolishness here. If you're conservative you've heard the litany; if you aren't they'd be meaningless anyway. But from steel tariffs to Medicaid to Social Security reform to agricultural subsidies to overall spending Republicans have utterly abandoned conservatism.

I was a college senior in 1994 when Republicans wrested control of the House and Senate from Democrats, and the wise words of my faculty adviser, Dr. Marvin Folkertsma, have returned to me many times since. He agreed the Republican takeover was one of the most remarkable and unexpected political events of his lifetime, but cautioned that it wouldn't change much about how Washington works. He was dead right.

I believe that time spent in Congress is in it's own way just as perceptually corrupting as being a famous actor, athlete, televangelist, or any other of the perputually dysfunctional celebrities among us. That's why I think it's a disgrace that the Republican congressman for whom I was an intern, Frank R. Wolf, recently celebrated his silver anniversary in Congress and is now the senior member of Virginia's delegation. I'd like all congressmen limited to a single term and their staffs, perquisites, and pay cut in half. Serving should constitute a huge sacrifice with no incentive for careerism at that level. Not only would this reduce the direct attraction of public office to candidates motivated by self-interest, it would reduce the value of ex-congressmen to lobbyists (there'd be a lot more ex's with a lot fewer connections) and thus the indirect attractions of public office as well.

What finally brought me to this point? The oil price gouging legislation and demagoguery were the last straw. Republican leaders are spouting rhetoric that undermines the very foundation of American prosperity and fosters economic ignorance--already an overly plentiful commodity. All that distinguishes our economic policies from those of the degenerating powers of Europe are a few population points of economic simpletons; cultivate a few million more such larcenists and we'll slip to the level of a South American banana republic like Bolivia or Venezuela.

Each previous time I've begun this post Democratic leaders immediately did or said something so childish and irresponsible that I changed my mind and decided voting against Republicans wasn't worth the chance of Democratic rule. Not this time. I've now realize it's time to "reload" and try again with a new Republican majority a few terms down the road. That's why I'll be doing my best to see that Republicans lose both houses of Congress in 2006. That's why I'll no longer financially support the Republican party, and why I'll only support Republican challengers, not incumbents in congressional elections.

More Votes Cast Against Democratic Senators Than For Them

Sometimes I wonder why liberals care so much that Gore won the popular vote in 2000, or that the populations of states represented by Democratic senators are larger than those represented by Republicans. Do they feel more emotionally secure believing the majority of Americans really do agree with them, despite losing elections? Or do they simply enjoy dreaming that a few rejiggered Constitutional clauses would return them control of American government? (Conservatives fall prey to a similar fallacy when they count Presidential acreage instead of votes, but that doesn't seem quite so prevalent or vehement.) Someone's even created a blog named Democratic Senators Represent More Americans. (Or "savedemocracy" if you go by the link--as though democracy is suddenly in danger because the Federal election system, humming along the same way for decades, has recently spit out a few results they don't like.) The proprietor counts half of a state's population for each party in mixed states (one senator from each party) and counts the full population for the party with both Senators in non-mixed states. He links to a chart showing that nearly 9.4 million more Americans are represented by Democratic senators than Republican ones. But that's not a very refined way to count representation because to be consistent--horror of horrors--you'd need to put the full U.S. population in the Republican column since we're all represented by President Bush. And liberals are quite fond of telling us Bush doesn't represent them. Here's another demonstration of the silliness of this method of counting support: if the three biggest states--California, New York, and Texas--changed to mixed states, Republicans would pick up just one additional Senate seat but 15 million new represented voters and a 21 million voter lead over Democrats. A more equitable solution is to count the number of votes cast for each senatorial candidate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. And with this a slightly different picture emerges: 4,058,810 more votes were cast against Democratic candidates than for them. True, Democrats had a slight edge in vote totals over Republicans, but nearly six million votes for independant candidates swing the majority decisively against the Democrats. Ahhhh. I feel secure again.

	2000	2002	2004
Republican	37,186,653	21,443,548	39,920,562
Democrat	36,944,395	19,244,015	44,014,943
Other	1,530,679	1,905,007	2,275,714

	Total All Years	Percent
Republican	98,550,763	48.2%
Democrat	100,203,353	49.0%
Other	5,711,400	2.8%
Total All Parties	204,465,516	100.0%
Non-Democrat	104,262,163	51.0%

U.S. Senatorial Election Vote Totals (Compiled from CNN.com - 2004, 2002, 2000)

UPDATE: DSRMA responds--I think. He mentions "some right wing bloggers" but doesn't name or link anyone:

It seems like some right wing bloggers are saying that if you didn't vote for Bush you don't have to pay taxes. They are taking issue with my finding that Democratic Senators Represent More Americans. They say that those people who didn't vote for a Democratic Senator, don't have to be counted as being represented by them. In that case president Bush doesn't represent me. He's not my Head of State. It sure sounds like the bloggers are saying I don't have to pay taxes because I didn't vote for the guy running this country. I mean are we supposed to be one country or two? I could have counted every person in a state as being represented by each Senator. The percentages would have come out the same. But if the right wingers want to break up the country, who am I to stop them? So much for unity. And, BTW, if I didn't vote for my Congressman, does that mean I don't have to obey laws?

He's trying a neat little trick: implying he really just meant more Americans are legally represented by Democratic senators, not that Democrats represent the political viewpoints of most Americans. But that's not what the left means when it drags out this claim to justify filibustering judicial nominees, as done by the reliably fuzzy-headed E.J. Dijonnaise and others last year. It's a claim of moral authority, a cry for Liberté, égalité, fraternité, a claim they've been cheated of their rightful majoritarian primacy. To claim otherwise is to relegate the title "Democratic Senators Represent More Americans" to a mere truism--like "Most Chinese Live in China".

Neil Young Forgot

My wife wanted me to blog on Neil Young's new "Impeach the President" song. Yawn. What a rebel. I have no idea what the music sounds like, but he could have assembled the lyrics by copying and pasting randomly from any one of a million angry-lefty blogs. Poetic and subtle they aren't. Well, put him ahead of that ex-ER actor for next year's Heroic Hollywood Dissident Award anyway.

UPDATE: Ok, on second thought I do have a few more things to say about this. Politically strident art is an incredible waste of time. Art delivers moral messages effectively through subtle emotional engagement. The entertainment industry has failed miserably at that over the past few years, especially when it tries to directly confront conservatism (or what it perceives as conservatism). Having lost control of American government over the past decade (Congress, the Presidency, state governorships, state legislatures, etc.), leftist artists seem to think elevated intensity will make their messages more convincing. They may feel better after producing songs and movies that are political primal screams, and their efforts may be appreciated by other leftists, but they aren't very effective or entertaining.

Each year I rank the top-100 highest user-rated movies in the Internet Movie Database and add any good ones I've missed to my DVD rental list. I've done year-by-year searches all the way back to 1970 or so, and in the past few years I've noticed a definite increase in the number of highly-rated, yet mediocre and politically tendentious films. These films have C-shaped rating graphs--meaning everyone who agreed with the film's "message" rated it a ten and everyone who disagreed rated it a one. I find that highly annoying.

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Related Washington Post stories: Young's Protest Album Heads to Internet; Young's Anti-War Album

Abortion Law Confusion Quantified

Several pundits on the right and left believe overturning Roe v Wade would prove politically disastrous for Republicans, principally by mobilizing a great army of heretofore silent pro-choicers and secondarily by demotivating pro-life conservatives. Ramesh Ponnuru argues that this view is completely wrong because the public is not nearly so pro-choice as the left wishes. He theorizes in a related article that Roe enjoys majority support only because the public misapprehends the breadth of the ruling.

Ponnuru doesn't offer any data to quantify the size of this ignorance distortion, but I recently stumbled across a rarely asked poll question that starkly illuminates the scope of public confusion. This 2005 Harris poll asks "In general, do you think that abortion should be legal or illegal during the following stages of pregnancy?" Respondents could answer "legal" or "illegal" for each trimester of preganancy, described as "the first three months of pregnancy", "the second three months of pregnancy", and "the third three months of preganancy". A full 86 percent of those polled said abortion should be illegal in the third trimester of pregnancy, while 72 and 38 percent said abortion should be illegal in the second and first trimesters, respectively.

In the same poll, 52 percent of respondents favored Roe (the poll explains that Roe overturned state laws outlawing abortions in the first three months of pregancy). Juxtaposing this number with the 86 percent who would make abortion "generally illegal" in the third trimester shows that 73 percent of those who support Roe (38 of the 52 percent) would make third-trimester abortions illegal. These folks don't understand that the inextricably linked rulings of Roe and Doe v Bolton effectively eliminated all abortion restrictions through the ninth month of pregancy. (To calculate that number I'm simply extracting the overlap of the 86 and 52 percent--or those who selected two mutually exclusive answers: 86 + 52 - 100 = 38)

A similiar comparison shows how flexibly some label themselves "pro-choice". Fifty-one percent of respondents identified themselves as pro-choice while 44 percent called themselves pro-life. Thus over 72 percent of self-identified pro-choice respondents would outlaw third-trimester abortions (37 of the 51 percent) and 45 percent would also ban second-trimester abortions (23 of the 51 percent). On the flip side, just nine percent of pro-lifers would allow even first-trimester abortions (4 of the 44 percent). (Again this is calculated by overlapping the 60 percent of respondents who prefer abortion to be "generally legal" in the first trimester with the 44 percent who call themselves pro-life.)

UPDATE: James Taranto reports a fortuitously timed poll that roughly corresponds with my conclusions. The poll asked respondents to choose which of three answers best decribes the impact of Roe on abortion law. Seventy-one percent chose an incorrect answer or said they didn't know--almost exactly same percentage of Roe supporters I said misunderstood the ruling's impact in the 2005 Harris abortion poll. Note that the 71 percent who misunderstood Roe in this new poll were from the entire population of respondents, not just Roe supporters. However, it's not unreasonable to assume similar numbers of Roe opponents also underestimate the breadth of the ruling, and simply oppose abortion in nearly all circumstances. That fits well with my other conclusion that a very small percentage of pro-lifers would allow even first-trimester abortions.

Impeach the Leaker (Again!)

So the media now has angst in it's pants over President Bush's release of classified intelligence information to counter the false information Joseph Wilson was spreading about Iraq's attempts to purchase enriched uranium. That's bad you see because the public has no right to know the truth--unless it sells newspapers! And it's bad because it was political! Verrry baaaad! It's only good to illegally release classified information for political purposes!

I think I understand now. Governor pardons prisoner: bad; prison guard helps prisoner escape: good. Getting a bonus from your boss: bad; stealing from your company: good. A slight inversion of perspective clarifies the matter greatly!

I Alone Escaped McNulty's Clutches

In the summer of 1994, before my final semester at Grove City College, I served as a congressional intern for Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). The internship program included a weekly public policy seminar with GCC alumnus Paul McNulty, then counsel for D.C. law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge and previously spokesman for the Bush (senior) Justice Department.

At the time Paul was mulling a 1995 run for the Virginia House of Delegates. As the two of us got on reasonably well, and as I had worked on a winning 1993 campaign, and as I happened to be the only GCC intern from the Northern Virginia area, he asked if I might be interested in managing his campaign. Then came Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, and the GOP tide which rolled over all of Washington in early 1995. Paul moved on to become chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, and I went in another direction entirely.

I watched with interest as Paul moved on to become the U.S. Attorney prosecuting John Walker Lindh, Zacharias Moussaoui, and other high-profile terror suspects. But I completely missed his rise to Deputy Attorney General until reading about the Moussaoui death penalty decision today. So on the one-in-a-million chance that you read this while googling yourself, congratulations, Paul.

You know you've arrived when you're important enough to be gratuitously villified by the looney leftists at the Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and others. They were certain back in October that Paul "The Grinch" McNulty was a Bush loyalist being installed to axe independent prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald; and they seem genuinely upset about his bang-up job of prosecuting terrorists! The left's paranoid demonization of the Justice Department seems foolish enough most of the time; it's yet more poignant when you know and respect the target personally.

Keep giving the terrorists hell, Paul. Oh, and how about a tip for an old acquaintance just before you impose the police state?

Krauthammer Smartest Man Ever?

While browsing through the footnotes of Charles Murray's latest Commentary magazine essay on race and IQ differences I ran across an interesting bit of trivia on Charles Krauthammer: Murray mentions that one of the highest scores he's ever observed on the "backward digit span" component of the Weschler IQ test was 12 by Krauthammer (and under less than perfect conditions).

A quick search turned up this scoresheet and percentile distribution (PDF) for the digits-forward and backward tests, which involve reciting strings of random single-digit numbers back to the examiner. The scoring system requires adding forwards and backwards scores together, but helpfully notes that the average person can recite about two more digits forwards than backwards. To roughly extrapolate Krauthammer's full score we must multiply his digits-backwards score by two and add his estimated digits-fowards score times two (12 x 2 + 14 x 2), which equals 52.

Krauthammer's raw score equates to a standard score (one component of Weschler IQ) of....well the scale stops at 164 for a raw score of 36! The standard score increments a steady 3.5 points for every additional point of raw score so we can extrapolate a raw score of 52 to a Weschler deviation IQ of about 220! However, this would place Krauthammer at eight standard deviations above the mean (rarer than one in 100 billion), so I think we can safely conclude that A) Krauthammer is a very bright guy; and B) that either this test is not well-calibrated for extremes or that Krauthammer's every political opination is nothing less than a scurrilous defrauding of all mankind.

UPDATE: Oops! The scoring starts at two digits rather than one, so Krauthammer's extrapolated raw score would be 48 (11 x 2 + 13 x 2) and his standard score 206, which is "only" seven standard deviations above the mean.

State of Fear Still has Liberals Thrashing

Last night I became suddenly curious about the fate of Michael Crichton's last book, State of Fear . In case you aren't familiar with it, Crichton makes an unusual direct plea to his readers, through an author's note and scientific journal citations embedded in the text of his fictional story, that we resist global warming alarmism.

It's been more fun to read the hysterical liberal comments on Amazon (approaching 900 now) than it was to read the book. And I couldn't help but wonder: Would liberal anger at Crichton's apostasy keep this book from reaching the silver screen as his offerings so frequently do? I searched Publisher's Weekly and the Web for any mention of the sale of the movie rights, but found none.

I did, however, run across this fun diatribe against Crichton and State of Fear. The writer, Marc McDonald, manages to crank out 850 words, without even attempting to refute a single specific citation in the book. Instead, he points to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and another fictional Crichton book, Rising Sun, to show why alarmism is good, and Crichton is wrong.

McDonald's use of Rising Sun to criticize Crichton's track record is especially inapposite. He says Crichton's now clearly inaccurate portrait of a looming Japanese economic threat leaves him no credibility on global warming predictions. But Rising Sun makes predictions only through its characters. There is no direct statement of Crichton's opinion; nor are there footnoted citations as in State of Fear. Crichton typically prods both sides when treating any sensitive issue; it's not clear what he really believed about Japan.

If Crichton did fear the Japanese, his opinions squared with the alarmist popular wisdom of the time. And perhaps he learned from that to consider more carefully and investigate more deeply before taking the popular, alarmist position again.

UPDATE: Marc McDonald responds in the comments below and gets his facts wrong again. He says:

I wasn't primarily interested in going after Crichton's citations. I'm fully willing to admit that citations exist that support both sides. Instead I was more interested in challenging Crichton's central premise in the book: that global warming simply doesn't exist. One can argue about the extent of global warming---but it is positively ignorant to claim that it doesn't exist. The vast majority of the world's scientists believe that global warming is real. A small minority disagrees. If casting my lot with the majority of the world's scientists makes me an "alarmist" then so be it.

Actually, Crichton doesn't at all deny the existence of global warming. His author's message includes the following personal conclusions:

• Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause.
  
• We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a four-hundred-year cold spell known as the "Little Ice Age".
  
• Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon.
  
• Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made. Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century. The computer models vary by 400 percent, de facto proof that nobody knows...I suspect that part of the observed surface warming will ultimately be attributable to human activity. I suspect that the principal human effect will come from land use, and that the amospheric component will be minor...Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better....
  
• There are many reasons to shift away from fossil fuels, and we will do so in the next century without legislation, financial incentives, carbon-conservation programs, or the interminable yammering of fearmongers...

(If you care to read the whole thing, go to the Amazon listing for State of Fear and search inside the book for "authors message".)

Crichton has also posted the text of two entertaining speeches that give further insight into his thinking: Environmentalism as Religion and Aliens Cause Global Warming. He has quite low regard for those who determine the correctness of scientific theories by voting:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

He proceeds with a litany of historical cases where scientific evidence was ignored in favor of consensus, sometimes resulting in thousands of preventable deaths. And let's not forget, while treating McDonald's argument from authority, that the "majority of scientists" who sign vague statements of concern about global warming are often not themselves climatologists; Nor are they risking professional credibility or academic standing as they would by submitting a shoddy journal article or peer review. We don't judge professional advice received at cocktail parties by the same standard as that given in the office of our doctor or lawyer for good reason. It's the same difference.

Coleman Still Guilty

DNA tests last week proved again that Roger Keith Coleman was guilty of raping and slitting the throat of his sister-in-law. I used the Coleman case as an example of the extreme gullibility of death-penalty opponents in my Deadly Innocence article. How long before the first Coleman apologist insists the test results were faked as they did in the case of James Hanratty in Great Britain?

Not surprisingly, the Associated Press article reporting the test results looks as though it was written with the opposite outcome in mind, leading with a reminder that DNA testing has freed many prisoners and focusing on demands by death penalty opponents for retesting in other cases:

DNA has the power to cut short nightmares. It can save an innocent man from the horror of life behind bars for a crime someone else committed. It can ease the public's fear of a murderer walking free and looking to kill again.

In the past 16 years, DNA testing has freed scores of prisoners found to be wrongfully convicted, resolved old mysteries including murders and rapes, and transformed the debate over the death penalty. It has shaken the foundations of the criminal justice system itself.

...

Advocates for reform remain convinced that there are other executions that need to be retested, sure that an innocent person somewhere along the way has been executed--even as prosecutors and courts have been hesitant to go back and revisit cases that juries and courts have deemed closed.

Death penalty opponents are desperate for hard proof that one innocent person has been executed. But they aren't likely to find any.

Hope for Skins in Seattle?

I've been tinkering with ways to quantify NFL schedule strength differences in terms of wins and losses. While working on that I noticed a timely tidbit last night that's worth sharing before tomorrow's big game.

Seattle's opponent win percentage this year is the third-lowest in the past five years (I've only compiled data back through the 2001 season). Washington, on the other hand, is tied with six other teams for the 16th toughest schedule over the same span. The tables below include Washington, Seattle, and several other 2005 teams.

The first table lists teams with the lowest opponent win percentages (easiest schedules). Notice that six of this year's playoff teams are on the list.

Over the past five years teams with an opponent win percentage of .400 to .449 averaged 11.2 wins. Teams with an opponent win percentage of .450 to .474 averaged 10.1 wins.

The second table lists teams with the highest opponent win percentages (toughest schedules). It includes two 2005 teams whose coaches were fired this year (Oakland and Houston), and one team whose coach would likely have been fired this year if he wasn't in the first year of his contract (San Francisco). The list also includes one of the best teams not to make the playoffs this year (San Diego) and another team that barely edged into the playoffs by winning its last five games (Washington).

Teams with an opponent win percentage of .550 to .599 averaged just 5.1 wins, and teams with an opponent win percentage of .525 to .549 averaged only 6 wins over this period.

Some other offhand observations: In 2003 Atlanta Falcons coach Dan Reeves was replaced with three games to go as the Falcons finished 5-11. Too bad for Reeves. He not only lost Michael Vick that year, but also drew one of the toughest schedules in the league. In 2004 Reeves's replacement Jim Mora, Jr. was hailed as the NFL's next great genius--after getting back his star quarterback and drawing the fourth easiest schedule in the past five years.

Fortunately for Redskins fans, Buffalo unceremoniously dismissed Gregg Williams in 2003 after he led his team to a 6-10 record against the fourth toughest schedule on the list below.

And then there's Tony Dungee who was dimissed from Tampa Bay after a 9-7 down year in 2001--against opponents with a win percentage of .535. Good thing for young genius Jon Gruden that Tampa Bays' schedule strength dropped to .480 in 2002, helping his team lock up home field advantage through the playoffs.

Oh, and remember that uncharacteristically bad 6-10 record Indianapolis compiled in 2001? Yep, they had an even tougher schedule than Tampa Bay that year, which led to the firing of Jim Mora (Senior) and the hiring of Tony Dungee. And round and round we go!

I didn't include win-loss records but Washington is the only team on the toughest-schedules list to win 10 games and reach the playoffs. The Redskins may have improved more this year than is readily apparent: Last year's 6-10 record and dismal offensive performance were achieved against a much weaker schedule (.477 opponent win percentage) than this year's 10-6 mark.

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Current Washington Post Redskins stories: Seattle to Washington; Seattle all Smiles; Taylor Trial Update; Uneasy Truce; Yes, Taylor Brazen Liar; Seattle Waiting; Holmgren Loser; Getting D; Prioleau Grabs Chance; Brunell Odd; Kicking Bad Habits; Focus on Offense; Kornheiser; Griffin Difference Maker; City Powerless

Lowest Opponent Win Percentages Since 2001

Rank	Year	Team	Opp Win Pct
1	2001	Pittsburgh	0.418
	2003	Kansas City	0.418
3	2005	Seattle	0.430
4	2001	Green Bay	0.434
	2003	St. Louis	0.434
	2004	Atlanta	0.434
7	2001	Arizona	0.445
	2003	Carolina	0.445
	2004	Seattle	0.445
10	2001	New England	0.449
	2002	Green Bay	0.449
	2005	Carolina	0.449
	2005	Tampa Bay	0.449
14	2001	Seattle	0.453
	2004	Philadelphia	0.453
16	2003	Baltimore	0.457
	2003	Cincinnati	0.457
	2003	Minnesota	0.457
	2004	Green Bay	0.457
	2005	Chicago	0.457
	2005	Indianapolis	0.457
	2005	Miami	0.457
23	2003	Dallas	0.461
	2004	Arizona	0.461
25	2001	Chicago	0.465
	2001	San Francisco	0.465
	2003	Seattle	0.465
	2004	Chicago	0.465
	2004	New Orleans	0.465
	2005	Jacksonville	0.465

Highest Opponent Win Percentages Since 2001

Rank	Year	Team	Opp Win Pct
1	2004	Cleveland	0.590
2	2001	Detroit	0.582
3	2001	Carolina	0.574
4	2003	Buffalo	0.570
	2003	Houston	0.570
	2004	Oakland	0.570
7	2001	Indianapolis	0.563
	2005	San Diego	0.559
9	2003	NY Giants	0.555
	2004	Miami	0.555
11	2004	Baltimore	0.551
	2004	Kansas City	0.551
13	2003	Arizona	0.543
	2003	Jacksonville	0.543
	2004	Cincinnati	0.543
16	2002	Cincinnati	0.539
	2003	Atlanta	0.539
	2003	Cleveland	0.539
	2005	Oakland	0.539
	2005	San Francisco	0.539
	2005	Washington	0.539
22	2001	Tampa Bay	0.535
	2003	Detroit	0.535
	2005	Houston	0.535

CAP = KKK

I haven't paid much attention to the Alito Supreme Court nomination hearings. Once you know a little about the nominee the process quickly becomes quite tedious--aside from the occasional comic relief from Senatorial buffoonery. But I just can't refrain from pointing out this comment left on the Washington Post Campaign for the Supreme Court blog because it captures so perfectly the degree to which some on the left believe their own anti-Alito propaganda:

I always find it interesting how often republicans and conservatives bring up Sen. Byrd's KKK membership way back in the day, but when memberships in similiar orgs like CAP are brought up then somehow it's out of bounds

I love that! Membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative group supporting a mismash of causes from getting ROTC back on campus to keeping women off, is equivalent to membership in the most murderously racist organization in American history! And of course Senator Byrd's affinity for the Klu Klux Klan went far beyond mere membership: In 1942 he single-handedly signed up 150 new members and assumed leadership of the inaugural chapter of the KKK in Crab Orchard, West Virginia.

Thickening Gibberish

Something about playoff time in the NFL spurs sportswriters to fill their pages with ever thicker helpings of gibberish. I've been in the mood to bash them recently so here's another round.

NFL.com asked its stable of writers to predict playoff winners for this weekend through the Super Bowl. And boy is there a lot of gibberish. Green Bay Packers safety Darren Sharper notices that Redskins quarterback Mark Brunell and Buccaneers quarterback Chris Simms are similar...and different. After a lot of back and forth he gives the edge to Brunell because of his greater 'playoff experience'. (Do the rules change in the playoffs?)

Simms passed for five times as many yards as Brunell today--so much for playoff experience. Simms did throw one more interception than Brunell--perhaps with a little more experience he'll learn that's a bad thing to do in the playoffs.

Sharper predicted Cliinton Portis would have a big day against the Bucs because that's what he did last time. Portis didn't get the message--he finished with 16 carrys for 53 yards.

Sharper believes the Redskins had the 'momentum' edge against the Bucs after winning their previous five games. Lincoln Kennedy likes the Skins chances against Seattle but is worried that Washington has "expended too much energy just getting to the playoffs". On the other hand, at least they haven't needed to 'rebound from a tough loss'!

(Hmm. I think understand this: Wins give you momentum and make you harder to stop, but they take a lot of energy. When your energy runs out you slow down and become easier to beat. If the Redskins have enough fuel in their tanks they'll reach the Super Bowl. And Joe Gibbs owns a champion NASCAR pit crew so he'll never let his football team run out of gas!)

Today's Wall Street Journal (yes they do have a sports page) gets the gibberish of the week award. A chart in the print edition (not sure if it's online--their site requires a subscription) shows the top-seeded playoff teams and ultimate Super Bowl contenders for the past ten years. Its caption reads:

While much is made of the value of getting the top seed--and it's accompanying home-field advantage--in the NFL postseason, recent history shows that teams with home-field advantage throughout the playoffs made it to the Super Bowl less often than teams that had to win on the road.
...
From 1995 to 2004 in the AFC 3 of 10 teams with the No. 1 seed (home-field advantage) reached the Super Bowl. In the NFC over the same period, 6 of 10 teams with the No. 1 seed (home-field advantage) reached the Super Bowl.

But the chart demonstrates exactly the opposite of what its caption implies! Yes, only nine of 20 teams in the past ten Super Bowls were top-seeds, but there were five times as many lower-seeded teams in the pool. Nine of 20 top-seeded teams (45 percent) reached the Super Bowl while only 11 of 100 lower-seeded teams did (11 percent). Top-seeded teams are actually four times as likely to reach the championship game! Moreover, seven of the 11 lower-seeded teams reaching the Super Bowl were second seeds--meaning they had home field advantage up to the conference championship game.

You'd think a newspaper with over two million daily readers could afford a few numerical literates amongst its fact-checkers!

Skins Beat Bucs?!

You know you found every bit of luck you needed to win an NFL playoff game when:

• You set a new record for fewest yards of offense ever by a playoff winning team (120)
• Your opponent's yards per rush (3.0) are more than double your yards per pass (1.4)
• The other team gains over twice as many yards of offense (120 versus 243)
• Your quarterback's total passing yards (41) are barely more than your average yards per punt (38)
• Your total net passing yards (25) are less than the receiving yards of your opponent's backup tight end (Anthony Becht, 26 yards)
• You fumble three times and get them all back
• The other team fumbles three times and you run one of them back 58 yards for a touchdown (fumble returns are rare and fumble recoveries are considered about 1/3 as valuable as interceptions for this reason)
• Your star safety who's shutting down the other team's star receiver is booted from the game just after halftime for spitting in the face of another player while the referee is pushing him away (expect more stuff like this from Taylor)

That sure was one ugly offensive performance! Early in the season team followers fretted over the Skins' turnover deficit. Some of that was due to Washington's poor fumble recovery luck as I've often written, but the team wasn't picking off interceptions either.In case you haven't been paying attention to how dramatically those trends have reversed, consider these numbers: In the first eight games Washington took balls away from their opponents just six times; over the past nine games including today's win over Tampa Bay Washington has 25 takeaways. That's a change from .75 per game to 2.77 per game!

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Washington Post Redskins stories: Who Needs Offense?; Springs to Return Next Week; Brown Still Alive; Seattle Up Next; Defense Scores KO; Good and Ugly; Shepherd Made Catch

If They Can't Get Football Right...

It's when you read the sports pages, where all the facts and statistics are simple and readily available that you begin to realize how bad some newspaper writers are at getting their stories straight. Thomas Boswell builds up the Redskins' chances of going deep into the playoffs in his latest column by emphasizing Joe Gibbs's past success at taking weak teams to the Super Bowl. To do this he tears down the 1987 Redskins to make them appear much weaker than they were, and builds up their competition to appear stronger than it was. Boswell first runs through a litany of the '87 team's skill position statistics and compares them unfavorably with today's players. But Washington's stars only played 12 games because of the strike shortened season. (Did Boswell forget that? No, he mentions the strike early in the article.) Despite playing just 12 games Gary Clark managed to rack up 1066 yards receiving with a hefty 19 yard per catch average. Clark was third in the league in yards and tenth in TDs that year. Ricky Sanders also managed to pile up 630 yards and average 17 yards per catch. Oh, and don't forget Art Monk who, despite playing just nine games because of injuries, snagged 38 balls for nearly 500 yards. And while Washington had only three pro-bowlers in '87, the offensive line starters for that year were selected for a total of 13 pro-bowls between 1981 and 1988, and the defensive linemen from that team went to six pro-bowls during their careers. "Even the ['87] defense was none too special, allowing 19 points per game -- a bit more than the current Redskins (18)," adds Boswell. There's just one problem with that comparison, though: Point production changes from year-to-year in the NFL. The '87 Redskins were actually ranked sixth in the NFL in points allowed while this year's team is ranked ninth, despite allowing fewer points. More importantly, the '87 team ranked fifth in points scored versus this year's 13th place ranking. Next Boswell builds up the '87 competition. He notes that the 13-2 49ers were hotter than today's Colt's, winning their last three games by 124-7 and that the '87 Bears had gone 40-7 over the three previous seasons. But again he has problems: Washington never played San Francisco because the 49ers were knocked out by the 8-7 Vikings who, by the way, also dispatched the 12-3 Saints (thank you very much). Washington scraped by the Bears 21-17 on a 52-yard Darrell Green punt return TD, and returned home to edge the Vikings before blowing out the mediocre Broncos in the Super Bowl. The 10-4-1 Broncos had the second best record in a weak AFC that year (Cleveland went 10-5). And just how strong were those Bears? Well, it's true they were 40-7 from 1985-87, but four of those seven losses came in '87. In other words, they had the same 11-4 record as Washington (while scoring 23 fewer points and allowing just three fewer points than Washington for the season). There's a big reason why wildcard teams usually fare poorly in the playoffs: Home field advantage makes a huge difference in the NFL. Washington probably has a slightly better than even chance of knocking off the Bucs Saturday in Tampa, but realistically they have a very small chance of going deep into the playoffs. Savor a good season and appreciate the foundation Gibbs is building for serious playoff runs in the next few seasons.

Skins Recover the Playoffs

The Washington Redskins sealed their first playoff appearance since 1999 when Sean Taylor scooped up a fourth-quarter Eagles fumble, rambled 39 yards, and launched himself into the endzone. Taylor's score was the perfect capstone to a season nearly sabotaged by what must have been one of the worst strings of fumble recovery luck experienced by an NFL team.

After the first seven games of the season Washington had recovered just 4 of 26 fumbles on offense and defense combined. Their 15 percent recovery rate at that point was far behind the rest of the league and was extremely improbably. (The chances of recovering just 4 of 26 fumbles are 1 in 3,333--about as likely as tossing 12 heads in a row while flipping a coin.)

From that point to the start of today's game Washington recovered 20 of the next 29 offensive and defensive fumbles to move from worst (by far) to ninth-worst in the league. In today's game Washington recovered four of seven Philly fumbles, lifting their season recovery rate to 45 percent. (The NFL.com stats for today are confusingly contradictory--as of this writing they show five Eagles fumbles and four Skins recoveries on the team stats page; four Skins recoveries and three Eagles recoveries on the game stats page; and three Eagle fumbles and three Skins recoveries on the play-by-play page.)

The five teams with the worst fumble recovery rates through 15 games are Houston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Green Bay, and Seattle--all tied at 38 percent. With this poor recovery rate and one of the toughest schedules this year the Texans are likely much better than their 2-14 record indicates. At the other end of the league are New Orleans, the New York Giants, Carolina, Atlanta, and New England with respective recovery rates of 69, 61, 58, 58, and 57 percent. That's bad news for the Saints who may be worse than their 3-13 record--perhaps why Jim Haslett is so eager to escape!

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Current Washington Post NFL stories: Washington Monumental; NFL Playoff Schedule; Giants Clinch East; Gibbs Gamble Pays; Kornheiser; Boswell; Jenkins; Springs Questionable; Bucs Conversion Revisited; Kornheiser II; Wilbon II; Gibbs's Replacement to Stay; Fans Snap up Tickets; Gibb's Methods