Apparently the NYTimes killed a story last October when the editors worried it might effect Obama’s election.

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

After reading this report, if you are thinking this is some staffer that overheard something and is now using it to make headlines then I would agree. However, think about how many people in this position are used by newspapers including the NYTimes to paint an untrue picture. During the Bush administration the NYTimes loved to use ‘anonymous’ sources to undermine policy decisions. Many of you have used the NYTimes in pointing to such people when attempting to argue against one of my positions. So it seems only fair to use these crappy bitter ’sources’ to ascertain the truth when that truth confirms my hypothesis.

Therefore, we can conclude that the sole reason that the NYTimes decided not to run this story was to protect Obama’s campaign and to insure that he would win the election. Some bitter crappy staffer said it was true therefore it must be.

Is the crisis all about consolidating power?

For quite a while, but especially over the last nine months, the best way to predict developments in politics and finance has been to ask: what will do the most to increase the concentration of power? Every headline, from the Geithner regulatory plan to the proposed cap on the charitable deduction, to the resignation of the General Motors CEO, should be viewed in that light.

If it is, I know Darwin won’t mind. He only cares about giving power to the state when Republicans are in office.

It’s not looking good for Steve’s argument

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Not only is torture completely unethical, it’s totally inneffective.

Can you imagine the amount of people that were paid to help build and decorate this estate:

Rich people. Without them nobody would have money.

Food safety frequently comes up in the regulation/no regulation debate. Supposedly we need regulation to keep our food safe. However, regulation often fails us anyways; recently, salmonella peanuts killed 9 and sickened 22,500 others, and 143 million tons of beef from sick cows was recalled. So what’s a regulator to do?

Maybe we should take a lesson from the 1980’s commercials for the Hair Club for Men. You may remember those cheesy ads, which concluded with the pitchman declaring that “I’m not only the Hair Club president, I’m also a client.” The right way to align the incentives of management with those of the customers, in other words, may be to make sure that the managers are customers. One way we could implement this would be to require inspectors to certify that they saw the president of the company (or perhaps the plant manager) eating a substantial helping of the product being sold. (Maybe the inspectors should be required to eat some as well!) Someone who knows that his downer-burger was made from a cow that was too sick to stand, or his salmonella-butter-and-jelly sandwich contained infested nuts, might not be so happy about his working lunch.

I think this is what people mean when they talk about smarter regulation. I, for one, am a fan.

When it comes to relying on experts, Dan is absolutely right. Experts knowlege makes them uniquely qualified to predict the future and therefore we should heed their advice. Why just take a look at this long term study examining the proficiency of experts:

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

By the way, these experts are the same people that are constantly used by politicians to justify increasing state power. A tactic many of you support when you vote for politicians that favor expanding state government on the advisement of experts.

I have recently discovered how to get a clear picture of an issue despite the rampant bias Steve loves to point out. It’s called a debate, and it’s wonderful.

Intelligence Squared U.S. brings Oxford-style debating to America — one motion, one moderator, three panelists for the motion and three against.

The latest topic is “Who’s To Blame For The Financial Crisis?” and recent debates include “Is Reducing Carbon Emissions Worth The Cost?” and “Do Guns Reduce Crime?”

Once people admit their biases, it becomes much easier to decide what is really going on, especially when they’re pitted against someone who is equally biased in the opposite direction.

How did this news report make it through the AP editors?

But precise trajectories are impossible to plot and even approximations can be wildly off, as the authors of these forecasts acknowledge, usually more readily than the policymakers who use them to promote the plan.

Flip through the stacks of economic analyses underpinning the stimulus plan and you find a lot of throat-clearing qualifications and angst:

_”Very uncertain.”

_”Difficult to distinguish among alternative estimates.”

_”We confess to considerable uncertainty.”

_”Subject to substantial margins of error.”

In other words, who really knows?

Economic modeling may prove to be a haywire navigational device in this crisis.

By the way this is what agenda looks like masquerading around as news. However unlike the vast majority of MSM reports this agenda leans right as opposed to left. This report is in no real sense ‘news’. Its just some guy with a position that he wraps a bunch of experts around to put out his agenda. Fortunately for me, his agenda, and thus what he calls news, is consistent with my views.

It’s nice to see fiscal conservative opinion wrapped in ‘news’ and passed on by a MSM organization. You don’t see that very often. I’m sure this report will make top headlines in most MSM organizations. Especially the NYTimes.

Over at Shadow’s World a writer makes an observation about press coverage.

On Saturday, there were “Tea Party” tax protests held in Orlando FL, Raleigh NC, Ridgefield CT, and Cincinnati OH. Round-up here.

Today I opened my Sunday Washington Post, and what did I find?

On the front page, below the fold, an article on Obama’s “volunteer” campaign (Obama’s Campaign Army on Road Again).

On page A-8, an article on a rally outside the AIG offices in Washington (In the Capital, a Glut of Outrage).

On page A-10, a full-page article on the anti-AIG demonstration outside the home of AIG executive Douglas Poling in Fairfield CT (Obama Looks for Calm in a Firestorm).

On page A-16, an article on the anti-war (in Iraq) march from the National Mall to the Pentagon (Protestors Mark Milestone). The largest demonstration (against the war) was estimated at 2000-2500 people.

The Tea Parties linked to above were more widespread, and at least one was larger than those reported on by the Post. Did I see any coverage of the Tea Parties?

Its been widely reported that their was more media covering the AIG protests than actual protesters. However, you assemble several thousands people to protest the government’s expansion and you can’t get a single reporter to show up. How can anyone seriously argue that the MSM is neutral when things like this happen?

It reminds me in the last couple of years the ridiculous amount of coverage small groups of Iraq war protester received. Just because only a small amount of radicals were showing up to protest doesn’t mean MSM shouldn’t give it extensive coverage. No, what determines coverage is whether it fits their narrative. Iraq war is bad so we cover the protest. Corporations are bad so we cover the protest of bigwigs getting bonuses. Expansion of federal government is good so we ignore those that protest it. Good olde bias news coverage. You just can’t get enough of it can you?

The recession bites responsible people too.

Brown and her family are being evicted not because of anything they did, but because her landlord defaulted on the mortgage and the house fell into foreclosure. The house was recently sold at auction.

The bad news came just seven months after Brown had moved in. A real estate broker came to the door and handed her an eviction notice, telling her she had 30 days to vacate. “I was hysterical, I was like, what do you mean?”

The broker explained that the landlord no longer owns the property and that the lease was no longer valid. Brown had no idea the house was in foreclosure. As a tenant, she always paid her rent on time, and she assumed the rent was going toward the mortgage.

It looks like Ms. Brown would have benefited from an additional contract with her landlord.

In most states, when a bank forecloses on a landlord, the tenant has no guarantee of being allowed to stay in the property, and neither the bank nor the landlord has a legal obligation to tell the tenant about the foreclosure. So while the owners know what’s going on, renters are usually kept in the dark.

I think this might be a case where a little legislation could go a long way. Just require full disclosure to the tenant about a house’s foreclosure status. Seems fair to me.