Wednesday, August 14, 2002

The irony of being a dittohead How the letter writer used the column in my previous post is wonderfully ironic.  Here is the letter: I feel sorry for Bill Stoner. He has been tricked, deceived, misinformed. His letter [about how only NPR reported that Dubya's budget slashes the funding to the agency that rescued the coal miners while covering Dubya's visit to the coal miners] reveals just how far he has been sucked into the true tangled web of deceit his great National Public Radio blinded him with. Network television followed the story of the miners because it is significant news of the time. President Bush used their plight as a microcosm of the nation; when we face adversity, if we stick together, we will survive and be stronger. That is the underlying message. If it is the truth Mr. Stoner seeks, I suggest he look back about two years. As reported by Robert Novak, the Clinton administration overestimated the economy by 30 percent – basically stating the economy was significantly stronger than it actually was. This makes Enron look like small potatoes. Did NPR reveal that full story? Probably not, because that would show deceit. The truth is, Mr. Stoner, the nation knows the truth: President Bush is trustworthy, his popularity polls prove it. Let me suggest he listen to WBAP at 1 p.m. – Rush Limbaugh – to prevent avoid being easily deceived in the future. Now if you read Novak's column, you know that he got the facts from it wrong.  It wasn't the economy that was overestimated, but a piece of the economy, the before-tax profits of domestic non-financial corporations. It was a 27 percent overestimation, not 30 percent. Clinton didn't have any involvement in the overestimation, that it was done career public servants in the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. Finally, Mr. Novak admits that there has been no allegations or any evidence that the misestimation was anything other than a projection gone wrong. The writer thought a prior writer was tricked, deceived and misinformed by NPR, but offers no evidence that the NPR story was wrong.  Instead, he presents a totally different story, apparently from Rush, about which he was misinformed and deceived.  Is there a better example of how misled dittoheads are? 8:40:32 PM    comment []

You find what you want to know sometimes the oddest way On 8/7, I wrote a post about some huge changes to 1999, 2000 and particularly 2001 GDP numbers.  As I said at the time, "The adjustments radically change the story of the economic development over the last two years."  Fast forward to today, when I was reading a letter to the editor.  The writer said that Robert Novak had reported that the Clinton administration overestimated the economy by 30 percent.  I found this curious, as everything I have seen as said that the Clinton administration was very conservative in their economic estimates.  I went to Google.com and found the Robert Novak.  Much to my surprise, it was about the recent changes to the GDP numbers. Here is the column.  Novak tries to imply an evil Clinton conspiracy was behind the number correction (though he admits there are no facts to support the allegation), but when you get beyond that, it actually gives some details on what went wrong with the original GDP estimates. 8:37:11 PM    comment []

Here is a Washington Post story on "Bush's Plan For Social Security Loses Favor".  Despite lots of talk about Dubya's Social Secutiry Privitization plan from a political point of view, somehow the reporter overlooked the fact that no one has developed any details for the plan in the 3 1/2 years since it was proposed. 7:47:04 AM    comment []

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