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Peder DeFor

Minneapolis, Minnesota
Commenter for
1 year 17 weeks

Recent Comments

Posted on 05/02/13 at 07:47 pm in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

The poll question that marked the famous 90% wasn't on specific legislation, it was on whether or not there should be more background checks. In other words, I didn't start the conflating.

Posted on 05/02/13 at 07:52 pm in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

Well Neal, now you know. There is lots of money on both sides of just about every contentious issue. I personally think that the opinions form and then the money lines up later. In other words, I think that even if we had publicly funded campaigns, we'd still have things like strong gun supporters in Congress.

Posted on 05/02/13 at 08:02 pm in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

Hey Ray, do you remember the whole meme about how Bush lied us into war? You may not remember this, but repeated investigations have shown that this wasn't true at all. The intelligence community believed that Iraq was developing WMDs. Bush believed this and acted as he saw fit. Now obviously, you can question whether those actions were correct but he didn't lie about it. And yet, Dems and their allies repeated this accusation endlessly. In fact, you still hear it.
Why do they do...

Posted on 05/03/13 at 07:44 am in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

Well who doesn't support background checks? We have significant ones in place already. From what I understand some 40,000 checks are done daily.
And if the poll question didn't have any connection to the legislation, why is it being brought up in support of passing legislation?

Paul, stop digging.

Posted on 05/05/13 at 12:51 pm in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

The 40% factoid is also problematic, as it relies on a small study that was done more than fifteen years ago. In fact, that's another example of a number that is throw out and accepted fairly uncritically from the gatekeepers, when it really should get some challenge. More on that here:...

Posted on 05/05/13 at 01:28 pm in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

(Instead of creating a half dozen threads, I'll just respond here.)

I'll still submit that Bush was wrong but didn't lie. A lie is a deception on purpose, not just a case of someone saying something that turned out to be wrong. (For instance, Obama was wrong on the benefits of his spending splurge, but that doesn't mean he lied about it.) I'll submit that the best case against Bush lying, is the fact that his rhetoric on whether Iraq and WMD was fully in step with that of the...

Posted on 05/07/13 at 07:47 am in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

Obama was very wrong about the stimulus effect on unemployment. Others, notably Krugman, argued that it wouldn't be enough, but not the Obama administration. They even famously released a graphic that showed what would happen to unemployment under the stimulus and non-stimulus scenarios. They were very, very wrong.
I've already said that I don't think Bush lied. He was wrong on some important things, the biggest probably being the impact of Hussein on global terrorism. But the...

Posted on 05/07/13 at 08:06 am in response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson and the 'attack on fact'

Neal, I appreciate the directness of your reply, even if I disagree with parts of it. Most of the statements in the report fall fully under the heading of 'wrong in retrospect'. The rest are best described as 'overstating the evidence'. Which is problematic, but understandable. If the intelligence community believed for years that Iraq had, or was close to having, WMD, then it is understandable to treat that conclusion as a certainty. This is different than lying.
An earlier...

Posted on 05/01/13 at 01:33 pm in response to How a heavy police presence in high-crime neighborhoods hurts democracy

I'm curious if Weaver talked about the proportion of the incarceration that is due to the drug war and how that compares to other countries. I'm also curious how much of the 'stop and frisk' approach is drug prevention and how much is related to actual violent crime. If we stopped focusing on the more victimless crimes, we'd be better off in many ways.

Posted on 05/02/13 at 08:41 am in response to How a heavy police presence in high-crime neighborhoods hurts democracy

It seems like adding a higher police presence to a high crime area, would be an obvious solution. I can understand the objections though. I'm curious about alternative methods. Do we have any other tried and true options? Perhaps Weaver has mentioned something in her book, but I haven't read it.
My fear is that if we lessen the police presence in an already high crime area, we would see even more crime. We'd also see longer response time to calls for help. I'm guessing we'd see...