I am not a statistician. The statistics class I took in college was easily in my top two least favorite courses^[a].

Still, the graphs in this article about the stimulus spending don’t seem to show what the article says they show:

The stimulus bill “includes help for those hardest hit by our economic crisis,” President Obama promised when he signed the bill into law on Feb. 17. “As a whole, this plan will help poor and working Americans.”

But FOXNews.com has analyzed data tracking how the stimulus money is being given out across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and it has found a perverse pattern: the states hardest hit by the recession received the least money. States with higher bankruptcy, foreclosure and unemployment rates got less money. And higher income states received more.

The transfers to the states having the least problems are large. Even after accounting for other factors, each $1,000 in a state’s per capita income means that the state got $21 more per capita in stimulus funds. With a spread of almost $38,000 in per-person income between the top and bottom states, this has a sizable impact. High-income states get considerably more stimulus money.

Admittedly, I’m just looking at the graphs here, not running any actual numbers, but it seems to me like there’s a pretty low correlation on any of the scales shown. I’ll grant that it seems true that the stimulus isn’t being distributed in a way to help the hardest hit the most, but it seems unclear that the opposite is true, as the headline would have us to believe.

Does anyone with more statistics education than me have an explanation that would support either the Administration’s line or that of this article? I’d also be interested in seeing if there was a graph that showed the correlation (or lack of same) between stimulus outlays and political contributions to Democrats (particularly those in the administration).

1. The only course even close on the “least favorite” list was taught by a professor who seemed to have a tendency to grade somewhat erratically – when comparing one returned test with a few classmates’ copies of the same test, we discovered that the same mistake that cost one person 2 points might have cost another anywhere from 10 to 15 points, with no real consistency across the tests (that is, he didn’t seem to be favoring any particular student, exactly; he just seemed to be scoring things randomly), which was an… eccentricity… that I particularly despised. [↩]

You can look different, as long as you don’t think different.

I’ve never read Just a Girl in Shorts before, and with the announcement that Becky is quitting, I guess I won’t do so in the future, either. She’s quitting because, once again, the blog has been flagged as being inappropriate by Blogger/Google (at the behest of a few readers, presumably).

Why was it flagged as inappropriate? The post from the first time that the blog was flagged may offer some insight:

I must say, I find it rather amusing that a website started by folks like Bill Bennett, is more tolerant, and less prudish, than the enlightened New Age Yuppies of Mountain View.

But I am not surprised. Although there have always been those who strenuously disagree with me, I noticed during all the months and years that I railed against George Bush, and what the Republican Party had become, conservatives, though often disagreeing with me, were regular visitors.

I started getting the bitchy stuff, and accusations of being a fascist, extreme right winger and puppy killer when I began to periodically comment on Barack Obama, and sometimes even question his divinity.

…

Democrats always talk about their party being a big tent—but I don’t think there is room in that tent for those who are against abortion on demand, favor reducing the size and power of the federal government, or just believe that many of the policies of Barack Obama are a serious threat to the Republic.

You know, I don’t have a problem with the idea that liberals may not consider those who don’t share liberal ideals to be a part of their “tent”, but it always seems to me that they only tolerate people who are different from them physically (or sexually) if those people are the same politically. As Becky C. points out, she didn’t get the attacks when she was opposing George W. Bush and being read by conservatives on a regular basis. It was only when she started opposing Barack Obama that liberals started getting vicious.

That, in my mind, compares to Senator Barbara Boxer, who was accused of making “racial” comments because she pointed out statements by the NAACP and 100 Black Men Of Atlanta to counter arguments by President/CEO of the Black Chamber of Commerce, who (according to him), had actual evidence to back up what he wanted to say. Her stance, he says, is condescending. I tend to agree. Her stance seems to be that she seems to be saying that, well, these black people agree with me, so I don’t need to consider your evidence at all.

Liberals are “big tent” – they want all the people who don’t look like them to support them. If you don’t look like them, though, and refrain from thinking like them, a lot of them will viciously attack you for any reason they can get their hands on – even if all they can find is the very differences they would’ve embraced had you been on “their side”.

The Washington Post has a review up of Brad Paisley’s newest album. The review itself is pretty positive, but it starts out by bashing country music as a whole:

Country music has always had something of an image problem, particularly among people who fancy themselves as progressives. Immigrant-trashing, gay-bashing, race-baiting, women-hating songs aren’t hard to find in the country catalogue. Heck, sometimes you can find them all on a single album.

Many of my friends don’t like country music much. My wife doesn’t like it, for that matter. I grew up listening to it, but I (mostly) quit several years ago when it seemed that new artists whose styles I didn’t like (e.g., Big & Rich, Gretchen Wilson) were being played nonstop on the radio. My faith was becoming more and more important to me, just as (it seemed to me, at least) the music I was listening to was becoming less and less edifying (and it wasn’t all that edifying to begin with). Still, the accusation here seems false to me.

It’s true that you can go through the catalogue of country music and probably find all of the things that Mr. Heim mentions at the beginning of this piece, but I’d wager that’s true of any musical genre. Is it truer of country than other music? I suspect that it isn’t. When talking it over, I really couldn’t come up with any songs off the top of my head that fit any of these groups, with the possible exception of a line in A Good Way To Get on My Bad Side that says, “A little sissy in a cowboy hat ain’t country,” but my wife and I both believe that assigning that to “gay bashing” is a bit of a stretch (her take was that it had more to do with country performers who didn’t have enough “Cowboy Cred”).

After thinking about this for a while, I decided to do a decidedly unscientific experiment. My original thought was to sample the music on the radio on our way to and from church^[a], but after discussing it with my wife, she suggested that I just look at the top songs for the last few weeks or months instead (that way, I could check the lyrics online, and she didn’t have to listen to country music). Here’s what I found at the top of the Country charts:

1. Out Last Night, Kenny Chesney
2. Whatever It Is, Zac Brown Band
3. Sideways, Dierks Bentley
4. Then, Brad Paisley
5. Kiss a Girl, Keith Urban
6. I Run to You, Lady Antebellum
7. People are Crazy, Billy Currington
8. You Belong With Me, Taylor Swift
9. Alright, Darius Rucker
10. Lost You Anyway, Toby Keith

I tried to be as harsh as I could on these songs, but the only ones I could really put in any of the categories that Mr. Heim mentions are the ones that talk about being out drinking and admiring the women who’re there, such as Out Last Night or Sideways (or talking about women while out drinking, as in People Are Crazy), and that’s a huge stretch.

Next, I checked out the Mainstream Top Ten

1. Boom Boom Pow, The Black Eyed Peas
2. Halo, Beyonce
3. Don’t Trust Me, 3Oh!3
4. Second Chance, Shinedown
5. I Know You Want Me, Pitbull
6. The Climb, Miley Cyrus
7. LoveGame, Lady Gaga
8. I Do Not Hook Up, Kelly Clarkson
9. Waking Up In Vegas, Katy Perry
10. Please Don’t Leave Me, Pink

Again, picking any of these songs as fitting any of the criteria that are listed above is a bit of a stretch, but not as much as one as for the country music. The 3Oh!3 song, Don’t Trust Me, repeats lines that are pretty insulting to women, much more so than the admiring language used in the country songs listed above. The same is true for I Know You Want Me by Pitbull. The Lady Gaga song, LoveGame, isn’t so much misogynistic but it is crude and trivializes sex.

The only conclusion I can reach from this (admittedly small) sample is that country music is no more susceptible to “Immigrant-trashing, gay-bashing, race-baiting, [or] women-hating” than any other genre of music. The image problem that it has among “people who fancy themselves as progressives” is not because of any fault of the music itself, but that those “progressives” have a tendency to believe that it’s wrong for us to judge any culture… unless it’s that of rural (particularly southern), conservative America (which they stereotype in ways that are generally unfair). Since they associate country music with this culture, they hate it, even while they’re unable to bring themselves to say that it’s their own inherent culturism that causes them to do so.

1. I thought about just picking one of my old albums at random, but realized that, since I would have avoided any of the items he mentions above, that would’ve self-selected away from his stereotypes, even if they had been true [↩]

One of the charges often levelled against pro-life activists is that they’re inconsistent. The basic argument is that if a pro-life activist (who tend, generally, to be conservative) also supports policies that would end a life (e.g., pre-emptive war, the death penalty, etc.), then the pro-life activist is being inconsistent, and, therefore, their stance is wrong (or, alternately, their stance is based solely in a patriarchal desire to keep women from having the freedom to murder an innocent life to decide what happens to their own bodies).

This argument is mostly ineffective, and, in fact, fundamentally flawed. The truth is, it’s absolutely possible to oppose the ending of innocent life while still believing that there are times when risking the lives of brave men for a cause or ending the life of an irredeemable criminal is acceptable. These situations aren’t analogous, really, and don’t pose a cognitive dissonance.

The people making these arguments (for lack of a better term, I’m going to call them the Consistents) are perfectly aware that their argument is a pretty weak straw man. They simply don’t care. With that in mind, I think it’s fair to turn that back on them. Please note that the rest of this post is (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek.

I have to wonder if the Consistents don’t have a bit of dissonance in their own minds. I’m going to take some liberties here. The Consistents assume that because being pro-life is a conservative opinion and because conservatives tend to be hawkish and support the death penalty, that all conservatives have all of these positions at the same time. To be fair, I’m going to do the same thing. Being pro-choice is usually a liberal stance, as is environmentalism. I’m going to assume the Consistents hold both of those positions, as well as other liberal standards.

Thanks to the efforts of environmentalists, DDT was outlawed back in the early 1970s. The primary reason given was that DDT allegedly caused egg shells to weaken, which led to a lot of baby birds (especially bald eagles) never making it past the egg stage. One of the main benefits of DDT was that it killed a lot of mosquitoes, which largely made malaria a thing of the past in most of the Western world. One of the side effects of outlawing DDT, therefore, is that a huge number of people have died from malaria, specifically in Africa.

Therefore, our Consistents believe that unborn birds are so important that a lot of people should die to protect them.

On the other hand, the Consistents believe that unborn humans are so unimportant that murdering them should be perfectly acceptable if their mothers would prefer not to be inconvenienced by them.

Seems rather… inconsistent^[a], doesn’t it?

[Update: Ed points out in the comments that my history of DDT with respect to environmentalism and malaria in Africa is off. I think the point still stands (the "inconsistency" pointed out by the Consistents really isn't one), but my analogy is wrong.]

1. Of course, there is a way to reconcile these two beliefs, and it dovetails nicely with the Consistents’ support of affirmative action policies (again, we’re assuming they cling to all leftist policies). Outlawing DDT internationally disproportionately affected Africans. Abortion disproportionately affects African-American babies. Affirmative action policies attempt to tell us that certain classes of people are unfit to compete in the work force without assistance from the government. Which people? Minorities in general, but the intent was to “help”, specifically, African-Americans. Are you detecting a pattern? Makes you wonder why they’re so quick to call conservatives racists, doesn’t it?

   Of course, the preceding footnote is (mostly) a matter of me taking issues out of context and twisting their intent (slightly), but the Consistents (and many of their fellow leftists) seem to feel that’s fair when taking on conservatives…

   [↩]