{"id":5905,"date":"2008-12-22T17:42:38","date_gmt":"2008-12-23T01:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5905"},"modified":"2008-12-22T17:42:38","modified_gmt":"2008-12-23T01:02:26","slug":"john-lott-rides-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5905","title":{"rendered":"John Lott Rides Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Lott is the Republican go-to guy for false statistics and cooked books<\/a>. Lott cooked the books<\/a> on his more-guns-less-crime study, then lied about it; he made up a sock puppet named Mary Rosh<\/a> to sing his praises. Most people who did these things would be pariahs in the academic community, but Lott isn\u2019t an academic \u2014 he\u2019s a conservative. And as he knows how to use nifty math-laden language to make his points appear to be more than a blogger rant, he\u2019s useful to the right.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s bit of Lott inanity comes from Fox News, in which Lott and\u00a0someone else with the\u00a0same last name\u00a0(son? Brother? Invisible friend?) declare that the Canvassing Board is, like, totally biased toward Al Franken and stuff<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Some board decisions on votes are exceedingly difficult to understand, and even watching the television coverage of their decisions this last week provided little additional insight. Here is an example where the Minnesota Canvassing Board claims the vote is clearly for Franken. Voters are supposed to fill in the small oval next to a candidate\u2019s name to vote for that candidate. The board explains its decision as there being \u201cNo Dup\u201d (presumably meaning that there was no duplicate ballot), but it is not clear how that would switch what looks like an obvious Coleman vote to a Franken vote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OMG! He\u2019s right! The vote is obviously for Norm Coleman<\/a>. What can explain this sinister action?<\/p>\n

Knock knock!<\/em><\/p>\n

Who is it? Why, it\u2019s actually accurate statistics wonk Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com! What\u2019s that, Nate? You say that there\u2019s an innocent explanation for this? I find that hard to believe, but do tell<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The ballot in question, from Minnesota\u2019s 4th Ward, 8th Precinct, was originally cast and counted for Norm Coleman. It was challenged by the Franken campaign, which claimed that it was a duplicate ballot, and designated as the 3rd challenge from that precinct. The challenge was subsequently withdrawn, as the Franken campaign withdraw essentially all of his challenges on supposed duplicate ballots. And appropriately, the Canvassing Board added the vote back into Coleman\u2019s column [\u2026]<\/p>\n

So where did Lott get the idea that the vote had been counted for Franken? Apparently from the Star Tribune\u2019s website, which had it listed it that way. The Star Tribune, keeping an unofficial tally of more than 6,000 challenged ballots, apparently made a boo-boo.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah. So the Canvassing Board counted this obviously for-Coleman ballot as\u2026a ballot for Coleman. But the Strib<\/em> had a typo. This only prove\u2019s Lott\u2019s larger point, which is\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026What in the world can that be?\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026Um, anyhow. Where were we? I\u2019m sure it was another display of Lott\u2019s dizzying intellect.<\/p>\n

The truth is that Lott can cherry-pick data with the best of \u2018em, and he does that very well. But the Minnesota recount has been conducted as fairly and openly as possible under the circumstances. Lott wants us to believe that a Canvassing Board with two Pawlenty-appointed judges somehow had it out for Norm Coleman from the start. Sorry, given the choice between John Lott and my own eyes, I\u2019ll trust my own eyes, thank you very much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Lott is the Republican go-to guy for false statistics and cooked books. Lott cooked the books on his more-guns-less-crime study, then lied about it; he made up a sock puppet named Mary Rosh to sing his praises. Most people … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}