Rachel,
First of all, I love your show. I guess I'm more of a liberal on most issues, but more than wanting to take sides, I really just like hearing the facts about what's going on. So much of the "news" is about poll numbers or speculation. It's almost like the news anchors have become pundits, and you're the one that just gives us the actual facts. Plus it's hilarious when you get all excited about things like which cocktails were served at a White House cocktail party. =)
Anyway, I'm glad you're still following the "Discrimination based on sexual orientation? Yup, that's fine" story from Virginia. It's really shocking and horrible and most people (news people and regular Americans) only seem to have the attention span to follow it for a day or two. I was thinking: Though it doesn't happen often (maybe ever), if someone were fired for being straight, that would also constitute discrimination based on sexual orientation, wouldn't it? Which means it would be perfectly legal to do in Virginia, and in several other states that don't have an ENDA-like law.
What do you think about the following scenario: There is a government official in VA who is gay, but has straight employees who work under him. He picks one of them and fires him without explanation. When questioned, he says that the official was "one of those heterosexuals" and although he was a good employee, "it was just hurting the morale of our government office to have a breeder in our offices. After all, there were women who worked in the same office with this guy. Who knows what might have happened? I wish him the best of luck in life, with his "partner" and hold no personal grudge against him, but this is what is needed for the proper functioning of the Virginia government" etc.
Of course, you would probably want to get the permission of the person who was going to be fired, maybe make it someone who was planning on leaving anyway, or has enough money saved up to be out of work for a little while. But the idea is that then straight people across Virginia and across the country would be livid. "How dare you fire someone just because they're not the same sexual orientation as you are! What he does in the bedroom has no bearing on how he does his job or serves his state! We should judge people based on their work ethic and intelligence, not their sexual orientation!" And then anyone who agreed with the governor's position (maybe even the governor himself?) would pause for a second and go "Ohhhhhh, so that's how it feels when the law doesn't protect you."
What do you think? Is it feasible? Do you know any straight Virginia government employees that would be up for it? Would people dismiss it as a cheap, irresponsible publicity stunt? Maybe just presenting this as a hypothetical would make people think twice about it.
Tyler Breisacher
http://trojansax.blogspot.com
Showing posts with label Rachel Maddow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rachel Maddow. Show all posts
3.27.2010
Discrimination
If you know me at all, you know I love The Rachel Maddow Show. One of the things that Rachel often says, both on her show and her website, is that they really do read the emails that they get. So I decided to send her an email about an idea that's been floating around in my mind for a while. We'll see if they respond, or maybe even mention my idea on the air (unlikely, but possible, right?). Here's my message (linkified for my blog audience).
1.28.2010
The numbers don't lie. Except when they do.
On The Rachel Maddow Show today, they did a cute little segment where they played a fake game show called Pin the Debt on the Donkey whose purpose was to point out that Republican presidents in recent history have added much more to the national debt than Democratic presidents. To that end, they showed this graph.
I don't want to argue about this from a political standpoint, or imply that Rachel Maddow's staff got the numbers wrong* or anything like that. My issue with this graph is that the way the graph is designed deceives you into thinking Reagan spent way way more than anyone else. It's the kind of simple misunderstanding of math that Good Math, Bad Math is all about. First of all, some of these presidents were in office for 4 years, and others for 8. They put this in the "fine print" so to speak, but this is a graph! The point is to show information visually. They could have used the average increase per year, which is also readily available on PresidentialDebt.org. That graph would look like this:
(Sorry it doesn't look as fancy as Rachel's. Upper Harmonics' graphics department consists of, well, me and OpenOffice.org.) In this graph, things look a little more balanced, and you could argue that if Carter and Bush Sr. had gotten a second term, they would have increased the debt by about as much as they did during their first term, so it's a little more fair.
I don't think this is the biggest issue though. The real problem with this graph is that the numbers are percentages, not absolute numbers. This would be of no consequence if they were percentages of the same thing. But each number is a percentage of the national debt at the start of that president's term. So if you happened to be president after someone who (as Rachel points out) nearly tripled the national debt, you look much better in comparison. Not just because you're being compared to someone who spent a lot of money, but because your spending is being reported as a percentage of a higher number. If we look at each president's debt increase in actual dollars (actually, trillions of dollars), we get this:
Wow! You mean the first President Bush and President Clinton actually increased the national debt by the same amount? Yup. And both of them increased the debt by just a little less than Reagan did? Yes. But that's not really fair, you say. Clinton had two terms, and Bush only had one. Okay, let's look at each term, rather than each president, shall we?
This still illustrates the general point Rachel Maddow was trying to make: The worst four-year presidential terms of national debt increase in recent history were mostly during Republican administrations, and the best were mostly during Democratic ones. But I think the graph they chose to create didn't show the whole story as clearly as it could have.
You don't have to be an economics or math major to understand this. This is very simple math. A given amount of money may be a small percentage of one value, and an enormous percentage of another value. Comparing percentages the way they did on the show distorts the facts.
To be clear, I don't think Rachel Maddow or her staff were intentionally deceiving anyone or trying to distort the truth -- it sounds cliche but I'm really not trying to make this into a politcal thing. I suspect they just took the five easiest-to-spot numbers off of PresidentialDebt.org and quickly threw them onto a graph. So some of the blame should lie with that site, which made those numbers a bit more prominent than they should have been.
* Although, they rounded Bush Sr.'s number from 55.6% (direct from PresidentialDebt.org) to 55%. We could argue about the .5 rule all day, but I think we can all agree that 55.6 rounds to 56, right? Also, during the segment, she says George W. Bush grew the national debt by $4.9 trillion. The number is actually more like $5.04 trillion, which I assume is due to another rounding error. Either that or they got that number from another source that uses the actual inauguration days, instead of the end of the year, as the delineation between presidencies.
I don't want to argue about this from a political standpoint, or imply that Rachel Maddow's staff got the numbers wrong* or anything like that. My issue with this graph is that the way the graph is designed deceives you into thinking Reagan spent way way more than anyone else. It's the kind of simple misunderstanding of math that Good Math, Bad Math is all about. First of all, some of these presidents were in office for 4 years, and others for 8. They put this in the "fine print" so to speak, but this is a graph! The point is to show information visually. They could have used the average increase per year, which is also readily available on PresidentialDebt.org. That graph would look like this:
(Sorry it doesn't look as fancy as Rachel's. Upper Harmonics' graphics department consists of, well, me and OpenOffice.org.) In this graph, things look a little more balanced, and you could argue that if Carter and Bush Sr. had gotten a second term, they would have increased the debt by about as much as they did during their first term, so it's a little more fair.
I don't think this is the biggest issue though. The real problem with this graph is that the numbers are percentages, not absolute numbers. This would be of no consequence if they were percentages of the same thing. But each number is a percentage of the national debt at the start of that president's term. So if you happened to be president after someone who (as Rachel points out) nearly tripled the national debt, you look much better in comparison. Not just because you're being compared to someone who spent a lot of money, but because your spending is being reported as a percentage of a higher number. If we look at each president's debt increase in actual dollars (actually, trillions of dollars), we get this:
Wow! You mean the first President Bush and President Clinton actually increased the national debt by the same amount? Yup. And both of them increased the debt by just a little less than Reagan did? Yes. But that's not really fair, you say. Clinton had two terms, and Bush only had one. Okay, let's look at each term, rather than each president, shall we?
This still illustrates the general point Rachel Maddow was trying to make: The worst four-year presidential terms of national debt increase in recent history were mostly during Republican administrations, and the best were mostly during Democratic ones. But I think the graph they chose to create didn't show the whole story as clearly as it could have.
You don't have to be an economics or math major to understand this. This is very simple math. A given amount of money may be a small percentage of one value, and an enormous percentage of another value. Comparing percentages the way they did on the show distorts the facts.
To be clear, I don't think Rachel Maddow or her staff were intentionally deceiving anyone or trying to distort the truth -- it sounds cliche but I'm really not trying to make this into a politcal thing. I suspect they just took the five easiest-to-spot numbers off of PresidentialDebt.org and quickly threw them onto a graph. So some of the blame should lie with that site, which made those numbers a bit more prominent than they should have been.
* Although, they rounded Bush Sr.'s number from 55.6% (direct from PresidentialDebt.org) to 55%. We could argue about the .5 rule all day, but I think we can all agree that 55.6 rounds to 56, right? Also, during the segment, she says George W. Bush grew the national debt by $4.9 trillion. The number is actually more like $5.04 trillion, which I assume is due to another rounding error. Either that or they got that number from another source that uses the actual inauguration days, instead of the end of the year, as the delineation between presidencies.
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