Orton's Arm

I don't want to ruin Coli's thread, so let's continue this fight over on the "Err Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy" thread.

The concept of the separation of church and state is based on the First Amendment That "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" language was intended to keep any given church from receiving the favorable treatment the Church Of England received in England. You would have to interpret the establishment clause's language very broadly indeed if you were going to stop voucher money from going to Catholic or Muslim or Protestant or Jewish schools. If you interpreted the Second Amendment equally broadly, Bill Gates would have his own private nuclear arsenal.

You know far less about economics than anyone allowed within a fifty mile radius of any of the schools I attended.

Before the investigations, Starr was considered fairly moderate. He had political ambitions of his own, and didn't want to offend anyone by digging too deeply into Whitewater. There are people who've served jail time instead of coming clean about Whitewater. George Stephanopoulos discussed the Whitewater cover-up in his book All Too Human. He'd advised that the Whitewater coverup be dropped, both because (in his eyes) the Clintons hadn't done anything wrong, and because the coverup was getting in the way of doing the things Clinton had been elected to do. Hillary responded to this suggestion by screaming at Stephanopoulos in front of a number of people. She accused him of disloyalty, and insinuated he'd never really been loyal. Utterly overcome with the strength of her own emotion, Hillary finally stormed out of the room. Draw your own conclusions about whether the Clintons are guilty of wrongdoing.

Let's see: an intern having an affair with the president--and then both of them lying about it, is the same thing as an Arkansas governor and his wife engaging in illegal transactions involving an S&L.

You tend to hit people over the head with a hammer. As such, I can see how you wouldn't understand how other people are able to use more subtle, yet sometimes more effective, ways of communicating their points.

Perhaps you should start following your own advice. You don't know anything about how careers were allocated in East Germany, but you act like you do. You know literally less than nothing about regression toward the mean. At least someone with no ideas at all wouldn't be able to confuse himself on the subject the way you've done. Yet you act like you're a divine authority on both these issues. You're not, so shut up.

I don't believe I've insulted your intelligence, but you're tempting me to do it here. I did not use the $88 billion/$1.7 trillion discrepancy to criticize the study's methodolgy. Do you understand? I am not attacking the study' methodology here. What I am saying--and please drill this fact through your three foot thick skull--is that if you only look at a 5% slice of total U.S. healthcare spending, you can't conclude that illegal aliens are only imposing $11 per household in extra healthcare costs. Am I accusing the study's authors of drawing this incorrect conclusion? Of course not. But I've seen that conclusion erroneously drawn on this thread, and that's what I'm taking issue with.

Okay, fine. I'll start believing that chemists and engineers in East Germany got their careers based strictly on party loyalty and connections; without any reference to merit whatsoever. I'll start believing that the HyperStat examples and explanations of regression toward the mean are utterly moronic. I'll adopt these beliefs because you say I should, and against my better judgement. This, I'm afraid, is what you mean by "healing myself."

Wow! I've seen plenty of false confidence on these PPP boards, but your post takes the cake. That's amazing. Not only did you fail to understand my post, but you also didn't understand the Bungee Jumper post which you're trying to reference. Nor, evidently, did you understand the press release to which I was replying. The study looked at a specific $88 billion portion of U.S. healthcare spending. Of the $88 billion it looked at, it concluded $1.1 billion represented taxpayers paying for illegal aliens' healthcare. But the $88 billion the study looked at represents just 5% of U.S. healthcare spending. Because it apparently ignored the other 95%, it can't quantify the extent to which illegal aliens are imposing costs on the U.S. healthcare system. Sorry if this burst your ill-founded sense of smug self-superiority. Well, not really.

I'd argue the Lewinsky scandal should have been news, because a man who is dishonest towards his wife is more likely to be dishonst toward his nation. In any case, Clinton used his influence to get Lewinsky a good job elsewhere. I have the feeling it's illegal to give women career rewards in exchange for sexual favors. At very least it's a bad example for everyone else. I agree though the media covered the scandal because of its sensationalism, and not because of any deeper concern for the moral issues involved. I felt that the Whitewater affair represented a far graver abuse of power than did the help Clinton provided Lewinsky. However, the Whitewater affair didn't involve sex or violence or anything. It was boring, and didn't get the attention it should have from the media.

If you don't understand what's being debated, feel free to keep silent.

A dozen other people who do statistics for a living participated in that thread, and they all called me an idiot? Who are they, and why haven't they been fired yet? How is your dirty dozen claim consistent with your other claim that the three statistics experts on the PPP boards are yourself, Ramius, and Coli?

You obviously didn't understand my post. What else is new?

You didn't understand my post. I said that it wasn't a methodological mistake to look at only a 5% slice of healthcare costs. I also said that because the study only looks at that slice, it can't be used to support the conclusion that illegal aliens only impose $11 per household in added healtcare costs.

Why did I say it? Because I remember reading those articles, and thinking their intent was pretty transparent.

Wraith--who does statistics for a living--agreed that my explanation of regression toward the mean is fundamentally correct. Don't embarrass yourself by attempting to comment on my knowledge of either statistics or of economics.

I'd like to point out a flaw in the way this study's conclusions are being used. The total size of the pie that the study is looking at is $88 billion of government healthcare spending. Of that $88 billion, supposedly only $1.1 billion (1.25%) goes to providing healthcare for illegal aliens. However, U.S. healthcare spending for 2003 wasn't $88 billion. It was $1.7 trillion. The study is looking at only 5% of total U.S. spending on healthcare. That's fine from a methodology standpoint, but you can't rightfully conclude that illegal immigrants only create $11 in heathcare costs per household until you've examined the 95% of U.S. healthcare spending that the study apparently ignored.

This is one of the best posts I've seen.

It would have cost $12.95 to read what's likely a piece of Leftist propaganda, which isn't going to happen. I get the feeling nobody else on this thread cared to be ripped off in that particular way either. But without having read the study, I can tell you there are various ways to calculate cost; in order to prove a point you're trying to make. For example, let's say you wanted to show a low cost number for being a passenger on an airplane. You'd look at the marginal cost of the extra jet fuel required for one extra passenger. If you wanted to show a high cost, you'd start allocating overhead costs, such as a portion of the pilot's salary, costs associated with leasing and maintaining the airplane, airport service fees, stuff like that. Under the first method, you could get a cost of a few dollars. Under the second, you could get a cost in the hundreds. Suppose an illegal alien receives services from a hospital, and suppose the hospital doesn't get paid for providing those services. I suspect the study was set up in such a way that whatever costs the hospital may have incurred were ignored. It was probably assumed that none of these costs were passed onto the government in some other form. If an illegal alien walked into a hospital, received a service, walked out, and the government didn't pay anything for this, you could argue that there was no cost. But if a million illegal aliens walk into hospitals, receive services, and walk out, there is a cost to everyone else involved. The hospitals need to get paid from someone for all the extra doctors and nurses and equipment and building space they're using to treat those illegal aliens. The extra money may come from higher HMO premiums, higher Medicare and Medicaid costs, or from other sources, but it has to come from somewhere.

During the 1992 Democratic primaries, all the reporters traveling with those Democratic candidates supported Clinton. Then you have obvious sources of support, such as the NY Times and the big three networks. During the Lewinsky scandal, CNN.com had news articles about how smart children learn to lie at an earlier age than do other children. They also had articles about how the most attractive male birds will cheat on their spouses. Am I supposed to ignore all this because you've started making vague references to "scholarly research" that allegedly shows a hostile media toward Clinton? Ha! It's probably just some liberal think tank or other to which you're referring. Well, Ann Coulter's done research that shows just the opposite: that the media is more friendly toward liberals than toward conservatives. Well, you say, Coulter is a very partisan source. But how do I know the "scholarly research" to which you're referring isn't equally partisan?

Reason D: it would have been politically incorrect. Bernard Goldberg had some pretty interesting examples of that in his book about media bias.

That doesn't ring true at all. The majority of the media should have been negative toward him. They weren't.

Quite frankly, ignoring the OL was TD's biggest problem. Look at my sig.

Yeah, TD was a great GM, as demonstrated by the Bills' 5-11 record his last year here. Imagine how bad our record would have been without him.