Racist John Lott Spanked Over Florida Analysis

[MrBenchley]

Lest we forget, Mary Rosh also lends his crackpot pseudoscience to other areas of right wing concern...like spinning away open bigotry.

"Imagine an election in Northern Ireland where one of every nine or ten ballots cast by Protestants was rejected as invalid compared to less than one of fifty ballots cast by Catholics. This would be a stunning international scandal, with cries of outrage and protest and calls for the most thorough of investigations. Substitute Florida for Northern Ireland, blacks for Protestants, and whites for Catholics and that is precisely what happened in the 2000 presidential election in the United States, the world’s longest surviving democracy.
Moreover, John Lott, the analyst who conducted a statistical study for the dissenters (who was found to have created a sock puppet, Mary Rosh, on the Internet to heap praise on his work and even review one of his books) has since abandoned the argument presented in the dissenter’s report. He now makes instead the bizarre claim that the burden of ballot rejection fell upon African-American Republicans, who were just 5 percent of black voters. Lott asserts that black Republicans “are 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African-American to produce non-voted ballots.” If this claim were true, then the rate of ballot rejection for African-Americans was 540 percent to 660 percent – an impossible 5 to 6 ballots turned aside for every ballot cast.
Lott’s work indicates just how desperately the dissenters and their political allies have sought to obscure what actually happened in Florida. "

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/3798.html

[papau]

1. And the media say W and Jeb have a nice honest smile - a direct

way of speaking - truth tellers - great credibilty

Could our media be made up of a bunch of liars?

:-)

[nodictators]

2. Lott, along with James Glassman, had an op-ed come out the same day ...

...that the NORC ballot review media analysis was published, Nov. 12, 2001. Curiously, Lott had taught for one year at the University of Chicago, the home of NORC. The op-ed was published in the LA Times. Lott was cited in the NY Times articles on the same day.

Lott's "analysis" is pure crap. The clown was way off with the facts. For instance, he claimed there were about 22,000 black Repub-registered voters in Florida. The official registration data showed more than 49,000.

Apparently, he took his data from the Miami Herald ballot review data. His number was exactly what one gets by summing a field called something like "brep". Unfortunately, that table was NOT registration data. Also, the M-H data had no data for Glades county, where there were 8 black Repubs, according to the official FL registration data.

In their op-ed Lott and Glassman spun a conspiracy theory that somehow black Repubs in counties with a black election supervisor had the highest rates of uncounted ballots. They never mention how the hell any county election supervisor could do that, since ther ar often hundreds of precincts in a county.

Neat, eh? They trashed black voters as well as black county election supervisors.

[MrBenchley]

3. Nor is this Lott's only racist "science"

The ugly crackpot's also published a "study" purporting to show that minority police officers CAUSE crime.

And of course he leapt quickly into the breach to defend Rush Limbaugh with a "study" when the flabby junkie attacked McNabb and black quarterbacks last fall.