Category: Words

Today an item scrolled by on my Facebook feed that alleges evidence of 800,000 illegal votes in the 2016 election. The source of the article was the highly partisan Sean Hannity, quoting a Washington Times piece:

Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion.
Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.

I decided chase down this study. Here was what I found with just a little bit of effort searching Google for Jesse Richman

As a primary author cited in this piece, I need to say that I think the Washington Times article is deceptive. It makes it sound like I have done a study concerning the 2016 election. I have not.

He has more explanation of his method, and a link to the original article quoted in the Times piece. As a bounus, his original study has serious methodological shortcoming.

Perhaps a bigger problem with utilizing CCES data to make claims about the non-citizen voting in the United States is that some respondents might have mistakenly misreported their citizenship status on this survey (e.g. response error)… In fact, any response error in self-reported citizenship status could have substantially altered the authors’ conclusions because they were only able to validate the votes of five respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters in the 2008 CCES.

Just a reminder to use your build-in BS detector, or at least try a little Googling.

Texas Monthly round-up of Texas Women’s Marches:

50,000 marchers packed the streets in Austin; 22,000 gathered in Houston; as many as 9,000 in Fort Worth and 8,000 in Dallas; more than a thousand in San Antonio; 2,500 in Denton; at least 1,000 in El Paso; 500 in Amarillo; 350 in Lubbock; more than 300 in Brownsville; hundreds in Beaumont and Nacogdoches; 200 in Abilene; more than 150 in Wichita Falls; about 100 in Corpus Christi; about fifty people marched in Midland, and another fifty in College Station; and even in cold, rainy Alpine, nearly 100 marchers trekked about 1.5 miles up a hill.

Via Daring Fireball, Glenn Fleishman’s Atlantic article on curly quotes:

The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture. Take the shape of quotation marks. These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. It’s a small, infuriating difference: “this” versus “this.”

I write my content in Markdown, render it to HTML, and post raw HTML into WordPress. It’s a couple extra steps, but I get to write in a proper text application, and the output is reliable and well-formed. During that process the quotes are “educated” to transfrom plain ASCII inch marks to proper double quotes.

Ironically, the quote above is the biggest problem I’ve encountered in a while: the plain quotes are automatically educated, so I have to update the HTML output and change it back. Then I discovered that WordPress automatically educates my quotes, so I couldn’t display straight quotes even though I wanted to. I would have to update WordPress to remove the wptexture filter. I started this post explaining how easy this was for me, but only proved the point that it is a pain purposely using both proper quotes and dumb straight quotes. Using one or the other is easy.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will remain solvent – that is, able to pay 100 percent of the costs of the hospital insurance coverage it provides – through 2028, the program’s trustees wrote in their latest report. Even after 2028, when the HI trust fund is projected for depletion, incoming payroll taxes and other revenue will still cover 87 percent of Medicare hospital insurance costs.

Paul Ryan is dishonest when we charactarized Medicare as going “bankrupt.”