Brendan Nyhan

We will never get rid of the misperception that Saddam Hussein had WMDs as long as Fox News is around. Media Matters is reporting that the channel aired an absurd discussion of — get this — whether Saddam had WMDs that were given to Syria and then passed to Hezbollah:

During a segment in which John Gibson and Julie Banderas were speculating on whether there was any truth to the baseless reports and statements from unidentified “experts” that Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction had been secretly transported from Iraq to Syria before the Iraq war and “might have been put in the hands of Hezbollah,” the onscreen text read: “Are Saddam Hussein’s WMDs Now in Hezbollah’s Hands?”

Note that this theory requires (a) Saddam had WMDs; (b) they were shipped to Syria before the invasion; and (c) Syria has now given them to Hezbollah. There’s no credible evidence supporting any of these claims, and all three have to be true for this speculation to be accurate.

Here’s a picture of the on-screen text that Fox showed during the segment:

Just unbelievable. To view the video clip and read the full transcript, go to the article on the Media Matters website.

In an otherwise useful fact-checking article on claims made during the stem cell debate in Congress, Wired News endorses the misleading “ban” rhetoric of John Kerry and other supporters of embryonic stem cell research:

“There is no ban at the present time on research in this country on embryonic stem cells.” — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma)

Misleading. While it’s technically true that no law bans embryonic stem-cell research, current administration policies have had much the same effect as a ban. Under an executive order, no federal funding can be used for research on embryonic stem-cell lines that were created after 9 p.m. on Aug. 9, 2001. That has had the practical result of stymieing U.S. embryonic stem-cell research, and is one of the main reasons HR810 was drafted in the first place.

This is awful fact-checking. A citizen who hears the claim that there is a ban on stem cell research will infer that it is legally prohibited (as in the definition of ban: “to prohibit especially by legal means”). That is simply not accurate. Whether Bush’s policy makes private research difficult or not, it is more than “technically true” to say that no ban exists. The correct statement is that federally funded research is limited to certain embryonic stem cell lines. People who summarize this as a “ban” without clarifying their meaning are being misleading.

The Washington Post notes a sad victory for the reality-based community (via Josh Marshall):

Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war. In the first half of this year, 4,338 Iraqi civilians died violent deaths, according to a new report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. Last month alone, 3,149 civilians were killed — an average of more than 100 a day.

“It’s like after Katrina, when the secretary of homeland security was saying all those people weren’t really stranded when we were all watching it on TV,” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.). “I still hear about that. We can’t look like we won’t face reality.”

Despite my concern about the effectiveness of manipulative PR, facts should still prevail in the long run.

If Rudy Giuliani runs for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, we’re going to hear a lot of talk about how great a job he did fighting crime in New York City. The ever-compliant Chris Matthews recently touted Giuliani’s record on “Hardball”:

Let me ask you about Rudy Giuliani. We just had a little joust off-camera—I’m always told don’t waste it off-camera. I believe he’s not only running, I think he’s going to win the whole thing come around the next election, the way things look right now.

…Here’s my thought. I want to throw it out again, I’m not going to argue again. I’ve got a position, I think he’s going to win the next presidential election, but let me tell you something. I think the No. 1 issue, check me on this, both of you, you first: Is security the No. 1 issue in the country right now?

…Who’s tougher than him on security out there, Democrat or Republican?

…We’ve got a murder problem in Washington, D.C., in Baltimore, in Philly. There’s something going on, it’s not the economy. We’ve got a street problem and isn’t Rudy the toughest cop in the country?

…You could walk around New York when he was mayor and wander around late at night and you felt safe as hell.

This is basically an urban legend. As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner write in Freakonomics (pp. 129-130), Giuliani’s “broken window” approach to fighting crime “probably had little effect” — he got credit for a drop in crime that began before he took office and happened all across the country:

First, the drop in crime in New York began in 1990. By the end of 1993, the rate of property crime and violent crime, including homicides, had already fallen nearly 20 percent. Rudolph Giuliani, however, did not become mayor — and install [police commissioner William] Bratton — until early 1994. Crime was well on its way down before either man arrived…

Second, the new police strategies were accompanied by a much more significant change within the police force: a hiring binge. Between 1991 and 2001, the NYPD grew by 45 percent, more than three times the national average. As argued above an increase in the number of police, regardless of new strategies, has been proven to reduce crime… Many of these new police were in fact hired by David Dinkins, the mayor whom Giuliani defeated. Dinkins had been desperate to secure the law-and-order vote, having known all along that his opponent would be Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor…

Most damaging to the claim that New York’s police innovations radically lowered crime is one simple and often overlooked fact: crime went down everywhere in the 1990s, not only in New York.

In short, the Giuliani “toughest cop” theory isn’t supported by the evidence. But that doesn’t mean the media won’t parrot it when Rudy runs.

John Kerry is still pushing the line that President Bush has instituted a “ban” on stem cell research (via OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web Today):

“If you ever need to be reminded of why it’s morally right to lift the ban on stem cell research, just listen to Beth [a paralyzed Kerry intern],” Kerry said in a statement. “She’s more eloquent on this subject than any lobbyist or member of Congress.”

As I showed back in August 2004 for Spinsanity, the Kerry campaign frequently repeated this line, which falsely suggests that all stem cell research is off limits:

The reality is that the President has actually allowed federal funding for research into embryonic stem cell lines that had already been created before August 9, 2001… Furthermore, privately-funded research can be conducted without restrictions in the United States. The only “ban” is on federal funding for new stem cell lines that were not included in Bush’s original group…

Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of Bush’s policy, but not Kerry’s rhetoric – it’s blatantly misleading.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Duncan Black, aka Atrios, explains why the left is angry with Joe Lieberman. In the process, though, he appears to make a factual error:

Late last year, after President Bush’s job approval ratings hit record lows, Lieberman decided to lash out at the administration’s critics, writing in the ultraconservative Wall Street Journal editorial pages that “we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.” In this he echoed the most toxic of Republican talking points — that criticizing the conduct of the war is actually damaging to national security.

But Lieberman made that statement verbally, not in the Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote in November. Indeed, Atrios presented a transcript on his site in which CNN’s Wolf Blitzer played the clip of Lieberman making the statement.

This Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article from December 2005 makes the sequence clear:

Lieberman, who in 2000 ran unsuccessfully for the vice presidency, made his fourth trip to Iraq late last month. Afterward he gained attention for a Wall Street Journal op-ed article in which he asserted that progress would be lost in spreading democracy in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East, if U.S. troops were brought home before the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country.

Tuesday, Lieberman urged Democrats to acknowledge that President Bush will be commander-in-chief for three more “critical” years. “In matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril,” he said.

Lieberman still made the statement. But Black should get the facts right, especially when he’s writing in a major newspaper.

Phil Gingrey, a House Republican from Georgia, has figured out the best US diplomatic approach to the crisis in the Middle East:

Another Georgia Republican, Representative Phil Gingrey, said support for traditional marriage “is perhaps the best message we can give to the Middle East and all the trouble they’re having over there right now.”

Next up: Why banning abortion is the key to winning the war on terror.

Did you know that many scholars still believe the death penalty deters crime? I didn’t.

Among others, Richard Posner, an influential appeals court judge and legal scholar, and Nobel laureate Gary Becker have both recently endorsed scholarship suggesting that the death penalty deters homicide.

But a very useful article by John Donohue and Justin Wolfers in The Economist’s Voice demolishes that claim (registration required to view PDF). Reanalyzing the most prominent recent paper in the field, which claims to find that each execution deters 18 homicides, they find that standard econometric adjustments for the structure of the data yield a confidence interval ranging from “119 lives saved per execution to 82 lives lost” — essentially, a null result. (And there are a number of other, more technical problems with the paper in question — see also this followup.) Donohue and Wolfers then reanalyze a superior dataset and find that most model specifications suggest an increase in executions is associated with a limited increase in the number of homicides.

In short, there does not appear to be any convincing empirical evidence that the death penalty deters homicides. Some may support the death penalty for moral reasons alone, but for most Americans, that is not enough. I suspect that the combination of this finding and the threat of executing innocent people will cause more states to roll the policy back in the future.

Update 7/18 10:46 AM: Here’s the Stanford Law Review paper on which the Donohue and Wolfers article referenced above is based (registration required to view PDF).

If you missed the episode of “This American Life” that ran last weekend (a rerun from February 2005), do not miss it. It’s the story of the exoneration of a man named Collin Warner for a murder he did not commit after more than twenty years in prison. The person who made it happen is Warner’s childhood friend, Carl King. Here’s a summary of the episode, which is titled “D.I.Y.”:

After four lawyers fail to get an innocent man out of prison, his friend takes on the case himself. He becomes a do-it-yourself investigator. He learns to read court records, he tracks down hard-to-find witnesses, he gets the real murderer to come forward with his story. In the end, he’s able to accomplish all sorts of things the police and the professionals can’t.

It’s available as a free streaming MP3 or for purchase. Highly recommended.

As Paul Krugman points out today, the administration forecast a war cost of $50-60 billion in 2002. Now military commanders are saying we won’t be able to leave until 2016.

As Krugman notes, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts a vastly higher cost if US forces stay in Iraq that long (PDF). CBO estimates we have already spent $290 billion on Iraq. If the number of troops in Iraq shrinks from “170,000 in 2007 to 40,000 by the end of calendar year 2010” and stays at that level through 2016, it estimates an additional cost of $368 billion from 2007-2016.

The total? $658 billion. So the administration was only off … by a factor of 10.