One of the catechisms of the liberal faith is that they are altruistic while conservatives are selfish. Liberals like this part of their faith because it makes conservatives not only wrong about politics but bad people to boot. (And I do mean boot.)

This belief being a matter of faith and not fact, it is unsupported by the data, which I’ll get to in a moment. So, instead, liberals support it with parables.

One I recently saw is typical. A liberal wrote about his conservative friend who purportedly is selfish, as conservatives purportedly are.

In contrast was this liberal himself, who, he modestly reported, is altruistic. He informed us that his altruism is good for his soul.

Apart from the incongruity of performing altruism for the purpose of benefiting one’s own soul, I have two questions about this story, and then we’ll get to the data.

First, what kind of altruist goes around advertising his altruism? Continue reading →

The true believers of global warming got some bad news recently. Namely, things are not so bad. Here’s the story.

They had predicted, often and repeatedly, that global warming would melt the ice in Antarctica. Melting Antarctic ice would be a disaster because it would flow into the oceans, making them rise like water in a bathtub with the faucet left on.

The skeptics were skeptical. For expressing their scientific skepticism, the believers name-called them “deniers,” took away their professorships and denied them government grants for their work.

The local “green guy” with the ski company in Aspen, which makes money by burning fossil fuels to drag people up a hill so that they can amuse themselves by sliding back down, purchased additional fossil fuel indulgences from the high priests by announcing that people who don’t chant the global warming mantra cannot be elected to public office anymore.

It turns out, however, that Continue reading →

Last month, we saw the World Series and another set of debates in the presidential election.

In the World Series, fair-minded umpires let the players play. They called balls and strikes the way they saw them. The best team won.

In the debates, the umpires cheated. Under the guise of moderators, they didn’t just call the balls and strikes — they delivered the pitches. They delivered pitch after pitch for the Democrats and called strike after strike against the Republicans.

And those pitches were not just any kind of pitch. Not confident of their ability to get fastballs past the Republican candidates, the moderators doctored the ball by smearing their questions with bias and smirk. They threw spitballs.

Their goal was not to ask hard policy questions that might inform viewers as to which GOP candidate would be the best president. It was to name-call them, mock them and strike them out.

In contrast, the moderators in the one Dem debate served up not spitballs but softballs, and invited the Dem candidates to participate in a home-run derby.

The moderators assumed they would get away with bending the rules because they always had.

And so in a scene right out of a Saturday Night Live skit, Continue reading →