Friday, October 03, 2008 - Posts
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sponsorship
See all Swift Boat Watch entries here.
Who They Are: Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund
Purpose: Protecting endangered species by promoting the election of pro-environment lawmakers
Senior Director: William Lutz
Funding: According to the WSJ, the group is funded mostly by small donors.
Cost: The group says it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for airtime but would not specify an exact amount.
Where It Ran: The ad has run in Florida, Ohio, and Michigan and will expand into Colorado and Northern Virginia.
Claims: The spot crosscuts between images of Sarah Palin and footage of aerial hunting, stating that Palin supported aerial hunting and also proposed a $150 bounty fee for the foreleg of any killed wolves in order to encourage the practice.
Accuracy: The ad describes the basics of Palin’s record correctly but fails to mention the rationale for aerial hunting, which supporters refer to as “predator control.” These proponents argue that killing gray wolves, which are abundant in Alaska though they have been on and off the endangered species list in the continental United States, is necessary to maintain sufficient levels of moose and caribou for subsistence hunters that rely on those animals for their food. Whether the policy really helps these hunters is another question. Various groups of scientists have also questioned the logic of the policy, saying it didn’t consider the imperative of maintaining predator populations. Critics have also said that predator-control operations should be limited to fish and game agents.
Swift Boat Rating: 
The ad gets the essentials of Palin’s record right. While some may disagree with its characterization of aerial hunting, the characterization is not blatantly unfair.
Background: After Palin proposed the bounty on wolves’ forelegs, Defenders of Wildlife themselves filed a lawsuit that forced her to back off the policy.
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sponsorship
The House of Representatives will vote on a financial bailout bill for the second time in a week this afternoon, and backers of the measure are desperately hoping to corral at least 13 more vote than they did on Monday, when the bill failed by a 228-205 margin.
In order to have any hope of wrangling those 13 votes, party leaders need to understand the unusual ingredients that made up the defeating coalition. Various Trailhead readers noted that the extremes of both parties voted against the measure, while donations from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae correlated with support for the bill.
Catholic University politics professor Matthew Green took that analysis a step further. He ran the roll call-vote against 14 factors that might have affected a representative’s vote: Data points like freshman status, membership in the various House caucuses, vulnerability in the upcoming election, and so forth.
Using a standard logistic regression model, Green discovered several factors that reliably predicted a "no" vote, and another few that reliably predicted a "yes" vote.
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats, the Congressional Black Caucus, and those on the ideological extremes of their party were likely to vote against the bill with a high statistical significant (p < .05, if that means anything to you).
Meanwhile, party leaders, those not running for re-election, and members of the New York delegation were significantly likely to support the bill. Members of the Financial Services Committee also trended toward supporting the bill, but with a slightly weaker correlation.
This model essentially studies each factor in a vacuum, holding other factors constant in order to study its effects in isolation. So a lawmaker with multiple, conflicting traits—take for examples, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and a party leader—predicting the vote gets tricky.
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