ACORN Filmmakers Batting 1.000 But Media Matters Says It’s “Statistically Insignificant”
by Matthew VadumAs damning video after video is released showing ACORN’s willingness to counsel lawbreakers, no one has been more willing to assassinate the character of ACORN’s opponents than the hired guns at the left-wing group Media Matters for America.
As I noted yesterday, thin-skinned Jamison Foser of Media Matters wrote Oct. 16 that “some conservative activists induced a statistically insignificant number of the organization’s low-level employees to behave badly.” [emphasis added]
Setting aside the question of whether the ACORN employees were “induced” by activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles to do things they wouldn’t have already been willing to do, was the number of ACORN personnel behaving badly statistically insignificant? Let’s take a look at that claim.
In statistics, a result is considered statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance.
So far ACORN employees in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York City, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Philadelphia have been shown on video behaving badly. On all the videos, ACORN personnel have been cooperative and helpful to the make-believe pimp and prostitute.
So far ACORN personnel in six offices have acted badly. That’s six out of six, or 100%.
What are the chances of that happening?
This is –obviously– not statistically insignificant.
Actually, in statistics when a phenomenon keeps repeating itself over and over again and you’re batting 1000, it’s called a “trend.”
With the release of the Philadelphia video Wednesday, let’s add up the total number of ACORN employees behaving badly.
Unless I’m leaving somebody out:
Baltimore (2): Shera Williams and Tonja Thompson
Washington, D.C. (3): Sherona Boone, Lavernia Boone, unidentified woman
New York City (2): Volda Albert and Milagros Rivera
San Bernardino (1): Tresa Kaelke
San Diego (1): Juan Carlos Vera
Philadelphia (1): Katherine Conway Russell
That’s a total of 10 ACORN employees. Of the 10 ACORN employees videotaped, all 10 have acted badly. That’s 100% too.
What are the chances of that happening?
According to ACORN’s website, ACORN has 71 offices. I believe the total number is actually lower because several of the offices listed do not appear to be open for business.
But for sake of argument, let’s say it’s 71 offices. Expressed as a percentage, six out of 71 is 8.4%. That means that 8.4% of ACORN offices contain badly behaving employees. That’s a very good-sized statistical sample.
ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis told “Democracy Now!” Sept. 17 that ACORN has 700 employees.
Assuming Lewis is telling the truth (which is a very risky assumption to make given her proven mendacity) then 1.4% of ACORN’s workforce has been shown on video behaving badly.
Of course 1.4% is not as impressive a sample as 8.4% but it is certainly not small.
Desperate to defend his allies in ACORN, Foser of Media Matters can’t even think straight.
He’s asking people to believe that the 100% of the 10 ACORN employees (representing 1.4% of ACORN’s total workforce) shown in videos behaving badly is a statistically insignificant fluke.
Bear in mind if more videos are released showing ACORN employees behaving badly, the percentages are only going to grow.
Foser’s asking Americans to believe that the bad behavior of a statistically significant percentage of ACORN’s employees documented on video is purely coincidental. In other words, he’s arguing O’Keefe and Giles just happened to stumble upon the few rotten apples working at ACORN.
What are the chances of that happening?
Foser’s “rotten apples” spin happens to be the same lie that ACORN has been telling for years.
Is that a coincidence too, Media Matters?
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44 Comments
The same people who say that the ACRON corruption is statistically insignificant have (for decades) supported changes in our laws that treat honest people as criminals (Sarbanes Oxley is a good example) based upon significantly smaller statistical samples.
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Foser at MMA could never acknowledge that a culture of corruption at ACORN really exists and that the behavior captured by O'Keefe and Giles is more par for the course rather than just a rarity. To acknowledge otherwise would shatter the Leftist Utopia he built in his mind.
John Podesta works for george Soros also. They run Center for american Progress
John is on the ACORN board
Here is Obama's opinion on the Fox News war
http://myfreepress.net/2009/obama-on-wh-war-with-...
Jamison Foser is a whacked out loon. Who cares what he thinks?
ACORN and George Soro's.
Birds of a feather, flock together. It is an incestious web of deceit.
T paraphrase the immortal words of Ol' Ma Richards: "Poor George, he caint help it, he was born with a silver acorn in his mouth"……..
Andrew, can we have an investigation into the AMA and AARP please?
I asked my health insurance-broker (17 years) wife about the cpt (Correct Procedural Terminology) monopoly that the AMA enjoys. She laughed (and it wasn't a pleasant laugh). I found this from 2002 which gives background and lots of useful links:
http://www.myhealthscore.com/cpt4_opinions/ama-cp...
Last night on Fox, Sean Hannity reported that the AMA (representing just 17% of doctors) stands to make up to 300 million a year (up from 20 million now) under it's CPT monopoly as a consequence of the health-care "reform" (wrecking) it supports.
"If a ray of light falls into a pigsty, it is the ray that shows us the muck and it is the ray that is offensive."-From "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand.
Obviously here ACORN is the pigsty and the complicit socialist left ideology is to make the ray out to be the "wrong-doer", the "criminal". Hey, don't hate the light that is showing you for what you are.
Truth will always prevail, and if you have no guilt, then you have no reason to defend yourself.
If 1.4% of H&R Block's or Jackson Hewitt's "low level" employees were giving out such tax advice, non-stop Congressional investigations would be the least of their problems. The FBI and the state's Attorney Generals for anywhere they operate would have shut them down months ago.
Media Matters is "Statisticallt Insignificant"!
I wonder why those "statistically insignificant," employees have NOT been charged accordingly? Also, I wonder how those former employees like being called "statisically insignificant?"
Love that Soros artwork……….
You forgot the second person at the Philly office. The person that filed the false police report was also behaving badly. The video shows that what was alleged in the report was certainly not a truthful representation of the facts. Now that makes 11 and counting.
…if you have no guilt, then you have no reason to defend yourself.
On which planet? "Innocence" hasn't mattered much for awhile now, what does matter is who makes the best presentation in court. Likewise it doesn't matter for financial matters like taxes, if you can't document your innocence for the IRS then you are assumed guilty. People without guilt have to defend themselves every day, that's how we ended up with taxpayer-funded public defenders. Plus in the media anyone can accuse anyone else of doing just about anything. If you don't have a good defense lined up, you are toast.
"If you're not guilty of anything then you have nothing to worry about." Gee, how many additional layers of bureaucratic paperwork and "just in case" investigations have been justified by that line?
Let's take the math just a bit further.
700 employees
10 out of a random sample of 10 proven bad
If those 10 were the only bad apples, the chances of randomly getting those 10 would be: 1 in 7.3×10^21 (seven point three billion trillion)
If all 700 were bad apples, then they had 100% chance of going 10 for 10, of course.
The median number of bad apples in the organization, ie, how many out of 700 would be bad, so that James and Hanna had a 50/50 chance of going 10 for 10: 630 or 90% of the employees.
For those who may care how I got to these numbers
http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.comb.perm.ht...
700_C_10 = 700!/(10! x 690!) =7297452464858376897230 ~ 7.3 x10^21
Your broker's wife knows what is coming in 2010. Not sure, but I believe that the ICD-9 codes (diagnosis codes) are not copyrighted and can be used without paying licensing fees.
The CPT codes are copyrighted. This IS a huge monopoly run by the AMA. Every book publisher, medical software developer, etc., that must incorporate these codes into what they are doing has to pay up. The AMA is NEVER going to give this up.
The degree of corruption in Washington and more specifically the left is mind boggling. Washington is a den of thieves that needs to be cleaned thoroughly. ACORN is a symptom of the larger problem. Fire them all and start over with the Founding Documents.
The artist forgot to draw the "666" on Soros' forehead.
Media Matters is in a long line of information outlets that have purchased and raved about their tickets for the irrelevant train.
Ok for those of you who think, he doesn't actually write any useful content, and he just re-post the news. Here you go, here is my useful content
http://myfreepress.net/2009/generation-x-please-s...
“So far ACORN personnel in six offices have acted badly. That’s six out of six, or 100%.”
To be fair, that 100% success rate represents the videos that Giles and O’Keefe have chosen to publish. I have no reason to believe that they are withholding other videos that show ACORN employees turning them away, but it is theoretically possible. If there were 30 other offices in which they did not succeed in showing bad behavior, that would drop the rate down to 25%. That is STILL unacceptably high (and statistically significant) but not 100%.
Just to repeat, for clarity, there is no evidence that Giles and O’Keefe have withheld anything, and I trust that they have not. However, the possibility cannot be ruled out a priori and a sceptic would be justified in asking the question.
I really am not concerned with the percentages, only the fact that Acorn has and is a corrupt organization that needs to be put down….NOW
I agree with your sentiment. However, the problem I have with all this is that without knowing all the offices that Giles and O'Keefe went to, we have no way of knowing how "random" the sample is. Indeed, we know the release is *NOT* random. That is, if they taped anyone who did the right thing, they would not release those those tapes (yet). Thus, you cannot argue that this is a random sample that happened to catch 10 bad apples out of 10 possible.
I, of course, agree that ACORN is a 100% corrupt organization. My personal belief is that at least 90% of ACORN workers are corrupt, and that the *good* apples are the exception, not the rule. But in the interest of scientific accuracy, I must point out that your above numbers only show one end of the spectrum of *possibilities*.
BTW, I must also add that this argument cuts against Media Matters claims too. There's no way to say this sample is "statistically insignificant" without knowing all the details of Giles & O'Keefe's method either.
In other words, this seems to be the typical use of statistics (i.e., "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."). This was not a controlled experiment, and until all the tapes are released it will be impossible to apply statistical models to the data, for *either* side.
You are quite correct of course. For me this was more of a "fun with numbers" exercise than anything else. A few unreleased "good apples" would tilt the results, but there is still a long way to go. When contemplating how many more possible site visits they may have made you run up against the $1300 budget. It's simply amazing that they did what they did at 6 locations scattered across the country on that.
8.6% Wow! That is a huge number – although insignificant.
Consider the 46 million without health insurance, then adjust for those who actually qualify for medicaid (if they would apply) and those who specifically decline the insurance offered by their employer because they'd rather have the money…. then divide whatever is left by the 300+ million people in the country, you get a number very close to 8.6%. I'm so glad to know that we don't lose our minds and do something rash over a group as small as 8.6%.
The number that makes me crazy is .3%. ACORN is just one of over 300 organizations that are interwoven together with familiar names found on the boards and executive committees. To completely shut down ACORN only addresses .3% of the fraud being perpetuated on the taxpayers.
But Matthew, you're using logic! How could you expect these people to grasp a logical argument? This is way above their "pay grade"!
I agree, and enjoyed your "fun with numbers" too. And I agree that they are useful insofar as they are an accurate representation of what we *KNOW* (the only problem is there's a lot we *DON'T* know that could significantly change them). Again, I personally don't believe the final numbers will be all that different. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that *NONE* of the films will show any "good apples" at all. My only concern is that we go only so far as the evidence allows us to, lest we be burned. Because when dealing with something like ACORN, the media is going to treat your minor burn as fatal while letting their missing appendages get passed off as flesh wounds.
Please refer back to Jon Stewart and his piece "audacity of Hos"
Stewart correctly observed — I quote from memory " Clearly this is not an new concept to these people. 'mOh, you're a pimp and whore and you want help with the tax implications of that? YO, TONYA! Bring me a Form SEVEN-D"
If these ACORN people had been induced to give this advice, they would not have appeared as practiced as they –clearly — were.
Please refer back to Jon Stewart and his piece "audacity of Hos"
Stewart correctly observed — I quote from memory " Clearly this is not an new concept to these people. 'mOh, you're a pimp and whore and you want help with the tax implications of that? YO, TONYA! Bring me a Form SEVEN-D"
If these ACORN people had been induced to give this advice, they would not have appeared as practiced as they –clearly — were.
The freeze on ACORN's federal funding ends Oct. 31.
http://patterico.com/2009/10/21/acorn-funding-ban...
So, looks like The One will enable ACORN to go on receiving taxpayer money to allow an "insignificant" number of employees to encourage prostitution, tax evasion, and child sex trafficking.
"Actually, in statistics when a phenomenon keeps repeating itself over and over again and you’re batting 1000, it’s called a “trend.”
In this case, I would call it an infestation.
Can you pick which committee that Republicans stalled it in?
A website that has at least 2 ACORN Derangement Syndrome stories a day to feed the same 40 or 50 people who actually care and already have ACORN Derangement Syndrome is not a trend. It's the textbook definition of mental insanity.
1.4 % doesn't sound so bad for total number of employees behaving badly in 8.6% of locales…but would anyone over at Media Matters consider it significant if 1.4% of Airline pilots were drunk on duty and 8.6% of that airlines aircraft suffered unrepaired fuel leaks….and they had to fly to Hawaii and back?
Yeah…I didn't think so…..it's all a matter of perspective.
Perspective indeed. Enron had an even smaller percentage of employees behaving badly.
"in statistics when a phenomenon keeps repeating itself over and over again and you’re batting 1000, it’s called a “trend.”
with ACORN, it's referred to as "Standard Operating Procedure"
Why arn’t these “statistically insignificant” employees being formerly charged with breaking federal laws? And, ACORN keeps saying they did nothing wrong-that being said-how come they fired these “statisically isignificant” employees. Sounds to me, that these employees were “used.”
Don't forget that polling firms use only .0006% of the population to get their data. Mr. O'Keefe's data is over 2000% better than this ratio, so I don't see where the problem is….
Soros should be jailed and made to pay back every dime he stole.
Who gives a damn about statistics? They broke federal&state laws. And, should be charged accordingly. Do you think if you had/have broken a federalor state law you should be able to get away with it-ACORN OR NOT? You, know the right answer here! We have the Constitution and FEDERAL/STATE laws for a reason. This is NOT a lawless society yet. But, if one Obama continues on his path of destruction it will be.
I wonder how many of Media Matters' employees would become statistically insignificant if their organization was put to an equally telling litmus test?
Hedge Funds-legal stealing from investors based on inside information. I thought insider trading was illegal? Is George Sorros an American? If not kick him out of the country or arrest him for acts of terrorism for trying to undercut the American way of life! Wake up America! Put America first and anyone who doesn't in jail! If i wanted to livelike the europeans i'd live in europe. I don't and won't! LIke the founding fathers i will fight for freedom! The elitsits inthe white house are right about Moas quote about all power coming from the barrel of a gun and they are headed for an in person demostration of what and how that works. Wake up America! don't let these America haters steal your freedoms or dreams or wealth! Wake Up!
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