Wednesday, June 13, 2007

WTF

It's old news that Susan Howell retired from UNO, but Gambit informs us that:
The professor counts herself among the 15 percent of whites who approve of Nagin's performance (compared to 51 percent of blacks).

That's really not surprising coming from Susan "lockstep" Howell, but what's really surprising is that she said:
I think he's honest. I think he's very intelligent. ...

I knew that she liked Nagin, I suspected that she was one of those local media figures who was somehow charmed by or infatuated with Nagin, but I had no idea that she was utterly daft. Makes you wonder what his poll numbers would have looked like from an unbiased pollster.

One other surprise in the piece:
Last week, Howell and her husband, John Vinturella, moved back to Cincinnati, her hometown.

I had no idea.

Really WTF? I've been to the Daily Howler since last Thursday. Never mind -- Daily Howler seems to be back online.

Update: Billy Carter Rides Again

There was a minor item in today's Picayune report about a "Justice for Jefferson" rally:
Several women from Smith & Associates, a firm owned by Cedric Smith, the brother-in-law of Mayor Ray Nagin, also turned out for the event.

The connection to Susan Howell is simply that it demonstrates how irresponsible it is for a respected opinion maker like Susan Howell to publicly attest to Nagin's honesty. Nagin's reputation as an honest businessman who's not one of the corrupt "politicians of the past" helped doom any efforts to recall Nagin from the start. Yet we find his brother-in-law's employees actively supporting the most embarrassing example of the "politics of the past."

But, of course, Nagin isn't responsible for the actions of his brother-in-law. He wasn't at the start of his first term, when he found Smith an embarrassment (his own Billy Carter), why should he be now? Of course, Nagin claimed to be embarrassed by his brother-in-law five years ago, but Nagin's embarrassment didn't prevent Cedric Smith from being a featured speaker at Nagin's second inauguration. Whatever questions Nagin may have about Smith's judgment didn't prevent the Nagin campaign from paying a $20,000 consulting fee to Smith's firm. So, it's quite possible that donations to the Nagin re-election campaign have indirectly made their way to the Jefferson defense fund.

In a future post, I'll go through a point-by-point list of reasons why it's absurd for somebody on Howell's position to publicly attest to Nagin's integrity, this just happened to be in today's paper.

Comments:
Heh. Remember this poll? I wonder if she included herself in the results there as well. Also.. daft simply isn't the word. In all my years of following politics, I've not come across a more consistently untrustworthy pollster. Always wrong.. so much so that I often suspected her results were tailored to suit her own preferences.
 
Like you said at the time, the poll was conducted by Susan Howell, which rendered it essentially useless.
 
I didn't know the Vinturella connection, either.

Daily Howler must've exceeded the bandwidth this afternoon, after writing a great post on Carl Bernstein's lame Hillary book.
 
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