January 5, 2007 by mr_flood.

According to Webster:

to be evasive, unclear, or confusing

George Will’s latest column calling for the abolishment of the Federal minimum wage has garnered much contempt, as one might expect, from the left, and not a little obfuscation.

First up is Mcjoan at Kos:

The policy paper has much more information to debunk the myths propogated by minimum wage opponents, those people like George Will who don’t recognize what trying to live on $10,712 a year means.

Except that one of the major points of his article was to highlight the fact that the vast majority of people earning minimum wage weren’t relying on it as their only source of income. Obfuscation.

She points us to Echidne who says:

And an odd path it is. Take this, for example: Will gives us a lot of data about how unimportant the minimum wage is in general, and one of these data is the number of people earning it:

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America’s wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor.

Ok. And where might he have gotten these numbers?

Could it be from the government sources? Like this one:

Of those paid by the hour, 479,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage. Another 1.4 million were reported as earning wages below the minimum.

Bolds are mine. Note how conveniently George forgot to include the information I bolded in his column.

So George makes the point that most of the minimum wage earners aren’t poor and Echidne makes the counter-point that there’s a bunch of people earning below the minimum wage. Obfuscation.

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January 5, 2007 by mr_flood.

Gutfield’s list of potential titles of the next Indiana Jones movie:

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Prunes

Indiana Jones and the Soilers of the Fresh Depends

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Memory

Indiana Jones and the Last Gasp

Indiana Jones and the Eye of Glaucoma

Indiana Jones and the Walkers of Five Miles Through The Snow Just To Get To School

Indiana Jones and the Heimers of Al

Indiana Jones and the Replacement of the Broken Hip

Indiana Jones and the Nursing Home of Despair

Indiana Jones and the HMO of Doom

Indiana Jones and the Givers of the Full-time Care

By the way, Harrison Ford is not at all high in that picture.

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