Thread: Barack Obama vs. Lou Dobbs

I apologize if this is a dupe. If so, someone let me know and I'll delete it. I just heard about this on Lou Dobbs today. To see the graphic and the Pinnochio test go to the link at the bottom.

"A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There's a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it's not surprising that would happen."
--Barack Obama, Palm Beach fundraiser, May 22, 2008.

The presumptive Democratic nominee for president needs to be more careful in his use of statistics. If he is going to blame Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh for "ginning up" hate crimes against Hispanics, he needs solid data to back up his allegation. The hate crimes statistics that he threw around at a fundraiser in Florida are wildly inaccurate--and a subsequent modified claim provided by his campaign was also off the mark.


The Facts
As I made clear yesterday, Lou Dobbs of CNN is no relation to the Fact Checker. The CNN anchor has repeatedly made use of flawed statistics to fuel his anti-illegal immigrant campaign. His claim that illegal immigrants were responsible for introducing 7,000 new cases of leprosy into the country between 2002 and 2005 was grotesquely inaccurate. (The number of new leprosy cases discovered in 2006 was 137.) He was also way off the mark in saying that a third of the prison population is made up of illegal immigrants. (Immigrants, legal and illegal, account for about six per cent of the total prison population.)

That said, however, there is no excuse for resorting to equally flawed data to attack Dobbs and his ilk. Statistics on hate crimes are easily checkable through the FBI website, and show nothing like the increase claimed by Obama. The most recent data available are for 2006, not 2007. As you can see from the following chart, hate crime offenses against Latinos rose from 529 in 2003 to 770 in 2006, a total increase over three years of about 45 per cent.



In the previous three years, the incidence of hate crimes against Latinos had been falling, so they are now back to where they were around 2000. Whatever you think about Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh, it is difficult to point to these trends as evidence that they are somehow responsible for a "doubling" in anti-immigrant hate crimes. It is also worth noting that hate crimes against Latinos are still only a fraction of hate crimes against African-Americans.

When I asked the Obama campaign for an explanation, I was told that the candidate had been referring to anti-Latino crimes in California. (That was not at all clear from his remarks.) Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor pointed to data used by the Amy Goodman "Democracy Now" radio show aired on many public radio stations. Goodman told her listeners last December that the number of hate crimes against Latinos in California, the state with the largest number of Latinos, had "almost doubled" since 2003. She did not provide a source.

A couple of points to note here. (1) Obama was quoting Goodman incorrectly. He said that hate crimes against Latinos doubled last year, not since 2003. (2) Goodman got it wrong in the first place. Here is what the California Department of Justice has to say in its latest report on hate crimes.

Anti-Hispanic Offenses - Anti-Hispanic offenses averaged 187 between 2001 and 2005, with a high value of 207 in 2001 and a low of 142 in 2003. In 2006, 218 of these offenses were reported, an increase of 16.0 percent from their 2005 value.
In other words, the trend in anti-Latino hate crimes in California roughly paralleled the trend in the rest of the country. A total of 11 more hate crimes were reported against Hispanics in 2006 in California than in 2001. There was a 54 per cent rise in hate crimes in California between 2003 and 2006.

Obama "misspoke," said Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's quarterly Intelligence Report, which has been highly critical of Lou Dobbs for "twisting the facts" on the immigration issue. According to Potok, hate crimes are routinely underreported but the figures provided by the FBI are the best available. There is no evidence for a doubling of hate crimes against Latinos, as claimed by Obama.

The Pinocchio Test
This is hardly the first time that Obama has come up with faulty stats. I have already called him out for repeating the myth that there are more young black men in prison than in college. And then there was the time when he said that 10,000 people had been killed in tornadoes in Kansas when the real figure was 12. Perhaps he could do with a personal fact checker.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-che ... dobbs.html

Dobbs redid his website and his factfile is gone. I wonder why?? The factfile was a good source of information.

Why dosen't OBAMA talk about the hate crimes against blacks from latinos that is going on in California? I am white, by the way.