The Rachel Maddow Show segment is labelled The right presses on for welfare drug tests.
It is quite an interesting segment even though it has a lot of logical flaws. Let me point out a few that I can remember.
She probably spends more time touting what she says is starting to look like a success of Obamacare enrollments after a slow start than she does on the headline issue. She also compares the Obamacare enrollment record to that of Massachusetts’ experience with its law at start up. Massachusetts’ startup was even slower in its first three months. Part of the implication is that a measurement at three months is barely starting to show the possibilities.
When she finally gets to Florida’s experience with its drug testing law, she makes a big deal of its failure even while explaining that a court decision ended the implementation of the law after three months. No irony here.
She also makes the case for Florida’s failure that they have found that welfare recipients were found to be using drugs at one quarter the rate of the general population. I am at a little bit of a loss as to why this figure is so significant logically. Let’s say that someone thought that the general population were using drugs at a rate that was 1,000 times too great. Would it be a failure of common sense to want to stop part of the population that was “only” using it at a rate 250 times too great, when that was the population that you might have the most influence over? (1,000 and 250 were just numbers I picked to make a point. I make no claim that they represent any real situation.)
Perhaps I picked those numbers because of my experience buying low salt products in the grocery store. Most regular soups give you on the order of 900 mg of salt per serving. That is more than ⅓ of your total daily recommendation in one serving of a component of one meal. Low or reduced salt versions of these soups have as much as 600 mg of salt. That way you only get ¼ of your daily recommended amount from one component of one third of your meals. I think low salt is about 50 mg of salt per serving. So the store’s low salt is over 10 times as much salt as I consider low.
Rachel Maddow’s segment is a bit long. Perhaps she could have left out the easily attacked leaps in logic to make a more compact and more powerful indictment of the people she was ridiculing.
This may also be an example of why such “left wing” shows are not as popular among the “left” as the “right wing” shows seem to be among the “right”. Some of us on the “left” don’t really like defenses of our principles that are logically flawed, when in fact logically sound arguments could be made, and were made by Rachel Maddow.