The first major Republican presidential primary debate takes place in only three days. In an attempt to avoid hosting a circus, the debate’s sponsor, Fox News, capped the number of participants at ten, to be selected using an aggregate of the five most recent reliable polls - the top ten would be included; the bottom seven left out. The rationale is obvious: with seventeen candidates on stage, some of them with no chance, even in their own minds, of actually winning the presidency, none of the candidates would have time to convey any sort of message. After watching the debate, viewers would be left knowing just as little about the candidates as they did before.
As good as the argument for limiting the field is, there is an argument on the other side. The polls going into the average are generally very imprecise, with large margins of error. When distinguishing between the tenth and eleventh place candidate, a few percentage points could make an enormous difference; if the polling average includes polls with a six-point margin of error, how sure can we be that we really got the top ten?
The answer is that we can't be certain, but we can be reasonably sure, as long as we do the calculation correctly. Taking the weighted average of the polls, accounting for the margin of error of each one (strangely enough, Real Clear Politics, one of the leading sources of aggregate polls, does not do this), it's possible to guess at the actual value with much more precision than any one of the polls going into the analysis, as shown in the graph below (the red line marks the tenth candidate).
It should be clear that, although it's still difficult to make a noticeable difference between the tenth (Christie) and eleventh (Perry) candidates, the margin of error has dropped to 1.95 percentage points - enough that the distinction between one candidate and another, even in the middle of the pack, is not entirely arbitrary. It is, for example, possible to say with almost complete certainty that Cruz, the leading candidate from the lower tier, is polling well ahead of Graham, whereas this wasn't necessarily possible with every poll that went into the analysis.
It should also be noted that the values calculated here don't match those from RCP's averaged polls, and it does change the order: RCP incorrectly has Walker slightly ahead of Bush, whereas in reality the opposite is the case. As long as Fox does its due diligence and avoids falling into elementary errors, we can be reasonably certain that the ten candidates on stage will be the top ten candidates in national polls. Whether those national polls have any meaning at all this early in the contest remains to be seen, but the process, at least, is sound.
Slight of build, his once-dark hair first tinged with gray, then snow white, a Republican representative from the 14th Congressional District - Galveston and its environs - once walked the halls of the Capitol unbowed. Where others followed party loyalty, this man fought so singlemindedly and consistently for his view of limited government and personal liberty that he earned the nickname “Dr. No,” an homage to his medical degree and the frequency with which his convictions brought him into conflict with proposed legislation. Ron Paul was unbreakable, unshakable, and possessed of a kind dogged determination not to yield found more often in myth than reality. The modern libertarian movement that he helped father took the porcupine as an unofficial mascot, but it could just as easily have used a badger in honor of the congressman: it is an animal which, without being remarkable for its size or apparent strength, is, because of its persistence, a formidable adversary.
Political considerations, without fail, took a back seat to matters of conviction. Ron Paul was not afraid to be the only voice of dissent, and not afraid to call out the leaders in his own party when they strayed from his vision of conservative orthodoxy. His bills - whether or not they represented positions taken by the majority of his own party - died quiet deaths in committee, the clearest possible signal that party leaders intended to neutralize him. None of it mattered to the grandfatherly congressman, who would fight any battle. He was the politician the cynics tell you doesn’t exist, who will not engage in the dishonesty and underhandedness rampant in politics; Jefferson Smith, but shorter. His commitment to principle drew grudging respect from his enemies, even as they worked to sabotage him.
The cynics, however, are usually right. Ron Paul was an anomaly in American politics; his allies few and far between. With his retirement after yet another unsuccessful presidential run in 2012, politics lost a truly unique figure. For a time, it appeared that his son, Rand, might fill that void. Swept into the Senate in 2010 on a wave of conservative opposition to far-reaching regulation and subsidization of health insurance, freshman Senator Paul began as his father had. He was the in the first wave of so-called “Tea Party” senators, the first breach in the dam of political orthodoxy enforced by corporate interests in the major parties, and he lived up to that mission.
For a time - but Rand Paul was not his father. He would fight, but he did not share his father’s resignation to being neutralized. Where Ron Paul was content to do nothing at all before doing something he believed to be wrong, Rand Paul was not. From the beginning, even as he made party leaders uncomfortable, his sights were set on bigger goals. Compromise and political maneuvering were second nature to Senator Paul, just as they were anathema to Representative Paul. Senator Paul began more socially conservative than his father, recognizing that the 14th Amendment gave Congress the authority to ban abortion, and he pledged to fight for that as well as for his father’s goal of stripping the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction (allowing states to make their own laws). He attached personhood amendments to appropriations bills, reintroduced his father’s bill stripping Supreme Court jurisdiction, and held the line as bravely and as staunchly as his father had . . . for a time. As time went on and he realized that the young voters whose votes he was courting did not agree, however, Senator Paul did something his father never had: he backed down. His rhetoric grew quiet, his proposals shifted from personhood to the half-measures “pro-life” politicians content their constituents with, and he called for a “truce” on all social issues. Senator Paul was not his father.
It wasn’t just on social issues that the inherited obstinacy had crumbled. Even at the beginning of his campaign, all of the future senator’s positions were moderated to be more palatable to the traditional conservatives his father had never quite won over. Non-interventionism, but not the radical non-interventionism of Representative Paul. States’ rights, but returned to the political mainstream. Balance the budget, but in five years - not now. Once elected, Senator Paul began to bend back. Conservatives, he now saw, weren’t his ideal constituency. Instead, he began to move back toward the young libertarians who had supported his father. Social issues were unimportant to them - or they disagreed with Senator Paul’s stance - so social issues were unimportant to Senator Paul. Privacy and pot were important to young libertarians, so privacy and pot were important to Senator Paul. Where his father had worked to change minds, the younger Paul changed his emphasis.
This was nothing out of the ordinary. Unlike his father, Rand was going to play the game just like everybody else, and play it well. The reasoning was clear: Ron had a dedicated following that wasn’t quite large enough to win a national election. If a more palatable version who could keep that following while making deeper inroads into both the political mainstream and the libertarian movement, a President Paul would be well within reach. The reasoning was clear, but there was a mistake: Ron Paul had earned the respect of supporters and enemies alike precisely because he did not bend with the political wind. He didn’t pander, and when he took a position you could know that it represented his convictions, that he would fight for it. The same couldn’t be said for Rand. An endorsement from Ron Paul was a guarantee that Ron Paul believed he’d found the best man for the job - high praise indeed. Rand Paul, in contrast, chose to endorse his fellow Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, in his primary battle against a conservative challenger. Even before Paul’s staff admitted that the move was driven by political calculations (looking forward to the 2016 presidential election), no one believed that Rand Paul believed that McConnell, as bitter an opponent of conservatives as you’ll find in the Republican Party, was the best man for the job, only that Paul knew that McConnell exerted tremendous control over both the Kentucky GOP and the Senate.
Without the traits that made his father great, Rand is only another senator. A reasonably good one, and one whose policy positions appear more in agreement with most conservatives than his father’s, but one who embraced politics as usual. Representative Paul was more than his positions, Senator Paul, less. The father’s mantle fell to the ground, not to the son, and voters saw: where his father had a dedicated group of supporters who could break fundraising records despite their candidate sitting far back in the polls, the younger Paul has been in the middle of the pack of 2016 contenders in both fundraising and polling. Appropriately, Ted Cruz, the man whose disregard for “the way things have always been done” most closely matched Ron Paul’s, has carried on the tradition of building a band of zealous supporters whose passion and fundraising outpaces their numbers (although, in part on the strength of having called out Republican leadership in a style very reminiscent of the elder Paul’s willingness to take on any fight, polling numbers have begun to catch up with fundraising). It is Cruz and Representative Justin Amash and a few others who picked up the standard of opposition to politics as usual, while Paul found himself changed by the system, rather than changing it. The reckless courage that marked the Paul name is gone; the glory is departed - Ichabod!
Anatomy of a Failure: Andrew Wakefield and the Limits of Peer Review
0 comments Posted by Unknown at 1:17 PM One could argue that few, if any, medical studies have had the same impact as Andrew Wakefield's study, published in the British journal Lancet, attempting to establish a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Certainly, no study has had the same impact with as small a dataset - Wakefield's twelve case studies, eight of which were claimed to show a temporal correlative link between autism and vaccines, were an incredibly small sample size for such a groundbreaking study. Still, from 1998, when the study was published, to 2010, when it was completely retracted (Lancet had already published a partial retraction in 2004), the study stood as ostensibly sound science. Of course, the scientific community, which had already viewed the small sample size with a jaundiced eye, saw the total inability of any other study to replicate Wakefield's findings (Hurley et al., 2010) as the final nail in the coffin of an already suspect idea, but that wasn't enough to stop the study from launching a new wave in the anti-vaccine movement. This new wave brought with it an increase in the rate of vaccine-preventable disease. Measles in Ireland, Whooping Cough in the US - declining vaccination rates inevitably brought the return of diseases previously reduced to a historical footnote. A single slip in peer-review brought hundreds of deaths, perhaps even thousands, by the time the movement runs its course. With this in mind, it is worth examining the course of events that led to the publication of something so resoundingly rejected by the scientific community and so harmful to the world at large.
When Wakefield started his study, he was working in conjunction with Richard Barr, a lawyer, to bring a lawsuit alleging that the MMR vaccine was the cause of autism, and seeking damages for nearly 1,500 families. His proposed bowel-brain syndrome was the centerpiece of the lawsuit; his study thus had the potential to be incredibly financially beneficial if it reached the desired result. To that end, Barr emailed the families he was representing, asking any families who had symptoms that matched the desired sequence (the MMR vaccine followed relatively closely by intestinal distress and then autism). Wakefield's twelve were selected from this group and from patients at the Royal Free Hospital, where Wakefield held a non-clinical position. This should have been the first warning sign: a doctor with an egregious conflict of interest selecting an exceptionally small sample. It would be difficult to imagine a situation more conducive to cherry-picking data.
Strangely enough given the opportunity he had to cherry-pick his data, optimistic data selection wasn't enough to prove Wakefield's point. His hypothesis was that the MMR vaccine brought on bowel-brain syndrome, which then lead to regressive autism. From NHS records, we know that his sample of twelve included between one and six examples of regressive autism - given his already-small sample size, not enough to even pretend to have reached a conclusion. To sidestep the issue, he committed the cardinal sin in science: he fabricated his data. In his paper, three patients who definitely did not have regressive autism, and five whose symptoms were unclear, were reported as having regressive autism. Nor did he stop there - the next two steps in his hypothesis were that the patients have non-specific colitis, a bowel disorder, and experience their first symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine. Only three of the twelve showed non-specific colitis, and only two showed their first symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine (five even showed symptoms before receiving the vaccine). Wakefield reported that eleven had non-specific colitis, and that eight experienced symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine (Deer, 2011). The data Wakefield started with matched subsequent studies almost exactly; the data he ended with, however, was a different matter.
Branch may talk a good talk while he’s running for Attorney General, but he hasn’t walked the walk as a state representative. Ken Paxton will be an excellent Attorney General, with the courage and ability to stand for conservative principles.
Wayne Christian vs. Ryan Sitton
His opponent, Ryan Sitton, is also an appealing candidate, but for different reasons. Sitton is very familiar with the workings of the oil and gas industry in Texas, having been trained as a petroleum engineer, and would likely be a steady voice for good sense on the Commission. Unfortunately, although he makes the necessary lip-service to conservatism, he does not appear to have Christian’s deep-seated principles. For example, several years ago Sitton ran against Greg Bonnen in the Republican primary for Bonnen’s Texas House district, despite the fact that Bonnen was one of the most conservative members of the Texas House at the time.
Pat Hardy (I) has been a vocal proponent of the status quo in the educational system. She opposes using market-based solutions to make the education system more efficient, opposes a balanced approach to origins, supported CSCOPE, and has stated that the state, not parents, has the primary responsibility for educating children.
SBOE races may not seem important, but the Texas SBOE has massive influence both inside and outside Texas, and Pat Hardy would be yet another voice pulling our education system towards its failed liberal stasis. Eric Mahroum could be part of a change for the better in education in Texas.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." As a general rule, human behavior varies very little, within certain norms - fallen human nature's desires and fears are constant, so that "what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."
The first example is well-known by name, but its specifics are poorly understood. An understanding of its example, and how it applies to the battle liberty-minded Americans are fighting today, would not be amiss. The Fugitive Slave Act contained a number of provisions, but two in particular upset Abolitionists (and indeed all those who valued personal freedom). The first denied the right of those accused of being escaped slaves to trial by jury. This provoked a great deal of protest - and rightly so - but the second part is more relevant to our discussion. This required that magistrates and ordinary citizens in free states not only refrain from hiding escaped slaves, which was already illegal, but also actively work to capture and return escaped slaves. The law not only worked to prevent slaves from escaping, it attempted to force northern states into taking part in the brutal "peculiar institution" of the South.
Sixty-four years later, we face a similar situation. Not content with legalized - even, in some cases, taxpayer-funded - abortion, advocates for abortion insist that every business owner be forced to bloody his hands by providing funds to his employees specifically for the purpose of providing abortifacients (or, if he chooses an "exemption," he can pay someone else to do the exact same thing). It isn't enough that employees can already use their salary to buy abortifacients, the employer must provide compensation for that and no other purpose. Why? It isn't because of financial hardship - the abortifacients covered by the HHS mandate range from $30 to $60, and someone claiming financial hardship can get them from Planned Parenthood free of charge. Abortifacient drugs for early pregnancy are readily available and inexpensive - this, by the way, is a shameful indictment of the value our society places on life, but it is nonetheless true. No one is being prevented from using abortifacients because they can't afford them. At face value, it would appear that there is no particular reason to force employers to pay for these drugs, and yet that is exactly what the HHS mandate does. Again, why? Perhaps because "there is nothing new under the sun," and those who do evil are still afraid to do it alone. One person standing up for right is a threat to those who do wrong and a prod to their sore conscience. By forcing universal participation in their misdeeds, abortion's apologists apparently hope to wipe away every hint that abortion is a sickening affront to the dignity of humankind, just as slavery's apologists hoped to silence their consciences by silencing their opposition.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." The particular circumstances may change, but we must continue to do the right thing, because fallen man will keep on doing the wrong thing. "New occasions teach new duties," to quote a rousing old abolitionist hymn, but right never changes.
God is perfectly sovereign, and man's will is free. At the risk of dangerously abbreviating a fascinating discussion, I'd like to prove both phrases in that sentence, and, more important, provide a commentary on why they are anything but contradictory.
The first is easy. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that God is sovereign over all things. In Psalm 103:19 we are told that "the Lord has established His throne in the heavens; And His sovereignty rules over all." Again in Isaiah 46:10, "remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I
am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall
stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,'" Yet again, Psalms 103:19, 115:3, and 135:6, among many other verses, speak to God's sovereignty. The final piece is Ephesians 1:11, which tells us that God "works all things after the counsel of His will." We are left in no doubt that God is indeed sovereign. In addition, we are told that we are created in the image of God. We are not given his power, so the implication is that we are given the ability to be free moral agents, responsible for our own action - that man has free will.
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
How is it possible to reconcile the competing facts that man's will is free and that God is sovereign? The answer, I think, lies in properly understanding the nature of God. Too often, we approach God as if He were simply a human like us with a particular ability - for example, when we think of God's omnipotence we think of a human who can do anything, or when we think of His omniscience, we think of a human who knows everything. To a certain extent, this is inevitable. We will naturally compare an unknown to what we know. Generally speaking, this is an effective aid to our understanding, but it isn't perfect. When we start probing too hard into the nature of God - His sovereignty, for example - this approximation will always be imperfect. To correctly understand the coexistence of God's sovereignty and man's free will, we need to look closer at who God is.
If any human were to be sovereign in the way God is, he would completely preempt free will. Humans can create systems over which they have a certain limited sovereignty, but only if certain conditions are met. The system must be deterministic (that is, for any given situation, given a unique input, there will be a unique output) closed (that is, free from outside influences), and it must be understood completely. Assuming a system meets all three of those requirements, a human could theoretically uniquely determine all events in the system by determining the starting conditions (making the system deterministic and closed allows the starting conditions to determine the course of events, and understanding the system completely allows the starting conditions to be manipulated to produce a given event). Unfortunately for "fortune-tellers" everywhere, the real world is nothing at all like this. At a very general level the purely physical world can be thought of as a deterministic system, but in actuality it is probabilistic. Even worse, humans aren't just probabilistic, they are free agents, and are not bound by external circumstances except in the most general sense. For this reason, if a human were sovereign, free will could not exist, and if free will exists, no human can be truly sovereign. This, in my opinion, is the source of much of the apparent conflict between free will and sovereignty.
This is only true if a human were sovereign - the solution to the contradiction lies in how God differs from us. For us, the contradiction exists because the world is not deterministic. We cannot possibly know exactly what the output will be for every input, and so we have no way of knowing how to manipulate the starting conditions to produce a desired event, even if we had the ability. What if we were omniscient, though? If so, we would know exactly what would happen in any given set of circumstances, which is simply another way of saying that for any given input, we would know the output - not because the system was limited to one output for that input, but because of our hypothetical omniscience. One could argue about whether this means that the universe is actually deterministic to an omniscient being or whether the universe is merely similar to a deterministic system, but that's not particularly important at the moment: what matters is that the universe is perfectly predictable for an omniscient being, and thus can be determined through setting the starting conditions.
We can go farther than that, though. Not only is it possible for an omniscient being to determine an unrestricted system by setting the starting conditions, since God is omniscient, He knew precisely what effect any variance in the starting conditions would have. Because of this fact, we can conclude that God decided what every event would be - had He wanted something else, He could have changed the starting conditions to produce a different outcome. Every molecule in the universe acts according to His plan.
As an aside, it should not be assumed from this discussion that God only acts by setting the starting conditions. Certainly, that is the way He usually chooses to work His will, but he can also intervene supernaturally if He chooses to. For the purposes of this discussion, since God is the only source of external input, the fact that setting the starting conditions requires that He be sovereign implies that He is sovereign. The fundamental point is that an omniscient creator God logically must be sovereign.
We've essentially arrived at the conclusion that those who argue for God's sovereignty support, but remember how we got there: we assumed free will in a probabilistic universe. We didn't arrive at God's sovereignty by limiting man in any way - God is still sovereign, but our will is free, at least to the extent that our nature and God's power (recall Pharaoh, whose heart God hardened) allows. This should not be taken as a license to lethargy or wrongdoing. Because our wills are free, we are still responsible for our actions. God doesn't preempt your will, rather, He uses it to work His ends. Both God's sovereignty and man's free will are important elements of the Christian worldview, and - far from being contradictory - they are perfectly compatible as long as we recognize who God is.
Early this year, Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), which advertises itself as the “most active political youth organization” in Texas, released a press release discussing Republican candidate for lieutenant governor Jerry Patterson. This press release closely paralleled Dan Patrick’s campaign literature, and like much of Dan Patrick's campaign talking points, it strayed from being precisely correct on a number of points. In the interests of maintaining a standard of scrupulous honesty, it is important not only to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" oneself, but also to call out dishonesty whenever possible, in order to allow others to be truthful without being tempted to resort to their own fabrications to counter their opponents’. With this in mind, a careful point-by-point examination of YCT’s press release is very much in order.
Passing over YCT’s opening vitriol and moving to their first charge, the first problem becomes readily apparent. YCT correctly points out that Patterson supports a guest-worker program - for the record, I do not agree with him on that point - but then goes on to claim that he called efforts to secure the border first a “cop-out.” This is certainly a compelling argument against Patterson; it would be even more compelling if it were true. The precise quote was “the cop-out response among some Republicans is, ‘Well, we have to secure our borders first.’ Ok, yeah. This is part of doing that.” Obviously Patterson’s argument is that most people who make that argument don’t intend to do anything beyond it - that’s the cop-out. You don’t have to agree - I don’t - but you do have to be honest about what he said. YCT went on to discuss some of Patterson’s comments on the implications of a guest worker program, and wrapped up their discussion by asserting that Patterson supports an “essentially open border.” The term “open border” has a precise definition - a border between jurisdictions which allows passage with limited or no restrictions - and what Patterson advocates does not fit that definition. Looser than is wise? Yes. Open? No. Patterson’s biggest “soft” stance on immigration lies in advocating legal status for those already here, not in advocating decreased border security. I disagree with Patterson’s stance on immigration, but YCT is simply wrong in their analysis of his position.
YCT goes on to address the votes they disagreed with during Patterson’s first term. While discussing voting records, it should be noted that Patterson’s lifetime score from YCT is 85%, while Patrick, the candidate YCT endorsed, has a lifetime score of 84% - any commentary YCT would like to offer on insignificant conservatism in Patterson’s record could be applied equally to Patrick. YCT, unfortunately, did not find it appropriate to mention this, however. YCT mentioned four votes they found objectionable: Patterson coauthored SB 456, which created “hate crime” laws in Texas, voted for the creation of the state lottery commission, supported a ban on corporal punishment in schools, and voted to advance the spectacularly unsuccessful “Robin Hood” system. All of those votes are questionable, but YCT does not tell the whole story. On the first two things are simple enough - dubious meddling with motives and a misguided plan to raise money by fleecing the gullible are simply enough. The third, the ban on corporal punishment in schools, is actually slightly different, since the motivation was not opposition to corporal punishment, but support for parental rights (actually, I might have supported the measure myself, provided it were worded correctly). Finally, YCT completely ignores the circumstances under which Texas’ “Robin Hood” system was passed. In 1987 the courts found the Texas system of funding education in violation of the Texas Constitution. Twice after that the Texas legislature attempted to create a system that would satisfy the courts, but each time the courts struck it down. This was the situation in 1993, when the Texas Senate finally tailored a SB 7 73 (R)to the Texas Supreme Court’s whims enough that it was allowed to stand (until 2006, when the Texas Supreme Court struck that one down, too - it would be laughable if it wasn’t true). That bill was the “Robin Hood” bill, and its nature was largely determined by what the Texas Supreme Court dictated. Even at that, Patterson didn't vote for the final version of the bill. Patterson joined all but four members of the state senate in voting to advance the original bill from the senate (Journal of the Senate of the State of Texas, Regular Session of the 73rd Legislature, Volume 2, p. 1848), but what YCT doesn't mention is that Patterson joined with five other senators in voting against the final passage of the bill (Journal of the Senate of the State of Texas, Regular Session of the 73rd Legislature, Volume 3, p. 3014). Once again, YCT carefully manages the facts they release to present an apparently correct but actually very misleading picture.
YCT’s next accusation stands out among a number of doubtful accusations as being particularly misleading, even dishonest. They charge Patterson with using “his position as Land Commissioner to dictate to property owners along the Gulf Coast, even going so far as to confiscate their land without compensation after a natural disaster.” What they’re referring to is Patterson’s action as the head of the Texas Land Office to enforce the letter of the law regarding Texas public beaches. The beach is considered public from the vegetation line seaward. Unfortunately, as the shore moves, the vegetation line moves. Through time, it was generally accepted that the boundary of the public beach shifted with the vegetation line, otherwise the shoreline would eventually simply shift inland and completely obliterate all of Texas’ public beaches (for various reasons our sediment balance is low, so the beaches typically move inland). When a storm hit, the vegetation line would often shift quite dramatically, and that’s what YCT is referring to. After Hurricane the vegetation line shifted inland so much that it moved behind a set of condominiums. The Land Office followed the law as written and informed the landlord that the property up to the vegetation line was now public beach (the Texas Supreme Court eventually struck down the Land Office’s decision). YCT and Dan Patrick’s interpretation of events is mind-boggling twisted and nothing short of dishonest. YCT goes on to make ambiguous complaints about Patterson’s management of the Land Office. Since they provide no support for their claims, and since those claims seem to bear little resemblance to anything that occurred in the Land Office, it is difficult to determine exactly what they’re referring to in order to refute it. It can safely be assumed, then, that it holds as much weight as the rest of the press release, or perhaps even less, since in the rest of the press release there were at least facts there to twist, whereas this appears to have been a complete fabrication.
YCT does bring out a few of Patterson’s downsides, but they intermix them so thoroughly with misrepresentations approaching outright lies that the exercise is largely pointless. Those of us who claim the mantle of Christian conservatives have a particular duty to be perfectly honest in everything we do. Young Conservatives of Texas’ press release not only fails to reach that standard, it doesn't even come close. We need to honestly examine our candidates in the primary to decide which one to support, but that needs to be a truly honest examination, not a prejudiced attempt to justify the candidate we already support by denigrating his opponents.