alexpgp | Clinton dooms us all...

In a story titled "Clinton to dedicate life to redistributing world's wealth," the Australian newspaper The Age has reported that His Billness "said it would cost America $US2.5 billion ($A4.87 billion) to meet UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's request for an extra $US10 billion ($A19.47 billion) to fight AIDS and other infections diseases." Clinton attempted to put this figure in perspective by comparing it to "two-and-a-half months of the Afghan war," or "about one tenth of one per cent of the federal budget."

(I seem to recall that when anyone proposed cutting one of Clinton's favorite programs by even a fraction of such a sum during his presidency, the idea would routinely be attacked as an attempt to eviscerate vital government programs, but I digress... )

At any rate, the story in The Age later quotes Clinton as saying, "There are 40 million AIDS cases a day and if we don't do something about it, there will be 100 million AIDS cases a day."

Now, I suppose it would be out of place for the story to have noted that, at a rate of 40 million new cases a day, Earth's entire population would become infected within five months! But surely there's got to be at least one editor out there who doesn't suffer from terminal innumeracy?

Then again, one of the points made in Bernard Goldberg's recent book, Bias, (which I am about 100 pages into, currently) is that folks of the liberal persuasion can pretty much get a free ride when it comes to spouting statistics like that.

Cheers...