Lil White Lies: Does Lou Lou do more Doo doo?

As part of an analysis of PolitiFact’s (PF) “bias” I made a list of possible items to consider: one was, is there one PolitiFact writer/researcher who may be more biased or prone to error favorable to one side than the others? I thought Bryan White’s Grading PolitiFact series might provide some insight into that. I also wondered, now that I had a population numeric for PolitiFact rulings (2,788), did Bryan attain a number of grades that might be considered a sufficient sample. There was also a certain curiosity as to whether any other characteristics (who made the statements, etc.) of his sample revealed any other trends of interest.

So I went back to his blog and started adding up the rulings. I found that he “officially” started his Grading PolitiFact series in 2009 coinciding with the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidential term. So I counted two years forward from that, to January 20, 2011, getting a total of 97 rulings. According to statistical sampling techniques, he would need a sample of at least 142 rulings with the same finding of “bias” to achieve a 95% confidence level for that finding to exist in the rest of the population. Bryan also “graded” PolitiFact in 2008, so there are additional rulings on top of his 97. But I would make an educated guess that he doesn’t have 45 additional rulings to get to the 142 benchmark. Additionally we get brought down by an important (and perhaps most crucial) requirement of the sampling: it must be unbiased, and we know it is already tainted (because Bryan openly admits to his conservative bias).

Bryan predominantly selected Republican rulings for analysis (60%) with the highly-inflammatory Michele Bachmann and similarly noisy, opinionated pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh topping his list. His choice of Democrats follows a similar pattern of PolitiFact’s choices, with Barack Obama getting roughly one third of the Democrat ruling analyses.

Politi-Hack Attack

Now that I’ve looked at the new blogspot site which is a one-stop shop for PolitiFact (PF) detractors as created by Jeff Dyberg and Bryan White, I do have to slightly “retract” a post done earlier, as I see that Bryan (not so much Jeff) has done some work to show how other conservative ideologues have charged PolitiFact with liberal bias. Other conservative ideologues. In other words, birds of a feather flocking together. That’s why I can’t completely retract, as they’ve made it amusing and predictable.

One site they link to is called PolitiHack Tracker, an actual website in lieu of a blog, which appears to have been created by someone named Weston Hicks, currently residing in Austin, Texas. He can be found on Facebook: one of his “favorite pages” is “I hate it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is president” and the Heritage Foundation, which tells me all I need to know. Besides the fact that PolitiHack Tracker targets PolitiFact Texas, PolitiFact’s partner publication being the Austin-American Statesman.

I consider Bryan a superior critic to Jeff and Weston. He may go way overboard in employing the use of fallacies, and tries to make an argument with some semblance of reasonableness, but for the strength of his pseudo-explanations I prefer to challenge him instead of Jeff and Weston. He’s the closest one can come to being objective in his analysis, or at least sounding so. On that note, one of the things I’ve seen Jeff and Weston do, that I do not see Bryan do very often, is to compare PolitiFact rulings….the specifics of a ruling on a Republican as compared to a ruling on a Democrat, to show the “unfairness” of the application of PolitiFact’s writers standards. I suppose Bryan does not do it for the same reason I have not done it: it’s too often apples to oranges.

For example, Weston started his website with two articles on Texan politicians Rick Perry and Bill White: he compared a ruling of Half True on Rick Perry (R) for saying that Texas has the most Fortune 500 companies and is the fastest growing state, against a statement also ruled Half True by Bill White (D) that the Texas State Board of Education, led by a Perry appointee, voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from social studies textbook standards. According to Weston:

How Dummies Set A New Tone

Tchotchkes: Evidence Many Boomers are losing their Hearing

Politi-Score: Any Way You Shake It

During some recent internet research on PolitiFact, I came across something that answered what I had always wondered in regard to my Politi-Score: Is there someone out there that’s already done some thing similar to it? An article at Daily Kos published in October, 2009 by “cinematical” entitled “Analysis of PolitiFact: GOP/Conservatives Significantly Less Honest” had analyzed PolitiFact rulings and had done essentially the same thing: counted up the rulings and assigned a score to each ruling (scaled according to True, Mostly True, etc.), added them together and divided by the total number of rulings to get a “relative score.”

But the methodology was completely different than mine, in fact, almost the opposite, although it achieved something similar in its results as well as its conclusions.

“Limitations.” When I initially did the scoring, I wanted to get a relatively large sample, because when sampling a population (according to what I learned in Statistics), the larger the sample, the closer the results of what you are measuring should resemble that of the population. And I didn’t have a lot of time to go through individual listings (PolitiFact’s Personalities Page has over 800 individuals/ groups/blogs/e-mails listed), so I only counted those who had a lot of rulings. My cut off was to only include those with 5 or more rulings. Cinematical did the opposite. He did not include the scores of those who had 13 or more rulings. His reasoning was thus: “Inculsion [sp.] of these individuals would overwhelmingly weight their honesty over the collective honesty of the group.”

One of the commenters to this article said it well:

The fact that you limited the incidents to 13 per input person kind of skews it too much towards the "be kind" side. Why? Because the people with the most input likely have the most media presence. Therefore their propensity for truthfulness or lack thereof has a greater impact. An evaluation of the totality might prove interesting.

Lil White Lies: Take-over Hang-over

When PolitiFact published its “Lie of the Year”—that the healthcare reform passed in 2010 amounted to a "government take-over” as espoused by Frank Luntz, I dutifully published my response to Bryan White’s criticism of PolitiFact…then he, of course, published his criticism of MY criticism, as PolitiFact’s choice was, in his opinion, almost the crown jewel of evidence of PolitiFact’s liberal bias. This post included one particular observation which I am devoting this post to:

… With dozens of "well-known conservative pundits/politicians” calling it "socialized medicine" you'd think Street would have thought to give an example or two. Oh, well. She probably just copied the PolitiFact method. Simply stating it makes it sufficiently true.

Yes, I must admit Bryan was absolutely right and I just copied the PolitiFact method and simply stated it (not really, he ignored my examples, see below).  Because I found out it was not socialized medicine when I watched this Michele Bachmann "Infomercial" on Fox News just last night. I found out it’s even more: it’s the crown jewel of socialism:

Lil White Lies: The Tax Cut Billemma

Emphasis added is a very important feature of this critique, for it spells out the differences for which PolitiFact’s critics think it can be rebuked.

PolitiFact Virginia’s fact-check reads as follows (emphasis added): that Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) claimed “The tax-cut deal [Tax Cuts Compromise] ‘adds more than $800 billion to the deficit over two years -- more than the cost of TARP and more than the cost of the Recovery Act’ and about the same as health care reform.”  It ruled his statement Mostly True.

Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.) actually said in his statement: (emphasis added)

“This bill adds more than $800 billion to the deficit over two-years – more than the cost of TARP and more than the cost of the Recovery Act. It costs about the same over two years as the 10 year cost of the Health Care Reform bill, which we paid for." …

But Bryan White finds his loophole in the second paragraph: (emphasis added)

“We cannot add more than $800 billion to the deficit through tax cuts and tell the American people with a straight face that they won’t have to sacrifice anything in the future to balance the federal budget. If we didn’t have the political will to end the Bush-era tax cuts tonight, we certainly won’t have the political will to do it two years from now during a presidential election.”

According to Bryan, it’s “tax cuts” only that adds $800 billion to the deficit, and not “the bill”, and since it’s only tax cuts, the $800 billion is incorrect and also less, not more than the cost of the TARP, ARRA and the HCR bills. Note (1) That it is the bill he says adds more to the deficit than TARP and the Recovery Act, and that IT (the bill) costs about the same as HCR; and that (2) Scott initially calls it “the bill” and then (in the second paragraph) refers to it as tax cuts. It appears Scott is using “the bill” (or “tax deal” as PolitiFact refers to it) interchangeably with tax cuts. He could be talking about either one or both. Maybe he just didn't want to get into all the detail, since even Bryan admits, 90% of it was tax cuts.  So PolitiFact writer/researcher Wes Hester chooses (or as Bryan would say, selects “with bias”) the FIRST description—bill—the beginning subject line for the statement--but Bryan thinks it should be the second paragraph “context” line, which is “tax cuts”. Further aggravating the rhetoric is PolitiFact referring to the bill (or tax cut) as “tax deal” in its title which Bryan uses to further his cause.

As a believer in the “Laffer” curve, I find it troubling that the tax cuts, as they were originally put in place in 2001 and 2003, failed to increase tax revenues, and job creation remained flat. So, while there may be some economic recovery, there will likely be no “payback” for this tax compromise. This means in terms of “offsets” to cost, the TARP and HCR contain more “offsetting” factors than the Tax Compromise, while the ARRA is about the same, i.e., it’s hard to tell.

Peasel Prattle: Welfare for Rich

When I began this post, a response to Richard Peasel’s commentary on my  post of January 5, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to how he started it, since it looked like his standard cynical claptrap. I had pretty much easily refuted all his claims, but in review, this statement gave me a bit of pause:

Karen, I see a lot of pretty charts above, are you trying to dazzle me with your bean counter brilliance, or baffle me with your BS….your graph explanations leave a lot to be desired.

It turned into a bewildered pause when I saw the end of his comment, a long stack of monthly dates. Why? Because the purpose of a graph is:

To ILLUSTRATE numerical data, thus making it easier to understand.

To represent the data Graphs give a visual representation of progress (or regress) and they are much quicker and easier to grasp than a boring stack of numbers. 

So…by saying he “sees a lot of pretty charts” and telling me that mine “leave a lot to be desired” then showing me a stack of about 60 months with an “index” as if he thinks it’s much easier to understand is not only disingenuous but oxymoronic. Oxymoronic because he’s essentially saying that HIS jumble of numerical data with off-point commentary is more easily understandable than my focused, easy to understand charts. Not only that, his data was incomplete, because the Misery Index is the combination of inflation and the unemployment rate. Rich only presented the unemployment rate. He probably did not want to mention the inflation rate, because at the end of 2008 it fell precipitously, and was actually negative in 2009, meaning there was no condition of 70’s stagflation (which would have allowed him to draw parallels between Obama and Jimmy Carter).

Nevertheless, here is a graph of Peasel’s data, more complete month-wise, and including the inflation rate:

Note that green line (inflation) dropped with employment.  The black line is where the Dems took Congress in 2006.

Sidebar: Book Report on the Fly

While Amazon.com seems to have a virtual monopoly on discounted books, Kindle downloads and such, it still can’t beat going to a local bookstore (in my case “Books a Million”) to look them over in hand. Although I’d never buy a book by one of these authors (or even one from someone who shares my political views), it’s still a good idea to read what they have to say.

So I looked over three books today that I’m going to discuss here; they all had certain similarities. They were prominently displayed in the “New Releases” non-fiction section at the front of the store, and naturally they were by people who were not “liberals” who seem to dominate in this area:

•  “Broke” by Glenn Beck
•  “Pinheads and Patriots” by Bill O’Reilly
•  “America By Heart” by Sarah Palin

Un-Broke my Heart. If I was going to buy any of these three, it would be Beck’s “Broke”. Wide paged, highly glossed with lots of color, it was replete with charts and tack notes; it seemed like a “Conspiratorial Libertarians for Dummies” kind of book in the way it was laid out. The “tack notes” were often entitled “Teachable Moments.” Now that the word “Liberal” has been successfully demonized and mischaracterized, he has now moved on to the word Progressives in order to do the same.

But on Page 120-1, he doesn’t celebrate Republicans either; he has a laundry list of the “bads” that George W. Bush accomplished during his administration, such as the Medicare prescription bill of 2003 which added hundreds of billions to the national debt, and the Homeland Security Act which added 100,000 government employees.

Of course, he spends a lot of time on Social Security and Medicare as the focus of the blame for America’s “broke” condition. Here’s a notable block quote on Page 205 called “Mr. Ponzi Would Be So Proud”:

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Statistics, Damnable Lies, and Lies

Matthew Dowd, “a former strategist for President George W. Bush who lives south of Austin, was the subject of PolitiFact’s factcheck when he stated during the December 12, 2010 edition of ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour: "Barack Obama is in an economy that's only worsened since he's been president of the United States.”

So PolitiFact supposedly starts sifting through a “wealth of statistics” it says it has available to reach the conclusion that Matthew Dowd’s statement merited a ruling of Half True….because, according to writer Louis Jacobson, half the statistics say the economy’s been improving, while half say it is not.

According to them, the most important statistical measure is job growth. But Obama has been president just a tad short of two years. This was one of the worst economic crashes in our nation’s history short of the Great Depression. Just when should job growth start to recover, or how long should it take? Is it too soon to give this statistic such weight?

Return of the Dummies

It's been almost two months without you dummies! You were missed!  The part about Sarah Palin is eerily omniscent given what happened in Arizona. But it clearly shows the symbolism used by Palin (guns, hunting, shooting) as a celebrity/ political candidate.  

Politi-Score: 2,788 Reasons, Part 2

Do politicians tell more lies during an election, or off-election?   It seems the obvious answer is that they would tell more lies during an election campaign.  Let's see how much more, and how Democrats and Republicans compare overall, using the PolitiFact Politi-Score statistics.

This is how the *averages*  compare between the campaign and overall.  There were 2,788 rulings from PolitiFact's launch until the end of 2010.  These are compared to 414 rulings counted from September 1, 2010, until the election, November 2, 2010.  In otherwords, the 414 rulings are part of the 2,788 rulings.

Click "About This Blog" link to learn how these scores were computed.

Here is the information presented graphically, which displays how they compared by category by percent:  True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and Pants on Fire, starting with Democrats.  In this chart, the Democrats are compared on a percentage basis during the 2010 election cycle to their percentage overall.  The Democrats had 1,184 total rulings including 200 rulings during their 2010 campaign.

Sidebar: Second Amendment Remedies?



Even Republican Elizabeth Hasselbeck described Palin's *crosshairs* as "despicable."


This morning I viewed Jared Lee Loughner's youtube videos, and I can conclude from them:

• He's anti-government
• He's looks to be a gold nut because of his strange "currency" revelations (and who has almost all "gold" sponsors of his TV show???)
• He's into logic fallacies (ha ha)

Jared, at 22, seems to have not really developed a cogent political view; but that "person of interest" who may have been with him, described as a 40-ish white male, may have had solidified political views if he was indeed involved.  We have yet to find out.   One of my favorite websites points out, however:

Rethugs & FOX say: "More guns, more guns,more guns for everybody! Obama is a traitor! Democrats want to give America to bin Laden, Democrats are a threat that must be stopped! More guns, more guns, bigger clips, fewer laws, Obama is a Kenyan Muslin, out to destroy us!

Then some Teabagger answers their call and they say, "Who me?" after he fires into a woman's head.

As always, a bit over the top, maybe, but well said, Bart!  Although I disagree on the "Teabagger" part.  It doesn't have to be a teabagger who answers their calls; it can be a deranged person (who could be apolitical) who hears the teabaggers' messages and answers their call.

Postscript:  News updates since the publishing of this post have revealed that the "person of interest" was but a cabbie who unknowingly drove Loughner to his fateful destination of John-Hinckley-dom, and was videotaped obtaining change...which leads me to wonder, since this kid lived with his parents: who's financing him?  He had just bought ammo, and he bought the gun in November for $500.  He did drugs, and obviously with his wierdo videos on youtube, had a computer.  Yet it's been said he was unemployed, dropped out of high school and college, and was rejected by the armed forces (because he tested positive for drug use). 

Postscript to Postscript:  I just wonder if Palin will somehow manage to come out smelling like a rose on this one.  At this point, I'd say all bets are off.

Sidebar: Janine Turner's been drinking too much Texas Tea

Besides her comments on Congress' reading of the constitution ("thunder" dismissed), she started talking about how the deficit needed to be cut by the Congress, which means she must not have read the news:

Critics say the GOP has come up with no specific ways to meet its goal of cutting $100 billion this fiscal year, a goal many Republicans concede privately is probably unattainable, and would do little to dent the deficit. The first vote on spending cuts, due Thursday, would slice $35 million from the House's own budget.

In addition, if Republicans ultimately succeed in repealing the sweeping health care law passed last year — which no one expects, given the Democrats' control of the Senate and President Barack Obama's veto pen — that would add to the deficit, since the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the measure would save $143 billion during the coming decade.

There's also remarks by Paul Ryan on the Today Show.  I thought the "leaders" of the Tea Party would certainly have prepared answers, since spending cuts were their platform.    Janine has lost a lot of credibility and was a real disappointment.  She had nothing of substance to say.

Another Year, Another Blog

Now that I've learned about the method of argument called "proof by intimidation" and its connection to Ayn Rand, I think Hans and Franz from SNL may be more appropriate than Vince and Jules to describe Bryan White and Jeff Dyberg, especially now that I've learned they've "teamed up" to start a blogspot website called "PolitiFact Bias."  With that in mind, I'm going to start a new category for my Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style posts, as well as links to articles claiming PolitiFact has a conservative bias, and occasional commentary about anything they may have come up with.  In the meantime, I thought I'd have a little fun with my photo edit program.

Lil White Lies: Another Year, Another Logic Fallacy

‎@ Bryan - If you tried to improve clarity, you failed. I've read it at least 5 times and I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of your sentence construction…

--Kyle Sparks, Facebook Comment, December 23, 2010, 3:22 p.m.

Keeping the above Facebook comment in mind, recently in my research I came upon a “fallacy” not encountered before, called proof by verbosity or intimidation.

Argumentum verbosium is also known as Proof by Intimidation, or Proof by Verbosity. It refers to an argument that is so complex, so long-winded and so poorly presented by the arguer that you are obliged to accept it, simply to avoid being forced to sift through its minute details.

This fallacy is epitomized by this lovely statement, “If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bullshit.”

And then there’s this, by none other than Ayn Rand, written in her 1964 essay "The Virtue of Selfishness:"  Emphasis is added to the sentence that's "the whole show":

There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent's agreement with one's undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure. Since it is particularly prevalent in today's culture and is going to grow more so in the next few months, one would do well to learn to identify it and be on guard against it.

This method bears a certain resemblance to the fallacy ad hominem, and comes from the same psychological root, but is different in essential meaning. The ad hominem fallacy consists of attempting to refute an argument by impeaching the character of its proponent. Example: "Candidate X is immoral, therefore his argument is false."

But the psychological pressure method consists of threatening to impeach an opponent's character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: "Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X's argument is false." 

Tchotchkes: Congress is Back in Session

Peasel Prattle: Fish, Barrel, Shoot, Repeat

More from the WaC Files

A few months ago, I started the “What a Crock” part of my blog to spotlight a few people whose opinionated commentary compels me to occasionally challenge them. One of them was former co-worker and rabid right-winger Rich Peasel, who has found my blog and wrote me a nice *concise* 400-word diatribe in my comment area about my oh-so-lengthy 1,683 word response to a letter he had published by the Flint Journal back in September.

Rich is getting the royal treatment here, instead of just publishing his comments as comments, I’m going to do another lengthy post to respond, because unfortunately, that’s what it takes to plow through it. But that’s what “What a Crock” is all about. I call ‘em like I see ‘em.

So…let’s get started:

Wow Karen, Sorry I did not run across this blog earlier. It took you 5 pages and 1683 words to refute my 4 paragraphs in the Flint Journal. Maybe you should borrow the president's teleprompter to help in writing a concise blog.

Well, Rich, your stuff is not 100% bullshit, but a rich blend of manure from a wide variety of farm animals. I don’t need a teleprompter, however. Just a lot of Googling and quoting (including you) to make it abundantly clear that manure IS being spread. And I don’t need to be concise on a blog like this…but why don’t you do one yourself and we can see how concise YOU are?

You neglected to mention that the Republicans controlled Congress in the Bush years from 2000 to 2006 before the Democratic took over the Congress with Nancy Pelosi promising PayGo. From 2000 t0 20006 (or 6 years) , the Republican Congress increased the national debt 2.4 trillion. When the 110th Dems took control of the purse strings in 2006, they increase the national debt another 2.6 trillion in only two years. The Bush presidential years totaled 5 trillion in 8 years with two wars and less than 4% unemployment.

It should be noted that Peasel had made a previous comment with regard to a speech given by then-Senator Obama about the deficits being due to a “failure of leadership” by Bush, leading to his contention Obama does not “practice what he preaches.” But he doesn’t realize his contradiction: he blames the previous deficits on the Democratic congress, the current deficits on the Democratic president. His reasoning with regard to “the Republican Congress increase[ing] the national debt [*only*] 2.4 trillion” in six years as compared to the Democrats increasing it 2.6 trillion in two years uses the classic fallacy of “tu quoque” or “you too” argument. He also conveniently ignores the events leading up to the current fiscal crisis that is driving the spending (and no, it wasn’t just the Democrats who caused it). I wonder if a Republican congress would have done any better.

Politi-Score: 2,788 Reasons

Beginning the day after Christmas, I began compiling all of PolitiFact’s rulings from its website "Personalities" page, and completed the task New Year’s Eve: a comprehensive list of 2,788 rulings (actually, 2,787: one was counted as two because it ruled on statements of two people as one). Yes, from Snooki to Spike the Romney Attack Dog, I recorded every last one by name, affiliaton, whether they were "media" or a pundit, the ruling, and which PolitiFact partner wrote it if one did.  This was a good point to compile the list because PolitiFact was taking a self-congratulatory end of year break as well, so the rulings were in a delayed point of time status and were not changing as I recorded them.

Minor sore spots, however: 89 “chain” e-mail ratings were all counted as one "personality" by PolitiFact, as well as 13 “blogger” rulings. The field I am most interested in recording is that of political affiliation: however, for example, all 89 chain e-mails could neither be just Democratic nor just Republican—or even affiliated with either party. So that meant I had to go through each chain e-mail ruling and determine if there was an affiliation. Which led to a quandary on Obama: during the primaries, the Republicans were not his only adversary: there were Democratic Hillary fans who might be disseminating anti-Obama e-mails as well, which would make the affiliation Democratic. So I decided not to include those rulings unless there was clear and convincing information in the ruling which could associate it with the parties, such as a verified source of the e-mail within the ruling critique.

The majority of the chain e-mails were anti-Obama (43 of the 89 emails): birtherism, Muslim/Ayres/ socialist/ anti-Christ connections ran the gamut, followed by dubious claims about healthcare reform (9). There was a short run of anti-Palin rulings from Democrat affiliated chain e-mails, but the number of those (5) were one tenth of those making allegations about Obama. There were also three anti-Hillary rulings which seemed to me should not have been attributed to “chain e-mails” but to Dick Morris, the Fox News Contributing Clinton-hater (I left them in the chain e-mails with a Republican affiliation).

The rest were of a more local political variety such as property taxes and school issues for which there was no certain “ideology” associated with them. It appears that recently PolitiFact National has “demoted” many of the chain e-mail ruling critiques to its partnerships. Most of these rulings for which a political affiliation could not be determined were of this type.

Now to get to the results…..here is the breakdown by affiliation by the numbers (in my new and improved easier-to-understand line graph!):

Tchotchkes: More Mumbo Jumbo

I guess he's the only one who understands the obvious.