Sidebar: The ULTIMATE in "Hurry Up and Wait" (and worth it!)

Or:  Seeing Your Tax Dollars at Work

On Thursday, February 24, I made a trek to Titusville, Florida, to watch the last launch of space shuttle Discovery.  Arriving about 11:00 a.m., it cost $20 to sardine-park along Washington Avenue (instead of Space View Park) which is the only viewing area outside the Kennedy Space Center, since tickets were only available on a lottery basis to watch it there.  Then there was an almost six-hour wait until 4:50 p.m. for the scheduled lift-off (with the possibility that it could be cancelled up to minutes before and everyone's trip wasted).  We were a large crowd (I was told this was the largest number of visitors ever) directly across the Intra-Coastal Waterway at a distance of 13.5 miles, but with a clear view; this is how the lift-off looked through my old Canon camera with  telephoto lens.  But even by the naked eye, it was quite a sight to behold.  The roar of the engines took seconds to reach us,  it wasn't quite as loud as expected.

Postscript:  Here's probably one of the best views of the launch ever.

Tchotchkes: Keyboard Designed Only for Men

It would have been better with an oversize 3-D LED monitor instead of this antiquated one.

Politi-Score: Dumb Politics

Recently there’s been some hubbub now that more notable forums are trying their hand at crunching PolitiFact’s rulings, and arriving at similar conclusions, with a piece by one Eric Ostermeier at a website called “Smart Politics” which is part of the University of Minnesota website. (U of M???? I prefer the Wolverine-type, actually.)

The title of Ostermeier’s article is, “Selection Bias? PolitiFact Rates Republican Statements as False at 3 Times the Rate of Democrats.” Looking over his tables, which are presented in reverse with Pants on Fire first, I was immediately struck by the fact that the 511 total number wasn’t enough--even if he was just counting “Current and Former Political Officials.”

A Smart Politics content analysis of more than 500 PolitiFact stories from January 2010 through January 2011 finds that current and former Republican officeholders have been assigned substantially harsher grades by the news organization than their Democratic counterparts.

Ostermeier supposedly tallied these 511 “statements put through the Truth-o-Meter test from January 1, 2010 through January 31, 2011.” That’s 13 months. Therefore, my educated guess is that he only counted the rulings of PolitiFact National.

Ostermeier segregates the rulings similarly to the method I have followed: the “current and former political officials” from those of “pundits, groups, emails, blogs and miscellaneous” rulings.  It appears that he wanted to determine if the pundits were graded more “harshly” given they would not be driven by voter appeal. But his conclusions are clear on the “current and former political officials”:

Republican statements were graded in the dreaded "false" and "pants on fire" categories 39 percent of the time, compared to just 12 percent for statements made by Democrats.

That means a supermajority of falsehoods documented by PolitiFact over the last year - 76 percent - were attributed to Republicans, with just 22 percent of such statements coming from Democrats.

As a consequence, Democrats have therefore been presented as much more truthful - with over 75 percent of statements receiving the top three grades of True (16 percent), Mostly True (27 percent), or Half True (33 percent).

Less than half of Republican statements graded by PolitiFact were regarded as half truths or better - just 90 out of 191 (47 percent).

Now that he’s given me his breakdown, I can compare it with mine.  First my data needed to be filtered to PolitiFact National.  Secondly,  the pundits, orgs, emails, etc., were separated out so my measure would match his criteria.   The comparison reflects two different periods of time:  Ostermeier's is for the 2010 calendar year, while mine is for PolitiFact rulings since its inception in 2007 through the end of 2010.

FOX Man...You Don't Have to Put on the Red Light

Politi-Score: 2,788 Reasons Part 4 - The Flip-o-Meter

An initial look at the results of a compilation of PolitiFact's Flip-o-Meter rulings, on the surface, appear rather mundane and offer nothing of interest: An equal distribution of flips between Republicans and Democrats. It really doesn’t tell you much. The Republicans made only two more flips than the Democrats, and they had more half flips, whatever that is (I regard a "Half Flip" along the same lines as a statement ruled "Half True"--an PolitiFact equivocation.)

Most anyone who reads PolitiFact can probably make the obvious guess of who made the most flips. Here are all of those with two or more flips:

Sidebar: FactCheck.org versus PolitiFact

NOTE:  Click here for another more recent (July, 2011) review and comparison of FactCheck and PolitiFact analyses like this one.

FactCheck.org does not give the type of rulings that PolitiFact uses to grade the claims it investigates. As noted in a previous post, most of the claims FactCheck investigates are found to be false or misleading the majority of the time, and there is no great middle "average" Half True like with PolitiFact.

Snopes.com "Truth o Meter":  Not as cut and dry.

Another website, Snopes.com, occasionally looks at similar claims as well (particularly over-the-top ones such as Obama’s citizenship) but gives a rating it calls “multiple truth values” when there are both elements of truth and untruth in the claim and its underlying argument. In some ways, this is a better label for Half True, since Half True is, well, also Half False, so the possible complexities are conveyed in the rating.

Conservatives and Republicans often site FactCheck.org’s connection to the Annenberg Foundation as proof that it has liberal bias. However, there is some evidence that it is more objective in its approach to factchecking than PolitiFact, at least in the posts of one serious fact-check monitor. Sometimes I wonder why Cato or Heritage do not sponsor their own fact-checking website; my guess is because they can’t bring themselves to call their *own* on the carpet, like FactCheck and PolitiFact often do, even with PolitiFact’s trend toward rating fewer Democrats than Republicans and on average scoring them higher on their “truth o meter” as well.

Tchotchkes: 2010 in Review (via parody of Eminem/Rihanna)

Sidebar: She's Outdated and Vul-GaGa

Like Chris Matthew's "Tell Me Something I don't know" segment of his MSNBC show, I suppose my cynicism shows my age.  After watching Lady GaGa at the Grammys last night, all I can say is, that bit of hers looked awfully...Madonna-ish.  Especially her hair.  I don't have a pic of her from last night, but this graphic comparison shows where it all started...even pre-Madonna.

We know where you got that look, Lady GaGa...you're not exactly originally "expressing yourself."

Postscript:  And that egg thing...been there, done that.  Where's Ripley and her forklift truck when you need her?

Let's see, eggs (she said she stayed in it for three days....maybe she should have waited until Easter and played Jesus) from which she emerges to do a bad knock-off of Madonna's Vogue-plus-Express-Yourself with get-ups that look like cheap underwear from Walmart, except for those horny shoulder pads.

Postscript to Postscript:  And there's *the* Alien as we see a very brief glimpse during the video Bad Romance.  Oh no, I'm sorry, that's not an Alien, that's a Little MONSTER....so, does it hug your face, burst out of your heart and have acid for blood, or is that Lady GaGa?

Politi-Score: 2,788 Reasons Part 3

Doing calculations on PolitiFact (PF) rulings seems to be gaining in popularity. I noted a comment on the Facebook PolitiFact page the other day with regard to Ron Paul being the highest rated person on the PolitiFact’s truth-o-meter; however, I did offer a response that it was not Ron Paul but losing candidate for governor of Florida, Alex Sink. In fact, between Ron Paul and Alex Sink was the liberal public advocacy group moveon.org.

Just so you don’t have to use the link, the Politi-Score is calculated by assigning points to each ruling as follows:

Ruling	Number of points
True	100
Mostly True	75
Half True	50
Barely True	25
False	0
Pants on Fire!	-25

So, for example, if a politician has one True and one False ruling, that would be 100 for True and zero for False, totaling 100 points. Divided by two rulings, the Politi-Score averages to 50.

Getting back to Ron Paul and Alex Sink, here is a listing of everyone who had ten or more PolitiFact rulings from PF’s inception through the end of 2010, listed by highest to lowest Polit-Score. And yes, Michele Bachmann bottomed out the truthometer as the only one with a negative score (some Half Trues and Barely Trues from factchecks her 2011 SOTU response did put her into positive territory).

Tchotchkes: Run like an Egyptian

[Time was up yesterday!]  This goes to the heart of the Egyptian Revolution.  From a Yahoo lead article from U.S. News and World Report: "There was no accountability, no need for transparency," says Prof. Amaney Jamal of Princeton University. "He was able to reach into the economic sphere and benefit from monopolies, bribery fees, red-tape fees, and nepotism. It was guaranteed profit."

In  other words, Mubarak was no better than a Egyptian Mafia godfather running a protection racket using his army as enforcement thugs. "The British Guardian newspaper cites Middle Eastern sources placing the wealth of Mubarak and his family at somewhere between $40 billion and $70 billion."  Because I often take the side of the Democrats, some crazy Republicans might call me a socialist, and here, I say, yes, I'm a socialist.  Most of his wealth should be redistributed to the Egyptians, because it truly belongs to them.  Heck, Mubarak can even keep a billion or two.  But he doesn't need all that money when it is desperately needed in Egypt.  You go Switzerland.  I hope all the other secret bank countries do the same. 

Beyond Cows: Another Look at PolitiFact Wisconsin

Earlier I looked at allegations of so-called conservative bias at PolitiFact Wisconsin by one Jed Lounsbury of the website Uppity Wisconsin; now I’ve just happened upon a blogger here on Blogspot called “XbeyondX” who has posted some very detailed, cogent arguments almost worthy of somebody’s “Sith Blogroll” on several of PolitiFact Wisconsin’s rulings, including one that Jed Lounsbury expounded upon, again alleging conservative bias. Only this time, this blogger may really be onto something.

For “proof” of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s source of right-wing bias, “XbeyondX” provides some interesting information:

“…I am starting to wonder if we can add Milwaukee's media monopoly Journal Communications to the growing list of blatant conservative ideologues. Yes, this is the corporate parent of a radio station that interrupts its constant barrage of conservative talking points only for occasional sports.”

XbeyondX had just rated a PolitiFact (PF) Wisconsin fact check with a “Mostly True” on Wisconsin’s Republican Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen, who stated that “more than 22,000 IP addresses in Wisconsin have downloaded child pornography.” XBeyondX’s argument was that PF’s methodology—by extrapolating an estimate of the number by looking at other states—was flawed because:

To merely multiply the number of IP addresses identified during a 1 month period to conclude the number would be 9 times larger if the analysis continued for a 9 month period completely ignores the fact that one IP address may be downloading child pornography throughout that period.

Regurgi-state and Rationing

Redstate.com is another conservative website that publishes a lot of items attempting to prove that PolitiFact (PF) is liberally biased. One particular article aimed at PF’s Lie of the Year, the Republican claim that “Obamacare” is a government takeover of healthcare. It used Bryan White’s Sublime Bloviations review of it as most of its support.

It was particularly funny how the writer “Freedoms Truth” (of Austin, Texas—another Weston Hicks?) referred to it without actually quoting it or using it in his own arguments; probably because he had as hard a time “wrapping himself around” Bryan’s sentence construction as everyone else does. He loosely re-words probably the only statement of Bryan’s he could understand, the false choice message that any increased regulation = government takeover.

And again, I have to ask, where the line is drawn as to where the “partially” regulated private sector insurance ends and where government take over begins. I also am told there is no scaled line or measure 1-100%: "Obamacare" is not even close to a single-payer system, medicare for all, or total nationalization. Yet I am supposed to believe they are all one in the same; I suppose it’s due to that black/white only conservative view, with no room for shades of grey.

To quote Freedoms Truth, this is his “truth”:

Many lies have been told about ObamaCare, but most have been told by Obama and the sponsors and supporters. They lied about getting to keep your care (nope, regulations have forced millions to lose coverage they had, from children-only to medicare advantage), lied about the deficit impact (it is going to cost trillions when fully implemented), lied about ‘death panels’ (denied they existed then tweaked the policy on QALY that was in question), lied about alternatives (claimed there was none), lied about constitutionality (denied the fact that Obamacare mandate really is NOT in the Constitution at all and an honest Judge - like happened this week - would rule it unconstitutional).

Let’s take these *lies* one at a time: “They lied about getting to keep your care—nope, regulations have forced millions to lose the coverage they had….” Well, you can’t have it both ways, Freedom. You Republicans have said that illegal immigrants will be covered by “Obamacare”—so they will be covered and not those millions of regular citizens? Sounds like Freedom’s only worry is about the welfare queen getting another limo, so to speak. But he provides no backup to this claim. One would think that the rule (or regulation!) for insurance to include children up to 26 years of age in a family policy would bring in more children, not less. I’m assuming Freedom got this direction from the Republican “Pledge to America” which reads on Page 26: “The Obama Administration has been forced to acknowledge that the new law will force some 87 million Americans to drop their current coverage.” Factcheck.org, another “biased source” (I can’t seem to find any that meets Freedom’s approval except for Heritage.org) reports that this is a misrepresentation.

Tchotchkes: Sharia Law invades Fox News

Tchotchkes: The Power of Social Media

Thanks again to Bartcop.com

From Cowboys to...Cows?

So now that we’ve taken a look at right-wing charges of left-wing bias at PolitiFact Texas, we now travel north to PolitiFact (PF) Wisconsin, where we have an opportunity to take a look at left-wing charges of right-wing bias against PF’s partners at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. And it will be using a similar methodology that was utilized by the critics of PolitiFact Texas: a “comparison” to support the belief that PolitiFact applies different standards in making its rulings, which in this case are allegedly more favorable to Republicans.

The subject writer in this case is Jed Lounsbury of Uppity Wisconsin.org, a website featuring “Progressive News from the Cheddarsphere.” We’re off to the right start already, since the counterpart at PolitiFact Texas was also easily established as a *non*-Progressive. And his very first sentence tells us after our right start where we are headed: “The Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact is a joke.”

As one of the few keepers of PolitiFact’s rulings database, I immediately run into something that needs to be addressed:

PolitiFact has chosen to pull out the "pants on fire" ruling three times and all three times have been for Democrats. (PolitiFact has never rated a comment their highest designation of "true," but they have twice designated ads as "mostly true"-- and both of those have gone to Republican candidates.) …

…the MJS has not found a single statement or ad by a GOP politician to brand with their nuclear "pants on fire" designation and couldn't find anything by a Democrat to designate as "mostly true" or higher!

Jed may have not known at the time (since it was September) that there were quite a few True rulings made by PolitiFact Wisconsin, from its inception through the end of 2010. The distribution breaks down as follows, along with the Politi-Score: