Sidebar: Politi-Psychotic without the "otic"

Recently when using a friend’s new laptop with Windows Seven (I’m still on Vista), typing in the name of this blog in the search box, I noticed that for each letter a different search would come up (assuming that’s Windows Seven or a better browser)….and when I got to politipsych, I found there was a site by that name, and it had some excellent write-ups on Republican candidates…they read with the flare of one of my favorite authors and occasional Salon journalist Camille Paglia. In this case, a post dated August 15, by Dr. Alan J. Lipman, caught my eye:

Note Ben Smith’s excellent article on Bachmann’s rapid Waterloo at Waterloo moment, showcasing all the insular, self-protective tightness of fearful “can’t believe that we’re here” organizational pathology that will magnify as the spotlight increases upon her.

The triangle is between Perry-Bachmann-Romney.

Perry will chip away at Bachmann’s brittle, protected, highly anxious and therefore highly managed style. Bachmann will also increasing demonstrate numerous unforced errors in this regard. End result: Perry’s relaxed strength will be reinforced against Bachmann’s increasingly difficult to hide over-controlled self-protection against her own fear of her shaky insecurity.

Perry’s downhome Texan style, while likely an issue in the general, will wear well against Romney’s shape-shifting, “corporations are people”, off-kilter retail politics. R’s will like his comfortable, broken in boots, and barring a scandal, he’s got it.

I agree: I’m betting on Perry as the one who "gets it", who’ve some described as someone who looks like Josh Brolin portraying George W. Bush. It’s the possibility of scandal and/or the successful ability of the Obama 2012 election team to focus on Perry in terms of Bush’s many negatives (and Perry's forays into right-wing extremism) that will keep him from going to the Whitehouse. While I had always heard he might run in 2016, announcing for 2012 was a good idea (for the Republicans) because he is a far better candidate than the others in terms of potential appeal to independent voters.  Lipman followed by this more in-depth psychological analysis of Perry's rival Michele Bachmann:

Bachmann coming in with expectations of near certifiability for inpatient treatment, has shown herself to be able to shift to voice that is reasonably free of near psychotic utterances (e.g. Swine Flu the result of Democratic machinations), and to show reasonable tenacity at evading the worst dangers of her dangerously near past utterances. Of course–that does not mean that they weren’t said, and while showing increased skill at evasion, she has little with which to actually answer the content of these statements.

She has been able to do this for short bursts. This will not last for the campaign, the frayed edges of the anxious need for controlled perfection–borne of anxiety, of the fear that it will all collapse around her from one mistake, of the remarkable house of cards upon which her “Tax attorney” “Family Business” candidacy has been built, will force a self-protective shock troop surrounding her; a prima donna need to ensure perfect conditions for appearances which will quickly undermine any “voice of the people” rhetoric, and slips of the less than factual or reassuring variety. She is tight, controlled, scared. It won’t be long.

Yep, it won't be long. Next up, as time affords me, will be a Politi-Score review of Perry.

Hurricane Irene Meets Uncle Jay

This week's word: Turbulence!

Hurricane Irene Meets The Dummies

Sidebar: On Media Bias--Guest Blog (3)

By Paul Waldman (written June 17)

Note:  This title of this review is called "Tomorrow's Bogus Liberal Bias Claim Today" as posted by Paul Waldman and is the third part of a series about the book by Tim Groseclose as pictured directed at those who might view it as definitive proof of liberal media bias.

I hesitated somewhat to write about this, but since this book -- Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind -- will almost certainly be promoted across the conservative media and become a hit, I figured I had no choice. Although the book has not been released yet, I have read a study the author, Tim Groseclose, conducted on the subject, which sounds as though it was the basis for the book, so there are some things I can say.

Groseclose is a political scientist at UCLA, and in 2005, he and a co-author (an economist) published this study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, in which they claim to document widespread liberal bias in the media. I detailed some of its problems back when I was at Media Matters for America, but it's worth recounting briefly. This study was perhaps the most extraordinary methodological train wreck I have ever encountered outside of a freshman term paper. That it was published in a peer-reviewed journal can only be explained by the fact that it was an economics journal, and presumably, the referees and editors, like the authors themselves, not only had no idea how media analysis is done, but seemed unaware that lots of scholars had approached the issue with a variety of methods. To quote myself:

Standard scholarly practice dictates the assembly of a literature review as part of any published study, and meta-analyses, as they gather together the findings of multiple studies, are particularly critical to literature reviews. That Groseclose and Milyo overlooked not only the Journal of Communication meta-analysis, but also the 59 studies it surveyed, raises questions about the seriousness with which they conducted this study.

Indeed, they seem to be unaware that an academic discipline of media studies even exists. Their bibliography includes works by right-wing media critics such as Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell III and Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine (now deceased), as well as an article from the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. But Groseclose and Milyo failed to cite a single entry from any of the dozens of respected scholarly journals of communication and media studies in which media bias is a relatively frequent topic of inquiry -- nothing from Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Political Communication, or any other media studies journal.

This is relevant because the promotion of this book is going to rest on the idea that it's a serious, objective, scholarly work. Yet in addition to ignoring the dozens of studies on media bias in the apparent belief that they were the first ones to ever attempt to address the topic quantitatively, Groseclose and his co-author used the most bizarre methodology I've ever encountered to come up with their assertion of liberal bias. See if you can follow: They took members of Congress' ideology scores from Americans for Democratic Action; searched the Congressional Record to see which think tanks each member cited in floor speeches; assigned ideological scores to each think tank based on who cited them on the floor; then counted how often the think tanks were quoted in news sources. If a news outlet quoted think tanks cited more often by liberal members, the outlet had "liberal bias." That's it.

Sidebar: On Media Bias--Guest Blog (2)

By Mark Wylie (written August 7)

Note:  This is an Amazon.com review of the book "Turn Left: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind" by Tim Groseclose.  Mark's was one of fifteen reviews.  Two of those fifteen reviews were by individuals who had received advance copies.  Thirty-one of seventy-six people who read Mark's review found it "helpful."  This is being posted as the second of a series directed at those who might view his book and research as definitive proof of liberal media bias.

In this book Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at UCLA, tackles the issue of supposed "liberal bias" in the news media. He reaches conclusions that are very provocative, and which will be warmly greeted by conservatives; however, his analysis is flawed, even crippled, by numerous, serious failings. His conclusions should be rejected.

Let me start by briefly summarizing the core research Groseclose did, which was originally published in a journal article co-written with economist Jeffrey Milyo. Groseclose and Milyo first assembled two large databases: one of citations of 200 political organizations (Groseclose constantly uses the term think tanks, but many of them are activist groups like the NAACP or the NRA) in speeches made in Congressional debate, the other of citations of the same organizations by 20 news media outlets. Their next step is to estimate "political quotients" for the think tanks, using the Americans for Democratic Action voting ratings for Senators and Representatives to impute an ADA rating for the organizations they cite. Finally, they construct an algorithm to compare the citation patterns of news organizations to those of Senators and Representatives, and from that they estimate the "slant quotients"--again, these are imputed ADA ratings--of the 20 media outlets.

The basic conclusions they reach are repeated in the book. Groseclose and Milyo find that almost every media outlet they studied has a "slant quotient" of well over 50, which they claim is a leftward slant (more on this issue below). In the book Groseclose goes further, and concludes that the "bias" of the media significantly impacts American elections, by swinging 8-10% of the vote to the Democrats; he claims that without media "bias," John McCain would have won in a landslide in 2008 with 56% of the vote.

So what's wrong here? Plenty. A full discussion of the shortcomings of this book would far exceed the word limit for reviews. There have been some significant online critiques of Groseclose's work, and I encourage readers who want to learn more to track down those written by Andrew Gelman, Brendan Nyhan and Paul Waldman, in particular. I'm going to focus on three basic criticisms:

1) One big problem with Groseclose's basic method concerns his use of the ADA voting ratings as a measure of ideology. Not only is he assuming that we can numerically measure political ideology at all by doing this, he is making the assumption that you can capture all major differences in ideology with a one-dimensional statistical measure.

To see why he's wrong let's do a little hypothetical exercise. Suppose we have two members of Congress, Ms. A and Mr. B. Ms. A is a consistent, principled libertarian; Mr. B is an equally principled communitarian. On economic issues, Ms. A almost never votes in favor of government intervention in the economy, while Mr. B is much more likely to vote in favor. Likewise, on social issues, Ms. A will vote to maximize individual freedom, while Mr. B is likely to vote in favor of many government limits on individual freedom. To a liberal group, like the ADA, or a conservative group, like the American Conservative Union, both Ms. A and Mr. B are going to be perceived as voting the "right" way about 50% of the time; they would tend to have voting scores that were about equal.

Sidebar: On Media Bias--Guest Blog (1)

By Andrew Gelman of The Monkey Cage (July 29, 2011)

Respected political scientist Tim Groseclose just came out with a book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” I was familiar with Groseclose’s article (with Jeffrey Milyo) on media bias that came out several years ago—it was an interesting study but I was not convinced by its central claim that they were measuring an absolute level of bias—and then recently heard about this new book in the context of some intemperate things Groseclose said in a interview on the conservative Fox TV network.

Groseclose’s big conclusion is that in the absence of media bias, the average American voter would be positioned at around 25 on a 0-100 scale, where 0 is a right-wing Republican and 100 is a left-wing Democrat. (Seeing as the number line is conventionally drawn from left to right, I think it would make more sense for 0 to represent the left and 100 to be on the right, but I guess it’s too late for him to change now.) Groseclose places the average voter now at around 50, so, by his assessment, media bias is a huge deal.

After some further blog discussion, I became curious enough to head over to the local Barnes & Noble and take a look at the book.

Before I get to the details, let me again link to Brendan Nyhan’s thorough methodological discussion of the Groseclose and Milyo article from 2004.

Journalism as one of many institutions that affect politics

Stepping away from the data for a moment, it makes sense that the news media would generally fall on the left side of the political spectrum. Whether this is good or bad is another question, but newspapers generally seem to position themselves on the side of the underdog. Consider, for example, the slogan that a newspaper should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Another way to think about media bias is to think about the communication industry as a whole. I imagine that “journalism,” taken as a whole, leans left, while “public relations,” taken as a whole, leans right.

And if most of the news media in a country moved from journalism to public relations (as in Berlusconi’s Italy), I could imagine it could make a difference in the country’s politics.

The question, “What would public opinion be like if journalists expressed views comparable to the average American?”, while interesting, could perhaps be combined with similar questions such as, What would U.S. politics be like if there were no public relations industry? Or, What would U.S. politics be like if campaign contributions were given equally to the left and the right? Or even, What would U.S. politics be like if religious leaders were, on average, in the political center?

Lil White Lies: No Way Out

My good friend Janet is a smart lady who’s worked in IT most of her life, has taught herself the cryptic programming language C++ (I don’t know if it’s even in use anymore) and has a web host certification along with a lot of other skills. She’s been off and on employed since late 2003, currently unemployed. Her husband has a very steady job so she isn’t hurting; she’s been wise enough to pay off her home and I’ll just say, Suze Orman would probably love to make her an example of living lean and not getting into debt.

Anyway, when we visit we usually go out to eat and sit and talk until the restaurant kicks us out. One of our last conversations was about taxes. She’s accepted that she can no longer get the type of IT programming job she once had in the higher income brackets, but the marginal tax brackets made the lower paying jobs less desirable because of the large bite of Federal taxes when her pay was added to her husband’s: in other words, her entire paycheck got taxed at the 15-25% rate once his pay has been subjected to the lower bracket rates. On top of that, she would be hit with 7.65% in payroll taxes.

This is an intro to my conservative counterpart’s most recent missive on PolitiFact’s ruling of True on Warren Buffet’s New York Times op-ed statement “The ‘mega-rich’ pay about 15 percent in taxes, while the middle class ‘fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot..’" You’ll see how it figures in as we go along.

Screenprint to prove Bryan's error before he sneaks in and corrects it.

 Bryan White gets off to a great start with his own flub on Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). AGI is the line on your Federal Income Tax Return where you add together all your sources of income and make any adjustments: this would include, but is not limited to, wages, interest, dividends, capital gains, rental income, pensions, etc. He provides an example of “effective” tax rates as follows: (emphasis added)

For purposes of illustration, suppose we have a worker who earned $15,000 over the course of a year. After deductions, the worker has $1,000 of taxable income, and that falls for purposes of our illustration into a 10 percent tax bracket. The worker would owe $100 in taxes, and that tax payment would represent an effective tax rate of 0.67 percent (100/15,000). Alternatively, one might use adjusted gross income as the denominator in the equation. In that event the effective tax rate in our example would equal the marginal rate (10 percent).

He’s saying that the Adjusted Gross Income is $1,000?  A review of the adjustments to gross income to be subtracted are not the type of things a “worker who earned $15,000” would be likely to have, such as self-employment taxes, and IRA/HSA deductions are limited in amount. Apparently, Bryan has his taxes done or knows nothing about them. But the 10% of AGI is not correct, it would still have to be taxable income, or the term I think he meant to use, which is the marginal income, or $100/$1000. The other problem here is he’s ignoring the “heavy hit of payroll taxes” as Buffet said in his op-ed, so his example actually paid an effective rate of 8.3% ($1247.50/$15,000). That’s more than 12 times higher than Bryan’s .67% example, but that’s more like reality. So let’s look at that in total compared to Buffet: he made 2,667 times what Bryan’s taxpayer example made in AGI, or 40,000 times what he made in taxable income; percentage wise, though, Buffet paid just less than twice as much tax. Yeah, that probably sounds fair enough to Bryan.

So now that we’ve cleared up Bryan’s muddled way of providing “background” let’s continue with his twisted tale of PolitiFact analysis. He quotes PolitiFact’s story on Buffet, where Buffet establishes the point that writer Angie Drobnic Holan is going to fact-check. He comments:

…it should be instantly obvious that Buffett is talking about effective (federal) income tax rates on adjusted gross income. In Buffett's version of events, the progressive system of tax credits and deductions does not exist. Neither counts against the type of effective tax rate he measures with his informal workplace survey. Misleading? Yeah.

I don’t think Buffet is pretending the “progressive system of tax credits and deductions does not exist.” “Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent” along with the headlined fact-check “the middle class ‘fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets’” indicates he is highly aware of the way progressive taxes work.

But because Drobnic Holan confines her review to Buffet’s contention that the middle class tax rates generally fall between the brackets of 15-25%, and because Bryan believes Buffet is talking about effective rates, he terms Drobnic Holan’s review criteria as “very narrow” and then finds a way to mischaracterize both.

Tchotchkes: GOP Prez Buttons I'd Like to See

Although for Bachmann, I can think of some appropriate by-lines, such as: 

• Tender n Flakey
• What's my Lyin'?
• Vote for me--or go to Hell 

Politi-Score: The Six Million Meal Woman

S T R E T C H I N G
the truth more than her face!

 Nancy Pelosi is the subject of this next individual analysis of fact-check to fact-check comparisons with the Politi-Score. In a previous post I stated I was thinking about doing Joe Biden, but he has not had much this year in the way of rulings: Pelosi’s have gone down “a bit” since she lost her position as speaker, but I thought she would serve as a useful female Democratic comparison to Republican Michele Bachmann, who was my initial Politi-Score designee. Pelosi has not had as many rulings as Bachmann so I have to compile her scoring a bit differently: looking at her total rulings up to about a year ago, then comparing them to that year since, as well as to Bachmann.

There’s a total of 22 rulings from all sources: 11 from only PolitiFact up until one year ago (August 2010) and 11 for the period August 2010 to August 2011: from PolitiFact (6), Factcheck.org (4) plus a single one from the Washington Post Fact Checker. Although that single one proved to be a very crucial fact-check in terms of PolitiFact ruling accuracy and/or potential bias.

It turns out Pelosi has been going the way of Bachmann on the Politi-Score, or maybe even the opposite direction, since Bachmann’s PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index has technically improved from a year ago. Pelosi’s “truthiness” has gone down considerably, and her overall average of an almost “Mostly False” negative 41 was a vast drop from a close-to-Half-True negative 4 which was her Truth Index up until about a year ago. This was because in the last year she’s averaged a negative 75 on the PF Truth Index; her Politi-Score for the last year, the combination of all three fact-checkers as a measure, is a negative 77. That’s pretty bad. As my favorite Truth Indexer Steve at Quibbling Potatoes might prove, she’s way out of one standard deviation. In other words, her non-truthfulness is way off the norm.

There were two re-covered fact-checks. The first one was an employment numbers comment that Pelosi’s made frequently in different forms. In April, she said that more jobs were created in the first year of the Obama administration than all eight years of George W. Bush. PolitiFact and Factcheck.org both reviewed this statement. PolitiFact ruled it False while Factcheck.org called it misleading:

Nancy Pelosi accurately — but misleadingly — said more private jobs were created last year than under Bush. Her statement was true. But it's also true that there were still 2,065,000 fewer private jobs in May than there were when Obama took office.

At last year's pace of job creation, it would take until February 2017 just to regain the jobs lost since the high point reached under the previous administration. And it would still take until 2015 to regain all those jobs even under the faster pace of job growth during the last 15 months.

PolitiFact ruled Half True on a statement by Pelosi that “Under a House Republican appropriations bill, "6 million seniors are deprived of meals” concluding as follows:

In other words, Pelosi’s problem wasn’t her math; it was how she reported her math at the event. So ultimately, Pelosi is wrong, but we think she deserves credit for taking a cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers. On balance, we rate he claim Half True.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker, wasn’t nearly as magnanimous, giving Pelosi’s statement 4 Pinnochios, or the equivalent of a PolitiFact Pants on Fire:

In a city with overheated rhetoric, Pelosi’s statement ranks high on this year’s list of bloviated bluster. It’s bad enough that she repeatedly mixed up 6 million meals and 6 million people — and made no effort to correct the record after her statement was reported in the media. But the figure she used appears to have been invented itself, with little basis in fact.

So, we have PolitiFact saying she took a “cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers”, while the Washington Post Fact Checker titles Pelosi's figures “absurd math.”

Tchotchkes: Uncle Jay Explains The News

This week's word is "ousted." Uncle Jay explains that it's been happening to more than just Moammar!

Politi-Score: Quibbling Potatoes, Very Well Done

Quite a cerebral Quibbling
Mr. Potato Head

I knew there had to be another blog, somewhere, someplace,  that was doing the same "Politi-Scoring" that I was. At least in the realm of assigning values to the PolitiFact (PF) Truth-o-Meter ratings and averaging them between Democrats and Republicans. After all, a few mainstream websites had been making some attempts at quantification, so it was an open idea that had been tried different ways many times.

I can’t recall exactly how this blog came up in a search result, but Quibbling Potatoes, a blog hosted by someone named Steve from Norman, Oklahoma, was doing almost everything I was doing, presenting similar graphs and quantifications of what became the PolitiFact Truth Index. He delved into some of the same issues with PolitiFact, and reached many of the same conclusions.

But the most interesting thing about Steve’s version of the Truth Index? I’ll put it in Steve’s words. 

This week PolitiFact announced a new feature on their mobile phone app...

They developed a chart of general truthiness against time so that trends could be seen more easily. ..

The feature is almost exactly like my PolitiFact Truth Index.

What did PolitiFact call this new feature? The PolitiFact Truth Index.

Coincidence? Who knows.

(Personally, I think it's more than a coincidence. But I can't prove that.)

As I said, Steve reached some of the same conclusions: that Republicans lie more than Democrats, that the lying increased, for example during the 2010 elections and the February Wisconsin protests, that the PF states have differences to PF National. I find Steve’s analysis more penetrating than my own, as I just publish what I find (or as he said in one of his posts, “charts ‘em as [he] sees ‘em”) and tend to leave more on conclusions to the readers. His post on subject analysis was excellent. Like me, he seems to be searching for a better way to graphically present his findings…yes, those murky clippings of Excel graphs (which is what his appear to be) aren’t the best. I appreciate his calculating the standard deviation but I’m doubtful how many readers have taken the necessary statistics to understand it.

But most of all, poor Steve was getting tormented by my conservative counterpart in his comments area, reaching the same impasse with him as everyone else. Steve referred to the blog PolitiFact Bias in one of his most recent posts: (emphasis added)

Sidebar: Anniversary Time

Well, I just noticed that PolitiFact was celebrating its Birthday Number 4, and I thought, I think it's my birthday, too....my first.  I created Politi-Psychotics about a year ago with several themes in mind:  first, I was tired of debating (someone) at PolitiFact's Facebook page and wanted a better forum where I had more rhetorical/graphical freedom and second, I wanted to quantify PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter.  But as everything changes over time, this blog has evolved:  now PolitiFact has its own Truth Index, and there's a lot of other fact-check websites, and a lot of people are interested in what PolitiFact does. This is the "job" I enjoy day in and out, on weekends and holidays.  I hope to continue unabated, although September will be a busy month for me as it looks like I may be packing up and leaving Michigan to make a permanent home in Florida.  So there may not be a lot of posts for that month.

Thanks to all my commenters and followers and I hope it keeps getting better!

PolitiFact Detractors: Tax Cut Dilution (or Delusion?)

It appears Bryan White is on a part-time vacation at PolitiFact Bias (or is busy with his real job), so "Deff Jeff" Dyberg is trying to fill in. For his most recent post, he tries to make a case that PolitiFact is mathematically challenged, or at least mathematically biased. Bryan’s added comment will be addressed here as well.

Dyberg reviews an article by Jeffrey H. Anderson with the Conservative Weekly Standard, who is contesting PolitiFact’s awarding a False on the Truth-o-Meter to John Boehner, who tweeted that “POTUS’ economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per job.” Anderson asks “what does PolitiFact have against long division?”

Dyberg’s conclusion on Anderson’s review:

In the end we're left with yet another (and multiple) examples of PolitiFact taking an objective, verifiable statement, constructing a straw man, and quickly demolishing their creation. Anderson never implied that the $278,000 figure represented salaries per job. He was making a point regarding the expense of the stimulus overall and putting it into a context that was easily digested by readers. It's impressive (if not disturbing) the lengths PolitiFact went to in order to distort and discard Anderson's valid premise.

Yes, drag out that straw man one more time, except that it doesn’t invalidate the argument (that's called "the fallacy of the fallacy," Bryan White's best kept secret). It’s NOT an objective or verifiable statement simply because the divisor cannot be objectively verified, besides the dilution of the tax cuts. Tax cuts made up 43% of the stimulus (or about $120,000 per job created of the $278,000). Tax cuts: what White and Dyberg (and Boehner and all the Republicans) think is the only thing that can create jobs.

But before I begin let me address Dyberg’s claim that “PolitiFact fails to offer evidence that Anderson did classify the entire stimulus spending as salaries.” Anderson also denied this saying “I never said that the $278,000 per job was all spent on salaries or wages.”

PolitiFact Detractors: Your AIM is Way Off

Whoever owns (Logan Churchwell) Accuracy in Media (AIM), as it calls itself, probably just loves Cliff Kincaid, the writer of this recent AIM fact-check of the fact-checker, in this case, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker (Glenn Kessler). He really knows how to take “fairness” and “balance” (where have I heard that before?) in media to the upper stratosphere of politi-psychotics. Cliff may not have known that PolitiFact weighed in as well (seconding the False) on fact-checking Michele Bachmann’s statement that the August 5 S+P downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt proved her right that the debt ceiling should not have been raised (see my previous post on this). Oh well, he’d just say they’re all just part of that vast left-wing conspiracy that is “so determined to undermine Bachmann’s presidential run.” 

She's whipping her campaign into shape!



Analogy time. Let’s say it’s the dead of winter and you have your grandma connected to a breathing machine in your home. Suppose you’re not able to pay the utility bill that's due unless your credit limit is raised, and Michele Bachmann was just hired at the bank and is put in charge of increasing said limit. So Bachmann says to you, I’m not raising your credit limit, because you need to cut your expenses NOW and turn your thermostat down to 58 degrees. What would you say? Is cutting that expense now going to pay the current utility bill?

Now, you and your family would be freezing and grandma might die if the power gets interrupted. But Bachmann doesn’t think that’s a big deal, and still threatens to cut you. She says you can throw some blankets on her and give her mouth to mouth (i.e., just pay the interest on the debt). In the final moments before power cut-off, you get the office manager to over-ride Bachmann so you can get the credit to pay the utility bill and keep the power on, and submit a plan to turn down the thermostat to 60 degrees and have a family meeting to pare down future expenses further. FICO lowers your credit score, however, because your negotiations with Bachmann made you late paying the bill and because you really should lower your thermostat to 58 degrees.

You see Bachmann later and she proclaims: “See FICO was right. Your credit limit should not have been raised.” You bite your lip. If Bachmann was really right, and you didn’t get that increase, grandma would be dead.

It was your previous utility expenses incurred in the bill currently due that required the credit limit increase, so it was not possible to just immediately cut expenses and pay the bill (the debt ceiling had to be increased in order to pay bills already incurred). Both Bachmann and Kincaid conflate the debts incurred which required the debt ceiling increase with current and future expenses. It was clear in the S+P report that increasing the debt ceiling was not the issue: the issue was the wrangling and the “trajectory” of the increasing debt in the future. The S+P report also discussed a more positive scenario by expiring high-earner tax cuts in 2013 because it would bring down the high trajectory—the cuts the Republicans want to keep in place. (emphasis added)

Our revised upside scenario--which, other things being equal, we view as consistent with the outlook on the 'AA+' long-term rating being revised to stable--retains these same macroeconomic assumptions. In addition, it incorporates $950 billion of new revenues on the assumption that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high earners lapse from 2013 onwards, as the Administration is advocating. In this scenario, we project that the net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74% of GDP by the end of 2011 to 77% in 2015 and to 78% by 2021.

Then to add insult to injury, Bachmann says, “You just got a blank check when they raised that debt limit.” You now feel like cold-cocking her.

But there may be a better answer to explain this to conservatives like Cliff: The Clinton Surplus. Because as most conservatives would only be too giddy to tell you, there was no Clinton “surplus”—it was a budget surplus--the debt continued. There was just a lot less added to the debt. I’m sure Kincaid would suddenly be able to differentiate it then..as well as Bachmann. Of course, no problem. That’s what you might call conservative “bias exposed for all to see.”

Tchotchkes: Uncle Jay Explains The News

The word for this week is "surmise." Or maybe, the phrase "educated guess."  So surmise was more of a surprise and educated guess shows education doesn't do one too much good sometimes.  Uncle Jay explains.

Politi-Scoring the Ames Debates: Ceiling Fans

Reviewing the fact-checks of the recent Republican debate in Ames, Iowa, at the three sites that the Politi-Score is ascribed to (PoliGraph got left out as it did not do a review and as noted before, is more of a PolitiFact Junior/Minnesota) it becomes obvious who they tend to concentrate on: the person who ultimately won the Saturday “Straw Poll”, that is, Michele Bachmann, with a distant second by perceived strongest contender Mitt Romney. The fact-checks of statements by Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum seemed to be a courtesy if anything by FactCheck.org.

There were 24 statements fact-checked in total: 8 of them (1/3) were made by Bachmann, 5 by Romney, 3 each Paul and Pawlenty, 2 for Huntsman, and 1 each for Cain, Gingrich and Santorum. Doing an individual Politi-Score would not make much sense. In total, however, this is how it looked for each of the fact-checking websites, along with the aggregated Politi-Score.

Overall, you can compare the debate Politi-Score of (-54) to that of ALL 2011 PolitiFact Republicans (-23) or ALL 2011 Washington Post Fact Checker Republicans (-60). It seems PolitiFact found them (far) less truthful while the Washington Post found them a bit more. It should be noted, however, that PolitiFact had the "most truthful" debate score (-30) which compares more closely with their overall 2011 Republican of (-23).

This was the most "popular" fact-checked statement at the Ames debates.

Along with the most fact-checks, Bachmann had the most replications. The most re-covered fact-check was Bachmann’s distorted contentions regarding the debt ceiling: that raising the debt ceiling was giving Obama a blank check (False by both FactCheck.org and the Washington Post Fact Checker), and that the Standard and Poor downgrade of U.S. Treasuries proved she was right about not raising the debt ceiling (False at PolitiFact and “a mischaracterization” at Washington Post FactChecker). Mitt Romney was the only other one re-covered for two statements, and the only Pants on Fire from PF. Tim Pawlenty did have one very True statement about Bachmann (which no one checked, although he did make one other about Romney rated True): that she has a reputation for making false statements. He must be reading those fact-checking sites.

Tchotchkes: The Growth that's "Teatastasized"

Politi-Score: Good Golly Ms. PoliGraph

In MPR PoliGraph’s profile (on its “About PoliGraph” web page), there’s an interesting cross reference to PolitiFact (PF) as follows: (emphasis added)

If this reminds you of PolitiFact.com, the Pultizer Prize-winning from the St. Petersburg Times, you'd be right. We know good ideas when we see them.

Who Works on PoliGraph?

Catharine Richert writes PoliGraph. She is an experienced journalist who previously worked at PolitiFact.com and Congressional Quarterly. She has a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College.

Mike Mulcahy, MPR News' political editor, directs the feature.

That Pultizer sure has....pull. So Catherine Richert went off in a different direction, back to Minnesota where she got her Masters, with a different version of PolitiFact, called PoliGraph, using her PolitiFact training and experience. She (or Editor Mulcahy) decided it would be better to have four rankings, throwing out the ubiquitous Pants on Fire, and including a more descriptive “Inconclusive” to replace the equivocating Half True. No “Mostly” True or False, but a “Misleading” something like FactCheck.Org. But with a signature PolitiFact generic checkmark.

Richert holds the PF checkmark close
to her heart.



So we have the PolitiFact state partnerships, and then this sort of PolitiFact offshoot. PoliGraph functions as a sort of PolitiFact Minnesota. Michele Bachmann was a good person to start off with since I had four fact-checking sources, the fourth (PoliGraph) being one from her home state. Then there’s Tim Pawlenty, the other Minnesotan presidential candidate (and even Al Franken the Minnesota Senator, although he’s not given much attention by PolitiFact National). In other words, there’ll be nothing on poliga-statist (pun sort of intended) Mitt Romney or Texan Rick Perry from PoliGraph.

This means PoliGraph’s utilization for me in the Politi-Score is limited. In certain respects, it can’t be weighted as heavily as PolitiFact, FactCheck or the Washington Post Fact Checker because of its somewhat symbiotic relationship with PolitiFact. Although it should be noted, PoliGraph slightly differed on a ruling it shared with PolitiFact: that of the $105 billion hidden in Medicare (by Michele Bachmann). PoliGraph called it False, while PF was “Mostly False.” So, the caveat for PoliGraph on shared rulings will be those where it differs with PolitiFact, along with those rulings it doesn’t share.

How Dummies Sell Their Boehner

With a special appearance by Michele and Marcus Bachmann.

Tchotchkes: The Teapublican World

Sidebar: Preconception Detection

It’s been proven in my blog to some degree that any sort of bias by PolitiFact (PF) in its rulings can’t be proven through “a preponderance of anecdotal evidence.” Because (1) some of that preponderance is clearly arguable, as I have shown in Lil White Lies, and (2) the evidence of bias can go both ways, as I have shown in Grading PF Liberal Style, as well as in my Guide to PF Detractors, which lists those alleging PF of bias on both sides of the aisle.

In my many searches for items to add to my Guide to PF Detractors, I occasionally look at comments, to see if someone has anything original to say (generally it’s run of the mill). Here were two, however, that really offer some different approaches to determine bias by PolitiFact.

They come from an article by David Brauer at MinnPost.com who was critiquing Bill Adair’s response to Eric Ostermeier’s study in which he suggests that PolitiFact writers may be using “selection bias” in choosing statements for review. (I reviewed Ostermeier’s numbers, comparing them to mine, and found that his Republican “negatives” were somewhat higher in his database of 512 rulings as compared to my database of 1,330 rulings on current and former office-holders.)

Here’s the first one written by Mark Gisleson: (emphasis added)

Politifact isn't biased by party, they're biased in an establishment way. That's why Bachmann does badly by them, but so do people like Alan Grayson who they often parsed to death.

They also cannot differentiate between politicians who skillfully dissemble, as opposed to politicians who equivocate themselves into gray areas.

They would do much better if they placed every politician's statements in the context of their party's political agenda. If a misstatement serves their agenda, it should be graded more harshly because it's fair to assume that lies that benefit the cause are deliberate. 

I’ve already noticed that my conservative counterpart might be aware of this, because, in his Grading PolitiFact critiques, he often seems to deliberately and assiduously avoid placing the argument in the context of the (Republican) party’s political agenda. An excellent case in point is a PF ruling on Ann Coulter reviewed earlier this year where, following the tsunami-nuclear reactor incident in Japan, she claimed to Bill O’Reilly that radiation was good for you. Bryan’s argument that she didn’t deserve a “False” from PF was that the context of Coulter’s argument was the media’s over-reaction to it, when the fact was, as I showed, they seemed to be under-reacting, if anything, and the real context was the Republican party’s promotion of nuclear energy, ergo, Coulter’s claims about radiation. Bryan didn’t say anything about the Republican advocacy of nuclear energy.

Lil White Lies: Moral Mushrooms

Before PolitiFact (PF) recently published that Obama had kept the above promise on the Obameter, they reviewed it and talked about it.

After they put it out, IF they saw what Bryan White had to say (essentially, that he didn't keep the promise because the energy producers exceeded it regardless) they most likely talked about it again, and decided there wasn’t any merit in his suggestion, and didn’t do it. It was probably in a meeting, for that matter, it was a group decision following some discussion.

If I was in that meeting, I would have said, this is bullsh*t. Leave it the way it is. Bryan White claims it is an “obvious” mistake, but that’s his opinion. I’d ask a few simple questions, which I’m sure some of which were covered if PF did have a meeting:

1. How does Bryan even know that the energy companies weren’t influenced by Obama to exceed this percentage which brought about it “just happening”? What is his evidence? Does he have Obama’s phone records to see if he called anyone in the energy industry? Is that the extent to which he wants PF to go?

2. Assuming Obama isn’t past-posting, if he encouraged these companies to try to achieve the 10% goal, and it was done, should he not deserve credit for the encouragement? Isn’t this a function of leadership, the so-called bully pulpit?

3. Assuming you’re a company who doesn’t want government intervention, you’re supposed to (in theory, according to Conservatives and Libertarians) “do the right thing.” What Bryan claims is implicit in Obama’s “promise” is the government riding rough-shod over the energy providers (the way I think he sees regulation or government pressure) in requiring them to achieve the standard. So it was apparently left to the “free markets” and the goal was achieved without government regulation: isn’t that what Bryan would want?

4. Actually, it WAS government intervention: it was the Stimulus which was “primarily responsible” for the growth. And who was behind the Stimulus? (emphasis added)

Yet, as Dave Hamilton, director of Global Warming and Energy Programs for the Sierra Club, pointed out in an e-mail interview, the Obama administration might not have had that far to go. Hamilton contends that, based on a report by the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) -- the statistical, independent body within the Department of Energy -- the U.S. was already receiving roughly 10 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2009. "It was the strong growth in both hydro and wind that brought it over 10 percent for 2009, so I'm not saying the promise was disingenuous. But somebody must have known they didn't have that far to go to make 10 percent with hydro left in the mix,” said Hamilton. The EIA report that Hamilton cites specifies that the American Recovery and Re-Investment Act was primarily responsible for this growth of renewable energy-based electricity in 2009.

So, when Bryan was a kid and his mother told him to put his shoes away, I guess he put his shoes away, but he didn’t put his coat away too. He couldn’t make the correlation because his youthful logic said, that’s all my mother requires me to do. 

Politi-Score: Wrapping Up Bachmann (Jumping the Snark Part 5)

Here’s the rest of the statements by Michele Bachmann which have been fact-checked at least two times.

Bachmann: "My husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm." (June 26)

PolitiFact (PF) ruled False, and there was this from FactCheck.org:

Bachmann falsely claimed that she and her husband "have never gotten a penny" from a family farm that received federal subsidies. But she reported income from the farm in 2006, 2008 and 2009 — the most recent year available — on her congressional financial disclosure statements.

Bachmann:  “The president released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve.” (June 26)

PolitiFact ruled False, while the Fact Checker included it as the "blended" Mostly False, expressed thus:

This is a huge overstatement. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has 727 million barrels of oil, and the Obama administration announced last week that the U.S. will release 30 million barrels of oil from the reserve. (Another 30 million barrels will be released by European countries.)

So she’s off by a factor of 25.

Bachmann:  “One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office.” (March 26)

PolitiFact gave this one a Pants on Fire, while FactCheck.org said “not even close”:

This claim is not even close to the truth. A query of Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement’s online database shows 276 permits were approved for "new wells" — both developmental and exploratory — from the time Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009 to the date of Bachmann’s speech.

Jumping the Snark AND Grading PF Liberal Style!

When I initially saw this result in my Excel “sort” I straight off dismissed it: Half True at PolitiFact versus False at FactCheck.org , for Michele Bachmann’s statement that “Obamacare” would require 16,500 new IRS agents to police it. After all, Half True can just as well mean Half False, and because the False could arguably just as well be a Mostly False at Factcheck since it’s subject to my own interpretation as to ranking, I didn’t think it was a candidate for a major post. But, just in case, I decided to first read FactCheck’s take on it. FactCheck was pretty emphatic (and a bit snarky, I might add) about the False:

Bachmann not only exaggerates but is flat-out wrong when she repeats the oft-stated false claim about the need to hire "16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama’s health care bill." As we reported previously, the figure of 16,500 originated from a House Republican report that relies on false assumptions and outright misrepresentation. The CBO estimated in March 2010 that the health care law would increase IRS administrative costs by $5 billion to $10 billion over 10 years. But that money will not be going for "16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing" health care mandates. The IRS is mostly responsible under the new law for administering tax credit programs, not collecting penalties.

When I looked at what PolitiFact had to say, I saw opportunity a-knocking for an excellent Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style piece. Because now I had another website verifying the same claim which was basically saying through its harsher “grade” that PolitiFact was going way too easy on Republicans/Conservatives. So,  here's the best of both worlds!

Bachmann made this statement in January when she followed up President Obama’s State of the Union message. In February, an actual estimate emerged as reported by U.S. News, of 1,054, besides the required systems changes to implement the law. So, compared to 16,500, we can safely say Bachmann’s claim is False to maybe Mostly False. But that conservatively biased (snark snark) PolitiFact just had to elevate it to an inconclusive Half True.

Politi-Score: Jumping the Snark (Part 3)

Michele Bachmann had one statement with what appeared to be “opposing” rulings on its veracity by PolitiFact (Mostly True) and the Washington Post Fact Checker (Mostly False). But closer examination revealed that they both treated the ruling similarly.



The statement in question as published in the Washington Post Fact Checker:

In February 2009, President Obama was very confident that his economic policies would turn the country around within a year.

He said, and I quote, ‘A year from now, I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition.’ Well, Mr. President, your policies haven't worked. Spending our way out of the recession hasn't worked. And so Mr. President, we take you at your word.”

According to Kessler, Bachman left some crucial words out of her Obama quote which “undercut her claim.”

However, this was again a case I’ve previously discussed in my Bachmann series: it was part of a “blended ruling” Kessler awarded Bachmann for eight statements combined. As Kessler noted in his “Pinnochio Test” conclusion: (emphasis added)

Bachmann’s announcement speech had relatively minor transgressions, fact wise, but she did worse in her pre-announcement interviews. We are pleased to see she has modified her language on the 800,000 jobs — though this stale talking point should be dropped altogether — but she erred badly on her assertion about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She needs to figure out how to eliminate the use of hyperbole — such as “massive” or “all” — from her vocabulary.

On a blended basis, she is getting two Pinocchios, but that’s only because we do not use 1/2 Pinocchios.

In this “blended” ruling, Kessler’s toughest “grade” was levied on the 800,000 jobs Bachmann claimed would be lost under Obamacare and an assertion that Obama had released all the oil from the SPR. Other than that, the rest, including the statement that quoted Obama as saying he would turn the economy around in one to three years, he considered “relatively minor transgressions, fact-wise.” So I’m guessing the “turn the economy around” statement was the minor transgression, an improvement truth-wise over the other two, and would have garnered less than Two Pinnochios by itself—or maybe 1-1/2 if Kessler could award half Pinnochios....or even one, the Mostly True.

PolitiFact's banner:  "Not a major omission"...WaPo: "Relatively minor transgression."

PolitiFact used the same Bachmann quote in its analysis and several others which preceded it that, as writer Louis Jacobson indicated, expressed a similar “variation on the line” of Bachmann leaving out a not quite inconsequential part of what Obama actually said, which, to paraphrase Kessler, undercut her claim:

Politi-Score: Jumping the Snark (Part 2)

One of the many so-called “proofs” of liberal bias on the part of PolitiFact (PF) offered by my conservative counterpart was the “snark” it displayed with regard to Michele Bachmann in some of its initial rulings on her. I’ve noted since that if there was indeed snark, it has substantially slipped, but it may still be there today, only not on the part of PolitiFact.

The 50 “rulings” of four fact-checkers on Michele Bachmann, as I noted before, contained ten statements which had been fact-checked by more than one fact-checker, resulting in 16 duplicates. Let’s take a look at some of these.

The $105 billion hidden in Obamacare (March). Covered by all four fact-checkers, the rulings ranged from Mostly False (PF and FactCheck.org), False by the MPR PoliGraph, and a full Pants on Fire Four Pinnochios from Glenn Kessler’s The Fact Checker. A small bit of snark surfaced in his conclusion: (italics added)

There is no "bombshell" except Bachmann's bombast.

She is correct that Congress already has appropriated some spending in future years, but her claim that this money was "hidden" does not have credibility. The money for these programs was clearly described and analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office before the legislation was voted into law.

FactCheck.org said Bachmann was “wrong” on the $105 Billion, twice, first in the headline and then: (italics added)

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s claim…is way off base…Bachmann is just wrong to characterize the mandated appropriations in the health care law as "hidden." It was, as the saying goes, hidden in plain sight.

I assigned a Mostly False to this one, but it could have qualified for a “False.” The MPR PoliGraph gave it a False. PolitiFact’s ruling, on the other hand, was clearly minus the snark, and gave her the benefit of the doubt, awarding her a Mostly False.  So much for "liberal bias."

The 800,000-jobs-killing Obamacare (June). All four fact-checkers selected this statement as well, and in this case they all agreed on the ruling of Mostly False, since the CBO estimated there would be a “small impact.” That is, except for FactCheck.org who took it a little further calling it an outright “false claim,” so I classified it likewise. They were pretty clear on this, headlining the check “Repeating a Falsehood on Healthcare” along with a twist of snark, if you want to call it that:  (italics added)

Politi-Score: Jumping the Snark (Part 1)

Michele Bachmann will be my test baby for the first in a series of Politi-Psychotic pieces examining and analyzing the results of multiple fact-checkers on an individual politician’s statements.

Bachmann has been getting more reviews lately because of her presidential inclinations, and there are four fact-check sources to consider on her, and “consolidate” into one. A total of 50 Bachmann statements (all of which were made during 2011) are broken down as follows in parentheses: PolitiFact (15), FactCheck.org (15), the Washington Post Fact Checker (13), and the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) PoliGraph (7).

After categorizing the statements into their levels of truthfulness, I realized I may have to revive the Politi-Score just retired in favor of PolitiFact’s Truth Index. It could be said that the Politi-Score has undergone a complete re-design and emerged as a comprehensive, “global” Truth Index, taking into account other fact-checkers. So, look for that tag soon.

I tried to keep the rules consistent to those used in my last post on the Fact-Checker: FactCheck.org was the tough one, because it does not grant rulings. So, there were basically four categories: True (which, like Glenn Kessler’s Fact Checker, are very rarely awarded); Inconclusive (I don’t think FactCheck.org would even publish those), which would rank a Half True; Misleading, which would get a Mostly False, and False, and this is where FactCheck.org uses the words “False” or “Inaccurate” (untrue, erroneous) somewhere in its review describing the statement at hand. If it does not use those words, it falls into the Misleading or Mostly False category. I did do one “Mostly True” however for FactCheck. This was a numbers claim which fell within the percentage “minimum” for Mostly True that’s been posted about before in a review of PolitiFact numbers claims. The MPR PoliGraph was handled similarly to the Washington Post Fact Checker-PolitiFact Truth Index in my previous post.

Of the 50 statements, one third, or 16 were duplicates (speaking of "selection bias"). That is, there were 10 statements which were also evaluated and ruled on by another fact-checker. There were two statements reviewed by all four fact-checkers (6 dupes). There were two statements reviewed by three of the fact-checkers (4 dupes). The other six were reviewed by two fact-checkers (6 dupes). Those I was most interested in examining were ones which could have (widely) divergent rulings. However, there were cases where the rulings had to be reconciled with the methods of the Fact-Checker and the context they said they examining, in other words, they may not be as divergent as thought.

Here is Bachmann’s Truth Index for each Fact-Checker, with the newly appointed “Politi-Score” at the end, which is the overall average:

I have to figure out a better way to present these graphs:  CLICK on graphic TO ENLARGE.

In my next post, I will take a look at some of the individual duplicated statements and the discrepancies between rulings between and among the fact-checkers.

Applying the Truth Index to The Fact Checker

Glenn Kessler’s The Fact Checker in the Washington Post (WaPo) has some marked similarities to PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter, and its rankings of “truthiness” can be associated as follows: 

• WaPo Gepetto Checkmark: True = PolitiFact True: The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing.
• WaPo ONE Pinnochio: Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.  =  PolitiFact Mostly True: The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. 

• WaPo Withholding Judgment/Verdict Pending or True but False = PolitiFact Half True: The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. 

• WaPo TWO Pinocchios: Significant omissions and/or exaggerations: Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily =  PolitiFact Mostly False: The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. 

• WaPo THREE Pinocchios: Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions =  PolitiFact False: The statement is not accurate.

• WaPo FOUR Pinnochios: Whoppers!  =  PolitiFact Pants on Fire: Not just inaccurate, but makes a ridiculous claim.

The stickler for me in making these “equivalencies” was WaPo’s Withholding Judgment/Verdict Pending or True but False category. PolitiFact really has no such thing (maybe it should?). But it needed to count for something, and because PolitiFact, in its Truth Index, assigns a zero score to Half True, this seemed like the right place for it to be. Because it’s neither negative nor positive—therefore it’s a zero.

So, like PolitiFact, can I take the Fact Checker’s rankings and quantify them likewise into a WaPo Truth Index? You betcha! Although we have far fewer rulings at the Fact Checker that have only been available since March of this year. There’s also rulings where the Fact Checker and PolitiFact have overlapped (evaluated the same statements), which will be covered later.  Here's the Truth Index applied to the approximately 100 Fact Checker rulings, compared to PolitiFact for the first half of 2011, for Democrats and Republicans: