Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Slam Bam Bachmann!

Or:  How to give Michele Bachmann a *True* in 240 words or less

The United States in 1913 was far different than the it is today. “Unions” were limited to craft guilds (and I believe that “collective bargaining” as we know it today was illegal). There was no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid. The freeing of the slaves in the south gave way to rampant Jim Crowism along with racial subordination. Women could not vote. When you went to the hospital, it meant you were going to die. There was no infrastructure yet—such as the interstate highway system—as cars were just coming of age. And it would be another year before a major world war would start, necessitating a stronger defense, and the U.S.'s coming new world role as a formidable foreign power. Military investments by our government later enabled the space age and the advent of NASA.

So yes, Michele Bachmann saying that income taxes were 7% in 1913 and were 70% by 1980 (in this PolitiFact ruling) was True, but it was a far different country we lived in as far as what services our tax revenues  provided. And, taxes didn’t rise on a straight line, either, as writer Lou Jacboson briefly recognized in two short paragraphs, “…For every year between1944 to 1963, the top tax rate exceeded 90 percent.” That’s a period of 19 years, until it was lowered to the rate Bachmann specifies.

The other implication of her statement seems to be that taxes rose steadily until about the time Reagan became president, to give Ronald Reagan credit where credit wasn’t really due, as the one who started the movement to cut taxes (since shortly after his initial cuts, he went on to raise them several times). One Facebook commenter, Dean Hare, put it this way:

I would have ranked this as Mostly True due to the cherry-picked dates, because the rates during the Eisenhower administration were 91%, and all the current Republicans want to out-Reagan Ronald Reagan by making 'Historic" tax cuts. You were a little generous and need to re-visit this. I think you need to keep in mind with ALL your tax policy rulings the facts that the World War II debt was paid off with these high tax rates and an economy booming with publicly funded physical and intellectual infrastructure spending (ie: Government Stimulus on roads, the military and education). Too many of your rulings forget the tax policy and federal spending history from the 1945-1980 era -- and you also refuse to cite the eleven tax increases Reagan signed into law after it became obvious his initial cuts were too deep, requiring additional revenues.

Another Facebook commenter (or topic page) with the  name "Economics Online Tutor" published a comparison of U.S. economic performane and tax policies since 1913 on their Facebook wall, and it's worth a view in the context of Bachmann's other implication in this statement, that tax cuts stimulate the economy.

If a Democrat had said this I could just hear my conservative counterpart screaming that writer Lou Jacobson was ignoring the underlying argument (but neither blog post nor Facebook comment could be found on that from him, being as Bachmann is a Republican). Without underlying context Bachmann’s statement means very little, and there’s more than a few caveats here. This is not the usual Bachmann whopper, but PolitiFact certainly appears to be throwing her a bone in the way it was ruled on.

Truth Index Trends: 2011 Source and "Occupation"

There’s been a variety of ways that other PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index quantifiers have broken down their results: about two years ago, someone named “cinematical” at Daily Kos was probably one of the first to talley up PolitiFact rulings and assign a score for each Truth-o-Meter ranking. He broke it down by office holders and non-office holders, groups and individuals, politicians and non-politicians.

My Truth Index counterpart, Steve of Quibbling Potatoes, has done one of the most comprehensive and analytical reviews of the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter scores ever. His “Truth Index” moniker was copied by PolitiFact (although I don’t know if they were aware that Steve had preceded them). One of his breakdowns is by “occupation”—Activist, Advocacy Group, Journalist, Party Booster and Politician.

So I’ve decided to do it by what I’ll call “Source and Occupation":

Office-holders. This includes current, former and “potential”, for example, Herman Cain, since he is running for president but never held office.

Non-office holders. That’s everyone else, including journalists, blogs, and chain e-mails and as Steve might call them, just plain “rabble-rousers.”

Groups. I lumped advocacy groups and “party boosters” (like the RNC or DNCC) all together. Blogs and chain e-mails were not included here.

Individuals. This one is self-descriptive.

Media. That would include all journalists, pundits, and TV/radio talk show personalities. Someone who is a consultant to media, like Sarah Palin, would still be categorized as an office-holder since she was governor of Alaska.

Below is the breakdown (for the first nine months of 2011) of these categories by overall Truth Index score (multi-color), the by Democrat (blue), Republican (red) and all other political affiliations (light purple).

Going up from the horizontal zero line is “more truthful” and going down from it is “less truthful.” To keep the graph less busy I have not included a Truth Index number label for “all other.”

“Safety in numbers” appears to hold true when it comes to not telling the complete truth, as Groups appear to lie the most, which include “party boosters.” Steve had this to say about “party boosters” in his review of his compilation of the same database:

…party boosters (basically any organization with "Democrat" or "Republican" in its name, or such an organization's spokesman), whose sole function is to get folks to elect Democrats or Republicans, seem to lie at a shockingly high rate independent of party affiliation.

The Truth Index for Individuals appears to mimic office holders closely, since the majority of individuals are office holders. The score of non-office holders includes the media and the groups, as well as bloggers and chain e-mails, which made its score much lower than office holders across the board. Media personalities, however, constituted the biggest divergence in the Truth Index, with a variance between Republicans/Conservatives and Democrat/Liberals of almost 60 points. About 40% of all the statements coming from Republican/Conservative pundits or journalists were either False or Pants on Fire on the Truth-o-Meter; it was half that for the Democrat/Liberals.

Bloggers and chain e-mails by far are the worst offenders on the Truth-o-Meter. Their combined score (regardless of affiliation) was an almost Pants on Fire -133.33. There were six overly similar rulings of Pants on Fire done by various PF states all at the same time which concerned the ideology of certain Democrats, however, that I have a very strong inclination to do a separate post on. Nevertheless, nearly three fourths of the rulings on these two were Pants on Fire.

For 2012, I am thinking of separating office-holders to “local” and Washington-based as Steve did in order to contrast the two. He also did something interesting which was to look at senators as opposed to congressmen. At first I thought this should not be that relevant, but when you think about it, does the six year term as opposed to two year have any effect on “truthiness”? In a way, it might make you less inclined to be more truthful since you have the benefit of a longer term…or it could make you less? Hopefully I can continue where Steve may have left off and try to remain up to his excellent standard.

Truth Index Trends: 2011 State-side 3rd Quarter

The PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index by state and affiliation stayed about the same as it did for the first six months of 2011, except for the additions of PF's New Hampshire and New Jersey. PolitiFacts Virginia and Wisconsin continue to slightly favor the Republicans.

The greatest Truth Index gaps exist with Rhode Island and Oregon, both with a near 45 point, or one full notch on the Truth-o-meter, variance between the Truth Index for Democrats, as compared to that for Republicans. While I have been looking at these regions in terms of the associated newspapers’ endorsements, another way one might look at them is by the political makeup of the state. Both Rhode Island and Oregon tend to be more Democratic than Republican; Rhode Island, for example, has a far larger number of active Democrats than it does Republicans. Whether this has anything to do with why Democrats are ruled on as truthier, I don’t know, but could reflect the chances of getting a PolitiFact writer (if they were hired locally) who would reflect that political make up. It could also be because they don’t have a lot of rulings compared to their PolitiFact partners, which may skew the results.

The other thing I have observed is that we have “some” relationship between the population and the number of rulings done. I say “some” because it’s not very proportional when you take the number of rulings and say, for example, divide them by the number of congressmen for the state or the latest population numbers. But the way it’s been going, PolitiFacts Florida and Texas are the two highest producers of PolitiFact rulings, followed by Wisconsin, Ohio and Georgia. Virginia, Rhode Island and Oregon seem to be the PolitiFact Juniors. It appears to correlate roughly with population as well as any significant political events in the state: for example, Wisconsin’s labor protests in February drove a roughly 50 percent jump in the number of rulings, as politicos and pundits got subjected to the Truth Index as events developed, and then fell off in the subsequent months. Even so, Wisconsin has fewer representatives and a much lower population by far than Georgia, but is well ahead of it in number of rulings, even adjusting for the February output. So the relationship is a “loose” one.

PolitiFact New Hampshire is a question mark, as I have posted previously. Occasionally, other PolitiFact locations have written rulings for PolitiFact New Hampshire, such as W. Gardner Selby of PF Texas, who wrote a ruling regarding Rick Perry for PF New Hampshire under the PolitiFact Texas banner. These are few and far between, however. It just makes things a bit confusing if you’re trying to categorize the rulings by state. So far, PF New Hampshire has done very few rulings on local politicians (or doing the New Hampshire Democratic Party) and has mainly concentrated on the Republican presidential contenders, generating rulings as the many debates have taken place. Perhaps, as I have commented before, with the divergent status given it, New Hampshire is a training ground for PF writers and editors. We’ll see.

Tchotchkes: If House Pets were Libertarians

(or Republicans, for that matter)

Lil White Lies: I Dream of Gini

Lawyers’ Rules of Thumb(i.e., how my conservative counterpart works his blog):
If you can’t use the law (i.e., argue fallacies), use the facts
If you don’t have facts, use the law (i.e., argue fallacies)
If you have neither law (fallacies) nor the facts, pound on the table and create a distraction.

Here we have another sublimely bloviating multiple-infected specimen of misrepresenting the source along with the underlying argument of a PolitiFact (PF) ruling. My conservative counterpart takes aim at a statement made by ex-Florida-congressman Alan Grayson on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show that there are “are only five countries in the entire planet that are more unequal than the United States in the distribution of our wealth.”

The first part of Bryan White’s argument is that PolitiFact’s Lou Jacobson (who else!) incorrectly attributed where Grayson said he got his information: a link provided in Wikipedia to a “peer-reviewed” paper published in The Economic Journal in 2010. He explains:

If the PolitiFact team had paid closer attention, they would have noticed that the numbers on which Grayson relies were not published in any peer-reviewed journal. The numbers Grayson used ultimately came from an appendix (Excel file) to a working paper that preceded the version published in The Economic Journal.

PolitiFact reports falsely in claiming that PolitiFact sourced its numbers to the linked "a peer-reviewed paper." Sift through the linked work from now until doomsday and you won't find "Namibia" mentioned at all nor any comprehensive list of Gini coefficients (identified by PolitiFact as the primary statistic used to identify inequality) for all the nations of the earth.

But if one reads the paper (paid closer attention!), one would find 25 countries listed,with the identical Gini Coefficients from the “unpublished” Appendix VI, in Table 7 on page 246 . The writers describe how they chose these 25 countries: “Note. Countries are listed according to the number of members of the global top wealth decile.” In other words, the writers made this the criteria for selecting countries from Appendix VI. In fact, Table 7 has the U.S. as Numero Uno in wealth disparity, as the four countries which exceed it are not there, although one of them, Switzerland, is mentioned on the previous page: “…Switzerland, whose distribution is based on hard data with good detail in the upper tail, has a Gini coefficient of 0.803 (Davies et al., 2009, Appendix VI) The US and Switzerland have Gini coefficients close to the global wealth Gini of 0.802.” And right there is the cross reference to “Davies et al., Appendix VI” which is cited frequently throughout the paper. James Davies is the first “academic” listed as the writer of the paper.

So, if Appendix VI wasn't published, what becomes of this? Does that make it incorrect?

If one looks at the working papers cited/linked in a bottom reference at Wikipedia, one can see it reads like the paper submitted to The Economic Journal. In other words, it’s virtually certain that Appendix VI served as the data source for Table 7. Actually, it WAS published, although not in The Economic Journal: it was at the NBER, National Bureau of Economic Research. I suppose only the reference was required for the table instead of appending it to what was published in The Economic Journal; but for all intents and purposes it was the foundation of the paper’s Table 7 and was the sole reliance for the Gini data presented . You can say it was partially published, but it can’t be said, as Bryan’s trying to claim, that it wasn’t published at all.

Truth Index Trends: Month to Month, Third Quarter 2011

The PolitiFact Truth Index appears to be slowly and steadily eroding since the beginning of 2011 on a monthly basis, as is shown on the following graph.

However, each month's Truth Index is not an accumulative figure...it is comprised of the rulings for that month.  The dotted line average above is all the rulings, while the blue line represents the Democrats and the red line the Republicans.  Notice that while the red and blue lines come close, they never cross; it seems the Democrat "truthiness" is consistently higher than the Republicans.

The Democrat Truth Index dip in February was clearly attributable to the labor unrest that was going on in Wisconsin, as PolitiFact took issue with some statements being made by prominent Democrats and pundits at the time.  The reason for the dip in June, however, is not clear.  I found that there were twice as many statements by Democrats that were found to be "Pants on Fire" in June than the average, but there was not any other particularly good explanation for why it dived.   The dip that the Republican average experienced in September is attributable to the fact-checking scrutiny being given to the Republican presidential debates.

It should be noted that Republican fact-checks represent the largest portion of PolitiFact's fact-checks; they made up about 55% of the rulings so far this year, while the Democrats along with other parties and those of unknown affiliation are in the other 45%.  In September, the number of Republican rulings increased to about 58% as the debates started to gain traction.

Next up, a look at the state PolitiFacts. 

PolitiFact Truth Index Third Quarter Results

Overall of the Overall

PolitiFact posted 476 rulings for the third quarter of 2011, bringing their 2011 total for National and all states to 1,462 rulings. They dropped a bit from the second quarter when there were 501 rulings. They’ve averaged about 162 rulings a month this year.

This means PolitiFact has published 4,251 rulings since their inception through the end of September. That’s a pretty big number and the bigger it gets—the more it gains the characteristics of a population—the more the charges of any bias should be mitigated. At least that’s my theory.

Of the 4,251 rulings, 2,205 were on Republicans (I also classified Tea Party members as Republicans), and 1,705 were Democrats/Liberals. The other 341 were Independents, Libertarians, non-partisans, or their political affiliation was simply “unknown."

As far as the Truth Index, overall it was a -13.29, a bit under Half True. Democrats were a hair’s breath over zero (Half True) at .76  while the Republicans were much further to the minus side, halfway down between Half True and Mostly False at -24.41.

Below is a mocked up PolitiFact percentage bar as it appears on one of its apps to show the affiliation breakdowns. Stay tuned for further analysis.

Everything including the kitchen sink of PF rulings, plus political affiliation breakdown.  Click to enlarge.





How Dummies Respond To Occupy Wall Street

The October 8 Ironic News Report: What the Frack!

Sidebar: Doing the Hanky Panky

Normally I try not to make a lot of political commentary by celebrities, but my conservative counterpart’s post “In Defense of Hank Williams” where Williams compared Obama to Hitler (or Hitler to Benjamin Netanyahu in the name of John Boehner, Obama’s golf partner) was just too much to leave alone.

My conservative counterpart (Bryan White)’s claim is that it was an analogy easily graspable "by the fair-minded person” of Hitler to Netanyahu as “ideological opposites.” But it is much more complicated than that, and such a comparison is not only just poor, but instead of easily graspable, is easily misleading. And Bryan chose to carry on that blatant misrepresentation in his post.

Bryan White implies as well that Williams may not have meant that Obama was being compared to Hitler, but if you listen to the full interview, it is clear that’s what Williams meant. To the delight of the Fox morning crew and its mostly right-wing viewers, he made his dislike of Obama well known, so the “context” was there for all to see. He hedged any left-wing race card play by invoking a preference for Herman Cain as a presidential choice.

Here’s Bryan’s customary word-twisting take on it:

…Williams is not admitting that he compared Obama to Hitler. All he's admitting is that he drew an analogy. And he explained the analogy sufficiently for a fair-minded person to grasp his point (I trust Morrissey will grasp it eventually): Hitler and Netanyahu are ideological opposites. While we may have a predisposition to identify our least favorite between Boehner and Obama with our least favorite figure from the analogy, the analogy does not depend on that identification at all. One can understand Boehner as Hitler just as well and the point--that polar opposites are having a ludicrous tete-a-tete--continues to stand. And one shouldn't have to agree with that point in order to understand it.

Actually, the “analogy” was a very poor one: the only disparity was the semitic one, the symbol of the Jewish Holocaust with the current leader of Israel is quite an opposing comparison. Yet Bryan White claims they are ideological opposites, and they are not. Ideologically, it is a comparison of right-wing extremism (Hitler) with center right-wing (Netanyahu). Netanyahu is a member of Israel’s Likud, which is described by Wikipedia as follows: (emphasis added)

Likud (Hebrew: …‎ HaLikud, lit. The Consolidation) is the major center-right political party in Israel… It was founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin in an alliance with several right-wing and liberal parties.

The Likud party claims to support a free market capitalist and liberal agenda, though in practice it has mostly adopted mixed economic policies. Under the guidance of Finance minister and current party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud pushed through legislation reducing value added tax (VAT), income and corporate taxes significantly, as well as customs duty. Likewise, it has instituted free trade (especially with the European Union and the United States) and dismantled certain monopolies (Bezeq and the sea ports).

Additionally, it has privatized numerous government-owned companies, e.g. El Al and Bank Leumi, and has moved to privatize land in Israel, which until now has been held symbolically by the state in the name of the Jewish people. Netanyahu was the most ardent free-market Israeli finance minister to-date. He argued that Israel's largest labor union, the Histadrut, has so much power as to be capable of paralyzing the Israeli economy, and claimed that the main causes of unemployment are laziness and excessive benefits to the unemployed."… Under Netanyahu, Likud has and is likely to maintain a comparatively fiscally conservative economic stance, although it might be considered centrist or even progressive from a world view.

Sound familiar? Compare that to the ideological stances of the Nazi party, for which people like Bryan try to focus on the well-documented misnomer “National Socialist” as if that’s all they need to do:

Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named "National Socialist." But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production. In Nazi Germany, private capitalist individuals owned the means of production, and they in turn were frequently controlled by the Nazi party and state. True socialism does not advocate such economic dictatorship -- it can only be democratic. Hitler's other political beliefs place him almost always on the far right. He advocated racism over racial tolerance, eugenics over freedom of reproduction, merit over equality, competition over cooperation, power politics and militarism over pacifism, dictatorship over democracy, capitalism over Marxism, realism over idealism, nationalism over internationalism, exclusiveness over inclusiveness, common sense over theory or science, pragmatism over principle, and even held friendly relations with the Church, even though he was an atheist.

In other words, Bryan White’s claim that the comparison was one of a “polar opposite” analogy, is ridiculous. Their ideologies are far from being polar opposite. You can’t replace one with the other as opposites, because it’s only opposite as a matter of Semitism, and that cannot be switched. And if you base it on ideologies, it would have to be Boehner as Hitler (extreme right) with Obama as Netanyahu (center right—because in his recent capitulations to the Republicans, many Democrats and Liberals view him that way).   So Williams’ analogy is incorrect.  All that Bryan gets right is that "one can understand Boehner as Hitler just as well"--because when you really look hard  at the core ideologies of both political parties (Nazi versus Likud), Boehner can only be Hitler.

Yes, here’s just one more “you all missed the point except for me” schlock-crock of sublime bloviations  from my conservative counterpart. Williams needs to study up on what he says before he starts shooting off his mouth, because he certainly didn’t comprehend the comparison.

Fox News Clip (Unaired) of My New Hero Jesse LaGreca

Why Fox News is "Fair and Balanced (with a thumb on the scale)":  Jesse LaGreca tells it like it is at Occupy Wall Street!

Growing Up Paul Part Two: Not One Thin Dime