Truth Index: 5,000 PolitiFact Rulings

On Monday, February 20, Tom Kertscher of PolitiFact Wisconsin published a somewhat crazily titled PolitiFact ruling:  a G.O.P. senate candidate by the name of Mark Neumann stated that " the federal government could save $175,587 by eliminating a study of the 'connection between cocaine and risky sex habits of the Japanese quail.' "    Before I determined the real significance of this ruling, I was considering it for inclusion in my "Top Ten List" of stupidest or most useless PolitiFact rulings.  But it was not quite that useless because, on careful reading,  it was really about some of the seemingly stupid things that government grants--i.e., taxpayer dollars--go for, and Kertscher made the point quite well.

Click to enlarge.

The real significance was that this was, according to my records, PolitiFact Ruling Number 5,000.  PolitiFact's Bill Adair acknowledged the fact he knew that the 5,000 mark had been surpassed that Friday, February 24, in a "celebration" article featuring a few facts and figures from that period of time in which the 5,000 rulings were accumulated.

Adair published a table of the breakdown of rulings for National:  here they are snipped from the article at the left.  Later, I will publish a few things Adair doesn't keep track of (at least I don't think he does) and that's the various Democrat/Republican breakdowns, which is the centerpiece of my blog.  However, I want to confirm his National breakdown was very close to the overall. 

I decided to round to the whole as Adair has and as you can see below, True and Mostly True are the same percentages, while Half True on down is within one percentage point of his calculations.  I have included the overall Truth Index as well, which is a -13.44.  It increased slightly to the negative from the end of 2011, where for 4,707 rulings it was a -13.32.    

Click to enlarge:  I call it my Insta-Chart as this year I decided to do something "real time."

The reason for the decrease in the Truth Index has been due to the pattern emerging at the end of 2011:  increasing coverage of the Republican presidential contenders.  For example, so far this year the Republican rulings have outnumbered the Democrats almost two to one, and the Republican Truth Index so far in 2012 has stood around a -25 while the Democrats have been a +3.6.  The four remaining presidential contenders (Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul) have a collective Truth Index of -29 (and represent about 20% of all the rulings). This is for 332 rulings covering all of January and February (and a couple from March 1 and 2).  More later.