Tchotchkes: When Dummies Double Down on Dying Demographic

Sidebar: PF True Lie of the Year?

Mitt Romney's surreptitiously recorded comments about the 47 percent were quickly checked out by PolitiFact as well as the other fact-checkers.

 

For me, it quickly brought to mind a few posts I had done about red state socialism, and how a New York Times columnist stated that the more the (red) states are given in Federal dollars, the more dependent they become, the more Republican they vote.  It is an irony indeed that Romney is so wrong on these 47 percent, because I'd be willing to venture that more than half of them vote Republican.

 

And even though PolitiFact has pointed out that the statement that 47% pay no tax is on its face True, (and I've posted before about how Republicans are more than fairly rated by PolitiFact when it comes to tax share, which this clearly is) this statement, with its context, is a fantastic candidate for "2012 Lie of the Year." A complimenting statement providing context--that those who supported Obama paid no income tax--was rated False.  Because if it becomes known as the "Romney Cliche", I would bet it may be the point of no return for the Romney campaign--this could be the statement that cost him his election.  That makes it a pretty big lie even without the pants on fire. (Click here to see my other prediction for PLOTY.)

 

Of course I could be completely wrong, and  Romney and his cohorts may spend enough money in PAC and campaign ads to confuse the issue enough to win or find some way to make lemonade out of this lemon.  Or Obama could make his own big gaffe.  But I still think it's a pretty good bet. 

Truth Index: Obama-Romney 6 Weeks To Go

And a Peak at the Congressional Quarterly

For reasons to follow in this post, I thought it might be a good idea in this update on Obama and Romney's running PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index, to get a better look at what happened before 2010. So I haven't been posting as much, because it meant I had to go through 272 rulings for Obama and 44 rulings for Romney to date all the rulings...and do a few other things. 

Click to enlarge:  Until Romney veered way right, he had an admirable Truth Index

This latest chart shows the accumulated Truth Index for Obama and Romney quarter to quarter starting at the end of the third quarter of 2007, when the PolitiFact operation was really gearing up, since at that time as Obama fought for the Democratic presidential nomination, Romney also tried unsuccessfully to do likewise as a Republican. A note on the chart (brackets indicating the flat trend line) indicates the result at PolitiFact once John McCain became the presumptive 2008 Republican presidential nominee: from the end of the first quarter of 2008 until early in 2010, Romney was not subjected to the Truth-o-Meter at all. In early 2010, he was interviewed as the Affordable Care Act was being signed into law by Obama (perhaps because of his "Massachusetts" knowledge), which instigated a few rulings, and here it was that Romney perhaps hinted at one his future campaign talking points when he stated that he thought Obama was too soft (full of "apologies") in his foreign policy. He disappeared from PolitiFact's prying Truth-o-Meter until early 2011, and from then on he was a fairly regular PolitiFact fact-check target until his nomination put the fact-checks on (maybe temporary) steroids. He now has 174 rulings, which I believe is the second highest for PolitiFact.

 

But the trend shows, just as my last post with monthly trends showed, that Romney's Truth Index fell off considerably once he announced his candidacy for the second time in 2011. Of seven Falses awarded Romney between April and September, six of them were bad enough to be made Pants on Fire. He had only one True ruling during that time. By 2012, his average leveled off somewhat around negative 15.

 

Obama's Truth Index has been pretty steady in the positive 12 area (with 416 rulings as of this post), although the pre-2010 trend indicates he got off to a rocky start. He started with a very respectable 30 and then plummeted in the very next quarter to a negative 11. His Truth Index for that quarter only was a negative 62.5, with four Falses, with not one True nor one Mostly True. Must have been that the PF honeymoon with Obama was over.

 

The CQ Connection: A theory set forth in a PolitiFact Pants on Fire analysis by my conservative counterpart was that the Congressional Quarterly had influenced a less biased approach to the rulings, that PolitiFact had gone wild with Pants on Fire once the CQ partnership "was dissolved" at the end of 2008:

When PolitiFact first launched, it existed as a joint venture between the St. Petersburg Times newspaper and the Congressional Quarterly magazine, both owned at the time by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. The numbers for 2007 and to a lesser extent for 2008 demonstrate tendencies not present in later years. Some of the differences may stem from the vigorous Democratic primary season or from the removal of input from CQ staff when the partnership was dissolved after the 2008 presidential election. Simply put, PolitiFact’s bias against Republicans as measured by its use of the “Pants on Fire” rating has intensified since the separation from CQ. Republicans during the more recent era receive a “Pants on Fire” rating 143% more often than Democrats (see Fig. 2).

Part of my effort is not just in dating the PolitiFact rulings, but determining which ones were written by a Congressional Quarterly writer. My interest was to see how the writers treated Democrats and Republicans in terms of the Truth Index, to see if there's any correlation to support PF Bias writer Bryan White's claims. But to do so is an enormously tedious exercise, because PolitiFact National has roughly 1,780 rulings to go through for almost a four year period.

 

So to start I did Obama and Romney (for purposes of this post), with John McCain in my sites to next do a "presidential candidate trend" comparison; but at this point I've only done less than 20 percent of the rulings, so it will be a while. That being said, a few points about the Congressional Quarterly (CQ): between Obama and Romney CQ writers wrote about 15 percent of the rulings: 39 for Obama and 9 for Romney. The Truth Index as computed for only the Congressional Quarterly writers was within half a point: a positive 5.1 for Obama and a positive 5.6 for Romney. The Pants on Fires seem to defy White's contentions, however: Romney received only one from a CQ writer, while the three Pants on Fires Obama received were all from PolitiFact writers.

Tchotchkes: Homer Votes 2012

Liberal Proof of PolitiFact (Liberal) Bias: A Summary Thus Far

A better standard is needed for me to say something at PolitiFact (PF) looks like "liberal" bias than for me to be a Republican and just not like what they say like many of its detractors.   Or to pick something out of selected rulings that I think is "bad journalism" when it's just my opinion.  Let's review what I've come across so far that I have assigned to "Liberal Proof of PolitiFact Liberal Bias" because I honestly have to admit there isn't much way around explaining it otherwise:

(1)   Yes, there is some inconsistency on the application of tax rates in the rulings, especially what exactly an "effective tax rate" should consist of, as noted in this recent post.   A ruling from PF Ohio and one from PF Rhode Island are particularly suspect for not being as thorough as they could have been and as a result appearing to  jack up the Truth-o-Meter for Democrats.

(2)  The PolitiFact National writers do seem to assign a lot more Pants on Fire to Republicans than their stateside counterparts (as well as produce rulings which make the Republicans look less truthful overall), with two exceptions.

(3) The Republican Party of Virginia was correct in one part of their over-the-top study of PolitiFact Virginia this past July:  it did appear to "dump" positive Republican rulings in the weekend Richmond Times Dispatch; however, they may be wrong assuming most people only read the news on weekdays.

(4) For the first three months of 2012, a weekly trend analysis of the Democrat and Republican Truth Index  appeared to indicate that at the end of the month, ratings would "even up."  I haven't done any analysis since, but have it set up in my data to do it for the year 2012.  What this means--those with a conspiracy mindset might think this was a deliberate attempt by PolitiFact to periodically even up the Truth-o-Meter (or the Truth Index) between parties.  I'm not sure what it means, and it might not occur again.

(5) Pat Boone's advertisement about Obamacare's IPAB rationing care got doubled up in Pants on Fire from two relatively-leaning-left-based-on-Truth-Index writers, but when a Georgia congress person made a very similar statement calling the rationing "the power to deny care to seniors" it received a Half True from PF Georgia.

(6)  In my version of what was to become my conservative counterpart's Pants on Fire factor, a measure of how much "more" Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire rulings, I looked at the Pants on Fire for PolitiFact's first 5,000 rulings and then proportioned them to the percentage of rulings overall.  The Republicans had 2.5 times as many Pants on Fire as Democrats, not considering the percentages.

7)  I also looked at the Truth Index in terms of writers,  by occupation (officials versus PACs, etc.) and by what I judged to be "local" rulings, for the year 2011, with varying results, although for the most part, they would predominantly favor the Democrats.  The one exception I found for what I judged to be "local" rulings, done for the first time in the final quarter of 2011,  was totally reversed in the first quarter of 2012.

8)  PolitiFact's most egregious problem may be "cookie cutter" rulings, where rulings are duplicated and serve to amplify the Truth Index negatively,  although the claimant often goes without political affiliation even though it's obvious what that affiliation probably is.    A major one this year was the across-the-board claim by "bloggers" that all the Democrats in congress were card-carrying socialists,  where almost all the PF states with a Democrat Congress member accused of "carrying the card" decided to jump on board and basically copy/paste the same ruling, inflicting a lot of Pants on Fire on those bloggers who had to be Republicans.  It could also be a subject as seemingly innocuous as light bulbs, a popular one in mid-2011.    Now it's been turned on its head a bit with the doubled up-assignment of "True" to a Democrat. 

Now, there's a few rulings of the same genre where PolitiFact has not been kind to the Democrats, and an excellent case of what could be termed Republican bias by PolitiFact Wisconsin.  And it would not take a lot of analyses to refute a few of my findings.  It just needs to be neatly summarized and put out there.

 

 

Liberal Proof of PolitiFact (Liberal) Bias: Once is Enough

The Liberal Proof of PolitiFact Liberal Bias label began back in 2010 when I had enough data to look at the Truth Index in terms of the states.  I thought it might be interesting to look at the sponsoring newspapers' political endorsements and compare them to how the Truth Index was leaning.  I did get a slight correlation:  the "blue" papers tended to have the highest Democrat-favorable Truth Index, while the "red" and "purple" papers, while still favoring the Democrats, did so much less than the "blue."

No, not double vision or a computer glitch: it's the same statement rated twice in a row.

Then I come across things like this that magnify the overall Truth Index through duplication:  the same ruling shown over and over, whether False/Pants on Fire for a Republican, or True for a Democrat.  In this case, Julian Castro was ruled True twice in a row in a cut-and-paste job by PolitiFact Texas writer Sue Owen assisted by main writer J. Gardner Selby.  In the second ruling which came a little over a month after the first, Selby simply changed the first two paragraphs; everything else appears to be the same, including a graphic of a chart from the Milken Institute.  To add background:  Castro is mayor of San Antonio, Texas and touted its rating as the top "local performing economy" in the country by the Milken Institute.

As you can see by the side-by-side labels (above) from the PolitiFact rulings for Castro, they look like just a duplicate....and they are.  It's the same ruling for Castro who said it on two different occasions.  Now if someone were to say this was selection bias, here, I might be inclined to agree.  Although not party-related, more like easy or lazy-related.  I might ask writer Sue Owen:  do you mean to tell me you didn't have anything else to fact-check when Castro gave his speech at the Democratic National Convention, that you had to re-hash something you just did?

While I can see the necessity of occasionally repeating a fact-check on a repeated lie, I do not know why PolitiFact would want to take the same statement rated True and rate it True again, especially when the rulings were so close together.

PolitiFact detractor Sublime Blovations also covered the second statement by Castro, and disputed its veracity because Castro preceded the statement with a cause-and-effect where PolitiFact appeared to ignore the cause:  that the reason for it being a top performing economy was because  it was "investing in young minds today to be competitive in the global economy tomorrow."  Nowhere, it seems, did PolitiFact indicate evidence of how investing in young minds resulted in San Antonio's economic performance.  Writer Bryan White called it a "bias in story focus."

Both of Castro's speeches highlighted that the end result of  investments in education and infrastructure in the city of San Antonio were  a "return on investment" of the Milken rating at the end of 2011.  One of the sources cited by PolitiFact, an article from the Texas Tribune, says that in San Antonio "Training an educated workforce... may be a more daunting obstacle for a city that has long struggled with high dropout and low college completion rates."

In his first speech Castro spoke of efforts in boosting the number of children graduating from high school with programs such as "Cafe College" (one stop help for students in getting test prep and completing financial paperwork) as well as Service-SA (volunteer tutoring).

Lil White Lies Extra: One Context for You, TWO for Me

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.
-- Sublime Bloviations/PolitiFact Bias

And fact-checkers of fact-checkers should bring out those elements as well. Of course, if you're a biased fact-checker like PolitiFact Bias' Bryan White, you'd do it for the side you ideologically prefer and not the other. Here's a most excellent example.

 

In a recent review of a hotly-contested-by-the-right PolitiFact ruling on a statement by Paul Ryan that Obama promised to keep a GM Plant in his Wisconsin home district open, White formatted in bold the last words of Obama's speech "that's the future I'll fight for as your president" to prove it was a "pledge" as compared to Ryan's word "promise." He then said:

Importantly, Obama opened his speech with references to the plant. He then sketched his vision of America before mentioning how the Janesville plant could stay open if the government provides support. In that context, Obama pledged to provide that support. Does Mr. Obama use the specific term "promise" in his statement? No, certainly not. Does he guarantee the plant will remain open? Again, no. However, there is little doubt that every person in Janesville listening to his speech took it as a pledge from the president to work to enact policies to keep the plant open. Mr. Obama did, in fact, pledge to do just that.

Here's the complete context that preceded Obama's statement at the Janesville Plant in February, 2008, that was available on the internet, but White decided to "bury":

I believe that we can create millions of those jobs around a clean, renewable energy future. A few hours northeast of here is the city of Manitowoc [MAN-a-ta-WOC]. For over a century, it was the home of Mirro manufacturing – a company that provided thousands of jobs and plenty of business. In 2003, Mirro closed its doors for good after losing thousands of jobs to Mexico.

But in the last few years, something extraordinary has happened. Thanks to the leadership of Governor Doyle and Mayor Kevin Crawford, Manitowoc has re-trained its workers and attracted new businesses and new jobs. Orion Energy Systems works with companies to reduce their electricity use and carbon emissions. And Tower Tech is now making wind turbines that are being sold all over the world. Hundreds of people have found new work, and unemployment has been cut in half.

So Obama was talking about how a "sweeping energy policy could give the town the resources to produce something else." Since the plant was still producing (the biggest gas-guzzling) vehicles at the time, with the future unknown, this naturally follows and makes the most sense.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: The Egg-ception

I expected PolitiFact's ruling on a twittered statement by Obama's campaign about Republican vice presidential Paul Ryan regarding abortion to be a fairly straightforward, simple one:

Make sure the women in your life know: Paul Ryan supports banning all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest.

PolitiFact's Dave Umhoefer agreed with the statement in principle, except for an implicit "except for" for which he made it unduly complicated--where the life of the mother is at stake. But for that it is ruled as a Half True? According to the website Reproductive Health Reality Check, the reality is that Ryan wants it both ways:

Abortion rights supporters say that his previous vote on a "no exceptions" late abortion ban, the so-called "partial birth" abortion ban, means that he does not believe in exceptions ever. Ryan apologists claim that he has never stated he would ban abortion in all cases, and his support of "personhood" bills is simply an affirmation that the issue of whether abortion should be legal or not should be returned to the states.

Can Ryan have it both ways?

Polifact tries to give him cover. At the same time that they report that both the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the National Right to Life Committee agree that the only exception Ryan supports is in the case of the "life of the mother" being at risk, they also point out that the "Sanctity of Human Life" bill that Ryan supported in 2011 doesn't actually do any banning of abortion.

That's true. More likely to actually ban abortion would have been another bill sponsored that year, called the "Life At Conception" Act. It too declared "life" began at fertilization, but that there was a right to life from that point on.

It goes on to note that Ryan received the ready vice-presidential endorsement of the Catholic pro-life group CatholicVote which stated that Ryan understood Catholic "social teaching" which in the case of CatholicVote included no exceptions, even for rape.

 

Umhoefer failed to take note of Ryan's avoidance of taking a stand on that exception by making it implicit--or I should say, hiding it beneath the language of personhood at conception: (emphasis mine)

And while right wing pundits helpfully point out that Paul Ryan doesn't want to make abortion illegal (which: hahahahahahah), he just wants to give states the right to make abortion illegal, Mother Jones' Kevin Drum notes that Ryan's Sanctity of Human Life Act states,

(B) the life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, irrespective of sex, health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological development, or condition of dependency, at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood; and

(2) the Congress affirms that the Congress, each State, the District of Columbia, and all United States territories have the authority to protect the lives of all human beings residing in its respective jurisdictions.

Which actually means that states would have the right to ban all abortions with no exception for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. Further, in those states, if a woman was raped and wanted to have an abortion in another state, her rapist could theoretically sue her to stop the abortion, and Drum suspects that he'd probably win.

Further, yesterday another Mother Jones columnist pointed out that if the Sanctity of Human Life Act had become law, it likely would have made many forms of IVF illegal, and since Mitt Romney's two newest adorable grandbabies are the product of IVF and a surrogate mother, Ryan's big idea would turn Romney's kids into criminals. Most awkward political bromance ever.

The Republican Party Platform states under the sub-heading "The Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life"-- "We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children." This has been the pro-lifer legal loophole: “Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" with that person being the newly fertilized egg.

Obama Hates God? (Fox News Politicizes 9/11)

Tchotchkes: WHOSE in the tank for Obama?

Truth Index: Romney and Obama Update

Through the end of August, with about two months plus one week left until the election, Obama and Romney's accrued Truth Index scores have remained about the same since my last report.

Click to enlarge: Romney was "truthier" than Obama until he announced his candidacy for president.

Both Romney and Obama have experienced a slight uptick to their Truth Indexes as the election campaigns rev up; Romney's has stabilized, and he's actually been awarded quite a few "Trues" lately, with the exception of one Pants on Fire, a repeat of his "Obama Worldwide Apology Tour" claim.

Obama just surpassed his 400th ruling (the chart is based on 403 rulings as of August 31); he has been the "most ruled on" person at PolitiFact for obvious reasons.  Mitt Romney is far behind with 162 rulings and he has a few more to go before he surpasses John McCain (at 169) which will then make him Number Two.  That should happen very soon. 

My plan is to update this Truth Index chart again at the end of September, although my feeling is it will look almost the same. 

Oh yes, and lest I forget, PolitiFact is almost four times as likely to make a False "Pants on Fire" for Romney as it is for Obama, according to a certain PolitiFact detractor's dubious measure.