Tchotchkes: The Muppets "Attack" Fox News

WaC Files: Red Herring Rich

When my fellow car-poolian from the 1990’s Richard Peasel began to spew right-wing talking points at me during our drives to and from work, he’d often do it with silly distractions. It looks like he hasn’t changed in all that time. There’s facts and there’s background; but he was good at distorting facts and dismissing background by using the distractions. In this case, where Peasel “anonymously” commented on my Grading PolitiFact Liberal-Style “Bureaucratic Bungling” review of a statement by Mitt Romney, there was a lot of the same. He actually sent me four comments like this. This time, however, he can’t get away with it.

It appears as if he never read my post or read the link to PolitiFact’s ruling. He just jumped out there with a bunch of bullet points of what he thinks is the difference between private sector and governmental productivity, presenting me with a false dilemma (“bureaucrats and freedom”) and making the absurd claim that “this” is Accounting 101. Then there were the implicit personal attacks on my education, which have nothing to do with the ruling.

The first bullet points, on the definitions of private sector productivity, are okay for the most part. I have no disagreement with them, except for “This process in turns creates profits enjoyed by both labor and owners.” Yea right, by the labor. Who is he trying to kid. Tell some 99 per centers that. Or people laboring for FoxConn in China. He also does something which is just plain silliness: although a lot of right-wingers suffer from this woefully wrong assumption. That is that liberals hate profits and wealth (“(ugh) profits, or (yeck) wealth”). I recall from our travels that he actually believed that liberals can’t be rich. I wonder what Warren Buffet (#3) or Bill Gates (#1) would say about that.

The second set of bullet points, on governmental productivity, is restricted to differing definitions only of bureaucrats; in other words, he makes the erroneous, typically right wing false equivalency that government worker = bureaucrat. The point of my criticism of this PolitiFact ruling on Romney was that most of these people hired were, as noted, part of the VA and military, tending to the needs of wounded soldiers returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was PolitiFact’s point as well for rating the claim Half True (emphasis added):

But Romney referred to those government workers as bureaucrats. This is a loaded term that obscures what most of the new employees actually do. Merriam-Webster lists as one of its definitions of bureaucracy: "a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation." That may not bring to mind doctors and nurses caring for wounded veterans or border patrol agents. When we examine the largest areas of growth, we find it is in national defense, veteran care, anti-terrorism and border security.

Finally, while Romney makes it sound as if this is solely Obama's doing, congressional Republicans and Democrats have approved increases in those areas. If President Obama is responsible for this growth, he had a lot of help from members of Romney’s own party.

Are doctors, nurses and healthcare aids doing the same thing in the government as they do in the private sector? Are they “writing laws, regulations, ordnances, and rules to define a conduct, action, or control by a bureaucratic authority”? No, they’re doing the same in the government sector as they did in the private sector: their jobs, to give medical assistance, administer drugs or therapy…to save lives.

The VA (Tri-Care) is the only real “government takeover” of healthcare in that the doctors are directly hired by the government. While for some strange reason (by Peasel) Tri-Care is very popular, let’s say the government did away with it and hired an outside contractor to administer medical assistance to wounded vets. The doctors, nurses and practitioners would be doing the same thing they did before, only they would be privately employed. In other words, their productivity would be there regardless of who employed them. Or if they hired private security as border patrols: are not the private security guards and those employed by Homeland Security doing the same thing?

Truth Index: Smart Politics Revisited

Early last year I did a pretty detailed analysis on Eric Ostermeier’s study of about a years’ worth of PolitiFact (PF) National rulings. I compared my larger numbers to his at that time; to be specific, Ostermeier evaluated 511 PolitiFact statements while my sample was 1,784. My number actually included everything that was in his 511.

This time I am again looking at the entire population of PolitiFact rulings to compare to Eric Ostermeier’s. The most notable and most cited by various conservative pundits in terms of its possible bias is the 76/22 one: that is, 76% of all False and Pants on Fire rulings are attributable to Republicans while only 22% are attributable to Democrats. Mark Hemingway of the conservative Weekly Standard cited it in a recent NPR radio piece with Washington Post Fact-Checker author Glenn Kessler.  Here's Eric's finding:

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

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

So, how does it look now? I could never get close to Ostermeier’s numbers, although Republican False and Pants on Fire always outnumbered the Democrats. I did it in several ways to compare to Ostermeier: one with everything, which would include the PF states, one with everything including the non-office holders, and one just on National. I actually achieved the 22% for the Democrats by using the top 60 in terms of those with 10 or more rulings as posted previously on individual Truth Index average; but that is not a representative sample. The Republicans in this case were just over 70%, not 76%. But in all the other more inclusive measures, as shown in the graph below, the Republicans varied from around 60% (all False and Pants on Fire rulings) to 69% (PF National only). The Democrats were anywhere from 26% to almost 30% for all False and Pants on Fire rulings. Here’s a graphic of all my “permutations,” including one which included everyone and everything: for the 4,707 rulings PF did from the day it was “born” through the end of 2011, the False and Pants on Fire categories were roughly 60% attributable to Republicans, 30% to Democrats, with the remaining 10% for Independents, non-partisans and unknowns. While it’s still a 2 to 1 ratio in favor of the Democrats, it’s clearly better than the 3.5 to 1 as found by Ostermeier.

Click to enlarge:  Smart Politics' percentages for Republican "Falsehoods" exceeded all five ways I did it with the entire PF database. (NH is New Hampshire, which appears to only do national rulings related to the 2012 Elections.)

The other Truth-o-Meter categories were reviewed by Ostermeier as well, and so I obliged with my own, calculating not only just the percent of total rulings compared, but the rulings as a percent of all those in the Truth-o-meter rating. Again, this was for elected officials and those holding office. According to Ostermeier, "....… Democrats have therefore been presented as much more truthful - with over 75 percent of statements receiving the top three grades of True (16 percent), Mostly True (27 percent), or Half True (33 percent)."

The numbers indicate that Ostermeier’s sample appeared to be skewed more in favor of Democrats, no matter how I tried to shake the numbers. I had 10 fewer points for the Democrats and 5 more for the Republicans, and there was even one stat in favor of the Republicans: that was the percent True, Mostly True and Half True as a percent of the total True, Mostly True, and Half True: Of the 2,033 rulings in those Truth-o-Meter categories, 50% were attributable to Republicans, while 47% were attributable to Democrats. Part of the reason may be, of course, that there were more Republican rulings. While at the time Ostermeier found that PF National had roughly the same number of rulings for each party in his sample, they began to become more heavily Republican with the 2010 Elections putting more Republicans in office, and the 2011 Republican presidential campaigns and debates requiring frequent fact-checks. As a result, Republican rulings increased about 10 percent while Democrat rulings dropped almost 14 percent from Ostermeier’s more even percentages.

Next, and last but not least, a few fact-ettes and fact-oids shared from my database of PolitiFact rulings.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Pink Slipping PolitiFact

Last night (January 25) MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did a small segment on PolitiFact (PF) wherein she “fired them.” It was because of its correction of a ruling on Obama. During his state of the union address, he said “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than 3 million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005."

Maddow noted that while PF found both statements to be true using BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) data, it initially rated it Half True, and she displayed the text of its reasoning: 

Obama is correct on both counts when using private-sector job numbers. But he went too far when he implicitly credited his administration policies. So we rate the statement Half True.

Maddow took issue with the fact that Obama credited businesses, saying “businesses have created more than 3 million jobs” not “I, Barack Obama” or “my administration” or “the Stimulus” or “my policies.” She jokingly said something to the effect that “Obama didn’t wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say ‘good morning, businesses!’”

From the Huffington Post

She noted that PolitiFact reviewed it again and then issued an update, upgrading the ruling from Half True to Mostly True. Based on what I’ve seen in cases like this, it appears PolitiFact will not move the Truth-o-Meter needle too far, thereby admitting something it investigated and ruled on turned out to be almost the opposite. Loath to admit to such gross errors, it will try to stand by its ruling come hell or high water, and if it moves it, it will be a one notch, which is what it did here.

Maddow then concluded that she had had it with PolitiFact and then “terminated their position” in the inimitable Grand Vulgarian Donald Trump fashion along with a few other choice criticisms.

"PolitiFact, you are fired. You are a mess! You are fired! You are undermining the definition of the word fact in the English language by pretending to it in your name. The English language wants its word back. You are an embarrassment. You sully the reputation of anyone who cites you as an authority on fact-ishness, let alone fact. You are fired."

But in the long thread of angry Facebook comments (for which most liberal-media-bashers would chomp at the bit to deride), the publicized correction and Maddow’s televised dismantling of PF’s ruling, there wasn’t a whisper from my conservative counterpart and his partner in crime over on the “red” side of politifact detractors. Nope, while they were both busy on Facebook at the same time, Bryan White going completely non sequitor over another Obama SOTU remark on spilled milk, and Jeff Dyberg beating the dead horse called Solyndra one more time, they somehow failed to notice this one.

In fact, the corrected Obama ruling was right next to the spilled milk ruling. It had a great deal more comments—more than double that of the spilled milk ruling--and being as it was a straight sort of “numbers” claim, it should have attracted Bryan’s or Jeff’s attention. Here’s the snipped screen print showing their side-by-side placement on PolitiFact's Facebook page:

Lil White Lies: Something in the Way He Moos

My conservative counterpart had not published anything nor had been commenting on Facebook since the beginning of this year, and I was enjoying the quiet time. I know he has been working on a “special PolitiFact project” which was supposedly the be-all and end-all of proving PolitiFact’s liberal bias, but he had said he was working on something last year about this time, so I didn’t think too much of it (maybe it was his joint effort initiating the PolitiFact Bias blog with Jeff Dyberg). When I first saw some comments by him leading to this Lil White Lies post, I had added a comment of “Hey LOOK who’s crawled out from under his rock.” But on second thought I retracted it, and just “liked” some comments in response to his, whereby he added “Discounting KS's pablum before she even starts, there's no way to reconcile these two rulings without employing a fallacy of equivocation.” So, that “KS” is probably me, but I have to say: why even predict it if you think it’s pablum? Maybe I should have left the “under the rock” comment in.

So....I’ll begin this post mimicking how Bryan started his:

Yes.
This.
IS.
Easy.
To.
Reconcile.
Unless.
You’re.
Just a.
Bitter.
Conservative.

Let me translate/simplify:

Morgan Griffith says: There’s a NEW rule (read: more job-killing regulation!) that milk spills will be treated like oil spills!

Griffith misinterpreted and misled by stating this was a "new" ruling, as well as the fact it was up for elimination.

PolitiFact (PF) says: No it’s not new, it’s been around 38 years, and there’s a proposal to eliminate it, so it’s just the opposite of what Griffith says.

Obama says in his SOTU: I removed this rule.

PF says: Yes, he removed this rule.

So, why is Bryan White having a cow?

Try it this way:

Morgan Griffith says: There’s a NEW rule (read: job-killing regulations!) that milk spills will be treated like oil spills!

PF says: No it’s not new, it’s been around 38 years, and it’s under study for being removed, so it’s just the opposite of what Griffith says.

Bryan White says: Yes it’s been around 38 years, if it was there when Griffith said it was a new rule (even though he called it “new” and it wasn’t) then what he said is at least Half True. “But the exemption would not have covered raw milk, which should have left Griffith's claim at least partly true. And if raw milk received no exemption from the EPA then Obama's claim is approximately half true as well.”  ( I'm crossing this out ironically since Bryan goes on to correct his original “this sound like a good excuse” post—this just points up how he was looking for something to fit his argument.)

Obama says in his SOTU: I removed this rule.

PF says: Yes, he removed this rule.

Bryan White says: It was originally proposed for removal under the Bush Administration, but Obama recalled it for further study, so it can’t be (all) true because it wasn’t Obama’s idea.

Welcome to the world of Bryan White checking the fact-checkers. Or, Bryan White trying to find a way to steal back the milk that Obama said he cleaned up. Or Bryan White finagling around trying to disguise his own bias and find a way to get the credit back for de-regulating under the GOP column. Oh, there’s something in the way he moos.

The best explanation for his defense, however, comes from a New York Times article early in 2011 which shows what really led Morgan Griffith to say what he did:

Tchotchkes: The Ironic News Report

With Julianna Forlano

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Bureaucratic Bungling

Mitt Romney, who so far has done the best of the presidential contenders, even though he ominously failed to win South Carolina, is the subject of 2012’s first Grading PolitiFact (PF) Liberal Style review.

Early in January, Romney told a crowd in New Hampshire that President Obama’s approach to improving unemployment was not to rely on the private sector, but to “hire lots of bureaucrats” and that “he’s added 135,000 to the government workforce.”

Sometimes I ask a very simple question when analyzing  such a fact-check as this: that would be “whose fault is that?”—whose fault is it that 135,000 employees were hired? Was it actually Obama’s doing? Besides the usual “why” which was covered in the ruling by PF New Hampshire’s Jon Greenberg by reviewing statistics from the Office of Personnel Management:

The Office of Personnel Management tallies are done every quarter, not every month, so the numbers don’t exactly match what you find on the BLS web site, but the trends line up. In round figures, from September 2009 to September 2011, the federal workforce grew about 100,000. Counting permanent civilian employees, the departments of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Defense grew by 53,000 -- more than half of the total. Veterans Affairs provides another 24,000, or about a quarter of the overall increase. Homeland Security contributes 12,000 -- call that another 10%. All told, national defense, assisting veterans, and protecting the national borders account for close to 90% of all federal civilian employee growth.

The numbers fall off quickly after that. The departments of Justice and Health and Human Services are tied at roughly 4,000 each.

There’s a nuance in Romney’s statement that bears some scrutiny. He talked about hiring lots of bureaucrats which raises the question, is everyone on the federal payroll a paper-pushing practitioner of the dark arts of red tape? Not in the opinion of Palguta.

"The sad fact is that the VA has had to increase staff at the hospitals to care for the wounded warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan," Palguta says.

So, whose fault was it that staffs had to be increased to care for wounded warriors? If most of the hirings are VA-medically-related, who started the wars? If Obama had started troop withdrawals early in his presidency, it sounds like the VA would still have had to hire medical care for those returning. So, whose fault is it then? Or, let's say Republican John McCain had won the presidency in 2008--McCain, the renown former Viet Nam POW--would he have not just permitted, but embraced the hiring of additional VA medical care for returning soldiers?    If there were no wars we can assume there’d be far less than 135,000 “bureaucratic hirings.” One can also consider Obama’s continuing Bush’s “surge” but that’s only a little over ten percent of the peak number of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

PolitiFact made this more palatable for a Half True by portraying it as being two parts (one true, one false): the number 135,000, and whether or not they were bureaucrats. But there’s a third one: Romney said “You can hire lots of bureaucrats…That’s what the president’s done.” He’s saying it’s Obama that did this. Aside from the fact that it wasn’t literally Obama that hired 135,000, the VA needed to hire additional medical personnel to care for the returning troops who fought a war started (for nefarious reasons and at HUGE expense) by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The Department of Homeland Security was part of the fact-checked number, which was created under Bush. And it’s the GOP that’s generally more interested in protecting our borders than the Democrats.

Finally there’s the word “bureaucrat.” PF’s Greenberg gives the word “bureaucracy” (instead of individual bureaucrat) a definition of “a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation." But to Republicans and conservatives, a “bureaucrat” is someone (who must be from the government) who does nothing productive (even though I know from personal experience you can have bureaucrats in the private sector). And almost all of those 135,000 definitely had productive things to do.  It's hard to argue otherwise unless you're making a generalizing and  misleading statement like Romney did.

The only “element of truth” in Romney’s statement was the number. The rest of it ignored critical facts specifically in order to give a different impression. In other words, this should have been a deceptive, misleading Mostly False.

Sidebar: Why SOPA and PIPA were Bad Ideas

Truth Index: Individual Truth Index Fest

Presentation of the PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index individually can be done in any number of ways. Some people want to see everything, others want a more current perspective. Most want to see Republicans versus Democrats. Some want just to see the ratings for people. Some want them highest to lowest in terms of the Truth Index. Some want comparisons. So I’m going to show a little bit of everything.

I had done something on the presidential contenders, but every day this past week, the contenders seemed to be dropping like flies. At this point we’re down to the Final Four. But I’m going to include all of them since they all qualified because of the number of rulings PolitiFact made during the debates.

So I will start with 2011 and work my way down (or up) the various statistical machinations.

2011. The top 25 2011 politicians are listed here in the PolitiFact app format, from highest on the Truth Index to the lowest. I asterisked the Democrats…because there weren’t too many this year. Donald Trump and Herman Cain bottomed out the entire list, with Trump’s birther buffoonery giving him a negative 80 Truth Index for his 10 rulings, while Cain had 23 rulings with a negative 61.

Click to enlarge:  Tim Pawlenty was most truthful of ALL candidates, including Obama, according to the Truth Index.

The most honest Republican Truth Index-wise was Florida Senator Marco Rubio at a positive 30 Truth Index. Other than DNC Chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at a precise “Half True” zero on the Index, all of the Democrats occupied the positive side of the chart. The Republican presidential contenders varied a great deal other than the extremes of Trump and Cain: Tim Pawlenty, the first candidate to drop out of the campaign, was getting the highest rating, a positive 13, edging out President Obama.

2011 and prior (ALL rulings). Some of the candidates, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain and Donald Trump, had not been rated by PolitiFact at all prior to 2011. The ratings shown for them are “all time.” So, it may be interesting to see how the candidates compare overall, by including every PolitiFact ruling done. Here’s how it would look for the same people in the same format above.

Click to enlarge

Change from 2010 overall to 2011 overall. But there are those that may be interested in the delta: the (cumulative) change in Truth Index up until the end of 2010, to the end of 2011. Here is how that looks, although a little explanation is necessary: with the exception of Ohio Governor John Kasich, those candidates without 2011-prior rulings obviously don’t show a blue bar. Kasich doesn’t show a 2011 red bar because he scored a Truth Index score of exactly zero for 2011 for his 27 rulings.

Click to enlarge:  Mitt and Newt (highlighted) both dropped a bit but not much; Obama held steady; Bachmann greatly improved.

This comparison shows how most of the presidential candidates fell down in the Truth Index, as (someone might say) it appears PolitiFact was finding a lot more untruthful statements during the debates and in other venues of the Republican presidential campaign. On the other hand, the increased attention to one-time presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, resulted in a plethora of new PF rulings on her which bettered her pants partly on fire negative 123 Truth Index to a close to mostly false negative 63. Clearly, she had more opportunity to get PolitiFact points with her candidacy.

Some, like Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Obama, kept their averages roughly the same. Rick Perry had a safety-in-numbers advantage in that with the help of PolitiFact Texas, he’s one of the very few with over 100 rulings. This mitigated any large changes.

Everything and Every One. The top sixty recipients of ten or more PF rulings comprised 2,075, or 44%, of the 4,707  rulings published through the end of 2011. Here’s the list in alphabetical order: it includes the political affiliation, the number of rulings, the Truth Index, and the percentage of False and Pants on Fire rulings. An analysis was also done on how the Democrats and Republicans compared in terms of this percentage (to update what was found by Eric Ostermeier at Smart Politics in 2010). I’ll be publishing that later, although those really interested can figure it out from this info unless they’re severely mathematically challenged.

Sidebar: Damned as Dives

Another brilliant piece this MLK Holiday from Lee Papa, a.k.a. The Rude Pundit:

Here's something relevant to our current debate over whether or not it's okay to raise the marginal income tax rate on millionaires by 4%. It's from the sermon "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on March 31, 1968, after King had finished discussing racial injustice:

"We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia."

King then described a trip that he and his wife took to India, coming to the conclusion that "maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding."

He continued, "Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

"I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

"And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, 'How do you live?' And they say, 'Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it.'

"And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, 'The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair.' She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, 'How much do you pay for this apartment?' She said, 'A hundred and twenty-five dollars.' I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, 'It isn’t worth sixty dollars.' Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

"Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, 'Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives.'

"There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

"Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

"And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world — and nothing’s wrong with that — this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will."

That this sermon could be delivered today, 44 years later, with some adjustments for inflation and with "billionaire" in there, speaks to a shame that should scar us as deeply as any mark of Cain. That it doesn't and that we speak of helping the poor with the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich as "wealth redistribution," as if that's wrong and evil, demonstrates that we are, indeed, damned as Dives.

Truth Index: 2011 PolitiFact Writers

There’s been some suggestions to me for improvements to the PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index on writers, and so I’ve tried to incorporate them here. One was, that my previous method of presenting the writers, by degree of variance between the Democrat and Republican Truth Index, didn’t mean a whole lot , and was in and of itself not a sufficient indicator that the writer might be biased. So I’ve decided to relate it to the state Truth Indexes for now.

It is true that it’s really hard to tell much from doing it the way I did it before. When I hear about “selection bias” the question becomes, to me, who does the selection, and how do they select. If a writer is not part of selecting the claim, in other words, if the claim is an assignment, this would certainly affect their variance. Some of the writers have very true leaning ratings (like Eric Stirgus of PF Georgia) while others have very false leaning ratings (like James Nelson of PF Wisconsin). A future post might look more closely at why Eric Stirgus appears to have so many more True ratings for both parties as compared to his PF Georgia compatriot Willoughby Mariano, especially if the Truth Index holds for both in 2012.  It was surmised that part of the reason PF Wisconsin's averages dropped was because of the labor unrest and recall efforts (and statements made associated with them) which were highly publicized in February.

The Truth Index here reflects all PolitiFact rulings for the year 2011 because that’s when I started keeping track of the writers.

Click to enlarge: These include ALL 2011 work of the writer (some also wrote for PF National as well as their state.)
Jacob Geiger's Democrat Truth Index calculated to zero.

Tom Feran of PF Ohio had the largest variance between Democrats and Republicans the last time, and retained this “gap” for 2011, at almost 60 points. He did about 60% more Republican rulings. Half of his Democrat rulings were done on Dennis Kucinich and Senator Sherrod Brown, who score very high on the individual Truth Index (Steve at Quibbling Potatoes also noted the affect on the Truth Index of Sherrod Brown) and might explain why his Democrat Truth Index was so high.

The Truth Indexes by writer are in the same order as the PF states featuring the major writers (those who have written the most rulings) for that state. This can be compared to the Truth Index by state in my previous post. For an even closer look, here’s a chart on the two Republican-favorable states Virginia and Wisconsin, to get a look at which writers affected the averages.

Click to enlarge:  Geiger's looks slightly different than overall chart because it only includes his PF Virginia work.

A few personnel changes should be noted here as well. It appears Robert Farley is no longer writing for PF National. I often see him as a writer over at FactCheck.Org., so he may have “jumped ship.” One of PF Virginia’s writers, Jacob Geiger, has not authored a ruling since July, 2011, and it appears he’s been replaced by Warren Fiske along with a rev up by Sean Gorman.

Next, individual politician ratings.

Sidebar: Political Fact-Checking Under Fire at NPR

Recently NPR did a call-in segment on the fact-checkers, which you can listen to at the link below (or here).

Here is the article called "Lies, Damned Lies, and Fact-Checkers" by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, and here is the link to read the transcript.  My conservative counterpart is pretty adept at keeping up to date with the latest PolitiFact (PF) related posts and pieces published.  This one is  extremely interesting in that Glenn Kessler speaks directly about how he selects statements: that he is more interested in verifying those in prepared speeches and written pieces and such because the person saying them should have "vetted" them before coming out with them, which should make them more prone to fact-checking.  He does not sound like he is "deliberately" making biased selections, and as I have noted, more often than not, the same statement will be checked by FactCheck.Org and PolitiFact.

The other item of note is that Kessler does not rate pundits, and for the most part, neither does FactCheck.  This seems to be a niche at PolitiFact.  And I do agree that PF's Truth-o-Meter ratings can easily be deemed (as Hemingway called them) pseudo-scientific, and even a "marketing gimmick".  By virtue of their quantity accumulated (as we approach 5,000 PF rulings), however, it seems the Truth Index averages can soften the "hard edges" of those rulings in the trends revealed.  The study  by Eric Ostermeier of 522 rulings was referred to several times, which I examined in detail and compared with my database of 1,330 rulings from the same time period.  While he had 76% of Republican rulings either False or Pants on Fire on the 522 rulings, I had calculated  64% (on the 1,330).  On the Democrats, while he had 22%, I had calculated 34%.  So his database was somewhat skewed against the Republicans, and Hemingway was basically using it as a weapon to claim it raised suspicions that PolitiFact was liberally biased because it appeared to be targeting False statements by Republicans.

Postscript Caveat:  I'm going to have to do a more up to date re-calculation (to include all of 2011 and New Hampshire) to see how these numbers are holding.

Truth Index: National and (or versus?) States

The PolitiFact (PF) state or regional analysis requires (in my view) that all the rulings through 2011 be included (adding those from 2010 and prior) to get the best statistical picture. That’s how it’s been handled in the past. PolitiFact New Jersey and New Hampshire were 2011 PolitiFact start ups, and some of the states don’t do as many rulings as others for obvious reasons. PolitiFacts Oregon and Rhode Island did the fewest rulings, generally about a quarter of what PolitiFacts Florida and Texas do. I’ve posted about this before; the state’s quantity of rulings roughly follows the population/amount of political representation, but not always.

PolitiFact New Hampshire is an anomaly because it only reports on the presidential candidates as "PolitiFact 2012" and does nothing of a “local” nature.  I’ve been tempted to include New Hampshire with National. And today, the day of my post, is the New Hampshire primary. I’m almost wondering what happens next when the primary is over? Was this just a project for a large staff of interns? We’ll know very soon. 

New Hampshire also holds the distinction, although with only 60 total rulings, as having the highest Truth Index for the Democrats as well as the largest variance between Democrats and Republicans. Since New Hampshire is only covering issues related to the presidential race at a national level, this serves to contrast the Republican’s higher “truthiness” at a local level discovered previously.  It also makes me bring up another theory of mine:  that Bill Adair is relegating some of the "liberal bias" to a "state" to lower the truth index variance between Republicans and Democrats at PolitiFact National.   I will save doing an analysis on this for later.

PolitiFacts Virginia and Wisconsin still favor the Republicans by a small margin. Most variances between Democrats and Republicans have stayed pretty steady; PolitiFact Virginia, the "reddest" PolitiFact state (where the Richmond Times-Dispatch has been established to endorse Republicans), still favors them by a small margin, going positive on its Republican Truth Index. PolitiFact Wisconsin has the worst Truth Index in terms of “lying”, at an overall average of negative 42.4, with the Republicans slightly more truthful than Democrats.

Click to enlarge:  The non-affiliated numbers are not included so the chart would look less cluttered.

Here’s how it looks when PF National is compared to all the states combined. This graph also includes the numbers on rulings on those with “Other” Independent, non-partisan or unknown political affiliations.

Click to enlarge:  Politically unaffiliated ratings are included here as "Other."

Truth Index: All Politics "R" Local

What is termed “local” deals with the nature of the PolitiFact (PF) ruling. Most often it would show in the title or subtitle. It means it just relates to something having to do with the state or locality, that it’s not national. It could be ideological, but it still pertains to a local issue. None of these rulings were from PolitiFact National. Intuitively they wouldn’t, but state PolitiFact rulings can be done for an office holder of that (PolitiFact) state, while the subject of the fact-check is of national scope. In other words, without reviewing each ruling, the state rulings can't all be counted as local.

For that reason, the rulings here only reflect the final quarter of 2011 because that is when I decided to start keeping track of the ruling itself along with whether it was “local.” I will continue doing this in 2012 to see if  trends continue.

There’s also an “overlap” which required these rulings be separately charted. Many of them are in the source or occupation category “office holders.” A good example is a statement by Rick Perry (office holder) made on Fox News in December, that “… Texas did not bail out a loan program he oversaw as state agriculture commissioner”:

Neil Cavuto of Fox News initially noted that noted that Perry wants Congress to stop spending so much. Then, referring to Austin American-Statesman reporting, Cavuto said the Texas program "had so many defaults that the state had to stop guaranteeing bank loans to start-ups in the agribusiness and eventually bailed out the program with the taxpayer money. So aren't you guilty of the same behavior you rail against as a presidential candidate?" Cavuto asked.

Perry replied: "Number one, don't believe everything you read in the Austin American-Statesman. And the second side of it is, we had that program put in place, and the state did not bail (it) out; those programs worked as they were supposed to work. Just like in any bank or any business, you are going to have some that fail."

At first blush this sounds like the subject could be the federal budget. It really has to do with what Perry did when he was the Texas Agricultural Commissioner in the 1990’s. Since the fact-check has to do specifically with Texas, Perry’s claim was counted as a local one.

Even though my example was a Republican with “Pants on Fire” it appears that locally, Republicans are more truthful than Democrats….by a pretty good margin. Republicans were at a precise “zero” on the Truth Index, while the Democrats were a negative 27. There were 173 “local” rulings which represented 38% of all the PF rulings in the fourth quarter of 2011; Democrats and Republicans were also equally represented, each having 74 rulings. There were 25 rulings for which the affiliation was independent, non-partisan or just unknown.

Click to enlarge:  Truth Index is in parentheses next to label.  Republicans were 27 points higher than Democrats locally.

Thirty percent of Democrat rulings were False or Pants on Fire, while only 18 percent of Republican rulings were in these categories. On the truthful side, almost 40% of Republican statements were found to be True or Mostly True, while only about 27% of Democrat statements were found to be the same.

Truth Index: Occupying the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter

In 2011 I came across the website of Steve’s Quibbling Potatoes, and I have to admit he gave me some good ideas about further finessing my database of PolitiFact (PF) rulings. So Steve, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I stole them! But you haven’t done anything on PF stats since July! In the last quarter of 2011, I started keeping an ongoing track (the way Steve does) of what he called the “occupation” of the statement-makers. Instead of just office holders, non-office holders, groups and media, he further defined it in terms of party boosters, advocacy groups, activists, etc. He also looked at state and local politics separately from “national” politics in Truth Index terms, to see if there was any difference in the averages and any insights could be gained.

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, another “group” is starting to be fact-checked that wasn’t part of Steve’s categorization, that he may have included under party boosters or advocacy groups if he had them. That’s the PAC – Political Action Committee – which I thought might be interesting to segregate out, especially in 2012.

Party boosters can best be described as groups whose purpose is to support the party. They’re pretty easy to distinguish because they have Republican or Democrat in their name. The 2011 PolitiFact Lie of the Year originated with the party booster DCCC – the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (well, it actually originated with the Wall Street Journal, but I won’t go there for now). It was fairly easy for me to go back through the previous rulings and find these, so I can show numbers on these for the entire year of 2011.

Advocacy groups and advocates (I’m including activist with advocates) are those whose sole purpose is (to advocate for) a “cause”—everything from “Critics of Florida Fluoridation” (public water supply in Florida) to the National Taxpayers’ Union (U.S. taxes). Of course, there may be some conflicts with the PAC’s, because PACs can support causes as well. Some of the groups are clearly non-profits or foundations and may run ads similarly to PAC and have PAC offshoots. I am trying to confine the PACs to those whose function is very clearly to garner contributions in order “to elect political candidates or to advance the outcome of a political issue or legislation.” It is difficult to tell sometimes; a patriotic-sounding name isn’t the only indicator. Usually, the PolitiFact ruling will note that it’s a PAC, but not always. I was able to include these for the entire year as well.

My last review of “occupation” categories was: office holders, non-office holders, groups, individuals and media.  This time the non-office holders will be further delineated into party boosters, advocacy groups, PACs, media and whatever’s left that can’t be included in those four. That would be such things as websites, bloggers, yard signs, Facebook posts, and those ubiquitous chain e-mails.

Click to enlarge: Maybe PF has a soft spot in their heart for liberal media people?  Dem and Repub party boosters lie
about the same; advocacy groups and PACs favor the Republicans.

The results this time yielded a surprise of sorts. So far, Democrats pretty consistently come out higher on the Truth Index than Republicans in almost all categories. In the case of advocacy groups and PACs, however, the Republican advocacy groups and PACs scored higher in overall “truthiness”, although collectively both parties averaged on the negative side of the Truth Index. The difference was pretty substantial with the advocacy groups, with the Republican Truth Index (-12) less than half that of the Democrats (-27.3). The Republican PACs were about two-thirds more truthful at a negative 17.6 compared the Democrats negative 29.2.

If I accidentally included advocacy groups with PACs or vice versa, in certain respects, it doesn’t make much difference. The number of errors would not amount to much, and the results would still favor the Republicans. But more than that, one of Steve’s charts, similar to mine done earlier in the year, I believe reflecting a database of about six months of data, reflects the same pattern with party boosters and advocacy groups.



Click to enlarge: At Steve's Quibbling Potatoes, party boosters and advocacy groups score similarly to mine. 



Next up, another surprise with the “locals.”

PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, Part 2

The number of PolitiFact (PF) detractors who yelled “foul” at its choice for 2011 Lie of the Year could make a whole new blog page, there were so many. In Part 1 of this post, there’s displayed a cartoon someone even created about it.

In the course of my research, I found what is believed to be the first “claim” that Medicare was ending, before the Democrats decided to really publicize it. It was from the Wall Street Journal in an article by Naftali Bendavid: (emphasis added)

…The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills. Mr. Ryan and other conservatives say this is necessary because of the program's soaring costs. Medicare cost $396.5 billion in 2010 and is projected to rise to $502.8 billion in 2016. At that pace, spending on the program would have doubled between 2002 and 2016.

Then there were some (like Dave Weigel at Slate), as noted by PolitiFact, who believed the choice of PLOTY was because of the lobbying efforts of Paul Ryan, who upon learning of the nominees, posted a YouTube video asking viewers to vote for the Ryancare ending Medicare claim in PF’s poll. It seems he might not have known that it was the PF editors who make the final selection, not the winner of the poll. But we don’t know that he may have called PF’s Washington Bureau, or asked constituents to call, or made other lobby efforts behind the scenes.

Along with Weigel, Matt Ygelsias at Slate had a pretty good review called “PolitiFact lies about lying.”

It seems the most “noticed” and quoted PolitiFact detractor was Paul Krugman at the New York Times, who stated that this choice was “awful” in a memorial obit entitled “RIP PolitiFact.” Without much ado, he hit upon the real reason:

The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

Well, perhaps useless and irrelevant to Paul Krugman until the next time they make a Democrat statement Lie of the Year? Or call a blatant Pants on Fire on whoever the Republican candidate is next year as he campaigns against Obama? Because to dismiss PolitiFact on the basis of this one ruling is vastly under-rating it, however one may agree with Krugman’s assessment.

Media Matters published quite an extensive response to PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year, lending support to my contention that the Stimulus creating zero jobs claim should have been the winner, by not just pointing out the other PolitiFact rulings on it as uttered by others, but linking an additional ten examples, such as the publications Washington Times (9/7/11) and Washington Examiner (8/22/11), and well-known conservative pundits like Sean Hannity (video 7/13/11), Laura Ingraham (video 2/4/11) and Charles Krauthammer (video 5/31/11).  From the Media Matters article:

When asked about his explanation about the "zero jobs" lie by Media Matters' Joe Strupp, Adair said that the Lie of the Year "is a subjective decision of Politifact editors. ... [I]t's not based on data points."

Given how often the lies about the stimulus and the Obama apology tour were repeated by conservatives, it may have been helpful for Politifact to look at "data points" rather than just their editors' "subjective" sense of how widespread the lie was.

Data points? How does one determine how “widespread” a lie is without data points? I discussed data points in terms of the number of rulings in my previous post. The number of rulings that PolitiFact does relating to the economy, such as jobs, taxes, budgets, the deficit, far exceed those about healthcare and Medicare. I suppose the judgment of how “widespread” a lie is has to do with what might be termed its “urban mythology”—how it seems to have made an impact culturally, how much it has become accepted as a common belief. The first Lie of the Year, Sarah Palin’s death panel claim, is definitely in that genre.

But how does the public get informed in order for a myth to get rooted? I’m thinking it’s perhaps an “image” that the claim conjures up in peoples’ minds. The “image” makes the claim compelling, gives the claim a unique “brand”. In 2009, it was this board of faceless people having a meeting and saying who would live and who would die. In 2010, it was the incompetent socialist government taking over, bullying doctors and allowing the patient no choices. In 2011, it was…grandma getting thrown over the cliff. The “stimulus creating zero jobs” does not have any memorably associated image except maybe a Democrat congress and Obama throwing money down a toilet, but that’s not unique in that it could be associated with the debt ceiling or the deficit as well. So maybe I’ve seized upon a possible reason for its choice, on the other hand, it doesn’t always have to be the“granny off the cliff” lie that’s the most widespread.

But I digress. The list of complainants is extensive. I’ve already recorded a few of them above: Slate, Media Matters and Krugman at the New York Times. Many of the others have already been included in my page PolitiFact Detractors, although not linked to their latest PolitiFact “detraction.” Here they are in alphabetical order.  There's probably many more, but these are some of the "best" ones.

PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, Part 1

My only response on this blog so far to PolitiFact’s 2011 Lie of the Year was a “guest post” by my favorite vulgarian “Rude Pundit” Lee Papa, who over all the colorful expletives called it over-compensating and pandering by PolitiFact.

I should have listened to my original gut feeling back in July that the Democrat claim that "RyanCare" was ending Medicare was a choice by default for 2011 PolitiFact (PF) Lie of the Year because of its sort of inverse relationship to the 2010 Lie of the Year (that Obamacare was a government takeover). But the Republican claim that Obama’s Stimulus created zero jobs—in the year of Occupy Wall Street and what seemed to be the paramount issue with voters--unemployment--as the Republican primary candidates made their bids, appeared to overshadow the RyanCare claim. It won in PolitiFact’s voting canvass as well. But as I noted in my prediction, PolitiFact may surprise us all…and they did. Although I was hoping the liberal-bias-complainers would be ignored, they weren’t. While it was a good choice, the stimulus created zero jobs was a better one. It was just that this was more of a “politi-choice” decision, pure and simple.

Paul Ryan and Bill Adair in this cartoon version of an analogy by Steve Benen of theWashington Monthly

Making my case from PolitiFact’s own rulings for the year 2011, there were 33 PolitiFact rulings on the subject of “Medicare.” The total number of rulings under the subject “stimulus” was 21 and for “jobs” it was 85. In other words, there were three times as many fact-checks devoted to jobs and the stimulus than to Medicare. If you include similar major topics, for example, healthcare along with Medicare, and the economy along with jobs and stimulus, jobs, stim and economy (246 fact-checks) still outnumber Medicare and healthcare (166 fact-checks). So clearly, jobs was a hotter topic this year than Medicare and healthcare. The economy, in fact, was the number one most fact-checked topic at 140 rulings.

On the other hand, PolitiFact might make its case by virtue of the Truth Index: Medicare scored the lowest, a negative 43.06, of the 20 topics that comprised just over 75% of all 2011 PolitiFact rulings. The topic stimulus had 21 rulings with a very close negative 40.48; jobs, however, scored a negative 12.35, which aligns with the overall 2011 Truth Index average of negative 14.38.

PolitiFact also listed nine rulings about the same subject that had been published, along with the original one by the DCCC. While I don’t have nine to refute PF’s nine exactly, the “stimulus created zero jobs” message as a PF fact-check on the Republicans has been going on for almost two years now, starting with Scott Brown...then later with Rick Scott when he was running for governor of Florida, which was one of the nominees for PolitiFact’s 2010 Lie of the Year...then Eric Cantor in May said the Stimulus failed to get people back to work, which is pretty much the same thing...then Rick Perry on the campaign trail in September...before the National Republican Senatorial Committee used it in an ad, which was PF's official nomination of the fact-check for the 2011 Lie of the Year. Most recently New Jersey governor Chris Christie used it, but in a different tack, as if there never was a stimulus.  Or, there were just claims that not only were zero jobs created, but jobs were lost.

And then there was a blatant flip-flop in the respect that there were a couple claims about the “high” Stimulus cost per job: the number $278,000 is bandied about a lot by John Boehner and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is a bit confusing since saying it cost that much per job means admitting that 2.4 million jobs were saved or created.  So, which is it?

My own review of this claim, called “RyanCare: Pay or Die” back in April, placed this claim firmly on the roll of “Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style”—because “the available evidence is insufficient to establish it as either true or false.” I wondered in my write-up what it would be when the last baby boomer died off; I also wondered about the “voluntary” aspect of the program. If years out, you have a lot of Medicare-eligible people without insurance, has it not ended for them?

Truth Index: 2011 Overall, and Monthly Trends

PolitiFact published 1,919 Truth-o-Meter rulings in 2011.  It would have been 1,920 if not for a duplicate.  As with the previous ALL rulings through the end of 2011, here is the year 2011 in its "cool" and 3-D PolitiFact app format, in a way PolitiFact won't show it: of the 1,919 statements, 1,080 (56.3%--compared to 52.6% overall) were by Republicans/ Conservatives/Tea Party/Libertarians; 677 (35.3%--compared to 39.6% overall) were by Democrats/Liberals, and 162 (8.4%) were by independents, non-partisan or unknown political affiliation. These statements include all those made by individual politicians, as well as pundits, advocates, media, groups, websites, PACs, blogs and chain e-mails.

The Truth Index is shown in parentheses:  the Democrats ended at almost exactly zero with .07, or Half True, while the Republicans were (still) at a negative 23. 

Click to enlarge:  Both parties' Truth Index stayed pretty steady while "unaffiliateds" improved a bit.

It seemed to me that a lot more rulings were being done on Republicans toward the end of the year, with the debates and the upcoming primaries/caucuses.  This was indeed especially the case in December.  In fact, it almost looked like the word went down to the PolitiFact writers to keep the number of Democrat statements selected (selection bias? lol) to between 55 and 60 a month, and the Republicans to 80 or more, because for the most part that's how many would be done.  In December, however, a huge divergence occurred as can be seen in this month to month chart of the percentage of Democratic statements checked as compared to the percentage of Republican statements checked:  in numbers, there were 33 Democrat statements fact-checked as compared to 91 fact-checks for the Republicans in December, an almost 3 to 1 ratio.

Click to enlarge:  Republicans consistently had more claims fact-checked in 2011 with a big bounce up in December.

Here is how the Truth Index fared month to month in 2011:  this graphs the Truth Index calculated for all claims in each month by party.  Interestingly, while more Republican claims were being fact-checked, both the Democrats and Republicans enjoyed a late-year upswing in their "truthiness."  I've also highlighted where the index lines almost met, in February and June, in what appeared to be the Democrats obviously getting more Mostly False/False/Pants on Fire rulings.  Nevertheless, the Democrats appear to consistently have higher ongoing Truth Indexes than the Republicans.

Click to enlarge: One of these days, the lines might cross!

Next up, a look at the "who" (Truth Indexes between office holders, non-office holders, media, etc.).  In the fourth quarter I started a "PAC" designation, so please be patient while I go back to properly record the PACs for the first nine months.  In the meantime...