Tchotchkes: Mr. Burns Explains the Fiscal Cliff

Truth Index+: The PolitiFact Saga on Obamacare

In the history of PolitiFact rulings, from its beginnings in 2007 to the election of 2012, the most covered subject was healthcare. PolitiFact currently has 42 pages of rulings related to healthcare. While there's a lot of overlap with other subjects (particularly fiscal ones) as designated in every ruling, my counts for 6,535 PolitiFact rulings show healthcare and Medicare were the "main" subject(s) for over 10 percent of them.

 

In 2007, the very first characterization of a Democrat national healthcare reform plan as "socialized medicine" which earned a False was from budding 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. PolitiFact called it "pure hyperbole."   In early 2008, eventual 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney was the first person fact-checked for what would become the PolitiFact 2010 Lie of the Year--that "Obamacare" (the meme not yet invented for healthcare reform) was a "government take over" of the healthcare system.

Click to enlarge:  Low number of Democrat rulings caused larger swings

There were very few fact-checks (12) evenly divided between party on healthcare reform as it related to Obama's proposals in 2007 and 2008, compared to what happened after he became president. So the Truth Index+ at that time did not tell us much. Indeed, as I noted in a previous post on what caused the big increase in Pants on Fire assignments to Republicans, the year 2009 was a very big ruling year when it came to healthcare reform and Obamacare. In that year, over 1/4 of PolitiFact rulings related to that topic.

Obamacare, however, was the leading PolitiFact ruling topic in 2009: healthcare was the subject of over 30% of the rulings with about 27% relating to healthcare reform, and made up over 1/3 of the Pants on Fire. With the majority coming from Republicans, this was for the most part what drove up the Pants on Fire factor against them.

The year 2010 was not as important in terms of PolitiFact's concentration on Obamacare; it was a pivotal year, however, in terms of the Republicans doubling down on attacking it. Republicans dominated on dubious healthcare claims as 64 fact-checks brought their Obamacare Truth Index+ down to under 34. It continued into 2011 and worsened in 2012. The number of Obamacare-related rulings doubled from 2011 to 2012, when it seemed as if the Republicans thought the public dislike of it would get them the same type of election results as in 2010.

Truth Index+: Are Election Winners More "Truthful"?

Since PolitiFact has been through three national election cycles and a few minor ones, I've always been curious as to whether the fact-checking matters in regard to who gets elected. Or to put it another way, are those who win more "truthier" according to the Truth Index.... or less? So as an experiment, I went through the PolitiFact rulings and keyed in whether the candidate/official won or lost in a pending election from the time he or she made the statement.

But first I had to do a lot of filtering of my list of 6,535 rulings (all rulings through 11/5/12).  All the non-official people (like pundits and advocates) and groups (like websites, bloggers, chain e-mails, PACs etc.) had to go, of course. I also didn't include (or partially included) the rulings of those who retired or lost in the primaries (good example: Dennis Kucinich). There were some who won and lost, like John McCain: I rated his statements prior to his 2008 presidential election loss as a "loser" and those since as a "winner" since he won re-election as Arizona senator in 2010. Local and state elections are also excluded except for governors races. And just for the heck of it, I also keyed in those who were in the Tea Party caucus. When I got done, I was down to 2,937 rulings.

Click to enlarge:  Winners appear to make fewer False/PoF statements regardless of affiliation.

As of November 5, 2012, for all 6,535 PolitiFact rulings, the Truth Index+ is 54.2. For the 2,937 candidates making campaign statements, it was about 5 percent higher at 57. However, the "all" includes everything along with the kitchen sink. A better comparison might be to the Truth Index for those were in office at the time of the statement, which is similar to those facing elections, which was a tiny bit higher 57.7. Compared to the overall, however, what this says is that individuals and those in official positions tend to be more truthful on their own than groups or those who advocate for them. I've already shown this to be the case when I've posted calculations of the Truth Index separately for office-holders versus the various categories of advocacy groups, party boosters, media pundits, etc.

The "bias" factor would not be as relevant here because I am not looking at this in terms of Democrat versus Republican. But it's evident from these statistics that the "winners" are found more "truthful" by the PolitiFact fact-checkers than are the "losers" by about 8 percent in terms of the Truth Index+. It's about 6 percent if you re-adjust the Pants on Fire category to False.

Comparing Republicans and Democrats gets a wee bit trickier. Democrats have always held a higher Truth Index in general, and even though some say it's due to selection bias, something did emerge from the analysis of interest concerning the Republicans that can't be totally attributed to bias. While the Democrats had a pretty substantive variance between winners and losers (63.6 versus 55.8, or 14 percent), the Republican's variance was insignificantly small--53.5 versus 52.8, or about 1.5 percent. What this says is that the Republicans have about the same level of "truthiness" based on statements evaluated whether they win or lose. What this means, I don't know.

Tchotchkes: Obama Responds to Secession Petition(s)

Zebra Factcheck is the PolitiFact *Unskewed*

(OR "Fact-checking you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better"....)

If there's one thing to be learned from the elections, it's that creating one's own realities doesn't work. From Salon.com:

Conservatives will hear that Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie delivered the election to Obama, that Mitt Romney wasn’t a true conservative, and that mainstream media bias blinded Americans to the truth. A few voices may acknowledge that the state of polling science is actually pretty good, and the demographics of the U.S. have fundamentally changed, but don’t hold your breath for a widespread reappraisal of the dangers of listening only to what you want to hear. The right-wing echo chamber is built of stronger stuff than the left’s.

And along with "mainstream media bias," fact-checkers must be 100% liberally biased as well! And Zebra Factcheck will unblind you to "the truth"! But I digress.

Current TV's Cenk Ugyur reported how much 26 polls were off in predicting this past election, listed in terms of accuracy: it almost came as no surprise to me that one of those near the bottom was the conservative Rasmussen--while the top poll was the liberal Public Policy Polling and one from the Daily Kos.

 

There were a number of polling analysis outfits, the most prolific being Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, along with Real Clear Politics. But then a website called Unskewed Polls became well known, especially with Republicans, with over 25,000 fans on Facebook, as authored by Dean Chambers who was very highly critical of Nate Silver. It essentially based its election prognostications adjusting for what it believed was over-sampling of Democrats by the other polls (and under-sampling Republican enthusiasm)--because those polls were part of the "main stream media" and that by "showing results unrealistically favorable to Obama that they are leading to a perception among voters of the inevitability of Obama's victory in the election." 



Unskewed Polls electoral map Nov. 4: Romney to win 52% to 47%

And so, the weekend before the election up until election eve, Unskewed Polls was basically predicting a Romney sweep of 342 electoral college votes to 196 for Obama, as shown above  in a screen-snip from its website. Sometime Election Eve Monday Dean Chambers did some quick back-pedaling (strangely, with almost all the polling done) on his electoral map to make it look like he only failed to predict four states for Obama, changing the electoral counts to 275 for Romney and 263 for Obama. Meanwhile, people like Karl Rove and Dick Morris were making similar errors to Dean Chambers on Democratic over-sampling, in predicting a Romney landslide on Fox News. Everyone ended up eating a lot of crow failing to discern the voter suppression backlash and growing minority demographics.

 

So you can see where I am going with PolitiFact Bias (PFB) and its new "project" Zebra Factcheck. I believe the writers at PFB commit the same type of cognitively dissonant blunder, insisting that PolitiFact is "Democratically skewed" like Chambers claims all the polls are. And they think they are unskewering PolitiFact's rulings at their websites, just as Chambers says he does.

Tchotchkes: Victory from Obama's Anger Translator

You can't touch this!

Giving ZFC a KO on CKDs

This first check of Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC) is also a postscript on something just posted as a response to PolitiFact Bias--on the misleading information in a late Mitt Romney campaign ad being used to rile autoworkers in Ohio.

ZFC writer Bryan White offers us this "these-are-jobs-in-China-from-the-U.S." citation from the Toledo Blade to back up the veracity of Romney's literal statement that Fiat/Chrysler is going to build Jeeps in China.

Jeep currently exports U.S.-made vehicles to China, which is Jeep’s largest market outside of North America. Last year, Jeep sold 22,294 vehicles in China. The company is expected to exceed that this year.

He then asks "If a Chinese Jeep plant takes over production of some or all of the more than 20,000 vehicles Jeeps sells in China then how does this not affect workers in the United States?"

Let's first start with the 22,294 vehicles from a relative perspective. One Detroit Jeep plant produces about 950 vehicles per day in 2 shifts. That means if the plant was working a normal 5-day work week, this would be roughly one month's production. Not very much, less than 10% of total annual production, and would be even less if the plant was at maximum production (3 shifts) or was working overtime. The Chinese production is what is called low volume. Even the 33,463 vehicles cited from the Business Standard fit the same definition: not enough for full production, not enough for a plant.

ZFC might counter that this could still be 10 percent of the workers being replaced....but that's not quite so black and white. If ZFC had been thorough in its fact-checking like it claims it is, it should have noted the paragraph at the bottom of the Toledo Blade article:

That commitment means Chrysler will not fully build and assemble Wranglers outside America. The automaker does currently ship low volumes of what the industry calls “knock-down kits” for final assembly in Egypt. Mr. Bragman said that's fairly common in the automotive industry, and the kits are not equitable to full-scale production plants. Parts would still have to be made and partially assembled elsewhere.

Knock-down kits (CKD = Complete Knock Down) contain "the parts needed to assemble a product" and are used when there is a low volume for export as "a method of supplying parts to a market, particularly in shipping to foreign nations, and serves as a way of counting or pricing." That is how Jeeps were produced in China up until 2009. The kits are assembled in the United States...and guess who does the assembly of the parts in those kits here for shipment to China? Now, if ZFC or counterirritant want to call Chrysler to find out if fewer workers are needed for CKD kit assembly than for full-scale assembly, they're more than welcome to find out. And, it is possible the kit assembly could be outsourced to a local supplier--but then, additional jobs would be created there to replace any auto plant jobs. 

So when Aaron Bragman, a senior automotive analyst at IHS Automotive, was quoted to say that the Chinese production "doesn't take any jobs away from anyone else" he was correct. Romney is not correct, and neither is ZFC nor counterirritant.

Finally, the original Bloomberg article said that Fiat was in "detailed conversations" about making Jeeps in China. It wasn't definite nor confirmed. So, what happens if the deal with Guangzhou Automobile Group doesn't materialize? I didn't mention this in my original criticism, but it is another large gray area on the Zebra. Because while Romney himself said the Italians ( I could do another post on that one as well) were "thinking" of moving the production to China, the ad (which was aired much more) said it was a sure thing...which it wasn't. That alone makes Romney's literal statement false.

But what else would one expect from right-wing fact-checkers.

Lil White Lies: Read It and Jeep

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) gleefully joins with the anti-PolitiFact blog counterirritant in misrepresenting a blatant misrepresentation by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as we enter the last 100 hours of the 2012 presidential campaign.

PolitiFact awarded a Pants on Fire (and WaPo FactChecker and Factcheck.org agree in line with it) when the Romney campaign released an ad which said:

Who will do more for the auto industry? Not Barack Obama. Fact checkers confirm that his attacks on Mitt Romney are false. The truth? Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry. He is supported by Lee Iacocca and the Detroit News. Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

It basically was "piggy-backed" (Glenn Kessler's words) from a very similar statement Romney had made during an Ohio campaign stop: " “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America."

 

That's pretty much everything....so PFB and counterirritant decide that "building Jeeps in China" is technically true as parsed waaaaaaaay out of context, and the fact-checkers need to fact-check more, as the loud and clear, self-evident implication isn't enough. They need to actually verify that the Chinese production is replacing (at least some of) the American production. Counterirritant thinks he knows the fact of the matter, and he condescendingly tells us: "For those slow on the uptake: Jeep vehicles that will be produced in China by Chinese workers are currently produced in the U.S by U.S. workers."

 

Nope, not quite. Because when Chrysler or Fiat talk about this Chinese production, it's added production, not replacement. Chrysler built Jeeps in China--for the Chinese market--before Fiat acquired it in 2009. And Romney's fearmongering came on the heels of this report from the Detroit Free Press:

In fact, Chrysler is investing $500 million at its Toledo North Assembly Plant and plans to add 1,105 new workers by the third quarter of 2013 to build an all-new SUV that will replace the Jeep Liberty.

Production of the new SUV will begin next summer and the hiring process for the new workers, who are scheduled to start by the next fall, has begun, said Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson.

In other words, as noted succinctly by the New York Times: "Jeep is discussing increasing production in China for sales within China; it is not moving jobs out of Ohio or the United States, or building cars in China for export to the United States."

Truth Index+: Obama-Romney FIVE MORE DAYS

Five more days...unless of course, something happens due to Super-Storm Sandy and voting gets delayed somewhere in New Jersey or New York City or New England....or Romney wins the vote but loses the Electoral College and sues...you never know.  The only "poll" I really pay attention to is one and even though it's now almost 80% favorable to Obama, that still means, because the fellow who calculates it used to do odds in Vegas, that, like any table in Vegas, the 20% can still come in.  And I'm very superstitious when it comes to being overly hopeful when gambling or making predictions.

But here's where Obama and Romney stand with regard to what was in the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter count for them as of October 30, 2012:

 

 

Obama is about 22.8% more "truthful" based on PolitiFact rulings than Romney.  PolitiFact is 3.6 times more likely to elevate a False ruling for Romney to Pants on Fire than they are for Obama.

 

For the trend line, I'm going to add a period-to-period average (in the dotted line) along with the accumulated average (shown in the solid line).  This is so you can see where the Truth Index+ made any significant movements:

Click to enlarge:  Romney's 2011 28.6 Truth Index was from his presidential announcement (see below)

And what did Romney say that got his Truth Index down so low in early 2011?  Well, a few of the things he said then he continued to repeat, and stated during the October, 2012, debates.  He also re-stated one of PolitiFact's Lies of the Year:  that "Obamacare" was a government take-over.  He also made the comment about Obama's worldwide "Apology Tour" and that the United States was inches from being a free economy.

 

But it looks like--for the last 4 months, at least--that even here Romney has narrowed the gap on the Truth Index+.  Since June Obama rates only 12% more "truthier" than Romney with the PolitiFact rulings.  Of course, there are some that say this is all for naught because PolitiFact has a left-leaning bias.  But so what...because there are also some that say that's malarkey, and back it up.

Three Pants on Fires in a row didn't help Romney's Truth Index in 2011.

 

 

 

Tchotchkes: Post Rape Nuts

Truth Index: Obama-Romney One Month Out

Dreaming of a Michele anniversary gift

Recently I posted about Mitt Romney's 47% remarks, saying it might be the game changer and even though it was rated "True" by PolitiFact, it might be considered a candidate for Lie of the Year...unless, as I said "...Obama could make his own big gaffe" which would reverse Romney's course following that statement. Well did he ever. I got up Thursday morning hoping the first debate had just been a bad dream. But I did enjoy SNL's take on it, which was just about the whole show.

 

But life must go on and it's time again to look at the Truth Index trend line for Romney and Obama. It hasn't changed much (unlike the polls), so I thought I might add something to show what appears to be the "Truth Index trend" for presidential candidates during their campaigns, i.e., the Truth Index of 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain. We see how all three candidates had slipping Truth Indexes as their campaigns went on. In my last post on this, and as can be seen in the chart below, Romney had a higher Truth Index than Obama until after he announced his candidacy in 2011, after which it deteriorated substantially.

Click to enlarge: All 3 candidates' Truth Index fell off during the campaign period

This chart represents 427 rulings for Obama (which may explain why his Truth Index has not fallen as much in 2012), 183 for Romney, and 169 for McCain, from about June of 2007 to present. Today Obama's Truth Index has bumped down a bit to a positive 11.48, and Romney is at a negative 16.12. John McCain's Truth Index, most of his rulings from the 2007-8 period, is a negative 8.88, roughly half that of Romney based on a similar quantity of rulings. For what it's worth, looking at the infamous "Pants on Fire" factor on an individual basis, Pants on Fire were assigned nearly three times as much to Romney than Obama (PoF 3.86), and twice as much to McCain than Obama (PoF 1.97).

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

Truth Index: The *Sweet* Sixteen

PolitiFact’s adding the percentages to the Truth-o-Meter tally on its website made me realize that when it came to individual rankings, I was wasting my time with my spreadsheets. I could do the individual tally “real time” as long as I knew who had the most rulings…which for the most part isn’t too hard to figure out.

Those who ran and who are running for president, or are an official in a PolitiFact state, got the most rulings. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are hardly ever subjected to the Truth-o-Meter these days, but they’ve had a bigger share of PolitiFact rulings overall than a lot of people making the news today because of the 2008 election campaigns. I suspect by election day,the newly selected Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan might get up there in number to make the list, especially with PolitiFact Wisconsin’s help, although he has a way to go.

There are sixteen individuals who’ve had at least 40 PolitiFact rulings, and they comprise a bit over 25% of all of them. Here they are in order of the highest Truth Index to the lowest, and congratulations Hillary—appearing more “truthful” doesn’t seem to correlate to “winning” or getting one more votes, does it?

They are more of the representative sample that should be used in any “testing” of the Truth-o-Meter as to “truthfulness” or that supposed bias, but I won’t get into that here.

For those interested, for the top 16, the Democrats comprised 35% of the rulings (yes, for Hillary, Obama and Joe Biden!). The Democrat Truth Index was a positive 15.5, compared with an almost zero (.22) for all Democrat rulings; the Republicans a negative 16.8, compared with a negative 23 overall. (AND for what it's worth, the percent of Pants on Fire measure was 1.92 in favor of the Democrats.)

Truth Index by Subject since 2011

In a previous post on the subject of guns, I had written a huge paragraph on the overlap of subject assignment, which I ended up taking out when I realized that all I have to do at the PolitiFact website is click the label link for the subject to get all the rulings. But it’s still easier to do it on a spreadsheet because it’s all on one page right in front of me.

Anyway, the top ten subjects by order of number of occurrences (i.e., because of that ubiquitous selection bias) are shown in the chart below: They constitute roughly one half (48%) of all the rulings for which I kept track of the subject, for all of 2011 and the first half of 2012, 1,405 rulings out of 2,923 total. The chart shows the subjects highest count to lowest (starting with “Economy” with 234 rulings, working down to “Environment” with 67 rulings). Then it shows the Truth Index for Democrats and Republicans for each subject with the Truth Index score labeling each bar.

Click to enlarge: On the subject "Federal Budget" Republicans calculated to a "zero" Truth Index.

The chart does not show the total breakdown or average for these top ten: of the 1,405 rulings, 843 (60%) were from Republicans and 488 (about 35%) were from Democrats, with the remaining 5% Independent, Non-Partisan or unknown. The Republicans had an overall Truth Index for these top ten subjects of negative 21.5 (compared to negative 24.1 for all 2,935 rulings), while the Democrats had a positive 4.4 for these top ten (compared to a negative 1 for all 2,935 rulings).

The conclusions: while the economy was the most covered subject, in terms of number of rulings and Truth Index divergence between Democrats and Republicans, healthcare was by far the worst and most lied-about subject, especially by Republicans. For the year 2011, healthcare was also Number 1, and I’m sure this continued trend has something to do with their keeping the public turned against that dreaded “Obamacare.”

You can also check my recent post of some of the more repeated statements on the topic of healthcare, as well as PolitiFact rulings for which FactCheck.Org reached the same conclusion.

The Republicans were ahead Truth-Index-wise of the Democrats two subjects, jobs and “candidate bio”. Job creation has been lackluster under Obama, and so there may be a little stretching of the truth on the topic of jobs on the part of Obama and other Democrats to make it seem better than it is. As the political campaigns for 2012 start to take shape, “candidate bio”—something said about the candidate's opponent, his background or history—has been getting more attention for fact-checking verificiation, and here it seems the Republicans are a wee bit more “truthier” than Democrats.

The largest divergence between Truth Indexes without considering count, however, was on the topic of energy. I filtered out three “underlying reasons” just looking at the statements which I labeled Drill (Baby Drill), Gas (prices), and Keystone (Pipeline). When I looked at the “affiliation” list after executing the filter for these three items, I didn’t have to do anything more: there were 25, and they were ALL Republican statements, with a combined Truth Index of very negative 66. One of my favorites was a Pants on Fire for a Florida senatorial candidate by the name of Dave Weldon who said that there was no wildlife in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—sort of sounds like someone saying Ulysses S. Grant isn’t buried in Grants Tomb. Or a False from PolitiFact Ohio for a statement by Representative Mike Dovilla that Obama’s policy on the Keystone Pipeline was thwarting the ability to (immediately!) reduce gas prices.

Other than that, my readers can reach their own conclusions.

Truth Index: Don't Rush Me

After publishing the first half PolitiFact (PF) ruling results, it’s come time for more breakdown of the detail, and as I accomplished that I came across an “amusing” error I had made: I accidentally classified Rush Limbaugh as a Democrat! Oh woes me! So that’s been fixed. He only had one Pants on Fire ruling for the first half of 2012, but it did slightly affect the Truth Index.

Here’s how it breaks down by “source”—starting with the President/VP, the congress, the governors, the states and local governments, as well as advocacy groups, PACs and the media, and includes the overall Truth Index (here's the one for first quarter of 2012). “Others” includes former officials, blogs, chain e-mails and websites. A new category has been added called “Candidates (other than President)” as we have more and more of them due to the beginning of the 2012 election campaign. All officials I’ve categorized are “sitting”: in the case of presidential (I’d say ex-presidential but I don’t want to incur the wrath of Ron Paul fans) candidates like Ron Paul and Rick Perry, they are included in the categories of their “sitting” positions, congressman and governor.

Click to enlarge:  Groups (PACs etc) have a far lower Truth Index (-43) than individuals (-12) .

The following is a further breakdown of the pie chart, showing Democrats and Republicans. As can be seen the “local” category is now almost exactly even between Democrats and Republicans, whereas for the first quarter I showed a Republican advantage. The difference in the “local” Truth Index you’ve seen in earlier posts (as far as number of rulings) is that the chart indicates local politicians only, but there are also local issues covered by almost every source category which was what my earlier posts were about.

Click to enlarge:  FIRST HALF 2012: Only 3 rulings on Democrat governors made for the lowest Truth Index.

The senators and governors having more positive rulings than the other positions seems to be holding. The senators’ longer terms and their proverbial meaning of being “the eldest and wisest” (although let’s remember the word senator is from the same root as “senile” ha ha!) may have something to do with their being more “truthier” when subjected to the Truth-o-Meter. I posted something earlier on the predominantly Republican governors as far as who was the lowest on the Truth Index (Scott Walker of Wisconsin) but relatively speaking as a group they are much more “truthier” than their political counterparts.  

Next up, PolitiFact states or maybe PolitiFact writers?

Is Mitt's Irrational Religion an Election Issue?

Truth Index: Quantity has a Quality All its Own

In a Politi-Score/Truth Index review of Mitt Romney, it was graphically shown how his Truth Index has deteriorated since entering the 2012 presidential race, from 2011 forward. At the end of 2010, it was more than 50% higher than Obama’s (a positive 19 versus Obama’s 12). At that time Mitt had 45 rulings total, which put him in the “exclusive club” of those with the number of Truth-o-Meter rulings which might mean something statistically.

By the end of March, 2012, Mitt’s Truth Index had dropped to a negative 12.7, while Obama’s barely moved, from just over 12 to under. But there is another way to look at this: what if Romney had the same number of rulings as Obama at the end of 2010, but with the same Truth Index of a positive 19 he had at the time? How would it look now?

Mitt talks about the Obama economy, Obama-care, Obama recession, Obama-blah blah blah. So let’s give Mitt an Obama-adjusted Truth Index. Based on an 18.9 Truth Index with 272 rulings (Obama’s number)as opposed to 45, Mitt’s Truth Index would today be a positive 8.02. It would still have gone slowly down, but obviously much more smoothly. Point wise he would be very close to Obama at 11.54.  Here's the graph:

Click to enlarge:  Obama and Mitt might draw close to even in next 6 months to the election (on quantity-adjusted).

So there is a flattening effect in the averages caused by the large number of rulings, even with the index heavily weighted to the False side. When Mitt hit 100 rulings, each additional ruling affected the average less than 1 percent, in Obama’s case, it’s now less than a third of one percent.

In a way, this shows the poor sensitivity of the Index individually—one more reason it should not be considered a reliable measure of “truthiness.” It should also be noted that Romney fell below Obama’s Truth Index in January…this may in part be due to Romney’s veering way right as the primaries started and the campaign ramped up. I will have to review this later to see if Romney’s Truth Index improves.

Sidebar: Yet ANOTHER Reason for More Republican Fact-checking

And Another Reason I don't believe in the "Liberal Media"

(AND Things You won't see at those Anti-PolitiFact Blog Sites)

As soon as I posted "Another Reason For More Republican Fact-checking" the other day, I got yet another fine surprise from the Daily Beast (via Yahoo News) as a follow-up: yet another study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which reported:

During the bruising Republican primaries, there was one candidate whose coverage was more relentlessly negative than the rest. In fact, he did not enjoy a single week where positive treatment by the media outweighed the negative.

His name is Barack Obama.

That is among the findings of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington nonprofit that examined 52 key newspaper, television, radio, and Web outlets.

“Day in and day out, he was criticized by the entire Republican field on a variety of policies,” Mark Jurkowitz, the group’s associate director, says of Obama. “And he was inextricably linked to events that generated negative coverage”—including rising gas prices, the ailing economy, and the renewed debate over his health care law.

In short, while the president was being hammered on both fronts, his message was somewhat drowned out by the volume of news coverage surrounding the GOP candidates.

As my recent Politi-Score analysis of Mitt Romney's rulings revealed, many of his statements concentrated on "hammering" Obama and his policies as noted in the above quote, with the end result of bringing down his overall "truthfulness."   The study also evidences the reality of there being so many of these type of  "Candidate Bio" (Obama) statements being checked.  And it doesn't seem that PolitiFact's "setting the record straight" with many of the claims it found misleading and false (as well as the other fact-checkers) had much effect.

Overall, it was no contest. From Jan. 2 through April 15, Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 29 percent neutral, the researchers found. Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive, 34 percent negative, and 34 percent neutral. That means Romney’s depiction by the media was more than twice as positive as the president’s. So much for liberal bias.

So, consider this the next time you see those signs that say "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" often seen at some of the Republican presidential campaign events.  Because if the coverage of Obama has been found to be so negative, maybe those sign-holders are doing themselves a dis-service, because by extension they're telling anyone (i.e., swing-voters) reading the sign that what the media says about Obama is probably NOT true.