Tchotchkes: Post Rape Nuts

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

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

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

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

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

Can Ryan have it both ways?

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sidebar: Night of the Living Fact-Check

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC brought PolitiFact up again in her weekday show (I think she termed PolitiFact as a “zombie that won’t go away” since she previously had declared them “dead”; hence the title of this post) recently because of a fact-check on the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) which basically distorted the “fine print” of a Whitehouse visitor policy. And yes, they distorted it in a ridiculous way. But it doesn't appear to qualify for a Pants on Fire, or even a False.

It contains an “element of truth”: the Whitehouse does recognize babies before they are born in order to “count” babies after they are born, for the purpose of pre-registration for White House visits.

For me, what it was exactly that the NRLC was trying to make a point about was mystifying. So what if the Whitehouse “recognizes” unborn babies, how does that make its stance on abortion rights hypocritical? Are they not supposed to recognize an unborn child because it’s a women’s decision to make, even if her decision the majority of the time is to keep it? Do they think that on arrival at the Whitehouse they’re going to give all pregnant women (or in this case, women with babies) a lecture or pamphlet on how they can have/could have had an abortion? The NRLC could play this both ways as well. They could use the “Whitehouse recognition of the unborn” as evidence of “personhood.” They could lament how the Whitehouse is pro-“killing” because they even recognize babies in utero as people. That’s probably what they’ll do the next time.

Here was the NRLC Facebook explanation (at PolitiFact's Facebook page) of its “point”, followed by a quote from an article in “ProLife News” which published a similar claim:

We didn't say that the White House Visitors office counted a pregnant visitor as two people, but rather, made the point that the White House recognizes the "baby" as a family member prior to birth, "for purposes of providing security within the White House," but not for purposes of establishing abortion policy for the District of Columbia, an exclusively federal jurisdiction. Moorhead apparently went to all of that re-write work as part of a studied effort to miss our point. I wonder why?

...Notably, the newsletter provides no guidance on what the staff should do if an unborn baby is first registered for security purposes, but then aborted,” Johnson added. “On May 17, the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee plans to hold a hearing on the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R. 3803), which would generally prohibit abortion in the sixth month and later in the District. If the President wants to provide for the security of the unborn child immediately outside of the White House gates, as well as inside, he should endorse this bill.”

The congress has a quasi-jurisdiction over the District of Columbia (not the president). So the NLRC would be better off targeting the Republican-dominated congress, but it (hypocritically) doesn’t do so here. They don’t need the president’s endorsement.  This was basically a political move to criticize Democrat Obama in a public way for not being pro-life.

It also seems this is a fetus-obsessive tactic of the pro-life crowd: comparing abortion to anything, anything, which promotes “life”…even the preservation of wildlife, as a way of saying why is this life protected but not that of the unborn.

The Whitehouse, however, simply wants to do a proper headcount and this has nothing to do with whether there is a miscarriage or abortion. The NRLC was clearly “fishing.”

The day following the ruling PolitiFact published a letter from a Rachel Maddow fan who agreed with PolitiFact’s ruling. Here is the heart of their letter, providing an excellent rebuttal:

It simply cannot be argued, Ms. Maddow, that the White House does not recognize unborn children: by asking potential visitors whether they are pregnant, so as to account for a possible additional attendee in the future, the White House IS ACKNOWLEDGING unborn children at that moment. There is no getting around this; it is pure logic. But, as Politifact then argues, the White House does not recognize the unborn children as the NRLC implies; the NRLC's suggestion is indeed "wildly misconstrued." Hence, the IMPLICATION is terribly misleading and IS FALSE, but the STATEMENT is, BY ITSELF, technically true. Politifact, as they often acknowledge, have the difficult task of rating STATEMENTS while also factoring in the veracity of the statement's IMPLICATION.

Rachel Maddow tends to very narrowly focus on what she believes is “False” and doesn’t look at what was said in its entirety, the context, the implicit meanings or what my conservative counterpart might call “the underlying argument”—she doesn’t seem to have a good understanding of PolitiFact’s principles in the methods it uses for the statements it scores.  It also seems to me she hasn’t really looked at how PolitiFact defines Mostly False: "The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression." PolitiFact has a responsibility to look at those critical facts in accordance with those principles.

Maddow seems to be a knee-jerk True-or-False-and-nothing-in-between kind of fact-finder. She looked at the last fact-check in which she declared PolitiFact dead the same way. She crammed her analysis into the last minute of her show as if meeting the time deadline was more important than presenting the whole story, and if she doesn’t try to see the whole story, I guess she’s going to be haunted by the PolitiFact zombies forever.  And she may never know what it takes to get a False. 

Tchotchkes: Women For Santorum

From The Partisans at The Second City Network on YouTube

Lil White Lies: Selective Hyperbole

Special Note April 26: Jon Kyl has apparently decided to leave his "hyperbole" off the congressional record.  The "well over 90 percent" has been "erased".

Hyperbole is exaggeration…For example, to describe  a very  long car trip,  I  might  write, "I'd been driving for about a hundred years when I finally came to a fork in the road." This is dramatically more descriptive than "I'd been driving for a very long time when I finally came to a fork in the road." Since the reader knows it's impossible for the writer to drive for a hundred years, it becomes clear that hyperbole is being used. This particular hyperbole is also a good example of comic irony.

Wikipedia: Hyperbole… is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally…Hyperboles are exaggerations to create emphasis or effect. As a literary device, hyperbole is often used in poetry, and is frequently encountered in casual speech. An example of hyperbole is: "The bag weighed a ton."… Hyperbole helps to make the point that the bag was very heavy, although it is not probable that it would actually weigh a ton.

According to dictionary.com, hyperbole is defined as “an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as 'to wait an eternity' "…as further confirmed by the definitions above.

Recently PolitiFact (PF) ruled “False” on a statement by Republican Senator Jon Kyl that “Abortion services are ‘well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.' " His office’s response to CNN with regard to the remark that it was “not intended to be a factual statement” was greatly mocked (by Stephen Colbert et al). My conservative counterpart was quick to claim that the explanation was “the definition of hyperbole” along with “… to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions in taxpayer dollars, does subsidize abortions.” It seems to me that was in reality a great way to cover up something meant to mislead, or what might be called “backpedaling.”

So the questions for Kyl’s “not intended to be factual” statement become: Can we expect that those watching Kyl’s speech would know for certain that it’s impossible for over 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services to be abortion? In other words, if you weren’t told it was an “exaggeration for purposes of illustration”, would you have known it was when you heard it the first time? Was the 90 percent figure enough to "evoke strong feelings" or create a strong impression (or did you just question it like PolitiFact)?  Secondly, why didn’t Kyl just say it was hyperbole or intended to be an exaggeration, instead of admitting it was just not intended to be factual (but rather used for “illustrative” purposes)? In my Facebook commentary, I said I knew that was not true because I used Planned Parenthood’s services when I was in college. But would someone not familiar with Planned Parenthood know this? Would they repeat it to others as if it was true (a PF criteria for looking at evaluating statements)?

Hoy Polloi and Abortionomics

It’s difficult to discuss the controversial subject of abortion; it’s a complex issue and I prefer to avoid it. A conservative blogger named Matt Hoy who has a website called hoystory.com which is linked from the PolitiFact Bias blogspot, has made some interesting contentions about PolitiFact’s “logic failures” in regard to rulings they’ve made on abortion in relation to healthcare reform. So while I’m going to try to stick with looking at the “logic failure” I will most likely still say some things contentious. However, as PolitiFact says, “appeasing both sides is impossible.”

His website article displayed two PolitiFact (PF) rulings which seem to contradict each other. They are statements by the National Right to Life Committee which PolitiFact ruled on concerning healthcare reform about six months before “Obamacare” passed. PF ruled that it was TRUE that the proposed “Baucus bill” “contains provisions that would send massive subsidies directly to both private insurance plans and government-chartered cooperatives that pay for elective abortion” , but PF ruled that it was FALSE that “under the Baucus bill, federal funds would subsidize coverage of elective abortion.” Hoy did them backwards in order to make his logic look more “logical.”

Yep, sounds contradictory on first glance. Looking at the first claim ruled True on “massive subsidies” the most important point (ignored by Hoy) is that many of the private insurers, as pointed out by PF, were already paying for abortion:

...many private plans (outside the government) currently offer abortion services. If the government starts providing health care subsidies but bans the participation of any plan that offers abortion services (as some legislators have suggested), abortion rights groups argue it would strip millions of women of benefits they currently get.

There’s a good reason why they offer them, and Hoy knows precisely what that is, but I’ll get into that later.

Sidebar: Notes on the 2010 Election

U.S. "Personhood" Party:  As I voted yesterday, I noticed a party on my ballot which had candidates in every category, called the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party (USTPM). That day, a friend of mine told me she had voted for their candidates because they actively promoted a “fair and flat tax" on individuals as well as corporations.   I thought I’d look into it, but I found that it appears my friend has the wrong party or has them confused with somebody else. All that the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party of Michigan says with regard to taxes is “The USTPM and the Constitution Party opposes any taxes in excess of the minimum needed to fund the enumerated functions of government.” That’s it--one sentence. But the Constitution Party, with whom the USTPM is affiliated, states with regard to taxes (italics added):

We are opposed to the flat-rate tax, national sales tax, and value added tax proposals that are being promoted as an improvement to the current tax system. The Sixteenth Amendment does not provide authority for an un-apportioned direct tax.

Moreover, it is our intention to replace, with a tariff based revenue system supplemented by excise taxes, the current tax system of the U.S. government (including income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate taxes.)

Lil White Lies: Bucking Bias Selection Again!

Lately I’ve been in agreement with more of Bryan White’s PolitiFact analyses. I thought perhaps his “selection bias” might have gotten better, choosing PolitiFact (PF) rulings more carefully, where he stood a better chance of making more substantial counter arguments. But it didn’t take him very long to really politi-flub it up with this recent review on a PF ruling on a statement by Democratic candidate William Bennet about his opponent, Republican Ken Buck, on his position on abortion.

The sublimely bloviating pattern comes up again: parse the statement (to his favor), then argue selection bias. Bryan’s contention is opposition to abortion is not the same as wanting to outlaw it, then follows up with what looks like straw man argument that “it simply isn't realistic to anticipate an abortion ban even if Buck were elected president.”

Bryan frequently faults PolitiFact for “selection bias” in its rulings; certainly, if there’s a defect in the selection method that Bryan can show isn’t valid, he has some room for argument, but there isn’t any to speak of here.

So, did Ken Buck just oppose abortion, or did he want to ban it? For starters, Buck chose not to answer David Gregory’s question in the Meet the Press interview, which was (emphasis added):

Sidebar: Small Talk

Something I discovered during my 30 years of working among more men than women, is that they are BY FAR bigger gossips than women…contrary to the traditional “women as gossiper” lore.   If I wanted to find out what *dirt* was going on in the office, the go-to person who knew and would be more than happy to tell me, was almost always a male.  That part of my life over, recently I visited a friend who somehow found herself elected president of her 360-unit condo association. As we sat in her living room there was a knock on the door. It was a fellow who regularly ran around the condo grounds, and was coming to report everything he saw. He did that every day, and wasn’t paid or given any other incentive than just to tell my friend who had noisy parties or parked in violation of condo rules, even though the adjacent neighbors made no complaints.  That’s just one more example to show it wasn't just where I had worked.