Meta Meta, All That Data

This past fall, my conservative counterpart started his own fact-checking website called Zebra Fact-Check, sort of jumping on that "conservapedia" bandwagon of playing to the right-wing choir. He gave a new term to a categorization of his Zebra fact-checks where he was again publishing criticisms of PolitiFact rulings as he did at his original blog: he called it a meta-factcheck, which by definition is the correct terminology, since he is "fact-checking the fact-check." So I suppose that makes me a META-meta fact-checker, because I am "fact-checking" his fact-check of PolitiFact's fact-check. Wew!

 

But more than that, on his new "non-blogspot" website, he includes a little detail on the "About" page that has me wondering....whether my speculation about his concentrated vindictiveness toward PolitiFact may in fact have some foundation.

I graduated from the journalism program at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg in 2008. The university campus is located across the street from the Poynter Institute, which owns both the Tampa Bay Times (then known as the St. Petersburg Times) and PolitiFact.

I regarded Poynter’s 2007 foray into fact checking with hope and interest at first, but that changed quickly to horror. I couldn’t believe that the Times would produce a product so deeply inferior to the Annenberg Fact Check model.

My blogging gradually changed its focus to criticism of PolitiFact. I hoped that vigorous criticism would help PolitiFact reach for a higher set of standards.

Here's what I've "speculated" about previously (in October, 2012):

Speaking of that, this makes my theory seem all the more likely that Bryan White may have been someone rejected for a journalist-type job by the Tampa Bay Times or PolitiFact itself: he states that these [new Zebra] fact-checks are what he does best. So this bolsters my theory that this was his retaliation. But that's pure speculation.

I had written this before I browsed his website and found where he listed his educational achievements. So now I know for a fact that he has the background necessary for such a job, and graduated and (as known) resided in the vicinity of the biggest newspaper in the Tampa/St. Pete area, right at the time the PolitiFact operation was starting. If this was expansion at the paper, there quite possibly could have been openings for, if not full-time journalists, at the very least, interns, for the specific PolitiFact project, because in the course of my recording the writers along with each ruling, it was apparent they had many interns who tried their hand at composing fact-checks. Nowhere did I see anything written, researched or edited by one Bryan W. White.

As of today's date, Robert Farley remains one of Factcheck.Org's lead writers, as can be seen in this screen clip

Then there's the "deeply inferior" comparison of PolitiFact to the Annenberg FactCheck. FactCheck.org, as I've noted in many posts, for the most part agrees with PolitiFact when checking the same item. The only difference is that Annenberg FactCheck doesn't have a Truth-o-Meter, and its fact-checks are often more limited in scope, because they will include several checks in one post at their website. So, in certain respects, its fact-checks are not as complete nor as sourced as PolitiFact's. To top that off, one of its writers, Robert Farley, used to write for PolitiFact (although White seems to have about the same opinion of him as he does Louis Jacobson and the others). While one could say Farley moved "up", there's really no way to verify that Farley went from an inferior fact-checking operation to a superior one...unless White could find out from Farley himself. It would be interesting to see what Farley would have to say about that, and I have a feeling he might not agree with White.

 

Nevertheless, something definitely smells even more rotten in Largo, Florida.

Sidebar: Does Ze Bra Hold Up?

I knew it might be too good to be true when my conservative counterpart appeared to stop posting his criticisms of PolitiFact at both of his sites...as well as stop posting at the PolitiFact Facebook page.  I also thought he might be up to something.  In my last contact on the PolitiFact Facebook page, he said he was going to do the same Pants on Fire analysis of the state PolitiFacts, and it seemed likely to me he was going through the process of collecting the state data which was taking up his time.

 

It also seemed he was getting heard at a higher level in the right-wing media where he was cited and featured with an interview; he had also "un-blogspotted" his PolitiFact Bias site, making it a real website, in order to give it more "cred" I suppose.  There's most likely money to be made in connections to Big Government or Weekly Standard especially when you're regularly trashing an "independent fact-checker" as being liberally biased.  Now that he was being cited by the bigger names, it seemed that would be a natural progression.

 

As it turns out, author Bryan White has decided to launch a new website where he does his own fact-checks with a conservative bent.  Of course, he's not rating them like PolitiFact or the Washington Post Factchecker, and he's given the site the name of Zebra FactCheck, which I think reflects his ideology very neatly--for most conservatives don't see the world in shades of grey, they see it in black and white.  This also is very indicative of  the false dichotomies he often presents.  But in terms of the right-wing websites, he may have segued into something that might get him a real job.

 

Speaking of that, this makes my theory seem all the more likely that Bryan White may have been someone rejected for a journalist-type job by the Tampa Bay Times or PolitiFact itself: he states that these fact-checks are what he does best.  So this bolsters my theory that this was his retaliation.  But that's pure speculation.

 

All in all, it makes it easier for me in the sense that it is harder to make a criticism of a criticism of a factcheck than it is just to criticize the factcheck itself.  And that I will do.  In fact, I've discovered that the best way to check his fact-checks may be with PolitiFact's fact-checks.

 

In the meantime, I am having fun trying to find a comical symbol for "Checking Zebra-Factcheck".  I thought of De-Zebtions and the graphic for the title of my post "does Ze-Bra hold up?'  Or there's the black and white angle.  Lil Black and White Lies?  "Gray"-ding Zebra Factchecks" maybe?   Stay tuned.

PolitiFact Detractors: Prediction Fulfilled (Part 1?)

About 1:21 p.m. yesterday, PolitiFact Bias published the same photo of Bill Adair in his office from the Nieman Journalism Lab article as written by Andrew Phelps, and yes, he did just as predicted in my last post (posted 10:32 a.m., or about 3 hours earlier) although patting himself on the back not in the way I had thought (although he left the door open to do so).

PolitiFact Bias’ Bryan White felt the insufficient exchange Phelps included between Amy Hollyfield, Bill Adair and Lou Jacobson was enough evidence to prove the “lack of objectivity” in deciding a Pants on Fire, as “hypothesized” in his “initial research study.” A highly limited conversation, with no other context, on ONE SINGLE ruling, to conclude an institutionalized dynamic liberal bias was afoot.

In terms of “objectivity” the review by Lou Jacobson which suggested a methodical, objective approach to determining the final ruling was totally ignored by White: 

• Is the claim literally true?
• Is the claim open to interpretation? Is there another way to read the claim?
• Does the speaker prove the claim to be true?
• Did we check to see how we handled similar claims in the past?

More than that, for all we know, the PolitiFact crew may have other objective point-by-point lists to guide them as to how to classify a ruling—and it could be when the claim does not meet all points, a meeting is called to decide; otherwise, it’s a no-brainer. And it’s more than possible Phelps didn’t get into that detail because it was “too much information” for his article.

That’s why I said in my first post on this that Bill Adair was setting White up. He thought it would be amusing to feed White’s false narrative, and White ate it all up:

Andrew Phelps of the Nieman Journalism Lab recently sat in on PolitiFact's formerly private deliberations and produces much the picture I have come to expect (pun not intended) during my years of increasing skepticism….The fact checkers doubtless assure themselves of their neutrality as nearby two-dimensional cardboard Obamas smile approvingly at their work….All credit to Jeff for spotting the President Obama cardboard figure in Adair's office that turns the statement about staffers' voting history into an absolute howler….But don't get the idea that Adair is biased or anything. 

White is also implying that, by saying “Obamas” (plural), all the PolitiFact crew have his image smiling at their work as part of his spin. I’m assuming this one was in Adair’s Washington office. So, does he know if Angie Drobnic-Holan has one down in Miami, or Lou and Amy have one in Tampa?

One of the concluding paragraphs of the Neiman article is very telling:

Unlike The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who awards Pinocchios for lies, or PolitiFact, which rates claims on a Truth-O-Meter, Jackson’s FactCheck.org doesn’t reduce its findings to a simple measurement. “I think you are telling people we can tell the difference between something that is 45 percent true and 57 percent true — and some negative number,” he said, referring to Pants on Fire. “There isn’t any scientific objective way to measure the degree of mendacity to any particular statement.”

So, White has his answer right there. Maybe the real problem is he knows there’s no scientific, objective way to measure it—that’s why he pretends to demand it. Just as he pretends to demand that PolitiFact find a way to control for selection bias, knowing there’s no way for professional journalists in an environment where the demand is for “newsworthiness” can do it. He even demands they publish their bias as a disclaimer, as if they were begging for the cardboard Obama's approval. He demands the impossible so he can falsely claim failure on the part of PolitiFact.

The only part of my prophecy “fulfilled” was that PolitiFact Bias would make a lot of hay from the cut-out of Obama; as PolitiFact Bias “mines” this article as it says it’s going to, I expect some of my other points will be repeated. More to come.

PolitiFact Detractors: So Simply Irresistably Predictable!

When PolitiFact posted an article from the Neiman Journalism Lab, a report on a sort of PolitiFact 2-Day Reality Show, it included the photo below, I couldn’t help but see what my conservative counterpart might do with it. Here’s my prediction: Bryan White now “thinks” he has some new evidence on which to base his claim that Bill Adair, the head of PolitiFact, must be liberally biased. Here’s my educated guess:

Yep, Adair's liberally biased!

That photo of Adair (right ) has an Obama cardboard likeness behind him, so Adair must therefore support Obama. Plus it appears Adair has given him a swag PolitiFact baseball cap. Not slung over Obama's head misshapenly, but to represent a "gift" from PolitiFact.

In the interview Adair says part of his inspiration to create PolitiFact came from when former Senator (formerly Democratic) Zell Miller “turned on” John Kerry at the Republican National Convention in 2004 and presented a highly misleading message of Kerry’s Viet Nam service—“...I didn't do anything about it,” said Adair. So, he wants to help the Democrats, then!

And this entire matter of  "adding more structure" to discerning a Pants on Fire in response to criticisms—it must be that Adair either read White's pseudo-research paper…or it relates to that PolitiFact Virginia debacle. Either way, White’s blog must surely be making Adair nervous.

To which I say—I think Adair is setting White up. (LOL)

The reality is that cardboard cutout tells us nothing about Adair’s political affiliation or “voting history.”  This is reasoning akin to saying those journalists who attend the annual Whitehouse Correspondence Dinner are Democrats because Obama is there--many of the same people were in attendance when Bush was president, does that mean they were Republicans back then?  Obama has been president almost four years,  so I’m guessing someone gave the cut-out to him as a joke. The cap slung over it shows the humor of it.

Note:  I composed the above on Tuesday, August 21. Unfortunately, I did not post it in time to prove my prediction correct, because White had this post on Facebook the morning of August 22:

Really?  Fellow conspiracy theorist Dyberg had to point that out?  Yea, right.  We'll wait and see what he does on one of this blogs.

PolitiFact Detractors: Virginia Night Cap

It seems my conservative counterpart was forced to reference my analysis of the recent mega-paper protest by the Virginia Republican Party to PolitiFact (PF) Virginia, basically presenting an overly voluminous case of why it was biased toward Democrats. Bryan White called me a person with “semi-daily clock-work accuracy” as far as my being “correct” in terms of the ruling “statistics” used in the paper. Gee, I was hoping for a battle of wits, but I guess he’s apparently unarmed.

But White did bring out one point with regard to “the Weekend Dump.” This was the Republicans’ contention that more positive Republican PolitiFact rulings were “buried” in the weekend editions of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, while negative ones were saved for during the week, on the premise there were more readers during the week. He felt that the Sunday or weekend news may have more readers, not less, which contradicts their “bury” allegations.

Dumping stories over the weekend can put them in the Sunday newspaper, which is often the most widely read portion of a major newspaper. No case is made for the significance of a weekend dump for either a daily paper or an Internet news site. If the Richmond Times-Dispatch literally publishes the most positive Republican stories in its least popular editions then the Virginia GOP may have a legitimate gripe, but that evidence does not appear in this document.

Where readership demographics are reported on the internet, four major markets (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco) separate weekday and Sunday readership, and it appears Sunday is always higher for all adults. This backs up White’s assertion.

On the other hand, let’s consider the growing group of people who get their news on line. For example, (it appears to me that) many more comments are made on line at the PolitiFact Facebook page during the week, as the rulings are generated. Less commenting is posted on weekends, although some rulings are published late Friday. This may not mean anything, but this would seem to infer that the rulings are read by the majority of on line news fans during the week. Of course, the only way to verify that is for PolitiFact to look at its website “statcounter.”

Click to enlarge:  You can
barely make out Virginia since both
parties are so close to zero.
Compare to Wisc. and Nat'l.

In reviewing the Republican Party numerical data, I computed the Truth Index for ALL rulings ever done by PolitiFact Virginia to evaluate against the Republican’s anecdotal contention that the rulings “on average” favored the Democrats. Warren Fiske reported a very similar result to mine using a different scoring method which gave equal weight to the Truth-o-Meter categories. I used the scoring method delineated by Bill Adair for the Truth Index about a year ago, which more heavily weighted the negative rulings. But the result was approximately the same: the Republicans and Democrats were in a dead heat at PF Virginia. As an update, however, I started running overall stats for 2011 to current, as I have more detail for those records to make more interesting analyses. In charting PolitiFact by state, it was found that for 166 rulings done by PF Virginia since the start of 2011, there was still a dead heat, but the Republicans were trending to a very slight advantage over the Democrats. In other words, the very slight advantage the Democrats have in their overall score was accomplished in 2010, when PolitiFact Virginia first kicked off, and then it reversed to the Republicans' favor since that time. But it’s more of a “margin of error” variance, so it does not mean much.

The snippet to the left shows the Democrats in blue and the Republicans in red.  I will be publishing the complete chart in a later post.  The baseline is "zero" on the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter, a rating of Half True.  Each line is 10 points on the Truth Index.  The Truth Index score was rounded for easier reading; in Virginia the Democrats were at a positive .78 while the Republicans were at a positive 1.56.  It should be noted that PolitiFacts Virginia and Wisconsin are the only two PolitiFact states to appear to favor the Republicans; all others have higher scores for the Democrats, as can be seen in the overall score at the right, where for 2,935 rulings, the Democrats are at a negative .81 and the Republicans are at negative 24.07.  (Perhaps the Virginia Republicans are looking in the wrong place for "bias" and this is something the Republican party should do on a national level.)

Nevertheless, White makes a brief admittance at the end of his post that the Virginia Republican Party’s paper was similar to his PolitiFact Bias blog: “… the report scores with the anecdotes and not much else.” He notes the last 32 pages of the 86-page opus were fluff, a simple listing of all the Republican rulings by PolitiFact Virginia. In other words, it’s right there in the same league as Eric Levine so aptly described: the Republican Party of Virginia report on PolitiFact is just one more Gish Gallop of anti-PolitiFact propaganda.

Postscript 7/24/2012:  I should also note that this puts a previous post on the weekday/weekend publishing of PolitiFact National in a different light.  It makes them look good from the aspect of the newpaper, but not so good from the aspect of on-line readers, in terms of a alleged "bias."

Lil White Lies Extra: SIX Months--Where's the Beef?

Last February 8, with a follow up on May 17, I posted about a comment added at a blog called "Content In Reality" by my conservative counterpart with regard to a study he was working on:

…I've been busy conducting a study that objectively verifies PolitiFact's ideological bias. I've got all the information for the national operation collected and sorted, and I'm in the process of readying it for publication.

In March, a post at his Sublime Bloviations blogsite suggests this is what it was supposed to be about:

The first PolitiFact Bias research project will suggest that all "Pants on Fire" ratings are unfair and the result of a subjective determination by the responsible PolitiFact teams. [For example,] Pat Boone's statement was neither false nor ridiculously false in any non-subjective sense. It was at least somewhat accurate when considered objectively.

So, I’m still keeping track. It’s still not there. Not at either of his anti-PolitiFact propaganda blogs, not publicized to his "fans" at his PolitiFact Bias Facebook page. I know from my “stat counter” that he very likely has something worked up on Google docs. If he’s done it, he certainly hasn’t made it public.

Here’s a screenprint of the empty page of his blog where I would anticipate such a study would most likely be published. It’s not dated, so to prove the time of the screen snip, I included the blog archive which shows it’s at the seventh post for July (see yellow highlight arrow).

Lil White Lies Extra: Hopelessly De-Voted

Early in June, as I was about to take an intermission from my blog, I received some commentary from my conservative counterpart, lambasting a recent Lil White Lies post on his criticism of a PolitiFact ruling concerning shark attacks and voting fraud in Florida.

I decided not to waste my time with him and deleted his comment; I also felt it was a bit of a threat—basically the sort of argument by intimidation he commonly uses.

Customized for Lil White Lies

He intimated that I had better recant and delete the post called “Jumping the Shark” because it contained such grievous errors...about which, of course, he would elaborate no further. I refused to take the bait….well, until now—and no, I didn’t withdraw the post: it remains intact and unedited. At the time, however, I couldn’t waste time with his never-ending Gish Gallup (thank you, Eric Levine) of why he is the conservative cartel of truth and why anything a liberal says (or I should say, anyone who disagrees with him) doesn’t know what they’re talking about and must be condescended. And if you won’t buy into his bogus quality, he’s then going to resort to quantity. Until he wears you out.

After the threat of whatever error I made ruining my blogging career, he then followed with how "all you liberals have to censor my comments”….an accusation of cowardice (more argument by intimidation), basically. Well, yea, this is my blog and I’m not obligated to publish everyone’s comments….some blogs don’t allow any comments. I didn’t feel like publishing his. He can call me whatever, if I don’t want to publish them, I don’t have to.  Conservatives like to go on and on about freedom, but somehow I don't have the freedom to delete a comment.

So he then posted something to replace those comments at his “Bad Blogs Blood” blog, which I’ve previously described as a poorly formatted, sporadically posted, minutely viewed blog used to supplement his “master blog” for criticism where he wants to give his victim the least web “airtime” possible, to create a class below Slimey Bloviations for blogs that he doesn’t agree with.

But let’s get to the gist of his criticism:

In my original post I pointed to evidence from the Miami Herald that thousands of felons may have voted in the 2000 election. That's the Bush/Gore election. It was illegal at that time for felons to vote in Florida. No question about it. As for my follow up post about the television news story, that wasn't about felons at all. It was about non-citizens voting. Non-citizens aren't allowed to vote whether felons or not.

The way in which I do Lil White Lie posts needs to be explained first. I copy/paste the Grading PolitiFact piece to a Word document, along with the link. That way I only have to go to the Slimey Bloviations blogsite one time. That way I can refer to it as much as I want on one page, and can directly, easily copy whatever White has written if a quotation is needed.

So, since White is complaining that his post was not about felons but about non-citizens, I searched the post first for the word felons…it appears six times, here’s where it appears four times, and you can tell this is what the post was about: (italics added)

The fallacy in PolitiFact's reasoning comes easily to light.

For most of Florida's history as part of the United States it has prohibited voting by felons. Every time a felon votes illegally, it constitutes a case of voter fraud--albeit not the phony representation of "case" settled on by the fact checkers.

Most often nothing can be done to prosecute a case of voter fraud against a felon who votes illegally even though it happens with some regularity. The Miami Herald, for example, reported the following in the wake of its investigations of the 2000 presidential election:

At least 445 Florida felons voted illegally on Nov. 7, casting another cloud over a disputed presidential election already mired in legal challenges, a Herald investigation has found.

So how about “illegal immigrants” or “non-citizens”? The word immigrant could not be found. The word “non-citizen”—the word which White says this post was premised on and that through “fallacious impetus” I missed it, only appeared in a very brief addendum as an update to his “concrete examples” listing the types of voter fraud: “A Florida television station airs a story documenting approximately 100 non-citizens registered to vote in Florida, at least some of whom voted in past elections.”

That was it. I never read whatever follow up story he had after this Grading PolitiFact review. Although he may later have added a link, my copy/paste would have brought it over to my Word document, but it didn’t. My review was based on his original review, as well it should have been, not what he decided to add later about non-citizens.

Lil White Lies Extra: DAY 121...AND COUNTING!

On February 8 I noted a post made in comments by Bryan White at a PolitiFact Bias-critical blog called Content in Reality, on January 16, 2012:  

…I've been busy conducting a study that objectively verifies PolitiFact's ideological bias. I've got all the information for the national operation collected and sorted, and I'm in the process of readying it for publication.

Here’s a screenprint of the empty page of his blog where I would anticipate such a study would most likely be published. It’s not dated, so to prove the time of the screen snip, I included the blog archive which shows it’s at the eighth post for May (see yellow highlight arrow).

Click to enlarge:  It's been "Coming Soon" since January.

So here we are in the middle of May, about 4 months or 121-plus days since he said this, and there’s STILL nothing out there on the PolitiFact Bias Research page. I thought he might have a different blog where he was hiding his “study objectively verifying PolitiFact’s ideological bias” but all I found was something called “Beyond the PolitiFact Matrix” where he had blogged some paranoid pinings mid-2011 about what he believed was PolitiFact censoring his Facebook comments, which abruptly ended when he discovered it was some glitches with Facebook itself.

I’m sure a HUGE deal would be made out of the publishing of such of study by Bryan and his ilk….but it doesn’t seem there is any. Post activity at both blogs had diminished greatly early in the year, so I was highly expectant and interested in seeing what he came up with. Supposedly, from what I could glean from his blog and Facebook comments, it was a comparison of the degree of “ridiculousness” in Pants on Fire rulings, although I’m sure if my post was read, there’d be a different spin on it. But there’s been no links at Facebook at either the PolitiFact or PolitiFact Bias page, no big announcements at the Sublime Bloviations blog…nothing.

I do recall as well, but cannot find, comments also made early in 2011 that he was doing the same sort of research project. I wish I could find them…because if he does this sort of thing early in 2013, I may be onto something.   However, if he does eventually get something out there, I will be the first to say "well, it's about damn time" and then take a good look at it.

Lil White Lies Extra: The Unbearable Rightness of Bryan

My conservative counterpart recently offered up a 1,500-word tome essentially doing a finger-pointing “shame on you” to PolitiFact for “caving to the pressure” of its left-wing readers in its “flim-flam” ruling on Marco Rubio who stated that the majority of Americans are conservatives (from Mostly True to Half True).

He went into a diatribe on what appeared to be PolitiFact’s reliance on further polling numbers which he translated into this:

PolitiFact repented of its original ruling in advance of and regardless of new reporting, refused to admit any error in reaching the original conclusion and subsequently used the new reporting as a deliberate pretense to unveil a new ruling motivated by criticism from the left.

This is one of the best examples of the paranoid, conspiratorial thinking of conservatives I have ever encountered. PolitiFact’s change of the rulings is in and of itself admitting an error. On the top of that, if it was in fact motivated by criticism from the left to “cave” why did they not do it on the “2011 Lie of the Year” which created an outcry from the left of Biblical proportions? Maybe that would be too much to back down from, but there are many other rulings that PolitiFact has re-examined and left the same,  like here and here (and there have been Democrats downgraded as well).  What PolitiFact did here was realize—and admit--that with polls, the answer was not certain. As noted by Jonathan Bernstein of Washington Monthly:

One could look at it another way, which is to get beyond self-identification to go to whether people believe in conservative concepts or not. But then it gets very tricky, as can be seen easily in from the speech Politifact was fact-checking

This may be the best fit for Rubio's statement.

The Minnesota MPR PoliGraph is done by a former PolitiFact writer, Catherine Richert. It employs a category called “Inconclusive” which seems to correlate to the Half True rating.

PolitiFact might want to add something to its definitions which allude to the “inconclusive” nature of the Half True designation. It often uses the expression “on balance” in its “Our Ruling” finale. This would be a case of “on balance” we are at a “zero”—the negatives equal the positives. It’s sort of like something I’ve seen in legal responses that “PolitiFact can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this claim based on the 'facts.' "

But caving into liberal readers? PolitiFact occasionally caves to both sides. Sometimes it won’t cave. It’s the nature of the beast. Nobody’s perfect (unlike Bryan). But to accuse it of caving as some sort of proof of its left-wing bias is beyond the pale, and is not supported by the evidence of its corrections and updates.

And as I noted in my original "Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style" post on this ruling, this was more than about Rubio’s statement about conservatives: it was about the context of his remark. It was about all the other statements (most blatantly false) included with this that PolitiFact could have fact-checked, but chose not to, which my conservative counterpart chose to cherry-pickingly ignore as well—or I should say, as “nothing to see here” featured in his new blog series.  Except you won't see it in his series since it's  unseen fact-checks found false for a Republican.

Lil White Lies: Sorting out Solyndra--THE Novel

Coming across a PolitiFact ruling that arguably could be one category higher or lower, particularly those in the center spectrum of rulings, is not a particularly good way to prove PolitiFact is biased, or that a particular rating is incorrect.  Even my series Grading PolitiFact Liberal-Style suffers from that.  I'm trying my best to "tell 'em like I see 'em."

One method my conservative counterpart and his partner in crime try to prove a PolitiFact (PF) rating deserves more than just one move or two is what I would call “dramatic writing.” The words you use, the tone of your writing, can make things look much worse than they are. Those of us who “journalize”—particularly when we have a political axe to grind—can make it look like suspicious connections or behavior, even when they can be shown to be historically common and/or not unusual, are hugely criminal. In other words, there’s not just smoke, there’s a gigantic fire burning down the city, and everyone is just not as smart as Deff Jeff to see it.

Another review by Deff Jeff Dyberg called “Sorting out Solyndra” does just that. He calls it a “clusterfact”—borrowing from “cluster” as a group with the four-letter “F” word replaced with “fact”, which means “a chaotic mess with multiple problems.” You kind of wonder why he even goes to such lengths in writing such a “magnum opus” (3,600+ word count) if that’s indeed what it is. He appears to have been apprenticed by who else but my conservative counterpart to take the review apart sentence by sentence, with complaints not always justified.

Another opus could be written to show how he jumped the shark and “cluster-facted” himself, but I don’t have all day to comb through everything. So I’ll just make a few points about his most strident “facts” of himself.

Speaking of “Tu Quoque Memes”. A large part of Deff Jeff’s novella centers around the tu quoque complaint: that Obama referred to the Solyndra loan process as having started under President Bush, and the Democrats likewise following suit as defense. But there’s another “tu quoque” that he artfully ignores in keeping with his conclusion that the “Solyndra scandal is a rotting pile of stink in a bucket of corruption.” Because if Solyndra meets his definition of “scandal” there’s more scandals in the stink pile. Remember the Koch Brothers, those big Republican contributors?

Koch Supply and Trading, LP, one of the world's largest crude oil trading companies, will become the newest supplier of crude oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) under President Bush's plan, announced last November, to fill the nation's emergency oil stockpile to its full capacity by 2005.

Of course, by people like Bryan and Jeff, no correlation or causation there.

Or how ‘bout our former VP, Dick Cheney and his company Halliburton? No, no causation or correlation there, or even cause for accusations of “scandal” or “corruption”:

Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, the former chief oversight official of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, has reached a $970,000 settlement six years after she was demoted for publicly criticizing a multi-billion-dollar, no-bid contract to Halliburton—the company formerly headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Greenhouse had accused the Pentagon of unfairly awarding the contract to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. Testifying before Congress in June 2005, she called the contract the worst case of government abuse she had ever witnessed in her 20-year career.

Wait, there’s one more! One that comes out and just says it!

An inspector general's report charges that top U.S. housing official Alphonso Jackson urged staff members to favor friends of President Bush when awarding Department of Housing and Urban Development contracts.

Favor friends of President Bush? Nah! No cronyism or scandal there! This was in 2006, at the peak of the housing bubble. I wonder if any friends of President Bush went belly up when the housing market crashed, and how this affected their HUD contracts. But that’s okay by Deff Jeff.

Live on Arrival. Deff Jeff also incorrectly states that the loan to Solyndra was “dead” and “had been rejected by the Bush administration.”

Sidebar: Gini is Out of The Bottle

My conservative counterpart was told he was welcome to “knock himself out” again when some of his comments didn’t come through to this blog (according to him) responding to my post critical of his post on a PolitiFact (PF) ruling on Alan Grayson, concerning the Gini co-efficient of wealth. He indeed self-immolated with a bunch of non-sensical points: his usual sentence-by-sentence parse in order to falsely complicate and conceal the over-riding issue of Alan Grayson’s remarks about wealth inequality as evaluated by the Truth-o-Meter.

Saying “You've been proved wrong on point after point and you simply dismiss it without addressing the arguments” is arrogantly absurd on its face…if it’s proof, it’s proof by verbosity. Just because HE says I’m proven wrong doesn't mean that I am, that's just what he thinks. Talk about  self-stultification (with admirable aplomb)! But OK, I’ll give him a break, he does offer one somewhat worthwhile point:

“As I pointed out, Grayson has no real argument unless wealth inequality has demonstrably ill effects.”

Either Bryan is out of touch with reality or just choosing to ignore the obvious for the sake of argument. I think I’d choose the latter because of his frequent intransigence when debating people (as I’ve provided many examples of in previous posts).

The recorded history of our planet is replete with the demonstrably ill effects of wealth inequality, as well as the apathy of the “1%”: from the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned to that of Marie Antoinette’s telling those without bread to eat cake, which was said to have sparked a revolution. Only this time through the skillful use of propaganda, some of those in the 99% ( I am assuming) such as Bryan are defending those telling them to eat cake.

Bryan referred me to such propaganda with a PBS video of an interview with Richard Epstein, a “libertarian” law professor, who claims there’s a “good side” to wealth inequality. If you read Epstein’s bio, by the way, nowhere does it say he teaches or has a background in economics. His background is law. Now, at the undergraduate and graduate level, he might have taken some economics courses (and note, this was during the 1960’s before the advent of Reaganomics/supply side economic theories), but that limit to his qualifications makes me somewhat wary of his economic opinions. Other than that, Epstein is also an “Adjunct Scholar” at the conservative Cato Institute, and his writings have been warmly regarded at the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute’s website.

But even with this background, I’m certainly not in a position to provide the correct explanation of the other side, why economic inequality “isn’t good for America.” So for this, there’s a video as well, an interview with economist Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. You can watch it below. His three pronged counter-argument to that of Epstein:

Sidebar: Doing the Hanky Panky

Normally I try not to make a lot of political commentary by celebrities, but my conservative counterpart’s post “In Defense of Hank Williams” where Williams compared Obama to Hitler (or Hitler to Benjamin Netanyahu in the name of John Boehner, Obama’s golf partner) was just too much to leave alone.

My conservative counterpart (Bryan White)’s claim is that it was an analogy easily graspable "by the fair-minded person” of Hitler to Netanyahu as “ideological opposites.” But it is much more complicated than that, and such a comparison is not only just poor, but instead of easily graspable, is easily misleading. And Bryan chose to carry on that blatant misrepresentation in his post.

Bryan White implies as well that Williams may not have meant that Obama was being compared to Hitler, but if you listen to the full interview, it is clear that’s what Williams meant. To the delight of the Fox morning crew and its mostly right-wing viewers, he made his dislike of Obama well known, so the “context” was there for all to see. He hedged any left-wing race card play by invoking a preference for Herman Cain as a presidential choice.

Here’s Bryan’s customary word-twisting take on it:

…Williams is not admitting that he compared Obama to Hitler. All he's admitting is that he drew an analogy. And he explained the analogy sufficiently for a fair-minded person to grasp his point (I trust Morrissey will grasp it eventually): Hitler and Netanyahu are ideological opposites. While we may have a predisposition to identify our least favorite between Boehner and Obama with our least favorite figure from the analogy, the analogy does not depend on that identification at all. One can understand Boehner as Hitler just as well and the point--that polar opposites are having a ludicrous tete-a-tete--continues to stand. And one shouldn't have to agree with that point in order to understand it.

Actually, the “analogy” was a very poor one: the only disparity was the semitic one, the symbol of the Jewish Holocaust with the current leader of Israel is quite an opposing comparison. Yet Bryan White claims they are ideological opposites, and they are not. Ideologically, it is a comparison of right-wing extremism (Hitler) with center right-wing (Netanyahu). Netanyahu is a member of Israel’s Likud, which is described by Wikipedia as follows: (emphasis added)

Likud (Hebrew: …‎ HaLikud, lit. The Consolidation) is the major center-right political party in Israel… It was founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin in an alliance with several right-wing and liberal parties.

The Likud party claims to support a free market capitalist and liberal agenda, though in practice it has mostly adopted mixed economic policies. Under the guidance of Finance minister and current party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud pushed through legislation reducing value added tax (VAT), income and corporate taxes significantly, as well as customs duty. Likewise, it has instituted free trade (especially with the European Union and the United States) and dismantled certain monopolies (Bezeq and the sea ports).

Additionally, it has privatized numerous government-owned companies, e.g. El Al and Bank Leumi, and has moved to privatize land in Israel, which until now has been held symbolically by the state in the name of the Jewish people. Netanyahu was the most ardent free-market Israeli finance minister to-date. He argued that Israel's largest labor union, the Histadrut, has so much power as to be capable of paralyzing the Israeli economy, and claimed that the main causes of unemployment are laziness and excessive benefits to the unemployed."… Under Netanyahu, Likud has and is likely to maintain a comparatively fiscally conservative economic stance, although it might be considered centrist or even progressive from a world view.

Sound familiar? Compare that to the ideological stances of the Nazi party, for which people like Bryan try to focus on the well-documented misnomer “National Socialist” as if that’s all they need to do:

Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named "National Socialist." But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production. In Nazi Germany, private capitalist individuals owned the means of production, and they in turn were frequently controlled by the Nazi party and state. True socialism does not advocate such economic dictatorship -- it can only be democratic. Hitler's other political beliefs place him almost always on the far right. He advocated racism over racial tolerance, eugenics over freedom of reproduction, merit over equality, competition over cooperation, power politics and militarism over pacifism, dictatorship over democracy, capitalism over Marxism, realism over idealism, nationalism over internationalism, exclusiveness over inclusiveness, common sense over theory or science, pragmatism over principle, and even held friendly relations with the Church, even though he was an atheist.

In other words, Bryan White’s claim that the comparison was one of a “polar opposite” analogy, is ridiculous. Their ideologies are far from being polar opposite. You can’t replace one with the other as opposites, because it’s only opposite as a matter of Semitism, and that cannot be switched. And if you base it on ideologies, it would have to be Boehner as Hitler (extreme right) with Obama as Netanyahu (center right—because in his recent capitulations to the Republicans, many Democrats and Liberals view him that way).   So Williams’ analogy is incorrect.  All that Bryan gets right is that "one can understand Boehner as Hitler just as well"--because when you really look hard  at the core ideologies of both political parties (Nazi versus Likud), Boehner can only be Hitler.

Yes, here’s just one more “you all missed the point except for me” schlock-crock of sublime bloviations  from my conservative counterpart. Williams needs to study up on what he says before he starts shooting off his mouth, because he certainly didn’t comprehend the comparison.

Politi-Score: Quibbling Potatoes, Very Well Done

Quite a cerebral Quibbling
Mr. Potato Head

I knew there had to be another blog, somewhere, someplace,  that was doing the same "Politi-Scoring" that I was. At least in the realm of assigning values to the PolitiFact (PF) Truth-o-Meter ratings and averaging them between Democrats and Republicans. After all, a few mainstream websites had been making some attempts at quantification, so it was an open idea that had been tried different ways many times.

I can’t recall exactly how this blog came up in a search result, but Quibbling Potatoes, a blog hosted by someone named Steve from Norman, Oklahoma, was doing almost everything I was doing, presenting similar graphs and quantifications of what became the PolitiFact Truth Index. He delved into some of the same issues with PolitiFact, and reached many of the same conclusions.

But the most interesting thing about Steve’s version of the Truth Index? I’ll put it in Steve’s words. 

This week PolitiFact announced a new feature on their mobile phone app...

They developed a chart of general truthiness against time so that trends could be seen more easily. ..

The feature is almost exactly like my PolitiFact Truth Index.

What did PolitiFact call this new feature? The PolitiFact Truth Index.

Coincidence? Who knows.

(Personally, I think it's more than a coincidence. But I can't prove that.)

As I said, Steve reached some of the same conclusions: that Republicans lie more than Democrats, that the lying increased, for example during the 2010 elections and the February Wisconsin protests, that the PF states have differences to PF National. I find Steve’s analysis more penetrating than my own, as I just publish what I find (or as he said in one of his posts, “charts ‘em as [he] sees ‘em”) and tend to leave more on conclusions to the readers. His post on subject analysis was excellent. Like me, he seems to be searching for a better way to graphically present his findings…yes, those murky clippings of Excel graphs (which is what his appear to be) aren’t the best. I appreciate his calculating the standard deviation but I’m doubtful how many readers have taken the necessary statistics to understand it.

But most of all, poor Steve was getting tormented by my conservative counterpart in his comments area, reaching the same impasse with him as everyone else. Steve referred to the blog PolitiFact Bias in one of his most recent posts: (emphasis added)

Lil White Lies: Moral Mushrooms

Before PolitiFact (PF) recently published that Obama had kept the above promise on the Obameter, they reviewed it and talked about it.

After they put it out, IF they saw what Bryan White had to say (essentially, that he didn't keep the promise because the energy producers exceeded it regardless) they most likely talked about it again, and decided there wasn’t any merit in his suggestion, and didn’t do it. It was probably in a meeting, for that matter, it was a group decision following some discussion.

If I was in that meeting, I would have said, this is bullsh*t. Leave it the way it is. Bryan White claims it is an “obvious” mistake, but that’s his opinion. I’d ask a few simple questions, which I’m sure some of which were covered if PF did have a meeting:

1. How does Bryan even know that the energy companies weren’t influenced by Obama to exceed this percentage which brought about it “just happening”? What is his evidence? Does he have Obama’s phone records to see if he called anyone in the energy industry? Is that the extent to which he wants PF to go?

2. Assuming Obama isn’t past-posting, if he encouraged these companies to try to achieve the 10% goal, and it was done, should he not deserve credit for the encouragement? Isn’t this a function of leadership, the so-called bully pulpit?

3. Assuming you’re a company who doesn’t want government intervention, you’re supposed to (in theory, according to Conservatives and Libertarians) “do the right thing.” What Bryan claims is implicit in Obama’s “promise” is the government riding rough-shod over the energy providers (the way I think he sees regulation or government pressure) in requiring them to achieve the standard. So it was apparently left to the “free markets” and the goal was achieved without government regulation: isn’t that what Bryan would want?

4. Actually, it WAS government intervention: it was the Stimulus which was “primarily responsible” for the growth. And who was behind the Stimulus? (emphasis added)

Yet, as Dave Hamilton, director of Global Warming and Energy Programs for the Sierra Club, pointed out in an e-mail interview, the Obama administration might not have had that far to go. Hamilton contends that, based on a report by the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) -- the statistical, independent body within the Department of Energy -- the U.S. was already receiving roughly 10 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2009. "It was the strong growth in both hydro and wind that brought it over 10 percent for 2009, so I'm not saying the promise was disingenuous. But somebody must have known they didn't have that far to go to make 10 percent with hydro left in the mix,” said Hamilton. The EIA report that Hamilton cites specifies that the American Recovery and Re-Investment Act was primarily responsible for this growth of renewable energy-based electricity in 2009.

So, when Bryan was a kid and his mother told him to put his shoes away, I guess he put his shoes away, but he didn’t put his coat away too. He couldn’t make the correlation because his youthful logic said, that’s all my mother requires me to do. 

Lil White Lies: Mister Predictor

Yes, my conservative counterpart has made yet another startling prediction about PolitiFact: (emphasis added):

I was thinking on Friday (I know, I know! I'm trying to quit!). PolitiFact is taking a pounding to their reputation on their FaceBook page. And, no, I'm not patting myself on the back. There are a pretty fair number of "fans" who write strong criticisms of the PolitiFact entries.

If this trend continues, I foresee PolitiFact either curbing their hosting of criticism or terminating the FaceBook page altogether. It is, in the end, all about protecting and burnishing the brand. If the criticisms are not somehow marginalized, the brand suffers. I just can't see the St. Petersburg Times putting up with that over the course of time.

Only problem is, he said this on November 21, 2009, in his blog, about 18+ months ago. Since then, PolitiFact’s Facebook page has gone from about 7,000 fans to approaching 38,000, and PolitiFact has expanded with at least six (or more) other state partnerships. Oh, and I think they got that Pullitzer for 2009 as well. So, instead of patting yourself on the back, Bryan White, maybe you need to kick yourself in the arse for being so egotistical.

And just in case he goes back and deletes the post (I get the impression he checks his “Stat-Counter” frequently), I’ve snipped a screen-print of it.

Sidebar: Holy Troller, Batman!

Working for a highly political organization for many years, I watched the politics in action and learned the do's and don'ts...one if the many things I learned was that you don't "burn your bridges" by alienating everybody, because sooner or later, you're going to alienate someone who's going to hurt you back more than you think....in other words, actions have consequences.

For the first time, at the Facebook commentary suggestion of one Shiela Fahey Wallenius, I visited my conservative counterpart Bryan White's Facebook "Wall".  It looked like a laundry list of various PolitiFact commenters, Bryan's lengthy "j'accuse" of those committing some version of fallacy sin.

If she had been posting regularly at FB PolitiFact's page, she would know this is not true.

Wallenius, however, decided to take it one step further when Bryan decided to pick on her (see above snippet from Facebook).  She declared Bryan a "professional troll" since it appeared that his only purpose--his assignment--was being the in-house aggravator of PolitiFact's (Liberal or Democratic) Facebook page commenters, as noted by her suggestion above.  She stated she had not only blocked him but reported him. Another commenter, Barry Powers, joined in. Bryan's co-conspirator "Deff Jyberg" rushed to Bryan's defense, but the commenters ganged up on both of them, one of them linking Deff Jeff Dyberg to Bryan's PolitiFact Bias blog site.   It was an engaging reading.

Lil White Lies: Take-over Hang-over

When PolitiFact published its “Lie of the Year”—that the healthcare reform passed in 2010 amounted to a "government take-over” as espoused by Frank Luntz, I dutifully published my response to Bryan White’s criticism of PolitiFact…then he, of course, published his criticism of MY criticism, as PolitiFact’s choice was, in his opinion, almost the crown jewel of evidence of PolitiFact’s liberal bias. This post included one particular observation which I am devoting this post to:

… With dozens of "well-known conservative pundits/politicians” calling it "socialized medicine" you'd think Street would have thought to give an example or two. Oh, well. She probably just copied the PolitiFact method. Simply stating it makes it sufficiently true.

Yes, I must admit Bryan was absolutely right and I just copied the PolitiFact method and simply stated it (not really, he ignored my examples, see below).  Because I found out it was not socialized medicine when I watched this Michele Bachmann "Infomercial" on Fox News just last night. I found out it’s even more: it’s the crown jewel of socialism:

Lil White Lies: The Tax Cut Billemma

Emphasis added is a very important feature of this critique, for it spells out the differences for which PolitiFact’s critics think it can be rebuked.

PolitiFact Virginia’s fact-check reads as follows (emphasis added): that Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) claimed “The tax-cut deal [Tax Cuts Compromise] ‘adds more than $800 billion to the deficit over two years -- more than the cost of TARP and more than the cost of the Recovery Act’ and about the same as health care reform.”  It ruled his statement Mostly True.

Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.) actually said in his statement: (emphasis added)

“This bill adds more than $800 billion to the deficit over two-years – more than the cost of TARP and more than the cost of the Recovery Act. It costs about the same over two years as the 10 year cost of the Health Care Reform bill, which we paid for." …

But Bryan White finds his loophole in the second paragraph: (emphasis added)

“We cannot add more than $800 billion to the deficit through tax cuts and tell the American people with a straight face that they won’t have to sacrifice anything in the future to balance the federal budget. If we didn’t have the political will to end the Bush-era tax cuts tonight, we certainly won’t have the political will to do it two years from now during a presidential election.”

According to Bryan, it’s “tax cuts” only that adds $800 billion to the deficit, and not “the bill”, and since it’s only tax cuts, the $800 billion is incorrect and also less, not more than the cost of the TARP, ARRA and the HCR bills. Note (1) That it is the bill he says adds more to the deficit than TARP and the Recovery Act, and that IT (the bill) costs about the same as HCR; and that (2) Scott initially calls it “the bill” and then (in the second paragraph) refers to it as tax cuts. It appears Scott is using “the bill” (or “tax deal” as PolitiFact refers to it) interchangeably with tax cuts. He could be talking about either one or both. Maybe he just didn't want to get into all the detail, since even Bryan admits, 90% of it was tax cuts.  So PolitiFact writer/researcher Wes Hester chooses (or as Bryan would say, selects “with bias”) the FIRST description—bill—the beginning subject line for the statement--but Bryan thinks it should be the second paragraph “context” line, which is “tax cuts”. Further aggravating the rhetoric is PolitiFact referring to the bill (or tax cut) as “tax deal” in its title which Bryan uses to further his cause.

As a believer in the “Laffer” curve, I find it troubling that the tax cuts, as they were originally put in place in 2001 and 2003, failed to increase tax revenues, and job creation remained flat. So, while there may be some economic recovery, there will likely be no “payback” for this tax compromise. This means in terms of “offsets” to cost, the TARP and HCR contain more “offsetting” factors than the Tax Compromise, while the ARRA is about the same, i.e., it’s hard to tell.

Another Year, Another Blog

Now that I've learned about the method of argument called "proof by intimidation" and its connection to Ayn Rand, I think Hans and Franz from SNL may be more appropriate than Vince and Jules to describe Bryan White and Jeff Dyberg, especially now that I've learned they've "teamed up" to start a blogspot website called "PolitiFact Bias."  With that in mind, I'm going to start a new category for my Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style posts, as well as links to articles claiming PolitiFact has a conservative bias, and occasional commentary about anything they may have come up with.  In the meantime, I thought I'd have a little fun with my photo edit program.

Lil White Lies: Another Year, Another Logic Fallacy

‎@ Bryan - If you tried to improve clarity, you failed. I've read it at least 5 times and I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of your sentence construction…

--Kyle Sparks, Facebook Comment, December 23, 2010, 3:22 p.m.

Keeping the above Facebook comment in mind, recently in my research I came upon a “fallacy” not encountered before, called proof by verbosity or intimidation.

Argumentum verbosium is also known as Proof by Intimidation, or Proof by Verbosity. It refers to an argument that is so complex, so long-winded and so poorly presented by the arguer that you are obliged to accept it, simply to avoid being forced to sift through its minute details.

This fallacy is epitomized by this lovely statement, “If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bullshit.”

And then there’s this, by none other than Ayn Rand, written in her 1964 essay "The Virtue of Selfishness:"  Emphasis is added to the sentence that's "the whole show":

There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent's agreement with one's undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure. Since it is particularly prevalent in today's culture and is going to grow more so in the next few months, one would do well to learn to identify it and be on guard against it.

This method bears a certain resemblance to the fallacy ad hominem, and comes from the same psychological root, but is different in essential meaning. The ad hominem fallacy consists of attempting to refute an argument by impeaching the character of its proponent. Example: "Candidate X is immoral, therefore his argument is false."

But the psychological pressure method consists of threatening to impeach an opponent's character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: "Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X's argument is false."