Lil White Lies: Return to Sender

It gets a little tiresome seeing “Grading” PolitiFact (PF) repeatedly engage in partial reporting on its reviews of PolitiFact. Or I should say, it accuses them of doing the same thing it does, the reason I’m starting this review with its very words.

In this ruling Obama campaign spokesperson Stephanie Cutter said that Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan included the same cuts as the ones Obama is making. PolitiFact’s Angie Drobnic Holan writes that she is rating Cutter on "whether Cutter is correct that Ryan relies on those same reductions in his budget."

She finds her claim True because in an interview with George Stephanopoulos Ryan agrees: "Well, our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare. ..." So Grading PolitiFact concludes:

Sorry, but that's not a fact check and it's very misleading. PolitiFact is seizing on an ambiguity from Ryan and insisting that it perfectly dovetails with Cutter's claim. A real fact check would verify from the text of Ryan's budget that the savings have the same origin as those projected by the CBO for the health care reform law. This fact check doesn't do that at all. Ryan's budget is neither listed among the sources on the sidebar nor linked in the text of the story.

First off, there’s a lot of other sources confirming Cutter’s remarks indirectly, such as the New York Times:  (emphasis mine)

Mitt Romney’s promise to restore $716 billion that he says President Obama “robbed” from Medicare has some health care experts puzzled, and not just because his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, included the same savings in his House budgets.

Or, FactCheck.Org: (emphasis mine)

The Romney campaign told us that the “Romney-Ryan plan” is Ryan’s latest Medicare plan, except it would not include any of those $716 billion cuts that were in the Affordable Care Act. Ryan’s plan did include the majority of those cuts, and overall, Ryan estimated his plan would lead to greater Medicare cuts/savings than the president’s.

Or ABC News, which stated its information on the Ryan-Obamacare cuts came from the Kaiser Family Foundation: (emphasis mine)

Voters might be left with the impression that Romney and Ryan have both opposed the cuts. The truth is that Ryan himself endorses them in his signature budget plan – the same plan Romney has said he would sign as president if it reached his desk.

Those Medicare savings -achieved through reduced provider reimbursements and curbed waste, fraud and abuse, not benefit cuts – appear in the House Republicans’ FY 2013 budget, which Ryan authored.

His plan would in part repeal the entirety of the Affordable Care Act — except the reductions in Medicare spending now at the center of debate, according to analysts with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Or NBC News, linked in the ruling’s source list:  (emphasis mine)

The Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – does cut the growth of Medicare by $700 billion over 10 years. But benefits to seniors actually increase under Obamacare, which reduces payments to providers in exchange for more people covered by insurance. What’s more, the Ryan plan – approved by the House – cuts Medicare spending every bit as much as Obamacare does. In fact, it incorporates the very same budget projections, even as it repeals Obamacare. That’s what you call having it both ways.

Faced with questions about Ryan's support for these cuts, the Romney campaign clarified its position Monday evening and disagreed with those cuts.

White cites an article by Dave Weigel of Slate, which he says belies PolitiFact’s argument as to how the "cuts" are to be achieved:

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Walmart Welfare 2012

Earlier this year, my former wingnut carpoolian buddy boasted in a comment section of my blog how he had annuitized his 401K through an insurance company: he expressed a seeming anger that if he had the opportunity to invest himself, he could have done much better over what he received from Social Security, to which he had contributed heavily over the years. Although I am highly dubious of the value of such annuities, he may be correct about “doing better” himself than through “forced” contributions to social security; however, the point is that in either case Social Security is an insurance annuity option for retirement income.

All this (and a little more) is part and partial to a statement by Rick Santorum which PolitiFact (PF) rated Mostly True, that “a little less than 50 percent of the people in this country depend on some form of federal payment, some form of government benefit to help provide for them." An excerpt from PolitiFact’s finding:

The Census Bureau found that a little over 147 million Americans received payments from at least one of these programs at a time when the U.S. population was just over 303 million. This meant that 48.5 percent of Americans received federal cash or cash-like benefits -- and it means that Santorum’s number is well-supported. In fact, counting such items as amounts refunded from the Earned Income Tax Credit or agricultural subsidies -- neither of which are included in these figures -- would push that number higher.

I believe Santorum’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details (Half True by PolitiFact): many of the entitlements are actually a form of insurance that have already been contributed toward through payroll taxes. Then there’s the point made by the Washington Post that “the usefulness of these numbers is weakened because they count everyone in a household as benefiting from a particular federal payment even if that payment is made in the name of only one person.”

Then, there’s the statement following which, taken in context, was a patently absurd one: that “After Obamacare….it will be 100%.”

Then there’s a problem I have with the states that Santorum won in the primaries: the “bite the hand that feeds them” states, in particular, Mississippi and Alabama, where we already know there are a higher percentage of food stamp recipients relative to other states, and where they receive more assistance than what they pay in taxes. As noted by Lee Pappas, the Rude Pundit:

Some conservatives see the social safety net as a calculated plot by liberals to make people dependent on the federal government, a way of controlling them. Of course, since the states where people receive more in government assistance than they pay in taxes vote Republican, that's pretty much demonstrably false.

Let’s get back to the first point, Social Security as insurance. Over 37 million people age 65 or higher receive Social Security. Almost 8 million people under 65 receive social security because of a disability. I would imagine the vast majority of the total 45 million contributed to the Social Security system. Even my conservative counterpart admits it’s a form of insurance. If that’s what it is, how can Santorum say those who receive it depend on it, when they planned to get it because they contributed to it in the first place?

Lil White Lies: The Thief Shouting Robber

Eric Levine of the blog Content in Reality correctly analyzed the “professed bias” of Bryan White and Jeff Dyberg’s blog PolitiFact Bias with a story about two dogs he named Rex and Dex:

One could theoretically argue that one political party has made a disproportionately higher number of false claims than the other, and that this is subsequently reflected in the distribution of ratings on the PolitiFact site. However, there is no evidence offered by PolitiFact that this is their calculus in decision-making." Yet they don't look for evidence that their [PolitiFact Bias’] explanation is the better one. To show the fallacy in this kind of thinking, let me present an analogy: Let's say i have two dogs that roam free in my house all day, Rex and Dex. I come home one day to find my couch clawed to pieces. I cannot find evidence that Rex did it, so I assume Dex did it (even though I found no evidence specifically pointing to Dex). This is exactly the same fallacy they employ. They don't specifically have evidence of a Republican tendency towards falsehoods so they assume it must be a Politifact tendency towards liberal bias. Like I noted earlier, the article did not randomly chose articles.

So to extend Levine’s canine example of Rex and Dex, it can be applied likewise to the logic that Grading PolitiFact employs when poster Bryan White says that Pat Boone’s statement about Medicare “rationing care to pay for wasteful spending” cannot possibly be Pants on Fire false as determined by PolitiFact, but “somewhat accurate when considered objectively.”

Republican "Death Panel"

Let’s say one of my older kids brings home two dogs, one named Rex from Red’s Pets and one named Dex from Blue’s Pets. I find that both dogs have fleas, but Rex has fleas and a bit of mange. I can see they both have had the infestations for a while. I go visit Red’s Pets and before telling him the problems with Rex I admit I’ve been to Blue’s Pets. The owner of Red’s Pets (Red) proclaims,” you don’t want to buy a dog at Blue’s Pets, they all have fleas.”

In this statatement from Red, the implication is that his dogs don’t have them. Yet Rex is actually in worse shape than Dex. Yes, Blue’s pets have fleas, but is Red’s statement a credible one?

In this case, Pat Boone is the owner of Red’s Pets. ALL the dogs have fleas—and his dogs have not just fleas but mange, but he’s telling you only his competitors’ dogs have fleas as if his dogs didn't.

Taken in context, it’s clear Pat Boone was fear mongering seniors about their Medicare, and not only that, misleading them about the alternative (to both Medicare and "wasteful spending"), which was worse….much worse.

Grading PolitiFact author Bryan White’s problem is that he does not (or refuses to) recognize that rationing exists systemically for any scarce resource, and that America’s method of rationing healthcare is very poor given what we spend as a percentage of GDP. ACA is meant to ration….more rationally, but not in the context Pat Boone was conveying.

The healthcare market is NOT a free market. It is similar to a utility: the supply is severely constricted (as one of my economics professors told my class, the most powerful union in the world is the AMA) and everyone is compelled to use it, especially in an emergency. While American healthcare in general is rationed by employment and cost, Medicare is rationed by age and price (and employment through retirement benefits): Simply put, Medicare Part A is major medical, which pays 80%, and is “free” once one reaches the age of 65, Part B is for outpatient services, for which a monthly premium is required (now about $100 monthly). Medicare pays 80% over a deductible; which means, for most people, a “Medi-Gap” insurance policy must be purchased (or is provided as an employer benefit) to cover the other 20%.

The issue with Pat Boone’s stating that a board will ration care is not just the context in which it was used, but the “pot calling the kettle black” (the Thief shouting Robber) implications of it. Unfortunately, the IPAB  provides the Republicans an easy target at which it can shoot criticisms. The systemic rationing of healthcare is often also referred to as “covert” which makes it easy to pretend that it didn’t exist until a board of experts was created with ACA to recommend cost containment measures.

Recall what happened last year when Paul Ryan came up with a plan “to end Medicare as we know it” (PolitiFact’s 2011 Lie of the Year). It basically turned Medicare over to the insurance companies and gave people what amounted to insurance discount coupons (“premium support”). Systemically, there is no doubt that this would be a much more drastic rationing method (some estimate as many as 1 million additional people would be removed from the Medicare rolls, i.e., denied treatment), and obviously people caught on as complaints mounted, and Ryan quietly re-drew the plan to “include” Medicare as we have it today.

PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sidebar: The PLOTY Thickens

PolitiFact (PF) has just announced its finalists for the “non-coveted” 2011 Lie of the Year. It has led to some interesting speculations by my conservative counterpart and his partner in crime.  So, it's time for my own.

There are ten candidates: four Democrat statements and six Republican. Earlier this year, I had speculated on one of them, a Democratic (DCCC) claim that Republicans had voted to end Medicare, and it indeed made it to the list of nominees:

My educated guess is that PolitiFact (PF) might just make this the 2011 Lie of the Year because they can show (1) Democrats can make PolitiFact Lie of the Year as well, (2) its “inverse” relationship with the 2010 Lie of the Year (that “Obamacare” is a government takeover versus the privatization in “Ryancare”), and (3) the similar label (Obamacare versus Ryancare). The $12,500 is incidental; it is the “voted to end Medicare” that is the focus of the lie and makes it a "contender."

The "ending Medicare" part continues to make the rounds among various Democratic politicians as a “talking point”—for example, at PF Rhode Island and PF Wisconsin—and their debunkings by PolitiFact have caused it to face an avalanche of bias charges from both sides—Conservatives on Obamacare and Liberals on Ryancare.

The other currently popular topic that will be the issue in the coming presidential election campaign is job creation. PolitiFact actually has two contenders (from “Facebook posts” and from the National Republican Senatorial Committee) dealing with job creation: I wouldn’t put it past them to announce a bi-partisan “tie” between these two party-competing fibs. Remember, according to PolitiFact, the winner chosen will be “the one that played the biggest role in the national discourse.”

My money's on "zero jobs" or a tie between
these two.



If it can only be one, the edge would go to the NRSC “The Stimulus created zero jobs.” It should be noted that this one goes back to 2010; Rick Scott, the current Governor of Florida, also received a Pants on Fire for saying something similar, and it was nominated for the Lie of the Year in 2010. Like 2009 and 2010 winners, they were frequently repeated “talking-points” which PolitiFact rated more than once throughout the year.

The Republican side has played this “zero jobs from the Stimulus” to the hilt, and since job creation is a popular meme right now because of Occupy Wall Street, it has eclipsed the so-called Pants on Fire Statement that Ryancare is ending Medicare. It should be noted too, that after a few congressional town halls where the real people (as opposed to tea partiers) showed up to complain, Paul Ryan and those espousing his plan suddenly got pretty quiet (since they knew those were real people/voters complaining).

The problem for PolitiFact is that they have given the Lie of The Year award for two years’ running now to Republicans and now it’s time for a Democrat. In a way, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: it looks like they’re deliberately trying to convey they are non-partisan by choosing a Democrat statement, but sticking by their best objective judgments if they give it to a Republican, although looking even more liberally biased. So if they did a tie, they could sort of have the best of both worlds: "we're objective and we're non-partisan."

Politi-Score: Three Debates, Part 2

Before a review of some of the rulings made on statements in the recent three Republican debates, I thought it might be a good idea to present a topic breakdown.

Click to enlarge:  Healthcare/Medicare, jobs, social security and the debt ceiling made up 66% of the fact-checked topics in the debates.

The Number One Topic of fact-checking interest was Healthcare/Medicare, followed by Jobs and then Social Security. Most reviewed Topic Number 4, the Debt Ceiling, was a one-man, or I should say, one-woman topic, as all the rulings were on Michele Bachmann, centered on her determined-to-be-false “Obama blank check” claims, mostly made during the first debate in Ames. She also Politi-Scored a hefty negative on this topic at -88. Including Bachmann’s topic of the debt ceiling, these four topics made up two-thirds of those fact-checked from the debates.

Healthcare/Medicare, besides being the most fact-checked, had one of the most negative Politi-Scores at a slightly-worse-than-Mostly-False -61. Healthcare/Medicare was also a topic dominated by Michele Bachmann, with her making 11 of the 16 statements fact-checked and the rest divided between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney (oh, and a single one by Tim Pawlenty).

There were a few miscellaneous topics that were specialties of certain debaters. A good example is the Federal Budget, which consisted of a statement by Newt Gingrich (his contention that he balanced it four years in a row, determined to be a misleading claim by the fact-checkers). Another one was Border Security and Rick Perry’s challenging claims that Obama made about it at El Paso, Texas, which PolitiFact found to be Half True and the other fact-checkers, misleading.

So now we have a pretty good over-view of the fact-checking side of the three debates. For a heads up on the next item of interest, I’ll note that there were 51 fact-checks representing 21 statements where the fact-check was re-covered, or duplicated. So please stay tuned as I sort through them.

Sidebar: And the Nominees for PLOTY are...

Well, one nominee.  My educated guess is that PolitiFact (PF) might  just  make this the 2011 Lie of the Year because they can show (1) Democrats can make PolitiFact Lie of the Year as well, (2) its “inverse” relationship with the 2010 Lie of the Year (that “Obamacare” is a government takeover versus the privatization in “Ryancare”), and (3) the similar label (Obamacare versus Ryancare). The $12,500 is incidental; it is the “voted to end Medicare” that is the focus of the lie and makes it a "contender."

The "ending Medicare" part continues to make the rounds among various Democratic politicians as a “talking point”—for example, at PF Rhode Island and PF Wisconsin—and their debunkings by PolitiFact have caused it to face an avalanche of bias charges from both sides—Conservatives on Obamacare and Liberals on Ryancare.

Both deal with that slippery slope of ideological beliefs with regard to where it slides into that abyss of the unknown, a.k.a. the death panel (which was the 2009 Lie of the Year), as Republicans would like you to believe, where a government-appointed panel decides that you’re too old and unstable, or your condition too far gone, to give you care….or is it going to be the death panel of the free market: if you can’t afford healthcare, you die. (That’s really what Democrats need to emphasize: we have death panels today, they are the medical directors at insurance companies who for the sake of profit deny the insured treatments that might save their life, and the 44,000 people estimated to die annually simply because they cannot afford health insurance.  I'd also like to get into the fact that there is no, and never will be, a free market in healthcare, but that's another long post.)

This will be close to or at the heart of the 2012 presidential debate, and part of any local elections that may go on this year; it's already shown to be a major factor on why the Republicans had some come uppance from the Democrats in several special elections in May, particularly one in upstate New York where the voters were predominantly Republican.   It’s why the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called for a vote on Paul Ryan’s Budget. So unless something else big happens between now and the end of the year 2011, that’s the one that has my vote….and I think we’ll hear more about it again once this debt ceiling charade is over.

Sidebar: What Have You Done *FOR ME* Lately?

Recently, the so-called liberal media is spotlighting a May 24 special election in a solidly “red” Republican district in New York: following the introduction of “RyanCare” and its drastic re-structure of Medicare (most liberals call it "the end of") a sudden “shift” occurred among the older, conservative voters. And now the district is in play.

Spelling's improved; thinking hasn't.

If the Tea Party candidate concedes to the Republican (which is doubtful), the Republicans would still own the district, but it appears it would not win by as much of a margin as in prior elections. The division between the Tea and Republican parties is causing some polls to show the Democrat in the lead, so it’s interesting to speculate as to what’s causing the shift.

My take on it: I once heard the Tea Party called the “Tax ‘Em All (but me)” party, and it made me chuckle. And that’s the thing about many of these Randian, self-interested "Republican" voters (I'm just calling them for what they are, even though they like to say they include Democrats:  come on!).  They want the government made smaller, they want taxes cut for them, but they don’t want to lose any government benefits for themselves, and when they do lose anything, when it hits them in their pocketbook, they go with their self-interest…which may mean voting for the Democrat. This could also be termed “wanting the best of both worlds”—not just tax ‘em all (but me) but cut benefits and services for everyone (but me).  Voting opportunistically, not ideologically.

I got mine...so screw you.

I noted in a previous post how, in my home state of Michigan, several quite noisy diehard retired Republican letter-to-the-editor writers suddenly went silent when new governor Rick Snyder put forth his proposal to solve Michigan’s budget crisis by taxing their pensions to the tune of 4.25%, which were previously exempt. Or some years ago, I recall meeting a new neighbor, who proudly told me he was a “staunch conservative” because “liberals were hypocrits” only to then inform me he was a pipefitter for General Motors: i.e., he was a member of the UAW, from which he derived Cadillac wages and benefits because of their hard fought collective bargaining efforts, took his dues to support 99% Democratic candidates, and put out a monthly publication to members like him that reads like a socialist manifesto.  So he must have seen no contradiction (read: hypocrisy) between working for a major union for much higher pay and benefits than he would get as a plumber (that's basically what a pipefitter is--Joe the Plumber would be envious) yet voting for a party that would bust his union given the opportunity...which raises the obvious question:  would he still vote for them if they did?

So we see that same type of shift here: the conservative “personal responsibility” mantra also entails personal risk. The risk is that in order to reduce government, you may personally lose certain  benefits , whether from the government or because of the government, or be taxed (by Republican vote) directly or indirectly, and part of “personal responsibility” is recognizing and preparing for that. Apparently “personal responsibility” doesn’t mean anything to some Republican tea partiers beyond a nice talking point.

Postscript (5/24/11):  The winner of the special election in New York's normally solidly Republican 26th District mentioned at the beginning of this post was indeed the Democrat, Kathy Hochul.  It should be noted that in 2010, the Republican winner, Chris Lee, garnered close to 74% of the vote.  What a difference six months makes--or, to use another "song", when it comes to privatizing Medicare, don't it make your red states blue.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: RyanCare--Pay or Die!

There was quite a “liberal” uproar over this PolitiFact (PF) ruling on the claim made by a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee TV ad on Paul Ryan’s proposed “Path to Prosperity” to change Medicare from a defined benefit to defined contribution plan, as well as raise the eligibility age from 65 to 67. And of course, leave it as is for the most important Republican voting bloc, the “screw-everybody-but-me” baby boomers.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly (which appears to be a sort of counter to the conservative Washington Examiner) headlines his criticism "When PolitiFact Becomes PolitiFalse."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points memo: “Knowledge Counts”-- “This is why Republicans are spinning this issue so hard and bamboozling folks at places like Politifact.”

“PolitiFact has Pants on Fire in their rating of Democratic Claims about Medicare” says David Dayen of FireDogLake.

Finally, Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo makes a mild claim, “PolitiFact Insists Republicans Don't Want To End Medicare”.

I’ve listed these links first as part and partial to linking from the “Guide to PolitiFact Detractors” page because it adds a lot to the “liberal” PolitiFact critics who think PolitiFact leans right.

Careful reading of what “RyanCare” offers, as noted above, is its re-structuring of the Medicare program from a defined benefit, government as single payer to defined contribution, consumer-driven plan. And once all the baby-boomers die, should this program as defined by Paul Ryan actually come to pass, there would be no Medicare as we know it today. Medicare would simply be an individual subsidy program.