Lil White Lies: Slim Jim Spin

Yes, there’s inflation at the grocery store—I’ve been there enough to see that. But in this review of a PolitiFact ruling on Sarah Palin’s statement about the cost of Slim Jims, for my conservative counterpart to claim increases in the cost of Slim Jims should be the sole basis of the ruling is not quite on the mark. Palin’s argument is that there’s recent, substantial inflation (and most importantly, Obama is to blame, of course): not just the Slim Jim scenario, but “every time I walk into that grocery store, a couple of pennies more.” What PolitiFact is pointing out is that the inflation isn’t as bad as she purports it to be.

Most people I know go to the grocery store about once a week, sometimes more. For the purpose of this example, let’s just use once a week. If a loaf of house brand whole wheat bread is $2.35 and it goes up 3 cents per week, that means in a year it should be just under $4.00. Is that the kind of inflation we’re presently experiencing? Because that’s what Palin is saying, and that is not true.

This is also an excellent case for comparative purposes of how my conservative counterpart wants it both ways. According to him:

I count it as a misinterpretation to think Palin was suggesting the high price Mr. Palin paid for his Slim Jim snack was representative of food inflation.

…if the Palins paid what they claimed for a Slim Jim it wasn't entirely because of a rise in the suggested retail price. It is likely that ConAgra has increased the price during the past year…

PolitiFact sees an argument implied in Palin's anecdote. PolitiFact ignores alternate interpretations such as the one I've suggested that make the implied argument irrelevant to Palin's point.

How Dummies Release A Blockbuster

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Score 5 in June

On July 4, PolitiFact published a Mailbag issue in which readers took it to task for some of its rulings from the month of June. While I try to critically think on just about everything, especially when it comes to grading PolitiFact in a liberal style, it seems to me that more “thinkers” make for better ideas and insights. And as I haven’t done much lately in the “Grading PolitiFact Liberally” area, this mailbag gave me the opportunity to catch up. Because some of the readers have some compellingly good reasons for either upgrading a Democrat or downgrading a Republican—for a total of FIVE rulings. So let’s get started:

1. Liberals should just revere that Palin-speak!

Several readers charged that we [PolitiFact] were too soft in giving former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a Barely True -- rather than a False or Pants on Fire -- for her comment that "Part of (Paul Revere’s) ride was to warn the British that were already there that, 'Hey, you're not going to succeed.' "

One reader wrote, "Going to your definition of Barely True, the ‘element of truth’ you were referring to was that he ‘warned the British.’ But he did not, in fact or in deed, warn the British. He bluffed the British, since his intention was to gain his freedom, not to give them notice of danger. The statement should be correctly be rated False.

Another reader, tongue half-way in cheek, offered a justification to rate Palin’s comment True.

"Technically, she was right since there was no America yet. All of the citizens in the area were still considered British subjects, and any warning given by Revere would certainly have been heard by British subjects that were still loyal to the King, as well as those that wanted their freedom from the crown," the reader wrote.

Chris Wallace of Fox News got it right on this one: Palin “messed up.” I mean, I’m sure Revere intended to get captured by the British just so he could warn them. As for the “tongue half-way in cheek” excuse most likely offered by some sublimely bloviating type, Wikipedia explains:

Riding through present-day Somerville, Medford, and Arlington, Revere warned patriots along his route, many of whom set out on horseback to deliver warnings of their own. By the end of the night there were probably as many as 40 riders throughout Middlesex County carrying the news of the army's advance. Revere did not shout the phrase later attributed to him ("The British are coming!"): His mission depended on secrecy, the countryside was filled with British army patrols, and the Massachusetts colonists (who were predominantly English in ethnic origin[43]) still considered themselves British.

So, why then the secrecy and how did those who were loyal to the King know the signals? Anyway, Palin could well have merited a False on this one. Score 1.

2. POW! BAM! It's Bachmann!

We also received a number of comments suggesting that we were too lenient on Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann when she said, "The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs." We rated that statement Barely True.

"Hey guys, you blew it," wrote one reader. "The CBO did not say that 800,000 jobs will disappear -- it said that 800,000 workers might disappear. The jobs that they occupied like would still exist to be filled by other workforce participants. This would reduce the unemployment rate slightly, make the workers seeking the vacated jobs better off and presumably make the disappearing workers better off, since leaving would be their choice."

This one is kind of sad—800,000 people will no longer have to work because they don’t have to just for the insurance. Most of the jobs would still be there. When some of those people leave because they now have health insurance, they will necessarily have to be replaced. In other words, in a sense, it’s creating jobs, not killing them. Bachmann distorts this CBO extrapolation way out of line in a disingenuous way. Not only that, she repeated it. Misleading, says PolitiFact? Your Factcheck.org cohorts are calling it flat out false: (emphasis added)

Part 2 of When Dummies Forget Why They Have Handlers

Before Trump's punctuation and grammar, there was Sarah and her sentence structure.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

How Dummies Beef Up Their Foreign Relations Credentials

Featuring Sarah Palin looking like a schmuck.

Sidebar: Book Report on the Fly

While Amazon.com seems to have a virtual monopoly on discounted books, Kindle downloads and such, it still can’t beat going to a local bookstore (in my case “Books a Million”) to look them over in hand. Although I’d never buy a book by one of these authors (or even one from someone who shares my political views), it’s still a good idea to read what they have to say.

So I looked over three books today that I’m going to discuss here; they all had certain similarities. They were prominently displayed in the “New Releases” non-fiction section at the front of the store, and naturally they were by people who were not “liberals” who seem to dominate in this area:

•  “Broke” by Glenn Beck
•  “Pinheads and Patriots” by Bill O’Reilly
•  “America By Heart” by Sarah Palin

Un-Broke my Heart. If I was going to buy any of these three, it would be Beck’s “Broke”. Wide paged, highly glossed with lots of color, it was replete with charts and tack notes; it seemed like a “Conspiratorial Libertarians for Dummies” kind of book in the way it was laid out. The “tack notes” were often entitled “Teachable Moments.” Now that the word “Liberal” has been successfully demonized and mischaracterized, he has now moved on to the word Progressives in order to do the same.

But on Page 120-1, he doesn’t celebrate Republicans either; he has a laundry list of the “bads” that George W. Bush accomplished during his administration, such as the Medicare prescription bill of 2003 which added hundreds of billions to the national debt, and the Homeland Security Act which added 100,000 government employees.

Of course, he spends a lot of time on Social Security and Medicare as the focus of the blame for America’s “broke” condition. Here’s a notable block quote on Page 205 called “Mr. Ponzi Would Be So Proud”:

Return of the Dummies

It's been almost two months without you dummies! You were missed!  The part about Sarah Palin is eerily omniscent given what happened in Arizona. But it clearly shows the symbolism used by Palin (guns, hunting, shooting) as a celebrity/ political candidate.  

Sidebar: Second Amendment Remedies?



Even Republican Elizabeth Hasselbeck described Palin's *crosshairs* as "despicable."


This morning I viewed Jared Lee Loughner's youtube videos, and I can conclude from them:

• He's anti-government
• He's looks to be a gold nut because of his strange "currency" revelations (and who has almost all "gold" sponsors of his TV show???)
• He's into logic fallacies (ha ha)

Jared, at 22, seems to have not really developed a cogent political view; but that "person of interest" who may have been with him, described as a 40-ish white male, may have had solidified political views if he was indeed involved.  We have yet to find out.   One of my favorite websites points out, however:

Rethugs & FOX say: "More guns, more guns,more guns for everybody! Obama is a traitor! Democrats want to give America to bin Laden, Democrats are a threat that must be stopped! More guns, more guns, bigger clips, fewer laws, Obama is a Kenyan Muslin, out to destroy us!

Then some Teabagger answers their call and they say, "Who me?" after he fires into a woman's head.

As always, a bit over the top, maybe, but well said, Bart!  Although I disagree on the "Teabagger" part.  It doesn't have to be a teabagger who answers their calls; it can be a deranged person (who could be apolitical) who hears the teabaggers' messages and answers their call.

Postscript:  News updates since the publishing of this post have revealed that the "person of interest" was but a cabbie who unknowingly drove Loughner to his fateful destination of John-Hinckley-dom, and was videotaped obtaining change...which leads me to wonder, since this kid lived with his parents: who's financing him?  He had just bought ammo, and he bought the gun in November for $500.  He did drugs, and obviously with his wierdo videos on youtube, had a computer.  Yet it's been said he was unemployed, dropped out of high school and college, and was rejected by the armed forces (because he tested positive for drug use). 

Postscript to Postscript:  I just wonder if Palin will somehow manage to come out smelling like a rose on this one.  At this point, I'd say all bets are off.

Tchotchkes: Sarah Palin Note to Self

Lil White Lies: Nefarious Factoids (Updated)

Sarah Palin seems to get a lot of mileage out of items she posts on Facebook. So recently she published a “factoid” there on excerpts of a speech she gave : “Did you know that U.S. actually only ranks 25th among major world players on defense spending as a percentage of GDP?" PolitiFact (PF) picked it up, and wanted to verify this ranking, and then determine if it was a valid measure. For the record, re-evaluating quoted statistics found technically true for comparison to “peers” isn’t something that’s only been done with Sarah Palin:  When it comes to global stats—be it health, climate change, and in this case, defense, we can almost always count on Republicans to suspect the source as biased or in error. Bryan in his Blog reviews is no exception. 

Bryan begins with a quote about how the media has a “deep anti-military bias.” Bryan claims that Palin wanted to show her audience that … ‘there is no "gusher" of defense spending.” Clearly, both Palin and Bryan want to justify US defense spending, and Bryan’s preconception with that justification was demonstrated throughout his critique.

But getting back to Palin’s statement, how DOES the US compare to the rest of the world?

Sidebar: Arianna and Sarah on PolitiFact Rulings

Recently there were two responses from opposite camps on PolitiFact’s Fact-Checking rulings, namely, Arianna Huffington (“Democrat”) and Sarah Palin (“Republican”). I thought it might be worth checking both of their responses, as well as their fact-checks, to see how both compared as an experiment in looking at PolitiFact’s supposed “bias.”

Palin’s original claim: “ …this is going to result in the largest tax increase in U.S. history.” (in response to Chris Wallace question on tax cuts expiring FOR TOP 2% [he WAS very specific])

What PolitiFact (PF) checked: ….” her claim that the Democratic plan would result in "the largest tax increase in history."

Gist of Palin’s response: “There is NO plan” by Obama or the Democrats. PF are the pants on fire liars.

My summary: (1) She conflated top 2% tax with *everyone* tax. (2) She refused to recognize (or didn’t know about) *unofficial* proposals and (3) she still thinks it’s 2008 and she’s campaigning (or maybe she’s campaigning for 2012, who knows).

Huffington’s original claim: “Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government… hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq.”

What PF checked: “…we decided to fact-check Huffington's statement that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government of "hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq.”

Gist of Huffington’s response: “…PolitiFact's facts clearly supported a conclusion different than the one its editors came to.” PF is “equivocating.”

My summary: (1) Inefficiencies are not the same as fraud, but Arianna clearly implies they are the same (2) She does not address the security problem (which KBR procured and illegally billed for because the military often did not protect their workers) and (3) Concluding with her emotive “Workers of the World Unite” complaints with regard to AIG and BP sort of misdirects her anger at PF’s “equivocation.” That being said, PF could have easily gone with Mostly True. But I would not go with True.

Analysis of both: