PolitiFact 2012 Lie of the Year: Factual isn't the same as Honest

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.
-- Sublime Bloviations "Grading PolitiFact"

(Really? Then...practice what you preach!)

When I saw the finalists for the 2012 PolitiFact Lie of the Year, I knew that its focus this year had to be on a fact-check that reflected some sort of "defining moment in the 2012 presidential election". I commented at Facebook, however, that it might not be good to do one on Romney or  Obama from the standpoint it made PolitiFact look ever yet more biased.  PolitiFact very carefully (perhaps deliberately) divided the finalists evenly betweeen Democrats and Republicans, although Romney had more direct statements.  On the other hand, they should not let "objectivity" get in the way of their choice, which is what they supposedly did here when they chose the "Jeeps to China" campaign ad that Mitt Romney ran in a last ditch attempt to convert swing Ohio voters, as the PolitiFact 2012 Lie of the Year.

 

I did feel vindicated that one of my choices discussed last August was selected as a finalist; it also received the most votes in PolitiFact's own poll. But given the newsworthiness of the election, I was not surprised it picked the Jeep ad. And all I hear from the Republican side is that it's "factual." Now, I covered this in a post on this statement when it first came out: it was the implications, the premise of the ad; it was certainly not the "fact" it was superficially "factual."

 

As I reviewed the Facebook comments and read PolitiFact's review of e-mail feedback, it looked to be a far greater right-wing deluge of faux outrage this year ("#Benghazi" the most oft-repeated comment, as if somehow PolitiFact could turn back the clock); of course, this shouldn't have been the case last year since the 2011 Lie of the Year was one from the Democrats.. But even though all these commenters were basically "hating on" PolitiFact, I'm watching its "like" count continue to grow past 75,000, when you'd think it would lose fans with all the "hate". Of course, having commenters like "TheFamily BackEast" and "NoLonger Proud" plus several with the middle name of Benghazi, takes a bit away from whatever that count means, and also makes it look like a few people may have been multiplying their Facebook identities to make the "hate" look more popular than what it really was.

 

My conservative counterpart added a comment at the Politico website trying to debate another commenter (his usual modus operandi) who stated that this was "Mitt Romney's last-ditch advertisement asserting that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China." He asked "What part of the ad made that assertion?" as if this was not was what was implicitly meant if Romney didn't say it. Someone by the name of Jack Brockway replied:

The ad was dishonest... even Jeep thought so. Are you asserting otherwise? Careful here - factual isn't the same as honest.

(It appears no response was made as of December 14). While I pointed out a lot of other factors concerning car manufacture (which I am deeply familiar with) that show it's not the case that anyone in the U.S. is going to lose their job if the Chinese exports were built in China, expansion had already been planned beyond current production in the United States. What is likely being planned for both China and Italy is expansion as well: the models are entirely different from what we have here, designed specifically for those consumers. We will never see those models here. What we export there isn't enough to justify building a plant there in lieu of exporting...it's just not economically feasible.

 

And even if for the sake of argument I went along with the contention that the Jeep SUVs now exported to China would be built in China, it still does not refute the implication of Romney's ad as well as his remarks. The ad gave the impression that all Jeep production was being moved to China by the concluding statement, for which there is also little evidence ("Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.") It was such a strong impression that the union local was receiving phone calls from workers at the Jeep plant who thought their jobs were in jeopardy. The ad was fear-based and boiled down to: if you vote for Obama, you will lose your job. And as noted by the PolitiFact ruling " it presents the manufacture of Jeeps in China as a threat, rather than an opportunity to sell cars made in China to Chinese consumers." To say the statements were correct and Romney didn't mean anything else (so why would he need to fight for those jobs?) and that there is no premise, no implication, no "underlying argument," is sheer intellectual dishonesty.

Lil White Lies: Double Bain Dead

A post at Sublime Bloviations says this PolitiFact fact-check is ”a joke” and not relevant, and its "inflammatory" partner anti-factchecker blog counterirritant chimes along, adding Limbaugh “didn’t try to make [the] argument” to support PolitiFact’s ruling of Pants on Fire.

Let’s start by taking a look at what Limbaugh initially said, from the PolitiFact ruling:

"This evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane. And there's now a discussion out there as to whether or not this is purposeful and whether or not it will influence voters. It's gonna have a lot of people. This movie, the audience is gonna be huge. A lot of people are gonna see the movie, and it's a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd, and they're gonna hear Bane in the movie and they're gonna associate Bain. The thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie, ‘Oh, yeah, I know who that is.’ There are some people who think it'll work. Others think you're really underestimating the American people to think that will work."

He wrapped up:

"You may think it's ridiculous, I'm just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people that they are campaigning to. These are the kind of people that they are attempting to appeal to."

But wait, there’s more! The implication from Sublime Bloviations' Bryan White was that since Limbaugh could not be taken seriously, it was not worth fact-checking (even though even PolitiFact admitted it was a  “pop culture diversion" ). But it gets seriously expanded the following day, as scripted at the Rush Limbaugh website, and serves to further contradict counterirritant’s claims:

So I'm in the library last night, and I'm doing what I always do. I'm doing show prep. And I get a text message from Kathryn who's in with the dogs in the kitchen. She says, "Are you in this Batman movie and you didn't tell me? Is this Batman movie about you?" I said, "What now?" She says, "I can't go anywhere without reading about you and this Batman movie." And I finally, in that moment, folks, I finally figured out what's going on. I outed them. Forget the creator. I don't care that the creator created the character Bane in the Batman movie back in the '90s. It doesn't matter. The Democrats clearly were going to try to link this villain to Mitt Romney. And I outed 'em. They've even got a couple Democrats admitting they were gonna, Chris Leheinous and Jon Stewart. And they're still trying to do it.

You know, independently of the producers and the actors and all the people associated with the movie, they saw it, they were gonna try to make the linkage, and now I'm out there basically accusing them of that, so they've got their backs up. They're acting like I'm some sort of conspiracy creep. But I outed 'em. I have shined the light of truth, as it were.

Counterirritant says Limbaugh never advanced the idea “ that the villain Bane was named in reference to Bain Capital.” Yes he did—he advanced it by being the first one to say “there was a discussion out there whether or not this was purposeful” and associating Bane to Bain and the Democrats in the next few sentences. In other words, if he didn’t advance the idea, what was it then that Limbaugh was “outing” the Democrats for? What precisely was that “light of truth”? Counterirritant debates like White, in that he tries to ignore the obvious.

So, the next issue becomes whether PolitiFact should rightfully consider Limbaugh's claims "a joke."  In 2008, Limbaugh was thought to have “caused mischief” in the Democratic primaries. According to one article, the Indiana primary “may be the first vote in which his influence [was] measured in qualitative terms.” He called it “Operation Chaos.” And more recently, his calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” was taken so seriously, many of his sponsors dropped him.

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).

Sidebar: Christmas in July

I did not read the full SCOTUS Opinion issued June 28 on “Obamacare”; I read most of the dissent to see what the four conservative justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy had to say. Most of it was about the narrow interpretation that the consequence for not getting health insurance was a penalty (in lieu of a tax), and in their view the congress could not compel commerce (to purchase insurance) through this penalty. But I came across a most interesting analogy that provides a fantastic example of how my conservative counterpart operates, both in his critiques of PolitiFact rulings as well as his commenting style on the PolitiFact Facebook page.

 The “Obamacare dissenters” described why the entire healthcare law needed to be struck down: it was because it had lost its heart with their invalidation of the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion. They compared it to a Christmas tree: the tree itself was the mandate and the Medicaid expansion, while all the other requirements laid down by the massive ACA bill were merely ornaments on the tree, and that without the tree, the ornaments were now useless.

This perfectly describes the manner in which he argues: he cleverly ignores the tree, the foundation, while arguing incessantly about one of the ornaments. You take that ornament off, yet the tree is still there, but White thinks because he’s successfully (in his mind) reasoned that since the ornament should come off, the tree should be ignored.

He argues that PolitiFact deserves a False because Obama did not describe the wage gap for women correctly, but there’s still a wage gap. He argues that PolitiFact misses specifics of a fantasy Paul Ryan budget proposal but ignores that, as I explained, that budget might as well be made of green cheese. He argues that PolitiFact failed to recognize that Obama’s spending gets a false lift from “negative spending” (later shown to only have been recorded once) though the spending was the result of factors for the most part out of Obama’s control. He argues about felons and non-citizens voting in Florida, when it’s really about those who should be able to vote getting kicked off the voter roll (as one Republican congressperson from Pennsylvania recently proudly admitted).

So, to that end, I have decided to graphically present this (deliberate) error in thinking each time it occurs: with a “White” Christmas ornament. What better way to show that removing that White ornament leaves the tree still standing; the tree White wants you to pretend not to see.

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: Less Than Positively Pointless

Recently I discovered that PolitiFact had linked to my blog (Thank you!) in its website, in an article by Bill Adair where he’s now decided to compare Truth-o-Meter rating charts ("report cards"). I don’t know if he’s going to display a computation of the Truth Index, that might be a bit politically dicey. My feeling was he was looking for a nice high “magic” number of rulings before he would start this feature, which was 5,000.

PolitiFact Bias (which some call the “Gish Gallop of anti-PolitiFact Propaganda”) and co-blog Sublime Bloviations caught the link at PolitiFact and immediately posted (my blog was linked at the word "commentary"):

The other link ("commentary") was the sort of pointless statistical exercise that simply elaborates on the results of PolitiFact's fundamentally flawed process (the former link I gave a positive review, the latter author I've given a less-than-positive review).

I guess if I didn’t have a professed liberal bias by disagreeing, and I was someone especially important, I might get more positive reviews.  Because one can be important, but ideological disagreement makes one an idiot.

But the less than positive reviews have nothing whatsoever to do with my Truth Index analysis. Brad’s Terribly Bad Blog, or whatever it’s called, never looked at my Truth Index. It only looked at my Grading PolitiFact Review series at the time I first started it, which were attacked with almost the same intensity as PolitiFact's rulings. So for that, the Politi-Psy Truth-o-Meter on their claim gets a FALSE (I don’t use Pants on Fire, that belongs to PolitiFact). And I know the “selection bias” is just as pointless, as noted by Eric Levine:

They [PolitiFact Bias] just compiled a list of articles on Politifact over the course of a year and came to the conclusion that, since the worst ratings tend to favor republicans more than democrats, they must be biased in their selection in favor of the left. The problem with this is that their conclusion simply does not follow. Their are other possible reasons for this kind of result that have nothing specifically to do with Politifact being biased.

I encourage you to read the rest of Eric Levine’s analysis.

Sidebar: Preconception Detection

It’s been proven in my blog to some degree that any sort of bias by PolitiFact (PF) in its rulings can’t be proven through “a preponderance of anecdotal evidence.” Because (1) some of that preponderance is clearly arguable, as I have shown in Lil White Lies, and (2) the evidence of bias can go both ways, as I have shown in Grading PF Liberal Style, as well as in my Guide to PF Detractors, which lists those alleging PF of bias on both sides of the aisle.

In my many searches for items to add to my Guide to PF Detractors, I occasionally look at comments, to see if someone has anything original to say (generally it’s run of the mill). Here were two, however, that really offer some different approaches to determine bias by PolitiFact.

They come from an article by David Brauer at MinnPost.com who was critiquing Bill Adair’s response to Eric Ostermeier’s study in which he suggests that PolitiFact writers may be using “selection bias” in choosing statements for review. (I reviewed Ostermeier’s numbers, comparing them to mine, and found that his Republican “negatives” were somewhat higher in his database of 512 rulings as compared to my database of 1,330 rulings on current and former office-holders.)

Here’s the first one written by Mark Gisleson: (emphasis added)

Politifact isn't biased by party, they're biased in an establishment way. That's why Bachmann does badly by them, but so do people like Alan Grayson who they often parsed to death.

They also cannot differentiate between politicians who skillfully dissemble, as opposed to politicians who equivocate themselves into gray areas.

They would do much better if they placed every politician's statements in the context of their party's political agenda. If a misstatement serves their agenda, it should be graded more harshly because it's fair to assume that lies that benefit the cause are deliberate. 

I’ve already noticed that my conservative counterpart might be aware of this, because, in his Grading PolitiFact critiques, he often seems to deliberately and assiduously avoid placing the argument in the context of the (Republican) party’s political agenda. An excellent case in point is a PF ruling on Ann Coulter reviewed earlier this year where, following the tsunami-nuclear reactor incident in Japan, she claimed to Bill O’Reilly that radiation was good for you. Bryan’s argument that she didn’t deserve a “False” from PF was that the context of Coulter’s argument was the media’s over-reaction to it, when the fact was, as I showed, they seemed to be under-reacting, if anything, and the real context was the Republican party’s promotion of nuclear energy, ergo, Coulter’s claims about radiation. Bryan didn’t say anything about the Republican advocacy of nuclear energy.

Politi-Score: Insidious Effects

I devote a lot of my blog to someone I often term “my conservative counterpart” because he seems to have his life devoted to “exposing PolitiFact” for its supposed liberal bias at his weblogs Sublime Bloviations and PolitiFact Bias. When he (Bryan White) first became aware of my counterpoint blog, he immediately wrote some pieces trashing me at another shadow-blog he had called “Bad Blogs' Blood.” (If you Google “politi-psychotics” you will see his blog in the results, referring to my “bad reporting” and “bad thinking” and “publishing predominantly a load of nonsense.” I must have had him worried!) After he wrote me four consecutive letters one day on Facebook which I chose to ignore, he in turn ignored me, by making a point to never mention my blog on his main blog Sublime Bloviations.  Recently, however, he’s made comments (as he does every now and then) where it’s obvious the message is directed to me, as in this case, since he is very much aware of the Politi-Score:

Afters: The insidious effects of the type of selection bias found in this PolitiFact story have their full effect when PolitiFact encourages readers to look at the collected statements about a person in order to develop an impression about the person. Using Eisnaugle as an example, the reader of Eisnaugle's PolitiFact "report card" (they actually call it that!) would see a lone "False" rating. Yet if PolitiFact had chosen either of the other two statements to rate, Eisnaugle would have a lone "True" rating. Or if PolitiFact had rated all three, Eisnaugle could expect to have two "True" ratings and one "False" rating.

What good is a grade point average created under these types of conditions?

Short answer: There is no “good” to a grade point average (GPA or Politi-Score) under these types of conditions. It is an irrelevant measure.

Long Answer: In order to get a reasonably “good” GPA (Politi-Score), there has to be a sufficiently large quantity of rulings over a sustained period of time. Probably the only politicians who meet this measure, as of the end of 2010, are Barack Obama and John McCain, with over 400 rulings between them.

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:

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Denying the Profiling

This most recent ruling by PolitiFact Florida concerns a remark by Tea Party (supported) incoming congress person Allen West, who as a candidate claimed he had a higher security clearance than the president, and from what I’ve heard is really into interrogation techniques as well. The statement being fact-checked was made by West on NBC's Meet the Press November 21: “after September 11, we had the opportunity with Israel coming and talking to us about improving our security screening procedures, and we turned them down.”

So PolitiFact proved we spoke with the Israelis about their security system, but could not pin down that we “turned them down” and ruled the statement Half True.

“Turning them down” implies that the Israeli’s made some sort of recommendation or request that required a yes or no—in order to “turn it down”. The fact is, however, that the U.S. was well aware of how Israel handled its airport security and weren’t required to turn them down—they could not use the major part of their system to begin with, because one factor made it too “objectionable” to Americans:

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Steele-ing a Half True from PolitiFact

According to the website Fivethirtyeight,  Sharron Angle and Ken Buck were on course to win as senators in their respective states. Mike Castle was supposedly a solid shoe-in for the Delaware general election over the Democrat, had not Christine O’Donnell upset him in the primaries. But because of tea party extremism (which should probably more appropriately be called Republican extremism), the Republican Party only won the House of Representatives and lost the Senate in the 2010 midterm elections; in otherwords, they should have won both houses -- if Michael Steele had managed the tea party side of the Republican Party correctly, particularly in Nevada, Colorado and Delaware.

That is why this PolitiFact (PF) ruling on a statement by Michael Steele on having "won more elections than any chairman since 1938" merits attention.

In addition, there is Steele’s kowtowing to Rush Limbaugh and what Rush had to say about him, shortly after Steele became chairman of the RNC. (emphasis added):

On March 1, 2009 in response to a question on CBS's Face the Nation as to who spoke for the Republican Party, President Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said it was Rush Limbaugh because "whenever a Republican criticizes [Limbaugh], they have to run back and apologize to him, and say they were misunderstood. He is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party. And he has been upfront about what he views, and hasn't stepped back from that, which is he hopes for [President Obama's] failure. He said it. And I compliment him for his honesty, but that's their philosophy that is enunciated by Rush Limbaugh."[46][47][48]

In remarks aired by the CNN program D.L. Hughley Breaks the News on March 1, 2009, Steele said he, rather than Limbaugh, is "the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh's whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it is incendiary. Yes, it is ugly." On March 2, 2009 Limbaugh said on his radio show that Steele is not fit to lead the Republican Party, asking of him "Why do you claim to lead the Republican Party when you seem obsessed with seeing to it President Obama succeeds?"[49] After the show Steele called Limbaugh to apologize, saying "I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership. I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren't what I was thinking. It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he's not."[50] Steele later issued another statement to say that Limbaugh "is a national conservative leader, and in no way do I want to diminish his voice. I truly apologize."[51]

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: John Boehner and Finance Reform

In the “Lil White Lies” category, I have been giving structured criticisms of another person’s criticisms of PolitiFact’s ruling write-ups. The assumption is that the purpose of these criticisms (being critiqued), blogged in a very professional style by a conservative, of what he has asserted many times is a liberally biased fact-checking website, helps prove anecdotally its liberal bias.

But perhaps a different approach is warranted. That approach is to use the identical logic to prove what could be conservative bias on the part of PolitiFact. What does that prove? This is what the critiqued critic, Bryan White, might say, coming directly from a comment he posted at the PolitiFact Facebook page very recently (emphasis added):

@ Carol Ahrens, who wrote:

***Politifact is doing a great job! why else would both sides be accusing them of bias?!***

Well, both sides *could* accuse them of bias because they make mistakes--mistakes that sometimes favor one side and sometimes favor the other. But if you throw logic entirely out the window then I guess you can conclude that criticism from both sides simply means that PolitiFact does a great job.

(November 28, approx. noon EST)

Of course, Bryan fails to explain or elaborate (which is typical of his commentary) on “throwing logic entirely out of the window” except to take a jab at Carol Ahrens by implying she is not thinking logically.

Lil White Lies: How to Blow Up Blowing It (!)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’ve called Bryan White the Word Warden…..I’ve joked about his always having to have “more cowbell”—I’ve written about his “monolithic certitude”—but this one really takes the cake. Well, it just keeps confirming everything, in one orgy of narcissistic, unbending, not-so sublime bloviations.  I’m sure Bryan's aware of what happens when someone submits posts on Facebook; he’s “sharing” them.

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2.  When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).

When writing opinion letters to the editor of a newspaper in anticipation of their possibly being published, I assume that most all of them will tell you that your letter becomes its property and “may be edited”—

All submissions become the property of The Flint Journal; submissions may be edited and may be published or otherwise re-used in any medium.

So recently PolitiFact issued one of its occasional “mailbag” pieces, publishing comments from its Facebook fans and e-mailers, and entitled it “PolitiFact blew it again!” in what appeared to be a partial quote of a Facebook comment posted by Bryan. Of course, when he saw this he immediately went ape sh*t crazy over the fact that PolitiFact had “grafted an exclamation point on the end.”

Lil White Lies: A Review of *Grading PolitiFact* (15 of Them!)

Some time ago, I made a comment on a Facebook PolitiFact page comparing Bryan White’s debate methods to Chinese food. It seems tasty and filling at the time, but a short time later one is hungry and has a headache from all the MSG. His  blog's Grading PolitiFact series has a similar *nutrition.* It sounds good, but later you say to yourself, after thinking about it…"Hey, wait a minute….that isn’t quite right…” and you're feeling a bit empty and kind of sick.

Or you might say, "…something smells here, and I don’t know what it is.” Keeping that *odor* in mind, at this point, 15 of Bryan White’s “Grading PolitiFact” series’ analyses have been evaluated in my blog. I’ve given (most of) them my own grade (I started out with peanuts, but found this much more demonstrative), namely anywhere from one to five of that famous cartoon skunk Pepé LePew. Why Pepé? Because of the strong whiff of Bryan’s personal “selection bias”, the reek of his incredibly subjective opinion passed off as “reason” and “logic”, and the overwhelming stench of his excessive use of logic fallacies. Because once past that, Pepé LePew’s initial charm is understood to only be the bait of the sting.

Out of this fifteen, there have been three cases where I’ve actually agreed with Bryan’s analyses. The best example of the three is a recent PolitiFact (PF) ruling on a statement made by perennial political candidate Christine O’Donnell, the loser in the Delaware senate race, in a debate with Chris Coons, concerning the increase in the unemployment rate in (one county in) Delaware from 2008 to 2010. I agreed with Bryan to the point that I made a comment at PolitiFact’s Facebook Page for this particular ruling, supporting his contention that PF did not thoroughly look at the unemployment statistics. The rate had indeed doubled from 2008 to 2010 as O’Donnell had claimed. It had doubled in the way Bryan had measured it , and in the way I thought it should be measured, which was slightly different than his, and totally different than PolitiFact’s, which was unwittingly (or wittingly? sayeth Bryan) too precise.

Sidebar: That piss on my leg...is NOT the rain

When I found Bryan White’s *secret* blog, I was quite surprised at its, well, let me use his words:

“…the ghastly formatting of her blog posts…the formatting was so atrocious that reading the blog was a chore…”

There was more than just the headline page, he had done three posts of criticism directed at my blog. Well, that’s of course his right in this internet blogging world. I managed to read through this one without going blind, responding to my Lil White Lies: No Way CRA.

Of course, it was more about why I label my posts criticizing his posts as “Lil White Lies.” Little white lies are often “polite” ways of twisting words.  If Bryan had a name during the Roman age, it would be Argumentum Maximus Ad Nauseum. He’s called me a crackpot and an occasional idiot in his secret blog; maybe I should add “Ad Hominem” onto his above Roman name.

Politi-Score: On grading PolitiFact

A Facebook email was received from Bryan White in which he told me that I should "get a clue" about Politi-Score; I was wasting my time because it was "useless."   Yeah, OK.  So here's graphical proof that those grades he grants in his PolitiFact critiques at Sublime Bloviations aren't exactly useful either:

Sidebar: Self-stultification with admirable aplomb?

Found this interesting website  except it's very difficult to read with white font on black background.

Note:   Yep, that Stats tab on Blogspot is nice.