Tchotchkes: Hitler Finds Out About Romney's Dog Seamus

Peasel Prattle: Practical Examples of Fallacious Reasoning

Here’s the six-step method of argument as promoted by Rich Peasel in commenting on one of my previous posts:

(1) Preview with poisoning the well.

(2) Start with a glaring self-contradicting, circular argument.

(3) Follow by a nice non-sequitor. Make a false, grandiose assertion spiced up with a little false dichotomy.

(4) Throw in another non-sequitor. Declare another “fact” which is not only irrelevant, but isn’t a fact.

(5) Red herring: Then distract by a rant.

(6) Conclude with a sweeping generalization which includes a complete mischaracterization of what the blogger originally said.

So, let us begin with Peasel’s poisoning of the well:

Karen, Karen, Kar-en! Give up for you can never win a argument against famous prattle Peasel – especially without evidence. Again no evidence that the VA, TRICAREVA, OR CHAMPVA is not bureaucratic – no evidence except the moron logic used daily on the ONBC (Obama National Broadcasting Corporation).

Yes, Peasel must have a monopoly on the truth, like all conservatives do. Fox News, Heritage and IBD would never lie, misrepresent or exaggerate. Besides that, anyone who doesn’t agree with him….is a liberal moron. Great way to start.

According to Karen’s logic, the bankrupt Post Office is not bureaucratic since mail carriers are the same whether working for the government or for UPS or FX.

Other than the fact that I never made this statement, it clearly does not follow—it’s a non-sequitor. A non sequitur is an argument where the conclusion is drawn from premises which aren't logically connected with it. Even reversing the negatives does not make this comprehensible: the Post Office IS bureaucratic because mail carriers are NOT the same as those who work for UPS or Fedex. Is Peasel making the claim that because mail carriers receive a pension they are therefore bureaucratic?

The reason the Post Office is bankrupt is because in 2006, the Republican congress gave it a "poison pill" and mandated that it must fully fund (75 years of!) its pension liability; if UPS or Fedex had been required to do this, they would have been forced into bankruptcy as well. Nevertheless, his statement makes no sense at all.

That’s interesting Peasel mentions the Post Office, because I thought he was in love with the constitution and the founding fathers:

The United States Postal Service (also known as USPS, the Post Office or U.S. Mail) is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution. The USPS traces its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress, where Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general.

The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters.

Peasel follows with false equivalency by virtue of Kaiser Health News: that difficulties in increasing government efficiency is evidence of bureaucracy.

According to Kaiser Health News, we have evidence that the VA is bureaucratic. “Congress also appropriates funds annually for the VA to provide health care services to eligible veterans. Since demand is often greater than available resources, veterans assigned to higher priorities are enrolled first with the possibility that those in lower priorities may not receive care. While funding levels for the VA have increased in each of the President’s budget requests, the proposals assumed that management efficiency initiatives that would save money without compromising access or quality. However, these savings have failed to materialize, resulting in a funding shortfall.”

The “evidence” actually tells a different story: Republicans blocked such efforts prior to Obama. When Bush was president, he stacked the VA with political cronies, such as former RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson, who, as VA Secretary, defended a budget measure that sought major cuts in staffing for health care and at the Board of Veterans Appeals, slashed funding for nursing home care and blocked four legislative measures aimed at streamlining the backlog of veterans' benefits claims.

Sidebar: I just *donut* believe this PF ruling!

As March approaches, I decided it might be time to start gathering PolitiFact (PF) rulings for the first quarter of 2012. And along with that, more refinements to the database to enable me to glean ever more stats. This year I decided to use the specific date of the fact-check—before, I had only input the month/year. I added gender and a second subject line, so that I could fine-tune the subject breakdown.

And since I am now adding the tag line of the fact-check, which I started in the last quarter of 2011, I’m now compelled to more closely examine the ruling itself. As I’ve gone along I’ve realized that there might be a need for a “Bad Fact-Check” series on my blog. By bad fact check, I don’t mean those that are disputed as permeated with the inherent bias of the reviewer, like recently by Rachel Maddow.

With the first 100 rulings recorded (between PolitiFacts National and Florida) I’ve noticed a few things for January: due to the Republican primaries, the vast majority of rulings have been the Republican candidates. In January, almost 85% of the fact-checks were Republicans, confined mostly to Romney, Santorum and Gingrich and their SuperPACs, which were 77% of the Republican fact-checks.

In addition, I noticed that PolitiFact New Hampshire appears to no longer be publishing rulings with the PF New Hampshire heading and topic categorization, and that Angie Drobnic-Holan has become one of the main writers for PolitiFact Florida, and no longer writes for PolitiFact National. Of course, the two PolitiFacts are inexorably connected, and that is more about the internal operations of PolitiFact as a business. For all I know, Bill Adair may have already published something about New Hampshire’s role.

Whoever selected this ruling needs to have their sugar levels checked.

But this post is more about a ruling I came across which I thought my conservative counterpart would find pretty…sweet for his blog. This was a statement by Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott in his State of the State address on January 10: that he had worked in a doughnut shop (called Nicola’s) earlier that day and that they had sold out of doughnuts, 240 dozen, by 8:30 a.m.. PolitiFact Florida determined that it was closer to 80 dozen, and so rated the claim Mostly False.

So here we have another statement from that “vast ocean” that PolitiFact can select from, and yet they choose this? Doughnut counts? Is this a joke?  I feel like I just got fried.

Shortly after Scott’s speech, Waatti spoke to David DeCamp of the Tampa Bay Times. She said the 240-dozen figure includes all of the doughnuts sold at both Nicola’s locations throughout the entire day Scott worked at the bakery. But she also reconfirmed that the shop Scott worked at sold about 80 dozen while he was there.

At PolitiFact Florida, we’re almost as serious about our doughnuts as we are our fact-checks. We rate Scott’s "240 dozen" claim Mostly False.

Now can somebody pass a maple glazed?

So Scott gets a Mostly False because he wasn’t exactly truthful about the number of doughnuts, using the number for all locations instead of just the location where he “worked”. The problem I have with this satire of a ruling is that it puts a big Mostly False on a Republican, for a fact check on something that’s like a doughnut in that it has a lot of calories (counts on the Truth-o-Meter) yet there’s no nutritional value.

It makes me not just want to glaze over, but pass a nutty one to PolitiFact. This one gets my first nomination for the Top Ten List of bad fact-checks by PolitiFact. I’m guessing there may be more, and hope they’re not all on Republicans, because this may end up inadvertently doing all those Politifact-bashers a favor.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: The Unadmitted Majority

NOTE:  About a week after this "Mostly True" ruling was published, PolitiFact revised it to Half True:  "After it appeared, we heard from many readers who argued that our rating of Mostly True was the wrong call....Upon further discussion, and bolstered by more reporting, we have decided to change this ruling to Half True."

The last time I ran with a PolitiFact ruling that Rachel Maddow had “graded” as perhaps conservatively biased for purposes of Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style, I caught a bit of flack. It had to do with the context of the statement and perhaps the implied intentions of the statement-maker (in that case, Obama). I thought I had better check such statements a bit more carefully in the future instead of trusting Maddow; however, we now have another Maddow fact-check of the fact checkers with a lot more to it than just the statement.

I often try to note when my conservative counterpart covers these, whether in one of his blogs or in Facebook commentary, because when the bias goes the other way he tends to ignore them. In this case, however, he was all over on this one, and it gave me a fine way to showcase his dishonesty, particularly in the area of “selection bias.”

Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio made the fact-checked statement in a speech he gave at the 2012 CPAC conference. He actually said it twice, that “this” is a movement of conservatives, or what I call the majority of Americans…” and then after a few words about “how he knew” because “liberals” never admit they’re liberals and instead using the term “progressives” he said “The majority of Americans are conservatives — they believe in things like the Constitution. I know that’s weird to some people…”

PolitiFact (PF) Florida obviously concentrated on the first statement. If they had concentrated on the re-affirmation, they would have had to deal with the caveat that it’s (only) conservatives who believe in things like the Constitution, which would make that statement blatantly false, or a lot less than Mostly True.

PolitiFact Florida used a twenty-year Gallup Poll to “support” Rubio’s claim:

For 2011, Gallup found that the largest group of Americans identify as conservative, at 40 percent. Another 35 percent identify as moderate, while 21 percent identify as liberal.

That means a plurality of Americans identify as conservative, not a majority. Then PF writer Angie Drobnic-Holan compares this to the Democrat/Republican/Independent labels, where an equal 40 percent plurality are self-indentified as Independent. Ultimately she finds that no matter how you shake it, no matter how charitable she is with the statistics, the majority is not conservative. But because conservatives and those who “lean Republican” are higher than everyone else, this justifies a ruling of Mostly True.

My conservative counterpart does his usual routine of reading into the statement and authoritatively reaching his own conclusions:

So, was Rubio correct that the majority of Americans are conservative? That depends on his argument. Rubio didn't cite surveys about self-identification. He used a method concerned with attitudes toward the respective labels. One can argue with the method or the application of the method, but using an inappropriate benchmark doesn't cut it.

Just because Rubio “used a method concerned with attitudes” doesn’t mean he was correct. In fact, Rubio’s explanation that liberals never admit they’re liberals doesn’t cut it either. If a person won’t admit they are liberal, they are still NOT conservative. There is no way to measure whether the majority of Americans are conservative by basically backing it with an anecdotal observation that liberals won’t admit they’re liberal—some other method must be employed. Bryan White uses this “attitudes” measure as a way to excuse Rubio’s point and find fault with PolitiFact’s efforts to determine whether the majority of Americans are conservative.

As usual, this provides a way for Bryan White to assert his superiority to those who disagree with him, a calculated way to set up an argument from authority:

Maddow is supposed to be ultra smart. So how come she can't figure out that Rubio's statement isn't properly measured against self-identification numbers?

(Translated: Bryan White is even more than ultra smart?). We never find out what the proper measurement is, because there is no quantifying method when “attitudes” is used.  There is no way to verify such "context." The most accurate and reasonable would be self-identification polls. Again, Rubio made the statement twice, the second time, without the “how come” that Bryan latched onto. In other words, Bryan’s complaint is sheer over-reach along with a bit of equivocation.

In the Facebook PolitiFact page comments, a poster by the name of Brian Varley made the best case as to Rubio’s statement being far less than Mostly True, by many, many different measures, in this case, widespread support for public programs and social issues which conservatives are by policy against:

Fox News Distortion of Birth Control Exemption

(To Rich Peasel:  I not only have to explain by practically drawing you a picture, but now you get a youtube video!)

Truth Index: PolitiFact's Male Selection Bias?

Eric Levine’s blog Content in Reality gave me another variable to measure my database of PolitiFact rulings, which should have been obvious, although I had not really given it a thought before. Maybe it was because of my bleeding heart liberal need to be politically correct. Well heck with that.

He graciously responded to some comments I gave him on his blog concerning the availability of my database, with the pertinent portion for this post:

I will suggest one really important point I made on a previous post about the question over Politifact's ratings meaning republicans lie more or if there is selection bias:

"First off, notice that Politifact has never had an overall Dem vs GOP report card. Ostermeier was the one who did this. So this means that certain conclusions one may be tempted to draw from Ostermeier's study are not ones people may necessarily draw from Politifact itself. This is because all Ostermeier did was total up all statements made by Democrats and Republicans, and compared them. Of course he could have easily done the same with any arbitrary breakdown of statements: Men versus women, majorities versus minorities, southerners versus northerners, etc... If we found similar disparities in the data to the Dem vs GOP data, would we be accusing them of covering "political discourse with a frame that suggests this is the case?”...

I never assigned a variable key for men versus women, etc., because I thought it was not appropriate. But I realized in reading all of Levine’s enlightened writing along with his commentary responding to my conservative counterpart’s “trolling” that it would not be too difficult a matter to assign the male versus female variable to my data: the only time-consuming task would be to make sure gender-neutral names (like Pat, Chris or Alex) are assigned correctly. I didn’t check every every last one, but I know I’m very close. So here it is: of 3,989 rulings through the end of 2011 for individuals, 642 or 16% (1/6) of the rulings were on females. The Truth-o-Meter app breaks down like this:

Click to enlarge:  The Truth-o-Meter male to female looks close to identical except for the Pants on Fire.

At first glance, it looks like on a percentage basis the Truth Index categories are all quite close. But if you read across from True to Pants on Fire, the female percentages are very slightly lower going all the way to Pants on Fire—where it’s about 3 points higher than the males. On a percentage basis, the female Pants on Fire Percentage is almost 50% (45% to be exact) higher than the males (9.3% versus 6.4%).

But what about the Truth Index—in terms of Republican males and females and Democrat males and females, and those of neither party? Here’s how that looks:

Click to enlarge:  Boys are blue and girls are pink:  Pretty close except for Republican girls.

The indexes across the board fell within a fairly close range with the exception of the Republican females who had the worst Truth Index approaching a “Mostly False” negative 50. And when one thinks of PF Pants on Fire and Republican women, the one outlying outliar who immediately comes to mind is “PolitiFact came out and said everything I said was true” Michele Bachmann.

So, just for sh*ts and giggles, if you back out Bachmann’s rulings, you improve the Republican female average to a negative 39.47. That’s only five points but look at it this way. The percentage of Pants on Fire rulings for Females in total drops from 9.3% to 8.1%, dropping the percentage difference between Pants on Fire for Males to about 27% higher instead of the overall 45% higher. In other words, a lot of bad rulings on one person can have a very large affect on the rulings as a group.

Conclusions? In the same way that my conservative counterpart strains to prove that PolitiFact selects statements with a liberal bias, can it be said from this that they select them with a male bias as well? Indeed, this can almost be seen as a good example of how difficult any bias would be to prove if it indeed existed, as well as the conspiratorial, absurd nature of the “liberal” selection bias claim. To put it in Levine’s words, with this “arbitrary breakdown” I have done, should PolitiFact be “accused of covering political discourse with a frame that suggests” gender bias? I think not.

Tchotchkes: Libertarian Ice Fishing



Another great cartoon from Bartcop.Com



Sidebar: Fear of Fact-Checking

Recently I got into a huff with my conservative counterpart on PolitiFact’s Facebook page. I was so frustrated, I ended up blocking him and deleting my comments in the thread because I felt it was useless to have any discussions at all given his reaction.

Under the Facebook heading of a link to an article about PolitiFact (PF) by Nate Silver at his New York Times Blog Five Thirty-Eight, I told Bryan White that in 2011 PolitiFact’s Truth Index for Republicans was more “truthier” in the context of local rulings, as well as advocacy groups and PACs. Although I thought I might get some partisan reaction of (in so many words) “of course, Republicans are more truthful, why are you telling me, you idiot!” or “This proves their inherent liberal bias (you idiot!)”…instead his response was, as I recall, a summary dismissal that “it didn’t follow (you idiot!)”.

I now realize I’m getting an answer from him in this Jeff Dyberg post at PolitiFact Bias. The fact is he didn’t want to hear this conclusion. He wants to portray Republicans as the victim of PolitiFact’s bias. He wants others to believe the Truth Index is “shtick” and “junk.” And therefore all those stats must be irrelevant and bad, whether favoring the Republicans or not; in fact, he doesn’t want to hear that in certain circumstances they favor the Republicans because it goes against what he’s trying to do: if the Truth Index at a local level says Republicans are truthier, then it belies the notion that “PolitiFact's ratings provides far more information about the ideological bias of PolitiFact's editors.” But that ideological bias must be to the left, or his “findings” go out the window.

Furthermore, because I’ve done a lot of data manipulation (along with others like Steve at Quibbling Potatoes) of the PF Truth-o-Meter stats, it would make sense to trash me. I’ve noticed when he comes across the same data manipulation of others, he notes it in his blog; although I’ve done probably the most extensive analysis of the Truth-o-Meter database, I get ignored (with an occasional peak every now and then exposed at my Stat Counter account—unless of course he has a proxy server). I guess he doesn’t like my criticisms of his Grading PolitiFact series (which he also trashes in a separate blog).

As I recall, he kept asking for a conclusion based on the data and would neither recognize nor accept the conclusions I had given him. So I tried to soft pedal it, saying these conclusions can only be taken with a grain of salt, at which point he accused of me of flip flopping. Well, damned if I do and damned if I don’t—so the hell with him. It was clearly a waste of time.

Yes, there probably is a certain amount of selection bias, to which I say SO WHAT. As I've heard before, if a politician says “The sky is blue” (and it could be Mitt Romney or Barack Obama) PolitiFact doesn’t check it out. That’s because the bias is not to check out statements that are obviously true, or would be impossible to verify, or that are simply insignificant. Neither Bryan nor Jeff has ever satisfactorily answered why other fact-checkers, the great majority of the time, select many of the same statements and reach the same conclusions. In other words, their entire argument relies on this selection bias claim. To me it’s like a person who has a fear of flying; it’s like PF is the jet, but PF Bias wants you to use their car because they have evidence of a few plane crashes. Even though statistically speaking you have more chance of getting in a car crash than a plane crash.

Bryan and Jeff complain that there’s a “vast ocean” of rulings aside from what PF has selected. But among close to 5,000 PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter rulings, they repeat the few anecdotal exceptions they’ve “uncovered” thus far… so why don’t they have anything new, or a larger series? Jeff repeats these ten or so examples: that’s two tenths of one percent of everything PF has subjected to the Truth-o-Meter during its existence. Does that make PF misleading? Bryan White has done somewhere around 200 or so “Grading PolitiFacts” tainted by his own bias, which he has admitted are weak as far as evidence: does that make PF misleading/biased?

Early in 2011 Bryan White claimed he would be publishing some important research on PolitiFact’s bias, and he made that claim again this year. If you go to the link on his PolitiFact Bias page called “Research” you get a “Coming Soon” with nothing else. At another hard-on-my-eyes but having lots of great stuff about the PolitiFact Bias blog called “Content In Reality” Bryan White commented on January 16:

…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

Okay, I’m still waiting!

Let’s take a look at recommendations for avoiding sampling bias for researchers and see how it can be applied to PolitiFact's rulings:

Lil White Lies: Out of Africa

In a movie that’s now 40 years old, one of Woody Allen’s first efforts, called “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” Gene Wilder plays a man in love with a sheep. In one scene he is lying in bed with the sheep smoking the obligatory sexual after glow cigarette. At that time, it was believed that syphilis the disease came from shepherds having sex with sheep. It’s possible that the story that AIDS came from human sex with monkeys was merely a conflation with the sheep story.

Hot Monkey Love wouldn't be like this.

The sheep story may have a glint of truth in real life. On the other hand, monkeys are not as passive as sheep. Monkeys, chimps, siminians are known to be pretty aggressively vicious, so the story about sex with them is a very difficult one to comprehend. And since it wasn’t all the monkeys that had been infected with SIV (their version of HIV), only a small number, if indeed there was human-monkey sex, it makes the odds extremely high that the monkey the person happened to pick was infected with it.

The way some of my Christian evangelist friends often explain the homosexual marriage issue to me is through the slippery slope of how it will lead to bestiality: and of course, there’s God’s message that the “punishment” for homosexuality is the curse of a deadly disease.

Then we have what Rick Santorum said in 2003, equating homosexuality with “man on dog” acts rising to the level of sodomy, and so offending some of those in the gay community that now you can’t google Santorum without an embarrassing search result.

This recent PolitiFact Tennessee ruling on Tennessee Republican Stacey Campfield reflects the conservative evangelical view of God’s punishment of bestiality and its relationship to homosexuals in its finding of Pants on Fire for his statement that “AIDS was transmitted to humans because ‘one guy’ had sex with ‘a monkey’ and then started ‘having sex with men.’”

My conservative counterpart has a number of problems with this ruling in his Grading PolitiFact piece, mainly “ because journalists often display a difficulty in reporting science and because of a widespread journalistic sympathy toward social liberalism.” That social liberalism being tolerance of gays and the efforts to make gay marriage legal, or as Bryan came right out and said with an implicit homophobic feel: “the harm of homosexual practices…the spread of AIDS.”

According to him, “Campfield was not attempting to make any point associated with his proposed legislation…” But the interview in which he made the statement was about a “Don’t Say Gay” bill he was sponsoring which critics claimed “could open the door to anti-gay bullying.” As part of his agenda in promoting this legislation, there could only be one reason Campfield was making these claims: to further spread fears about the “harms of homosexual practices.”

Then Campfield back-pedaled in his blog, saying this theory had not been neither proven or disproven. The problem with this is that no one—at least no reputable source, that I can find-- presents this as a theory of the origin of AIDS, for example, the CDC, or Wikipedia, or even Conservapedia (which, like Bryan, seems to be more concerned with it being spread by homosexuals). Wiki-Answers claims it is an urban myth. Snopes refutes an entirely different myth about the origins of AIDS:  that it was started by the CIA.   So if it was a theory, it is no longer used. Of course, Bryan White conveniently never looks into or just ignores this detail.

Sidebar: O'Reilly and Malkin Lie about Gitmo Lawyers

The Evolution of the Right-Wing Smear Machine

Truth Index: 2011 Fact-oids and Fact-ettes

Hot Topics. The health care topic, as noted earlier this year, continued as one of the most covered as well as getting the worst PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index ratings. The Republican average was worse than that of Democrats, with labor/union rulings for both parties being the next two in a virtual tie.  The largest "spread" between averages was Republicans on the economy at -21 to Democrats at +27, a 48 point variance.  The top ten topics shown here broken down between Republicans and Democrats totaled about 55% of all 2011 rulings.

Perry beats Obama by two. While we’ll never see that headline, Texas Governor Rick Perry was Number One in 2011 for PolitiFact fact-checks, perhaps owing to the work of PolitiFact Texas. While Obama is the Number One fact-checked person of all time on PolitiFact, in 2011 he received 59, while Perry received 61.

Pundits. Liberal Rachel Maddow was the most fact-checked of the pundits in 2011, beating out second place Bill O’Reilly by two fact-checks. Her Truth Index was -21.43 (three Mostly True, two Mostly False and two False), while O’Reilly was across the Truth-o-Meter with one each of every rating except for Pants on Fire, translating to a precise zero on the Truth Index.

Liberal columnist Paul Krugman, who some conservatives call a “partisan hack,” had eight fact-checks with an outstanding Truth Index of 81.25 for 2011. If he’s a “pundit” (I’m not sure) then he was actually the most fact-checked (over Maddow).

Ex-Presidents. Previously I’ve reviewed the Truth Index of the remaining Presidential contenders (including some of those who eventually dropped out). Their combined Truth Index for 2011 was -31.11, as compared to the 2011 overall of -14.38. If you took all the presidential contenders’ ratings out (not including Obama) it would improve to -11.74. That’s an almost 22 percent improvement.

Governors' Ball. The Truth Index for governors as a group was -14.23 which is almost equal to the all-time overall of -13.32. Of the 485 rulings, Republicans dominated with 460 (almost 95%) of them and a Truth Index of -16.09, while Democrats got the remaining 25, with a Truth Index of 20.  It should be noted that this is said with the caveat that I may possibly have missed one or two when I filtered them because I am not familiar with every governor in every state, and that I did not include those running for governor who lost, for example, Alex Sink in Florida, even though she had a lot of rulings.  Beginning in 2012 I am considering recording the person's official position in my database for another filter key. 

Cha-cha-chains...chains of Fibs. There were 106 chain e-mails through the end of 2011 with an overall Truth Index of -103.3. Those e-mails of unknown or non-partisan origin, comprising 50 of them, had a Liar, Liar Pants on Fire Truth Index average of -114.00.

Blogs, Dogs and Groundhogs. There were 23 “bloggers” subjected to the Truth Index and they did worse as a group than the chain e-mails, with an overall Truth Index of -110.87. And those of unknown or non-partisan origin scored the very lowest, nine rulings with an average of -133.33.

But the “animals” rated by PolitiFact over its history, Spike the Romney Attack Dog and General Beauregard Lee (who should be presenting himself soon) both scored a Mostly True for a 50 Truth Index.  At least they'll tell you the truth.