Sidebar: Something out of Nutting

“In a sluggish economy, never, ever f**k with another man’s livelihood.”
--Guido the Pimp to Joel Goodson (Tom Cruise) in "Risky Business"

PolitiFact Bias’ Bryan White had a Facebook comment "put-down-fest" on a PolitiFact ruling related to a recent article (by Rex Nutting of MarketWatch) which has set liberal circles abuzz while enraging the right with numerous re-checks of federal spending numbers concluding that “Obama’s spending binge never happened.” And it looks like there’s a potential conflict in rulings between the Washington Post’s Fact Checker and PolitiFact. He declared on a cross-post with his other anti-PolitiFact blog:

Criticisms of Nutting make clear that the accounting of bailout loans substantially skews the numbers in Obama's favor. Using the AP's estimates of 9.7 percent for 2009 (substantially attributable to Obama) and 7.8 percent in 2010, Obama's record while working with a cooperative Democrat-controlled Congress looks like it would challenge the high spending of any of his recent predecessors. The leader from the Facebook graphic, President Reagan, tops out at 8.7 percent without any adjustment for inflation. PolitiFact's fact check was utterly superficial and did not properly address the issue…

There is a silver lining. The Obama administration has so aggressively seized on this issue that PolitiFact will certainly feel pressure to fact check different permutations of Nutting's claims.

I can't wait to see the contortions as PolitiFact tries to reconcile this rating with subsequent attempts.

PolitiFact’s finding of Mostly True was to a Facebook post that “Mitt Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has 'accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history' ” while WaPo’s Glenn Kessler looked into Nutting’s piece as referred to by WhiteHouse spokesperson Jay Carney (and his statement that journalists not checking items like this out are “ slothful and lazy”). While I don’t see much difference between the two, it could be claimed (as PolitiFact did) they were only checking the correctness of Nutting’s figures, while Kessler was examining the methodology itself, along with his disclaimer that “numbers can be easily manipulated.” Which indeed they can, as others came out with their own manipulations, which put Obama all over the place.

Writer White is obviously trying to place the emphasis on Obama spending and portray it in the worst possible light, because it’s an excellent (as he would put it) “red herring.” He’s well aware that it distracts from the real issue of the deficits.

I have to admit that the Washington Post article made some good points: Obama certainly looks like he spent more, although it’s leveled off beyond the Stimulus and as the TARP accounting winded down. Instead of an up-the-down mountain, it looks more like a plateau—expenditures took a steep turn up when the economy crashed in 2008-9 and then flattened, but stayed right up there, never coming down.

But my concern is the BIG PICTURE: is there something only Obama did that caused the rise in spending? Or, to be “charitable” to George Bush, and to quote a National Review article of a similar theme: What changed about Bush policies that made them so much more expensive once Barack Obama took office? Republicans could say that, until they won the congressional majority in 2010, that it’s a Democrat spending binge; but it appears the plateau is continuing into 2011. Even their mid-2011 demands about the debt ceiling did very little to stop it.

We know it’s not “Obamacare” because it hasn’t really kicked in yet. A look at spending charts from that bastion of conservatism Heritage.Org provide some interesting information. It has this basic chart and another great list below it under the title “where has all the money been going?” (It actually has A LOT of good charts as one scrolls down the page.)

Obama adm. between vertical lines:  net interest, anti-poverty and SS/Medicare increased.

Tchotchkes: Rove Me Tender

Truth Index: Local Update

In the last quarter of 2011, in my quest to find unique statistical trends from the data mining I had done of PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter rulings, I had assigned a field called “Local” to each of the PolitiFact rulings. As I described at the time:

What is termed “local” deals with the nature of the PolitiFact (PF) ruling. Most often it would show in the title or subtitle. It means it just relates to something having to do with the state or locality, that it’s not national. It could be ideological, but it still pertains to a local issue. None of these rulings were from PolitiFact National. Intuitively they wouldn’t, but state PolitiFact rulings can be done for an office holder of that (PolitiFact) state, while the subject of the fact-check is of national scope. In other words, without reviewing each ruling, the state rulings can't all be counted as local…

…Republicans are more truthful than Democrats….by a pretty good margin. Republicans were at a precise “zero” on the Truth Index, while the Democrats were a negative 27. There were 173 “local” rulings which represented 38% of all the PF rulings in the fourth quarter of 2011; Democrats and Republicans were also equally represented, each having 74 rulings. There were 25 rulings for which the affiliation was independent, non-partisan or just unknown.

That quarter I had 174 rulings of a local nature, and I got a somewhat surprising result in the Truth Index by party: the Republicans, as noted in the quote above from my post, were ahead, way ahead of the Democrats on the Truth Index (as compared to the Democrats normally being higher, as I have shown when you look at all rulings accumulated). I wondered whether it just an anomaly for the quarter. Although I was excited at this seeming incongruence, and confounded to determine an explanation, I still needed more data in order to confirm that this trend continued.

Click to enlarge:  The Republicans local "Pants on Fire" quintupled from 2011 to 2012, lowering their overall Truth Index.

So I now have six months of data to look at, almost 400 rulings (more than twice what I had the first time) and it seems my initial findings may have been premature….or maybe the Truth Index is functioning the way it should. In the first quarter of 2012, the Democrats have reversed the trend from the last quarter of 2011, and the Republicans reversed as well. The Democrats went from a negative 27 in the 2011 fourth quarter to a positive 11 in the 2012 first quarter for an overall average of negative 5.6. The Republicans went from an exact zero to a negative 12 for an overall average of negative 6.8. In other words, the Democrats and Republicans are statistically tied for the Truth Index average at around a negative 7 based on six months of Truth-o-Meter rulings. Compare this to a negative 13 for all rulings (well, the first 5,000) or a negative 9 for individuals.

But this also serves to prove in a sense that PolitiFact isn’t doing anything deliberately—the Truth-o-Meter goes up and it goes down, and it has nothing to do with “selecting” those statements which would benefit either side.

One of the reasons the Republicans “took a fall” this quarter was that there was a steep increase for them in Pants on Fire rulings, from two in the last quarter of 2011, to ten thus far in 2012. The pantalones en fuego ranged from such things as a statement by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie that “23 percent of kids starting ninth grade in Newark will graduate in four years” to PolitiFact Tennesee’s ruling on state representative Frank Niceley on his claim regarding the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency bringing coyotes into the state "to try to keep the deer population down." They were spread out over almost every PolitiFact state and didn’t all occur at any particular time during the quarter.

But this does show, so far, that overall, politicians appear to be a bit more truthful at a local level. I will continue to keep the “local” factor in the rulings and monitor them to get a better picture.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Hokey 'bout the Pokey

This PolitiFact (Georgia) ruling brings to mind all the stories I’ve heard about North Korea: how there are no birds (because they’ve all been captured and eaten) and how the South Koreans “look down” on the North Koreans, not just figuratively, but literally, due to poor nutrition:

If you look at older Koreans, we now see a situation where the average South Korean woman is approaching the height of the average North Korean man.

This is to my knowledge a unique situation, where women become taller than men.

PolitiFact Georgia rated this statement by Hank Johnson about the United States being Number One in locking up people as “Half True” because Cuba and North Korea “may jail more.” Cuba…North Korea? How many there are political prisoners? Is it appropriate or fair to include these outlying nations who criminalize dissent, and where the actual rate is undocumented? The context of Johnson’s speech referred to the United States as the greatest country in the world—i.e., it's because we are a FREE country—shouldn’t we be compared to other other FREE countries in terms of incarceration (as contradictory as that sounds)?

For example, there are people in North Korea that are imprisoned for reasons they never would be in the United States:  

In North Korea, entire families are jailed in large political prison camps if one family member is suspected of anti-government sentiments

And in America’s Caribbean neighbor Cuba you can be imprisoned for being a journalist and connecting to the internet, which means the whole PolitiFact Havana crew would be in jail ("lol") among other things:

The Cuban government has been accused of numerous human rights abuses including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials, and extrajudicial executions (also known as "El Paredón").[94][95] The Human Rights Watch alleges the government "represses nearly all forms of political dissent" and that "Cubans are systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law".[96]

Cuba had the second-highest number of imprisoned journalists of any nation in 2008 (the People's Republic of China had the highest) according to various sources, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an international NGO, and Human Rights Watch.[97][98] As a result of ownership restrictions, computer ownership rates are among the world's lowest.[99] The right to use the Internet is granted only to selected locations and they may be monitored.[99][100] Connecting to the Internet illegally can lead to a five-year prison sentence.[citation needed]

Let’s say we could estimate what kind of rates Cuba and North Korea would have if they did not criminalize dissent, who could we compare them to? If North Korea was a democracy it would probably have incarceration rates similar to South Korea. South Korea’s rate of incarceration is Number 151 out of 218 countries, at 94 prisoners per 100,000 population (compared to 730 per 100,000 in the United States). Cuba could be considered the “Caribbean.” Almost half of the countries in the top twenty in the world for incarceration rates are Caribbean, the top country being Caribbean islands St. Kitts and Nevis which rank just below the United States at 649, going all the way down to Haiti at 55. Puerto Rico might be the fairest comparison to Cuba because of its size, and it is Number 35 at 303 per 100,000. It appears from the rates, however, in terms of the Caribbean nations, that they sort of follow the United States as far as incarceration….which would mean that Cuba would probably have a rate similar to the United States or other Caribbean countries. It would be high, but not as high as it is with the criminalization of dissent.

In general discussions of incarceration, the countries of North Korea and Cuba are not included since their rates cannot be documented (and they are not democracies).  In a May 23 prison expose on the costs of the California  system and alternatives to incarceration by Jennifer Granholm on her Current TV political talk show “The War Room” she began with the same statistic as Johnson about the United States being Numero Uno in rate of “lock up.”

So, I could contest this with insisting on a knee-jerk Rachel Maddow “True” , but it would seem to me that on balance, Mostly True was more in line considering North Korea and Cuba. Hank Johnson did not say “documented” but it’s reasonable to assume he was going by that type of measure for incarceration rates. His statement was accurate but needed additional clarification or information.

 

Grading WaPo Liberal Style: 3+3, Six or Half Dozen

In an initial review of the blog counterirritant it was found that it doesn’t just review PolitiFact rulings, it looks at other fact-checkers. It recently did a review that’s sort of cut short on Glenn Kessler’s Washington Post FactChecker, of Mitt Romney’s statement that a normal economic recovery consists of about 500,000 jobs created per month (i.e., Romney really thinks people will believe that’s what he can do?)

Click to enlarge:  Crucial descriptors ignored by counterirritant (and PF Bias) circled.

Kessler looked at employment stats in the course of Romney’s lifetime, so counterirritant’s first complaint is this is not a “logical” period of measure.  Kessler was most likely using this period in terms of Romney's experience.  Maybe Kessler should have said “post World War 2” when the United States achieved its greatest manufacturing boom--and a period where those types of job creation numbers may most likely be if they were anywhere in the course of America's economic history.  In other words, using this period would be the most advantageous to Romney.

He (or she) then disputed Kessler’s “methodology” of counting every time in Romney’s lifetime the monthly number was near or exceeded 500,000, even counting those numbers as much as 10 percent below it (another very "charitable" accommodation). Since it very rarely exceeded this number, it proved that Romney was greatly exaggerating.

Counterirritant’s methodology consists of determining the median in monthly job creation numbers, that is, the number at which half the monthly job creation numbers are above, and half the numbers are below, for Romney’s lifetime, which he determined to be 146,000 per month. He then quotes liberal economist Paul Krugman who says this number (or even 200,000) is not adequate. But that’s where he stops. In other words, according to counterirritant, since 500,000 is a lot more than 146,000, Romney must be correct, unless there's something I'm misunderstanding.

But counterirritant never says anything about what a normal “recovery” number should be, since that was what Romney was talking about—a recovery. For example, if it was 325,000, then 500,000 is a gross exaggeration. We know it’s likely to be a number like 325,000 or 350,000 just because of the few times it’s approached 500,000.

Another method would be to look at the average for all recovery periods (beyond the period Kessler looked at) and then compare Romney’s 500,000 to that. You could just as well look at the median for all recovery periods, but in counterirritant’s case, this would make Romney probably look more like the liar because those might be lower than the average (so we have another "charitable interpretation" from Kessler).

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Boomers Going Bust

 

PolitiFact Florida gets kind of close , but doesn’t close the deal, in justifying its overly-generous Mostly True ruling on a statement by Governor Rick Scott who thinks that fewer people collecting unemployment is a good thing: 

Scott said Florida’s economy is getting better in a lot of ways.

"We’re doing well. We’re at a three-year low on our unemployment in this state... We generated around 100,000 net jobs so far, if you look at the federal numbers," he said in the April 18, 2012, interview with Orlando-based station WDBO. "But if you look at the state numbers, about 230,000 people that were on unemployment when I took office are not on unemployment now.

The “boomer years” started in 1946, which means that the first boomers turned 62 in 2008, when they qualified for receiving reduced Social Security. Now they are turning 66, which is the age at which they receive the full amount (and of course, also have become eligible for Medicare). According to CBS News, a “ full 70 percent of recipients sign up for Social Security between age 62 and the normal full retirement age, which is between 65 and 67, depending on the year you were born.”

So, assuming 70% of boomers signed up, what we have is a lot of people dropping out of the workforce permanently, or those who have done so not of their own preference (there was no work and they ran out of unemployment benefits). I believe this phenomenon is what is making the unemployment rate drop even though so few jobs are being created, not enough jobs to keep pace with population growth. Sorry, Obama, but he (and Scott) know that's true.

In Florida this translates to about 79,000 retirement-age people (by my own calculation, based on population) who could have dropped out of the workforce in the last year, assuming half those eligible to retire at 62 continued working.

PolitiFact Florida adds “about 15,000 Floridians age 16 and up dropped out of the labor pool last month.” This certainly begs the question: how many dropped out the month before that, or for the year? If an annual number was provided, it might include the 79,000 estimate above.  I can't seem to find such month-to-month numbers on line, so it makes this 230,000 all the more elusively difficult to verify.

Coupled with the denial of “131,115 applicants for failing to comply with the new law” it seems to me Rick Scott has nothing to brag about, and in view of the many caveats to his 230,000 number, it’s more of a “partially accurate but leaves out important details.” The reason 230,000 people are not on unemployment is because the majority gave up, were rejected by Florida’s new unemployment system, or those who were eligible started collecting social security.  It had little to do with any “turn-around.” More like a Half True.

PolitiFact Detractors: Irritable Fact-Checker Syndrome

This past year I’ve kind of laid off looking for PolitiFact Detractors—most of the time, I find short pieces which don’t amount to much (although here’s one I found recently that’s pretty good). PolitiFact Bias is often a source for me, because its authors are more focused on the greater amount of criticism directed at PolitiFact for being liberally biased.

A new wordpress blog published “anonymously” called counterirritant (lower case) does some “conservative” reviews of PolitiFact rulings from what appears to be the same venue as PolitiFact Bias; however, it’s the kind of criticism that should attract more readers because unlike PolitiFact Bias/Sublime Bloviations' often incoherent rhetorical excesses, counterirritant is more like a PolitiFact Bias for Dummies. At least so far, it hasn’t used questionable, self-aggrandizing logic. It just uses the facts as it sees them, with a simple and easy to read presentation, although one might not necessarily agree the facts are being used correctly. It’s only done three reviews of PolitiFact (it also reviews other fact-checkers).

"PolitiFact backing Smiley" as counterirritant claims doesn't go with the Half True ruling he received.

However, thus far they don’t seem to bridge the gap in refuting PolitiFact’s ruling(s): for example, in his post called “Poverty Makes Men Ridiculous”--about a PolitiFact ruling on PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley who stated "one out of two Americans … are living either in or near poverty"-- he said that “PolitiFact backed Smiley’s use of the SPM number in the equation used for the traditional poverty threshold.”

Well, not quite: they made it very clear that they thought the number was slightly misleading:

So Smiley has support for his number from Census Bureau statistics. However, in the context of a fast-paced television interview, some nuance got lost.

The statistic has not been received neutrally, said Douglas Besharov, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland who specializes in children and poverty. He said that "liberals like" the SPM while "conservatives dislike" it.

Given the nature of the statistic as new and unofficial, economists we interviewed agreed that it would have been more appropriate if Smiley had specified that he was using an alternative measure. Otherwise, viewers would think he’s talking about official poverty statistics.

Basically “counterirritant” is showing its “conservative dislike.” If PolitiFact in fact supported this Census Bureau Statistic, it would have awarded Smiley a True or Mostly True. Half True indicates that they are not supporting it precisely in the context that counterirritant is complaining. Half True is a sort of “this is a bit misleading but we can’t make a determination” ruling. To say it was Mostly False or False would probably put this one in my Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style series, because what Smiley said has more than an element of truth: it is more like “partially true but leaves out important details.”

The suggestion from counterirritant that PolitiFact wasn’t checking all its sources is a bit absurd. It almost looks like counterirritant never looked at PolitiFact’s list of sources. It’s apparent that those writers Lou Jacobson communicated with in e-mail interviews (Michael Wiseman, Arlec Sherman, Andrew Biggs and Douglas Beharov) alerted him to the same thing that counterirritant is talking about, since it’s alluded to in the ruling.

Facts Lost in Chamber of Commerce's Attack Ads

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.

U.S. National Debt: The Who, What, When and How

Via an easy-to-understand graph from one of my favorite websites, Bartcop.com

Lil White Lies: Grating PolitiFact Green Cheese

Well, I knew I was overdue to be in agreement with one of my conservative counterpart’s Grading PolitiFact reviews, and for a moment I thought I was, in reading his review of this PolitiFact ruling on statement by Obama on Paul Ryan’s Budget.  On the face of it, it looked like Grading PolitiFact made a good point.  But as is most often the case, as I dug into the details, I realized that I just couldn’t comfortably see eye to eye with that “F” being awarded for “bad journalism” along with those “protesteth-too-much” exclamations of a PolitiFact ruling that’s “horrifying” and “a train wreck.” It always seems to turn out its readers are expected to make some logic/reality jumps that are just too far reaching.

Grading PolitiFact’s contention is that ruling writer Angie Drobnic Holan totally ignored Paul Ryan’s “specifics” he noted in a later interview about the loopholes he intended to close in his so-called Budget plan, making Obama’s statement that the “Republicans in Congress never list(ing) one” less than the True it was awarded. Writer Holan admits as much, publishing exactly what Ryan said in her ruling write-up. So the question becomes why she “skipped over” this, from a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace.

The problem is that it not only wasn’t enough, when it comes right down to it, Ryan’s budget is pure fantasy, and Grading PolitiFact wants you to accept the fantasy as reality.

This was like Newt Gingrich’s “Moon colony” fantasies. Imagine this scenario (green background added for "effect"):

Newt Gingrich makes a statement that “My plan for this lunar colony is to mine its green cheese and haul it back to earth.”

Obama, trying to remain polite, tells an audience that Newt has not said how he would specifically pay for any lunar colony .

In the mean time, Fox News asks Newt about how he planned to pay for the colony, and Newt says the green cheese could be mined and marketed by private industry.

PolitiFact says Obama’s statement is True, that Newt did not say how he would pay for it, since the “mined and marketed by private industry” statement was so vague.

But PolitiFact could just as well say Obama’s statement is True because THE MOON IS NOT MADE OF GREEN CHEESE. PolitiFact likely avoided that as too many Republican pundits would yell “bias” because they really believe the Moon is made of green cheese.

But Grading PolitiFact says because Newt told Fox News the non-existent green cheese could be mined and marketed privately, that means Newt did specifically say what could be done, therefore Obama’s statement should not have been rated true.

On the basis of Ryan’s agreeing with interviewer Chris Wallace on loopholes which may be closed for high income earners, according to writer Bryan White, it makes the “literal claim” of Obama’s less than True. Now, this in and of itself doesn’t “broaden the tax base” and certainly won’t make up the $4.6 trillion that White claims means “isn’t spending $4.6 trillion on lower tax breaks.” In other words, at what income level is the loophole to be closed? Does Ryan specify that? With such a lack of specifics, the so-called loopholes can’t relevantly be calculated into that $4.6 trillion.

And when White says Obama is engaging in double-speak, he then follows with his dose of what I’ve called “the thief shouting robber.”

If the budget pays for the $4.6 trillion by increasing taxes by closing loopholes and eliminating deductions then it isn't "spending" $4.6 trillion on lower tax rates. There are honest and forthright ways to express skepticism that the Ryan proposal remains neutral on income tax revenue. Obama did not use one of them.

But it isn’t honest and forthright on the part of Ryan because closing ALL the loopholes aren’t enough to pay for the $4.6 trillion. The debt still increases, the deficits are still there (see chart below by clicking "read more").  Ryan’s budget proposal is an exercise in futility (i.e., the moon is made of green cheese). And I don’t know how else Obama could be more honest and forthright in expressing skepticism on Ryan’s proposal of  “tax revenue neutrality.” Maybe it’s just his political correctness in not just coming out and saying Ryan’s budget is a sham.

Eric Alterman explains it quite nicely, putting the onus squarely on “conservative pundits” like writer White:  (emphasis added)

Sidebar: Night of the Living Fact-Check

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC brought PolitiFact up again in her weekday show (I think she termed PolitiFact as a “zombie that won’t go away” since she previously had declared them “dead”; hence the title of this post) recently because of a fact-check on the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) which basically distorted the “fine print” of a Whitehouse visitor policy. And yes, they distorted it in a ridiculous way. But it doesn't appear to qualify for a Pants on Fire, or even a False.

It contains an “element of truth”: the Whitehouse does recognize babies before they are born in order to “count” babies after they are born, for the purpose of pre-registration for White House visits.

For me, what it was exactly that the NRLC was trying to make a point about was mystifying. So what if the Whitehouse “recognizes” unborn babies, how does that make its stance on abortion rights hypocritical? Are they not supposed to recognize an unborn child because it’s a women’s decision to make, even if her decision the majority of the time is to keep it? Do they think that on arrival at the Whitehouse they’re going to give all pregnant women (or in this case, women with babies) a lecture or pamphlet on how they can have/could have had an abortion? The NRLC could play this both ways as well. They could use the “Whitehouse recognition of the unborn” as evidence of “personhood.” They could lament how the Whitehouse is pro-“killing” because they even recognize babies in utero as people. That’s probably what they’ll do the next time.

Here was the NRLC Facebook explanation (at PolitiFact's Facebook page) of its “point”, followed by a quote from an article in “ProLife News” which published a similar claim:

We didn't say that the White House Visitors office counted a pregnant visitor as two people, but rather, made the point that the White House recognizes the "baby" as a family member prior to birth, "for purposes of providing security within the White House," but not for purposes of establishing abortion policy for the District of Columbia, an exclusively federal jurisdiction. Moorhead apparently went to all of that re-write work as part of a studied effort to miss our point. I wonder why?

...Notably, the newsletter provides no guidance on what the staff should do if an unborn baby is first registered for security purposes, but then aborted,” Johnson added. “On May 17, the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee plans to hold a hearing on the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R. 3803), which would generally prohibit abortion in the sixth month and later in the District. If the President wants to provide for the security of the unborn child immediately outside of the White House gates, as well as inside, he should endorse this bill.”

The congress has a quasi-jurisdiction over the District of Columbia (not the president). So the NLRC would be better off targeting the Republican-dominated congress, but it (hypocritically) doesn’t do so here. They don’t need the president’s endorsement.  This was basically a political move to criticize Democrat Obama in a public way for not being pro-life.

It also seems this is a fetus-obsessive tactic of the pro-life crowd: comparing abortion to anything, anything, which promotes “life”…even the preservation of wildlife, as a way of saying why is this life protected but not that of the unborn.

The Whitehouse, however, simply wants to do a proper headcount and this has nothing to do with whether there is a miscarriage or abortion. The NRLC was clearly “fishing.”

The day following the ruling PolitiFact published a letter from a Rachel Maddow fan who agreed with PolitiFact’s ruling. Here is the heart of their letter, providing an excellent rebuttal:

It simply cannot be argued, Ms. Maddow, that the White House does not recognize unborn children: by asking potential visitors whether they are pregnant, so as to account for a possible additional attendee in the future, the White House IS ACKNOWLEDGING unborn children at that moment. There is no getting around this; it is pure logic. But, as Politifact then argues, the White House does not recognize the unborn children as the NRLC implies; the NRLC's suggestion is indeed "wildly misconstrued." Hence, the IMPLICATION is terribly misleading and IS FALSE, but the STATEMENT is, BY ITSELF, technically true. Politifact, as they often acknowledge, have the difficult task of rating STATEMENTS while also factoring in the veracity of the statement's IMPLICATION.

Rachel Maddow tends to very narrowly focus on what she believes is “False” and doesn’t look at what was said in its entirety, the context, the implicit meanings or what my conservative counterpart might call “the underlying argument”—she doesn’t seem to have a good understanding of PolitiFact’s principles in the methods it uses for the statements it scores.  It also seems to me she hasn’t really looked at how PolitiFact defines Mostly False: "The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression." PolitiFact has a responsibility to look at those critical facts in accordance with those principles.

Maddow seems to be a knee-jerk True-or-False-and-nothing-in-between kind of fact-finder. She looked at the last fact-check in which she declared PolitiFact dead the same way. She crammed her analysis into the last minute of her show as if meeting the time deadline was more important than presenting the whole story, and if she doesn’t try to see the whole story, I guess she’s going to be haunted by the PolitiFact zombies forever.  And she may never know what it takes to get a False. 

Truth Index: Quantity has a Quality All its Own

In a Politi-Score/Truth Index review of Mitt Romney, it was graphically shown how his Truth Index has deteriorated since entering the 2012 presidential race, from 2011 forward. At the end of 2010, it was more than 50% higher than Obama’s (a positive 19 versus Obama’s 12). At that time Mitt had 45 rulings total, which put him in the “exclusive club” of those with the number of Truth-o-Meter rulings which might mean something statistically.

By the end of March, 2012, Mitt’s Truth Index had dropped to a negative 12.7, while Obama’s barely moved, from just over 12 to under. But there is another way to look at this: what if Romney had the same number of rulings as Obama at the end of 2010, but with the same Truth Index of a positive 19 he had at the time? How would it look now?

Mitt talks about the Obama economy, Obama-care, Obama recession, Obama-blah blah blah. So let’s give Mitt an Obama-adjusted Truth Index. Based on an 18.9 Truth Index with 272 rulings (Obama’s number)as opposed to 45, Mitt’s Truth Index would today be a positive 8.02. It would still have gone slowly down, but obviously much more smoothly. Point wise he would be very close to Obama at 11.54.  Here's the graph:

Click to enlarge:  Obama and Mitt might draw close to even in next 6 months to the election (on quantity-adjusted).

So there is a flattening effect in the averages caused by the large number of rulings, even with the index heavily weighted to the False side. When Mitt hit 100 rulings, each additional ruling affected the average less than 1 percent, in Obama’s case, it’s now less than a third of one percent.

In a way, this shows the poor sensitivity of the Index individually—one more reason it should not be considered a reliable measure of “truthiness.” It should also be noted that Romney fell below Obama’s Truth Index in January…this may in part be due to Romney’s veering way right as the primaries started and the campaign ramped up. I will have to review this later to see if Romney’s Truth Index improves.

Tchotchkes: New Feature "FlackCheck"

FactCheck.Org recently started something called "FlackCheck" on youtube which "uses parody and humor to debunk false political advertising, poke fun at extreme language, and hold the media accountable for their reporting on political campaigns."

It seems the two series "Mock the Dummies" and "Uncle Jay Explains the News" have stopped publishing new videos. This looks to be a much more suitable, a propos replacement, and I will be posting selected FlackCheck videos...which are sort of like video fact-checks...enjoy!

Lil White Lies: Jumping the Shark

In reviewing a Grading PolitiFact review of a PolitiFact Florida ruling on a statement by the ACLU of Florida on the amount of voter fraud in Florida versus the number of shark attacks, I let it go and didn't publish a response because the only reason I could find to oppose their argument—although it was a good one—was the ideological “it’s always best to expand democratic participation.”

But a recent youtube video from “Liberal Viewer Presents” (see below) and a follow-up post from Grading PolitiFact made me realize that Grading PolitFact’s basis for saying this Mostly True ruling was in the “wrong” and should be “False” was a, pardon the pun, felonious one, and did something it often accuses others of, that is, it built a “felons voting” straw man around the voter fraud (in this case, third party voter registrations).

I would have argued originally that in some states felons can vote once they have served their time—their debt to society has been paid, so to speak, so why should they be banned from voting. It sort of shows the absolutest, unforgiving, punishing bent of some Republicans. I might also have taken it right to the end of the slippery slope with the reductio ad absurdum “death panel” argument as well: if you’re not going to allow felons and those without ID to vote, why don’t you just restrict voting to property holders….just like our founding fathers considered doing.

But the “democracy” argument is not the right one for this case. That’s because Grading PolitiFact cannot add these felons to the count as voter fraud to compare to shark attacks. The reason it cannot add them is because the new law does not prevent felons from voting. A person’s driver license does not indicate if they are a felon. Often the police can only see that a person’s drivers’ license is legitimate and hasn’t expired along with traffic charges, and the only way to know whether the driver is a felon is to have police access and be able to look at the person’s arrest record. One can possibly have a felony conviction with traffic charges from being at fault in a deadly traffic accident, but there are many more felonies outside of that. In some cases the police access is restricted (there has to be “cause”): Is it a “cause” to check every person’s driver license for a felony when they vote? In the case of the teacher helping her students register to vote, I’d say the felon question applies in the same way. When filling out the application you must confirm that you are not a felon without “civil rights restored.” The article in the Tampa Bay Times as well as the PolitiFact ruling was not about felons found voting; it was about the rules for third party voter registrations.

It should be noted that Florida’s assistant attorney general called the subject teacher in the article (doing the "third party registrations") and made her an offer to “settle out of court” which means it was not being treated quite like an “illegality.”

Sidebar: Credit Going South

Recently I made some large purchases and took advantage of what used to be known as “same as cash” payment terms. So I thought it might be a wise thing to see how this was affecting my credit score. I tried a site called “My FICO” and there it was—a map of the United States allowing a mouse-over where you could see the average FICO for every state. And of course, my immediate thought was this was the perfect vehicle to look at the red states and the blue states to see if there was anything that could be added to my red state socialism compilation. So far I have looked at:

1. State expenditures of federal tax dollars versus amount of taxes paid in by the state

2. Food stamp usage

3. Percent of uninsured (medical)

4. Percent of obese

5. Percent of Diabetics

6. Percent of Heart Disease

7. Rate of Cancer Mortality

8. Most versus least “peaceful”

9. Per capita on-line porn subscriptions

10. Smoking

11. Teen age pregnancies

12. Amount of debt per capita

13. Job opportunities

Because of the large number of uninsured, the red states are featured predominantly as part of the top ten least healthy, while blue states dominate the most healthy. For the first 11 categories, the red states exceed the blue states (are “worse”), particularly those red states in the Bible belt: Louisana, Mississippi, Georgia, etc. They are  better, however, in the last two: job opportunities and amount of debt per capita.

The “new” category is FICO scores, the well known measure of credit worthiness. I’ve heard that over 60 percent of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills, which may be related to this, although one would think with a lot less debt per capita it might not be so. The average FICO for the top ten least healthy states (80% red) is 667; the average FICO for the top ten most healthy states (80% blue) is 708. Now this is just an average without calculating in the populations, so it may be off slightly. But it just adds fuel to the fire. Every red state score was below 700, and almost every blue state score was above (very  blue state California was a 691).  Maybe the stress of bad credit affects one's health adversely?

I also believe what could be pulling down some of these scores is the degree of how the housing crash affected that state: in particular, Nevada (665) and Florida (673). California, as noted above, has also had problems in this area and is below 700 as well.

Another category I took a look at but got somewhat mixed results was liquor consumption. Of course, you’d get zero in a red state like Utah (at least the last time I was actually there in the late 1980’s, liquor could not be sold, so things may have changed), and there are many “dry” counties in red state Tennessee, so this might be a difficult measure. You also have to take into account the mostly red Appalachian “moonshine” states where who-knows-what is going on. But I found that the most-liquor-per-capita state was blue New Hampshire, and it was due to the fact they did not tax liquor, which meant there were probably people taking advantage of this in the nearby states.

If you use a measure called “binge drinking”—defined as “adults having five or more drinks on one occasion”—it appears that the least healthy states binge drink substantially less. Red states Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Tennessee rank in the bottom five (Tennessee is at the bottom with Utah), while the top five include Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Iowa and Rhode Island. So that’s one more we can add to the positive side for the red states.  One more to make three out of 13.