Sidebar: Oh The Strawmanity!

In the course of my YouTube experience, I ran across a lot of people who used logical fallacies, particularly in the debates concerning religion.  Since my conservative counterpart focuses on them in his fact-check project, blog, and in commentary on Facebook, I also realized that this may have been the same place where he honed his skill on spotting/using them, besides that which he received in his education.

 

A straw man is an argument based on misrepresentation of the opponents' position.  The trouble with straw man is they are often thrown around like so many straws.  They are a logical-fallacy way of saying in your opinion the opponent is lying.   Some people will use them if they don't have anything else to argue with, like an accusation that bears a slight relation to the claim, so it's often difficult to distinguish whether it's really a straw man.  In other words, like everything else, logic can be abused.

 

My main defense (more than once) of PolitiFact's choice of the 2012 Lie of the Year--Mitt Romney's attack ad in the electoral-college crucial state of Ohio where there were several Chrysler plants, that its Jeep division was going to build cars in China--was its cruel inference that those Ohio plants would close.  If I had written that defense today, I would have stated it differently:  Romney's statement (and the ad) were straw men.  He misrepresented the position of Fiat-Chrysler and he misrepresented what Obama did at the time.

In a statement from Fiat-Chrysler management, it refuted that very misrepresentation.  In Obama's case, that was pretty much left to the fact-checkers.

But that is not really the point of this post.  The point is as I wrote it in the way I did, my counterpart attacked me by saying my arguments were straw men--as he stated, "an impressive array."  In other words, he was defending Romney's straw man by claiming those who said it was not true were using a straw man (not just PolitiFact, but Factcheck.Org and the Washington Post). He was doing the very thing that I had seen done in YouTube and Facebook commentary:  when all else fails, bring out the straw man.  Now I understand.

PolitiFact 2012 Truth Index Outbreak Confirmed

Following the election, it was apparent from Facebook posts that PolitiFact had gone into "clean up" mode and had taken a hiatus from fact-checking.  They needed the rest after kicking it up to about 238 rulings in October, about 40 percent more than their usual output.  It updated its Obamameter of promises, and  only two, yes, one plus one, rulings were published between the election and the new year.

 

Because of those two rulings and the PolitiFact states continuing to churn out  rulings at a lower pace, PolitiFact's 1,961 rulings for 2012 exceeded their production for all other years (2011 was 1,919, second place).  If it continued at same rate as in the first ten months of 2012, there would have been over 2,100 rulings for 2012.  Through the end of 2012, since PolitiFact began in 2007, it has done a total of 6,658 rulings.
 



PolitiFact's Truth Index App has
rather limited info.

As usual, Republicans comprised 55 percent of the rulings in 2012; the Democrats only 37.5 percent.  The congressional majority and the predominance of Republican legislatures and governors in PolitiFact states Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Texas and Wisconsin contributed to the Republican numbers.  PolitiFacts New Hampshire, Oregon and Rhode Island, while having more Democrats in power, do not contribute as many rulings overall as the other seven.   Those three states combined contributed 299 rulings for 2012, compared to 1,170 for the other seven heavily Republican states.

 

Recently PolitiFact noted in an article that since the election, the Truth Index had an "outbreak" up the "truthiness scale" in its week-to-week graphic that I'm assuming is available on its android application (I don't have a smart phone because in my circumstances I really don't need one).  Using PolitiFact's Truth Index methodology, the increase in "truthiness" is pretty striking as shown here, smoothed out month to month for the entire year of 2012.  The only other difference to PolitiFact is, it's being shown for Democrats (blue line) versus Republicans (red line), with the grand average as the dotted purple line (which includes those with another or no political affililiation).   The number of rulings published  is shown in parentheses next to the month.

Click to enlarge:  The Truth Index went into a narrow range between parties in the 3
months prior to the election.  Note this is not Truth Index+, but PF's methodology.

The chart has what one might call a "bowl" pattern bottoming out in July; after bounding back in August, the Democrats and Republican resumed a rather closely corresponding line with both pivoting up sharply following the election.  So, yes, this confirms PolitiFact's breakout.
 

The question about this chart that most may wonder about:  what caused the Republicans to "bomb" in July?  The percent of False and Pants on Fires of the total rulings for that month was the highest for the year, at 38.4 percent.  A quick check on Pants on Fire revealed the most likely answer.  July was the "month" of the ruling that received the most votes from PolitiFact readers as the 2012 Lie of the Year, although it was not selected for that "prize" by its editors.  It was the statement about Obamacare being the biggest tax increase in history.  It was repeated that month four times, along with another Obamacare myth about a 3.8 percent real estate transaction tax (ruled on twice).

Finally, what happened to PolitiFact Tennessee (as of January 29, 2013)? They haven't done a ruling since late November, and they are not on the state drop-down at the PolitiFact website.  Searches don't seem to be turning anything up with any sort of "announcement."  Well I hope PolitiFact Tennessee doesn't just waltz away.

Confounded by Contextual Complications

It is our policy to make on-the-record email correspondence public where the content affects the context of a story.

Zebra Fact-check, January 7, 2013

 

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.

Sublime Bloviations "Grading PolitiFact", August, 2012

 

(For the second damn time, practice what you preach!)

 

 

Right wingers feel vindicated that Fiat/Chrysler has announced it will be building Jeeps in China, especially at those websites critical of PolitiFact. Instead of beating the same dead horse again and again, I'm going to take another look at this in the terms of the right-wing argument: that if any (even a very small) percentage of production at the Jeep plants in the United States is replaced by production in China, then Mr. Romney's statement (see above graphic) is true in all respects, and needs no further explanation.

 

The right-wing website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC) uses the word "context" in almost every one of its "fact-checks." It seems to feel that it's so important that  they even have a tile symbol for it. For example, in one of its more recent posts on Marco Rubio, it claims that " In effect, PolitiFact takes Rubio’s tweet out of context."

Zebra Factcheck's littered graphics has a white tile symbol for "Out of Context"

 On his review of Romney's "Jeeps to China" comment, anti-PolitiFact website(s) PolitiFact Bias and Zebra Factcheck writer Bryan White duly notes the "context" he feels is crucially important to Romney's claims.

That’s right. PolitiFact takes a preferred Obama campaign claim about its rescue of the auto industry and states it matter-of-factly in a fact check of Romney. No additional context needed, apparently.

The media treatment of the dispute between the campaigns misses the context while focusing on the particulars. Romney is not simply making statements about Obama’s role in the auto bailout. His campaign is answering the Obama campaign’s messaging and pointing out missing parts of its story.

The only context I can see that was missed (according to Zebra Factcheck) appears to be what was presented by one of Romney's spokespeople to the New York Times in response to Romney's ad:

The facts are clear: despite his false and misleading attacks, President Obama took the auto companies into bankruptcy,” said a spokeswoman, Amanda Henneberg. “His mismanagement of the process has exposed taxpayers to a $25 billion loss.”

Romney had proposed "letting Detroit go bankrupt" in opposition to what President George Bush decided to initiate with a bridge loan to GM and Chrysler in 2008. He said the government "should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing." But even Michigan's future (Republican) Governor Rick Snyder and (Republican) Congressman Fred Upton, acknowledged that "there was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government." The respected, not really liberal Economist had this to say:

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.

2012 PolitiFact Wacky Awards

PolitiFact has its Lie of the Year, but I don't think anyone's considered all the ones that were....just maybe too plain weird, wacky, dumb, or silly for a Truth-o-Meter ruling from PolitiFact.  So here are the Politi-Psychotic Awards for PolitiFact's Wackiest Fact-checks of the Year. (BTW, here's my prediction for 2012 PolitiFact Lie of the Year, posted in August.)

 

□  The "Really Bad Economic Indicator" Award.  If Rick Scott wanted to overplay the Florida economy with this one, he should have waited just a month more for Fat Tuesday and counted pazckis.  How many donuts you say you sold in one morning pretending to work at a donut shop is SUCH  a profoundly brilliant way to preface your state-of-the-state address and I can't wait to see the "donut sales indicator" in all econ books.  But seriously....

I bet PolitiFact enjoyed investigating this one.

□  The "Excuse To Go To Vegas" Award.  A PolitiFact ruling onTampa being the strip club capital of the world (uttered by Florida State senator Ellyn Bogdanoff) was written by Angie Drobnic Holan, who had to call around to find out for sure, besides, perhaps, I'm curious...did Bill Adair, Lou Jacobson and Alan Sharockman go on any field trips to determine that "evidence [was] lacking" to help Angie?

□  The "Who was Buried in Grants Tomb" Award.  Dave Weldon, a Florida senate candidate, said there was no wildlife in ANWR, which stands for Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.  PolitiFact's writer Katie Sanders quotes an interviewee: " With regard to the lack of animals, he appears to be very uninformed."   Well, DUH.

□   The "Best of the Birthers" Award.  So, the governor of Hawaii actually went to Kinko's in person to forge Obama's birth certificate?  Gee, he could have  had someone in his office do it instead of getting his picture taken while there.  I mean, I've got the Onion to read stuff like this, I don't know what it's doing in PolitiFact.

□   The "Terribly Twisted Taxonomy Award".  So a Congress is a bunch of baboons, or vice versa?  I still see this "fact" come up on Facebook shared by well-meaning friends.  It's another joke, and I don't know why PolitiFact wasted its time rating it.  While there's a lot of groupings of like animals I haven't heard of, I just don't think congress of baboons is one that merits a fact-check.  Leave it for Snopes, instead of being so monkey see, monkey do.

□   The "Flinging Poo Award."  Conservative firebrand Michele Malkin got a True for saying Gloria Steinem called Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator" back in 1993.  While Steinem's characterization seems ill-formed to me, it's not a sufficient "tu quoque" argument by Malkin to defend Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" as "slut" carries a lot more baggage than a (female as a) female impersonator.  Other than that, if anyone's a female impersonator, it's Ann "Adams Apple" Coulter...

□   The "Too Much Information Award." Wisconsin state senator Joel Kleefisch got into trouble for voting on behalf of two state senators who were in the bathroom, on his (found Mostly True) claim that the bathroom is considered part of the chamber.  PolitiFact Wisonsin's James Nelson tries to answer the question we all want answered " Are Assembly members really considered in the chambers when they are, um, on the chamber pot?"   Um, I was expecting PolitiFact to tell me the two state senators Kleefisch voted on behalf of had constipation which was why they couldn't make it back on time to vote.  Well, maybe (not) the next time.

Giving ZFC a KO on CKDs

This first check of Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC) is also a postscript on something just posted as a response to PolitiFact Bias--on the misleading information in a late Mitt Romney campaign ad being used to rile autoworkers in Ohio.

ZFC writer Bryan White offers us this "these-are-jobs-in-China-from-the-U.S." citation from the Toledo Blade to back up the veracity of Romney's literal statement that Fiat/Chrysler is going to build Jeeps in China.

Jeep currently exports U.S.-made vehicles to China, which is Jeep’s largest market outside of North America. Last year, Jeep sold 22,294 vehicles in China. The company is expected to exceed that this year.

He then asks "If a Chinese Jeep plant takes over production of some or all of the more than 20,000 vehicles Jeeps sells in China then how does this not affect workers in the United States?"

Let's first start with the 22,294 vehicles from a relative perspective. One Detroit Jeep plant produces about 950 vehicles per day in 2 shifts. That means if the plant was working a normal 5-day work week, this would be roughly one month's production. Not very much, less than 10% of total annual production, and would be even less if the plant was at maximum production (3 shifts) or was working overtime. The Chinese production is what is called low volume. Even the 33,463 vehicles cited from the Business Standard fit the same definition: not enough for full production, not enough for a plant.

ZFC might counter that this could still be 10 percent of the workers being replaced....but that's not quite so black and white. If ZFC had been thorough in its fact-checking like it claims it is, it should have noted the paragraph at the bottom of the Toledo Blade article:

That commitment means Chrysler will not fully build and assemble Wranglers outside America. The automaker does currently ship low volumes of what the industry calls “knock-down kits” for final assembly in Egypt. Mr. Bragman said that's fairly common in the automotive industry, and the kits are not equitable to full-scale production plants. Parts would still have to be made and partially assembled elsewhere.

Knock-down kits (CKD = Complete Knock Down) contain "the parts needed to assemble a product" and are used when there is a low volume for export as "a method of supplying parts to a market, particularly in shipping to foreign nations, and serves as a way of counting or pricing." That is how Jeeps were produced in China up until 2009. The kits are assembled in the United States...and guess who does the assembly of the parts in those kits here for shipment to China? Now, if ZFC or counterirritant want to call Chrysler to find out if fewer workers are needed for CKD kit assembly than for full-scale assembly, they're more than welcome to find out. And, it is possible the kit assembly could be outsourced to a local supplier--but then, additional jobs would be created there to replace any auto plant jobs. 

So when Aaron Bragman, a senior automotive analyst at IHS Automotive, was quoted to say that the Chinese production "doesn't take any jobs away from anyone else" he was correct. Romney is not correct, and neither is ZFC nor counterirritant.

Finally, the original Bloomberg article said that Fiat was in "detailed conversations" about making Jeeps in China. It wasn't definite nor confirmed. So, what happens if the deal with Guangzhou Automobile Group doesn't materialize? I didn't mention this in my original criticism, but it is another large gray area on the Zebra. Because while Romney himself said the Italians ( I could do another post on that one as well) were "thinking" of moving the production to China, the ad (which was aired much more) said it was a sure thing...which it wasn't. That alone makes Romney's literal statement false.

But what else would one expect from right-wing fact-checkers.

Lil White Lies: Read It and Jeep

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) gleefully joins with the anti-PolitiFact blog counterirritant in misrepresenting a blatant misrepresentation by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as we enter the last 100 hours of the 2012 presidential campaign.

PolitiFact awarded a Pants on Fire (and WaPo FactChecker and Factcheck.org agree in line with it) when the Romney campaign released an ad which said:

Who will do more for the auto industry? Not Barack Obama. Fact checkers confirm that his attacks on Mitt Romney are false. The truth? Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry. He is supported by Lee Iacocca and the Detroit News. Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

It basically was "piggy-backed" (Glenn Kessler's words) from a very similar statement Romney had made during an Ohio campaign stop: " “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America."

 

That's pretty much everything....so PFB and counterirritant decide that "building Jeeps in China" is technically true as parsed waaaaaaaay out of context, and the fact-checkers need to fact-check more, as the loud and clear, self-evident implication isn't enough. They need to actually verify that the Chinese production is replacing (at least some of) the American production. Counterirritant thinks he knows the fact of the matter, and he condescendingly tells us: "For those slow on the uptake: Jeep vehicles that will be produced in China by Chinese workers are currently produced in the U.S by U.S. workers."

 

Nope, not quite. Because when Chrysler or Fiat talk about this Chinese production, it's added production, not replacement. Chrysler built Jeeps in China--for the Chinese market--before Fiat acquired it in 2009. And Romney's fearmongering came on the heels of this report from the Detroit Free Press:

In fact, Chrysler is investing $500 million at its Toledo North Assembly Plant and plans to add 1,105 new workers by the third quarter of 2013 to build an all-new SUV that will replace the Jeep Liberty.

Production of the new SUV will begin next summer and the hiring process for the new workers, who are scheduled to start by the next fall, has begun, said Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson.

In other words, as noted succinctly by the New York Times: "Jeep is discussing increasing production in China for sales within China; it is not moving jobs out of Ohio or the United States, or building cars in China for export to the United States."

Sidebar: Oops, They Said It Again

A statement about “Obamacare” which appears to have been started by Governor Rick Scott of Florida back in 2011 began to come up as a GOP standard talking point in 2012, re-gaining traction when Rush Limbaugh used it on his radio show (following the Supreme Court’s ruling on its constitutionality)—that the new healthcare law was bringing about the largest tax hike in the world…in the United States…on the middle class.  Or some variation on that theme.

As I worked on this post, which was initially going to be a prediction that this statement would definitely be on the “short list” of finalists for PolitiFact Lie of the Year (PLOTY),  if not the PLOTY, the so-called “Pants on Fire” factor was devised by my conservative counterpart, in a research paper where he was trying to find an “objective” way to determine the "subjectivity” of classifying a False statement (an “inaccurate” claim) Pants on Fire (“ridiculously so”). But he hardly had any theories to put forward (well, ignoring all possibilities so he could claim his usual "PolitiFact liberal bias") while Eric Levine of the blog Content in Reality did, in a post entitled “PolitiFact Bias Still Making the Same Mistakes” after reading the PolitiFact Bias research paper:

Not all false claims are lies. Most false claims can probably be explained by ignorance. However, a repeatedly debunked claim could spark a shift for some claims from “False” to “Pants on Fire.” The more likely you are to repeat an already debunked claim, the more likely your refusal to accept the debunking may constitute ridiculous lying. As can be seen, Bryan's justification fails to dismiss the possibility that Republicans lie more often.

The possibility of repeating “an already debunked claim” obviously raises PolitiFact’s ire for assigning a Pants on Fire. So, all for a very similar statement following Rick Scott in 2011 (by PolitiFact Florida) and then Rush Limbaugh (by PolitiFact National), PolitiFact Wisconsin rated Mark Neuman and Jeff Fitizgerald; PolitiFact Ohio rated Josh Mandel; PolitiFact Florida rated the PAC American Commitment; PolitiFact Georgia rated Phil Gingrey, and PolitiFact Tennessee rated Charlotte Bergmann.

In other words, these are eight good examples of something which brings  confirmation to Levine’s theory about repeatedly debunked statements.