Grading ZFC: More Republican Math!

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) writer Bryan White, via his conservatively skewed website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC), has committed a very similar error it pointed out in a recent PolitiFact Georgia fact-check on Cato Institute's Michael Cannon's statement concerning Obamacare "exchanges" being outlawed in Georgia. And I have to admit they both had a point: Cannon was talking about Obamacare exchanges in Georgia and in context he said--right at the beginning--that "by default" the feds would do their own exchanges in response. PolitiFact seemed to ignore this part of Cannon's claim and conflated it into something that should not have been called false. Yes, score one for PFB and Michael Cannon.

 

The error in this case is one which ZFC's writer Bryan White might call, if I had done the same thing, a logical "Red herring" or "Straw man." He does this in his fact-check of a statement by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)--that "Across the board tax rate cuts are regressive because a 20 percent tax cut for a millionaire – even as a share of income – amounts to a far greater benefit than a 20 percent cut for a hardworking low income American.” Instead of examining the premise of the statement he goes into a multifaceted dissertation on "effective tax rates" complete with pretty graphs, on how the overall rates were truly progressive up until seven years ago, and why poor Mitt Romney pays a lot more than Joe the Plumber.

 

He did not even try to actually calculate in numerical terms  whether there was a disproportional benefit to the rich of the across the board tax cut in and of itself. He even had something in his fact-check on how to "get there", quoting the IRS: “A tax that takes a larger percentage of income from low-income groups than from high-income groups.” So I will "get there", using two hypothetical progressive tax rates very close to what we have today, utilizing the 20% across the board factor.

 

Click to enlarge:  The 3rd thru 7th columns only needed formulas.

In the example above, we are using a 10% rate for a person with taxable income of $25,000 and a 25% rate for someone with income of $250,000, the current taxes paid using those rates, then re-calculated for a uniform across the board tax rate reduction of 20 percent. All other factors--excise taxes, corporate taxes--would be ignored because we are only concerned with the income tax cut itself and its effect on after-tax income (as that is the premise of the CPC statement). As shown in the last, highlighted bright yellow column, as a percent of after-tax income, the $250K earner has three times the additional income than that of the $25K earner. Now, you might say that it's because of the difference in tax rates, but even if you factor that in, the $250K earner still has 20% more after-tax income. THAT is the "far greater benefit" the CPC is talking about. The (yes, liberal) Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains this "concept" as well in a website article. They chart the "regression" by income category.

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.

 

Lil White Lies: Notorious T.E.D. (and Eleanor!)

Earlier this year (April), my conservative counterpart evaluated a PolitiFact (PF) Georgia Pants on Fire ruling on a since repeated statement by Herman Cain concerning Planned Parenthood: that “"When Margaret Sanger - check my history - started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.”  What was Bryan White’s explanation for Cain not deserving his pants set on fire? While he agrees that there’s “no good evidence black babies were being killed” he claims that (1) PF did not adequately examine the context of the statement, as is part of its standards, and (2) PF mistakenly interpreted (and defended) the statement as Cain viewing Margaret Sanger as racist and that this personal belief of Sanger’s was “largely irrelevant to the implicit argument that Planned Parenthood has a history of targeting blacks.” Or so he says.

Below is a youtube video of Cain’s recorded statement back in March.



Here’s most of the “context” of Cain's original comments:

His comments about Planned Parenthood come amid a debate in Congress over federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Attached to the spending bill recently passed by the House is an amendment from Republican Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana that denies the group funds.

Speaking to reporters and bloggers at the Heritage Foundation, Cain echoed a position expressed by many other Republicans.

“I support de-funding Planned Parenthood,” Cain said. “Tactically how they [Congress] does it…I can’t tell you.”

Cain then explained the reason behind his stance.

“You probably don’t hear a lot of people talking about this,” Cain said. “When Margaret Sanger – check my history – started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.”

“It's planned genocide,” Cain claimed.

“It’s carrying out its original mission,” he continued. “I’ve talked to young girls who go in there, and they [Planned Parenthood] don’t talk about how you plan parenthood. They don’t talk about adoption as an option. They don’t say, ‘Well, bring your parents in so we can sit down and talk with you, and counsel with you before you make this decision.’”

Six months fast forward, and with Cain now the leading presidential candidate according to polls, he was asked to re-confirm this statement by Bob Schieffer on “Face The Nation.” He not only re-confirmed, but embellished further:

If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger's own words, that's exactly where that came from. Look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history -- secondly, look at where most of them were built; 75 percent of those facilities were built in the black community -- and Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word "genocide," but she did talk about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.

There’s plenty of context there with which to infer what Cain was talking about, which were his reasons why Planned Parenthood should be defunded by congress. Faulting PolitiFact with failing to find the original context was misleading, nor necessary . But Bryan’s point is a larger one in respect to what seems to be a common thread throughout this blog post: that PolitiFact has “whitewashed” Planned Parenthood’s “unseemly” origins and that Cain “claimed nothing about Sanger other than calling her the founder of Planned Parenthood.”

If Cain called her nothing other than the founder of Planned Parenthood, then why did his remarks elicit a formal response not just from Planned Parenthood, but from Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Margaret, saying this was a “slur”?

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Politi-Fishing with PETA

Some people would call a PolitiFact ruling like the above “fluff” or “filler”—after all, this was something that was said late last year, being looked at only now by PolitiFact Georgia.   It's like somebody at PolitiFact said "We need more organizations viewed as liberal whose claims we can look at, folks!" That was how I regarded it when I initially read it. Then I read the article of PolitiFact reader responses on it, so for me it called for more research and reading.  Then I realized this was an excellent candidate for Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style.

My first observation is that no one defined what type of vegan/vegetarian Bill Clinton was, because there are all sorts of vegans and vegetarians. Because if Clinton was a pesca-vegetarian (also called a pescatarian), this ruling should be False or Mostly False. Because it means Clinton eats fish (pesca-) and by all counts the 200 animals he spared by turning this type of vegetarian doesn’t come close when you exclude fish and shellfish. So, what kind of vegan is he?

In a CNN interview with Sanjay Gupta, Clinton says at about Second Number 15 that he doesn’t eat “dairy or meat or fish”—so he’s a straight vegan. So now the number 200 includes fish, shrimp, scallops, etc. and the question becomes are these considered “animals”—PolitiFact Georgia writer M.B. Pell’s conclusion is that PETA implied that all 200 animals were farm animals.

If you visit the PETA website, there’s a lot about not eating fish, including some animated banners, two of which I’m displaying in this post. For example, here’s a recent article with the “Top Five Reasons Fishing Hurts”:

5) Eating fish is hazardous to your health. According to The New England Journal of Medicine, fish "are the main if not the only source of methyl mercury," a substance that has been linked to cardiovascular disease, fetal brain damage, blindness, deafness, and problems with motor skills, language, and attention span.

4) Suffocation isn't fun. When fish are yanked from the water, they begin to suffocate. Their gills often collapse, and their swim bladders can rupture because of the sudden change in pressure. Gross, eh?

3) Fishing kills more than fish. One out of every five manatee rescues conducted in the 1980s and 1990s was related to fishing-line entanglement, and during a four-year span, at least 35 dolphins died from injuries that they sustained as a result of being tangled in fishing line.

2) Fishing hurts the environment. Many commercial fishing vessels practice bottom-trawling in order to catch sea animals who live near, on, or under the sea floor, such as flounder, cod, grouper, shrimp, and scallops. Scientists say that the destruction caused by bottom-trawling is similar to that caused by clear-cutting old forests, only on a far greater scale.

1) Fishing really hurts. Fish slaughter plants in the U.S. make no effort to stun the fish, who are completely conscious when they start down the slaughter line. Their gills are cut, and they are left to bleed to death, convulsing in pain. Large fish, such as salmon, are sometimes bashed on the head with a wooden bat called a "priest," and many are seriously injured but still alive and suffering when they are cut open.

An example of many "fishy" ads published by PETA which allow you to use the code.