From The Partisans at The Second City Network on YouTube
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Please Relief Me
One of my biggest complaints about the evening shows on MSNBC (Rachel Maddow followed by Lawrence O’Donnell) or Fox News (Bill O’Reilly followed by Sean Hannity) is that they tend to repeat a lot of the same partisan news, criticisms and talking points. In fact, MSNBC might be worse than Fox News, because of those very liberally partisan “Lean Forward” promotional spots it features all day long by the same evening pundits ( my favorite being Al Sharpton’s “Blueberry Pie” )….and last month PolitiFact Texas took one of the claims in those spots by Lawrence O’Donnell to task: that there were critics of the ultimately very successful G.I. Bill who called it welfare (youtube video below).
At the time (end of World War II), the few critics of it called it “relief” and “dole.” Those two words can be found all over the net as synonyms for present day welfare. The underlying argument, however, is that this laid the groundwork for one of the foundational principles of the future Conservative/Republican party: the concept that any type of welfare is meant to breed dependency on government, which Republicans want you to think is how the Democrats keep their constituencies. The aversion to this dependency was epitomized by Ronald Reagan in his claims about “welfare queens” and glittering generalities about “rugged individualism.” It was also about, as the traditionally southern Democrats turned Republican in the wake of Civil Rights, a veiled type of racism. In other words, Republicans have made the word welfare a derisive one.
(Sidebar: I remember in my carpool days when my favorite right-wing loon Rich Peasel told me that he himself had seen black people driving Cadillacs and dressed in diamonds and fur coats at the grocery store paying with food stamps [they were buying steaks, too]. While I don’t believe this is what he actually saw [he was fibbing big time], this is the personification of that principle.)
The term welfare came into common usage about the time of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society/War on Poverty.” In 1944, it was a word that may have been viewed positively, as reported in one linguist’s blog who was reviewing PolitiFact’s ruling strictly from a “historical sentiment” view: “In 1944, "welfare" didn't appear to have a pejorative sentiment.” Well, knowing how that pejorative sentiment came to be, however, it may support the terms “relief” and “dole” which at that time may have been pejorative.
The critic to whom Lawrence O’Donnell refers for the most part is a Mississippi Democrat who PolitiFact quotes as being “an ardent white supremacist” named John Rankin—who I guarantee would have jumped to the Republicans had he been around in the mid 60’s—and who could just come out and say it back in 1944 before the advent of dog-whistle politics.
(Sidebar: I remember in my carpool days when my favorite right-wing loon Rich Peasel told me that he himself had seen black people driving Cadillacs and dressed in diamonds and fur coats at the grocery store paying with food stamps [they were buying steaks, too]. While I don’t believe this is what he actually saw [he was fibbing big time], this is the personification of that principle.)
The term welfare came into common usage about the time of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society/War on Poverty.” In 1944, it was a word that may have been viewed positively, as reported in one linguist’s blog who was reviewing PolitiFact’s ruling strictly from a “historical sentiment” view: “In 1944, "welfare" didn't appear to have a pejorative sentiment.” Well, knowing how that pejorative sentiment came to be, however, it may support the terms “relief” and “dole” which at that time may have been pejorative.
The critic to whom Lawrence O’Donnell refers for the most part is a Mississippi Democrat who PolitiFact quotes as being “an ardent white supremacist” named John Rankin—who I guarantee would have jumped to the Republicans had he been around in the mid 60’s—and who could just come out and say it back in 1944 before the advent of dog-whistle politics.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Lil White Lies Extra: The Unbearable Rightness of Bryan
My conservative counterpart recently offered up a 1,500-word tome essentially doing a finger-pointing “shame on you” to PolitiFact for “caving to the pressure” of its left-wing readers in its “flim-flam” ruling on Marco Rubio who stated that the majority of Americans are conservatives (from Mostly True to Half True).
He went into a diatribe on what appeared to be PolitiFact’s reliance on further polling numbers which he translated into this:
PolitiFact repented of its original ruling in advance of and regardless of new reporting, refused to admit any error in reaching the original conclusion and subsequently used the new reporting as a deliberate pretense to unveil a new ruling motivated by criticism from the left.
This is one of the best examples of the paranoid, conspiratorial thinking of conservatives I have ever encountered. PolitiFact’s change of the rulings is in and of itself admitting an error. On the top of that, if it was in fact motivated by criticism from the left to “cave” why did they not do it on the “2011 Lie of the Year” which created an outcry from the left of Biblical proportions? Maybe that would be too much to back down from, but there are many other rulings that PolitiFact has re-examined and left the same, like here and here (and there have been Democrats downgraded as well). What PolitiFact did here was realize—and admit--that with polls, the answer was not certain. As noted by Jonathan Bernstein of Washington Monthly:
One could look at it another way, which is to get beyond self-identification to go to whether people believe in conservative concepts or not. But then it gets very tricky, as can be seen easily in from the speech Politifact was fact-checking
 |
| This may be the best fit for Rubio's statement. |
PolitiFact might want to add something to its definitions which allude to the “inconclusive” nature of the Half True designation. It often uses the expression “on balance” in its “Our Ruling” finale. This would be a case of “on balance” we are at a “zero”—the negatives equal the positives. It’s sort of like something I’ve seen in legal responses that “PolitiFact can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this claim based on the 'facts.' "
But caving into liberal readers? PolitiFact occasionally caves to both sides. Sometimes it won’t cave. It’s the nature of the beast. Nobody’s perfect (unlike Bryan). But to accuse it of caving as some sort of proof of its left-wing bias is beyond the pale, and is not supported by the evidence of its corrections and updates.
But caving into liberal readers? PolitiFact occasionally caves to both sides. Sometimes it won’t cave. It’s the nature of the beast. Nobody’s perfect (unlike Bryan). But to accuse it of caving as some sort of proof of its left-wing bias is beyond the pale, and is not supported by the evidence of its corrections and updates.
And as I noted in my original "Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style" post on this ruling, this was more than about Rubio’s statement about conservatives: it was about the context of his remark. It was about all the other statements (most blatantly false) included with this that PolitiFact could have fact-checked, but chose not to, which my conservative counterpart chose to cherry-pickingly ignore as well—or I should say, as “nothing to see here” featured in his new blog series. Except you won't see it in his series since it's unseen fact-checks found false for a Republican.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Truth Index: No Mas Pantalones....
Of the first 5,000 PolitiFact rulings, it was established that 8.7% of them (435) were Pants on Fire. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the affiliation breakdown in that category:
 |
| Click to enlarge: Compare this graph to previous post which shows Republican/Democrat/Other total distribution of rulings. |
If everything was perfectly proportional, that is, Democrats and Republicans had Pants on Fire in the same proportion as the number of rulings, the Democrats would have had 170 Pants on Fire (versus 106), the Republicans would have had 226 (versus 271) and "other" would have been at 39 (versus 58). In other words, while the Republicans had about 2.5 times as many Pants on Fire rulings as the Democrats, they are about 17% higher than what they would have had proportionately (62% Pants on Fire versus their making up 53% of all rulings), and the Democrats are about 37% lower, while those of neither party are about 50% higher in the Pants on Fire category. Of course we cannot expect it to be perfectly proportional to the population of rulings, but what this shows is that the Republicans Pants on Fire are not that severe, as people like Eric Ostermeier would have you believe.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Truth Index: 5,000 Rulings Continued
The various permutations I show on the 5,000 PolitiFact (PF) rulings are very similar to my series on the 4,707 rulings analyzed through the end of 2011, so I will not repeat them here. The 293 rulings which took it up to 5,000 represent about six percent of all the rulings, so the stats should be very close to what they were then. I do want to show, however, that there are some trends which seem to continue that I didn’t emphasize in my end of 2011 analysis.
Affiliation. The majority of rulings (53%) were on Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians; 39% were Democrats/Liberals, and the rest were non-partisan or unknown (see graphic above). PolitiFact's own numbers, if they have them, would differ from mine slightly because of more delineation of the affiliation on my part: for example, their chain e-mails are not broken down by party (although many of them can't be) and there are a few people for whom I determined affiliations for which PolitiFact had assigned a "none."
 |
| PF's table adds to 99% |
The National percentages. I confirmed my agreement with the National Truth-o-Meter rulings which were displayed in the 5,000 ruling celebration article—that is, that it was very close to what I showed for 5,000 rulings including the states. However, it’s important to match to the National “only” rulings to see how I compared apples to apples, and there I have a slight discrepancy. For National, all percentages match except I am one point higher on the Pants on Fire, at 9 percent instead of 8 percent. Now, I may have more rulings in the National number because of the way I added up the rulings through 2010, which may have caused the over-calculation, but it is also important to note that the numbers as given by PolitiFact add to .99, not to 1.00. Carrying it out to decimals, I have 8.69% for Pants on Fire for PolitiFact National. For greater analysis on PolitiFact regions (by party) through the end of 2011, click here.
Individuals versus Groups and “Entities.” Some of these are fairly intuitive when you think about it. Individuals (85% of the 5,000 rulings) score more truthful on the PolitiFact Truth Index than groups or “entities”(advocacy, party boosters, bloggers, chain e-mails, etc.) They average a -9.06 while groups and entities are -37.55, a pretty substantial difference. For a further breakdown of these groups and how they compared affiliation-wise, click here.
 |
| Individuals comprise about 85% of PolitiFact's 5,000 rulings and are more "truthful" as measured by its Truth Index. |
Office-holders (current and former) are 74% of the 5,000 with a Truth Index of -8.47 while non-office holders (which would include those groups and entities mentioned above) score a -27.77 on the Truth Index.
And as noted in a previous post, one out of seven (674) of the 5,000 rulings were on females who had a lower aggregate Truth Index (-13.2) than the males (-8.28) although it is a fairly small variation.
All suggestions for further refinements are welcome!
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Truth Index: 5,000 PolitiFact Rulings
On Monday, February 20, Tom Kertscher of PolitiFact Wisconsin published a somewhat crazily titled PolitiFact ruling: a G.O.P. senate candidate by the name of Mark Neumann stated that " the federal government could save $175,587 by eliminating a study of the 'connection between cocaine and risky sex habits of the Japanese quail.' " Before I determined the real significance of this ruling, I was considering it for inclusion in my "Top Ten List" of stupidest or most useless PolitiFact rulings. But it was not quite that useless because, on careful reading, it was really about some of the seemingly stupid things that government grants--i.e., taxpayer dollars--go for, and Kertscher made the point quite well.
 |
| Click to enlarge. |
The real significance was that this was, according to my records, PolitiFact Ruling Number 5,000. PolitiFact's Bill Adair acknowledged the fact he knew that the 5,000 mark had been surpassed that Friday, February 24, in a "celebration" article featuring a few facts and figures from that period of time in which the 5,000 rulings were accumulated.
Adair published a table of the breakdown of rulings for National: here they are snipped from the article at the left. Later, I will publish a few things Adair doesn't keep track of (at least I don't think he does) and that's the various Democrat/Republican breakdowns, which is the centerpiece of my blog. However, I want to confirm his National breakdown was very close to the overall.
I decided to round to the whole as Adair has and as you can see below, True and Mostly True are the same percentages, while Half True on down is within one percentage point of his calculations. I have included the overall Truth Index as well, which is a -13.44. It increased slightly to the negative from the end of 2011, where for 4,707 rulings it was a -13.32.
 |
| Click to enlarge: I call it my Insta-Chart as this year I decided to do something "real time." |
The reason for the decrease in the Truth Index has been due to the pattern emerging at the end of 2011: increasing coverage of the Republican presidential contenders. For example, so far this year the Republican rulings have outnumbered the Democrats almost two to one, and the Republican Truth Index so far in 2012 has stood around a -25 while the Democrats have been a +3.6. The four remaining presidential contenders (Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul) have a collective Truth Index of -29 (and represent about 20% of all the rulings). This is for 332 rulings covering all of January and February (and a couple from March 1 and 2). More later.