Lil White Lies: 'Til Death Panel do we part

[Note:  This blog author offers apologies that this review is a little out of order date-wise, it is a PolitiFact fact-check from June.]

According to Wikipedia **The heart of the slippery slope fallacy lies in abusing the intuitively appreciable transitivity of implication, claiming that A lead to B, B leads to C, C leads to D and so on, until one finally claims that A leads to Z. While this is formally valid when the premises are taken as a given, each of those contingencies needs to be factually established before the relevant conclusion can be drawn. Slippery slope fallacies occur when this is not done — an argument that supports the relevant premises is not fallacious and thus isn’t a slippery slope fallacy.**

PolitiFact has fact-checked various versions of this topic many times, starting with their "2009 Lie of the Year,"  Sarah Palin's death panels, as well as on others who are not as much in the public eye as Sarah.  This topic has also been covered by FactCheck.  This particular one was from a video on a website for a candidate by the name of Dan Fanelli who is running against Florida congressman Alan Grayson.

Tchotchkes: Female Talk

This is an "actual letter" from an Austin, Texas woman, Wendy Arons (a former Austin , TX copywriter) sent to Proctor and Gamble regarding one of their feminine products. The true focus of her complaint : P&G’s packaging of it’s “Always” brand feminine pad:

She really gets rolling after the first paragraph:


Dear Mr. Thatcher,

I have been a loyal user of your 'Always' maxi pads for over 20 years and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core or Dri-Weave absorbency, I'd probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I'd certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts.

But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic I can't tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there's a little F-16 in my pants.

Politi-Score: Suddenly PF is number-crunching

After I wrote that email to PolitiFact, they had a self-congratulatory third anniversary article where PF (Bill Adair) decided for some unknown reason to do a little number crunching. Well, maybe he did it when they hit two years or on their first anniversary, so I should just stop speculating.

And in reading my email to them, I did not send them my spreadsheet, nor did I say anything about the percentage of each “Ruling” category. Although I had done that right from the beginning, because it just seemed logical. Here is how my numbers compared to theirs. Apparently, the better-known and more rated politicians and pundits are a little more honest than organizations and emails, because the most noticeable percentage variances are between the True and False/Pants on Fire categories.

Lil White Lies: Partition Definition Edition

‘When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.' --Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass”

This is how Bryan began his critique of PolitiFact’s (PF) ruling on Joe Biden’s statement “I never called for a partition of Iraq.” But it’s obvious Bryan has Humpty Dumpty upside down. In other words, for whatever Humpty Dumpty chose ‘a word’ to mean, if it always meant the same thing, does that make Humpty Dumpty wrong? Especially if it was how others chose what the word would mean, not necessarily him?

The following is a point-by-point summary of Bryan’s argument as to why Joe Biden’s statement is “disingenuous” in denying he called for a partition of Iraq in an interview with Jake Tapper on “ABC’s This Week”:

1.  Biden makes statement X “I never called for partition--I called for a central government and three autonomous regions”

2.  Bryan says Joe’s wrong, it IS partition (Y)

3.  Bryan attacks Y, citing all these other sources calling it partition, deducing that Biden (and others) have re-defined partition (“employing euphemisms”) to suit his purpose.

4.  Therefore X is wrong: it is disingenuous for Biden to deny that he never called for partition (And furthermore, you guys at PF are covering for him by using only ONE definition for partition!)

Do you see something here? If I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers….oh, excuse me I digress…..

Politi-Score: PolitiFact is not interested

PolitiFact *advertises* to Facebook commenters that it would appreciate any suggestions.  So I emailed the "Truthometer at PolitiFact" a few weeks ago, and asked them what they thought of the averages as I described in my previous post (although that is only the pundits--I have calculations on the non-pundits as well), and asked if there was any way they could be utilized.

It took about a week, but I received an email from Lou Jacobson with the following response:

Politi-Score: Sean Hannity most truthful pundit

My method (see above clip of my Excel spreadsheet): Went through PolitiFact (PF) ruling page by Person/Group and included those with 5 or more PF Truthometer rulings (with the exception of Michael Savage and Ed Schultz). True ratings= 100 points, Mostly True= 90, Half True= 80, Barely True= 70, False= 60, and Pants on Fire= 50. I then multipled by the number of rulings made for the category, added up the points, and divided by the total number of rulings.

Sidebar: People will say we're in love

Somehow, Bryan White found this blog.  I assume he looks at updates at Blogspot of new blogs pertaining to his area of interest, and mine came up.

“A new blog appeared recently by name of "Politi-Psychotics" and with the subtitle of "Because Bloviations aren't that Sublime."

The author, presumably Karen Street (based on the blatant similarity to her comments at PolitiFact's FaceBook page), has begun a series of criticisms of my criticisms of PolitFact. Despite the ghastly formatting of her blog posts, I'll probably bother to explain the problems with her criticisms from time to time.

Why anyone would bother to target the little-known commentary I publish is beyond me ... unless it's love."