Tchotchkes: Ah, the Ironies of Capitalism!

In three great cartoons courtesy of Bartcop!

Yes it's so!  Google Marinol or visit http://www.drugs.com/marinol



Remind you of certain somebodies (Walton, Gates, to name a few?)



Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Walmart Welfare 2012

Earlier this year, my former wingnut carpoolian buddy boasted in a comment section of my blog how he had annuitized his 401K through an insurance company: he expressed a seeming anger that if he had the opportunity to invest himself, he could have done much better over what he received from Social Security, to which he had contributed heavily over the years. Although I am highly dubious of the value of such annuities, he may be correct about “doing better” himself than through “forced” contributions to social security; however, the point is that in either case Social Security is an insurance annuity option for retirement income.

All this (and a little more) is part and partial to a statement by Rick Santorum which PolitiFact (PF) rated Mostly True, that “a little less than 50 percent of the people in this country depend on some form of federal payment, some form of government benefit to help provide for them." An excerpt from PolitiFact’s finding:

The Census Bureau found that a little over 147 million Americans received payments from at least one of these programs at a time when the U.S. population was just over 303 million. This meant that 48.5 percent of Americans received federal cash or cash-like benefits -- and it means that Santorum’s number is well-supported. In fact, counting such items as amounts refunded from the Earned Income Tax Credit or agricultural subsidies -- neither of which are included in these figures -- would push that number higher.

I believe Santorum’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details (Half True by PolitiFact): many of the entitlements are actually a form of insurance that have already been contributed toward through payroll taxes. Then there’s the point made by the Washington Post that “the usefulness of these numbers is weakened because they count everyone in a household as benefiting from a particular federal payment even if that payment is made in the name of only one person.”

Then, there’s the statement following which, taken in context, was a patently absurd one: that “After Obamacare….it will be 100%.”

Then there’s a problem I have with the states that Santorum won in the primaries: the “bite the hand that feeds them” states, in particular, Mississippi and Alabama, where we already know there are a higher percentage of food stamp recipients relative to other states, and where they receive more assistance than what they pay in taxes. As noted by Lee Pappas, the Rude Pundit:

Some conservatives see the social safety net as a calculated plot by liberals to make people dependent on the federal government, a way of controlling them. Of course, since the states where people receive more in government assistance than they pay in taxes vote Republican, that's pretty much demonstrably false.

Let’s get back to the first point, Social Security as insurance. Over 37 million people age 65 or higher receive Social Security. Almost 8 million people under 65 receive social security because of a disability. I would imagine the vast majority of the total 45 million contributed to the Social Security system. Even my conservative counterpart admits it’s a form of insurance. If that’s what it is, how can Santorum say those who receive it depend on it, when they planned to get it because they contributed to it in the first place?

Sidebar: Yet ANOTHER Reason for More Republican Fact-checking

And Another Reason I don't believe in the "Liberal Media"

(AND Things You won't see at those Anti-PolitiFact Blog Sites)

As soon as I posted "Another Reason For More Republican Fact-checking" the other day, I got yet another fine surprise from the Daily Beast (via Yahoo News) as a follow-up: yet another study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which reported:

During the bruising Republican primaries, there was one candidate whose coverage was more relentlessly negative than the rest. In fact, he did not enjoy a single week where positive treatment by the media outweighed the negative.

His name is Barack Obama.

That is among the findings of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington nonprofit that examined 52 key newspaper, television, radio, and Web outlets.

“Day in and day out, he was criticized by the entire Republican field on a variety of policies,” Mark Jurkowitz, the group’s associate director, says of Obama. “And he was inextricably linked to events that generated negative coverage”—including rising gas prices, the ailing economy, and the renewed debate over his health care law.

In short, while the president was being hammered on both fronts, his message was somewhat drowned out by the volume of news coverage surrounding the GOP candidates.

As my recent Politi-Score analysis of Mitt Romney's rulings revealed, many of his statements concentrated on "hammering" Obama and his policies as noted in the above quote, with the end result of bringing down his overall "truthfulness."   The study also evidences the reality of there being so many of these type of  "Candidate Bio" (Obama) statements being checked.  And it doesn't seem that PolitiFact's "setting the record straight" with many of the claims it found misleading and false (as well as the other fact-checkers) had much effect.

Overall, it was no contest. From Jan. 2 through April 15, Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 29 percent neutral, the researchers found. Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive, 34 percent negative, and 34 percent neutral. That means Romney’s depiction by the media was more than twice as positive as the president’s. So much for liberal bias.

So, consider this the next time you see those signs that say "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" often seen at some of the Republican presidential campaign events.  Because if the coverage of Obama has been found to be so negative, maybe those sign-holders are doing themselves a dis-service, because by extension they're telling anyone (i.e., swing-voters) reading the sign that what the media says about Obama is probably NOT true. 

Lil White Lies: Politi-Pedantry

PolitiFact has covered this twice, in November and in January, with the same "False" ruling.

A few months ago when my conservative counterpart was not yet blocked on Facebook, I used a word to describe his blog that I had never seen him use before, which was that it was “shlock.” Shlock means something which is of inferior quality, cheap and shoddy. Now I’ve seen him recently use it in both his blogs, as if he looked up “shlock” when he saw my use of it and thought to himself, “hey I got another good nasty deprecating word to use for PolitiFact!”

But shlock might describe this short little Grading PolitiFact ditty which doesn’t offer any further good explanation for why saving money and cutting expenses are two different things, and that is somehow proof that PolitiFact got this fact-check of Romney wrong. He can do his “You just don’t have a clue--I’m the only one who really gets it” routine all he wants on this, but I can even tell him from my years as an accountant that “reducing expenses” and “saving money” are often used interchangeably. And if context is so very important (as writer Bryan White alludes to in quoting PolitiFact Principles about context at the start of his post) he totally ignored the context of Romney’s claim.

As an example, let’s say my income was reduced to where I had to live off my credit cards (something like what our government is doing now). It would behoove me to start looking for ways to save money/reduce costs—to reduce the amount I was having to pay with the credit cards. For example, I might decide to get rid of my cell phone, or buy a “prepaid” one. That would save $35-50 (or more) a month I might be paying off my credit card. That would be reducing my costs, that would be reducing the amount that would be added to my credit card (my "deficit"), that would be saving money. Grading PolitiFact wants you to believe that cutting costs and saving money are “not necessarily the same thing.”

And if I said I was saving $50 a month in cell phone bills by getting a prepaid phone that would not be quite correct. Because I’d have to figure in the cost of the prepaid phone. That’s what is happening here. Romney is misleading because he’s expressing the $95 billion in absolute terms.

 Let’s try a little experiment here by word replacement: if the PolitiFact ruling had said Obama “ wants to cut government spending by rolling back President Barack Obama’s signature health care law” instead of “wants to save money by rolling back President Barack Obama’s signature health care law” would it have made any difference in the rest of the ruling and the ruling result? If they had done that, would anything in the rest of the ruling explanation needed to have been changed to coincide or force it to agree? You can see my point. Romney said in his USA Today op-ed “The federal government should stop doing things we don't need or can't afford” directly followed by the example of “Repeal ObamaCare, which would save $95 billion in 2016.” (Of course, had it been this way, I would expect that Grading PolitiFact would have a reverse position, reproving PolitiFact by saying “saving money” morphed into “cutting government spending.”)

So PolitiFact went with Romney’s precise statement—“which would save $95 billion”—yet Grading PolitiFact disputes that as a “morph” from reducing expenses, which is basically the same thing. This is not even splitting hairs, this is pedantry at its extreme.

Sidebar: Another Reason for More Republican Fact-checking

(...And Why I don’t believe in the “Liberal Media”)

Since I’ve started tracking PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter rulings, I’ve generally described an ongoing higher percentage of Republicans fact-checked as compared to Democrats. For example, when PolitiFact hit Ruling Number 5,000 this February, it was determined just over 53% of the 5,000 rulings were on Republicans /Conservatives, while only 39% were attributable to Democrats/Liberals. For the first quarter of 2012, it’s been even higher with almost 61% Republicans /Conservatives’ statements checked versus 34% Democrats/Liberals.

A recent article by David Ferguson of “The Raw Story” reports the results of a study (by media watchdog group FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Media and Reporting) on “guests featured in one-on-one interviews and roundtable discussions on the four main Sunday morning talk shows.” This is often where PolitiFact finds its “selections” of “facts” to investigate. And lo and behold, which party tends to dominate this format, which might very well explain the larger number?

…[The breakdown of guests were from] the four main Sunday morning talk shows, ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’s “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday” from June 2011 to March 2012. The results skewed heavily Republican, white and male, with only token representation by blacks and Latinos, and virtually no appearances by guests outside of one of the two national political parties.

Extra! points to November 6 of 2011 as typical of the ideological breakdown of the Sunday shows. CBS’s Bob Schieffer welcomed “a cross section of Republicans” to discuss the issues facing the primary that week. On ABC’s “This Week,” lone liberal Arianna Huffington was featured alongside conservatives Matthew Dowd, George Will and Niall Ferguson. “Meet the Press” featured Republican operative Alex Castellanos with Wall Street Journal conservative scribe Kimberly Strassel alongside a pair of middle-of-the-road Beltway journalists.

The study showed that one-on-one interviews with policy makers and other national figures, which are the ratings bread and butter of the talk shows, featured 166 Republicans to Democrats’ 70. Roundtable discussions welcomed 189 Republican guests and 109 Democrats.

It’s worth noting, also, that the liberals typically presented on these programs are mostly centrists with very few out-and-out progressives, leading FAIR to quip that “corporate media’s idea of a debate is conservative ideologues matched by centrist-oriented journalists.”

The increase in Republican coverage in 2011-12 seems to have a similar explanation to mine for increased fact-checking of Republicans:

It could be argued that during this period the nation has been in the throes of a long and competitive Republican primary race, hence the heavy percentages of Republicans and right wing operatives. A similar study done by the group Media Matters during the 2004 Democratic primary race still found 56 percent of the guests chosen for the Sunday morning shows were Republicans to 44 percent Democrats.

So it appears what’s needed is an off-election-year study to make a comparison. In the meantime what this all brings to mind for me is when certain conservatives I know speak of the “Obama News Network” or that perennial favorite the “lame stream media.” Which is to say, this is just one more of the many facts that doesn’t seem to fit their narrative.

Politi-Scoring Romney Part 2: NOBama

Late last year I started including a brief description of the fact-check in my database. I wanted to make it easier to look for overlaps, contradictions, things that might be interesting to post, etc., and although it was a pain to do, it really helped, especially in this case, with Politi-Scoring Mitt Romney.

Mitt "Monty Burns"-style

There was one obviously repeating theme of topic throughout the fact-checks for all the presidential candidates, in particular front-runner Romney. PolitiFact often puts it under the subject of “Candidate Bio” (although not always) which is basically a statement about the “other” candidate they are running against. As I could see it unfold, I tried to make that subject the very first word (regardless of “subject”) so I could later filter them out: Obama.

Statements about Obama and his administration and policies comprised just over 30 percent of the Romney fact-checks. There were 56, of which half were PolitiFact rulings (so about 1 in 4 of the 125 PolitiFact Romney rulings dealt with statements about Obama).

The Romney Politi-Score for just “statements about Obama” was a negative 55.4, which almost triples to the downside his overall Politi-Score of negative 18.6. There were no Romney statements from any of the fact-checkers which could be ruled 100% True when it was about Obama; in fact, PolitiFact had no statement rulings True or Mostly True on Romney when Obama was the subject (their Truth Index in this category was a very “untruthful” negative 64.3). Most of the “Mostly Trues” were “1 Pinnochio” rulings coming from Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post Fact-Checker, some of them combination claims done on Romney speeches.

Some examples of “Mostly Trues”:

• Obama and “crony capitalism” (Washington Post)
• Did Obama say he ranked among top 4 U.S. Presidents? (Washington Post)
• Over 500,000 Californians have lost jobs since Obama became president. (FactCheck.Org)

Most of the “Half Trues” were numbers claims which were difficult to substantiate.  Two appeared to be duplications of each other by PolitiFacts National and Georgia on a statement from Romney about 25 million people out of work (I included this as an “Obama” claim because Romney is implicitly faulting Obama for so many unemployed).  One more looks as if it’s a Romney repeat very similar to the 25 million claim, but in that case it’s 20 million people, and was one of the three fact-checks from AZ (Arizona) FactCheck, done in July of 2011 (they found it “unsupported.”)  Other examples of statements found "Half True":

• Since Obama’s Stimulus over 1 million jobs were lost (PolitiFact Florida)
• Obama raised taxes 19 times (PolitiFact National)
• Obama added 135,000 bureaucrats to workforce (PolitiFact New Hampshire)

Play Mittsy for Me: Politi-Scoring Romney

Keep it under wraps, Mitt.

When I first became interested in politics as a teenager, I was particularly enamored with what was then called the Rockefeller Republicans. As I lived in the Midwest (Ohio) I was intrigued with Mitt Romney’s dad, George, who seemed to me to be one of those Republicans with a liberal streak, and at the time he was running for president, I thought he was just the guy America needed: socially liberal and fiscally conservative. But that was just me, and as it turned out, he didn't make it.

Mitt was probably a lot like his father at one time; but since then he has been too much of all things to all people. Right now I am looking for him to veer back left in his winding road to trying to win the presidency, and I believe his right turn may (partly) account for some of his down turn in truthiness as I will show in this Politi-Score review (although I discovered something more specific, but related to that right turn). In the mean time he needs to work on his “Tin Man” image, and there are certainly some good ways to do that.

In my last post I was looking forward to scoring 184 Mitt Romney statements but in cross-checking everything found I had missed one, so make that 185 Romney statements, a pretty big number considering the other reviews I’ve done. There were 125 by PolitiFact, 33 from FactCheck.Org, 24 from the Washington Post Fact-Checker, and an extra 3 I threw in from AZ (Arizona) Fact Check. PolitiFact may have an even higher count now; my cut off for their rulings was as of April 10.

For comparison purposes, Rick Santorum had 45 rulings (although his were only from PolitiFact); Newt Gingrich, my last full Politi-Score before Romney, had 76; Rick Perry was 37, Herman Cain 34, and Michele Bachmann was my first with 50 fact-checks and rulings. So all in all, Mitt has had more rulings and fact-checks than all the other presidential candidates I’ve done combined, excluding Gingrich. That being said, there will be another post comparing the Truth Indexes/Politi-Scores for all Republican candidates.

For FactCheck.Org, it is much more difficult to gather as well as decide the “score” on claims. They do not have any nice neat lists like PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact-Checker. I must go through a name search and then evaluate each article and subjectively decide where it goes as far as a Truth-o-Meter ruling. For most purposes there is no “Pants on Fire.” For FactCheck.Org I decided to go as far back as early 2011. And I must evaluate the rulings from WaPo as well; the page that shows accumulated rulings for each politician also includes statements made by their superPACs on their behalf which I did not include. So including inevitable new rulings since this post, my numbers are slightly different than what you may see at the respective fact-check websites.

Overall. Here’s how the “current” Politi-Score looked overall for Romney: he’s at a negative 18.6, a relatively good score compared to the other presidential candidates, but with a lot of caveats.

Click to enlarge:  Romney's Politi-Score on 185 fact-checks

Fact-Checker comparison. It might help to take a look at the score he received from each fact-checking source. To make it more apples to apples with the other fact-checkers, I separated Romney’s pre-2011 PolitiFact rulings from those since early 2011, as the other fact-checking scores were also mostly for this current period. I did not include a Politi-Score for AZ-FactCheck for the three rulings they did as that does not mean much. For the record, they had one True, one False, and one they called “Unsupported” which I counted as “Half True.” This puts AZ-FactCheck’s Politi-Score right at zero for the three rulings.

Click to enlarge: Romney's combined PolitiFact Truth Index for 125  rulings is -12.9, almost the same as Washington Post's.