Sublime Bloviations

Rick Santorum and "bla-" vs. "black"

2012-02-01T02:42:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to looking into this claim that Rick Santorum intimated that blacks tend to be on welfare with his comments during a campaign stop in Iowa.

I know it's all the rage to portray every Republican as racist, but his example just doesn't wash. Let's assume that Santorum said "black" and try to make sense of his statement.

Via CBS (edited to leave only Santorum's words):

"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program. They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is. I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

It's been pointed out that Santorum was speaking to an audience of white people. In Iowa, that den of racism (I'm kidding, Iowa). And that's why the comment, contextually, doesn't make sense if he's saying "black." Santorum just got through saying "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote." More of "you." He was addressing his audience, which represented Iowa. "Black" doesn't fit the context. "Black" mainly fits as some sort of Freudian slip letting his fellow racists in Iowa know where he stands on race (still kidding, Iowa).

Granted, I have no idea what Santorum meant to say. It's possible he meant to say "blacks" despite the fact that it doesn't fit the context. But the times I've heard him say "blacks" he enunciates it more clearly than in the Iowa video.

Who hears racist dog whistles and why?

2012-02-01T01:47:00.001-05:00

I'm a skeptic of racist dog whistles. Could they exist? I suppose so. May they be used effectively? I can imagine some circumstances where they might. But in electoral politics the key is reaching the independents and undecided voters. Do those groups contain enough racists or latent racists to make dog-whistle racial messaging an effective election strategy?

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing his Blomberg View column, apparently thinks that may be the case. He predicts big things from the dog whistlers in the 2012 election season:

Here are some things you couldlearn about black Americans from the recent statements andinsinuations of Republican presidential candidates,Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radiopersonalities:

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’swork. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them bywhite taxpayers. Black people, including Barack andMichelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them somethingbecause they are black. Black children should work asjanitors in their high schools as a way to keep them frombecoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting blackAmericans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, whichhas created in them a dependency on government notdissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on theirowners.

I'm trying to keep an open mind, here.

Supposedly a Republican/Republican-friendly said/insinuated black people have lost the desire to perform a day's work. Goldberg provides a link, but it provides no apparent support for his claim. Rather, it deals with the Food Stamp program in response to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's comments in response to a question from Fox News contributor Juan Williams. Gingrich, in fact, explicitly denied that the comments that stimulated Williams' question were racist in nature, and Gingrich did not declare that any race had lost its desire to perform a day's work.

Supposedly a Republican/Republican-friendly said/insinuated black people rely on food stamps provide to them by white taxpayers. Goldberg again provides a link, which tells the same type of story as the previous one. Race isn't mentioned, but Goldberg is apparently able to detect a reference to race, at least to the point of definitively claiming the Republican candidates are teaching us that "Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers." Goldberg apparently figured all that out when candidate Rick Santorum said "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

Supposedly a Republican/Republican-friendly said/insinuated the Obamas feel as though they are owed something because they are black. That one's close to being true, since radio personality Rush Limbaugh stated he thinks the Obamas feel owed something because of the way their ancestors were treated. I think we're supposed to set aside the fact that ill treatment of ancestors is not a racial reason for expecting some payback. A white ancestor, after all, is perfectly capable of receiving ill treatment. And the racial angle falters as Limbaugh continues:

I think if you look at the way the Obamas live, with Michelle and herseparate vacations and not being concerned about how much it costs to takeseparate airplanes -- there's no question inmy mind that they view this as -- whateverelse they view it as, as an opportunity to live high on the hog without havingit cost them a dime. And they justify it by thinking,"Well, wedeserve this, or we're owed this because of what's been done to us and ourancestors all these" -- who knows? I think that's --I think that's part of it.

I also think that it is why the Republican establishment wants back -- and everybodyin Washington wants to be in charge of the money. Everybody wants to run thecommittee chairmans-- the committee and be thechairman. Everybody wants to be in charge of the budget. Everybody wants tohave power over it. Do not discount, ever, the money.

If Limbaugh blunts his racism at all with the intimation that the Republican establishment is black, Goldberg takes no notice.

We get the picture. It is the plausible deniability of the racial angle that makes the dog whistle a dog whistle. Other than decoding specialists like Goldberg and every liberal blogger in the whole wide world, it's just a special targeted sub-population (of Republicans) that receives the racial message.

Goldberg:

Dog-whistling -- the use of coded, ambiguous languageto appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters --is one of the darkest political arts.

Just to be clear, Goldberg is not intimating that blacks ("darkest political arts") disproportionately engage in the use of racist dog-whistle techniques. Goldberg is not a Republican, so we can't draw any conclusion like that. He's just saying that using that type of ambiguous language is evil.

And Goldberg helpfully introduces us to an expert at understanding and combating the dark art of racial dog-whistle politics:

(Randall) Kennedy, who studies the role of race in nationalelections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measurewhether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: Ifit takes more than two sentences for a critic to explainwhy a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins.

Thank goodness for run-on sentences.

Okay, seriously. Kennedy is an academic serving as a law professor at Harvard. But the appeal to authority isn't good enough. What is the evidence for the existence of a working racist dog whistle? And why is Jeffrey Goldberg better at hearing them than I am? Am I not Republican enough? Is Goldberg a closet Republican?

I needed an academic willing to talk in terms of evidence. Kennedy wasn't the guy, so I did some searching and came up with another name: Tali Mendelberg.

Mendelberg's "The Race Card" was published in 2001. It supposedly contains experimental evidence of the effects of dog whistle politics. But what I found most intriguing while I read the first chapter was the support the work provides for my counter-theory.

Mendelberg's first example comes from the use of Willie Horton to attack the candidacy of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

When an implicit appeal is rendered explicit—when other elites bring the racial meaning of the appeal to voters’ attention—it appears to violate the norm of racial equality.

Mendelberg suggests the violation of "the norm of racial equality" negates the effect of the dog-whistle ad, using as evidence an increase in Dukakis' poll numbers after elites denounced the ad on racial grounds. But what stops her from drawing the inference that denouncing the ad counted as a net gain for Dukakis? We apparently have two dynamics in play rather than just one. What if we had a non-racist alleged dog-whistle ad denounced as racist? And what if it takes fewer than two sentences to explain the alleged racism?

That's the beauty of the counter strategy. Making racist dog whistles by definition deniable removes from those who cry "racism!" any real responsibility for making their case that a statement constitutes a racial appeal.

Perhaps Jeffrey Goldberg is researching the issue for us.

Related viewing.

February Artist: Joe Beier

2012-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

I listen to quite a bit of instrumental guitar music, everything from Allan Holdsworth to Joe Satriani.

Joe Beier is new to me this year. I downloaded some of his music in January and it's receiving repeated listens.

His songwriting reminds me of guitarist Dave Weiner, but Beier's music is more interesting to me--it has that eclectic approach that artists like Steve Morse use.

Anyway, give it a listen for the great tone, tasteful playing and accessible songwriting.

Krugman takes over as head of the Truth Police Police

2012-01-27T12:51:00.000-05:00

When PolitiFact Bias started out about a year ago, the clear majority of criticism PolitiFact received over its first three-plus years came from the right. Thanks largely to its 2011 "Lie of the Year" selection--the claim Republicans voted to end Medicare--and some energetic pushback from Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow when PolitiFact dinged them with poor ratings, PolitiFact has started to enjoy criticism from the left in earnest.Economist and partisan hack Paul Krugman has taken it on himself to torment PolitiFact with his scolding, the latest with his New York Times blog item "Finding the Truth."

Krugman knows what a fact checker should do, and he's not afraid to tell PolitiFact:

(T)he point of Politifact and other news-org fact-check things is supposed to be to do this work for readers, so that you don’t have to learn your way around labor-force or trade or crime or whatever statistics every time you have doubts about a political claim.

Happily, there's an element of truth in there amidst Krugman's hacktastic folderol. If PolitiFact presents itself as objective news (it does), Krugman is essentially correct that PolitiFact should simply check what facts it can check and leave the semantic analysis alone. Semantic analysis, after all, is analysis, and news analysis is a slightly different animal than news reporting.On the other hand, if PolitiFact views itself as a news analysis operation and simply fails to apply to its work the label "news analysis" or the like, then Krugman has no business telling PolitiFact what it is "supposed to" do. That's kind of like me telling Krugman to stick to economics instead of political hackery. It might be fun for me to write, but Krugman's free to do as he pleases. I don't have the moral authority to tell him otherwise any more than he has it to wield on PolitiFact.

Krugman:

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage.

When did PolitiFact lose sight of what it was supposed to be doing?Pretty much right out of the gate.

PolitiFact has always used one of six grades on its "Truth-O-Meter" scale, explicitly taking things like context and misleading presentation into account. In PolitiFact's first year, it rated poor Joe Biden "Pants on Fire" for calling President Bush "brain-dead." Did anyone on the planet think Biden meant it as some type of medical diagnosis? No, I didn't think so. But PolitiFact treated it that way.PolitiFact hasn't changed much. After the 2008 election cycle ended, the St. Petersburg Times ended its PolitiFact partnership with Congressional Quarterly and ran PolitiFact with its own staff while working to start up state versions of itself in partnership with other news outlets such as the Miami Herald. PolitiFact has waffled a bit with its "Half True" rating, and changed the name of "Barely True" to "Mostly False." It added features like the "Flip-O-Meter." But in essence, PolitiFact today performs like it did back in 2007 when it started out.

So Krugman could have leveled his criticism against PolitiFact back in 2007. What stopped him?Oh, that's right. He's a political hack. If PolitiFact attacks his sacred cows then Krugman will sharpen his knives and go to work.

Krugman:

The simple fact is that in today’s US political scene, Republicans make a lot more factual howlers than Democrats. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

By "Sorry, but that's just the way it is" apparently Krugman is telling us he has no intention of pointing to an expert, study or data source in support of the purported fact.Looks like a job for PolitiFact!

Dear Truth-O-Meter,

This week I read yet another political claim that appears dubious. This time the claim came from Paul Krugman.

The simple fact is that in today’s US political scene, Republicans make a lot more factual howlers than Democrats. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/finding-the-truth/

Is it a simple fact? On what objective evidence could Krugman have possibly relied?

Thanks, Truth-O-Meter. I'll never forget you for this.

Sincerely,

Bryan White

Sent.

Update 1/28/2012
Hat tip to Jeff Dyberg for pointing out where I substituted "this" for "things." Corrected. Also added a link or two.

Trusty "NewsTrust" rates PolitiFact

2012-01-26T04:30:00.003-05:00

This is just too funny.

A website called "NewsTrust" purports to serve as a guide to good journalism. Check it out:

NewsTrust helps people find good journalism online. We rate the news on quality, not just popularity.

It's a grand mission they've set for themselves.

The site reviews a recent story about PolitiFact from the Huffington Post, written by Jaon Linkins. The reviews don't so much rate the HuffPo story so much as they take hearty swings at PolitiFact.

Enjoy the hilarity of a deep quality assessment:

Linkins does fact checking on Politifact, and finds they are using their bias again to mis-interpret facts.

Wow.

There's more!

Politifact is ran at the top by Republicans, and seem to force bias into their politically important analysis.

There you have it.

Ideas like NewsTrust have some merit. People can use some help searching out epistemologically solid sourcing on their information. The difficulty of assembling an appropriately qualified and sufficiently unbiased group accounts for the main pitfall.

And it's a big pitfall, if NewsTrust is any indication.

PolitiFlub: Udderly confused by EPA's milk regs

2012-01-25T03:04:00.003-05:00

This.
just.
doesn't.
look.
very.
easy.
to.
reconcile:

(link to story at PolitiFact.com)

That's President Obama from yesterday's State of the Union Address.

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The latter rating came from PolitiFact Virginia almost a full year ago.

On the face of it, one can imagine a reconciliation of the two rulings. But it's doubtful if you've looked at the one for Obama after evaluating the one for Griffith.

The best part of it is that PolitiFact may have flubbed both rulings. The EPA was leaning toward an exemption for homogenized milk. But the exemption would not have covered raw milk, which should have left Griffith's claim at least partly true. And if raw milk received no exemption from the EPA then Obama's claim is approximately half true as well. A raw milk spill would still be treated just like an oil spill even after President Obama supposedly eliminated the rule that required a milk spill to be treated like an oil spill.

Welcome to the wonderful world of PolitiFact fact checking.

Update: Looks like the EPA did get around to exempting all milk products from the rule. Griffith was still partially correct at worst, and President Obama did not eliminate an EPA rule. Rather, Obama's EPA exempted milk from a rule that remains in effect. And Obama's statement obscures the administration's vacillating actions on the issue:

"The Obama Administration pulled back the rule in January of 2009, then reissued it in November, and to large degree it was the same rule," Schlegel said.

The muddying of the bloodying of PolitiFact

2012-01-25T00:14:00.002-05:00

Columbia Journalism Review is at it again, fishing me in with a mention of "PolitiFact." This time it's Trudy Lieberman, hitting PolitiFact a tad late for its most recent "Lie of the Year" selection while trying to convince us that Republicans really did vote to end Medicare.

Though it's fair to say there was a shred of truth to the Democrats' claim, the arguments for it representing the unvarnished truth leave a great deal to be desired.

Lieberman, a CJR contributing editor as well as a fellow for the Center for Advancing Health and a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Health Care Journalists, charges that PolitiFact primarily failed with its "Lie of the Year" because it failed to adequately explain Medicare's complexity:

The fact is Republicans by supporting Ryan’s voucher plan did essentially vote to end Medicare. The Dems who didn’t like that idea should have been more precise in their statements, saying instead “Republicans voted to end Medicare as we know it” or “voted to end Medicare as a social insurance program”—a point that Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, made in PolitiFact’s critique.

PolitiFact and others should have left it there and devoted space to the larger issue. Medicare may be wildly popular, but it is not well understood by most people—be they beneficiaries, politicians, or journalists. Deconstructing how this complicated and misunderstood program works and the historical context for proposed changes would go a long way to helping the public evaluate the arguments from both Democrats and Republicans. For more than a year, Campaign Desk has urged journalists to fill that void.

Good luck understanding Lieberman's rationale for thinking Republicans voted to end Medicare:

There’s no doubt that the voucher plan contemplated by Ryan—and now his new sidekick, Oregon senator Ron Wyden—will eventually change Medicare from a social insurance scheme, where everyone who paid into the program is entitled to a benefit, into private insurance, where the sellers must bow to the profit incentive.

The Ryan-Wyden alternative would not constitute a social insurance scheme? Why not? The new plan is sponsored and subsidized by the government. Lieberman doesn't say why, other than to assure us there's "no doubt" about it.

At a basic level I agree with Lieberman, however. Explain Medicare to people. Explain how the changes in national demographics combined with the advance of medical technology make the current system absolutely unsustainable. Lacking a reform such as that proposed by Ryan, there are two main methods for keeping the system from going destructively into the red. One is to reimburse health care providers so little (a prominent feature of ObamaCare) that it reduces the supply of health care providers. As the number of providers shrinks, fewer patients receive services in a timely manner. A certain number die prior to obtaining expensive treatments. That's savings. Second, the government can explicitly limit the number and types of services it makes available. That also accounts for savings, this time via explicit rationing.

Both methods were what Sarah Palin had in mind when she referred to Obama's "death panel," by the way, summing up principles expressed by economist Thomas Sowell in the process.

Skip the issue of cost as Lieberman does in her CJR column and shortchange the nation on its health care conversation.

Piquing PolitiFact: Building a straw man with which to attack Mitt Romney?

2012-01-21T05:00:00.000-05:00

A recent fact check of Mitt Romney has drawn criticism from two of the experts cited in the story, in addition to Politico and the Huffington Post (find summary and links at PolitiFact Bias).

I'm not doing many "Grading PolitiFact" posts because of some research projects involving PolitiFact, but I took time out to submit a fact check suggestion to PolitiFact:

Dear Truth-O-Meter,

It is said PolitiFact rates those who make political claims. I ran across a political claim a moment ago that seems highly questionable and I'm wondering if you would please consider fact checking it.

A political fact check operation presented Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as saying the following:

The U.S. military is at risk of losing its "military superiority" because "our Navy is smaller than it's been since 1917. Our Air Force is smaller and older than any time since 1947."

The quoted snippets are accurate enough, but please check the "because." Romney in the immediate context talked of administration proposals to cut military spending. Isn't that the chief reason Romney is suggesting as the risk to U.S. military superiority?

Thank you oh-so-much, Truth-O-Meter.

I suspect that PolitiFact will triple down on its rating of Romney (either that or turtle and wait for the furor to die down), but in the unlikely event the editors decide to retract, a fact check of their own item might serve as a partial antidote to the high-handedness that pervades PolitiFact's typical response to criticism lately.

Disagreeing with Jay Rosen

2012-01-14T13:04:00.000-05:00

Jay Rosen's a good press critic, and I liked his work even more after I found him writing while atop one of my traditional soapboxes.

But I think he's mostly wrong in his opinion about the competing methods of handling truth claims.

Rosen wrote about the issue after a remarkable New York Times piece that asked readers if the paper should employ vigilante zeal in fact checking:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years or so that never got acknowledged and to this day would be denied by a majority of newsroom professionals. Somewhere along the way, truthtelling was surpassed by other priorities the mainstream press felt a stronger duty to. These include such things as “maintaining objectivity,” “not imposing a judgment,” “refusing to take sides” and sticking to what I have called the View from Nowhere.

I'm not going to call Rosen entirely wrong. I've encountered persons in the journalism profession who see themselves almost like the Watcher from the Fantastic Four comic books. The Watcher was a figure of great power who was pledged to merely record great events without interfering. There are journalists who feel it is their duty to report every bit of news regardless of resulting harm.I could write a lengthy blog post about that, but for now I'll just concede that Rosen identifies at least part of the problem.

I think Rosen misses a more obvious explanation, one that better explains the facts.Journalists today are an educated class. And this shift falls pretty much in the 40-year window Rosen identifies. Traditional journalists knew that they possessed a broad lack of expertise. When confronted with complex or controversial issues, journalists responded economically: They punted.In other words, journalists found an expert or two, presented those views and left the rest up to their readers. Yes, this method preserved the appearance of objectivity--as Rosen notes. More importantly, it kept journalists from having to figure out aspects of the story they were unequipped to evaluate in terms of both time and education.

Consider PolitiFact's handling of many economic claims surrounding the effects of the economic stimulus bill. Are the journalists at PolitiFact experts on economics? They are not. They survey a group of experts, find a majority of Keynesians in that group and tend to confirm issues of fact according to a Keynesian paradigm. The reader is typically none the wiser.

PolitiFact's handling of such stories illustrates the key pitfall in journalists' vigilante attitude toward truth: It makes journalists more likely to try to handle issues of fact they are not prepared to evaluate.

If journalists can stay safely in the shallow end of the pool of epistemology, then, fine, practice a vigilante attitude toward truth. Traditional journalists uncomfortable with that approach need to clearly articulate a strong rationale for their opposition. Doing so will help make it more clear to the truth vigilantes where they can safely swim in that pool.

WaPo's Glenn Kessler offers cold comfort with fact check summary

2012-01-02T15:12:00.003-05:00

Criticism of the fact checkers at PolitiFact represents the dominant theme of this blog, but Glenn Kessler's summary of the Washington Post's year in fact checking at least shows that PolitiFact isn't alone in its reckless approach to fact check reporting.

Quantifying opinion then reporting the aggregated results as if they reflect on the political figures involved? Check:

Democrats fared slightly better than Republicans in terms of Pinocchios. They have an average of 2.32 Pinocchios per statement, compared to 2.49 Pinocchios for Republicans. As we noted at the six-month point, some of the GOP presidential contenders (We are looking at you, Rep. Bachmann) were largely responsible for inflating the Republican score.

The average Pinocchio rating of the political candidates is constantly updated by our Pinocchio tracker. Obama, with a vast White House staff to vet his statements, at the moment is basically tied for the lowest average with his nearest rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Romney also has a large campaign staff who help vet his statements, so it should not be a surprise that these two politicians have the best Pinocchio ratings.

Misunderstanding the reason why such aggregated results mean virtually nothing apart from representing a measure of selection bias? Check:

Some readers have complained that the “average Pinocchio rating” is a bit absurd because it is completely dependent on a random selection of statements that we vet. This is true; it is inherently arbitrary. But we would also argue that over time one can get a broad sense of how accurate a politician is, and so that makes the average ranking is [sic] a rough but imperfect guide.

D'oh!

No, a random selection is exactly what you want if the average Pinocchio rating is used to establish politicians' trends for veracity. And that's exactly what we don't get from either Kessler or PolitiFact. Both choose items of editorial interest. Thus the selection of items is not "arbitrary" in the random sense but rather "arbitrary" because the editors serve as arbiters of what facts to check.

And Kessler's last sentence in the same paragraph is a howler, plain and simple.

The logic of the sentence construction appears to suggest that because WaPo's fact checker argues for the utility of the results therefore the results possess that utility. Any truly reasonable argument supporting Kessler's conclusion somehow failed to make it into the story.

Kessler helps illustrate the peril of relying on journalists for fact checks.

NFL 2011: Summing up the Buccaneers

2012-01-02T02:00:00.000-05:00

Not good.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers suffered through a miserable 4-12 season just one year after narrowly missing the playoffs with one of the NFL's youngest teams.

What happened?

Part of the problem stemmed from roster risks the team took entering the season.

First, the Bucs parted ways with Cadillac Williams, who signed a free agent contract with the St. Louis Rams in the off season. That left the Bucs with LeGarrette Blount, Earnest Graham and untested Kregg Lumpkin to tote the pigskin. Blount serves as an ungainly third down back at this point in his career. Graham was the best backup option before an injury ended his season. It may be more than a coincidence that the Bucs failed to win another game after Graham's injury.

The Bucs also allowed middle linebacker Barrett Ruud to depart in free agency. That move disappointed relatively few Tampa Bay fans, as Ruud had acquired a reputation among fans for making a sure tackle after the runner had gained good yardage. But the Bucs replaced Ruud with rookie Mason Foster, who ended up playing like a rookie. Tampa Bay's linebacker corps ended up a major weakness during 2011. Having Ruud probably would have helped.

The Bucs lost on those roster risks, but they don't come close to fully explaining the porous defense and turnover-prone offense.

Quarterback Josh Freeman threw almost four times the number of interceptions he threw last year.

The defensive line improved its pressure on opposing quarterbacks, but other teams usually ran on the Bucs at will, often breaking runs of 10-20 yards or even longer.

The offensive and defensive problems complemented one another for the worse. The offense found many ways to cough up the football, and the defense excelled at giving up an early score, which would put pressure on the offense to throw the ball.

All in all, it made games tough to watch this season. So what about next season?

Josh Freeman and coach Raheem Morris won me over with their performance the first two years. But this third season forces scrutiny on Morris' coaching ability. He served as defensive coordinator for a defense that often just couldn't compete. And he was using players he says he likes. So something's deeply wrong. My take: The defensive line and defensive backfield have talent. The linebackers have athletic ability but aren't getting the job done. The defense needs better tackling across the board. Straighten out the defense and the offense will probably turn the ball over less frequently. That probably means personnel moves at linebacker and safety if Cody Grimm and Tanard Jackson can't stay healthy and/or clear of league suspensions.

It's not an easy call, but in ownership's shoes I give Morris another year to establish whether 2010 or 2011 was the fluke.

PolitiFact 2011: A review

2012-01-01T21:00:00.001-05:00

PolitiFact Bias has now spent approximately a full year highlighting criticisms of the PolitiFact fact checking brand.

Our hopes that PolitiFact would improve its performance in light of outside criticism have gone largely unfulfilled. Perhaps the biggest improvement was the reconciliation of two differing definitions of the "Half True" rating, but that modest accomplishment occurred without any announcement or acknowledgment at all from PolitiFact. By contrast, PolitiFact wrote extensively about its momentous change in calling its fourth rating from the top "Mostly False" rather than "Mostly True" even though the definition remained the same.

Here's a rundown of the issues that should keep discerning readers from trusting PolitiFact:

1) PolitiFact persistently ignores the effects of selection bias. It simply isn't plausible that editors who are very probably predominantly liberal will choose stories of interest on a neutral basis without some systematic check on ideological bias. PolitiFact, for example, continues to publish candidate report cards as though selection bias has no effect on the report card data.

2) PolitiFact continues to publish obviously non-objective stories without employing the journalistic custom of using labels like "commentary," "opinion" or even "news analysis." Readers are implicitly led to believe that stories like an editorial "Lie of the Year" selection are objective news stories.

3) PolitiFact continues to routinely apply its principles of analysis unevenly, as with its interpretation of job creation claims (are the claims assumed to refer to gross job creation or net job creation?).

4) PolitiFact has yet to shake its penchant for snark. Snark has no place in objective reporting (see #2 above). Unfortunately, PolitiFact treats it like a selling point instead of a weakness, and PolitiFact's intentional use of it has apparently influenced Annenberg Fact Check to follow suit.

There is a silver lining. PolitiFact's methods produce perhaps the best opportunity yet to objectively measure mainstream media bias. Some of those projects will be published at PolitiFact Bias over the coming year, with the study specifics available through Google Docs.

January Artist: The Jelly Jam

2011-12-29T03:49:00.000-05:00

The obvious choice for January Artist leading off 2012, given the December release of a new album and my rabid fandom of their music, is The Jelly Jam.

The Jelly Jam is an under-the-radar supergroup featuring guitarist/vocalist Ty Tabor of King's X, bassist John Myung of Dream Theater and Rod Morgenstein of the Dixie Dregs, Steve Morse Band and Winger.

The band plays commercial rock with insanely technical yet subtle twists (the tune "Feeling" serves as an excellent example). Kind of like nutritious vitamins that taste like candy. I decided to try allowing the music to play when people visit. Complain to the proprietor (me) if you don't like that feature.

Bill Adair: You who criticize us are in an echo chamber chamber chamber chamber

2011-12-24T05:50:00.000-05:00

Crossposted from PolitFact Bias.

PolitiFact editor Bill Adair served up some delicious irony with his recent defense of PolitiFact's 2011 "Lie of the Year" selection.

That selection was Democrats' claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare. Liberals and progressives far and wide have condemned the selection, and we at PolitiFact Bias share a degree of sympathy with offended liberals since there is some (not much) truth in the claim.

The deluge of port side criticism has prompted yet another one of PolitiFact's nearly content-free rebuttals under the headline "Fact-checking in the Echo Chamber Nation."

Adair seems blissfully unaware that he's inside the echo chamber.

Adair:

At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news."I listen to Rush and read NewsMax," he said. "And to make sure I'm getting a balanced view, I watch Fox."My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.

Adair just told us that he's positioned within an echo chamber oriented left. He hears opinions from the right when he's out reporting. But to hear what the left is saying he can just hang out with his friends. A truly centrist Bill Adair may be expected to have discussions with a conservative friend to draw from in writing his story.

Adair:

This is life in our echo chamber nation. We protect ourselves from opinions we don't like and seek reinforcement from like-minded allies.

Bear in mind Adair just finished hinting that his list of friends is predominantly (if not exclusively) liberal.

If Adair isn't in the echo chamber shoulder-to-shoulder with those he criticizes, then it's more akin to a liberal echo chamber duplex with one common living area.

Adair:

The paradox of the Internet age is that never before have we had access to more ideas and different thoughts. And yet, many of us retreat into comfy parlors where everyone agrees and the other side is always wrong. Each side can manufacture its truths and get the chorus to sing along.PolitiFact had its latest brush with the Echo Chamber Nation this week. We gave our Lie of the Year to the Democrats' claim that the Republicans "voted to end Medicare." That set off a firestorm in the liberal blogosphere, with many saying that claim was not actually wrong. We've received about 1,500 e-mails about our choice and only a few agreed with us.

Adair borrows a page from President Obama's book of rhetorical tricks. Sure, "many of us" insist on surrounding ourselves with like-minded opinions. But Adair's problematic audience response probably comes more from those who expose themselves to contrary opinion yet do not have the ability and/or inclination to sift through the clash of ideas to figure out what's wrong or right from either side.

And blame falls on PolitiFact on this point. PolitiFact often fails to make a clear case in favor of its decisions, and its 2011 "Lie of the Year" is another good example. Observe Adair's method of treating substantial criticisms in response to the "Lie of the Year" selection:

Some of the response has been substantive and thoughtful. The critics said we ignored the long-term effects of Rep. Paul Ryan's plan and that we were wrong to consider his privatized approach to be Medicare. In their view, that is an end to Medicare.We've read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.

You just can't blame the outraged liberals for finding this type of response unsatisfactory. Adair appears to admit that they have a point. And then tells them with no reason why--unless it's sufficient to claim non-specific support from Annenberg Fact Check or the Washington Post fact checker--that there's no reason to change the ruling.

Adair:

We got other silly comments from readers who declared we were "a tool" of the Republicans, Fox News and the Koch brothers. Their reaction is typical these days. To paraphrase George W. Bush, you're either with us, or against us.In reality, fact-checking is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth. PolitiFact now has nine state sites run by news organizations around the country that employ more than 30 full-time journalists for fact-checking. We've inspired many copycat sites around the nation and roughly a dozen in other countries.

Adair says the extremist reactions are "typical." And in almost the next breath he claims that fact checking is thriving because of the people living outside the partisan bubbles. The atypical ones account for PolitiFact's success? Why, if that's the case, did PolitiFact not receive greater email support for its "Lie of the Year" selection? Is it that hard for Adair to see the writing on the wall from within his echo chamber?

On the whole, Adair's defense is elitist and defensive. The PolitiFact staff is enlightened, thank you very much. If you don't like their "Lie of the Year" selection then there are plenty of potential readers who live outside the echo chamber. And it would be nice if a few of those readers would send in some supportive emails (hint, hint).

It seems Adair doesn't know his audience.

Addendum:

One more area where PolitiFact needs to clean up its act:

Adair:

Some of our critics wrongly attributed our choice to our readers' poll and said we were swayed by a lobbying campaign by Ryan. But our editors made the choice and the poll was not a factor.

Um--how do we know the poll was not a factor? Because Adair says so?

Free advice for Adair: If you want to be able to claim with confidence that the poll plays no role in the editors' selection then keep the editors ignorant of the poll numbers until they're finished making their choice. And if you do it that way then you can write your defense like this:

Some of our critics wrongly attributed our choice to our readers' poll and said we were swayed by a lobbying campaign by Ryan. But we shield the editors from the poll data to ensure that it will not affect our decision.

Doesn't that sound a lot better? More convincing?

Mother Jones with the bird's eye lowdown on PolitiFact

2011-12-21T15:12:00.000-05:00

A Mother Jones story about PolitiFact's shocking selection for its 2011 "Lie of the Year" award works at cross purposes with itself.

Fact-checking, as a genre, probably shouldn't exist. It does largely because of one of the weirder conventions of mainstream journalism, which is to give equal weight to competing claims regardless of whether or not they actually deserve it. Determining the truth or falsity of a given claim is of a lower priority than actually meeting a deadline.

The so-called weird convention arose because journalists recognized that they weren't likely to possess sufficient expertise to accurately decide between two competing views, especially when those competing views came from experts in a given field of study.

As the story continues with its predictable panning of PolitiFact's 2011 Lie of the Year selection, writer Adam Serwer bears out the difficulty journalists have with accurately determining the facts (bold emphasis added):

Previously, PolitiFact's system for deciding the "Lie of the Year" was through popular vote, which in all honestly [sic] seems like a strange way to decide something like this. Nevertheless, while in 2009 and 2010 the lies of the year reflected choices made by readers, as Steve Benen points out, this year PolitFact decided to go with the third-place choice.

PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" selections always came from a committee of editors, not from the results of the readers votes. Surwer is correct, at least, about the dubiousness of granting the award based on the votes of readers. But PolitiFact doesn't do it that way. The readers vote, no doubt, for entertainment purposes and to give PolitiFact more stuff to write about relating to its annual award. It's a natural, really. People tend to have opinions about annual awards ranging from the Emmys to the Miss Universe pageant. And the popular media exploit that interest to draw readers by letting the readers vote on who they think should have won.

Surwer ought to have stopped himself to double check after supposing that PolitiFact operates akin to "American Idol."

Mother Jones has had a day or two to generate a correction to Surwer's story. Nothing yet as I move to hit the "publish" button.

Dec. 22, 2011: Added "[sic]" in first Mother Jones quotation, added "ought to have" in next to last paragraph.

PolitiFact picks surprise winner for its 2011 "Lie of the Year" award

2011-12-20T13:36:00.000-05:00

The claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare receives PolitiFact's Lie of the Year for 2011.

I'm calling it a surprise, given my effort to handicap the selection back in early December.

I reasoned that PolitiFact would have some impulse to choose a "lie" from the Democrats to help preserve the impression of nonpartisanship, and I discounted statements likely to harm President Obama in the coming election.

Unfortunately, I did a poor job of distinguishing between the result of a poll for readers and PolitiFact's selection for Lie of the Year. PolitiFact doesn't publish the ordering of its 10 finalists. It simply announces the winner.

I chose Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the likely winner for Democrats, and I chose the eventual winner to vie with Schultz's statement. And there was an interesting wrinkle in PolitiFact's reasoning:

As we were concluding our reporting for our Lie of the Year story last week, Ryan announced that he was altering his plan and would retain an option for people to stay in traditional Medicare if they want.

His announcement of a bipartisan effort with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., changes the dynamic in the polarized debate and could increase the likelihood that Congress adopts his approach.
Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, wrote that Ryan "has plausibly inoculated his party against a full-frontal Mediscare campaign. Or at least he gives Republicans a credible rebuttal to neutralize it."

But Ryan's latest tactic doesn't affect our decision on Lie of the Year. The statements made about his original plan were clearly inaccurate, they were repeated by many Democrats and they perpetuated a 60-year tactic in using false claims to scare seniors.

Ryan's "latest tactic" (intriguing choice of words, that) decreases the chance that PolitiFact's selection will affect the coming election. That aspect of the outcome matches the thinking I used in handicapping the selection.

PolitiFact surprises, however, by choosing an item that many on the political left continue to regard as a perfectly true claim. And that claim, like the two LOTY winners that preceded it, does have a little more truth to it than PolitiFact's rating might suggest. PolitiFact, after all, has never revealed an objective criterion for ruling a statement "Pants on Fire."

The decision is likely to decrease public trust in PolitiFact's findings, particularly for PolitiFact's most devoted fans.

As for the reader vote, there was only one surprise: that the statement PolitiFact editors chose as their winner finished as high as it did. I was correct that only one statement from a Democrat finished in the top five.

Dec. 22, 2011: Corrected link in final paragraph. Hat tip to Jeff Dyberg for catching the broken link.

PolitiFlub: "the deciding vote"

2011-12-19T12:41:00.002-05:00

Usually I find myself highlighting PolitiFact's inconsistencies. This item highlights a PolitiFact consistency, albeit it's consistent error.

A fresh story from PolitiFact rates Democrat Tim Kaine "False" for his claim that Republican George Allen cast the deciding vote in favor of the Bush tax cuts. PolitiFact, as it has in the past when Republicans make such claims of Democrats, argues that it simply cannot be the deciding vote unless it breaks a tie in somewhat the same sense as the vice president breaks a tie in Senate voting.

I'm completely sympathetic to the counter argument of the Kaine campaign:

(I)f Allen had voted against the 2003 tax cuts, they would have failed by a 51-49 Senate vote.

Exactly! And people understand this type of campaign advertisement in that sense.

In this case, at least, PolitiFact applies its misguided principles consistently. Ineptitude squeezes out bias as the root of the problem.

Addendum:

This PolitiFact item from October 2010 appears to complete the set of items dealing with claims about "the deciding vote." Kaine joins three Republicans in getting a raw deal on his claim, and joins Scott Bruun in getting a "False" rating for his claim.

Center for Freedom and Prosperity Video: Myths about the New Deal

2011-12-16T14:58:00.001-05:00

Hurray! Another video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, this time featuring lovely-yet-traitor-to-her-gender Michelle Fields:

Another good video (might be a tad misleading with some of the quotations), but a note to Michelle Fields: Two weeks of voice lessons might be some of the best money you ever spend. Speak up, girl! Let your voice be heard!

Grading PolitiFact: Newt Gingrich and space mirrors

2011-12-14T04:56:00.000-05:00

Words matter -- We pay close attention to the specific wording of a claim. Is it a precise statement? Does it contain mitigating words or phrases?
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

I thought about doing a comparison piece instead of a "Grading PolitiFact" evaluation of this next item. I decided to do the normal evaluation, but we'll be doing a comparison to PolitiFact's check of a chain email about the Obama administration's Cass Sunstein.

The issue:

clipped from PolitiFact.com

For comparison:

clipped from PolitiFact.com

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton: editor

Robert Farley and Bill Adair filled the corresponding roles for the Sunstein item.

Analysis:

Before examining the text of PolitiFact's fact check, let's take a moment to look at the initial presentation of the two items we're comparing.

The top portions seem very comparable. Gingrich is said to have "suggested" something and Sunstein is said to have "advocated" something.

The middle portions differ. In Brooks' case, the headline material stick with the narrow description of Brooks, claim, paraphrasing "has suggested" with "once proposed." The nearby "Truth-O-Meter tells readers what to think of Brooks' claim ("True"). PolitiFact handles the chain email differently. Instead of paraphrasing the material just above, PolitiFact includes its assessment in the statement. And we get the "Half True" graphic. The "then thought better of it" part ends up justifying a rating other than "True."

Now let's follow PolitiFact's little tale about Brooks and Gingrich--both conservatives, so there's something for everyone to like on both sides of the partisan divide.

PolitiFact:

Brooks cites negatively what he considered half-baked ideas by Gingrich. "For example, he has called for ‘a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the moon’s resources.’ He has suggested that ‘a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.’"

The space-mirror system seemed so outlandish that we felt compelled to check whether Gingrich really suggested it.

So that's the issue: Did Gingrich suggest the space mirror system Brooks mentions?

In the item we're using for comparison, PolitiFact was checking the claim (quoting PolitiFact) that "President Barack Obama's nominee to be the administration's regulatory czar once advocated a "Fairness Doctrine" of sorts for the Internet, one that would require partisan sites to link to sites with opposing viewpoints."

PolitiFact did not receive a response from Brooks asking for the source of his claim. PolitiFact surmised the source was Andrew Ferguson in the New York Times magazine. But Ferguson's account only hints at the notion that the space mirrors were Gingrich's suggestion. As PolitiFact presented it:

Here’s a portion of what Ferguson wrote:

"Gingrich’s first book, Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future, came out in 1984 and contained the seeds of much of what was to follow. Beneath its cover image — a flag-draped eagle inexplicably threatening the space shuttle— the backbencher Gingrich was identified as chairman of the congressional Space Caucus, a position that inspired a series of ‘space cadet’ jokes that took years to die. Window of Opportunity was co-written by Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, and a science-fiction writer called David Drake. ...

"In Window of Opportunity, Gingrich introduced himself as a futurist, a role he has played off and on throughout his career. There are problems inherent in futurism, most of them involving the future, which the futurist is obliged to predict (it’s his job) and which seldom cooperates as he would hope. Gingrich has called some and missed some. In 1984, he saw more clearly than most that computers would touch every aspect of commercial and private life, but nobody any longer wants to build ‘a large array of mirrors [that] could affect the earth’s climate,’ warming it up so farmers could extend the growing season."

Because the quotes from Brooks and Ferguson are slightly different, we wanted to look directly at the book ourselves before making our judgment.

It isn't that what Brooks and Ferguson wrote is simply "slightly different." That's fairly normal with a paraphrase. The problem that invites deeper investigation is the uncertainty as to whether Gingrich advocated a system of space mirrors. So it apparently comes down to the book.

PolitiFact:

In the book, Gingrich proposes (among many other ideas) "five simple steps to a bold future" in space, most unusually a lottery in which randomly selected taxpayers would win a spot on a space shuttle flight. But the floating mirror idea isn’t on this list. Instead, it’s included in Gingrich's recap of a June 1979, NASA-sponsored new concepts symposium in Woods Hole, Mass., "where 30 experts brainstormed a range of pioneering options for NASA worthy of Lewis and Clark."

Just in case the paragraph above obscures PolitiFact's findings, they did not find Gingrich mentioning mirrors when he gave recommendations. They found the mirrors mentioned when he presented some ideas from a NASA-sponsored brainstorming session.

Where's the advocacy?

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

Here’s how Gingrich summarized the idea:

"The climate group at the Woods Hole conference suggested that a large array of mirrors could affect the earth’s climate by increasing the amount of sunlight received by particular areas, citing recent feasibility studies exploring the possibilities of preventing frosts in Florida or enabling farmers in high altitudes to plant their wheat earlier.

"A mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways. Ambient light covering entire areas could reduce the current danger of criminals lurking in the darkness. Mirrors could be arranged to light given metropolitan areas only during particular periods, so there would be darkness late at night for sleeping."

Brooks’ portrayal glosses over the fact that Gingrich was primarily reciting proposals made by participants at a NASA-sponsored forum. Still, Gingrich cited them approvingly.

I have Gingrich's book before me as I write. The relevant passage occurs in Chapter 2: "Americans and the Greatest Frontier." PolitiFact's reporting about the book is perfectly accurate and complete, except I can't figure out the justification for the claim "Gingrich cited them approvingly." Clearly Gingrich found the ideas coming out of the brainstorm session exciting. That's reason enough to put them in a book. But can we justify an equivalency between that and specific advocacy of the space mirror idea?

Where's the advocacy? PolitiFact admits that Gingrich was "primarily" citing the proposals of others. We get no objective evidence of the type of advocacy Brooks suggests.

PolitiFact:

Still, we didn’t want to stop with a look at whether Brooks framed the issue fairly. We also wanted to know whether this was ever a mainstream idea -- and whether it’s technologically feasible.

These issues are irrelevant to whether Brooks' claim is true. They are relevant to Brooks' apparent underlying argument that Gingrich's supposed suggestion of putting mirrors in space is crazy.

Of course, that kind of sidesteps the concept of a brainstorming session (come up with ideas regardless of merit) and ignores the prestige, if any, of the participants at NASA's symposium. Apparently the space mirror idea came from climate scientists. Some people have suggested space mirrors could help alleviate problems associated with global climate change.

PolitiFact's story acknowledges the global warming connection through the testimony of one science expert, though it concludes with a kicker quotation from another supposedly neutral expert:

Raymond S. Bradley, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts, put it simply: "This is not a mainstream idea. It is one of the dumbest ideas I have heard of."

Bradley doesn't sound like the sort of person who would fit in well at a brainstorming session.

But all this window dressing aside, where's the advocacy?

PolitiFact:

Our ruling
Gingrich co-wrote his book more than a quarter century ago, and since he doesn’t appear to have reiterated the call for floating mirrors in recent years, we can safely assume the idea is no longer at the top of his policy agenda. But did cite the idea approvingly in his book, so we rate Brooks’ statement True.

Funny. The gracious snarkmeisters at PolitiFact can assume the idea is "no longer at the top of Gingrich's policy agenda." This after their story failed to turn up any evidence that the idea had ever been anywhere on Gingrich's policy agenda.

We reach the end of PolitiFact's analysis without any solid evidence that Gingrich ever advocated the idea of placing giant mirrors in space for any reason at all, yet David Brooks warrants a "True" rating?

No, I haven't forgotten the comparison to Cass Sunstein:

Yes, Sunstein acknowledges this was an idea he once threw out there — albeit, in his words, "tentatively." But he now thinks it's a bad idea. So the chain e-mail/article is correct that Sunstein once suggested it. But contrary to the headline, it's a position he no longer holds, as he has since said strongly and repeatedly. Once true. No longer. That leaves us at Half True.

Readers may notice a discordant thread in the above conclusion. PolitiFact's own headline material does not match in substance the World Net Daily headline associated with the story about Sunstein. The fact check was of the chain email. While PolitiFact did not provide a copy of the email, it's at least clear that the claim PolitiFact highlighted in its headline material is a true claim. The entire justification for dropping the chain email claim apparently comes from the World Net Daily headline. Applying that standard to PolitiFact, their story fact checking the claim about Sunstein is "Half True."

PolitiFact provided no evidence that Gingrich had advocated a system of space mirrors.

PolitiFact found that Sunstein definitely had advocated a type of fairness doctrine for the Internet.

Gingrich did not write to withdraw his space mirror proposal as Sunstein did with his Internet fairness doctrine, but the most obvious explanation for that comes from the fact that Gingrich didn't advocate putting up space mirrors in the first place.

Yet the claim about Gingrich received a "True" rating ("The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing.") while the claim about Sunstein received a rating of "Half True" ("The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.")

It isn't relevant that Gingrich never specifically advocated the idea right through to the present day?

Seriously?

The grades:

Louis Jacobson: F
Martha Hamilton: F

Robert Farley and Bill Adair receive honorary failing grades for the bait-and-switch technique they used to justify the "Half True" rating on the Sunstein claim. People in glass houses ...

The meta-savviness of Brendan Nyhan

2011-12-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan is back--not that he ever went away--with another of his patented faux-objective assessments of the U.S. media's relationship with its audience.

Nyhan's fundamental trouble remains his difficulty in assessing the aquarium habitat while always swimming in the tank with the rest of the fish.

His pet issue in his story is the tendency of news reports to continue to use "he said/she said" accounts of political disputes:

The first obligation of journalists is to the truth. As such, it is important that reporters set the record straight when ads like these are misleading their audience. The problem, however, is that many national reporters—and the state reporters who increasingly emulate them—have been sucked in by the cult of the savvy. For these journalists, producing meta-level analysis of the effectiveness of deception as a campaign tactic is more important than correcting the factual record for readers.

I, for one, do not see why Jay Rosen's description of the journalistic "cult of savvy" would be incompatible with the solution Nyhan recommends:

A better approach would be for reporters to characterize the accuracy of ads in their own voice and to invoke non-partisan experts like PolitiFact. In some cases, it may even be possible to find credible sources on the side of the candidate airing the misleading ad who are willing to state the truth.

So journalists will let readers in on their supposedly specialized knowledge regarding the truth of political claims. And then what? The cult of savvy will proceed to meditate on the effects its findings should have on the reader, no doubt abundantly citing Nyhan's flawed research in the process. Both steps leave ample room for the cult of savvy to direct the journalistic approach. Glenn Greenwald, for example, pointed out the tendency at PolitiFact to use expert sources from both sides of an issue. The main difference with the traditional he said/she said approach is that PolitiFact not infrequently ends up making an arbitrary decision as to which expert opinion carries the day.

If the journalists taking that step are both expert and not ideologically biased, then fine. But who buys either proposition?

Apparently the meta-savvy Brendan Nyhan buys it, as he refers to PolitiFact as "non-partisan experts."

Give me a break.

Say what?

2011-12-04T17:41:00.001-05:00

The blog I share with Jeff Dyberg has a Google profile page:

"PolitiFact has not filled out their profile yet."

As interesting as it might be to let PolitiFact fill out our profile page, if it ever gets filled out we'll probably do it ourselves.

December Artist: The Grip Weeds

2011-12-04T02:07:00.001-05:00

Thanks to a timely new Christmas album, the Grip Weeds return to the sidebar at Sublime Bloviations.

If you like the Beatles or the Who or just the late 60s/early 70s rock sound then check them out to the right.

No video from the Christmas album yet, so here's an older one for the song "Don't You Believe It."

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Rick Scott and "the law of the land"

2011-12-03T23:21:00.001-05:00

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

PolitiFact's reader vote for "Lie of the Year" is underway. Because of many cases like the one we're about to examine, I submitted the above principle of the "Truth-O-Meter" as my write-in suggestion for "Lie of the Year" for 2011. Go here to add your write-in vote to mine.

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Becky Bowers: writer, researcher
Aaron Sharockman: editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact does provide the relevant context of Gov. Scott's remarks. Let's go there right away:

Randy Schultz, the paper's editorial page editor, noted that Florida had not worked to implement Obama's health care law, then asked: "Will you implement the law if the Supreme Court upholds all or part of it?"

Scott replied: "If it's the law of the land, we'll be ready."

Post editorial writer Rhonda Swan commented that the state has rejected millions in federal grants designed to help the state prepare. So, she asked, how would the governor pay for implementation?

"It's my job, if it's the law of the country, to be ready when it's the law," Scott said. "... When it's the law of the land, we'll implement the law."

"Where will you find the money?" Swan asked.

"It'll be part of our budget," Scott said.

Swan continued to press, finally asking: "Why not take the money that the federal government is offering now so you can be prepared?"

"Because it's not the law of the land," Scott said. "I don't believe it'll ever become the law of the land."

The fact check starts out lost and never finds its way. It is apparently assumed throughout the story that Scott believes that no part of the PPACA stands as the law of the land regardless of the implementation dates specified in the law. That is, until PolitiFact stumbles over the likely answer and promptly moves on to other things (bold emphasis added):

(D)oes the governor really mean to argue that he's turning away money to prepare for provisions of the law to go into effect because they haven't yet gone into effect?

Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor involved in the Supreme Court challenge to the health care law, offered another interpretation of Scott's statement.

The governor took an oath to support the Constitution. So he might take the stance that the law, "though properly enacted, is contrary to the Constitution and therefore not a valid and binding law," Barnett said.

The answer to the question in bold seems like an abundant and obvious "yes." Yet PolitiFact can't seem to get the story to deal with the most obvious meaning of Scott's statement.

When PolitiFact gets around to its "Truth-O-Meter" rating of "False," we finally see a hint of the reasoning PolitiFact may have used--but only a hint (bold emphasis added):

The Governor's Office argues the law's not "the law of the land," because several significant provisions haven't yet taken effect. But that misses the point. It's telling that the governor has resisted implementing all parts of the law, not just those slated to take effect later or that have raised constitutional questions.

Scott can argue it's not a good idea, but it's incorrect for him to claim it's not the law. We rate his statement False.

Scott has a good argument that provisions that have yet to take effect are not the law of the land. If a mandatory seat belt law is passed in 2010 but goes into effect in 2013 I am not violating any law today by not wearing my seat belt. The law has not taken effect and it is accurate to say that it is not the law of the land in 2011 that I must wear the safety belt.

And though this seems very clearly analogous to Scott's meaning, PolitiFact refuses to see it, even to the point of huffing that Scott "misses the point." With all due respect to PolitiFact, Scott's allowed to determine his own point.

And then there's this interesting nugget (bold emphasis added):

It's telling that the governor has resisted implementing all parts of the law, not just those slated to take effect later or that have raised constitutional questions.

Like what?

No, seriously: Like what?

PolitiFact offers no example.

Read the timeline for implementation of the PPACA and try to figure out what aspects of the law Florida must comply with now. The timeline appears to include no mandatory requirements for the state government of Florida.

I located one aspect of the law that Florida actively resists, a fixed medical loss ratio for insurance companies including Medicaid, but that resistance has not consisted of a simple refusal to implement the law but rather negotiation with federal agencies regarding a phasing in of the requirements.

With no example of Florida blowing off the federal law, the PolitiFact story features a great big hole. The thin rationale for ignoring Scott's likely meaning could pass for nothing, leaving us with a perfectly reasonable way to understand Scott's meaning: Florida will only comply with the law when it must. And that only happens when the PPACA, as Scott put it, is the law of the land.

PolitiFact offers no reasonable evidence to support finding Scott's statement "False" yet finds it "False" anyway.

The grades:

Becky Bowers: F
Aaron Sharockman: F

Handicapping PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" (Updated x2)

2011-12-03T11:25:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year again. PolitiFact has released its finalists for the non-coveted "Lie of the Year" award.

The contestants, in the order PolitiFact presents them:

Congressional Republicans have introduced dozens of bills on social issues and other topics, but "zero on job creation."

I give this one no shot at winning. It's just not going to resonate with PolitiFact's readers, first because liberals may well think it true and second because it was a type of Facebook spam. It would be the equivalent of giving the award to a chain email.

The stimulus created "zero jobs."

This is a fine choice to finish in the top five. Liberals pretty much have to believe that the stimulus worked or else admit that their signature policy in response to the "Great Recession" was a flop. Attacking the claim that the stimulus created zero jobs helps serve that purpose. And it's easy to ignore the fact that the claim was very probably referring to net jobs. Claims like this one, juxtaposed with White House claims about the ARRA, help point out the emptiness of the administration's claims. Who cares how many jobs it creates if the overall result if a net loss in jobs? That reflects a failed policy.

President Obama "went around the world and apologized for America."

This claim by Mitt Romney also has a great chance to finish in the top five, especially if liberals regard Romney as a likely bet to win the nomination as the Republican presidential candidate. This "Pants on Fire" rating is notable because one of the experts PolitiFact consulted on the story flat out supported Romney.

Says the vaccine to prevent HPV can cause mental retardation.

Though liberals have a thing for Michele Bachmann, this statement has no chance of winning unless it is perceived as a key reason why Bachmann had no staying power in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. I don't see it that way, but then again I'm no liberal.

Scientists are "questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. … (It is) more and more being put into question."

Global warming remains a hot-button issue with liberals, so Rick Perry's statement about global warming has an excellent shot at ending in the top five.

"What I have done -- and this is unprecedented ... is I've said to each agency ... 'look at regulations that are already on the books and if they don't make sense, let's get rid of them.'"

This claim seems like tossing a bone to conservatives. Obama is to some extent to conservatives as Bush was to liberals, or as Bachmann is today--the easy target. But who really thinks this faux pas was significant regardless of how much precedent accompanied Obama's review policy? I certainly don't. Don't look for this one to receive many votes. It occurs as a finalist to symbolize PolitiFact's fairness.

By advocating new requirements for voters to show ID cards at the polls, Republicans "want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws."

Debbie Wasserman Schultz actually does fill the Bachmann role for the Democratic Party. She's rapidly forging her own legend of rhetorical excess. And since this one's a doozy it does stand a decent chance of hitting the top five. Conservatives will vote for this partly based on Wasserman Schultz's overall history and figure she's deserving. Democrats can feel comfortable throwing her overboard because they can condemn her rhetoric without making their policies look bad.

"Seniors will have to find $12,500 for health care because Republicans voted to end Medicare."

This claim also has a good shot at hit at hitting the top five for some of the same reasons cited for Wasserman Schultz's contender status. On the downside for PolitiFact, Republicans can make it an election issue and potentially move votes.

Abortion services are "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

Senator Jon Kyle's statement on abortion is about as important as Obama's "unprecedented" review policy, but Kyl could do well in the voting depending on how much liberals perceive abortion a a lightning-rod issue this election season. But I'll be surprised if this one ranks in the top five either among PolitiFact editors or among PolitiFact's readers.

"I didn't raise taxes once."

This one's true in the Clintonesque sense! Obama raised taxes more than once and so can truthfully claim that he did not raise taxes (just) once. This statement is likely to vie with Wasserman Schultz's to serve as the lone liberal representative in the final top five. Journalists may resent Obama's implicit challenge to their willingness to call him on a statement like this one.

These predictions are just for fun, representing my sense of how the results will turn out. Readers should not make bets based on this information as though it is gambling advice.

Update:

It's occurred to me that Obama can't win.

Even though his statement about not raising taxes at all is about as baloniful as anything, making Obama the winner of a "lie of the year" award would serve as campaign fodder in next year's election. A nearly perfect way for PolitiFact to distance itself from a growing reputation for ideological bias in its rulings? Yes--but can they tolerate the political cost to the Obama campaign?

I don't see it happening. Surprise me, PolitiFact.

Wasserman Schultz is the way to go if you don't want to pick a third straight conservative.

Update 2:

I missed adding one significant Democratic Party claim to the list. With this update I'm also trying to fix the problem with the unusual font size and appearance.

PolitiFlub: Scott Walker vs. the unions

2011-11-27T10:01:00.001-05:00

Just a reminder: I exercise selection bias in deciding which PolitiFact items to critique. By no means do I read all of them. I look at ones I think are likely to contain errors based on their subject matter. I tend not to have any difficulty finding errors, and I expect that if I looked at more of the items I'd find many more errors.

I don't have time for do a detailed critique of every PolitiFact item in which I find flaws. But sometimes I have to point out a significant mistake even if I don't do the full critique. That's what "PolitiFlub" items are for.

This item concerns a spectacular offense against the principle of charitable interpretation, committed by PolitiFact Wisconsin. PolitiFact took issue with Walker's description of his clash with Wisconsin's public sector unions:

He focused sharply on labor unions, which fought legislation by Walker and Republican lawmakers to curtail collective bargaining and force public workers to contribute more toward pensions and health care. That push, which became law, attracted massive and prolonged protests in Madison.

"I asked the unions to pay into their own health care insurance (just as their Wisconsin neighbors do) and they said I was being unreasonable," Walker’s letter said. "I requested that they contribute toward their own pensions (just as their Wisconsin neighbors do) and they screamed it was unfair."

What was the problem?

In PolitiFact's eyes, Walker made it look like he was asking the unions to agree to the changes in pension and health care contributions:

(T)he portrayal of "asking" the unions rewrites history, leaving the misleading impression there was give and take with labor.

Why is this a PolitiFlub? Isn't PolitiFact obviously correct?

Shame on you if you think so.

PolitiFact conveniently overlooks that "ask" and "request" and their permutations are routinely used where the associated behavior represents a demand.

Teacher:
"I ask that you all take your seats."

Politician:
"With this tax hike we're simply asking the filthy stinkin' rich to pay their fair share."

Still think I'm kidding?

5. to demand; expect: What price are they asking? A little silence is all I ask.

And, yes, the word "request" works the same way:

5. the state of being asked for; demand.

The principle of charitable interpretation must receive evenhanded application in fact checking to ensure fairness. Every subject, without exception, is entitled to charitable interpretation. Skipping the step according to whim or bias leads to the straw man fallacy and other errors.

Another embarrassing juxtaposition for PolitiFact

2011-11-25T04:38:00.001-05:00

Oy vey.

A little over two weeks ago, I panned a PolitiFact Florida fact check that found "Mostly False" the claim that one can register to vote without proving citizenship.

Just now I stumbled over a parallel fact check from PolitiFact Wisconsin. Apparently state Rep. Donna Seidel claimed that a new Republican-backed law would allow persons without firearms training to receive a state permit to carry a concealed weapon.

In the Florida case, a person registering to vote needs to sign an affidavit affirming possession of legal citizenship status. That's it. That's the proof requirement unless one registers through the "motor voter" program.

In Wisconsin, the law continues to require firearm training but does not specify the amount of training required. Here's how PolitiFact Wisconsin summarized it:

States typically do one or more of the following: certify the training organization, their instructors or their courses; mandate specific topics for training; set a minimum number of hours; require the instructor to sign the training certificate.

Wisconsin now requires none of those.

The finding? They ruled Seidel's statement "True" without reservation. The justification for the ruling provides an amazing comparison with the reasoning applied by PolitiFact Florida with respect to voter registration:

PolitiFact Wisconsin:

The law is still on the books requiring an instructor-led training course, but it’s hard to prove that someone skipped it. So the door is open to "untrained" individuals getting a permit.

PolitiFact Florida:

Individual supervisors of elections do have the ability to determine if an applicant is an U.S. citizen, Cate said, though it would be difficult for a supervisor to ascertain citizenship.

In the former case the difficulty of proving the lack of qualification serves as a key point supporting the Democrat's statement. In the latter case, the difficulty of proving the citizenship of a registered voter is apparently completely ignored as a reason contributing to the truth of the claim.

If a Wisconsin Democrat raises concerns about untrained persons carrying firearms, PolitiFact sees a problem with a soft standard for proving training status.

If a Florida Republican raises concerns about illegal immigrants registering to vote, PolitiFact finds hardly any problem with a comparable standard of proof.

Despite the similarity of the claims and the related set of facts, the Democrat receives a "True" while the Republican receives a "Mostly False" from the Truth-O-Meter.

And doesn't that fit pretty well with the liberal preferences for easy voting and stricter controls on firearms?

The "PolitiFact heuristic"

2011-11-25T03:24:00.001-05:00

A thoughtful college student wrote a pretty good blog post about the usefulness of PolitiFact ratings.

Peter William Hurford overall does a handy job of pointing out the limited conclusions we can legitimately draw from "Truth-O-Meter" ratings, but ends up offering PolitiFact a bit too much credit.

The problem stems from an early assumption:

Enter PolitiFact. PolitiFact is a website located at politifact.com that aims to “fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups”. Run by the St. Petersburg Times, an independent newspaper, PolitiFact elaborates on their history and promises “that no one is behind the scenes telling us what to write for someone else’s benefit. We are an independent, nonpartisan news organization. We are not beholden to any government, political party or corporate interest. We are proud to be able to say that we are independent journalists. And for that, we thank Nelson Poynter.”

Thus we probably have enough information to establish PolitiFact as reasonably trustworthy, and a sufficiently reliable source of information that we can draw upon it to approximate knowledge about the trustworthiness of candidates in a heuristic.

PolitiFact reliable?

Credit Hurford with using the language of caution ("probably" "sufficiently reliable"), but his premise about PolitiFact's reliability is a judgment call resting on little more than a presumption of PolitiFact's competence and fairness.

An abundance of anecdotal evidence shows PolitiFact failing journalistic standards as well as its own standards while strongly suggesting that PolitiFact exhibits the leftward ideological tilt we might expect from the typical aggregation of journalists. Cases like one I wrote about hours ago, where two very similar fact checks essentially gave a pass to the lone Democratic Party entity involved would doubtless give a reasonable person like Hurford pause if he was aware of their existence.

I should emphasize again that Hurford's reasoning is mostly solid. He does a good job of pointing out the types of conclusions the findings at PolitiFact would fail to reasonably support. But at the bottom line, the "PolitiFact heuristic" is probably less useful than Hurford's earlier example of heuristic reasoning: trusting elite opinions.

And an informed voter may well be more likely than the writers and editors at PolitiFact at identifying statements that discredit a candidate.

Another shifting standard at PolitiFact

2011-11-24T05:49:00.001-05:00

Remember the terrible job PolitiFact did fact checking the Florida Democratic Party's claims about Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum's supposed vote for his own pay raises?

No? Well, I'm not so surprised.

PolitiFact Florida revisited the issue yesterday and did a decent job of explaining the pay raise process that made the claim about McCollum so dubious. Not to worry, Florida Democratic Party. I'm sure your "True" rating is permanently ensconced in PolitiFact's Hall of Records. And it's far too late to erase any political damage your ad did to McCollum that year.

This time it's Republican against Republican, with Republican senatorial candidate George LeMieux making a similar claim about Connie Mack's voting record. LeMieux received a "Half True" rating.

LeMieux is a dirty lyin' scoundrel. The Florida Democratic Party is pure as the driven snow.

Time for me to write another futile letter to PolitiFact ...

Dear Amy Sherman (cc Aaron Sharockman),

Thanks for doing a credible job with your story on congressional pay raises. I sincerely appreciate seeing you do such a nice job on it.

On the downside, your inconsistency at PolitiFact just cracks me up. Another PolitiFact team did a parallel fact check of a very similar claim about Bill McCollum back in 2010 and found it true without reservation. That claim was made by the Florida Democratic Party, for what that's worth.

Will you dare demand a revision of that item, shedding on it some of the light from the superior reporting this time around? It's a bit late to help out McCollum, of course, whose reputation took the damage from PolitiFact's earlier fact check, but it might ease a conscience or two.

Ball in PolitiFact's court.

Fatally flawed design

2011-11-23T04:06:00.001-05:00

An MIT grad student has designed software that would highlight suspicious sentences as a type of fact-checking help.

But there's a problem:

Schultz is careful to clarify: His software is not designed to determine lies from truth on its own. That remains primarily the province of real humans. The software is being designed to detect words and phrases that show up in PolitiFact’s database, relying on PolitiFact’s researchers for the truth-telling. “It’s not just deciding what’s bullshit. It’s deciding what has been judged,” he said. “In other words, it’s picking out things that somebody identified as being potentially dubious.”

So the software is next to useless.

Hasn't Schultz heard of Annenberg Fact Check? Still biased, but not the joke that is PolitiFact.

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney's Obama ad and talking about the economy (Updated x2))

2011-11-22T22:53:00.001-05:00

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

PolitiFact delivered on the above principle this time--after a fashion.

The issue

On occasion I'll provide an expanded clip of PolitiFact's visual presentation of the story to help emphasize the way our supposed fact checkers mislead the audience.

This is another of those times.

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

PolitiFact sends the message that it is beyond merely false that Barack Obama said "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Bill Adair: editor

Analysis:

This is an amazingly inept effort by PolitiFact.

You've been warned.

PolitiFact:

On the eve of a presidential trip to New Hampshire on Nov. 22, 2011, Mitt Romney’s campaign released an ad targeting President Barack Obama. In the ad, the Romney campaign used a quote that prompted an immediate counterattack from the Obama camp, which argued that it had been taken out of context.

Wait a minute. The Obama camp complained about the quotation being taken out of context? So Obama actually said what Romney claimed he said? What about the headline and deck material making it look the opposite? What about that "Pants on Fire" rating when PolitiFact's rating system until recently had a category for accurate statements that take things out of context ("Half True")?

What's going on here? Jacobson had better come through with a spectacular explanation for this one.

PolitiFact:

The 60-second ad, called "Believe in America," is designed to contrast "candidate Obama from 2008 with President Obama of today," highlighting "his failures in between," according to the Romney campaign.

The ad contrasts a 2008 campaign speech by Obama with text on the screen that criticizes Obama’s economic record, including, "Greatest Jobs Crisis Since Great Depression," "Record Home Foreclosures" and "Record National Debt."

The ad then has a clip of Obama saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose."

PolitiFact fails to make clear that every one of Obama's words come from that same 2008 campaign speech. And the Romney ad prefaces the quotations with the year in which they were made: 2008.

Here's the ad:

The ad contains nothing to cue the viewer that Obama was speaking about the 2012 election in the last clip. Paying attention to the context, the viewer is left to figure out what Obama was talking about in 2008. Obviously Obama isn't talking about his own re-election prospects on Oct. 16, 2008--not in those words. Obama hadn't been elected at that point. The election didn't take place until November of that year.

PolitiFact somehow fails to see it:

The clear implication is that Obama believes that his economic record is so bad that he will lose in 2012 unless he can steer the conversation away from the economy.

Why would Obama have any beliefs at all about his economic record as president way back in 2008? This supposed "clear implication" occurs only if the viewer either ignores the context or has an unaccountably difficult time taking obvious clues from the context. We're not in Sherlock Holmes territory, here.

But PolitiFact rolls with it:

But the Obama camp, among others, immediately charged that the clip was taken out of context. Was it?

Here’s what Obama said in the October 2008 speech, which came about two weeks before he defeated Sen. John McCain:

"Even as we face the most serious economic crisis of our time, even as you are worried about keeping your jobs or paying your bills or staying in your homes, my opponent's campaign announced earlier this month that they want to ‘turn the page’ on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead," Obama said in the speech. "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.’"

So the comment is drastically different than the way it's portrayed in the Romney ad. Obama was actually saying that his opponent’s campaign three years earlier had said, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." That context is not included in the Romney ad -- and leaving it out sends a profoundly different message.

1) The claim from the Obama camp that the quotation was taken out of context deserves its own fact check.

2) PolitiFact is correct that Obama was referring to something said by the McCain campaign.

3) PolitiFact is incorrect that omitting the context sends a profoundly different message. I will illustrate.

Let's make it a 35 second ad instead of a 30 second ad, adding in the full quotation from Obama, and let PolitiFact explain it just like before:

The ad contrasts a 2008 campaign speech by Obama with text on the screen that criticizes Obama’s economic record, including, "Greatest Jobs Crisis Since Great Depression," "Record Home Foreclosures" and "Record National Debt."

The ad then has a clip of Obama saying, "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.’"

What is the message of the ad with the context included?

No doubt someone could complain that in our augmented version Romney makes it look like McCain is saying that Obama can't get re-elected on his economic record. But we can even make it a 45 second ad, including context sufficient to ensure that every viewer understands that McCain was talking about the economy in 2008 and the GOP prospects for the presidential election and it still doesn't change the point of the ad.

The point of the ad is that if it wasn't proper to run on the economy in 2008 then it's even worse to run on the economy in 2012, with many economic indicators far worse than they were in 2008.

And the fact that Obama mockingly brought up what the McCain campaign said pretty well confirms that Obama did not think the 2008 economy was good election material for the incumbent party. Is Obama supposed to think otherwise in 2011-2012 with unemployment over 8 percent, the housing market still a shambles and an anemic growth rate?

That's the point of the ad. It doesn't change with the context added. And the fact that it doesn't change with the context added means that the quotation was not taken misleadingly out of context.

PolitiFact, of course, fails to see it that way:

Our ruling

We certainly think it’s fair for Romney to attack Obama for his response to the economy. And the Romney camp can argue that Obama’s situation in 2011 is ironic considering the comments he made in 2008. But those points could have been made without distorting Obama’s words, which have been taken out of context in a ridiculously misleading way. We rate the Romney ad’s portrayal of Obama’s 2008 comments Pants on Fire.

Kudos to PolitiFact for at least admitting the real point of the ad is legitimate despite missing the real point. Only viewers completely unable to appreciate the significance of Obama's remarks from 2008 could miss the real point of the ad. The real point flies whether McCain said it of himself, whether McCain said it of Obama or whether Obama said it of himself.

In a situation like that no additional context is needed. The Romney campaign was justified in omitting it.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson: F
Bill Adair: F

What can you say about a team that wrote a knee-jerk response to the Romney ad? What can you say about a team that produced a presentation that makes it appear false that Obama said something that Obama did say? What can you say about a team that corrupted the Truth-O-Meter's supposed grading system in favor of its subjective knee-jerk response?

They're journalists reporting badly.

Update:

ABC News serves up a handy reminder that PolitiFact isn't the only impossibly inept news source out there. ABC ran the following under the headline "Mitt Romney ad misquotes President Obama":

Mitt Romney’s inaugural TV ad of the 2012 campaign aired today in New Hampshire just as President Obama traveled to the state, but the ad immediately came under fire from Democrats and fact-checkers for incorrectly quoting Obama.

The White House, the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s re-election campaign accused the Romney campaign today of unfairly twisting the president’s words.

We have people reporting the news who do not know what is and what is not a misquote.

It's stuff like this that makes it plain to so many, regardless of a want of an easy scientific proof, that the leftward tilt of media ideology results in left-tilted news reporting.

Update 2:

Jim Nolte at Big Journalism evaluated the Romney ad the same way I did, and he published first:

Watch Romney’s ad again. The point wasn’t “look at what Obama said!” The point was that the statement about talking about the economy is true when it comes to Obama. You could add the full context and it might even hit Obama harder because of the obvious irony. Moreover, campaigns do this kind of thing all the time.

Word.

But don't expect PolitiFact to pay any attention to the criticism unless it is picked up and amplified by its primarily liberal fan base.

Hope 'n' change at PolitiFact (Updated x2)

2011-11-21T15:13:00.001-05:00

I keep hoping that criticism will influence positive change at PolitiFact, the fact checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times (soon changing its name to the Tampa Bay Times).

Well, a positive change occurred at PolitiFact recently.

Unfortunately, it was of the "one step forward, two steps back" variety.

For some time I've carped about PolitiFact's inconsistent standards, and in particular its publishing of two different standards for its "Half True" position on the "Truth-O-Meter."

The recent change probably stemmed from a message I sent to an editor at the paper's city desk (sent Nov. 9):

PolitiFact has created a problem for itself through inconsistency. During the site's earlier years a page called "About PolitiFact" gave information about how the "Flip-O-Meter" and the "Truth-O-Meter" supposedly operate. The page includes a description of each of the "Truth-O-Meter" rating categories.

More recently, editor Bill Adair posted an item called "Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter." The problem? The definition for "Half True" is different than the one PolitiFact posted for well over a year prior. Compounding the problem, PolitiFact has kept both versions online through now.

1) The statement is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.
2) The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

I'll be interested to see the eventual remedy. Which items over PolitiFact's history went by which definition? Was a change made in Feb. 2011 or before without any announcement? How can PolitiFact legitimately offer report cards and "Truth Index" ratings if the grading system isn't consistent? Those are questions I'd imagine readers would have if they realized PolitiFact is using two different definitions for the same rating. I don't expect you to answer them for my sake (not that I would mind if you did).

Good luck to all sorting this one out.

The eventual remedy is apparently to simply change the longstanding definition at "About PolitiFact" to match the newer one at "Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter" without any fanfare--indeed, without any apparent notice whatsoever. I detect no admission of error at all and no acknowledgment that PolitiFact changed its standard.

The move seems consistent with the desire of the mainstream press to avoid doing things that "undermine the ability of readers, viewers or listeners to believe what they print or broadcast."

Sadly, I'm not at all surprised.

On the positive side, the definitions are now consistent with one another.

On the negative side, PolitiFact either created a past illusion where Truth-O-Meter ratings used the old system or else created a fresh illusion that past ratings follow the new system. And went about it in about the least transparent way possible.

Update:

Good luck to PolitiFact retroactively changing the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of places on the Web that republished the original definition of "Half True."

(Clipped from PolitiFact.com; click image for enlarged view)

Contact PolitiFact Wisconsin. They didn't get the memo yet. And PolitiFact Texas has the same problem.

It's not the crime, it's the coverup.

Update 2:

It's also worth remembering PolitiFact's agonizing decision to change "Barely True" to "Mostly False."

"It is a change we don't make lightly," wrote Bill Adair.

How do you like that? A change in the wording of a rating gets a reader survey prior to the change and an article announcing the change. A change in the definition of a rating--a much more substantial change--gets the swept-under-the-rug treatment.

Video: Blue Angels with Dixie Dregs soundtrack

2011-11-20T01:49:00.001-05:00

What's not to like? I can't resist posting this.

Is Steve Morse slightly stoked at having his music used for this video? Morse is, after all, a pilot.

Video: "The European Fiscal Crisis and Lessons for America"

2011-11-19T23:32:00.001-05:00

Yes, it's time for a flirtation with "rule 5" blogging, featuring yet another economics instruction video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

I like the line about the "safety net" turning into a hammock.

Hat tip to Hot Air.

PolitiFlub: Who gambles the most?

2011-11-18T14:11:00.001-05:00

Argh. Perhaps Media Matters is better than PolitiFact after all.

The latest improbable flub from PolitiFact involves the question of gambling demographics.

PolitiFact examines a statement supposedly from John Stemberger. Here's the headline blurb:

The largest number of gamblers are "from the poorest segments of the population."
John Stemberger on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 in a website

However, it turns out that the portion in quotes was in turn quoted by Stemberger from another source (bold emphasis added):

The blog post from Oct. 20, 2011, uses partial quotes from Wayne Grudem, a theology professor at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona and author of the book Politics According to the Bible:

"My own judgment is that large commercial gambling outlets such as casinos and state-sponsored lotteries bring much more harm to a society than the benefits they generate (such as tax revenue)… First, it is socially harmful (and fiscally regressive) because the largest numbers of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population. Second, (it) leads to an addiction to gambling … and this addiction destroys marriages, families … and increases societal breakdown. Third, studies have shown that where gambling businesses are established, crime rates increase."

Every bit of the information PolitiFact is checking, as a matter of fact, comes from quotations of Grudem.

But there's more.

PolitiFact is good enough to link to the page in Grudem's book from which the material ultimately came. But PolitiFact does not provide what may be a key part of the context of Grudem's claim, and ignores that potential key element in its reasoning.

Grudem:

(S)erious objections can be brought against gambling, or at least commercial gambling as a business. A number of studies have shown that gambling brings negative effects in a society, and these must be seriously considered. First, it is socially harmful because the largest number of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population, who make unwise decisions and trap themselves deeper and deeper in debt. Second, the existence of gambling businesses leads to an addition to gambling on the part of a certain percentage of the population, and this addiction destroys marriages, families, and any hope for career advancement ...

Note that Grudem is sourcing his objections to an unnamed "number of studies." So, if we keep each of the successive statements in context, the fact check ought to be about whether those studies say what Grudem claims they say (compare Jon Stewart).

Yet the fallout lands on John Stemberger without even apparently considering the studies to which Grudem alludes. Though it's worth noting that Grudem apparently does not cite the studies specifically, fact checkers thereby obtain no excuse for ignoring the original context of the claim.

As bad as the failing makes PolitiFact appear, it gets even worse.

Note the wording of the claim from Grudem: "the largest number of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population." Though Grudem refers to segments plural, PolitiFact proceeds to interpret it in the singular. That interpretation leads to what may represent a straw man version of Grudem's argument.

Note the response elicited from one of PolitiFact's expert sources:

"In my opinion this is a poorly worded and misleading statement," said David Just, an economics professor at Cornell, who has studied poverty and lotteries. "By no means does this group constitute the majority of those playing the lottery. Those in poverty are just 16 percent of the U.S. population."

It's possible that Grudem had a poverty-level demographic in mind. But is an assumption warranted?

PolitiFact simply fails to handle the material objectively. Stemberger did not make the statement attributed to him other than by quoting his source. Grudem deserves the fact check if anyone, and PolitiFact takes his statement out of context and applies to it something less than the charitable interpretation.

Afters:

I'm still shaking my head over the opening paragraph:

In the ongoing war about gambling in Florida, some critics have turned to the Bible to state their case.

Some critics may have turned to the Bible to make their case, but it doesn't have much to do with this fact check, which concerns a criticism of the lottery based on economics and harm to society.

The paragraph doesn't belong in this story. Good grief.

More D'OhbamaCare

2011-11-16T13:52:00.001-05:00

The story "Another ObamaCare Glitch" by Jonathan H. Adler and Michael F. Cannon, appearing in the Wall Street Journal, identifies yet another problematic aspect of President Obama's signature piece of legislation:

Even if ObamaCare survives Supreme Court scrutiny next spring, its trials will be far from over. That's because the law has a major glitch that threatens its basic functioning. It's so problematic, in fact, that the Obama administration is now brazenly trying to rewrite the law without involving Congress.

It seems the PPACA requires state-run insurance exchanges to provide premium assistance but contains no provision for the federal version where states elect not to organize an exchange.

Adler and Cannon provide plenty of details about the can of worms thus opened, so read the whole article.

The EPA should regulate airplanes

2011-11-13T05:16:00.001-05:00

While researching a PolitiFact fact check, it occurred to me that the Environmental Protection Agency ought to regulate airplanes. Not the emissions from airplane engines, but the airplanes themselves.

This notion stems from the definition of air pollution that EPA and the courts have used to justify shoehorning carbon dioxide into the regulated pollutant category (bold emphasis added):

While greenhouse gases and their impacts have been a matter of concern for years, these gases were not definitively determined to be an air pollutant covered by the CAA until the Supreme Court resolved that issue affirmatively in 2007. In addressing this issue, the Court looked to the definition of “air pollutant,” which is defined as “any air pollution agent or combination of such agents ... which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air.” Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497, 506 (2007) (“Massachusetts”).

Airplanes enter the ambient air with every takeoff, unless we're supposing the mere manufacture of a plane causes it to enter the air (albeit grounded). It seems like the statutory text would foreclose any exclusion of airplanes from the EPA's regulatory sphere. Certainly planes regularly cause human endangerment via crashes and skydiving accidents (not to mention the heightened risks to human life associated with warplanes!), so it makes complete sense for the EPA to require permits of plane owners.

Just sayin'.

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Alan Hays, proof of citizenship and voting

2011-11-08T06:39:00.001-05:00

Words matter -- We pay close attention to the specific wording of a claim. Is it a precise statement? Does it contain mitigating words or phrases?
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

If anything about an anecdote can strongly suggest an ideological bias, it is the complete ease with which PolitiFact can ignore its supposed principles.

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Amy Sherman: writer, researcher
Aaron Sharockman: editor

Analysis:

Words matter. Here are the words Alan Hays used during the committee meeting, via the PolitiFact story (bold emphasis added):

"Before we design a district anywhere in the state of Florida for Hispanic voters, we need to ascertain that they are citizens of the United States. We all know there are many Hispanic speaking people in Florida that are not legal, and I just don't think that it's right that we try to draw a district that encompasses people that really have no business voting anyhow. If we know registered voters are people who have proven their citizenship then that's a completely different story, but I'm not aware of any proof of citizenship necessary before you register to vote."

Hays says he isn't aware of any proof of citizenship necessary in Florida, before one can register to vote.

Watch the PolitiFact twist:

Hays said you don't need to prove that you're a citizen in order to cast a ballot.

Words matter?

If words matter then we should expect PolitiFact to note the difference between saying one does not know of a requirement and saying that no requirement exists. If PolitiFact subjected its own claim to the "Truth-O-Meter"--and the thing actually worked like it's supposed to--I don't see how it could rate higher than "Mostly False."

It seems that words matter at PolitiFact's discretion. That is, according to subjective criteria.

Fact checking a dubious paraphrase rather than the subject's actual words already constitutes justification for failing grades, but even apart from this blunder the fact check takes an astonishingly errant course.

Is it necessary to prove citizenship in order to register to vote in Florida?

PolitiFact takes up the question by initially examining the motor voter registration system, perhaps reasoning that the emphasis is appropriate given the popularity of that mode of registration:

Floridians can register to vote a variety of ways -- but the most common registration method is at driver's license offices. In 2010, more than 270,000 people registered to vote at driver's license offices. The second-most common method was what the state division of elections calls the "other" category, which includes registering in person at supervisors of elections offices.

Motor voter registration apparently does require proof of citizenship:

In Florida when drivers apply for a driver's license, they must provide proof that they are in the country legally. U.S. citizens could show a passport or a proper birth certificate to verify their citizenship. Immigrants who are not U.S. citizens would have to provide the proper visa.

But for non-citizens who wish to vote, the motor voter identification requirements represent no real barrier:

But what if someone walks into a supervisor of elections office and asks to register to vote?

In those cases, people registering to vote must sign an oath on a registration application attesting that they are qualified to vote and that all the information on the application is true. (Usually at driver's licenses offices applicants who want to apply to register to vote don't have to sign that particular form since the office already has their signature as part of the driver's license application process.)

The application includes a question: Are you a citizen of the United States? If you answer no, the form says "you cannot register to vote."

We asked state Division of Elections spokesman Chris Cate if the state does anything to verify citizenship.

"The answer is no," he said. "The law doesn't require someone to provide proof of citizenship when they register. If they swear, attest and sign under oath that their information is accurate and that they are a citizen we will accept their voter registration."

Voter registration through an elections office, then, basically utilizes the honor system. If you say you're a citizen then you can register to vote regardless of whether you couldn't provide proof of citizenship when you received your driver's license.

Game over? It may look like it, but the story continues with a description of the torments waiting in Hell (felony charges, anyway) for non-citizens who lie on their registration form.

It isn't relevant. Whether or not the state metes out punishments to those it isn't even seeking who have improperly registered, they're allowed to register without proving citizenship.

Then there's this puzzling statement from PolitiFact:

Individual supervisors of elections do have the ability to determine if an applicant is an U.S. citizen, Cate said, though it would be difficult for a supervisor to ascertain citizenship.

Huh? I'd like to see that unpacked. Supervisors of elections have the authority to verify citizenship but verifying citizenship is difficult? That's my best guess at translating the meaning. And it isn't very reassuring in that form.

But PolitiFact still isn't finished.

It turns out that election experts Ion Sancho (FEC filings here) and Emogene Stegall say there's no problem with non-citizens voting:

Sancho said the idea that illegal residents are voting is "laughable it's so wrong."

"We are not seeing any problem with illegal citizens voting in the U.S. anywhere, not just in Tallahassee or Florida. It's a canard that illegal individuals are registering and voting. ... Voting requires putting your name and address on an official document and that is not something undocumented individuals tend to do."

The local elections supervisor in Hays' own district, Lake County, sees it the same way.

"We've never had a problem with illegal voting in Lake County, no way,'' said Emogene W. Stegall, who has served in the county's election's office for 40 years.

PolitiFact interviews "impartial experts." Or Democrats. Apparently either will do.

Opinions from Sancho and Stegall are not necessarily wrong simply because they are liberals. Simply observe that their opinions are accompanied by the very thinnest of evidences, the best of it being Sancho's claim that undocumented individuals tend not to put names and addresses on official documents.

Seriously, what's the harm in putting a name and address on voter registration if elections supervisors do not attempt to verify citizenship? Do these two have any data in support of their expert opinions?

What does the Truth-O-Meter conclude?

Our ruling

Sen. Hays said that Florida doesn't require "any proof of citizenship necessary before you register to vote." There is a kernel of truth here: According to the state Division of Elections, state law doesn't require new voter applicants to prove their citizenship in some physical sense. They simply must sign a sworn statement attesting that they meet the voting requirements -- including being a citizen.

Again setting aside the, ah, liberal interpretation of Hays' statement, why is there simply a "kernel of truth" to the proposition that it isn't necessary to prove citizenship in order to register to vote in Florida? PolitiFact subsequently mentions caveats, so let's look there for our answer:

First, willfully lying on a voter registration form about your citizenship status can lead to a felony conviction.

Failing to bring your vehicle to a complete stop at a stop sign can lead to a traffic citation. Enforcement is really the key, isn't it? The state admits that it has no active enforcement mechanism attached to the voter registration system other than the easily circumvented identification requirements associated with the motor voter program.

Second, the most common way to register to vote in Florida is during the process of obtaining a driver's license -- in 2010, 57 percent of those who registered to vote in Florida chose that method. And during that process, people are asked to verify their citizenship.

Is this a joke?

If registration through the driver's license program isn't a necessary requirement to register to vote then the identify checks associated with that program are not required in order to register to vote. It's basic logic. And it is already admitted that one can go straight from the driver's license office to the supervisor of elections and register on the honor system.

Lastly, we have to consider the experiences of two actual supervisor of elections, who said there is no widespread problem of illegal immigrants registering to vote.

We have no evidence that either of the helpful liberal supervisors of elections base their claims on empirical data.

For those reasons, we rate this claim Mostly False.

Those were rationalizations, not reasons.

The fact check attributed a claim to Hays that Hays did not make and then used a ridiculous set of excuses to obscure the truth of the made-up claim.

I'm sputtering trying to think of condemnatory language equal to the task of lambasting PolitiFact over this fact check.

The grades

Amy Sherman: F
Aaron Sharockman: F

Both members of the team could have earned failing grades simply for making up the claim attributed to Hays. But this duo when beyond the pale by ignoring clear evidence that the claim they graded "Mostly False" was essentially true.

We have yet another instance of a PolitiFact team earning the label "journalists reporting badly."

The St. Petersburg Times and Charlie Crist's share of public campaign dollars (Updated)

2011-11-07T12:37:00.001-05:00

I don't have the St. Petersburg Times to kick around any longer.

The newspaper has changed its name to the Tampa Bay Times to (allegedly) more accurately reflect its distribution pattern. Dollars to donuts the name change is at least partially designed to increase the paper's appeal to those in the areas surrounding St. Petersburg.

Regardless, I'm holding the Times responsible for what the Times did in the past, namely ballooning in its reporting the amount of money former Florida governor Charlie Crist received through public campaign financing.

As reported in earlier blog posts, I notified the Times of its error back in June 2010, shortly after the flawed stories were published. I eventually went all the way up the chain of command, to the point of sending an email to the Times' president.

None of that had any effect, apart from the author of the news report (Steve Bousquet) apparently agreeing that the report on Crist's share of the campaign funds was incorrect.

Still eager for a greater sense of how the Times feels about the charge of inaccuracy, this month I started phoning the paper's city desk. Editor Jim Booth also appears to agree that the paper's reporting was in error, and he told the he has forwarded the problem to those who are supposed to deal with it.

Booth sounds unhappy about the mistake, for what it's worth. And he was unerringly cordial on the phone.

So now the waiting game is on again.

We'll see what happens.

Update:

W00t!

Yesterday the Times mostly fixed both errors. Complaining by phone must be magical or something.

I can quibble with the correction notice:

Correction: During his 2006 run for governor, Charlie Crist received $3.3 million in public financing. A previous version of this story included a different figure.

[Last modified: Nov 07, 2011 01:52 PM]

It's not like the previous version said "$3.5 million." I'd prefer greater transparency.

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney and $95 billion in savings

2011-11-06T07:09:00.002-05:00

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

Ordinarily I do not participate in PolitiFact's uber-lame "Lie of the Year" voting, but I'll consider the above as a write-in entry when the time comes.

This issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan: writer, researcher
Bill Adair: editor

Analysis:

Even though I see stuff like this from PolitiFact pretty much every week I still can't believe my eyes sometimes.

PolitiFact rates "False" Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's claim that repealing ObamaCare would save $95 billion. So let's see how PolitiFact reasons it out (bold emphasis added):

Mitt Romney has recently been emphasizing one of the favorite themes of the tea party movement: cutting government spending.

He’s been getting pretty specific about some of his ideas, both in an op-ed in USA Today and in speeches on the campaign trail. His plans include ending subsidies for Amtrak, stopping funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and eliminating foreign aid to countries "that oppose America’s interests."

He also wants to save money by rolling back President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

See the change? PolitiFact avers that Romney's op-ed talks about ways to cut government spending. That's in the first graph. By the third graph, the idea has morphed into saving money. The two can mean the same thing but do not necessarily mean the same thing.

PolitiFact:

He made the point in the USA Today op-ed, suggesting he would "repeal ObamaCare, which would save $95 billion in 2016."

We were surprised by his suggestion. As we remembered the health care negotiations, Democrats took pains to make sure the 2010 health care law was projected to reduce the deficit, and they bragged repeatedly about their numbers.

PolitiFact's surprise is apparently a product of a liberal bias.

Romney was writing about reducing spending in that section of his op-ed, not about the net effect of repealing the health care reform bill. It's easy to prove (bold emphasis added):

There are three ways to reduce spending, which combined, will achieve a fiscal turnaround of this size.

First, eliminate every government program that is not absolutely essential. There are many things government does that we may like but that we do not need. The test should be this: "Is this program so critical that it is worth borrowing money to pay for it?" The federal government should stop doing things we don't need or can't afford. For example:

•Repeal ObamaCare, which would save $95 billion in 2016.

Taking context into account, Romney's list of bullet points are his suggestions for cutting spending. It is perfectly legitimate to talk about spending cuts as distinct from overall deficit reduction. Somehow this is lost on the fact finders at PolitiFact. Even setting aside the misleading nature of the CBO scoring for the PPACA (the doc fix and CLASS, to name two obvious examples), PolitiFact constructs a straw man version of Romney's argument.

As a result, the subsequent paragraphs lauding the supposed budget savings from the PPACA are irrelevant. Romney was talking about cutting spending, not cutting the deficit as such.

PolitiFact sums up:

So according to the CBO analysis, a full repeal of the bill would reduce the deficit by $16 billion in 2016, much less than the number Romney cited.

Romney cited a number for a reduction in spending. PolitiFact grades him on deficit reduction. Of the two, PolitiFact is the one engaged in partisan spin.

It's disgusting to label this schlock as a fact check.

The judgment from On High:

If Romney had only criticized the law as an expansion of government spending, he would have been on firmer ground. Instead, he asserted that a repeal of the law would save significant money -- $95 billion. In fact, the law included new taxes and cost reductions so that the actual savings for the year he cited would be much smaller -- $16 billion. And, over the long haul, repealing the law actually adds significantly to the deficit. So we rate his statement False.

Romney did criticize the law in terms of its expansion of government spending. And not spending $95 million saves $95 million in spending.

The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan: F
Bill Adair: F

Together, they are journalists reporting badly.

AP Spin Meter flunks logic, spins story

2011-11-04T16:01:00.000-04:00

The Associated Press (unwittingly?) turned "Spin Meter" into a pun with today's story on a supposed inconsistency by the GOP.

The AP story, carrying Donna Cassata's byline, charges that Republicans regard defense spending as a job creator while also claiming that government spending does not create jobs.

Cassata's story contains four main problems.

First, Cassata produces very little quoted material to support her claims about what GOP politicians supposedly say.

Second, the quotations she uses fail to support the story's claim of a reversal, inconsistency or contradiction (however one wishes to interpret her claim):

Running for re-election, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., said in February 2010 that the stimulus package did not create new jobs. In a statement about the economy and jobs now on his website, McKeon says "congressional Democrats and the administration continue to insist that we can spend our way out of this recession and create jobs, but the numbers just don't add up."

But at a hearing last week, McKeon, now the committee chairman, argued against cuts to the military, saying, "We don't spend money on defense to create jobs. But defense cuts are certainly a path to job loss, especially among our high-skilled workforces. There is no private sector alternative to compensate for the government's investment."

He later added, "While cuts to the military might reduce federal spending, they harm national security and they definitely don't lead to job growth."

There simply isn't any contradiction in McKeon's statements.

Cassata appears to simply assume the presence of a contradiction, and tries to sustain the impression for the reader's sake with stuff like this:

Asked about the competing statements, a spokesman for McKeon, Claude Chafin, said they were "not inconsistent" because the defense industry is a unique recipient of federal dollars.

Note how it is taken for granted that the statements compete with one another. Pulling the two word snippet ("not inconsistent") from Chafin makes his response look like a thin denial if not a case of the fallacy of special pleading.

One should note that special pleading is not a fallacy where special circumstances obtain, not that McKeon ultimately needs to argue that point.

Third, and stemming from the second failure, Cassata fails to make any type of logical case for McKeon (or the GOP) offering an inconsistent view of government spending. As McKeon made very clear in his statement, concerns over jobs lost from government cuts are separate from concerns over net job creation.

Fourth, Cassata enters the dreaded realm of liberal media bias. By the time her story concludes it could pass for an op-ed extolling the virtues of government spending as a means of producing jobs, with that thesis reliant on the writings of a Keynesian economist with a strong record of giving money to liberal politicians.

I will emphasize that my point is not that Robert Pollin's work should not be trusted because of his partisanship. The point is that a fact check should not arbitrarily take sides in a controversy and call it a fact check. The truth is that Pollin's opinion has no real relevance to McKeon's consistency. It may have relevance to McKeon's position that stimulus spending did not work, but if that's the case then Pollin should have to explain the apparently dismal results of the stimulus bill.

Conclusion: The Spin Meter is spinning.

November artist: Gretchen Menn

2011-10-31T23:16:00.002-04:00

I'll be making an effort to rotate the ReverbNation music gadget on a monthly basis. I've had the Serial Thrillers in the sidebar for a good long time and hopefully some folks took the time to listen to that excellent band.

As November rolls around, guitarist Gretchen Menn occupies the widget space. Fans of Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, Steve Morse Band, Kansas, Deep Purple) and Eric Johnson should enjoy her music. Check it out!

PolitiFlub: Bachmann blames Obama for Iraq War?

2011-10-31T22:43:00.000-04:00

During an Oct. 28 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Min.) attacked President Obama for his failed foreign policy, using the complete withdrawal from Iraq as her concrete example.

Today PolitiFact published a fact check based on the idea that Bachmann pinned the full cost in terms of lives and money on Obama.

PolitiFact reproduces a healthy chunk of the CNN transcript, which includes the following:

BACHMANN: Well, my main challenger right now is Barack Obama. That's who I'm focused on.

His economic policies are a disaster and his foreign policy is even worse. Under Barack Obama's watch, we have expended $805 billion to liberate the people of Iraq and, more importantly, 4,400 American lives.

President Obama just had his hat handed to him by the Iraqis, who have essentially kicked him out and our people out of Iraq while Iran is waiting in the wings. So Iraq is essentially kowtowing to Iran. Iran is seeking to have a nuclear weapon.

It sure looks like Bachmann is blaming the whole cost of the war on Obama, doesn't it?

But Bachmann almost certainly is not making the argument PolitiFact rates "Pants on Fire" on its vaunted-yet-lame Truth-O-Meter.

And here's why: People speaking on live television often do not deliver well-organized communications, and their words often challenge a would-be transcriptionist in terms of appropriate punctuation.

This is where the interpretive principle of "charitable interpretation" comes in. Where a statement is ridiculous on its face, the reader/listener ought to consider alternative means of understanding the communication.

It is a stock argument that a hasty withdrawal can turn the expense of war into a waste. Many conservatives made that argument in defending President Bush's decision to execute the "surge" strategy in Iraq. And that is the most likely interpretation of Bachmann's words.

But a word of caution, here. A video or audio version of the exchange between Blitzer and Bachmann ought to make clear whether the alternative suggestion is the obvious solution or not. Perhaps Bachmann misspoke so badly that it was natural to take her meaning other than the way she intended.

On the other hand, Bachmann did offer a certain amount of clarification later in the interview (this portion also quoted in the PolitiFact story):

BACHMANN:
What President Obama has failed to do is secure the gains that America paid for with an extremely dear cost -- 4,400 American lives, nearly a trillion dollars in expenditures, and we have nothing to show for it. And we may look at a Maliki government which has admitted they cannot secure the peace.

One may legitimately criticize Bachmann for muddying her talking point (and Herman Cain shares that vulnerability), but where Bachmann's words in context leave this much doubt about her intent it is incumbent on the journalist to obtain clarity. To his credit, CNN's Wolf Blitzer tried to do that and Bachmann did little to help. And while that failure on Bachmann's part can add up to another legitimate criticism of her candidacy, it does not excuse third party journalists like those at PolitiFact from their duty to inquire about Bachmann's intent.

PolitiFact's conclusion:

Bachmann’s numbers are essentially on target, but she errs badly in blaming Obama for all $805 billion spent and 4,400 American lives lost in Iraq "on his watch." Most of the money spent and lives lost in Iraq came during George W. Bush’s presidency. The idea that Obama -- who wasn’t even in the Senate until two years into the war -- is responsible for all the costs and casualties in Iraq is ridiculous. We rate her statement Pants on Fire.

Again, Bachmann almost certainly was not saying what PolitiFact took her to say, and the PolitiFact story offers no evidence that PolitiFact attempted to obtain a clarification from the Bachmann campaign.

As a result, this effort from PolitiFact warrants the tag "journalists reporting badly."

Grading PolitiFact: Jeb Hensarling and the ballooning budget

2011-10-31T03:37:00.001-04:00

After a blip in Alan Grayson's favor, cherry picking stats is once again a sin over at PolitiFact.

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton: editor

Analysis:

CSPAN helped provide context beyond that provided by PolitiFact:

Transcript mine, orange-yellow highlights indicate the portion used in the PolitiFact story and bold emphasis added (note that some subtle differences exist between my transcript and the one PolitiFact used):

HENSARLING:

Again, when I look at the statutory duty as opposed to the statutory goals of this committee, uh, our duty is to frankly offer recommendations and statutory language to address both the short term and long term imbalance. With respect to the short term imbalance, um, is it not true that the, um, stimulus bill, um, with interest, amounts to over a trillion dollars of spending which accounts for a large temporary growth in our discretionary budget?

ELMENDORF:

Um, yes, although as you know, congressman, only a part of the Recovery Act was about discretionary spending; there were also increases in mandatory spending and reductions in taxes. In total we put it a little over $800 billion and including interest I think you're right, about a trillion. Um, and it did lead to a bulge in discretionary funding and then to uh, um, an attenuated bulge in outlays because not all the money gets spent right away.

HENSARLING:

I don't know if you have at your fingertips numbers with respect to agency growth. I had quoted a few and now that I look down apparently the source is your office so I hope I'm quoting your office correctly ...

ELMENDORF:

Um, I don't have those at hand, Mr. Congressman, but if they're from us you can certainly trust them.

HENSARLING:

I can trust them (laughs). Well then I trust that when you add in the stimulus the Commerce Department has grown 219 percent from '08 to '10, that with the stimulus EPA has grown 830.8 percent, the Energy Department has grown 170.7 percent with the stimulus, Education has grown 180.6 percent at a time when the economy has actually seen negative economic growth and family paychecks, um, have shrunk. And unfortunately, again this is not the forum in which to debate the stimulus, but I think it has to be noted when we're talking about areas of the budget where savings could be had; at least the American people certainly deserve the facts.

(conversation shifts to discussion of CBO's alternative scenario and the increase in mandatory spending)

Hensarling identifies short term and long term responsibilities for the committee and uses the stimulus and its effect on agency growth to add concrete detail. The subsequent discussion of the growth in mandatory spending fits with Hensarling's mention of a long term imbalance.

PolitiFact:

During an Oct. 26, 2011, hearing of the congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction -- the "supercommittee" that’s charged with making steep cuts in the federal budget -- the co-chairman, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, offered budgetary statistics designed to show massive spending increases by federal agencies in recent years.

PolitiFact's summary misses Hensarling's broader point in focusing on agency growth, and PolitiFact's cropping of the exchange between Hensarling and Elmendorf cuts away most of the contextual clues that communicate that broader point. The only remaining clue is the word "temporary" in the first sentence PolitiFact quotes from Hensarling.

We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

Right. Sure.

We can already see this fact check veering off track.

PolitiFact:

When this exchange got picked up in a Fox News Web article, a reader saw it and asked us whether Hensarling’s numbers were accurate. So we took a look.

This paragraph makes it appear that PolitiFact abdicated to a reader how to direct the focus of the fact check. If the reader wants a focus just on the number and not on the underlying point--the latter supposedly the most important aspect of a numbers claim according to PolitiFact bigwig Bill Adair--then who is PolitiFact to object?

Before moving on, it is worth noting that Fox News did a poor job of presenting Hensarling's statement in context. The Fox News version makes it appear that Hensarling was focused solely on agency growth and mostly dropped the context of the impact of the stimulus on the near-term budget.

PolitiFact:

As Hensarling stated at the hearing, he was adding together the 2010 authority and the stimulus amount to arrive at his percentage increase. And using that method, the numbers do work out. But is it a fair method to use? We have a few problems with it.

It's also worth noting that Democrat Alan Grayson's claim about wealth inequality faced no similar questions about whether the method was a fair way to measure privation or poor employment. But what can you do if the reader doesn't ask to have the underlying point checked?

PolitiFact

Hensarling combines several years of stimulus spending into a single year, exaggerating the actual amount of budgetary growth between 2008 and 2010.

Lumping all of the budget authority from the stimulus into one year makes the final year of his two-year comparison higher, even if the stimulus money was actually spent over multiple years. This juices the percentage increases he cited at the hearing.

PolitiFact makes a fair point here, despite Hensarling saying that he was adding the stimulus numbers in to obtain the increase. Even with Hensarling's description the method is misleading, though his underlying argument about the effect of the stimulus remains valid.

PolitiFact:

Hensarling leaves out that stimulus spending was always supposed to be temporary.

Hensarling is guilty of cherry-picking for another reason: The stimulus was designed to be temporary.

If Hensarling appears to leave out that stimulus spending was temporary, that is only because PolitiFact left out the parts of the context where Hensarling attached his comments about the stimulus to a short term increase in discretionary spending.

The second criticism from PolitiFact has no merit. Indeed, PolitiFact quoted Hensarling as saying "temporary growth" in referring to the stimulus bill.

PolitiFact:

The Commerce Department figures are skewed by a different temporary bump -- from the 2010 Census.

PolitiFact makes another fair point, though again it does not appear to significantly affect Hensarling's underlying message that the stimulus has temporarily added considerably to the budgets of some federal agencies.

PolitiFact prepares to issue its ruling:

We understand the arguments behind Hensarling’s methodological choices, but we still believe the path he chose cherry-picked the highest possible increase that the numbers would allow -- one several times higher than other ways to measure the same figure.

Would that PolitiFact had shared the rationale behind Hensarling's supposed methodological choices. Readers may continue to wonder whether Hensarling chose the methodology or simply elected to use the statement from the House Budget Committee (to which Hensarling does not belong). Again, it's hard not to detect an inconsistency between PolitiFact's treatment of Hensarling with its easy acceptance of wealth disparity estimates cited by Democrat Alan Grayson.

PolitiFact:

He lumped all stimulus spending into a single year, even though the spending was spread over several years. The year he chose to assign the stimulus spending to -- 2010 -- was not even the year the budget authority had been granted. And he obscured the fact that much of the enormous increases he cited stemmed from temporary factors, whether it’s the stimulus or spending on the decennial Census. We rule this claim False.

PolitiFact makes a fair point that Hensarling's numbers maximize the budget increases well into the realm of exaggeration. PolitiFact is off base in claiming Hensarling obscured the temporary nature of the stimulus spending. The point about the Commerce Department is fair but relatively minor.

With two out of three points on fairly solid ground, is the rating fair?

I'd say no. Leaving aside the "True" rating Grayson received for what looked like a classic case of cherry picking, Hensarling has a legitimate message underlying the exaggerated numbers. This case again fits a pattern that has underlying messages ignored if they help a conservative or ignored/reinterpreted if they harm a liberal.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson: F
Martha Hamilton: F

Jacobson also wrote the Grayson item to which I have referred in this review, so his "F" is richly deserved. Hamilton flunks for apparently not catching the fact that Hensarling was quite clear that the effects of the stimulus are temporary.

Afters:

I have concerns about PolitiFact's fact check stemming from the complexity of the written federal budget. If Hensarling or the House Budget Committee had a justifiable rationale for crunching the numbers as it did, it's hard to see why PolitiFact shouldn't give Hensarling a Boxer Mulligan on this one.

Except that Boxer is a Democrat and Hensarling isn't.

PolitiFact Virginia: The Good Umpire speaks

2011-10-26T15:51:00.000-04:00

PolitiFact Virginia announces its one-year birthday along with a break from the tradition of not publishing a summary of its ratings by party. With a word about the role of a good umpire (bold emphasis added):

A frequent complaint -- from Democrats and Republicans alike -- is that we’re biased toward the other side. Sometimes, readers ask for a breakdown of our ratings by political party and are surprised to learn that we did not keep count. That’s because we’re focusing on the action in front of us, trying to make our most objective call. A good umpire shouldn’t keep track of the number of close plays at home plate he or she has called in favor of the home team or visitors.

I'll suggest there's a problem here.

What if the record shows the umpire consistently favoring the Yankees? Does the umpire wish to remain ignorant of what the record shows about his judgments?

The comparison shows PolitiFact Virginia rating more Republican statements than Democrat statements, 79 to 58. PolitiFact Virginia says that's fair considering the Republicans control the governor's office and the legislature, along with a spirited Republican primary for a Senate seat running against the Democratic former governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine.

There's a ready-made study topic.

Democrats scored slightly higher on a numerical basis (2.78 to 2.66), but the striking thing is PolitiFact's continued failure to note that such numbers mean very little without some control for selection bias. Trusting editorial selection to pass as a random determinant simply doesn't cut it.

The numbers do contain some potential evidence showing a degree of even handedness at PolitiFact Virginia: The percentage of "Pants on Fire" ratings is nearly the same for both parties, with the Republicans actually scoring slightly lower by that measure. I suggest the number of "Pants on Fire" ratings is significant because PolitiFact offers no objective measure for using "Pants on Fire" as opposed to simply "False."

That's not to say that the, uh, Subjectivometer cannot be fooled, of course. It always matters what particular rulings the editors choose. In primaries, for example, one can easily rule favorably on a claim by a Republican that makes it look bad for other Republicans. So conservatives suffer the harm while looking pretty on the "Truth-O-Meter" scale.

Bottom line, the numbers PolitiFact Virginia offers us don't mean much. We're left to wonder whether the birthday story appears this way if Republicans score a perfect 5.0 on the Truth-O-Meter while Democrats score below a 2, or any result that seems questionable in terms of fairness. It's hard to see why PolitiFact Virginia publishes the story unless it is designed to make the operation look fair. The numbers don't say that without a control for selection bias.

PolitiFact and the fact check smear

2011-10-24T04:12:00.001-04:00

In 2010, Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact designated the "government takeover of healthcare" line as its "Lie of the Year" award winner for 2009.

The fact check outfit received considerable push back on the designation, including an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that helped its author win a Pulitzer Prize of his own.

From James Rago's editorial:

Evidently, it doesn't count as a government takeover unless the means of production are confiscated. "The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors," the editors write, and while "it's true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers," they'll still be nominally private too.

In fact—if we may use that term without PolitiFact's seal of approval—at the heart of ObamaCare is a vast expansion of federal control over how U.S. health care is financed, and thus delivered. The regulations that PolitiFact waves off are designed to convert insurers into government contractors in the business of fulfilling political demands, with enormous implications for the future of U.S. medicine. All citizens will be required to pay into this system, regardless of their individual needs or preferences. Sounds like a government takeover to us.

Unfortunately, Rago's assessment of PolitiFact's argument is entirely fair. PolitiFact argued that without government ownership of the means of production PPACA could not qualify as a government takeover.

This past year when PolitiFact received challenges to its rating of a claim by comedian Jon Stewart, PolitiFact responded with a special story defending its reasoning from the attacks.

The "government takeover" controversy has received no parallel treatment by PolitiFact.

Sure, we got the mailbag reaction story with its traditional failure to address criticism. But the closest thing to a response from PolitiFact was a short story simply acknowledging the fact that the "Lie of the Year" choice had received a good amount of published criticism.

Over time, PolitiFact has gone from acknowledging the controversy to regularly doling out lousy Truth-O-Meter ratings to Republicans who dare to call ObamaCare a "government takeover."

In Christie's case, PolitiFact New Jersey took it a step further. Acknowledgment of the controversy has morphed into the assertion that the "government takeover" phrase is proved wrong:

By referring to the national reform as "a government takeover of health care," Christie was repeating a claim that’s been debunked numerous times by various news organizations.

Goodbye, controversy! Down the memory hole with you!

Instead of fact checking, this puts PolitiFact in the role of myth making. Specifically, promoting as fact the myth that "government takeover" cannot legitimately refer to the government assuming a dominant role over the delivery of health care.

Grading PolitiFact: Joe Biden and the Flint crime rate

2011-10-23T17:39:00.000-04:00

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.
--PolitiFact editor Bill Adair

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan: writer, researcher
Sue Owen: researcher
Martha Hamilton: editor

Analysis:

This PolitiFact item very quickly blew up in their faces. The story was published at about 6 p.m. on Oct. 20. The CYA was published at about 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 21, after FactCheck.org and the Washington Post published parallel items very critical of Biden. PolitiFact rated Biden "Mostly True."

First, the context:

(my portion of transcript in italics, portion of transcript used by PolitiFact highlighted in yellow):

BIDEN:

If anyone listening doubts whether there is a direct correlation between the reduction of cops and firefighters and the rise in concerns of public safety, they need look no further than your city, Mr. Mayor.

In 2008--you know, Pat Moynihan said everyone's entitled to their own opinion, they're not entitled to their own facts. Let's look at the facts. In 2008 when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city. In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers the murder rate climbed to 65 and rapes, just to pick two categories, climbed to 229. In 2011 you now only have 125 shields.

God only knows what the numbers will be this year for Flint if we don't rectify it. And God only knows what the number would have been if we had not been able to get a little bit of help to you.

As we note from the standard Bill Adair epigraph, the most important thing about a numbers claim is the underlying message. Writer Angie Drobnic Holan apparently has no trouble identifying Biden's underlying message (bold emphasis added):

If Congress doesn’t pass President Barack Obama’s jobs plan, crimes like rape and murder will go up as cops are laid off, says Vice President Joe Biden.

It’s a stark talking point. But Biden hasn’t backed down in the face of challenges during the past week, citing crime statistics and saying, "Look at the facts." In a confrontation with a conservative blogger on Oct. 19, Biden snapped, "Don’t screw around with me."

No doubt the Joe Biden of the good "Truth-O-Meter" rating is very admirable in refusing to back down. The "conservative blogger" is Jason Mattera, editor of the long-running conservative periodical "Human Events." You're a blogger, Mattera. PolitiFact says so.

But back to shooting the bigger fish in this barrel.

PolitiFact:

We looked at Biden’s crime numbers and turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's uniform crime statistics to confirm them. But the federal numbers aren’t the same as the numbers Biden cited. (Several of our readers did the same thing; we received several requests to check Biden’s numbers.)

When we looked at the FBI’s crime statistics, we found that Flint reported 32 murders in 2008 and 53 murders in 2010. Biden said 35 and 65 -- not exactly the same but in the same ballpark.

Drobnic Holan initially emphasizes a fact check of the numbers. Compared to the FBI numbers, Biden inflated the murder rate for both 2008 and 2010, and his inflated set of numbers in turn inflates the percentage increase by 45 percent (or 27 percentage points, going from 60 percent to 87 percent). So it's a decent-sized ballpark.

PolitiFact:

For rapes, though, the numbers seemed seriously off. The FBI showed 103 rapes in 2008 and 92 rapes in 2010 -- a small decline. The numbers Biden cited were 91 rapes in 2008 and 229 in 2010 -- a dramatic increase.

If inflating the percentage increase in murders by 27 percentage points is not a problem for Biden then this at least sounds like a problem.

After going over some other reports on the numbers and a surprising discussion of how not much evidence suggests that Obama's jobs bill would address the number of police officers in Flint, PolitiFact returns to the discrepancy between the numbers:

(W)e found that discrepancies between the FBI and local agencies are not uncommon, and they happen for a number of reasons. Local numbers are usually more current and complete, and local police departments may have crime definitions that are more expansive than those of the FBI.

All this is very nice, but we're talking about the city of Flint, here. We don't really need current stats for 2008 and 2010 because they're well past. Perhaps that affects the completeness aspect of crime statistics also; PolitiFact's description is too thin to permit a judgment. As for "expansive" definitions, well, there's a problem with that. Biden's number of rapes in 2008 is lower than the number reported in the UCR (FBI) data. That is a counterintuitive result for a more expansive definition of rape and ought to attract a journalist's attention.

In short, even with these proposed explanations it seems as though something isn't right.

PolitiFact:

Flint provided us with a statement from Police Chief Alvern Lock when we asked about the differences in the crime statistics, particularly the rape statistics.

"The City of Flint stands behind the crime statistics provided to the Office of The Vice President. These numbers are an actual portrayal of the level of violent crime in our city and are the same numbers we have provided to our own community. This information is the most accurate data and demonstrates the rise in crime associated with the economic crisis and the reduced staffing levels.

"The discrepancies with the FBI and other sources reveal the differences in how crimes can be counted and categorized, based on different criteria." (Read the entire statement)

This is a city that's submitting clerical errors to the FBI, and we still have the odd problem with the rape statistics. If the city can provide numbers to Joe Biden then why can't PolitiFact have the same set of numbers? And maybe the city can include stats for crimes other than the ones Biden may have cherry-picked? Not that PolitiFact cares about cherry-picked stats, of course.

Bottom line, why are we trusting the local Flint data sight unseen?

PolitiFact caps Biden's reward with a statement from criminologist and Obama campaign donor James Alan Fox of Northeastern University to the effect that Biden makes a legitimate point that "few police can translate to more violent crime" (PolitiFact's phrasing). Fox affirms that point, by PolitiFact's account, though it's worth noting that on the record Biden asserted a "direct correlation" between crime and the size of a police force. The change in wording seems strange for a fact check outfit that maintains that "words matter."

The conclusion gives us nothing new other than the "Mostly True" rating. Biden was supposedly "largely in line" with the UCR murder data for Flint. His claim about rape apparently did not drag down his rating much even though PolitiFact admittedly could not "fully" explain the discrepancies. PolitiFact apparently gave Biden credit for the underlying argument that reductions in a police force "could result in increases in violent crime" despite Biden's rhetoric about a "direct correlation."

The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan: F
Sue Owen: N/A
Martha Hamilton: F

This fact check was notable for its reliance on sources apparently predisposed toward the Obama administration and its relatively unquestioning acceptance of information from those sources. The Washington Post version of this fact check, for comparison, contacted three experts to PolitiFact's one and none of the three had an FEC filing indicating a campaign contribution to Obama.

And no investigation of whether Biden cherry-picked Flint? Seriously? See the "Afters" section for more on that as well as commentary on PolitiFact's CYA attempt.

Afters:

Assuming Biden's numbers had escaped the competent fact checks unscathed, what about his underlying point? Was he right, based on that presupposition, that we need not look beyond Flint to confirm the direct correlation between shrinking police forces and increasing crime rates?

My peek at the evidence did not seem to help Biden's case.

(chart from CityRating.com, chart uses FBI data)

Are we supposed to believe that Flint's police force was smaller back in 2006?

I also wanted to check Biden's claims about the number of policemen as well as population variance, so I took a series of screen captures including data from Flint as well as some of its alphabetical neighbors for comparison.

Annenberg Fact Check beat me to the employment numbers:

As for the city’s police force, it’s difficult to assess whether Biden was right. The FBI says Flint had 233 full-time law enforcement employees in 2008 and 155 in 2010, a decline of 78 employees or 33 percent. That’s a significant decline, for sure. Biden’s figures, however, show an even greater drop. In Flint, Biden said the number of “sworn officers” declined from 265 to 144, a drop of 46 percent.

The story went on to hypothesize that part-time employees might account for the difference since the FBI data only include full-time employees.

2006:

2007

2008

2009

2010

The data start including population data in 2008 (first column). The next column (first column for 2006 and 2007) represents the total sworn employees, civilians included. The next two columns represent officers and civilians, respectively.

The snippets don't seem to contain anything earth-shaking. I mainly posted them to save the work if somebody's curiosity mirrored mine. I find it plausible that Biden drew his employment figures from the prior year (2007), though factcheck.org may be right about the FBI not counting part-time employees. For what it's worth, I saw nothing of that in the employment definitions.

PolitiFact's CYA

What to do when other liberal fact check sites are out of step with your rating? CYA!

After reading the three reports closely, we began to understand how we arrived at different conclusions, even though there were no obvious errors of fact-checking to correct.

I fail to detect any mystery. It's a plain case of disagreeing on the selection bias. Jeff Dyberg put his finger on it very promptly in a comment at PolitiFact's Facebook page (bold emphasis replaces Dyberg's use of asterisks):

How convenient that they selected the statement that showed Biden in the best light.

How exactly does this work then when PF is constantly telling its readers to look at a persons profile to gauge that persons honesty? Had they selected Biden(')s other comments, it would have lowered him on the "Truth Index." Instead, he's given a pass, and PF would have left it that way except for the WaPo article.

And that my friends is what you call "Selection Bias."

And of course PolitiFact magnified the bias problem with its kid gloves treatment of Biden's underlying message--in contradiction of a principle described by PolitiFact editor Bill Adair. None of the three fact checks failed to correctly identify Biden's underlying message. PolitiFact is the one that gave Biden a pass.

And now PolitiFact's brilliant stroke:

Here, we want to highlight a few of the differences between our reports and ask what you think.

Hmmm. Ask the predominantly liberal PolitiFact readership what it thinks about the situation. What could possibly go wrong with that?

The good news is that even with the lame brained plan of surveying the readership for suggestions, PolitiFact pulls a few lessons from the debacle:

It matters what specific statement fact-checkers choose to check.

Yes! And, as I have often pointed out, this aspect of selection bias warrants a strong disclaimer from PolitiFact about using its collected ratings about individuals or groups to draw conclusions. Yet PolitiFact continues to do special stories encouraging readers to consider a public figure's Truth-O-Meter "report card" and no such disclaimer appears.

Causal claims about complex social phenomena remain a fact-checking challenge.

Yes! And if a researcher has an ideological bias (whether publicly known or not), it increases the chance of acceptance or rejection of a causal claim based on poor evidence. As may be the case with the Biden claim, the researcher may feel it self-evident that more police equals less violent crime and not bother to test the claim while researching the story. The editor ought to help prevent that occurrence, but if the editor shares the same or a similar ideology then a deeply flawed story may result.

Independent fact-checkers often agree -- but not always.

This one goes without saying, but the important thing is the source of the error. Unfortunately PolitiFact's explanation seems to pin the blame on subjectivity.

Subjectivity doesn't really belong in a fact check, does it?

Perhaps one day it will occur to PolitiFact that methods exist to prevent this sort of thing from happening. And maybe then we'll get a real mea culpa from them instead of CYA.

Oct. 26, 2011: At the start of the "Afters" section replaced twin if's with an "Assuming."

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney, the NLRB and Boeing

2011-10-19T05:39:00.000-04:00

Words matter -- We pay close attention to the specific wording of a claim. Is it a precise statement? Does it contain mitigating words or phrases?
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Jon Greenberg: writer, researcher
Aaron Sharockman: editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact, it is said, pays close attention to the specific wording of a claim. We might as well look at the precise wording from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney before we delve into the nitty gritty of the fact check.

PolitiFact, oddly enough, provided no link to a transcript of the debate.

Romney's claim was part of a reply to fellow candidate Herman Cain (yellow highlights indicate portion used by PolitiFact):

CAIN: Yes. One of my guiding principles has been and will always be, surround yourself with good people. The 999 plan that I have proposed is simple, transparent, efficient, fair, and neutralMy question is to Governor Romney. Can you name all 59 points in your 160-page plan, and does it satisfy that criteria of being simple, transparent, efficient, fair, and neutral?

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

ROMNEY: Herman, I have had the experience in my life of taking on some tough problems. And I must admit that simple answers are always very helpful, but oftentimes inadequate.

And in my view, to get this economy going again, we're going to have to deal with more than just tax policy and just energy policy, even though both of those are part of my plan.

And the other parts of my plan are these. One is to make sure that we stop the regulatory creep that has occurred in Washington. And all of the Obama regulations, we say no to, we put a halt on them, and reverse all those that cost jobs.

Number two, we have trade policies that open up new markets to American goods. And I lay out a number of things that I would do in that 59 points to open up more markets to American goods. And, we, of course, stop the cheating that goes on.

We also have to have the rule of law. By that I mean you can't have the federal government, through its friends at the National Labor Relations Board, saying to a company like Boeing that you can't build a factory in a non-union state. That's simply wrong and violates the principle of the rule of law.

We also have to have institutions that create human capital. We're a capitalist system. But we don't just believe in physical capital or financial capital, also human capital. We need great schools, great institutions.

Finally, you have got to have a government that does not spend more money than it takes in. Those are the seven major pillars of those 59.
(Time)

Either PolitiFact did not pay particularly close attention to the precise wording of Romney's claim or else something is amiss. Note that the PolitiFact headline/deck material portray Romney as saying unequivocally that the government told Boeing that it could not build a factory in a non-union state.

In fact, Romney references the Boeing case as a hypothetical ("a company like Boeing"), so his point stands regardless of whether the event occurred or not. Granted, Romney's point receives its greatest support with a valid concrete example, but for purposes of evaluating PolitiFact we are interested in the specific wording of the claim.

PolitiFact:

We decided to examine this question: Did the NLRB tell Boeing that it "can’t build a factory in a non-union state."

That's an interesting question, I suppose, but a picture of Romney's face appears near the "Truth-O-Meter" rating. Wouldn't it be a good idea under those circumstances to rate a statement that Romney made and did not simply imply?

Well we might as well see where the errant path leads us.

PolitiFact:

About six years ago, Boeing was ramping up to build its newest passenger jet, the 787 Dreamliner. The company explored making all the planes at its factories in Washington state, but in 2009, it decided to start a second, smaller production line in South Carolina. The union plants in Puget Sound would make seven planes a month; the non-union facility in North Charleston, S.C. would produce three a month.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers complained. The NLRB’s general counsel tried to bring the parties together but failed. In April 2011, the general counsel’s office formally issued a complaint on the grounds that Boeing built its factory in South Carolina in order to punish the union.

Top Boeing officials were quite open about the connection between the machinists union and the new factory. According to the filing,one executive told a newspaper that "the overriding factor (in transferring the line) was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years."

The first of the above three paragraphs seems accurate on its face, but the second paragraph is loaded. The union complained. The NLRB's general counsel tried to bring the parties together? How? In what way? By telling the union its complaint was poorly founded? By telling Boeing to cave and build the Dreamliner in Washington state? Something in between? It matters to Romney's case.

In the third paragraph PolitiFact offers a one-sided account of the situation between Boeing and the union. The first sentence makes a judgment about statements from "top Boeing officials." Supposedly they were "quite open about the relationship between the union and the new factory," and our concrete example chops off Boeing's rationale for avoiding a work stoppage (it's also a phantom citation; see "Afters"). Boeing maintains that delivering its product on time plays a key part in global competition. The union characterizes the move as a punitive action against the union. The PolitiFact story highlights the union's position and obscures that of the company.

We see that biased presentation continue in the next paragraph from the NLRB:

In the eyes of the general counsel, this was a form of retaliation against the union for having conducted strikes in the past. As such, he argued Boeing violated the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibits employers from interfering with the right of workers to organize and to strike.

The question is: Did Boeing act to get back at the union or did it have other reasons? "The whole thing boils down to motivations," said Nancy Cleeland, a spokesperson for the NLRB. "That’s the reason to have a hearing. To see what was going on."

Golly. What possible reason could Boeing have for wanting to avoid a work stoppage other than to punish the union? It's quite the mystery! Except that looking at Boeing officials' words in context we see again and again the rationale of remaining competitive in the global market.

Yet we don't see that rationale in this fact check.

PolitiFact:

Cleeland’s emphasis on a hearing could sound like boring procedure, but it’s actually pivotal. Since Romney brought up the Boeing dispute to demonstrate his regard for the rule of law, it's worth looking at the legal process here. The NLRB has five board members. So far, they have played no role in this matter at all.

Board members are appointed by the president and heavily reflect President Obama's preferences, but you don't need to be bothered with that while we're fact checking.

PolitiFact:

The call for a hearing came when the general counsel of the NLRB, who acts independently of the board, filed a complaint because there seemed to be enough evidence to make it stick. Based on such a complaint, this case now sits before an administrative judge who has yet to make a decision. After the judge rules, that ruling will then go to the NLRB to be voted up or down or changed.

Yes, the NLRB's general counsel is independent of the Board, but both are appointed by the president. Not that you need to know that. It should be enough to know that the general counsel is independent of the board even if both operate at the behest of President Obama. Right?

PolitiFact:

In short, the law provides a process with checks and balances.

How silly. The NLRB operates under the executive branch. The board is dominated by the president's appointees. The general counsel is likewise appointed by the president. Even the administrative judge is part of the NLRB and as such an extension of the executive branch rather than the judicial branch of government.

If we have checks and balances here, they consist of the Senate's advise and consent power in the Democrat-dominated Senate and the roles of Congress and the judiciary in keeping the executive branch (and with it the NLRB) in line.

PolitiFact:

Romney’s statement gets way ahead of that process, and it runs into trouble on another front. The complaint against Boeing is not based on the fact that South Carolina is a right-to-work state. We spoke to lawyers who think the complaint is well founded and lawyers who think it is utterly misguided, but they agree on this point.

Again, the PolitiFact evaluation comes across as simply laughable. The entire process is under the NLRB thus far and thus entirely under the auspices of the Obama administration. When Obama's general counsel files a complaint it is likely on its face that Obama's board of directors will back it. But credit PolitiFact writer Jon Greenberg with a valiant effort to make it look like a process fitted with all manner of checks and balances.

Greenberg's attempt to fault Romney's reasoning is similarly lame, even if he can share that blame with his cited experts (like Stanford's William Gould).

Romney doesn't affix any particular importance to the fact that South Carolina is right-to-work state. He could have said it was a Southern state instead and that would not indicate that South Carolina's position relative to the equator had a role in the Obama administration's decision. That complaint against Romney is a non-starter.

Does Greenberg buy what he's selling?

PolitiFact:

The third problem with Romney’s statement is that if the general counsel at the NLRB really wanted to block the factory in South Carolina, he could have asked for an injunction, which is allowed under the National Labor Relations Act. He did not. The factory is up and running, and Cleeland, the NLRB spokesperson, says Boeing now can tell the administrative judge that to shut the plant would cause undue economic hardship.

Perhaps the general counsel was concerned that the judicial branch would not back the NLRB. Best to stick with political pressure based on an in-house effort from the executive branch without risking interference from an independent judiciary. You don't always get to pick your own judge. Note the expert job Greenberg does of making it appear that the administrative judge is part of the judicial branch. You'd think the administrative judge would have had a role in granting the would-be injunction based on Greenberg's writing. Maybe Greenberg even believes that's the way it works.

Just before PolitiFact's grand conclusion, Greenberg adds a paragraph's worth of balance to the story:

There is of course political context to this story. Organized labor has more pull with Democrats than with Republicans, and the machinists union pressed hard to have its complaint move forward. Semmens with the NRWC said he thinks that pressure lies behind the NLRB action.

No kidding.

PolitiFact:

Romney claimed that the NLRB told Boeing that it "can’t build a factory in a non-union state." This presents a sweeping distortion of the NLRB's actions that is not borne out by the facts.

Compare the above with my parallel version:

PolitiFact claimed that Romney claimed that the NLRB told Boeing that it "can't build a factory in a non-union state." This represents a sweeping distortion of Romney's words that is not borne out by the facts.

The same type of argument that PolitiFact uses to undermine Romney works to undermine PolitiFact's criticism of Romney.

PolitiFact:

An office at the NLRB has started a process that could, at the theoretical limit, result in a factory closure, but the NLRB as a whole hasn’t told Boeing anything.

Again, Romney did not say that the NLRB told Boeing anything. PolitiFact inferred that from Romney's statement and blamed Romney. Boeing experienced a threat from the executive branch of government to its plans to maintain global competitiveness. Romney's statement need not mean more than that.

Romney’s statement reflects reality in that a Democratic administration tends to give more weight to union complaints, and unions don’t like to see jobs flow to right-to-work states. But his words go far beyond what the NLRB has actually done.

We rate his statement False.

PolitiFact's words go beyond what Romney actually said. I say this is journalists reporting badly.

The grades:

Jon Greenberg: F
Aaron Sharockman: F

PolitiFact editor Bill Adair has said PolitiFact tries to go beyond the "both sides of the story" approach to fact checking. Greenberg and Sharockman succeed at avoiding the "both sides of the story" method and then some with this lopsided account of the Boeing labor dispute. The only thing missing is the rigorous finding of fact that would support PolitiFact's landing on the side of Obama and the union with this fact check.

Afters:

Here's another good example of PolitiFact's shoddy handling of evidence:

Top Boeing officials were quite open about the connection between the machinists union and the new factory. According to the filing,one executive told a newspaper that "the overriding factor (in transferring the line) was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years."

You won't find the quotation in the linked filing. Go ahead and look.

See? It's not there. It's not in the other documents PolitiFact links as sources of the story, either, so far as I can tell. Judging from the information in the other documents the quotation probably occurs in one of the sources cited in the filing PolitiFact linked. Linking to a secondary source is not among the best practices for a researcher. Linking to a secondary source that doesn't even include the material that supposedly came from that source is worse. Congratulations to PolitiFact.

Second Afters:

One of the more interesting aspects of the labor dispute comes from the union's claim (later picked up by the NLRB's general counsel) that a Boeing official appears on videotape saying that the Dreamliner work was moved to South Carolina because of work stoppages and the like. Recalling that Boeing asserts the importance of maintaining its ability to compete globally via dependable delivery of its products, you be the judge:

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Alan Grayson and global wealth inequality

2011-10-16T02:54:00.002-04:00

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.
--PolitiFact editor Bill Adair

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Aaron Sharockman: editor

Analysis:

We have here another specimen where PolitiFact makes a clear exception to its principle that the most important aspect of claims involving numbers is the underlying message. There is no attempt in the story to either identify or evaluate the underlying argument of Democrat Alan Grayson. One could imagine that PolitiFact did not extend the effort because Grayson's point was opinion--that unequal wealth distribution is unfair at least in some sense--but without any explanation to that effect we're left with PolitiFact relaxing its principles without explanation.

Before we start evaluating the Grayson fact check, have a look at how PolitiFact pans Sarah Palin for an accurate report of the U.S. ranking of defense spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product:

"In absolute dollars, we spend almost as much as all other countries combined," (Todd) Harrison said. "So saying we are 25th is a bit misleading and a selective use of facts."

We agree. Although she's technically correct, the numbers are wildly skewed by tiny, non-industrialized countries. We find her claim Barely True.

The Palin rating adequately demonstrates that PolitiFact will take an underlying message into account for a number ranking claim such as Grayson's, at least on a selective basis.

Grayson, responding to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's question about why the "Occupy Wall Street" protests resonate with Americans (yellow highlights indicate portion used by PolitiFact):

The second thing is that they`ve created a system that is enormously unequal. And the result of that is people are struggling to find a job to pay their bills, to pay their rent, to pay their credit card bills. According to Wikipedia, there are only five countries in the entire planet that are more unequal than the United States in the distribution of our wealth. That`s a system that Wall Street created, that Wall Street maintains, and that Wall Street enforces.

PolitiFact puts immediate and exclusive focus on the numbers claim:

We should note here that we’re glad that Grayson cited his sources -- in the midst of a national TV interview no less! -- but we’re also disappointed that his source was Wikipedia, which is open to editing by anyone.

Luckily for Grayson, the Wikipedia page he cited had sourced its numbers to a peer-reviewed paper. The paper was coauthored by four academics, James B. Davies, Susanna Sandstrom, Anthony Shorrocks and Edward N. Wolff and published in The Economic Journal in 2010.

Grayson was correct that the United States had the fifth-highest Gini coefficient for wealth in the world, trailing only Denmark, Namibia, Switzerland and Zimbabwe. In other words, the U.S. distribution of wealth was more unequal than all but four other nations.

If the PolitiFact team had paid closer attention, they would have noticed that the numbers on which Grayson relies were not published in any peer-reviewed journal. The numbers Grayson used ultimately came from an appendix (Excel file) to a working paper that preceded the version published in The Economic Journal.

PolitiFact reports falsely in claiming that PolitiFact sourced its numbers to the linked "a peer-reviewed paper." Sift through the linked work (see Update below) from now until doomsday and you won't find "Namibia" mentioned at all nor any comprehensive list of Gini coefficients (identified by PolitiFact as the primary statistic used to identify inequality) for all the nations of the earth.

Wikipedia apparently made no secret of the source of the information. PolitiFact's research simply missed it (click image for enlarged view):

(clipped from Wikipedia.org)

As we continue evaluating PolitiFact's story we'll obtain some potential clues as to why the appendix did not appear with the published version of the paper.
PolitiFact:

There are a few technical caveats to note.

First, international comparisons such as these are always a bit dicey, because the statistics available for each country are not always perfectly aligned.

The first caveat is a massive understatement.

From the published paper:

The core data for this exercise are provided by national wealth distribution data that are available for 20 countries. These countries include the largest and richest countries in the world and together account for 59% of the world's population and, we estimate, 75% of its wealth. While it is interesting to look at the distribution of wealth just for these countries, and we do provide those results, our main focus is on an estimate of the full global distribution of wealth. This requires imputation of both wealth levels and distribution to the countries with missing data.

For nations outside the 20 represented in the "core data," it is not a matter of statistics "not always perfectly aligned" but a matter of the researchers approximating the statistics because of a lack of data.

Perhaps the group of researchers did an absolutely fantastic job with their approximations, but for purposes of the published article they provided cautions aplenty:

The purpose of the empirical exercise reported in this Section is to predict wealth levels in countries where wealth data are missing. This imposes certain limitations. Most importantly, the independent variables in our regressions need to be available not only for the countries with wealth data, but also for most of those without such data – otherwise we would not be able to impute wealth to the missing countries. Fortunately, this limitation does not prevent us from estimating a sensible empirical model of personal wealth levels across countries.

The researchers' methodology represents the key review aspect of the paper, and simply publishing the paper does not serve as an endorsement of the methodology. It is plausible that the appendix did not appear with the published version because it provides an appearance of concrete reliability unmatched by the content of the rest of the paper (see Update below).

But as much as this oversight embarrasses PolitiFact, it represents the least of the problems with Grayson's claim.

PolitiFact:

Second, most of the figures are about a decade old. These are the most recent comparisons available -- and as a result, we don’t fault Grayson for using them -- but they do represent a snapshot of time before the recession that began in late 2007, a recession notable for the implosion of the U.S. real estate market as well as the values of many other financial holdings. (To be fair, it’s unclear whether current numbers would show a higher or lower Gini coefficient for the United States, since many Americans of modest incomes lost significant wealth when home prices tanked. It’s also unclear what new data would show for other nations.)

At least PolitiFact recognizes that the figures are over a decade old, but the spin here is ridiculous. Does one credit the wealth inequality for the economic growth and low unemployment rate during the bulk of the Bush administration or for the economic crisis occurring in 2007? PolitiFact opts for the latter, for no apparent reason other than to give Grayson the benefit of the doubt.

Seriously, should we register a high degree of concern that we're ranked right up there with Switzerland and Denmark in wealth inequality? Which nations should we emulate? Those with the lowest Gini coefficients such as Spain (0.565)? Oh, wait. Spain's unemployment is worse than ours now and in 2000.

PolitiFact:

Third and most important, these figures refer to wealth (that is, accumulated holdings) rather than income (the funds earned on an annual basis). To his credit, Grayson described the statistics correctly -- he very clearly said "wealth," not income.

However, to understand the full picture, it’s worth a look at income figures as well. A paper by the United Nations Development Program -- the Human Development Report 2010 -- shows that the Gini measurement for income places the U.S. more in the middle of the international pack. (Wikipedia has its own page for international income inequality, as well.)

Among the nations ranking as more unequal in income than the U.S. were Hong Kong, Singapore and Qatar among richer nations and a large proportion of middle- and lower-income nations, ranging from Niger and Mozambique in Africa to Nicaragua and Honduras in Central America to Cambodia and Thailand in Asia to Russia and Turkey in Europe.

If the income distribution rankings have us closer to the middle of the pack then what are the implications for the high ranking in wealth distribution? What are the implications for Grayson's underlying message?

PolitiFact lets it drop and again gives Grayson the benefit of the doubt:

The peer-reviewed data backs up Grayson’s claim that "there are only five countries in the entire planet that are more unequal than the United States in the distribution of our wealth." Had Grayson used "income" rather than "wealth," the answer would have been much more mixed.

But Grayson was admirably careful in his phrasing. So we rate this claim True.

It's funny that PolitiFact credits Grayson with being "admirably careful in his phrasing" right after printing the quotation from Grayson that "there is overwhelming, staggering inequality in America, however it is measured, and that inequality substantially exceeds the inequality in many other countries." It's neither careful nor admirable to characterize income inequality measuring near the middle of the pack as "overwhelming" or "staggering," especially with such thin (if any) correlation to general prosperity.

In short, Grayson's underlying message was obviously spurious and PolitiFact did him a profound favor by ignoring it. Considering the underlying messages his claim was less true than Palin's claim about defense spending. Without considering the underlying message for either the claims were equally true. Yet Grayson ended with a "True" while Palin ended with a "Barely True."

PolitiFact's standards vary and follow a trend of partisanship.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson: F
Aaron Sharockman: F

Reporting inaccurately that Grayson's source material was peer-reviewed and published in The Economic Journal warrants a failing grade. Likewise, ignoring PolitiFact's standard of stressing the importance of the underlying message for a numbers claim warrants a failing grade.

Together, they warrant the tag "journalists reporting badly," and that's without considering the journalists' failure to fully consider the meaning of the journal article and the very tenuous support Grayson could claim even from the appendix that the publishers omitted. Jacobson and Sharockman produced a big fat mess unless their purpose was simply to undergird Grayson.

Toward that purpose the story was a rousing success.

Update (10/20/2011):

While going back to add the Excel file I neglected to link, I noticed that PolitiFact linked to two different versions of the paper in the same paragraph (bold emphasis added):

Luckily for Grayson, the Wikipedia page he cited had sourced its numbers to a peer-reviewed paper. The paper was coauthored by four academics, James B. Davies, Susanna Sandstrom, Anthony Shorrocks and Edward N. Wolff and published in The Economic Journal in 2010.

The a peer-reviewed paper link goes to the published version that does not include the comprehensive list of nations with their Gini coefficients. The "paper" link leads to the earlier "working paper" version that does include the appendix. In my view, this "bait and switch" paragraph represents the type of writing an author would do if the intent was to mislead the audience. Using two different link destinations provides the appearance of honesty (plausible deniability) while the vast majority of readers will assume that the "paper" is the same as "a peer-reviewed paper."

With luck, nobody would look into PolitiFact's work to the point of discovering the inaccuracy and the misleading language that serves to hide it from the reader.

Oops.

I should add that, because none of the appendices associated with the working paper appear in the version published in The Economics Journal, the journal may simply have a policy of not publishing appendices. Either way, no professional reading the journal would have the opportunity of peer-reviewing the numbers supporting Grayson's claim without seeking out the working paper. That working paper is no more "peer-reviewed" than this blog except to the extent that a portion of it was later published in a peer-reviewed journal. The portion not published in that journal is not peer-reviewed.

The Axis of Misbehavior

2011-10-14T13:50:00.001-04:00

We've certainly come a long way.

Whereas the previous "cowboy" president referred to Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil" the new, civilized president provides a powerful contrast with his choice of words.

Iraq, at least temporarily, no longer gets lumped with Iran and North Korea. The latter nations drew fire from President Obama as he sanction-rattled over Iran's foiled attempt to assassinate the ambassador from Saudi Arabia on American soil.

There is great similarity between how Iran operates and how North Korea operates -- a willingness on their part to break international rules, to flout international norms, to not live up to their own commitments. And each time they do that the United States will join with its partners and allies in making sure that they pay a price.

Among our many new options for the Iran-North Korea axis:

The axis of international norm flouters
The axis of failing to live up to their own commitments
The axis of out-of-bounds behavior
The axis of not acceptable behavior

PolitiFlub: The employee contribution to Social Security

2011-10-13T05:58:00.001-04:00

A recent PolitiFact fact check used the employer's share of the OASDI (Social Security) payroll tax to help calculate the effective tax rate on a person earning $50,000 per year.

I opined that PolitiFact's calculation was wrong. And I pointed out that PolitiFact has exercised the rule inconsistently over time. PolitiFact Bias team member Jeff Dyberg pointed me toward another recent example of PolitiFact's inconsistency:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

Herman Cain says every worker pays a 15.3 percent payroll tax. PolitiFact finds the statement "Mostly False":

Cain said, "Every worker pays 15.3 percent payroll tax." That's not accurate. Workers only pay half that, with the exception of the self-employed, as we mentioned above.

Yet Cain could have used PolitiFact as his source for the 15.3 percent figure. It's almost exactly what PolitiFact claimed in its fact check of President Obama (blue highlights added):

Payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare. In general, payroll taxes hit lower-to-middle-income taxpayers harder than high-income taxpayers, for two reasons. First, workers with low to moderate incomes are more likely than rich taxpayers to make the bulk of their income from salaries and wages, which are subject to the payroll tax, rather than capital gains or other types of investment income, which are not subject to payroll taxes. For the very rich, that pattern is reversed. Second, Social Security tax is levied only on the first $108,600 of one’s salary, meaning that virtually all of the earnings of someone making $50,000 a year is subject to it. That wouldn’t be the case for someone who’s very rich.

We asked two researchers at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center, Roberton Williams and Rachel Johnson, for their advice on how to factor in payroll taxes. They estimated that combining the workers’ share of the payroll tax with the employer’s share -- the usual practice among economists -- would mean an extra 15 percentage points for our hypothetical middle-class worker, and less than 2 additional percentage points for the high-income taxpayer.

Rejecting the 15 percent figure harmed Herman Cain's "Truth-O-Meter" rating. Barack Obama and Warren Buffett received a benefit from PolitiFact's acceptance of a 15 percent figure in calculating a worker's effective tax rate on a $50,000 income.

So it's time for another little tally of how PolitiFact's inconsistency pans out in terms of the partisan divide.

Benefit
Barack Obama (story uses 15 percent figure)
Warren Buffett (story uses 15.3 percent figure)

Neutral?
Jeff Merkley (story uses 6.2 percent figure)
Barack Obama (story uses 6.2 percent figure)
Kendrick Meek (story relies on Tax Policy Center figures)

Harm
Herman Cain (story uses 6.2 percent figure)
Michele Bachmann (story follows CBO in crediting employer's share of tax to the employee)
Sheldon Whitehouse (15.3 percent would have aided Whitehouse*)

*It's worth noting that Whitehouse received so much assistance from PolitiFact in justifying his claim (ignoring the effect of corporate taxes on tax burdens) that he hardly needed any help from the employer's share of the payroll tax.

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): American Crossroads and the Clinton take on Obama's jobs plan

2011-10-12T16:15:00.000-04:00

Words matter -- We pay close attention to the specific wording of a claim. Is it a precise statement? Does it contain mitigating words or phrases?
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Aaron Sharockman: writer, researcher
Amy Hollyfield: editor

Analysis:

We have here an unusual fact check in that there is no quotation at all from the supposed source of the information, the political action organization American Crossroads. The fact check concerns accurate quotations of President Bill Clinton and the impression they create as presented in an American Crossroads political ad.

Here's the ad:

Here's the PolitiFact set up:

The ad splices together television news reports highlighting Obama's plan to raise taxes a total of $1.5 trillion over 10 years, then pivots to Clinton. "I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes," Clinton says in what appears to be an interview. "It won't solve the problem."

Between the lines "we ought to be raising taxes," and "it won't solve the problem," the ad jumps -- for just a split-second -- to some other image.

It's a 30 second ad, but the PolitiFact description omits a sizable portion in the beginning using President Obama's own words on taxation: "The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession."

The ad does not merely use Clinton's words to oppose Obama's proposed tax increase. It uses Obama's words toward the same purpose.

PolitiFact:

The cut-away caught our attention because we've seen instances where politician's words were cut in a way that would create a different impression.

Indeed, after further review, that's what American Crossroads did here.

If PolitiFact is correct that the ad creates a different impression than did Clinton's words in context then we should expect to see PolitiFact identify the proper understanding as well as the false impression along with the supporting rationales for each.

The video of Clinton grabbed by American Crossroads comes from a 25-minute September 2011 interview Clinton did with the conservative news website Newsmax.com. The interview was set up in New York, where Clinton was holding the 10th annual meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative project.

We found the original Newsmax.com video. The two lines quoted by American Crossroads come more than three minutes apart, as Clinton was delivering a meandering answer on how to create jobs and fix the flailing American economy.

PolitiFact is correct that the statements occur more than three minutes apart. The video confirms it.

PolitiFact:

When American Crossroads quoted Clinton as saying, "I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes," they clipped Clinton's full comments short. Here's the full quote, including what American Crossroads left out:

"I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending -- either one -- until we get this economy off the ground. This has been a dead flat economy. And you don't want in something this flat ... if we cut government spending, which I normally would be inclined to do when the deficit's this big, with interest rates near zero you can't get the benefits of it."

So Clinton was as much deriding spending cuts as he was a plan to raise taxes.

PolitiFact is also correct that Clinton disparaged spending cuts as well as tax increases, though it isn't clear why that would have relevance with respect to American Crossroads' use of Clinton's words. Simply clipping Clinton's words does not misrepresent misuse, or else PolitiFact is acting hypocritically. Note the ellipsis (...) in middle paragraph above. In journalistic style an ellipsis indicates missing text.

PolitiFact:

Clinton went on to praise Obama's plan to continue cuts to the payroll tax, saying it's a proven way to help the economy, before spinning off into a discussion of former President Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill.

Clinton remained on topic, praising Reagan and O'Neill for disposing of the debt from the savings and loan bailouts which in turn, by Clinton's account, corresponded with a job growth spurt during Reagan's tenure.

PolitiFact:

Later in the interview the second half of the quote comes up. But again, it's shortened.

"I would pay it," Clinton said, referring to a millionaire's tax (though Clinton said that many wealthy New Yorkers like himself wouldn't be affected because they already pay high state and local income taxes that can then be deducted from your federal tax bill).

"It's okay with me, I'd pay more," he said. "But it won't solve the problem."

We still have no rationale from PolitiFact explaining how American Crossroads took Clinton out of context and/or juxtaposed his statements to alter their meaning. "It's shortened" doesn't cut it without an explanation as to how the shortened version significantly altered the meaning.

PolitiFact:

After the American Crossroads ad was released, Clinton fired back saying the group wrongly implied his opposition to Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy -- sometimes referred to as the "Buffett Rule" -- as well as Obama's jobs plan.

"The Republican group American Crossroads has used a quote from me in a video opposing President Obama's jobs plan and the 'Buffett Rule,'" he said in the statement provided to POLITICO. "The advertisement implies that I opposed the 'Buffett Rule.' In fact, I support both the American Jobs Act and the 'Buffett Rule.' I believe that it's only fair to ask those of us in high-income groups -- who have received the primary benefits of the last decade's economic growth and the majority of its tax cuts as well -- to contribute to solving our long term debt problem.

"What I did say was that the 'Buffett Rule' cannot solve the problem alone. Reducing the debt requires three things: more economic growth, more spending cuts, and more revenue," he said.

Even if Clinton has a spotless reputation for truth-telling we don't take his explanation uncritically, do we?

In the case of the American Crossroads ad we're concerned with Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy. That is the focus of the ad.

Clinton says American Crossroads presented him falsely as opposing Obama's jobs plan. That's a half truth. The ad does not address any aspect of the jobs plan other than the tax increases. The ad does not address, for example, the payroll tax decrease that Clinton praised.

Clinton further stated that American Crossroads painted him in opposition to the "Buffett Rule." Again, that's a half truth. The ad shows Clinton criticizing the tax increase for not addressing the creation of jobs. It does not include any mention of Clinton's support for such a tax increase during better economic conditions nor does it try to portray Clinton as opposed to tax increases on the rich regardless of circumstances.

Clinton's statement avoids the points made in the American Crossroads ad. Does Clinton favor raising taxes on a flat economy and does Obama's "Buffett Rule" proposal raise taxes on a flat economy? Does the tax increase help address the jobs problem, contrary to what Clinton suggested during his interview?

PolitiFact:

American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio defended the ad's quoting of Clinton to PolitiFact Florida, noting that a 30-second ad cannot run two-minute-plus quotes and that the "quotes selected for the ad are the most succinct and relevant clips of Clinton's Newsmax interview, and fairly represent his views."

We see it differently. The ad suggests that Clinton opposes Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy as a means of reducing the deficit. By our review of the interview, Clinton actually appeared to straddle that fence. At one point, he said that he didn't think the country should raise taxes "until we get this economy off the ground." At another point, he said he'd be "okay" with the tax and willing to pay it, though he said in his particular case, he probably won't be affected.

PolitiFact's review of the Clinton interview resulted in a false impression. Clinton did not straddle the fence, though he was made to appear that way through selective quotation.

Here's an expanded version of the second statement from Clinton, my portion of the transcript in bold, portions used by PolitiFact highlighted in yellow:

What I would like to say both to Speaker Boehner and to the president, "Okay, you've both had your deal. Go work it out. Meanwhile focus on putting American back to work now." Because it just confused Americans. Americans lost the fact that, whatever you think about this millionaire's surcharge, it--I don't really care because I would pay it but it won't affect me because I already pay the minimum income because I live in New York. So if you live, anybody that lives in New York, because our state and local taxes are so high and you get to deduct those against your federal taxes, we're already over any threshold anybody can consider. But, I, you know, it's okay with me, I'd pay more. But it won't solve the problem.

Clinton's thought, without the digression detailing his opinion of how it affect him, goes like this: Americans lost the fact that, whatever you think about this millionaire's surcharge, it doesn't solve the problem.

The PolitiFact version turns an irrelevancy into a critical piece of missing information. Clinton was saying that whether you favor increasing taxes on the rich or not, it doesn't solve the jobs problem. PolitiFact's interpretation contradicts Clinton's intent.

The American Crossroads ad segues from the Clinton quotations to another quotation critical of Obama. Note the accompanying text in the ad:

"We need jobs not higher taxes."

It falls right into line with Clinton's criticism of Obama's tax hike proposal. The tax hike does not address the jobs problem.

PolitiFact:

At the least, American Crossroads is guilty of cherry-picking parts of Clinton's statement to best fit into the narrative of its ad. But we think they go one step further by cutting out critical pieces of evidence -- namely that Clinton said he would be "okay" with higher taxes for the wealthy and that he'd pay additional taxes if he was required to.

Clinton's voice and image were no doubt selected specifically because it'd be a stinging rebuke of Obama's policies -- from a fellow Democrat.

But viewer beware. We rate this claim False.

As explained above, PolitiFact miscategorized the evidence from the context. Clinton's general support for taxing the rich at higher rates, by his own words, does not mitigate the failure of the tax increases to address the jobs problem, and the latter was the focus of the American Crossroads ad.

With full consideration of the context it's hard to see any significant flaw in the ad's use of the Clinton quotations. The biggest failing is the juxtaposition of one quotation concerned with the weak economy while the other was focused on jobs. Given that the two are closely linked a criticism along those lines seems like hairsplitting.

On top of everything else, it's extraordinarily difficult to see how PolitiFact could justify a "False" rating for this item. As noted, American Crossroads doesn't make any sort of concrete claim. The ad in question simply quotes President Clinton. And the quotations are apparently perfectly accurate. If they were taken entirely out of context to mean the opposite of what Clinton intended then PolitiFact's definitions of "Half True" or "Mostly False" (formerly "Barely True") appear to fit better than the "False" rating:

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

BARELY TRUE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

FALSE – The statement is not accurate.

The tag "journalists reporting badly" will apply.

The grades:

Aaron Sharockman: F

Amy Hollyfield: F

Grading PolitiFact: Michael Moore and the Occupy Wall Street arrests

2011-10-10T15:38:00.001-04:00

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.
--Bill Adair, PolitiFact editor

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan: writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton: editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact, we are told, examines claims in their full context including the comments made before and after. Plus PolitiFact examines the point the person was trying to make.

Some of us don't believe that PolitiFact applies its principles evenly across the board.

What did Michael Moore say? What did PolitiFact supposedly examine? We go first to the rush transcript of the Democracy Now! interview of Michael Moore (yellow highlights added to denote portion used in the PolitiFact story):

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your comments on Hero Vincent and all that are down there?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, it’s highly ironic that now over 100 of the protesters have been arrested and not a single banker, a CEO from Wall Street, anyone from corporate America — nobody, not one arrest of any of these people who brought down the economy in 2008. Who created schemes, financial schemes that not only destroyed the economy, but took away the future of this generation, of this young man and his children in the future. They have completely ruined it for people while they have become filthy rich. Not one of them arrested, but 100 of these people who have stood up non-violently against this madness, and they’re arrested? This just boggles the mind. I want to say something, too, because, Amy, you’ve lived here, in this area, in the city for probably most of your life. I have been here for many years. By and large, the New York City cops are actually pretty good as police forces go.

In terms of the interview context, Moore's statement amounts, at least at first blush, to a red herring or a "you, too!" fallacy. The red herring is a fallacy of distraction, distracting from any wrongdoing by the protesters by shifting the focus to "these people who brought down the economy." And perhaps Moore attempts to excuse the protestors' actions because of the banking evildoers went unpunished, which would qualify as a version of the "you, too!" fallacy--excusing one set of actions based on the actions of another.

And what of Moore's underlying point? Is his point best described as one of the aforementioned fallacies or something else?

Let's get the PolitiFact take on things:

We read the same sentiment repeated on Twitter from people supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement's protests.

We've noticed news reports before that have noted a general lack of prosecutions. But we wanted to know if Moore and others were right that not a single banker or corporate executive had been arrested. So we decided to check it out.

PolitiFact just explained to its readers why this story was done. This issue had come to the attention of the PolitiFact staff well before Moore opened his mouth. Moore's statement on Democracy Now! gave PolitiFact an excuse to do a story the editors wanted to see. That's selection bias by definition. And it probably accounts for PolitiFact's failure to take the context or Moore's point into account when it comes time to determine the position of the "Truth-O-Meter" needle: PolitiFact is not interested in anything other than the literal claim in this case.

PolitiFact:

To summarize our findings, we found a few prosecutions, but not many. And we wouldn't describe the targets as the people who were responsible for bringing down the economy.

So the claim is "False"? Moore did appear to emphasize the total lack of prosecutions three different ways during the course of a single sentence:

not a single banker , a CEO from Wall Street, anyone (1) from corporate America — nobody (2), not one (3) arrest of any of these people who brought down the economy in 2008

Of course Moore repeated the charge a couple of sentences later, if anyone's counting.

Alas, if we skip to the end we find PolitiFact awarding Moore a "Mostly True" rating. So now we get the fun of seeing PolitiFact reconcile Moore's inaccuracy with the favorable "Truth-O-Meter" rating as we move through the body of the story.

PolitiFact:

If you're looking for arrests and prosecutions against executives associated with the biggest banks, you won't find them.

Heh. "If" we're looking for arrests and prosecutions against executives associated with the biggest banks.

Indeed, PolitiFact's language hints at at a couple of unaddressed problem in the story. Who was responsible for the economic collapse? And if we can find a responsible group, were their actions illegal?

For purposes of its fact check, PolitiFact appears to accept Moore's premise that some group of corporate executives was responsible for the economic collapse and that their actions were illegal.

PolitiFact:

And we found no arrests of execs with the firms most widely associated with the financial crisis such as Countrywide, AIG or Lehman Brothers.

The highest-profile convictions we found were from Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, which was a mortgage lending firm based not on Wall Street, but in Ocala, Fla. Its former chairman, Lee B. Farkas, was convicted of directing nearly $3 billion in fraud that put thousands out of work and contributed to the collapse of Colonial Bank.

For review, Moore claimed that nobody from corporate America, Wall Street CEO's and "not a single banker" had been arrested. The Taylor, Bean & Whitaker case by itself provides a number of arrests contradicting Moore, but PolitiFact blurs Moore's claim, making it appear that the conviction of Farkas almost shouldn't count since he wasn't a Wall Street CEO.

In the wake of the financial crisis, President Obama launched a task force intended to push for appropriate legal action against banking fraud:

The sweep was organized by President Obama’s interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, which was established to lead an aggressive, coordinated and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. Starting on March 1, to date Operation Stolen Dreams has involved 1,215 criminal defendants nationwide, including 485 arrests, who are allegedly responsible for more than $2.3 billion in losses. Additionally, to date the operation has resulted in 191 civil enforcement actions which have resulted in the recovery of more than $147 million.

www.justice.gov

Agencies such as Countrywide ended up as the focus of federal investigations.

Does Moore want Countrywide execs arrested even if federal investigators do not believe they can successfully prosecute the case?

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

There have been many other prosecutions of mortgage fraud and insider trading. The U.S. Justice Department pointed us to its StopFraud.gov website, and sent us a long list of other ongoing actions against mortgage fraud, investment fraud, insider trading and other corporate offenses.

But the cases have not involved the highly prominent executives Moore described as bringing down the U.S. economy.

Seriously? Moore said nobody from corporate America had been arrested. Wall Street CEO's were just one group within the broader statement he made. PolitiFact is spinning on Moore's behalf and ignoring the quotation from Moore used in the story's headline. If PolitiFact wanted to focus just on Wall Street CEO's then maybe the PolitiFact team should have written something to that effect. As it stands we have Moore's statement applying to "anyone from corporate America" cozied up next to the "Mostly True" Truth-O-Meter graphic.

Isn't that a bit misleading?

PolitiFact:

In reviewing the research and talking to experts about why there have not been more prosecutions associated with the financial crisis, we found several reasons.

For one thing, such cases tend to be difficult, and it's not immediately clear what offenses executives could be charged with.

Not clear what offenses executives could be charged with? Maybe Moore should have considered that before he opened his yap.

Then again, there's no need for Moore to consider it when he can get outfits like PolitiFact to cover for him.

Consider this: Moore's statement mentioned irony. In comparison to the arrests of "nonviolent" protesters it is supposedly ironic that authorities failed to arrest figures from corporate America who caused the financial crisis. Moore's statement assumes we know who caused the financial crisis and strongly suggests that their actions in doing so were criminal actions. The latter is Moore's real underlying point, and PolitiFact found only weak evidence supporting that point.

Did I mention that Moore's upper-class evildoers are apparently just as nonviolent as the protesters?

Where's the irony, again?

PolitiFact's conclusion (blue highlights added):

Our ruling

Moore said, "Not a single banker, a CEO from Wall Street, anyone from corporate America — nobody, (there was) not one arrest of any of these people who brought down the economy in 2008." Well, there have been a few arrests. Certainly the executives of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker who were arrested would qualify as "corporate America."

But Moore's larger point is correct -- there have been very few arrests among executives of firms the public would associate with causing the financial crisis. Obama implied in his recent remarks that it was because many of their actions weren't criminal.

Whatever the cause, we rate Moore's statement Mostly True.

The spinners at PolitiFact tell their readers that Moore's "larger point"--that not many "executives of firms the public would associate with causing the financial crisis" were arrested--is correct.

Sorry, but that supposed "larger point" does not result in any significant irony when we consider Moore's remarks in context.

This fact check involving Moore provides us yet another example of a public figure saying something kind of close to a fact check PolitiFact wanted to do. PolitiFact wanted to do a story on the low number of prosecutions stemming from the financial crisis. So they just interpreted Moore to agree with their preconceived agenda and wrote the story accordingly.

There's good evidence that hundreds of figures from corporate America were arrested based on fraud charges from the time period when the financial meltdown occurred. Moore claimed no arrests had occurred. Not one. His underlying point was that many figures from corporate America had committed illegal acts in bringing on the financial crisis yet had escaped arrest.

An inaccurate claim combined with an extremely dubious and ill-supported underlying argument should not lead to a "Mostly True" rating on the "Truth-O-Meter." If it does, something's wrong.

The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan: F
Martha Hamilton: F

Agenda journalism results in PolitiFact ignoring its principle of taking context into consideration.

Afters:

For good measure, here's a reminder of what can happen if you use language similar to Moore's yet PolitiFact minimizes the weight of your underlying point (bold emphasis added):

If Boehner had offered a more measured assessment, he would have had a fair point about the differences between Obama’s fiscal approach and that outlined by the commission. The president certainly could have gone further in embracing the recommendations of the panel he had commissioned. But he did embrace a wide variety of them, so to say bluntly, as Boehner did, that Obama "took exactly none of his own deficit reduction commission’s ideas" is simply not correct. To one degree or another, the commission’s recommendations are sprinkled throughout Obama’s budget proposals, in recognizable -- if not always in identical -- form. So we rate Boehner’s statement False.

The inconsistency is obvious, isn't it?

Grading PolitiFact: Haley Barbour and Obama's unified government

2011-10-05T02:23:00.000-04:00

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.
--PolitiFact editor Bill Adair

Here we go again.

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton: editor

Analysis:

Does PolitiFact focus on the underlying message this time with a Republican the subject of its fact check process? By the end of the second paragraph it seems like it (bold emphasis added):

During the Oct. 2, 2011, edition of CBS’s Face the Nation, two governors -- Democrat Martin O’Malley of Maryland and Republican Haley Barbour of Mississippi -- faced off over a variety of political and policy issues.

At one point, Barbour parried O’Malley’s criticism of Republican economic policies by noting the size of President Barack Obama’s congressional majorities after he took office in early 2009. His argument was that Obama had significant legislative advantages that should have enabled him to do what he wanted policy-wise -- meaning that Obama can’t legitimately blame the Republicans for blocking what he wanted to do.

That's about as far as we get with the underlying point, however. PolitiFact proceeds to satisfactorily demonstrate that Democrats on a number of occasions have held greater majorities than the majority enjoyed by Obama during his first years in office.

PolitiFact's conclusion? "False":

It’s true that Democratic strength in Congress at the beginning of Obama’s term was the strongest it had been in 16 years. But that’s not what Barbour said -- he said the numbers were the strongest going back to President Johnson in the late 1960s. And that was not the case. We rate his statement False.

Have we changed our mind about the underlying point being the most important thing or what?

PolitiFact should check itself with the Flip-O-Meter.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson: F
Martha Hamilton: F

The grades assume that Bill Adair isn't lying when he says the underlying point is the most important aspect of a numbers claim.

Afters:

I'd have no problem with the grade for Barbour if PolitiFact operated consistently. But when Sarah Palin accurately states the rank of the U.S. for defense spending as a percentage of GDP she receives a "Barely True" based on her underlying point. In contrast to Palin, Senator Barbara Boxer gets a benefit from having her underlying argument ignored in addition to kid-gloves treatment of her raw numbers to the tune of "Mostly True."

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi is simply the latest conservative to suffer relative harm from PolitiFact's inconsistent application of standards.

In defense of Hank Williams Jr.

2011-10-04T13:06:00.000-04:00

I'm no fan of either Hank Williams or country music in general, but the criticism of Hank Williams Jr. for his comments made on Fox & Friends is ridiculous.

Williams expressed displeasure with the golf outing pairing Boehner and Obama, calling it a "big mistake." Asked to explain why he felt that way, Williams said the meeting was like Hitler playing golf with Benjamin Netanyahu.

So Williams compared Obama with Hitler?

The esteemed Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air seems to think so:

To paraphrase Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder: You never go full LaRouchian, dude. Never.

I don’t think Williams was misunderstood at all; he was pretty blunt about it, and claiming that people didn’t catch some alleged nuance is just laughable.

Morrissey needs to check his impulse toward a laughter response and think. Morrissey's subsequent update helps illustrate the problem:

There’s been some silly defenses of Williams in the comments that claim he didn’t compare Obama to Hitler. Williams himself admitted he did:
“My analogy was extreme — but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me — how ludicrous that pairing was. They’re polar opposites and it made no sense. They don’t see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the President.

“Every time the media brings up the tea party it’s painted as racist and extremists — but there’s never a backlash — no outrage to those comparisons,” Williams said. “Working class people are hurting — and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job – it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change. The policies have to change.”
None of which makes anyone Hitler, champ.

Sorry, Ed, but Williams is not admitting that he compared Obama to Hitler. All he's admitting is that he drew an analogy. And he explained the analogy sufficiently for a fair-minded person to grasp his point (I trust Morrissey will grasp it eventually): Hitler and Netanyahu are ideological opposites. While we may have a predisposition to identify our least favorite between Boehner and Obama with our least favorite figure from the analogy, the analogy does not depend on that identification at all. One can understand Boehner as Hitler just as well and the point--that polar opposites are having a ludicrous tete-a-tete--continues to stand. And one shouldn't have to agree with that point in order to understand it.

What's worse than using Hitler in a comparison? I'd nominate hypersensitivity to the use of Hitler in a comparison.

Troy Davis, two minds, and the justice system

2011-10-02T23:46:00.001-04:00

I don't understand people who want to abolish the death penalty because of our flawed justice system while at the same time thinking that the justice system is the best way to fight the battle against terrorists.

Not that I actually know any of those people. It's just that I see both positions often espoused from the political left. So it seems like they're out there. Somewhere.

A fact-checking travesty

2011-10-02T18:30:00.001-04:00

During the course of my most recent "Grading PolitiFact" item, I questioned a figure PolitiFact used to estimate the portion of an individual's average tax rate.

PolitiFact asked a pair of Center for Tax Policy experts to estimate the effects of payroll taxes on the tax rate of a person making about $50,000 per year. And mine were not the only eyebrows raised by the estimate returned by Roberton Williams and Rachel Johnson.

From PolitiFact's Facebook page:

Zwack asks a good question, and we're still waiting for any sort of response from PolitiFact.

An Annenberg Fact Check (factcheck.org) story linked through the PolitiFact website helps confirm one of my two proffered solutions to the payroll tax percentage mystery.

The Annenberg item, unlike the PolitiFact story, took its calculations out of the black box and put them on display:

In all cases, when calculating combined payroll and income tax rates, we have followed the same method used by Buffett in his New York Times piece (and in general by economists and tax analysts as well). That is, we have counted the employer-paid portion of both Social Security and Medicare taxes as though they were paid by the worker, and we have also added those amounts to the worker’s income when calculating the overall rate. This is based on the economic theory that employers see the taxes as a part of total compensation, and that they would pay it as salary if the worker paid that half of the tax instead.

The above justification makes sense. But even the Annenberg researchers do not make clear that the calculations were performed correctly.

To illustrate the problem, consider the person making $50,000 per year. Most of us think of that figure as the person's salary--the gross amount on the paycheck stub before taxes and other deductions. If the person making $50,000 pays a 6.2 percent payroll tax on that amount, then the effective tax portion stemming from the payroll tax is 6.2 percent--an easy calculation. But the employer's share works differently. If the employer's share of the payroll tax (a match of the 6.2 percent) counts as employee income then the employees is making 6.2 percent of his salary added to his $50,000 salary: $53,100.

That total income figure, in turn, affects the person's average tax. Instead of adding the employer's match to the employee's share to reach 12.4 percent for the share of payroll tax, we take the total tax ($6,200) and take that as a share of the $53,100 total. Which comes to about 11.7 percent.

The same principle appears to apply to any other aspect of employee compensation, and there are quite a few of those potentially adding $10,000-$20,000 to the total compensation of the employee earning a $50,000 salary.

It isn't clear that the Annenberg fact check took all these things into account. It's pretty clear that the PolitiFact fact check did not:

We asked two researchers at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center, Roberton Williams and Rachel Johnson, for their advice on how to factor in payroll taxes. They estimated that combining the workers’ share of the payroll tax with the employer’s share -- the usual practice among economists -- would mean an extra 15 percentage points for our hypothetical middle-class worker, and less than 2 additional percentage points for the high-income taxpayer.

Adding these to the percentages we previously found for the income tax alone produces a new, "final" rate of 22 to 23 percent for the construction worker and 20 to 30 percent for the $50 million earner.

Williams and Johnson very probably were not responsible for the faulty equation PolitiFact uses for its calculation. But if either Tax Policy Center expert reads their press then what stops them from pointing out PolitiFact's error?

And what stopped PolitiFact from considering total compensation in certain other fact checks from the past?

Regardless of the reasons, PolitiFact botched the calculation and called it fact checking.

Grading PolitiFact: President Obama and the Buffett fallacy (Updated)

2011-09-29T13:50:00.001-04:00

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Bill Adair: editor

Analysis:

President Obama's words, in context (yellow highlights added to indicate the portion quoted by PolitiFact, "laughter" and "applause" notes deleted):

THE PRESIDENT: Now, this isn’t to punish success. What’s great about this country is our belief that anybody can make it. If you’re willing to put in the sweat, if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, if you’re willing to work hard, you’ve got a good idea, you’re out there taking a risk -- God bless you. You can make millions, you can make billions of dollars in America. This is the land of opportunity. That’s great. All I’m saying is, if you’ve done well -- I’ve done well -- then you should do a little something to give something back. You should want to see the country that provided you with this opportunity to be successful, and be able to provide opportunity for the young people who are going to be coming up behind you.

And all I’m saying is that everything should be fair. You know, you learn the idea of fairness when you’re two, three years old. Right? You’re in the sandbox and you don’t want to let somebody play with your truck and your mom or your daddy go up and they say, “No, hon, that’s not fair, you’ve got to share.” Isn’t that what they say? Things have to be fair. So all I’m saying is that Warren Buffett’s secretary should not be paying a lower tax rate on her income than Warren Buffett. That doesn’t make any sense. A construction worker who’s making 50 or 60 grand a year shouldn’t be paying higher tax rates than the guy who’s making $50 million a year. And that’s how it’s working right now. Because they get all these loopholes and tax breaks that you don’t get.

So for me to say, let’s close those loopholes, let’s eliminate those tax breaks, and let’s make sure that everybody is paying their fair share -- there’s nothing wrong with that.

After noting that Obama's statements contain quite a bit of unverifiable opinion, the fact checkers weigh in on the fact check:

In his Cincinnati speech, Obama did make a comment that was Truth-O-Meter-ready. By saying "and that’s how it’s working now," Obama is saying this pattern of taxation is a common practice.

Though the president's statement qualifies as slightly ambiguous, the PolitiFact judgment seems reasonable on its face: Obama is saying that a $50,000 earner is routinely taxed at a higher rate than the $50 million earner. Therefore the president requires more than just a few appropriate individual cases to justify his claim.

PolitiFact:

We found an IRS chart for tax year 2008 that shows a variety of tax information broken down into 18 ranges of adjusted gross income for the filer.

This chart lists three types of tax returns -- filers who have income for a child who earns more than $1,900 (meaning the child’s income is taxed at the parent’s rate); those who have income reported on Schedule D (primarily capital gains); and those without either of these types of income. For the purposes of our calculations, we are combining data for all three types of returns.

It's hard to see why PolitiFact went to all that trouble when the Congressional Budget Office--ordinarily a trusted source--has already done the work for them.

PolitiFact crunched the IRS numbers, after a fashion, and didn't find much to vindicate Obama:

By these calculations, Obama would be incorrect in most cases.

I saw nothing in the calculations, inadequate though they might be, to indicate that Obama would ever be correct. If any reader sees it differently I'd love to see the explanation.

Never fear, fans of liberal media bias. There's more to come.

PolitiFact:

But that’s not the end of the story. These figures are for federal income taxes only. There are also a bunch of other federal taxes that could, and probably should, be included in the calculation. The burden for some some taxes, including corporate taxes, excise taxes and estate taxes, are hard to attribute to individual returns, so we’ll set those aside. But one federal tax is straightforward to throw into our calculations: payroll taxes.

Figuring the burden for corporate taxes, excise taxes and estate taxes may well provide a stiff test for researchers, but given the admitted relevance of those taxes why not make use of the previously-mentioned CBO report that estimates the effective tax rate with corporate and excise tax burden estimates figured in?

(Clipped from CBO report, click image for enlarged view)

Apparently PolitiFact's version of fact checking only involves consideration of the most regressive tax (by far) in the group, payroll taxes. Ironically, payroll taxes are probably the least relevant tax in the group since the Social Security tax is peddled as retirement insurance--a premium paid for a fixed benefit package at retirement. The argument for progressive insurance premiums based on the ability to pay lacks something in terms of moral authority. Shall the rich also pay more per unit for milk, tea and gasoline?

PolitiFact:

We asked two researchers at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center, Roberton Williams and Rachel Johnson, for their advice on how to factor in payroll taxes. They estimated that combining the workers’ share of the payroll tax with the employer’s share -- the usual practice among economists -- would mean an extra 15 percentage points for our hypothetical middle-class worker, and less than 2 additional percentage points for the high-income taxpayer.

Don't you just love the back-of-the-envelope methodology?

Let's take a figure calculated by journalists based on data that ignore a number of relevant taxes such as excise and corporate taxes, then call on the left-leaning Tax Policy Center to give us a modification based on (regressive) payroll taxes. While we're at it, let's ignore the work done by the highly respected CBO touching the issue.

PolitiFact doesn't tell us what method (see Update below) the Tax Policy Center experts used to estimate an additional 15 percentage points for the middle-income worker. Based on this chart from the Social Security Administration I'd hazard the guess that they assumed that the worker is self-employed. Either that or they figured the employer's share of the payroll tax as a tax on the employee's income.

(Social Security Administration chart; click image for enlarged view)

For what it's worth, the CBO figured the effective tax rate for payroll taxes at 9.5 percent for both 2004 and 2005. That figure seems very plausible if the CBO took into account both employees and self-employed workers, falling as it does between the 7.6 percent and 15.3 percent figures from the chart above. The 9.5 percent figure matches well the expectation that most workers in the middle quintile are employees rather than self-employed.

It's kind of hard to take PolitiFact seriously on this fact check, but let's keep trying.

PolitiFact:

Adding these to the percentages we previously found for the income tax alone produces a new, "final" rate of 22 to 23 percent for the construction worker and 20 to 30 percent for the $50 million earner.

So it’s certainly possible that a given construction worker pays a higher effective tax rate than a given $50 million earner -- but it’s also not a guarantee. There is a lot of variation for taxpayers in both categories -- especially when you consider that we have been using average tax rates rather than median tax rates, which means that a small number of very high incomes can throw off the average.

Summary: If you fudge the numbers enough in Obama's favor you can make it seem possible that he's possibly correct in some individual cases.

Just don't take the highly progressive effects of corporate taxation into account and you can believe that there's some basis in truth for Obama's claim.

Whoopee! It's conclusion time:

Our ruling

Obama has made a sweeping statement that it’s common, even typical, for a $50,000-a-year construction worker to pay a higher tax rate than someone earning $50 million a year. The reality is that it’s hard to know for sure.

We found that a typical taxpayer with $50,000 in income pays 22 to 23 percent in income and payroll taxes, while the comparable rates for very, very wealthy taxpayers are in the 20 to 30 percent range. The data isn’t specific enough for us to be able to say if a majority of $50 million earners pay tax rates at the low or high end of that 20 to 30 percent range. We do think it’s safe to say that some of those very high earners pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than workers who earn $50,000, and some don’t. So, on balance, we rate the statement Half True.

The evidence supporting PolitiFact's view that "some high earners pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than workers who earn $50,000" comes from an extremely dubious process that ignored taxes that place a greater burden on the rich along with a very suspicious estimate of the effects of payroll taxes on middle-income earners. The CBO's numbers seem far more reasonable on the face of it, and they do not support Obama's statement at all.

And one other thing. PolitiFact takes context into account, right? There's nothing in the story about the things the president claimed as the cause of the unfair application of the tax code ("all these loopholes and tax breaks"). The tax rate on capital gains is not a loophole. It is an intentional aspect of the tax code designed to promote risk and investment. Neither is it a "tax break" any more than the lower income person in the lowest tax bracket is receiving a "tax break" for not having his income taxed according to the rate in the next bracket up.

PolitiFact quotes the president's demagoguery but fails to call him on it. Instead, we get the next best thing to partisan spin if it isn't 100% partisan spin.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson: F
Bill Adair: F

I'll assign "F" grades for relatively modest journalistic flaw given the importance I place on accuracy and objectivity where a story receives the label "fact check." But this story is a stinker through and through, receiving the special tag "journalists reporting badly." Any journalist not predisposed toward Obama's position ought to question a 15 percent markup for the effective tax rate based on payroll taxes. It doesn't add up.

Afters:

I'm tempted to hypothesize that PolitiFact's continued difficulty with providing accurate fact checks on these tax issues has to do with the Democrats' apparent reliance on the class warfare strategy for the coming election. Rather than based on sympathy with the Democratic Party itself, journalists may feel sympathy with the class warfare angle. It jibes with the way many journalists view their role in society, I suspect.

After Afters:

Some readers may find it fascinating to compare my critique of this PolitiFact item with that of an enthusiastic Kossack (language warning).

Update (Oct. 3, 2011):

I should have credited PolitiFact with a partial explanation for its procedure of adding 15 percentage points to the effective tax on the $50,000 income worker. Yes, one can consider the employer's share of the OASDI payroll deduction as part of the employee's income. But one does not then calculate the percentage tax paid using $50,000 as the denominator as PolitiFact ends up doing by simply adding the employer's matching 6.2 percent to percentage tax paid by the employee. It is explained in slightly more detail here.

Update II (Oct. 4, 2011)

Turned the "m" right side up to make "may well" instead of its predecessor, "way well," and eliminated a stray two-letter word in the same paragraph. Hat tip to Jeff Dyberg for pointing out the errors.

PolitiFlub: Engaging Rick Perry

2011-09-28T16:08:00.001-04:00

I can't pass this one up, so it's time for another PolitiFlub item, the Cliff's Notes version of the Grading PolitiFact category.

A PolitiFact item stemming from Florida's iteration of the GOP presidential debate focused on this (bold emphasis added) statement from Gov. Perry in response to fellow candidate Rick Santorum (bold emphasis carried over from the version published by PolitiFact):

WALLACE: Governor Perry, 30 seconds to respond, sir.

PERRY: I've got one question for him.

Have you ever even been to the border with Mexico?

SANTORUM: Yes.

PERRY: I'm surprised if you have, but you weren't paying attention, because the idea that you --

SANTORUM: Well, the answer is, yes, I have.

PERRY: -- are going to build a wall, a fence for 1,200 miles, and then go 800 miles more to Tijuana, does not make sense. You put the boots on the ground.

We know how to make this work. You put the boots on the ground. You put the aviation assets --

SANTORUM: But it's not working, Governor.

PERRY: -- in the ground. No, it's not working because the federal government has not --

SANTORUM: But you said we know how it works. Is it working in Texas?

PERRY: The federal government has not engaged in this at all. When I'm the president of the United States, I'll promise you one thing --

SANTORUM: But you're saying you put the assets there. Has it worked in Texas?

PERRY: -- we will put the assets on the ground --

SANTORUM: You said you have.

PERRY: -- the boots on the ground --

BAIER: Senator Santorum, let him finish, please.

PERRY: -- the aviation assets on the ground, and we will stop illegal immigration, we will stop the drug cartels, and we will make America secure.

Hmm. In what has the federal government not engaged?

PolitiFact:

Really? There aren't any federal boots on the Texas border?

Really? PolitiFact seriously thinks Perry was saying the federal government hasn't put any agents along the Texas border?

If they're going to take it that literally then they might as well take Perry to be suggesting that we can secure the border by dropping boots from the sky to land along the southern border. Boots as in shoes.

Basic charitable interpretation suggests that Perry was talking about something more than simply having agents on the border. Even PolitiFact grants that it matters what the agents do while they're stationed there:

We're not checking whether federal investment has been effective — merely, as Perry said, whether the federal government has been "engaged."

This fact check item is a bad joke. One cannot assume that Perry was denying the presence of federal agents on the border with his statement. Perry's words carry a good deal of ambiguity stemming from his failure to specify what it is the boots ought to do while on the ground. One can fault Perry for that, but it's simply ridiculous to leap to the assumption that he was denying the presence of federal agents.

The term "engaged" carries a connotation of focus. As well, Perry may not have gotten around to describing the particular booted activity in which the federal government has failed to engage. Moderator Chris Wallace terminated the exchange and Perry had only received permission for a 30 second response in the first place.

The PolitiFact item contains no hint that the PolitiFact team tried to obtain any clarification from Perry regarding his intent. Therefore, the tag "journalists reporting badly" applies.

Sad.

Tampa Bay Rays note

2011-09-28T01:01:00.000-04:00

I made a couple of predictions related to the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays this year.

One was a specific prediction: Jeremy Hellickson would win more games than the pitcher he replaced in the rotation, Matt Garza. Garza had a decent season for the Chicago Cubs. But Hellickson pitched very well all season to finish with 13 wins to Garza's nine. W00t. Nothing against Garza. I just thought Hellickson's superior composure would give him the edge over Garza in earning positive decisions. Both are good pitchers and I wish Garza well with the Cubs.

The second prediction was hazy, to borrow a term from the Magic 8-Ball. I thought the Rays could finish anywhere from first to last, and that was a revised assessment after the Rays righted themselves after a dismal start. At the start of the season I didn't think the Rays could win the division since I felt every team had improved except for the Rays.

But here we are. With one game left in the regular season, the Rays stand tied with the Bo$ton Red $ox for the American League wild card playoff spot.

The credit goes to the pitching staff and the stellar defense, because the offense has struggled to score runs all season.

A few quick notes on the rest of the division:

Baltimore Orioles
I thought the Orioles would play much better this year. But while the Orioles vastly improved on last year's season series performance against the Rays, Baltimore's young pitching staff just hasn't blossomed as did the Rays' over the past few years. If the pitching comes along then watch out for Baltimore. On the other hand, perhaps Baltimore's failure with its young pitchers serves as a tribute to Tampa Bay's organization.

Toronto Blue Jays
Toronto also starts a stable of young pitchers, and a number of them turned in solid seasons while the Jays' batting order hit dingers at a dizzying clip. The Jays will finish near .500 in the tough AL East.

Boston Red Sox
Boston was the best team in the majors during the middle third of the season. But the team couldn't play worth beans at the start and end of the regular season. I accept no excuses. Buying veteran players earns the risk of injury, and Boston had its share of those. But the lineup was still better than it played near the start and finish of the regular season. The Rays had no realistic shot at the playoffs without Boston's collapse.

New York Yankees
New Yorks batting lineup made its starting pitching stand up, with a good bit of help from a solid bullpen. And the Yankees improved their play against the Rays this season. Curtis Granderson had an insane season at the plate. They earned the AL East title even if they paid a high price for it.

Sublime Bloviations

Rick Santorum and "bla-" vs. "black"

Who hears racist dog whistles and why?

February Artist: Joe Beier

Krugman takes over as head of the Truth Police Police

Trusty "NewsTrust" rates PolitiFact

PolitiFlub: Udderly confused by EPA's milk regs

The muddying of the bloodying of PolitiFact

Piquing PolitiFact: Building a straw man with which to attack Mitt Romney?

Disagreeing with Jay Rosen

WaPo's Glenn Kessler offers cold comfort with fact check summary

NFL 2011: Summing up the Buccaneers

PolitiFact 2011: A review

January Artist: The Jelly Jam

Bill Adair: You who criticize us are in an echo chamber chamber chamber chamber

Mother Jones with the bird's eye lowdown on PolitiFact

PolitiFact picks surprise winner for its 2011 "Lie of the Year" award

PolitiFlub: "the deciding vote"

Center for Freedom and Prosperity Video: Myths about the New Deal

Grading PolitiFact: Newt Gingrich and space mirrors

The meta-savviness of Brendan Nyhan

Say what?

December Artist: The Grip Weeds

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Rick Scott and "the law of the land"

Handicapping PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" (Updated x2)

I give this one no shot at winning. It's just not going to resonate with PolitiFact's readers, first because liberals may well think it true and second because it was a type of Facebook spam. It would be the equivalent of giving the award to a chain email.

Though liberals have a thing for Michele Bachmann, this statement has no chance of winning unless it is perceived as a key reason why Bachmann had no staying power in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. I don't see it that way, but then again I'm no liberal.

Global warming remains a hot-button issue with liberals, so Rick Perry's statement about global warming has an excellent shot at ending in the top five.

This claim also has a good shot at hit at hitting the top five for some of the same reasons cited for Wasserman Schultz's contender status. On the downside for PolitiFact, Republicans can make it an election issue and potentially move votes.

These predictions are just for fun, representing my sense of how the results will turn out. Readers should not make bets based on this information as though it is gambling advice.

Update:

Update 2:I missed adding one significant Democratic Party claim to the list. With this update I'm also trying to fix the problem with the unusual font size and appearance.

PolitiFlub: Scott Walker vs. the unions

Another embarrassing juxtaposition for PolitiFact

The "PolitiFact heuristic"

Another shifting standard at PolitiFact

Fatally flawed design

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney's Obama ad and talking about the economy (Updated x2))

Hope 'n' change at PolitiFact (Updated x2)

Video: Blue Angels with Dixie Dregs soundtrack

Video: "The European Fiscal Crisis and Lessons for America"

PolitiFlub: Who gambles the most?

The largest number of gamblers are "from the poorest segments of the population."

More D'OhbamaCare

The EPA should regulate airplanes

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Alan Hays, proof of citizenship and voting

The St. Petersburg Times and Charlie Crist's share of public campaign dollars (Updated)

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney and $95 billion in savings

AP Spin Meter flunks logic, spins story

November artist: Gretchen Menn

PolitiFlub: Bachmann blames Obama for Iraq War?

Grading PolitiFact: Jeb Hensarling and the ballooning budget

PolitiFact Virginia: The Good Umpire speaks

PolitiFact and the fact check smear

Grading PolitiFact: Joe Biden and the Flint crime rate

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney, the NLRB and Boeing

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Alan Grayson and global wealth inequality

The Axis of Misbehavior

PolitiFlub: The employee contribution to Social Security

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): American Crossroads and the Clinton take on Obama's jobs plan

Grading PolitiFact: Michael Moore and the Occupy Wall Street arrests

Grading PolitiFact: Haley Barbour and Obama's unified government

In defense of Hank Williams Jr.

Troy Davis, two minds, and the justice system

A fact-checking travesty

Grading PolitiFact: President Obama and the Buffett fallacy (Updated)

PolitiFlub: Engaging Rick Perry

Tampa Bay Rays note

Update 2:

I missed adding one significant Democratic Party claim to the list. With this update I'm also trying to fix the problem with the unusual font size and appearance.