Blue Lectroids in Jersey?

That's it! These red creatures, they somehow give off the bacteria, we breath it, it swims up our nose... to our cerebral cortex, where it literally talks to our brain cells, tells us to see exactly what they want us to see.
--New Jersey (Jeff Goldblum), "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension"

And these blue creatures--PolitiFact journalists--give off fact checks which literally talk to our brains and make use see exactly what they want us to see.  That is, they purport to fact check statements that the figure in question either did not make or clearly did not intend as interpreted by PolitiFact.

Raymond Bateman, former Republican state senator in New Jersey:  "New Jersey’s North-South political landscape during the Civil War was definitely mixed — remember that Cape May, Cumberland, Salem and part of Atlantic counties are all south of the Mason-Dixon line."

What the Blue Lectroids want you to hear:  "The Mason-Dixon line crossed into New Jersey."

Republican Senate candidate Joe Kyrillos:  "Here's the thing: our economy is not performing. We are not producing jobs. We created 80,000 jobs last month. We don't talk about the jobs that we lost. The net of it all is that we lost jobs. And so listen, raising taxes now in these times is not going to help with job creation."

What the Blue Lectroids want you to hear:  "We are not producing jobs."

It's not just PolitiFact New Jersey.  Made-up and sculpted claims occur regularly in the PolitiFact catalog across the states.

Don't trust the Blue Lectroids.

Bateman may have been a bit off with his description of New Jersey's racial history--the northern part of Jersey has a more significant history in the slave trade than the southern portion.  But there's no question at all that the southern part of New Jersey is south of the Mason-Dixon line, even if it is not directly south.

Kyrillos was obviously talking about the big picture, otherwise he doesn't directly contradict himself by flatly saying "We created 80,000 jobs last month."  The explanation from the Kyrillos campaign was coherent and sensible.  The U.S. has failed to recover all the jobs lost from the recession, and the present job recovery is the slowest in the post-WW2 era.  PolitiFact played the part of the pedant on this one.

Don't trust PolitiFact.


Update 7/18/2012:

Blue Lectroids also apparently monitor "Fox & Friends."

Fox News host Steve Doocy:  ""If you make more than $250,000 a year, (President Obama wants to) jack up your taxes about 5 percent.  But when you think about it, at $250,000 you only really take home about $125,000, which in some parts of the country, if you've got a couple of kids in college, is not much money."

What the Blue Lectroids want you to hear:  "Someone earning $250,000 pays half that in taxes."

PolitiFact wants us to forget that "take-home pay" means what you get after things like pension contributions and an employee's share of an insurance premium come out of a check.

PolitiFlub: No credit or blame for Bill Clinton?

Rookie mistake?

Close on the heels of a hard-to-explain discrepancy involving call-and-response claims from the Obama and Romney campaigns, PolitiFact New Jersey sheds one of PolitiFact's principles like newly adult cicadas shed old exoskeletons .

Recall PolitiFact editor Bill Adair's edict that the fact checkers would start taking credit and blame consistently into account:

About a year ago, we realized we were ducking the underlying point of blame or credit, which was the crucial message. So we began rating those types of claims as compound statements.

Now watch PolitiFact New Jersey duck blame or credit as Bill Clinton claims credit for balancing the budget and partially paying down the national debt:

Our ruling

At a June 1 campaign event, Clinton touted his fiscal record in the final years of his presidency. "Then I gave you four surplus budgets for the first time in more than 70 years, paid $600 billion down on the national debt," Clinton told the crowd.

Clinton delivered four consecutive surplus budgets for the first time in more than seven decades, but the former president misstated the level of debt reduction. During those four fiscal years, the debt held by the public dropped by nearly $453 billion, but total debt jumped by about $400 billion.

We rate the statement Mostly True.

Who says the executive branch doesn't control the purse strings of the federal government?

Piquing PolitiFact: Ranting at PolitiFact New Jersey

Ever notice that PolitiFact finds it impossible to detect and expose various iterations of the Buffett Fallacy?

PolitiFact New Jersey stuck with the pattern while checking a claim by Rep. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) that people making over $1 million/"these richest people in America" pay their taxes at the lowest rate in 80 years.

Take it away, me:

This fact check perpetuates PolitiFact's failure to fully report the story on income taxes.

Marginal tax rates certainly don't tell the whole story, as they kick in and apply only to income exceeding that taxed at the next lowest rate. Yet the story focuses primarily on the top marginal rate.

Then the story achieves a cockeyed sort of balance by talking about the effective tax rate--but only the effective tax rate for personal income taxes. The CBO estimated effective income tax rates a few years ago. For some reason PolitiFact is allergic to accurately reporting the results of that study.

Admittedly, it's very hard to find. One has to know how to use Google and how to type in "CBO" and "effective tax rates." Don't bother trying it unless your I.Q. is at least 160. You're bound to fail.

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/98xx/doc9884/12-23-effectivetaxrates_letter.pdf

As anyone who can read a table can see, the CBO numbers for effective federal tax rates (which includes estimates for corporate taxation) do not support Rothman's claim. He's cherry-picking his data, in effect.

Explain to me why no PolitiFact franchise appears to have the ability to share this information with readers? PolitiFact is a disgrace.

NJ.com.

It's truly mind-boggling that not one (so far as I can tell) of PolitiFact's franchises from National to Rhode Island has reported on the CBO's study of effective tax rates to put the progressive nature of the tax system in context.

Grading PolitiFact (New Jersey): Burying Michael Doherty's underlying point

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:

Bill Wichert:  writer, researcher
Caryn Shinske:  editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact appears to have the goods on Doherty.  It sure seems like he got the numbers wrong:

Doherty referred us to a fact sheet prepared by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., showing that 7,021 prenatal clients were served nationwide in 2009. Based on that figure, Doherty determined there were, on average, about 140 prenatal patients per state.

Here’s the problem: the fact sheet said "clients," but Doherty referred to "visits" on the Senate floor.

Oops.  Big mistake.  One client might have more than one visit.

PolitiFact:

When we checked with Michele Jaker, executive director of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of New Jersey, she said Planned Parenthood centers provided a total of 40,489 prenatal visits across the country in 2009, which is the latest data available.

That's 5.77 visits per client, for those who like to see the numbers crunched.  And Doherty ends up underestimating the correct number by a walloping 83 percent.  What can save Doherty from receiving a "Truth-O-Meter" grade of "False" or worse?

The underlying point, maybe?  PolitiFact editor Bill Adair does call the underlying point the most important thing about a numbers claim, after all.  And there's some good news for Doherty in this fact check.  He's pretty much on target with the underlying point:

But for his overall argument that Planned Parenthood sees few prenatal patients, Doherty is right.

According to the same fact sheet, "other women’s health services," which includes prenatal care, only accounted for 10 percent of all services provided by Planned Parenthood nationwide in 2009.

According to figures provided by Jaker, prenatal clients represented about 0.6 percent of the 91,617 patients served by New Jersey centers in 2009.

In the context of overall services provided by Planned Parenthood, in fact, Doherty's error would shrink to a negligible level.  And since "the biggest factor" in grading a numbers claim is the underlying point, Doherty should fare okay.

Eh.  Not so much, as it turns out.

PolitiFact:

The senator said Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide many prenatal visits, saying the figure was "about 140 visits for each state in the entire country." That figure is way off, because Doherty was using the number of clients. The actual number would be more like 800 visits per state.

Figures provided by Planned Parenthood confirm that prenatal care represents a small part of the services offered, but since the senator’s figures were inaccurate to such a large degree, we rate the statement False.

Depending on the subject and/or the PolitiFact team doing the evaluation, the underlying point isn't always the most important thing.  Sometimes the underlying point doesn't appear to matter at all to the Truth-O-Meter's mighty objective needle.

Fancy that.

The grades:

Bill Wichert:  F
Caryn Shinske:  F

PolitiFact needs to decide as an organization what role the underlying point plays in a fact check.  And then stick to it.