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.