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.

Grading PolitiFact (Georgia): Herman Cain and the early objective of Planned Parenthood

We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories.
About PolitiFact

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Willoughby Mariano:  writer, researcher
Jim Tharpe:  editor


Analysis:

Let's dive right in with PolitiFact's explanation of the issue:

"When Margaret Sanger - check my history - started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world," Cain said during a talk in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group.

"It's planned genocide," Cain added. He wants the U.S. Congress to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, which receives about $75 million a year to provide non-abortion health services.

Was Planned Parenthood founded to help kill unborn black babies?

Cain went on to talk about today's Planned Parenthood working to fulfill its "original mission," so it's probably fair to infer that Cain is, at minimum, linking the killing of black babies with that original mission.

The line about killing black babies prior to birth accounts for my agreement with PolitiFact on one aspect of Cain's claim:  The early incarnations of Planned Parenthood didn't do much to push abortion.  It was too controversial at the time.

But before we move on, please note that we do not have Cain's comment in its original context.  We have PolitiFact relying on a news account of Cain's speech.  PolitiFact claims that it "always" tries to work from an original version of a claim to allow consideration of the surrounding context.  If it isn't important to consider the surrounding context, then why assure readers that searching out the context is standard practice?  And if the original context is important, then shouldn't any fact check lacking the original context make special note of that missing feature?

In Cain's case, the original context is missing, and PolitiFact fails to emphasize the potential significance of missing material.

The ensuing fact check emphasizes that there is no good evidence that black babies were killed and that the evidence that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was personally racist is of the poorest quality.

I'm already on record supporting the former point.  But Sanger's personal beliefs are largely irrelevant to the implicit argument that Planned Parenthood has a history of targeting blacks.

The PolitiFact story offered a fleeting glimpse of the elephant in the room:

Eugenics was once a wildly popular theory that the human race can be improved through better breeding and genetics. It drew together backers as diverse as President Theodore Roosevelt and black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois.

At its best, the U.S. movement pushed for better prenatal care. At its worst, it enabled forced sterilization laws and let claims that blacks and immigrants were inferior to masquerade as science.

Sanger welcomed some of the movement’s more notorious leaders onto the board of a predecessor to Planned Parenthood.

The question any journalist should have sought to answer after a statement like that is why Sanger welcomed some of the most notorious leaders of the eugenics movement into leadership in her organization.

Dorothy Roberts summed up the relationship well in her essay "Margaret Sanger and the Racial Origins of the Birth Control Movement":

The eugenics movement supported Sanger's birth control clinics as a means of reaching groups whose high fertility rates were thought to threaten the nation's racial stock and culture.

"Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity," Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, editors, Duke University Press

Sanger herself was more directly concerned with the disastrous effects of a Malthusian population bomb.  British scholar Thomas Malthus, back in the 19th century, had theorized that exponential population growth led inexorably to an extinction or near-extinction disaster.  Sanger bought the idea.  But unlike the eugenicists who wanted to explicitly adjust racial demographics, Sanger primarily wanted fewer people generally rather than a smaller number of any particular race or set of races, though it is also true that she believed in the power of eugenics to better the human race as a whole by allowing poor genetic lines to die off.

By moving the emphasis to Sanger's personal beliefs, PolitiFact ends up presenting a whitewashed version of Planned Parenthood's history and a misleading evaluation of Cain's claim.  Cain, after all, claimed nothing about Sanger other than calling her the founder of Planned Parenthood.   As a result, aspects of the fact check such as the following miss the point:

But we found no evidence that Sanger advocated - privately or publicly - for anything even resembling the "genocide" of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior.

Every academic PolitiFact Georgia consulted said that Cain’s claim is wrong.

"I have never run into any serious academic reference of Sanger or others wanting to ‘kill black babies,’" Indiana University professor Ruth Engs, a eugenics movement expert, told PolitiFact Georgia in an e-mail.

Engs at least extends her defense of Sanger to "others," but uselessly bases it on a lack of the desire to "kill black babies," which in turn obscures the varieties of racial motivation found in the ranks of the eugenicists who supported Sanger's birth control initiatives.

Despite pointing out Sanger's association with eugenicists, the PolitiFact Georgia team can scarcely imagine why eugenicists would want birth control for the undesirable population:

Really, calling the Negro Project a genocidal plot defies common sense. Why would Sanger try to destroy a race of people by giving them access to the very thing she thought could make life better?

Sanger probably wouldn't, but her eugenicist allies would.  Roberts succinctly fills the journalistic hole left by Mariano and Tharpe:

Even if the Negro Project did not intend to exterminate the black population, it facilitated the goals of eugenicists.  Eugenicists considered southern blacks to be especially unfit to breed on the basis of a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind.

Roberts goes on to note that North and South Carolina instituted state-run birth control initiatives while the use of contraceptives remained unlawful in enlightened Massachusetts. 

Sanger's view that fecundity resulted in poverty and thus lack of reproductive fitness was not a popular view among eugenicists.  The overtly racist eugenicists could see a benefit to giving contraceptives to an undesirable class of persons.  And the non-racist eugenicists most likely to ally with Sanger likewise saw a good result in limiting the population of the unfit:

These close allies of birth control held more rigidly deterministic views than Sanger did.  As Kevles notes, what distinguished these men from other social reformers was their firm belief that biology mattered.  In disparaging the racial prejudice of mainstream eugenics, they did not dispute its goals, only its methods.

Carole R. McCann, "Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945"

As with the lending practice of redlining, preventing the births of black children to a greater degree than preventing the births of others is not necessarily a racist practice.  And if Cain erred by referring to killing black babies, he was at least correct that Planned Parenthood's roots contain a concerted effort to reduce procreation by blacks, especially in the South.

Presumably the media experts at PolitiFact have no real knowledge of this, so we can't be surprised at the conclusion:

Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card. We rate it Pants on Fire.

Cain's claim was only ridiculous to the extent it is restricted to the method of limiting the reproduction of blacks.  The PolitiFact team exhibits difficulty in restricting its evaluation to that point and provides a distorted picture in the end.

And it's worth noting that calling Cain's claim a "cynical play of the race card" is a outright editorial judgment, rather than a check of the facts. 


The grades:

Willoughby Mariano:  F
Jim Tharpe:  F

If the original context is important then treat it that way.  Otherwise, revise the descriptions of PolitiFact's process.

It seems that fact checkers had a pair of facts they wanted to check ("Was Margaret Sanger a racist?" "Did Planned Parenthood kill babies fetuses back in the early days?") and used Herman Cain as their excuse to check those data points.  In the process, the validity of Cain's point about the unseemly origins of Planned Parenthood received short shrift.

Afters:

This fact check provides yet another example of PolitiFact's practical immunity from the standards it applies to others.  PolitiFact's "burden of proof" criterion allows PolitiFact to rule a statement "False" if the claimant fails to substantiate his claim.  Yet we're supposed to trust PolitiFact's ruling despite the apparent lack of a complete record of Cain's statement.

As well, one could note the lack of a strictly objective criterion for ridiculousness that would allow PolitiFact to distinguish between "False" and "Pants on Fire."

Grading PolitiFact: Rick Santorum and the aborted third (Updated)

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

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

The PolitiFact version of Rick Santorum's statement appears to provide adequate context:

"The Social Security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period," Santorum said in response to a question from a caller. "But having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion."

Judging by the context, Santorum is making the point that abortion has a substantial effect on national demographics to the point where it exposes a weakness of the Social Security system.  Despite the fact that the underlying message is the important thing about a numbers claim, once again we have an instance where PolitiFact simply ignores the most obvious underlying message in favor of something else.

In this case the numbers claim itself is the point along with a later nitpick about the extent to which abortions would affect population dynamics.

PolitiFact:

Live births: 4,090,007
Fetal deaths: 25,653
Abortions: 1,250,000

Total known pregnancies: 5,365,660

So abortions account for 23.2 percent of all known pregnancies. That’s less than a quarter of all pregnancies, rather than the one-third Santorum said.

One minor quibble with PolitiFact's equation:  Given Santorum's point that abortions affect population dynamics it makes sense to think he would discount fetal deaths since those occur regardless of elective abortion.  Subtracting fetal deaths boosts the percentage slightly to 23.4 percent.  The adjustment ends up moot since PolitiFact eventually uses a Guttmacher Institute publication's estimate of 22.4 percent.

So what of the "Truth-O-Meter"?

PolitiFact:

(W)e find Santorum is significantly overstating the frequency of abortions when he claims that "one in three pregnancies end in abortion" -- it’s actually in the 22 percent to 23 percent range.  That's less than one in four. And the effect on population would be even lower if women who had abortions had children later in life. We can't know exactly how that would affect the numbers, but it would send the estimate even lower. We rate Santorum's statement False.

The fact check indicates that Santorum inflated the abortion rate by about 50 percent.  That makes this fact check useful to me in graphing the way numerical inaccuracy affects the needle of the "Truth-O-Meter, except that PolitiFact uses two of the sentences in the concluding paragraph to comment on Santorum's inference regarding demographic effects.  Assuming that commentary has no effect on the objectivity of the Truth-O-Meter respecting the stated goal of the fact check, a figure inflated by approximately 50 percent may result in a "False" rating.

PolitiFact's nit-picking got me thinking.

If we're going to pay attention to stats like women having kids later in life, then why don't we pay attention to a few others?  Such as the fact that the abortion ratio for 2003 (as calculated by PolitiFact) and the abortion ratio for 2008 (as calculated by Guttmacher Institute researchers) do not determine the percentage of children missing because of abortion.  If 2003 is relevant then so is 2004.  Not to mention 2005.  In fact, Santorum might have some justification based on the expanded history of the abortion ratio.  The Guttmacher Institute found the ratio as high as 30.4 percent in 1983.  If even one third of each aborted group avoids abortion annually, a multiplier effect takes place over time.  The women who would have been born in 1980 have an opportunity to give birth later down the line, perhaps even to the point where Santorum underestimates the demographic effects of elective abortion.

I'm not going to argue that Santorum is entirely correct, nor will I suggest that Santorum had the factors I mentioned above in mind when he made his claim.  Performing a calculation reliably establishing that notion is beyond my ability, not to mention time-intensive.  In this context, it is sufficient to point out that PolitiFact entirely overlooked a fairly obvious part of the math that would positively affect Santorum's claim while giving emphasis to a far less significant point that negatively affects his claim.


April Fools?

By the time I reached this item for review, PolitiFact had given it an update:

UPDATE, April 1, 2011: After we published this item, a reader pointed out that the statement we quoted from Santorum’s office was incorrect. While a spokeswoman had told us that "the prolife community has been astounded at the increasing percentages in the pregnancies that result in abortion," the reader pointed us to statistics from the Guttmacher Institute that show the rate of abortions declining over time. From a 1981 peak of 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, the rate has fallen, gradually but steadily, to 19.6 in 2008 -- a decline of about one-third. According to Census Bureau data, the raw number of abortions has also fallen consistently, from a peak of 1,609,000 in 1990 to 1,242,000 in 2006.

PolitiFact is either pretty careless or pulling an April Fools' Day joke.

It is true that the abortion ratio is on the decrease, making the comment from Santorum's office a bit perplexing.  But the number of abortions per 1,000 women (the rate of abortion) is not the same thing and that number is independent of the abortion ratio.  The same goes for the raw number of abortions.  A higher number of pregnancies can allow a higher raw number of abortions even if the abortion ratio drops.


The proper numbers to bring the comment from Santorum's office into question were there in the report. They were just ignored in favor of numbers that failed to support the objection.  Big oops.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

The failures to focus reasonably on Santorum's underlying point and to take into account a major factor in support of Santorum's demographic inference justify the failing grades.  If I discover that the team was responsible for the botched update (and not kidding around with us) then the "journalists reporting badly" tag will apply.


Update (Fresh afters) April 4:

Though it remains true that reliably calculating the effect of abortion on a demographic over time is a complicated process best attempted by experts in the field, I programmed my own estimate just to illustrate the point about the cumulative effects of abortion done year after year.  It's an effect like compound interest but in reverse.

I used a fertility rate near the bottom of those recorded since the early 1970s (65 pregnancies in a year per 1,000 women aged 15-44).  I measured the effects over a 40 year period, roughly the length of time since Roe v. Wade made abortion generally legal in the United States.

Plugging an abortion ratio of 20 (200 abortions per 1,000 pregnancies annually) into my model, the control demographic (kids aged 0-10) fell by over 30 percent compared to zero abortions.

My reliance on conservative figures for purposes of my estimate suggests that Santorum would be very close and quite possibly low with his estimate over the time period since Roe v. Wade.  It would not make right his claim that one third of pregnancies end in abortion, of course.



April 3, 2011:  In the paragraph just prior to taking on PolitiFact's "nit-picking," corrected "100 percent" figure to match the previously used (correct) figure of 50 percent. 
April 4, 2011:  Restored the explanation for the difference between abortion ratios, rates and raw abortions as used in the Guttmacher report.  Not sure how it got cut out in the first place, but there you have it. Also fixed a redundancy in my opening paragraph.

Grading PolitiFact: Michael Bennet, Ken Buck and the abortion issue

Democrats facing tough re-election battles are having a tough time running on their records in Congress.  A number are trying to bring social issues to the forefront in hopes of fracturing the broad support the electorate is showing for the conservatives' messages of fiscal responsibility and restrained government.  Incumbent Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) played the abortion card with his opponent in a Florida race.  Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), appointed by Colorado's governor to replace Ken Salazar after the latter was named to the Obama cabinet, tried the same tack with Republican opponent Ken Buck.  And PolitiFact was there.


The issue:

The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

Let's first review the way PolitiFact has initially framed this story:

Ken Buck wants to "outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest."
Ken Buck opposes abortion, including cases of rape or incest

From where I sit, "wants to 'outlaw abortion'" does not seem entirely equivalent to "opposes abortion" (taking the subsequent qualifications into account in both cases).  It is potentially equivalent but not necessarily equivalent, just as a bird potentially flies (think hummingbird) but does not necessarily fly (think ostrich).  A proper fact check would distinguish whether the equivalency is justified in the context of the political claim.

Speaking of the political claim, the story presents it like so:

"Extreme beauty, extreme sports -- good extremes in Colorado," the ad says. "But what about Ken Buck's extreme ideas? Do we really want to privatize Social Security and risk it in the stock market? ... Are we ready to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest? Extreme beauty is a good thing, but Colorado's no place for Buck's extreme ideas."

Let's see where writer-researcher Angie Drobnic Holan takes it:

Thou shalt have abortion rights

Robyn Blumner calls herself an atheist. But I think she's religious.

Her religion is reproductive self-determination. But not that heretic branch that claims that women have the right to have as many babies as they wish. She's of the sect that holds the right to an abortion as sacrosanct.

Which brings us to her editorial column in last week's St. Petersburg Times:

In the vote on health care reform offered by the House Democratic leadership, women were given the status of potted plants. It didn't seem to matter that women generally vote Democratic at substantially higher rates than men, their reproductive health care was sacrificed on the altar (and it was an altar) of getting the thing passed.

No wonder she's mad. The altar of a competing religion was getting in the way. Better no health care bill than to see her religion slighted?

On with the sermon:

Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan and a purported member of the secretive fundamentalist Christian group known as The Family, threatened House Speaker Nancy Pelosi like a spoiled child possessing the playground's only basketball. He promised to let health reform fail, with about 40 members in tow, unless the bill included his amendment that barred abortion coverage from any public option or private health insurance plan purchased with federal subsidies.

I'm sure there are times when Blumner recognizes rights of conscience. But not where her religion is concerned. If the courts recognize the constitutional right of a mother to kill a fetus, then taxpayers need to pay for it whether or not they find it highly objectionable.

From what I can tell, the bit about "The Family" is an unsubstantiated rumor. Stupak lists his religion as Roman Catholic and maintains a membership at a Roman Catholic church in his home state. Classy of Blumner to mention the rumor.

Pelosi didn't have a choice. Even with Stupak's amendment, health care reform squeaked by on a vote of 220 to 215.

The stubborn position of Stupak and his lobbying partner, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is made even more extreme by the fact that a compromise had been reached to protect the status quo's strict limits on federal funding of abortion. The House bill contained a provision directing health insurers in the new exchanges to segregate federal subsidies from private premiums and use only the private funds to pay for abortion coverage. No public money would be used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.

What a laughable compromise. Private religious schools should try that one sometime. Let them receive federal money, but keep it segregated from the religious activities of the school.

I'd give Blumner ... 2.5 seconds to blow her top if that arrangement became reality.

Funny how Blumner noticed Stupak's alliance with the USCCB but without letting on that he is a Roman Catholic.

But Stupak and his fellow conservative Democrats wanted more. They wanted to use health reform as an antiabortion tool. Stupak's amendment means insurers in the exchanges are unlikely to offer plans including abortion coverage since most customers will be federally subsidized.

It makes you wonder whom Stupak's team is playing for?

I suppose it is too much to assume that Stupak's well-known Catholicism and the associated probability that he would adopt a pro-life stance was known to Michigan voters. Let's go with the rumor that he is part of the secretive cult known as "The Family."

Passing health reform is the Democrats' top domestic policy priority. In addition to helping save nearly 45,000 people who die every year from a lack of health insurance, Democratic hopes in midterm elections may ride on its successful passage.

Funny stuff! Why is health care reform the Democrats' top domestic policy priority when unemployment is over 10 percent? And why push it when the price tag is so high while the federal deficit is blowing up like a passenger-side airbag after a high-speed collision? Especially when the American people are not behind it? Whether Blumner likes it or not, a majority of Americans oppose providing abortion services under the health care reform bill:

At least on the level of rhetoric, all the politicians and outside groups that have weighed in on health reform seem to agree: taxpayers shouldn't pay to fund abortion. "No federal dollars will be used to fund abortions," said Barack Obama in his speech to Congress on Sept. 8. His Democratic colleagues say they agree with the same principle, as do GOP leaders. That stance mirrors public opinion as well. A 2008 Zogby poll found that 69% of Americans oppose "taxpayer funding of abortion."

It makes no sense except as a long-term strategy to make Americans more dependent on government and thus more likely to vote for the Democrats who dependably vote for more spending on entitlements. Not counting Medicare under the health care reform bill, of course.

Short term, the Democrats will not do well politically to pass health care reform legislation--except with the hard left base. Blumner must be smoking something to think otherwise.

So what else is she thinking these days?

But Stupak and his crew were prepared to trade their own party's electoral prospects and all those lives for a rule that tells low- and middle-income women that they are on their own to pay for a needed abortion. Even in cases where the fetus is deformed and won't survive outside the womb.

As pointed out above, the federal health care reform legislation is unpopular as it is, and it would be even more unpopular if abortion coverage was included. With a reality base like that, Blumner should get Lucy in the Sky to give her enough diamonds to retire from the editing biz.

I'm kind of wondering about this "needed abortion" thing. The reform legislation includes an exception where the life of the mother is at risk. What are the other times an abortion is "needed"? It seems to me that a "needed, elective abortion" is oxymoron territory.

The Catholic bishops also made that calculation. To them, standing in the way of health coverage for an additional 36 million people — which they did aggressively — was worth it. Because now, maybe, some working woman who can't possibly afford another child since she can't even pay for an abortion, will be forced to have an unwanted baby. That was their compassionate, charitable reckoning.

The compassionate thing, evidently, would be to kill the fetus. Beezlenut! Beezlenut! Rah! Rah! Rah! It's not like people adopt babies or anything. And it's not like we'll need workers to pay for the health care of retiring baby boomers.

Whatever the numbers, the reason Stupak and the bishops were so keen to get their regressive amendment through was to make it harder for women to exercise their right to choose.

Probably not. The amendment probably would not make it any harder for a woman to have an abortion than it is at present. If Blumner meant to say that Catholics wanted to keep abortion from becoming an easier choice, that may be accurate. But the rights of conscience should not be discounted without mention.

Blumner ends with a howler:

Every lawmaker with a shred of decency knows that health reform is essential for our nation's future. But reform can't take abortion access with it. Women have to count for something.

The implicit argument: Unless women receive federal funding for elective abortion, women count for nothing.

Is that stupid or what?

As a bonus, we get the implication that a health care reform bill that will either increase the deficit (while being advertised as a deficit cure) or result in much higher taxation--during a recession, no less--is essential to the nation's future.

Dude.

Why Blumner should worry everybody

My last broadside at Robyn Blumner, that official pinata of The St. Petersburg Times, offered a bit of a preview of her Sunday column this week, titled "Why McCain should worry women."

Fresh from her previous week of worrying about the risk of having more than one child per family, Blumner turns to her worry that McCain will damage what Blumner calls "reproductive freedom."

What scares me most about McCain, beyond our 100-year presence in Iraq, his itchy trigger finger relative to other foes, and his enthusiasm for tax cuts for the rich, is his fiercely conservative record on women's reproductive freedom.
(The St. Petersburg Times)

The uninitiated among us might think that "reproductive freedom" has to do with being able to reproduce freely. That isn't really what Blumner has in mind. Reproductive freedom isn't being able to reproduce freely, even though Blumner calls it the ability to control the size of your family. She has small family size in mind more so than large family size.

The next president will be the decider on whether women's emancipation from the slavery of the womb will continue in this country. We are on the cusp of losing the right to control our bodies and determine our family size. McCain promises as much.

Slavery of the womb? I suppose a hysterectomy should cure that. Blumner's language hints at a certain degree of dislike for her sisters whose fondest wish is to bear and care for a large family. Apparently they have a slave mentality in her eyes.

I suppose we'll all be slaves of one sort or another until we have attained freedom from the consequences of our actions.

But I don't want to send this post down essentially the same path as my last one on Blumner. Having fewer kids is good, having more is bad. If you have to kill a few fetuses to achieve those fine ends, what of it? We get it, Robyn.

Her focus here is the danger of McCain. Her personal vision of the better society is just part of the vehicle for attacking McCain.

Blumner is scared of our "100 year presence in Iraq." She must be going gray from our continued military presence in Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Germany/Japan (since WWII), and South Korea.

She's even more terrified of McCain's "fiercely conservative" record on abortion rights. Doesn't the word "fiercely" scare you all by itself? What is McCain's record on abortion?

According to Blumner, he's as radical as someone from "Operation Rescue." Except she provided no photos of McCain protesting outside an abortion clinic. Perhaps she should specify which member of "Operation Rescue" she has in mind. Maybe one of the office secretaries?

John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench. Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.
(Johnmccain.com)

Sounds like yet more of that patented Blumner hyperbole. Even liberals (not counting Blumner among them, so far as I can tell) acknowledge that Roe v. Wade was bad law. They like the outcome but realize that the legal reasoning was out in left field.

But Roe received equally harsh criticism from the academic community. Perhaps most strikingly, the opinion was lambasted by John Hart Ely, perhaps the leading liberal constitutional theorist of the century. Although he dedicated much of his work to supporting the Warren Court rulings, Ely denounced Roe as lawless. He termed Roe a “very bad decision” because it was “bad consti-tutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Roe was, he thought, uniquely open to the charge of being utterly constitutionally ungrounded, “a charge that can responsibly be leveled at no other decision of the past twenty years.” He found no legal basis for the decision.
(Missouri Law Review)

That's blasphemy in the Church o' Blumner, where Roe v. Wade is supposed to receive consideration as a super-duper-uber-precedent. Higher, perhaps, than the Constitution itself since the latter is a "living document" that may be freely interpreted by the courts. Sacrosanct, in effect.

Yes, McCain votes solidly pro-life. The comparison to "Operation Rescue" is uncalled for since even many liberals agree that Roe v. Wade constitutes bad law.

Blumner's funniest gaffe this week is her argument to the effect that voters misperceive McCain as a moderate voice on abortion. The evidence? Well, pro-choice voters in the primary went to McCain 45 percent to 19 percent. Could that have been mostly due to the fact that Giuliani was poised to be counted out of the race? Keep those blasphemous thoughts out of the Church o' Blumner.

To my amusement, Blumner's argument tracks directly to NPR. Neither Blumner nor NPR offers any evidence in favor of the supposed misperception other than the primary voting in Florida. I voted for Giuliani in the primary because I judged him as more in the mainstream of the GOP than McCain despite the mayor's weakness on social conservatism. No matter who got the GOP nomination, even Giuliani, Blumner would be making essentially the same argument. She would tell readers to fear Giuliani because of his pledge to nominate strict constructionist judges in the mold of Scalia. Blumner would write something like:

The next president will be the decider on whether women's emancipation from the slavery of the womb will continue in this country. We are on the cusp of losing the right to control our bodies and determine our family size. Giuliani promises as much.

Here's a fishy one:

He told the American Conservative Union that one of the three most important goals that he wants to achieve as president is to promote "a nation of traditional values that protects the rights of the unborn."

It's easy enough to find the exact phrase Blumner quotes, but not with "American Conservative Union." It comes from Blumner's column and McCain's Web site for the most part.

OK, I see what Blumner did.

The American Conservative Union sent out a questionnaire. The McCain campaign sent back a stock answer from the campaign Web site and Blumner didn't bother to note that McCain's answer consists of five points in the portion she quotes rather than three.

See for yourself:

I believe our nation’s best days are ahead and remain committed to an America with a strong national defense; a smaller, more accountable government; a robust economy with abundant opportunity for all who seek it; a judiciary that interprets the law and does not make it; and a nation of traditional values that protects the rights of the unborn and the traditional family.
(www.conservative.org)

Compare it to the McCain campaign Web site (actually an op-ed authored by McCain). It's pretty much the same statement. Subsequent to that five-point introduction, McCain offers a three-point paragraph apparently representing his three top priorities and goes on to devote an additional paragraph to each--without bringing up his pro-life stance.

In short, Blumner either blundered or lied, and her editor(s) (I assume she isn't given free reign to publish without having her facts checked) trusted her too much.

There are more errors and spin to mine from this Blumner column. While one could make a day of it, I've got other things to do at the moment.

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