.
This chart is from a NYTimes piece by Angie Drobnic Holan, of Politicfact, published under the cheerful title “All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.” Which is… well, difficult to rebut. I would argue that the whole premise behind the chart is Pants on Fire, because it seems like Politifact makes no effort to distinguish between “Hello, voters, it’s so great to be here with you in Pig Lick, Iowa, on a dreary February morning” and “The Kenyan Usurper plans to declare martial law during his next State of the Union speech”. But — truthiness!:
… Even though we’re in the midst of a presidential campaign full of falsehoods and misstatements, I see cause for optimism. Some politicians have responded to fact-checking journalism by vetting their prepared comments more carefully and giving their campaign ads extra scrutiny.
More important, I see accurate information becoming more available and easier for voters to find. By that measure, things are pretty good.
Mr. Trump’s inaccurate statements, for example, have garnered masses of coverage. His claim that he saw “thousands of people” in New Jersey cheering the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, grabbed headlines but the stories were about the rebuttals…
In fact, journalists regularly tell me their media organizations have started highlighting fact-checking in their reporting because so many people click on fact-checking stories after a debate or high-profile news event. Many readers now want fact-checking as part of traditional news stories as well; they will vocally complain to ombudsmen and readers’ representatives when they see news stories repeating discredited factual claims.
That’s not to say that fact-checking is a cure-all. Partisan audiences will savage fact-checks that contradict their views, and that’s true of both the right and the left. But “truthiness” can’t survive indefinitely in a fact-free vacuum…
**********
Apart from taking what solace we can in the conviction that the deck chairs on our political Titanic will be cunningly arranged and flawlessly well-kept, what’s on the agenda for the day?
NotMax
Politifact plays pretty fast and loose with the term true.
If someone said “I saw little green men from Mars at the mall today” they would rate it partly true if the person was confirmed to be at a mall on that day.
OzarkHillbilly
Headline of the day: Eating people is wrong but is it against the Law?
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Ever since they said Paul Ryan’s plan would not end Medicare, I have wondered: Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Exactly. The fact that the Dems fair as well as they do is all the more impressive. But my complaint can easily be dismissed with
Satby
OMIGOD, I lost a whole day! After waking up at 2:30 am yesterday for my epileptic Rosie (she’s fine) and just staying up; I drove the girls to school, came home and finished the last shipment to get out for Christmas, made myself presentable for my first day of training, picked the girls up late, dropped them off at home and went to get a cake for Qunoot’s birthday, made dinner, and fell asleep in front of the tv by 9.
How was the new job? First day of training was from 10-3, no breaks at all were scheduled during that time (we finally said we needed a lunch break at 1:30),and at 3 pm they asked if we could stay because they had about an hour of material still to cover. Thinking I am not going to like it at all…
Baud
@Satby: Not the best first impression on their part.
OzarkHillbilly
@Satby: I’m thinking you don’t like it already. :-( Well, you were looking for a job when you found that one.
Schlemazel
@Satby:
WHAT?!?!? They expected you to sit there for 5 hours with out a break? Thats a dick move, either they are insensitive morons or they wanted to see if you would put up with that sort of crap without complaining & they own you. It sure doesn’t seem like a positive sign for the future, sorry.
Satby
@Baud: In the quest to be “balanced” the MSM will leave no stone unturned to find Democratic party liars. Remember the whole kerfluffle about “if you want to keep your doctor you can” being rated a lie? Because of course Obama can control how insurance companies build their network or where doctors choose to practice, so that was rated by Politifact as a lie, even though anyone reasonable understood what he meant.
I see nyms still don’t link to our websites. Bummer.
bemused
@OzarkHillbilly:
Potential Fox news headline: Is eating people wrong or against the law if corpse was a Christian or a Muslim?
Baud
@Satby: It was the Lie of the Year, IIRC.
NotMax
@Satby
You nym links to your etsy store.
Satby
@Baud: @OzarkHillbilly: @Schlemazel: Especially galling since I spent most of my latter IT career as a trainer, so I know how to do it right.
We were supposed to “shadow” other job coaches today but they didn’t have it set up, so now I’m off. They changed the schedule they just gave me on Monday yesterday to different days, which I already had plans for, and were quite surprised when I told them sorry, couldn’t do those days based on the schedule from ONE day ago. I think they’re just really badly organized, but I’m now secretly glad I’m leaving in 6months or so anyway. I was feeling guilty.
Satby
@NotMax: huh, it doesn’t on my Kindle. Are you on desktop or mobile?
Edited to add: I also have 2 reply buttons. One black, one blue.
I do like choices…
Baud
Baud
@Satby: It doesn’t on the mobile site.
NotMax
@Satby
Desktop.
Schlemazel
@Satby:
Yeah, that falls into insensitive. Even disorganized they should recognize humans need to get up and move around every hour or two just to stay focused. But, since this is not life time employment, it is probably something you’ll learn to live with.
Tissue Thin has been having fun at his job too, he has posted on FB about having to pull multiple back-to-back shifts and 11-12 days without a day off because his outfit can’t seem to hire & retain reliable help. This brave new world sucks for the worker.
Baud
Big nab for Bernie.
OzarkHillbilly
@Satby: Desktop works
Baud
90 too many. The original freakout still lives on.
Satby
@Baud: @NotMax: AHA! Also, the black reply button lets me reply to you both, the blue one opens up a new reply window that announces that I am “leaving a reply for Baud” but doesn’t let me also reply to NotMax, adding that opened a new window with my “reply to NotMax” helpfully headlined.
In case I forget, I suppose because lots of us are such olds we might.
Baud
Test
Baud
@Satby: I didn’t even notice the blue reply button. On mobile it creates a threaded comment.
ETA: another reason not to like threaded comments is the inability to reply to multiple people.
Satby
@Schlemazel: It really is. I know it mostly always has been, but they used to hide what a disposable cog you were with a thin veneer of b.s. about “their valued employees”.
Satby
@Baud: oh! EWWW, no likely. I had seen a couple of threaded comments and wondered how that happened.
Edited: yes, I like to respond to more than one person if we’re all in the conversation.
OzarkHillbilly
Sponsor withdraws Mizzou athlete strike proposal “In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, Brattin said: “I sincerely believe students should be able to express their viewpoints, but I also believe our flagship state university has to keep and maintain the order that is expected from such an esteemed educational institution.” That’s mighty white of you, sir.
Baud
How many levels?
Satby
@OzarkHillbilly: Looking at the picture of the guy who proposed that legislation you can tell he probably used to play football. I assume on his athletic scholarship they didn’t study civics or the first amendment.
Baud
Can we get to four?
ETA: looks like three is the limit.
Baud
@Baud: test of black reply button in third level threaded comment. Where does it show up?
ETA: Outside of the thread.
Kay
I saw (one of) Clinton’s petitions being passed at an event- they get many, many more signatures than the 3000 required so they pass tens of petitions and then submit all of them.
OzarkHillbilly
@Satby: Hmmmm…. All I saw was a proud racist asshole.
Germy
In honor of Star Wars, the Kings Row theme (1942)
Schlemazel
@Satby:
I am old enough to remember when even the huge company I worked for treated me like a human. Sure that was not perfect but it was a hell of a lot better than disposable trash owners think of us field hands as.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
Black reply button? multiple levels? I have no idea what you are talking about & don’t see any of this stuff
Baud
@Kay: So Trump did better than Paul and Christie in the operational aspect of the campaign. Incredible.
Baud
@Schlemazel: You haven’t been cleared for access to that information.
ETA: It shows up on the Android mobile site. I’m haven’t seen how it looks in the desktop site.
MomSense
@Satby:
No lunch break? Potty? What? Were there any training evaluations? Good grief!
BillinGlendaleCA
Halperin still says that if tRump doesn’t win in Iowa, he won’t win in NH. I don’t buy this, history doesn’t bear this out.
OT: I got a Google Cardboard viewer, kind of a cool way to view my 3d photos.
OzarkHillbilly
Anti-Isis proposals floated at Republican debate would likely be war crimes I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.
Kay
@Baud:
This whole race is weird. I was at a Christmas party with Republicans (literally all Republicans except for my husband) and they’re so angry. I asked about Kasich several times- fake curious- like “why isn’t he doing better?” (I don’t care- I just wanted to see what they’d say) and they impatiently waved him away. They all loved Kasich at the same party in 2010. They hate Trump and love Christie. They all want to invade “ISIS” too. They have so many candidates and they’re horribly dissatisfied and cranky. They’re like “the establishment base”- one of them is a county chair, judges, bds of election members, that sort of thing.
greennotGreen
The article quoted above fails in the same way that PolitiFact fails: by equating arguing against a false proposition and arguing against a judgement call. Note that when “the left” in the form of Rachel Maddow disagrees with Politifact, she uses contemporaneous news articles that show what they said to be in error. When “the right” in the form of The Weekly Standard disagrees, it first labels the AP as “liberal media” (which assumes facts not in evidence,) and then lists two examples of the AP countering Romney’s proposed response to Iran and Gingrich’s estimation of U.S. intelligence capabilities. The AP, at least in the snippets included in the article, didn’t accuse either man of lying.
So, on the left we have people who say the Earth is spherical, and on the right we have people who say the Earth is flat. Our media “fact checkers” say both sides are lying because, actually, the Earth is a slightly flattened sphere.
debbie
@Kay:
Crap. I had hoped we had heard the last of Deb Pryce.
Elizabelle
@Kay: The children of Fox News, Rush, etc. They’ve been punked, and they’re too dumb to know it.
debbie
@Baud:
Is the site changing to threaded comments? I can’t keep up with all these changes. What’s a quirk and what isn’t???
Baud
@Kay:
Sign ’em up!
If I were the GOP establishment, I would be cranky too. They are all about control, and they have no control over the current situation in their party.
Kay
@debbie:
I notice Husted isn’t a delegate for Kasich. Maybe he can’t be (Sec of State- I don’t know if he’s barred from that because of that office) or maybe he’s voluntarily taking the high road and staying off because he’ll be counting the votes but he’s so clearly incredibly ambitious I noticed his absence.
Also, Mandel is Rubio which means Rubio is the neocon 1st choice.
debbie
@Kay:
Local Republican “political operatives” (as they’re called) are twisting themselves into pretzels explaining how Kasich is doing what needs to be done. I don’t know if you ever get a chance to see WOSU’s “Columbus on the Record,” but it’s been amusing watching them stand up for Kasich. They insist he’s being very clever.
http://wosu.org/2012/columbusontherecord/
Baud
@debbie: I hope not.
Cermet
Yesterday, I bought a belt sander that I intend to use (many of its parts) to build a high current Van de Graaff (VdG) for my deuterium electro-static nuclear accelerator project. I will begin construction tonight – the accelerator and all its support systems are complete and working. Just need a strong electro-static field source (200,000 volts or so – even as a “high current (say 60 uamp if I am lucky) that voltage can’t hurt you so it is safe to touch).
I need a moderate flux of neutrons to run an interesting experiment I setup – a small nuclear fusion reactor (called a fusor and yes, they can and do produce nuclear fusion at home – the levels are so low, they are very safe and not hard to build at all.)
This electric field part of my project has been the issue for me (the commercial VdG units I bought are far too low in current to drive the accelerator successfully) and I am hoping this solves that issue. I then hope to develop a new neutron detector system. Maybe get a paper out of it. Once that is done I will see if I can try an e-field trap to increase the fusion rate in the fusor – maybe get 10^6 neutrons/sec up to 10^8 neutrons. That would be still safe since my total run time will be, at best, a millisec or less … .
debbie
@Kay:
Shows the weight of the neocons in Ohio. I missed Mandel’s name; he’s even lower than Pryce. It kills me that the GOP can keep control of this state with all these lousy people.
Kay
@Baud:
There was a woman there who is a county chair. She’s the one who told me Romney’s campaign people were patronizing and insulting and didn’t “reach out”- the rural counties in Ohio are really important to Republicans because they need huge margins to offset the urban counties. Even that’s not enough, they also need suburban voters in urban counties but the rural counties are must-haves. I consider her reliable because she’ll criticize GOP campaigns. She was just sour about this race. Not happy. Later in the evening she and my husband went at it about “boots on the ground” but he loves to argue and if it hadn’t have been her it would have been another of them :)
ThresherK (GPad)
@Satby: Your nym link works on Android with Chrome.
Sherparick
@Baud: “BOTH SIDES!!!!!” is the default position of corporate journalism as it has evolved (or is that devolved) over the last 30 years, with an emphasis on “narrative,” which is the reason we now have “fact checkers” as separate journalistic function. In the journalism of the 1930s through the 1970s, “fact checking,” not “the narrative” was considered the fundamental function of reporters, e.g. accurately answering the questions of what, where, when, who, and why in particular story.
Applejinx
What on earth is Hillary saying that they’re able to pull out more ‘utterly true’ from her than Bernie? They’re pretty on par as a rule, which is kind of reassuring. Hil’s got some ‘pants on fire lies’ which doesn’t shock me.
How is Bernie able to avoid being savaged by these guys for saying things to the effect of ‘bankers are ruining this country, we should make college free for Americans, we will stand with Muslim Americans’ and such? I’m impressed at how well he’s done given that just about anybody in the MSM will do anything they can to inflict a hatchet job.
We got to TWO MILLION individual contributions by midnight Wednesday, which I think doubles the best anybody’s done before that? I wonder if the MSM is going to make a point of stifling that as well. It boggles my mind how controlled we are, and I am so done with all that.
Let me know if you heard about Bernie reaching two million individual contributions. I only knew about it because of a plea for help reaching that goal, from the campaign. Hillary does have more money, but not that much more and it’s from Wall Street and doesn’t count for voters (if it did, Jeb? would be winning bigtime).
Another Holocene Human
So Jeb? only lies about his positions? How is that less significant? Look at what he did to Florida.
Baud
@Applejinx: l heard about it on my news feed.
Baud
@Kay: I really don’t see how it’s not either Trump or Cruz at this point. There just aren’t that many days left.
MomSense
@Kay:
The Daily Show covered the debate last night and the Kasich segment was so funny. I won’t be able to look at him now without seeing him karate chopping fruit.
Kay
@debbie:
I was wondering if it’s Medicaid. I didn’t think it would be because “opposition to Medicaid” is the biggest lie Republicans tell- Medicaid is absolutely essential for rural hospitals and health care providers, not to mention nursing homes and these people would know that- they’re all lawyers. Maybe expanding Medicaid just knocked Kasich out w/the base in a way that isn’t mentioned.
OzarkHillbilly
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, dealing with the results of Republican governance, and fighting back too.
debbie
Good grief, the Google Doodle has gone interactive. Pretty tough if you can’t read music.
debbie
@Kay:
It seems to me people outside Ohio are angrier at Kasich about Medicare than Ohioans are. I think the anger is because the situation has gotten out of control for these self-described control freaks. Dommage.
Kay
@Baud:
Obviously the huge field is dividing the anti-Trump vote, yet none of them will drop out. If they had a real “establishment” or “pragmatic” caucus that worked together they would align and some would drop out to let a non-Trump candidate get a larger share but that’s not happening.
If Trump wins it will be the fault of the “mainstream” candidates who can’t win but won’t drop out because there’s two sides to this- they can’t control Trump but they can control their own behavior and tactics. They’re choosing to focus on the element they can’t control.
OzarkHillbilly
A black church in Wilmington DE has it’s 2nd fire in 2 weeks, this time it burned to the ground Who wants to give me odds that it was arson?
OzarkHillbilly
Stupid headline of the day: Unseen images of the 1953 Iran coup – in pictures Oh really? I thought maybe they would be in words.
BillinGlendaleCA
@MomSense: That was pretty funny, the second segment was about “fact checking”.
Kay
@debbie:
It’s difficult for me to have conversations with Republicans about the threat of terrorism because I am genuinely not afraid of that- on my roster of fears I don’t think that’s an entirely rational fear (as far as in the US) and I never have. I think it goes back to a basic difference. They once “felt safe” and they no longer do. I never “felt safe”- it was more like I was only vaguely aware of terrorism before 2000 and then I was more aware of it, but I didn’t “feel safe” from it then and I don’t feel less safe now. I accept the possibility of terrorism in the US but I accept the possibility of lots of things that rarely happen or haven’t happened yet. Their fear is just of a wholly different quality and urgency than what I perceive.
debbie
@Kay:
Right, but just try and convince them that they were safer under “their people” than they are under Democrats. And also convince them that it was Bush’s decisions that have created all this lack of safeness.
The most heated arguments I have with my GOP brother is whether the GOP’s actions during the Clinton administration contributed to what we have now. I remind him how he laughed at Clinton’s attempts to get OBL in Sudan (“tail wagging the dog”) and how different today would be if the GOP had instead supported those efforts.
The true enemy of the GOP is the GOP.
Satby
@OzarkHillbilly: Well of course that too. Just in a former jock flavor.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@debbie: You just need to know the pieces. If you can hum the piece, you can identify which should come next by playing the snippets; there’s a little button on each one.
Satby
@MomSense: nope, nope, nope. And done by the assistant HR person.
Her method of training was to ask odd non sequitur questions and to give us the answers to the quizzes. Clearly just hoops to jump through, no real intent to teach anything.
K488
@Germy: Speaking of John Williams, EWK, etc., let me reply with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZl6Ks3XBR8
Give it a few minutes, but be prepared to phone home.
magurakurin
@Applejinx: whatever. It’s all over but the voting now. The polling shows that people now know Bernie and on his issues they rate him the tops, but on the other dozen or so issues he is blown away by Clinton. People like Bernie, they think he is the go to guy as far as “reining in” Wall Street and income inequality, but unfortunately he is running for President and not Secretary of the Treasury. It’s not a conspiracy to shut him out of the media, it’s not the DNC “establishment” trying to keep him down(are Sherrod Brown and Al Franken in on it?) Democrats just think Clinton is better suited for the general election and the job. There is no need to make this into some struggle against the free peoples of the world and the evil establishment. The voters are going to decide, and barring some miraculous event they are going to decide for Hillary Clinton by a wide margin. Nothing nefarious or conspiratorial about it. It’s a primary. There’s a winner and a loser. Then, we pull our collective head’s in and go on to fight the actual enemy.
Satby
@ThresherK (GPad): thanks. Must just not work on Android browsers like Amazon’s Silk.
debbie
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Stupid me. I was trying to figure out the notes.
debbie
@Satby:
Almost as rewarding as having someone read their Powerpoint presentation to you, word by word.
Grung_e_Gene
“Keep and Maintain Order” is the giveaway.
Grung_e_Gene
They want you to invade ISIS while they go about their lives at home sans sacrifice. That was the biggest lesson Republicans learned after Vietnam, let others do the actual fighting and take advantage of the situation at home.
Satby
@debbie: inorite?
Calouste
@Kay: That doesn’t work because the “mainstream” is a minority in the polling. Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and Cruz have been consistently polling around 60% combined, and the rest only at about 35%. and even then that includes people like Huckabee, Santorum, and Paul.
Calouste
@Baud: Trump’s business, the Trump organization, employs about 22,000 people. He didn’t get to that without having some decent organizational and delegation skills, so that his campaign manages to do all the work necessary to qualify for the ballot doesn’t surprise me at all. That Christie, despite being the head of New Jersey state, a far larger organization, can’t, is indeed surprising, but then, a state government is more or less in place already and will continue to do a lot of its work even if the governor is a total fuck-up.
Matt McIrvin
Aside from questions of what Politifact counts as a lie, their fact-checking has an inherent sampling bias from what statements they choose to check. Presumably when people make non-controversial statements of fact, there’s no point in checking them, so selection bias should push all politicians’s scores in the direction of lying more of the time.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@debbie: Not stupid; those buttons are small and easy to miss. I didn’t see them until the second one.
Quick hint for people who don’t read music: a double bar at the right means “the end”.
J R in WV
@Satby:
You nym links to your store on Linux/Ubuntu 14.04 using Firefox V 42…
for all the Linux users out there, haha ;-)
JustRuss
@OzarkHillbilly:
Heh, the first time I heard that expression was when I transferred to Mizzou from out of state.
Jack Hughes
There are the traditional political lies where politicians inflate their resumes, maximize their accomplishments and minimize their failures. These are the “lies” of the Democrats.
Then there are the Republicans, who deliberately obscure their actual economic policies, shamelessly pander to know-nothings in brazen defiance of reality, and manufacture phony “scandals” out of thin air to smear their opponents. This goes far beyond politics as usual — making today’s Republican Party just a bunch of goddam liars.