Ian wrote:LOL indeed. But just to keep going, Romney isn't much better than Ryan:
True/mostly true: 28%
Half true: 28%
Mostly false/false/Pants-on-Fire: 43%
EDIT: Take heart though - neither of them are anywhere near Michelle Bachmann's numbers:
True/Mostly true: 16%
Half-true: 11%
Mostly false/false/Pants-on-Fire: 72%
(Pants-on-Fire alone was 22%!)
Those numbers really don't mean much, because everything depends on the number of statements analyzed. Ryan has made as many public policy statements as Biden has, and yet Biden gets his statements reviewed (and approved as true) far more than Ryan. The point being that the sampling skews the percentages.
Moreover, I take politifact with a grain of salt because they ratings are often subjective and strange.
If a Republican campaign spokeswoman says the other party’s candidate “and his special interest allies in Washington are plotting to spend over $13 million” in a race and has verified figures to support that claim and more, she should have nothing to fear from a fact-checking organization. PolitiFact, a national fact-checking effort co-sponsored by the prestigious Poynter Institute and several major daily newspapers, found the Republican spokeswoman’s claim no better than Half True.
If a Republican schools commissioner says an annual standardized test takes “less than 1 percent of the instructional time,” and the actual figure is between 0.26 percent and 0.90 percent of annual class time, a serious fact-checker wouldn’t make a different claim and check that instead. But that’s precisely how PolitiFact found the Republican commissioner’s statement False.
If a conservative advocacy group runs an ad saying Obamacare could cost “up to $2 trillion,” an honest fact-checker would look up the government’s own estimate and see that, indeed, the Congressional Budget Office puts the cost at $1.76 trillion for just the first few years.
PolitiFact is not that honest fact-checker.
http://www.humanevents.com/2012/08/30/p ... ft-really/Remember the three anecdotes with which we began here? PolitiFact pronounced the three claims Half True, False, and False, respectively. In each case, the fact-checkers dismissed the speaker’s claim, made up a different claim and checked that instead.
In the first example, PolitiFact Ohio reporter Joe Guillen acknowledged that Republican spokeswoman Izzy Santa said something “literally true” — that incumbent Democrat U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and his backers were spending $13 million in current the race. Remarkably, he still declared the statement only Half True. Guillen achieved that rhetorical sleight-of-hand by determining on his own that Santa probably meant to discuss only money spent by groups outside Brown’s control — despite the fact that her terms explicitly referred to both spending by all groups and by Brown’s campaign (“Sherrod Brown and his special interest allies” and “Brown and his supporters”). The combined total spending of Brown and his supporters was actually higher than $13 million. But if you pretend she didn’t include Brown, then you can pretend she said something wrong.
A Florida schools official was a victim of the same sort of willful refusal to acknowledge the meaning of plain English. Teachers unions and other critics had argued that annual standardized tests took precious class time from instruction. In response, Republican schools commissioner Gerard Robinson said the typical two or three tests per student per year “account for less than 1 percent of the instructional time provided during the year.” He backed it up with data showing the tests specifically took from 0.26 to 0.90 percent of annual class time. But PolitiFact Florida reporter Amy Sherman was determined to put words in Robinson’s mouth. “Robinson used the phrase ‘instructional time’ in his claim, which could fairly be interpreted to mean classroom time spent preparing for the test,” she wrote. Then she clucked about teaching to the test. Of course, “instructional time” needs no interpretation; it means “class time.” And that’s not even the phrase Sherman “interpreted.” She replaced a highly specific claim – two to three assessments per student per year – with her own concern: classroom time spent teaching to the test. Then she checked whether time spent teaching to the test was more than one percent, and failed even to establish that. And then — presto! — she ruled Robinson’s original claim False. That’s not fact-checking or even opinion journalism. It’s lying.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare “represents a gross cost to the federal government of $1,762 billion,” or $1.76 trillion, over the next decade, and that the costs will grow over time. Yet PolitiFact still managed to dismiss that bedrock number as something to be dismissed. In critiquing an advertisement that attacked the program’s costs, PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote that “the $1.76 trillion number itself is extreme cherry-picking. It doesn’t account for the law’s tax increases, spending cuts or other cost-saving measures.” On paper, the Obama administration projects that new taxes and Medicare cuts will offset the new program’s costs for a while. But that doesn’t change the cost of “up to $2 trillion.” That would make the statement True, of course. Incidentally, the CBO’s 10-year cost figures will be closer to $3 trillion in a few years, if current forecasts prove accurate.
I have noticed that sort of thing, too. Like when they labeled a statement regarding the actual panel that exists in the Obamacare legislation "half true" because it "might be construed as alluding the discredited Death Panels." Of course, there is a review panel in Obamacare, and it is there to control costs, etc, and it will in a general sense determine what treatments will, not based on a specific patient but overall, be paid for.
And, then there are glaring falsities that they'll point out like this: "Says Obama was in New York City the same day as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but went on a TV show instead of meeting with him." LOL -- why was this declared "False!" Because they were in New York City a couple days apart, not on the "same" day. Sure. It is false. I'll give them that. But, I'd like to see them flyspecking Biden and Obama for such slips of the tongue.
But, of course, no such pedantic accuracy of Ryan's statements in order to rank them half true -- On unemployment, PolitiFact tested a claim Ryan made that In Massachusetts under Mitt Romney, "unemployment went down, household incomes went up," and the state "saw its credit rating upgraded." It wasn't enough that these statements were, in fact true, and that unemployment went down, household incomes went up, and the credit rating was upgraded. On unemployment, Politifact noted that Romney reduced Massachusetts unemployment to 4.7 percent. They rated that claim Half True; the number was correct, but we ruled that Romney did not deserve as much credit for it as they said Romney was giving himself for it.
LOL - seriously, dude -- the more I've read Politifact, the less their analyses make sense. I mean -- Ryan in that last bit, should have been rated "True" because what he said was true. Taken in light of his "same day as Netanyahu" statement, I mean -- fuck -- if that statement is declared "False" (not even half true, given that the gist of it was that Netanyahu and Obama could have easily met, but Obama didn't meet with him). I can certainly live with holding Ryan to his exact wording on the latter IF they would also give him the courtesy of applying his exact wording when they analyze him as telling half truths.
