The left and media (PTR) was skipping and gamboling about like happy little meerkats yesterday; a new PPP poll showed – as PPP polls tend to do – nothing but good news for Minnesota Democrats.

In an automated phone survey of 937 likely MInnesota voters, they found…:

PPP’s newest poll on Minnesota’s amendment to ban gay marriage finds it running slightly behind, with 46% of voters planning to support it and 49% opposed.

That represents a 4 point shift compared to a month ago when it led for passage 48-47.

The poll claims that the major movement has been among indies and women.

“The marriage amendment in Minnesota continues to look like a toss up,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Voters are very closely divided on the

issue.”

Well, we more or less knew that.

Then, they addressed the other Constitutional Amendment:

When we polled on it in June it was leading for passage by a 58/34 margin. By September that had tightened to a 56/39 advantage. And now it’s leading only 51/43. Democrats are now even more opposed to the voter ID amendment (23/71) than they are to the one on

marriage. And although independents continue to support it their 52/41 favor for it is down a good deal from 62/33 a month ago. This fight may end up a lot closer than people

initially expected.

Or it may not.

We’ll come back to that one.

They also put the DFL up substantially on a “generic legislative ballot”, which would be big news if voters voted for a generic legislature.  They don’t, of course.

As always, the devil is in the turnout model:

Here it is, buried deep in a set of crosstabs:

That’s D+9.  Not as far out as the D+13 we got from the Strib a while back, but it still higher than 2008.

That’s especially interesting compared to this other bit of crosstabbery:

So Democrats outnumber Republicans 38/29, but conservatives outnumber Dems 37/34?

At any rate – the polling services continue to put out (if you look hard enough for them) polls with turnout models that, when you ask them, they are are legitimately what they’re encountering out there…

…but do not in any way pass the sniff test.

And the media?

Well, they just shovel it on out there.  It’s just the topline number that really matters.  Right?

Obama guts the Clinton-era “Work for Welfare” requirements.

Romney calls Obama on it.

Clinton lies about it from the podium at the DNC.

And America’s “fact-check” industry lines up behind Obama, no matter how they need to forcibly bugger “fact” to do it:

PolitiFact did link to [welfare expert and former Clinton staffer Robert Rector, who was one of the co-authors of Clinton’s original bipartisan welfare reform law]’s blog post—but only to dismiss him. “Robert Rector, a welfare expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it could ultimately allow ‘state bureaucrats’ to count activities that aren’t really work. We should point out that those concerns are at odds with the policy’s stated goal of encouraging employment.” In other words, PolitiFact said his concerns should be dismissed for no other reason than they are at odds with the Obama administration’s spin. PolitiFact didn’t even address the fact that Rector—who’s quoted in Romney’s ad—was the source of the charge the Obama administration is gutting welfare reform or that he helped write the welfare reform law. (They did reference an article Rector wrote for National Review Online and concluded that he made “a noteworthy point” when he argued that the Obama administration doesn’t have the legal authority to waive the work requirements.)

Rather than engage in any critical discussion about the issue, PolitiFact regurgitated the HHS memo for the sole purpose of making the waivers sound benign.

And yet again, reality imitates my hyperbolic fiction; Berg’s Fourteenth Law (“The more strenuously a media organization identifies itself as “fact-checkers”, the more completely their “fact checking” will actually be checking statement for congruency with liberal conventional wisdom”) has come vividly to life.

I said “vividly”:

Let’s take that last example of accommodating workers with disabilities—please. It’s a classic bit of bureaucratic misdirection intended to make exemptions that undercut welfare work requirements sound reasonable. “There’s no one on TANF that’s disabled. If you’re disabled, you’re on another program called Supplemental Security Income,” Rector tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “In TANF, you should be able to work—but what the left likes to do is to create a nebulous category of TANF recipients who are disabled with these very cloudy, fuzzy definitions, and then the state can chunk essentially an unlimited part of its [welfare] population into an exempt category. That has twofold consequences—now the state doesn’t have to do anything [to steer the exempted recipients into the workforce], but it can still maintain it has a high participation rate [in workfare programs]. If you have a 30 percent participation rate, and you exempt half the caseload, all of a sudden you can make it look like your participation rate went up.”

Read the whole thing.

And if you’re in the mainstream media, imagine how much less revulsion the general public would feel for you if you actually checked facts, rather than ran to the local Democrat spin doctor for further instructions.

There’s been some interesting follow-up from last week’s series on the Minnesota Poll.

More tomorrow.  Hopefully.

Like most conservatives, there are few things in the world I like less than standing around, marching or chanting.  Oh, I do like being out in the fresh air with a group of good people that have goals similar to mine in mind – but leaving aside the fact that it seems so group-think-y, hippy-ish and downright liberal, it’s pretty much inevitable that there’ll be something better to do, somewhere in the world, than that.

But I, myself, am getting a little exercised about the Star/Tribune’s ongoing propaganda exercise (AKA “the Minnesota Poll”).  And I’m more than a little tempted to grab an afternoon next week and see if we can’t get some people more or less like us out in front of 425 Portland to try to let them know that not everyone out there is a querulous low-information lemming.

Just saying.

Tempted.

Very, very tempted.

Who’s a better actor; Scarlett Johannson or Donald Rumsfeld?

Now, if you’re a sophisticated polling operation like the Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” – a Mason-Dixon joint – it’s an easy question; Ms. Johannson will likely outpoll the former Secretary of Defense.

Of course, you may respond “but measuring a Secretary of Defense in terms of acting skill is meaningless!”

And if you say that, then you’re already too smart to buy the latest Minnesota poll.

———-

The final Star/Tribune Minnesota poll of this long, nauseating week was released this morning – and it has two conclusions:

After two years of budget battles, vetoes and the longest state shutdown in Minnesota history, DFL Gov. Mark Dayton is winning the popularity battle with the GOP-controlled Legislature, a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.

A slim majority of 53 percent of likely voters say they approve of Dayton’s job performance, while 31 percent disapprove. Another 16 percent say they are undecided.

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, the poll found 51 percent disapprove of the job they are doing. Another 21 percent approve and 24 percent are undecided.

This poll really needs two responses.

Damnation With Faint Praise

The poll notes that Governor Dayton scored a 53 percent approval rating.

Now, on its face, that’s not a good number.  Under 50%, says conventional wisdom, is trouble – and Dayton is a governor that’s done virtually nothing in two years but make odd, slurred pronouncements before scuttling away into his office under the cover of a fawning media.

But as always, you have to look below “the face”.  Of course, the poll has the same absurd, worse-than-Watergate-level turnout model – Democrats 41, Republicans 28 – as all the other polls this week.

However, for some reason the Strib doesn’t favor us with the full range of crosstabs; while reporter Jim Ragsdale notes the Governor’s geographic strengths and weaknesses, at no point in the article is the approval of Republicans or Democrats explained.

Is this an accident?  Or would showing it reveal something about the poll the Strib doesn’t want us to see?

Because if we assume Democrats are over-polled by 3%, and that they were the vast majority of the “approve” numbers, then Dayton’s approval drops down to right around 50% – and the “disapprove” numbers jump into the high thirties if we assume most Republicans disapprove of Dayton’s job.

Of course, it’s all guesswork until the Strib releases those crosstabs.

Damnation By Packing Peanuts

Of course, the numbers on the legislature are just plain nonsense

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, certain trouble spots stand out: Only 24 percent of voters in the metro suburbs outside of Hennepin and Ramsey — which include strong GOP areas — approve of their leadership, while more than half disapprove. In southwestern Minnesota, 57 percent disapprove. They had slightly stronger showings in Rochester, where 30 percent approve, and in the northwest corner of the state at 33 percent.

This is just a stupid thing to measure.

Grading a legislature, as an entire body, all together, is like asking what a football fan thinks of the NFC Central Division.  You will get a dog’s breakfast of opinions, or no opinion – because the division is not the focus (except for bracketing playoffs).

One startling figure is that the GOP-controlled Legislature only broke even among Republican voters: 31 percent approve, 32 percent disapprove and 37 percent are undecided. Undecided numbers are higher throughout the Legislature’s poll, suggesting many voters do not have a clear opinion on the topic.

Well, dug.

I disapproved of the Legislature’s job!   The GOP caucuses gave away too much money in 2011 and caved on the stadium last year without getting anything useful in return!  I give them a “D”.

Does that mean I’m going to support Mark Dayton?  Not if you held a gun to my head (not to give the SEIU any ideas).

It’s a meaningless number.

So Why Run A Poll With A Meaningless Number?

That one’s easy; it gives the Strib a nice tidy number – 53-21 approval ratings! – to toss in front of people who don’t pay much attention to what the numbers actually mean.  These voters – the “Low-Information Voters”, people who retain headlines from the Mainstream Media and believe things that appear in the Strib – are the target for this sort of polling, or as it’s known in the world of logic, a “non-sequitur”.  The Strib is comparing apples and axles, just like comparing Donald Rumsfeld with Scarlett Johannsen.

While the individual numbers might be valid (they’re not – remember, the turnout model is absurd), at least in terms of math used to generate the numbers we see – but even if both numbers were in fact dead-nut accurate, what the Strib has done is created a phony horserace.

And why would the Strib splash a phony, non-sequitur comparison on its front page when it only serves to show Mark Dayton with a decisive (if phony) lead…

…oh, wait.

Never mind.

More Monday.

It’s my contention that the Star/Tribune “Minnesota” poll is, and has been for two and a half decades, less a “public opinion” poll and more an instrument of DFL propaganda.  I’ve supported that contention with a raft of circumstantial evidence; proof that the Minnesota Poll underestimates GOP turnout – especially in races that are perceived to be close; it showed Mark Dayton with an absurdly huge lead over Tom Emmer, and Al Franken with a four point lead over Norm Coleman, while guessing the Klobuchar/Kennedy race fairly accurately.

It’s my contention that this is to leverage the “Bandwagon Effect” – to discourage Republicans and conservatives from going to the poll.

But this year’s race presents a dilemma for the editors who – I’m being half-hyperbolic here [1] – plan the results of these polls.  On the one hand, you have the Voter ID initiative which is likely to win in a blowout.  To skew that poll enough to encourage Democrats and opponents of the amendment, the Strib would need to skew the poll to an absurd extent.  As in, assume conditions that are the same as in 1976, after Watergate.

On the other hand, you have a Senate race between Amy Klobuchar and Kurt BIlls that is widely perceived to be a pretty safe race for the incumbent.   Skewing the sample too far to the left would make the results look completely implausible.

The answer, if you’re the Strib?  You see it in this weeks’ Minnesota Polls; this is their old buddy Jim Klobuchar’s daughter we’re talking about here!  Of course they’ll do what it takes to make her re-election as epic as possible – why, everyone on Editor’s Row remembers Amy when she was just this tall, dagnabbit!

Beyond that – and more germane to the propaganda organ – they know that the voters the DFL needs are the “low-information” voters. The ones that rarely get past the headline, much less the lead – forget about looking at partisan breakdowns.  The ones that still believe the Strib is anything but DFL shills, or don’t care either way.

The Strib is showing a 57-28 lead for Klobuchar, with 15 percent either undecided or voting for someone else.  As we’ve been showing every day this week, this is based on a sample that includes 41% Democrat/28% GOP turnout.

Now, if we assume it’s more like 38/34 – which is more in line with Rasmussen’s figures, which have been traditionally vastly more accurate – and multiply the changes by the support each candidate gets within their party…

…well, that’s bad for Bills, if you believe the Strib.  While 90-odd percent of Dems say they’ll vote for A-Klo, the Strib claims only 2/3 of Republicans will vote for BIlls.  While the nomination battle was a bruising one in the GOP, and left a lot of bad blood, Republicans are much more suck-it-up-and-support-our-guy than that.  This strikes me as dubious – the “stink test” is crying “BS!” – but I’ve got no hard evidence to the contrary just yet.  Absent that, let’s run with the Strib’s numbers.

So if we subtract 3% from the Democrat split, multiplied by 90%, we get a net loss of 2.7% for Klobuchar, taking her down to 54.3%.

Adding 6 to Bills – times the 66% support in the party, naturally – leads to a four point rise, to 32.

54-32 still isn’t close.  But it’s not the 2:1 humiliation…

…that, I contend, the Strib wants Republicans to believe is coming, on top of all the other “bad news” they’ve brought us this week.

So what does all this mean?

More tomorrow.

(more…)

The Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” has declared Minnesota tied on the Obamacare issue:

About 46 percent of the state’s likely voters say they support keeping the Affordable Care Act, whose main tenets were largely upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court this summer, while 47 percent believe the law should go.

As always when dealing with any polls – especially polls with records of dishonesty as long as the Strib’s -http://www.startribune.com/local/171271561.html.  The Strib’s, in case you’ve forgotten,  is 41% Democrat, 28% Republican – which, as I showed yesterday, is more Democrat-leaning than the 1976 post-Watergate, post-Nixon-pardon election, the post-war nadir of GOP fortunes.

As a bipartisan sampling – liberal Hamline poli-sci professor Dave Schultz and I – both agree,  the sample is more like 38% DFL, 34% GOP.   Since 80% of DFLers (according to the Minnesota Poll) support the amendment, that means you deduct 80% of 3 points – 2.4 – from the “support” column.  Likewise, 90% of the six additional points of Republicans – 5.4% – support repeal.

With those assumptions – a more realistic turnout model and those levels of support – the “repeal” case is really more like 52-44.

It looks like the MInnesota Poll is building up to the Senate Race.

As I wait for the latest “Minnesota Poll” to release its results for the Senate race, I’ve been turning the poll’s D+13 (their sample of respondents was 41% Democrat and 28% Republican) number around in my head.

After all, as the Strib tells us, “Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, which conducted the poll for the Star Tribune, said those numbers are consistent with what he has seen over the years”.

But as we noted yesterday, the 2008 election – an epic Democrat win – was D+6 or so.  The 2010 election had turnout of D+2, roughly, and turned out to be a GOP rout nationwide and in the MN Legislature.

So what about the worst election in the past 50 years for the GOP – the post-Watergate presidential election of 1976?    Where the GOP got shredded in DC and in Saint Paul, sending the MNGOP running to their “Independent Republican” label?

I can’t find the partisan split – but does it seem unreasonable that in a year when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Fold by 12 points in Minnesota that the partisan split was, maybe in the neighborhood of D+12?

In other words, maybe somewhere around the D+13 number the Strib would have you believe today?

As we look at the abusive travesty that is the Minnesota Poll – in this case, the ludicrously skewed, 3:2 pro-DFL partisan breakdown in this weekend’s polling on the two Constitutional Amendments – let’s take a trip back through history.

Frank Newport, the president of the broadly-respected Gallup Polls, savaged the Minnesota Poll in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 midterm and gubernatorial elections.

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this.  Pollsters attacking pollsters in public is a little like magicians publicly heckling other magicians.

Is there any evidence the Strib has polished up their methodology?

No.  Indeed, the two polls released over the weekend on the Marriage and Voter ID amendments show quite the opposite – or that some copy editor took a poll of Ramsey County voters and mislabeled it a poll of Minnesotans.

The Strib “Minnesota Poll” is doing what it’s paid to do:  create a pro-DFL bandwagon effect, and suppress GOP voter turnout.  It’s calling Minnesota at Obama with 48% and Romney with 40%.

But the poll uses the same absurd D41/R28 breakdown that the Marriage and Voter ID polls.  This polling would have you believe that while in 2008, with a messianic media darling running against an unpopular two-term candidate (McCain was irrevant) and the war the DFL had a six point advantage in partisan turnout (D39 R33), this year, mirabile dictu, we have a 13 point Democrat advantage in this state?

If you use turnout numbers from somewhere in between 2008 and 2010 – say, D36 R34 – and multiply the changes by the percent of each party that the poll itself says plan on voting for their candidate (93% of Democrats plan to vote for Obama, vs 96% of Republicans), then you wind up lopping off roughly .3% of Obama’s numbers, and adding a whopping 5.8% to Romney’s.

That makes the real split 47.7% Obama, 45.8% Romney.  

Question – especially for you libs in the audience:  In what way is a widely (one might say “lavishly”) publicized poll using a partisan split that this state hasn’t seen since Watergate to be interepreted as anything other than an elaborate voter-suppression scam?

Yesterday, the Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” also delivered its mid-cycle tally of support for the Voter ID Amendment.

And coming barely a week after the generally-accurate Survey USA poll showing Voter ID passing by a 2:1 margin, the Strib would have you believe…:

Slightly more than half of likely voters polled — 52 percent — want the changes built around a photo ID requirement, while 44 percent oppose them and 4 percent are undecided.

That is a far cry from the 80 percent support for photo ID in a May 2011 Minnesota Poll, when the issue was debated as a change in state law. Support among Democrats has cratered during a year marked by court battles, all-night legislative debates and charges that the GOP is attempting to suppress Democratic votes.

Republicans and independents continue to strongly back the proposal, which passed the Legislature this year without a single DFL vote.

Wow.  Sounds close!

Sort of; if you accept the validity of the numbers (and unless the DFL is headed for a blowout win, you must never accept the validity of the “Minnesota Poll’s” numbers), and every single undecided voter today voted “no”, the measure would pass in a squeaker.

But are the numbers valid?    And by “valid”, I don’t mean “did they do the math right”, I mean “did they poll a representative sample of Minnesotans?”

To find that out, you have to do something that almost nobody in the Strib’s reading audience does; look at the partisan breakdown of the survey’s respondents.  Which is in a link buried in the middle of a sidebar, between the main article and the cloud of ads and clutter to the right of the page, far-removed from the headline and the lede graf.  Which takes you to a page that notes (with emphasis added):

• The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – as with the Marriage Amendment numbers we looked at this morning (it’s the same survey), the Strib wants you to believe…

…well, no.  I’m not sure they “want” anyone to believe anything.  I’m sure they want people to read the headling and the “almost tied!” lede, and not dig too far into the numbers.

It’s part of the Democrat’s “Low-Information Voters” campaign; focus on voters who don’t dig for facts, who accept what the media tells them, who vote based on the last chanting point they heard.

Fearless prediction:  On November 4, the Strib will release a “Minnesota Poll” that shows the Voter ID Amendment slightly behind, using a partisan breakdown with an absurdly high number of DFLers.   It’ll be done as a sort of positive bandwagon effect – to make DFLers feel there’s a point to come out and vote against the Voter ID Amendment (and for Obama, Klobuchar, and the rest of the DFL slate, natch).

And it will be a complete lie.  Voter ID will pass by 20 points, and this cycle of polling will disappear down the media memory hole like all the rest of them.

Question:  Given that its entire purpose seems to be to build DFL bandwagons and discourage conservative voters, when do we start calling the “Minnesota Poll” what it seems to be – a form of vote suppression?

If you take the history of the Minnesota Poll as any indication, yesterday’s numbers on the Marriage Amendment might be encouraging for amendment supporters:

The increasingly costly and bitter fight over a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is a statistical dead heat, according to a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.

Six weeks before Election Day, slightly more Minnesotans favor the amendment than oppose it, but that support also falls just short of the 50 percent needed to pass the measure.

Wow.  That sounds close!

But as always with these polls, you have to check the fine print.  And the “Minnesota Poll” buries its fine print in a link well down the page; you don’t ever actually find it in the story itself.  And it contains the partisan breakdown (with emphasis added):

The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – to get this virtual tie, the Strib, in a state that just went through photo-finish elections for Governor and Senator, and has been on the razor’s edge of absolute equality between parties for most of a decade, sampled three Democrats for every two Republicans to get to a tie.

If you believe – as I do – that the “Minnesota Poll” is first and foremost a DFL propaganda tool, intended largely to create a ‘bandwagon effect” to suppress conservative turnout (and we’ll come back to that), then this is good news; the Marriage Amendment is likely doing better  than the poll is showing.

What it does mean, though, is that they are working to build a narrative; that the battle over gay marriage is much more closely-fought than it is.

And the narrative’s players are already on board with this poll.  The Strib duly interviews Richard Carlbom, the former Dayton staffer who is leading the anti-Amendment

Actually, here’s my bet; the November 4 paper will show a “surge of support” that turns out to be much larger than any that actually materializes at the polls.

More At Noon.

UPDATE:  I wrote this piece on Sunday.  Monday morning, all of the local newscasts duly led with “both ballot initiatives are tied!”.

If you’re trying to find a construction job in Minnesota, you can get a job putting siding on the DFL’s narrative.

UPDATE 2:  Professor David Schultz at Hamline University – no friend of conservatism, he – did something I more or less planned to do on Wednesday; re-ran the numbers with a more realistic partisan breakdown:

Why is the partisan adjustment important? The poll suggests significant partisan polarization for both amendments, with 73% of DFLers opposing the marriage amendment and 71% of GOPers supporting. Similar partisan cleavages also exist with the Elections Amendment. If this is true, take the marriage Amendment support at 49% and opposition at 47%. If DFLers are overpolled by 3% and GOP underpolled by 6%, and if about 3/4 of each party votes in a partisan way, I would subtract about 2.25% from opposition (3% x .75) and add 4.5% to support (6% x .75) and the new numbers are 53.5% in support and 44.75% against. This is beyond margin or error.

If one applies the correction to the Elections Amendment there is about an 80% DFL opposition to it and a similar 80% GOP support for it. Then the polls suggest approximately 56.8% support it and 41.6% oppose.

Which brings us very nearly back to the 3:2 margin  for the Voter ID amendment, and the tight but solid lead for the Marriage Amendment that every other poll – the reputable ones, anyway – have found.

The grandfather – great-grandfather? – of the “Fact-Check” industry, “60 Minutes whitewashes for Obama:

Tonight, CBS aired a 60 Minutes interview with President Obama. But curiously enough, the news magazine show did not air a clip of Obama admitting to interviewer Steve Kroft that some of his campaign ads contain mistakes and that some even “go overboard.”

Anyone remember when “60 Minutes” was the “gold standard of journalism?”

I know – that never really meant anything.

But anyone who doubts that “60 Minutes” is anything but a geriatric propaganda mill for the left has been asleep for half a generation.

Have you noticed something?

No “Minnesota Poll” yet this cycle.  Ditto the Humprey Institute.

Usually by this point in an election cycle, they’ve run a poll showing the Republican candidate down by some absurd amount that turns out to be many times greater than the eventual margin of victory (or defeat) for the DFLer.

Now, I’ve been writing about the HHH and Strib “Minnesota” polls for quite some time.  I noted that since 1988, the Strib Minnesota Poll has consistently shorted Republicans by a consistently greater margin than Democrats in their pre-election polls – and that the discrepancy is even greater in elections that end up being closest.  I noted that the HHH poll is even worse – but that in polls where the DFLer appears to be in no danger, their polls end up being more accurate.

It is my contention that the Strib and the Humphrey Institute are allied – at least at the executive level – with the DFL, and use their polls to further the DFL’s ends; everyone involved is certainly aware of the “Bandwagon Effect” – the phenomenon by which voters who believe their candidates have no chance of victory will stay home.

So we’ve seen no “Minnesota” poll so far this cycle; Amy Klobuchar – perhaps the greatest beneficiary of media bias in the history of Minnesota politics, as the daughter of a former Strib columnist – seems to be in no great danger, so the polls say, from Kurt Bills (not to say I won’t do everything I can, personally, to fix that).  I’ll bet dimes to dollars the Strib polls wind up pretty darn close to the election totals, in fact!

———-

But the “Bandwagon” effect is going nationwide; Minnesota in 2008 and 2010 showed that it can keep juuuuuuuuust enough people home, if it’s relentless enough, to tip a close election.

And so you see the mainstream media already declaring the election over, based entirely on polling that is entirely based on the Democrats getting turnout they didn’t even get in 2008.

It is, in fact, the flip side of the “Low Information Voter” strategy they’ve run on their own side – convincing the ill-informed, the querulous and the not-bright that there’s a “war on women” and Obama “stands with the 99%” and “the economy was Bush’s fault but it’s almost back, any day now”; trying to convince people, especially independents, who might be sick to death of Obama and possibly thinking of voting GOP that it’s all hopeless and they should stay home.

Think about it.  Why else would they run polls that are transparently false?  That rely on assumptions that probably didn’t even occur during the post-Watergate election in 1976, much less 2008, much less today?

Because only the high-information voters either dig into the partisan breakdowns (or read the bloggers who do), and the record in Minnesota shows there are just enough incurious, too-busy, ill-informed, and just plain un-bright people to sway the matter if it’s close enough.

The media at all levels – bald-faced cheerleaders like the LATimes and the Strib and the supposedly-ethical ones like NPR alike – are going to be beating the “it’s over” drum constantly ’til the election.

The well-informed people know it’s baked wind.

But it’s not aimed at them.

Mark Dayton gave a speech the other day.

John Gilmore at MN Conservatives heard the audio.

And we’ll get to that.  But first, the review:

Gov. Dayton’s first two years have been abysmal. What was it he wanted to do as governor anyway? Wouldn’t a house and senate controlled by republicans offer him the perfect opportunity to lead? To show compromise? To get things done as these political types like to pretend they can? If one was a real leader instead of a lost soul looking for external housing to shore up the inner, yes. But a leader is not who Gov. Dayton is and it is not who he will be in the coming two years, either.

John’s a good friend of this blog.  But I’m not sure whether he’s overestimating Dayton, or underestimating him.

On the one hand, the entire body of evidence that Mark Dayton has ever been that kind of politician is…the body of Mark Dayton’s spoken record claiming it.

On the other hand?  Mark Dayton, his beliefs, his “ideas” and “ideals” and “policy initiatives” – are about as relevant as mine are to the job – because Mark Dayton isn’t really the governor.  Indeed, when they paint Mark Dayton’s official gubernatorial portrait – hopefully in two years – it should look a little like this:

It’s an intercom speaker.  Dayton occupies a seat with the sole mission of repeating, like that intercom speaker, what Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid and Javier Morillo and Tom Dooher to say.

And when he doesn’t have electric cables tied to him, figuratively, to carry their messages, he may as well be that intercom speaker; he’s about as fluent a public speaker as a disconnected intercom.

Back to Gilmore:

Last week the Governor, sounding like a vaguely fascist mandarin, simply insisted without any intellectual depth or sustained engagement that taxes must increase because of his perceived need of all that government must do. His idea of the size & scope of government is not open to discussion. There is no opting out from it because he knows best. What’s that called again?

He made his statement at what, until just yesterday, I had been led to believe was simply a speech reported on by the press. Instead, as MinnPost reported the day before (as did the Pioneer Press), it was a University Lecture. MinnPost polished the knob by saying that the title “university lecturer” could be added to Mark Dayton’s resume. No, really.

Yet what shocked is that this was a lecture grandly titled: “Minnesota’s Future: Challenges and Opportunities” given to the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs Policy Fellows (there’s more intellectual diversity among supporters of Ron Paul by orders of magnitude; the Fellows are the stuff of David Mamet’s nightmares). This was a liberal/progressive/left confab with Little Lord Fauntleroy in attendance.

Now, listening to Mark Dayton speak is, to this speech teacher’s kid, a singularly masochistic thought.  The guy has the diction of Michael Stipe circa 1984.  He’s not a monotone – he’s got two or three tones, really.

And that’s just style points:

I listened to the audio of the Governor’s 25 minute speech. It is appallingly bad. To learn only after the fact that it was a university lecture proper for a set of fellows was mind boggling. He spoke from notes as best from what I could tell. Meandering, at times pointless, at others a non-sequitur minefield, his speech revealed that there is serious trouble with our Chief Executive.

Here’s the problem:

But wait there’s more! The event was closed to the public.

Pardon? Is this possible? Is Common Cause Minnesota on it? From whence shall our help come? Surely the event was taped and surely I will get my hands on it. Try making it private. The entire speech and question and answer session should be posted on the Humphrey School’s website without delay. This event was not a private function.

Huh.  Odd, that.

Where are Common Cause?  The ACLU?  All the usual watchdogs?  MPR’s “Poligraph?”

But here’s the real question:

Why would the press acquiesce in this? Access? Or just the usual hot dish politics? Both?

That’s easy.  For some of the media, it’s access.

For others, it’s that they see themselves as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.

Remember – after over a decade of hearing about the Governor’s history of alcohol abuse and treatment, of mental illness and concomitant prescriptions for various psychotropic medication, the sum total of the Twin Cities mainstream media’s coverage of Candidate Dayton’s chemical and psychological history was one, single, solitary piece in the Strib by Rachel Stassen-Berger, in January 2010 – roughly nine months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap about the election.

Our Governor’s visual performance at this public event is what is being deliberately withheld from the public. What an odd thing to say about Minnesota politics.

Nothing odd about it.

Nothing new, either.

…but I wonder if any of the major-media “fact check” operations are going to go the new ad from “Alida Buys The Legislature” “A “Better” Legislature” that claims…:

• The Republicans shut down the state government (it was Dayton)
• Republicans protected tax breaks for the wealthy (it was for everyone)
• The GOP “passed a law that raised taxes for 95% of homeowners” (property taxes are local government’s job, and the 95% number reeks of fakeness)
• The GOP blocked a job bill (Er, no – they blocked a Dayton bonding proposal that was nothing but a bone for the public employee’s unions that we couldn’t pay for).

Here’s a job for Minnesota’s “professional fact-checkers”; do a story on Alida Messinger’s entire attack-PR operation.

No, I’m not holding my breath either.

Call me a cynic, but for me, the prototype of all of the “fact-checking” columns in today’s mainstream media was in this piece here:

With the world breathing a collective sigh of relief following the violence-free passage into the year 2000, an international coalition of terrorists issued a reminder Monday that the new millennium does not actually begin until Jan. 1, 2001. “Technically speaking, we are now in the last year of the 20th century,” said Mahmoud al-Habib, a spokesperson for the terrorist organization Hamas. “Since there was no year zero, next New Year’s Eve is the real time to detonate bombs in Times Square and blow commercial airliners out of the sky.” Speaking from a secret bunker in the Kashmir hills, Osama bin Laden agreed. “We were all set to blow up the Eiffel Tower,” bin Laden said, “when one of my suicide bombers pointed out that it should actually be done next Jan. 1, not this one. I suppose we’ll just have to wait.”

Why, of course it’s the Onion.   But it spells out the model for so many “fact-checkers” in the industry; a relentless focus on the finding “gotchas”.

The piece spells out a key pitfall in the whole idea of “Fact-Checking” the news; it’s entirely possible to be right about “facts” and still miss, or even detract from, the truth.  In the example above?  It was, perhaps, a fact that the millennium didn’t begin until 2001, but that missed the point for the fictional terrorists (check the date-stamp on that piece), for whose purposes “crowds on the street” were more the issue than “having the right date”.

And that’s even when the “fact-checker” isn’t being cynical and exploiting the “fact-check” system to serve as a political editorial.

Takeaway:  It’s possible for facts to be true and still divert the audience from a larger, more important truth.

Takeaway Question: If a fact (“The Millennium begins in 2001!”) diverts the user from a larger truth (2000 is when all those crowds were out on the street, tempting the terrorists of the day), does it advance or divert from the story?

The answer, of course, is a question; “Is your story about Calendar Trivia, or Terrorism?”

Indictment

Last week, Jon Cassidy at Human Events wrote as clear an indictment of the “Fact-Checking” system, or at least of as I’ve seen.

And that indictment ran down not only the top-line biases built into “Politifact”, the national über-fact-check organization…

In 2007 [when Politifact was still affiliated with Congressional Quarterly], PolitiFact was checking numbers thrown around in debates, such as whether 300,000 babies annually are born deformed (False: it’s 40,000), or whether Social Security “is solid through about 2040 without any changes whatsoever” (True, in PolitiFact’s view: the system’s not going broke until 2041).

By 2010, PolitiFact was giving False ratings to statements that were true, such as U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky saying that federal workers make an average of $120,000, compared to a private sector average of $60,000. Paul used total compensation figures, which PolitiFact found misleading. The arbiters arbitrarily decided that salary alone is the valid figure, which would be news to the Internal Revenue Service.

By 2012, it was “fact-checking” extremely general statements of personal experience like this one by Paul’s father, Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and GOP presidential candidate: “I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early ’60s before we had any government” involvement in health care. “It worked rather well, and there was nobody out in the street suffering with no medical care. But Medicare and Medicaid came in and it just expanded.”

Fact-checker Louis Jacobson tried to disprove Ron Paul’s statement, but eventually admitted his limits. It’s the only example we’ve seen of PolitiFact admitting that the truth was too complex or beyond the scope of the Truth-O-Meter treatment.

…as well as the absurdities of its performance once you get into the weeds with specific stories:

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…

…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.

Read the whole article.  And remember it next time someone waves “Politifact” in your face.

Takeaway:  Journalists – really, journalism itself – depend on having some sort of trust from their consumers.  It starts with the little things – did they get the who, what, when, where, why and how correct – and in the bigger things, like “not slanting their coverage to suit some other agenda”.   See Dan Rather.

Meanwhile, Here At Home

I’ve always had a fair amount of regard for MPR News, which is perhaps counterintuitive for a Minnesota Conservative.  While a very close, and admittedly very partisan, listen reveals the odd bit of bias among the reporters and their editorial process, I think it’s fair to say that MPR News makes a game effort at playing the news straight (that is, of course, as distinct from MPR’s and “American Public Media’s” non-news programming, which is designed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the upper-middle-class liberal).

But I have had some questions about MPR News’ “Poligraph” feature this past week (and, let’s be honest, for years).  While I think Catherine Richert does a broadly acceptable job of balancing her “fact-checking”, I’ve taken a closer look at some of her pieces this week.  And I wrote her to ask some quesitons, which led to an interesting interchange between her and her boss, Mike Mulcahy and I.

Richert (as she herself noted in the comment section yesterday) responded, pointing out “Polograph’s” “about” section (which I also posted yesterday), and adding:

As you’ve probably noticed, we check one Democrat and one Republican every week, and occasionally a member of the IP. Once in a while, we switch the schedule up and check two members of the same party in one week. When that happens, we check two members of the other party the following week.

That was good to learn, actually.

 Both the Hernandez and Klobuchar claims from last week meet several of our criteria. Both were “checkable” statements, both were made in debates, which are significant news events, and both are central to major campaign issues.

And that was even better to learn.

And next, we get to the beef:

 Hernandez is adamantly opposed to the bank bailout, which highlights the GOP’s broader campaign theme that government has become too intrusive.

That’s correct.  We talked about this on Tuesday.  I called the fact-check “Obtuse” because while Tony wasn’t literally to-a-point accurate (the bailout didn’t cause unemployment all by itself), he spoke to a larger point that even Richert’s sources agreed with – that government intervention is fouling up the economy.

Question:  As in the “Millennium” example: does analyzing Hernandez’ ad-lib as an absolutely literal statement (“did the bailout literally cause our unemployment rate?”) rather than a general statement of economic principle (“did bailouts harm or help the economy”) or political princple (“are bailouts the right thing to do?”) bring us closer to, or farther from, the larger truth?  That the results of Obama’s (and Bush’s) interventions in the economy are, even if you’re completely non-partisan, mixed at best?

And Klobuchar has made bipartisanship a cornerstone of her political persona; her claim about how many bills she has sponsored with Republicans underscores that part of her campaign message.

And as I pointed out on Wednesday, that’s true in and of itself; it showed Klobuchar’s “bipartisanship” – according to one measure, at least.  It proved that the numbers gave to support her own assertion were in fact correct.  So if your question was “does Amy Klobuchar give out correct numbers to prove her assertions”, she passed with flying colors!

But if your question was “Is Klobuchar really bipartisan?”, there was much more to it; her voting record is 94% Democrat (as Richert noted), and in the leftmost third of the Democrat caucus; put another way, she’s the 17th most-liberal Senator out of 100.

Question:  Which is the more important question, if the goal of ones’ fact-checking is to inform people about the upcoming election: “Does Amy give out valid numbers?”, or “Is Amy’s contention that she’s bi-partisan accurate?”

I’d maintain that while the latter question’s answers are dependent to some extent on one’s political perspective, that that question is the real story.

As I noted yesterday, my most important question – after learning and noting their “ping-pong” format of hitting a statement by both major parties every week, more or less – is “how does a statement get picked for analysis?”  I noted a couple of Betty McCollum statements – one on her views of the Ryan budget, one on the funding for the Stillwater bridge project.  Let’s stick to the former for right now.  It’d seem this fits Richert’s description of Poligraph’s criteria;  it’s “checkable” (I checked it!), it took place at a significant news event (the same debate that Hernandez’ statements came from), and it’s a central part of her campaign (raise taxes, oppose the Ryan budget).

So I asked – why did MPR pick, as the “Democrat” question in the weeks’ ping-pong of statements from both parties, Klobuchar’s self-serving but accurate statement about her bipartisanship, as opposed to McCollum’s completely fact-free statement about the Ryan Budget?

Because that speaks to my second question, way up above – about how a “fact-checker” whose integrity isn’t trusted is just barking in the wind.

Now, it’s entirely possible that MPR News’ management doesn’t see the incongruity; I’ll cop to the fact that my perspective is one that it finely tuned to find bias, and that fine-tuning sometimes warps the perspective.  All that’s a given.

But I thought it was a legitimate question:  for the single, sole, weekly “fact-check” of a Democrat, by what rationale was a self-serving innocuity like Klobuchar’s statement selected (and a very tightly-focused validation given)) over an out-and-out untruth like McCollum’s?

Because given…:

• the growing, documented tendency of “journalistic” “fact-checking” organizations like Politifact, Factcheck and Snopes to operate from a standpoint of political bias, and…
• the fact that we are in an election where peoples’ votes are going to be swayed by the impressions they get from the news, and the “Journalism 101”-level fact that things like ledes and “MISLEADING” graphics tend to be remembered more than the deep-down details about a story, and that…
• looking at both of the stories from this week’s selection of “Facts” checked at that level would lead one to think “Tony Hernandez lied about the bailout, Amy Klobuchar told the truth about being bipartisan, and there’s apparently no news about Betty McCollum”…
• …while allowing that I’m looking at one week’s worth of Poligraph stories in a near vacuum, focusing on a couple of debates and statements of particular importance to me.   I’ll stipulate that that could very well skew my own perception.  I’m more than willing to be set straight on this.  I say that as a matter of intellectual honesty, not because I necessarily believe I’m wrong.

Question:  Did Poligraph’s stories about Hernandez or Klobuchar bring the news consumer closer to the real story – the candidates’ views on the economy and their “bipartisanship”?  Or did they answer the questions by asking the wrong questions, thus missing the forest for the trees? Or did they, like the “Terrorists” “fact-checking” at the top of the post, obscure rather than clarify the issue for someone seeking the truth?

Folllow-up question:  Does MPR’s choice of “facts’ to “check” make you trust their judgment and perspective on covering political news more, or less?

What Obama Said:

“Sometimes they just make things up. But they’ve got a bunch of folks who can write $10 million checks, and they’ll just keep on running them,” he said. “I mean, somebody was challenging one of their ads — they made it up — about work and welfare. And every outlet said this is just not true. And they were asked about it and they said — one of their campaign people said, ‘We won’t have the fact-checkers dictate our campaign. We will not let the truth get in the way.’”

What really happened:

Mr. Obama was referring, as many other critics of the Romney campaign have, to a comment that its pollster, Neil Newhouse, made to reporters at the Republican convention on Tuesday, dismissive of those faulting the campaign’s television ads. What Mr. Newhouse actually said was, “These fact-checkers come to those ads with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs. We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Mr. Newhouse did not say, “We will not let the truth get in the way.”

No, but you can bet your life that hundreds of leftybloggers and leftytweeps will say he did up until the election, and all the way through the 2016 campaign.

Further evidence that the Obama campaign is pinning its hopes on the “low-information” voter – those who vote according to slogans, prejudice, and the last thing they heard.

For years, now, I’ve had questions about how politicians’ statements get selected for MPR’s “Poligraph”.

If you Google the feature, one might be forgiven for thinking the feature should be named “MPR’s Michele Bachmann Bureau”.  That’d be unfair; Poligraph reporter Catherine Richert does spread some of the fact-checking love around among parties.

But I do seriously wonder what a pol has to do to get a statement picked up by Poligraph.

Huge Gaping Factual Hole, Ready For Occupancy

For example, I’ve wondered for years why Richert’s crew have never once checked up on Heather Martens, who has yet to speak her first significant truthful thing about the gun control issue.   This blog has spent years shredding everything Martens has ever said on the public stage.

It’s a big issue to me, naturally.  If I were a real cynic, I’d say it’s because MPR has invested some of its own credibility in Martens, airing an op-ed of hers in which every single one of her fifteen factual assertions – every one – was untrue.

But Martens isn’t an elected official?  Okie-Dokey – Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom is an elected official, and every single word he wrote about last years’ “Stand Your Ground” bill over the past four years was a lie.  Every single word.   And he’s elected, ya?   And both of them had Governor Dayton’s ear last session, when he vetoed the “Stand Your Ground” bill, which had passed with a bipartisan majority in the legislature.

Is it because MPR’s target demo doesn’t care about the issue?  I could almost understand it if that were the rationale.  But I don’t suspect a news organization would get behind that as an official alibi, do you?

Checking The Facts

So I wrote Richert over the weekend.  She emailed me back bright and early Tuesday morning.  Since I didn’t specify anything would be on the record (it was late), I’ll paraphrase; she referred me to the “About Poligraph” page, and noted the feature’s ground rules involve picking one statement from each party, each week (or, at times, two from one party one week, and two from the other the next).

The “About” page also notes:

PoliGraph puts the findings into short, clear explanations accompanied with a rating — accurate, misleading, false or inconclusive.

– Accurate: These claims are entirely or mostly true. They include important details and are supported by the facts.

-Misleading: These statements that leave out key information, are exaggerated, or have been taken out of context.

– False: These claims are not true or misleading to the point of being false.

– Inconclusive: This rating typically applies to projections or estimates. While such claims could be true under certain circumstances, more information is needed.

Well, that explains a few things, anyway.

One might hope that this next bit, however…:

If this reminds you of PolitiFact.com, the Pultizer Prize-winning from the St. Petersburg Times, you’d be right. We know good ideas when we see them.

…does not.  The political bias of Politifact (and those of the Pulitzer committee, as well) are a matter worth discussion; if those are “good ideas”, MPR News may see it; I do not.

More about the “Fact-checking” industry tomorrow.

Anyway – that brings us to my question from last Tuesday.

Selection Bias?

Yesterday, we looked briefly at “Poligraph”‘s take on an Amy Klobuchar claim to bipartisanship during her debate with Kurt Bills.    While Klobuchar’s statement was accurate as far as it went – the numbers literally supported the exact letter by letter intent of the Senator’s statement – Richert’s “fact check” focused to exclusion on the numbers, while ignoring the larger context Klobuchar’s statement seems to have been meant to hide.  This earned “Poligraph” a rating of “Cherry-PIcked”

That was their weekly “Democrat” fact-check.

But today’s installment will go back to this past Tuesday’s installment, in which Poligraph hit its self-imposed weekly “GOP” quota.  There, we looked at the “Poligraph” “fact-check” of a Tony Hernandez statement linking the bank bailouts to the unemployment rate.  While Tony oversimplified the issue, there is considerable debate about the question, and Richert herself focused excessively on refuting Hernandez’ words and ignored the broader context of the remark.   Calling Hernandez’ statement “Misleading” rather than “Oversimplified” earned “Poligraph” a rating of “Obtuse”.

But I wondered:  if “Poligraph’s” quota is one article per party per week, why pick the fairly innocuous Klobuchar quote about her record of co-sponsored bills?  The claim was almost as innocuous as the Senator herself (although it covered, I maintain, a much more important context).

But let’s go back to another moment from the State Fair debate.

Check out this segment from the Hernandez-McCollum debate:

(Video courtesy MN CD4 Conservatives blog)

Here’s the money quote from Rep. McCollum:

“The Ryan Budget does nothing to move this country forward.  It only protected tax cuts for the wealthy…[when presented with a putative Democrat budget proposal]…the Republicans said “No, if we can’t have tax cuts for the upper 1%”, which by the way is borrowed money from China, that we couldn’t have the middle-class tax cuts!”

This is an unvarnished lie.  The GOP and Ryan’s plan have been all about tax cuts across the board all along, combined with broadening the tax base so that a broader share of the people are actually paying something.  The Democrats want to use “tax cuts” as a class-warfare-baiting wedge, and seek to jack up taxes on the “wealthy”.

This McCollum statement was devoid of fact.  It contains an absolute absence of truth.  There is no validity to it in any way shape or form.

And yet it passed, while Richert spent a solid day or two vetting Hernandez’ off the cuff oversimplification about the bailout, and giving Amy Klobuchar’s blandishment about her “bipartisanship” a pass.

Why was that?

So I’ll give Poligraph a “Huh?”.

Here’s another one:  :

She says there’s lots of “Federal Highway Money” involved in the new St. Croix bridge project.  But there’s actually fairly little direct federal funding involved; it’s a lot more complex than that.

Now – the standard set with Tony’s oversimplification we looked at Tuesday was that, according to “Poligraph”, “too complex to put exactly that way” is “Misleading”.

So what is this?

We give Poligraph a rating of “Double Standard” for this one.

The question is, why does “Poligraph” pick the statements they pick?

More tomorrow.

Yesterday, I suggested that it might be a good idea for Minnesota Public Radio’s “Poligraph” feature (for whom Cathy Richert is listed as the “lead reporter”) might do well to add an “Oversimplified” rating to its rather cut-and-dried set of verdicts.

I suggested it because at first blush, it might be used to cover Richert’s own “fact-checking” – for example, the sole “fact-check” she did of Amy Klobuchar during the debate with Kurt Bills.

During the MPR debate at the Minnesota State Fair last week, A-Klo claimed that 2/3 of the bills she authored were ‘bipartisan”.  Richert dutifully confirmed that Klobuchar did, in fact, have Republican co-sponsors for 2/3 or so of the bills she wrote (while factually noting that Klobuchar votes with Harry Reid’s line in the caucus a very liberal 94% of the time).

On hearing this odd little juxtaposition – a “bipartisan” record of sponsoring bills versus a very partisan voting record – the curious reader and listener might have a question or two.

So What Did Klobuchar Sponsor?

Richert assures us that once fripperies like Senate Resolutions – which are usually non-controversial – are stripped from the data set, two-thirds of Klobuchar’s bills are, indeed, co-sponsored by Republicans.

And what assortment of bills are these?  I include them all below the jump.  And they are indeed some bipartisan profiles in courage; suspension of duties on plastic children’s wallets, bamboo kitchen utensils and inflatable swimming pools and the like.  Read the list at your leisure; you’ll need it.  There are 75 of ’em.  And right around 50 have a Republican co-sponsor.  And they are, pretty much to a T, innocuous.

The only two bills that Klobuchar has actually had signed by the President?  Neither the “Appeal Time Clarification Act“, co-sponsored by Jeff Sessions, and the St. Croix Bridge legislation, cosponsored by Franken and Wisconsin’s Senators Kohl (D) and Johnson (R), are especially controversial.

But there’s nothing wrong with having an innocuous record, really – is there?

Of course not.  Not everyone is a leader and a trail blazer, a la Paul Ryan.  It’s perfectly fine to claim innocuity as a virtue.

But what if there’s more to it?

Why Pick Such An Odd Figure To Wave Around In A Debate?

Klobuchar has, in fact, been running on the fact that she’s a pleasant enough person who is not averse to “bipartisanship”, but not in a way that risks anything.

But GovTrack shows her well to the left among Senators, with a voting record to the left of Harry Reid and San Francisco überliberal Dianne Feinstein, with only 16 Senators with more left-leaning rap sheets.  And it remained to Richert to point out to the reader and listener – days after the actual debate – that Klobuchar’s voting record is actually 94% in line with the Senate’s Democrat majority.  That is hardly a “bipartisan” record.

So it’d seem that:

• Klobuchar cherry-picked a statistic – a record of milquetoast bill sponsorships – to camouflage her extremely liberal voting record.
• Richert delved into the literal facts of the Senator’s claim and declared it “accurate”, while giving the shortest possible honest shrift one could give to the larger context – noting the top line of Klobuchar’s voting record without giving the faintest hint as to where that put Klobuchar within the Democrat caucus – that could still vaguely qualify as “journalistic balance”.

So there are a couple of questions here.

1. Richert called Tony Hernandez’ claim in the August 28 MPR debate (that the bailouts caused the unemployment problem) “Misleading”, when it could much more accurately be called an “Oversimplification” of a very complex question.  So – given that Richert has oversimplified Klobuchar’s statement, is she “oversimplifying” – my term – or, as she put it, “misleading?”
2. Given that , as I’ve shown, Klobuchar’s actual claim – that’s she’s oh-so-bipartisan – is supported by her co-sponsorship numbers but mocked by her voting record, doesn’t MPR, in the interest of accuracy, need to add a new, snappy “verdict” graphic?  Perhaps “Accurate on its face but intended to mislead the reader given a deeper context?”  It doesn’t fit on a snappy graphic like MPR seems to like, but it is in fact, more accurate, assuming “accuracy” is what “fact-checkers” shoot for.   I’ll run with “Cherry-Picked”.

And there’s another question.   Given all that was said in those two hour-long debates, why did MPR’s Richert pick this assertion of Klobuchar’s to “fact-check” (and oversimply), as well as Hernandez’ statement that we talked about yesterday?

What, indeed, are MPR’s criteria for submitting a politician’s statement to “Poligraph’s” eagle eye?

More on this tomorrow.
(more…)

Over the past week, we’ve seen ample, fairly conclusive evidence that the mainstream media’s “Fact Checking” industry is, to a great extent, part of the Obama Administration’s propaganda mill, part of the mainstream media’s major ongoing role as Praetorian Guard for the liberal establishment.

But what about Minnesota Public Radio?

I’ve acknowledged many times in this space that MPR – at least its news department – has made an effort to at least appear, if not be, relatively non-partisan.   Its programming department – think Keri Miller and Garrison Keillor – are quite another matter, of course, but that’s to be more or less expected of an organization that depends for the bulk of its funding on the Volvo-driving free-range Alpaca-wearing St. Olaf alum set and the insecurity it seem to feel over its own intellectual and political supremacy.

I’ve also acknowledged that American Public Media is making an effort, in its own way, to recognize that conservatives exist and are people too.  That’s all to the good.

But if you’ve followed the news department’s “Poligraph” feature – MPR News’ entrée into the “Fact-Checking” business – you might ask a question or two about their sense of focus or proportion.  To say nothing of its story selection.

Case in point: last Tuesday’s debate between CD4 Representative Betty McCollum and GOP endorsed candidate Tony Hernandez.  Richert jumped on a statement of Tony’s:

“The reason why unemployment is so high right now is because we bailed out the banks,” Hernandez said during the debate. “The reason why the debt shot up $6 trillion since then is because we bailed out the banks.”

Let’s make sure we have the context straight, here; Tony Hernandez, a private-sector guy in the biggest debate of his life (so far), ad-libbed a remark on the deleterious effect of the bailouts, as (I think it’s fairly accurate to say) the rhetorical tip of an iceberg of data showing that government intervention in the economy under all guises has been a disaster during this past four (indeed, twelve) years.

By the way, I realize that if you ad-lib something that’s wrong, it’s still wrong.  Still, I bring it up because what Tony was doing – speaking ad-lib in front of a partly-friendly, partly-hostile crowd – is  harder than it looks.  Want proof?  Just listen whenever MPR people try to do it.  It’s rarely pretty, and they know it; if you watch these MPR debates, or any live MPR event, and you’re used to  the unscripted scrum of commercial talk or sportstalk radio, it’s amazing to see that they do their intros and outros from scripts.  

Anyway, MPR’s Richert has a history of holding off-the-cuff ad-libs – by Republicans, anyway – to a oddly tight, if factually-justified, standard of accuracy, as in this 2010 episode, where Tom Emmer said half of MInnesota’s cities didn’t get Local Government Aid.  In fact, it’s half of Minnesota’s people who live in cities that don’t get LGA; Richert called that statement “FALSE“, where it would be more accurately called “a mis-statement caused by transposing a fact from one category to another.

OK, their game, their rules.  But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

Richert’s Conclusion

Anyway, Richert gave Hernandez’ statement a flat “Misleading” rating, under the headline “Economists disagree with GOP candidate’s TARP claim”.

She promptly qualifies it, of course:

Indeed, there’s a reasonable argument to be made about whether the bailout was effective. Hernandez pointed to three news articles that underscore how the bank bailout and the auto industry bailout were costly and essentially prolonged a process that could have ended quickly if the government had stayed out of the picture.

For instance, in 2011, Bloomberg News reported that the Federal Reserve loaned the banks an additional $7.7 trillion – that was on top of the money banks received from the bailout.

But here’s the rub:  Tony said – in his off-handed remark – that the bailout caused the unemployment.  Richert provides a set of economists that, sure enough, deny that the bank bailout was the sole proximate cause of our national malaise, even as none of them deny that it’s an important contributor. In fact, that’s nearly an exact quote:

Michael Franc, vice president of government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation agrees with Calabria, and says that while the bailout may have indirectly been one of the reasons for some unemployment, it’s not the reason.

Indeed, every economist Richert mentioned – and both of the economists I’ve personally spoken with about this episode – all agree that the bailout was not the cause of unemployment, but most said, and none denied, that it was an important contributing factor to the larger national economic malaise.   Richert herself notes in rendering her “verdict” that “it’s far more complicated than that”.    Economiist Bruce Bartlett notes that the bailout, and some of the instruments of that bailout, like the payment of interest on reserves, have been contributing to the freeze on lending. Alfred Blinder in the WSJ amplifies this.

To sum it up:

• Tony may have been guilty of oversimplifying an incredibly complicated issue in a brief ad-lib while getting to a larger point
• He may not have gone into the level of detail on the statement it’d take to qualify it to the extent Richert did – with hours (over a day, in fact) to research her response.

In short: while everyone seems to acknowledge that the bailouts were a reason our unemployment rate is high today, Richert labels the statement “Misleading” because it’s not the whole reason.

Perhaps in the interest of accuracy and honesty MPR needs to add a category to its rankings – “Oversimplified”.

And for that reason – the selection of sources that pared away all possible context to Hernandez’ quote, in order to give it a more detrimental “grade” than warranted – we give Poligraph a rating of “Obtuse”.

We’ll come back to this tomorrow, when we go over the reasoning behind one of Richert’s other fact-checks.  Wednesday we’ll look at one she for whatever reason, opted not to “fact-check”.  Thursday?  We’ll see.

While the WaPo’s “Politifiact” claims impartiality, they are in fact strongly biased to the left.

No, there’s math and everything.

Democrats who a few months back were praising Chief Justice Roberts for his judicial restraint in respecting the intent of Congress are sniveling like stuck cats that the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) didn’t find a penumbra emanating from Alida Messinger’s visage forcing them to accept their masters’ complaints without question.

The lawsuits by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and Alida’s Cause Common Cause  claimed on the one hand that the Voter ID law was just too complicated and not clear enough for public-educated Minnesotans to understand, and on the other than Mark Ritchie had the right to make both measures more complicated and less clear.

I may be a cynic, but I’m frankly amazed the judges disagreed.

And now, the pro-gay-marriage and pro-vote-corruption forces need to do something neither has been able to do:

• The anti-Marriage-Amendment forces need to show the voters a case for changing the definition of traditional marriage a little more convincing than “vote no or you are teh bigot”.
• The pro-fraud forces need to convince Minnesotans that while buying cigarettes or getting a job or buying ammunition or starting a bank account requires that we know someone is exactly who they say they are, exercising our supposedly-precious franchise does not.

It’s a good day.

I’ll await the usual logic-free liberal arguments on both.

UPDATE: Mir. D has an excellent piece on the subject at True North and over at the Neighborhood:

I’ll be honest with you — the Photo ID amendment matters a lot more to me. We’ve been round and round on gay marriage and as I’ve written before, this is a battle that ultimately conservatives are going to lose, mostly because young people are being taught that it is a civil rights issue, especially in the public schools. While I don’t agree with that, the view will prevail and most of the constitutional amendments that are passing in the various states will eventually go away, probably within 10-20 years. At that point we’ll begin the unwitting longitudinal study that will eventually reveal, years after most readers of this feature are pushing up daisies, whether or not gay marriage is a good idea or not. My future grandchildren and great-grandchildren (God willing) will get to suss that one out.

The Photo ID amendment is much more important, because it goes the integrity of elections. Voter suppression is the usual charge you hear, but as a practical matter the real issue is multiple votes and illegal votes. The challenge is getting local election officials and prosecutors, who are partisans, to take such things seriously. Minnesota Majority identified 1,099 cases of felons voting in the Franken/Coleman election and over 200 cases have been either adjudicated or are in the process of being investigated. The rest aren’t going to see the light of day because the local prosecutors can’t be bothered. Franken won the election by on 312 votes…Now the amendments go for a vote. I expect Photo ID to win easily. The marriage amendment will be close. Opponents of both amendments will have ample opportunity to state their case. They just can’t depend on Mark Ritchie to keep his thumb on the scale this time.

And there’s the victory for real justice.

And I never believed the SCOM or Minnesota law had it in ’em.

To:  Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the ACLU of Minnesota
From: Mitch Berg, mere peasant
Re: SCOM Decision

All,

Suck it.

That is all.

(more…)

Peggy Noonan on the media’s kid-gloves coddling of Slow Joe Biden:

If it had been a Republican vice presidential candidate who had made those gaffes, one after another, so comically, and all on tape, the subject today of the panel would be how stupid is this person, can this person possibly govern?

They know what matters, though. Romney’s income taxes and holding impromptu on-air conference committees to reconcile the Romney and Ryan budgets, three months before the election and five months before they take (God willing) office.