Not a freaking chance in the world.

Three years and seven months into the Obama administration, there’s no longer any reasonable doubt that we’re living through the worst presidential exercise of economic stewardship since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rabid progressivism known as the New Deal locked the Federal Reserve-created, Herbert Hoover-enhanced Great Depression into place for eight additional years. In 1932, the year before FDR was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 23.6%. In 1940, it was still 14.6%. In between, it never fell below 12%. The economy only recovered because of the military build-up required to win World War II.

I heard Kruger on NPR on Friday – spouting his “Recovery” claims without any pushback from the hosts.

The media is doing its best to floss the narrative to a fine sheen.

Today, as Mort Zuckerman accurately contended in a Friday evening Wall Street Journal op-ed, “we are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression,” where “dependent millions” relying on food stamps and swelling the disability rolls “are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s.” Zuckerman, James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, and Amy Payne at the Heritage Foundation have accumulated separate litanies of awful statistics, largely focusing on deep drops in labor force participation and sharp increases in discouragement. Collectively, they completely repudiate Krueger’s and Solis’s aforementioned recovery assertions.

Read the whole thing.

And make sure your less-informed friends, relatives and neighbors read it too.

Mitt Romney didn’t actually say “I Can Relate To Black People, My Ancestors Once Owned Slaves”, didn’t get his slogan from the KKK, and isn’t promising to abolish MLK day.

Hard to tell exactly who these meme’s be aimed at: the lower-information end of the Afro-American voter spectrum, or the more-bigoted college-educated white liberals.

It’s September 10.  Not November.

But the media – basking in the afterglow of an Obama bounce they bent over backwards to manufacture – doesn’t want you, conservative reader, to think that.

It’s “Operation Demoralize” [1], the coastal mainstream media’s effort as part of its duty as the Democrat party’s Praetorian Guard, to try to demonize and demoralize Conservatives and Republicans from hitting the streets, opening their wallets, and above all voting in November.

The Democrats are well aware of the research showing the effects of “The Bandwagon Effect“; put briefly, “if you tell people long and loudly enough that their candidates have no chance, they’ll start to believe it.  Like an abusive spouse telling a partner “you’re ugly and nobody but me will ever love you, so don’t bother trying”, it’s a way to browbeat people out of voting.

And you can expect a lot of it.

Prediction:  Expect a Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” any day showing Obama, A-Klo and the DFL legislative caucuses with improbably large leads.  It’s their MO, never moreso than with the tight races.  And the Bandwagon Effect, I maintain  with little fear of factual contradiction, is why.

[1] No, it’s probably not a real name, and it’s possible there is no actual collusion among mainstream media outlets.  Anything’s possible.

As we’ve noted a time or two in this space, the new leadership as of this past April in the Fourth District MNGOP has taken what appear, to a rank outsider, to be some odd stances on what it takes to lead a major party unit in an election year – at one point saying it wasn’t, in his opinion, the job of the Congressional District to take a role in any elections at the BPOU or Congressional District level.

The chairman, of course, is John Kysylyczyn, former mayor of Roseville.  I don’t know Kysylyczyn from Adam, and have no ambitions whatsoever in the party; I chose to serve on the District executive committee previous to Kysylyczyn’s purely as a matter of putting my actions where my mouth was.  I have no personal reason to attack him at all.

There is, of course, quite a bit of video of Kysylyczyn’s term as mayor of Roseville; according to the video (which, it’s fair to point out, was clipped from hundreds of hours of City Council meetings by his detractors), the then-mayor seemed to be prone to subjecting his City Council to bladder-busting gales of Roberts’ procedural pedantism.  On the other hand, the Twin Cities press – largely but not exclusively the sophomoric howler monkeys at the City Pages – savaged him during his regime, in a manner that even the media sometimes called unfair (which is ironic, given the way he wrapped himself in the “Society of Professional Journalists “Code of Ethics”  when I sought clarification from him, like journalists do, on rumors from within his own committee that he was considering spending the district’s money to send pro-Ron-Paul delegates to Tampa rather than support candidates.  He used the CD4 official website to take his potshot back at me, in fact – which is an odd use of a district party resource.  Of course, the irony springs from the fact that I, being a conservative pundit, bend over backwards to support, or at least be fair to, libertarians and conservatives, while the SPJ COE is nothing but a framework that “journalists” can use to whitewash their own abuses – it’s a whitewash they apply to their biases as needed.  Lori Effing Sturdevant waves the SPJ COE around like Ignatius Reilly’s bedspread).

At any rate, as we noted a few weeks ago, Kysylyczyn  had a meeting scheduled for the fall – only the third since his election, and the only one before the General Elections.  He then cancelled it because it fell on the same night as the Vice Presidential Debate.

A groundswell of district activists overrode him, and met the district’s constitutional requirement to call a new meeting.   The meeting is taking place tonight.  The main subject – at least, according to the activists involved in demanding the meeting – is the topic of the donation of the other $5,000 to the Hernandez for Congress campaign – which is, let us not forget, the campaign endorsed by 97% of the convention’s delegates, and a solid majority of CD4’s primary voters.

Kysylyczyn posted the meeting on the CD4 website – as well as a “notice” with a whoooole lot of questions and Kysylyczyn’s answers.  85 of them, to be exact – which, with all due respect to Chairman Kyslyczyn, tells you a bit about his communication style.

While I’m not a member of the committee, I’ll endeavor to respond, from the perspective one one activist anyway, to Kysylyczyn’s statements – many of them, anyway – below the jump.

UPDATE:  I just looked at the meeting call.  Kysylyczyn has pivoted from “We have no need to take people off the streets before an election” to a bladder-bursting, buttock-numbing budget question along with the issue of the donation.  A meeting which starts at 9PM will likely be dragging on into the wee hours.

Amazing what a week’s worth of focus will do, isn’t it?

(more…)

Pete Hegseth’s MinnesotaPAC. They’ve targeted 12 races; peel off a buck or two if you can.

…is the party economy!

Tomorrow night is the eighth (I think) annual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Summer Party!

We’ll be at Keegans’ Irish Pub in Northeast Minneapolis.

View Larger Map

The party starts at 7PM, and runs ’til we’re done, pretty much.

Come on down, whether you’re a blogger or a reader, a conservative or a liberal or a “don’t care”, a guy or a gal, an extrovert or an introvert, a Ronulan or a Romnorrhoid – the whole point is just hanging out.

The only promises we make?  There is no agenda, there are no name tags, there will be no politicians speaking, and unless a treasured member of the MOB community passes away in the next 36 hours, there will be no addressing the group for any reason.

Just stop by.  I’ll introduce you to everyone.

See you then!

The employment numbers are out today.

Obama’s supporters are saying “Yaaaay, 8.1%” out one side of their mouth…

…and “thank Gaia these numbers didn’t come out before The Light Worker’s speech yesterday” out the other.

While unemployment is down 0.2% to 8.1%, that would seem to be entirely due to the workforce participation rate also dropping 0.2%, to an all-time low of 63.5%.

Let’s put this in context:  this means that 58.36% of the workforce is actually working.   Not only is this 2.22% lower than when Obama took office in 2009 – it’s worse than when the economy had an ostensible 10% unemployment rate in October of 2009 (when the participation rate was 65%).

Most telling, perhaps?  Since mid-2010, we had not been above 58.5% of the workforce employed, except for a few months earlier this year, when the employment rate bounced between 58.5 and 58.6.  It’s been steadily down since June, as the participation rate has resumed its slide.

The Dems are trying to put lipstick on the pig, of course; Extreme-DFL Representative Jim Davnie of Minneapolis tweeted this morning:

Jobs 8/12: Up 96K, Jobs 8/08: Down 84K. Net 180K jobs to the good. Yes better off than 4 yrs ago. Imagine if #GOP worked to help

In August of 2008, the labor force participation rate was 66.1%; today, it’s 63.5%.  That’s 2.6% lower.  The unemployment rate was 6.1% (and getting worse), two points lower than today.  The actual employment rates?  62.07% then, 58.35% today.  Go ahead, Rep. Davnie; make my day, and keep using these stats in public.

If the participation rate drops low enough, we’ll technically have full employment, I guess.

Upside, sorta? I actually heard some of the morning news people mentioning the full context of the unemployment number drop – it’s a function of the number of people leaving the work force – this morning.  Maybe even they can’t ignore it anymore?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I feel sorry for President Obama. He’s running for re-election but I don’t think he truly wants it. The job’s no fun anymore.

Look, here’s the bottom line: Barry was an affirmative action kid his entire life and Thomas Sowell is correct that affirmative action is harmful to minorities because it throws them into the deep end when they’re not prepared for it. A student who would have succeeded at a second-rank school will struggle against those who made it into a top-rank school on merit. The results show in low minority graduation rates, grades and class rank. Anyone who works with an affirmative action hire knows “minimally qualified” is not the same as “well qualified.”

Nobody knows President Obama’s grades, test scores or class rank at Columbia University or Harvard Law School. He was elected President of the Law Review by popular vote but never wrote a law review article. He worked for an undistinguished law firm and tried no cases. He was an adjunct teacher at the University of Chicago Law School, which there is no performance review. Chicago Democrat Machine trickery got him into the Illinois state senate – where he did nothing of note – and the United States Senate where he voted “present.” Obama stole the nomination from Hillary because in the Democrat hierarchy of victim worthiness, Black trumps Woman. Voters picked the Black guy to assuage their guilt, not for his competence.

Nobody ever expected anything of him, they were happy to have him fill a quota and do nothing embarrassing. Joe Biden nailed it: an articulate, clean, non-threatening Black man who looks good in a suit.

“President Of The United States” sounds like a cool gig but it’s no fun. People criticize every move and that’s a tough adjustment for a pampered kid. Notice how quickly Presidents age in office and ponder the reason for it. Nothing in Barack Obama’s life prepared him for that relentless pressure.

Yes, the Greek columns, stadia of fainting women and a Nobel Prize were cool. But three years on, Rahm is gone and free golf doesn’t outweigh the irritation of everyone demanding decisions then bitching about them. Even worse is the sinking realization that he’s in over his head, the economy sucks, the world is going to pot, he doesn’t actually know what to do and he can’t fake his way out of it. That’s got to be an awful feeling.

President Obama is going through the motions to get re-elected but his heart isn’t in it. The job’s no fun anymore.

I’m at a loss to think of a President who was less prepared for the office.

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.

In their campaign to take down Chip Cravaack, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota has just launched the dumbest campaign in the history of stupid ABM campaigns, “Keeping up with the Cravaacks”.

The message:  “A lifetime of service, savings, prudent investment and hard work leading to prosperity are something to be mocked”.

This, as the DFL’s environmentalist pals do their best to lower “the average Northern Minnesotan’s” income.

This is the Minnesota DFL in action.

The sudden change of venue for The One’s acceptance speech tonight – from the 70,000-seat Bank of America stadium to 20-odd-thousand seat Time-Warner Cable Arena – due to a 20% chance of rain, maybe, has led to one major problem for the Dems.  Because while the arena is a fine facility (and, unlike BOA, won’t be over 2/3 empty), with…:

…[s]tate delegate sections already in place. TV sky booths for the anchors. Big impressive stage. Flashy video backdrop.

But balloons? Thousands of red, white and blue balloons up in the ceiling, ready to come cascading down for the finish that America expects?

Nope. Sigh.

The Republicans had balloons aplenty, last week in Tampa, Fla.

Too late for the Democrats. But their spirits are still high. Stay tuned. Organizers are scrambling to come up with another festive way to punctuate the end of the convention.

It’s a pity, really – all that hot air could have been recycled.

But we’re all about the help, here.  So I’m going to throw this open for the audience:  since the Dems can’t get balloons together by tonight, what should they drop instead?

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.

Democrat Congresswoman bobbles the history in all 57 states:

Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) appeared to botch American and Brooklyn political history during an appearance on “The Colbert Report” that aired Tuesday night, saying that slavery in the United States persisted under the Dutch as late as 1898.

The Dutch left in 1674.

Colbert was quizzing Clarke on the history of her borough.

“Some have called Brooklyn’s decision to become part of New York City ‘The Great Mistake of 1898,’ ” Colbert said. “If you could get in a time machine and go back to 1898, what would you say to those Brooklynites?”

“I would say to them, ‘Set me free,’ ” Clarke said.
Pressed by Colbert what she would be free from, the black congresswoman responded, “Slavery.”

“Slavery. Really? I didn’t realize there was slavery in Brooklyn in 1898,” Colbert responded, seemingly looking to give the lawmaker a chance to catch her error.

“I’m pretty sure there was,” Clarke responded.

“It sounds like a horrible part of the United States that kept slavery going until 1898,” the late-night comedian then quipped.

I’m frankly amazed Colbert didn’t switch the subject.  Maybe start painting her toenails…

Colbert pressed on, asking, “Who would be enslaving you in 1898 in New York?”

At that point, Clarke responded, “The Dutch.”

Remember:  Liberals are teh smart!

Gary Gross, writing in the maddeningly inscrutable “Examiner”, recounts a trip to a Stearns County Commission (St. Cloud) meeting last May by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.

At that meeting, Ritchie handed out an op-ed whose chase was cut to with this money quote:

“Minnesota’s counties currently do an excellent job of administering fair and open elections across a state with significant geographic challenges. The lack of any significant voter irregularity for decades supports this assertion.”

Clearly, the purpose of the piece was to campaign against the Voter ID Amendment.

Which is great – provided that Ritchie was working on his campaign time. Not his SOS time.

But according to a Data Practices request on the subject, the trip was paid for as part of his SOS gig:

A Data Practices Act request was sent to Ritchie’s office asking whether Secretary Ritchie had been reimbursed by taxpayers for the trip. Bert Black gathered the information and responded to the Data Practices Act request. Here’s his response:

 

Thank you for your follow-up message. The staff person in our Fiscal Division who has these records was out yesterday, so I had to wait until today to get the information you requested.

 

Since the trip of May 15, 2012 to Waite Park, Minnesota was part of the Secretary’s official duties, Secretary Ritchie was reimbursed for mileage. The reimbursement was for 148 miles at the standard rate of $0.555 per mile, for a total of $82.14.

 

Best regards,

 

Bert Black

 

Office of the Secretary of State

 

And that is just plain unethical, if not illegal. (And when I say “if not illegal”, I’m really saying “I don’t know that it’s not illegal”).

,,.there are not “4.5 million new jobs”.  Or rather, while there may have been 4.5 million jobs created in the past four years, it’s been a piker compared to the jobs lost, downgraded, and sent overseas.

We are not better off than we were four years ago.

But keep on chanting, Dems.  There are only so many dumb voters.

This came from the MPR 4th CD debate last Wednesday, courtesy of the MNCDConservative blog.

Independence Party candidate Steve Carlson is talking about “infrastructure”. Listen to Betty McCollum’s supporters at the end (eyewitnesses say it was, in fact, McCollum’s people doing the booing):

They’re booing Carlson for attacking the Central Corridor; to hell with the businesses it’s destoryed, and continues destroying.

Guess it’s good to have your priorities straight.

(Video courtesy Minnesota CD4 Conservatives blog)

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…)

Watching Melissa Harris-Perry (!)’s meltdown on MSNBC…:

(Which I’ve moved below the jump, to keep it from auto-launching):

(more…)

How can this tack possibly go wrong?

The chair of the California Democrat Party compares Republican “tactics” to those of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels:

“They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie,” Chairman of the California Democratic Party John Burton told KCBS Monday in Charlotte. “As long as you lie, Joseph Goebbels, the big lie, you keep repeating it, you know.”

a) It was Hitler, in Mein Kampf, not Goebbels.  Hitler coined the saying – and I say this with full, creepy and utterly appropriate irony – to accuse “The Jews” of telilng big lies often until the thick-headed believed them.  Goebbels used it the same way – accusing Churchill of being a big fat liar.  In other words, the real story of “the Big Lie” is actually a classic example of Berg’s Seventh Law.

b) Again – I guess civility isn’t the supreme civic virtue anymore, is it?

“First of all,” he continued, “you’ve got Republicans who truly believe the Earth is flat, so I don’t know exactly what, you know, what’s going to do, but they, I think that when people figure out that these people say they do not care about the truth and they will lie and they don’t care if they lie because it doesn’t matter if they lie.”

He’s referring, in his preliterate way, to the “progressive” conceit that conservatives don’t care about science.

And it’s another punch in the ticket for the Democrat quest to reel in the “Low-Information Voters”.

And, naturally, further proof that Berg’s Seventh Law is immutable.

UPDATE:  Chairman Burton has apparently departed Charlotte for a “pre-scheduled root canal” that he, apparently, arranged during his party’s most important quadrennial event.  These things happen, I guess.

(Via commenter Prince Of Darkness)

Romney/Ryan, running to peel the “Midwest” away from the Democrats?

A rout of the Democrats along the Great Lakes would be huge not only electorally, but also culturally.

It would marginalize the party as a group of arugula-munching, latte-sipping elites who enjoy their ocean views and heedlessly live off the fat of the land (many on the taxpayers’ dime) as lawyers, journalists, college professors, government employees and entitlement recipients — while the rest of the interior labors to pay the bill and suffers the “regulation” of distant, unaccountable bureaucrats.

In other words, the Heartland Campaign is not simply about Electoral College votes. It’s also a way to frame the Democrats as the out-of-touch party of the status quo — i.e., Big Government — at a time when Big Government has so signally failed the average American.

If it works — and if a Romney administration can successfully grapple with the debt bomb, the entitlement crisis and growing government dependency — it could set back the Democrats’ prospects for years to come.

Which brings us back to Eastwood. In such films as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and “High Plains Drifter,” he’s the embodiment of rugged, rebellious heartland values.

And those cranky, cantankerous, all-American voters are just who Romney & Ryan need to defeat the coastal elites and return America to its heartland roots.

If it works, and R&R crush in the heardland, leaving the left clinging to the coasts and their suppurating outposts in Chicago, the Twin Cities and Madison/Milwaukee?  Expect to see a lot of mid-November prate and gabble from lefties about coastal secession.

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.

Seen at the State Fair (courtesy Andy Parrish):

“Exterminate Christians One Bullet At A Time”.  Photo courtesy Andy Parrish, found at @AndyParrishMN on Twitter.

Now, is this really the Is this the exposed intellectual id of the DFL in action?

No, not really.   Well, not totally – the Twin Cities is home to quite a few Wahhabi Atheists.

No, it’s just that after years not only of dim-bulb leftybloggers posting photos of redneck peckerwoods from Moldy Holler with objectionable signs hanging around the fringes of Tea Party rallies in Chattanooga labelled “This is today’s GOP”, but in fact Minnesota’s state-supported news service doing exactly the same, I figured I was entitled to one humorous fit of pique.

Note To Mr. Hairball:  It’s been tried.  Lots of us Christians are much harder targets than you are – and, let’s be honest, like most lefties, you’re all talk and no delivery, so I’m not exactly concerned.  Nonetheless, in the words of the prophet Callaghan, “do you feel lucky?”

Serious Question For Lefties:  I know, moral equivalence is a one-way street with you folks – but seriously, this is one of your guys, at the fair to espouse one of your key anti-initiatives this fall, in the intellectual center of the upper-Midwest left.  You know damn well if it were a conservative – even one obviously from some trailer park outside Ashland Wisconsin – wearing a “God Hates Fags” T-Shirt, you’d be holding every blessed Republican in Minnesota and Wisconsin answerable.  I mean, you blamed Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” for the Tuscon shooting, for Stu’s sake.

I’m beyond asking for intellectual honesty from you folks, or the media that serve as your Praetorian Guard.

I’m just pointing it out. . Yet again.  As I’ve done for ten solid years now.

Final Question For “Progressives”: At what point does this become a “Dog Whistle”?  Or, alternatively, a commentary on the entire lefty id?