Random Politics & Religion #19

Even when Obama was President for 8 years I don't recall waking up and searching for things to be upset about. I just dealt with it like most normal people do.

A few weeks ago, Donald Trump responded to Meryl Streep’s insults by calling her overrated. Some fact checks came out saying that Streep, in fact, had won many awards. The Associated Press’ “Meryl Streep overrated? Donald Trump picks a decorated star,” was one such example. Four of the seven paragraphs to the story listed awards and honors she’d received.

As Victor Morton noted, “‘She has won a bunch of awards’ isn’t even a prima-facie rebuttal of the claim ‘she is overrated’.” He added, “If anything, ‘She won a bunch of awards’ is a necessary precondition for being ‘overrated,’ i.e. rated highly in first place.”

Exactly. If journalists involved with the “fact” “check” enterprise are capable of self-reflection, they should begin understanding why so many people find it a waste of time at best. Here are a few other examples just from the past few days.

1) Palestinians Are Not All the Same

The New York Times ran what it claimed was an Associated Press “fact check” on David Friedman, President Donald Trump’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to Israel. Here’s how it began, with a characterization of a Friedman statement and then “THE FACTS”:


That’s really what it says. You don’t say, Associated Press. Thanks for that brilliant piece of information about which we were all unaware. If you are a reader looking for facts to gauge whether terrorism had increased since Oslo, you are completely out of luck.

2) The Ninth Circuit

PolitiFact “fact” “checked” a Sean Hannity claim that “The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is ‘the most overturned court in the country.'” They rated it patently “false.”

Researcher Lauren Caroll said she used SCOTUSBlog’s Supreme Court statistics archive to evaluate the claim and found that the Supreme Court reversed about 70 percent of the cases it took between 2010 and 2015. The Supreme Court reversed 79 percent of cases from the Ninth Circuit, which put it in third place for most reversed court.

But a reader noticed something interesting: the fact check didn’t mention the sheer number of reversals even though the researcher would have had to know the number of reversals to calculate the rate of overturn. And if you just look at the actual number of reversals, not only is the Ninth Circuit the one with the highest number, it’s not even close. From 2010-2015, the Ninth Circuit was overturned at the Supreme Court 77 times. The next highest was the Sixth Circuit, with 28 reversals.

Here are the overturned decisions by circuit court of appeals from 2010-2015:

First: 6
Second: 16
Third: 19
Fourth: 12
Fifth: 27
Sixth: 28
Seventh: 10
Eighth: 16
Ninth: 77
Tenth: 10
Eleventh: 21
DC: 10
Federal: 19

In fact, in each year of the sample, the Ninth Circuit had the most reversals. The reader notes: “I suppose one could argue that the percentage of reversals is cases heard by the Supreme Court is more significant than the raw number of reversals (although [a] quote in the article seems to caution against looking at the rate of reversal percentage), but the article does not even acknowledge the story told by the raw data. Moreover, it was necessary to look at the raw data in order to calculate the percentages of cases overturned, so the decision not to mention this in a purported ‘fact-checking’ article is curious, to be charitable, particularly since the statement being evaluated makes no claims with respect to percentages. The upshot is that the article does a nice job of proving Mark Twain’s point that the three types of lies are lies, damn lies and statistics, as it uses a statistical analysis of questionable merit to ‘disprove’ a statement that was literally true.”

PolitiFact continues to be a place where you can say something literally true and get a false rating (if you are a non-liberal).

3) An Abortion of a Fact Check

Our next example of a “fact” “check” failure is a Snopes piece on whether Planned Parenthood rewards employees for promoting abortion services. Journalist Lila Rose interviewed former Planned Parenthood employees who said they were expected to increase the revenue-generating abortion portion of the business. She also had a document purporting to show a reward for one clinic exceeding its abortion visits relative to a prior period of time. Therefore, the check couldn’t determine that the allegations were “false.” Instead they were rated “unproven.”

But where things got really weird is when the piece used a completely unrelated legal case to discredit one of the women who had made the claim. And then Snopes got the facts wrong on that case.

Twitter link

Whoops.

Snopes used Planned Parenthood talking points in an attempt to discredit Sue Thayer. They claimed she was unsuccessful in a lawsuit she brought alleging Medicaid fraud. But the lawsuit is ongoing and was reinstated by the Eighth Circuit.

Had they reviewed the actual video they were purporting to check, they would have known this. They would have known this if they’d looked up her congressional testimony. Heck, “researcher” Kim LaCapria didn’t contact Thayer, Mattox, the Alliance Defending Freedom, or Lila Rose’s LiveAction before running the “fact” “check” that was nothing other than unrelated Planned Parenthood talking points. It’s a stunning lack of work for an organization that is supposed to fact check facts I don't like on Facebook.

4) ‘Actually,’ Regulations Create Jobs

For our last entry, we head over to the Washington Post, which has a piece headlined “Trump supporters see a successful president — and are frustrated with critics who don’t.” Authored by Jenna Johnson and Dave Weigel, the piece is about how Trump voters are frustrated at media hostility to Trump’s successes. It positively drips with condescension, as this sample section shows:


Oh where, where, where to begin?

First off, it’s absolutely true that most national media completely messed up by spending all of their Trump coverage last Thursday on his press conference instead of the far more important regulatory reform. It’s not just important in an economic sense, but a political sense. You bet your patootie that Republicans in mining states were elated by this change to proposed regulations. Also, seeing miners in hard hats praising a Republican president was far more significant than Round 242 of the war with the media.

Second, Nana is correct that the industry projected job losses for 70,000 miners. In fact, she lowballed it. The actual prediction was a loss of up to 78,000 coal mining jobs, on top of the 40,000 already lost since 2011. The National Mining Association produced a report that the rule could lead general coal-related employment to plummet by 281,000 positions, including in related fields.

As we investigate the last sentence excerpted above, let’s note that the reporters smugly wrote “actually” in their “fact” “check” of Nana, the 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. Not only do they appeal to a government report they don’t even bother to identify, they put complete trust in it. They trust, with not a smidgen of doubt, that the government that designed a given regulation is the best, if not only, judge of its impact. They refer to a speculative report about the future — about the future — as “verifiable facts.”

Here’s an idea for Johnson and Weigel: Read this Michael Crichton essay until you understand it. You can’t assert that a prediction, of all things, is a verifiable fact. That would be true even if central planners had good track records of looking out for all unintended consequences. The writing duo don’t bother to quantify “relatively few.” Relative to what, you might ask. If you are one of the vast majority of Americans who don’t trust the media, they have given no information that you can use to check whether what they’re saying is true.

Even that’s not the big problem with this. The big problem is the idea that a “relatively” minor loss of mining jobs is no big deal because there will be “nearly as many new jobs on the regulatory side.” Is this some kind of a joke … about how Trump won? That elites think jobs can go from the mining sector to the … regulatory sector?

Apart from the abject ignorance required to imagine that the downsides of losses in coal mining jobs are easily balanced in their communities by new jobs in regulating the affairs of other people, there’s another issue. Say what you want about coal miners, they are producing a real thing that powers much of our economy. Electricity generation, steel production, cement manufacturing, and liquid fuel are some of the uses of coal.

What would you say regulators produce?

In short, that “actually” line may be the stupidest thing I’ve read in a year.

Democrats need to pull their head out of their ***.

He didn't though, if you listen to what he actually said. I don't agree with him but that's not what he was saying.

I'm not sure if you are trying to make this into a racist thing.

No, it's not the "black bloc" that he is referring to. It's those people who riot over the silliest things, such as a gay conservative speaker speaking at a university known throughout the world to start the "Free Speech" movement, or those who violently destroy businesses because they perceive a harm on them.

That's not a racial thing, that's a liberal thing.

Even when Obama was President for 8 years I don't recall waking up and searching for things to be upset about. I just dealt with it like most normal people do.

The media has to be hyper-investigative and critical of everything tRumpy says and does, because every time he opens his mouth, even if just to take a breath, you can assume he's either going to lie or tell a *** story.
Sure, they had let stuff slide a bit on Obama,

Obama wasn't a pathological lying sociopath.

pathological adj.
(Regarding this case)
3. being such to a degree that is extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal.

Source

They also weren't so harsh on George W. Bush because GWB, while an idiot, had his heart in the right place even if his facts weren't entirely straight.

The black block is almost exclusively composed of whites. They WEAR black. That is where their name comes from.

King, if you don't care to know your enemy at least google them.

I'm not sure if you are trying to make this into a racist thing.

You never did answer my question KN about those lists.

I meant Presidents, not candidates.
Bill Clinton.

....
What reality were you in back between 2001-2009? ...

In my early 21st century reality W's administration TOTALLY rolled the press. They not only uncritically accepted his weapons of mass deception, they almost universally rattled the sabers for his proposed war. Only the actual liberal media, rags like The Nation and Mother Jones, were against his dandy little war.

Supposedly liberal papers, like the NYT and the WaPo were among the loudest voices advocating the war.

I do remember the MSM being very negative during Bush's reelection.

The Democratic National Committee will choose its next leader on Saturday, and when it does it should choose a leader who will resist the pressure to pursue the wrong white people. Hundreds of articles have been written about the imperative of attracting more support from white working-class voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 but then bolted to back Donald J. Trump.

The far more important — and largely untold — story of the election is that more Obama voters defected to third- and fourth-party candidates than the number who supported Mr. Trump. That is the white flight that should most concern the next D.N.C. chairman, because those voters make up a more promising way to reclaim the White House. The way to win them back is by being more progressive, not less.

To be clear, all white voters matter. But Democrats must make tough, data-driven decisions about how to prioritize their work. Right now, too many are using bad math and faulty logic to push the party to chase the wrong segment of white voters. For example, Guy Cecil, who spent nearly $200 million as head of the progressive “super PAC” Priorities USA, urged the party to rebuild trust with the “millions of white voters who voted for President Obama and Donald Trump.”

The math underlying that conclusion is incorrect (Mr. Trump picked up not “millions,” but only 784,000 white votes in the 10 battleground states he won by single digits). And it misses the bigger — and more fixable — problem of white Democratic defections to third- and fourth-party candidates.

Hillary Clinton lost the decisive states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan by 77,744 votes; the number of Democratic votes dropped significantly from 2012 levels, and the Republican total increased by about 440,000 votes. The third- and fourth-party surge, however, was larger than the Republican growth, with 503,000 more people choosing the Libertarian or the Green candidate than had done so in 2012. When you look at the white vote in those states, the picture is even more stark.

In Wisconsin, according to the exit poll data, Mrs. Clinton received 193,000 fewer white votes than Mr. Obama received in 2012, but Mr. Trump’s white total increased over Mitt Romney’s by just 9,000 votes. So where did the other 184,000 Wisconsin whites go? A majority went to third and fourth parties, which, together, received 100,000 more white votes than they did in 2012.

In Michigan, where 75 percent of the voters were white, Mrs. Clinton received about 295,000 fewer votes than Mr. Obama did, but the Republican total increased by just 164,000 votes. The ranks of those voting third and fourth party leapt to more than 250,000 last year from about 51,000 in 2012, and Mrs. Clinton fell short by just 10,704 votes.

In Pennsylvania, the Democrats’ problem was not with white voters, but with African-Americans. Mrs. Clinton actually improved on the Democratic 2012 results with whites, but over 130,000 unenthused black voters stayed home, and she lost by about 44,000 votes.

If Democrats had stemmed the defections of white voters to the Libertarian or Green Parties, they would have won Michigan and Wisconsin, and had they also inspired African-Americans in Pennsylvania, Mrs. Clinton would be president.

If progressive whites are defecting because they are uninspired by Democrats, moving further to the right will only deepen their disillusionment. But if the next D.N.C. chairman can win them back, the country’s demographic trends will tilt the field in Democrats’ favor. As Mrs. Clinton’s popular vote margin showed, there is still a new American majority made up of a meaningful minority of whites and an overwhelming majority of minorities. Not only is there little evidence that Democrats can do significantly better with those white working-class voters who are susceptible to messages laced with racism and sexism, but that sector of the electorate will continue to shrink in the coming years. Nearly half of all Democratic votes (46 percent) were not white in 2016, and over the next four years, 10 million more people of color will be added to the population, as compared with just 1.5 million whites.

Keith Ellison, a D.N.C. chairman candidate, has a proven record of engaging core Democratic voters rather than chasing the elusive conservative whites, and the party would be in good hands under his stewardship. (Thomas E. Perez, the former labor secretary, has less electoral history, but his reliance on political superstars such as the strategist Emmy Ruiz, who delivered victories for Democrats in Nevada and Colorado, is encouraging.)

Whoever prevails as chairman must resist the pressure to follow an uninformed and ill-fated quest for winning over conservative white working-class voters in the Midwest. The solution for Democrats is not to chase Trump defectors. The path to victory involves reinspiring those whites who drifted to third-party candidates and then focusing on the ample opportunities in the Southwest and the South.

Mrs. Clinton came closer to winning Texas than she did Iowa. She fared better in Arizona, Georgia and Florida than she did in the traditional battleground state of Ohio. The electoral action for Democrats may have once been in the Rust Belt, but it’s now moving west and south.

Until what, 2003?

I do remember the MSM being very negative during Bush's reelection.

....
What reality were you in back between 2001 2004-2009?...

He stole the election / hanging chad / etc etc etc

He did not. It was handed to him by the Supremes.

Fixed.

So basically, when all other outlets are telling you to not double down on the very policies and rhetoric that alienated voters away from Clinton and into Trump, NYTs is telling liberals to...double down.

Inside every democrat there is an american trying to get out.