A Small Dose Of Large Reality

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Fact Checking

FactCheck.org

The Republican presidential candidates met for their second debate on Sept. 16, this one hosted by CNN at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California. We found they strayed from the facts on numerous issues, including:

--Donald Trump told a story linking vaccination to autism, but there’s no evidence that recommended vaccines cause autism. 

--And Sen. Rand Paul suggested that it would be safer to spread out recommended vaccines, but there’s no evidence of that, either.

--Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Trump donated to his gubernatorial campaign to get him to change his mind on casino gambling in Florida. But Trump denied he ever wanted to bring casino gambling to the state. A former lobbyist says he did.

--Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said that Hillary Clinton was “under investigation by the FBI” because she “destroyed government records.” Not true. She had the authority to delete personal emails.

--Trump said that “illegal immigration” cost “more than $200 billion a year.” We couldn’t find any support for that. Actually, it could cost taxpayers $137 billion or more to deport the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, as Trump proposes.

--Trump again wrongly said that Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy like the United States. It does.

--Carly Fiorina said that the Planned Parenthood videos released by an anti-abortion group showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” But that scene isn’t in any of the videos.

--Fiorina repeated familiar boasts about her time at Hewlett-Packard, saying the size of the company “doubled,” without mentioning that was due to a merger with Compaq, and she cherry-picked other statistics.

--Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that U.S. policies to combat climate change would “do absolutely nothing.” The U.S. acting alone would have a small effect on rising temperatures and sea levels, and experts say U.S. leadership on the issue would prompt other nations to act.

--In the “happy hour” debate, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham glossed over the accompanying tax increases when he said only that Ronald Reagan and then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill “found a way to save Social Security from bankruptcy by adjusting the age of retirement from 65 to 67.”

"Argument"

And try not to think about what goes on when you try to engage your more "conservative" friends in a real discussion on anything that matters.



Every fucking time.

And damn if it wouldn't be great for the cops to come in and arrest the whole bunch.  Or even better if the fuckin' thing just ended with a

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Don't Get Cocky

Deny, Deny, Deny

In everybody's attempts to figure out what the fuck went wrong Wednesday night at the "debate", we seem to have overlooked important elements in the Repubs' tactical approach.

1. Mis-represent, mislead, mis-state (but be sure your surrogates are regularly hinting/claiming/screaming that your opponent is a fibber/liar/etc)
2. Be prepared to dance a little if somebody calls you on it (but knowing nobody's gonna call you on it, feel free to make it all up)
3. When the Lefty Scum point to very specific examples of the unicorn shit you've been spraying on the walls - Deny, Deny, Deny

The Backfire Effect

Posted by sofa king at Democratic Underground today:
(and pasted into this post in its all-together cuz it's awesome)

"But why would people so woefully lacking in the basic facts of an issue think they were the best informed? Social scientists call the effect, 'pseudo-certainty.' I call it, 'being a fucking moron.'" --Al Franken

The use of cognitive bias against the public can probably be traced back to the United States' foundation. Consider, for example, the rapier-like tact Americans used in the Declaration of Independence, directing all of their ire against Great Britain's slowly maddening King instead of the Parliament that they knew had wronged them. I think it is a classic example of misdirection, in the same family of dishonesty as mentioning Osama bin Laden in the same paragraph every time one mentions Saddam Hussein.

Last night, Mitt Romney made the most of a particular cognitive bias which we all need to know about. It is called the Backfire Effect. Here is a link to the paper.

People have a bad habit of clinging to disinformation, particularly if they are fed the disinformation first. If the disinformation is refuted, many of us simply give up trying to figure the problem out and default to the first thing we learned, and if the first thing we learned is crap, we believe the crap.
We are all vulnerable to some degree to the Backfire Effect, but there is a critical difference in the way the Backfire Effect works between conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans.

The shortest version I can give is this: when a conservative lies and a liberal refutes the lie, conservative observers become more likely to believe the lie. This effect does not work in reverse--because liberals have better thinking skills, I say, but I'm biased. This is part of the reason why an alarming number of American doofuses are still shambling about thinking that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and why the vast majority of them are Republicans.

Up to now, Mitt Romney's biggest problem has been that he hasn't won over the right-wing authoritarians who make up the most important voting bloc in the Republican Party, and maybe in all of American politics. They are diligent voters and can be easily programmed with lies, fear, and racism, of which they are fed a steady diet by Fox News and AM radio. Almost one in four Americans fits the profile of a right-wing authoritarian.

Despite every effort, right down to nominating arch-conservative darling Paul Ryan, Romney just hasn't been able to convince them that he's their guy.

And why should they think so, when Romney gamed the nomination process, knocked off the conservative authorities they trust one by one, and silenced all dissent at the convention? He had to steal it from them before he can steal it from us, and they haven't easily forgotten.

Last night was Romney's last big chance. He's got the press and the pollsters pulling for him to make it a closer race, because it is to their personal, professional, and financial advantage. He has finally assembled the captive audience of right-wing authoritarians he needs to win over. All he needed to do was to finally, permanently, establish himself as a conservative authority, someone the conservatives can trust.

He needed President Obama to help him, by doing what every Democrat, including myself, wanted him to do: call Mitt a liar.

So Mitt Romney went out and did what he's best at. He lied his ass off. He changed a central plank of his platform at the debate in an attempt to draw out President Obama, to encourage the President to raise his voice and express outrage at such malicious dishonesty.

But President Obama wouldn't bite.

Instead, the President stuck to his own policy, his own platform, and pointed out only the most basic and agreed-upon flaws in whatever Romney's so-called plan is today (or rather, last night, because I'm sure he's walking back half of what he said right now). He tried not to show flashes of anger or disgust, as Al Gore so tragically did in 2000.

It was probably disappointing to all of us here to see the President steer away from direct confrontation, but it probably also sealed the election for him.

Consider what would have happened had the debate swung a different way.

Gov. Romney: "I'm not in favor of a $5 trillion tax cut. That's not my plan...."

President Obama: "That's bullshit. You've run on that all year."

Millions of Democrats would have stood up and cheered at that moment, to be sure, but it wouldn't have done a damned thing to change the political landscape because we're all already going to go out and vote for President Obama, and every other Democrat on the ballot. We're all registered now, right?

Just as certainly, a giant mob of tea-partiers would have been on their feet and whooping. That would have been the signal they needed, the sign from baby Jesus that Mitt Romney was the anointed one. They would have dusted off their IDs and registrations, and they would have come out and voted--at a higher frequency, unfortunately, than we do. Millions of our votes would have been canceled out.

We need to realize that right now an unusually high number of right-wing voters are far closer to reality than they usually are. They don't trust Mitt Romney, and they shouldn't, and it is to their credit that they do not in spite of the enormous psyops being run on them.

But we also need to acknowledge that these voters unfortunately tend strongly toward racism, and are highly motivated to vote against President Obama simply because he is a person of color. President Obama will never win their vote--but he might win their non-vote.

So that is why President Obama didn't "win" last night's debate. Because this debate wasn't about us. But do you know who is going to refute Mitt Romney's bullshit? We are. In the voting booth.

A New Thing

Big national campaigns almost always give us some memorable slogans or phrases.

There you go again.
Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy
Welfare Queens

Soledad O'Brien may have come up with one last night.  At about 5:10 she coins the phrase "The myth of the Deadbeat Nation".


And BTW - Bay Buchannan seems to be fairly gasping for air trying to beat this thing down.

Fast forward to the first coupla years of Willard's first term, and imagine what happens when he's faced with some majorly snarled problem in - oh, I dunno - the Middle East or SW Asia or North Africa or wherever.  We'll have Willard out front saying some kinda stupid shit that he thinks only Americans can hear, while his State Dept team is saying something exactly the opposite to the rest of the world because they're trying to keep from being barbecued inside our embassy in Western Fuckedupistan - and then we'll spend the next 7 or 8 years trying to get ourselves out of the shooting war that Sec Def Lyndsey Graham absolutely knew was a great way to settle the issue etc etc etc.

DO NOT put these clowns in charge of anything more complicated than a Saturday morning carwash down at the local high school.

Unproved

But wouldn't it be just too sweet if Obama's buttons were Union Made in the USA (which I think is verifiable), and Romney's buttons all had the Made In China label (probably not true).

Obama Speaks

Did you hear that?  Do you hear those footsteps?

He's comin' for ya, Willard.

GOP Convention Scorecard

A quick look at what FactCheck had to say about the Repubs' get-together last week:

FactCheck.org's Weekly Update for August 31, 2012

New Wire ItemsRomney’s Sorry ‘Apology’ Dig
Mitt Romney wrongly accuses President Obama of going on an “apology tour” in foreign countries.

Romney’s Big Night
There were a few bits of exaggeration and puffery in his Republican convention speech.

Ryan’s VP Spin
Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech at the GOP convention contained several false claims and misleading statements.

Santorum’s Distorted ‘Dependency’ Claims
Rick Santorum faults Obama for 'almost half of America receiving some sort of government assistance.'

Christie’s Fact-Free Keynote
The New Jersey governor made some exaggerations in a speech heavy on generalities, opinion and platitudes.

Republican Retreads from Tampa
The first day of the Republican convention saw a lot of exaggerated, misleading or downright false claims that we’ve heard before.

Spin Detectors: Help Us Monitor the Conventions
We still want you to help us monitor the Democratic National Convention.

Winning? Super PAC Compares Republican to Charlie Sheen
There is less to Majority PAC's claims about Connie Mack IV than meets the eye.

New Ask FactCheck Responses
Q: Is the Democratic National Convention hosting a Muslim “Jumah” prayer service after rejecting a Catholic cardinal’s offer to lead a prayer?
A: No. A Muslim group scheduled an event that was independent of the convention at a city park. The cardinal is leading the convention’s closing prayer. 

Q: Would a “list of Republican budget cuts” by the “new Republican House” slash $2.5 trillion from federal spending over 10 years?
A: The list is real. But so far, there has been no action on the bill, which was sponsored by 33 conservative GOP House members.