Stretching the Truth

I came across this article and couldn't help but chuckle. It just underscores how important it is not to take everything you see/read as truth - on either side of the political spectrum.

A Rough Summer, Factually Speaking
By Bill Adair, CQ Staff

In the presidential campaign, truth has been a casualty of summer.

We’ve rated more than 600 claims on our PolitiFact Web site since the campaign began, and last week we made an interesting discovery: The candidates, political parties and independent groups we’ve been rating have become significantly less truthful in the past two months.

Before summer, we found that 65 percent of the claims we checked were on the upper end of our Truth-O-Meter — Half True, Mostly True or True — while 35 percent were on the bottom end — Barely True, False or Pants on Fire. That’s not a great track record, but it’s better than we would have expected.

The start of summer — which roughly coincided with the kickoff of the general-election campaign between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain — was a turning point.

Since then, only 55 percent of the claims have earned a Half True or better, while 45 percent have been Barely True or lower. Those numbers aren’t scientific, because we choose the items to check based on our own curiosity about which statements are accurate. But they confirm our suspicions that the candidates have been stretching the truth more in the past two months.

The biggest change has come in the number of claims we’ve rated Barely True. They accounted for 12 percent of our ratings before summer began but 22 percent in the past two months. That reflects the unusually aggressive ads we’ve seen lately. It’s only August, but on the campaign trail, it feels like October.

In previous elections, the campaign slowed during the summer, allowing everybody (especially voters) to get a break after the primary battles. The general-election campaign did not really gear up until Labor Day.

This year, the candidates and their surrogates have been going full tilt, firing charges and countercharges like it was the final sprint of October. They’ve been leveling the kind of charges that, in previous years, would have been held back until the final few weeks.

In keeping with the summer theme, the campaigns are doing a lot of cherry-picking. They find a few facts to support their attacks and pound away. (The McCain theme: Obama is a high-tax, big-government Democrat. The Obama theme: McCain is a carbon copy of President Bush and a puppet of Big Oil.)

A Grain of Truth
The cherry-picking explains why we’ve rated so many claims Barely True. There’s a grain of truth behind many of their claims, but they ignore contradictory facts and distort the overall truth.

A few examples:

• Obama’s claim that McCain offers “billions in tax breaks for oil and drug companies, but almost nothing for families like yours.” This one misleads about who would benefit from McCain’s plan to reduce corporate taxes. It would lower taxes on all corporations, not just those perennial Democratic villains, oil and drug companies. And the ad is wrong in saying that McCain’s plan offers nothing for middle-class families. McCain proposes doubling tax exemptions for dependents (usually children), a significant help for many families. We gave this one a Barely True.

• Obama’s allegation that McCain worries about nuclear waste in Arizona but not in Nevada. We found that the Obama campaign used some creative editing to make its point, relying on a snippet of a McCain comment that he would not want the waste trucked through Phoenix. The ad conveniently left out the rest of his comment, “I think it can be made safe.” This ad also earned a Barely True.

• McCain’s charge that Obama “promises more taxes on small business, seniors, your life savings, your family.” This one, like several other McCain ads, is based on Obama’s plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the upper income brackets. So yes, it’s accurate if you earn more than $200,000 per year. But the McCain ad is misleading, because most people would not have higher taxes under Obama’s plan. Another Barely True.

• McCain’s claim that Obama plans “a tax increase for everyone earning more than $42,000 a year.” That’s based on the same flawed logic as the above item and was so wrong we gave it a False.

Other Trends of Summer
Another trend we’ve noticed is how chain e-mail messages have been evolving. They often seem like organisms that adapt to survive in a harsh environment.

PolitiFact and other news organizations have discredited many of the e-mails. No, Obama is not a Muslim, he didn’t take the oath of office on a Koran and he does not want the national anthem to be “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

A growing number of the messages now include a line that says, “I checked this out on Snopes and it’s true,” referring to the Web site that determines whether urban legends are accurate. That line is like a defense mechanism intended to reassure a skeptical reader.

But most of the e-mail messages that include the line are still false. So if you see it, be skeptical.
Another adaptation: a new chain letter that makes false claims that Obama plans to raise the capital gains tax. It’s a variant of one we checked last spring that made inaccurate accusations about Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tax proposals. In the new version, Clinton has been removed and some new false charges have been added.

As with most chain e-mail, we have no idea who wrote it, but it’s been passed along by many people who haven’t bothered to check out the facts.

We received another e-mail that used a different twist to spread misinformation: a bogus column. It purported to be written by columnist Maureen Dowd, claiming that Obama received millions of dollars in suspicious contributions from China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Dowd fans quickly knew it was a fake because, as one fan wrote, it had “no silly puns, alliteration, movie references, or odd nicknames.”

We published a story about the bogus column and interviewed one man who was spreading it, but it continues to circulate widely.

We also saw how fast a false message can spread — presumably to thousands and possibly millions of people. Just a day or two after Obama visited Afghanistan in July, an e-mail spread with lightning speed alleging that he had “shunned the opportunity to talk to soldiers to thank them for their service.” (We checked it out and found it was False.)

We got that e-mail from many PolitiFact readers who asked us to check it out, and it received considerable news coverage elsewhere, which indicates how widely and quickly it spread.
Looking ahead to the fall and the claims we’ll check from the candidates, their surrogates and chain e-mails, we’re a little apprehensive.

If they’re exaggerating and distorting this much in August, what will October be like?

PolitiFact.com is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. If you would like to suggest a factual claim by a campaign for PolitiFact to explore, e-mail truthometer@politifact.com.

Source: CQ Today Print Edition Round-the-clock coverage of news from Capitol Hill. © 2008 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In Other News

I almost forgot the biggest news of all: I get to go to the Republican National Convention this year!!

I am beyond excited. It's something I've always wanted to do and I can't wait. It will be tough navigating the ethics mess (with rules like you can serve bagels and muffins for breakfast but not eggs lest you actually feed people), but I figure there will be a lot of people in the same boat there to commiserate with.

I went shopping tonight to get a couple cute outfits and was pleasantly surprised to see that Ann Taylor had gotten into the campaign spirit by rolling out a red, white and blue line just in time for the fall political season.

See you in St. Paul!

August Recap

It's hard to believe August is almost over! Man, oh man. It feels like the month just started. Which isn't good because I have a lot of work to do before recess is over.

I spent the first day of the month, which was the last day the House was in session, reading the Politico blog and wondering what the heck was going on on the House floor, then traipsing down there with my coworkers to watch the show as Republican Members held an impromptu session after Nancy Pelosi turned off the lights, cameras and microphones to protest the lack of action on energy. We finished off the day by joining with the assembled crowd in singing "God Bless America" led by Rep. Tom Price, and shouting "USA! USA!" It was so much fun. Only in America.

That evening, Brian and I had planned to fly to California, but instead ended up spending 3+ hours standing at the US Airways ticket counter and finally getting on an American Airlines flight the next morning. I'm never flying US Airways again. Our friend Adriel, who just got back from a 3-month vacation in Costa Rica and is crashing at our place for a while, was awesome, though - he waited for us at the airport the entire time to drive us home.

We spent the next week in sunny, beautiful California. It was a wonderful break that we both really needed. The first weekend we spent with my family, and helped my parents design their soon-to-be-new kitchen. I got to hang out with my little sister Kathryn, who is getting more beautiful and more grown up every day. I realized how much I miss seeing her grow up. It seems like she was only 4 years old last year, and now she's almost as tall as I am and getting ready to start 6th grade. Time sure does fly.

Sunday night we drove down to our favorite place in the world, Disneyland. We had such a wonderful, relaxing time. The best thing about having season passes is we can go and not feel like we have to actually do anything while we're there. We can just enjoy the stress-free atmosphere and go at our own pace. It was so much fun.

We also got to have dinner with our good friends Kimmie and Jared and their adorable little boy, Caleb. I think he ended up with more food on his face than in his stomach by the end of the night, but we had a blast.


After 2 days in LA we drove up the coast to Brian's grandma's house in San Luis. We spent the evening with his parents who were there taking care of her, and then drove back to Clovis that night to get ready for his brother's wedding. It was the most disorganized, dysfunctional wedding I've ever gone to, and I think we were all glad when it was over.

Saturday was our last day in Fresno, and I spent the morning getting the most amazing massage ever from my mom at her spa in Old Town Clovis. Then Robbie (who flew in from DC the night before) and Kathryn met up with us for lunch at Dog House Grill across from Fresno State, which has the most amazing Tri-Tip sandwiches ever. Somehow we're going to figure out a way to bring Tri-Tip to the east coast. The rest of the day we spent packing, then we hit up other places we couldn't get in DC - Jamba Juice for smoothies in River Park and Me 'N Ed's for dinner - before saying goodbye to our parents and riding the red-eye back home to DC.

The rest of the month has been relatively uneventful. Brian was in Minnesota for a couple days for work, and Robbie and I went to part of The Call DC last weekend, which was really good. We celebrated Rob's 22nd birthday this week at Clyde's in Chinatown (one of our faves), and Brian is getting ready to head to Denver to do some work before the DNC Convention.

Oh yeah, the Olympics. I'm completely addicted. To the point that I haven't gone to bed before 1 a.m. pretty much since they started. I love the Olympics, and I've gotten much more into them than I have in the past. Especially women's gymnastics (always my fave) and the amazing, super-human Michael Phelps. Diving, beach volleyball, and track and field are up there as well.

Okay enough distraction... back to the Olympics!

Thought for the Day

This was, I thought, a very insightful perspective on the Olympics and the country hosting them, courtesy of one of my favorite writers, George Will (in a mostly unrelated piece on the respective responses of the two presidential candidates to the crisis in Georgia). If you watched the opening ceremony, you know what he's talking about:

"For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything."

Recess

Well, we here in Congress are officially on a five-week vacation as of 11:23AM this morning, despite the myriad issues that have yet to be resolved, and only having passed one appropriations bill (even though that's the only job expressly dictated to Congress by the Constitution).

So in the spirit of the frustration that accompanies most of the Members heading home today and the staff left behind, here is a great WSJ op-ed to help you try to understand the collective minds of the Democratic "leadership," and reassure you that yes, things really are that bad in Washington right now.

Along those lines, we figured out the real reason we're not stying in town to vote on an energy bill: it would conflict with Ms. Pelosi's much-anticipated book tour (note heavy sarcasm).

Pelosi's Energy Stonewall
Wall Street Journal Editorial
August 1, 2008

Hell -- otherwise known as Congress -- has officially frozen over. For the first time since the 1950s, Members will skip town today for the August recess without either chamber having passed a single appropriations bill. Then again, Democrats appear ready to sacrifice their whole agenda, even spending, rather than allow new domestic energy production.

Or even a mere debate about energy. The Democratic leadership is stonewalling any measure that might possibly relax the Congressional ban on offshore drilling. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid know that they would lose if a vote ever came to the floor, and they're desperate to suppress an insurrection among those Democrats who are pragmatic about one of the top economic issues.
Behind this whatever-it-takes obstructionism is an ideological commitment to high energy prices. The rulers of the Democratic Party want prices to keep rising.

A good gauge of the radicalism of their energy blockade is the lowest common denominator of this energy fight: The effort to blame "speculators" for $4 gas was promoted by both Barack Obama and John McCain, as well as nearly everybody else in Washington. Sure enough, the House voted 276-151 on Wednesday for a bill that would have driven oil futures trading overseas.

But the legislation actually failed to become law -- by design. It needed a two-thirds majority because Speaker Pelosi suspended the rules to prevent Republicans from offering amendments, drilling among them. Ms. Pelosi had decreed that she would not permit a roll-call vote under any circumstances, even if it stopped her own goal of wrecking the U.S. futures market.

Meanwhile, the Senate is locked down over its own antispeculation bill. Majority Leader Reid briefly agreed to allow four amendments on GOP policy alternatives, but he withdrew the offer after he was subjected to the fury of the environmental lobby and Ms. Pelosi. To prevent a vote on offshore drilling this week, Senate Democrats also let fail a bill providing home heating assistance for the poor. Same thing for tax subsidies for wind and solar energy.

Other liberal inspirations, including suing OPEC and a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, also ended up in the Congressional dumpster. And of course Democrats long ago shut down the normal budget process in both the Senate and the House to avoid any vote.

Normally, the spending hiatus would be a useful byproduct of Congressional bickering. But in this case the shutdown is malign neglect. Surging energy prices act like a huge tax increase on the economy, since energy demand is relatively fixed over the short term. The price spike is imposing genuine hardships on middle-income and working-class voters across the country.

The Democratic leadership isn't oblivious to this man-at-the-pump reality. But Al Gore's vision of the apocalyptic tides of climate change perfectly expresses their mentality: Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid see soaring prices as a public good -- the mechanism that will force energy enlightenment on the U.S. If anything, they think the price of gas is too low. As recently as June, the Senate debated a multitrillion-dollar carbon tax-and-regulation scheme that was designed to boost energy costs. A new version will be a priority in the next Administration.

If nothing else, this summer's oil drilling stonewall is giving voters an insight into this ideology, which recoils at any oil, natural gas or coal production -- oh, and nuclear besides. That puts 93% of all U.S. energy off limits for expansion. Back in the real world, and barring a cold fusion or other miracle, the U.S. will remain dependent on fossil fuels for decades. A fresh round of domestic oil-and-gas exploration would ease the long-term pressures that supply and demand are exerting on prices, plus bolster energy security.

And those not bound by anticarbon theology are coming around. Broad margins of the American public -- now even a slim majority of Californians -- favor increasing domestic production. Many Congressional Democrats are working below the radar to craft a compromise that couples drilling with conservation and programs to prop up renewable alternatives.

But the leadership won't bend even a bit, and so Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid have spent the summer using every parliamentary deception to evade debating the issue that the American public cares most about. Short of cutting off the air conditioning on Capitol Hill, Democrats won't get the message until voters make them -- perhaps in November.