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Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party's Woman in Washington...

She isn't lying. She really believes this crap. Dim-witted and batcrapcrazy, but not neccessarily a liar.
 
• "President Obama's bill won't bring down the costs (of health care) for average Americans -- or really for very few Americans, if any." According to the Congressional Budget Office, Congress' official, non-partisan scorekeeper, 60 percent of Americans in the private insurance market would see their premiums fall. Taking into account the subsidies, a full 70 percent would see their premiums fall. And almost 94 percent would see their premiums either fall or stay the same. We found her claim False.
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A disagreement is not a "false". Someone needs to edjumicate them about that.

Bodies can pile up based on government's "truth" behind planned programs.



• Says the Constitution only requires her to tell the census "how many people are in our home." One expert told us that Bachmann's claims that the Constitution only requires people to say how many people live in their household is "completely baseless." We found Bachmann not only wrong but engaging in fearmongering that encouraged people to break the law. We rated her comment Pants on Fire.
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As an aside, I often wondered this myself. Has anybody ever challenged it in court? The purpose of the census was to apportion congresscritters amongst the several states. I don't see anything in there about forcing you to tell them your race, gender, and so on.
 
Beerina said:
As an aside, I often wondered this myself. Has anybody ever challenged it in court? The purpose of the census was to apportion congresscritters amongst the several states. I don't see anything in there about forcing you to tell them your race, gender, and so on.
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The unammended Constitutionrequires it in that they originally needed to know how many Indians and slaves there were in a state to allocate congressional seats.
 
Beerina said:
A disagreement is not a "false". Someone needs to edjumicate them about that.

Bodies can pile up based on government's "truth" behind planned programs.
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If she's going to posit an alternate conclusion based on the numbers the CBO used, or some other set of figures, she's welcome to do so. She hasn't. At least not yet.

Simply stating something without numbers to back it up is, in addition to being typical of Republican politicos in recent years, does not make for a particularly compelling argument.
 
leftysergeant said:
She isn't lying. She really believes this crap. Dim-witted and batcrapcrazy, but not neccessarily a liar.
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Whether she believes it or not is, frankly, irrelevant.

The point is that her record is emblematic of the sort of "Ready, Fire, Aim" style of politics that characterizes the Tea Party. A lot of sound and fury, a lot of misdirected anger, not many facts [or brains].
 
The Charnel Expanse said:
... is apparently physically incapable of telling the truth

http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/sep/21/bachmann-and-truth-o-meter-collected-works/

This is the woman who founded the 'Congressional Tea Party Caucus'.

I don't know about y'all, but to me it does not speak well of a political movement when the person anointed as its champion in the halls of Congress is, by all appearances, a pathological liar.
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I skimmed the list and for the very first thing I found (about social security) Bachmann happened to be right and Politifact happened to be wrong.

We concluded that Social Security isn"t yet out of money, nor is it borrowing from the general treasury, as Bachmann said. According to the latest projections, the money won"t run dry until 2037. We rated her statement False.
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This is an entirely different thread all on its own, but the "money won't run dry" only if you pretend that the Social Security Trust Fund actually contains funds (it does not*) and ignore the fact that Social Security has recently had multiple months in which it has had to pay out more in benefits than it recieved in taxes.

I didn't read the rest of the list, partially because just the other day I read an article detailing just how badly Politifact was willing to twist to facts in support of an agenda:

Just a reminder: ‘Politifact’ is often more politics than facts
You may have run across Politifact before. It’s a feature of the St. Petersburg Times that purports to fact check political statements, rating them “true” or “false.” In 2009, Politifact won a Pulitzer prize, so people put a lot of a faith and credibility in what they say. However, rather than objectively weighing the facts, Politifact is hardly above employing highly-politicized context to render judgment. The latest example of this is their recent item on Rand Paul.

Here’s what Rand Paul said: “The average federal employee makes $120,000 a year. The average private employee makes $60,000 a year.”

Here are the facts: “Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.”

Here’s how Politifact rated Rand Paul’s statement: “False.”

Come again? The only way that Politifact can reach this conclusion is through a great deal of sophistry, which they lard on with abandon:
Since most people usually think about how much they, their spouses and their colleagues get paid in salary alone — not salary plus benefits — we think most people hearing this statement would assume that Paul means that the average federal employee gets paid a salary of $120,000. That’s simply not true.
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So what they’re saying is not that what Paul said was literally false, but that according to how they think people will understand what he said, it’s not true.
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It purports to be a "fact check" feature. It is not. It might very well be good political commentary (I don't know, I don't read it), but it is not anything even approaching an unbiased seeker of the truth pronouncing fairly on the facts.

* The Social Security Trust Fund does not hold dollars because those Social Security tax revenues are 'borrowed' by the government to spend along with general funds, with the dollars borrowed being replaced with T bills. T bills have value to you, and to me, but they have no value to the issuer, which in the case of a T bill, is the government. You can try a simple experiment: write and sign an IOU to yourself for $50,000,000. Are you now any richer?

Only the government is allowed to count the same assets multiple times (and counts intragovernmental debt payment as revenue), any accountant who used the accounting methods that the government uses would be thrown in jail.
 
MikeMangum said:
I didn't read the rest of the list, partially because just the other day I read an article detailing just how badly Politifact was willing to twist to facts in support of an agenda:

Just a reminder: ‘Politifact’ is often more politics than facts


It purports to be a "fact check" feature. It is not. It might very well be good political commentary (I don't know, I don't read it), but it is not anything even approaching an unbiased seeker of the truth pronouncing fairly on the facts.
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Actually, it's your source that is engaging in sophistry this time. The central point of the Politifact article on Rand Paul's claim is that the statement "X makes Y a year" is misleading. How many individuals read the $120,000 number and then said, "Wow! Really? And to think they get all of those benefits too!" Granted, this is a time I thought they should have instead rated Paul's statement as "barely true", but I'm more than willing to chalk that up to a poor judgment call. As far as Politifact playing partisan games, here's another article from Politifact in which they defend a statement from Paul as true.

I have to question what political game Politifact is supposedly playing here. They come down on total compensation for federal employees in the article several times, so they don't seem to be going out of their way to defend it. And I really doubt they were being so childish as giving Paul a false for the sole purpose of hurting Paul, especially when they've agreed with him as well. And even if I accepted your criticism as valid (weak-sauce at best, imo), it certainly doesn't support your claim that your article demonstrates "just how badly Politifact was willing to twist to facts in support of an agenda" or "...purports to be a "fact check" feature. It is not. It might very well be good political commentary (I don't know, I don't read it), but it is not anything even approaching an unbiased seeker of the truth pronouncing fairly on the facts" especially when you haven't yet posted to anything that is an outright lie.
 
Kthulhut Fhtagn said:
The central point of the Politifact article on Rand Paul's claim is that the statement "X makes Y a year" is misleading.
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So, it's true, but misleading? If they were actually providing an unbiased fact checking service, they would say something to the effect of: 'partially true - depending on whether total compensation or pure salary is considered' and then explain. If they really were an unbiased fact checking service, their opinions on governmental employee compensation would be irrelevant to their answer of whether or not Rand Paul spoke the truth.

Did Michelle Bachmann lie when she said that Social Security has already had to dip into general funds to pay benefits as Politifact claims? HINT: the US Treasury has had to borrow money to pay Social Security benefits in 16 of the last 25 months.

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/ProgData/tsOps.html
 
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MikeMangum said:
Did Michelle Bachmann lie when she said that Social Security has already had to dip into general funds to pay benefits as Politifact claims? HINT: the US Treasury has had to borrow money to pay Social Security benefits in 16 of the last 25 months.

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/ProgData/tsOps.html
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Um, isn't this a bit misleading? I mean, the part that I bolded. It makes it sound that SS is barely holding on. When I clicked your link to look at the data I found that had to borrow relatively small amounts in comparison to the other months where it had a revenue gain that dwarfed the small amount of borrowing.
 
MikeMangum said:
This is an entirely different thread all on its own, but the "money won't run dry" only if you pretend that the Social Security Trust Fund actually contains funds (it does not*)

* The Social Security Trust Fund does not hold dollars because those Social Security tax revenues are 'borrowed' by the government to spend along with general funds, with the dollars borrowed being replaced with T bills. T bills have value to you, and to me, but they have no value to the issuer, which in the case of a T bill, is the government. You can try a simple experiment: write and sign an IOU to yourself for $50,000,000. Are you now any richer?
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I wonder how China and US retirees view their T-bills. You had better go tell them that their value is zero. Please explain the difference in a T-Bill issued to the government versus a T-Bill issued to me. Both are accounted for in the budgets. Both are accounted for in interest payments. Please enlighten me how the T-Bill in the US vault is worthless.
 
But back to Bachmann, she claimed that SS is out of money. That it is borrowing from the general treasury.

REALITY: Overall for 2010 SS is loaning money to the general treasury. Is it better to look at the whole year or isolated data points (which are tiny negatives compared to the large positives) like Bachmann is doing? Which tells us more?

She leaves an impression of SS that is bankrupt. Sorry, that is just not true.
 
MikeMangum said:
So, it's true, but misleading? If they were actually providing an unbiased fact checking service, they would say something to the effect of: 'partially true - depending on whether total compensation or pure salary is considered' and then explain.
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You missed the part where I said "barely true" didn't you? There is such a thing as a half-truth and less than that afterall. I already said that I'm more than willing to chalk this one example up to a poor judgment call. And I'm unwilling to conclude that Politifact is an unreliable fact-checker on the basis of one iffy judgment call.

MikeMangum said:
If they really were an unbiased fact checking service, their opinions on governmental employee compensation would be irrelevant to their answer of whether or not Rand Paul spoke the truth.
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So, the writer of the article should be expected to withhold his/her opinion on a complicated issue because...?

MikeMangum said:
Did Michelle Bachmann lie when she said that Social Security has already had to dip into general funds to pay benefits as Politifact claims? HINT: the US Treasury has had to borrow money to pay Social Security benefits in 16 of the last 25 months.

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/ProgData/tsOps.html
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Did you not read the statement being addressed?

Michele Bachman said:
Social Security, like I told you, is out of money. This year it is borrowing from the general treasury.”
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As Lurker pointed out, Bachman is leaving the impression that Social Security is kaput. The numbers that you provide show that they are, indeed, borrowing. However, this is such a minuscule amount that we shouldn't even be concerned with it. Especially when the numbers you provided show that total assets have grown since January 2009. This hardly backs up Bachman's claim that Social Security is "out of money".
 
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Lurker said:
Um, isn't this a bit misleading? I mean, the part that I bolded. It makes it sound that SS is barely holding on. When I clicked your link to look at the data I found that had to borrow relatively small amounts in comparison to the other months where it had a revenue gain that dwarfed the small amount of borrowing.
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That would be a valid point if excess SSI revenues were actually being saved. They are not. They are spent immediately on general fund spending.
 
Lurker said:
I wonder how China and US retirees view their T-bills. You had better go tell them that their value is zero. Please explain the difference in a T-Bill issued to the government versus a T-Bill issued to me. Both are accounted for in the budgets. Both are accounted for in interest payments. Please enlighten me how the T-Bill in the US vault is worthless.
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A T bill (which is really no different than an IOU) has value to anyone other than the issuer. Notice in my original statement the italics. If I write you an IOU for $50, that IOU is an asset worth roughly $50 to you, but for me it is a liability of $50. If I write myself an IOU for $50, it is worth nothing.
 
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