Next up, on rare poll anomalies! Our latest polls--results you'll NEVER see anywhere else, in the history of polling!

***Who has the best manners?***
Charles Manson: 78%
Mike Ditka: 20%
Emily Post: 2%

***Most Admired US Scientist***
Super Grover: 44%
Ryan Gosling: 21%
The drummer from Depeche Mode: 20%
Kathie Lee Gifford: 14%
Neil Degrasse Tyson: 1%

better fact check the fact checkers.

Literally, "who guards the guards?" or as it's more frequently cited (and incorrectly translated) "Who watches the watchmen?"

Great, we have someone ranking the truthfulness of the candidates...but that ranker of truthfulness has their own inherent and inescapable biases. So do I, so do you, and so does JaneyVee (the OP above)...everybody does. Bias is inescapable in assessment of "truths" subjective upon worldview. There are very few objective factual truths in the world...virtually none of them reside in the arena of politics.

Looking at many of the truths they've rated as "true" for Clinton, they tend to be no more-or-less conditionally-true that those rated "mostly true" for Sanders...several of Sanders "mostly-true" statements are more objectively true than Clinton's "true" statements. Bias is skewing results because the arbiter is permitted to self-assess degrees of truthfulness. It's only when we look at the GOP candidates that we see anybody stating unconditional lies.

This would be more useful or functional as a metric assigned in imposed dichotomy...assign things as {true, false, or undetermined} and you'd get a purer and more-useful metric, but one that is flawed as it rests on the biases of the author.

And during a presidential campaign that bias is magnified times 10!

Well, it's got to be true!

It means it fits my perception of what we've been seeing in the debates. Both candidates are basically factual, but I'm not surprised that Hillary gets a higher "true" score compared to Bernie's high "mostly true," because Hillary is in much greater command of details over a broad range of issues than Bernie is.

Perceptions are often wrong. As I said, I'll wait for the proof.

Nobody gives more verbose answers than Hillary so perhaps she can be considered most accurate since each answer seems to please as many people as she can muster. I'm laughing. Not sure I trust this but then Clinton supporters will all think I'm just biased so be it.

I think I'm analytical. Now, if they would show the facts they checked, I'd be interested in seeing them. I've a friend who teaches students how to critically analyze documentaries which most people take as fact and he cautioned me about taking at face value such things as fact checkers, polls, and points-of-view in documentaries. Everything can be nuanced. So, give me more.

Also, is a higher rating on MOSTLY TRUE better than a high rating on TRUE? How many facts were checked? As a Bernie supporter who has seen and heard Bernie be very carefully about his answers and facts, I'll wait for the answers to my questions above.

It's not the Republicans, it's not the Liberty Union/Independent/Democrat/Independent, but the Democratic candidate.

count as dishonesty or just typical politician stuff like Cruz promising to abolish the IRS?

... enough

To us she's a liar and a cheater. Sniper Fire anyone? Lying for no reason except to boost oneself. Then getting caught, and we're not supposed to bring it up.

for the people who are now being murdered in Honduras by a right-wing coup government whom she helped to legitimize.

Nor for me. I prefer a US foreign policy that doesn't splash blood upon my hands.



http://www.salon.com/2016/03/18/hillary_must_answer_for_honduras_partner/

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35818-why-is-hillary-ok-with-honduran-death-squads

http://www.workers.org/articles/2016/03/19/hillary-clinton-has-hondurans-blood-on-her-hands/

Here are some of the items that they used to give Bernie "false"

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/bernie-s/statements/byruling/false/

"When you're white ... you don't know what it's like to be poor."

"Not one Republican has the guts to recognize that climate change is real."

Neither of those are "false" statements.

They take the newspaper ad controversy and split it into 2.

"Almost all of the polls that have come out suggest that I am a much stronger candidate against the Republicans than is Hillary Clinton." - This one actually proved to be true.



However, when you look at Clinton's false statements, they actually have some substance to them.


"The Clean Power Plan is something that Sen. Sanders has said he would delay implementing." A lie

"We now have more jobs in solar than we do in oil." Simply not true. Maybe she meant coal???

"I am the only candidate on either side who has laid out a specific plan about what I would do to defeat ISIS." - Que???

on what planet are there no poor whites? The majority of people who are on welfare are white, the majority of people on food stamps are white. Appalacia is full of poor whites. The majority of white may have no idea what it is like to be poor but that isn't what Sanders said.

And one in which ANYONE who heard it live knew exactly what was meant.

That statement, would be, at best considered a gaffe, but to consider it a lie you would have to believe that Sanders was ACTUALLY trying to convince people that there were no poor white people, which is nonsensical.

However, you can draw a very sharp distinction between the poor white experience and the poor black experience, which is what he was doing.

Calling this line a lie is the same as calling Chelsea's Clinton statement calling Bernie "President Sanders" a lie.

Bernie really does want a violent Socialist Revolution and bring Communist repression to the United States.

Dang Clinton is so frickin honest.

and I will PayPal you $1000.

google is my friend if it works, ha ha

I can't recall where in the debste it occurred, but I was about to throw my shoe at the television when I heard it.

Since I'm lying on the couch, I'm too lazy to seek out the link, so you only owe me $500 if you do the work.

As you will inevitably knitpick it to say "That's not what she REALLY said" I won't bother to go through that exercise.

However I will provide you with my original suggestion...Look up a transcript of the Florida debate. You find a dandy litttle smear on the subject.

everything I read on the Internet.

And it's hilarious.

Black is white, red is blue, up is down ... wet is dry.

Girl, listen to me: STAND-UP.

ETA: I mean as in "Stand-up Comedy".

You should be doing it.

I am puzzled as to what Bernie has said that is close to false and I would be interested in who owns the Tampa Bay Times.

Oh and only 15% of what Bernie says is true....I don't believe that at all and I have been listening to him for years.

In the end it comes down to this...do you want a Third Way president or a real progressive?

Lots of winners with Third Way but lots more losers.

Politifact's findings have been dubunked and ridiculed over and over again.

All you have to do is pay attention to what Hillary says to know this is far from accurate.

.

Eye-crossingly snickerful. Chokingly chortle-licious.

Not to mention idiotic on an industrial-strength scale.

Politifact is well respected. This is valuable information.

I've never been able to see past the flaws in their methodology resultant from their refusal to use imposed-dichotomy as a decisioning tool and to identify better ways to screen for arbiter-bias.

The Backfire Effect is one of the most infuriating new developments in politics and one of the major differences between liberal and conservative voters.

Simply put, conservatives are too stupid to evaluate between truth and falsehood. They rely upon the "authority" of the speaker and if a speaker they trust lies, and that lie is refuted by a liberal, they automatically gravitate toward the lie because they are not capable of evaluating the truth and instead default to the (totally untrustworthy) authority they trust.

This is why Republican candidates at the debates have adamantly stood by their lies even when stone-cold busted by facts and figures. By sticking to their guns when refuted with actual facts they are actually making stupid Republicans believe the lie they told.

Journalists help the Backfire Effect along quite a lot by 1) pretending it doesn't exist, and 2) pretending it works equally among all people. It does not. Some of all people default to the first thing they learned, true or not, but only conservatives become more likely to believe the lie when it is refuted.

You can see the Backfire Effect at work in the statistics above. Democratic candidates, playing to their own audience, have no incentive to lie and can suffer greatly for being deceptive (see Gary Hart, John Edwards). Conversely, Republican candidates are rewarded for lying, and you can see it in the stratification of the candidates from most dishonest (Trump) at the top to least dishonest at the bottom (Kasich).

Depending on who wins which nomination, some candidates may have an incentive to adjust their delivery by lying more or less, but at this point neither can do much adjusting. Trump must try his hand at telling the truth but his prior statements will always be used against him. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, would benefit from not refuting false statements by Trump, which is its own form of dishonesty.

Thus we are all the victims of the use of fear and dishonesty in political statements. Nobody wins, except the most evil ones who can successfully wiggle like a catfish in the hippo-poop-mud of a drought-stricken African pond. Great.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021469106
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11109-010-9112-2
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_backfire_effect.php?page=all

FIFY

Democrats shouldn't fall for this stuff.

how some people consider HC dishonest (and they usually don't specifically state what she supposedly lied about), but people like "Caterpillar Head" Trump are considered straight talkers and "tell it like it is". I guess in order for a candidate to be considered trustworthy, s/he has to shout, be angry all the time, and invent CTs.

And yet another foul shot from across the room, and bang! into the Trash Can.

And 2, 3, 5, 6, & 7. LOL!

"Now we see the violence inherent in the system... "

I think I made a very strong argument in my two posts in this thread about why I reject the truth of this argument.

I'd feel the same way about it if they'd declared Sanders more-truthful...since neither knowingly tells outright lies, the determination of truthfulness between them comes down to the biases of the arbiter as to what is true or mostly-true...a lot of the things determined as one or the other for both of them could be easily argued to to determined the other way.

The methodology is only really useful when determining honesty on an imposed dichotomy (i.e. everything has to be declared to be true or false; else, indeterminate)...which in-turn is only really determinable when one or both parties tells outright lies.

We can easily declare them both more-honest than the GOP candidates; all of whom hold only the most tenuous connection to honesty...beyond that, bias and noise.

This isn't new...I've always had issues with Politifact's methodology.

Politifact does not rate 100% of statements from candidates, nor does it take care to select a representative sample. So this comparison may or may not be accurate--there is no way to know based on politifact's information.

Politifact ratings are only meaningful individually.