EDITOR’S NOTE: Our original Half True rating was based on an interpretation that Obama was crediting his policies for the jobs increase. But we’ve concluded that he was not making that linkage as strongly as we initially believed and have decided to change the ruling to Mostly True.

That said, the rest of my post is still mostly true.
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Jared Bernstein expresses his disappointment with Politifact’s lame reasoning for giving President Obama a “half-true” rating on his statements that “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs.”, and “Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.”

Mr. Bernstein says:

This is not half true or two-thirds true. It is just true.

So why, I ask you, why do they go where they go? Because of this:

In his remarks, Obama described the damage to the economy, including losing millions of jobs “before our policies were in full effect.” Then he described [sic!] the subsequent job increases, essentially taking credit for the job growth. But labor economists tell us that no mayor or governor or president deserves all the claim or all the credit for changes in employment.

Really? That’s it? That makes the fact not a fact? I’ve seen some very useful work by these folks, but between this and this, Politifact just can’t be trusted. Full stop.

Politifact seems to use “half-true” most of the times a politician makes claims about jobs, based on that advise from their “labor economists”. That’s a pretty weak policy, but at least it’s fair. Politifact would be even more fair if they simply used “half true” for everything.

When Romney said “More Americans have lost their jobs under Barack Obama than any president in modern history.”, they rated it as mostly false. It should have been pants on fire. Romney compared Obama’s unfinished term against previous presidents’ final tallies. If you use a fair measurement, by their own words:

So by this measurement, Obama doesn’t have a net loss of jobs at all — in fact, the only president who does is George W. Bush.

Additionally, Romney counts jobs losses that Obama can’t be responsible for, in the beginning of his term before his policies took effect. I don’t think “mostly false” covers it.

But Politifact has policy of aiming for the middle whenever a politician makes a claim about jobs.

So what good are they?

The script presents a list box with [type command] as the first choice and your command history as all the other choices, with the most recent on top (your command history is blank the first time).

Using Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity, after creating your script with the listing below, save it in an appropriate location and make it executable.

Then choose system settings > keyboard > shortcuts > custom shortcuts, as detailed here: Click the gear in the upper right corner of your screen and choose System Settings. From there, find the keyboard widget (not the keyboard layout widget), choose the shortcuts tab, and click custom shortcuts.

Click the + sign at the bottom, and add the path name of the script file. Then click on the shortcut field (it probably says “Disabled”) and click again if necessary until it says “New shortcut”. Then press the keystroke that you want to assign. You probably want alt+f2.

You may have to disable alt+f2 elsewhere to avoid conflicts, but I didn’t disable it for the Unity plugin in CCSM and I’m not having any problems.

Below is the script.

#!/bin/bash

#Filename: launch (or whatever you want to name it)

#Command Launcher
#Brings up a dialog box from which you can choose a command from your history
#Also has a choice to type in a command

#Works in Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity
#Requires zenity

#Make this file executable.
#You can create a hotkey in the "Command" section in CCSM

#You can directly edit this history file
HISTFILE=~/.launchhistory
TEMPFILE=~/.launchtemp

# Setting the field separator to be newline, to preserve whitespace
OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'

# Populating the list box with commands
# The first command to appear in the least box is [type command], which brings up a text box
echo "[type command]" > $TEMPFILE

# The remaining commands in the list box come from the history file
for hist in `cat $HISTFILE`; do {
echo "$hist" >> $TEMPFILE ;
} ; done

# Setting the field separator back to normal, to run the command properly
IFS=$OLDIFS

#calling the zenity list box to bring up a choice of commmands
runthis=`cat $TEMPFILE | zenity --list --column='choose' `

#If user chose [type command], bringing up the zenity text box
if [ "$runthis" == "[type command]" ]; then {
runthis=`zenity --entry --text="run"`
} fi

#Running the command, and if successful adding the command to the history file
$runthis && {

# Setting the field separator to be newline, to preserve whitespace
OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'

#Putting the new command at the top of the tempfile
echo "$runthis" > $TEMPFILE

#Putting the old commands from the history file into the tempfile
for hist in `cat $HISTFILE`; do {
#But not repeating the newest command
if [ "$runthis" != "$hist" ]; then {
echo "$hist" >> $TEMPFILE;
}
fi
} ; done
#Saving the tempfile as the history file
cat $TEMPFILE > $HISTFILE

#Setting the field separator back to normal before exiting
IFS=$OLDIFS
} ;

I had to look up that statistic and indeed it’s true, at least according to icasualties.org. This statistic is featured prominently on anti-war sites as well as right wing blogs such as The Blaze, where possibly retarded members of that blog’s readership theorize that the increase in casualties is due to Obama’s allegiance to Islamic forces.

But focusing on the death toll in Afghanistan misses the withdrawal from Iraq. These numbers are based on the tables in icasualties’s home page:

Since Obama took office, the U.S. casualty rate dropped significantly due to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, even as the toll increased in Afghanistan as Obama stepped up operations there.

To ignore the Iraq withdrawal in an effort to suggest that twice as many Americans are dying under Obama’s leadership is miserably dishonest. To speculate that it’s because Obama is a Muslim is stupid.

But only about half of those job losses — or 4.3 million — happened under his watch.

The statement is true enough, but it should come with an explanation that most of that “half” was lost while the economy was still in the same free-fall it was in at the end of the Bush years, and the jobs loss started to turn around when Obama’s plans had a chance to take effect.

It reminds me something Al Franken wrote in Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, that it was Clinton’s military who won in Afghanistan even though Bush was president at the time. That’s because none of Bush’s military policies were in place by then. Similarly, a statement which suggests Obama’s responsible for the millions of jobs lost before his economic policies were in place is misleading.

(Ezra Klien via Keven Drum )

Because a recovery is likely within five years, whichever party wins the White House in 2012 is likely to get the credit, and so too will its policy agenda. You can see how this will work. If Romney wins the presidency and the economy begins to rebound, Republicans will argue, and America’s experience will seem to show, that they were right all along: The stimulus was useless and the regulatory uncertainty the Obama administration created with its health-care plan and its talk of cap-and-trade and all the rest kept businesses from investing.

I believe that the economy will recover. I believe that we would have recovered eventually no matter what fiscal policies we pursued, but the President’s policies have kept us from crashing much harder than we already have. It would be a shame if credit for the recovery goes to people who tell us that the thing to do during an economic crisis is slash taxes for the wealthy and cut services for the poor.

But even though the violence-prone rivalry between these two schools is newsworthy, I don’t think this story would be in the most popular list if it wasn’t for the misleading “War-on-Christians” slant that the headline implies. The fight didn’t break out because of an act of Christianity. It was triggered by a display of celebration. Excessive celebration is against the rules in most leagues today.

I can’t get into the head of Tim Tebow, who might be genuine is his need to pray openly in front of an audience of billions, in defiance of Mathew 6:6, but I think for most young athletes, Tebowing is the new ass wiggling. Try to stop it though, and you’ll be up against a national army of Christians with a persecution complex.

The story of the fight between Wando and West Ashley students is a story about sports related violence and violence in high schools, which are important topics. But a story about a basketball fight that didn’t result in any serious injuries, involving two schools with a history of fighting, doesn’t rake in the advertising dollars as well as a headline about Christians getting beaten up for praying.

Take a look at these two charts:

Series Id: LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over

Series Id: LNS12000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Employment Level
Labor force status: Employed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over

Both are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One was pointed to in a Hot Air article to suggest that Obama’s policies, specifically health care reform, destroyed jobs (The article is titled “ObamaCare, the Job Destroyer”). The other is similar to a chart in Paul Krugman’s blog demonstrating that Obama has created jobs.

How can two charts about employment data look so different? Because only the second chart, “Employment Level”, shows whether jobs have been created or destroyed after the President’s fiscal policies took effect.

The other chart represents a problem and is concerning, but it does not indicate what Hot Air wants you to believe and does not undermine the fact that after the stimulus passed, the job decline turned around and our economy created over two million new jobs.

What the first chart, titled “Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate”, shows is the percentage of U.S. population who are either employed or looking for work. Employed or looking for work means you’re part of the labor force. How does a person fail to be counted as employed and also fail to be counted as looking for work? Certainly, when someone gets fed up after weeks of not finding a job and becomes discouraged, that person drops out of the labor force. Like I said, it’s concerning. But also people who stay in school rather than finding a job, stay at home parents, and retirees are not in the labor force.

The baby boomers are retiring, and that’s having a real effect on labor force participation, as are discouraged workers.

To get a feel for the meaning of employment level vs labor participation, and whether a drop in labor force participation makes Obama a “job destroyer”, imagine a group of 10 people. 8 are working, and 2 are looking for jobs. One new job appears and one of the job-seekers snatches it up. The other gets discouraged and stops looking. Has employment improved or have jobs been destroyed?

When someone says that Obama is a Job Destroyer, they are mistaken or lying. And you cannot trust any news source or presidential candidate that promotes such a fallacy.

Update: I had the first chart labeled incorrectly, and incorrectly referred to the second chart in the text when I was talking about the first chart. I had mislabeled it “(Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level” instead of “Civilian labor force participation rate”

In the video, Matt describes Dakota, Marin, and Simon, a group of young, mindless, consumers, as they plan for a day of protesting while purchasing and using products sold by big corporations. Matt says that they are hypocrites for being compulsive consumers while protesting the evils of “corporate greed” and asks, “If you really wanted to change the system, wouldn’t you want to boycott these evil corporations?”

Well, no. Generally, what the occupiers hoped to accomplish was financial regulations to prevent the kind of investments which create great risk to people not making those investments. The target of the protest were primarily financial institutions, hence “Occupy Wall Street”. Since most of companies that Matt lists in his video aren’t financial institutions, the Occupy movement, though diverse, wasn’t generally targeting those corporations. As it turns out, many of the protesters did put their money where their mouths where, and closed accounts at large financial banks and moved them to local banks and credit unions. But even if they were protesting Verizon, Dell, and Cisco, boycotting isn’t the only way to voice displeasure and sometimes isn’t event he best. A massive boycott of dozens of major corporations would cause an even greater financial crisis than the one we’re recovering from now. That would be hypocritical.

Thus, Matt uses the activities of his three characters (I don’t know if he completely made them up ) to describe the entire movement as a bunch of “Self righteous, morally indignant hypocrites”, even though their activities, real or not, don’t demonstrate hypocrisy (thoughtlessness and consumerism, perhaps).

Towards the end of the video, Matt starts to sound a little bit like a liberal. He chastises his three characters for not giving money to homeless people, then he talks about Chinese slave laborers and Vietnamese children who make all the products that we mindlessly purchase. He actually says, “It’s your consumerism that’s driving the social inequality that you’re out protesting”.

So true. Interesting that the occupy movement was started by an anti-consumerist organization called
Adbusters (according to Wikipedia). Perhaps Matt and the occupiers have more in common than he realizes.

Matt doesn’t seem like a really bad guy, and I won’t chastise him for not telling us if Dakota, Marin, and Simon are real people, amalgams of stories he’s heard or read about, or just three dopes he dreamed up. He wasn’t expecting his little video to go viral.

The problem isn’t Matt, so much, as all the people who took this little story seriously, despite all of its irrelevancy, and hailed it as proof that the occupiers were all just a bunch of hypocrites.