Today's Blast From thePast

Almost Perfect, But Wait .... Look.  What's the one thing missing that keeps it just short of perfection?  (Roll Over) As seen

The Truth à La Carte Infestation

The Truth à La Carte Infestation Lou Jacobson (.@loujacobson) and .@PolitiFact descend into self-parody One of the many chancres on the genitalia of American journalism is the “fact check” scam. This is where reporters, who generally aren’t terribly well educated about anything, take it upon themselves to act as a truth squad to uncover falsehoods by political figures. Virtually without fail, even the simplest statements by Republicans are false.  Back in 2012, I grew sofrustrated with the casual dishonesty of the Washington Post’s “fact checker”, Glenn Kessler, that I threatened, quite seriously, to ban anyone who quoted any of the media fact checkers in a comment: The Pinocchio Test We cannot fault the RNC’s math, as the numbers add up. But at this point this figure doesn’t mean very much. It may simply a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with “Obama’s job market.” If trends hold up over the next few months, then the RNC might have a better case. But at this point we will give this statistic our rarely used label: TRUE BUT FALSE But Kessler is not the worst. That title goes to the bunch of stooges and ignoramuses who populate the staff of PolitiFact.com, a spawn of the Tampa Bay Times. Try these for examples. PolitiFact rated a Rick Perry claim false after proving it was, in fact, true.  [Etc ..] Ca. 1998;  In a post on Free Republic, about hilarious television bloopers, I offered the Newlywed Game answer [That would be in the butt, Bob] a women gave to Bob Eubank's question "where is the weirdest place she'd ever made whoopee? "  A reader commented that Snopes said this never happened.  I wrote Snopes,  saying that I had actually watched the episode, and could verify that it was true.  Snopes actually e-mailed me back, saying that, sorry, it was urban legend. They had called me, at best, a 'teller of tales; at worst a liar.  So, I began monitoring Snopes, and correcting errors with sourced rebuttals.  I finally received a I have recently discovered that Snopes.com is owned by a flaming California liberals [David and Barbara Mikkelson who are]  an the tank for Obama. There are many things they have listed on their site as a hoax and yet you can go to You tube yourself and find the video of Obama actually saying these things. So you see, you cannot and should not trust Snopes.com, ever for anything that remotely resembles truth! I don’t even trust them to tell me if email chains are hoaxes anymore.  Alamo City Pundidt- 2010 scathing e-mail from the Snopes Hdqrs (I had no idea that it was run out of someone's kitchen) telling me to fuck off.  Later on, after I found a source for "in the butt," I sent it.  Snopes didn't correct it until much later, and I received no apology.  It dawned on me that this preeminent fact checker had a public responsibility to be accurate.  I was offended.  Little did I imagine. Sometime later the fact-check dam burst when Leftist political sites, most notably the George Soros's funded Moveon.Org, began gaming Google by internally  tagging articles with things like "George Bush used Heroin" (for example).  Every time the Google bot scanned them, that invisible tag was picked up and before you know it, anyone searching, say,  "Republicans; Drugs" would find George Bush leading the list.  This is very much a simplified example, but you get the drift.  Eventually Google caught on, and threatened to ban sites who used that tactic, but the horse was out of the barn, and the "Moveons" were able to update their methodology and stay ahead of the game.. We have by now entered the stage where truth is what you want it to be.  So, e.g., when I see someone I know cite something on, say Facebook, that's inaccurate, any attempt to refute it will get me banned.  So, that's  where we are. How do you fix that?  I have no idea.  Do you?