I'm Rooting for Romney. Really.

It seems Mitt Romney has won the Republican primary in Michigan, defeating Rick Santorum in a close race.

As a Democrat who is going to vote for Barack Obama in the fall (a pointless action in red-state Oklahoma!), I am glad to see him win.

While I understand the Michael Moore Operation Hilarity perspective, I think having Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president keeps a lot of issues that I would consider important on the front burner.  Issues like privilege and wealth and income inequality.  With Mitt Romney as a candidate, allies of Barack Obama will be making arguments that the system that rewards the wealthy at the expense of the 99% will be perpetuated and strengthened under a Romney administration.  We will get to continue asking questions like, "why is it fair that Mitt Romney pays an effective 14% tax rate when those who make a tenth of what he makes pay almost twice what he does?" and "why was it logical for Mitt Romney to be against the GM bailouts but for the bank bailouts?"

We may also get to hear debates about policies long taken for granted, like "why should capital gains be taxed lower than wages; has this economic theory been proven?" and "what is the cost/benefit of a government's increasing regulation in terms of the overall welfare of its citizens?"

This is in addition to the fact that Mitt Romney is an unlikable candidate.  He does not inspire that warm fuzzy Reaganesque feeling in his fellow Republicans.  He inspires more of the McCain/Dole/Kerry "hold your nose and pull the lever" feeling that has lost elections in the past.  He has been saying all the right things for Republicans in this primary, but many Republicans don't believe that he means them.  He has an inauthenticity problem.  Although it's not entirely true.  I have no doubt that he really does have friends who are NASCAR team owners, and that he really does believe that "corporations are people."

And if I'm wrong and Barack Obama loses?  The consequences of a Republican victory in November are less dire with Mitt Romney than with Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul.  Romney has flipped before, and he is perceived as one who would flip again.  And even if his electorate holds him to his word in the campaign, his campaign has for the most part been perceived as more moderate than his fellow Republicans.  Did he say he'd get rid of Obamacare on day one of his presidency?  Maybe.  Do I think he's going to actually do it?  No. 

So, all in all, I'm feeling pretty good about the 2012 presidential election.  And that feeling will carry me all the way to 2016, when our nation will elect President Marco Rubio to the first of his two terms. 

Serious Journalist Quotes: February 27, 2012

NPR quote of the morning: it's a tie!

1. "Ron Paul has denied the allegation that he's having a bromance with Romney." - Sonari Glinton

I'm almost positive Ron Paul would call you a queer if you suggested he was having a "bromance" to his face.

2. "Only time will tell if 'Man or Muppet' becomes a classic." - Mandalit del Barco

Only time will tell if in 20 years we dumb down the threshhold for the word "classic" low enough to incorporate a novelty song about Muppets.

Income Tax Cuts - Mary Fallin's War on the Poor

It has been an absolutely wacky first week of the Oklahoma legislature's 2012 session. Foods containing aborted fetuses? Personhood definitions? This cake featuring Ronald Reagan's face and an extra "W"? This declaration that "any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman's vagina" would be "an action against an unborn child"? This isn't even counting the stuff going down at Night Trips' newest location, the insurance commissioner's office.

But maybe the most important news from this week was officially unveiled at Governor Mary Fallin's State of the State address. Fallin introduced a plan to reduce the Oklahoma state income tax drastically, from a current top rate of 5.25% down to a rate of 3.5% for individuals making more than $35,000 per year or couples making more than $70,000 per year. Fallin said that a family making $40,000 per year would pay 37% less in taxes in 2013. Amazing, right? So, how will we pay for it?

The official word is that the $100,000,000 revenue-deficiency in 2013 and the $300,000,000 revenue-deficiency in 2014 would be made up with the elimination of "loopholes", "credits", "carve-outs", and other words for things that unscrupulous businesses and rich people with personal accountants take advantage of. But, as it turns out, just doing the transferable tax credit stuff still means that the state is "woefully short" on making up the revenue lost. So that means eliminating a bunch of other tax credit programs that normal people use, like the personal exemption (claimed by 83% of tax payers), the earned income tax credit, the child care tax credit, a tax credit used to offset the sales tax for groceries for poor people, et cetera.

As it turns out, Mary Fallin's tax reform proposal would actually result in tax increases for the bottom 55% of income earners, according to the Oklahoma Policy Institute. Now that's broadening the base!

Other ways to pay for Fallin's tax reform proposal, according to Fallin, would be that as a result of shoveling fat stacks of Benjamins into the pockets of the Aubrie McClendons of the state, the state's economy would grow fast enough to overcome the revenue shortfall. "New jobs and increased investments in Oklahoma will lead to more revenue and increased collections in sales tax, corporate tax, excise tax, and more." Tax cuts pay for themselves, y'all. If this smells exactly like an Arthur Laffer supply-side voodoo economics argument-turd, it's because Arthur Laffer's consulting firm helped create the plan with the right-wing think tank Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs.

Oklahoma's economy has grown quite fast since the 2008-2009 recession in part due to our booming energy industry and in part because, well, nowhere to go but up, right? This should mean that bond ratings agencies would look more favorably at the credit rating of the state and its ability to pay back its bonds. But today Moody's announced that it was keeping the credit rating of the state steady, partly because of the tax reform plan, but mostly because our constitution makes it really hard to raise taxes.

From the Tulsa World:

The Moody's report says the state's financial situation is made stronger by a strong state constitutional balanced-budget requirement, a healthy state balance sheet, and substantial oil and gas reserves.

But the agency expressed concerns about the state's past and future plans to cut income taxes.

"The trend of decreasing income tax rates combined with the difficulty in increasing taxes constricts future financial flexibility," the Moody's report says.

So when bad economic times come again, tax reform will cripple the state, and we will be unable to afford many of the functions of government that so many people, at least in part, will depend on to offset the cost of having to pay higher taxes due to said tax reform.

PolitiFact Truth Index, Part 5: That Other PolitiFact Truth Index

This week PolitiFact announced a new feature on their mobile phone app. They developed a chart of general truthiness against time so that trends could be seen more easily. In order to do this, they had to create some way of quantifying their own Truth-o-meter® ratings, so they assigned values to their ratings with positive numbers representing truths and negative numbers representing lies. Then they took the average of the last seven days and charted the results.

The feature is almost exactly like my PolitiFact Truth Index.

What did PolitiFact call this new feature? The PolitiFact Truth Index.

Coincidence? Who knows.

So now when you search for "politifact truth index" in Google, PolitiFact's site comes up first rather than mine. On the other hand, now that the PolitiFact Truth Index is actually a thing, maybe auxiliary search traffic to this site will increase.

Not that any of that actually matters.

There are differences between our methods, PolitiFact and me, but most of them are arcane, with one big exception: PolitiFact's PolitiFact Truth Index doesn't break it down by political party. This is probably in an attempt to avoid any overt semblance of partisanship, because otherwise PolitiFact would have to defend the reason why Democrats have a higher Truth Index value than Republicans, and then they get into the whole debate about selection bias versus actual lying, and then they lose their non-partisan aura which is essential to their reputation as a source for the mainstream media.

I obviously don't have any of those qualms. I just charts 'em as I sees 'em, and I see Republicans lying (although recently the numbers have been evening out, as shown below).




Other differences between the Quibbling Potatoes PolitiFact Truth Index and the PolitiFact PolitiFact Truth Index have more to do with the calculation of points. My points for the six categories of statements in descending truth order are as follows: 1, 1, 0, 0, -1, -1. PolitiFact's are essentially as follows: 1, 0.5, 0, -0.5, -1, -1.5. They also multiply the result by 100 because it just looks cooler that way. And their average is calculated by date that they analyzed the statement, not by the date that the statement was made. So even though PolitiFact claims to be tracking the "ups and downs of political discourse" with its Truth Index, they are really tracking the ups and downs of PolitiFact's choice of statements for the week. There are differences between those two methods as you can see by comparing the chart below to the one above.



PolitiFact's method is so similar to mine that it was really easy to calculate and make a chart based on one of the other methods of quantification that I tried which was based on a 5-4-3-2-1-0 point system. So the chart below represents what PolitiFact's PolitiFact Truth Index would be if they broke their numbers down by political party.



For the week ending July 1, 2011, Republicans had an Index value of -30.43 and Democrats had an Index value of -25.00.

PolitiFact's method makes everyone look a little worse, which is to be expected when three out of the six categories essentially are downgraded by half a point so that Pants-on-fire ratings are 50% worse on the bad side than True ratings are on the good side. But it still shows that, but for the week ending on May 20, 2011, Democrats have scored better than Republicans in every week I've looked at so far.

Michele Bachmann's No Flake, Unfortunately

With merely 16 months to go before the general election in 2012, the field of Republican presidential candidates is coalescing into a smorgasbord of eight or nine hopefuls who will achieve outsized media attention for the next six months before six or seven of them will drop out of the race. One of the strongest candidates, at least according to a poll in Iowa, is Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann. But despite the recent media praise and favorable poll numbers, Chris Wallace of Fox News asked her on his Sunday show if she was "a flake". The prelude to this question was that Bachmann had a well-known reputation for, let's say, stretching the truth into a fact-free porridge of inventive talking points. But my main issue is with the definition of the term "flake", and why an insane-yet-committed Republican would be thought of as a flake.

Bachmann took immediate issue with Chris Wallace's question, calling it "insulting" and later stating how serious she was. And, for once, I have no reason to mistrust Bachmann. The Republican Party has been splitting for the last two years between moderate conservatives and the more right-wing Tea Party conservatives. With the ascendance of the Tea Party, the power center of the Republican Party as a whole has continued to veer right. Ten years ago, someone who was known for speculation that the dollar would be replaced by a multinational currency, who speculated that the Carter administration may have been responsible for a swine flu outbreak, who spread paranoia about the U.S. census, and who was responsible for some of the most egregious lies about the health care system may not have been able to speak for the Republican Party. But the times, they are a-changin'.

But this is all beside the point. Isn't a "flake" someone who sometimes doesn't show up to events they are expected to be at? Given a choice between candidate A who is spending her first official day on the campaign trail in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and made appearances on two national Sunday talk shows the day before her announcement; or candidate B, who is going to skip out on the Iowa caucuses and took a pass on the first real Republican debate: wouldn't candidate B look like the huge flake? How about candidate C who, despite being the assumed front-runner and who was the wealthiest candidate in 2008, will skip the Iowa straw poll in August because it is "an expensive proposition"?

But then, maybe I'm wrong in my interpretation of the term "flake". I was listening to NPR at lunch, and on Here and Now, Jay Newton-Small, congressional correspondant for Time Magazine, stated that Michele Bachmann was going to try to "get away from that bomb-throwing, that flakey type of reputation that she has." Wait, since when does bomb-throwing have anything to do with being a flake? The only connection that comes to my mind was H. Ross Perot in 1992, a bomb-thrower who later went on to quit his campaign despite pretty good poll numbers for a third-party candidate. And unfortunately, I think Michele Bachmann has more staying power than H. Ross Perot.

So now I'm confused. What does "flake" mean again? It's time I turned to that most esteemed and venerated source of terminology: Urban Dictionary. Aha! A flake is "an unreliable person; someone who agrees to do something, but never follows through." I thought so!

Chris Wallace later went on to apologize for his "flake" question for being too insulting. He did not, however, apologize for misinterpreting what a flake is. I'm still waiting, Mr. Wallace.

Oklahoma Democratic Party Chair Election - With Maps!

It is a long time until we get to 2012. A long time before an electoral map junkie like me gets to wonk out about polls and predictions and electoral votes and whatnot. Fortunately for me, I was selected as a delegate to the Oklahoma Democratic Party's state convention last weekend at the Bricktown Hotel and Convention Center (conveniently located nowhere near Bricktown).

The contest for chair of the party provided that perfect combination of geography and politics that I so crave. Former state representative Wallace Collins (D-Norman) ended up winning the position, but it took three votes and approximately four hours to get him there. After the first vote, a problem with the credentials of the delegates was discovered, which caused a delay of a couple of hours and resulted in a huge amount of business for the hotel's bar. Then once everything was finally worked out and everyone was re-credentialed, a second vote was held, but by then two of the candidates had dropped out. After those votes were tallied, a final runoff was then held between Wallace Collins and Dana Orwig, a favorite of a constituency of delegates calling themselves True Blue Democrats. It was initially announced erroneously that the runoff would be between Collins and Mannix Barnes, a candidate with strong support from the southeastern Oklahoma region known as "Little Dixie", an area that traditionally leans Democratic in state politics.

I kept track of the vote tallies as each county official announced it for all three votes. Then I made my own electoral cartogram of the state with the size of each county roughly proportional to the number of delegates allotted to it. I say "roughly" because I couldn't find exactly how many delegates each county was allotted because of the presence of ex-officio delegates and party officials, so the size of the counties in my maps is determined by the largest of the following: the number of delegates allotted according to the formula in the Oklahoma Democratic Party's constitution (which involves number of votes in statewide elections), or the largest number of delegates to vote in any round of voting for the chair. There are plenty of holes in the map because not every delegate showed up to the convention, including whole counties like Mayes, Sequoyah and the entire panhandle region.

Anyways, here are the maps.

PolitiFact Truth Index, Part 4: Breakdown by Occupation

PolitiFact came into existence prior to the 2008 presidential campaign. It's sole purpose back then was to serve as a check on the claims made by presidential candidates. After the election, PolitiFact changed focus. Now they fact-check policy statements made not only by politicians but also by journalists, rabble-rousers, and anyone whose statements catch the eyes and ears of PolitiFact's writers and editors. Despite branching out into statements made by people who cannot be thrown out of office, the overwhelming majority of claims analyzed still lies in the domain of politicians.




Most of these claims follow the trend that I have compiled here, here and here; that is, Republicans tend to lie more than Democrats do. Below is a chart showing the breakdown of the PolitiFact Truth Index by occupation of the speaker.




Maybe it's not surprising that PolitiFact, an organization of journalists, generally gives fellow journalists good marks (the term "journalist" is used loosely to incorporate not just reporters but also regular opinion columnists and the personalities of the cable news networks). Republican activists tend to lie more than other types of Republicans. And party boosters (basically any organization with "Democrat" or "Republican" in its name, or such an organization's spokesman), whose sole function is to get folks to elect Democrats or Republicans, seem to lie at a shockingly high rate independent of party affiliation.

The biggest surprise is in the category of advocacy group. Since advocacy groups are basically organizations composed of another category, activists, I expected their numbers would be similar. But they're not. Since March Democratic advocacy groups have mostly lied, while Republican advocacy groups have mostly made factual statements. I am interested in seeing if this number changes as we get closer and closer to the 2012 campaign.

As for politicians, PolitiFact grades Democrats a little bit higher than the overall average. The answer to why this is does not lie in the states. There is no real difference between the Truth Index grade for Democratic state legislators and Democrats overall. And the governor number is based on only a single statement; most of the PolitiFact states have Republican governors; my limited database has 35 Republican claims but only one Democratic claim. And an isolated Democratic claim carries very little weight.




The difference between Democratic politicians and Democrats as a whole lies in the numbers for the U.S. Senate. Of the 19 statements made by Democratic senators analyzed by PolitiFact in my database, only three were rated as something other than "true" or "mostly true". That doesn't sound right at all to me.



A large part of this has to do with PolitiFact Ohio's rating of things that Sherrod Brown says. Sherrod Brown is the second most frequently analyzed Democrat after Barack Obama, and the most frequently analyzed member of the U.S. Senate with six statements (2nd place: Rand Paul (4); 3rd place: tied, Saxby Chambliss (3) and Marco Rubio (3)). It's not like Sherrod Brown is one of the more important members of the U.S. Senate; he just happens to represent a state with a PolitiFact branch. Of those six statements, five were rated by PolitiFact Ohio (known to be friendly to Democrats), and all five were rated "true" or "mostly true". The sixth statement was rated by PolitiFact National as "barely true".

And how do the presidential candidates stack up to Barack Obama? Not great.



But on the whole, at least they're not as bad as Donald Trump (-0.60 on 10 statements).

Next: Whatever graphs I have left over!