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Is Politifact trustworthy? Is Politifact unbiased? A review of past rulings

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Politifact is in the news again for labeling actual video of Democrats explaining their opinions of v4cc1nes as “False News”.

Fox News reports:

Amid the Biden administration’s struggle to v4cc1nate Americans, a video surfaced comments made during the 2020 election cycle by the then-Democratic ticket that cast doubt in a v4cc1ne developed under President Trump.

Biden suggested back in August that any v4cc1ne that comes along is “not likely to go through all the tests that need to be done and the trials that are needed to be done.”

[…]Biden repeatedly indicated only if there was enough “transparency” would he take the v4cc1ne and that the “American people should not have confidence” in the v4cc1ne developed by the Trump administration if his concerns weren’t addressed.

Harris was heard during a CNN interview that getting a v4cc1ne that’s approved by the Trump administration would be “an issue for all of us” and “if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it” during the vice presidential debate.

However, PolitiFact issued a so-called “fact-check” with the headline “Biden, Harris distrusted Trump with C0V1D-19 v4cc1nes, not the v4cc1nes themselves.”

This isn’t the first time that Politifact, which is used by all the big social media companies to “fact check” speech, has been caught protecting their favored political party.

Let’s see some examples of past bias.

Arizona Senate Race

Politifact screwed up their fact-check for the Arizona Senate race.

The Daily Caller explains:

PolitiFact incorrectly labeled it “mostly false” that Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema “protested troops in a pink tutu” during its live fact-check of the Arizona Senate debate Monday night.

It’s an established fact that Sinema, a former Green Party activist who co-founded an anti-war group, wore a pink tutu at one of the multiple anti-war protests she attended in 2003.

“While we were in harm’s way, she was protesting our troops in a pink tutu,” Republican candidate Martha McSally, a former Air Force fighter pilot, said during Monday night’s debate.

Here’s their Politifact’s evaluation of McSally’s claim:

Who are you going to believe? Politifact, or your own eyes?
Who are you going to believe? Politifact, or your own eyes?

And here’s the photo of Kyrsten Sinema, protesting the troops, in a pink tutu:

Anti-war Democrat Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema
Anti-war Democrat Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema in a pink tutu

The Daily Caller notes:

A 2003 Arizona State University news article at the time described Sinema wearing “something resembling a pink tutu” at one of the protests.

[…]Sinema openly associated with fringe elements of the far-left during her anti-war activism.

She promoted an appearance by Lynne Stewart, a lawyer who was convicted of aiding an Islamic terrorist organization, in 2003.

Sinema also reportedly partnered with anarchists and witches in her anti-war activism and said she did “not care” if Americans wanted to join the Taliban.

And now for the big one: Politifact’s fact-checking of Obamacare.

Obama’s claims about Obamacare

Avik Roy, health care policy expert at Forbes magazine, wrote about Politifact’s assessment of Obama’s promise to Americans about keeping their health plans after Obamacare.

In 2008, before the presidential election, PolitiFact rated Obama’s claims about Obamacare “True”:

Roy writes: (links removed)

On October 9, 2008, Angie Drobnic Holan of PolitiFact published an article using the site’s “Truth-O-Meter” to evaluate this claim: “Under Barack Obama’s health care proposal, ‘if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it.’”

And she concluded:

[…]…people who want to keep their current insurance should be able to do that under Obama’s plan. His description of his plan is accurate, and we rate his statement True.”

Roy notes:

PolitiFact’s pronouncements about Obamacare were widely repeated by pro-Obama reporters and pundits, and had a meaningful impact on the outcome of the election. Indeed, in 2009, PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008 campaign.

Here’s the screen capture from 2008:

Politifact caught with its pants on fire
Politifact says that everyone who likes their health care plan can keep it

Before the election, it’s true! And Obama got re-elected, because people believed that. But what happened after the election?

In 2013, after the 2012 election, PolitiFact rated Obama’s claims about Obamacare “Pants On Fire”:

Roy writes: (links removed)

On December 12, [2013] the self-appointed guardians of truth and justice at PolitiFact named President Obama’s infamous promise—that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it”—its 2013 “Lie of the Year.”

[…][N]one of the key facts that made that promise “impossible” in 2008 had changed by 2013. The President’s plan had always required major disruption of the health insurance market; the Obamacare bill contained the key elements of that plan; the Obamacare law did as well. The only thing that had changed was the actual first-hand accounts of millions of Americans who were losing their plans now that Obamacare was live.

And the screen capture from 2013:

Politifact says: we were just kidding! Kidding!
Politifact said one thing before the election, and the opposite afterwards

So when Politifact rates a statement by a Democrat as true, what they really mean is that it’s pants-on-fire-false, but it’s election time so they don’t say that. It’s not like the critical assessments of Obamacare from health policy experts were not out there between 2007-2012. I know, because I blogged on every study and report on the predicted effects of the law that I could find. But the intellectually lazy journalism-major clowns at Politifact couldn’t be bothered to read those studies and reports.

Secular left journalists are the stupidest people on the planet. Stick with reading The Federalist and Daily Wire if you want to know what’s really going on in the world.

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The production of carbon from lighter elements is fine-tuned to an amazing degree

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Fine-tuning of the strong nuclear force and the fine structure constant
Fine-tuning of the strong nuclear force and the fine structure constant

If there is one thing that science fiction is good for, it’s for popularizing the phrase “carbon-based life”. Everyone has heard that carbon is essential for life. But do you know why carbon is so important? And did you know that the reaction that produced the carbon in our universe is actually fine-tuned, and therefore evidence for a Creator and Designer of the universe?

Hugh Ross has a new article up in Salvo magazine, which I found thanks to a post at Uncommon Descent.

Now he starts off with a discussion of how the mass density of the universe needed to be fine-tuned in order to produce elements heavier than hydrogen from the (only) hydrogen that was present at the creation event. I’ve talked about that reaction previously, but I won’t repeat that here. Nucleosynthesis is one of the most important chemical reactions in science, and something every Christian should know and understand well enough to explain it.

You can’t make complex embodied intelligent creatures such as ourselves out of only hydrogen and helium, but you can’t make a life permitting universe without some hydrogen and helium. For one thing, you can’t have liquid water without some hydrogen.

But the element carbon is the center hub of all of the molecules inside of us that allow for the storage and processing of information necessary for life.  And it turns out that the reaction that creates carbon from elements lighter than carbon is fine-tuned to an amazing degree.

Excerpt:

But cosmic mass density is not the only thing that must have been exquisitely fine-tuned for the universe to contain any carbon. The nuclear resonance (or energy) levels for helium, beryllium, carbon, and oxygen also had to be exquisitely fine-tuned for carbon to exist. Here’s how that happens.

Stars fuse carbon and oxygen from helium through a series of reactions known as the triple-alpha process, in which three helium nuclei are combined to make one carbon nucleus. In the first step in this process, two helium nuclei (with 2 protons each) fuse together to make beryllium (which has 4 protons). Next, a helium nucleus fuses with a beryllium nucleus to make carbon (which has 6 protons). Then, some carbon nuclei fuse with helium nuclei to make oxygen (which has 8 protons).

The only reason that the triple-alpha process produces any carbon or oxygen at all is because in the first step, the ground state energy level (i.e., the state of an atom when all of its electrons are at their lowest energy levels) of the beryllium-8 nucleus (containing 4 protons and 4 neutrons) almost exactly equals the ground state energy level of two helium-4 nuclei (2 protons and 2 neutrons each). In the second step, the ground state energy level of a beryllium-8 nucleus plus a helium-4 nucleus almost exactly equals the energy level of an excited state of a carbon-12 nucleus (6 protons and 6 neutrons). In the third step, the ground state energy level of a carbon-12 nucleus at 7.65 million electron volts is just slightly larger than the ground state energy level of an oxygen-16 nucleus (8 protons and 8 neutrons) at 7.12 million electron volts.1

If it were not for the near equivalences or resonances of the nuclear energy levels of two helium nuclei relative to a beryllium nucleus, and of a beryllium nucleus plus a helium nucleus relative to a carbon nucleus, the universe would contain very little or no carbon and very little or no elements heavier than carbon. Life would be impossible.

Furthermore, unless the difference in the nuclear energy levels between a carbon nucleus and an oxygen nucleus were precisely 0.53 million electron volts, the universe would contain either a lot of carbon and no oxygen or a lot of oxygen and no carbon. Either way, physical life would be impossible in the universe.

In the early 1950s, astronomer Fred Hoyle and physicist Willy Fowler were the first to understand how critical the relative nuclear energy levels of helium, beryllium, carbon, and oxygen were for making life possible in the universe. Commenting on the highly fine-tuned nature of these nuclear energy levels, Hoyle wrote in an article he published in Engineering & Science,

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion beyond question.2

The article continues to explain that there is an additional problem of carbon fine-tuning related to habitability.

The carbon formation problem is one of the best examples of fine-tuning, and as you can see, it’s even admitted by atheists. It’s not the easiest one to explain (because resonance levels are not familiar in every day life), but it’s worth knowing about all three of the fine-tuning topics in the post.

Keep in mind that the more science has made progress, the more fine-tuning problems we have discovered. The trend is very bad if you are a naturalist. But very good if you are a theist. Evidence matters, and scientific evidence is the best kind of evidence.

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UK’s government-run NHS healthcare system wants to kill a child against parents’ wishes

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Every day in the UK, the government-run health care system kills patients so they can pay their unionized work force lavish salaries and benefits. As with any government-run system, waste and inefficiency is rampant. Far-left politicians spend taxpayer money on elective / cosmetic treatment and call it “health care” in order to buy votes from the reckless and irresponsible voters.

You can get sex-reassignment surgery, breast enlargements, in-vitro fertilization, etc. for free, but if you get cancer, they’ll put you on a waiting list until you die. All the better to give themselves 30-year pensions at taxpayer expense.

Here’s a story from the Daily Wire that shows how things work when secular leftists run health care:

Parents are fighting to keep their two-year-old daughter alive after a United Kingdom judge ruled in May against the family, stating it’s in the girl’s “best interests” to allow the hospital to remove her life support.

The parents of Alta Fixsler, 2, contend that their Jewish faith bars them from allowing the hospital to remove their baby from life support and that they are trying to have Alta relocated to a hospital in Israel or the U.S. at no charge to the government-run National Health Service (NHS).

“There is no reason to kill my daughter like this,” the baby’s American father Abraham Fixsler told the New York Post.

The Jerusalem Post reported on the case, Sunday:

Alta Fixsler is a two-year-old girl who was born prematurely and sustained a severe brain injury. She and her parents are Israeli citizens and hassidic Jews. The hospital decided that Alta was “experiencing pain” and has no quality of life and therefore petitioned the British High Court for permission to remove her life support. Numerous pediatric neurologists contest the hospital’s position and insist that Alta does not feel pain. Still, the court gave the hospital the unilateral decision-making power over the girl’s life.

Motivated by the Jewish outlook on the unconditional worthiness of every human life, Alta’s parents have made every effort to save her life and vigorously oppose the hospital’s intentions. Removing life support is prohibited by Alta’s Jewish religion, and is against Israeli Law.

Hospitals in Israel and the U.S. have offered to take Alta into their care, the report noted. United Hatzalah Air, too, has offered to fly the baby to any destination needed without charge.

“The life-saving effort would not cost the UK National Health Service a penny, yet in scenario that can only be described as Kafkaesque, the doctors in the UK are not willing to release the child to the parents’ family, determined to kill the child instead,” The Jerusalem Post argued. “The entreaties of dozens of politicians, hundreds of clergymen, and numerous human rights activists from around the globe have fallen on deaf ears.”

“There are a lot of places around the world where I can take care of my daughter and they would be happy to take care of her long term,” 28-year-old Fixsler said. “Let me go. That’s all I am saying.”

“The doctors don’t think she has quality of life. But I think she has quality of life,” the father argued. “This is something very, very painful.”

Family spokesman Yossi Gestetner told the New York Post, “Our value of life is built into our religious upbringing. Orthodox Judaism encourages the continuation of life until all means are exhausted.”

This sort of thing happens all the time in the UK, and if anyone speaks out about it, the police are there to monitor their dissenting speech, and take action.

UK Police enforces the decrees of the government-run NHS
UK Police enforces the decrees of the government-run NHS

Remember the Alfie Evans story from a few months ago? They would not release a sick child back to the parents, but instead chose to guard the hospital with armed police to keep the parents out.

The NHS killed the (born) child through asphyxiation, starvation and dehydration. And it was done against the will of the parents.

The parents wanted the child back so that they can take the child to a country that has modern private-sector healthcare facilities and skilled, moral medical personnel. Italy volunteered to provide these things, and has even sent an air ambulance to transport the child. But the NHS insteadkilled the child, because they have decreed that the child is unfit to live, i.e. – “life unworthy of life“. This is not surprising, as the NHS also kills millions of unborn children as well.

The judge who initially ruled against the parents of little Alfie previously ruled that a patient in a minimally conscious state be starved to death, according to Life Site News. The appeals court judge also ruled against the child because the parents were hostile to the NHS. So, the NHS can’t release the child because his parents are “hostile to the NHS” after the NHS kidnapped and starved their child. This is the kind of legal reasoning that you can expect from the judges in the UK.

Still think that government-run health care is a good idea? It’s never a good idea to pay unionized thugs money up front, and then beg them for goods and services later. Keep your money in your pocket so that you can get what you need when you need it. You cannot trust secular leftists to act morally. There is no rationally-grounded concept of objective morality in the atheistic worldview.