The Saint Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact.com picked its Lie of the Year, and the distinction goes to retired government employee Sarah Palin, for “death panels”:

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really?”

I can’t think of a more influential but demonstrably false statement from this year, can you?

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” –Robert Frost

A video about open-mindedness that I’ve been meaning to share for a while:

Facts!

Reihan Salam reads a Pew poll:

“of voters who approve of Obama’s job performance, 7 percent believe that he’s a Muslim”

Wolfram Alpha looks like a really useful tool. Danny Sullivan’s overview is the best I’ve read. Here’s a 10-minute sampling of some of the functionality:

From the Huffington Post, What Most Doctors Won’t Tell You About Preparing for the Swine Flu:

The next immune booster is part of the facial reflexology – the point between the upper lip and the nose needs to be pressed firmly for 5 – 10 seconds; do the same for the hollow point slightly above the chin, and the two points at the base of the inside of the eye-brows.

The next significant immune shot is massaging the ears, starting from the inner base up and then from the upper point down, then pulling the soft part of the ear in all directions to increase blood supply.

They never mention why most doctors won’t tell you these things.

via 1gm

“Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don’t have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They’ve obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.”

- Charles Krauthammer, April 22, 2003

Writers and thinkers who aren’t self-critical are always the least interesting.

Relevant part is around 1:15:

Excerpt:

“The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

First of all, cows emit methane, not carbon dioxide. Methane is orders of magnitudes more potent than carbon dioxide, but neither of them are carcinogens. To be clear: nobody claimed that CO₂ is a carcinogen, which makes you wonder/know how well John Boehner has studied this subject. In fact, cow emissions cause a greater greenhouse effect than cars. This seems surprising at first, until you think about the numbers: there are about 1.5 billion cows in the world and around 650 million cars. With methane being so much more potent, it isn’t hard to comprehend how this could be possible.

It’s a mistake to consider the effects of cows as a naturally-occurring event. In 1950, there were less than half as many cows as there are today: this is a number that tracks roughly with human population growth. Much like many emissions come from coal-burning energy factories, some come from our food factories: cattle.

The fact that a substance is naturally occurring does not mean that generating a greatly increased amount of it will have no effect on the world. You’d think that this was obvious, but apparently it isn’t.

I’m a big fan of skepticism, and I think that it’s especially appropriate in a field such as climatology, but there’s a difference between skepticism and denial. In the former, you question, prod, and refine the theories, in the latter, you just look for things to refute the theories. Boehner is not a skeptic, he’s a denier.

UCB’s video is pretty funny (language warning):

FactCheck says no.
(or at least, it’s highly unlikely)

Both sides of that debate have abused statistics with little restraint (previously).

I’d heard this a lot, from a lot of news outlets, but FactCheck.org provides some clarification:

At a Nov. 19 House Financial Services Committee hearing on a possible bailout for the auto industry, Alabama Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus said, “Even with recent changes, the average hourly wage at General Motors is still $75 an hour. …” Two of his GOP colleagues on the panel made similar statements. And in a Nov. 18 column in the New York Times, business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote, “At GM, as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs.”

The problem is, that’s just not true. The automakers say that the average wage earned by its unionized workers is about $29 per hour. So how does that climb to more than $70? Add in benefits: life insurance, health care, pension and so on. But not just the benefits that the current workers actually receive – after all, it’s pretty rare for the value of a benefits package to add up to more than wages paid, even with a really, really good health plan in place. What’s causing the number to balloon is the cost of providing benefits to tens of thousands of retired auto workers and their surviving spouses.

The automakers arrived at the $70+ figure by adding up all the costs associated with providing wages and benefits to current and retired workers and dividing the total by the number of hours worked by current employees.

I’m not making a claim about bailouts or the auto industry one way or the other, but I’d seen that $70 number so often that I thought it was true.