2016 Election Results

[rogue06]

Louisiana's election results are in...

Republicans Sweep Louisiana Runoffs, Ending 2016 Elections

By Melinda Deslatte
December 11, 2016

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- The 2016 campaign season has finally ended, with Louisiana's runoff election cementing Republican control of the U.S. Senate. The GOP also is holding onto the two U.S. House seats that were undecided going into the state's runoff election.

Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy's victory Saturday gives the GOP a 52-48 edge in the Senate starting in January. His runoff campaign focused on his support for President-elect Donald Trump and opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

This is pretty rare. Usually the party that lost in the previous election wins in elections including run-offs held soon after. It's kind of a buyer's remorse/second guessing phenomena.

[shunyadragon]

Houston is the most ethnically diverse city in our nation, and Texas' Blue zones are growing exponentially. It won't be long at all before we're a Blue State.

Fantastic!!! But I believe your over stating the trend. It is more a national trend.

[Sparko]

Louisiana's election results are in...

Republicans Sweep Louisiana Runoffs, Ending 2016 Elections

By Melinda Deslatte
December 11, 2016

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- The 2016 campaign season has finally ended, with Louisiana's runoff election cementing Republican control of the U.S. Senate. The GOP also is holding onto the two U.S. House seats that were undecided going into the state's runoff election.

Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy's victory Saturday gives the GOP a 52-48 edge in the Senate starting in January. His runoff campaign focused on his support for President-elect Donald Trump and opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

We need a recount!!

[Adrift]

Fantastic!!! But I believe your over stating the trend.

you're

[Cow Poke]

Fantastic!!! But I believe your over stating the trend. It is more a national trend.

Yeah, that must be why we'll be inaugurating a woman president in a couple weeks, eh?

[rogue06]

Their initial refusal to drop it in light of being shown to be wrong speaks volumes. Taking two months after that says even more. They had an ax to grind and that is what they wanted to do.

Now as to the various "fact checkers," there were several discussions concerning them prior to the election over several issues most prominently about birtherism. I cobbled a couple of my posts together below.



This entire fact checking shtick is basically nothing but a joke. A bunch of biased journalists playing make believe where they pretend that they are impartial fonts of truth who have appointed themselves as arbitrators of determining what is accurate.

Studies have shown that these almost always liberal journalists very carefully pick and choose what they want to "fact check" in order to draw the conclusion they want^[1]. Case in point with Hillary's honesty, they either exclude her constant, repeated lying and lying about her lying about her emails and server (saying it wasn't part of the campaign) or if they do include it count it as a single offense when it was a whole series of lies about various different aspects.

And they aren't exactly honest in their accusations of lying especially when it concerns Republicans and/or conservatives being forced to either twist what they said or offer an "interpretation of what they said to fact check (again, see footnote below). For instance when Trump said that Hillary was going to raise people's taxes Politico's "fact checkers" proclaimed that Trump was wrong because she said she won't raises taxes on households earning less than $250,000/year. Yet Hillary didWashington Post "fact checkers" gave Trump four Pinocchios for saying that the Hillary campaign pushed the birther issue.

This in spite of the fact that Patti Solis Doyle (who was Hillary's assistant during Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and later became her campaign manager for Hillaryn's 2000 Senate campaign, her 2006 re-election campaign and her 2008 presidential campaign) confirmed on Twitter and later on CNN that she fired those on Hillary's staff responsible for sending emails questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S.

Around the same time James Asher, the former Washington, D.C. bureau chief for McClatchy news group (it operates 29 daily newspapers in 14 states), declared that Clinton aide and close confidante Sidney Blumenthal "told me in person" that Obama had been born in Kenya and urged him to investigate it. At the time Asher was the investigative editor and in charge of Africa coverage. An editor for McClatchy, David Goldstein, confirms that Blumenthal was claiming that Obama was born in Kenya adding that on the strength of that they sent someone to Kenya to investigate the charge. And the person they had investigating the charge, Shashank Bengali, now a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has also confirmed all of this.

More recently, Larry Johnson, who runs the No Quarter USA blog, which was a staunch supporter of Hillary's in 2008 but not any longer, said that Blumenthal was the source for a lot of the negative stories about Obama that he posted on his blog back then (which was very popular during the 2008 campaign) including information concerning Obama not being born in the U.S.

But the Post ignored all of that simply because Blumenthal (who undeniably was responsible for spreading whisper campaigns about Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s) denied it. They went with someone with a well deserved reputation for being less than honest, someone well known for pushing conspiracy theories (Clinton staffers themselves nicknamed him "Grassy Knoll" -- a reference to the most famous of the JFK conspiracy theories -- for his proclivity for them), someone despised by Obama and his people for his role in spreading rumors about Obama (as the New York Times reported, they "blamed him for spreading harsh attacks against their candidate in the primary showdown with Mrs. Clinton" -- sounds like they knew what he was up to), and someone with a motive for once again lying through his teeth, rather than multiple witnesses that don't have a dog in this fight -- or in Doyle's case is decidedly pro-Hillary.

FactCheck.org^[2] was especially dishonest by blowing off camp Hillary's involvement off by only checking whether Hillary herself ever directly said anything about Obama being born outside the U.S. but as we've seen it wasn't her personally but rather her minions including one of her closest advisers. But they got around all that in order to come up with the conclusion they sought by only checking if Hillary herself had personally said something.

Is it really any wonder why, according to a recent Rasmussen poll1. Covered before in another thread:

Something to keep in mind when bringing PolitiFact into a discussion (which started off nonpartisan but quickly veered sharply to the left). From USNews & World Report:

Source: Who�s Checking the Fact Checkers?

A new study sheds some light on what facts the press most likes to checkThe fact that, as the Lichter study shows, "A majority of Democratic statements (54 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18 percent of Republican statements," probably has more to do with how the statements were picked and the subjective bias of the fact checker involved than anything remotely empirical. Likewise, the fact that "a majority of Republican statements (52 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to only 24 percent of Democratic statements" probably has more to do with spinning stories than it does with evaluating statements.



[*Emphasis at end added by rogue06*]

Source

© Copyright Original Source

Human Events

2. Factcheck.org receives its funding from the Annenberg Foundation which went far to the left after the death of its founder, Walter H. Annenberg, and his wife. For instance the unrepentant terrorist and radical leftist Bill Ayers is now closely associated with the Annenberg Foundation (being a co-founder and then co-chair of their Chicago Annenberg Challenge and has received a multi-million dollar grant).

Over at The Federalist Mollie Hemingway eviscerates PolitiFact (as well as Snopes and FactCheck.org) in an article about "Fake News":

Source: 5 Major Problems With Facebook�s Attempt To Limit �Fake News�

2) PolitiFact Is A JokeSource

© Copyright Original Source

The above contains multiple hyperlinks in the original

[Terraceth]

Over at The Federalist Mollie Hemingway eviscerates PolitiFact (as well as Snopes and FactCheck.org) in an article about "Fake News":

Honestly, a lot of its claims are hardly "eviscerating." For example:

So, in this criticism of PolitiFact... they admit that PolitiFact got it right, that zero are licensed to do mammograms. Their only actual criticism (beyond the "half true" which I do have an issue with as well) is the "throat clearing" and it's rather true that the article needs an editor badly. But that's not the same as saying the facts in the article are wrong, and they seem to be correct even by this criticism's analysis. It's a little weaselly in the presentation, but again, the information appears accurate.

Whatever the hell this is, it's not reading comprehension. He said "97 percent of the work that Planned Parenthood does is about mammograms and preventative health." Apparently, the Federalist decided to ignore those last three words that were a critical part of PolitiFact's checking in order to criticize them. It's perhaps bad on Martin O'Malley for mentioning mammograms at all, but zero percent of the work involving mammograms doesn't instantly make the statement wrong because of those three letters that the Federalist article writer apparently didn't read.

If I say "100% of humans are dragons or mammals" that doesn't become false because no humans are dragons. All humans are mammals, so that statement still holds true. It might be a really weird way to put it, but it isn't false because no humans are dragons... well, as far as we know, anyway.

There are some legitimate criticisms of the "fact checking" sites, both in this article and in general. One is their frequent insistence, particularly in the case of PolitiFact, on assigning a True/Mostly True/Half-True/Mostly False/False label on everything even though those are extremely arbitrary terms; there's no way to quantify such a thing. And it's especially bad in the case of PolitiFact which displays the amount of true/false/half-true/etc. for each specific pundit so you can see their supposed accuracy, which doesn't mean anything to begin with unless every single claim of theirs is checked. But I can't help but notice that the article from the Federalist seems to be engaging in much of the same things it criticizes PolitiFact and the like for doing.

[Jaecp]

http://www.politifact.com/about/

Ahh, actually, while writing this I stumbled upon perhaps the key detail that gets this rated "half true" when I looked to see if there was some sort of "challenge us" button on the bottom of the page

"However, that narrow bit of information ignores that Planned Parenthood physicians perform the clinical exams that lead to referrals for a mammogram or other specialized breast care."

A technically true statement said to mislead people on the nature of medical care available at/through PP? Seems like a half truth to me!

[Mountain Man]

So I can open up a car repair shop that does nothing but refer customers to other repair shops and then claim that I have a full-service repair facility? Makes sense.

[Sparko]

Honestly, a lot of its claims are hardly "eviscerating." For example:


So, in this criticism of PolitiFact... they admit that PolitiFact got it right, that zero are licensed to do mammograms. Their only actual criticism (beyond the "half true" which I do have an issue with as well) is the "throat clearing" and it's rather true that the article needs an editor badly. But that's not the same as saying the facts in the article are wrong, and they seem to be correct even by this criticism's analysis. It's a little weaselly in the presentation, but again, the information appears accurate.

uh... no. If they were accurate they would have rated it as TRUE, not half true. Their RATING is what is at stake. They used weaseling to justify downgrading their rating to half-truth. That is dishonest and cheating.

Whatever the hell this is, it's not reading comprehension. He said "97 percent of the work that Planned Parenthood does is about mammograms and preventative health." Apparently, the Federalist decided to ignore those last three words that were a critical part of PolitiFact's checking in order to criticize them. It's perhaps bad on Martin O'Malley for mentioning mammograms at all, but zero percent of the work involving mammograms doesn't instantly make the statement wrong because of those three letters that the Federalist article writer apparently didn't read.

If I say "100% of humans are dragons or mammals" that doesn't become false because no humans are dragons. All humans are mammals, so that statement still holds true. It might be a really weird way to put it, but it isn't false because no humans are dragons... well, as far as we know, anyway.

That is what is called "weaseling" - you are using a technicality to sneak in a term that has no business in there. since zero people are dragons, it should not be there in the first place. It is as bad as congress sneaking in riders on bills that are going to pass. You could use such a technique to say anything you wanted to.

100% of democrats are liars, murderers, or liberals.

Gee great job Politifact.