Discussion for article #243983
In the Democratic debate Saturday night, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders heaped praise on the king for accepting many Syrian refugees and recognizing that the fight against the Islamic State group must be waged primary by Muslim nations. But he called him Abdul, not Abdullah.
Bullshit. He said Abdullah. I heard it. Youâre wrong.
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The AP ought to have fact checked the moderators as well.
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Pew defines the median upper income as starting at $174,625 â a lot of money, but hardly the billionaire class attacked by Sanders.
Hey, AP, can you fact-check your implication that Sanders attacked the Pew-defined âmedian upper incomeâ class as if they were billionaires?
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Pretty revealing â they were clearly working very, very hard to get a list of boo-boos at least remotely comparable to what they got from the Republicans, and this was the best they could doâŚ
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HILLARY CLINTON: âAssad has killed 250,000 Syrians.â
THE FACTS: Clinton appears to be blaming the entire estimated death toll of the Syrian civil war on just one side: the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Hey, AP, can you fact-check your assertion that Clinton is referring only to deaths during the civil war in Syria? The debate transcript doesnât support your assertion. Furthermore, observers were reporting killings by the Syrian government prior to the civil war.
The United Nations has estimated a death toll of 220,000 since 2011; other estimates are higher, and Clintonâs figure is roughly in line with them.
Hey, AP, why are you fact-checking a December 2015 debate by citing UN numbers that date back at least to December 2014?
You conceded that âother estimates are higher, and Clintonâs figure is roughly in line with themâ, but didnât back off your assertion that âClinton appears to be blaming the entire estimated death toll of the Syrian civil war on just one side.â Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that the civil war was responsible for 310,000 deaths, as of April 2015. If we assume a rise to just 350,000 since then, Clintonâs 250,000 shrinks from âthe entire estimated death tollâ to just 71%.
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Seriously, theyâre really digging for nitpicky crap. Exact numbers of who killed who in Syria, desperately trying to make something out of the âdisappearing middle classââŚthey donât even have enough space to cover many of the major lies told in the Republican debates, let alone minor things like this.
And Sanders clearly knows the name of the king of Jordan; he does slip and say Abdul the first time:
but gets it right just a few minutes later, though he still pronounces it with his New York accent as âAbDOOllahâ instead of âAbDUHlahâ as it normally is, and without much emphasis on the last syllable:
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And the contractor that manages the campaign data for the Democratic Party, NGP-VAN, issued a statement Friday saying "our team removed access to the affected data, and determined that only one campaign took actions that could possibly have led to it retaining data to which it should not have had access."
Okay, Iâm going to be nitpicky here, myself. Does this statement say that, without a doubt, that Clintonâs folks did not even view Sandersâ data? âRetaining dataâ (in my layman mind) means downloading or copying the screen, etc. It does not mean viewing only (without downloading, copying, etc.) Again, this is my layman understanding ⌠but does that make sense?
Please note that Iâm not taking sides in this whole debate. I am just pointing out a hole in the fact-checking here.
If they mean to say that Clintonâs people never as much as accessed Sandersâ data, much less viewed it or copied it ⌠then just say so. Their choice of words sounds like thereâs more to it ⌠and, dog, I hope not.
Edited to say: Fuck you, spell-check!
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âPew defines the median upper income as starting at $174,625 â a lot of money, but hardly the billionaire class attacked by Sanders.â
Sanders didnât say âI attack everyone making more than Pewâs definition of the middle class.â So what can the sense of this sentence possibly be?
For that matter, what does âmedian upper income ⌠startingâ mean? A median is a single number.
Going further on this nonsense, the percentage of the population in the middle class does not necessarily correlate in any way to question of how and why those in the middle class (however its boundaries are defined) are struggling. That about all the gains in national income, as GDP has doubled since 1970, have gone to the top 20%, with the lionâs share to the top 0.1%, while costs for college and health care have gone up several times over, constitutes struggle. The AP hired idiots to write this summary. TPM shouldnât publish dreck like this without editing it into sense.
Okay, re-reading the article theyâre differentiating between âstrugglingâ and âdisappearing.â Thatâs nonsense too. The struggle is an aspect of the disappearance. You can always draw arbitrary income boundaries so that 50% of the population is within them and say âmiddle classâ! The question is whether those within those boundaries are living as well as the middle class of 50 years ago. Theyâre not. So the standard of living of the American middle class is disappearing.
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Hereâs the facts, the Democrats have a few minor slips of the tongue during a real debate and their facts pretty much to stand up even after loose fact checking and the Republican Partyâs candidates flat out lied for just about 100% of every debate.
So the conclusion is, if you want to be lied to, condescended to, misled, misinformed and duped into huge financial and international messes-vote Republican.
But, if you want the straight facts and a realistic view of how to deal with the true problems of our nation and the world around us and a government that actually governs, vote Democrat.
Trump is a real estate mogul with no discernible policy other than he thinks heâs awesome and his closest competitors arenât experienced enough to know that they arenât experienced enough and the experience that they do have is clouded in controversy.
The Democratic side and teams have the qualifications and background that the job of POTUS actually requires and calls for.
This isnât a biker rally, feud or homecoming rivalry, this is the election of the leader of the âentireâ nation and basically, the world.
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Sadly the Democrats wonât say boo to these nitpickity comments (AP) they are wearing binders and gags, thatâs the only conclusion I can come up with for their silence. Maybe DWS has put a spell on them.
Democrats and progressives donât own their own broadcast companies, newspapers nor commentators so non of the concerns or clarifications above will ever make it out of the progressive blogosphere. There wonât be any outrage other than what the right wing can make up from the APâs talking points.
He also acknowledged that he didnât know whether or not Sanders campaign information was breached. It is a reasonable question when the company providing the service is closely tied to the Clinton campaign. Why didnât AP mention that?
This is typical AP hackery.
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I donât know if that was fact checking or a silly attempt to fair and balance the Democartic debate with the Republican one. They had to find something wrong so they took the very paltry crap in this bit. And, they made more errors than the Candidates. That is for sure.
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That stuff the fact checkers did in this case used to be called ânut pickingâ ( a Kevin Drum creation I think ). But come on AP. Everyone knows what the debate is here when it comes to Sanders and the GOP on the American standard of living. Sanders says, correctly, that the middle class is in decline and that collapse is fueling inequality. The AP danced around that with some income stats equivocation but Sanders point: This is not good and the GOP point: its great cannot be overshadowed with a âfact checkingâ numbers game.
Everyone knows what Sanders was talking about. So does the AP. But they needed somethingâŚso they massaged it a bitâŚtrimmed it here and embellished it there and voila: Fair and Balanced!
The Democrats shouldnât say a word. The APâs âworkâ was silly and everyone knows that. Just handle like your Grandmother told youâŚâconsider the source and ignore itâ. No need to say anything because anything they do say will be contorted by the AP in its effort to find somethingâŚanything to support the âboth sides do itâ crap.
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It isnât a pro-wrestling match either. The last Republican debate reminded me of the wrestler interviews.
could possibly has now become stolen
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Excellent post. And, I think it was their version of âFair and Balanced.â I thought so many hours ago when I first read this article. âBalancingâ a scale to appear equal, by putting your thumb on it, is not fair. My high school journalism teacher must have pulled out all his hair long ago.
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You got this rightâŚ
How many nits can a nit picker pick
when a nit pickerâs pickinâ nits?
~OGD~
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While weâre piling on the AP, note that they offer no evidence that Pewâs definition of âmiddle classâ corresponds to the same level of economic security that a middle-class family enjoyed in 1971 (pension, employer-paid healthcare, job security, expectation to be able to pay for kidsâ college educations without taking on horrific debt and so forth) or just happens to be the middle of the income distribution.
(And in fact, from Pew:
In this study, which examines the changing size, demographic composition
and economic fortunes of the American middle class, âmiddle-incomeâ
Americans are defined as adults whose annual household income is
two-thirds to double the national median, about $42,000 to $126,000
annually in 2014 dollars for a household of three.
Which is to say, nothing about the lifestyle that those income levels represent)
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