From Kevin Drum, my favorite politics blogger since Calpundit days: How Honest Is Your Favorite Candidate?

I have a few special awards to hand out, as well as a couple of comments:

• Cheers to Bernie Sanders, the only candidate with not a single Pants On Fire rating.
• Jeers to Donald Trump, who failed to earn a single True rating.
• Double jeers to Ben Carson, who remarkably failed to get a single True rating or a single Mostly True rating.
• The average Democratic rating is 3.34. The average Republican rating is 2.26.
• Among Republicans, honesty is the exact inverse of popularity. Jeb Bush is the most honest, and he’s got the lowest poll numbers among the serious candidates. Donald Trump and Ben Carson are the least honest by quite a bit, and they’re also leading the field by quite a bit. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are in the middle on both honesty and popularity.

I especially draw your attention to the last bullet. It’s eerie. It’s almost as if the Republican electorate wants to be lied to, and the more you lie, the more they like you. I’ll hold off on guessing precisely what this means, but it might explain a lot about this year’s GOP primary race.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1Sq4hqz.

hello-delicious-tea:

upworthy:

It’s One Of The Craziest Internet Rumors About Guns. And As It Turns Out, It’s True.

It’s a fact so jaw-dropping it’s unbelievable — people thought it was a crazy Internet rumor until Politifact verified it. But it’s true: More Americans have died just since 1960 from gun incidents — suicides, accidents, and homicides — than died in every war in U.S. history. The deadliest war the U.S. has ever had is the war we waged against ourselves. 

Well, shit.

The statistic is true. But the graph is a lie.

People make snap emotional judgments based on a quick glance, and a non-zero-based graph like this is intended to mislead the viewer into thinking the value of the second bar is many times greater than that of the first bar. Which is not the case. So yes, while the actual numbers it shows are correct, the graph itself is intended to create a false impression. Intentionally creating a false impression is lying, even if you accomplish it in a tricksy way using elements that are individually true.

In the grand scheme of things it’s a much smaller problem than having a country of 300 million people awash in a sea of guns, such that the tiny fraction of people who really shouldn’t have them often do. But deception is kind of a hobby of mine, and I’d already looked into these numbers and knew their true relationship, so it jumped out at me.

As a matter of personal philosophy I prefer social justice/public welfare arguments to be made using truth rather than lies. That puts me in a bit of a dilemma when a position I agree with is being advanced using deception.

I strongly favor addressing the wacky imbalance this country has arrived at concerning gun control. (I mean, I believe we should have a lot more of it.) But as a side issue, the deceptive nature of this graph makes me sad.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/42760191129.