The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

Since the start of the government shutdown, a majority of voters have blamed President Donald Trump. His polling has ranged between 50% and 60%. Blame on the Democratic House has ranged between 30% and 40%. On MSNBC the other day, anchor Katy Tur made the claim that a new Pew Research poll found 53% of the public now blame the Democratic Party for the shutdown, also noting that most pollsters run contrary to this and blame Trump. Due to the outlier-nature of this report, I decided to do a little fact-checking and here's what I found. While Ms. Tur was accurate in the specific number she reported, she was inaccurate in what that number represented. The Pew Research poll she cited asked participants whether they approved or disapproved how Donald Trump, Republican Congressional leaders, and Democratic Congressional leaders were handling shutdown negotiations. Here were the results: - 53% disapprove of how Democratic Congressional leaders are handling shutdown negotiations - 60% ...

I'd say roughly 9 out of 10 times, I think Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checker Politifact gets their grades right. When they get something wrong, though, they should be called out like everyone else. That's the case with a very recent article of theirs, written by Amy Sherman and titled "Story says poll shows Trump tied to Obama at same point in presidency." The fact-check is actually in response to an article posted at the far-right website, The Gateway Pundit , where the headline reads, "Trump approval rating better than Obama and Reagan at same point in their presidencies." The article then goes on to cherry-pick two conservative-leaning pollsters, Rasmussen and Fox News. To my surprise, Politifact then went on to give this claim a "Mostly True" grade. If one were to check the polling breakdown courtesy of RealClearPolitics , they'd quickly see Politifact was off with this grade. At this point in Barack Obama's first term as presid...

Kentucky senator and politician voted most likely to start a hair product called Randgaine - Rand Paul - yesterday announced that he would run for president in the 2016 election. Like what happened to Texas Senator Ted Cruz shortly after announcing he'd be running for president, however, Rand ran into, what online doctors would call a website boo-boo (yes, that's the technical term, in my mind anyway). In the education section of Rand Paul's website, a video was showcased with the Kentucky senator speaking about this very topic. What was the title of this video? "Rand Paul Opposes A One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Eductation." Yes, that's right, in the education portion of his website, the Rand Paul team misspelled "eductation." It's no wonder the Kentucky senator opposes a one-size-fits-all approach to education. He even believes there should be more than one correct spelling for "eductation." In light of the hilarious typo, I thou...

Like most other people who have heard about the story, Howard Kurtz has an opinion on NBA player Jason Collins coming out via an article in Sports Illustrated . Unlike most other people, however, Kurtz writes for The Daily Beast , and unfortunately for him, it appears as if he didn't read the entire Sports Illustrated article before commenting on it. In his "piece," Kurtz wrote: "He has always struggled with being gay, the NBA player said to Sports Illustrated and George Stephanaopoulos, drawing rave reviews for his candor and a congratulatory call from President Obama. Except that he left out one detail. He was engaged. To be married. To a woman." Obviously, Mr, Kurtz left out one detail from his "piece" - he didn't read the entire article before writing about it. In the Sports Illustrated article, Collins wrote: "When I was younger, I dated women. I even got engaged. I thought I had to live a certain way. I thought I needed to ...