Rachel Maddow on Politifact

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Rachel Maddow points out just how bad Politifact truly is. Sen Marco Rubio claimed at CPAC that the majority of Americans are conservative. Politifact found that the Gallup poll has never had people who claim to be conservative near 50 percent.

Here is the kicker of Politifact's findings.

And here’s another wrinkle: When you ask people which party they lean toward, the independents split up so that the country is almost evenly divided. For the year of 2011, Gallup reported that 45 percent of Americans identified as Republicans or leaned that way, while 45 percent identified as Democrats or leaned that way.

Any way you slice it Rubio's claim is false. Politifact rated it mostly true. Maddow has good reason to not take Politifact seriously.

Disgust of the Day

Politifact fact-checked Gov. Rick Scott on how many donuts were sold during his fake work day at Nicola's Donuts. Scott said during his State of the State speech that 240 dozen donuts were sold by 8:30 AM.

Waatti and workers told Politifact Florida the number was definitely above the 65 dozen they originally baked for the shop and was probably around 80 dozen. That's probably at least 240,000 calories at breakfast, but it's not the "more than 240 dozen" bragged to legislators about.

Politifact has the audacity to rate Republicans wanting to end Medicare the Lie of the Year. Politifact seriously damaged their credibility as a fact-checking news service. Fact-checking Scott's donut sales doesn't build confidence that Politifact is going to provide muckraking reporting and take its responsiblity as a member of the Fourth Estate seriously. The bigger question is why should we take Politifact seriously.

Update: Benjamin Kirby takes exception to Politifact rating Scott's donut claim mostly false. For the life of me I can't figure out how Politifact came to that conclusion. Scott did not talk about the calories of the donuts during his State of the State speech. Politifact doesn't provide a quote or link to a Scott quote on the total calories of all the donuts sold. The fact-checker rated Scott's claim on calories true. The bigger question is why is Politifact wasting time checking the amount of calories in donuts.