The partisan-hack, self-appointed “fact checkers” at the so-called “PolitiFact” unit of the Tampa Bay Times are again struggling to carry Democratic water by claiming that the president’s health care law doesn’t cut Medicare.
As we noted the last time they posted a propaganda piece about us:
The Tampa Bay Times insists that the enormous Medicare cuts in the president’s health care law are not cuts, because even though they reduce spending by hundreds of billions of dollars below the expected, or “baseline,” level for Medicare, they still allow Medicare spending to be higher in the future than it has been in the past – little solace for the bulge of retiring baby boomers entering the program.
They do not, of course, apply this same definition of the word “cut” to the food stamps bill presently being debated in Congress, which spends $70 billion more on food stamps in the next five years than the actual amount spent in the last five. Those “cuts are draconian” the Tampa Bay Times insists – which would be “Mostly False” if they followed their own definition of “cut.”
Since then new information has come to light that does make our claim that the law cuts $500 billion from Medicare slightly suspect — because the number is too low! The latest CBO score now shows (page 5, Table 2 of this PDF) that the law cuts $741 billion from Medicare versus the baseline.
So you can believe the Congressional Budget Office or you can believe left-wing hacks at PolitiFraud, who pronounce statements that are clearly true to be “mostly false” based on a self-serving standard disregarded by their own editorial board when it’s attacking Republicans.
Speaking of editorials, you can expect another slobbering endorsement of Obama from the Tampa Bay Times soon, but it will be hard to top the 2008 edition.
ADDENDUM: We responded to PolitiFraud’s most recent inquiry saying simply: “We choose not to cooperate with you because of your bias.” (In the future, we won’t reply at all.)
This is how they grossly misrepresented our response: “American Commitment told PolitiFact they refused to work with us, citing previous Truth-O-Meter rulings with which they didn’t agree.”
Not so. We don’t disagree with “rulings”; we reject any pretense that what PolitiFraud does is fact-checking. They are certainly not fit to sit in judgment of us.
PolitiFraud Strikes Again
