Published at the Tampa Bay Times site July 20, 2016 Fact checking Rudy Giuliani and Dick Morris: PolitiFact covers the conventions By Louis Jacobson, PolitiFact senior correspondent INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and consultant and pundit Dick Morris threw loads of red meat to members of the Florida delegation to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland over breakfast on July 20. Once again, PolitiFact was in attendance and took a look at some of the facts that were checkable. Morris argued that Trump is winning support from both sides of the ideological spectrum, from disaffected Americans of either partisan stripe, or none at all. As evidence of the phenomenon of downwardly mobile voters being attracted to an outsider candidate like Trump, Morris cited the recent vote by the United Kingdom to exit the European Union, known as Brexit. “In Brexit, we won the same percentage of the vote from Conservatives … as from Labor Party members,” Morris said. “There was no left and right in that.” However,_ exit poll data_ (http://www.politico.eu/article/graphics-how-the-uk-voted-eu-referendum-brexit-demographics-age-education-party-london-final- results/) from the firm YouGov undercuts that claim. According to the poll, voters who cast a conservative ballot in the most recent election voted 57 percent to leave, compared to 43 percent to remain in the E.U. By contrast, only 31 percent of Labor voters cast a ballot to leave the union, while 69 percent voted to remain. That’s an enormous partisan difference. (Voters in the centrist Liberal Democrats voted 27 percent to leave and 73 percent to remain, while backers of the right-populist U.K. Independence Party voted 93 percent to leave and only 7 percent to remain.) Morris was on safer ground in a remark about the Affordable Care Act and its “shared responsibility payment” — essentially a tax — on people who do not sign up for some type of health insurance. “Seven million people have chosen to pay the fine rather than enter the system,” Morris said. That’s basically correct. The IRS_ reported_ (https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/national-taxpayer-advocate-reviews-filing-season-and-identifies-priorit y-areas-and-challenges-in-mid-year-report-to-congress) that in 2014, the first year of the law’s full implementation and the most recent year for which data is available, 6.6 million households filed returns with that payment included, with the average amount of the payment roughly $190. Morris also criticized the expanded requirements for what plans must cover under the law. Under Obamacare, he said, “we have to cover everything from psychotherapy to drug therapy to drug addiction therapy to sex change operations to mammograms for men.” For starters, equal coverage for physical and mental health care has been required since the passage of a law in 1996, and provisions for drug addiction coverage were enhanced in 2008. Both bills received bipartisan support and were in place long before President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. On the specific question of “mammograms for men,” Morris appears to have radically broadened and misconstrued a notion that has been circulating in the conservative media. The conservative website CNSNews.com published an_ article_ (http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/obamacare-guidelines-insurance-must-cov er-mammogram-or-pap-smear) on June 24, 2015 about how Affordable Care Act guidelines prevent insurance companies from limiting “sex-specific recommended preventive services based on an individual’s sex assigned at birth, gender identity or recorded gender.” But this means that under the law, mammograms — a common preventive procedure — cannot be denied to transgender individuals who have “residual breast tissue.” This accounts for a far tinier segment of the population than Morris indicated — transgender individuals who have such remaining tissue. As for Giuliani, we found one checkable statement. When a questioner in the audience asked whether Trump could win the presidency given his current position in the polls, Giuliani said Ronald Reagan was written off as having no chance in 1980, when he went on to oust the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. In April, we fact-checked a_ similar statement_ (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/14/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrong-about- 1980-ronald-reagan-race-a/) by Trump himself. “My numbers are better right now than Ronald Reagan’s numbers were with Jimmy Carter,” Trump said in April. “Ronald Reagan had a 30 (percent) favorability and he was behind Jimmy Carter by so much everybody said, ‘Oh this is going to be a disaster.’ “ However, using the April polls for 1980 and 2016, we found that Trump’s favorable/unfavorable ratings were much worse than Reagan’s were during that same period. And polls show that Trump’s favorability has not improved appreciably since then. In other words, the Reagan-Trump comparison is far from exact -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[RC] Fact checking at the Republican convention
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:40:18 -0700
