Romney definitely appears to have stalled Gingrich’s momentum in Florida, and there are signs that he’s reversing the tides. Whether this is due to Romney going on the attack, Gingrich calling the dogs off a bit at the last debate, or some other factor like Florida people so geting over Gingrich, it’s hard to say:

Right now the 2-week average stands at:

Romney: 36.4%
Gingrich: 32.1%
Santorum: 11.2%
Paul: 8.9%

Which is a 4.3% lead over Gingrich. Romney isn’t back to his pre-South Carolina levels (yet), though recent polls by Rasmussen, InsiderAdvantage, and ARG suggest he may be heading back in that direction. I would think Gingrich’s people see this as well and probably realize that taking the foot off the peddle at the last debate was a mistake, and I fully expect to see the same Newt we saw in South Carolina in the next debate in Florida. Also, Santorum has a downward trend in the state as well. I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if he finished in single digits, or even in 4th at the moment. One would think that would be the end of Santorum’s campaign if that occurred. Paul is, well, Paul. He’s floated from between 8% and 10% ever since the start of January.

Things to note about this 2-week average: It encompasses the entirety of Gingrich’s surge and now apparently stalling. The oldest polls in the average are ones showing Romney with 20+ point leads in Florida, which may be making his average better. Then again, it also includes polls showing Gingrich ahead as well, which doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. I’m interested to see how this chart changes over the next couple of days once older polls fall of the 2-week window.

I may also use the primaries to test out what might be the best way to present data.  In 2008, I largely did a “weighted average” of all polls, meaning that every poll, no matter how old, had a say in the average, however small that say was. While the general election may not be as volatile as the GOP primary, the primary has shown the pitfalls of that type of calculation as older polls that have a candidate considerably higher or lower than they are now can sometimes skew the poll. Then again, you don’t necessarily want to rely too heavily on polls just released either, I don’t think, so it’s good to have a balance. So I’ll be besting out two lengths of time to try to balance the polls: a 1-week weighted average and a 2-week weighted average. This is using the same algorithm I used in 2008, except I would only take the polls conducted in the last week or last two weeks (exception is if there are fewer than 5 polls available, in which case I take the most recent 5).

Here are the current “projections” based on each of the three calculations:

Weighted average (every poll taken is used):

Romney: 34.8%
Gingrich: 30.4%
Santorum: 12.3%
Paul: 9%

2-week Average (only polls from past two weeks):

Romney: 35.2%
Gingrich: 30.7%
Santorum: 12.2%
Paul: 9%

1-Week Average (only polls from past week)

Gingrich: 33.6%
Romney: 32.9%
Santorum: 12.5%
Paul: 9.2%

Clearly the 1-week average takes into consideration the recent Gingrich momentum, but that also means it’s listening to the immediate polls that are out. Is that good? Well, I suppose the most recent polls are the more accurate description of the race as it is now. However, it also reduces the number of polls available for the average, meaning that outliers can unduly influence the calculations. As a result, I think I’ll rely on my 2-week average for Florida and see how it does.  The history chart for Florida, based on the 2-week average, is below (click on the image for full size):

There are many interesting things about it. One thing is glaringly clear: what the GOP is advocating as a remedy isn’t addressing the problems at hand.  The solutions to the problems are hard and long term, and even if the US is able to solve the problems we can solve, Apple (and other companies like them) may choose to stay in nations like China anyway.

I’m sure some in the GOP will grab this article as an instrument to try to bash Obama as being out of touch in creating jobs. Doing so will merely prove that they didn’t bother reading the article. There was little to none in the article about burdensome taxes or constraining regulations. The big explanation for why Apple (and others) have moved plants to China and other places overseas: Labor. And I’m not talking about big labor here.

There are two parts to the labor problem where China is beating the United States according to the article. One of them is potentially solvable. However, the other one is much more problematic.

First, the more solvable problem can be summed up by this quote:

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Creating a workforce with more technical workers is certainly something the US can work on, though the US is challenged by the fact that China has so many more workers than we do, and the fact that, in China, taking a step to be such a worker is a step up, while to many in the US, it may be seen as a step down. However, these are potentially problems we can overcome.

Here is the problem: even if the US is able to, one day, compete with China on the size and quality of our technical workforce, there are other factors that may still keep Apple and other companies in China. Here are a few quotes to illustrate why this is the case:

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

and…

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said….

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

and…

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

and…

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

Apple may be right in claiming that “labor costs” aren’t the biggest driver in moving jobs from the US to China, but the core problem is still labor. Apple, and companies like them, like having a source of cheap, docile labor that is almost literally willing to live for the company: work 60 to 80 hours a week for barely more than $1 an hour, and able – and willing – to be on call to go to work at a moment’s notice, mainly because they are literally living at the factory.

These are labor practices that the United States swept away 100 years ago, but Apple, and companies like them, are taking advantage of those working conditions in China today. And it’s hard to see the US going back to allowing those working conditions here, and even if we did, how does that improve the lives of every day Americans who would be forced to work almost every waking hour in the factory, at the cost of their family and having a life?

The other problem is the supply-chain problem: Apple moved most of their manufacturing overseas because most of the parts used to build their products were already overseas. Many, many years ago, manufacturing hit a sort of critical mass where enough things were made overseas that it became cheaper, just due to the supply-chain, to move assembly plants overseas, closer to where the parts were made, than to keep them in the US. That’s what Apple realized as well. The problem is, how do you bring those plants back?

Even if you could train workers with the requisite skills, and those workers were willing to work in the same conditions as their Chinese counterparts – those plants are already in China, and they have little incentive to move them back to the US. As the article notes, Apple likes where their facility is because it is literally blocks away from the factories producing the parts for their products. Why should they move back to the US and have to ship those parts back here, even if there are the workers here available to do the work?

Finally, if getting government out of the way is the answer, then why is China kicking our ass in this area? One of the things that makes China so attractive is the fact the government is willing to subsidize much of the work. Note the quote in the article where Apple was looking for pieces of scrap glass to do tests on for their new screen. The Chinese were willing to give them the scrap glass for free. If that wouldn’t be derided as government corporate welfare here, I’m not sure what would. On top of that, it’s the Chinese government, not the free market that produces manufacturing plants just like what Apple needs sitting next door to each other, and hundreds of thousands of people that just happen to be trained just for the jobs Apple and other companies need.

Think of it as a marriage of Socialism and Capitalism. United State’s capitalism is using of China’s socialism to provide them with everything they ever wanted or needed – namely cheap and docile labor and huge economies of scale. It’s a marriage made in heaven, at least for companies like Apple. Companies end up getting the best of both worlds while minimizing the problems with both systems. And it’s the workers in both systems that end up paying the price for this marriage.

If you aren’t aware of how I calculate these, candidates get awarded 2 points for a “true” rating, 1 point for “mostly true,” 1/2 point for “half true,” -1/2 point for “mostly false,” -1 point for “false,” and -2 points for “pants on fire.” I then divide the total points by the number of ratings to get the Truth Average. The higher the score, the better. A negative score basically means a candidate wouldn’t know the truth if it punched them in the face.

So here are the ratings as of January 17th, with the change from the scores from January 3rd in parentheses:

1. Barack Obama: 0.58 (-0.01)
2. Ron Paul: 0.37 (-0.04)
3. Mitt Romney: 0.28 (-0.05)
4. Rick Santorum: 0.18 (+0.03)
5. Rick Perry: 0.00 (-0.01)
6. Newt Gingrich: -0.33 (+0.05)

Obama’s rating changed for the first time since I’ve been tracking this, mainly thanks due to three “half-true” ratings and one “pants on fire” rating in the past 2 weeks (though I somewhat disagree with giving that rating “pants on fire” considering some of the things that have passed as “half-true” there. I may rate it something like “mostly false” since, yes, Perry says Israel probably would end up receiving funding, but he does say that everyone – including Israel – would “start at zero”). In any case, this is only the 5th “pants on fire” rating for Obama, which is fewer than Romney (9), Perry (12), and Gingrich (8). Paul and Santorum only have 2 and 1, but they have about 1/10th and 1/20th the number of ratings than Obama does as well. He’s also more than 2/10ths of a point ahead of anyone else, and more than double’s his likely general election opponent Romney’s score.

Paul’s spectacular drop is still going on, with this score having fallen by half since the fall. Romney hasn’t fared much better, either. Santorum has actually been doing the best, by far, lately, at least as far as Politifact ratings are concerned. With Bachmann leaving the race, Gingrich remains as the only candidate with a score which is underwater.

In any case, I was thinking of reviving it for 2012, though it’s a little early to get started, and I haven’t decided if I’m going to do it here, do it as it’s own wordpress.com blog, or get a domain for it again. There are advantages as doing it as it’s own domain such as having all the PHP that calculates everything online and being able to format things the way I want. Of course, the downside is that I have to pay for it.

In any case, my project in 2008 was a success. It predicted every state right except for two: Indiana and Missouri, which were the two states with the closest margins in my projections (0.6% and 0.2% respectively) and, well, a lot of people guessed wrong on Indiana and Missouri. The only thing I didn’t get was the Nebraska electoral vote, mainly because I wasn’t trying to track it.

One thing I don’t think I have done yet is actually go through my final projections and compare them to the actual final margins in each state. In fact, I still haven’t, so as you see them on here, they’ll be as new to you as they are to me…

So jump below the fold to see the results

On my EV Status site, I had a “weighted average” and a “weekly average.” As I recall, I reduced the weight I gave the poll based on how old it was, so as a poll got older, it got weighted less. Then I did a week average where I think I just averaged the polls released in the last week. The weekly average actually only missed Indiana, but it uses a smaller sample, and not even all states had one, but I’ll compare both to see if it made a difference when it came to predicting the margin.

I’m getting the official margin from The Green Papers, rounded to the nearest 1/10th of a percent. If you don’t want to read the table, just jump down to the analysis

Analysis

As you can see, the numbers are all over the place, but here is the quick roundup, ignoring which way I was off by:

The average miss for the weighted average was 3.61% while the median miss was 2.2%. The average miss for the weekly average was 3.4% while the median miss was 2.25%.  Of course, not all states had a weekly average, so the average and median for the weighted averages only in states that also had a weekly average were 3.09% and 2.05% respectively.

So based on the average, the Weekly Average was better – unless you only looked at states that had both averages, in which case the Weighted Average was better. However the median for the Weighted average was better in both cases, but got better when only comparing states that had both.

However, this includes all states, including states that weren’t polled often, but happened to have a poll in the last week. What if we narrow it down to, say, the closest 20 states (or in this case, closest 21 states since there was a tie at 20th). The Weekly Average does better here, with an average miss of 2.07% and a median miss of 1.1%, where the Weighted Average had an average miss of 2.13% and a median miss of 1.2%.

But what if we get down to the nitty gritty – the 10 closest states, which in this case are states which had a final margin better than 9%. This is once again mixed. The Weighted Average had a better average miss of 1.74% vs. the Weekly Average, which had an average miss of 1.94%. However, the Weekly Average had a better median miss of 0.45% than the Weighted Average, which had a median miss of 0.5%.

In any case, at the end both averages performed pretty similarly and, I would say, reliably. The worst miss by either average in the any of the 8 closest finishes, was a miss of 2% in Indiana’s Weekly Average. The Weighted Average projected the final margin within 1%  in 7 of the 8 closest states, while the Weekly Average projected the final margin within 1% in 6 of the 8 closest states. And the 10th closest state – North Dakota – should probably have an asterisk next to it since almost all of the polls done there were from Research 2000, who may very well had been making shit up at the time.

Clearly Romney agreed, as his acceptance speech last night had a distinct general election feel, focusing almost entirely on President Obama, with only a couple of swipes at the rest of the primary field mixed in.

The speech, as seems to be normal now days, probably had more lies in it than discernible facts. I was going to make a list of his lies and quick debunking, but it just made this post way too long. However, one of this statements last night was particularly galling to me:

The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We have to alter an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we’re lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success.

My mouth almost fell open when I heard him say this. The bigger politics of envy? This isn’t about the middle class being “jealous” of the rich and wanting to punish them for being rich. This is about many rich people – with Romney personifying them in many ways – getting rich on the backs of and at the expense of the middle class. As I said on twitter this morning, Obama isn’t about the politics of envy, it’s about the politics of stop screwing the middle class in the name of making yourself a bigger profit.

The reason why Romney’s time at Bain is a problem for him isn’t because he got rich there. It’s the way he got rich, by basically taking over struggling companies, sucking everything he could out of them, and them letting them go, often resulting in complete failure. Perry’s term of “vulture capitalism” is pretty accurate, I think. It’s the same thing with banks, where executives were giving themselves big bonuses while at the same time foreclosing on millions of Americans and getting bailed out by the government. If Romney wants to defend that sort of capitalism, as opposed to the person getting rich through actually working hard and success, then that’s up to him.

However, what makes it even worse, is that he doubled-down on the politics of envy this morning on the today show:

Matt: Let me ask you about the choice of words last night when you said we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. I’m curious about the word envy. Did you suggest that anyone who questions the politics and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country is envious? Is it about jealousy or fairness?

Mitt: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99% versus 1%, and those people who have been most successful are in the 1%, you have opened up a wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God. I believe in the final analysis, the American people will reject that.

Matt: Aren’t there questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy?

Mitt: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and tax policy and the like. But the President made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires, and billionaires, and executives, and Wall Street. It’s an envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.

There are so many things wrong with what Mitt said this morning. Of course there is doubling-down on the politics of envy. Then there is him saying that any criticism of how Wall Street has operated or how financial institutions ran things is out of envy and not out of fairness. So Mitt Romney is saying that if you’re mad that bank CEOs wrote themselves huge bonuses while throwing you or your family or your friends out of their homes, you’re just jealous and should get over it.

He then goes further, not only saying that it’s A-OK for rich people to get rich on the back of the middle class and poor, but that it is part of this nation’s religious heritage by invoking “one nation under God.” So not only are you being envious by criticizing how people became rich, but you’re potentially being un-Christian too!

Then the final blow came with this suggestion that, sure, it’s OK to talk about wealth distribution, but only hidden away in “quiet rooms,” lest we incite the rabble, or something.

Mitt thinks he’s found a winner in his politics of envy line, but I think he’s really going to step in it based on how he answered questions here. He is making a full-throated defense of the exploitation of the middle class by some members of the upper class, not as just being OK, but as the way America does and should work.

If that’s the debate Romney wants to have, I have a feeling Obama will be more than happy to engage him in that discussion.

Of course, there are some serious problems with this. The first problem is that Sirota is essentially making the judgement call that things like racism, destroying the welfare state, destroying labor laws, environmental regulations, unions, and so on is equally as evil as Obama sending more troops into Afghanistan, using drones, killing Anwar al-Awlaki, and the drug war. I think this is a very difficult equivalence to make, but his entire article is essentially based on this premise. Is using drones really as bad as eliminating environmental regulations? Is sending more troops into Afghanistan really as bad as allowing corporations to run their workers into the ground? Is continuing the drug war really as bad as gutting Social Security and Medicare? Sirota appears to think so. I don’t know about you, but I think Paul’s flaws here far outweigh Obama’s

However, let’s take Sirota’s claim at face value that Paul is just as much of a progressive as Obama is, but just on different issues. I’m sure we’ll agree on the issues where we think Obama is a progressive, so let’s address the list where he claims Paul is:

At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare and civil liberties, Paul is more in line with progressive goals than any candidate running in 2012 (or almost any Democrat who has held a federal office in the last 30 years). This, too, is indisputable.

See! This is indisputable. Except I’m about to dispute it right now.

Let’s take them one at a time:

1) War

If you oppose Afghanistan completely (and I would argue that, while this is the majority positions among progressives, it’s still not a universal one), Paul’s position still isn’t as great as it sounds. First off, wars take a while to wind down. Obama essentially ended the Iraq war as quickly as was feasible. He’s in the process of doing the same thing in Afghanistan. It’s hard to see how Paul would be able to pull out of Afghanistan significantly quicker unless you just don’t care about things going to hell in the process. I’m sure some may argue it will go to hell anyway, but perhaps we have a responsibility to try to prevent that as much as we can?

It also seems unlikely that Obama is going to get us engaged in any similar type of war in his second term as well. This leaves us with situations like Libya. About the only argument here is that you oppose using military force at all for any reason. It’s hard to find a reason to oppose Libya except for a universal opposition to the use of military force. Of course, the problem here is that that’s not really Paul’s position. He’s not anti-war in the Kucinich sense. Yes, he’s against things like doing things in Libya. But if someone attacks us, it’s not like Paul is going to refuse to respond. His main thing is the belief that a declaration of war is required to take action, not that we shouldn’t take action.

So is Paul better than Obama on war? I suppose that depends on your point of view. Obama ended Iraq and is ending Afghanistan. It’s hard to see how Paul is better here. I actually think limited military strikes such as what we did in Libya to take out dictators may actually be a good use of the military, though if you disagree you would side with Paul on that. Otherwise, it’s difficult to see an appreciable difference between the two candidates right now.

2) Police Power

Here’s the problem with this argument: the vast majority of police power is vested in the states which, frankly, Paul doesn’t really care about. Indeed, I think he’s essentially made it clear that the states can do whatever they want. In fact, one could argue that Paul is worse on police power because he would oppose any sort of federal check on the use of police powers by the state where Obama might, if a situation got serious enough anyway. All of these OWS crackdowns were done by city and state forces, after all, not federal forces.

3) Bank Bailouts

Here is the thing about the bailouts: they were necessary. I know many progressives hate even thinking about admitting it, but you pretty much have to. Not doing TARP (which didn’t cost us anything in the end, by the way) would have resulted in pretty much the economy collapsing.

So the question here is: how do we prevent doing bank bailouts in the future? There are essentially two options: the first is to implement regulations that make bank bailouts unnecessary in the future. Obama and Democrats have been trying to work toward this goal. This option is also antithetical to Paul’s libertarian ideas. The other option is to not have any regulations and just not bail out the banks and let the economy burn.

I find it difficult to grasp how Paul is better on this issue. Obama supported the bailouts in 2008 because that was our only real choice at the time. As a consequence, he’s supported policies that will hopefully make it unnecessary to have to do the same thing in the future. Paul opposes both bailing banks out and having regulations that would prevent situations where bailing out banks may become necessary, and as a result, essentially supports a form of economic armageddon. Again, it’s hard to see how this is the superior policy position.

4) Cutting the Defense Budget

The biggest problem with cutting the defense budget has more to do with about 500 members of Congress being opposed to it that who the president is. Also, it’s not like Paul opposes the military. Yes, he would cut the budget by closing bases and things like that and is perhaps the position I agree with Paul on the most, personally. It’s also the issue where the President has perhaps the least power of all to actually effect change because the opposition to it in Congress is so strong and vast. Also, Obama has signalled willingness to cut the defense budget himself. Certainly not to levels that Paul might, but it’s certainly better than any other GOP alternative would come even close to.

5) Corporate Welfare

I find this argument actually rather silly because it doesn’t take into account the candidate’s complete views on corporations. Sure, Paul opposes corporate welfare, but only because he opposes government doing anything in general, not because he’s some sort of anti-corporate crusader. OK, so you get rid of corporate welfare. But what do you get in exchange? Repeal of labor laws? Repeal of safety laws? Repeal of consumer protection laws? That hardly seems like an equal trade. And it’s not like Obama is big on the corporate welfare bandwagon himself. And he would keep all of that other stuff too. Again, I find it hard to accept the argument that Paul is actually better than Obama on this issue.

6) Civil Liberties

For sure, Obama perhaps hasn’t done as much on civil liberties as some people probably hoped he would. But this notion that he’s restricted them even further seems silly to me. Also, I think you have to look at the entire package here.  Paul may improve civil liberties on the federal level, but may very well allow states to violate people’s civil liberties – and civil rights – at that level. And, much like the police powers, much of this rests on the state level and not just the federal level. So while Paul may be, in absolute terms, better than Obama here, I don’t think the advantage is as big as people make it out to be.

7) Surveillance

I’m sure part of the hope here with Obama is that he would oppose the PATRIOT ACT. And indeed, he has renewed the law without any real changes, although he has implemented some improvements unilaterally that at least makes things a little better. Certainly he probably hasn’t done enough to roll back some of the surveillance things Bush put into place, but it is also hard to argue that he’s made things worse. This may be the only real point where one can say without very much equivocating that Paul would probably be better than Obama. Of course, that comes back to the question about whether this issue is enough to abandon everything else.

So, despite Sirota’s claim of Paul being “indisputably” better than Obama on the above 7 issues, I’d say that Paul isn’t actually better than Obama at all on 3 of them, is better, but with an asterisk or not as much as people like to claim on 3 others, and is actually clearly better on 1 issue.

Now let’s address the 2nd part of Sirota’s claim, which is essentially that Paul won’t be able to implement the things liberals don’t like about him because of Congress.

With perhaps the exception of the defense budget (which is the main thing liberals like), this is a pretty silly argument. Why? Because when it comes to the budget, Paul largely falls in line with the GOP, and there is a not insignificant chance that the GOP will control both Houses of Congress come 2013. If that’s the case, who, exactly, is going to stand in Paul’s way?

And even if you address some of the more extreme parts of Paul’s plan, even those that the GOP may balk at, Paul has a great card: the veto pen. After all, if your plan is to essentially eliminate government, is there much different between getting a budget passed that does just that and repeatedly vetoing budgets that don’t and getting government shutdowns in the meantime? Not really.

About the only things Paul couldn’t do without Congress is mandatory spending – mainly Social Security and Medicare. Those can’t be touched without an active act of Congress. But again, if he has a GOP congress to work with, do people really believe those won’t be carved up as well? Paul may have to compromise on completely eliminating them, but if we get to that point in the debate, it’s already going to be too late for progressives.

So in conclusion, what do we have? This appears to be an exercise in overstating Paul’s positive, overstating Obama’s negatives, and then pretending that Obama’s negatives and Paul’s negatives are roughly equal in weight. Sirota tries to argue that such a choice is “debatable” but I find it hard to see how it is. One is essentially saying “since Obama isn’t a 100% pure progressive, then we’ll go with the guy who supports the few things that Obama isn’t really doing, but nevermind that he’ll destroy everything else.” As I’ve kind of said on twitter a couple times, people are abandoning Obama over 1 or 2 issues, despite all others, but are willing to support Paul over 1 or 2 issues, despite all others. And yet, we, the Obama supporters, are the ones “willing to accept anything” our candidate does.

If you aren’t aware of how I calculate these, candidates get awarded 2 points for a “true” rating, 1 point for “mostly true,” 1/2 point for “half true,” -1/2 point for “mostly false,” -1 point for “false,” and -2 points for “pants on fire.” I then divide the total points by the number of ratings to get the Truth Average. The higher the score, the better. A negative score basically means a candidate wouldn’t know the truth if it punched them in the face.

So here are the ratings as of January 3rd, with the change from the scores from December 16th in parentheses. Minimum 10 ratings:

1. Barack Obama: 0.59 (NC)
2. Ron Paul: 0.41 (-0.05)
3. Jon Huntsman: 0.40 (-0.06)
4. Mitt Romney: 0.33 (-0.01)
5. Rick Santorum: 0.15 (NC)
6. Rick Perry: 0.01 (NC)
7. Newt Gingrich: -0.38 (-0.07)
8. Michelle Bachmann: -0.56 (+0.03)

So the only GOP candidate with any upward movement in the past two weeks is Bachmann, thanks to a Mostly True rating and her already abysmal average that makes it hard for her not to move up short of a False or Pants on Fire rating. Santorum didn’t change because he didn’t get any new ratings. Perry got several new ones but they pretty much all averaged out to zero which is why his didn’t change either. Everyone else went down.

If you were wondering, five GOP candidates have been in the ratings since I started posting them on my blog in August – Paul, Romney, Gingrich, Perry, and Bachmann. Only Perry and Bachmann haven’t seen rather precipitous drops in their ratings since then. Bachmann, again, because it’s hard to keep such a horrible rating, and Perry, who seems to consistently average about 0, telling as many truths and untruths. Romney has dropped 0.13 points, Paul had dropped 0.30 points, taking his reputation has being a “different” candidate when it comes to the truth with it, while Gingrich had dropped a staggering .49 points, going from above zero to next to last and in danger of being passed by Bachmann, of all people, for the cellar.

For a while, both Paul and Huntsman – and even nominally Romney – could challenge Obama for truth telling, with both Paul and Huntsman actually leading the ratings at one point. But at this point, in the battle for the GOP bottom feeding votes, there is pretty much no one who is even close to Obama’s score now. Indeed, both Paul and Romney (and Huntsman if he had enough ratings to count) had better scores in August than any GOP candidate has today, including themselves.

If you aren’t aware of how I calculate these, candidates get awarded 2 points for a “true” rating, 1 point for “mostly true,” 1/2 point for “half true,” -1/2 point for “mostly false,” -1 point for “false,” and -2 points for “pants on fire.” I then divide the total points by the number of ratings to get the Truth Average. The higher the score, the better. A negative score basically means a candidate wouldn’t know the truth if it punched them in the face.

So here are the ratings as of December 16th, with the change from the scores from November 29th in parentheses. Minimum 10 ratings:

1. Barack Obama: 0.59 (NC)
2. John Huntsman: 0.46 (-0.17)
3. Ron Paul: 0.46 (-0.08)
4. Mitt Romney: 0.34 (NC)
5. Rick Santorum: 0.15 (+0.40)
6. Rick Perry: 0.01 (NC)
7. Newt Gingrich: -0.31 (-0.21)
8. Michelle Bachmann: -0.59 (-0.03)

Some notes: Herman Cain has been taken out of the ratings because he dropped out of the race. However, Newt has apparently decided to take his spot as one of the worst liars now that he’s been made the frontrunner. I don’t know what it is about becoming a front runner and lying, but Bachmann did it (and continues to do so), Perry’s score fell lock a rock when he became the frontrunner, Cain’s score was always low, and now Gingrich’s score has dropped like rock since becoming the front runner. I don’t know if this lying is making them the front runner or if they feel compelled to lie to appease their base, but there definitely seems to be some connection between being the flavor of the month candidate and not telling the truth. The only candidate this doesn’t really seem to apply to so far is Mitt Romney.

As recently as August, Gingrich had a score of 0.11, making him the 3rd most truthful Republican. Now he’s next to last, having lost almost a half point average since then. That’s a lot of lying in the past 3 1/2 months.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, has been doing some truth telling. It’s not really about Obama or anything – basically some statements on unemployment for college grads and some statements about the Balanced Budget Amendment when he was in the Senate, but I don’t really care what the ratings are about, and Politifact decided to judge them, so they’re in. In any case, it’s enough to boost his score by nearly half a point – helped by the fact that he only has 13 ratings to begin with. But it’s moved Santorum from next to last (sans Cain) to 4rd among Republicans, at least for the moment.

Jon Huntsman’s lead didn’t last long. He joined the list last month (finally) having a rating of 0.63. However, a couple of “mostly false” ratings has dropped his score into a tie with Ron Paul for 2nd overall, though still tied for first among GOP candidates.

Since the end of August, the change in the candidates ratings are now thus (Huntsman and Santorum aren’t listed since they didn’t have enough ratings to have a score at the time):

• Michelle Bachmann: +0.23
• Rick Perry: +0.02
• Barack Obama: No change
• Mitt Romney: -0.12
• Ron Paul: -0.25
• Newt Gingrich: -0.42

I should note it should say something when Bachmann has improved her score by a quarter of a point and she still is about a quarter point behind any other candidate at this point. Her score back in August was a truly abysmal -0.82. It’s now only -0.59. Which means she’s told the truth occasionally, but her “mostly false,” “false,” and “pants on fire” ratings still outnumber her “true,” “mostly true,” and “half true” ratings nearly 3 to 1.

Sadly, she’s really the only Republican candidate to have made any improvements. Perry improved from -0.01 to +0.01, which isn’t that much of a change, really. All other GOP candidates scores have dropped in the past 3 1/2 months. The main reason Obama’s score hasn’t changed is that his over 300 ratings make his score extremely stable.

I suppose the only good stat for the Republicans is that, unlike last month, half their field is no longer underwater. Newt Gingrich already had a negative rating, Herman Cain dropped out, and Santorum went from having a negative rating to a positive one. That means 5 of the 7 GOP candidates now actually have a positive rating. But as noted above, the trend for almost all of them is still downward.

First, I largely understand the arguments about why some want Plan B available over the counter to anyone. They’re pretty similar to the arguments surrounding a minor being able to get an abortion without parental consent. Arguments range from avoiding the stigma of having sex or having to reveal abuse before getting treatment to a general argument that women, and in this case girls, should have complete and unfettered freedom to do whatever they want with their reproductive health. However, I have a few comments I’d like to add to that.

The first is that – and perhaps I’m wrong about this – I find it difficult to believe that someone as young as 13 or 14 or younger would be looking into getting Plan B without some sort of adult education or urging, whether it’s a parent, sibling, friend, or otherwise. And if that’s the case, how much of a greater burden is it to just have that adult buy Plan B and ensure the child uses it correctly than hoping they buy it themselves and hope they know what they’re doing, or at worst take them to a doctor to get a prescription?

The second is, I was rather surprised to learn as part of the discussion that minors, even those 10 or 11 years old, could buy drugs like aspirin, tylenol, or hell, take any drug, without a problem over the county. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. Perhaps there’s a good reason for it, but I can’t immediately think of a good one right off hand. I found it a bigger problem that a 14 year old could buy a bottle of aspirin, no questions asked, than with the fact that they couldn’t buy Plan B the same way.

Some people are trying to argue that this is some sort of sexism because condoms are available for anyone to buy. The problem with that logic however, is that you’re essentially saying that Plan B, which is a drug by the way, is just as harmless as a condom. And while there haven’t been any real serious side effects reported with Plan B, I think one would be hard pressed to argue that something like a condom is equal to a drug – any drug – as far as risk.

I suppose the argument I’m most sympathetic toward is the stigma argument. I seem to recall some statistic somewhere – I’m not sure I could even find it now – that showed that condoms used to be one of the most shoplifted items from stores, but since scan-it-yourself registers came, that rate has fallen, suggesting that people were shoplifting condoms not because they wanted to steal them, but because they didn’t want to go through the stigma of having to have the person at the register know that they were buying condoms. If there is one part of the decision I don’t like, it’s that Plan B has to stay “behind the counter” (though available without a prescription) as a result of the ruling.

It seems drug stores don’t work this way, but I guess I’d think it would be better if they were on the shelf, and anyone who looked too young to buy it was IDed, ala cigarettes. I would think that would at least help reduce the stigma part of the problem, though I suppose the concern about that  is if a store has a scan-it-yourself register, someone under 16 could just buy it anyway like that, and the argument that there may not be much of reduction in the stigma problem if either everyone has to show ID or you have to swing by the register anyway.

My last comment is about this article where some people are threatening to “stay home” in 2012 over this issue. Really? You’re going to stay home, and not vote, and allow the GOP to take over everything just because a 14 year old can’t buy Plan B over the counter? I suppose this issue is a big one for women’s groups, but in the whole sceme of everything that is going on and everything that is at stake, it seems like a pretty pathetic thing to stay home over. I think your time would be better spent re-electing Obama and trying to change his mind than letting a Republican president come in, who you know will never change their mind about it, and perhaps (and probably) do even more damage. You really want to possibly destroy abortion, and possibly even contraceptive rights, in America over the fact that Plan B isn’t available to a 14 year old over the counter? I don’t think so. And if you do, you’re the world’s biggest fool.