Today is the last day you can sign up for health insurance via the Affordable Care Act exchange.  Here’s the chart thrown up by Fox News:

Look at that!  LOOK AT IT!  Look at how far short “Obamacare” has fallen from its goal!  IT’S A TRAIN WRECK!  WE TOLD YOU SO!  ARGLE-BARGLE!

Argle-bargle indeed.

Let’s pretend we studied propaganda techniques in school and take a look at this chart.

Here we’ve isolated the chart and done some examining of the units of measurement so generously provided by Fox News Corp.

There are eight divisions.  I’m lazy, so I’m going to go with the 6,000,000 number since it’s even.  It takes up three of the divisions, which means that each division is worth exactly 2,000,000.

So for each line that the bar reaches, that’s another two million people who have signed up for health insurance on the ACA exchanges.

The second bar reaches just past the eighth line, which means that…

Hold on there, bucky, that can’t be right, can it?  The second bar reaches past the eighth line, but Fox News Corp. has labeled it 7,066,000.

But if each line is worth 2,000,000…

There, I fixed that for you, Fox News Corp.

Here’s what we tell the third graders: always look to see who is giving you information and what they’re trying to sell you.  Here we find that Fox News has deliberately distorted the comparison between the 6 million and 7 million columns so that it looks like “Obamacare” has fallen short of its goal by about eleventy-million.  (Either that or they are incredibly incompetent.  It’s the classic choice of “stupid or evil.”)

But there’s actually more lying to look at:

We see that as of last Thursday (March 27), the ACA had registered six million people, but that is short of the actual goal of seven million.

However, that’s a lie.  The 7,000,000 figure was the Congressional Budget Office’s original estimate of how many people would sign up for insurance via the federal exchange.  Because of the website’s bumpy start (sure, private industry contractors can always do a better  job…), the CBO revised that estimate downward to 6,000,000.  Again, this is not a goal, it’s an estimate.

So here’s the actual news:

Based on the CBO’s revised estimate, the Affordable Care Act goalpost of 6,000,000 people signing up for health insurance on the federal exchange was passed four days before the deadline.

Here’s what Fox News Corp. reported in its chart:

Obamacare has failed to meet its goal of 7,066,000 people by a factor of about 2.66.

Here’s the deal, O conservative acquaintances: we can differ on whether “Obamacare” is a good thing or not—personally, I think it is a waste of time: let’s go straight to single payer universal healthcare.  But you cannot pretend that Fox News Corp. has done anything but lie to you with this chart.  Not to me, darlings; I don’t watch that particular entertainment channel.  To you.

And so what you have to ask yourself is what I would teach third graders to ask: What are they trying to sell you, and why?

Feel free to respond in comments, but we’re only discussing the particulars of this chart.  Comments about the ACA and its legitimacy will be deleted.  There will be no Gish Galloping here.

(hat tip to Media Matters)

UPDATE

As of midnight last night…

There, I updated that for you, Fox News Corp.

Hey there—it’s a bonus late-night liberal rant!

As you may be aware, the Republican party tends to have issues with women voters.  (It also has issues with black voters, Hispanic voters, educated voters, and young voters, but let that pass.)

So in Texas, where local toadstool Greg Abbott is running for governor against the lady Democrat Wendy Davis, the GOP has started yet another PAC aimed at women voters to splain to them why voting for Republicans is not as horrible as they might think.

Yeah.

So the nice (R) lady in charge of this thing was asked about equal pay for women.  And lo: she did not disappoint.  You can go read that if you like, but for me, here’s the money quote.  After agreeing that Texas women “want and deserve equal pay,” honcho Cari Christman went on to say:

“But honestly, Jason, we don’t believe the Lilly Ledbetter Act is what’s going to solve that problem for women. We believe that women want real-world solutions to this problem, not more rhetoric.”

Ahem, as Delores Umbridge would say.  The Lilly Ledbetter Act is not rhetoric.  It is a real-world solution, otherwise known as a law.  “Real-world solutions, not more rhetoric” is what Aristophanes would identify as rhetoric.

Why aren’t these people tarred and feathered?

I’ll get back to Burning Man plans tomorrow.  Today I want to toss out a couple of links that have been sitting around waiting for me to share them.

People, there are crazies among us.  Lots of them.  Many, if not most, of them completely conservative wackadoodles.

Do not mistake me: I don’t like name-calling, and there are plenty of ways to be conservative/Republican and still make a valuable contribution to society. How and also ever, because of the internets we are now able to see into the deepest recesses of the fearful, unhappy lizard brains of the far right.  Worse, they’re able to put it out there where we cannot help but see it.  It’s really squicky.

I suppose we’ve always had these people around, but mostly they kept to themselves (and for reasons that will become clear in a moment).  If they published anything, it was apt to be typed and mimeographed and handed out at the lodge meeting.  Now, they have the magic of 21st century technology at their fingertips, and they use it.

Check out these links, and then we’ll chat.

• http://crooksandliars.com/2014/02/latest-government-conspiracy-theory-fake : Yes, that’s right.  Snowpocalypse was a government conspiracy.
• http://www.riseearth.com/2014/02/what-church-isnt-telling-you-about.html#.Uxh0pV7Vgq_ : How nice a guy can Pope Francis be if he’s concealing space aliens from us?

These next two are, scarily, not fringe lunacy:

• http://www.first-draft.com/2014/03/today-on-tommy-ts-obsession-with-the-freeperati-oh-so-do-mi-o-edition.html : The whole thing is worth the read, but scroll down to just past the Dante’s Internet graphic (cute) and read that huge block of type.  (‘SHTF’ is prepper for ‘Shit Hits The Fan,’ prepspeak for when it all comes undone.  (‘Preppers’ are those who are convinced that SHTF is inevitable and who ARE TAKING STEPS BY GOD TO PROTECT THEMSELVES AND THEIR LOVED ONES DAMMIT!!!1!))
• https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=771001902923833&id=135010313189665 : ::sigh::

I had another link, to a roundup of conservative religious reaction to Russell Crowe’s Noah movie, but I can’t find it.  And I could have clogged this post with dozens/scores/hundreds of similar websites.

So why do I find this display of human frailty endlessly fascinating?  I think it’s the absolute fearfulness with which these people view the world. It’s like they’re literally zombies, infected with some virus to which the rest of us are immune but which reduces them to paranoid automatons.  The first two links are just amusing crazytalk, but the last two are worth noting because of the twin responses to this virus, rage and fear.  The prepper is consumed with anger at the world; the endtimers retreat into fearful incantations and shibboleths.

Here’s the most important point: their fear is not occasioned by their worldview—they’re not scared because they see things to be scared of.  It’s the reverse: their brains seem to be hardwired to be fearful, and so they see things to fear.  And if they don’t really see things to fear, their brains organize the randomness of reality into some really scary shit.  Where you and I would see some domestic and international political problems that require our attention and teamwork to be resolved, these people see vast machines that are out of their control, and their main response is to run away.

It’s exactly like our little dog Mia.  Whenever the doorbell rings, she barks and barks and barks. Even when we invite the people into our home and talk amiably with them, she barks.  Even when it’s the cleaners who have come every week for years, she barks.  Is there a threat?  Not even, but she barks: her brain is so fearful that she has no choice.  (She flinches even when my lovely first wife, whom she adores, reaches to pet her.)

Why do their brains work this way?  Pleasure, pure and simple.  Just like most of us go see 3 Days to Kill or Captain Phillips or Non-Stop for the frisson of adrenalin we get from the fake fear, these peoples’ brains provide them with an emotional rush every time they think of black helicopters or the Anti-Christ.

All I can say is, bless their hearts.  It’s a hell of a way to live.  And there is no cure.

One of the most gobsmacking brainfarts on the part of the conservative side of America is the inherent contradiction in their positions on a) tax cuts; and b) social welfare.  In a nutshell, it says that if we give the rich more money, they will work harder (with undoubted benefit to all of us), but if we give the poor more benefits (even if temporary, as is the norm), they will just get lazy.  We laugh, but the right wing believes it.

How, you might ask, is this even possible?  The answer is essentialism, a term I encountered recently in this Slate article.  As amateur philosophers, we all recognize that things can be grouped into categories, and often we base those groupings on the essence of the individuals.  For example, as the article says, dogs are “doggy” and cats are “adorable, fluffy little jerks.”

The philosophical trap we fall into, however, is that we start to believe that many surface attributes are in fact essential when they are not.  This would include some physical traits, such as sex, race, etc., but it can also include social traits or abstract traits, like gender (not the same as sex—see what I did there?) or religion.

Or economic status.

The researchers in the article devised statements to test peoples’ sense of essentialism with such phrases as ““It is possible to determine one’s social class by examining their genes.”  In other words, that’s just the way “those people” are—they were born that way.

Rich people were found to be much more likely to believe that their class status and that of others is determined largely by essentials.  Poor people are poor because they’re… you know… poor people.  People like us, on the other hand…

None of this surprises me at all.  I’m just glad to have a name for it.  Now if we could just find a cure for it…

So, the founder of Domino’s has a sad.

One of the more offensive comments rightwingers make about employers not wanting to provide their female employees with perfectly legal medication as part of their healthcare is that if women don’t like the religiousy beliefs of their employers, they are free to seek employment elsewhere.

I have a counter-offer: if Tom Monaghan’s deeply held religiousy beliefs conflict with the law of the land, he is free to sell off his interests and go do something else.