Why Ari Fleischer Can't Count Properly (When Tweeting About President Obama)
Lots of people are amused by this tweet from former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer:
Question to @gov: how come @BarackObama ‘s last tweet was more than 140 characters? Does he play by different rules???
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) September 24, 2013
Many are chortling that Fleischer has a math deficiency. Actually, I think the recent findings by Dan Kahan and colleagues (discussed here by Chris Mooney and here by David Ropeik) better speak to his numeracy error.
Anyone could slip up counting characters in a tweet.
What makes this disturbing and hilarious is that having done so Fleischer considered it more likely that Obama has a special twitter over-ride, than that he, Fleischer, miscounted.
NS, he was kidding, obviously. Personally, I find Obama’s tweet-claim about premiums disturbing and not at all hilarious.
Fleischer made a jackass of himself. The mockery is well deserved.
Eh, maybe you’re right. If he keeps it up he might even get his own section in The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/topics/joe-biden/
I can math. I’ve been part of the Massachusetts “Romneycare” experiment since it began. My premiums are lower than they were in 2006 (still) and I have more coverage (I didn’t used to carry any prescription coverage) a lot more choice than I used to.
I have the evidence to show this too.
But as we know, facts and data have little value in these discussions.
On a national scale, theory is going to run into reality very soon, one way or the other.
Yeah, this is true. And I look forward to it. For those of us who had no, or precarious and expensive, options before–I think reality will be swell.
Did Discover report the miss-count on the number of United States Obama visited? Miss-counting characters pales in comparison.
It is amazing how many different ways people can see what they want to see. If a person isn’t actively fighting to identify where their biases are affecting their thought they are a slave to their biases…
How is that a joke?
Seriously, like if I responded to your post by saying that you had misspelled “Obama,” would that be a funny joke? In what sense?
Because see, if you actually *had* misspelled “Obama,” and that was all I followed up about, that would suggest that I didn’t have anything else to take issue with in your post.
As GW Bush’s Press Secretary, Fleischer was not accustomed to getting his facts straight before making public comments at press conferences.
Apparently, old bad habits are hard to break.
Of course, the right wing blogosphere continues to adhere to their fundamental philosophy ofspreading disinformation: when fact-devoid rumors are disproven, ignore the facts and perpetuate the rumors.
I can math too
My wife an I voth quit smoking in January in hopes of qualifying for the ‘non-smoking insurance rate’ which would have saved up $200/month in health insurance premiums.
We’ll we qualify now for the non-smoking rate…the premiums however are going to be $300/month more and our deductible has gone from $3500 a piece to $5000 a piece.
So please help me with the math…a $200/month savings that we would have been entitled too without Obamacare has now become an additional $300/month expense.
We also have an additional $1500/piece deductible.
Not to mention our ‘co-pay’ has gone from 20% to 30% after deductable.
We’ve both always had health coverage…we are seriously considering just paying the fine and going ‘bare’.
Obamacare…turning financial responsible indivduals into criminals…