This program is made possible by the members and donors to the show for details visit the membership tab at bestivalf.com.

Now welcome to the award winning best of the left podcast with clips today from the young Turks, the Tom Hartman program, the Majority Report, the David Pakman show, the Progressive magazine, and the Rachel Maddo show.

And to note that this episode contains kind words about a Republican so you may want to hide your kids and hide your wife now.

George Mason University Center for Media and Public Affairs did a terrific study where what all they did was they looked at put a fact which is an organization that rates the different statements by politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Now they did that of course exhaustively during the 2012 election as they have in past elections and it turned out that Mitt Romney wound up making more misstatements.

And I'm being kind by saying misstatements they were like and they were significant amount of lies on the Romney side, some on the Obama side but Republicans won that one.

Well George Mason University decided to look at what's happening since then in 2013 and they took 100 statements over all that political fact the judge 46 by Democrats, 54 by Republicans, and trying to find out which party on average has lied more.

All they did was look at the numbers and understand that political fact tries desperately to not tilt the scales.

If I think you know look they have a huge beef with Rachel Maddo because Rachel Maddo thinks that they not necessarily lean right but they go out of their way to try to be neutral and thereby inadvertently lean right.

Sometimes I agree with Rachel on that sometimes I think political fact has been right about it but understand they are not trying to support the Democrats if anything they are treating to the other side to say no no we don't support the Democrats.

We are just trying to call it as it is but when they do and actually research the information and the facts here is the results in 2013 alone for claims that were called false or pants on fire meaning incredibly false.

Republicans have 32% of their claims in that category and Democrats only had 11% of their claims in that category.

It is basically a 3-to-1 margin where Republicans are blatant liars at 3-to-1 margin higher than Democrats are.

Again it is not saying Democrats don't like they do.

Now when you look at true claims well neither side did particularly well but entirely true claims Democrats were at 22% Republicans were only at 11% that is a 2-to-1 advantage for Democrats.

Now when you broaden it out a little bit and you talk about mostly false or pants on fire claims so broader category includes mostly false.

Again we have about a 2-to-1 I don't know if it is an advantage or disadvantage to the Republicans it winds up being a political advantage I will get to that in a second but Republicans were false 52% of the time in other words lying 52% of the time and Democrats only 24% of the time.

Now when you go to the true claims Democrats had 54% of their statements that were mostly true or true and the Republicans only had 18% of their statements that were true.

And as I said Bill Adair who runs this he is the editor at Politifact came out and said no no no no wait wait he said quote Politifact rates the factual accuracy of specific claims we do not seek to measure which party tells more falsehoods.

And he went on to say they just took a limited period of time and a limited number of cases and we have done over 7000 of these in other words do not close bias, do not close bias.

Because it is really important for them not to be perceived as bias. Now the reality is they are not bias, they look at the facts.

The only possible bias could be in the interpretation of those facts and that is what Rachel Maddo has some progressives complain about.

...