Spot check: BBBBBBB inductee Karen Street

Karen Street of the "Politi-Psychotics" blog is already on the Bad Blogs Blood Bloody Bad Blogs Blogroll, but since her kooky arguments directly concern the work I do at my main blogs, I have reason to revisit her insane domain from time to time.

And do we have a classic.

At Sublime Bloviations I criticized PolitiFact's fact check of a claim that Florida shark attacks occur more commonly then voter fraud.  Statistics like that are supposed to show that voter fraud isn't really a problem and therefore legislation that is supposed to keep ineligible voters from voting is about disenfranchisement of legal voters.

Later, also at Sublime Bloviations, I took note of a television news story that discovered non-citizens on the voter rolls in Florida.

Karen Street found the supposed flaw in my argument:

But a recent youtube video from “Liberal Viewer Presents” (see below) and a follow-up post from Grading PolitiFact made me realize that Grading PolitFact’s basis for saying this Mostly True ruling was in the “wrong” and should be “False” was a, pardon the pun, felonious one, and did something it often accuses others of, that is, it built a “felons voting” straw man around the voter fraud (in this case, third party voter registrations).

Neither of my posts was about third-party voter registration.  Street's tieing an extraneous aspect of the new Florida voter law to my arguments.  Perhaps Street reasons (using the term advisedly) that since the Colbert Report segment was about application of the Florida voting law to entities engaged in third-party registration of voters therefore my criticism of PolitiFact was a red herring or something.  But the ACLU spokesperson was making the point that the law was a solution to a non-existent problem.

Street wisely discounted her own initial impulse in response to my first post.  It really isn't relevant to the issue of voter fraud whether states other than Florida allow felons to vote.  Unfortunately good sense departed for the sake of her new argument (italics for emphasis in the original):

But the “democracy” argument is not the right one for this case. That’s because Grading PolitiFact cannot add these felons to the count as voter fraud to compare to shark attacks. The reason it cannot add them is because the new law does not prevent felons from voting.

Sometimes I literally have to blink while reading this stuff from Street.

In my original post I pointed to evidence from the Miami Herald that thousands of felons may have voted in the 2000 election.  That's the Bush/Gore election.  It was illegal at that time for felons to vote in Florida.  No question about it.  As for my follow up post about the television news story, that wasn't about felons at all.  It was about non-citizens voting.  Non-citizens aren't allowed to vote whether felons or not.

Street's entire premise for her post is entirely wrong, and wrong to an amazing extent.
Street (bold emphasis added):

A person’s driver license does not indicate if they are a felon. Often the police can only see that a person’s drivers’ license is legitimate and hasn’t expired along with traffic charges, and the only way to know whether the driver is a felon is to have police access and be able to look at the person’s arrest record. One can possibly have a felony conviction with traffic charges from being at fault in a deadly traffic accident, but there are many more felonies outside of that. In some cases the police access is restricted (there has to be “cause”): Is it a “cause” to check every person’s driver license for a felony when they vote? In the case of the teacher helping her students register to vote, I’d say the felon question applies in the same way. When filling out the application you must confirm that you are not a felon without “civil rights restored.” The article in the Tampa Bay Times as well as the PolitiFact ruling was not about felons found voting; it was about the rules for third party voter registrations.

To assist Street's memory:  The PolitiFact item to which I replied was a fact check comparing the frequency of voter fraud in Florida to the number of shark attacks in Florida.  Street might as well complain that PolitiFact in its exhaustive research counted all the claims of voter fraud that the State of Florida chose to investigate regardless of whether they stemmed from third-party registration.

There's no logical criticism of my work at all in Street's post, yet it flies under the banner of "Lil' White Lies."  Cute name, but misleading.  A lie unto itself.

Producing a post of considerable length based on a fallacious impetus is alone worthy of note, but this case is even better than that.  I've been dropping hints for over a week in the comments section letting Street know that there was a big error in her post.  Street has bravely returned to her former policy of screening comments, of course, and none of my comments were fit to publish (not because of any excess of coarse language).  I have a good number of screen caps available for documentation if any should doubt.

Thanks so much for the reminder of how thoroughly you've earned a spot on the BBBBBBB, Karen Street.