Archives September 2012

Atheist Contributions


James Osborne (1834-1881) was an early settler of Seattle, who opened the Gem Saloon (seen in the illustration to the left). His obituary said that “He maintained a reputable saloon patronized by the best citizens of the type that patronized saloons.”[1]

In addition, in his will, he left money to the city to build a civic building, provided that the city contributed matching funds. Unfortunately, he was so filthy rich (like much of the American west, Seattle was founded by a bunch of people trying to make a quick buck) that the city couldn’t afford to match the funds until 1927, when they built the Seattle Opera House (see also Speidel).

Speidel also tells us:

The will specified, for one thing, that his brother-in-law—who had thrown him out of the house once—was not to get “one thin dime.” It also stated flatly that he forbade anyone to take his body into—or even near—any church and there were to be no religious ceremonies conducted at the funeral.

Instead he asked that the funeral be held at Yesler’s Pavilion, that a competent brass band be employed to liven up the occasion, and that a good free-thinker like Judge I. R. W. Hall be paid one hundred dollars for the oration … and failing Judge Hall, that “either Thomas Burke or W. H. White will do.” The services were to end with burial in Lakeview Cemetery by the Ancient Order of United Workmen.

So that we can truthfully tell you that the “father” of our Opera House was an atheistic saloon keeper from the Skid Road.


[1]: William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, Nettle Creek Press, pp. 72-73.

Both Parties Lie, Right?

So I made some comment about the Republican convention being based on a lie or something, and my interlocutor made a comment about how, well, both parties lie. Well, sure. But the Republicans are worse than the Democrats. And she said no, they both lie about the same.

And thus, me being the type of person I am (and that type is “anal retentive”. Or “obsessive-compulsive”. Or something along those lines. Supply your own wild-ass psychoanalysis in the comments), I went looking for data.

FactCheck.org is good, but they have an annoying tendency to provide nuance and context, rather than just boiling a statement down to a single icon.

WaPo’s Fact Checker is better, with its Pinocchio-based truth scale, but when I checked, there wan’t a lot of easily-accessible data.

Which brings us to PolitiFact. They have both a cutesy-icon-based measurement, but also a lot of data. Although they allegedly have an API, I wasn’t able to find details on how to use it, so I just scraped a bunch of their web pages and grepped out the information I wanted.

And since you’ve been patiently waiting for, like, four or five paragraphs for a chart or something, here it is:

Comparison of Politifact rulings for major US parties. Each bar represents the percentage of statements by that party that fall into a given category.

The data I used is here. There are separate sheets for Democrats and Republicans, with a count of how many statements each person or organization has made in each truth bucket (BTW, in case the phrase “truth bucket” becomes useful during this or any other campaign season, remember that you read it here first).

The first thing that jumps out is that, well, Republicans have fewer “True” and “Mostly True” statements than Democrats, and more “Mostly False”, “False”, and “Pants on Fire”. Which is kind of what I figured anyway, but it’s nice to see my opinion confirmed in chart form.

Anyway, often a person’s or organization’s page has a field that gives their political affiliation, e.g., Barack Obama is listed as “Democrat from Illinois”, while Concerned Taxpayers of America is listed as “Republican from Oregon”. I took the people and organizations listed as “Democrat from” or “Republican from” wherever, and discarded the rest.

Then it was just a matter of spreadsheetizing the data, and totting up the total number of statements by each party, counting up how many statements fall into each category, and, of course, endless fiddling about with fonts and column layouts.

The result is as objective as I could make it. You could argue that PolitiFact is biased for or against the party of your choice, but if there’s bias in the above, I don’t want to come from me.