Something to see in Texas after all?

We just finished updating one of our "Nothing To See Here" posts after PolitiFact Texas revisited a speech by Senator John Cornyn's Democratic challenger, David Alameel.

PolitiFact Texas picked on a fairly innocuous statement from Alameel's speech in late June.  We found other statements in the speech we thought were more politically significant.  In our update we review the timeline of the reporting.  We think it's reasonable to suspect that our post helped prompt this new fact check of Alameel by PolitiFact Texas.

This example featuring Alameel shows again how story selection may easily skew the "report cards" PolitiFact publishes to help serve as voter guides.

Nothing To See Here: David Alameel edition (updated)

We picked up on a rating of a Texas Democrat, David Alameel, that looked a tad harsh at first blush.  PolitiFact Texas rated Alameel "False" for saying he had once lived in "La Colonia" since that claim produced the impression he lived in a colonia--a subdivision often lacking electricity or plumbing.  Alameel's "La Colonia" wasn't nearly that bad.  It just happened to share the name.

We figured where one correctly names a place he used to dwell, there's got to be some truth to it.  PolitiFact Texas didn't see it that way for some reason.

Hold the Presses

We were nearly ready to start on a short article recounting how PolitiFact had unfairly treated Alameel when we reviewed, for context, the speech Alameel was delivering when he uttered the statement PolitiFact examined.

We had to change the main focus of the story to "Nothing to See Here."  Alameel's speech is stuffed full of preposterous partisan claims.  Why did PolitiFact focus on the colonia issue when Alameel offered such a smorgasbord of superior fact-check opportunities?

There's nothing to do but simply recount some of the things Alameel claimed (chronological order, many of them consecutive).