In our recent article “Sliming Palin,” we addressed the pervasive rumor that Gov. Palin slashed funding for special needs education. She didn’t. Instead, she increased funding. Here’s more detail on how an increase got mistaken for a 62 percent decrease.
The evidence that’s been cited to support the false decrease claim:
The special schools component of the education budget for fiscal year 2007, before Palin was governor, was $8.3 million.
The special schools budget for 2008 was $3.2 million.
Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly conducted a sit-down interview with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama that is airing in four installments. (Parts three and four of the interview will air tonight and tomorrow night.)
The first segment was broadcast Thursday, and we noticed an accounting error on Obama’s part. When speaking about how much the U.S. is spending in Iraq, Obama added, “They’ve got $79 billion,” alluding to Iraq’s financial deposits and budget surplus. But that’s false.
Summary
Obama’s campaign is running a TV ad in Indiana that asks the question: "How can John McCain fix the economy, when he doesn’t think it’s broken?" But the ad uses quotes from McCain that are old and taken out of context:
The ad shows McCain saying, "I don’t believe we’re headed into a recession." But McCain said that in January, and he also acknowledged at the time that the American economy was in "a rough patch."
Q: What percentage of the national spending is pork?
A: About 1 percent.
Q: Were Clinton’s policies responsible for the 1990s’ economic growth?
A: He deserves part of the credit, but many factors were at work.
Bush and Kerry repeat discredited claims in their final flurry of ads. Here’s our pre-election summary of the misinformation we found during the Bush-Kerry presidential campaign.
New ad claims Bush inherited an economy “already in recession” and that 41 million seniors “now have access to lower cost prescriptions.” Wrong on both counts.
In an earlier article, we said Kerry based his claim that “our great middle class is shrinking” on some pretty stale numbers. Now fresh numbers are available — and Kerry’s statement is looking a lot better.
The Democratic National Committee released an ad Aug. 6 saying 2.7 million manufacturing jobs had been lost under Bush. That’s true, but ignores the fact that manufacturing jobs started their decline three years before Bush took office.
He says new jobs are paying $9,000 less than the old ones. That’s not a fact.