Lies, damned lies, and statistics

I don't know if any of you saw Palin's acceptance speech last night. Her delivery was fine, but the speech, originally written before McCain had made a choice and at a time when people thought he would pick someone like Romney or Lieberman, was your standard vicious Republican nonsense.

The AP, which has recently been quite friendly to McCain, has released a report condemning the falsehoods in her speech, and that can be found here.

In the speech, she claimed that she, as the mother of a disabled child, would support the parents of disabled children across the country. Perhaps in true Republican fashion she has had a change of heart, once confronted with such issues personally, but in her 18 months as Governor of Alaska, she has overseen a 67% reduction in funding for special education programs. Maybe in a similar vein, she will change her position on funding programs for young, unwed mothers and her support for abstinence only sex-ed programs. Such changes of heart would be good, were they to occur, but what does it say about the woman's judgment that she can only see the benefit of such things only when affected personally?

I would have liked to link to factcheck.org for some of these, but because no one had heard of Sarah Palin as of a week ago (and yet now the Republicans are going on as if she is the greatest politician in America), there is nothing up yet. I will, however, link to one of their posts about the McCain campaign's attacks on his tax plan.

Finally, Palin made a remark about Obama's work as a community organizer. She said: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities." The mouth breathers ate it up. Here's the thing: community organizers work hard and for little pay trying to create local solutions for local problems - they are just the sort of people that the small-government Republicans used to praise. Now they are the objects of Republican ridicule. The forever awesome Roland Martin takes this one down:



Update: The bit about the Special Ed. budget in AK being cut under Palin turns out to be based on an incorrect reading of the budget. See this here.