FactCheck.org debunks numerous rumors about Sarah Palin's record

One of the little-known resources available to voters during these heated political campaigns is a small band of independent, non-partisan groups that check the accuracy of the countless statements and ads flying around that can confuse voters.

These groups have been particularly busy in the last 11 days because of the sudden emergence on the political scene of someone known as Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old first-term Republican governor of Alaska named by Sen. John McCain as his vice presidential running mate.

Designed as a surprise pick, she was.

Which is great for political impact and theater.

But that creates an instant vacuum of information, in this case about the self-described hockey mom with the five children and her fisherman-oil field worker husband, Todd.

Palin's political opponents, some from within her own party, which she had successfully defied in running as a reformer in 2005-06, were only too happy to offer up information, mis-information, rumor and innuendo to journalists from the lower 48 states caught unawares.

Now, those independent fact-checking groups have swung into action on all this Palin info drifting around the internet. Probably the most prominent such group is FactCheck.org, a branch of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

It's run by a jerk named Brooks Jackson, a veteran journalist for the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal and CNN who,....

...in the interests of full disclosure, was once one of the messier college roommates that a certain Ticket blogger ever had.

Jackson got all famous when he pioneered those fact-check and adwatch stories on CNN where he diligently disassembled political ads, claim by claim, for verification, often to the embarrassment of the campaigns but to the benefit of studious voters paying attention. Yes, there are some.

Late Monday, Jackson's crowd of skilled independent researchers issued its first report on a whole bunch of widely distributed charges about Palin. It's titled "Sliming Palin" and is, in part, a response to allegations broadly e-mailed by an Alaskan named Anne Kilkenny.

Here's what FactCheck reports:

As governor, Palin did not cut funding for special needs education. In fact, she tripled that funding in just 36 months.

As mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin did not seek to ban any books from the library, nor did she fire the librarian for disobeying the order she didn't give. The purported lengthy list of published works Palin sought to ban is phony and includes books published after the alleged censorship attempt.

Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982 and was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which seeks a vote on seceding from the United States.

Palin never endorsed nor supported Pat Buchanan politically. As the mayor greeting him on a Wasilla visit once, she briefly wore a Buchanan button as a hospitality "courtesy." But soon after, she became a state co-chair for the short-lived presidential campaign of Republican Steve Forbes.

FactCheck also reported: "Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska's schools. She has said that students should be allowed to 'debate both sides' of the evolution question, but she also said creationism 'doesn't have to be part of the curriculum.'"

FactCheck's first full report and analysis on Palin is available here. Director Jackson, whose own full nefarious background probably bears a good dose of checking itself someday, has said that further reports on claims about Palin will be published shortly.

Voters can also go here and subscribe to free e-mail alerts for FactCheck's regular reports on a wide variety of timely political issues, especially campaign ads. The Ticket gives these helpful alerts four punches, our highest rating for usefulness.

--Andrew Malcolm

Photo credits: FactCheck.org (top); Getty Images (bottom).

Comments

[Peter]

Yeah you forgot to ask about her scandals and her alledged affair. http://www.hotpres.com

Dont forget about those. Seems to me Hillary clinton didnt have nearly this much baggage.

[Biden pale in comparison]

Verbal diahrea impacted Biden is beeing eviscerated by
the gracious republican fery from Alaska to the point that
many are asking why would Obama pick such a looser
over a prooven and tested lady and senator from NY.
Just further illustrates what bad judgment the Chicago
elitist would bring to the white house.Ayers,Wright and
Rezko and now this Biden wind bag just aint good enough for the USA.

[Maggie Knowles]

Factcheck.org is great, but they don't answer emails, I wrote to them twice to ask the question,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Did John McCain say this, “People who make under $80,000 are too stupid to understand taxes anyway.” ?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
factcheck.org never responded. There is similar site with truth-o-meters and flip-o-meters and other fun features at http://www.politifact.org/

[Bill Herman]

Check today's correction to this FactCheck story.

The authors retract the mistaken implication that the Kilkenny email was the source of these rumors. In fact, the only allegation in Kilkenny's email is the librarian's firing, and on this point, Anne Kilkenny simply recounts her understanding of the affair from the viewpoint of a highly informed local.

These are not the slimes you're looking for.

Otherwise, FactCheck.org has done fabulous work this election season.

[BJBJ]

I read that email from Anne Kilkenny, and off the bat she sounded like a paid Obama surrogate spreading his lies again. Obama's campaign figures, if they spread enough lies, it will take time to sort through & debunk, rendering McCain's camp as helpless as Obama's was, when they unleashed Palin on them.

What I would really like to know is... a follow-up on an article I read in your paper last month, about Obama registering African American criminals who have not yet been sentenced, and those that have been released after serving their sentences. Obama's strategy is, this number will strengthen his share of votes, especially in the southern states that normally vote Republican.

[Frieda]

"it's run by a jerk named Brooks Jackson"

wow! aren't you classy? why the jealously?

What he actually needs to report also is Fannie/Freddie mess and who they supported the most. YOUR GUY! oops. I am dying to know how Obama people are going to spin this one.

Top recipients of Fannie/Freddie donations:

#1 Chris Dodd
#2 John Kerry
#3 Barack Obama
#4 HIllary Clinton

[Tom Abraitis]

I'm baffled by Andrew Malcolm's characterization of Brooks Jackson as a "jerk". What is the basis of this? What does Malcolm know about Jackson that I don't?
Tom A

[Dave Atkins]

Oh for heaven sakes, the blogger all but told you he was his college roommate. He was kidding! Joking. Being facetious.

Having been a messy college roommate, I'm sure he's understating the case.

For those missing all sense of humor and irony without the emoticons of text messages and im's, THE AUTHOR WAS JOKING!

Not serious in any sense of that word.

[LA-renter]

Given your examples, it seems to me that "fact-checking" is just further polluting our political rivers and lakes.

I had either not heard the cited false claims before or had already heard that they were suspect or false.

Rather fact-checking is just creating more news from false news... which, if heard enough times in whatever context, seems to become real news!

As our favored monotheist God said in His 8th commandment: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."

He probably thought it was self-evident and forgot to add... "You shall not spread other people's false witness against you neighbor".

[dave]

since the factcheck refutations hardly at all refer to the allegations presented in the kilkenny letter, does that mean that those are (at least partially) true, and irrefutable?
or does it only mean that the suggestion that they were referring to that letter was not correct?
not that it matters. no doubt you'll prevaricate and bend the facts any which way you see fit to 'get the job done.' whatever that might be now.

the legitimate candidate for president with a longstanding record of integrity and consistently constitutional voting record, is RON PAUL. the malicious and fraudulent suppression of his campaign in the media, and even of his delegate votes at the republican convention, has alarmed many people to the political realities.
the 'campaign for liberty' is a long term rEVOLution.

[crust]

You write:
'It's titled "Sliming Palin" and is, in part, a response to allegations broadly e-mailed by an Alaskan named Anne Kilkenny'

As other commenters point out, FactCheck has corrected their original post. They now say:
"Correction: In our original story, we incorrectly said that a few of the claims we examine here were included in the e-mail by Kilkenny. Only one of the claims – about the librarian's firing – was similar to an item in that e-mail. We regret the error."

So they address at most one point in Kilkenny's email. (Not the weasel wording that one of the claims they address is "similar" to her email, so it's not 100% clear they're claiming to have refuted even that.)

[gerald]

Here's other information from factcheck.org:

* Palin may have said “Thanks, but no thanks” on the Bridge to Nowhere, though not until Congress had pretty much killed it already. But that was a sharp turnaround from the position she took during her gubernatorial campaign, and the town where she was mayor received lots of earmarks during her tenure.

* Palin’s accusation that Obama hasn’t authored “a single major law or even a reform” in the U.S. Senate or the Illinois Senate is simply not a fair assessment. Obama has helped push through major ethics reforms in both bodies, for example.

* The Alaska governor avoided some of McCain’s false claims about Obama’s tax program – but her attacks still failed to give the whole story.

* Finally, Huckabee told conventioneers and TV viewers that Palin got more votes when she ran for mayor of Wasilla than Biden did running for president. Not even close. The tally: Biden, 79,754, despite withdrawing from the race after the Iowa caucuses. Palin, 909 in her 1999 race, 651 in 1996.

[blair]

I am not surprised that big moose Koch does not care for Palin.

[Eric]

FactCheck also reported: "Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska's schools. She has said that students should be allowed to 'debate both sides' of the evolution question, but she also said creationism 'doesn't have to be part of the curriculum.'"

What are the two sides? The first side is that evolutionary forces such as natural selection are responsible for the variety of species past and present. This side is supported by an overwhelming consensus of scientists.

The other side of the "debate" is that some intelligent creator created these species in their present forms. Call it what you want, but this view is creationism. If you want both sides taught in school, then you are calling for the teaching of creationism in schools.

I think that the people at FactCheck.org need to study logic. If you support premises that lead to a conclusion, then, at least implicitly, you support that conclusion. Palin, implicitly, supports the teaching of creationism in public schools.

This "teach both sides of the debate" stuff is the latest attempt by creationist groups like the Discovery Institute to make it seem like there are serious doubts about evolution among scientists. There are not. The "debate" is between scientists and a variety of groups denying the validity of evolutionary theory in biology.

If Palin really wants debate in public schools, then I suggest that we start to teach philosophy courses in public schools. Then we can have some serious debate about whether God exists or not, whether the universe was created or not, etc. What do you think religious parents would do when they found out that the philosophy teacher in the local high school was spending several weeks going over arguments that God does not exist?

[Leslie Brooks]

Somebody needs to debunk the debunkers! Slime is a loaded word, not suggestive of a neutral fact checker!

The rebuttals to things said about Sarah Palin aren't speaking to what was actually said, so most of them don't rebut anything.

First example: the librarian brouhaha. Nobody said the librarian refused to ban certain books. Or if anyone said it, it was not the original criticism or the brunt of the concern. As described in Kilkenny's email, the librarian was asked by the Governor if she WOULD take books out of the library if Palin asked her to, and she answered that the books in the library were those approved by professional librarian associations and no, she would not remove them at Sarah Palin's request. And she was fired. Then, when townspeople came to her defense, she was rehired, and Palin explained her action this way: she hadn't asked the librarian to remove any particular books, she was just seeing if she was loyal, since there were those in official positions in town who were not Palin loyalists. Now this is scandalous in itself, reminiscent of the Bush Justice Department scandal where ot was found that Justice Department officials (educated where - oh, yes, at Regent U.,) were hired after interviews where they were asked to certify that they were Republican, were pro Iraq war, supported Bush, etc. And one of them, Monica Goodling, testified in defense of firing extremely fine US Attorneys who were not sufficiently on board with Bush or willing to prosecute at his request, that they believed their job was to serve the President. They didn't evn know, after their version of law school and working amongst Bush officials in the Justice Department, that, no, they didn't serve the President, they they served the US and the Constitution.. Sarah Palin smears herself with her own brush when she says she asked the librarian if she would ban books if she asked her to as a loyalty test!

Similarly, the Alaska Independence Party is secessionist, and Palin has been friendly to it, (speaking at its gatherings, wishing it luck,) even though its founder wrote about hating America and damned the American Flag, even though it has said its current goal is to place a friendly person, Sarah Palin a name they named as a good possibility, in the White House Administration, so they could achieve their goals from within the US government. Sarah Palin is a friend to them; for years her husband was a member of the party and ended his membership only when she became a US Governor. So no one is smearing Sarah Palin by mentioning this extremely pertinent association. And the original critique was that she was a sort of fellow traveller to this party's members, not that she was a member herself.

There is enough to be concerned about that it's extremely partisan of this group to call bring up these issue "sliming" Sarah Palin. She is not Caesar's wife and above reproach, she is running for an imprtant office and must be vetted, and since the Republicans skipped that step, American voters have to dbackgroud check for them. Any fact checking is appreciated, but it ought to be non-partisan.

Seems to me the real story is what a big lier she is, and how nobody is calling her on it! Her speech at the Convention was made up of lie after lie, and she's still saying the same things every day, all across America,

[chaz]

These facts may not be untrue but remember that Palin was forced to hire an administrator to run the city because as soon as she got into office she started firing those who opposed her . and that caused a major uproar and almost a recall campaign. And statrting that she never did these things mat be true but only because she was confronted by all those who did not agree with her and she was forced to back off. so just to say that facts are that she did not do these things you most state why she did not. Because if she could have gotten away with it she would have. And that the facts are she was forced to hire an administrator to run the city. so the facts are she has no real experience.

[Neal Heidler]

This post couldn't be more misleading. Palin is lying about her handling of the "bridge to nowhere"; she misled re: "put(ting) it on e-Bay (it didn't sell on e-Bay, this was SOP and nothing creative or mavericky on her part), she's lying about using her position to get try her former brother-in-law fired. Presidential? Don't think so.
Sarah Palin queried the librarian in question re: banning books several times (has she ever read the 1st amendment??) and subsequently tried to fire her but gave up after citizens of Wasilla rallyied to support the librarian. Read:
http://www.adn.com/sarah-palin/story/515512.html

[Ethel Steadman]

So, who exactly did Jackson check with, the McCain campaign and the RNC? Anne Kilkenny is right on the money, honey... and she's known Palin since 1992.

[Tom Abraitis]

Has anyone, anywhere produced incontrovertible evidence of Trig Palin's parentage? A birth certificate? Why would the Republican party in general and the McCain camp in particular ( que Rod Steiger) let an opportunity like that pass by? Wouldn't waving a birth certificate showing that Sarah is the mom make all those " Liberal " bloggers look like fools? Why would the McCain camp pass on that?

Teejay 10/2/08