Friday, September 05, 2008

Laziness pays off now

"Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now." Thus sayeth the find demotivational poster at Despair.com.

And laziness is a way of life, it seems, for Palin detractors (including CNN's Soledad O'Brien), who evidently figure that taking some tiny piece of information that they don't even understand and trying to turn it into a huge scandal is journalism.

I'll let The Raving Atheist take them to the woodshed:

Emily,

Do you ever, ever, EVER do any fact-checking? The other day, you repeated the Washington Post claim that Palin slashed funds for pregnant teens, when in fact she TRIPLED the funding from $1.2 million to $3.9 million. [It was funding for all manner of troubled teens, BTW, not necessarily for pregnant or parenting teens. -- ed.] And today, you repeated the thoroughly debunked lie that specials needs funding has been "slashed".

In fact, the funding is set to INCREASE 12% from 2008 to 2009. The erroneous reports of a 62% decrease are attributable to a misreading of the budget, which moved the Alaska Challenge Youth Academy out of the special needs category and into its own program. Furthermore, Palin worked to overhaul the special needs funding system so that per student spending is set to increase from $26,900 per student to $73,840 by 2011.


I just need to add one point that TRA missed. It wasn't even pregnant or parenting teens in the first place -- it was funding for a capital project for an organization that also provides housing to parenting teens.

Covenant House Alaska executive director, Deirdre Cronin, explained it this way in a September 4 statement:

Despite some press reports to the contrary, our operating budget was not reduced. Our $3.9 million appropriation is directed toward a multi-year capital project and it is our understanding that the state simply opted to phase in its support for this project over several years, rather than all at once in the current budget year.


But will these "journalists" who have been passing on malicious and/or ignorant lies make retractions? I've said it before -- when that bear in Governor Palin's office gets up and starts dancing.

I do note, however, that the blog, "RH Reality Check", where TRA posted his scolding, did post a correction. Well done!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Technically, Covenant House is not "all kinds of teens".

It's for runaways.

Or throwaways, which is what you call the kids who are shown the door and told not to come back.

Christina Dunigan said...

Point taken. I'll change it to "many kinds of troubled teens".

The point is, the MSM presented the story as if Palin had voted to throw teenage moms and their hapless babies out into the snow, when she actually voted to provide funding for a capital project for the organization that helped the teen moms.