I’m not all political like some of you Dose folks, so I’ve only just discovered PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times that fact-checks statements by the White House, Congress, lobbyists and interest groups.

While others have listed the years’s top music albums or best-selling books, PolitiFact polled the top eight lies told by politicians in ‘09.

Beating out Glenn Beck’s assertion that President Obama’s science czar proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population, Sarah Palin took top slot with her statements that the government would set up “death panel” boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care:

“The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

The other runners-up include Barack Obama, Joe Wilson, Joe Biden, and birther Orly Taitz.

Now I’m curious what a Rhode Island liar poll would look like…

State legislators will be gathering again next week, and more likely than not they’ll be voting on proposed legislation to change the state’s prostitution law.  One of the primary people trying to force this legislation through has been URI professor Donna M Hughes, who earlier this year started an organization called Citizens Against Trafficking.  Those interested in the problem of trafficking have probably heard of her, and may even get her newsletters which, it just so happens, are really crazy and misleading.  (This should come as no surprise, really, if you’ve been following the issue.  See here, here, and here.)

Citizens Against Trafficking calls itself a “broad-based coalition formed to combat all forms of human trafficking in 2009.”  In reality, from what its own website indicates, it is a coalition of two:  Donna M. Hughes, a Women’s Studies professor at the University of Rhode Island, and Melanie Shapiro, the office manager in the Women’s Studies department at the University of Rhode Island.  No other names of other coalition members are mentioned anywhere on the site.

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Ian has this article, on concerns about Clinton’s donations from big arms manufacturers — and, in particular, the money she’ taken from Textron:

Last October, in an examination of campaign contributions in 2007 from employees of major defense industry contractors, Thomas B. Edsall wrote on the Huffington Post that “Senator Clinton took $52,600, more than half of the total going to all Democrats, and a figure equaling 60 percent of the sum going to the entire GOP field. Her closest competitor for defense industry money is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R), who raised $32,000.”

Critics have previously rapped Clinton for voting in 2006 against Senate Amendment 4882, which would have banned the sale of cluster munitions for use in heavily populated areas.

Acknowledging that $2000 in PAC money is a minor amount in the scheme of campaigns, Segal, in an interview, nonetheless says that he is an Obama supporter “substantially because of the difference in his and Clinton’s behavior relative to issues like this.”

The full press release is after the jump.

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