Blogger: FactCheck misattributed chain email to me ("Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200")

FactCheck offers "Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200" (factcheck.org/2009/08/twenty-six-lies-about-hr-3200), a discussion of a chain email for which they say:

A notorious analysis of the House health care bill contains 48 claims. Twenty-six of them are false and the rest mostly misleading. Only four are true.

FactCheck recently misled about illegal aliens being covered under the House bill and for that and other reasons they aren't a credible source. However, I'm going to leave pointing out what if anything they got wrong in this case to those who are experts on the bil.

In this case, they make the following claim:

We can trace the origins of this collection of claims to a conservative blogger who issued his instant and mostly mistaken analyses as brief "tweets" sent via Twitter as he was paging through the 1,017-page bill. The claims have been embraced as true and posted on hundreds of Web sites, and forwarded in the form of chain e-mails countless times.

The blogger in question claims he didn't write the chain email (link) and a quick comparison of his tweets (link) with the contents of the email shows that they match up in some cases but in others have been slightly modified. If FactCheck is right about some of the claims being false, this is yet another example of Obama opponents mistakes, whether on the part of the blogger or on the part of whoever created the versions of his tweets in the email. In any case, it's dirty pool to try to pin the blame on the person who's post was used as the basis for the email but who didn't write the email itself.

Sun, 08/30/2009 - 13:22 · · Importance: 4