In May, 2008, Barack Obama smeared Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh, falsely claiming that hate crimes against Hispanics had "doubled" the year before. In fact, they only went up 7.8%. Not only that, but they've decreased as a percentage of the Hispanic population between 1995 and 2006.

Given that, you might not expect Andrea Nill of ThinkProgress to write the following, unless you were familiar with that site and her work. In that case, you - like me - would realize just how truth-challenged both she and the others associated with that site are. Referring to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (perhaps more on that later), she writes (thinkprogress.org/2010/03/03/dobbs-splc-hate-groups):

While campaigning in 2008, Obama himself accused Dobbs of "ginning things up" to such an extent that hate crimes against Latinos soared.

The last sentence links links to the contemporaneous Huffington Post report at huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/23/
obama-rush-limbaugh-lou-d_n_103315.html which, of course, doesn't even hint at how much Obama was lying.

If Nill had even a smidgen of intellectual honesty she would note that Obama lied. As it is, I strongly suspect that her use of "soared" instead of what Obama said ("doubled") is an outright attempt to deceive her readers but at the same time not raise red flags by repeating something so obviously false.