Sarah Palin collects a bushel of Pinocchios on her bus tour

[appleannie1]

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has spent this week taking a high-profile bus tour up to New Hampshire, in what may or may not be a prelude to a presidential run in 2012. She spent half an hour the other day chatting with Fox News’s Greta van Susteren. The full interview is posted on Palin’s Web site, but we watched all of it so you don’t have to.

Much of the interview consisted of fluffy stuff, but every so often van Susteren diverted into asking about policy issues. Palin responded with her trademark style of making broad assertions with only a shaky command of the facts. We’ll go through the key statements in the order in which she said them, which allows us to begin and end with some absolute whoppers.

“We don’t have the $2 billion . Where are we going to get it? From China? We are going to borrow from foreign countries to give to foreign countries. … We want to know where those dollars are going because we don’t have the money to be providing foreign countries, not in this day and age when we are going broke.”
Palin managed to get almost everything wrong in this comment. She clearly was not listening too closely to President Obama’s speech on the Middle East, because otherwise she would have realized that he was not talking about spending more taxpayer dollars.

Obama proposed to forgive up to $1 billion of Egypt’s $3.6 billion debt (money that was spent buying American farm products). The forgiveness, which would take several years, would take the form of a “debt swap,” in which the money saved will be invested in designated programs in Egypt.

The other $1 billion would consist of loan guarantees by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which are structured at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer. So none of this would involve new debt issued by the Treasury.

Palin appears to assume that the United States simply hands out dollars with little idea about what happens to the money. This is a common misconception. Actually, there are often strings attached.

Under the terms of the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, the United States gives about $2 billion in direct aid to Egypt every year, making it one of the largest foreign-aid recipients. But most of this aid — about $1.3 billion a year — is financing to buy U.S. military hardware and services.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/sarah-palin-collects-a-bushel-of-pinocchios-on-her-bus-tour/2011/06/02/AGkNAbHH_blog.html

[Ohio Joe]

1. Palin speaks... Palin lies

Pretty much every time she opens her mouth a lie comes out.