When preparing for last nights show, I of course wanted to cover the State Of The Union Address. I found the official fact checking of the speech, but there were several flat out lies that I caught that weren't mentioned, so I decided to do a detailed fact checking of the speech. I covered it in detail complete with sound clips on my State Of The Axis show but I decided to cover it here as well in an article.

Full Speech Transcript Here

Jobs

FactCheck.Org did cover this issue, but only how the number given by the President was a number provided by the White House and cannot be verified by any outside source. In fact, outside sources have given numbers much lower. What they did not cover was the individual cases cited by the President here.

The plan that has made all of this possible, from the tax cuts to the jobs, is the Recovery Act.

That's right, the Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus bill.

Economists on the left and the right say this bill has helped saved jobs and avert disaster, but you don't have to take their word for it.

Talk to the small business in Phoenix that will triple its workforce because of the Recovery Act.

Talk to the window manufacturer in Philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the Recovery Act, until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created.

Talk to the single teacher raising two kids who was told by her principal in the last week of school that, because of the Recovery Act, she wouldn't be laid off after all.

The business he referred to in Phoenix is a company called ECOtality Inc.  They are a company who will deploy electric cars and charging stations around the Phoenix area. Now President Obama was pretty close on this one, but this is a fact check, not an estimation check, so I decided to point this one out. The above linked news story gives the specific jobs totals as follows.

 Although The EV Project is only a few months old, it is already responsible for the creation of 15 new jobs in 2009, with another 27 anticipated in 2010.

The President, while close, claimed they would triple their work force. 3 x 15 is of course 45. 27 + 15 is 42. So while there was job creation, it was not actually a tripling as stated.  And while being off by 3 doesn't seem like a large number, with this company those 3 jobs would represent 1/5 of their current work force, or 1/9 of the jobs to be added.

As for the school teacher in Phoenix, it turns out that this is one Jeannie Simmons. The only reference I could find to her actually being told she would lose her job was a statement on the White House website that linked a CNN article by Phil Gordon, the Mayor of Phoenix. No article I could find refers to any specific proposal that would have ended her job. Furthermore, the local news coverage of the story tells it in a much different light. 3TV reports that she "Wasn't sure she would be able to keep her job" but neither the teacher herself nor the reporter state that she was told she could not keep her job.

Don't Ask Don't Tell

This year -- this year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It's the right thing to do.

If we take this statement at face value, it is a flat out lie. Many gay Americans serve their country proudly and openly. I'm quite sure Barney Frank was in attendance for the address to make that point quite obvious.  But going with what he meant doesn't make things much better. The implied meaning here is service in the military, but gay Americans are not banned from serving there either. 

It was 15 years ago, Tuesday, that President Clinton rolled out the policy that came to be known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which relaxed the long-standing bar against gay men and women serving in the U.S. military. While the move was initially hailed as progress for the rights of gays in the military, today many see it as a liability.

Summary

 The FactCheck.Org piece covers some of President Obama's lies and misleading statements on health care, the deficit, lobbyists, taxes, jobs, and his disgusting attack on the Supreme Court. More can be found here. I just wanted to add these to the list. In comparison to some of the others, they are not that flagrantly obvious, but as President Reagan once said, "Facts are stubborn things".