McCAIN & PALIN ARE "FLEXIBLE" WITH NUMBERS

Remember when Obama was drawing big crowds and the wingnuts said that was a BAD thing and the McCain campaign started attacking him for being a "celebrity" instead of a candidate? Well, you can toss out that meme because now McCain thinks crowds are a GOOD thing, so good that his campaign will lie about crowd size.

McCain-Palin Crowd-Size Estimates Not Backed by Officials

By Lorraine Woellert and Jeff Bliss

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Senator John McCain has drawn some of the biggest crowds of his presidential campaign since adding Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to his ticket on Aug. 29. Now officials say they can't substantiate the figures McCain's aides are claiming.

McCain aide Kimmie Lipscomb told reporters on Sept. 10 that an outdoor rally in Fairfax City, Virginia, drew 23,000 people, attributing the crowd estimate to a fire marshal.

Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson said his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it. Wilson, in an interview, said the fire department does not monitor attendance at outdoor events.

...on Aug. 30, at Palin's first big public appearance after her nomination. The McCain campaign said 10,000 people showed up at the Consol Energy Arena in Washington, Pennsylvania, home of the Washington Wild Things baseball team.

The campaign attributed that estimate, and several that followed, to U.S. Secret Service figures, based on the number of people who passed through magnetometers.

``We didn't provide any numbers to the campaign,'' said Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service.

Remember when Gov. Energy Queen claimed that Alaska provided almost 20% of U.S. domestic energy? Well, not so much, really.

Energetically Wrong
September 12, 2008
Palin says Alaska supplies 20 percent of U.S. energy. Not true. Not even close.

Summary

Palin claims Alaska "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." That's not true.

Alaska did produce 14 percent of all the oil from U.S. wells last year, but that's a far cry from all the "energy" produced in the U.S.

Alaska's share of domestic energy production was 3.5 percent, according to the official figures kept by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

And if by "supply" Palin meant all the energy consumed in the U.S., and not just produced here, then Alaska's production accounted for only 2.4 percent.