Thursday, September 06, 2007

Correcting GoodByeFaisal's errors would be a full-time job

Here's the latest lie from the GoodByeFaisal web site, buried in a post that is mostly just wrong:

Faisal Gill was the treasurer of of the Prince William Taxpayers Alliance PAC. In five years this PAC made exactly one donation, an in-kind contribution of a $2363 mailing for Steve Chapman in 2005. Steve Chapman's campaign manager for an abortive HOD run in 2006 was Faisal Gill.
First, I'm not sure this is true, although I don't know it isn't. The VPAP web site only seems to show the 2005 and 2007 years, and they only recently started tracking local races, so if there were donations to supervisors back in 2003 you might not see them.

But also, it looks like they are trying to tie the 2005 contribution to the 2006 race. In order to pull off this deception, they need to make people forget that there was a 2005 race.

So comes the error. They "quote" from the VPAP (a simple thing to do, since the VPAP is online and you simply have to cut-and-paste):

VPAP States: "Steve Chapman, a conservative Republican, lost to then-Del. Harry Parrish in a June 2004 primary.
Note: they say his race was in 2004, a year before the donation from PWCTA. But that is NOT what VPAP states:

Steve Chapman, a conservative Republican, lost to then-Del. Harry Parrish in a June 2005 primary.
Oops. Somehow, when they "cut-and-paste" the quote from VPAP, they "accidentally" changed the 2004 to a 2005.

Meanwhile, the post itself is pointless. The PWC Taxpayer's alliance was never just about giving money to candidates, but rather for endorsement of candidates. Further, they DID give money to other candidates. VPAP just recently started collecting data for local races, and is not a good source of information for historical data on such donations.

When I say you have to be careful about anything you read over at GoodByeFaisal, that apparently includes supposed "quotes" they lift from other sites.

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