I am awarding the Washington Post fact checker Four Pinocchios, a Pants on Fire, and a Jim Carrey (below) for his inane piece “President Clinton’s overenthusiasm for growth in green jobs.”

The fact checker decided to “fact-check” these two recent “comments about stimulus funding during NBC’s Meet the Press, Sept. 18, 2011″:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell : “If you look at the stimulus bill, what did we get out of that? Turtle tunnels and Solyndra. More money was lost on Solyndra than came to my state to fix roads and bridges out of the entire stimulus package last year, and now he’s asking us to do it again.”

Former President Bill Clinton: “I heard what Senator McConnell said about that one project, but the hard truth is that in America, in spite of his hostility to it, green technology jobs have grown twice as fast as the overall job-generating capacity of the economy in the last eight years, where all job growth has been anemic. You’re going to have a lot of that.”

Now you might think the WashPost would be all over McConnell’s falsehoods.  After all, it is an outright lie that all we got out of the stimulus was “Turtle tunnels and Solyndra.”  The Washington Post itself reported that according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus may have generated up to 3.3 millions jobs by mid-2010 alone.

And, of course, this sentence is false: “More money was lost on Solyndra than came to my state to fix roads and bridges out of the entire stimulus package last year, and now he’s asking us to do it again.”  Obama isn’t “asking us to do it again,” in any reasonable reading of the word “it.”  And the WashPost points out “Overall, Kentucky received nearly $3.7 billion overall in stimulus funding between 2009 and 2011, according to the government-run stimulus-tracking Web site Recovery.gov.”

But it appears that one small piece of McConnell’s cavalcade of  misinformation is correct “More money was lost on Solyndra than came to my state to fix roads and bridges.”  So, of course, the WashPost fact-checker gives McConnell a clean bell of health, saying nothing more about his falsehoods than, “We find no fault with McConnell’s claim about Solyndra funding versus Kentucky’s stimulus money.”

UPDATE:  CAP’s Bracken Hendricks has sent me a good explanation of why even this one supposedly fault-free part of McConnell’s statement is incredibly misleading, which I reprint below.

President Clinton, however, uttered the truth and even provided the WashPost with a reference to back him up, but the Post gave him two Pinocchios, claiming “He relied on selective data that would support his case while ignoring other relevant numbers.”  Seriously.  Who is being selective here — Clinton or the Washington Post?

Let’s run this one down since it involves accuracy by the former president and hypocritical inaccuracy by the Washington Post of a kind I expect that we will see repeated by bad fact checkers.  The key point President Clinton made that the WashPost contests is:

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Many of the key Arctic sea ice records fell this year (see “Record Low Sea Ice Volume, Area and Extent*).

In short, the Arctic death spiral continues.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi has always made nonsensical forecasts like “The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.” No doubt that’s a key reasons he is no longer AccuWeather’s chief long-range forecaster.  But before he left, Bastardi made a prediction that reveals how his anti-scientific views destroy his forecasting credibility.

On September 20, 2010, Bastardi predicted that Arctic Sea Ice extent would return to 2005 levels:  “We are going to recover dramatically here with a cold that is coming over the next 9 to 12 months“!

I know you are wondering where that cold was (see “Third Hottest Summer Globally, Second Warmest for U.S. With Stunning Weather Extremes, Texas Drought Worst in Centuries“).  And for those who find it hard to believe anyone could have made such a ridiculous forecast, let’s go to the videotape [put on those head vises]:

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Mike Lukovich also has a great cartoon on global warming, but with a (slightly) different spin:

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A rice field 25 miles north of crippled Fukushima Daiichi nukes via Reuters

TOKYO  – Japan found the first case of rice with radioactive materials far exceeding a government-set level for a preliminary test of pre-harvested crop, requiring thorough inspection of the rice to be harvested from the region, the farm ministry said late on Friday.

The ministry said radioactive caesium of 500 becquerels per kg was found in a sample of the pre-harvested rice in Nihonmatsu city, in Fukushima Prefecture, 56 km (35 miles) west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.  The ministry said the Fukushima Prefecture will expand the inspection spots nearly ten-fold to around 300 areas.

Pretty big news from Japan, via Reuters.  Needless to say, rice is central to both the Japanese culture and diet.

And it’s one more threat to a world food supply on the edge (see “Global Food Prices Stuck Near Record High Levels“).

Here’s more on the radioactive rice:

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