False Political Advertising

Can one report sponsors of political advertisements to the FCC if they blatantly lie? Probably not, due to 1st Amendment issues, but I certainly have candidate if one could.

The American Federation of Teachers-Massachusetts has endorsed Deval "free-em-all" Patrick the Democratic candidate for governor, in part because he advocates capping the number of charter schools. Their radio ad supporting Free-em-all blames the current Republican governor, Mitt Romney, and his lt. Governor, Kerry Healey, who is running against Deval, for massively underfunding public education and advocates for change.

The factual problem with this claim is that it is the Democratically-controlled Legislature that passes the budget not the governor. They have effectively reduced funding for public schools in favor of their own pet socialist programs like universal health care. The Democrats have had a veto-proof majority for years now so any attempted changes in public school funding by the governor that the Legislature disagrees with get overridden.

On a side note, according to the Boston Globe, Deval himself was the beneficiary of a scholarship to a prestigious private school when he was a child, yet he wants to limit access to educational alternatives to the kind of poor public schools that he himself escaped.

So what we have here is a hypocritical candidate supported by a lying union.