Whirled lies about Coburn, Carson immigration ratings

The Tulsa Whirled editorial board apparently will do and say anything to make sure that Little Boy Brad Carson is elected to the Senate so that the Senate will be controlled again by the liberal Democrats.

The latest lie is in today's lead editorial:

Carson has received an A-plus rating from Americans For Better Immigration, a strong immigration watchdog lobby....

Coburn, on the other hand, voted against or worked against measures that would have made it harder to hire illegal immigrants. He received a D-plus rating from Americans for Better Immigration.

So I visited the website of Americans for Better Immigration (ABI) to see who this group is. Just because the Whirled says this group is a strong immigration watchdog lobby doesn't mean that's necessarily so.

I was surprised to see that they were completely wrong about the ratings Coburn and Carson received. While it's technically true that Carson received "an A+" and Coburn received "a D+" among the nine individual category grades, the editorial creates the impression that those are the candidates' overall scores. In fact, they both got B+ overall. The ABI gave Democrat Brad Carson a B+ overall, with an F- in one category for his support for amnesty for illegal aliens. The ABI also gave Republican Tom Coburn a career B+, including an A+ for opposing amnesty. You can visit each page and there's a link for more details about what each one supported and opposed. Both Carson and Coburn received six A+s in various categories.

ABI appears to oppose all immigration, including the immigration of the sort of bright, skilled, and energetic people that have helped fuel our nation's high tech sector. That's an area where Tom Coburn disagrees with the ABI, and I think Coburn is right. I know that our company has benefited from the expertise and innovation of highly-talented foreign-born engineers.

But the main thing to notice is that the Whirledlings took a press release from Brad Carson's campaign and ran it as their editorial opinion without doing their own factchecking. This appears to be a common practice for them -- at least one of the editorial writers has won an award from an organization for doing nothing more than rewriting their press releases into editorials.

UPDATE: Charles G. Hill has read the editorial and expresses his amazement.