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I'm sure that if you haven't seen the accusations that Palin "slashed," the funding for the Alaska Special Olympics in half, you will... Here's the real deal:

Sarah Warren Throckmorton & Paul Kengor on National Review Online

The confusion stems from a failure — or refusal — to understand the difference between cutting funding and declining to increase funding to the requested degree. In a cut, you get less money; with a denied raise you get at least as much as you got before. This is not the first time liberals have abused these terms for political purposes.

Last year, the state of Alaska gave the Special Olympics $250,000. This year, the Alaska legislature requested $550,000 for Special Olympics, which would have constituted a 120 percent increase. It is typical, of course, for advocates to submit impossibly high budget requests, even during budget crunches, in the hopes of getting whatever they can. This is understood by anyone who has ever run an organization or prepared a budget that requires legislative or executive approval.

Gov. Palin denied the request, but not completely: She reduced it to a 10-percent raise, approving a gift of $275,000. A 10 percent raise during tough times is very good, as any employee in America would quickly attest. For most employees, a raise of 3 to 4 percent is a good raise.

In other words, not only did Palin not cut funding, she actually raised it — just not as much as some would have liked.

As a further check into the context of the 2008 raise, we went back to the 2005 budget. For that year, the Special Olympics received only $125,000. We also reviewed the Special Olympics 990 form for 2006, which shows that the group received over $1.8 million in revenues that year; thus, the organization gets the vast majority of its money from sources other than the state.

These numbers are straightforward. This information is easily accessible on the state of Alaska and Guidestar websites, and took us about 30 minutes to find. In other words, two professors at a little college in Western Pennsylvania have been left to do the simple research that America’s top news organizations — scrambling all over Alaska to dig up information on Gov.Palin — have ignored or, worse, abused.

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