Politifact Texas is the worst outfit in journalism... and that's saying a lot...

Politifact ran a couple of fact checks right before the election that were embarrassingly done and pretty obvious hatchet jobs against Rick...

Their latest "check" is so stupid... like so many of their other checks... they rate a claim that Rick made in his new book about the nanny state federal government telling us how much salt to consume in our food as "false" even though as usual they find evidence to support his claim (link). Excerpt follows...

In the first chapter of "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington," which was first available at Perry's election-night party, Perry writes: "We are fed up with being overtaxed and overregulated. We are tired of being told how much salt we can put on our food, what windows we can buy for our house, what kind of cars we can drive, what kinds of guns we can own, what kind of prayers we are allowed to and where we can say them, what political speech we are allowed to use to elect candidates, what kind of energy we can use, what kind of food we can grow, what doctor we can see and countless other restrictions on our right to live as we see fit."

We won't look at every regulation Perry sees out there for this article, but we wondered if he's right about government telling us how much to salt our food.

Responding to our request for elaboration, Carolyn O'Keefe, a publicity manager for the book, sent us a link to an April 20 Washington Post news article that says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration "is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products."

Okay... so.... there aren't nanny state liberals out there in government trying to tell us how much salt to put on our food? Politifact goes through a whole tortured thing to finally conclude that even though it has been widely reported that the FDA is working to reduce the amount of salt consumed by Americans Rick's statement is still somehow false because they technically haven't done anything yet to enforce it...

The Austin American Statesman really needs to put an end to this nonsense or replace the peeps running it with peeps with at least an inkling of credibility and objectivity. Anyone associated with the PolitiFactTexas project needs to really apologize for doing such a disservice to the public...