Obama administration caught in a lie -- here's how the media report it

Continuing on with dire warnings about sequesterageddon, President Obama warns that the across-the-board budget cuts will hurt education and could result in teacher lay-offs. Obama's own Secretary of Education announced on Sunday: "There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall." Oh noes!

The claim is actually a lie, or -- as the Washington Post explains it -- "not backed by evidence."

The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape that have been coming out of the Obama Administration have been alarming, specific--and, in at least some cases, hyped. ...

When he was pressed in a White House briefing Wednesday to come up with an example, Duncan named a single county in West Virginia and acknowledged, “whether it’s all sequester-related, I don’t know.”

And, as it turns out, it isn’t.

Officials in Kanawha County, West Virginia say that the “transfer notices” sent to at least 104 educators had more to do with a separate matter that involves a change in the way West Virginia allocates federal dollars designated for poor children.

The transfer notices are required by state law and give teachers a warning that they may be moved to a different position next school year. They don’t necessarily mean a teacher has been laid off, said Pam Padon, director of federal programs and Title 1 for the Kanawha County public schools. “It’s not like we’re cutting people’s jobs at this point.”

I'm sure Duncan simply misspoke.  Or maybe he was just commenting on the information available to him at the time, or something.

In any event, this isn't the first time the Obama White House has used such scare tactics.  To that end, Reason's Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg have outlined 5 key facts about sequestration you should consider before resorting to suicide: