My two favorite political fact checking organizations are PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter (run by the St. Petersburg Times) and FactCheck (run by the Annenberg Foundation).

PolitiFact recently picked their “Lie of the Year” and to the surprise of hardly anyone, it was Sarah Palin’s numerous claims of Obama’s “death panels”. This lie wasn’t just the choice of the editors, they also held a nationwide poll and “death panels” was the overwhelming choice for the biggest whopper of 2009, receiving five times more votes than the first runner-up (a lie from Glenn Beck).

And now, FactCheck has come out with their biggest lies of 2009, listing not just one, but a dozen and a half. The first lie in their list is also “death panels”, which surprised me, since FactCheck is run by the notoriously conservative Annenberg Foundation. Couldn’t they find a liberal lie to challenge the “death panels” whopper? They do attempt to balance their five conservative lies about health care with four liberal lies — we do need to be “fair and balanced”, don’t we? But none of the “liberal health care lies” seem to qualify as full whoppers, they are more like exaggerations.

It is interesting to count up who was to blame for each lie. Here are FactCheck’s whoppers:

Health care: 5 conservative whoppers, 4 liberal whoppers.

Two lies about Flu vaccines, which came from “viral” emails (no pun intended). FactCheck doesn’t attribute these to either side.

Three lies about the environment, two of which are from conservatives, and one from “both sides”.

Two lies about the stimulus bill, one from each side.

Two whoppers about Obama — one about his birth place, and one about gun control — both from conservatives.

Final score? Conservatives: 11 lies, Liberals: 6 lies. And as I mentioned, this is from a conservative organization. And conservatives also won the grand prize — making them the biggest liars of 2009.

UPDATE: Sarah Palin hilariously claims that she is not the biggest liar of the year. On her Facebook page, she even tries to blame the whole thing on “Nancy Pelosi and friends who have tried to call ‘death panels’ the ‘lie of the year.'” (the truth is that “lie of the year” came from nonpartisan PolitiFact.com, and “death panels” was widely condemned as a lie by both liberals and conservatives).