Either Mike Huckabee is Really Bad at Math, or He Has His Facts Wrong

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On Sunday, Mike Huckabee said the signers of the Declaration of Independence were “brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.” CQ’s Politifact.com says “not so fast”:

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). . .We’d like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That’s not “most,” that’s Pants-on-Fire wrong.

Or he could just be bad at math. See, maybe he was trying to make a point: we need better math education in schools so that presidential candidates will know that you need 29 out of 56 signers to have “most.” At least that’s what I choose to believe.

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I'm hopeful because of readers like you. Will you pitch in today?

We see the headlines on a weekly basis: the claw backs in public media, the gutting of The Washington Post, the bending over backwards to appeal to Trump and his allies.

But not here.

When Mother Jones started publishing 50 years ago, our founders made a critical decision: to be a reader-supported nonprofit. They knew that no corporate owner would be interested in a muckraking newsroom; they also knew that no muckraking newsroom would be interested in following the agenda of a corporate owner.

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You may be wondering: What does it take to publish an investigation? And what does my donation actually fund? The answers are one and the same: It takes people, resources, and time. And that’s what your donation funds directly.

Every donation Mother Jones receives from readers fortifies our newsroom, whether we’re covering underreported scandals out of Washington, DC, or the most important news of the day. And right now, each donation will be doubled thanks to a $50,000 match. So when you make a donation, it’ll go twice as far.

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