Drudge notes a funny figure from today's John Kerry's appearance on NBC Today:

COURIC:

He wanted to train 70,000 additional teachers in math and science.

KERRY:

That's terrific. But 53 percent of our children don't graduate from high school. Kids don't have after-school programs... He didn't ask America to sacrifice anything to achieve great goals and the biggest example is making the tax cut permanent for the wealthiest people in America. The average American struggles to find time to take carry of families, working two or three jobs... It's a disgrace. He did not tell the real state of the union.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2002 the percentage of 18-24 year olds (xls) who did not have a high school diploma was 12.3%. Kerry's figure was only off by 40%.

This is exactly the kind of thing that hurt him so badly as a candidate. This is not a 'Did I say 53%. I'm sorry, the actual figure was 43%, and I misspoke.', and it would be very difficult to blame the difference on a rounding error. If the Senator had any idea what the actual value was, he would have said the correct percentage. (Actually, he probably wouldn't have brought it up at all because the correct value doesn't bolster his argument.) Yet for some reason, he just pulled a number out of his butt and kept right on going. You would think he might know by now that people fact-check these things nowadays.

(Note that he also said that kids don't have after-school programs which is a ridiculious assertion - but it doesn't really matter because he already short-circuited his argument with his random number generator.)