Democrat California State Assembly Speaker Lied About His College Degree

He doesn't have one and he's been caught (from Flash Report):

Yesterday the online investigative website California Watch broke a story that has stunned the political community of the Golden State. They published a story, complete with documentation, proving that the Speaker of the California State Assembly, John Perez, for nearly a decade made assertions that he was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, when this simply was not true. Perez attended Cal, but never graduated. In his biography he boasted graduating, and subsequently news stories and political journals printed that he was a graduate as fact, which he did not dispute or seek to correct.

Suddenly the lie become, for Perez, the truth. At least until his lie helped him to establish bona fides that helped him to get elected to the State Assembly in 2008. Only after his election to the legislature is there an apparent effort to scrub biographies and put the falsehood in his past. All day long Perez’s office ignored the story. I spoke late yesterday afternoon with Lance Williams, the reporter who penned the story for California Watch — he told me that neither Perez nor his office would give him a comment.

Late last evening, and only when the Los Angeles Times (who is on record reporting the lie, that Perez had graduated U.C. Berkeley with a degree in political science) bird dogged the Speaker’s office, as did KCBS/KCAL 9 television in LA — until they finally got a statement — an admission…

Speaker Perez, in a statement last evening, admits to "mischaracterizing" his educational achievement.

“I take full responsibility for the initial mischaracterization that I graduated, and any other mischaracterizations about this that I or others may have made,” Pérez said. “I take full responsibility for this mistake, and I regret it. I was surprised that these questions were raised because over the last several years as a candidate and legislator, I have worked to correct the record, but obviously I wasn’t diligent enough.”

"Mischaracterization" = "Lie".

And dumping this on Friday night is the classic way to make a story disappear.