HuffingtonPost (9/20/2011):

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has admitted that she has no evidence backing her claim that half of job applicants at a local government facility flunked a drug test. She’d used the claim to push for requiring the jobless to pass a drug test to be eligible for benefits.

“I’ve never felt like I had to back up what people tell me. You assume that you’re given good information,” Haley told Jim Davenport of the Associated Press. “And now I’m learning through you guys that I have to be careful before I say something.”

Haley said two weeks ago she’d been told that of hundreds of job applicants at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation owned by the U.S. Energy Department, half failed a drug test. But Jim Giusti, a spokesman for Energy Department, told HuffPost that of the workers hired over the past few years, less than 1 percent failed a test. Additionally, only new hires — not applicants — have to submit to testing in the first place.