Wingnut queen bee Michelle Malkin gets a nice big FALSE rating from PolitiFact.com for doing what she’s done so many times before — concocting an outrageous outrage out of thin air. And this might be the cheapest and ugliest one yet. Malkin tried to claim that the White House orchestrated a “branded” political event out of the Arizona mass murder: Did the White House ‘brand’ the Arizona memorial service with a logo and slogan?

The University of Arizona memorial service for the victims of the Tucson, Ariz. shootings was called “Together We Thrive.” But Michele Malkin claimed the slogan was cooked up by the White House

In an opinion piece about the Jan. 12, 2011, memorial event, Malkin, a conservative pundit, accused the White House of “branding” the memorial service with the slogan, complete with its own logo. Malkin noted that all 13,000 people who attended the “Together We Thrive” event were given blue and white T-shirts with the logo.

“Can’t the Democrat political stage managers give it a break just once?” Malkin wrote in her column. …

But officials at the University of Arizona said the White House had nothing to do with the name or the logo.

“The name of the event and the logo for the event were done entirely by the university,” said Johnny Cruz, a spokesman for the University of Arizona. “Branding of the event was not done in consultation with the White House, or any elected officials or political organization.”

The T-shirts were also the university’s doing, Cruz said. “That was the university’s idea,” he said. “We wanted to give people something to remember, to symbolize the community spirit.” …

And “Together We Thrive” was conceived by a University of Arizona student, he said.

But to Malkin, of course, this is evidence of a conspiracy between the White House and the University of Arizona… and that’s what they would say, isn’t it, those commies?

Update: As noted above, the University of Arizona announced the Together We Thrive event — and a few readers write in to say that the campus initiated the logo/campaign. Given U of A president Robert Shelton’s embarrassing, thinly-veiled partisan cheerleading for Obama tonight, it may indeed be a 100 percent-campus-initiated campaign. Given the Obama White House’s meticulous attention to stage prop details, however, I would say the odds of involvement by Axelrod/Plouffe & Co. are high.