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Viral Spiral
FactCheck Mailbag
FactCheck Mailbag, Week of March 19-25.
See letters from previous weeks“ Criticizing the Democrats for citing the only available study on gun purchases for its age seems wide of the target. ” -
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2012 Players Guide
Author Archives: Brooks Jackson
Romney’s ‘Rhetorical’ Misery Index
The "Obama misery index" that Mitt Romney says is at a record doesn't really exist, except as political talk. That's what we discovered, to our surprise, when we contacted his spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, to ask exactly how Romney calculates his index, and to find out what number Romney currently assigns …
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Test Market for Spin
A May 24 special election to fill a vacant House seat in upstate New York has become a national test market for distorted political claims. It offers a preview of tactics that may be repeated in next year’s …
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Deceitful Attacks from the League of Women Voters
New ads accuse two senators of endangering children's lives by voting to allow asthma-causing "emissions" to be released from smokestacks and tailpipes. But in reality, all that the senators voted to curb was the government's attempt to regulate carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gasses, which have no direct connection to …
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Stockman’s Fiery Rhetoric
David Stockman claims that discretionary spending is "out of control." But it’s up just 1.6 percent this year. The former Reagan administration budget director caught our attention with an incendiary quote to The Fiscal Times news site, where he urged fellow Republicans to shut down the government if necessary to …
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Posted in The FactCheck Wire
Tagged budget, David Stockman, deficit, discretionary spending, tax cut, tax increase
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Congressional Reform Act
Q: What about the "Congressional Reform Act of 2011"? A: A viral e-mail calls for fixing some abuses and excesses that don’t exist, repeating misinformed claims that we’ve addressed before.
Reid’s Cowboy Poetry Puffery
Sen. Harry Reid vastly overstated annual attendance figures for the federally subsidized National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada. The Senate majority leader claimed that "tens of thousands of people" visited the annual event in Elko, Nev., "every year." He was speaking on the Senate floor March 8, defending federal funding …
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Crossroads & Unions
Crossroads GPS greatly exaggerates the earnings of unionized government workers in a new TV ad attacking unions and Democrats, including President Obama. The ad claims that government workers who belong to unions are paid "42 percent more than non-union workers." But the very study cited by the ad says the …
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Our Angry Readers
We’d like to respond to readers who disliked our article on Social Security’s red ink. We’ve received dozens of complaints and criticisms, expressing disappointment and sometimes outright anger at our finding that Social Security is in fact contributing to the federal deficit, and that some Democrats are making a false …
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