Author Archives: Viveca Novak

Cadillac Plans and Unions: Who Benefits?

When the White House and congressional Democrats agreed last month to scale back a Senate-passed tax on high-value health plans, it was widely portrayed as a giveaway to labor unions. For example, the New York Post reported that it was a "sweetheart deal" that would save union members $60 billion, …
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Dick Cheney vs. Joe Biden

Vice President Biden and former V.P. Cheney have been slugging it out publicly over the proper way to prosecute suspected terrorists. Biden went so far as to accuse Cheney of being “factually, substantively wrong.” So we took a look, and found both men have been straining the facts …
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Tea Party Fact-Checking

Sarah Palin made a splash over the weekend as the keynote speaker at the first National Tea Party convention, and she followed up with an interview on Fox News Sunday. But she didn’t always stick to the facts. Palin implied that the Nigerian would-be Christmas Day bomber stopped talking after he was read his Miranda rights. He did, but …
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Sunday Morning Stumbles

A lot of talking gets done on the Sunday morning shows, so it's no surprise that a verbal mishap or two might turn up. For instance, yesterday on CNN's "State of the Union with John King," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky dissed the Democratic health care overhaul bills, …
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More State of the Union

A section of our story "Obama’s State of the Union Address" was inadvertently dropped when we posted the article Thursday. It shows that Obama spoke a little too sweepingly when he claimed that lobbyists have been cut out of policymaking jobs in his administration. We’ve added the section to the …
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Obama’s State of the Union Address

President Obama peppered his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation with facts, which were mostly right but sometimes cherry-picked, strained or otherwise misleading. He said “there are about 2 million Americans working right now” because of last year’s stimulus bill. But his own economic advisers say …
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Court’s Decision: Keep FactCheck Busy

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that corporations can spend as freely as they like in federal elections, a decision that could bring a flood of new ads expressly favoring or opposing candidates in the congressional midterm elections this year. The opinion in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election …
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More Mischief in Massachusetts

Last week we barely dipped our toe in the torrent of ads blanketing Massachusetts, where voters are going to the polls today to decide who will replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy: Democrat Martha Coakley or Republican Scott Brown. There have been more since in the close race, too many …
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Medicare board: Unrepealable?

Q: Does the Senate’s health bill contain a provision that can’t be repealed? A: No. It would create an  Independent Medicare Advisory Board that could be repealed by a vote of three-fifths of the Senate.

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Bay State Battle

In the Massachusetts special election campaign for the Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy, the conservative American Future Fund and Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley’s campaign are on the air with misleading attack ads. AFF’s ad uses a Coakley quote, “We need to get taxes up,” to portray her as a tax-hiker. But …
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