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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Sunday Replay

Call this one the Axelrod Edition. President Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, was on three of the political talk shows on July 11, and we found that he strayed from the factual straight-and-narrow several times in talking about the oil spill, border security and other issues.
We also found Republican congressman Brian Bilbray overstating support for an immigration bill and Attorney General Eric Holder repeating a claim we’ve critiqued before about how many terrorism trials have taken place in the civilian justice system.

Reid Attacks Angle on Social Security

Democratic Sen. Harry Reid’s reelection campaign on June 11 released an ad attacking GOP nominee Sharron Angle for wanting to “get rid of Medicare and Social Security” — a charge she called “nonsense” in a June 14 interview with Fox News commentator Sean Hannity. It’s true that Angle has proposed phasing out Social Security and Medicare.
The Reid campaign, however, cannot support its claim that her plan to replace government-run Social Security with privately managed investments “cuts benefits for everyone coming into the system.”

It’s True: Massages, Saunas For Inmates

With the June 8 Nevada primary nearing, there was one TV ad in the Republican Senate race that caught our attention. It’s so outlandish that we thought it couldn’t possibly be true. Did former Nevada Assemblywoman Sharron Angle – a Republican backed by the Tea Party Express and the fiscally conservative Club for Growth — sponsor legislation to create a drug rehab program for state prisoners that included saunas and massage therapy? And was that program developed by the Church of Scientology?