Up next in our look at past claims made by the 2012 presidential candidates: Rep. Ron Paul. No stranger to presidential campaigns, the Texas Republican has made his share of factual flubs. Paul declared his 2012 candidacy May 13.
He falsely claimed last December that the estate tax "especially harms small and family-owned businesses." But if the estate tax was returned to 2009 levels, less than 8 percent of estates taxed in 2011 would be family farms and businesses,
Newt Gingrich is engaging in some revisionist history by claiming he was not referring to Rep. Paul Ryan during his now infamous “Meet the Press” interview. That’s absurd.
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 …
We are periodically taking a look at past claims from the 2012 presidential candidates. Up next: President Barack Obama.
The president officially launched his 2012 campaign on April 4, but we’ve been fact-checking his statements for about four years now. Among the major misstatements:
Obama has misrepresented Republican plans for Medicare. Recently, he made the exaggerated claim that Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal was "a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry."
Republican Newt Gingrich mistakenly claimed on "Meet the Press" that a U.S. helicopter involved in the Osama bin Laden raid "was shot down." There’s no evidence of that. U.S. officials say it crash landed and was destroyed by Navy SEALs. Gingrich also was wrong to say Pakistan’s intelligence chief did not apologize for "failing to find" bin Laden. He may not have apologized to Gingrich or the U.S. public, but he did apologize to the Pakistani Parliament.
This week, readers sent us comments about the League of Women Voters’ ads and Newt Gingrich.
In the FactCheck Mailbag, we feature some of the e-mail we receive. Readers can send comments to editor@factcheck.org. Letters may be edited for length.
Mitt Romney made misleading statements about the federal health care law in an effort to highlight how it differs from the overhaul he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts.
Romney, who has not yet declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, gave a major speech on health care May 12 at the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center. He started off by describing the federal plan, as he saw it, and what happened in Massachusetts.
Newt Gingrich referenced an old claim spread by conservative commentator Glenn Beck about supposed White House "czars," saying he would "abolish all the White House czars" his first day in office if he were elected president.
In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, the Republican presidential candidate said he would immediately sign executive orders, and "the first executive order by the way would abolish all the White House czars."
Does that mean he would get rid of the director of national intelligence ("intelligence czar") or the director of the National Economic Council ("economics czar") or the well-known "drug czar"
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 asthma, and an indirect connection that is a matter of debate in the medical community.
The League of Women Voters said April 29 that it would put at least $1 million behind its "ad blitz"