The Obama campaign is out with another ad making the false claim that Mitt Romney “backed a bill that outlaws all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.” Romney’s consistent position through this campaign, and the last, and as far back as 2005, is that he opposes abortion except in cases when the life of the mother is in danger, and in cases of rape and incest.
This latest Obama campaign ad begins with a woman named “Jenni,”
Q: Are Obama’s early records “sealed”?
A: No. Many records that presidential candidates don’t ordinarily release do remain confidential, but they are not “sealed” by a court. The 16 claims in a widely distributed graphic are mostly false or distorted.
In ads airing in three states, a Democratic PAC repeats familiar, and misleading, attack lines — saying one Republican lawmaker voted to “essentially end Medicare” and another voted for billions in earmarks and turned a surplus “into a massive federal deficit.”
The Majority PAC, a political action committee that aims to “[p]rotect the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate,” launched ads on July 24 criticizing Republican candidates in Senate races in North Dakota, Virginia and Wisconsin.
A bitter GOP primary contest in Texas for a U.S. Senate seat has come to this: an ad featuring a grieving mother who links one of the candidates to her son’s suicide.
A Texas super PAC is airing a TV ad that features a distraught mother who says Ted Cruz, a lawyer, “should be absolutely ashamed of himself” for representing a key figure in Pennsylvania’s infamous “kids for cash” scandal. In that case, two judges were convicted of taking $2.1 million from Cruz’s client in exchange for sending kids to private juvenile detention centers —
In an email to constituents, Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana claims “the Obama administration shut down the entire offshore oil and gas industry” after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That’s not true.
The administration halted the drilling of all new wells for one month. And the Interior Department issued a months-long moratorium on deepwater drilling. New safety requirements also slowed down the permitting process for shallow-water drilling.
But existing offshore wells continued to pump out natural gas and oil.
Arguing against the need for new gun laws in the wake of the Aurora shootings, Mitt Romney said many of the weapons possessed by shooter James Holmes were “illegal … already.” While it’s true that the bombs found later at Holmes’ apartment were illegal, that’s not the case for the weapons he used at the movie theater on the night of the rampage. Police confirmed that all of the weapons and ammunition used by Holmes that night were legally obtained at local sporting goods stores or over the Internet.
The Obama campaign says a new Associated Press story backs up its claims that Mitt Romney “did not leave [Bain Capital] when he says he did,” and that he’s responsible for “American jobs that were outsourced” by Bain-controlled companies after February 1999. We don’t think so.
Some impressive reporting by the AP and others recently has shown that Romney retained ownership and corporate titles at Bain for a time after he took a hurried leave of absence on Feb.
This week, readers reacted to our rundown on the whoppers, so far, of the 2012 campaign.
In the FactCheck Mailbag, we feature some of the email we receive. Readers can send comments to editor@factcheck.org. Letters may be edited for length.
Critics of the health care law have claimed that it’s the biggest tax increase in history. But that could only be true in raw dollars. When adjusted for inflation — or better yet, as a percentage of gross domestic product — several other tax increases just since 1968 are larger.
For a fuller explanation, see our July 10 Ask FactCheck, “Biggest Tax Increase in History?“