Sen. Mitch McConnell strained the facts when he claimed that "[w]e look a lot like Greece already." The public debt of Greece is double that of the U.S. in relation to the size of each nation's economy
McConnell made his comment in a July 6 news conference held prior to a meeting with President Barack Obama. It's an exaggeration he's made before. In a June 23 appearance on the Fox News Channel, for example, he said:
McConnell,
Nancy Pelosi accurately — but misleadingly — said more private jobs were created last year than under Bush. Her statement was true. But it's also true that there were still 2,065,000 fewer private jobs in May than there were when Obama took office
At last year's pace of job creation, it would take until February 2017 just to regain the jobs lost since the high point reached under the previous administration. And it would still take until 2015 to regain all those jobs even under the faster pace of job growth during the last 15 months.
Without an increase in the debt ceiling, could Washington avoid default simply by cutting spending? That's what two leading Republicans, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sen. Jim DeMint, urged over the weekend. What they didn't say is that this would require instant cuts of at least 34 percent in everything but interest payments. And the cuts would be far deeper if Congress exempted popular programs for the elderly, or for defense.
Minnesota Rep. Bachmann, appearing on CBS'
Jon Huntsman was off by $1 trillion or more when he claimed that Social Security, Medicare and interest payments would consume "every dollar of federal revenue" within 10 years. A spokesman says Huntsman meant to include Medicaid in that list, but even that wouldn't make the claim accurate.
In his June 21 speech announcing that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination, the former ambassador said:
Huntsman, June 21: We must make hard decisions that are necessary to avert disaster.
In the first New Hampshire debate among 2012 presidential hopefuls, we found a number of incorrect, misleading or shaky factual claims. Pawlenty was wrong when he boasted that he was …
Q: Does a recent book quote Secret Service agents saying denigrating things about Obama and other recent Democratic presidents while praising only Republicans?
A: No. The book's author, Ronald Kessler, states that a viral e-mail's descriptions of Obama and Clinton "are completely wrong." His book quotes both flattering and unflattering observations about presidents of both parties.
Sarah Palin's much-ridiculed story of Paul Revere isn't entirely wrong, but it's badly twisted. Revere didn't ring bells or fire shots, and he was riding to warn two fellow rebels that the British were coming to arrest them, not to warn the British "that they weren't going to be taking away our arms."
That's what the former Alaska governor said in an offhand remark, caught by a TV camera at a June 2 stop in Boston:
Palin,
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 to it. "It is a rhetorical reference," Fehrnstrom told us, and not an actual economic index.
It's rhetoric that the former Massachusetts governor has been using since at least March 8,
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 …
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"