To wrap up the Labor Day weekend, we present the Lindsey Graham edition of a holiday-delayed Sunday Replay, with cameos from a few minor characters.
Graham on Democratic Legislation
On NBC’s "Meet the Press," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham was skeptical about two Democrat-backed measures, the health care bill and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Graham, Sept. 5: [The health care bill is] going to lead to a government monopoly in health care.
On this week’s Sunday talk shows, we caught the education secretary making a greatly inflated claim about high-school dropouts. Plus, Florida lawmakers made exaggerated statements on tax cuts and support of environmental bills.
Too Cool for School
On ABC’s "This Week," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan greatly exaggerated the number of students leaving school every year:
Duncan: In this country, we have a 25 percent dropout rate. That’s 1.2 million students leaving our schools for the streets every single year.
Q: Did carbon dioxide emissions from the volcanic eruption in Iceland negate five years’ worth of effort to control CO2?
A: Not even close. Carbon dioxide emissions from the volcano were small relative to human activity, and partially offset by the shutdown of European air travel.
We don’t usually hit up gossip site Gawker for our fact-checking. We’re an academic group, and we’re serious and stuff! But we can’t ignore the site’s set-up and take-down of one of the weirder Internet rumors we’ve ever seen.
As most of the Internet knows by now, Gawker both popularized and debunked the claim that President Barack Obama appeared in a 1993 music video for one-hit wonder Tag Team’s infectious "Whoomp (There It Is)." Here’s how it went down:
Whoomp: A tipster sent Gawker the 1993 video,
Q: Will Muslim Americans be exempt from the mandate to have health insurance?
A: The Muslim faith does not forbid purchasing health insurance, and no Muslim group has ever been considered exempt under the definitions used in the health care law.
On April 29, we wrote that there was no evidence that President Obama would cancel the National Day of Prayer and that, in fact, the White House had announced plans to recognize it. Still, we received skeptical e-mails over the weekend from people who had heard a recycled rumor claiming Obama wasn’t going to acknowledge the day.
Today, one e-mailer complained about the phrasing in a quote we had cited, in which the chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force,
In an interview on "The Daily Show," Family Research Council fellow Ken Blackwell disagreed with host Jon Stewart about whether the Obama administration has an unprecedented number of "czars." (This is part two of the interview, available only online.)
Stewart: Not all the so-called czars were appointed by Obama, and again — and this is just from an organization called FactCheck.org, and just because they have "fact" in their title doesn’t necessarily mean anything — but again,
In light of our article yesterday about false and misleading political claims on Twitter, we found this story on media mis-tweetment amusing:
Mediaite.com: Just after 9:30 @ABCWorldNews twittered this: BREAKING: President Obama will name Elena Kagan his nominee for the Supreme Court, @jaketapper reports. As you will see, he did not, and the tweet has since been deleted.
It was picked up by one @lensmith22 who RT’d it.
Shortly thereafter Jake Tapper responded…on Twitter: “@ABCWorldNews no I dont.”
We’ve seldom seen a piece of legislation so widely misrepresented, and misunderstood, as the new health care law. We stopped counting the number of articles and items we turned out on the subject after the total reached 100. Some of that is understandable. The debate went on for more than …
In November 2009, private e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were stolen and made public. Climate change disbelievers called it “Climategate,” saying that the e-mails proved collusion and conspiracies that would discredit man-made global warming. We found that there was no solid evidence of wrongdoing in the e-mails, but noted that a detailed investigation by the university was underway.
As it turns out, this investigation came to more or less the same conclusion we did.