With Rick Santorum polling well in Mitt Romney’s birth state, a high-stakes TV shootout has broken out in Michigan. But some shots are off the mark. An amusing Santorum ad features a Romney look-alike machine-gunning mud at a cardboard cutout of Santorum. But …
As the Obama administration basked in the news that the unemployment rate in January dipped to a three-year low of 8.3 percent, Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich threw a wet blanket on the announcement. Romney said the “real unemployment rate” was actually 15 percent, and Gingrich said that when you include people who have simply given up on trying to find a job, the rate “jumps up to about 12 percent.”
Is the unemployment rate not the real unemployment rate?
Entrepreneur Donald Trump dismissed the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum by claiming that Santorum lost his Senate seat in 2006 by a wider margin than any incumbent senator in history. He’s wrong.
In fact, there have been two dozen incumbent senators who have taken worse beatings than Santorum did in 2006. Trump need only have checked back as far as the 2010 midterm elections — when Democrat Blanche Lincoln lost her Arkansas seat — to find an incumbent senator who lost by a bigger margin than Santorum did.
Newt Gingrich complained that in one early burst at the first Florida debate, Mitt Romney said “at least four things that are false” about him. Now Gingrich has specified which claims he was talking about, and we’ve checked the evidence he promised he would — and did — post on his website.
We conclude that two were not false; one was (mostly); and one is a matter of interpretation. In all cases, the claims are in need of further explanation and context.
President Obama’s first 2012 campaign ad misleads on ethics, “clean-energy” jobs and U.S. dependence on oil imports. The spot uses outdated quotes from groups that said his record on ethics is “unprecedented” and that he “kept a promise to toughen ethics rules.” One of those same …
Newt Gingrich joked that he ought to rename his proposed 15 percent flat tax the “Mitt Romney Flat Tax,” so “all Americans would pay the rate Mitt Romney paid.” Actually, not all Americans. Under Gingrich’s tax plan, Romney would likely pay closer to zero percent.
Although he has not released his tax records, Romney this week revealed an approximation of his effective tax rate:
Romney, Jan. 17: What’s the effective rate I’ve been paying? It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything.
A 28-minute political documentary released this week by a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC presents a one-sided, often distorted and misleading view of Mitt Romney’s years leading the venture capital firm Bain Capital. Interspersed with appropriately eerie music, the video …
Winning Our Future is a “super PAC” supporting the candidacy of Republican presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
A Mitt Romney ad running in South Carolina distorts the truth by claiming that the National Labor Relations Board told Boeing Corp., “You can’t build a factory in South Carolina because South Carolina is a right-to-work state.” That misstates the facts. The NLRB’s acting general counsel actually dropped the case. And South Carolina’s right-to-work law wasn’t the focus of the now-dismissed complaint. The acting general counsel had claimed Boeing was punishing workers in another state for union activity.
The White House misleadingly suggests that the Republicans’ plan to pay for a payroll tax cut would result in “forcing cuts to things like education and medical research.” The bill passed by House Republicans mentions no such cuts. And while the bill may or may not require cuts to discretionary spending, there’s no reason those cuts would have to come from popular programs like education or medical research.
The White House’s nearly six-minute “white board” video,