Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Ed Gillespie distorted some economic facts on “Meet the Press” when he accused President Obama of creating a U.S. economy that is “hostile” to women.
Gillespie said the “number of single-mother families living in poverty” is now the highest “in recorded history.” But poverty statistics date only to 1959, and the poverty rate for single mothers — which is a better indicator than the total number — is still relatively low,
Once again, FactCheck.org has been awarded the Webby for best politics website by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
A pro-Obama TV ad says that “big oil” pledged $200 million to help Mitt Romney, making him the industry’s “$200 million man.” But that’s a pretty slippery claim. The fact is that there is no evidence that truly big oil companies like BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. are behind the money in question. Rather, it’s a funding goal of the Koch brothers, the libertarian billionaires whose diversified corporation has fingers in lumber, commodity trading,
A TV ad by a conservative group gives some factually challenged answers to its own rhetorical question, “How exactly does President Obama spend your tax dollars?”
It wrongly claims that the boss of the General Services Administration “couldn’t make it to Vegas because she had meetings planned … at Solyndra.” That’s not true. The claim linking the two scandals is based on an inaccurate April 10 report that was quickly corrected — nearly two weeks before the ad first aired.
President Obama misrepresented the position of Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx on college debt. The president quoted Foxx as saying that she had “very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt.” But Foxx was speaking explicitly about those with very large amounts of debt, a fact that Obama omitted and that changes the meaning of the North Carolina congresswoman’s statement.
The sin of omission was in Obama’s speech in Boulder, Colo., as the president pushed for the extension of current federal student loan interest rates.
Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren evoked corporate tax punching bag General Electric Co. in a recent ad, claiming the corporate giant pays “nothing – zero – in taxes” to make a point about misplaced values. But that’s not accurate.
We should preface this by saying that we are wading into a heated media debate about the amount of taxes paid by GE, and the most crucial number — the amount paid in corporate income tax —
Club for Growth Action is out with another attack ad on Republican Senate candidate Jon Bruning, this time stretching to paint him as a “big taxer.” Earlier this month, the group exaggerated Nebraska Attorney General Bruning’s spending record.
The latest ad says Bruning “once called for higher gas taxes and Social Security taxes.” But it doesn’t mention that he did so back in 1992 in an opinion piece in the University of Nebraska’s Daily Nebraskan,
Rep. Tim Holden falsely claimed in a recent TV ad that his opponent won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in exchange for campaign contributions to a corrupt judge. In fact, a jury — not the judge — awarded $3 million to lawyer Matt Cartwright’s client in that case. The Holden campaign told us it had no evidence to prove the donation had any influence over the judge during that trial. The campaign pulled the ad after just one day on the air.
An ad running in San Diego and on MSNBC claims immigration will cause a rise in U.S. population equal to that of the American West within 30 years. That’s not true. The increase is projected to be substantial, but nowhere near that high, even counting the children and grandchildren of newly arriving immigrants, legal or illegal.
A group called Californians for Population Stabilization began running the ad April 17, pegging it to Earth Day, which is April 22.
The Republican primary for Sen. Richard Lugar’s seat is apparently too close for comfort. Both Lugar’s campaign and the American Action Network are airing misleading attack ads against Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, the senator’s challenger for the nomination. The ads strain the facts to make Mourdock look like a tax cheat who makes bad investments and does not show up for work.
The AAN ad claims that “Hoosier pensions and other funds lost millions” because of Mourdock’s “big bet on junk bonds.”