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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Bum Rap for Rahm

Sen. Rand Paul distorted an old quote from Rahm Emanuel during an appearance on Fox Business, as he disparaged the reaction of liberals to last weekend’s shootings in Tucson.
The Kentucky Republican, who took office just this month, was asked on Wednesday by Fox host Andrew Napolitano how pundits (Paul Krugman, a liberal columnist for the New York Times, was mentioned) could "get away with blaming murder on political discourse." Paul responded:

Rand Paul,

Gov. Rendell’s Outburst Misses Mark

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell's angry outburst on CBS' "60 Minutes" was more than unexpected. It was factually wrong.

In a segment on slot machine gambling, Rendell lashed out at CBS reporter Lesley Stahl, when she asked about the "downside" of expanding casino gambling. The outgoing Democratic governor, who signed legislation to allow slot machine gambling in 2004 and table games in 2010, said the "biggest downside is that some people lose their paychecks." But he became visibly angry at Stahl for asking if he had second thoughts about signing legislation that caused "new gamblers"

More Guns, Fewer Murders?

On CNN’s "State of the Union with Candy Crowley," Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah perpetuated a falsehood about gun ownership and lower murder rates.

Lee: And to the contrary, I think there is abundant research suggesting that in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate actually goes down.

That’s not true. A causal relationship between prevalence of gun ownership and crime hasn’t been established by researchers. We looked into this subject in 2008 and found that the statistical relationship is the opposite of what Lee said for murder,

Reid Wrong on Jobs, Tea Party

On NBC’s "Meet the Press," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid exaggerated the latest job gains in the manufacturing sector and grossly minimized tea party victories in the 2010 midterm elections.
In the interview — which NBC taped a day before the Jan. 8 shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, Ariz. — Reid spoke about the latest employment numbers. The economy added 113,000 private sector jobs in the month of December, dropping the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent from 9.8 percent.

A New Home for FactCheck.org

With the New Year we are getting new GPS coordinates.
FactCheck.org is moving to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s new headquarters building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Our web address, of course, remains unchanged.

 
Our new physical address:

FactCheck.org
c/o Annenberg Public Policy Center
202 S. 36th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3806

Our telephone numbers:

Annenberg Public Policy Center: (215) 898-9400
FactCheck.org News Desk: (215) 573-7070

Annenberg’s Washington, D.C., office — which has been our home since we began operations in 2003 —

Holiday Announcement

Both the Washington and Philadelphia offices of FactCheck.org will be closed from Dec. 24 through Monday, Jan. 3, in observance of Christmas and New Year’s.
When we resume, we will be taking a different approach to our coverage of weekend public affairs shows. We will continue to monitor them and to research any dubious factual claims by public officials and political candidates. And we will post separate items on any that we discover to be false or misleading.

Sunday Replay

Surprisingly – considering that the topic du jour was taxes, which means numbers – the flubs and fibs on the Dec. 12 talk shows were few, and relatively minor.
Not So Out-of-Context
On "Meet the Press," the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, claimed host David Gregory had taken a quote by White House economic adviser Larry Summers "a little out of context." Not so. Goolsbee and Gregory were discussing the tax deal President Barack Obama had worked out with congressional Republicans.

Cash Attack Conference

On Monday, FactCheck.org hosted a post-election conference on political advertising in the 2010 election by outside groups. Our liberal and conservative panelists played some TV ads to illustrate their points – and we couldn’t resist pointing out that we had found a few of them to be misleading. Here’s what we said about some of those ads:

"Crumble,” by California Working Families for Jerry Brown. The ad, funded by a coalition of labor unions, criticizes Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s years as CEO of eBay.

Obama’s Social Security Stumble

President Barack Obama rewrote the history of the Social Security system during a Dec. 7 press conference, claiming that only widows and orphans originally benefited from the program. Obama was defending a deal the administration reached recently with congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for all Americans for another two years:

Obama, Dec. 7: And that means because it’s a big, diverse country and people have a lot of complicated positions, it means that in order to get stuff done,

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Just Argue

The Dec. 5 edition of ABC’s “This Week” played host to a heated discussion about the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation. Claims pinged back and forth regarding the recent Pentagon investigation of troop attitudes toward the law. But we caught several people putting the wrong figures with the wrong questions, or otherwise misrepresenting the results.
First, Gen. Wesley Clark misrepresented how many service members thought having an openly gay colleague would not affect their combat performance:

Clark: And what the survey showed is that essentially all of the service members,