The House of Representatives passed H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act in June 2009. A chain e-mail that has been forwarded to us repeatedly in recent days says that the bill would require homeowners to retrofit their houses to meet new energy standards, and obtain a license from the Environmental Protection Agency before they could sell a home. Don’t believe it. The claims are false.
In fact, we said last summer that claims that the bill requires such things were false in our Ask FactCheck titled "Energy Bill and Exisiting Homes."
More Regulatory Rhetoric
A new attack ad targeting three Democratic senators and one Republican criticizes "hidden taxes on … pensions and retirement accounts" in the financial regulation legislation being considered by Congress, and urges the senators to "vote against this phony financial reform."
The ad gives a false impression. The Senate bill doesn’t contain the tax mentioned in the ad.
The ad is the work of a less-than-transparent group calling itself "Stop Too Big To Fail," which says its $1.6 million ad buy is targeting senators in Nevada,
A False Hit on Critz
We’ve written about misrepresentations in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s attack on Tim Burns, the GOP candidate in the Pennsylvania 12th. Being equal-opportunity fact-checkers, we can’t let a false attack ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee in this race slip by without mention.
The hit on Democratic nominee Mark Critz says that "Congress and liberals like Mark Critz didn’t listen" when "Americans said no to government-run health care." Now, we could go into all the claims the ad makes about the new health care law,
The Bailout Bill?
Does the financial regulatory bill put an end to taxpayer-funded bailouts? Or does it "institutionalize" them? Viewers of the Sunday political talk shows and recent C-SPAN clips from the Senate floor might well be wondering, as Democrats (the "end of bailouts" crowd) and some Republicans (the "institutionalize" camp) have made these contradictory claims.
No piece of legislation can guarantee that a future Congress won’t allow the federal government to prop up a failing financial institution. But claims that this bill makes taxpayer-funded bailouts a permanent fixture are misleading,
Another False Tax Attack (And One That’s Just Deceptive)
There they go again.
Earlier this month, we called out Democrats for falsely accusing a Republican House candidate in Hawaii of pledging to protect tax breaks for sending jobs overseas. All he did was sign a pledge not to raise taxes. Now a Democratic candidate is making the same false claim against his opponent in another special election in Pennsylvania.
For Democrats, misrepresenting an opponent’s anti-tax position as an anti-jobs position is getting to be a bad habit.
Sunday Replay
During his first appearance on CBS’ "Face the Nation" on April 18, Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts claimed that the financial regulatory bill could potentially cost insurance companies in his state 25,000 to 35,000 jobs. But the freshman senator has failed to provide any support for the claim, and we have been unable to find any elsewhere.
Brown didn’t provide the source of the estimate when host Bob Schieffer inquired about it. And our calls to the senator’s office haven’t been returned.
Some ‘Climategate’ Conclusions
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.
Tussling Over TARP
A recent TV ad from Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter claims that Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln "says she voted against bailing out Wall Street." That’s not what Lincoln said. The two are campaigning in the Democratic primary for the Senate.
Halter’s ad refers to a Lincoln campaign ad from March in which she said she has voted against "giving more money to Wall Street."
Lincoln never denied voting in favor of the 2008 Troubled Assets Relief Program,
Stimulus Jobs: The Fine Print
The White House announced April 14 that a new report shows that the Recovery Act has been responsible for 2.2 million to 2.8 million jobs through the end of March. As always, we advise reading the fine print.
As we’ve written before, it’s not possible to know what might have happened had the $787 billion economic stimulus bill not been enacted and signed into law more than a year ago, on Feb. 17, 2009. Economists can only estimate.
Shady Deals in the Sunshine State?
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has launched another ad attacking GOP primary opponent Marco Rubio — and the ethics and legality of his past dealings. They’re campaigning to get the Republican nod for a Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Mel Martinez. The primary is in August.
Crist’s ad draws parallels between Rubio, a former state House speaker, and Ray Sansom, Rubio’s budget chairman when he was speaker and, until recently, a state representative. The ad claims both were known for "preposterous deal-making,"