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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Plumber Joe and His Health Care

Fines for small businesses? Higher income taxes? The government choosing your health care plans? Gold-plated Cadillacs? It all sounds bad (or at least confusing) for Joe, and everyone else … but luckily we’ve broken it all down for you. For the full scoop on both Obama’s and McCain’s health care plans, see our recent article Health Care Spin.

Constitutional Queries about the VP Debate

Hundreds of readers have written us asking why we didn’t point out Joe Biden’s confusion of Articles I and II of the Constitution during his debate with Gov. Sarah Palin on Oct. 2. We should have. While his rambling response was generally correct in describing the constitutional role of the vice president, he did make a small error. And in the interest of clearing up previous debate matters before tonight’s final face-off between John McCain and Barack Obama,

Health Care Spin

An Obama-Biden TV ad says Sen. John McCain’s health care plan would be the “largest middle-class tax increase in history.” A McCain-Palin/RNC radio ad says Obama’s plan “will rob 50 million employees of their health coverage.” Both are false.
We lay out the details of each candidate’s health care plans and the misleading claims being made about them in a new article on our main site:
Health Care Spin October 14, 2008

The $79 Billion Iraqi Surplus, Reconsidered

We’ve criticized both Barack Obama and Joe Biden several times now for claiming that the U.S. is spending $10 billion a month to Iraq while that nation is sitting on a $79 billion surplus. We wrote that the $79 billion figure was out of date because Iraq had since passed a $22.3 billion supplemental spending bill. Our criticism was based on a report from the Government Accountability Office. But we misread the report. The figure that Obama and Biden use is probably still too high,

McCain found at fault in 1960 Navy plane crash

We have updated our Ask FactCheck item on John McCain’s flying career to note new information uncovered by the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper found records of a Navy investigation into the crash of John McCain’s aircraft while he was in flight training in 1960. McCain and others have written that the plane went down in Corpus Christi Bay when the engine quit, but Navy investigators concluded that the engine was still running when the plane hit the water,

World’s Nicest Nightmare

On MSNBC Wednesday morning, senior McCain advisor Nicolle Wallace said that John McCain won’t cut taxes for corporations, and that in fact he is “their worst nightmare.”

The quote is at about 5:10 in the above video, but if you rewind a bit, you’ll see host Joe Scarborough grilling Obama strategist Robert Gibbs on why Obama’s not proposing corporate tax cuts. Scarborough points out that other countries are reducing taxes on corporations and says that equivalent tax cuts are necessary to keep the U.S.

McCain, Palin and Rape Kits

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the pervasive rumor that Sarah Palin, when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, made women pay for their own forensic testing when reporting a rape. The verdict: This policy was enforced for at least some reported rapes in Wasilla, and in 2000, complaints about rape kit charges in Wasilla and other rural areas drove then-Gov. Tony Knowles to pass legislation requiring police departments to pay for the testing. The Wasilla police chief opposed the new state law and defended the practice,

The Momentary “No”

The third-party group Committee for Truth in Politics has released an ad accusing Sen. Barack Obama of favoring early release for sexual offenders. We like the group’s name — hey, that’s what we’re all about! But we find it pretty misleading in the case of this ad, which includes a gross oversight on a 1999 vote. The end result is absurdly wrong.
Here’s the script of the ad (we couldn’t find a version of the video that would run properly on our site,

FactChecking Debate No. 2

We published several tidbits here on The Wire during last night’s presidential debate. Our full article contains a few more misleading statements and falsehoods that we needed a little more time to research. Check it out on our main site:
FactChecking Debate No. 2
October 8, 2008 
Nonsense in Nashville

Oversimplifying the Fiscal Crisis

It’s finger-pointing time again, with each candidates blaming the other for the financial crisis. McCain called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the “catalyst” for the crisis and blamed Obama for failing to sign on to a bill to rein in the FMs. Obama countered that it’s a culture of deregulation and lack of oversight that caused the problem.
We’ve been here before. Both candidates have a point: Democrats really have fought regulation of the FMs and McCain has in fact been in favor of deregulation.