Romney and the Tax Return Precedent
Mitt Romney says he is following the “precedent” set by John McCain in releasing just two years of tax returns. That’s accurate. But McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee, bucked the trend of other recent presidential candidates.
In more than three decades, no other nominees for either party have released fewer than five years’ worth of returns. Romney’s own father released a dozen years’ worth when he ran for the GOP nomination in 1968.
Romney has been under mounting public pressure to release tax returns —
FactCheck Mailbag, Week of July 10-16
This week, readers sent us both positive and negative reviews of the website.
In the FactCheck Mailbag, we feature some of the email we receive. Readers can send comments to editor@factcheck.org. Letters may be edited for length.
If You Like Your Plan …
After the Supreme Court’s ruling on the federal health care law, President Obama repeated his claim that for Americans “who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.” But Obama can’t make that promise for everyone. At least a few million workers won’t keep their current plans.
Read more about Romney’s and President Obama’s false and misleading claims made after the high court’s ruling in our June 28 article, “Romney, Obama Uphold Health Care Falsehoods.”
Spotlight On: Jim Watson
Jim Watson was immediately skeptical of American Commitment’s attack ad, which he saw on Facebook.
The ad’s narrator claimed Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, voted to increase electricity costs while displaying the text, “Ohio: Electric Bills Will Skyrocket.”
“Like all political ads, the extreme language (skyrocket) and the improbable idea that anyone would actually vote for electric rates to go up, was too much to resist,” Watson wrote to us in an email. “I knew it was an attack ad,
Group Blows Fuse With Electric Bill Claim
A conservative group goes too far in TV ads that claim a new EPA regulation on coal power plants will make Ohio’s electric bills “skyrocket.” Utility officials say it’s too soon to determine how big the impact will be.
Nationally, projections from the Energy Information Administration show only a slight fluctuation in the residential price of electricity over the long run. The EIA factored in the regulation in its projections.
There’s reason to believe there might be more of an impact in price in Ohio,
DCCC Calls Latham Out on TARP
A Democratic robocall in Iowa accuses GOP Rep. Tom Latham of “looking out for himself” by profiting from legislation he actually opposed.
The Des Moines Register reports that the call from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee charges Latham with “only looking out for himself, not the middle class,” for having stock in a bank holding company that took Troubled Asset Relief Program funds in 2009.
The problem with that claim is that Latham actually voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act that created TARP back in 2008.
Sununu’s Out-of-this-World Outsourcing Claim
John Sununu claimed President Obama “outsourced a major portion of the U.S. space program to the Russians.” But it was President Bush who set NASA on a path eight years ago to retire the Space Shuttle and rely on the Russians for space travel.
“[Bush] Administration policy is to retire the shuttle in 2010 and purchase crew transport from Russia,” as then-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin once explained.
To be sure, Obama ended the Space Shuttle program,
July 13: Medicare, Abortion, Jobs
Romney’s Bain Years: New Evidence, Same Conclusion
New reporting cites strong evidence that Mitt Romney wasn’t actively managing Bain Capital while he was running the Olympics, despite what the Obama campaign (and some news reports) would have voters believe.
Dan Primack, a senior editor at Fortune Magazine, reports on previously confidential “offering documents” that Bain circulated to potential investors in June 2000, September 2000 and again in January 2001. And he says that in each of those three documents Romney’s name is conspicuously absent from lists of senior investment managers at Bain.