Nevada Sen. Harry Reid is slugging it out with his Republican opponent Sharron Angle over the state’s dismal unemployment rate. It’s a fair fight. Their dueling ads are totally accurate. But each leaves key facts unsaid.
Angle’s 60-second ad first aired July 9, and a 30-second version is also airing. It presents a gloomy, menacing picture of the Nevada economy with shaky, blue-tinged shots of melancholy faces, accompanied by background music fit for a funeral. There is no announcer.
This week, everyone liked us! Well, almost everyone.
In the FactCheck Mailbag, we feature some of the e-mail we receive. Readers can send comments to editor@factcheck.org. Letters may be edited for length.
Call this one the Axelrod Edition. President Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, was on three of the political talk shows on July 11, and we found that he strayed from the factual straight-and-narrow several times in talking about the oil spill, border security and other issues.
We also found Republican congressman Brian Bilbray overstating support for an immigration bill and Attorney General Eric Holder repeating a claim we’ve critiqued before about how many terrorism trials have taken place in the civilian justice system.
The big question in the final days of Alabama’s runoff election for the GOP gubernatorial nomination isn’t just who is going to win the tight race between Bradley Byrne and Robert Bentley. It’s the mystery of who’s behind a largely bogus TV ad attacking Byrne. …
Republican Rep. Mark Kirk is attacking his Democratic opponent in the Illinois race for the U.S. Senate with two ads that go beyond what the facts support. The ads make unsupported claims about the role Giannoulias played at his family’s troubled bank and strain to tie him to BP, among other dubious statements.
Kirk released the new ads less than a day after he apologized for embellishing his own military record.
Bank Shot
According to one of the ads,
Q: Did Eisenhower deport 13 million illegal immigrants? Did Hoover and Truman use mass deportations to open jobs for U.S. citizens?
A: No. Nothing close to 13 million persons were deported during any administration. All three of these presidents wrestled with a rising tide of illegal immigration,
In Episode 19 of FactCheck Radio, we look at a false ad from California GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman about her Democratic opponent Jerry Brown’s supposed "legacy of failure." We also examine whether Bill McCollum has really supported abortion providers, as his opponent charges in the Republican primary for the Florida governor’s contest. And we go back to what Obama really did say about the plans for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in July 2011.
For more on the stories discussed in this episode,
This week, readers sent us comments about the Jones Act, Haley Barbour’s blowout claims and Exxon’s penalty payments.
In the FactCheck Mailbag, we feature some of the e-mail we receive. Readers can send comments to editor@factcheck.org. Letters may be edited for length.
In Florida’s Republican primary for governor, a federal political committee founded by candidate Rick Scott and largely financed by his wife falsely accuses Attorney General Bill McCollum of supporting "abortion providers." The group’s new ad masquerades as a “fact check,” but it mangles facts by characterizing ordinary hospitals (such as the ones Rick Scott himself once ran) as "abortion providers."
The ad, by a group called Let’s Get to Work, first aired June 25. It begins: “Congressman McCollum’s on TV.
Q: Did border patrol recently discover a large cache of guns on the Arizona border?
A: No. A chain e-mail making that claim shows pictures of a seizure by the Mexican Army about 70 miles south of the Texas border.