Our pre-Thanksgiving round-up of bits and pieces of political bunk includes Al Gore, a fancy new dog park and chain e-mails that refuse to die.
Gore’s too hot
Al Gore overstated a key fact about geothermal energy during a recent appearance on "The Tonight Show":
Gore, Nov. 13: Two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, because the interior of the earth is extremely hot — several million degrees.
AAA estimates that 38.4 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more over the Thanksgiving weekend, the bulk of them (33.2 million) traveling by car. The total is a 1.4 percent increase over last year.
Source: AAA.com
This week, readers sent us comments on small businesses and health care, the recovery act and jobs, and a pimp Photoshop contest.
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.
Q: Did CNN’s Lou Dobbs denounce an immigration bill “going through Congress right now”?
A: The three-and-a-half-minute video being circulated in chain e-mails is from 2007. Dobbs was criticizing a bipartisan Senate bill, which was supported by Bush and McCain, and which died soon after.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that Thanksgiving 1939 would be held not on the last Thursday of the month, but the fourth Thursday. The declaration, which moved the national holiday up to Nov. 23 that year, was made at the request of business owners who wanted more shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Source: FDR Presidential Library
President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be a national holiday, observed on the last Thursday of November, in 1863.
Source: Census Bureau
Minnesota is expected to be the top turkey-producing state in 2009, raising 45.5 million of the Thanksgiving bird.
Source: Census Bureau
Of the 709 million pounds of cranberries estimated to be produced in the U.S. in 2009, 400 million pounds will come from Wisconsin.
Source: Census Bureau
Democrats in Congress have been pleased with the Congressional Budget Office’s findings that both the House and Senate health care bills would reduce the deficit over 10 years. But is that assessment due to some accounting trickery in the bills?
The conservative Employment Policies Institute is airing an ad on cable news networks featuring June O’Neill, former director of the CBO in the mid- to late ’90s, who says that "some politicians are using accounting gimmicks to hide the cost"
From time to time we come across bits of political malarkey or other items that don’t quite rate a full article. Starting today, we’ll collect these tidbits in a new, occasional feature we call "Extras."
Palin: "Who makes a decision like that?"
In a Nov. 6 appearance at a no-cameras-allowed fundraiser, Sarah Palin criticized moving the words "In God We Trust" onto the edges of some new $1 coins: "Who calls a shot like that?