Posted on September 22, 2008
Summary An Obama-Biden ad falsely claims McCain says he wants to "do the same to our health care" that "Wall Street deregulation" has done to the banking industry. The ad relies on a single phrase from a journal article under McCain's byline, in which he said he would reduce regulation …
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Posted on September 20, 2008 , Updated on September 22, 2008
Summary In Daytona Beach, Obama said that "if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week." He referred to "elderly women" at risk of poverty, and said families would be scrambling to …
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Posted on September 19, 2008
Summary An Obama TV ad tells Spanish-speaking viewers that McCain is "friends" with Rush Limbaugh, and quotes the radio host as calling Mexicans "stupid and unqualified" and telling them to "shut up or get out." The ad is doubly misleading. Limbaugh has until recently disparaged McCain repeatedly to his audience. …
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Posted on September 19, 2008 , Updated on September 20, 2008
Summary A new Obama ad characterizes the "Bush-McCain privatization plan" as "cutting Social Security Benefits in half." This is a falsehood sure to frighten seniors who rely on their Social Security checks. In truth, McCain does not propose to cut those checks at all. The ad refers to a Bush …
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Posted on September 18, 2008
Summary Biden proved once again that it doesn’t take outright falsehoods to create a skewed impression of one’s opponent. We found in a Sept. 15 speech that: Biden used partial quotes to support his charge that McCain wouldn’t help "small borrowers" suffering in the mortgage crisis but would "fight for those that …
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Posted on September 18, 2008 , Corrected on October 1, 2008
Summary The McCain-Palin campaign has released a new ad that once again distorts Obama’s tax plans. The ad claims Obama will raise taxes on electricity. He hasn’t proposed any such tax. Obama does support a cap-and-trade policy that would raise the costs of electricity, but so does McCain. It falsely …
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Posted on September 15, 2008
Summary Despite its place near the top of The New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list, where it has been riding high for the past six weeks, Jerome Corsi’s "The Obama Nation" is not a reliable source of facts about Obama. Corsi cites opinion columns and unsourced, anonymous blogs as if …
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Posted on September 12, 2008 , Updated on September 17, 2008
Summary Palin claims Alaska "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." That’s not true. Alaska did produce 14 percent of all the oil from U.S. wells last year, but that’s a far cry from all the "energy" produced in the U.S. Alaska’s share of domestic energy …
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Posted on September 11, 2008
Summary A new Obama-Biden ad includes misleading claims about McCain and education spending: It says McCain "voted to cut education funding" and lists five votes. But one was a vote for increased education funding, although for fewer dollars than what Democrats may have wanted. And three others were votes against …
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Posted on September 11, 2008 , Updated on September 12, 2008
Summary The McCain-Palin campaign has released a new TV ad that distorts quotes from the Obama campaign. It takes words out of context to make it sound as though the Democratic ticket is belittling Palin: The ad says "they said she was doing ‘what she was told.’ " But the …
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FactCheck Mailbag, Week of March 19-25.
