Since our article about Barack Obama’s birth certificate came out in August, we’ve heard many frivolous claims, nutty theories and made-up facts advanced by a small clique of Obama deniers. It seems that every time a rumor is debunked, a new one crops up to take its place. Sometimes contradictory rumors even circulate simultaneously.
The most recent claim is that Obama’s short-form birth certificate is legitimate, but that it was made up after his birth in Kenya,
Year: 2009
Social Security for Illegal Immigrants?
Q: Is Congress about to give Social Security to illegal immigrants?
A: Congress hasn’t voted on any measure to pay benefits to illegal immigrants, and has no plans for any such vote.
Free Money!!
The ads are popping up everywhere. We’ve seen them on the sidebar at Facebook and on the front page of The New York Times‘ online edition.
The ads are enticing, promising to tell you how you can get your hands on a share of free government money. The pitch is a scam, promising free information for a small "shipping and handling" fee. What the ads aren’t telling you (at least not outside the fine print) is that unless you are careful,
Tiny Iran
Feb. 26 marked the beginning of the Conservative Political Action Committee (or CPAC) annual convention. Conference speakers include leading figures from the Republican Party as well as conservative columnists, pundits and activists. Among yesterday’s speakers was John Bolton, U.N. ambassador under President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. During his speech, Bolton repeated a bit of old bunk from the 2008 campaign, falsely claiming that Obama called Iran “a tiny threat.”
Money on the Table
Before he gave the Republican rebuttal to Tuesday night’s presidential address, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was making headlines by saying he would leave some of President Obama’s stimulus funds on the table. Other southern GOP governors, such as Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Mark Sanford of South Carolina, said they may follow his lead.
Jindal announced last week, and reiterated Feb. 22 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he would not be applying for some unemployment insurance funding available to his state through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,
Infrastructure Jobs for Union Workers Only?
Q: Did Obama require that all infrastructure jobs in the stimulus bill go to union workers?
A: Obama didn’t set a requirement. He issued an executive order that "encourage[s] executive agencies to consider requiring" union labor for "large-scale" government contracts.
Ride into the Danger Zone
The Air Force’s much-criticized F-22 has been a favorite subject of much of the blogosphere, particularly since Mark Bowden’s feature article praising the fighter appeared in the March issue of The Atlantic . Tuesday night the discussion went mainstream, with Obama’s oblique reference to “Cold War weapons we don’t use.” As we said in our article over on the main site, Obama is right to describe the F-22 this way. Development on the fighter began in 1981,
ARRA Under Attack, Again
The belated attacks on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 keep on coming. For the second time in less than a week, the American Issues Project has released a television ad criticizing the stimulus legislation recently signed by President Obama. In our article "GOP Stimulus Myths," we discussed the group’s first anti-stimulus ad that contained misleading claims about "pork and pet projects" in the legislation, as well as a one-sided characterization of a Congressional Budget Office analysis.
When Economists Agree
We’ve been telling you for the last couple of weeks how economists are divided over the virtues of the stimulus bill. But, as former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and current Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw reminds us, we shouldn’t get too carried away with our skepticism of economists. While they might have differing views of macroeconomics, there are still a lot of areas where they agree. Mankiw provides us with a list of principles that most economists accept,
Fact Checking Obama’s Speech
President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress was stuffed with signals about the new direction his budget will take and meant-to-be reassuring words about the economy. But it was also peppered with exaggerations and factual misstatements. He said “we import more oil today than ever …