Truth took a punch or two at the first of two GOP debates before New Hampshire’s critical presidential primary. Romney, talking about taxes, said federal, state and local government consume 37 percent of the economy today compared with only 27 percent when John F. Kennedy was president. In fact …
A Mitt Romney ad running in South Carolina distorts the truth by claiming that the National Labor Relations Board told Boeing Corp., “You can’t build a factory in South Carolina because South Carolina is a right-to-work state.” That misstates the facts. The NLRB’s acting general counsel actually dropped the case. And South Carolina’s right-to-work law wasn’t the focus of the now-dismissed complaint. The acting general counsel had claimed Boeing was punishing workers in another state for union activity.
The remaining Republican presidential candidates meet Jan. 7 for a prime-time ABC News/Yahoo!/WMUR-TV debate at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. Less than 12 hours later, they meet again for an NBC News/Facebook debate on “Meet the Press.”
Here are some possible lines of attack to expect, based on what the candidates, their campaigns and their surrogates have been saying lately.
‘Timid vs. Bold’
A major storyline heading into New Hampshire has been former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s stepped-up attacks on former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney has taken to saying that he created more than 100,000 net jobs through his work in the private sector, and more jobs as governor than President Obama has created since taking office. But the first claim is unproven, and the second is misleading.
It’s true that the private equity firm Bain Capital, which Romney headed from 1984 to 1999, invested in many companies that went on to add jobs. But there’s no thorough count of the jobs gained and lost in all the companies in which Bain invested.
During our break for the holidays, readers sent us their objections to our year-end “whoppers” article.
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.
Labor union representing 2.1 million health care, government and property management workers.
Q: Does Obama plan to deny emergency brain surgery for patients over 70?
A: No. A man claiming on a radio talk show to be a brain surgeon lied about that, and about a meeting of two associations of neurological surgeons, those associations say.
President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign is circulating a video of promises the then-candidate made during an Iowa caucus victory speech in January 2008, claiming he kept the promises he made that night. Not quite.
To be sure, the president signed a major health care law, ended the long war in Iraq and signed multiple “middle-class” tax cuts, just as his campaign boasts.
But the health care law isn’t expected to make insurance “affordable and available to every single American,”
Iran is very much in the news, with President Obama signing legislation that imposes new sanctions against Iran, which has warned it may retaliate by closing a key oil route. But there was more heat than light on the critical issue of Iran from two GOP presidential candidates this weekend:
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Ron Paul falsely claimed the International Atomic Energy Agency “did not find any evidence” that Iran is “on the verge of a [nuclear] weapon.”