A recent TV ad from Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter claims that Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln "says she voted against bailing out Wall Street." That’s not what Lincoln said. The two are campaigning in the Democratic primary for the Senate.
Halter’s ad refers to a Lincoln campaign ad from March in which she said she has voted against "giving more money to Wall Street."
Lincoln never denied voting in favor of the 2008 Troubled Assets Relief Program,
Stories by D'Angelo Gore
Staff Writer, FactCheck.org
Jumping to Conclusions About Census Participation
Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina is fearful that "blatant misinformation coming from otherwise well-meaning conservatives" is affecting the rate at which conservatives return their 2010 Census forms. So concerned that he wrote an op-ed for RedState, a conservative news blog, where he claimed that "[e]arly census returns are showing that conservatives have been measurably less likely than liberals to return their census forms." But as our friends at Politifact wrote, there currently isn’t any evidence to support the claim.
Crist, Rubio Ad War
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist once looked like he’d surely get the GOP nomination in the race to replace outgoing Sen. Mel Martinez. But it’s the former Florida state House speaker, Republican Marco Rubio, who’s currently positioned as the front-runner.
With several months to go before the August primary, Crist released his first TV ad last week hitting his chief opponent for having been a "registered lobbyist" and using "Republican political donations on his lavish lifestyle."
It’s true that Rubio was a registered lobbyist in Florida’s Miami-Dade County for several years —
And Here We Go: Attack Ad Cites Health Care Vote
Republican businessman Scott Sipprelle, who is running to unseat Democratic Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey this fall, has launched one of the first TV ads attacking an incumbent on the recent health care vote.
In the 30-second spot, which is also the first TV ad of his campaign, Sipprelle says, "Rush Holt and Nancy Pelosi ignored you" and supported a "trillion dollar health care bill [that] creates a massive new federal bureaucracy that will hurt the quality of care and saddle us with more debt and higher taxes."
Stimulus Saves First Lady’s Brother?
We figured that people would recognize this latest chain e-mail for the hoax that it is. It makes a ridiculously false claim about Craig Robinson, who is the head coach of Oregon State University’s men’s basketball team and First Lady Michelle Obama’s older brother. But judging from the number of times we’ve been asked about this since the beginning of March, we were wrong. The author of this bogus e-rumor must be suffering from a different kind of “March Madness”
Future Fund’s Faulty Fusillade
The American Future Fund, a conservative advocacy group, is launching an offensive on multiple fronts against the proposed health care bill. Its television ad mixes bits of recycled images and false claims with new falsehoods, while its print ad sticks closer to the facts but begs some context.
Video Attacks
First off, the ad says that "liberals are crafting a secret health care bill behind closed doors." That’s absurd. The health care overhaul bills were passed months ago (the House version passed in November,
You’ve Got False Mail
If you live in Connecticut and are a registered Republican, you may have received a mailer or two from former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon attacking her opponent in the state’s GOP Senate primary, former U.S. Rep. Robert Simmons. But some of the mailers’ claims are false.
In one mailer, McMahon claims Simmons cosponsored cap-and-trade legislation that will “cost the average American family more than $1,700 a year.”
First, Simmons did not, as the mailer implies,
Insurance Coverage: Obama’s Air Ball
During an impromptu press conference with the White House press corps on Feb. 9, President Barack Obama claimed that more people are getting their health insurance this year from the government than through the private sector. But that’s not even close to being true. If this had been a basketball shot, it would have missed the backboard:
Obama, Feb. 9: I don’t know if people noted, because during the health care debate everybody was saying the president is trying to take over —
School Photo
Here at FactCheck.org, we’ve seen our share of fake photos of President Obama. So we were suspicious when a reader e-mailed us a silly-looking photo of the president speaking in a grade-school classroom with teleprompter, podium and presidential seal. The photo is so silly, in fact, that it was the butt of a late-night comedian’s ridicule. But this picture is real.
The White House video of this event prompted Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart to ask incredulously,
Enforcing the Individual Mandate
Q: How does health care legislation propose to enforce the individual mandate?
A: The Internal Revenue Service would verify whether individuals meet the requirement to have health insurance, and collect a tax if they don’t.