The Kentucky Senate race — likely pitting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell against Democratic challenger, and former Marine fighter pilot, Amy McGrath — is playing out on the airwaves. But the recent TV ads don’t always square with the facts.
President Donald Trump said “bailouts for insurance companies” would “end very soon” if Congress didn’t pass a new health care bill. Sen. Susan Collins said the payments aren’t a bailout, “but rather help people who are very low-income afford their out-of-pocket costs.” Trump distorts the facts.
In the Georgia Republican Senate runoff, Rep. Jack Kingston is falsely claiming that his opponent, David Perdue, “sat on a board promoting amnesty for illegal immigrants.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has gone to great lengths in ads — both Web and paid — to discredit the conservative credentials of his Republican primary challenger Matt Bevin. But his attacks have often stretched the truth or outright misled viewers.
The Romney campaign crams two howling falsehoods into a very few words:
It accuses President Obama of being personally responsible for actions by the Federal Reserve Board, which is independent.
It claims Obama is “spending your tax dollars” in the Fed’s latest move to buy mortgage-backed securities, when in fact the Fed is turning a big profit for the Treasury, reducing the deficit.
Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades committed both these whoppers in an appeal for donations that was emailed Sept.
Rick Santorum says, “I didn’t vote for a steel bailout.” But in fact, the former Pennsylvania senator voted in 1999 for the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program, which was dubbed a “bailout” by multiple news organizations at the time.
The loan guarantee program Santorum supported was much smaller than the auto bailouts he has regularly criticized on the campaign trail. Only three steelmakers ever tapped the program, and all money has been repaid. But it did underwrite more than $400 million in loans,
The Democratic National Committee casts Mitt Romney as an untrustworthy flip-flopper in a lengthy Web video, but pads a long list of examples with some falsehoods and distortions. It’s true that Romney has changed or modified his position on some major issues — including abortion, a federal assault weapons ban and Reaganomics, as the DNC says. But the video strains the truth …
Club for Growth exaggerates when it claims Sen. Richard Lugar voted to bail out New York City "back in the 1970s" at a cost of $9.4 billion. Lugar was mayor of Indianapolis when Congress passed the famous 1975 New York City bailout. He did vote for a 1978 bill that provided the city with $1.65 billion in federal loan guarantees — but it cost federal taxpayers $0.
The main point of the ad is also exaggerated.
Once again we find that Tim Pawlenty has changed course on an issue that is something of a litmus test for Republican candidates. In this case, it’s government bailouts.
On Jan. 16, he condemned all such bailouts, saying: "I don’t think the government should bail out Wall Street or the mortgage industry or for that matter any other industry." But back in 2008, when the sub-prime lending crisis was gathering force, Pawlenty said that some entities were "too big,
Midterm elections are an embarrassment of riches for fact-checkers — this year more than others. With Democrats fighting desperately to keep control of the House and Senate, and a torrent of money from corporations and other undisclosed …