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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Sunday Replay

On this week’s Sunday talk shows, we caught the education secretary making a greatly inflated claim about high-school dropouts. Plus, Florida lawmakers made exaggerated statements on tax cuts and support of environmental bills.
Too Cool for School
On ABC’s "This Week," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan greatly exaggerated the number of students leaving school every year:

Duncan: In this country, we have a 25 percent dropout rate. That’s 1.2 million students leaving our schools for the streets every single year.

AFSCME’s Misleading Tax Attack

AFSCME, the big labor union, is running a misleading ad attacking one of the GOP’s premier House candidates. In an attempt to protect a vulnerable freshman Democrat, Rep. John Boccieri of Ohio, AFSCME badly misrepresents his Republican challenger’s stance on taxation. AFSCME’s ad …

Thompson Wrong on Tax Cuts, Too

First, it was Sarah Palin. Now, it’s former Sen. Fred Thompson. They’re both touting a highly misleading Republican talking point on the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.
Thompson, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, warns in a new ad sponsored by the conservative League of American Voters: "Folks, America’s economy is struggling and Congress is about to make it a whole lot worse." He’s talking about the "massive automatic tax increase at the end of this year, when the Bush tax cuts expire,"

Did Ed Case Kill 3,000 Hawaii Jobs? No.

As the days tick down to Hawaii’s May 22 special congressional election, Republican Charles Djou is airing an ad falsely accusing former Democratic Rep. Ed Case of voting to raise “taxes that kill 3,000 local jobs a year.”

The ad, which first ran May 14, makes this claim: “Case said he’s against higher taxes, but in Congress he voted to raise taxes. Taxes that kill 3,000 local jobs a year.” It cites a Jan. 5, 2006,

Mis-Tweets on Twitter

Mis-tweet
v. To use Twitter to mislead your followers.
For providing false and misleading information, a 30-second TV spot crafted by a seasoned media consultant is still king. But there’s another medium this campaign year that makes …

A 3.8 Percent “Sales Tax” on Your Home?

Q: Does the new health care law impose a 3.8 percent tax on profits from selling your home?
A: No, with very few exceptions. The first $250,000 in profit from the sale of a personal residence won’t be taxed, or the first $500,000 in the case of a married couple. The tax falls on relatively few — those with high incomes from other sources.

Another False Tax Attack (And One That’s Just Deceptive)

There they go again.
Earlier this month, we called out Democrats for falsely accusing a Republican House candidate in Hawaii of pledging to protect tax breaks for sending jobs overseas. All he did was sign a pledge not to raise taxes. Now a Democratic candidate is making the same false claim against his opponent in another special election in Pennsylvania.
For Democrats, misrepresenting an opponent’s anti-tax position as an anti-jobs position is getting to be a bad habit.

Tax Breaks and a ‘Private Army’

In episode 7 of our podcast, we look at a Democratic ad that falsely claims a Republican House candidate pledged to protect tax breaks for companies that send jobs abroad. We also tell listeners about the political involvement of Massey Energy, the company involved in the West Virginia mining disaster, and we explain the truth behind Internet rumors claiming the health care law gives the president a “private army.”
(Click here to listen to the podcast.

Sunday Slips

Viewers were relatively safe from false or misleading tripe on the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday.
But we can’t let a couple of statements go unmentioned, one from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and a couple from Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota; both officials are Republicans.
Barbour, speaking on CNN’s "State of the Union" with Candy Crowley, said:

Barbour, April 11: I mean, [Obama] has proposed a $3.8 trillion budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit. The whole budget in 1997 —

A Final Weekend of Whoppers?

With the House preparing for a final vote on the Senate health care legislation, with revisions, Sunday afternoon, we thought we’d give our readers a wrap-up of the top falsehoods of late. The debate over this bill has stretched on about as long as a presidential campaign, and we suspect this weekend will be filled …