The Obama campaign is falsely accusing the Republican Party’s platform of calling for banning abortions even in cases of rape or incest. That’s not true. The 2012 platform is silent on exceptions — leaving that decision up to Congress and the states — just as it was in 2008 and in previous presidential election years.
To make matters worse, the latest falsehood comes from the president’s “Truth Team.” An Aug. 20 posting on the “Truth Team’s”
A Democratic congressman who has reliably supported extending the Bush tax cuts is now being attacked by a GOP TV spot claiming he “voted for higher taxes on Social Security, small businesses, middle-class families, even marriage.” All those claims are false or, in the case of Social Security, misleading.
The target of this deceptive attack from the National Republican Congressional Committee is Rep. Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, a conservative “Blue Dog” Democrat who bucked his party by voting for every extension of Bush’s cuts,
The Obama campaign points to old proposals by Rep. Paul Ryan in saying that Mitt Romney would pay “less than 1 percent in taxes” under Ryan’s plan and that seniors would pay $6,000 more for Medicare. Ryan’s 2010 budget proposal would have eliminated capital gains and dividend taxes — which were indeed the bulk of Romney’s tax burden for 2010 — but Ryan dropped that specific measure from subsequent budgets. The Medicare claim, too, pertains to a less generous plan Ryan released last year,
After yanking an ad with a false claim off the air in North Dakota, Crossroads GPS is back with an amended version that is technically accurate, but still grossly misleading.
The original ad claimed that Democratic Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp “spent taxpayer dollars on private planes” while she was the state’s attorney general. That wasn’t true. The planes were donated by the federal government.
The amended version, which started running Aug. 10, says she “allowed staff to fly a taxpayer-funded plane.”
A pro-Romney TV ad shows President Obama saying, “we tried our plan and it worked.” That twists his words way out of context. He was referring to his proposal to cut the deficit using both tax increases and spending cuts, like President Clinton. Obama wasn’t talking about past job creation efforts, as the ad would have viewers believe.
Restore Our Future, a super PAC founded by former Mitt Romney campaign staffers, went up with its new ad on Aug.
A new Mitt Romney campaign ad passes off opinions of a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush as though they were from a newspaper’s reporters or editors. It’s a political trick used by both sides: hijacking a news organization’s credibility.
In this example, the Romney ad attacks President Obama’s mandate requiring employers to provide health insurance that includes free contraception. It attributes to the San Antonio Express-News the words: “Obama’s Insurance Decision Declares War on Religion.”
But the newspaper didn’t say that in any editorial or news article.
The Obama campaign strikes another low blow with a TV spot accusing Mitt Romney of “personally” approving a notoriously abusive tax-avoidance scheme and suggesting he may have paid “zero” tax. That’s badly misleading.
It wasn’t Romney who was avoiding taxes, it was Marriott Corp. And there’s no evidence to support the ad’s speculation that Romney himself paid no income tax, or that he did something illegal.
The ad opens with an unsupported insinuation that Romney isn’t releasing more federal income tax returns because some would show he didn’t pay any income tax in those years.
In a campaign-funded radio ad to Missouri voters, Rush Limbaugh claimed the state’s lieutenant governor “banned taxpayer-funded travel for politicians” when he led the state Senate. Not really.
Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, who is Limbaugh’s friend, spearheaded a moratorium on paying travel expenses for state senators, not all “politicians.” The ban affected only out-of-state travel and failed to affect taxpayer-funded travel within Missouri, which is a far greater cost.
Furthermore, the ban expired after one year.
A Mitt Romney TV ad claims the Obama administration has adopted “a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements.” The plan does neither of those things.
Work requirements are not simply being “dropped.” States may now change the requirements — revising, adding or eliminating them — as part of a federally approved state-specific plan to increase job placement.
And it won’t “gut” the 1996 law to ease the requirement. Benefits still won’t be paid beyond an allotted time,
A grieving widower in a new pro-Obama TV spot says his wife contracted cancer and died “a short time after” Mitt Romney closed the steel plant that employed him and left “my family” without health coverage. That’s not quite so.
We find this ad from Priorities USA Action to be misleading on several counts.
Steelworker Joe Soptic’s wife, Ranae, died in 2006 — five years after the plant closed.
She didn’t lose coverage when the plant closed.