Rep. Michele Bachmann used misleading and at times wildly inaccurate portrayals of two key domestic and foreign policy issues — food stamps and the response to an attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya — to paint President Obama as someone who doesn’t “care.”
Her account of the White House response to the Benghazi attack included unsubstantiated claims, distortions of omission and outright factual errors, including the bogus claim that Glen Doherty “defied orders” to help colleagues under attack.
Rep. Charlie Rangel falsely claimed there are “millions of kids dying, being shot down by assault weapons.” In fact, fewer than 100,000 persons younger than 20 years old died of gun violence, including suicide, over a 30-year period through 2010, government data show. About two-thirds of those deaths — or nearly 65,000 — were homicides.
That’s for all guns, not just assault weapons. We don’t know how many of them were killed by assault weapons, but federally funded studies have shown that such weapons are used in a small percentage of crimes.
Rep. Michele Bachmann claims that “vulnerable women, vulnerable children, vulnerable senior citizens” will all “pay more” under the federal health care law and get “less” in return.
After the December mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., several Democrats advocating for stricter gun-control laws — including a law requiring universal background checks for gun purchases — took to using this talking point to support their case. …
In Sen. Ted Cruz’s twisted vision of economic history, Ronald Reagan cured double-digit unemployment by cutting spending and reducing the federal debt, and Jimmy Carter was guilty of “out-of-control regulation.”
In the real world:
Total federal spending soared during Reagan’s deficit-plagued first term, and the national debt nearly doubled. His budget director later resigned and wrote a book criticizing Reagan’s failure to cut spending.
And Carter signed landmark bills freeing airline, railroad and trucking rates from federal regulation,
Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul got laughs at the federal government’s expense at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, but the facts don’t jibe with the jokes.
Cruz accused the EPA of “trying to use a lizard to shut down oil and gas production” in West Texas to set up a one-liner about lizard boots. But the jab — an old campaign joke — no longer has any basis in fact. The federal government decided against listing the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard as “endangered”
At the Conservative Political Action Conference, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said that the Senate was “in violation of Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of our U.S. Constitution” by failing to “pass a budget.” She’s referring to a budget resolution. But that constitutional clause doesn’t mention a budget or a budget resolution, which was not required of the Senate until the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. The responses to Palin’s interpretation from constitutional scholars ranged from “completely invalid” to “kind of a stretch.”
Rep. Paul Ryan exaggerates future growth of the federal debt in a chart contained in his newly released budget plan.
The chart relies on Congressional Budget Office projections from last year that do not account for actions taken since then to reduce federal deficits by nearly $2 trillion over 10 years. The chart also projects debt levels out to 2060, although CBO warns that such long-term projections are “highly uncertain.”
Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee,
The release of the House GOP budget by Rep. Paul Ryan has sparked a resurgence of false and misleading claims about the Affordable Care Act, which the budget seeks to largely repeal. On the Sunday talk shows, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, and Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, each distorted the facts regarding revenues raised in the health care law. And Ryan wrongly said the law would take money away from Medicare and ration benefits for seniors.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi seized on an old talking point, miscasting a now-famous quote by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell in 2010 about the goal of making Obama a “one-term president.”
On CNN’s “State of the Union” on March 10, host Candy Crowley asked the leader of the House Democrats if President Barack Obama’s stated commitment to helping return the House to Democratic power, with Pelosi at the helm, wasn’t the same as McConnell’s comment about his goal of making Obama a one-term president.