FactCheck.org

Obama’s Fake Hayes Quote

March 15, 2012

President Obama unjustly criticized a dead Republican president — Rutherford B. Hayes — by putting words in Hayes’ mouth that he never uttered.
Obama, speaking about his energy policies at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md., said:
Obama, March 15: There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone,

Romney: Foggy on FactCheck

March 14, 2012

Mitt Romney is a little unclear on the facts when it comes to FactCheck.org — and what we and other fact-checkers have said about Rick Santorum.
In the same CNN interview in which he made a somewhat premature claim that Santorum was at the “desperate end” of his campaign (just before returns came in showing Santorum had won and Romney had come in third in both the Alabama and Mississippi primaries), he said:
Romney, March 13: Well,

Santorum’s Science

March 14, 2012

Rick Santorum calls global warming a “hoax.” If he were a scientist, he would be in a small minority.
“The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” Santorum said at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Miss., on March 12. He made similar comments in early February in Colorado Springs, Colo., saying that global warming was a “hoax” and that “man-made global warming” and proposed remedies were “bogus.”

Bogus Bipartisan Claims

March 12, 2012

In a mailer to constituents, a Republican congressman claims 27 “bipartisan bills” have passed the House but “hit a brick wall” in the Democratic-controlled Senate. But most of the bills are not very “bipartisan.” A majority of House Democrats voted against all but five of the 27 proposals, sometimes overwhelmingly. One of these “bipartisan bills” had the support of only four Democrats, and another had the support of just eight.
The mailer — sent out by Georgia Rep.

Wrestling with the Truth on Santorum’s Lobbying

March 9, 2012

The Mitt Romney campaign lifts a Rick Santorum quote out of context to level a charge that Santorum is being untruthful about his lobbying history.
The Romney campaign claims to have caught Santorum being “at odds with the facts” when he told CNN, “I was not a lobbyist.” The Romney camp points to press reports that say Santorum was a lobbyist in Pennsylvania in the late 1980s. However, Santorum’s statement to CNN came in response to a question about his post-Senate career.

Axelrod’s Hazy Memory of 2008

March 7, 2012

David Axelrod’s zeal to help President Obama win reelection has clouded his memory. In depicting the 2012 GOP primary as unusually nasty and harmful to the party’s eventual nominee, Obama’s senior campaign adviser falsely claimed “we mentioned Hillary Clinton twice in our advertising” during the 2008 campaign. With little effort, we found 10 such ads — five times what Axelrod claimed.
In a March 6 interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, Axelrod expressed shock at this year’s GOP primary nastiness and recalled with fondness (and fallacy) the gentleness of the 2008 Democratic nominating process.

Obama’s ‘Smidgen’ of Truth on Energy Efficiency

March 3, 2012

President Obama criticized “the other side” for failing to provide “a smidgen of an idea” for energy efficiency. But it turns out, there is only a smidgen of truth to the president’s criticism.
The president was speaking in New York at a March 1 fundraising event when he brought up his energy policies — which have come under attack by Republicans of late because of rising gasoline prices. Obama said: “You don’t hear just a smidgen of an idea from the other side about how we might want to enhance energy efficiency,

Democrat-on-Democrat Attacks in Ohio

March 2, 2012

Ohioans are getting a healthy dose of misinformation in a nasty congressional primary in Ohio, which pits incumbent Democrats Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich against each other. Only one can survive the March 6 vote.
Though Kaptur and Kucinich — both 65 and pro-union liberals — were longtime political allies, that changed with a Republican remapping of zones that put them in the same congressional district.
Kaptur has dominated the TV air wars with ads the Kucinich camp calls “dishonest,”

Obama White House ‘Full of Wall Street Executives’?

February 29, 2012

A conservative group exaggerates the number of “Wall Street executives” in the Obama White House. In a major TV ad buy, the American Future Fund lists 27 people it claims are part of “Obama’s Wall Street Inner Circle.” But the ad is either flat wrong or greatly exaggerated in more than half of those cases. Among the most laughable examples we found of “Wall Street executives” in Obama’s “inner circle”:

A “White House fellow,” class of 2009-2010,

The ‘Bailout’ Santorum Denies

February 28, 2012

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,