The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims in a TV ad that the Congressional Budget Office says unemployment “could top 9 percent in 2013.” Maybe so, if Congress doesn’t change current law — specifically if it fails to extend tax cuts, fails to patch the Alternative Minimum Tax that threatens to raise taxes on more than 31 million Americans, and also allows big spending cuts to take effect. But CBO also said that wasn’t a prediction of the future.
Entrepreneur Donald Trump dismissed the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum by claiming that Santorum lost his Senate seat in 2006 by a wider margin than any incumbent senator in history. He’s wrong.
In fact, there have been two dozen incumbent senators who have taken worse beatings than Santorum did in 2006. Trump need only have checked back as far as the 2010 midterm elections — when Democrat Blanche Lincoln lost her Arkansas seat — to find an incumbent senator who lost by a bigger margin than Santorum did.
Newt Gingrich exaggerates when he says the Environmental Protection Agency has a proposal “that would raise the price of gasoline by 25 cents a gallon.” Gingrich’s cost estimate comes from an oil industry study of “clean gasoline” recommendations made by U.S. automakers. The EPA has yet to issue a proposal, and a top agency official says the oil industry study is based on proposals more stringent than those being considered by the EPA.
In addition, there are competing studies that show the possible EPA rule changes would have far less of an effect at the gasoline pump.
Federal workers overall get just 2 percent higher wages than private-sector employees holding similar jobs, but they receive 16 percent more in total compensation because of generous benefits.
There are, however, great differences in wages and benefits depending on education levels; less-educated federal workers receive higher wages and benefits compared with private-sector employees, while those with advanced degrees are paid less.
That’s the conclusion of a new Congressional Budget Office report that dispels misinformation spread by both sides in a long-running debate over federal pay.
Sen. John McCain incorrectly claimed that earmarks nearly doubled from $7.8 billion to $14.5 billion in Newt Gingrich’s first two years as House speaker. Actually, the increase was about half that.
Furthermore, earmarks first peaked, then declined under Gingrich. By the final year of his speakership, earmarked spending was 20 percent higher than before, not double.
McCain is a longtime opponent of earmarks, which are pet projects added to annual appropriations bills at the request of members of Congress.
Now comes the counterattack.
After weeks of taking it on the chin in Florida without throwing a punch, the Gingrich side has finally begun to fight back with TV attack ads of its own.
Among the new ads is one from a pro-Gingrich super PAC that takes the personal attacks to a new level, suggesting Romney was associated personally with “illegal activity” in a massive Medicare fraud in the 1990s. The fact is Romney was never accused of wrongdoing in that case.
Newt Gingrich falsely claimed he never favored a federal mandate requiring individuals to have health insurance.
Romney repeated a false accusation that President Obama failed to denounce Hamas rocket attacks in a speech to the United Nations. And Santorum insisted that Muslim terrorists are seeking missile bases in Cuba — a wild claim based most likely on mistranslations of an Italian newspaper report.
These were among the factual fouls that we noted as four GOP presidential candidates met for yet another debate.
Before we got a chance to write about it, Newt Gingrich yanked a Spanish-language radio ad off the airwaves in Florida. The reason: No, it wasn’t a stellar fact-checking by journalists. Rather, it was Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s complaint that the ad’s criticism of Mitt Romney was “inaccurate, inflammatory, and doesn’t belong in this campaign.”
Gingrich’s ad had called Romney “the most anti-immigrant candidate,” a claim to which Rubio strenuously objected. He told the Miami Herald: “The truth is that neither of these two men is anti-immigrant.
Newt Gingrich is getting help from a surprising ally: the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The liberal-leaning labor group is running a TV ad in Florida slamming Mitt Romney for profiting personally from a company later convicted of Medicare fraud while he was a director. The ad began airing just before a new poll showed Gingrich in a dead heat with Romney to win the Jan. 31 Republican primary.
The ad, called “Greed,”
We concentrated our fact-checking efforts on the main attraction last night — the president’s State of the Union address — but we also found factual fouls in the Republican response from Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels.
Daniels took a swipe at President Obama for dictating which light bulbs Americans should use — but it was President George W. Bush who signed the legislation in question into law. And he used a misleading statistic in talking about the country’s unemployment situation.