During a Super Bowl XLV pregame interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, President Barack Obama claimed that he "didn’t raise taxes once" during his first two years in office. Cigarette smokers and fans of indoor tanning may be among those to disagree with that statement.
O’Reilly, Feb. 6: Do you deny the assessment? Do you deny that you are a man who wants to redistribute wealth.
Obama: Absolutely.
O’Reilly: You deny that?
Obama: Absolutely. I didn’t raise taxes once,
Every now and then, we like to check in on what our British cousin is up to, just to remind ourselves that Americans have no monopoly on political spin.
The FactCheck Blog is a project of a TV network, Channel 4 News, and it regularly skewers British politicians for false, misleading or exaggerated claims. It’s written by political correspondent Cathy Newman. The politicians’ names are different, but the issues and the malarkey will sound familiar.
The head of Britain’s biggest labor union claimed the United Kingdom’s budget deficit is "not high by either historical or contemporary standards.”
Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York exaggerated Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ plan to cut military spending during an exchange with Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation.”
Schumer criticized a group of conservative Republicans for proposing a bill to cut non-defense federal spending by $2.5 trillion through fiscal year 2021:
Schumer, Jan. 23: But for instance, they leave the military totally out. … But everyone knows there’s waste and inefficiency in the military budget. Defense Secretary Gates has proposed cutting a hundred fifty billion dollars out of it.
Former Bush adviser Karen Hughes and Democratic Rep. James Clyburn both twisted facts to make partisan points on "Meet the Press."
Hughes claimed that the "vast majority" of recent job losses happened under President Obama, when in fact slightly more jobs were lost when her former boss George W. Bush was president. And Clyburn claimed that inadequate health insurance is "the biggest cause" of personal bankruptcies, which isn’t quite true either. Health costs are a contributing factor to most bankruptcies,
Once again we find that Tim Pawlenty has changed course on an issue that is something of a litmus test for Republican candidates. In this case, it’s government bailouts.
On Jan. 16, he condemned all such bailouts, saying: "I don’t think the government should bail out Wall Street or the mortgage industry or for that matter any other industry." But back in 2008, when the sub-prime lending crisis was gathering force, Pawlenty said that some entities were "too big,
Likely GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty's views on cap and trade aren't what they used to be.
Pawlenty told "Fox News Sunday" on Jan. 16 that he "never did sign a bill relating to cap and trade" when he was governor of Minnesota, but that's not true. He also said: "I've opposed cap and trade." However, that's been the case only since 2009.
In fact, the bill he signed in 2007 specifically required a task force to "recommend how the state could adopt"
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani went beyond the boundaries of what investigators have reported on Sunday when he said the suspect in the 2009 Fort Hood shootings indicated "a desire to participate in jihad" three years before the attack. It is still not clear what the Army knew – and when – about the political views of Maj. Nidal Hasan, or how it failed to identify him as a potential internal threat before the attack that killed 13 people and wounded dozens.
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay resorted to hyperbole Wednesday when he claimed that he was tried and convicted for money laundering in the nation’s most liberal county. It’s liberal all right, but dozens of other counties are more so.
"I was tried in the most liberal county in the state of Texas, and indeed in the United States," DeLay said on NBC’s "Today Show." "The point is that this is a political campaign." DeLay appeared on the show two days after being sentenced to three years in prison.
Sen. Rand Paul distorted an old quote from Rahm Emanuel during an appearance on Fox Business, as he disparaged the reaction of liberals to last weekend’s shootings in Tucson.
The Kentucky Republican, who took office just this month, was asked on Wednesday by Fox host Andrew Napolitano how pundits (Paul Krugman, a liberal columnist for the New York Times, was mentioned) could "get away with blaming murder on political discourse." Paul responded:
Rand Paul,
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell's angry outburst on CBS' "60 Minutes" was more than unexpected. It was factually wrong.
In a segment on slot machine gambling, Rendell lashed out at CBS reporter Lesley Stahl, when she asked about the "downside" of expanding casino gambling. The outgoing Democratic governor, who signed legislation to allow slot machine gambling in 2004 and table games in 2010, said the "biggest downside is that some people lose their paychecks." But he became visibly angry at Stahl for asking if he had second thoughts about signing legislation that caused "new gamblers"