When President Obama said at his July 22 news conference that health insurance companies were making record profits "right now," we thought he might have insider access to corporate earnings data. After all, most of the top publicly traded companies were on the verge of filing their reports, but only one had done so at the time Obama spoke.
Obama, July 22: Now, you know, there had been reports just over the last couple of days of insurance companies making record profits.
If you don’t keep your eye on the health care overhaul bills making their way through Congress, it’s easy to find your knowledge quickly outdated. We posted an article Friday dealing with accusations by some conservative groups that the bills would mandate government-funded abortions (they wouldn’t). That very evening, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a new bill. Government-funded abortions still wouldn’t be possible under this version – in fact, it’s the only bill that explicitly prohibits the use of taxpayer money to pay for the procedure,
Yesterday, we wearily acknowledged that nothing would dissuade birth-certificate doubters from their conviction that Barack Obama is not a United States natural-born citizen. As if on cue, dentist/lawyer Orly Taitz appeared on the "Colbert Report," and told the faux pundit that nothing short of retroactive zombie naturalization would convince her that Obama was qualified to be prez.
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Colbert: What would he have to do to satisfy you and those in your movement?
We at FactCheck.org are grateful to the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists for hundreds of thousands of page views to our "Born in the U.S.A." article from last November, and to our other items debunking some of their more outrageously false claims. We’re less grateful for their thousands of sometimes abusive e-mails claiming that we’re perpetuating a dangerous falsehood, among the more printable comments. Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, is also fed up.
The Republican National Committee has released a new Web ad about health care. The RNC has some fun with the issue, framing its ad as a parody of pharmaceutical advertisements. Warning: trying to sort out fact from fiction in this video may lead to headaches, shortness of patience, and excessive Googling. If you experience any of these side effects, we recommend consulting the FactCheck.org archives.
The ad offers the sobering fine-print side effects of "Reforma," the health care reform "drug."
Republicans in Washington seem to be shifting into overdrive to keep a health system overhaul from passing Congress before the August recess. Yesterday, July 22, brought two more deceptive assaults (that we know of) on the pending bills, one from Minority Whip Eric Cantor and the other from the top GOP member of the House Immigration Subcommittee, Steve King of Iowa.
Cantor’s is in the form of a video that accuses Obama and the Democrats of being in a “reckless rush”
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has released a Web ad linking one confirmed and one potential Republican candidate in the 2010 senatorial races to soon-to-be former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. But one person isn’t quite like the others.
According to a description of the ad on its YouTube channel, the DSCC says, “Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte all have something in common: they all promised to serve the people of their state,
Harry and Louise may have switched sides, but that’s no excuse, in our book, for the health insurance industry to resort to misrepresenting polls as it argues against inclusion of a public plan in health care overhaul proposals on Capitol Hill.
Karen Ignani, the head of industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), told lawmakers that “77 percent of Americans are satisfied with their existing health insurance coverage,” according to today’s Washington Post.
The Republican National Committee announced a new TV ad attacking President Obama’s proposed health care plan as a “risky experiment” that threatens “our health.” It said the ad would run in Arkansas, Nevada and North Dakota.
The ad says “trillions” have been committed to “rushed” bailouts and takeovers of banks and the auto industry. Fair enough, though $68 billion of the bank bailout money already has been repaid, with interest. It may even be so that the Obama administration has embarked on the “biggest spending spree in our nation’s history,”
Today is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s successful landing on the moon – yet there are still those who would claim that the entire landing was a hoax. In 1999, Gallup reported that 6 percent of Americans did not believe U.S. astronauts ever landed on the moon, with another 5 percent (somehow) still unsure. One of the most common-sense responses to these theorists was spoken by Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, who, according to The Space Review,