House Minority Leader John Boehner has again attacked the way his home state is spending its stimulus funds. And again, he’s wrong.
At his weekly news conference, Boehner criticized the Ohio Department of Transportation for using millions of dollars in American Recovery and Reconstruction Act money for a project study, rather than for construction:
Boehner, July 9: As a matter of fact, [ODOT] took $20 million of stimulus funds to — to do a study of a proposed project in southwest Ohio that —
John Boehner, phone home. Or at least check the Ohio Department of Transportation’s highly informative Web site before talking about state road projects on TV.
Last week, Rep. Boehner, the House Republican leader who hails from the Buckeye State, released a video featuring a bloodhound purporting to sniff out jobs created by the $787 billion stimulus package that took effect in February – and finding none. Boehner followed that up with a July 5 interview on “Fox News Sunday,”
In a July 6 interview with Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, President Obama repeated his false claim that the U.S. “import[s] more oil today than ever before.” When Obama first said this in February during an address to a joint-session of Congress, we wrote that the president had gotten his facts wrong. We said then that oil imports peaked in 2005 and have “substantially” declined since.
That’s still the case. This chart from the U.S. Energy Information Administration,
The National Republican Congressional Committee has released a new ad attacking Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia for voting with "(Barack) Obama and Nancy Pelosi" for the Waxman-Markey energy bill. It’s part of a broader effort to target several Democratic members.
The ad says the bill will result in lost jobs and cost "middle class families" $1,870 a year. That sounds pretty dire, until you consider that this week we posted an item about the Office of the Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s claim that the same bill would "impose a national energy tax of up to $3,100."
If you’re the glass-half-full type, you might think it’s good news that the nation’s unemployment rate was largely unchanged from May to June. It crept up just 0.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent. But that also means that the original projections from President Obama’s economic advisers on what would happen with and without the stimulus plan are still off — and significantly so.
In mid-June, we wrote about the large discrepancy between the jobs that actually have been lost and what administration economists had predicted in January.
As part of his ongoing health-care-overhaul tour, President Barack Obama held a town hall event July 1 in Annandale, Va. Among the president’s messages: Medicare and Medicaid spending are getting out of control. And he’s right.
Obama said: “And for those who rightly worry about deficits, the amount our government spends on Medicare and Medicaid will eventually grow larger than what our government spends today on everything else combined,” adding that a recent Congressional Budget Office study showed that “when you look at the rising costs of entitlement,
In a post announcing the launch of a video news release questioning the priorities of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Office of the Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia says that the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which Pelosi helped usher through the House of Representatives, “will impose a national energy tax of up to $3,100 on all Americans and slam small businesses with higher energy bills, causing the loss of millions of jobs.”
The video,
Sonia Sotomayor isn’t mentioned in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision today in a much-watched reverse-discrimination case, Ricci v. DeStefano. But you can bet the decision will be mentioned plenty in the upcoming Senate confirmation hearing that could put her on that court.
Sotomayor and two other judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld a lower court decision in the case, saying that the city of New Haven, Conn., was on firm legal ground when it threw out the results of two exams firefighters took in order to be promoted.
On “Meet the Press” on June 28, former presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney falsely claimed that President Obama had called for a “single-payer” health care system on the campaign trail:
Romney: President Obama, when he was campaigning, said he wanted a single-payer system.
We debunked this falsehood when Sen. John McCain said it during the third presidential debate. McCain claimed that “as he said, his object is a single payer system.” But as a presidential candidate,
We received a number of e-mails after we said, in our article "Pushing for a Public Plan," that "the average monthly payment for workers with employer-sponsored coverage is … $280 for a family policy." It seems that a lot of you weren’t satisfied with the finding, which is from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
A sampling:
My Family policy with BCBS had a $500 [deductible] for all 3 members and my bill was $800 a month. We now have a group policy for all 5 members of our 2 optical shops,