Facebook Twitter Tumblr Close Skip to main content
A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Shot off the Mark

April 16, 2009

Earlier this week Americans United for Safe Streets, the gun safety advocacy group financially supported by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, released a television ad attacking former Attorney General Bob McDonnell of Virginia, a Republican running to be the state’s governor.

The ad features Omar Samaha, whose sister died in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, speaking to camera. Samaha says that his sister’s "killer got his guns because of a gap in Virginia’s background check," and then challenges McDonnell for not wanting to close "another loophole"

Afghanistan History

April 7, 2009

President Obama seemed to rewrite history in his remarks on Friday in Strasbourg, France, telling an audience at a town hall event:

Obama, April 3: But after the initial NATO engagement in Afghanistan, we got sidetracked by Iraq, and we have not fully recovered that initial insight that we have a mutual interest in ensuring that organizations like al Qaeda cannot operate.

But NATO didn’t have a mission in Afghanistan until Aug. 11, 2003, several months after the U.S.

Obama’s Old Campaign Group out with New Ad

March 26, 2009

Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, was born out of the former Obama campaign infrastructure. Today, the group released its first television ad in support of — guess who? — President Obama: 

The ad says that Obama has a plan to "cut the deficit in half." But as we pointed out yesterday in our review of the president’s prime time news conference, there is more to the story. The administration’s Office of Management and Budget does indeed project that the annual federal deficit will be half of 2009’s deficit by 2013,

Targeting Obama with Bonus ‘AIG’itation

March 24, 2009

The American Issues Project, a conservative group, has released an ad attacking President Obama and congressional Democrats for the bonuses issued by American International Group after it received federal bailout funds. The ad is scheduled to run for the next week on a $500,000 ad buy.
Here’s the ad:

It shows a headline saying that "Obama Accepts Blame for AIG Bonuses," which the group’s backup says is from The Wall Street Journal. And indeed,

Plane False

March 23, 2009

The conservative Web site Judicial Watch has made public e-mails to and from the Department of Defense regarding Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s travel requests. The organization claims in a press release that these e-mails show Pelosi "issue[s] unreasonable requests for military travel" and "treats the Air Force like her personal airline." A number of readers have asked us for our response to this information, given that we have debunked claims about Pelosi’s air travel.

Obama and the Deficit

March 19, 2009

During a speech on Tuesday, President Obama promised to reduce the budget deficit:
Obama: Now, this budget does not attempt to solve every problem or address every issue because of the massive deficit we inherited and the enormous costs of this financial crisis. We have made some tough choices that will cut our deficit in half by the end of my first term and reduce it by $2 trillion over the next decade.
To start, we want to clarify that Obama is talking about the budget deficit (the amount of money the government spends in a given year minus what it takes in),

He Said, She Said in the NY-20

March 19, 2009

The latest dust-up in the special election campaign for New York’s 20th district House seat, which we’ve written about here and here, involves the National Republican Trust PAC. It’s a twisted tale.
We’ll start on March 13, when Politico.com’s Ben Smith reported that the National Republican Trust PAC was spending $190,000 to run an ad in the district attacking Democratic candidate Scott Murphy.

But on March 16, the Albany Times-Union reported that the ad had been pulled after running just twice.

Will Work for Small(ish) Businesses

March 19, 2009

In his remarks to small-business owners March 16 at the White House, President Obama repeated a statistic we’ve heard from both Democrats and Republicans. (Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin
used it this month
on "Fox News Sunday.")
Obama said small businesses are responsible for creating "roughly 70 percent of all new jobs in the past decade."
That stat is one put forth by the Small Business Administration. The SBA says that small businesses "have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade."

Hold the Context

March 17, 2009

The latest ad from New York State Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco, a Republican, says that the Albany Times-Union and FactCheck.org have called Democratic challenger Scott Murphy’s advertising "unfair" and "false," respectively. The two men are vying for an open House seat representing New York’s 20th congressional district. The ad doesn’t specify which "attack" the Times-Union was calling "unfair," or which claim from Murphy’s advertising we called "false." Here are the details:
It’s true that we and the Times-Union called out the Murphy campaign for claiming that Tedisco wouldn’t say whether he supports caps on salaries for executives of companies receiving bailout money (he has said he supports the idea).

Obama’s Misleading Education Stat

March 16, 2009

We’ve noticed that in talking about education, politicians like to use statistics that show the U.S. is way behind other countries. That certainly makes it easier to tout whatever education policies the pols are pushing. But sometimes kids in the U.S. perform better than politicians make it sound.
Our colleagues at PolitiFact.com caught President Obama misleadingly claiming last week that “In eighth grade math, we’ve fallen to ninth place.” U.S. eighth graders are in ninth place,