A lot of talking gets done on the Sunday morning shows, so it's no surprise that a verbal mishap or two might turn up.
For instance, yesterday on CNN's "State of the Union with John King," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky dissed the Democratic health care overhaul bills, saying the American people don't like them either.
McConnell, Jan. 31: We know the public is overwhelmingly against the bill. In the NPR poll last week,
Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, at a nationally televised meeting of House Republicans in Baltimore, accused President Obama to his face of running up deficits a dozen times greater than the GOP’s. The president said, "That’s factually just not true, and you know it’s not true," and he invited "any independent fact-checker out there" to assess which man got the facts right.
OK, we will.
We have to score this one for Obama. Hensarling told a Texas-size whopper —
A section of our story "Obama’s State of the Union Address" was inadvertently dropped when we posted the article Thursday. It shows that Obama spoke a little too sweepingly when he claimed that lobbyists have been cut out of policymaking jobs in his administration. We’ve added the section to the piece, and we include it below:
K St. to the White House: Road Almost Closed
Obama touted his efforts to change Washington’s ways.
Obama: [W]e’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.
President Obama peppered his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation with facts, which were mostly right but sometimes cherry-picked, strained or otherwise misleading. He said “there are about 2 million Americans working right now” because of last year’s stimulus bill. But his own economic advisers say …
Here at FactCheck.org, we’ve seen our share of fake photos of President Obama. So we were suspicious when a reader e-mailed us a silly-looking photo of the president speaking in a grade-school classroom with teleprompter, podium and presidential seal. The photo is so silly, in fact, that it was the butt of a late-night comedian’s ridicule. But this picture is real.
The White House video of this event prompted Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart to ask incredulously,
Q: Is federal judge David O. Carter starting a trial on Jan. 26 to determine whether Obama is qualified to be president?
A: No. This is yet another bogus claim circulated by persons who cling to a belief that Obama was not born in the U.S.A. The judge threw the case out of court back in October.
Q: What’s up with “Columbo” and his questions for Obama?
A: The interrogator in a chain e-mail gets his facts fouled up and makes false accusations.
We’ve been questioning the Obama administration’s claim that the stimulus bill would "save or create more than 3.5 million jobs" since the president began saying it. In February, we pointed out that although several economists made such a projection, they all said there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding these estimates. Late last year, the administration’s effort to count actual stimulus-created (or saved) jobs was plagued by the reporting of jobs in nonexistent congressional districts. And now,
Q: Has President Obama taken more vacation time than his predecessors?
A: According to one count, Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush spent more time on "vacation" during their first year than President Obama did. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton spent less time on "vacation."
The rumor that President Barack Obama refuses, or doesn’t know how, to say the pledge of allegiance just won’t die. Since early in his presidential candidacy, we’ve been getting e-mails with photos that purport to show Obama failing to properly salute the flag during the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem. The photos have reliably been real, but taken out of context. The most recent example, for instance, included a genuine photo of Obama standing with hands folded while everyone else saluted or put their hands over their hearts —