The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s latest onslaught of television ads continues to miseducate voters about the potential impact of the health care law.
Chamber Continues to Mislead on Health Care Law
FactCheck Posts
Group Skews Facts on Obama’s ‘Shameless’ Statements
A group claiming to be backed by veterans has gone too far in a viral Web video that portrays the president as a glory hog after Osama bin Laden’s death.
We cannot dispute the video’s larger point: That President Obama is using Bin Laden’s killing to score political points. But the video – produced by a former Bush-Cheney campaign operative and boasting more than 1 million hits on YouTube — misleads by:
Claiming the Washington Post criticized Obama for having the “Shameless Gall” to score political points.
Romney’s ‘Gross’ Exaggeration on ‘Obamacare’
Mitt Romney falsely claims government will “constitute … almost 50 percent” of the U.S. economy when the new federal health care law takes full effect. But Romney gets to 50 percent by erroneously counting all health care spending — private and public — as “effectively under government control once Obamacare is fully implemented,” as his spokesman put it.
That’s nonsense — just as it was two years ago, when Rep. Michele Bachmann made a similar bogus claim.
Primary Piffle in North Carolina
In the final week of a hotly fought Republican primary in North Carolina, one congressional candidate accuses his rival — in a mailer sent to GOP voters — of being a “Big Money Donor” to Democrats. And he accuses another of breaking a tax pledge. But we find both claims by wealthy businessman and former state Sen. Robert Pittenger are off the mark.
In truth, financial adviser Dan Barry, the supposed “Big Money Donor,” contributed to 11 Republicans and only two Democrats in national races between 2003 and 2011.
White House Spins Women’s Health
Republicans are right: The White House is greatly exaggerating when it says that “women, in particular,” benefit from a prevention fund that the House GOP proposes to repeal. The truth is that the fund in question wasn’t set up specifically for women’s health programs, and we could find no concrete evidence that it has paid anything to gender-specific health programs so far.
For example, the fund has paid for programs to discourage tobacco use, encourage physical fitness,
Stimulus Money for Jobs Overseas?
An ad from the conservative Americans for Prosperity distorts the truth about stimulus money for “green jobs” going overseas. The ad, titled “Wasteful Spending,” introduces some new wrinkles to this well-used line of attack.
According to the ad, the stimulus included:
“$1.2 billion to a solar company that’s building a plant in Mexico.” Actually, the loans were to finance a solar ranch built and operated in California. It’s true that the company that got the loans also recently opened a solar-panel manufacturing plant in Mexico,
A New Front in the ‘War on Women’
Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Ed Gillespie distorted some economic facts on “Meet the Press” when he accused President Obama of creating a U.S. economy that is “hostile” to women.
Gillespie said the “number of single-mother families living in poverty” is now the highest “in recorded history.” But poverty statistics date only to 1959, and the poverty rate for single mothers — which is a better indicator than the total number — is still relatively low,
Two More Webbys for FactCheck
Once again, FactCheck.org has been awarded the Webby for best politics website by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
‘Big Oil’ Backing Romney?
A pro-Obama TV ad says that “big oil” pledged $200 million to help Mitt Romney, making him the industry’s “$200 million man.” But that’s a pretty slippery claim. The fact is that there is no evidence that truly big oil companies like BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. are behind the money in question. Rather, it’s a funding goal of the Koch brothers, the libertarian billionaires whose diversified corporation has fingers in lumber, commodity trading,
Straining the Facts on Federal Spending
A TV ad by a conservative group gives some factually challenged answers to its own rhetorical question, “How exactly does President Obama spend your tax dollars?”
It wrongly claims that the boss of the General Services Administration “couldn’t make it to Vegas because she had meetings planned … at Solyndra.” That’s not true. The claim linking the two scandals is based on an inaccurate April 10 report that was quickly corrected — nearly two weeks before the ad first aired.