Tag Archives: Fact Check

News

CNN fact-checks latest pro-Obama ad: it’s full of lies

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Radical leftist Wolf Blitzer fact checking a pro-Obama ad?

Let’s see:

Bridget posted this blurb which summarizes the situation for those who can’t see the video above:

The ad centers around the story of Joe and Ranae Soptic of Kansas City, Missouri. Joe lost his job when GST Steel went under in 2001, after 8 years of Bain Capital attempting to save the dying steel plant. Romney’s site addresses the claims regarding GST:

In 1993, GS Technologies, a company Bain Capital had invested in, purchased a struggling Kansas City steel plant from Armco. Prior to this investment, Armco announced plans to close the Kansas City plant if a buyer could not be found.

This investment – and $170 million in upgrades – kept the Kansas City plant competitive in a tough international market and saved the steel workers’ jobs for eight years.

In addition, the plant finally went under 2 years after Romney left Bain Capital to head up the Salt Lake City Olympics. Even if you believe the Obama campaign’s fact-checked and disproven claim that Romney left Bain in 2002, it would be obscene to blame Romney and Bain when the investment was designed to save GST Steel.

Now, the kicker that makes this the most offensive ad I have seen in a long time (although not in history, as a 2010 ad compared one GOP candidate to the Taliban). Soptic’s wife died in 2006, five years after he lost his job and health insurance with GST’s closing. When she went in for pneumonia, her cancer was so far evolved that it was untreatable, making health care irrelevent. The argument is basically that “some guy, who once worked for a company managed by the company Romney managed, lost his wife to cancer, so Mitt Romney killed her.” This is ridiculous. President Obama should immediately disown this ad, but I doubt that’s going to happen.

I’m actually surprised at CNN. I consider them less objective than Doonesbury cartoons. I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Obama campaign denies knowledge… yet they knew about it in May!

Although the Obama campaign is denying any knowledge of this story, Yahoo News says that the Obama campaign actually knew it was a fraud back in May.

Excerpt:

As Politico first reported, Soptic told essentially the same story in a May 14, 2012, conference call hosted by the Obama campaign. Here’s what he said then, according to a partial recording of the call passed along by a Republican official:

After we lost our jobs, we found out that we were going to lose our health insurance, and that our pensions hadn’t been funded like Bain promised they would be. I was lucky to find another job as a custodian in a local school district. They gave me some health insurance, but I couldn’t afford to buy it for my wife. A little while later she was diagnosed with lung cancer. I had to put her in a county hospital because she didn’t have health care, and when the cancer took her away, all I got was an enormous bill. That put a lot of stress on me: I thought I’d be paying it off until I died myself. That probably wouldn’t have happened if Bain kept its promise and I was allowed to keep our health insurance.

“It’s upsetting what Mitt Romney and his partners did to us,” he added.

The revelation drew an immediate rebuke from Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams, who said Obama and his campaign “are willing to say and do anything to hide the president’s disappointing record.”

“But they’re not entitled to repeatedly mislead voters,” he said.

The Obama campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even if Obama disowned the ad, it’s not going to make a difference to his rank and file – they get most of their news from the Comedy Channel anyway.

News

Fact check of Obama’s budget: is there really $4 trillion in deficit reduction?

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Here’s a story from the House Budget Committee, where Paul Ryan is the leader.

Paul Ryan made these two charts to help him discuss Obama’s new budget with Obama’s budget director.

Debt Increase in President's Budget
Debt Increase in President’s Budget

And:

Actual savings is 410 billion, not 4 trillion
Actual savings is 410 billion, not 4 trillion

Watch these clips to see Paul Ryan and Scott Garrett use the charts to do nasty things to Obama’s budget director.

Clip 1 of 3:

Clip 2 of 3:

Clip 3 of 3:

Guy Benson discusses both videos at Townhall.com.

Excerpt:

Ryan does a masterful job of puncturing Zients’ arguments, but let’s reiterate a few points that may have gotten lost in the shuffle.

(1) The White House is claiming that spending cuts within the Budget Control Act of 2011 — which is entirely separate from the FY 2013 budget — should count as savings “achieved” by their new proposal.  This is silly on its face, but crosses into laughable territory when one recalls that throughout much of the debt fight, President Obama adamantly opposed a cuts-for-debt-ceiling-hike quid pro quo.  He was on the record in favor of — demanding, in fact — zero cuts. Republicans dragged him into the BCA against his will; now he’s trying to take credit for that past action in next year’s budget.

(2) The White House says Obama’s budget “saves” $850 Billion by not fighting two wars at peak spending levels for another full decade.  This money was never proposed because the scenario is pure fiction.  These risible “savings” represent a White House bear-hug of Moon-Yogurt accounting. “Heaven help us” is right.

(3) Zients’ isn’t able to recall how much money this budget adds to the national debt.  You’d think the White House Budget Director would have that figure committed to memory (he likely does, but doesn’t want to admit it on camera), but let’s help him out:  The budget he’s defending adds nearly $11 Trillion to the debt, on top of the roughly $5 Trillion increase over which this president has already presided.  I seem to recall an infamous Right-wing zealot calling this sort of governance “unpatriotic.”

Next, we have Rep. Scott Garrett, a strong conservative from Northern New Jersey, asking Zients when the president’s budget comes into balance.  Zients refuses to directly respond to the question, perhaps because the correct answer is “never”…

Indeed, the closest Obama’s budget ever comes to balancing (expenses = revenues) within the ten-year projection window is 2017’s annual deficit of $617 Billion, which is still more than double the size of President Bush’s average annual deficit. Finally, Garrett lures Zients into a trap over Obamacare.  Garrett asks if a family making less than $250,000 per year (“the rich” cut off) is subject to a tax increase if they fail to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate…

The president sold Obamacare to the public by characterizing the resulting mandatory pay-out as a “fine,” not a tax increase.  He even mocked George Stephanopoulos’ suggestion that it met the dictionary definition of a tax hike.  Once the law passed, however, the administration’s lawyers pulled an about-face and have defended the mandate in court by arguing that the fine is, in fact, a tax increase after all.  Zients has apparently reverted back to the outmoded argument, thus undermining his own administration’s legal defense of their signature “accomplishment.”

What I find frustrating is the media does such a poor job of vetting these “4 trillion dollar” claims that Obama makes. Sometimes, I wonder why anyone listens to mainstream media at all. What do you really learn?

News

Fact check: Mitt Romney’s claim that Rick Santorum was a big spender

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The Weekly Standard evaluates Mitt Romney’s claim that Rick Santorum is fiscally liberal. (H/T Shane)

Excerpt:

The National Taxpayers Union (NTU) has been rating members of Congress for 20 years.  NTU is an independent, non-partisan organization that — per its mission statement — “mobilizes elected officials and the general public on behalf of tax relief and reform, lower and less wasteful spending, individual liberty, and free enterprise.”  Steve Forbes serves on its board of directors.

For each session of Congress, NTU scores each member on an A-to-F scale.  NTU weights members’ votes based on those votes’ perceived effect on both the immediate and future size of the federal budget.  Those who get A’s are among “the strongest supporters of responsible tax and spending policies”; they receive NTU’s “Taxpayers’ Friend Award.”  B’s are “good” scores, C’s are “minimally acceptable” scores, D’s are “poor” scores, and F’s earn their recipients membership in the “Big Spender” category.  There is no grade inflation whatsoever, as we shall see.

NTU’s scoring paints a radically different picture of Santorum’s 12-year tenure in the Senate (1995 through 2006) than one would glean from the rhetoric of the Romney campaign.  Fifty senators served throughout Santorum’s two terms:  25 Republicans, 24 Democrats, and 1 Republican/Independent.  On a 4-point scale (awarding 4 for an A, 3.3 for a B+, 3 for a B, 2.7 for a B-, etc.), those 50 senators’ collective grade point average (GPA) across the 12 years was 1.69 — which amounts to a C-.  Meanwhile, Santorum’s GPA was 3.66 — or an A-.  Santorum’s GPA placed him in the top 10 percent of senators, as he ranked 5th out of 50.

Across the 12 years in question, only 6 of the 50 senators got A’s in more than half the years.  Santorum was one of them.  He was also one of only 7 senators who never got less than a B.  (Jim Talent served only during Santorum’s final four years, but he always got less than a B, earning a B- every year and a GPA of 2.7.)  Moreover, while much of the Republican party lost its fiscal footing after George W. Bush took office — although it would be erroneous to say that the Republicans were nearly as profligate as the Democrats — Santorum was the only senator who got A’s in every year of Bush’s first term.  None of the other 49 senators could match Santorum’s 4.0 GPA over that span.

This much alone would paint an impressive portrait of fiscal conservatism on Santorum’s part.  Yet it doesn’t even take into account a crucial point:  Santorum was representing Pennsylvania.

Based on how each state voted in the three presidential elections over that period (1996, 2000, and 2004), nearly two-thirds of senators represented states that were to the right of Pennsylvania.  In those three presidential elections, Pennsylvania was, on average, 3 points to the left of the nation as a whole.  Pennsylvanians backed the Democratic presidential nominee each time, while the nation as a whole chose the Republican in two out of three contests.

Among the roughly one-third of senators (18 out of 50) who represented states that — based on this measure — were at least as far to the left as Pennsylvania, Santorum was the most fiscally conservative.  Even more telling was the canyon between him and the rest.  After Santorum’s overall 3.66 GPA, the runner-up GPA among this group was 2.07, registered by Olympia Snowe (R., Maine).  Arlen Specter, Santorum’s fellow Pennsylvania Republican, was next, with a GPA of 1.98.  The average GPA among senators who represented states at least as far left as Pennsylvania was 0.52 — or barely a D-.

But Santorum also crushed the senators in the other states.  Those 32 senators, representing states that on average were 16 points to the right of Pennsylvania in the presidential elections, had an average GPA of 2.35 — a C+.

In fact, considering the state he was representing, one could certainly make the case that Santorum was the most fiscally conservative senator during his tenure.  The only four senators whose GPAs beat Santorum’s represented states that were 2 points (Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire), 10 points (Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona), 25 points (Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma), and 36 points (Republican Craig Thomas of Wyoming) to the right of Pennsylvania in the presidential elections.  Moreover, of these four, only Kyl (with a GPA of 3.94) beat Santorum by as much as a tenth of a point.  It’s an open question whether a 3.94 from Arizona is more impressive than a 3.66 from Pennsylvania.

Do you know who is a big tax and spend fiscal liberal, though? MITT ROMNEY.

So, why is liberal Mitt Romney telling lies about conservative Rick Santorum?

New national Rasmussen poll: Santorum leads Romney 39-27

From Newsmax. (H/T Doug)

Excerpt:

Building on his triple play of victories in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri, former Sen. Rick Santorum has now surged to a 12-point lead over Mitt Romney in the race for the GOP presidential nomination heading into a key battle in Romney’s home state of Michigan.

Political analyst and Democratic pollster Doug Schoen tells Newsmax that Romney’s presidential bid is in “deep trouble” and his campaign badly needs a win in the Great Lakes State before heading into the do-or-die Super Tuesday contests on March 6, where voters in 10 states will pick their candidate to become the GOP presidential nominee.

“Romney is in deep trouble. He’s out of arguments. People don’t buy the central premise of his candidacy that he’s a businessman who can get things moving again,” Schoen said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “He’s entirely negative — whether it’s about President Obama, Newt Gingrich and now Rick Santorum. And Rick Santorum’s ad basically sums up the case against Mitt Romney: He’s a serial attacker who offers nothing other than negative ads, super PACs, bundlers and special interest money. It’s a recipe for failure.”

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely Republican primary voters released on Wednesday shows Santorum leading with 39 percent support, compared with 27 percent for Romney nationwide.

The two latest polls in Michigan, a state where Mitt Romney grew up and where his father was governor, show Rick Santorum with a 10 point lead and a 9 point lead.

Mitt Romney

Rick Santorum