Politico’s Jennifer Haberkorn’s May 26th article, Dems support Medicare brochure, article leaves out some key details about the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) produced four-page brochure. For starters she leaves out the fact that taxpayers are fooring the $18 million bill for producing and mailing the propaganda.

But more importantly she does not even try to identify or fact check any of the claims in the brochure. For example, the White House directed brochure says Obamacare will “provide you and your family greater savings and increased quality health care.” But the CMS’s own report on Obamacare … Continue Reading

Steven Pearlstein writes an opinion column for The Washington Post. And while Pearlstein is entitled to his own opinion, as Sen Danial Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) once said, he is not entitled to his own facts.

In Pearlstein’s May 26th column he writes:

What it misses is just how dramatically the regulatory agencies have been shrunken in size, stripped of talent and resources, demoralized by lousy leadership, captured by the industries they were meant to oversee and undermined by political interference and relentless attacks on their competence and purpose.

There is no data collected for “demoralized by lousy leadership” or “captured by the … Continue Reading

Covering the impending Democratic spend-a-thon in Congress in the May 24th Washington Post, Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray write:

With the national debt at its highest level in nearly 60 years, the question of whether to cut spending — and if so, how — is pitting liberals against conservatives, and Congress against the president. The White House has proposed a three-year freeze in programs unrelated to national security and warned House leaders Friday that it might go further, targeting the Defense Department for cuts.

The problem with this reporting is that President Obama’s “spending freeze” exempts far more than just “national security” … Continue Reading

A report from Reuters “Calderon urges U.S. to reinstate assault weapons ban,” edited by Cynthia Osterman and posted on May 20 contains both factual errors and careless omissions that misrepresent the challenges of border security and immigration enforcement.

The article quoted Mexican President Felipe Calderon as stating his country had “seized around 75,000 guns and assault weapons in the last three years, Calderon said. He said more than 80 percent of them came from the United States and noted there were more than 7,000 gun shops along the … Continue Reading

Darren Samuelsohn of Greenwire, published by Environment & Energy Publishing, reports on a study that says the newly introduced Kerry-Lieberman climate change legislation will be a jobs creator. Samuelsohn says the Peterson Institute for International Economics study finds that new energy investment will create 200,000 jobs per year. Actually, the study says:

Given that the United States is currently below full employment with most economists projecting a slow labor market recovery, this investment is more stimulative than inflationary in the first decade, resulting in an average annual increase in US employment of 203,000 jobs above business as

… Continue Reading

Reporting on the Senate’s first hearing on the New START agreement, The New York Times Peter Baker reports on May 18th:

The Obama team deflected the criticism, insisting that nothing in the treaty would inhibit missile defense plans.

Specifically, here is what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified:

The treaty does not constrain our missile defense efforts. … Nothing in the New START Treaty constrains our missile defense efforts.

This language mirrors the original White House fact sheet on New Start which read:

The New START Treaty does not contain any constraints on testing, development or deployment of current or planned U.S.

… Continue Reading

The Washington Post Editorial Board is entitled to its opinion but not its facts. They can agree or disagree with Supreme Court opinions but they should at least accurately describe what the Court did and did not rule. On May 18th they did not. Here is how the Washington Post editorial describes the holding in Graham v. Florida:

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday in Graham v. Florida guarantees that those who have committed serious crimes as teenagers get an opportunity for release once they reach adulthood even while leaving intact the government’s ability to keep incarcerated those deemed too

… Continue Reading

Reporting on President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Iowa, New York Times journalists Helene Cooper and Jeff Zeleny wrote on April 27th:

The president conceded that the rising level of the budget deficit “keeps me up at night.” But he extolled the benefits of the economic stimulus plan and took issue with his Congressional critics, who he said had tried to take credit for local projects even though they voted against the $789 billion measure last year.

President Obama’s stimulus may have only totaled $789 billion when Congressional critics voted against it, but its costs have increased since then. According to … Continue Reading

On May 14, Peter Baker (White House correspondent for New York Times since 2008) authored a highly misleading report on the administration’s plan for its stewardship of the US nuclear arsenal. Baker’s article “Obama Expands Modernization of Nuclear Arsenal” touts the release of a presidential report to Congress outlining the President’s plan to spend $80 billion over ten years on facilities and programs related to US defense nuclear weapons programs. Congress required this plan before the submission of New START to the Senate for ratification. Both the title and body of the article, however, failure to distinguish … Continue Reading

Associated Press reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported on May 12th:

Republicans hunting for clues about what kind of justice Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan would be said Tuesday they want to see papers from her time serving in the Clinton administration.

Hirschfeld Davis then goes on to give other details about the fight over Kagan’s nomination and her tenure with the Clinton administration, but she complete leaves out one key detail: the Senate Democrat filibuster of DC Circuit Court nominee Miguel Estrada over the Bush administration’s refusal to turn over papers from Estrada’s service as an adviser … Continue Reading

The Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990 set a $75 million liability cap beyond direct cleanup costs for any offshore oil spill. OPA also created a $1 billion Liability Trust Fund paid for by a 5-cent-per-barrel tax on the oil industry, later increased to 8-cents-per-barrel. Politico’s David Rogers reported May 10th that “payments from the fund — which covers not only damage claims but also restoring natural habitat, for example — are capped at $1 billion per incident. And while BP, as the responsible party, is charged with paying the full cost of the cleanup and oil removal, … Continue Reading

Ron Brownstein writes in the May 8th National Journal:

Republicans who say that President Obama’s stimulus plan hasn’t created any jobs must ignore not only the Congressional Budget Office (whose latest estimate put the total as high as 2.1 million) but also the more immediate examples of Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey.

The stimulus may very well end up helping Toomey and Rubio become Senators, but Brownstein fails to report just how easy the CBO’s stimulus job numbers are easy to ignore. As The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl reported on March 26th:

CBO director Doug Elmendorf has finally conceded that they

… Continue Reading

Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press reported on May 5th:

The Senate voted Wednesday to prohibit the use of taxpayer money for any more Wall Street rescues but set up a mechanism where the government would have to front the money, even if only temporarily, to liquidate a “too big to fail” financial institution.
…
Under the agreement:

Instead of using the $50 billion fund, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would borrow from the Treasury to pay for the costs of liquidating a firm. Those costs would be recovered by the sale of the firm’s assets, with shareholders and creditors bearing the losses.

… Continue Reading

As tragic as the oil spill is, reports are conflating energy sources that are used much differently. Reuters is one of many papers that fails to distinguish petroleum production for the transportation sector and renewable generation for the electricity sector. Reuters’ Richard Cowen reported on May 4th that Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) “told reporters the oil spill should expedite alternative energy legislation, which would encourage the use of cleaner power sources, such as wind and solar.”

What Reuters and others fail to point out is how little petroleum fuels our electricity sector. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, … Continue Reading

As Mark Twain told us, there are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Unfortunately, Agence France-Press (AFP) reporter Marlow Hood reminds us of Twain’s truth in his April 29th article entitled “Sea ice loss major cause of Arctic warming.” Mr. Hood uses the typical statistic-manipulator tactic of cherry-picking data points and wording descriptions in a way likely to mislead the average reader.

Hood begins his article by claiming that “melting sea ice has dramatically accelerated warming in the Arctic” and continues to talk about data from 1989 to 2008, as if the present is irrelevant.

In fact, … Continue Reading