Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
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Wow AP actually does fact check the speech:
FACT CHECK: Examining Obama's job, pork claims - Yahoo! News
FACT CHECK: Examining Obama's job, pork claims - Yahoo! News
FACT CHECK: Examining Obama's job, pork claims
By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer
Tue Feb 10, 4:05 am ET
WASHINGTON At least Route 31 is a road to somewhere. President Barack Obama had it both ways when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana and later at a prime-time news conference. He bragged in Indiana about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills...
THE FACTS: There are no "earmarks," as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects...
THE FACTS: Job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers...
THE FACTS: The economic stimulus bill would allocate about $20 billion to help hospitals and doctors transition from paper charts to electronic health records for their patients. Research has shown that in some instances, electronic record keeping can eliminate inappropriate services and improve care, but it's not a sure thing by any means. "By itself, the adoption of more health IT is generally not sufficient to produce significant cost savings," the Congressional Budget Office reported last year...
THE FACTS: Two of his appointees, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle for health and human services secretary and Nancy Killefer as Obama's chief compliance officer, dropped out after reports they had not paid a portion of their taxes.
Obama previously acknowledged he "screwed up" in making it seem to Americans that there is one set of tax compliance rules for VIPs and another set for everyone else. Yet his choice for treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, achieved the post despite having belatedly paid $34,000 to the IRS, an agency Geithner now oversees.
That could leave the perception that there is one set of rules for Geithner and another set for everyone else....
OBAMA: "We also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression."
THE FACTS: This could turn out to be the case. But as bad as the economic numbers are, the unemployment figures have not reached the levels of the early 1980s, let alone the 1930s yet. A total of 598,000 payroll jobs vanished in January the most in nearly 35 years and the unemployment rate jumped to 7.6 from 7.2 percent the month before. The most recent high was 7.8 percent in June 1992.
And the jobless rate was 10.8 percent in November and December 1982. Unemployment in the Great Depression ranged for several years from 25 percent to close to 30 percent.