diesel96
Well-Known Member
Sorry to bore everybody with fact checks, but here's an equalizer to all the claims of Biden's facts, lets check Sarah's shall we?
THE FACTS: Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska led an effort in 2005 to tighten regulation on the mortgage underwriters — McCain joined as a co-sponsor a year later. The legislation was never taken up by the full Senate, then under Republican control.
PALIN: Claimed she has taken on the oil industry as Alaska governor.
THE FACTS: Palin pushed to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and distributed the proceeds to the state's citizens to offset rising energy costs. However, she has also sided with the industry on a number of issues. She sued the Interior Department over its designation of polar bears as an endangered species. That puts her on the same side as the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's chief trade association. She also supports the industry's desire to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a position at odds with McCain.
PALIN: Said Alaska is "building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America's largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets."
THE FACTS: Not quite. Construction is at least six years away. So far the state has only awarded a license to Trans Canada Corp., that comes with $500 million in seed money in exchange for commitments toward a lengthy and costly process to getting a federal certificate. At an August news conference after the state Legislature approved the license, Palin said, "It's not a done deal."
Wink......Wink.......
- Sarah Palin asserted that Joe Biden backed John McCain's military policies until this presidential race. That is flatly false. Biden was an outspoken opponent of President Bush's troop increases in Iraq as soon as Bush announced them after the 2006 elections. As Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, he led the most heated hearings before the troops were actually deployed.
- Palin oversimplified Obama's vote to stop funding U.S. troops in Iraq. She was referring to a Senate vote on May 24, 2007, on appropriations bill funding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama was one of 14 senators who voted against the bill on the grounds that it did not set a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Obama made clear that he was in favor of funding the troops, but could not agree to an indefinite extension of the war. The previous month, most Senate Republicans voted against a Democratic bill (supported by Obama) that linked funding of the troops to the establishment of a timeline for withdrawal. McCain missed that vote.
- Palin repeated a standard line offered by the McCain campaign--that Obama has not admitted the "surge" of additional troops in Iraq worked. But in a September interview with Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, Obama said "the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated. I've already said it's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." Obama has not, however, retracted his opposition to the surge, and he has said political reconciliation still needs to take place in Iraq.
- Palin was erroneous when she claimed U.S. troop levels in Iraq are now at "pre-surge" levels. When President Bush announced last month that he would withdraw an additional 8,000 U.S. troops over the coming months, he committed to leaving at least 138,000 troops in the country at the end of his presidency, 3,000 more than there were before the troop increases known now as "the surge."
- Palin signaled early she would go after Barack Obama all night on the charge that he had voted 94 times to either raise taxes or fight against tax cuts. Factcheck.org, a non-partisan watchdog, has analyzed the charge. Of the 94, 23 of those votes were indeed votes against proposed tax cuts. Eleven of them were increases on families earning over $1 million to help fund programs such as Head Start and school nutrition. And 53 were on non-binding budget resolutions that foresaw allowing tax cuts to expire as scheduled. Such out-year projections are meaningless, since non-binding budgets are passed each year. On another point, Palin said a tax hike that hits earners over $250,000 would hit "millions of small businesses." That is untrue. The vast majority of small businesses barely break even and do not pay the top tax brackets. To get that figure, Republicans count affluent taxpayers who claim some income from some small business income as "small businessmen."
- Palin repeated John McCain's claim that Barack Obama voted to increase taxes for every American earning more than $42,000 a year. This is a considerable stretch. Obama voted for a non-binding budget resolution that laid down general budgetary guidelines based on the assumption that the Bush tax cuts will expire, as scheduled, in 2011. The budget resolution did not represent a vote to raise taxes. Obama has said that he is in favor of continuing the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans.
THE FACTS: Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska led an effort in 2005 to tighten regulation on the mortgage underwriters — McCain joined as a co-sponsor a year later. The legislation was never taken up by the full Senate, then under Republican control.
PALIN: Claimed she has taken on the oil industry as Alaska governor.
THE FACTS: Palin pushed to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and distributed the proceeds to the state's citizens to offset rising energy costs. However, she has also sided with the industry on a number of issues. She sued the Interior Department over its designation of polar bears as an endangered species. That puts her on the same side as the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's chief trade association. She also supports the industry's desire to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a position at odds with McCain.
PALIN: Said Alaska is "building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America's largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets."
THE FACTS: Not quite. Construction is at least six years away. So far the state has only awarded a license to Trans Canada Corp., that comes with $500 million in seed money in exchange for commitments toward a lengthy and costly process to getting a federal certificate. At an August news conference after the state Legislature approved the license, Palin said, "It's not a done deal."
Wink......Wink.......