A License to Kill – October 28, 2008

A new anti-Obama group runs a bunk-filled ad implying he’d give a driver’s license to Mohammed Atta.

Summary

An upstart group calling itself the “National Republican Trust PAC” mixes a pile of false claims and the image of 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta to create one of the sleaziest false TV ads of the campaign.

• The spot falsely claims Obama has a “plan” to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. In fact, Obama has said quite specifically, “I am not proposing that that’s what we do.”
• The ad implies such licenses would enable terrorist attacks. In fact, Atta wouldn’t have needed one to carry out his attacks.
• It claims that Obama’s health care plan will apply to illegal immigrants. But Obama has stated quite clearly that his plan “does not” cover illegal immigrants.
• The ad falsely claims that Obama’s plan “gives illegals Social Security benefits,” which is also flatly untrue.

Analysis

Despite its name, the National Republican Trust has no formal connection to the Republican Party. It is an independent group with ties to the conservative Web site Newsmax. It sprang into being barely a month ago and has reported spending more than $900,000 to attack Obama through e-mail messages and, now, TV ads.

Its TV spot first showed up on the air in Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 26, and it has also received considerable circulation on the Web. It attempts to link Sen. Barack Obama to the 9/11 hijackers. The link? A spurious claim that Obama plans to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. NRT PAC, which is headed by a former writer for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Insight magazine, says it plans to air the ad in other swing states.

The redesign and relaunch are made possible through a grant from the Verizon Foundation, which will highlight The Living Room Candidate on Thinkfinity.org, Verizon’s free comprehensive program and online portal that provides more than 55,000 educational resources for teachers, parents, students and afterschool programs.

Among the new features of this election cycle’s Living Room Candidate are:

• Ongoing tracking of John McCain and Barack Obama commercials and third-party advocacy and independent commercials as they come out
• Access to both official, broadcast commercials and web video/third party commercials from a single timeline interface
• Commentaries on the Museum’s selection of the top campaign commercials of all time
• Annotated playlists of commercials, past and present, selected by noted political consultants, cultural critics, scholars, and media celebrities, including John Dickerson (chief political correspondent, Slate) and Leslie Savan (author of The Sponsored Life)
• A function that enables site visitors to create their own playlists of commercials
• Activities that allow visitors to explore the decision-making process of ad design and production
• Upgraded classroom tools for students and educators

The Living Room Candidate demonstrates how advertising techniques and styles have evolved over the years, even as basic strategy has remained the same. The exhibition includes such landmark ads as the groundbreaking “Eisenhower Answers America” spots of 1952, the notorious “daisy girl” ad from Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ads from 1984, and the controversial attack ads run by George Bush’s 1988 campaign. Site visitors may also see how the strategies and techniques of persuasion have been played out more recently in third-party and web ads, such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn commercials from the 2004 election.

It’s our way of bringing you shorter posts on the latest political bunk. We’ll continue to publish articles, special reports and vidcasts at our Webby Award-winning site, www.FactCheck.org.

But now you can also stop by The Wire, Wire.FactCheck.org, for brief reports on who’s recycling old, misleading claims in new, misleading ways or for the latest on discredited chain e-mails that are circulating with new (and equally bogus) references. And when the candidates try to distill complicated issues into deceptive sound bites, we’ll be here with context.

We may post when we notice a particularly noteworthy debunking that’s been done by another organization. We can’t predict all that you’ll find on The Wire, but we think it’ll be worth watching. It’s everything you love about FactCheck.org.

The FactCheck Wire. Faster than the speed of spin.

McCain makes a use of wind turbines, solar panels, and soundbites about how the Us needs to focus on energy independence in several of his ads (all photos in this post are from his current and recent ads) but he is sticking with the majority Republican party line and letting his absenteeism act as Nay votes for legislation that would further the goals he espouses in his TV and web based ads.  If you feel a tickling sensation in your nether regions while watching his ads, its nothing to be concerned about.  It’s just John McCain blowing smoke up your ass.

US Senate Votes on S. 3335

As Thomas L. Friedman pointed out in The New York Times, McCain has missed every single one of the votes on this bill. Sometimes he was out campaigning, but on at least one occasion he was in his Senate office and just could not be bothered to go vote. A no show like that counts as a Nay and McCain clearly knows that.

Eight Strikes and You’re Out

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

“McCain did not show up on any votes,” said Scott Sklar, president of The Stella Group, which tracks clean-technology legislation. Despite that, McCain’s campaign commercial running during the Olympics shows a bunch of spinning wind turbines — the very wind turbines that he would not cast a vote to subsidize, even though he supports big subsidies for nuclear power.

Barack Obama did not vote on July 30 either — which is equally inexcusable in my book — but he did vote on three previous occasions in favor of the solar and wind credits.

The fact that Congress has failed eight times to renew them is largely because of a hard core of Republican senators who either don’t want to give Democrats such a victory in an election year or simply don’t believe in renewable energy.

This bill is crucially important for anyone who feels we need to transition our energy needs away from fossil fuels and over to cleaner, more sustainable sources of power.

In addition to addressing alternative energy issues the bill also makes permanent the authority for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) disclosure of tax information relating to terrorist activities and IRS undercover operations. McCain also claims to be the best candidate when it comes to the War on Terror so you’d think he’d show up to vote on that aspect of the bill at least.

The bulk of the bill extends the tax credit for producing electricity from wind facilities through 2009 and the tax credit for closed and open-loop biomass, geothermal, small irrigation, hydropower, landfill gas, and trash combustion facilities through 2011.

It includes marine and hydrokinetic renewable energy as a renewable resource for purposes of tax credits. It also extends the energy tax credit for solar energy and the residential energy efficient property tax credit through 2016 and extends the energy tax credits for fuel cell and microturbine property through 2017. The bill creates a new investment tax credit for combined heat and power system property. In addition, the bill provides funding for new clean renewable energy bonds to finance electricity production from certain renewable resources and for qualified energy conservation bonds.