It's getting hot in here!

By Willoughby Mariano
Published on Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 6:00 a.m.

Things got hot at PolitiFact Georgia, thanks to Josef Stalin, an aging stripper and a Cobb County school board member.

Some days, there was nary a whiff of burning pants in the newsroom air. Atlanta Police Chief George Turner and U.S. Rep. Tom Graves earned Trues on crime statistics and taxes, respectively.

It all changed when U.S. Rep. Paul Broun cranked up the heat with a False claim about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Stalin. A Cobb County school board member made a weak claim about the school calendar.   

Democrats earned a Pants on Fire for an ad that claimed seniors might have to find work mowing lawns or running lemonade stands to pay for Medicare because of Republicans. In one scenario, an elderly man resorted to stripping. Hot!

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Atlanta Police Chief George Turner: "If you go strictly by the numbers, crime is down across the board. Last year we had a 10 percent decrease in the most serious crimes."
Worried about burglars kicking in your door? If you live in Atlanta, you might find some comfort in crime statistics, according to the above statement by Turner.
Yet many city dwellers don’t think they are any safer, according to a recent survey. We therefore took a closer look.

The numbers confirm Turner’s statement. In addition, the drop is part of a broader trend. Crime in Atlanta during the past decade is down by about 30 percent.

Residents told PolitiFact Georgia they have noticed improvements, and recent audits of the city’s crime statistics found the agency is reporting them according to federal guidelines.

True.

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun: Says President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent his advisers to study socialism with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin so the president could replicate it in the United States.
The U.S. is marching toward socialism, Broun says. During last week’s scrum over the federal budget, he lectured Congress for 45 minutes on why and included the above claim.
This was like no version of history your PolitiFact Georgia scribes studied. We took a look.
A spokeswoman for the Athens Republican told us his proof is "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," a 2007 book that is critical of New Dealers.
We read it. It doesn’t say what Broun’s office claimed. Its author told PolitiFact Georgia that the congressman’s specific claim is incorrect.

We interviewed other experts. One called Broun’s comments a "malicious, scurrilous lie." Another called it "a whole bunch of hooey."

Broun earned a failing grade: False.

U.S. Rep Tom Graves of northwest Georgia: "America's wealthiest 25 percent pay 86 percent of total income taxes. Wealthiest 5 percent pay 60 percent of total income taxes."
In honor of the tax deadline, Tom Graves, a congressman from northwest Georgia, began sending out messages last week about the current tax system. The above claim, which was broadcast via Twitter, caught our attention.

Instead of trying to figure who’s right about whether the rich pay their fair share in taxes, we wanted to know whether Graves’ facts were correct.

Graves was off by a percentage point on one of his figures, but both numbers are very close to Internal Revenue Service data. While using only the federal income tax as a stand-in for the total federal tax burden paints a somewhat skewed picture, Graves’ tweet, as worded, is accurate. He earned a True.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee: "Seniors will have to find $12,500 for health care because Republicans voted to end Medicare."        
A new ad shows seniors running a lemonade stand, cutting the grass and even stripping at a bachelorette party -- all to raise money to pay for Medicare.
The stripper, dressed as a firefighter, bellows, "Did someone call the fire department? Because it's about to get HOT in here!"
The ad critiques a budget proposal from U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that would dramatically restructure Medicare.

But to say the Republicans voted to end Medicare, as the ad does, is a major exaggeration. All seniors would continue to be offered coverage under the proposal. Instead of $12,500, the cost is more like $6,350. Plus, people 55 and older won’t see changes under the Ryan plan.

Furthermore, Republicans voted on a budget resolution that states policy preferences. They did not actually change Medicare.
It is hot in here, but don’t blame the stripper. The Democrats’ Pants are on Fire!

Cobb County school board member Kathleen Angelucci: "It is a fact that it costs more to run the schools in August."
Cobb’s school board has debated for years about whether to start the school year at the beginning of August or a week or two later.

In 2009, it moved up the start to the beginning of August. In February, it pushed it back to Aug. 15. Angelucci supported the later start and made the above claim.

We called and e-mailed Angelucci repeatedly and didn’t get a reply. When we finally caught up with her at a recent board meeting she promised to send us supporting data. She didn’t.

Local school district officials who start school earlier said they did not have data on cost savings, but some said there were benefits such as fewer faculty absences that save the district money.  

Nationally, there’s little research.

There is scant evidence that Angelucci made a valid point, and she provided nothing to back up her statement. Barely True.

View the original article here

Washington Is Stuck, but He’s Getting Out

Washington

In the outer office, constituents were dropping by unannounced, more or less demanding to see the congressman, “right here on his doorstep,” as one visitor insisted. In his inner sanctum office, Representative Gary Ackerman was happily contemplating his departure from all that after 30 years in Congress.

“I like to work, but in order to work you need a work product,” said the New York Democrat, who described arriving in the Capitol as a “bright and bushy-tailed liberal,” up from a childhood in a public housing project, eager to pass a law on his first day. He is exiting not so much in despair as relief to be gone from the legislative intransigence that he sees extended across the aisle by the House Republican majority.

Sounding like an anthropologist, Mr. Ackerman talked of spending enough time in Congress to remember dealing creatively with an extinct species known as moderate Republicans. “Oh yes, compromise,” he said nostalgically of such long-ago behavior. “They’ve all been quieted, muzzled, taking pledges before they ever get here,” he said, his tone unabashedly partisan. “It’s not that they’re running a Do Nothing Congress — they’re running an Undo Everything Congress.” He quoted a Capitol truism: “Any jackass can kick down the barn.”

The low point, he said, was when a Republican friend told him that private caucus meetings featured prayer gatherings where lawmakers hold hands and invoke God for or against specific measures on the House agenda. “In the past, a fight was over how to make a good bill better. Now it’s become Good versus Evil.”

As one of scores of lawmakers expected to depart this year, Mr. Ackerman may be typical, with no big, historic law named after him, but a number of successful efforts like spearheading a campaign to feed the starving in Ethiopia and sponsoring the “Baby AIDS” legislation, which required that mothers be notified if newborns tested positive for H.I.V. He survived a political scuffle or two, resigning from the ethics committee in 1992 after being entangled in the scandal over abuses of House checking accounts. In campaigning, he recalls taking out a loan of $160,000 for his first run, and three decades later he admits to cringing at the need to beg people for $1 million-plus every two years to keep his job. He described slinking off to his party’s campaign committee office near the Capitol where, in separate phone cubbies, lawmakers must turn themselves into jolly mendicants to check-writing supporters. “A sad tale of woe to see famous politicians calling and schmoozing, and everyone knows why.”

Constituents from the old Sixth District, which straddled the Queens-Nassau border, couldn’t accuse Mr. Ackerman of losing track of home. He chose not to sink deep roots in Washington, and lived on a houseboat on the Potomac called the Unsinkable, which sank and was replaced by Unsinkable II. Over the years, he watched sizable yachts owned by lobbyists tie up at his marina, but he loathes the idea of cashing in as a lobbyist after retirement as so many colleagues do. Only more “hat in hand” behavior, he said, describing a pathetic subgroup of ex-congressmen. “Guys who lose or give up their seats and never go home and hang around town because home is no longer real — and this place became real.”

Sometimes he sounds passionate enough to go another two years. But at 69, Mr. Ackerman suddenly decided he had had enough of politics where healthy compromise is off the table, with no sign that the majority pendulum would swing back in time for him. So he quit, and then quickly endorsed Assemblywoman Grace Meng, to help her win the primary in the heavily Democratic district. She fit in with the philosophy he celebrated at a recent farewell dinner, that politics, at its heart, should be driven by a desire to help people, not attack government.

Looking back, he says he’s still haunted by some votes he took. One was for the repeal of the 1988 Medicare catastrophic coverage plan. “We were so proud” when the plan passed, he said, “but the seniors became outraged it would cost them $6.35 or something, and started a big rebellion. The public isn’t always right, you know.” Democrats quickly repealed the good measure, following their panicked leadership “like a bunch of sheep,” Mr. Ackerman bitterly recalled. “I didn’t come here to go along, but I went along.” And he regrets voting for the Iraq invasion, he says, on the basis of “contrived, phony evidence.”

Still, he departs as he arrived — an optimist about the public’s eventually making good choices. He sports a carnation every day just as he did as a city public school teacher, his first job. His sense of humor is intact.

“What do I do with all these plaques?” he asked, puzzling over 11 cartons of them, collected over the years from groups like the East Bayside Homeowners Association and American Veterans for Equal Rights for being a solid public servant. More constituents were coming and going in the anteroom, looking for the congressman who was happily making his own plans to be gone.

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Is Congress Capable of Getting Anything Done in a Timely Manner? (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | What is Congress doing? That was my first question when I read that the disaster aid bill passed by the House was blocked by the Senate. I know the House is led by Republicans and the Senate is led by Democrats. The Senate voted primarily along party lines. This means Republican's passed the bill in the House and Democrats refused to pass the bill in the Senate. That's got to be a huge blow to everyone suffering from the recent natural disasters.

Of course, it's not so much the refusal to pass the disaster aid bill. It's more Congress' refusal to pass anything. Everything passed this year has been passed just as the clock was set to expire. That's not the making of an efficient government. In fact, I think this is the most inefficient government I've ever seen.

It narrowly averted a shutdown and debt limit breach in August only to have to revisit the high deficit and a potential shutdown in September. If it does pass a measure to keep the government open it will only last until Nov. 18.

Doesn't Congress have anything better to do than keep revisiting the same issues? I don't want to see this budget issue come up again in November, then in December and January. In fact, it could keep doing this until the end of this presidential term. In which case, I'm pretty sure Obama wouldn't see a second term. I'm not sure he'll see a second term anyway. His idea of "hope and change" certainly wasn't my idea of hope and change.

I do know that I'm sick and tired of reading about the same issues. The federal deficit, the budget, and the disaster aid relief should have been decided and settled months ago. You'd think with a split party Congress they'd come up with some awesome compromises that would benefit the American people by reducing the deficit, helping those who have been harmed by natural disasters, create jobs, and reduce unemployment. Instead, I guess they're just focused on the 2012 elections, their own salaries, and pork.

Congress is just simply not getting anything done. Along with the disaster aid bill, Congress needs to pass 12 other financial bills before Oct. 1. It has one week to do it. I think it will get it done, but I think it will get it done on Sept. 30 at 11:59 p.m., and I, along with the rest of the American people, will be livid.

View the original article here

Obama and Congress Are Not Getting Along Right Now (The Atlantic Wire)

The tension between Congressional Republicans and the White House is manifesting itself on multiple fronts on Friday. House Republicans will vote on a resolution to limit what the American military can do in the Libyan intervention--and many Democrats are likely to join them, despite a last-minute appeal from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday, Politico's Jonathan Allen reports. "The president has not developed strong relationships with members of Congress that would allow members to even look at the politics of this," Rep. Maxine Waters told Allen.

Related: GOP Intensifies Demands for Votes to Raise the Debt Ceiling

Meanwhile, negotiations over raising the debt ceiling--which many experts say absolutely has to be done--are falling apart, as Minority Leader Eric Cantor quit talks led by Vice President Joe Biden Thursday. Sen. Jim DeMint said raising the debt limit would be "the most toxic vote" for Republicans, one that would "set [the party] back many years."

Starting at 12:30 p.m., the House will begin voting on two resolutions--one, modeled on a Senate proposal put forward by John Kerry and John McCain, would prohibit ground troops in Libya but otherwise authorize the war. That one will likely fail, Allen reports. The second would bar American bomb strikes, whether by drones or piloted aircraft. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid "has no intention of letting the bill become law," Allen writes, but "the White House is worried about the political fallout of losing a vote on the House floor." An anonymous Democratic aide explained, "They don't want to be embarrassed." But that's exactly what Republicans are predicting.

As for the stalled debt limit talks, The Hill's Molly K. Hooper reports that Republicans had planned for Cantor to bail for weeks. The Republican Study Committee, a conservative group of lawmakers, "wants Obama to publicly float a solution to the current debt-ceiling quandary," Hooper writes. "That way Republicans will know Democrats cannot back out at the last minute by saying the final deal was not acceptable to Obama," according to the RSC's budget chair, Rep. Scott Garrett.

Related: Debt and Taxes: Eric Cantor's Hot Potato Game With Boehner

But DeMint doesn't want to see a deal at all. "I can tell you if you look at the polls, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, they do not think we should increase the debt limit," he said. As ABC News' Jonathan Karl and Sunlen Miller report, "DeMint is not just talking political analysis here. He has a significant fundraising base and has shown a willingness to use his campaign money to support or oppose fellow Republicans."

View the original article here