Organizations: American Future Fund

American Future Fund: “Hoosier”

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American Future Fund accuses Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) of abandoning “Hoosier values” by supporting “Obama’s costly policies,” such as the Affordable Care Act and the Recovery Act. However, the health care law actually reduces the deficit, and the stimulus bill helped rescue the economy from a deeper recession. Furthermore, AFF suggests that the economy is not improving, but the facts show otherwise: The private-sector has now added 4.7 million jobs in the last 31 months.

Read more after the jump.

The Week In Conservative Attack Ads

In the penultimate week before Election Day, conservative outside groups once again flooded the airwaves with attacks on Democratic candidates. Ten conservative groups were responsible for the 31 televisions ads we fact-checked – 16 of them targeting House candidates, 10 aimed at Senate candidates, and five attacking President Obama or cheerleading for Mitt Romney. As they did last week, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS led the way, accounting for 12 of the ads we debunked. Since Monday, the two groups have announced four separate ad buys totaling a whopping $22.8 million.

Aside from American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, several groups contributed to the assault on President Obama and Democratic Senate candidates. Restore Our Future, 60 Plus, and the American Future Fund each weighed in on the presidential race. We also fact-checked two Senate ads from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one apiece from American Commitment and Hardworking Americans Committee.

Coleman Groups Drill House Candidates With Oil-Funded Ads

But the most prolific groups focused on the House, where, in addition to four spots from Crossroads GPS, we answered five ads from the Congressional Leadership Fund, four from American Action Network, and three from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Former Minnesota senator Norm Coleman is the chairman of both CLF, a super PAC, and AAN, a nonprofit that does not disclose its donors. CLF’s top individual contributors are billionaire Romney boosters Sheldon Adelson and Bob Perry, but it also recently received $2.5 million from Chevron – the “largest contribution from a publicly traded corporation” since the Citizens United decision – which is a good indication of who Big Oil expects to prioritize its interests in the next Congress.

Read more after the jump.

American Future Fund: “A New Path”

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The audio in a new ad from American Future Fund is exclusively Mitt Romney’s voice, making accusations about President Obama’s impact on spending and taxes and promising to create 12 million new jobs. That figure comes from a series of separate studies with different timelines, and two of those don’t even evaluate Romney’s policies. In addition, spending growth under Obama is low, and he has cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.

Read more after the jump.

The Week In Conservative Attack Ads

We checked 26 new attack ads in the last week, including a trio that appeared late last Friday afternoon. The heavy volume makes sense given that the campaign is entering the home stretch, and it was powered by 15 new U.S. Chamber of Commerce ads, all of them in House races. Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS (3 ads) and American Crossroads (2) combined to come in a distant second, and the remaining six came from the arch-conservative Club for Growth, the anti-immigration obsessives at NumbersUSA, the Iowa-based American Future Fund, Restore Our Future, and the abortion-focused Susan B. Anthony List’s new “Women Speak Out PAC.”

Read more after the jump.

American Future Fund: “Security”

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American Future Fund suggests President Obama has been negligent on his national security duties, claiming he “skips 50 percent of his national security briefings” and insinuating that he blew off a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly meeting. In reality, President Obama reads his security briefing each day and is regularly updated by intelligence personnel, and while there was never any in-person meeting scheduled with Netanyahu, they did speak on the phone.

Read more after the jump.

The Week In Conservative Attack Ads

After last week’s wave of House ads, conservative outside groups focused most of their attention on the Senate this week. Of the 14 ads we fact-checked, eight of them targeted Senate hopefuls (five from Karl Rove’s Crossroads groups and three from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), compared to only two hitting House candidates (both from the Congressional Leadership Fund). We also answered presidential ads from Restore Our Future, Americans for Job Security, and American Future Fund. Finally, Americans for Prosperity joined the conservative campaign to oust three Florida Supreme Court justices.

Read more after the jump.

American Future Fund: “Promises”

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American Future Fund highlights examples of President Obama making similar statements in 2008 and 2012, as if it’s somehow discrediting that, after a term marked by Republican obstructionism, the president would still have any of the same goals that he campaigned on four years ago. To drive the point home, AFF closes with Obama’s statement in 2009 that “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.” However, the ad leaves out crucial context: Obama was responding to a question about efforts to rescue the economy, and he suggested that he would lose if voters did not see the economy “starting to make some progress.” Three years later, the economy has added 4.6 million private-sector jobs over 30 consecutive months of growth.

Read more after the jump.

The Week In Conservative Attack Ads

We added eight ad checks this week, with conservative outside groups focusing their fire on the Nevada, Virginia and Ohio Senate races. Only two of them didn’t come from Crossroads GPS: an obscure group called the Treasure Coast Jobs Coalition lobbed tired Recovery Act claims at Rep. Allen West’s (R-FL) opponent, and the American Future Fund turned Paul Ryan’s Republican National Convention lie about a Wisconsin auto plant into a 60-second spot.

Crossroads GPS hit Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) with the standard misleading Medicare attacks (“Laughable” in Nevada and “Football” in Ohio), but got a bit more creative in Virginia. The group released two versions of an ad called “Teeth” that attacks Gov. Tim Kaine (D-VA) over education funding, and alleged in another that his support for the congressional debt ceiling deal meant he “supports cutting what matters: our jobs.” Karl Rove’s behemoth also launched two presidential ads, taking an Obama quote out of context in Nevada and scrambling to defend Mitt Romney’s tax plans in “Broke.”

Read more after the jump.

American Future Fund: “Janesville”

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American Future Fund is regurgitating Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) claim that the closure of a General Motors factory in his hometown proves President Obama’s economic policies failed. The timeline of events does not support AFF and Ryan’s claim, as the plant’s closure came under President Bush. More importantly, AFF and Ryan both omit some of then-candidate Obama’s 2008 comments to Janesville auto workers: Obama stressed the plant would have to retool its assembly line to make fuel-efficient cars rather than SUVs and trucks, because GM and the larger auto market were all shifting sharply in that direction. Indeed, Ryan lobbied GM throughout 2008 to retool the Janesville plant, while also claiming that government action could lower gas prices and help save truck assembly plants. Market forces and chronology render AFF’s ad highly dishonest.

Read more after the jump.

American Future Fund: “Tomorrow”

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A dramatic ad from the American Future Fund features a woman describing her worries about the economy, her husband’s job, stimulus spending, and debt, but getting a lot of details wrong as she blames New Mexico Senate candidate Martin Heinrich for the her woes. The ad cites an article about a Recovery Act-funded car company building cars in Finland, but all the money loaned to that business supported work done in the U.S. Four-and-a-half million private-sector jobs have been added over the last 29 straight months of unemployment, and it was Bush policies and the recession that drove up the debt.

Read more after the jump.