Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

not only because of GOP star of the year Scott Brown’s appearance on his behalf but because of a of a new twist.

Pittsburgh TV station WPGH has suspended the latest ad for Democrat Mark Critz for making false claims. The ad by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee falsely claimed that Republican Tim Burns supports a 23 percent national sales tax and wants to ship jobs overseas.

Dave Weigel notes that Democrats stand behind the claim and the ad remains up in other markets:

…they stand by the arguments in their ad, which are based on Burns’s support of the Fair Tax and his signing of Americans for Tax Reform’s taxpayer protection pledge. Democrats tell me the ad will remain on the air on other TV stations in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, which serve Pennsylvania’s 12th District

they are blaming this on the station’s conservative ownership. I wonder if they will claim factcheck.org is another bunch of biased conservatives too?

But this ad is quite misleading because it fails to mention that the FairTax proposal would also repeal the federal income tax entirely and do away with the Internal Revenue Service. It would also eliminate gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare and self-employment taxes. But anyone viewing the DCCC’s ad could easily conclude that Burns favored slapping a 23 percent sales tax on top of all existing taxes, which is not true.

Usually it would be an issue if factcheck disputed the ad but as Robert Stacy points out:

Well, of course, the Democrats aren’t backing down. They’ve got the MSM to cover their asses and pretend that the Fair Tax represents a “national sales tax” over and above current federal taxes. Of course, they don’t want to deal with the facts.

What is even more interesting and something I’ve touched on before is how a race that didn’t get much national attention when the newest polls showed Burns up by as much as 6 points last month in a heavily democratic district has suddenly become a “must win” for Republicans in a district they haven’t won in 38 years UPDATE: The previous sentence originally said 70+ years, that was misleading, the current 12th district is made up of two additional districts that haven’t elected a republican in 70+ years. In the 12th district that last republican to win was John Saylor in 1972, that’s my bad. when the latest poll give Critz an advantage As Sean Trende points out:

there are over sixty districts represented by Democrats with better Republican performances than PA-12. The Republicans’ path to 218 seats doesn’t necessarily run through this district – in fact, I don’t think their path to a 1994-esque 230 seats necessarily runs through this district.

This is basically extending the Morning Joe spin of yesterday to pretend if the democrats win that the tide of opinion has turned. We all know what the real question is: Can Burns manage to pull it off even without the presence of a Sicilian with a fedora?