Mitt Romney says, “If you want a fiscal conservative, you can’t vote for Rick Santorum, because he’s not.” Really? Three fiscally conservative groups rate Santorum’s lifetime voting record as better than most other Republican lawmakers, and one of them considers him a “Taxpayer Hero.”

Michigan has become squirm central for Republican presidential candidates who are trying to explain their opposition to the auto bailout before the big primary in the home of automakers. Their tale is terribly tangled, and President Barack Obama isn't telling it straight either.

Obama, in taking credit, and Republicans, in assigning blame, have ignored one driving force behind the love-it-or-hate-it bailout: George W. Bush in the waning days of his presidency. Moreover, GOP rivals Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum would have people believe the United Auto Workers union runs General Motors and the government "gave" it away, neither true.

The issue is a particularly nettlesome one for Romney, Detroit-born son of a Michigan governor and auto company chief executive. His provocatively headlined 2008 article, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," has made for tortured explanations in the campaign for the Feb. 28 primary — though the prescription he preached back then is not wholly at odds with what the government finally did.

Then again, Romney is hardly out on a Republican limb. Santorum opposes the bailout on similar grounds. As for the other candidates, Newt Gingrich raised the wild idea that Washington might force people to buy GM cars, and Ron Paul believes the market should let companies rise or fall without the government's intervention.

A look at some of the persistent claims about the bailout and how they compare with the facts:

___

ROMNEY: "If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won't go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed." — Nov. 18, 2008, New York Times op-ed article.

Pro-Romney forces are looking beyond Michigan, hammering Rick Santorum in four other states with a new TV ad making some misleading claims.

• The ad claims Mitt Romney turned around Massachusetts’ finances without raising taxes, when in fact he raised hundreds of millions in new government “fees” when he was governor.
•  
• It also rehashes a boast that Romney issued 800 vetoes, but fails to mention that more than 700 were overridden. It attacks former Sen. Santorum for “voting for billions in waste,” but fails to note that Santorum was given a lifetime “hero” rating by the anti-pork group Citizens Against Government Waste, and was consistently rated better than most of his Republican peers by the fiscally conservative National Taxpayers Union during his dozen years in the Senate.

With much of the political focus on upcoming Republican primaries in Michigan and Arizona, the ad from Restore Our Future sets its sights further down the road, airing in Super Tuesday states Tennessee and Oklahoma, as well as two states that vote a week after that, Alabama and Mississippi.

We dealt with a couple of these claims about Romney’s record when they were raised in a previous Restore Our Future ad that aired in Iowa in December.

With Rick Santorum polling well in Mitt Romney’s birth state, a high-stakes TV shootout has broken out in Michigan. But some shots are off the mark.

• An amusing Santorum ad features a Romney look-alike machine-gunning mud at a cardboard cutout of Santorum. But the ad slings a little mud of its own, claiming Romney is hiding his “support for cap-and trade.” In fact, for years Romney has been a consistent opponent of any national cap-and-trade plan. Nearly a decade ago, as governor of Massachusetts, Romney flirted with the idea of a regional cap-and-trade system for the Northeast — but he ultimately rejected it.
• An ad from pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future casts Santorum as a “big-spending Washington insider” and cites a statistic from the National Taxpayers Union to support that. But, in fact, the NTU awarded Santorum a grade of “A” for his voting record on fiscal issues that year — ranking him 5th best among all senators.

Another ad claims Santorum holds the coveted mantle of the “best chance to beat Obama.” We’re not in the odds-making business, so we can’t say whether Santorum is wrong or right. But he cites a single poll to support his claim. And that one is contradicted by a more recent poll from the same organization, as well as other recent polls.

President Obama has repeatedly and falsely claimed that “right now, we’re scheduled to spend nearly $1 trillion more” in tax cuts for the “wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.” That’s simply not true. The Bush tax cuts — which Obama and Congress extended for two years — expire at the end of this year, so any plans to “spend” beyond Dec. 31, 2012, would require Congress to act again.

It didn’t take long after President Obama released his latest budget for the oil lobby to pick up the misleading cry that it’s being targeted for “new taxes.” That’s mostly not true. Energy Tomorrow, a project of the American Petroleum Institute, ran a print ad in Washington, D.C.’s Politico Feb. 14 asking, “Guess who’ll pay for new energy taxes?”

The problem with that rhetorical question is that most of the “new taxes” are actually a proposed end to some old tax breaks — advantages not shared by other industries.

The ad comes only days after we criticized the wind-power lobby for making a similar claim, trying to pass off the scheduled expiration of a special tax credit for wind-generated electricity as “new taxes” on that industry. (See “Wind Spin,” Feb. 9.) So now we apply the same standard to the fossil fuel crowd.

It’s true that the president proposes raising $38.7 billion in additional taxes from the oil and gas industry over the next 10 years. But his budget would do so by repealing several existing preferences now enjoyed by the industry, not by imposing “new taxes.”

Special Oil & Gas Breaks

For example, the budget proposes (page 6) to raise nearly $14 billion over the next 10 years by repealing the industry’s ability to write off most or all of its “intangible” drilling expenses (including labor costs and rig time) immediately. Instead, the expenses would be deducted over seven years.

The budget also would repeal the industry’s “depletion allowance,” which allows royalty owners and independent producers to avoid taxes on 15 percent of their income from producing oil and gas wells. That would raise an estimated $11.5 billion over 10 years.

Two Indian tribes making payday loans over the Internet, even in states that ban or restrict payday lending, won a court victory Tuesday when a Denver judge blocked the Colorado Attorney General from investigating them further.

The ruling is among a series of recent court decisions posing legal obstacles for states trying to enforce payday-lending laws. Courts have ruled that state regulations don’t apply to businesses owned by tribes. In recent years, a number of tribes have flouted state laws by making loans over the Internet with interest rates as high as 800 percent.

For eight years the Colorado Attorney General has been in court trying to stop businesses affiliated with the Miami tribe of Oklahoma and the Santee Sioux tribe of Nebraska from making loans online. Attorney General John Suthers argued that their claims of tribal ownership are a sham cooked up by Kansas City businessman Scott Tucker, who is better known as an endurance race-car driver.

Tucker started the business in 1998 and approached the tribes only after it came under investigation in Kansas and New York, the court found.

However, the tribes say that their ownership is legitimate. And despite the businesses’ beginnings, District Court Judge Morris Hoffman said not only did the state fail to prove tribal ownership was a sham but added that to him it is clear that the business arrangements today seem not to be shams.

“We’re very disappointed with the court’s order,” said Mike Saccone, a spokesman for the Colorado Attorney General. Attorneys for Tucker and the tribes did not comment on the ruling.

The ruling doesn’t necessarily end the investigation. While the state cannot subpoena the tribes or tribal entities, Judge Hoffman said authorities can still subpoena Tucker and his non-Indian business associates to determine if they still own and control the payday-lending business.

Do you ever get the feeling that you don't know the first thing about your state's government? More than likely, its by no fault of your own; U.S. state governments are notoriously closed-off, and even more difficult to compare to one another.

So for the first time, extensive data looking at transparency in U.S. state governments has been made public. The State Integrity Investigation released its preliminary findings — a set of more than 300 indicators to determine the risk of government corruption — for all 50 states.

What is an ‘indicator’ of good transparency? Here are a few of the categories in each state’s questionnaire:

• Public access to information
• Political finance
• Accountability in each of the three branches of government
• Internal auditing
• Lobbying disclosure

See how your state fared in each of these areas, and 9 others on the StateIntegrity.org website.

“We wanted to open the research and reporting process up to the public to ensure our results were as balanced and as accurate as possible,” wrote Nathaniel Heller, executive director at Global Integrity, a partner for the project.

When a president introduces a budget, there are always phantoms flitting around the room. President Barack Obama's spending plan sets loose a number of them.

It counts on phantom savings from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's underpinned by tax increases Republicans won't let happen and program cuts fellow Democrats in Congress are all but certain to block.

And it assumes rates of growth that the economy will have to become strikingly undead to achieve.

A look at three budget ghosts, sometimes known as gimmicks:

___

BUDGET: Claims about $850 billion in savings from ending the wars and steers some $230 billion of that to highways.

REALITY: There is no direct peace dividend from ending the wars because the government borrowed to pay for them. The government would have to keep borrowing that amount of money to have it to spend on something else.

Counting the end of wars as a dividend is like a student coming out of college loaded with debt and aching to buy things, says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "When you finish college, you don't suddenly have thousands of dollars a year to spend elsewhere — in fact, you have to find a way to pay back your loans."

MacGuineas says, "Drawing down spending on wars that were already set to wind down and that were deficit-financed in the first place should not be considered savings."

President George W. Bush kept the cost of the wars out of his budgets, a contentious accounting maneuver that may have papered over the impact on spending projections but deepened the national debt as surely as if the price tag had been shown transparently. Taken together, the Bush and Obama budget tricks seem to suggest war costs nothing but ending it frees a ton of money.

___

BUDGET: Forecasts healthy growth in years ahead, with GDP growth predicted to reach a robust 4 percent in 2014 and 4.2 percent in 2015.