As Karl Rove's shady political organization prepares to unleash $1 million worth of negative attack ads on behalf of Congressman Mark Kirk in Illinois this week, an independent, non-partisan watchdog group has called his claims false.

In its latest report entitled "Crossroads Jam-Up: Conservative 'super PAC' makes false and misleading claims in a blizzard of ads," Factcheck.org offered a scathing rebuttal of Rove's group for unleashing a series of negative attack ads against Democratic candidates across the country.

"Mark Kirk is relying on George Bush's political operative Karl Rove to bring his dirty money and dirty tricks to buy the Illinois election for him," said Alexi for Illinois spokesman Scott Burnham. "But the truth is that Rove's blatantly false and baseless ads fit well with Mark Kirk's campaign themes of embellishing and outright lying about his own record for political gain. It's not difficult to understand why polls show that voters simply don't trust Mark Kirk."

Factcheck.org says the American Crossroads' spot attacking U.S. Senate nominee Alexi Giannoulias is a "Drive-by Hit on Giannoulias" and that his "attackers misuse language from a newspaper article" to imply he was at fault for losses in the Bright Start College Savings Program and add another "misleading charge."

American Crossroads, founded by Rove, is considered a "super PAC" - a new type of political action committee that accepts unlimited amounts of political contributions from corporations to attack individual candidates. Rove's group is not required to reveal its funding sources, despite calls for Kirk to disclose them.

In contrast to Kirk, Giannoulias is the first U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois to refuse corporate PAC and federal lobbyist money. "Rove's ad represents the worst of Washington, DC politics coming to Illinois," added Burnham, noting that Kirk supported all of Rove and Bushes failed economic policies that drove our economy to the brink of collapse and then opposed Wall Street reform after taking millions from special interests representing the banking and financial industry. "Illinois voters are sick of Karl Rove and Mark Kirk politics and their lies."

Factheck.org: Drive-by Hit on Giannoulias

American Crossroads' spot attacking Alexi Giannoulias, the Democratic candidate for Illlinois' open Senate seat, reprises some familiar themes: his role with the family's Broadway Bank, and his oversight of the state's college investment plan. We've written about both of these issues. This time his attackers misuse language from a newspaper article and add a misleading charge about an SUV purchase.

The ad charges that Giannoulias, who is state treasurer, "fell asleep at the wheel" while overseeing the Illinois Bright Start 529 college investment plan. On screen there's a mock highway sign with the quote "bad investment choices…leading to outsized losses" and a citation to the Chicago Sun-Times. It's a reference to losses in one of the funds the plan owns, the Oppenheimer Core Bond fund, in 2008.

The words in the ad indeed appeared in a Chicago Sun-Times story last year. But they were used in reference to the Core Bond fund's managers, not to Giannoulias. Those managers, as the Morningstar investment research firm put it, "gained exposure to the battered commercial mortgage-backed securities market through derivatives that had a leveraging effect on the fund, amplifying losses." Remember credit default swaps?

And a Giannoulias spokesman said that Illinois was the first state to notice problems with the fund and investigate. Of the approximately $150 million of investors' money that was lost in the Core fund (one of 21 funds owned by Bright Start, which is a $2 billion program), Giannoulias reached a settlement with Oppenheimer to recover $77 million.

The ad also accuses Giannoulias of using "$26,000 in Bright Start funds to buy an SUV." That's true, but misleading. Giannoulias drove the car but didn't own it - he used it as his Illinois state vehicle - and no taxpayer funds were used.

Giannoulias' office bought the new Ford Escape Hybrid in October 2007. The Chicago Tribunereported the purchase last year under the headline: "Illinois' Bright Start college fund loses $85 million, buys hybrid for treasurer." Giannoulias said the new SUV replaced a 10-year-old vehicle and was used not only by him, but also by Bright Start employees as "a more efficient, quicker, less expensive way" to sign up families for the savings plan. "What I think is important here to understand is that this is a vehicle used by Bright Start marketers to travel the state and talk about the program," he told the Tribune. Giannoulias denied ever using the vehicle for personal purposes, and no evidence has surfaced to show that he did. But his office kept no vehicle logs to document who actually used the vehicle, something Giannoulias said was "probably an oversight." His spokesman said money to buy the vehicle didn't come from taxpayers, but rather from a fee paid to the treasurer's office by the investment firm that manages Bright Start.

Did Giannoulias "help drive" his family's Broadway Bank to its demise? Broadway was seized by regulators in April. Giannoulias was a senior loan officer and a vice president at the bank from 2002 until spring 2006, according to a campaign spokesman. During that time, according to one publication's analysis of Broadway's problems, the bank made a great number of construction and development loans, tying up a far larger-than-average share of its portfolio in such loans for a bank of its size.

Giannoulias was fresh out of law school when he joined the family business, and says his role in the bank's failure was limited. Both he and the bank have said that only 9 percent of the nonperforming loans held by Broadway at the beginning of 2010 were made during his time at the bank. Furthermore, not all of those were approved by him. He has said that he takes his "share of the responsibility for mistakes that were made … in investing too heavily in commercial real estate and not diversifying into other sectors." He denied that the loans were "reckless or risky," though.

It's also true, as Giannoulias points out on his website, that more than 200 community banks have failed since the beginning of 2009, and the shutterings continue, because of the economy's downturn and particularly the collapse of the real estate market. Unfortunately, Broadway has lots of company.