As some may remember, the right-wing manufactured a controversy in early 2007 around the notion that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was regularly commandeering large military jets to fly an entourage of family and staffers between D.C. and her home district in California. That this claim was entirely baseless didn’t stop the Beltway media from rehashing it repeatedly. The only thing that finally put an end to the madness was the White House’s description of the story as “silly” and “unfair to the speaker.”

Well, this week, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch revived the smear with the release of a series of emails detailing Pelosi’s use of military planes. And right on cue, GOP Rep. Peter Roskam showed up on the local airwaves to help spread the misinformation. From yesterday’s broadcast of WIND’s Big John & Cisco:

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ROSKAM: The problem, I think, with the speaker’s requests is this sort of commuter travel -- that she styles herself in need of one of these large, large planes. And, you know, when Denny Hastert was speaker, the speaker gets a plane that is assigned to them, but there’s a little humility to it, right? ... The American public realizes that you’ve got a big job and you’ve got to get to places quickly. But you don’t need to take an entourage with you. You don’t need seating for 100 people or whatever. You know, just get on a plane with a couple of keys staffers and call it a day.

Let's take these claims one by one.

First off, Pelosi is not flying across the country in planes that seat "100 people." As ABC News reported on Wednesday, the Judicial Watch documents show that her “trips to San Francisco have all been on smaller executive aircraft, usually an Air Force C-20 (the equivalent of a Gulfstream G-3) or a more plush C-37 (a Gulfstream G-5).” The G-3 seats 12 and the G-5 seats 18.

Are these planes bigger than the ones Hastert used during his tenure as speaker? Most likely -- but that’s because he only had to fly to Illinois, while Pelosi needs to fly almost three times as far (which requires a larger fuel tank).

And did Pelosi “request” a certain type of plane, while Hastert just took the one “assigned” to him? Nope. The type of plane Pelosi takes is also assigned.  Specifically, it is determined by House Sergeant at Arms Bill Livingood in a “security context.”

Finally, in response to Roskam’s assertion that Hastert showed more “humility” in his use of government aircraft, there’s this little tidbit from ABC’s reporting:

The documents cover the period from January 2007 to November 2008 and show that Pelosi made the equivalent of 20 round-trips between Washington (Andrews Air Force Base) and San Francisco. That’s an average of less than one round-trip per month. In contrast, former Speaker Hastert traveled home to his Illinois district virtually every weekend and, his former aides tell ABC News, he would almost always travel on military aircraft.