Datasets:

pszemraj

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multi_fc

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vees-00436

VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Duterte’s oxygen concentrator

none

http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-sheet-dutertes-oxygen-concentrator

An electronically operated medical device that provides purified oxygen to those who require it.

Duterte,health

VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Duterte’s oxygen concentrator

April 07, 2017

['None']

pomt-08850

Allowing all Bush income tax cuts to expire on Dec. 31 "will amount to the largest tax increase in the history of America."

mostly false

/georgia/statements/2010/aug/08/johnny-isakson/isakson-warns-end-tax-cuts-will-result-historic-in/

In Washington, a simmering political battle is boiling over this hot summer. Some say it could hurt the checkbooks of virtually every American. The topic is taxes, specifically what will happen if the tax cuts approved under the presidency of George W. Bush expire at the end of this year. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., offered his theory in a guest column in the July 28 edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Now, these tax cuts are set to expire on Dec. 31, and allowing them to do so will amount to the largest tax increase in the history of America," Isakson wrote. Republicans are pushing to continue the tax cuts in all income categories. President Barack Obama has called for the cuts to end, but only for high-income Americans. The tax cuts would end for individuals making more than $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000. Many Democratic leaders in Congress have publicly stated they support the president's proposal. Neither Democratic leaders nor Obama have said they want all of the tax cuts to expire. Some loyal AJC PolitiFact Georgia readers asked us to investigate some of the claims in the column by Isakson, who is running for re-election this November against Democrat Michael Thurmond, Georgia's outgoing labor commissioner, and Libertarian Chuck Donovan. We decided to focus on the claim whether it does amount to the largest tax increase in U.S. history, since other politicians are repeating it. PolitiFact's national website this week gave former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a "Pants on Fire" ruling because she implied in a televised interview that eliminating the tax cuts for only high-income Americans would amount to the largest tax increase in U.S. history. Isakson, however, was more inclusive in his statement, which assumed all of the Bush tax cuts for all income groups could be eliminated. His argument was different than Palin's. Here's some background on the tax cuts. In 2001 and 2003, the Republican-led Congress approved a series of cuts that reduced the income tax rate in several categories. If the tax cuts expire, the 25 percent, 28 percent, 33 percent and 35 percent tax brackets will revert to 28 percent, 31 percent, 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Isakson's office argued in an e-mail to AJC PolitiFact Georgia three reasons its statement is correct. The senator's office says it's the largest in terms of dollar amount, the largest in terms of how many taxpayers are affected and largest in terms of revenue effect as a percentage of the national gross domestic product. There's little research about the impact of ending the tax cuts in comparison with past tax increases or cuts. Jim Nunns, a former U.S. Treasury Department official who is now a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, shared some Treasury data with AJC PolitiFact Georgia. He included a 2006 report called "Revenue effects of major tax bills." The report includes a chart that shows revenue estimates of tax increases and cuts as a percentage of the gross domestic product. Most economists say that measuring taxes as a percentage of GDP is the most accurate way to compare tax increases that were passed years apart. The measure takes into account how large the taxes are in relation to the economy in which they are levied, and it eliminates the effects of inflation. The 1942 tax increase, approved to help fund America's fight during World War II, was 5 percent of the gross domestic product, according to Treasury Department data. Treasury officials say the end of all of the current tax cuts would result in 2 percent of the gross domestic product. Our own analysis also found it would be about 2 percent. Isakson's office said the 1942 tax increase should be viewed with caution because the data are inconsistent with later tax information. The 2006 Treasury Department report says a consistent source of revenue estimates was not available for all bills between 1940 and 1967. Isakson's office believes the better comparison is to a tax increase in 1982 that resulted in 0.53 percent of the gross domestic product in the first year and 1.23 percent by the fourth year, according to its analysis of Congressional Budget Office data. CBO estimates show allowing the three main provisions of the Bush administration tax cuts to expire would result in an additional $209.6 billion in fiscal year 2012 and $251.7 billion by fiscal year 2014. The 1942 tax increase resulted in billions coming in to federal tax coffers in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the 2006 Treasury Department report. That total would be about $115 billion in today's dollars. Nunns, of the Tax Policy Center, said it's fair to compare the 1942 tax increase with what would happen if the tax cuts expire. The 1942 estimate came from the Congressional Record, which is the official record of the U.S. Congress. "If you look at the current dollar measure, you can see that would be an accurate statement," Nunns said of Isakson's statement. "If you look at it from the size of the economy, then it's not." Georgia State University economics professor Sally Wallace said she worked with Nunns and Jerry Tempalski, the author of the 2006 Treasury Department report, and thinks it's fair to compare the 1942 tax increase with the end of the tax cuts. "An overly conservative take on the early Treasury data would still lead to the conclusion that the 1942 act had a substantially larger impact on the economy, measured via GDP [than the end of the Bush administration tax cuts]," said Wallace, chairwoman of the economics department. The numbers show Isakson has a strong case that allowing these tax cuts to expire would result in more revenue than at any point in U.S. history. The senator's case concerning why it is a larger percentage of the gross domestic product than the 1942 tax increase is weaker. The 2006 Treasury Department report said a consistent source for the revenue estimates was not available. It did not say that the estimates were unreliable. The GDP is considered a more accurate way to measure the economy. Isakson's statement is misleading when you base his statement on the GDP. Therefore, we rate his statement as Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.

Johnny Isakson

2010-08-08T06:00:00

2010-07-28

['United_States', 'George_W._Bush']

pomt-11956

North Carolina has "the strictest anti-gerrymandering standards in the entire country."

false

/north-carolina/statements/2017/oct/05/phil-berger/berger-says-nc-has-strictest-anti-gerrymandering-s/

North Carolina Republicans in 2011 redrew districts for members of the N.C. General Assembly that federal judges later ruled were gerrymandered to diminish the power of African-American voters. Fast forward six years. The legislative districts are still under the microscope of federal judges. The General Assembly has drawn new maps. And North Carolina’s new Attorney General, Democrat Josh Stein, says he won’t personally defend Republicans’ latest maps in court – delegating the defense to his staff. Enter state Senate leader Phil Berger, the most powerful senator and a Republican, to defend the newest maps while accusing Stein of a political stunt. Berger’s office on Sept. 15 released a joint statement with state House Speaker Tim Moore. "If Josh Stein’s partisan political bias has blinded him to the fact that our maps abide by the strictest anti-gerrymandering standards in the entire country, then perhaps it’s best that he is personally recusing himself," the two legislative leaders said. Berger previously boasted of North Carolina’s standards in a Senate floor speech, according to a copy of the remarks on Berger’s website. The claim on Berger's website is more specific, claiming that North Carolina's rules are the strictest among states where legislatures draw election maps. That disclaimer wasn't mentioned in the statement about Stein. Federal judges on Sept. 19 described NC’s 2011 legislative maps as "among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court." So Berger’s claim definitely raised eyebrows. But let’s set the maps aside for a moment. We wondered what anti-gerrymandering standards Berger was referring to, and whether they’re the "strictest" in the entire country. (We’re putting Berger on the Truth-O-Meter because he has been more visible on the issue and because it was his office that released the joint statement.) To support his claim, Berger points to the redistricting guidelines in the state Constitution and a court ruling from 2002 that gives specific instructions for how North Carolina should carry those guidelines out. The state Constitution says legislative districts "shall represent, as nearly as may be, an equal number of inhabitants … Each representative district shall at all times consist of contiguous territory; No county shall be divided in the formation of a representative district." The Stephenson vs. Bartlett ruling from 2002 — in which, as Berger points out, a judge scolded North Carolina over maps drawn by Democrats — further strengthens the compactness provision by encouraging the state to use a specific formula to create compact districts, Berger says. What is gerrymandering? The term "gerrymandering" was coined in 1812 after Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, a Democratic-Republican, approved a redistricting map that diluted the influence of the opposing Federalist Party by placing many of its voters into a select few districts. Mapmakers drew districts with oblong shapes to increase the number of Democratic-Republican leaning districts. Gerry’s hometown district resembled a salamander, prompting a local newspaper editor to call it a "gerrymander." The term is now often associated with election maps that have oddly-shaped districts that stretch across multiple regions. North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District, for example, was for years known for boundaries that slithered like a sidewinder down Interstate 85 from Winston-Salem to Charlotte. But gerrymandering can occur in several forms – regardless of district shapes – such as when a district favors one political party over another, dilutes the influence of minorities or other groups, or blatantly protects or targets an incumbent. There are multiple strategies for trying to prevent gerrymandering. Each state is required to abide by the Voting Rights Act and other federal laws. Otherwise, states have some freedom in choosing who draws legislative districts, as well as how many rules they want their map-makers to follow. There’s no perfect system for preventing gerrymandering, said Wendy Underhill, director for elections and redistricting for the National Conference of State Legislatures. Government can make laws and impose a system of checks and balances – but that doesn’t mean mapmakers will follow them. "It’s not clear what is better," Underhill said. "How do you know what’s better than another? The guideline is, is it constitutional?" Experts told PolitiFact some states do a better job than others of ensuring the map-drawing process is politically neutral. One way is by reducing the influence elected officials have over the map-drawing process. Who draws districts? Most states allow the legislature to draw legislative districts. This structure, as the Harvard Political Review noted, can lead to problems. "Allowing partisan legislators to redraw their own districts creates a clear conflict of interest, and historically the temptation to game the system has proven too great to resist for the majority party," the review says. About 13 states use commissions. Depending on the state, the commission can include members of the legislature and/or play merely an advisory role. Six states use independent commissions that are run by people who aren’t elected officials but are chosen by the legislature and/or governor. Experts often point to Iowa, Arizona and California as having some of the best structures for creating fair legislative districts. Iowa’s legislature has final say over the maps. But its governor has veto power, the state’s geography makes it hard to gerrymander and the legislature relies heavily on Iowa’s Legislative Services Agency. In Arizona and California, the map-making process is placed in the hands of independent commissions. In each state, Republicans and Democrats have equal say in choosing commissioners. One study, pointed out by Berger’s office, suggests that maps drawn by independent commissions may offer as much protection to incumbents as maps drawn by legislatures. Additionally, experts like Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation cast doubt on the idea of commissions as impartial map-drawers. He doesn’t like that the commissions move the mapmaking process further from the traditional political arenas. "When a legislature does redistricting and voters don't like what they've done, they can always vote the legislators out of office," von Spakovsky said. "With these independent commissioners, if you don't like what they've done, you can’t vote them out of office." Republicans control NC Debates over commissions aside, other legislatures do a better job of including both political parties and have more structural checks and balances than North Carolina does. Connecticut, for example, requires supermajorities for approval of maps. In most of the states where legislatures draw the maps, the governor is involved in the map-drawing process and may have veto power, according to Justin Levitt, a redistricting expert at Loyola University. Levitt, who started allaboutredistricting.org, expressed concern about North Carolina’s maps in the 2013 and 2015 gerrymandering cases. He signed what’s known as a "friend-of-the-court" brief with other election law professors and redistricting experts. In North Carolina, the legislature (where Republicans currently have a supermajority) draws the districts and the governor (currently a Democrat) doesn’t have veto power over the proposed legislative maps. In fact, excluding states with independent redistricting commissions, North Carolina is one of only five states — along with Connecticut, Florida, Maryland and Mississippi — where the governor has no veto over the maps, Levitt said. In North Carolina, the party that controls the most seats in the legislature can control the entire redistricting process. "The biggest protection against gerrymandering are provisions that require that both parties have a role in approving maps," said Michael Li, senior redistricting counsel for the NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. "Single-party control is the biggest factor that correlates with extreme gerrymanders of the type that we've seen in North Carolina and Pennsylvania this decade," Li said. "If you take away the ability of one party to make all the decisions, you are virtually guaranteed to eliminate gerrymandering." Rules for drawing States can also prevent gerrymandering by adopting strict redistricting rules. Rules for mapmakers vary state-by-state. They regulate things like a district’s population, shape, partisan bent, inclusion of minorities and whether it favors an incumbent. This is where Berger’s argument comes in. He mostly focuses on the shape of districts, saying in online remarks and through his spokeswoman, Amy Auth, that the 2002 court decision prompted the General Assembly to incorporate strict metrics for measuring compactness. "The criteria also included a mathematical standard for measuring compactness … a mathematical standard which had never been adopted before in North Carolina or in many other states," Auth said. Experts place value in compact districts because they keep communities – often identified by city or county boundaries – intact. They say it’s unfair to include communities with unique populations and problems into one voting bloc. The influence of voters in, say, a farming community might be greatly reduced if the community was included in a district where the majority of voters were from an urban area. Experts acknowledge that North Carolina’s mathematical standard for measuring compactness can help keep communities intact. However, they say North Carolina’s rules don’t necessarily set the state apart. For one, the mathematical compactness standard isn’t written into the state constitution. While the redistricting criteria adopted this year by the legislature says districts "shall" be contiguous and "shall" keep county groupings as required by the 2002 court case, the criteria says mapmakers "may" use the mathematical compactness equation "as a guide." And, like NC, other states use formulas to regulate district compactness and contiguity, according to Levitt, the Loyola professor. He said Arizona uses part of the same test for compactness, known as the Polsby-Popper test, as North Carolina uses. He says Michigan also uses a compactness formula that's a variant of the Reock test, which NC uses, whenever there are multiple districts within a city or township. Meanwhile, "Iowa has three different formula for requiring that its districts be ‘reasonably compact,’ measured by comparison with regular polygons, by comparison of length and width, and by total perimeter," Levitt added. So let’s focus on state constitutions. North Carolina appears to be one of several states — including California, Oklahoma and Hawaii — where the state Constitution tells mapmakers to keep districts compact, populations even and counties as whole as possible. Charts published by the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Brennan Center for Justice, part of New York University’s School of Law, offer comparisons of each state’s map-drawing rules. Shapes aren’t everything District shapes may indicate whether an election map is gerrymandered, but they’re not the determining factor. Eric McGhee, a public policy fellow at University of California-Berkeley, said Berger may be right about North Carolina’s compactness formula being unique. But he emphasized that geographical guidelines alone aren’t enough to prevent gerrymandering. "If you're just talking about shapes, there's truth to it," McGhee said. "But if you’re saying there’s no advantage for either party, that's not necessarily true." McGhee and Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor from the University of Chicago, created a new measure known as the "efficiency gap" -- the difference between the two parties' wasted votes, divided by the total votes cast -- which is a focal point in the partisan gerrymandering case from Wisconsin that was argued at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. "You can have pretty districts and still deliberately, severely, and durably disadvantage the other side," Stephanopoulos said. "Your pretty districts are irrelevant to whether the map is a partisan gerrymander." Nate Persily, a law professor at Stanford University, noted that other states, such as Florida, have constitutions that bar mapmakers from drawing districts to favor one party over another. "The restrictions in the Florida initiative passed several years ago are stricter (than North Carolina) because they prevent drawing districts for the benefit of a party or incumbent," Persily wrote in an email. NC as ‘the strictest?’ PolitiFact found no evidence that North Carolina is considered among the states with the strictest anti-gerrymandering protections. Experts not only pointed to other states with similar standards, some scoffed at the notion that North Carolina’s protections might be among the nation’s strongest. Stephanopoulos called the claim "preposterous." He said, "It's true enough that NC (like many states) requires preserving counties, but I don't know how one could possibly jump from that fact to the claim that NC has the country's strictest anti-gerrymandering requirements." Theodore Arrington, professor emeritus of political science at UNC-Charlotte, also knocked Berger’s claim, noting that North Carolina ended up in court despite having compactness and contracting with prominent redistricting mapmaker Tom Hofeller. "What restrictions there are in the law are easily worked around given the use of sophisticated GIS software and the use of an experienced map drawer hired by the majority," Arrington said. And von Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation expert, couldn’t say whether redistricting experts had ever considered North Carolina as having some of the strongest protections. "It may hold a record for being before the Supreme Court more than any other state," von Spakovsky said. "That doesn't mean the state standards aren’t good ones." Our ruling Berger claimed in a press release that North Carolina has the strictest anti-gerrymandering protections in the entire country. North Carolina may have strict rules for grouping counties and a unique formula for measuring compactness. But the legislature didn’t require themselves – at least on paper – to use that compactness formula, and other states have similar rules for the shapes of districts. Furthermore, experts consider other states to do a better job of promoting fairness by mandating the inclusion of both parties or, in a handful of cases, strictly prohibiting mapmakers from favoring one party over another. Perhaps most tellingly: PolitiFact couldn’t find, and Berger’s office couldn’t point to, an expert or ranking system that puts North Carolina’s redistricting standards among the nation’s best. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com

Phil Berger

2017-10-05T13:47:23

2017-09-15

['None']

vees-00404

Galvante also admitted this before the Senate three months earlier, during the inquiry on the Tanay bus crash, which killed 15 individuals.

none

http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-whats-happening-motor-vehicle-inspecti

Is there a working motor vehicle inspection center in the country?

road safety,LTO,vehicle safety standards,MVIC,MVIS

VERA FILES FACT CHECK: What’s happening to the motor vehicle inspection centers of the LTO?

July 21, 2017

['None']

goop-01258

Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart Getting Back Together?

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/robert-pattinson-kristen-stewart-back-together-false/

Andrew Shuster

Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart Getting Back Together?

11:42 am, April 3, 2018

['None']

goop-00976

Sarah Hyland, Wells Adams Engaged,

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/sarah-hyland-wells-adams-engaged-not-true/

Shari Weiss

Sarah Hyland, Wells Adams NOT Engaged, Despite Speculation

1:44 pm, May 18, 2018

['None']

faan-00082

There are “1.2 million more Canadians working now than ever before.”

factscan score: false

http://factscan.ca/stephen-harper-1-2-million-more-canadians-working/

All previous periods of employment were not 1.2 million jobs beneath today’s count. The difference in jobs from just before the latest recession to when this claim was made is almost 800,000 jobs.

Stephen Harper

2015-06-13

May 15, 2015

['Canada']

snes-03374

President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to cut Social Security benefits.

false

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-social-security/

Politics

David Emery

Did Donald Trump Say He Will Cut Social Security?

10 December 2016

['Donald_Trump']

snes-02089

A photograph shows Muhammad Ali with all of his winnings in 1964.

miscaptioned

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muhammad-ali-winnings-1964/

Fauxtography

Dan Evon

Is This Muhammad Ali with All of His Winnings in 1964?

10 July 2017

['Muhammad_Ali']

pomt-01448

I’ve been involved in prosecuting a terrorist member of ISIS.

false

/texas/statements/2014/oct/03/greg-abbott/unsupported-greg-abbott-says-he-helped-prosecute-t/

Republican Greg Abbott let fly a statement of seeming international significance in the Sept. 19, 2014, gubernatorial debate in the Rio Grande Valley. Abbott, the state attorney general, defended his decision not to ease public knowledge of where explosive fuels are stored before saying: "We’ve seen the rise of terrorism. I’ve been involved in prosecuting a terrorist member of ISIS." Democrat Wendy Davis didn’t challenge his prosecutorial claim. But we wondered. The Islamic State group, believed to have tens of thousands of fighters, wants to see the Middle East cleaned of Western influence and put under ultra-conservative religious law. Since June 2014, it’s beheaded hostages (including journalists) on camera, conducted mass executions, captured American weapons caches, demolished ancient shrines and laid deadly siege to ethnic communities. Our look into Abbott’s actions led us through his state office to a federal indictment, news stories and an interview of the wife of the Austin-area suspect at issue. Ultimately, Abbott’s statement struck us as lacking in factual footing -- including whether the cited individual can reasonably be judged a terrorist. In July 2013, PolitiFact identified no ironclad agreed-upon definition of terrorism, which has been defined differently across think tanks and federal agencies. That story noted Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University expert, wrote in 2006 that terrorism is "the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change." His logic was that "all terrorist acts involve violence or the threat of violence. Terrorism is specifically designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate victim or objects of the terrorist attack. It is meant to instill fear within, and thereby intimidate, a wider ‘target audience’ that might include a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country, a national government or political party, or public opinion in general." Abbott’s backup information By email, Abbott’s state spokesman, Jerry Strickland, told us Abbott was referring to 23-year-old Michael Todd Wolfe of Round Rock, who was arrested at a Houston airport on June 17, 2014, as he boarded a flight to Toronto, Canada. Ten days later, Wolfe pleaded guilty to charges he’d concealed a plot to provide resources to terrorists. According to a June 27, 2014, FBI press release, Wolfe had admitted in court "he planned to travel to the Middle East to provide his services to a foreign terrorist organization, namely, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham/Syria (ISIS)." As of early October 2014, he was imprisoned and awaiting sentencing. According to a June 18, 2014, FBI press release, Wolfe’s arrest resulted from a Central Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation conducted by the FBI in cooperation with 11 other public entities including the Office of the Texas Attorney General and extending to local police agencies and even the state department that regulates liquor sales. According to the release, the FBI investigated "together with the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, United States Army Intelligence, Austin Police Department, Round Rock Police Department, Killeen Police Department, University of Texas Police Department, Travis County Sheriff’s Office, Texas Department of Public Safety, Office of the Texas Attorney General and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission." Mindful the attorney general’s office doesn’t typically focus on criminal prosecutions, we asked Strickland to specify how Abbott and his office pitched in, fielding no reply to repeated inquiries. We also asked how Abbott concluded Wolfe was an Islamic State terrorist. By email, Strickland pointed out mentions of "jihad" and "battle" in the criminal complaint against Wolfe, which was signed by an FBI agent. Federal complaint According to the indictment, Wolfe violated a law (Title 18, United States Code §2339A) written in the PATRIOT Act of 2001. The law states anyone who "conceals or disguises the nature, location, source, or ownership" of "material support or resources" that are intended to prepare for or carry out acts of murder, kidnapping or maiming can be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison. Also on file in U.S. District Court in Austin: A 12-page sworn complaint against Wolfe signed by Blake Crow, an FBI agent who wrote that he was relying on testimony from agents whose identities couldn't be revealed. In the complaint, Crow describes multiple conversations with Wolfe touched off by Wolfe’s wife, Jordan Furr of Austin, when she spoke to an undercover agent about Wolfe’s desire to fight with "his brothers" in Syria, saying Wolfe "just wants to hop into Syria. He’s ready to die for his deen. He’s ready to die for someone, for something," the complaint said. Deen is an Arabic word meaning religion. Here’s our summary of key portions of the complaint: A different agent met Wolfe almost three months later, on October 26, 2013, and they discussed "violent jihad overseas." Five days later, the agent offered to help Wolfe organize a trip to the Middle East. Subsequently, agents met with Wolfe or his wife at least 15 times. On at least six occasions, between April and June 2014, agents phoned Wolfe to develop a travel plan. In one phone call the complaint describes, Wolfe expressed reluctance to go to Syria. When an agent called Wolfe on May 19, 2014, "Wolfe utilized coded language as he expressed concerns about traveling to join Jabhat al-Nusra based on information he’d learned about the group’s recent activities. Wolfe indicated he was more in line with another group." In a footnote, Crow, said he "believes the other group referred to by Wolfe is the Islamic State of Iraq in Syria (ISIS)." The agent called again on May 23, 2014, and told Wolfe that a man who would join them, another agent introduced to Wolfe as an experienced jihadist, "already had the respect of the brothers because he had referrals and recommendations." Wolfe, using coded language, "explained that, given the demographics of their group, it would make sense to go to the other ‘performance." In a footnote, Crow said he "believes that Wolfe’s discussion of the other "performance" was a reference to the Islamic State of Iraq in Syria (ISIS)." At the end of the phone call, "Wolfe indicated he had struggled with whether to stay or go, and stated, ‘...but now...I’m back to going, so I’m kinda like scrambling...’ with respect to financial issues." There were two more conversations between Wolfe and the agent in which Wolfe agreed to meet the agent in Denmark before they ventured together to Turkey. Crow said he "believes that Wolfe intended to ultimately intended to travel to Syria through Turkey, and engage in violent jihad." Another view Furr, in her first interview on this matter, gave a conflicting interpretation of the described events. The man who turned out to be an FBI agent, she said, encouraged her husband to go to Syria, via Turkey. Furr said Wolfe wouldn’t have agreed to do so without the agent’s pushing. Wolfe also didn’t plan to enter combat, she said, and didn’t agree to join the Islamic State group. Asked if Wolfe was a member of the Islamic State group, Furr said, "No, no, laughingly no. He doesn’t know anybody over there." But Wolfe pleaded guilty to the charges he planned to join the group, Furr said, because the FBI had insinuated the government would prosecute his friends and family if he didn’t. Membership in the Islamic State Weeks after Wolfe’s arrest, the Austin American-Statesman spoke with experts about homegrown terrorists. National "security experts cautioned against hyping up a terrorist threat in the United States, saying most defendants who have faced similar charges nationwide have been unorganized amateurs with little to contribute to armed conflicts abroad," the July 2, 2014, news story said. It’s not necessarily easy to tell if someone is a member of the Islamic State group, experts agreed. By phone, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Washington D.C.-based think tank Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, called the Islamic State group "an open network." "In part whether you’re a member ...depends on whether you call yourself a member," he said. However, he said, the Islamic State group "has a central command" based in Syria and Iraq that directs the group. "It’s not clear if someone is arrested as an" Islamic State group "member in Texas if they were acting on orders of central command or if central command is even aware of them," he said. By email, Henri Barkey, professor of International Relations and a Near East expert at Lehigh University, said he didn’t know at what point an individual could be considered a "member of ISIS." Barkley suggested we ask the person in question. We spoke briefly by phone with Wolfe’s court-appointed attorney, Horatio Aldredge, who declined to talk about Wolfe. Our ruling Abbott said he helped prosecute "a terrorist member of ISIS." Given Abbott’s silence on what exactly he or state lawyers did in connection with this case, we have no evidence to back up his declaration aside from a press release crediting a range of agencies including the attorney general and extending to the Killeen Police Department and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. That release doesn’t say any of the agencies prosecuted Wolfe. Abbott’s statement also relied on a broad definition of "terrorist" and "ISIS member." The federal complaint suggests that Wolfe may have sought to be those things but does not offer evidence that he had become either a terrorist or ISIS member. We rate the claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.

Greg Abbott

2014-10-03T13:00:00

2014-09-19

['None']

goop-02934

“Survivor: Game Changers” Recap: Who Was Voted Off Third?

10

https://www.gossipcop.com/survivor-game-changers-recap-march-15-2017-eliminated-caleb-voted-off/

Shari Weiss

“Survivor: Game Changers” Recap: Who Was Voted Off Third?

8:54 pm, March 15, 2017

['None']

snes-01014

Is the Florida High School Shooter a 'Dreamer'?

false

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-high-school-shooter-dreamer/

Horrors

Bethania Palma

Is the Florida High School Shooter a ‘Dreamer’?

14 February 2018

['None']

pomt-08129

150,000 (oil spill) claims have been filed by Floridians, but only 40 percent of them have been paid.

true

/florida/statements/2010/dec/08/alex-sink/alex-sink-says-bp-claims-administrator-slow-respon/

In her last meeting of the Florida Cabinet, state Chief Financial Officer and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink took BP claims administrator Ken Feinberg to task for failing to live up to his promise to swiftly respond to oil spill claims from Floridians and Florida business owners. Sink, who has been critical of BP and the handling of the claims process, said Floridians are having their claims denied without being given a reason, that people in similar situations are having their claims processed differently, and that Feinberg has been "incredibly unresponsive to Floridians and to Florida business owners. "It just reveals that this process continues to be inefficient," Sink said near the end of a five-hour Cabinet meeting on Dec. 7, 2010. "One hundred, fifty thousand claims have been filed by Floridians, but only 40 percent of them have been paid, a third of them have been denied ... and then we have 20 percent that are still in limbo land." Now, more than seven months after the initial Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, we wanted to see if Sink is describing the speed of the claims process correctly. To recap, President Barack Obama selected Feinberg to manage the disbursement of $20 billion provided by BP to compensate spill victims through something called the Gulf Coast Claims Facility. Feinberg has been criticized by politicians at the state and national level for months for what some politicians have called a much too slow response. Sink spokesman Kevin Cate pointed us to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility's own analysis as evidence of the slow claims process. Cate used the latest statistics available for Dec. 7. Claim figures Claims Number Percent Total filed 153,360 100 Paid or approved for payment 65,676 42.8 Denied 59,799 39 Under review or needing more documentation 27,885 18.2 We should note that as of Dec. 7, Feinberg has awarded more than $900 million to Floridians and Florida business owners. Almost all of the money paid out is compensation for lost earnings or profits. You can read the latest report for yourself here. In lashing out against BP claims administrator Feinberg, Sink noted that of all claims made in Florida following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, only 40 percent had been paid. She's just about right on. So far, about 43 percent of claims submitted by Floridians or Florida business owners have been paid, another 39 percent have been denied and a little more than 18 percent are still under some type of review. We rate Sink's claim True.

Alex Sink

2010-12-08T17:50:46

2010-12-07

['None']

pomt-08856

Rob Portman has taken more than $125,000 from "Big Oil."

mostly true

/ohio/statements/2010/aug/06/lee-fisher/lee-fisher-accuses-rob-portman-taking-big-contribu/

Big Oil is emerging as the Halliburton of the Democrats’ 2010 campaigns, a convenient villain that conjures images of spoiled beaches and oil-covered birds. And since a BP deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico began spewing crude after an April 20 explosion, "Big Oil" has become a synonym for "big industry that needs a whipping." That’s why Lee Fisher, the Ohio lieutenant governor running for U.S. Senate, is highlighting the "Big Oil" campaign donations that his opponent, Rob Portman, has received. Fisher, a Democrat, wants BP to pay for all damages and losses, and he suggests that Portman prefers lenience for BP. By noting the money the Republican’s campaign has received, Fisher implies that Portman will do BP’s bidding. In a June 16 statement, the Fisher campaign said: "To date, Congressman Rob Portman, who spent 20 years in Washington and has taken more than $125,000 from Big Oil for his Senate campaign, has remained silent on the BP spill, the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history." There are legitimate differences between the two candidates, and at the time Fisher’s campaign issued this statement, Portman’s views on BP weren’t known. But Portman subsequently told Ron Ponder, a Canton-area radio host, on June 30 that "I agree that they are responsible. I agree they ought to be paying not just for cleanup but for the economic damage that's been done." Still, Fisher’s statement on Portman’s silence appeared to be accurate when the claim was made. But what of the other part of the claim? Has Portman taken at least $125,000 from the oil industry? We checked first with CQMoneyLine, which sorts contribution information that the campaigns report to the Federal Election Commission. CQMoneyLine data shows that political action committees representing the energy and natural resources industries have donated $122,400 to Portman’s campaign. That’s awfully close to $125,000 -- but the individual contributions within that category include companies that are not in the oil or even natural gas exploration businesses. Several of those donations came from utility companies including the PACs of FirstEnergy Corp. and American Electric Power. Call them Big Electricity, but don’t call them Big Oil. Other donations came from PACs for nuclear energy, coal and even copper mining interests. So those should be taken out. In the spirit of generosity, we’ll leave in PAC contributions from firms such as Koch Industries and Halliburton, which conduct an array of oil and non-oil businesses, and we’ll even leave in those from natural gas companies that have only a small portion of their business in oil exploration or production. Even so, we found that at least $46,000 of that $122,400 had nothing to do with "Big Oil." That didn’t make Fisher wrong, however, because other groups aggregate the data differently and CQMoneyLine only measured PAC contributions, excluding donations from individuals who work for oil and gas companies. So we turned to the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent group that tracks campaign contributions. That’s where the Fisher campaign says it got its figure, in fact. The center’s website, www.opensecrets.org, puts Portman’s current political take from the oil and gas industries at $132,008. The figure is higher than Fisher’s claim of $125,000 because the data has been updated since the Fisher campaign first made the statement, according to a Fisher spokesman. An even higher figure for the oil and gas will probably emerge as new FEC filings are tallied. We wanted to drill down further, so the center gave us more detailed information than it has on its website, and we did some additional checking of lobbying records and original FEC filings from the Portman campaign. It appeared that Fisher’s claim about the sum of Portman’s "Big Oil" claim was largely correct. We then took out the PAC contributions of companies like Koch and Halliburton, since those companies engage in other businesses as well as oil, just to see how the numbers would change. That took us to $122,008, which is pretty close to Fisher’s $125,000 claim. But there are two caveats: Of the $132,008 listed by the Center for Responsive Politics, $58,000 came from the PACs of oil-related companies and $74,008 came from individuals. It appears that most of the individuals were top executives or officers of the companies, but there was inadequate information to know about every single one. In a spot check, we found an accountant and a human resources officer, for example. Without knowing the motives and politics of every single contributor, it is impossible for us – or for Fisher – to know whether accountants and personnel executives contributed to Portman because they want to further the aims of "Big Oil." That gets us back to BP, since BP’s spill and liability provided Fisher’s line of attack. Fisher suggested that Portman was ducking the hard questions on BP and, by citing the "Big Oil" contributions, Fisher implied that campaign money could be a reason. But BP has had only one contribution to Portman, according to the Center for Responsive Politics as well as CQ MoneyLine. It actually comes from the BP Corporation North America PAC. And it is for only $1,000 and was made on March 19, a month before the oil spill began. Fisher’s number is essentially correct, but it’s important to note that the the bulk of the contributions came from oil industry employees, not the companies themselves. So we rate Fisher’s claim Mostly True. Comment on this item.

Lee Fisher

2010-08-06T08:00:00

2010-06-16

['None']

pomt-02750

Says he would have "almost twice the actual experience practicing law" Greg Abbott did on becoming attorney general of Texas.

half-true

/texas/statements/2013/dec/16/sam-houston/sam-houston-private-practice-longer-greg-abbott-wa/

The only Democrat running for Texas attorney general claims more experience in practicing law than the incumbent started the job with. Sam Houston, a Houston lawyer unrelated to the historical figure of the same name, includes this on his campaign website: "As a practicing Texas attorney with 26 years of experience, Sam Houston would enter the Attorney General’s office with almost twice the actual experience practicing law than did Greg Abbott." It’s an all-lawyer field bidding to replace gubernatorial hopeful Abbott, though state law doesn’t require that the attorney general be a practicing lawyer. The Republicans running in the March 2014 primary are state Rep. Dan Branch of Dallas, who chairs the House Higher Education Committee, who got his law license in 1983, according to the State Bar of Texas’ website; freshman state Sen. Ken Paxton of McKinney, vice chair of the Senate Transportation Committee and former House member licensed to practice law in 1991; and Texas Railroad Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman of Austin, licensed in 1984. Houston told us by phone that though he’s not addressing his potential opponents’ experience with this claim, he is making a statement about elected officials holding the position. "What I think is wrong with the AG’s office is it’s been politicized," he said. "I frankly think litigation experience is extremely important," he said, naming skills such as deciding which cases to pursue and advising clients. The attorney general acts as the state’s chief lawyer, whose duties as identified in the Texas Constitution include representing Texas in state Supreme Court cases, preventing corporations from exercising illegal powers or collecting illegal taxes and giving legal advice to state officials. Both Abbott and his predecessor, John Cornyn, were judges before becoming attorney general, Houston noted. "It’s a fine thing to be a judge, but that’s a different skill set," he said. Abbott and Houston both got bachelor’s degrees at the University of Texas; Houston’s law degree is from Baylor University and Abbott’s from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. According to the bar association, Abbott’s law license is dated Nov. 8, 1985, and Houston’s Nov. 6, 1987. News stories from Texas papers covering Abbott’s past campaigns and positions said he started his law career at Butler and Binion in Houston. There, the Dallas Morning News wrote Oct. 22, 2002, Abbott "focused on tort litigation, doing work for banks and defending hospitals against malpractice claims." Abbott was elected a state trial judge in Harris County’s 129th District Court in 1992 and served three terms. Appointed by then-Gov. George W. Bush to the Texas Supreme Court in 1995, Abbott started there in 1996 and won election twice to stay there. He resigned in June 2001 to run for another office, the news stories said, meantime becoming an appellate lawyer at Bracewell and Patterson in Austin. Human resources assistant Vira Santellena at the Houston office of the firm, now called Bracewell and Giuliani, told us by phone that Abbott was employed there from August 2001 through November 2002. In November 2002, Abbott defeated Democrat Kirk Watson, now a state senator from Austin, and was sworn in as attorney general Dec. 2, 2002. Judging by the dates involved, Abbott lawyered for Butler and Binion seven years, from about November 1987 through November 1992, then a year and a half at Bracewell and Patterson. That’d round up to nine years of private practice. Mary Bell, a spokeswoman for Houston, told us by phone, "What we’re saying is if you add up his private practice, that’s nine years." As she emailed us career information on both men, she added, "If you were to include" Abbott’s "time on the bench as time he was a practicing attorney, the total years is 17. Sam enters this race as a candidate with 26 years as a practicing attorney." Houston’s career is easier to sum up because he’s worked since 1992 for a firm he helped start -- Shepherd, Scott, Clawater and Houston, formerly Cruse, Scott, Henderson and Allen. The firm changed its name in April 2010, office administrator Regina Thompson told us by phone. After law school, according to news stories and Bell’s information, Houston began in 1987 at Andrews Kurth in Houston. Thompson said he started with Cruse, Scott on the firm’s first day, June 1, 1992, and is now a co-managing partner. A Feb. 25, 2008, Houston Chronicle news story about Houston’s 2008 state Supreme Court bid said Houston had been doing "mostly civil defense work, but he also has represented plaintiffs." Starting the clock in November 1987, Houston’s lawyering experience will total 27 years by the 2014 election. To count or not to count Abbott’s nine-ish years on the bench? We can see one school of thought might be that most people think of "practicing law" as representing clients. Then again, the state Supreme Court counts years on the bench toward the requirement that its justices must have practiced law for 10 years (district judges need only have been licensed in Texas for four years). Houston asked us to look at specific parts of the state’s codes of judicial conduct and the law governing the Texas bar. The code of conduct says a Texas judge "shall not practice law except as permitted by state law or this code"; exceptions we saw mostly allow judges to give legal advice to or draft documents for their own families and teach or write about law. State law on what constitutes "unauthorized conduct of law" says, "In this chapter the ‘practice of law’ means" preparing a plea or other document in response to legal action, managing such an action or acting on behalf of a client in court, as well as services outside court such as giving advice or drafting wills and contracts. In addition, reference librarian Ruth Harrison at the Texas State Law Library found us the Black’s Law Dictionary definition for "practice of law," which makes no mention of judicial experience: The professional work of a duly licensed lawyer, encompassing a broad range of services such as conducting cases in court, preparing papers necessary to bring about various transactions from conveying land to effecting corporate mergers, preparing legal opinions on various points of law, drafting wills and other estate-planning documents, and advising clients on legal questions. Our ruling Houston, who’s nearing 27 years of private practice, said he would have "almost twice the actual experience practicing law" that Abbott did on taking office. That would require Houston to have 18 years’ experience if only Abbott’s private practice is tallied, but 34 years if Abbott’s time as a judge is counted We rate Houston’s claim as Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.

Sam Houston

2013-12-16T11:24:17

2013-12-13

['Texas']

pomt-12465

Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.

pants on fire!

/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/may/08/raul-labrador/raul-labradors-claim-no-one-dies-lack-health-care-/

What Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, told a restive town hall audience in Lewiston, Idaho, was destined to go viral. And it did. At the May 5, 2017, event, questioners asked the congressman about the Republicans’ vote the previous day on a major health care overhaul that would roll back many aspects of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, including limits on expanding Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor. "You are mandating people on Medicaid accept dying," one audience member said. To which Labrador responded, "No no, you know that line is so indefensible. Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care." The crowd howled in protest, and the comment drew immediate national attention. Writing in CNN, political commentator Chris Cillizza awarded his "Worst Week in Washington" award to Labrador, saying that the congressman had essentially handed Democrats a video clip that was "a ready-made attack line against every vulnerable House Republican." Given all the attention to Labrador’s comment, we decided to fact-check it. It’s not our first time looking at a similar question. Because of varied results from academic papers, we have struggled since 2009 about how to rate claims that a specific number of people die every year because they were uninsured -- a common talking point for Democrats. We found it difficult to pinpoint a specific number. However, Labrador’s statement put a different twist on the question. Rather than saying that a specific number of people had died due to lack of health insurance, Labrador said that no one had. Could that be right? Labrador’s explanation When we contacted Labrador’s office, his staff pointed us to a Facebook post where he explained his remark the following day and accused the media for only focusing on a few seconds of a longer discussion. "During ten hours of town halls, one of my answers about health care wasn’t very elegant," Labrador wrote. "I was responding to a false notion that the Republican health care plan will cause people to die in the streets, which I completely reject. ... In the five-second clip that the media is focusing on, I was trying to explain that all hospitals are required by law to treat patients in need of emergency care regardless of their ability to pay and that the Republican plan does not change that." (Here’s the full exchange as posted by Labrador’s office.) However, even if you buy the argument that emergency room care would protect the uninsured, that leaves out a whole range of chronic and potentially deadly diseases -- from heart disease to diabetes -- that can be prevented only through long-term access to physicians. A literature review We found at least seven academic papers that detected a link between securing health insurance and a decline in mortality. In general, these papers present a stronger consensus that having insurance saves lives. • In 2002, a panel of more than a dozen medical specialists convened by the federally chartered Institute of Medicine estimated that 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 because they were uninsured. In January 2008, Stan Dorn, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, published a paper that sought to update the IOM study with newer data. Replicating the study’s methodology, Dorn concluded that the figure should be increased to 22,000. • A 2009 American Journal of Public Health study concluded that a lack of health insurance "is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease." • Three studies looked at state-level expansions of Medicaid and in each case found "significant" improvements in mortality after such expansions of coverage. These include a 2012 New England Journal of Medicine study of New York, Maine, and Arizona by Harvard researchers, and a 2014 study of Massachusetts by researchers from Harvard and the Urban Institute. • A 2014 study published by the health policy publication Health Affairs looked at states that, at the time, had declined to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It estimated that the 25 states studied would have collectively avoided between 7,000 and 17,000 deaths. • A 2014 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found improved survival rates for young adults with cancer after securing insurance under the Affordable Care Act. • A 2017 study in the journal Medical Care looked at a provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows young adults to be covered under a parent’s policy. The study found a decline in mortality among this population from diseases amenable to preventive treatment. (Mortality from trauma, such as car accidents, saw no decrease, as would be expected.) Any contrary views? We found two papers that might conceivably provide support for Labrador’s position. But as we’ll see, even the papers’ authors did not agree with Labrador. • A paper published in April 2009 in HSR: Health Services Research. In it, Richard Kronick of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California (San Diego) School of Medicine, raised questions about the conclusions of the seminal Institute of Medicine study from 2002. Kronick’s study adjusted the data -- as the IOM had not -- for a number of demographic and health factors, including status as a smoker and body mass index, and found that doing so removed the excess number of deaths found in the original study. • A 2013 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine co-authored by Katherine Baicker of Harvard University compared about 6,000 patients in Oregon who got coverage through a 2008 Medicaid expansion and about 6,000 who didn’t. While the study found improvements in out-of-pocket medical spending and lower rates of depression among those who got coverage, key benchmarks for physical health -- including blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar -- did not improve in such patients. So we asked both of these papers’ authors whether their papers could be used as justification for what Labrador said. "Rep. Labrador is misinformed," Kronick said. "Common sense, as well as the accumulated weight of evidence is sufficient to convince any reasonable analyst that lack of health insurance results in excess morbidity (that is, sickness) and mortality." Baicker, too, said she sees "strong evidence" that Labrador’s statement "is false. I agree that the exact number is up for debate, but the fact that it is more than zero seems clear to me." Every other health policy analyst who responded to us for this article agreed that Labrador was wrong. Some saw common sense as equally persuasive as the peer-reviewed research. "I was just at a physicians’ meeting where people described patients they had treated who had died because of a lack of coverage," said Harold Pollack, an urban public health researcher at the University of Chicago. "Everyone who does this for a living has personally experienced it in one way or another." Our ruling At the town hall, Labrador said, "Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care." Extensive research over the previous decade generally points to tangible reductions in mortality after patients obtain health insurance. Two papers found more equivocal results, but we reached authors of both papers, and they agreed that their findings do not support Labrador’s remark. While the exact number of deaths saved by having health insurance is uncertain, the researchers we contacted agreed that the number is higher than zero -- probably quite a bit higher. We rate his statement Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com

Raul Labrador

2017-05-08T15:39:22

2017-05-05

['None']

tron-03114

Starbucks CEO: If You Support Traditional Marriage, We Don’t Want Your Business

fiction!

https://www.truthorfiction.com/starbucks-ceo-if-you-support-traditional-marriage-we-dont-want-your-business/

politics

Starbucks CEO: If You Support Traditional Marriage, We Don’t Want Your Business

Sep 9, 2015

['None']

pomt-00420

When the law stopped Tony Evers from revoking a teacher's license for viewing pornography, Tony worked with lawmakers from both parties to change the law so offenders could be kicked out of the classroom.

half-true

/wisconsin/statements/2018/aug/29/greater-wisconsin-political-fund/hitting-back-group-defends-dem-governor-candidate-/

Who would have thought an 8-year-old case of a Madison-area teacher viewing pornography would become, prominently and repeatedly, a flashpoint in the 2018 campaign for governor? Three times, the state Republican Party has run attack ads against Tony Evers, the Democratic nominee, tying him to the teacher. (In fact, as we were preparing this fact check, the GOP released another, though broader attack ad, tying Evers to that case and two others.) None of the first three GOP ads fared well in our assessments. All of our fact checks in the governor’s race. Now, the liberal Greater Wisconsin Committee is coming to the defense of Evers, the state schools superintendent, in the Madison-area teacher case. Its TV ad, released Aug. 20, 2018, makes this two-part claim: When the law stopped Tony Evers from revoking a teacher's license for viewing pornography, Tony worked with lawmakers from both parties to change the law so offenders could be kicked out of the classroom. On the first part of the claim, the ad’s use of the word stopped goes a bit too far. Meanwhile, the ad partially undercuts itself on the second part. While the narrator is saying Evers "worked with lawmakers" to change the law, which is a fair characterization, words on the screen go too far in declaring: "Evers changed the law." Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter: @PolitiFactWisc. The case The ad alludes to the case of Andy Harris, a middle-school science teacher in the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, west of Madison. He was fired in 2010 for viewing images of nudity on his school computer and showing at least one of them to a female co-worker. Harris got his job back after an arbitrator ruled he had been improperly fired. The arbitrator concluded that Harris’ behavior did not endanger any students — a necessary factor under state law at the time. The decision to give Harris back his job was upheld by two courts. All our fact checks in the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race. Evers’ role Evers did have the discretion on whether to go through license revocation proceedings, which Harris could have challenged. But Evers decided against seeking revocation after concluding, as the arbitrator did, that the teacher’s behavior didn’t endanger kids, as defined by the law at that time. In other words, in the view of Evers’ department, there was no legal basis to take away Harris’ license. The law At the time, state law defined immoral conduct in such cases as "conduct or behavior that is contrary to commonly accepted moral or ethical standards and that endangers the health, safety, welfare, or education of any pupil." After the Harris case, the law was changed so that immoral conduct includes "the intentional use of an educational agency’s equipment to download, view, solicit, seek, display, or distribute pornographic material." That is, the part about endangering students was removed, a change that was backed by Evers and signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who Evers will face in the general election. GOP state Rep. Steve Kestell, who authored the bill, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Evers’ Department of Public Instruction did not push the bill. The Greater Wisconsin Committee did not respond to our requests for information to back the statement in the ad. But emails provided to the Journal Sentinel, and to us, by Evers’ department show the department worked with lawmakers in the sense that the department’s legislative liaison discussed the legislation with Kestell as it was being drafted. And department officials testified at hearings in favor of the legislation. But while Evers played a supportive role he did not, despite the words on the screen in the ad, change the law himself or even take the lead in doing so. Our rating The Greater Wisconsin Committee says: "When the law stopped Tony Evers from revoking a teacher's license for viewing pornography, Tony worked with lawmakers from both parties to change the law so offenders could be kicked out of the classroom." On the first part of the claim, the state law in place at the time didn’t actually stop Evers from trying to revoke the license who viewed pornography at school. Evers could have initiated revocation proceedings, which the teacher could have challenged. But Evers concluded that the law didn’t allow for a revocation because the teacher’s behavior didn’t endanger children. The same conclusion had been reached by an arbitrator. And two courts upheld the arbitrator’s decision. Moreover, the fact that Evers’ department backed, and Walker signed, a change in the law supports the idea that the law didn’t favor revocation at the time. On the second part of the claim, Evers did work with lawmakers to change the law, as the narrator states in the ad, but he didn’t change the law as words on the screen in the ad claim. For a statement that is partially accurate, our rating is Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com

Greater Wisconsin Committee

2018-08-29T06:00:00

2018-08-20

['None']

pomt-03082

One out of four corporations doesn't pay a nickel in (federal income) taxes.

half-true

/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/26/bernie-sanders/sanders-one-out-four-corporations-pay-no-taxes/

The taxes paid, or not paid, by corporations is a perennial topic in Washington. There is broad agreement that the current rules should be changed but no consensus on what those changes ought to be. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., pulled out a dramatic statistic during a Sept. 24, 2013, back-and-forth with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on CNN’s Crossfire. "One out of four corporations doesn't pay a nickel in taxes," Sanders said. The two senators were talking about federal income taxes, and we decided we should check to see if Sanders’ claim is accurate. In the context of his debate with Graham, the implication is that if it weren't for special deals in the tax code, these companies would be writing checks to the Internal Revenue Service. Sanders' office pointed us to a Government Accountability Office study from 2008. The GAO conducts analysis for Congress. In one sense, that study found that Sanders understated the situation. For all corporations, about two-thirds, or about 1.2 million, paid no federal income taxes in 2005. But many of those firms are quite small -- an owner and a couple of employees. For large U.S.-controlled corporations, those with at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts, one out of four paid no taxes, as Sanders said. The total revenues for those large companies was about $1.08 trillion. That, however, is not the end of the story. Why they owe no taxes We will focus on the large corporations because those seemed to be the ones Sanders had in mind. The GAO study found that 80 percent of those firms reported no income at the point in their tax return when they subtracted salaries and wages and took other deductions. That is, they showed a gross profit based on selling items for more than it cost to produce them, but they had additional expenses after that, such as payroll and tax deductions, which drove their taxable income to zero. The GAO lumped together firms that paid no taxes because they failed to turn a profit and those that were profitable but used additional wrinkles in the tax code to avoid paying the government. Distinguishing between those two groups sheds light on the situation. Citizens for Tax Justice is a research group that has as one of its goals "requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share." It has written in defense of Sanders’ positions before, but its most recent study of corporate tax payments suggests that the one-in-four statistic might be less significant than it seems. Steve Wamhoff, the group’s legislative director, said their 2011 report started with the Fortune 500 companies and culled the ones that met two criteria: they had three consecutive years of profitability from 2008 to 2010, and they provided enough information to do an accurate analysis. Of the 500, 220 did not meet those standards. With some notable exceptions, such as Google and Microsoft, the primary reason those 220 companies fell off the list was they had real losses. "We get the fact that if you have profits one year but not the next year, you would carry your losses forward," Wamhoff said. "We get that, but if you’ve been profitable for three years straight, those are the ones who really should be paying taxes." Of the 280 consistently profitable corporations that remained, the study found that 22 paid no taxes in 2008, 49 paid none in 2009, and 37 paid none in 2010. Across all three years, there were 30 corporations that had a tax rate of zero or even a negative rate. The negative rate meant they might get a rebate check from Washington or have a tax credit they could apply to future earnings. Many familiar names show up in this list, such as Wells Fargo, Boeing, Verizon and General Electric. In the study’s three-year span, those 30 companies had pre-tax profits of about $160 billion, but their direct contribution to the federal treasury was zero. Citizens for Tax Justice pointed the finger at the rules for accelerated depreciation and stock options. The report said these and various other deductions allowed the firms to avoid hefty tax bills. However, those policy matters fall outside the scope of this fact check. A lack of profits tends to reduce the tax bill For fact-checking purposes, the Citizens for Tax Justice findings are interesting for another reason. If pre-tax losses explain why a large number of firms would not owe the government money, then the meaning of Sanders’ claim begins to look quite different. We would not expect a firm without profits to pay taxes. The GAO study did not probe this deeply. The Citizens for Tax Justice did, albeit for a smaller group of corporations. In rough terms, out of the original 500 corporations, 220 or about 40 percent were dealing with losses. The study found 78 consitently profitable companies, or about 15 percent of the original 500, that paid no taxes in at least one year. That is less than one out of four; it’s closer to one out of six. If we look at the 30 that paid nothing in any year, the ratio drops to one out of 16. Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, generally seen as a centrist think tank, cautions against reading too much into the 2008 GAO study. In a blog post written shortly after it was released, he called it "interesting and suggestive, though also not conclusive." Toder noted that most corporations are quite small with gross receipts of less than $250,000. They report no income because the money turns up as paychecks to the owner and employers where it is subject to the individual income tax. He agreed that some large corporations use "aggressive techniques to shift reported profits to low-tax jurisdictions," but even those end up paying some U.S. taxes. Toder’s bottom line on the one out of four statistic? "Whatever the technical factual basis of the statement, it isn’t terribly meaningful or revealing." William McBride, chief economist at the Tax Foundation, a group that promotes lower taxes, finds Sanders’ ratio "misleading." McBride, as do the other analysts we contacted, pointed to the costs of doing business. His list included salaries and wages, interest, depreciation, rent and other taxes. "You cannot legitimately deny these businesses these write-offs," McBride said. Our ruling Sanders said that one out of four corporations doesn’t pay a nickel in taxes. The statement reflects a 2008 study from the Government Accountability Office. However, the GAO study did not distinguish between firms that had losses in the normal course of business and those that reported losses solely through the use of the tax code. Groups along the political spectrum give much weight to the costs of doing business that can lead to a bad year. There is wide agreement that losses in one year can be carried forward and that salaries are an unavoidable expense, to mention just two factors. Special tax breaks and abuses of the tax code exist but even an analysis from a group that shares many of Sanders’ perspectives pointed to a ratio that was, at most, one out of six and possibly as small as one out of 16. The one out of four statistic fails to take into account many relevant factors. We rate the claim Half True.

Bernie Sanders

2013-09-26T17:58:01

2013-09-24

['None']

pomt-07139

Anywhere in the world, when someone uses a mobile phone, e-mail, the Internet or GPS, they are enjoying the benefits of the American miracle.

mostly true

/florida/statements/2011/jun/15/marco-rubio/rubio-says-mobile-phone-email-internet-gps-stem-am/

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio used his first speech on the Senate floor, on June 14, 2011, to evoke the American dream. The so-called maiden speech is a "big deal for a senator," said fellow Florida Sen. Bill Nelson — and Rubio went for big ideas. "America is not perfect," said the freshman Republican, the child of Cuban immigrants. "... But since her earliest days, America has inspired people from all over the world. Inspired them with the hope that one day their own countries would be one like this one. Many others decided they could not wait. And so they came here from everywhere, to pursue their dreams and to work to leave their children better off than themselves. And the result was the American miracle." As he held the floor for nearly 15 minutes, Rubio highlighted rags-to-riches stories that he said happen "only in America," describing the founders of Nordstrom, Mattel and eBay. When he finished, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., commended him, saying, "No one expresses American exceptionalism better than Sen. Rubio." Rubio traced America’s role in the 20th century, from two world wars to the Cold War and the defeat of communism. Then he turned to other contributions: While our military and foreign policy contributions helped save the world, it was our economic and cultural innovations that helped transform it. The fruits of the American miracle can be found in the daily lives of people everywhere. Anywhere in the world, when someone uses a mobile phone, e-mail, the Internet or GPS, they are enjoying the benefits of the American miracle. Anywhere in the world, when a bone marrow, lung or heart transplant saves a life, they are touched by the value of the American miracle. And on one night in July of 1969, the whole world witnessed the American miracle firsthand. For on that night an American walked on the surface of the moon, and it was clear to the whole world that these Americans… could do anything. We briefly considered wading into fringe conspiracy theories about whether astronauts actually walked on the moon, but got control of ourselves. We were more curious about his other technology claims. Were Americans truly the ones responsible for innovation of the mobile phone, e-mail, the Internet and the global positioning system? We dropped a line to Rubio spokesman Alex Burgos, who provided us with links about inventors of the mobile phone, e-mail, the Internet and GPS. Indeed, stories from The Telegraph (via Huffington Post), NPR, the Internet Society, PBS and MITnews identify American origins for all four technologies. But these are complex systems that have developed over time. We wondered: Was there more to the story? Mobile phone A lot fits under the umbrella "mobile phone" -- including, say, early radio technology that led to car phones by the 1940s. But Rubio’s spokesman pointed to the inventor of the first portable cellular phone, which is fine by us. (Did you think of dawn-of-the-1900s ship-to-shore communication when Rubio said "mobile phone"? We didn’t think so.) Martin Cooper worked for Illinois company Motorola as it developed the DynaTAC phone and the cellular network behind it in the early 1970s. The lead engineer for the team that developed the phone, Martin made the first wireless call from Manhattan in 1973. The FCC approved the phone -- the world’s first commercial portable cell phone -- for regular folks in 1983. Now, Japan and some European countries were quicker to deploy cellular networks, in the late ‘70s and very early ‘80s. But Paul Levinson, a Fordham University professor who wrote the 2004 book "Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!" says it’s the phone that matters. "That was the breakthrough," he said "There were several different companies and scientists working on it. … But no one believed that it could be done. … So everything that came afterwards was based on that first breakthrough." An American breakthrough. Score one for Rubio. Internet & E-mail We read the work from the Internet Society and PBS that Burgos sent our way, then exchanged messages with Stephen Stein, who teaches the history of technology at the University of Memphis. Computer networks that led to the Internet we know today include Arpanet , a 1970s project of the U.S. Department of Defense, and NSFnet, created by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s. These projects, with their indisputably American roots, provided two cornerstones of the modern-day Web: the TCP/IP protocol and a major communications backbone. But Stein pointed out that the way we interact with the Internet owes much to the work of Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist who worked for CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. It was there -- in the late ‘80s as NSFnet was being developed in the United States -- that Berners-Lee "developed the whole concept of the World Wide Web," Stein said. (There’s more on this in a PBS article related to the one Burgos sent.) HTTP? HTML? Both Berners-Lee. "So, yes, Americans developed the Internet, but Berners-Lee made it user-friendly," Stein said. Meanwhile, Virginia Tech scholar Janet Abbate says in her 1999 book "Inventing the Internet," published by MIT Press, that even in the expansion of Arpanet , Americans enlisted the help of computer experts from England and France. She also points to Berners-Lee’s contributions, saying, "The history of the Internet is not … a story of a few heroic inventors; it is a tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players." The origins of e-mail, as you might expect, are entwined with the Internet. Electronic mail was part of the development of Arpanet in the early ‘70s, according to Stein, Abbate and others. American programmer Ray Tomlinson gets credit (and tongue-in-cheek blame) for the first working network mail program, picked up by users of Arpanet sites. Here's what Abbate told us when we asked her about Rubio's claim. "I think it's an overstatement to call the Internet a purely American product. Certainly other countries were building their own computer networks (and inter-networks) in parallel with the U.S.; these other networks eventually became part of the Internet," Abbate said. "Also, the Internet itself (as opposed to the earlier Apranet) was a collaborative effort with input from computer scientists in France and elsewhere, and I argue in my book that the diversity of input made the resulting system stronger. I do think the U.S. did a remarkably good job with the Internet design and expansion, maybe better than anyone else would or could have done. But if the resulting Internet hadn't suited other countries' needs, they were perfectly capable of creating their own networks (indeed, for a while there were a number of different competing network systems before TCP/IP eventually became the standard). "And of course, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN, not in the US or by an American. So does that mean we in the U.S. are enjoying the benefits of the "Swiss miracle" every time we use the Web?" GPS The satellite technology that puts some of the smart in your smart phone and informs your car’s navigation system is a system of satellites funded by taxpayers and operated by the U.S. government. So calling the global positioning system an "American miracle" is no stretch. The technology was born at Aerospace Corp., a military research contractor in El Segundo, Calif. Its founding president was New York native Ivan Getting. That isn’t to say there aren’t foreign navigation satellites. The United States cooperates with Australia, China, the European Union, India, Japan and Russia on global navigation satellite systems, sometimes referred to as GNSS. But Rubio said GPS, and the history there is fairly clear -cut. The ruling What to make of all of this? Rubio's basic point, that the technology behind mobile phones, e-mail, the Internet and GPS all have American roots, holds up. It’s true "in a general sense," said Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who writes on our relationship with technology. Or, as the University of Memphis professor, Stein, put it: "The statement is superficially correct, but there is (as usual) more to the story." Stein was most concerned about the non-American role in the development of the Internet, especially the substantial contribution of England's Berners-Lee. It’s also important to note in the context of Rubio’s "only in America" rhetoric that while the United States led, it wasn’t alone in its innovation. Other nations’ researchers contributed to the early Internet; commercial mobile phone networks were available overseas before they were in America; other nations operate satellite navigation systems. But in these areas and many others, Americans can claim primacy. We rate Rubio’s statement, that "when someone uses a mobile phone, e-mail, the Internet or GPS, they are enjoying the benefits of the American miracle," Mostly True.

Marco Rubio

2011-06-15T17:57:59

2011-06-14

['United_States']

pomt-02234

More "25- to 34-year-olds are moving to Austin than any other city in America."

mostly false

/texas/statements/2014/apr/15/will-wynn/austin-area-slips-no-5-among-major-metro-area-numb/

Former Austin Mayor Will Wynn, who often speaks on urban growth, suggested that Austin’s attractiveness to retirees and young Americans helps explain demand for downtown housing. "As our society ages, and as boomers start retiring by the millions, we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the demand for dense urban multifamily housing, with a broad mix of uses nearby," Wynn told the Austin American-Statesman for a March 30, 2014, news story headlined "Austin’s rebuilding boom." "Couple that with the fact that more 25- to 34-year-olds are moving to Austin than any other city in America," Wynn said, "and you’ve got yourself a hell of a strong demand for urban housing. I tell people that by any way you possibly measure it — quality of life, public safety, environmental sustainability, public health and fitness, economic — mixed-use density is literally the answer." Density preferences aside, is Wynn right that more young adults are moving to Austin than to any other U.S. city? Wynn recalls a newspaper story By phone and email, Wynn said he learned of Austin’s draw from a Statesman news story citing U.S Census Bureau research. He didn’t have the story handy, but we found a March 30, 2013, Statesman news story stating that analyses of U.S Census Bureau data by William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, found that from 2009 through 2011, the Austin metro area drew more Americans in the cited age span than any other U.S. city--just as the area did the previous three years, the story said. Frey, the newspaper said, measured rates for annual average net migration (including people who left Austin) of young adults ages 25 to 34 and young adults with college degrees. "Austin hits the trifecta," Frey said then. "It's got jobs, cachet, it's got people who see that it's a pathway to careers, either because they go there to get an education or to use an education." Frey further said jobs typically are the top reason people move. Twenty-somethings traditionally have the highest rates of mobility, and college graduates typically are more willing to move out of state for jobs because they tend to compete for them in national markets, Frey said then. Updated analysis places Austin-Round Rock fifth But there's been a change in the rankings, according to Frey’s Nov. 15, 2013, analysis of more recent census data. The Austin-Round Rock metro area placed fifth among 51 major metro areas as a draw on "millennials," adults in the cited age group, from 2009 through 2012, according to a chart posted online by Brookings. Over those three years, the Austin-Round Rock area had an average annual gain of 8,061 25- to 34-year-olds, Frey wrote. Washington, D.C., ranked first among major metro areas with an average annual gain of 12,583 people in the age group, he wrote. Also, the Denver, Portland, Ore., and Houston areas netted greater gains than the Austin area, according to Frey’s breakdown. On the Brookings site, Frey described the D.C. results as a "renewal of young adults in the post-recession period… compared to the loss of young adults during the recession. The existence of both government and non-government employment opportunities in a highly educated ‘millennial friendly’ environment make the nation’s capital an attractive destination until migration flows to a broader group of areas emerge. "A few other areas, including San Francisco and Minneapolis, have showed a rising post-recession young adult boom as well," Frey wrote. His chart shows the San Francisco area ranked sixth among major metro areas with an average annual gain of 7,688 such young adults in the three years. The Minneapolis area, 11th among major metros, had an average annual gain of 3,708 adults in the age group, according to the chart. Researcher says No. 5 isn't so bad To our inquiry, Frey said by email that while Austin’s rank fell between the cited time periods, there is another way to compare--by the rate of change in such adults settling in major metro areas. By that measure, Frey added, the Austin-Round Rock area’s 2.7 net gain per 100 25- to 34-year-olds placed it second among major metros only to the Denver area, which had a 3.0 rate, he said. Still, Frey said he considers numeric gains to be a more accurate measure of where migrants are going. Numeric gains, he said, are "not affected by the size of the destination population In other words, among all the places in the country, which places are gaining the biggest aggregate numbers of migrants? The rate, is more of an ‘impact’ measure: how are recent migrants affecting the destination population?" Generally, Frey said, the Austin area "has both educational and employment opportunities relevant to young people who are looking to advance -- especially during a period when many other places have taken sharp employment hits. Even if young people coming to Austin are not getting their dream jobs right away, they will be networking with others who might make that happen. This will not be the case in many other places." We wondered why Austin’s rank slipped. Frey said that as the economy "slowly revives elsewhere, there will be competitors, but being number two or number five" isn’t bad, he wrote. Wynn, apprised of the Austin area’s latest ranking, speculated by email that Austin by itself, rather than the metro area, draws more young adults than any other U.S. city. Our ruling Wynn said more 25- to 34-year-olds are moving to Austin than any other city in America. Wynn did not offer nor did we find data specific to individual cities. But four major metro areas, led by Washington, D.C., netted more new residents in the cited age group in the latest three years checked by Brookings demographer James Frey. The Austin area ranked fifth among the nation’s major metros. We see no basis for currently declaring Austin No. 1, but Wynn's claim has an element of truth; the Austin area was the biggest draw for young adults in some recent three-year periods. We rate his statement as Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.

Will Wynn

2014-04-15T15:25:57

2014-03-30

['United_States', 'Austin,_Texas']

goop-00500

Ben Affleck Worried Jennifer Garner Divorce Is Hurting Career?

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-jennifer-garner-divorce-career/

Andrew Shuster

Ben Affleck Worried Jennifer Garner Divorce Is Hurting Career?

2:13 pm, August 8, 2018

['Ben_Affleck']

afck-00188

The manufacturing sector created more than 7,000 new jobs during the first six months of 2016.

incorrect

https://africacheck.org/reports/zumas-anc-birthday-speech-6-claims-fact-checked/

Zuma’s ANC birthday speech: 6 claims fact-checked

2017-01-12 09:06

['None']

tron-01616

Executive Order Gives Pay Raise to Vice President, Members of Congress and Federal Workers

truth!

https://www.truthorfiction.com/biden-pay-raise/

government

Executive Order Gives Pay Raise to Vice President, Members of Congress and Federal Workers

Mar 17, 2015

['None']

pomt-09711

There is majority support for the Democrats' health care plans.

mostly false

/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/nov/02/valerie-jarrett/jarrett-claims-obama-has-majority-support-health-c/

As Democratic health care reform bills move toward votes in the House and the Senate, supporters and opponents alike have tried to harness public opinion polls to bolster their own arguments. One recent example came during the Nov. 1, 2009, edition of ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos , during a question-and-answer session with White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. STEPHANOPOULOS: "Our latest polling shows that there is not majority support for the president's health care plans." JARRETT: "Well, we actually think that there is. And I suppose it depends upon what poll you're looking at." We decided to put Jarrett's claim to the test by looking at roughly the last six weeks of public opinion polls that asked questions related to general support for, or opposition to, health proposals put forward by the president or by Democrats generally. We chose the past six weeks to keep the data fresh in this fast-changing debate. Before looking at the data, we should explain which polls we have decided to include, and not include, in our study. Our main starting point for polling information was the Web site pollster.com , a nonpartisan site affiliated with National Journal magazine that maintains a constantly updated database of poll releases. We tried to stick to questions that focused on general support or opposition to the plan, rather than more specific details such as whether to offer a government-run "public option" for health insurance, because the number of possible poll questions would quickly get out of hand. In addition, we decided to include only independently sponsored telephone polls and exclude Internet-based polls. Making this distinction hurts the president's cause somewhat, because one Internet poll -- the Economist /YouGov poll -- has on several recent occasions shown a small majority of respondents in favor of the Democratic plan. But we have decided to exclude Internet polls to remain consistent with mainstream professional opinion, which does not yet consider Internet polling to be as trustworthy as telephone polling. We are, however, including telephone polls conducted by machines rather than live humans. Also, since Jarrett specifically referred to "majority support," we will not count in the White House's favor polls unless the support breaks the 50 percent barrier. Using the pollster.com database, we found three polls conducted in October -- all done by live telephone interviews -- that reported true majority support for the Democratic proposal, though hardly by supermajorities. They are: -- A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll taken between Oct. 16 and Oct. 18 asked, "What do you think would be better for the country -- if Congress passed a bill to change the country's health care system along the lines of what Barack Obama has proposed, or if the current system were left in place with no changes?" The survey found that 53 percent said it would be better to pass a bill, while 44 percent said to leave the current system intact. The poll had 1,038 adult respondents and a 3 percentage point margin of error. -- A Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted between Oct. 8 and Oct. 15 asked, "Do you think the country as a whole would be better off or worse off if the president and Congress passed health care reform, or don't you think it would make much difference?" In this poll, 53 percent said the country would be better off, 28 percent said it would be worse off and 12 percent said it would not make much difference. The poll had 1,200 adult respondents and a 3 percentage point margin of error. -- A Gallup poll taken between Oct. 1 and Oct. 4 asked, "Would you advise your member of Congress to vote for or against a health care bill this year?" To this question, 51 percent said their lawmaker should vote for it and 41 percent said their lawmaker should vote against it. This poll interviewed 1,013 adults, with a 4 percentage point margin of error. (Technical note: The results for this question are a little more complicated than most. On the interviewer's first pass, 40 percent of respondents said they'd advise a vote in favor, 36 percent advised a vote against, and 25 percent said they had no opinion. Then, the interviewer asked the undecideds a second question to see how they were leaning; those answers were added to the initial totals to come up with 51 percent advising passage and 41 percent advising rejection.) Most of the time, though, similar questions have found opponents outnumbering supporters. Just to cite a few examples (there are too many to list them all): -- An NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll taken between Oct. 22 and Oct. 25 asked, "From what you have heard about Barack Obama's health care plan, do you think his plan is a good idea or a bad idea? If you do not have an opinion either way, please just say so." On this question, 38 percent said it was a good idea and 42 percent said it was a bad idea. In the five NBC/ Wall Street Journal polls going back to April 2009, the answer "good idea" never exceeded 39 percent. - - An ABC News/ Washington Post poll taken Oct. 15 to Oct. 18 asked, "Overall, given what you know about them, would you say you support or oppose the proposed changes to the health care system being developed by Congress and the Obama administration?" On this question, 45 percent said they support the changes while 48 percent said they oppose them. In two previous ABC/ Post surveys that asked the same question, opponents always outnumbered supporters, with supporters never breaking 46 percent. -- A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll taken between Oct. 13 and Oct. 14 asked, "Based on what you know about the health care legislation being considered right now, do you favor or oppose the plan?" The pollsters found that 35 percent favored it and 54 percent opposed it. In four prior polls going back to July 2009, the survey never found supporters leading opponents, and supporters never exceeded 38 percent. -- Finally, a series of Rasmussen polls, which were conducted by machines rather than live interviewers, have consistently found strong opposition to the Democratic health care proposal. The most recent of these, taken between Oct. 30 and Oct. 31, asked, "Generally speaking, do you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and the congressional Democrats?" It found that 42 percent favored the plan either strongly or somewhat, while 54 percent opposed it strongly or somewhat. Most polls have had "little change over the course of the year," said Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "It is certainly fair to say that no poll shows solid majority support" for the Democratic plan. So why did three scattered polls buck the general trend? The most likely factors are two issues often raised in conjunction with polling methodology: the nature of the population sampled, and the way the questions are worded. On the sampling question, the Fox and Rasmussen surveys sampled registered voters and likely voters, respectively, rather than all adults, as the other polls did. Interviewing only registered voters and -- especially -- likely voters weeds out Americans who are relatively disengaged with the political scene. This can be helpful in measuring support for candidates during election season, but when applied to the issue of health care, it can skew the pool of respondents against the White House. "Polls that screen for registered or likely voters tend to get fewer of the younger and minority voters that have been Obama's strongest supporters," said Mark Blumenthal, who runs pollster.com. And not surprisingly, those polls showed the strongest opposition to the Democratic plan. As for wording, it appears that how a question is phrased -- always a key issue in producing the most accurate survey results -- is especially important when asking broad questions related to the current health care debate. For instance, "those that describe it as only an Obama plan seem to get more support than those that emphasize the 'Democrats in Congress,' " Blumenthal said. And when the CNN poll asked, "What do you think would be better for the country -- if Congress passed a bill to change the country's health care system along the lines of what Barack Obama has proposed, or if the current system were left in place with no changes," it framed the Democratic plan squarely in opposition to the current health care system, whose shortcomings are apparent even to the president's critics. That wording may help explain the relatively large support for the president in that question. Let's summarize. Recent polls that asked general health care reform questions have found consistent opposition to the Democratic plan. In polls of all adults, it has often been opposition by a modest margin, while polls of registered or likely voters have found more intense opposition. But independent pollsters have produced three surveys in the past six weeks that found supporters narrowly cracking the 50 percent barrier. So part of what Jarrett said -- "I suppose it depends upon what poll you're looking at" -- is undeniably true. On balance though, those poll-verified majorities are the exception rather than the rule. We rule her statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.

Valerie Jarrett

2009-11-02T15:56:43

2009-11-01

['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']

pomt-08757

(Jeff) Atwater's bank was so weak that just a few months ago it was shut down by the FDIC.

half-true

/florida/statements/2010/aug/27/loranne-ausley/loranne-ausley-attacks-jeff-atwaters-banking-ties-/

A web ad by the Democratic nominee for chief financial officer has her Republican opponent crying foul. Loranne Ausley is trying to tie state Senate President Jeff Atwater to a Florida bank that was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in April 2010. The ad, called "Can Florida Afford Jeff Atwater?," opens with a picture of Atwater inside an elaborate frame, like it's a painted portrait. "Jeff Atwater wants to be Florida's next chief financial officer. But here is what he doesn't want you to know," a narrator says, as the video first cuts to an image of a safe, then a second image of Atwater and a bank. "Jeff Atwater was an executive vice president at Riverside National Bank, which was rated one of the seven weakest banks in all of Florida. In fact, Atwater's bank was so weak that just a few months ago it was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But not before Atwater's bank cost the FDIC $491 million dollars." Then the video cuts back to the image of the safe, then the Atwater portrait. "So ask yourself, can Florida really afford Jeff Atwater as our next CFO?" The ad produced this reaction from Atwater's campaign: "In another sign that her stagnant campaign is completely devoid of a positive vision for Florida, liberal Loranne Ausley has launched a mudslinging attack on the web that lies about Jeff Atwater's professional experience," Atwater spokesman Brian Hughes said. Lies? In a political campaign? Could it be? PolitiFact Florida wanted to get to the bottom of this. For the purpose of this fact-check, we're focusing on this statement: "Atwater's bank was so weak that just a few months ago it was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation." First, let's establish Atwater's role and time at Riverside. Atwater's background at Riverside Atwater, of North Palm Beach, oversaw business development at Riverside Bank's Palm Beach County branches from 2002 to February 2009. When he left the bank, it had more than 60 branches and more than 1,000 employees in Florida. Atwater told PolitiFact Florida he left the bank to focus on his responsibilities as Senate President. In newspaper articles, Atwater had been listed as Palm Beach County president of Riverside National Bank. But a bank spokeswoman told the Palm Beach Post that Atwater functioned as a "regional business development manager" at the bank's Palm Beach County branches. Atwater's 2008 pay from Riverside was $199,833 and he listed his title as "EVP" on his 2009 financial disclosure statement. Atwater spokesman Hughes says that stands for executive vice president. "The reality is it's a local community bank, one in which his title was vice president," Hughes said. "But his day-to-day responsibility was almost that of a regional branch manger. He worked with a few local branches." So Atwater was definitely a manager at the bank, and likely one of its higher-paid executives. He was not a member of the board of directors, however, and maintains he had no direct say in the bank's loan-making process. Bank finds itself in trouble On May 27, 2009 -- about three months after Atwater left Riverside -- the bank was one of seven in Florida that failed to hold the amount of money required by regulators, according to the St. Petersburg Times. And the Palm Beach Post reported on May 29 that Riverside was ranked among the weakest in the nation, according to TheStreet.com. Fast forward to April 16, 2010, almost a year later. The FDIC announced that it was closing Riverside National Bank and that TD Bank was taking over its accounts. Riverside, and two other Florida banks, were closed in order "to protect depositors," according to the FDIC. In its announcement, the FDIC said the cost to the FDIC's insurance fund to guarantee the bank's obligations was $491.8 million. The Post documented the bank's closure this way: FORT PIERCE — Beset by steep losses and unable to raise much-needed capital, Riverside National Bank was closed by federal regulators Friday. Its business was taken over by TD Bank, the U.S. arm of Toronto-Dominion Bank. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Riverside's failure is expected to cost the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund $492 million. Riverside, a stalwart of St. Lucie County’s business community, was the second-largest of the 25 Florida banks shuttered by the FDIC since August 2008. Riverside had 58 offices from Palm Beach County to Volusia County. Its $3.4 billion in assets made it the seventh-­largest bank headquartered in Florida. Riverside posted huge losses in the past two years, including red ink of $138.9 million in 2008 and $131 million in 2009. "This was a dead bank walking," said Miami banking analyst Ken Thomas. "The question is why has the FDIC let them flail away for so long." The article noted that Riverside was hit hard by the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008, rendering Riverside's securities in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worthless. Loan losses escalated. Atwater isn't mentioned in the story. Back to the ad Ausley's ad makes three basic claims. First, that Atwater worked as an executive at Riverside National Bank. That's true. Second, that the bank was rated one of the weakest in Florida. That's true. And third, that Riverside eventually was shut down by federal regulators. Also true. But the problem is the 30-second spot splices together those three events like they happened within weeks of each other, when really they were separated by 14 months. Why is that important to know? Because Atwater was no longer working at Riverside when the bank was either rated weak, or shut down. That alone doesn't mean Atwater can't be culpable. And we imagine he had to at least be aware of the bank's financial problems, considering it posted a $138.9 million loss in 2008. But the ad's references to "Atwater's bank" are misleading, because it's more accurately described as "Atwater's former bank." Naturally, the question of culpability is harder to determine -- and one we're not ruling on. We can, however, rule on the specific claim in Ausley's ad. She said, "Atwater's bank was so weak that just a few months ago it was shut down by the FDIC." At the time, it wasn't Atwater's bank. It may have been his former bank, or best yet, it was a bank where he used to work as an executive vice president. For the misleading timeline, we find the claim Half True.

Loranne Ausley

2010-08-27T15:44:34

2010-08-12

['Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corporation']

pomt-10780

First, he said he would leave residual forces in Iraq, and now he says he wouldn't.

true

/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/17/joe-biden/richardson-now-opposes-residual-troops/

Before he declared his candidacy for president, Bill Richardson said in an interview that the U.S. should leave residual troops in Iraq. Speaking to Chris Matthews of Hardball in October 2006, Richardson said America needs a plan for "responsibly supporting and representing our security interests in the region, and not just leaving without some kind of residual force or some transition force." But by April 2007, when he was running for president, Richardson said he would leave no residual forces in the country. In fact, he's stated that position over and over in debates and on his web site as a way to distinguish himself from the Democratic frontrunners. So we'll take him at his word that he's opposed to residual forces. But what is Richardson's definition of a residual force? Biden's attack cites a Richardson interview with George Stephanoupoulous on April 15, 2007. In that interview, Richardson said, "I would station some in the region. I would put a majority of them in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and the Taliban are really, right now, resurrecting. But I would not put them in Iraq. I believe I would leave Marine forces to protect our embassy and other vital American installations. But the point here is, leaving a residual force is going to invite more violence and make our troops targets." Based on that statement, it seems Richardson doesn't consider Marines guarding an embassy to constitute a residual force. But Richardson's web site www.getourtroopsout.com states that Richardson would leave "zero" troops in Iraq. His campaign didn't respond to a question on the embassy issue. Based on the 2006 Hardball interview, though, Richardson seems to have genuinely changed position on residual forces. And that's the charge that Biden is making.

Joe Biden

2007-10-17T00:00:00

2007-10-12

['Iraq']

goop-01064

Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani Marriage Plans “In Crisis”?

1

https://www.gossipcop.com/blake-shelton-gwen-stefani-marriage-plans-crisis-untrue/

Shari Weiss

Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani Marriage Plans “In Crisis”?

4:24 pm, May 3, 2018

['None']

para-00013

Let’s face it, we’ve had the five biggest deficits in Australian history from Wayne Swan’s five budgets.

mostly false

http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/23/tony-abbott/abbott-says-swan-delivered-five-biggest-deficits-e/index.html

['Budget', 'Debt', 'Economy']

Tony Abbott

Michael Koziol, Peter Fray

Abbott says Wayne Swan delivered five biggest deficits ever

Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 8:18 p.m.

['Australia']

abbc-00036

The claim: Environment Minister Greg Hunt says the Coalition's emissions reduction fund, at $13.95 per tonne of carbon, is around 1 per cent of the cost of reducing carbon under the former Labor government's carbon pricing scheme, which he says cost $1,300 a tonne.

in-the-red

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-28/fact-check-direct-action-vs-carbon-tax/6847234

The claim: Environment Minister Greg Hunt says the Coalition's emissions reduction fund, at $13.95 per tonne of carbon, is around 1 per cent of the cost of reducing carbon under the former Labor government's carbon pricing scheme, which he says cost $1,300 a tonne.

['environment', 'climate-change', 'environmental-policy', 'pollution', 'australia']

['environment', 'climate-change', 'environmental-policy', 'pollution', 'australia']

Fact Check: Was the cost of cutting emissions 100 times greater under Labor?

Thu 29 Oct 2015, 4:18am

['Greg_Hunt', 'Coalition_(Australia)', 'Australian_Labor_Party']

pomt-07999

On average, Americans spend less than 10 percent of their disposable income on food. Compare that to folks in Mexico, who spend 22 percent, China, 28 percent and Russia, 37 percent.

mostly true

/texas/statements/2011/jan/15/todd-staples/agriculture-commissioner-todd-staples-says-america/

Noting that Americans are "blessed with bargains at the grocery store," state Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples writes that "right now, on average, Americans spend less than 10 percent of their disposable income on food." "Compare that to folks in Mexico, who spend 22 percent, China, 28 percent, and Russia, 37 percent," he says in an op-ed column posted on the San Antonio Express-News website Dec. 29. Bryan Black, a Texas Department of Agriculture spokesman, initially pointed us to the U.S. Department of Agriculture website to buttress Staples' claim. A table created by the USDA's Economic Research Service outlines the proportion of an individual's disposable personal income spent on food from 1929 through 2009, when individual adults and families reportedly spent 9.5 percent of their total disposable personal income on food — 5.5 percent eating in and 3.9 percent eating out. According to the table, the percentage of disposable income spent by Americans on food has dropped over the decades. In 1929, it was 23.4 percent. Since 2000, the share of such income spent on food has run between 9.4 and 9.9 percent. Every year, the Economic Research Service uses data primarily from the the U.S. Department of Commerce and U.S. Census, which collects data from all retailers that sell food, to measure total food expenditures in the United States and estimates how much food is eaten at and away from home. (Go here for more details about the USDA's food-expenditure number-crunching.) Ephraim Leibtag, a USDA senior economist, told us the percentage of income individuals in the U.S. spend on food has dropped because "as income and wealth rises in a given country, less of that income needs to be spent on food in percentage terms." Black also pointed us to a July 2006 article on Salem-News.com, a website that describes itself as the "most unique and interesting news group in the nation" and "the first exclusively Web news organization in the world." The article lists "the percentage of disposable income spent on food at home" in various countries, statistics the article attributes to the USDA. According to the article, consumers in Mexico spent 21.7 percent of their disposable income on food at home, in Russia, 36.7 percent and in China, 28.3 percent. But we noticed that these statistics for foreign countries, which aren't dated in the article, focus only on money spent on food prepared at home, whereas the USDA data also accounts for money spent eating out. The statistics on the Salem-News website are also at least three years older than the USDA's most recent measure of how much disposable income Americans spend on food. We followed up with the Texas Agriculture Department about these distinctions. Black said in an e-mail: "USDA's ERS numbers are constantly changing, so there are many different sets of statistics floating around." He also sent USDA data comparing U.S. food costs to those of other countries. In 2005, according to the ERS table cited by Black, food accounted for 7 percent of total household expenditures for goods and services, incurred by U.S. households. For households in Mexico, food expenses were 24 percent, Russia, 33 percent and China, 36 percent. Separately, USDA economist Annette Clauson noted more recent data comparing the same food costs. In 2009, U.S. households spent 6.9 percent. In Mexico, households spent 24 percent; Russia, 28 percent and China, 32.9 percent. Those figures look similar to the ones cited by Staples when he compared how much of their disposable income American households spend on food versus how much households in other countries spend. But it appears that the USDA only looks at total household expenditures — not disposable income — when comparing relative food costs in foreign countries. That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, available indicators support the thrust of Staples's statement, which is that Americans spend less than 10 percent of their disposable income on food, and the other three countries spend two and three times as much. We rate his statement Mostly True.

Todd Staples

2011-01-15T06:00:00

2010-12-29

['Mexico', 'Russia', 'China', 'United_States']

snes-06360

AriZona changed its "Southern Style Sweet Tea" label after consumers complained that it depicted offensive images.

true

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/label-unable/

Business

David Mikkelson

AriZona Sweet Tea Label

25 March 2008

['None']

pose-01346

I will veto. I will unsign that (President Barack Obama's gun executive order) so fast.

promise kept

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1438/reverse-barack-obamas-2016-gun-executive-order/

trumpometer

Donald Trump

Reverse Barack Obama's 2016 gun executive order

2017-01-17T08:40:49

['None']

abbc-00207

The claim: Indonesian politician Tantowi Yahya says it is illegal for Australia to turn back asylum seeker boats in international waters.

in-the-green

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-26/government-turn-back-boat-policy/4979898

The claim: Indonesian politician Tantowi Yahya says it is illegal for Australia to turn back asylum seeker boats in international waters.

['immigration', 'refugees', 'federal-government', 'foreign-affairs', 'international-law', 'law-crime-and-justice', 'liberals', 'australia', 'indonesia', 'christmas-island', 'christmas-island-6798', 'cocos-keeling-islands']

['immigration', 'refugees', 'federal-government', 'foreign-affairs', 'international-law', 'law-crime-and-justice', 'liberals', 'australia', 'indonesia', 'christmas-island', 'christmas-island-6798', 'cocos-keeling-islands']

Is it illegal to turn back boats in international waters to Indonesia?

Mon 17 Nov 2014, 6:33am

['Indonesia', 'Australia', 'Tantowi_Yahya']

goop-02563

Paris Jackson “Doing Drugs” Amid “Family Crisis,”

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/paris-jackson-not-doing-drugs-family-crisis-substance-abuse/

Shari Weiss

Paris Jackson NOT “Doing Drugs” Amid “Family Crisis,” Despite Report

11:51 am, August 19, 2017

['None']

pose-01203

As mayor, I will launch a pre-kindergarten initiative aimed at helping to institutionalize pre-K for three- and four-year-olds in our city as one of the Mayor's Education Outreach Coordinator's highest-priority projects.

in the works

https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/adler-o-meter/promise/1293/launch-pre-kindergarten-initiative/

adler-o-meter

Steve Adler

Launch a pre-kindergarten initiative

2015-01-19T00:02:00

['None']

pomt-08528

Said that his batting average with Congress is higher than every other president since Dwight D. Eisenhower except Lyndon Johnson.

half-true

/georgia/statements/2010/oct/05/jimmy-carter/carter-said-record-congress-better-most-presidents/

Thirty years since losing the White House after a single term, Jimmy Carter is at ease with his presidential legacy. In his recent book "White House Diary," Carter released excerpts from a journal he kept as president. In its afterword, he acknowledged it may be his last chance to comment on the work he and his team carried out, and he is "proud of what we accomplished." This pride extends to what he described as a winning record with the U.S. Congress, according to his Sept. 20 interview with NBC anchor Brian Williams. "And as you probably know, I had the highest batting average with Congress than any president in modern days except Lyndon Johnson," Carter said. "Better than John Kennedy, better than anybody else. Despite the fact that we had some highly controversial things. So I had a very successful term." The Carter Center uses his success rating (batting average) from Congressional Quarterly, a leading authority on Congress. They calculate percentage of votes that go a president's way during his term. It's also based on a University of Virginia essay on his presidency. But wasn't Carter famously at odds with Congress? How could he possibly have been "successful"? We looked at Carter's "White House Diary," where he elaborated more carefully on his track record in commentary accompanying Carter's April 19, 1977, entry: "Despite the controversial and often unpopular nature of my proposals to the Congress, I had remarkably good success in congressional approval of bills I supported. The Congressional Quarterly reported that since 1953 Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy and I ranked in that order in obtaining approval of legislation proposed to Congress. The Miller Center reported that my record exceeded Kennedy's." CQ Almanac publishes vote studies each year that determine how often the president took a clear position on a vote in Congress, and how often they went his way. The almanac lists success rates by term of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower through George W. Bush. If you average those rates for each president, Carter is third. He got his way 76.6 percent of the time. That's right behind Kennedy at 84.6 and Johnson at 82.2. That seems simple enough, but things get complicated from there. We also looked at the Miller Center of Public Affairs' website, which he cited for saying he was second only to Johnson. The book's afterword quoted the site directly: "Carter gained a reputation for political ineptitude, even though his actual record in dealing with Congress belied that image. His success rate in getting presidential initiatives through Congress was much higher than that of Bush [...] Carter was also close to Johnson's success rates, and higher than Kennedy's record." The problem is that the website has since been revised since the book was published. Carter's CQ scores contradict it, so it was changed to avoid confusion, a Miller Center spokeswoman said. The Miller Center's assessment that Carter's congressional record is much better than it is perceived still stands, the spokeswoman emphasized. We located no study that found Carter was second only to Johnson. Still, even if he's third behind Kennedy, who did not serve a full term, the change does not make that big of a difference, said Steven H. Hochman, director of research at the Carter Center. "The difference was just Kennedy. Was he before or behind Kennedy? And it's not too much of a difference," Hochman said. Now for the tough part. There are many ways to assess a president's legislative success. Scholars think CQ's measure is helpful, but it does not take into account whether the president manages to turn his proposals into law. For instance, a tax package might pass the Senate but fail in the House. CQ would count the Senate vote as a success even though the overall effort failed. Furthermore, it may not be fair to compare the average of a two-term president with Carter's single term, one scholar noted. Second-term scores tend to be lower and drag a president's overall average down. If you compare first terms only, Carter drops to fourth behind Dwight D. Eisenhower. And if you look at how many of Carter's initiatives actually were enacted, his record is unexceptional. According to an analysis by Andrew Rudalevige, a political science professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., who has studied presidential legislative successes, only 44 percent of his initiatives became law. This puts him behind Johnson, Bill Clinton, Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush and Kennedy, in that order. (Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush are tied.) Plus, if you compare Carter to other presidents who served while their parties controlled both the House and Senate, he's at or near the bottom, according to another analysis published in 1990. Still, Carter won nearly 70 percent of his contested and important votes, according to CQ numbers cited in Rudalevige's analysis. Other problems with the CQ score are that it doesn't measure whether a president's proposal was watered down, or take into account whether he worked under unusually hostile conditions. And Carter did push an ambitious agenda during a very difficult time, experts agreed. His proposals included reforms on health care, welfare and energy, topics that remain difficult today. Furthermore, the Democratic Party was deeply divided during Carter's administration. Reforms in the House of Representatives dispersed power more widely among its members, making it difficult to influence the body as a whole. Even Johnson, who is renowned for his legislative skill, would have struggled under those conditions, notes Mark A. Peterson, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles who has written extensively on presidential legislative successes. "Yes, by one measure Carter did very well legislatively, but not quite as well as he has claimed," Peterson said. He didn't do well compared to other presidents whose parties had majorities in both houses of Congress, but considering his party's divisions, his achievements are notable, he added. "And by another measure that really matters -- actually enacting legislation -- Carter fared quite poorly, with the recognition that he tried to push a bold, difficult agenda," Peterson said. Overall, though, experts we interviewed said Carter's legislative record exceeds its reputation. "It's somewhat of a mixed case, but it is more successful than most people think," Rudalevige said. Consider his victory on the 1978 Panama Canal treaties, noted George C. Edwards III, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University who has written about Carter's legislative record. In 1976, almost half of the Senate pledged they would vote against altering the existing arrangement. Carter managed to get the two-thirds vote needed to change it in 1978. Now, what do we make of all this? We found no evidence that Carter's record surpassed every president since Eisenhower's but Johnson's, but according to one measure, he was close. A broader look at Carter's legislative record showed it was mixed. In at least one case, the Panama Canal treaties, his achievement was exceptional. Yet while his proposals garnered favorable votes in one chamber, many never became law. It's hard to call that a true record of legislative success. Still, he did better than most people think. AJC PolitiFact Georgia defines Half True as an accurate statement that leaves out important details or take things out of context. And we rate Carter's statement as just that -- Half True.

Jimmy Carter

2010-10-05T06:00:00

2010-09-20

['United_States_Congress', 'Lyndon_B._Johnson', 'Dwight_D._Eisenhower']

pomt-05823

Says Scott Walker enacted "the biggest cuts to education in our state’s history."

true

/wisconsin/statements/2012/feb/19/kathleen-falk/recall-candidate-kathleen-falk-says-governor-scott/

Democrats searching for the right combination of punches to drive Scott Walker from office have focused on joblessness, schools, tax fairness and leadership style. One of the jabs they throw repeatedly centers on cuts Walker’s 2011-’13 budget made in state aid to local school districts. Kathleen Falk, the best-known Democrat so far in the likely 2012 gubernatorial recall election, tried to land a roundhouse right as she became the first announced candidate. The former Dane County executive told a Feb. 8, 2012 audience in La Crosse that Walker has "divided us instead of united us." "He's done it with the wrong choices," Falk said, according to a WXOW-TV online story. "He gave big tax breaks for a few and then made the biggest cuts to education in our state's history." The state’s history covers a long time. Are Walker’s cuts truly the largest ever? We have already looked at several statements about Walker’s education budget. We gave state Rep. Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, a Mostly False for saying Walker’s property tax freeze would cost schools $1.6 billion in revenue. It was about half that, according to the most common accounting. We labeled Mostly False a claim from Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller that Wisconsin "enacted the most drastic cuts to K-12 public schools of any state in the nation." At the time, the study he cited looked at only 24 states, not all 50. Now we have Falk’s claim. It is bold, but it actually is narrowly drawn, referring specifically to cuts in state aid -- a number easy to track and measure. Asked for backup, Falk’s campaign said she was referring not just to state aid to local schools, but cuts in state funding to the university system and technical colleges. And she meant the biggest cut ever in raw dollars, according to campaign spokesman Scot Ross. To be sure, Walker made two other moves that affected school budgets: A virtual freeze on schools’ ability to increase property taxes to make up for lost aid, and collective bargaining limits that allowed many districts to cut costs by imposing larger contributions from workers towards health insurance and pensions. But Falk’s statement was not about net impact, just the state funding side of the equation. Falk’s campaign did not provide a total of the education cuts, nor provide any history of funding cuts other than to say they had found none bigger. We did the math and found $792 million in aid cuts to school districts, $250 million in reduced aid to the university system and $71.6 million from the tech colleges. Total: $1.11 billion. Looking at it in terms of raw dollars limits the usefulness of any comparison, given inflation. That said, let’s look back. Local schools Walker’s budget was not the first to cut education aid, though any cut is rare. Facing a massive projected shortfall, lawmakers and then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, approved cutting $284 million from aid to school districts in the 2009-11 budget. The cut under Doyle was the first ever, according to Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a nonpartisan research group that tracks the history of aid changes. We couldn’t confirm that, but went back to the mid 1980s and found no evidence of a cut. If there was one earlier than that, it couldn’t rival Walker’s -- unless a previous governor cut 100 percent of the school aid budget, which was much smaller then. Walker’s $792 million cut was much larger in raw dollars than the $284 million cut in 2009, and as a percentage -- 7.4 percent vs. 2.6 percent. In the first year under Walker’s budget, nearly all districts lost aid, and the median decrease was 9.9 percent, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. University system Doyle and Walker cut identical amounts -- $250 million -- from the base budget of the UW system. The cut under Doyle was in 2003-05. The cut under Doyle was a bigger percentage cut than Walker’s because the university system’s biennial budget from state taxes grew from about $2 billion to $2.3 billion between 2003 to 2011. On the other hand, Walker’s cut was deeper if you factor all the budget adjustments to the state-tax-supported portion of UW’s budget, according to Dave Loppnow, an education funding expert at the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. For instance, UW got more state funding for things like rising fuel and utility costs, offsetting some of the $250 million funding cut. By this measure, it was about an 8 percent reduction by Doyle, and 9 percent under Walker. Loppnow said the $250 million base-budget cuts under both governors were the largest ever in raw dollars. Tech schools Walker proposed, and the Republican-controlled Legislature passed, a 30 percent cut in general aid to the state’s technical college system. That amounted to $71.6 million over two years. The tech college system found records dating to 1991 that showed only one other general aid cut -- a 0.5 percent trim in 2007. As we noted in a recent item, that general aid is only 12 percent of the tech system’s funding, which relies heavily on property taxes. So, in the big picture, there have been very few instances of cuts to education, with all of them coming in recent years as deficits mounted. What makes the Walker cuts stand out is the combination -- in the same budget -- of reductions across the three levels of education: kindergarten-12th grade; tech colleges; and the universities. In 2003-05, when the UW took a hit, Doyle and lawmakers boosted the K-12 budget by 1 percent, or $115 million. And the tech colleges’ general state aid was not reduced. As we noted, there were many other changes in the budget. Notably, Walker sharply curtailed collective bargaining rights for public employees, including university and local school employees. That allowed local school districts to save at least $200 million in pension costs because most districts put in place a pension change made possible by the budget, according to Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates, school officials and our calculations. The savings to districts from changes to health insurance premiums were significant in some cases, but vary widely by district; no statewide cost savings estimate is available. But some districts, due to existing union contracts and other reasons, were not able to benefit from the health insurance changes. That underlines an element essential aspect of Falk’s statement: The state controls its aid, but not what is done at the local level. Our conclusion Falk claimed Walker’s cuts in state support to local schools, tech colleges and public universities amount to the largest in state history. We found previous cuts in those areas, but not in all three in the same year, and not nearly as deep when you roll them all together as has Falk. We rate her statement True.

Kathleen Falk

2012-02-19T09:00:00

2012-02-08

['None']

pomt-02527

It’s been 14 years since a president or a vice president or a member of their family has not gone and attended at least an event at the Olympics.

true

/punditfact/statements/2014/feb/09/candy-crowley/cnns-candy-crowley-says-its-unusual-president-or-t/

Relations between Russia and the United States have been decidedly frosty recently, and the international spirit of the Olympics doesn’t seem to have delivered much of a thaw. Or at least, that is one way to read the roster of the official delegation to the games in Sochi. Former Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano leads the group named by the White House. CNN’s Candy Crowley reminded Napolitano of how administrations have handled this before. "I'm sure it's been noted to you, that it's been 14 years since a president or a vice president or a member of their family has not gone and attended at least an event at the Olympics," Crowley said on CNN’s State of the Union. "Can you tell me as a practitioner of both policy and politics why Sochi is different for the U.S.?" Napolitano denied that any snub of Russian President Vladimir Putin was intended. Obama, she said, had sent a group that "represented the broad values of the United States." The Obama administration has made it clear that acceptance of gays and lesbians ranks prominently among those values. When the White House announced the delegation list, a spokesperson said it "represented the diversity that is the United States." The list included the gay tennis star, Billie Jean King. Russia’s anti-gay bias has become a sticking point between the two nations. The president himself said his schedule doesn’t allow him to attend. The meaning behind the make-up of the delegation is a matter for diplomats and students of international relations. In this fact-check, we will look at whether the tradition that Crowley suggested actually has been in place since 2000. As this table shows, the record speaks for itself. Year City Who went 1998 Nagano, Japan Tipper Gore 2000 Sydney, Australia Chelsea Clinton 2002 Salt Lake City, Utah George W. Bush 2004 Athens, Greece George H.W. Bush, Barbara Bush 2006 Turin, Italy Laura Bush 2008 Beijing, China George W. Bush 2010 Vancouver, Canada Joe Biden, Jill Biden 2012 London, England Michelle Obama While it’s uncommon for an American president to attend, the White House has reliably extended the personal touch. Crowley’s statement includes the important catch-all category of family member to make her claim accurate. As far back as 1998, the then-wife of Vice President Al Gore, Tipper Gore, represented the White House at the Winter games in Nagano, Japan. For the 2000 Summer games in Sydney, Australia, President Bill Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, took time off from college to watch the competition. In 2004, it was the president’s father and mother, former President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, who made the family connection in Athens, Greece. George W. Bush stands out for having personally attended twice. The first time, the games took place on American soil in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the leader of the host country pretty much always attends. But Bush also made the trip to Beijing in 2008 where he memorably bumped a volleyball to a bikini clad member of the U.S. beach volleyball team. Our ruling Crowley said "a president or a vice president or a member of their family" has attended every Olympic games since 2000. That is accurate. In fact, the tradition goes back 16 years to 1998. We rate Crowley’s claim True.

Candy Crowley

2014-02-09T15:27:44

2014-02-09

['None']

goop-01278

Justin Bieber Laughing Over The Weeknd Shading Selena Gomez,

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-the-weeknd-selena-gomez-song-reaction-untrue/

Shari Weiss

Justin Bieber NOT Laughing Over The Weeknd Shading Selena Gomez, Despite Claim

9:01 pm, March 30, 2018

['None']

pomt-01015

GEORGIA ROADWAY FATALITIES THIS YEAR: 59 PLEASE DRIVE SAFELY

true

/georgia/statements/2015/feb/02/billboard-spaghetti-junction/dot-sign-counts-roadway-deaths/

New Year’s resolutions were still rolling around in our heads, if not being followed. Traffic was moving at a reasonable Saturday clip, which, in metro Atlanta, means it was moving. And suddenly, an overhead sign on I-85 southbound near Spaghetti Junction announced a harsh reality. "GEORGIA ROADWAY FATALITIES THIS YEAR: 59," the sign stated in large lighted letters. "PLEASE DRIVE SAFELY." Twenty-four days into January, could that be right? This PolitiFact Georgia scribe was curious. We contacted Natalie Dale, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Transportation, who told us the message board’s numbers were already outdated. Roadway deaths, statewide, for the new year were updated to 70 by Wednesday, Jan. 28th. Among those killed were seven people in Chatham County, five in Fulton County and four in Hall and Hart counties, according to DOT data. Eleven were pedestrians, including Gayla Joyce Walker, 53. The Dunwoody woman was struck repeatedly on I-285 in Sandy Springs, prompting an investigation that shut down a portion of the interstate and snarled traffic for more than three hours during morning rush hour on Jan.22. Two other pedestrians, both over 65, were killed in Fulton County, one on 10th Street and one on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, DOT data shows. If previous trends continue, Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb, Georgia’s most populous counties, will likely end the year with the highest percentages of roadway deaths. But the number of roadway fatalities statewide would actually be down. DOT data shows that roadway deaths in the state have declined slightly year over year -- going from 1,503 in 2008 to 1,147 last year, despite there being nearly a half-million more vehicles on the road. (The state had 8.5 million registered vehicles in 2008 and just less than 9 million vehicles in 2014, according to data we obtained from the Georgia Department of Revenue). State officials offer several potential explanations for the decline in roadway deaths. Dale said safety enhancements, including raised medians, have been DOT priorities. Raised medians have a track record of reducing all accidents by 55 percent and pedestrian accidents in urban areas by 90 percent, she said. Harris Blackwood, director of the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, said greater seatbelt use is likely a factor. "We’re seeing some of the highest seat belt use -- somewhere north of 95 percent," Blackwood said. That -- combined with safer cars, stepped-up enforcement of drunken driving laws and graduated drivers’ licenses for young drivers -- could be contributing to fewer roadway deaths, he said. Our Ruling. Interstate message boards are being used to alert the motoring public to the latest data on roadway deaths. That can be quickly changing data. Last year, about three people died each day on Georgia roads. That’s a statistic worth pointing out. We rate the DOT post True.

Georgia Department of Transportation

2015-02-02T00:00:00

2015-01-24

['None']

pomt-10647

I supported the surge when you didn't.

false

/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/06/mike-huckabee/romney-supported-it-from-the-start/

Mike Huckabee has been trying to convince voters recently that while he's committed to the troop surge in Iraq, Mitt Romney has wavered. After winning the Iowa caucuses, Huckabee carried that theme into the Republican debate on Jan. 5, 2008, telling Romney, "I supported the surge when you didn't." He has made the point in other forums, too, saying in a Dec. 30, 2007, appearance on Meet the Press : "I stood by (President Bush) in the war. I stood by him in the surge. I wasn't a latecomer like Mitt Romney was to believing that the surge was effective." Like Huckabee, Romney immediately and publicly supported the troop surge when President Bush announced it on Jan. 10, 2007. Seven months later, Romney announced a push to give extra support to the soldiers participating in the surge. Because the record does not support Huckabee's claims, we asked his staff to explain. They responded with links to recent interviews and debates that they said would show a difference between the candidates. We'll address them individually: • First, the staff analysis paired two clips — a Huckabee statement that aired Jan. 10 and 11 on the Fox network in which he praises Bush's announcement and a Dec. 2, 2006, article on the conservative Web site, HumanEvents.com, in which Romney — not yet a candidate for president — declined to weigh in on the issue until the president's announcement. The staff omitted Romney's Jan. 10, 2007, announcement that he supported the surge. It also did not include Huckabee's Jan. 24, 2007, statement in an MSNBC interview expressing doubts about the strategy. In the interview, Huckabee said, "I'm not sure that I support the troop surge if that surge has to come from our guard and reserve troops which have really been overly stretched." • Next, the Huckabee staff pointed to an April 3, 2007, interview on Good Morning America in which Romney supported a secret timetable for withdrawal, saying: "There's no question that the president and (Iraqi) Prime Minister al-Maliki have to have a series of timetables and milestones that they speak about, but those shouldn't be for public pronouncement. ... You don't want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds until you're going to be gone." The staff left out Huckabee's Feb. 13, 2006, interview with USA Today, in which he, like Romney, saw the need for a withdrawal strategy. "I supported the president when he went in," Huckabee told the newspaper. "But I am disappointed. We don't have an exit strategy. I worry about the equipment of our armed forces. I worry that there is no end game. I don't favor a pullout date, but I believe we have to have a timetable for Iraq to take over security and civil administration. And we don't have that." • Finally, the staff points to a September 2007 Republican debate in Durham, N.H., arguing: "Governor Huckabee said, 'We have to continue the surge' (while) Governor Romney was only willing to commit that the surge was 'apparently' working, saying his course of action depended on 'if' the surge was working. We would note two things. First, the two candidates were asked very different questions in that debate. Romney was asked how long into the future he would commit U.S. troops in Iraq while Huckabee was asked directly if the surge should continue. Second, Romney also expressed hope the surge would work and said the troops should be supported. In addition, we note that the Councll on Foreign Relations, an independent think tank, finds no difference between Romney and Huckabee on this issue, saying both support the troop surge. Huckabee's claims about Romney were the subject of a Jan. 6, 2007, interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Wallace pressed him on the fact that the record did not square with his claims. Huckabee responded but did not answer the question. The record shows that Huckabee and Romney both have supported the surge and, at times, have both expressed doubts about the ability of the president's Iraq strategy to work in the long run. Huckabee says he's more committed to the surge. We find his claim False.

Mike Huckabee

2008-01-06T00:00:00

2008-01-05

['None']

tron-02104

The “crabby old man” who died with an inspirational poem in his pocket

fiction!

https://www.truthorfiction.com/crabby-old-man/

inspirational

The “crabby old man” who died with an inspirational poem in his pocket

Mar 17, 2015

['None']

snes-00001

A warning about "another friend request" alerts Facebook users about potential account "cloning."

false

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/got-another-friend-request-facebook-warning/

Computers

David Mikkelson

‘Got Another Friend Request from You’ Facebook Warning

7 October 2018

['None']

goop-00790

George Clooney Told Amal He Wants Twins Again?

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/george-clooney-amal-twins-again/

Andrew Shuster

George Clooney Told Amal He Wants Twins Again?

11:48 am, June 19, 2018

['None']

goop-01555

Teresa Giudice In New Romance?

2

https://www.gossipcop.com/teresa-giudice-new-romance-cheating-shane-wierks-dating-false/

Shari Weiss

Teresa Giudice In New Romance?

12:30 pm, February 17, 2018

['None']

pomt-01776

By some estimates, as few as 2 percent of the 50,000 (Central American) children who have crossed the border illegally this year have been sent home.

mostly true

/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jul/28/jeb-bush/jeb-bush-says-2-percent-children-apprehended-borde/

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the Republican Party’s most vocal advocates of federal action on immigration policy, recently re-entered the immigration debate with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal regarding the thousands of undocumented Central American minors flocking to the United States border. Bush, a potential 2016 candidate, co-authored the op-ed with Clint Bolick, the vice president for litigation at the libertarian Goldwater Institute (the two also teamed up for a book on immigration in 2013). Before laying out their suggested course of action, Bush and Bolick explain the problem. "Currently the vast number of children is overwhelming the process," they wrote. "Roughly half do not show up for their hearings. As a result, judging by Homeland Security figures, only a fraction of the approximately 20,000 Central American children who entered the country illegally in 2013 were repatriated. By some estimates, as few as 2 percent of the 50,000 children who have crossed the border illegally this year have been sent home." We’ve already looked at the number of minors who report for their hearings. (Bush's description of it as "roughly half" is not far off from what we found.) But what about the number of children that the government has returned this year? We decided to look into the stat. Where did 2 percent come from? Right off the bat, we’ll note that these numbers are hard to pin down. This particular immigration issue crosses multiple government agencies — the Justice Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, among others. Each one we contacted sent us toward a different department or agency to find the number. The bureaucratic labyrinth ultimately gave us no answer. So where did Bush get this 2 percent figure? A spokeswoman told PolitiFact that it came from a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing meeting on July 9, where many of the aforementioned bureaucracies testified. During the hearing, R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said since the start of Fiscal Year 2014 (which begins in October 2013), about 57,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., then asked: "Of those 57,000, how many have been returned?" Kerlikowske said he didn’t know because his agency only deals with "apprehension." "Okay, so who would know?" Johnson asked the panel. "Who'd know the number of how many of those have been returned?" "The numbers I have that we talked about, about 1,300, 1,500," said Thomas Winkowski, the principal deputy assistant secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If you do the math, 1,300 to 1,500 out of 57,000 is about 2 or 3 percent. So Bush seems to be right. But the numbers get a bit more complicated than that. In his op-ed (and his office confirmed) Bush was discussing a specific issue: the number of children from Central American countries showing up at the border. Due to a 2008 immigration law, Mexican children are processed differently than those coming from non-border countries. It’s the surge in Central American children that make up the ongoing border crisis. Once apprehended at the border, minors from Central America are screened for trafficking or other signs of abuse. Immigration and Customs officials issue a "notice of removal" that begins the legal proceedings to determine whether the child must be deported. In the meantime, the law instructs the child to be placed with a family member or sponsor, if possible. Immigration courts then determine whether a child is eligible for asylum or specialized visas for victims of trafficking, but that process can take years. Mexican children, meanwhile, can just be turned around at the border by U.S. authorities. The 57,000 figure includes children from Mexico, who make up about 12,600 of the apprehended minors. When you subtract the Mexican children from the three main Central American countries — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — you get about 44,000. From the testimony, it’s also not clear how many of the 1,300 to 1,500 returned are from Mexico and how many are from Central America. Bush’s office sent us to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. McCain’s staff told us that Immigration and Customs Enforcement said to them that 890 of the apprehended children from Central America in 2014 have been returned, but they could not forward us that correspondence and the agency would not confirm it independently. For what it’s worth, 890 is 2 percent of 44,000. A study released July 28 (after Bush’s op-ed was released) also seemed to back up the general figure. The Bipartisan Policy Center found about 18,300 cases in 2014 of juveniles from Central America entering the system (meaning, not just apprehended but beginning the legal procedures). Through June 2014, 393 have been ordered for removal and 62 left voluntarily. Together, that’s about 2.4 percent of all cases. (The data comes from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering service of Syracuse University, not a federal agency.) Why so low? According to the Bipartisan Policy Center study, 95 percent of the 2014 cases are still pending. A big reason why only 2 percent have been removed is because so few cases have made it to a hearing a yet — not because they failed to show up to a court hearing, like Bush wrote. Compare that to previous years. About 70 percent of the 2013 cases are still pending. Still, in about 15 percent of cases the minor was ordered to return to Central America or left the United States voluntarily. In 2012, more than a quarter of all cases resulted in removal orders; in 2011, it was one-third. In an example of how arduous this process can be, 8 percent of 2009 cases are still pending, the study found. Experts we spoke with said the legal proceedings can take two to three years. Why does it take so long? Previously, cases involving undocumented minors took a back seat in the court system to immigration cases involving apprehended adults. The Obama administration has taken steps to make these cases involving Central American children a priority, but immigration courts are notoriously overworked and the influx of new cases in the past 12 months has exasperated the issue, further slowing the process. Our ruling Bush wrote, "As few as 2 percent of the 50,000 (Central American) children who have crossed the border illegally this year have been sent home." It’s surprisingly difficult to track down exact numbers, but from what we can gather, that number appears accurate. That figure, though, is only useful as a snapshot of the current state of affairs; it is likely the number will rise as more and more of these children go through the legal process. Further, Bush said the low number was a result of Central American children skipping their court appearances. Actually, it has more to do with how long the legal proceedings take. The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True.

Jeb Bush

2014-07-28T16:07:58

2014-07-23

['None']

goop-00767

Is There A “Friends” Spinoff Starring Lisa Kudrow?

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/friends-spinoff-lisa-kudrow-false/

Shari Weiss

Is There A “Friends” Spinoff Starring Lisa Kudrow?

10:48 am, June 23, 2018

['None']

pomt-14393

The [Obama] administration’s regulatory assault on coal-fired energy has put thousands of Americans out of work

mostly false

/missouri/statements/2016/mar/16/roy-blunt/sen-blunt-overstates-white-house-policys-impact-co/

Supporters of the coal industry have criticized President Barack Obama’s administration as it attempts to establish stricter environmental regulations on coal-fired plants in the U.S. The Clean Power Plan is the administration’s latest initiative to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency proposes restrictions on coal-fired plants to reduce carbon emissions. On Feb. 9 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Clean Power Plan would not be allowed to go into effect until the court is able to hear arguments from those who support and oppose the plan. Before that ruling, Republican Sen. Roy Blunt spoke out against the Clean Power Plan in a January press release. Blunt said: "The administration’s regulatory assault on coal-fired energy has put thousands of Americans out of work, and threatens to double utility costs for Missouri families by 2020." We decided to look into that statement. Employment in the coal industry Employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows jobs in coal were declining well before Obama took office in 2009. Coal mining employment has been dropping since 1985. There are a number of market factors contributing to the long downturn, including technological innovation, investments in natural gas and renewable energy. PolitiFact has reported on the Obama administration’s impact on the coal industry before and found coal has been losing to natural gas for a while now. Natural gas attracts companieslooking for cheaper, cleaner and more efficient energy. Employment in the coal industry has declined faster since Obama’s first term, but Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a group that receives significant funding from labor unions, says regulations adopted by the administration so far probably only had a marginal effect. Instead, the decline has to do more with cheaper natural gas. "More than anything to me, they’re just sort of locking in the coal declines that were originally caused by the decline in natural gas prices," Bivens said. "The single biggest factor in the decline of the coal sector over the past decade has been the big fall in the price of natural gas." Bivens added that if the Clean Power Plan goes into effect, he expects jobs in the coal industry to decline further. Electric bills We can’t fact-check a prediction, so Blunt’s assertion about the doubling of utility costs is beyond the scope of this fact-check. But we did look into the source behind his forecast. Blunt spokesman Brian Hart pointed us to this study on behalf of a group of Midwest utilities and regulators. We found two significant issues. First, the study says Missouri electricity bills could possibly double by 2030, not 2020. Second, the study was conducted in 2009, but Obama and the EPA didn’t actually propose the Clean Power Plan until 2015. The methodologies used to conduct the study aren’t consistent with Obama’s current environmental proposal. But we did find a study from the U.S. Environmental Information Administration that specifically breaks down how the Clean Power Plan will affect electrical utilities. That agency predicts electricity prices will rise slightly in the early 2020s. Prices will differ across the country, but the highest rise in prices is predicted to be 7 percent. Our ruling Blunt said the Obama administration’s regulations have caused thousands of workers in the coal industry to lose their jobs. While the decline in coal industry employment is real, the role of administration policy is less certain. Experts note that competition from abundant, cheap natural gas has reduced the demand for coal more than any other factor. With less demand, the need for workers falls. While the administration has encouraged movement away from coal for environmental reasons, market forces in the energy sector have been the dominant driver. While it is impossible to know how utility costs will rise or fall in the future, the study on which Blunt based his claims was conducted before the Clean Power Plan was enacted. Blunt’s claim overemphasizes the role of White House policy. We rate the statement Mostly False.

Roy Blunt

2016-03-16T22:45:30

2016-01-15

['Barack_Obama', 'United_States']

pomt-11267

We have laws on the books where people can walk right up to our ports of entry, say ‘I have a credible fear of persecution,’ and we bring them in. We don’t send them back.

mostly false

/wisconsin/statements/2018/apr/27/ron-johnson/sen-ron-johnson-says-people-walk-us-border-say-few/

A caravan of Hondurans and other Central Americans fleeing poverty and gang violence by heading north through Mexico triggered a tweet storm from President Donald Trump. On April 2, 2018, Trump tweeted: "The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our 'Weak Laws' Border, had better be stopped before it gets there. Cash cow NAFTA is in play, as is foreign aid to Honduras and the countries that allow this to happen. Congress MUST ACT NOW!" The president continued to tweet about building a wall and securing the southern border of the United States as the White House announced a plan to deploy National Guard troops. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker said he is committed to sending troops from the state's National Guard to the Mexican border if asked by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the caravan that started off with more than 1,000 people had diminished a week later, with many migrants planning to remain in Mexico but some determined to continue their journey all the way to the U.S. border to apply for asylum in this country. On Friday, according to National Public Radio reports, the Central American migrants were gathering near the U.S. border and said they plan to request asylum from the U.S. government on Sunday. Into the midst of it all stepped U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, who declared during an April 3, 2018, interview on The Jeff Wagner Show on WTMJ radio (620 AM): "We need to fix our horribly broken legal immigration system." The senator went on to say: "We have laws on the books where people can walk right up to our ports of entry, say ‘I have a credible fear of persecution,’ and we bring them in. We don’t send them back." Is Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, correct? Is it that simple to get into the country? And to stay here? The evidence When asked for backup for the claim, Johnson’s staff pointed to a variety of situations and scenarios, including legal precedents (the 1997 Flores settlement); the Homeland Security Act; and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. An email from Johnson’s office also pointed to the issues of unaccompanied minors, immigration court capacity and hearings on border security, as well as "credible fear" claims. Let’s sort this out. It’s important to note Johnson’s claim focuses on those seeking asylum status. That is different than those who may seek to enter the country as refugees or other immigration channels. For example, the difference between asylees and refugees is procedural, according to AllLaw.com, a website that includes links to legal information, forms, and news. A person who requests asylum in the United States is called an asylee. A person who requests protection while still overseas, and then is given permission to enter the U.S., is called a refugee. An asylee, or a person granted asylum, is authorized to work in the United States, can apply for a Social Security card, can request permission to travel overseas and can petition to bring family members to the United States. Asylees may also be eligible for federal or Office of Refugee Resettlement benefits, such as Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance. After one year, an asylee may apply for permanent resident status (i.e., a green card). Once the individual becomes a permanent resident, he or she must wait four years to apply for citizenship. Testimony from border patrol agents and federal officials at Senate Homeland Security Committee hearings has included first-hand testimony from border agents and federal officials on the migrants presenting themselves at the border, citing fear of being accosted, forced into or killed by Central American gangs. Others have claimed they cannot return to their country of origin because of fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a political social group, or political opinion. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website details a variety of guidelines on how to proceed when migrants arrive at the border seeking asylum, including details on the definition for "credible fear of persecution or torture": Q. What is a Credible Fear of Persecution? A. A "significant possibility" that you can establish in a hearing before an Immigration Judge that you have been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of your race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion if returned to your country. Q. What Is a Credible Fear of Torture? A. A "significant possibility" that you can establish in a hearing before an Immigration Judge that you would be subject to torture if returned to your country. Asylum denials Contrary to what Johnson’s claim suggests, denials of asylum by immigration judges have been rising. As of the end of September 2016, overall asylum denial rates for fiscal year 2016 had risen to 57 percent. The total number of asylum denials from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2016 was 125,066, or 49.8 percent, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse TracImmigration. Among the number of Immigration Court asylum cases decided during fiscal year 2011 through fiscal year 2016, Mexico had the highest number of denials, with 12,028, or 89.6 percent. Others with high rates of denials include El Salvador with 11,546, or 82.9 percent; Honduras with 7,350, or 80.3 percent; Haiti with 1,599, or 80.1 percent; and the Dominican Republic, with 407 denials, or 87 percent. A 2017 analysis by Reuters illustrated that the difference between an asylum seeker being granted residency or ordered deported depends largely on which judge hears the case, and where. Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TracImmigration), confirmed that report. The median level of asylum decision disparity that asylum seekers face is now over 56 percentage points. That is, the assignment of the judge for the typical asylum seeker could alter the odds of receiving asylum by this magnitude. For example, while the specific ranges differed by court, the typical asylum seeker might have only a 15 percent chance of being granted asylum all the way up to a 71 percent chance depending on the particular judge to whom their case is assigned. In addition, Johnson’s argument that "we don’t send them back" comes with a major caveat. Under international law, the United States can’t simply "send them back," according to a Yale Law School report: Summary removal procedures put the United States at risk of violating the principle of non-refoulement, which forbids states from forcibly repatriating individuals who have legitimate claims for international protection. To satisfy its obligations under the Refugee Convention, the United States must provide arriving noncitizens a genuine opportunity to pursue asylum claims prior to their removal. A Trump directive calls for expediting eligibility claims of those attempting to stay in the United States and promptly deporting those whose claims are rejected. Unaccompanied minors Things work somewhat differently when children -- "unaccompanied minors," in immigration parlance -- arrive at the border themselves. Those procedures are covered by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. In those cases, the children are screened and may be placed in the care of a sponsor – usually a parent, relative, or family friend – who can care for them while their immigration cases proceed. If the child fails to show up for a hearing, he or she can be ordered deported. However, deporting unaccompanied minors who are no shows in court is no easy task, because some do not stay at the addresses provided to the government and disappear into the general population. Expert opinion We also turned to Fatma E. Marouf, a professor of law and director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Texas A&M University School of Law, who made it clear it’s not as simple as saying the right words and being allowed to stay. "If they pass the credible fear interview, they will be placed in removal proceedings and have an opportunity to apply for asylum in immigration court. If their case is denied, they will be deported," he said. "In some cases, (authorities) may choose to parole the person into the country instead of keeping him or her detained, but that is very much the exception, not the rule." Our rating Johnson said "We have laws on the books where people can walk right up to our ports of entry, say I have a credible fear of persecution, and we bring them in. We don’t send them back." His claim is problematic on two fronts. First, those who make a "credible fear" claim are not simply brought into the United States. Rather, there is an extensive review process and, in some cases, asylum cases can take years. Second, statistics show that many have their cases rejected and are sent back -- including nearly 90% of those from Mexico. That said, the scenario Johnson lays out can happen with unaccompanied children who arrive at the border -- for example if they fail to show up for their hearing and disappear into the country instead. For a statement that contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, our rating is Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com

Ron Johnson

2018-04-27T06:00:00

2018-04-03

['None']

abbc-00111

The claim: Bob Katter claims there were more gun deaths after the 1996 gun laws were introduced than there were in the three years before.

in-the-red

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-23/katter-wrong-on-gun-deaths/4904576

The claim: Bob Katter claims there were more gun deaths after the 1996 gun laws were introduced than there were in the three years before.

['law-crime-and-justice', 'murder-and-manslaughter', 'bob-katter', 'federal-government', 'minor-parties', 'federal-elections', 'australia']

['law-crime-and-justice', 'murder-and-manslaughter', 'bob-katter', 'federal-government', 'minor-parties', 'federal-elections', 'australia']

Bob Katter wrong on number of gun deaths after Port Arthur

Tue 17 Sep 2013, 2:33am

['None']

snes-02422

Did President Obama Refuse to Turn the White House Blue to Honor Fallen Police?

mixture

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-refuse-white-house-blue/

Politics

David Emery

Did President Obama Refuse to Turn the White House Blue to Honor Fallen Police?

16 May 2017

['None']

goop-01537

“The Bachelor Winter Games” Recap: Who Was Eliminated After Kissing Contest And Who Quit?

10

https://www.gossipcop.com/bachelor-winter-games-recap-february-20-2018-episode-three/

Shari Weiss

“The Bachelor Winter Games” Recap: Who Was Eliminated After Kissing Contest And Who Quit?

11:50 am, February 20, 2018

['None']

tron-00648

Walmart Check for Quality Control Program

scam!

https://www.truthorfiction.com/walmart-check-for-quality-control-program-scam/

celebrities

Walmart Check for Quality Control Program

Dec 1, 2015

['None']

snes-02231

The DEA raided the vacation ranch of U.S. Senator Hal Lindsay of New Jersey and seized large quantities of illegal drugs.

false

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lindsay-ranch-raided/

Junk News

David Mikkelson

The DEA Just Raided a United States Senator — Dems in a Panic?

10 June 2017

['United_States', 'New_Jersey', 'Drug_Enforcement_Administration']

goop-00386

Did Brad Pitt And Demi Moore Ever Date?

0

https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-demi-moore-date/

Shari Weiss

Did Brad Pitt And Demi Moore Ever Date?

4:17 pm, August 25, 2018

['None']

hoer-00674

Flower And Wine Delivery Credit Card Warning

true messages

https://www.hoax-slayer.com/flowers-wine-credit-card-scam.shtml

Brett M. Christensen

Flower And Wine Delivery Credit Card Scam Warning

26th March 2012

['None']

pomt-12785

Today, 27 million people .. are enslaved.

mostly true

/global-news/statements/2017/feb/17/bob-corker/are-27-million-people-trapped-modern-slavery/

If the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has one special cause, it is ending modern slavery. In December, he won passage of a law that uses $50 million in federal money to seed a private foundation aimed at ending forced labor and human trafficking for the sex trade. "It's illegal in every country in the world, including ours," Corker said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Feb. 15, 2017. "But, today, 27 million people, as we speak on this program, are enslaved." That’s a big number, and we looked into the research behind it. Corker acknowledged that hard data is, well, hard to find. "Many human trafficking and modern slavery victims are part of a hidden population, which unfortunately makes it almost impossible to count with 100 percent accuracy just how many human beings are trapped around the world," Corker told us. "Fortunately, there are numbers of well-respected organizations that have done extensive work on this issue and give us a general sense of the magnitude of the problem." One advocacy group Corker relied on is End It, which cited estimates ranging from 20 million to 45.8 million. That’s quite a span, which suggests considerable differences of opinion as to what constitutes slavery and how to measure it. Siddarth Kara, director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told us the 27-million figure has been in circulation for years. Kara gives more weight to the lower estimate of 20.9 million from the International Labor Organization’s 2012 report on forced labor. That study found that 4.5 million people were trapped by sexual exploitation. Another 14.2 million were locked in work that ranged from mining, to agriculture, to domestic service and manufacturing. The situation is complex. They found that people such as migrant workers can move in and out of forced labor. In Kara’s view, the truth lies between 20 and 40 million, and "closer to the International Labor Organization metric, I believe." A key architect of the high-end estimate is Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery at the University of Nottingham in England. Bales works closely with the Australian anti-slavery organization Walk Free to produce the Global Slavery Index. The index includes in its definition of slavery the same conditions as the International Labor Organization, but adds in child soldiers, child brides and other forced marriages. Bales told us "the 45.8 million number is by far the most accurate." It is based, he said, on surveys and statistical models that have been checked against multiple measures. But many long-time researchers of modern slavery strongly criticize the methods behind the Global Slavery Index. "The trouble with this potentially admirable effort is that the data on which these tables rely is usually second-hand and often of seriously poor quality," wrote Neil Howard, a fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Howard studies labor exploitation in the West African nation of Benin, one of the highest-ranked trouble spots in the index. In an op-ed in the Guardian in 2014, he said the reality is different from the story told in the index. "I worked with teenage boys who were said to be victims of trafficking and apparently forced from Benin to the artisanal quarries of Abeokuta, in Nigeria," Howard wrote. "The adolescent boys I interviewed willingly migrate to the quarries as part of a highly structured migrant network providing labor for the Beninese expatriate community that runs the quarry economy." However, even ardent critics of the larger figures in the index still describe a problem that afflicts millions of people. Joel Quirk, professor of political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, told us the overreach for hard data is rooted in the "huge market demand for numbers amongst journalists, government officials and the general public." At the end of the day, Quirk said, "I would generally go with tens of millions" of people living in some form of slavery. Our ruling Corker said 27 million people are enslaved worldwide. He acknowledged that it is difficult to put a precise number on modern slavery. We found that different estimates defined slavery in different ways and used different methods to arrive at a number. Estimates range from 20 million to 46 million. Among the experts we reached who question the higher estimates, we heard that Corker’s figure is in the right range. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ab88d6fb-90f5-4a80-ba07-cfd04477d02b

Bob Corker

2017-02-17T13:59:10

2017-02-15

['None']

bove-00159

Fact Vs Fiction: Did Narendra Modi Sell Tea & Did Rahul Gandhi Enter A Women’s Toilet?

none

https://www.boomlive.in/fact-vs-fiction-did-narendra-modi-sell-tea-did-rahul-gandhi-enter-a-womens-toilet36662-2/

Fact Vs Fiction: Did Narendra Modi Sell Tea & Did Rahul Gandhi Enter A Women’s Toilet?

Oct 19 2017 5:10 pm, Last Updated: Nov 06 2017 12:10 pm

['None']

pomt-07099

When Mitt Romney was governor, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in job creation.

half-true

/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/22/david-axelrod/dems-say-when-mitt-romney-was-governor-massachuset/

On the campaign trail, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney often blasts President Barack Obama's record on job creation while touting his own success in creating jobs as governor of Massachusetts. But a popular rebuttal by a number of Democratic leaders lately is this statistic: When Romney was governor, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in job creation. Most recently, senior Obama re-election campaign strategist David Axelrod dropped the statistic in an interview on CNN's State of the Union on June 19, 2011. "If you're Governor Romney and you say I'm going to turn this economy around, I've got the answers. You don't offer them. Then people have a right to say, why is it that your state was 47th in the country in job creation when you were governor?" Axelrod said. Former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs cited the 47th out of 50 statistic in interviews before and after the most recent Republican debate. And on NBC's Meet the Press on June 12, 2011, Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said, "Mitt Romney is pretty darn vulnerable on the economy himself. When he was governor, he literally was 47th in job creation. For someone who touts his own ability to create jobs, we're talking about somebody that never created and recovered the amount of jobs lost in Massachusetts from the 2001 recession when he was governor." Clearly this statistic is now part of the Democrats' playbook on Romney, prompted by his claims about success in job creation. First, it's true that when Romney took office, Massachusetts was losing jobs. And when he left, it was gaining jobs. So the job situation clearly improved. The argument, however, is that Massachusetts' jobs recovery was much slower than other states. We asked the Democratic National Committee for backup on the statistic, and they pointed us first to a Feb. 23, 2010, story in the Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch website. Reporter Brett Arends looked at statistics from January 2003, when Romney took office, to January 2007, when he left, and reported: During that time, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the state ranked 47th in the entire country in jobs growth. Fourth from last. The only ones that did worse? Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana. In other words, two rustbelt states and another that lost its biggest city to a hurricane. The Massachusetts jobs growth over that period, a pitiful 0.9 percent, badly lagged other high-skill, high-wage, knowledge economy states like New York (2.7 percent), California (4.7 percent) and North Carolina (7.6 percent). The national average: More than 5 percent. Romney campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom called the DNC's statistic "laughable" in view of President Obama's negative jobs record. "Mitt Romney took office during a recession when the state was losing thousands of jobs every month," Fehrnstrom wrote in an e-mail. "He not only stopped the job losses, but ended his four years in office with positive numbers on the board. If you go back and look at the last 10 years, it was a lost decade for job growth in Massachusetts. The only bright spot was Mitt Romney’s term as governor. Both his predecessor and his successor posted job losses." Fehrnstrom's statement about the anomaly of net job growth during Romney's tenure, as opposed to net job losses under both his predecessor and successor, is accurate. But there were two national recessions that bookended Romney's four years in office. Again, the DNC's point isn't that Massachusetts' job picture didn't improve during Romney's term in office, rather it's that it didn't improve as much as most other states during the same period. The DNC pointed us to an article from the Associated Press on Feb. 4, 2008, which begins: It's part of Mitt Romney's core narrative: Massachusetts, in the throes of a fiscal freefall, fell back on his CEO skills and turnaround wizardry to spark -- in his words -- "a dramatic reversal of state fortunes and a period of sustained economic expansion." It's a rosy opinion of Massachusetts' economy that few in the state share. Instead, observers say, the state's recovery from a disastrous 2001 recession has been tepid at best, and Romney gives himself more credit than deserved on job creation and balancing the state budget. Romney says that by the time he left office, the unemployment rate in Massachusetts was lower, and the state had recovered nearly 80,000 jobs from the low point of the recession. A fuller look reveals a state still struggling to recoup the jobs washed away in the recession, while much of the rest of the country has already sailed past pre-recession highs. According to state unemployment numbers, the net number of jobs added during the four years Romney was in office was 24,400 -- a fraction of the total of about 200,000 lost during the recession. Although the number of new jobs steadily climbed during Romney's four years in office -- from a loss of 54,700 in his first year to a gain of 34,700 in his final year -- most of the rest of the country rebounded much faster. Massachusetts is one of just six states that hasn't added back all the jobs lost during the recession. We ran the some numbers ourselves using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. We should note up front that there are a number of ways to slice the data, and the numbers change a bit depending on the parameters of your search. For example, do you look at all nonfarm workers (which includes government workers) or only private workers? We ran the numbers a few different ways, and while the numbers changed slightly, the ranking did not: Massachusetts was 47th out of 50 in the percentage of job growth. If you look at all nonfarm workers, for example, Massachusetts went from 3,158,800 jobs to 3,198,500, an increase of 1.3 percent. Only Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana were worse. The national average was 5.3 percent. At our request, the taxpayer-backed Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, which does nonpartisan analysis of the state's financial and economic statistics, ran some numbers as well. They looked at figures from December 2002 (right before Romney took office) to December 2006, so the percentages were slightly different than ours, but they came to the same ranking for Massachusetts. "Jobs grew, but they grew at an anemic rate compared to the rest of the country," said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. The country was coming out of a recession when Romney took office. And it's likely, Widmer said, that Massachusetts emerged more slowly from that recession because its pre-recession numbers were disproportionally inflated by the technology bubble. A lot of those tech jobs never came back. Widmer warned not to put to much stock in any governors' influence over their states' rate of job growth, or decline. The ability for governors to manage the state economy is vastly overrated, he said. States are tied to larger economic forces, he said, and governors often claim too much credit when things are going well and no blame when things are going poorly. But when you have Romney running for president as a business person who says he created jobs for the private sector when he was governor, "In that context, the numbers from the DNC are relevant," Widmer said. "They are a relevant and accurate rebuttal." However, to the extent that some may interpret the Democrats' statistic that Romney is to blame for Massachusetts ranking 47th out of 50 states in the percentage of job gains, Jeffrey Miron, director of undergraduate studies at the Harvard University Department of Economics, advises caution. "Governors and presidents generally get way too much credit and blame for job creation or losses," Miron said. Assessing a governor's performance on jobs is difficult due to national economic forces and policies that predate a governor's term in office, he said. "It's misleading to give him too much blame," Miron said. "I'm having a hard time pointing to anything he did that was that dramatic." And, Miron said, you'd also need to consider that if a state was faring better than others through the recession, there would be less room to go back up, and so the percentage gains would be smaller. Again, there are lots of ways to present jobs data. And jobs statistics can often be manipulated by political campaigns, so that it's possible for competing campaigns to point to equal and opposite statistics -- as is the case with Romney and job creation as governor. For example, the Romney campaign provided data showing that Massachusetts' rank in terms of the percentage of job growth improved from 49th out of 50 during 2003 to 36th during 2006. And, they note, Massachusetts added more than 47,000 jobs over the course of the Romney Administration -- a gross number that does not factor in job losses during the period Romney was governor, as the Associated Press did in citing the 24,400 job number. Our ruling As with many of the claims we check, there are two elements to Axelrod's claim. He is saying that 1) Massachusetts ranked 47th in job growth and 2) suggesting that Romney is to blame. We find he is right about the numbers. Indeed, federal jobs numbers indicate that, no matter how we sliced the data, the state was 47th. But we found little evidence to support the other part of Axelrod's claim, that Romney is responsible for those jobs numbers. Economists told us that it's a stretch to blame or credit Romney or any governor for job numbers. Overall, we find Axelrod's claim Half True.

David Axelrod

2011-06-22T16:48:42

2011-06-19

['Massachusetts', 'Mitt_Romney']

pomt-12018

Even with a permanent income tax increase... the budget is more than $1 billion out of balance…

mostly true

/illinois/statements/2017/sep/20/bruce-rauner/rauners-right-illinois-budget-balancing-act-ongoin/

Illinois’ record budget standoff ended July 6 with legislative Democrats, joined by a handful of Republicans, approving a $36 billion spending plan for the fiscal year that began July 1, which is underpinned by a 32 percent hike in the state income tax rate. Enactment came July 6 over the objections of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who two days earlier had vetoed the budget. "Even with the (House Speaker Michael) Madigan permanent 32% income tax increase, this budget remains $2 billion out of balance for fiscal year 2018," Rauner wrote in his July 4 veto statement. More than two months later -- after a summer in which tension over school funding made the budget debate seem a faint and distant memory -- Rauner has revived his claim that the Legislature has placed the state on a path to fiscal doom. "Even with a permanent income tax increase costing the average Illinois household more than $1,000 a year, the budget is more than $1 billion out of balance…," Rauner said in a Sept. 7 press release. However, his office cautions not to read too much into the downward revision of the unbalanced budget claim from $2 billion in July to $1 billion now. The difference, the administration says, is due to technical reasons and doesn’t mean the budget is in better shape than the governor originally asserted. The not-so-subtle subtext of Rauner’s claims in both his July veto message and his renewed criticism is that Democrats significantly jacked up taxes to impose a woefully deficient budget. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Unpacking the governor’s argument requires a trip into the weeds of budget minutia, not to mention a detour into political hypocrisy. When it comes to budgeting, Rauner has been clearly guilty of some of the same sins he is now complaining about. But being inconsistent and being wrong aren’t necessarily the same thing. Is Rauner correct that the General Assembly has produced a budget deeply in the red? We took a look at the numbers. Balancing act The Illinois Constitution defines a budget as balanced when spending doesn’t exceed "funds estimated to be available for the fiscal year." But "estimated" has given politicians license to stretch or shrink their definition of "balanced" to suit their needs. The Civic Federation, a Chicago-based government fiscal watchdog, noted in a Sept. 7 analysis that the budget as passed on July 6 -- which contained a $360 million operating surplus -- met the textbook definition of "balanced." "On paper, the budget enacted by the General Assembly on July 7 — in an override of another gubernatorial veto — has a modest surplus," noted the federation’s Institute for Illinois’ Fiscal Sustainability. But the budget is "built on assumptions" and making it work will depend on whether Rauner and the General Assembly can "make those assumptions hold up," said Civic Federation President Laurence Msall. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Two of those assumptions form the bulk of Rauner’s claim that the budget is in the red by more than $1 billion. Pension problem The first involves a Rauner-driven change in state pension options that Democrats came to embrace. Referred to as "Tier 3," it gives state workers a choice to divert some of their traditional benefits into a 401(k) style savings plan. The budget enacted over Rauner’s veto projects Tier 3 will save $500 million this fiscal year. But Rauner spokesman Jason Schaumburg said savings from this plan won’t happen during this budget year. And Illinois Teachers Retirement System Executive Director Dick Ingram told the Better Government Association that TRS anticipates an effective date of July 1, 2019, for the new plan. That means savings won’t show up until FY 2020. This validates a significant part of Rauner’s "out of balance" claim, but the irony here can’t go unmentioned. The $500 million savings figure in the current budget came from an estimate originally presented in Rauner’s ill-fated budget proposal from last February. That budget also contained $4.6 billion in phantom money identified only as "Working together on ‘grand bargain.’" And it was hardly the only time Rauner has pushed a budget full of the same sort of holes he now condemns. The first budget Rauner proposed in 2015 anticipated $2.2 billion in savings from a sweeping overhaul of pensions that at the time was of questionable constitutionality and was soon rendered invalid by the Illinois Supreme Court. Pay it forward The Sept. 7 press release in which Rauner made his claim about the budget imbalance also announced that the state would issue $6 billion in bonds to pay down part of the $16 billion bill backlog that accrued during the budget impasse of 2015-2017. The Illinois Comptroller’s Office said at the end of FY 2017 that the state was paying late payment penalties of 9 and 12 percent on $5.5 billion contained in the backlog. This costs the state about $2 million a day, according to the comptroller. By borrowing, the state can lower that rate by up to half while also getting payment quickly to creditors. Thus, the budget enacted in July contained a provision empowering the governor’s office to borrow up to $6 billion for this purpose. But as the Civic Federation noted, "the small projected budget surplus was estimated to support only $3 billion in borrowing capacity." Rauner was more pointed in his press release: "(A) $6 billion issuance would require 12 annual principal payments of $500 million, plus interest payments depending on the interest rate. The legislature-passed budget did not account for the increase in debt service costs to cover the bill backlog bond issuance." Schaumburg put the total figure at $600 million annually, which roughly squares with the Civic Federation’s statement. "The governor's office is identifying several hundred million dollars in possible spending reductions to address this budgetary shortfall," Rauner’s press release said. "The governor also would like the General Assembly to return to Springfield this fall to work with him to balance the budget and enact structural reforms that could save much more." But one of the budget’s chief architects, Rep. Greg Harris, D-Chicago, said Rauner is trying to make a crisis from what should be a source of fiscal relief. Though the budget gives the governor’s budget office the authority to borrow up to $6 billion, Rauner need not do it all at once. If the administration borrows $3 billion and uses it to pay down outstanding Medicaid bills, it will get $3 billion in matching funds from the federal government that can go toward paying down the backlog, Harris said. "A huge portion of the bills are Medicaid," Harris said. "That’s money that’s just sitting there." Medicaid bills make up $4.1 billion of the $16 billion backlog, according to the Illinois Comptroller’s Office. But an even bigger chunk of the backlog comes from bills owed to providers in the State Employee Group Insurance Program. In its May monthly report, the General Assembly’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability said the state owed $4.65 billion in group health insurance payments plus $462 million in late fees. The comptroller’s office now estimates group health insurance costs make up $5.1 billion of the total backlog. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com The Civic Federation report also emphasizes that the $360 million surplus claimed in the budget (and disputed by Rauner) is fragile at best. It is built in large part on proceeds of $240 million from the sale of the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago. The sale of the 17-story behemoth in the heart of Chicago’s Loop has been stymied by political fighting ever since Rauner first proposed it in October 2015. "The (budget) surplus could be reduced if it takes longer than expected to find a buyer or if the structure is sold for less than the projected price," the report says. New numbers Rauner’s office also complains that new revenue projections provided in August by the Illinois Department of Revenue to the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget show more trouble ahead. "The General Assembly’s budget was based on an earlier revenue projection from April, but FY17 revenues continued to underperform for the remainder of FY17," Schaumburg said. "As a result, the GOMB estimate is $500 million lower than the General Assembly’s FY18 revenue estimate." This argument, however, ignores the budget-making calendar in the Illinois Constitution, which puts a May 31 deadline on passing a budget with a simple majority in the Legislature. Reason for hope? The tone of Rauner’s news release makes clear that there will be tension in Springfield in the months to come as lawmakers work to, as Msall puts it, make the budget’s assumptions hold up. This is not an unfamiliar position for Rauner and the Legislature, even though for the entirety of Rauner’s term they have yet to agree on a full budget. In March 2015, state government faced the prospect of running out of money unless the governor and lawmakers closed a gap of $1.6 billion. Working together, Rauner and the Legislature hammered out a solution that appeared, briefly, to signal good things for future bipartisan cooperation. Then as now, the effort involved salvaging an existing budget. That’s a departure from the two fiscal years in between, when government operating without any budget controls ran up the $16 billion bill backlog. Our ruling Gov. Bruce Rauner said Illinois’ current operating budget is "is more than $1 billion out of balance…" The head of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System confirms Rauner’s claim that the new pension plan expected to generate $500 million in anticipated savings won’t be enacted during the current fiscal year (or even the next one). The Civic Federation reports that the small surplus in the budget will finance only $3 billion of the $6 billion Rauner plans to borrow. But putting $3 billion toward past-due Medicaid bills would generate $3 billion in federal matching funds -- something Rauner has not discussed. Failure to sell or get the expected price for the Thompson Center are possible scenarios that could further imperil the budget. Some of the assumptions identified as sources of the trouble originated in Rauner’s own budget, a fact that Rauner does not acknowledge and that needs to be considered here. Whether or not the imbalance reaches more than $1 billion is debatable, but Rauner is correct that there remains much work to do. We rate his statement Mostly True. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com

Bruce Rauner

2017-09-20T05:58:00

2017-09-07

['None']

snes-06337

A chart shows the relationship of voting patterns and intelligence quotients by state.

false

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/state-iq/

Ballot Box

David Mikkelson

State I.Q. Voting Patterns

12 September 2004

['None']

chct-00092

FACT CHECK: Did John Brennan Once Vote For The Communist Party?

verdict: true

http://checkyourfact.com/2018/07/19/fact-check-brennan-vote-communist/

David Sivak | Fact Check Editor

1:22 PM 07/19/2018

['None']

pomt-06214

I never favored cap and trade.

false

/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/07/newt-gingrich/gingrich-claims-he-never-favored-cap-and-trade/

Three years ago, Newt Gingrich went on television, cozied up to Nancy Pelosi and preached the need to respond to global warming. "We do agree our country must take action to address climate change," Gingrich said from a couch, which was oddly positioned in front of the U.S. Capitol. What seemed like genuine, bipartisan PR in 2008 now looks like conservative heresy by the current frontrunner in the Republican presidential race. Gingrich now calls that TV ad the "dumbest single thing" he’s ever done and insists his policy stance on the environment passes all conservative muster. "If you notice, I never favored cap and trade," he said in a candidate forum in New York City on Dec. 3, 2011. Really? Never? We did a little digging and it didn't take long to find that Gingrich has been inconsistent and has at times advocated cap and trade legislation when combined with other approaches. Origins of cap and trade Cap and trade legislation seeks to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and other greenhouse gas sources by setting caps on the amount of pollutants a plant can spew into the air. Companies that come in below their cap are then allowed to sell their emission credits to other companies that need them. Supporters say the approach provides economic incentives to reduce pollution and innovate. Critics deride it as an energy tax and say it increases costs for everyone. The approach was originally employed to curb the pollutants that cause acid rain in the early 1990s. President George H.W. Bush championed it, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress -- including, yes, Newt Gingrich. The idea was to provide incentives to reduce acid rain through a marketplace approach. As scientists found more evidence of climate change, cap and trade became a popular solution. "It embodied freedom from the command and control regulation that can be so confining. It was seen as a real step in the right direction for that reason by a lot of Republicans," said Eric Pooley, a former journalist and author of the 2010 book The Climate War who is now a senior vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund. In 2008, it was one of the few areas of common ground for Barack Obama and John McCain. Both acknowledged climate change and favored carbon caps. But then several factors combined to change the dynamic, Pooley said. The recession made it hard to talk about any solution that had a price tag attached, and Republicans dug in against Obama's main initiatives. Plus, Pooley said, the rise of the tea party movement put pressure on moderate Republicans, especially those in the House who voted in favor of a cap and trade bill in 2009 that demanded major emissions cuts. The bill died in the Senate. Today, most Republicans in Congress are staunchly against cap and trade. Gingrich praises cap and trade But contrary to his claim this week, Gingrich has not been consistent on the issue. Four years ago, he was singing the praises of cap and trade -- as long as tax incentives were included in new laws. On Feb. 15, 2007, Gingrich went on the PBS show Frontline and championed cap and trade. Asked if he supported George W. Bush’s campaign pledge in 2000 to set mandatory carbon caps, Gingrich responded: "I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there's a package there that's very, very good. And frankly, it's something I would strongly support." he said. He then went on to criticize Bush for backing off the pledge. "If he had instituted a regime that combined three things I just said -- mandatory caps, a trading system inside the caps, as we have with clean air, and a tax incentive to be able to invest in the new technology and to be able to produce the new technology -- I think we would be much better off than we are in the current situation," Gingrich said. Two months later, Gingrich took part in a debate with Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts about environmental matters. Gingrich was slightly less gung-ho about cap and trade than he had been on PBS, but his message of "urgent need for action" on environmental dangers was clear. "We should address it and we should address it very actively," he said in the debate, citing a UN report documenting the earth’s rising temperatures. "The … consensus is that humans have contributed to that. I don't think there's any consensus that we are the only contribution, but there is a clear agreement that human activity has helped increase the level of warmness." On cap and trade, Gingrich said he doubted whether the approach would be as effective with carbon dioxide emissions as it had been with sulfur pollution, which in his view is easier to measure. "And cap-and-trade, by the way, for sulfuric acid and acid rain -- which I voted for and helped pass as the Republican whip -- was a very definable number of plants. A carbon cap in trade, if it's universal, is enormously complicated and transfers an amazing amount of power to a Washington bureaucracy and will create, inevitably, winners and losers and will become politicized overnight." He said he favored tax incentives to reduce carbon emissions but added, "I'm not automatically saying that coercion and bureaucracy isn't an answer. I just don't think it's as positive and as creative an answer as market incentives in terms of getting the kind of change we want." Then, a bigger shift By 2008, Gingrich was firmly against cap and trade. Pooley called it Gingrich’s "signature reading of the American political moment." He started talking not about addressing climate change but about increasing oil drilling domestically. In April of 2009, Gingrich took his cap and trade opposition to a House committee hearing, testifying against the bill that would have set carbon emission caps. Said Gingrich: "An energy tax punishes senior citizens. It punishes rural Americans. If you use electricity it punishes you; if you use heating oil it punishes you; if you use gasoline it punishes you. This bill will increase your cost of living and may kill your job." In that same hearing, however, he left the door open to a law that would apply cap and trade, combined with tax incentives and regulatory changes, to the biggest polluting sites. "Now, if you want to write a bill that covers the 2,000 most polluting places and say, fine, those 2,000 are part of cap and trade, I'd be glad to look at it," he told the House committee. At the 2011 candidate forum, Gingrich cited this testimony in his opposition to cap and trade. A section of Gingrich’s campaign website devoted to "setting the record straight" has this to say on the controversy: Gingrich "absolutely opposes ‘cap and trade’ as well as any system of taxing carbon emissions" and on global warming itself and humanity’s responsibility, the website says "Newt has noted there is no settled scientific conclusion." Our ruling Gingrich, as a presidential candidate in 2011, declared, "I never favored cap and trade." But we found solid evidence he did, with the condition that carbon caps be combined with tax incentives to encourage energy companies to innovate. He told Frontline a cap and trade system combined with tax incentives is "something I would strongly support," and even took a hindsight-is-20/20 stance, saying the country "would be much better off" if cap and trade had been instituted. That’s favoring it. We rate his statement False.

Newt Gingrich

2011-12-07T16:55:19

2011-12-03

['None']

pomt-12741

Currently, when we ship products out of America, many other countries make us pay very high tariffs and taxes — but when foreign companies ship their products into America, we charge them nothing or almost nothing.

half-true

/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/mar/02/donald-trump/trump-exaggerates-economic-burden-export-tariffs-s/

In his address to Congress, President Donald Trump said there’s an uneven playing field when it comes to trade with foreign countries. "Currently, when we ship products out of America, many other countries make us pay very high tariffs and taxes — but when foreign companies ship their products into America, we charge them nothing or almost nothing," Trump said Feb. 28. Taxes on imports and exports are important given that Trump has been highly critical of America’s trade policies. Is this United States getting a bad deal when it comes to trade? Experts say Trump is exaggerating. ‘Many other countries make us pay very high tariffs and taxes’ Trump’s generalization that "many" countries make us pay "very high" tariffs and taxes is misleading. Tariffs are another form of tax that are imposed on many goods as they enter a country. They’re designed to make homegrown products more competitive. The United States has many trade partners, and most tariffs with key trading partners like the European Union, Australia and Canada are relatively low. (In Canada, we pay zero tariffs due to the North American Free Trade Agreement.) However, American exporters trying to access particular markets for certain goods do pay much higher tariffs compared to what the United States charges exporters in those countries. For example, tariffs in developing countries are typically higher. For example, Rwanda’s tariff rate was 13.9 percent in 2012, while the United States rate sat around 2.7 percent, according to data collected by the World Bank. So, in a sense, many other countries make the United States pay higher taxes, but those countries are usually quite small and trade relatively little with the United States. Trump also talked about taxes. Other countries charge their full value added tax on imports, while the United States does not have a VAT and uses a larger corporate income tax. The VAT is collected at each stage in the production or distribution of a product or service, but with a refund mechanism for VAT paid on purchased units so the final burden falls on the final buyer or consumer. For example, when a clothing wholesaler sells some pants to a retailer, the tax is booked on the wholesaler’s mark-up. When the retailer sells the shirt to a customer, the tax is booked again. But the retailer gets a credit back for the tax paid by the wholesaler. "So our producers do face ‘very high’ taxes in many markets," said Gene Grossman, a professor of international economics at Princeton. "However, the local producers also face these taxes when they sell locally, so the taxes do not disadvantage the United States producers relative to the local producers." For example, in many circumstances, a VAT administered in the manner that Europe or Japan does so is neutral with respect to trade, he said. So while the United States may incur more financial hurdles in some countries, Trump’s point is overly broad. ‘We charge them nothing or almost nothing’ The United States’ tariff rate is far lower than other countries. But Trump exaggerated when he said the United States charges nothing or almost nothing. On average, tariffs imposed at the border in the United States is 1.5 percent, according to a March 2016 report from the U.S. International Trade Commission. That is below the 2012 world average, which was about 4 percent, according to the World Bank. For a more specific example, you can look to China. For non-agriculture products, the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods sold in the United States is about 2.9 percent, while Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods sold in China faced a 5 percent tariff. "Almost nothing is an exaggeration, but not wrong," said Joel Trachtman, an international law professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Our ruling Trump said, "When we ship products out of America, many other countries make us pay very high tariffs and taxes — but when foreign companies ship their products into America, we charge them almost nothing." Trump’s claim makes a generalization about the reality of trade in the United States and abroad. There are examples of countries who make the United States pay high tariffs and taxes, but there are other countries who charge about the same or nothing (Canada). It’s really a mixed bag. As for the second part — that we charge them almost nothing — we do charge something, but experts said that something is relatively low on a global setting, so Trump has a point. Overall, we rate this claim Half True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com

Donald Trump

2017-03-02T13:32:56

2017-02-28

['United_States']

pomt-04552

Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of President George W. Bush’s policies and the recession.

false

/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/27/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-hes-responsible-just-10-percent-/

In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired on Sept. 23, 2012, President Barack Obama blamed the Bush administration for much of the nation's recent debt. "Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression," Obama said. "Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10 percent of this increase in the deficit." When we asked the Obama campaign for documentation, they pointed to calculations by the Treasury Department, based on data from the Congressional Budget Office. CBO is an independent congressional agency, but the Treasury Department is part of the Obama administration, so we need to look closely to see whether Treasury is interpreting CBO’s data fairly and accurately. To figure out what caused the accumulation of deficits over the past decade, CBO tracked the surplus it had projected back in 2001 and compared it to the actual cumulative deficits that resulted instead. Between 2002 and 2011, the government was projected to run a cumulative surplus of $5.6 trillion. Instead, the government ran a cumulative deficit of $6.1 trillion. That’s a swing of about $11.7 trillion. We combined the CBO data into four broad categories, which broke down like this: * About 37 percent of the swing came from higher spending * About 24 percent from tax cuts * About 12 percent from increases in interest costs * About 27 percent from CBO’s failures to predict economic conditions accurately. Obama's Treasury Department took CBO’s detailed, bill-by-bill calculations and assigned some of those laws to Bush and some of those laws to Obama. When Treasury did this, it found that 29 percent of the cumulative shortfall came from CBO forecasting problems, 59 percent of the shortfall came from Bush administration policies and only 12 percent from Obama administration policies. That’s where Obama’s claim comes from -- roughly 10 percent due to himself, and 90 percent due to either Bush or an economy so bad that CBO was unable to predict it. However, we see two problems with this methodology. We’ll take them in order. "Over the last four years" On 60 Minutes, Obama said his 90-10 split referred to "the last four years." But that claim is a stretch at best if you’re using the Treasury document. Its percentages refer to the cumulative deficit swing over a 10-year period between January 2001 and August 2011. We can calculate a more appropriate number using the original CBO data. We’ll use three years -- 2009, 2010, and 2011 -- because those are the years that reflect Obama’s presidency. (Data for 2012 isn’t available yet.) Over this period, 38 percent of the swing comes from spending, 20 percent from tax cuts, 14 percent from interest increases and 28 percent from faulty CBO projections. Using Obama’s strict definition of what laws count as "Bush’s" and "Obama’s," about 17 percent of this swing is attributable to Obama, not 10 percent. What should count as "Bush’s" and "Obama’s"? The bigger problem with Obama’s figure, though, is in what he blames on Bush. Obama in the interview mentioned the big-ticket "Bush" programs -- the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Medicare prescription drug program. The total by his Treasury department also includes other laws, such as the 2008 Bush stimulus package, which Obama supported as a senator. Meanwhile, Obama claims as his own the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus), TARP and the tax act of 2010. However, this division seems unduly generous toward Obama because it includes policies he supports, or has supported. Obama has said he intends to keep the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning under $200,000, which accounts for a significant chunk of the cost. If he supports the policy, he shouldn’t be able to fob off 100 percent of the responsibility on his predecessor. The same goes for the Medicare drug program -- a program Obama not only supports but actually expanded in his health care bill. Even the responsibility for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are more nuanced than Obama’s formulation makes it. While Obama didn’t start the wars, he did make policy decisions that wound down one war (Iraq) and extended, at least temporarily, another (Afghanistan). We won’t venture a guess as to the actual percentage; CBO in its report acknowledges that its own numbers are "only a very rough approximation of how changes since January 2001 have contributed to the swing from projected surpluses to a string of annual deficits over the 2002-2011 period and should not be interpreted as precise tracking of all the components of that cumulative change over the past decade." Still, even our revised starting point of 17 percent is higher than Obama’s 10 percent. And it would rise much higher if Obama were to take some responsibility for the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare drug program and the wars, as we believe he should. (The Washington Post Fact Checker gave Obama's claim four Pinocchios, its lowest rating.) Our ruling Obama said that "over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of" President George W. Bush’s policies and the effects of the recession. But Obama misstated his own documentation by using four years rather than the 10 that were included in the analysis. At a minimum, that makes him responsible for at least 17 percent. But more importantly, he engages in significant cherry-picking by assigning pricey programs to Bush’s column while ignoring the fact that he supported, or supports, many of them. We rate the statement False.

Barack Obama

2012-09-27T17:17:55

2012-09-23

['None']

pomt-01455

Dan Patrick said that if women "get paid less than a man for the same job, that that’s not a problem."

half-true

/texas/statements/2014/oct/02/leticia-van-de-putte/leticia-van-de-putte-says-dan-patrick-said-equal-p/

Leticia Van de Putte said in her recent Austin debate with Dan Patrick that Patrick had said that if women "get paid less than a man for the same job, that that’s not a problem." Patrick said that? To our query, Manny Garcia, spokesman for Van de Putte’s campaign, said by email Van de Putte. the San Antonio state senator and Democratic lieutenant governor nominee, heard Patrick, the Houston senator and Republican nominee, make the remark at the 2014 Texas Tribune Festival. Patrick, Garcia noted, voted in the 2013 legislative session against a proposal ultimately vetoed by Gov. Rick Perry requiring equal pay for women doing equal work. And in May 2014, Patrick said that as lieutenant governor, he would keep an equal-pay measure from being considered by the full Senate. As recapped by WFAA-TV, Channel 8 in Dallas, Patrick said: "I do not think that we should have government telling business how to pay their employees whether they’re male or female. I would hold that bill… Look, women deserve equal pay and if they’re doing a better job than the guy they’re working next to, they deserve more. It’s not up to government." Patrick added that the lieutenant governor should protect free markets. "I don’t want government interfering," he said. On Sept. 20, 2014, Tribune CEO Evan Smith interviewed Patrick and Van de Putte back to back on an Austin stage. We watched the video. The equal-pay portion of the conversation opened with Smith asking Patrick to confirm he’d previously said: "Women should be paid the same as a man, but I don’t believe government should enforce it." "Correct," Patrick said, adding that pay should be based on an individual’s performance. "And if a woman does a better job than a man, she deserves to be paid more," Patrick said. "And we have a lot of women business owners. I don’t want the state of Texas telling women business owners you have to pay, listen, you have to pay everyone the same." Smith then asked if Patrick thought Texas has an equal pay problem or, alternatively, if critics had overblown the issue. Patrick: "You know, I don’t think it’s a problem. But to say, are there some businesses that may not treat people fairly? Yes. But I don’t think it’s a problem. And I think look, I’m a small-business guy; I’ve always had a lot of women work for our company. I want the best employees I can have." Smith asked next if women who work for Patrick are paid equally as men. Patrick: "In some cases you’d find they are paid more. Look, I’m a business guy and like every businessman and woman, you want the best people. You don’t really care what color they are, where they come from, what gender they are; you want them to do the job." Patrick then reiterated he doesn’t want the government imposing pay requirements. Our ruling Van de Putte said Patrick said that if women "get paid less than a man for the same job, that that’s not a problem." Broadly, both candidates were vague in their use of "problem," leaving room for interpretation. Still, Patrick answered a question by saying he doesn’t think the equal-pay issue is a problem and he hammered his opposition to any state law mandating equal pay. However, Patrick also said some businesses don’t treat people fairly and said any worker should be paid on performance. These are important missing details. We rate this statement Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.

Leticia Van de Putte

2014-10-02T14:07:32

2014-09-29

['None']

snes-02427

During the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the American South, some businesses posted "colored only, no whites allowed" signs over their doors.

true

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/colored-only-no-whites-allowed/

Racial Rumors

David Emery

Did ‘No Whites Allowed’ Signs Exist in the Segregated South?

15 May 2017

['Southern_United_States', 'Jim_Crow_laws']

tron-03389

Pictures of Muslim Protests in London

truth!

https://www.truthorfiction.com/muslim-burn-isis/

religious

Pictures of Muslim Protests in London

Mar 17, 2015

['None']

pomt-03027

Louie Gohmert of Texas "compared the current general-in-charge in Egypt to George Washington."

mostly true

/texas/statements/2013/oct/10/gail-collins/louie-gohmert-linked-george-washington-and-egyptia/

In her Oct. 3, 2013, opinion column, Gail Collins of the New York Times referred to U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler as among a couple dozen "unhinged" House Republicans keeping the government from being funded unless the Obamacare law is unplugged. Collins wrote that this cast includes Gohmert, who had an "exciting time" with Republican Reps. Steve King of Iowa and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota "in Egypt on a recent fact-finding tour during which ... Gohmert compared the current general-in-charge, Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, to George Washington." By email, Collins’ research aide, Isabella Moschen, pointed us to a New York Times news article posted online Sept. 8, 2013, describing a Cairo news conference featuring Bachmann, King and Gohmert. The Times story said Gohmert "compared the leader of the military takeover, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, to George Washington." The visiting Americans vowed to defend the $1.3 billion in annual American military aid to Egypt, according to the story, so its army could continue its fight against what Gohmert called "the bloodthirsty Muslim brothers." "Stand strong, Egypt," Gohmert was quoted as saying. "Stand firm." We checked Gohmert’s wording by watching a 15-minute YouTube video of part of the press conference. Here’s the relevant quote by Gohmert from the video: "George Washington, doing what no one had ever done before him, led a military in revolution, won the revolution and then resigned and went home. No one had ever done that. And we met in Gen. el-Sisi, a man who’s the leader of the military, who might have a shot at being elected president, but who’s more concerned about giving his life to help his country, Egypt." So, Gohmert did liken el-Sisi’s situation to that of Washington after his Revolutionary War victory. Our ruling Collins said Gohmert compared the current general-in-charge in Egypt to George Washington. Gohmert linked the Egyptian general and Washington. But this statement could benefit from the clarification that Gohmert’s comparison was limited to each figure’s desire to put his country ahead of himself; he did not compare other aspects of their characters or achievements. We rate this claim, which would have benefited from clarification, as Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.

Gail Collins

2013-10-10T12:00:00

2013-10-03

['Egypt', 'Texas']

pomt-14654

Under Barack Obama, "the fewest number of adults are working since Jimmy Carter’s presidency."

false

/texas/statements/2016/jan/22/roger-williams/roger-williams-falsely-says-fewest-number-adults-w/

After the president talked up national job gains, a Central Texas member of Congress suggested things haven’t been rosy. U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin, whose district stretches nearly to Fort Worth, said in a Jan. 12, 2016, response to the State of the Union address: "It’s been seven years since President Barack Obama took office. In that time, the United States has accumulated the largest national debt in its history, the fewest number of adults are working since Jimmy Carter’s presidency and the executive branch has expanded its power immensely – the president has chosen which laws to enforce and created new ones without Congress’ approval." The national debt, in raw dollars, is at a record high, and Obama has issued provocative executive orders though, PolitiFact found in 2014, fewer orders than most recent predecessors. A reader asked us if Williams was correct about the country having fewer working adults than when Carter was president from 1977 into January 1981. Just given population growth, could that be? We asked Williams’ spokesman Vince Zito how Williams reached his conclusion and didn’t hear back. In 2012, PolitiFact explored similar territory, finding Mostly False a claim that the American "workforce" was smaller than when Carter was president. The word "workforce" refers to the absolute number of people employed or seeking work; that tally was way up by 2012 compared with Carter’s era due to population growth and, through the 1990s, the expansion of working women. Counting workers So, did the number of working adults subsequently plunge to Carter-era levels? No, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose figures indicate that in 1980, around 100 million people were in the civilian workforce. In 2015, bureau figures show, nearly 150 million Americans were in the workforce -- up about 50 percent from Carter’s last year as president. By phone to our inquiry, economist Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute, a former deputy in the Department of Labor, told us Williams’ claim isn’t supported. "Not close," Rose said. A chart in the 2015 Economic Report of the President shows 99.3 million people comprised the civilian workforce in 1980 and 146.3 million were in the workforce in 2014. Another bureau chart indicates 149.7 million people in the workforce in December 2015 and also that the workforce increased nearly every year from 1980 through 2015 -- with the exceptions of 1982, 1991, 2002 and 2008 through 2010, a period encompassing the end of George W. Bush’s terms and the first two years of Obama’s tenure. From 2010, when an Obama-low 139 million people were in the workforce, the count inched to nearly 140 million in 2011; 143 million in 2012; 144 million in 2013 and 146 million in 2014, according to the bureau. Employment-population ratio By another indicator, Rose said, it’s possible to compare the share of Americans who had jobs in Obama’s years with the share of job-holders when Carter was president. The BLS, drawing on results from the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, calculates the employment-population ratio to reflect the proportion of the civilian noninstitutional population aged 16 years and over that’s employed. The highest ratio under Obama was 60.6 in January 2009, the month he was sworn in. The lowest ratio on his watch, 58.2, was set in November 2010 and June and July 2011. In Carter’s four years as president, according to the bureau, the highest ratio, 60.1, was reached in February and December 1979 and the lowest ratio, 57.0, occurred in January 1977, the month he was sworn in (it nudged to 57.2 the next month). Labor force participation We wondered if another indicator might be relevant. That statistic is the civilian labor force participation rate -- meaning the labor force, civilians 16 and older working full- or part-time, divided by the civilian population. According to the BLS, 62.6 percent of the population comprised the labor force in December 2015, the latest month of available figures. While Carter was president, a bureau chart indicates, the participation rate fluctuated from 61.6 percent in January 1977 to 64 percent in January and February 1980. Score one for Williams, though the rate on Obama’s watch peaked at 65.8 percent in February 2009--which was higher than any rate in Carter’s years or the first seven years of successor Ronald Reagan’s tenure. The rate was 66.5 percent when Reagan left office in January 1989. Labor force changes There’s another chewy issue: Demographics, particularly the aging of the population, have affected changes in the workforce, making comparisons between current times and Carter’s era tricky. In the 2000 Census, Americans aged 60 to 69 -- that is, those who had recently hit retirement age or would do so soon -- numbered about 20 million. But thanks to Baby Boomers, that number surged in the 2010 Census to more than 29 million, for almost a 50 percent increase. This matters because the more people aged 60 to 69, the more people who pass into retirement age -- or, put another way, leave the labor force. Even though more people proportionally remain in the workforce after retirement age, the difference isn’t big enough to cancel out the flood of new retirees. In 2015, Atlantic magazine published a chart contrasting the workforce in October 1977, in Carter’s first year as president, and June 2015, in the seventh year of Obama’s tenure: SOURCE: Story, "How America's Workforce Has Changed Since 1977," the Atlantic, July 2, 2015 (accessed Jan. 21, 2016) Our ruling Williams said that under Obama, "the fewest number of adults are working since Jimmy Carter’s presidency." This claim doesn’t hold up in that far more people were working the past few years than in Carter’s time as president. According to a government calculation, about the same share of adults was employed during each Democrat’s presidency. We rate this statement False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.

Roger Williams

2016-01-22T10:00:00

2016-01-12

['Jimmy_Carter']

snes-02662

HUD director Ben Carson found more than $500 billion in accounting errors at the federal agency.

mostly false

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/carson-hud-accounting-errors/

Uncategorized

Bethania Palma

Did Ben Carson Discover $500 Billion in Accounting Errors at HUD?

7 April 2017

['None']

vogo-00508

Statement: “We’re the only (California) county to receive this funding and it was the largest grant in the United States,” Supervisor Ron Roberts, running for reelection this fall, said during a candidates’ debate Oct. 6.

determination: true

https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-the-county-a-rainmaker/

Analysis: Earlier this year, San Diego County came under public scrutiny for turning down federal stimulus money aimed at creating jobs. Most urban counties in the state applied for the stimulus money and raked in millions for unemployed, low-income residents. One advocacy group estimated that the county missed out on between $11 million and $18 million.

Fact Check: The County, a Rainmaker

October 12, 2010

['United_States', 'California']

bove-00028

Army Man Behind The Viral Kerala Floods Video: Is He An ‘Imposter’?

none

https://www.boomlive.in/army-man-behind-the-viral-kerala-floods-video-is-he-an-imposter/

Army Man Behind The Viral Kerala Floods Video: Is He An ‘Imposter’?

Aug 20 2018 1:10 pm

['None']

pomt-06249

Says the federal stimulus program was ineffective because "the number of jobs has actually decreased by 18,300 through July 2011."

half-true

/oregon/statements/2011/nov/30/greg-walden/greg-walden-says-stimulus-hasnt-helped-oregon-gai/

Like most Republicans, Rep. Greg Walden says the $825 billion stimulus law has been a failure. But unlike other critics who speak in contemptuous generalities, Walden puts hard numbers behind his opinion. "When the bill was signed into law, the White House promised that the stimulus would increase by 44,000 the number of jobs in Oregon by December 2010," he says on his official congressional website. "Unfortunately, even with the stimulus, since the bill was signed, the number of jobs has actually decreased by 18,300 through July 2011." Walden supports his claim with a study by the Republican staff of the House Ways and Means Committee. That study relies on federal statistics and, sure enough, both the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Oregon Employment Department show that Oregon had fewer people working in July 2010 than February 2009. When the stimulus was signed into law in February 2009, 1.643 million people in Oregon held non-farm jobs, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In July 2010, after billions of dollars of stimulus spending had been dispersed, the number of non-farm jobs in Oregon was 1.625 million. That’s a loss of 18,000 jobs which is the number Walden cited. But it’s only part of the story. First, a quick recap. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is the full name of what is commonly called the stimulus, became law in February 2009. Democrats pushed the legislation as a way to create jobs and extend unemployment benefits through a mix of government spending, tax cuts and financial aid to cash-strapped states. The stimulus and its performance have provided a high intensity battlefield ever since. The White House released at least six reports on the program, counting jobs that were created or "saved" as a result of the stimulus. Those counts were augmented by dozens of other reports from independent sources. The most recent came Nov. 22 from the Congressional Budget Office. It says the stimulus is responsible for adding between 500,000 and 3.3 million jobs nationally. But the CBO, which is nonpartisan, also says its reports, "do not provide a comprehensive estimate of the law’s impact on U.S. employment, which could be higher or lower..." Among the reasons is that "some of the jobs included in the reports might have existed even without the stimulus," and that the reports do not "attempt to measure" the number of indirect jobs. Earlier studies, both independent and partisan, have offered similar ranges for the law’s impact on jobs. A March study by the White House Council of Economic Advisers explains why. "Evaluating the impact," said the report, which was the sixth in a series, " … is inherently difficult because we do not observe what would have happened to the economy in the absence of policy." Separately, the council’s report cited four independent analyses by the CBO and three private economic analysis companies that all found between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs saved or created. Oregon’s acting state economist Mark McMullen agrees precision is difficult -- and fraught with politics. "This issue is about as politically charged as topics in economics get," he said. He points to CBO numbers to explain how many stimulus jobs were created and reported in Oregon. In 2009, 18,412 direct jobs were created with 33,489 in 2010 and 17,663 in 2011. Even trickier is estimating the indirect jobs from the stimulus. Here, McMullen and other economists extend estimates that Oregon collected between 1.2 percent and 1.5 percent of stimulus jobs depending on the year. That translates to 2,967 to 13,350 indirect jobs in 2009; 8,714 to 41,078 jobs in 2010 and 5,820 to 30,473 jobs in 2011. Economists say there’s another conundrum: Because of constant churning in the economy, the stimulus law could have generated - or come close to generating - the number of jobs the White House predicted even though total employment in the state declined. The reason is that the jobs total is fluid and that additions in jobs like road construction could be eclipsed by losses in other parts of the economy that aren’t touched by the stimulus. There are also jobs protected with stimulus money. Teachers, prison guards, and other state workers who probably would have been laid off were able to keep their jobs because the stimulus sent $2.4 billion to Oregon. More than $1.2 billion was used to fill state cuts to education that could have triggered teacher layoffs in every district. Another $117 million went to public safety, with some of that money used to avoid cut-backs in police and emergency response personnel. The White House and supporters factor those "saved" jobs into their calculations. Walden and critics do not. Got it? It’s all very murky and far from precise. But this much is certain: As of July 31, 2011, there were 18,300 fewer people working in Oregon than in February 2009. That is the number Walden cites in his comment and that much is true. But Walden’s context suggests that the stimulus did not produce jobs for Oregon, and that is not correct. While economists and other experts say it’s impossible to say how many Oregon jobs were "created or saved," as the White House puts it, there certainly were some. And it’s clear that a significant number of Oregon jobs would have been lost without the stimulus. Walden’s assertion of lost jobs uses numbers out of context and leaves out important details. For that reason we rate this claim: Half True. Return to OregonLive to comment on this ruling.

Greg Walden

2011-11-30T17:02:07

2011-11-30

['None']

tron-01405

Chinese Firm Purchased Smithfield Farms

truth!

https://www.truthorfiction.com/smithfield-farms-china/

food

Chinese Firm Purchased Smithfield Farms

Mar 17, 2015

['None']

pomt-12807

Idaho mother sentenced to prison after multiple citations for breastfeeding in public.

pants on fire!

/punditfact/statements/2017/feb/13/theseattletribunecom/idaho-woman-was-not-sentenced-prison-breastfeeding/

A fabricated story that says an Idaho mother was imprisoned for breastfeeding her child continues to be persistently shared online, despite being completely made up. "Idaho mother sentenced to prison after multiple citations for breastfeeding in public," reads the headline on a Sept. 3, 2016, post on TheSeattleTribune.com, which sometimes is shared with an AssociatedMediaCoverage.com url. Even though the story is months old, it continues to be shared widely on Facebook, which flagged it as part of its efforts to combat fake news. The story — which again, is not true — says that 32-year-old Heather Watson of Baker County, Idaho, was sentenced to seven years in prison and will have to register as a sex offender for breastfeeding her 6-month-old daughter in public. The post said Watson had received six citations for indecent exposure before landing in prison. There is no outward indication the story is fake, but several clues should tip off readers this is a work of fiction. There are no other news reports of this incident, beyond blog posts from incensed mothers. There also is no record of a Heather Watson at the Idaho Department of Correction offender search. (We doubt the story is about the British tennis player of the same name.) The main photo used on the story is from a 2014 post on a Flickr account, with a chyron added to make it look like a screen grab from TV news. The inset mug is of a woman arrested in Maricopa County, Ariz., in 2016. Another giveaway is the location mentioned in the story: There is no Baker County in Idaho. There’s further reference to a location called Wiser, Idaho, but the town is spelled Weiser, and it’s in Washington County. There’s also a phone number given as a way to contact the judge in the case at the fictional Baker County Department of Justice. When called, the phone number identifies itself as a voicemail service for the controversial Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. The story likely keys off Idaho’s distinction as being the only state without a law specifically defending breastfeeding in public (although there is a law excusing nursing mothers from jury duty). The post links to a MoveOn.org petition supporting a new law, and there is a graphic illustrating where in the United States it is legal to breastfeed in public, taken from a 2014 Huffington Post article. Many Idahoans support a new law protecting mothers from being kicked out of businesses or charged with public indecency. The state reportedly has a higher rate of breastfeeding mothers than any other state. In 2016, Miss Idaho America Christi Van Ravenhorst teamed up with a group called the Idaho Breastfeeding Law Coalition to push for a bill, and mothers staged a "nurse-in" on the steps of the state Capitol. The headline on this post, meanwhile, continues to draw the ire of breastfeeding supporters with its fake details. We rate it Pants On Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/3fb86d8d-c282-4528-b43d-fabd03ef658c

TheSeattleTribune.com

2017-02-13T10:55:41

2016-09-03

['Idaho']

pomt-07122

Says Allen West violated federal law by scuba diving with U.S. flag.

false

/florida/statements/2011/jun/17/blog-posting/blogger-says-west-violated-federal-law-diving-flag/

A couple days before Flag Day, Republican U.S. Rep. Allen West went for what was supposed to be a fun excursion for the Army vet: A patriotic dive off the coast in Broward County. Little did West know he was entering hot water. The Miami Herald reported on West's June 12, 2011 dive with a group of Army, Navy and Marine Corps veterans and published a photo of West underwater in scuba gear, saluting the American flag. "I think it's important wherever we are, that the flag flies," West, a 22-year veteran Army officer and experienced scuba diver, told the Herald. The veterans who joined him agreed. But was the whole thing illegal? That's a claim being circulated by bloggers. The Daily Pulp, a blog of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, reported on West's deep sea adventure June 14 with the headline: "Allen West violates federal law during weekend diving trip." "There's nothing really bad to say about Rep. Allen West going diving off the coast of Deerfield Beach with a bunch of military veterans -- except for the fact that he violated U.S. federal law in the process and provided a pictorial of himself doing so," the blog claimed. "During his diving session Sunday, Lt. Col. West was photographed holding an American flag underwater, on top of an artificial reef -- which would be a violation of the United States Code." The blog then quoted Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8, Subsection B of the U.S. Code: "The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise." The allegation against West -- a freshman legislator being targeted by Democrats in 2012 -- was picked up or repeated by dozens of websites, including POLITICO, and BlogPost, a Washington Post blog. The Salon.com headline was "Why does Allen West hate the American flag?" PolitiFact Florida wanted to see if the blogger's claim had merit. There is indeed a "Respect for Flag" section of the U.S. code. It reads: "No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, State flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor." The code contains several rules about how to respect the flag including that it should "never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free ... never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery" and "never be used as a covering for a ceiling." For this fact-check, we're focusing on the part that pertains to West, that "the flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise." We contacted five different experts -- two former federal prosecutors and three law professors who teach constitutional law. All agreed the flag code is intended to advise people on how to respect the flag and that there is no penalty for violating the code. Most said, generally, that West's actions did not violate law. • The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right to burn the flag. So, experts asked, how could diving underwater with a flag be possibly considered worse? West's display of the flag underwater would be protected by his First Amendment rights, which would trump the code, said Kendall Coffey, a former federal prosecutor who worked for Democrats in the Bush v. Gore 2000 recount case. "It's really just a guidance rather than an instrument of prosecution," Coffey said. "He's acting inconsistent with the law, but if your actions are in effect protected by the Constitution which overrides laws you would not say he is violating the law. ... I don't think he has violated the law. I think he is fully protected by the U.S. Constitution." • The flag code uses the word "should," as opposed to "shall." That suggest the code isn't legally binding, said Michael Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami. "It's pretty clear to me that this rule is advisory, or normative, but, not mandatory unless referenced somewhere else in the code. (I'm aware of no such references.)," Froomkin wrote in an e-mail. "While one might expect a congressperson to choose to obey these rules voluntarily, that is an issue of decorum, not law. So, yes, it is a violation of something in the U.S. Code, but no, not a violation of a law that you can actually get arrested or fined for violating." Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, agreed. "There is no punishment here," Jarvis said. "When we talk about law where there is no enforcement mechanism it's an advisory law. Then the question becomes is that really a law?" • No prosecutor would ever try the case. Coffey and former South Florida federal prosecutor Jeffrey Sloman said prosecution was extremely unlikely. "It is my opinion that no U.S. Attorney (in his right mind) would ever prosecute anyone, let alone a U.S. Congressman, for the conduct you have described," Sloman wrote in an e-mail. We asked for a response from West's spokeswoman Angela Sachitano. She e-mailed us back a June 15, 2011 blog item in the conservative Weekly Standard, which wrote "it turns out that U.S. Armed Forces routinely takes the flag underwater for reenlistment ceremonies and various other reasons. Nevermind that it was obvious West was honoring the flag, and he's a retired lieutenant colonel and combat veteran that's probably far more sensitive to what is and is not appropriate to do with the flag than a flurry of liberal bloggers." Sachitano also sent us a link from the Navy's website showing a photo of a member of the Navy underwater holding the U.S. flag. So is the Navy breaking the law? Is West breaking the law? No, at least in the opinions of experts. He may have violated U.S. Code, but there's no penalty for doing so, and there's a question if the code is anything more than a suggestion. And even if it was, the U.S. Supreme Court has already said you can burn a flag, so experts say (and we agree) that you can go swimming with one. We rate this claim False.

Bloggers

2011-06-17T17:35:13

2011-06-14

['United_States']

pomt-07219

The 2009 stimulus bill "failed to get people back to work."

false

/virginia/statements/2011/jun/03/eric-cantor/cantor-says-stimulus-failed-get-people-back-work/

The Democrats’ massive stimulus program passed two years ago was a dud, according to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. "They (Democrats) passed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill which failed to get people back to work," Cantor, R-7th, said in a May 26 news conference of House Republican leaders. Cantor is referring to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February 2009. Democrats pushed the legislation as a way to create jobs and extend unemployment benefits through a mix of government spending, tax cuts and financial aid to cash-strapped states. It adds $830 billion to the budget deficit between fiscal years 2009-2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Let’s turn to the crux of the majority leader’s assertion -- that the measure failed to get people back to work. How does Cantor justify that statement? In an e-mail, Cantor spokeswoman Megan Whittemore characterized his statement as a broad proclamation that the stimulus failed. She noted that the unemployment rate is higher now than when the stimulus passed, that there are more discouraged workers and that private sector growth in May was much slower than expected, she said. "Of course, when the government spends that much money it’s able to hire additional government workers, but it failed to spur real private sector growth," Whittemore said. Cantor didn’t specify in his statement what kinds of jobs he was talking about -- public or private. So we won’t give him the benefit of his staff’s elaboration after the fact. Also, the economic statistics Cantor’s office cited don’t address whether there were people who returned job rolls as a result of the stimulus. Cantor simply said the stimulus "failed to get people back to work." Is that true? We decided to check. The White House has posted on its stimulus website a listing of jobs funded by the stimulus, breaking it down by state and congressional district. Between February 17, 2009 and March 31, 2011, the U.S. had a reported 573,510 full-time equivalent jobs funded by stimulus fund contracts, grants and loans, which account for one-third of the cost of the stimulus. Virginia had a reported 11,446 full-time equivalent jobs funded by the stimulus fund contracts, grants and loans. White House data shows the bulk of the Virginia jobs -- 7,203 full-time equivalent positions -- were in downtown Richmond where the state government relied on stimulus funds to balance budgets from 2009 to 2011. That number may paint an exaggerated picture, however, because the state parceled much of the stimulus money to localities to help support schools. Even so, the statistics suggest a benefit to Cantor’s constituents in suburban Richmond counties, many of whom work for the state government. The data shows 178 full-time equivalent jobs arising from the stimulus were located in Cantor’s district. The Government Accountability Office has criticized the White House tallies, noting in a November 2009 report that there were "significant reporting and quality issues" in how the figures were compiled. For more insight, we contacted the Virginia Department of Education. Charles Pyle, a spokesman, said that as of January 2011, Virginia school divisions reported they had saved 5,692 jobs and created another 926 jobs using stimulus money. In a report released March 18, 2011, the president’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated that between 2.5 and 3.6 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus through the fourth quarter of 2010. Separately, the council’s report cited four independent analyses by the Congressional budget office and three private economic analysis companies. Here’s what the groups found: *CBO: Between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs saved or created. *IHS/Global Insight: 2.45 million jobs saved or created. *Macroeconomic Advisers: 2.3 million jobs saved or created. *Moody’s Economy.com: 2.5 million jobs saved or created. Many conservative economists balk at the methodology of these studies, which they say depends on assumptions that government stimulus automatically generates a net gain in economic activity. Conservatives have argued government stimulus doesn’t boost the economy, but merely shifts around dollars that could be better spent by the private sector. They’re also concerned deficit spending creates uncertainty for businesses looking to hire. Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, is among those skeptical the stimulus is a net plus for the nation’s employment picture. In an Aug. 2, 2010 column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, he wondered how many private-sector jobs were lost or not created because he said the stimulus shifted money from the private sector to the government. But does that mean that the stimulus failed to put people back to work? In an interview, DeHaven said the stimulus program did create jobs, at least in the short term. "On one hand, it creates jobs," DeHaven said. "But at what cost?" To sum up: Cantor said the stimulus "failed to get people back to work." A variety of national studies estimate the measure saved or created at least 1.3 million jobs. The reports do not break down how many of the positions were new and how many were existing jobs that didn’t get cut. They do not tell us how many of the jobs were in the private sector and how many were public ones. But they do provide ample evidence that the stimulus did get people back to work. We rate Cantor’s statement False.

Eric Cantor

2011-06-03T14:58:07

2011-05-26

['None']

pose-00681

I will issue a strong executive order on ethics on my first day of office. I will attack the culture of corruption and cronyism that hinders job creation starting on my first day in office. I will demand the highest standards of appropriate behavior. This executive order will designate one individual as the contact person for all state and municipal employees, as well as private citizens, to contact with concerns about unethical behavior involving state and local government.

promise kept

https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/linc-o-meter/promise/711/issue-executive-order-on-ethics-on-first-day-in-of/

linc-o-meter

Lincoln Chafee

Issue executive order on ethics on first day in office

2010-12-22T12:01:53

['None']

pomt-03592

When Susan Rice spoke about Benghazi on Sunday news shows, she said "that al-Qaida might be involved, or other al-Qaida affiliates might be involved, or non-al-Qaida Libyan extremists, which I think demonstrates that there was no effort to play that down."

mostly false

/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/13/jay-carney/jay-carney-says-susan-rice-didnt-play-down-terrori/

Journalists peppered President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, with a series of tough questions about Benghazi at a White House press briefing on May 10, 2013. The incident, in which four Americans were killed at two U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, was the topic at a congressional hearing on May 8. Members of Congress have criticized how the administration handled the Sept. 11, 2012, incident, both in the immediate aftermath and in the months since. One of the issues receiving the most attention is whether, or to what extent, Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice misled the American public about the incident when she offered talking points on five Sunday morning talk shows on Sept. 16, 2012. The criticism has focused on whether Rice was playing down the possibility that the attack in Benghazi was a pre-planned event carried out by terrorists, as opposed to flowing organically from a series of public protests at U.S. facilities throughout the Arab world following the news reports about a movie made in the U.S. that mocked Islam. At the press briefing, Carney responded to questions about Rice’s talking points by saying, "If you look at the issue here, the efforts to politicize it were always about were we trying to play down the fact that there was an act of terror and an attack on the embassy. … Susan Rice, when she went out on the Sunday shows using the very talking points that we're discussing now, talked about the possibility that we knew that, or believed based on the intelligence assessment, that extremists were involved, and there were suspicions about what affiliations those extremists might have, but there were not … hard, concrete evidence. And so Ambassador Rice, in those shows, talked about the possibility that al-Qaida might be involved, or other al-Qaida affiliates might be involved, or non-al-Qaida Libyan extremists (might be involved), which I think demonstrates that there was no effort to play that down. It was simply a reflection of we did not, and the intelligence community did not, and others within the administration did not, jump to conclusions about who was responsible before we had an investigation to find out the facts." So was Carney correct that she mentioned al-Qaida and did not try to "play that down"? We asked the White House for evidence, but didn't hear back by publication time. So we went back to the transcripts of Rice’s appearances on five shows -- CBS’ Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union, NBC’s Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday and ABC’s This Week. We’ve collected the relevant exchanges from each show below and, to show the repetition of her talking points, highlighted them in bold, as well as her one reference to al-Qaida. You'll see that Carney did not accurately describe what Rice said and that she in fact did play down the possible involvement of al-Qaida. • • • • • CBS’ Face the Nation Rice: "Based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent." Host Bob Schieffer: "But you do not agree with (Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.) that this was something that had been plotted out several months ago?" Rice: "We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned." Schieffer: "Do you agree or disagree with him that al-Qaida had some part in this?" Rice: "Well, we'll have to find out that out. I mean I think it's clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al-Qaida affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al-Qaida itself I think is one of the things we'll have to determine." • • • • • CNN’s State of the Union Rice: "Let’s recall what has happened in the last several days. There was a hateful video that was disseminated on the Internet. It had nothing to do with the United States government and it's one that we find disgusting and reprehensible. It's been offensive to many, many people around the world. "That sparked violence in various parts of the world, including violence directed against western facilities including our embassies and consulates. That violence is absolutely unacceptable, it's not a response that one can ever condone when it comes to such a video. And we have been working very closely and, indeed, effectively with the governments in the region and around the world to secure our personnel, secure our embassy, condemn the violent response to this video. "And, frankly, we've seen these sorts of incidents in the past. We've seen violent responses to (Salman Rushdie’s novel, The) Satanic Verses. We've seen violent responses to the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in an evil way. So this is something we've seen in the past, and we expect that it's possible that these kinds of things could percolate into the future. What we're focused on is securing our personnel, securing our facilities. ... "(It was a) horrific incident where some mob was hijacked ultimately by a handful of extremists." • • • • • NBC’s Meet The Press Rice: "We can't predict with any certainty, but let's remember what has transpired over the last several days. This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world. ... "Let me tell you the best information we have at present. First of all, there is an FBI investigation, which is ongoing, and we look to that investigation to give us the definitive word as to what transpired. But putting together the best information that we have available to us today -- our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was, in fact, initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo -- almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video. "What we think then transpired in Benghazi is that opportunistic extremist elements came to the consulate as this was unfolding. They came with heavy weapons, which, unfortunately, are readily available in post-revolutionary Libya, and that escalated into a much more violent episode. Obviously, that's our best judgment now. We'll await the results of the investigation." • • • • • Fox News Sunday Host Chris Wallace: "The top Libyan official says that the attack on Tuesday was, quote, his words ‘preplanned.’ Al-Qaida says the operation was revenge for our killing a top al-Qaida leader. What do we know?" Rice: "Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control. "But we don't see at this point signs this was a coordinated plan, premeditated attack. Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don't want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it's important for the American people to know our best current assessment." • • • • • ABC’s This Week Rice: "First of all, it's important to know that there's an FBI investigation that has begun and will take some time to be completed. That will tell us with certainty what transpired. But our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous -- not a premeditated -- response to what had transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated. "We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to -- or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo. And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that as you know in the wake of the revolution in Libya are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there. We'll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms, but that's the best information we have at present." • • • • • How do these comments speak to Carney’s claim? Here are a few key points. Did Rice talk about "the possibility that al-Qaida might be involved" or that "al-Qaida affiliates might be involved"? Barely. In only one of the five interviews did Rice speak the words "al-Qaida" -- on Face the Nation -- and even then she urged caution in jumping to conclusions. "Whether they were al-Qaida affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al-Qaida itself I think is one of the things we'll have to determine," she told Schieffer. Did Rice talk about whether "non-al-Qaida Libyan extremists" might be involved? Yes -- repeatedly. But it’s worth noting that Rice portrayed these extremists as opportunists who seized the moment during a public uprising, which is something quite different from the pre-planned terrorist attack that the administration’s critics are charging the White House initially played down. Indeed, Rice explicitly, and repeatedly, shot down speculation that the attack was planned in advance, for instance telling Schieffer, "We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned." Did Rice play down any of the three listed scenarios? Yes. In the one interview of the five in which she mentioned al-Qaida at all, she urged caution about assuming they were involved. And while she did allow that "extremists" appeared to have been involved in the attack, she made a point of saying in every interview that these extremists got involved only by hijacking an ongoing event that protested the anti-Islam film, a narrative that gives almost a secondary role to the extremists. Meanwhile, in three of the five interviews, Rice specifically rejected the idea that Benghazi amounted to a preplanned terrorist attack. Our ruling Carney said that Rice "talked about the possibility that al-Qaida might be involved, or other al-Qaida affiliates might be involved, or non-al-Qaida Libyan extremists (might be involved), which I think demonstrates that there was no effort to play that down." It’s true that Rice offered those three scenarios, but Carney is wrong to say she didn’t play them down. Rice barely mentioned the potential role of al-Qaida or one of its affiliates, and she urged caution about jumping to conclusions on the one occasion in which she did. And while she did point to a role for "extremists," Rice made clear that the extremists didn’t pre-plan the attack, but instead hijacked a demonstration that was already under way. Both decisions played down, to one degree or another, each of the three scenarios she mentioned. We rate Carney’s claim Mostly False.

Jay Carney

2013-05-13T17:58:19

2013-05-10

['Libya', 'Benghazi']

pomt-08501

Says campaign contributions to her rival for a state House seat was money intended for schoolchildren.

pants on fire!

/georgia/statements/2010/oct/08/jill-chambers/candidate-state-house-said-her-rival-took-money-in/

Even among this election season's accusations of corruption and dastardly deeds, an attack in a local state House race stands out. A recorded telephone message recently told voters that Democrat Elena Parent is taking money intended for schoolchildren to finance her campaign. Taking money from schoolchildren? We had to check this one out. The race for state House District 81 is one of the most heated and closely contested legislative contests in Georgia this year. Republican Jill Chambers, a feisty iconoclast, is trying to keep her seat against Parent, a former litigator who worked for a Democratic state senator who became the ambassador to Singapore. Chambers has served in the House since 2003 and is best known for her work on MARTA's oversight committee, known as MARTOC. Neither party dominates the district, which runs along Buford Highway in DeKalb County northeast of Atlanta. Democrats think the seat is up for grabs. The outspoken Chambers thinks she is on her way to re-election. The campaign is ugly. Parent lobbed attacks accusing Chambers of wastefully spending taxpayer money. Parent's campaign has also launched websites dedicated to attacking the incumbent. Last week, Chambers blitzed voters with three automated telephone messages, or robocalls, and a mailer accusing Parent of taking money intended for schoolchildren: "This is an important voter alert for PTA members in DeKalb County," a voice on one of the robocalls said. "Candidate Elena Parent has taken over $22,000 intended for our schoolchildren in campaign contributions from a law firm representing the corrupt DeKalb school board. "DeKalb County can no longer afford to have politicians like Crawford Lewis, the indicted former school superintendent, and Elena Parent jeopardize our school system’s future. Since these contributions became public last week, Elena Parent has repeatedly refused to return the money. Please call Elena Parent today and tell her to return these contributions." The mailer asks, "Hey, Elena Parent, what did you promise in return for $22,585.09 in contributions from the law firm for the corrupt DeKalb County Board?" It is true that corruption accusations are rocking DeKalb schools. In May, Lewis, former chief operating officer Patricia Reid, Reid's former husband and Reid's secretary were indicted on accusations that Reid ran a criminal enterprise that steered millions of dollars in contracts to the ex-husband, an architect. The attack's logic is that the school system's legal fees skyrocketed from its budget of roughly $900,000 to $5 million, Chambers said. That means money that should be going to student education is filling the coffers of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, the law firm to which the attack ads refer. Sutherland's employees are therefore giving political donations with money intended for children, the line of reasoning goes. Is this accurate? We looked at Parent's campaign contribution disclosure reports, which she filed with the State Ethics Commission of Georgia. The campaign donation figures are correct. From mid-2009 through July, Parent received exactly $22,585.09 in cash and in-kind donations from people who listed their employer as Sutherland, where Parent used to work. Chambers' attack mailer has other correct information. Sutherland does have a contract to provide legal services for DeKalb County schools, including in the Reid matter. The school system does not have its own in-house legal department. Records show DeKalb arranged to pay Sutherland $120,555 a month for its services, as Chambers' mailer said. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that DeKalb schools spent $5.79 million on lawyers from July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010, when the district had budgeted $934,816 for legal expenses. But those contributions to Parent's campaign don't come directly from Sutherland, as the robocall suggests. Its employees made individual donations with their own money. Chambers acknowledges this, and two of her other ads say the donations are from lawyers, not the firm. There are other problems with Chambers' claims. None of the school system's board members was named in the indictment. A schools spokesman said it is therefore inaccurate to call the board "corrupt." And saying campaign contributions to Parent came from money intended for schoolchildren tests the bounds of logic. Using Chambers' reasoning, if a Sutherland lawyer bought a candy bar at a Wal-Mart, you could accuse the retailer of taking money intended for schoolchildren. So while Chambers' attack mailer contains some correct information, the robocall accusation against Parent is incorrect and borders on the ridiculous. It's unfair to call the DeKalb school board corrupt. School employees, not board members, were indicted. And no one has been convicted. The contributions were not directly from Sutherland, as the call implied, and were not intended for children. They were from individual contributors who used their personal funds. This House race is smoking. We give Chambers a Pants On Fire for this one.

Jill Chambers

2010-10-08T06:00:00

2010-09-27

['None']

snes-00385

If Democrats gain a majority in the House of Representatives, Maxine Waters could become chair of a committee that has the power to subpoena President Trump’s bank records.

true

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maxine-waters-subpoena-trump/

Politics

Alex Kasprak

Could Maxine Waters Subpoena Trump’s Bank Records If Democrats Take the House?

2 July 2018

['Maxine_Waters', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']

vogo-00267

Statement: “Last year, [the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control] processed 9,444 new alcohol licenses. They denied seven,” Scott Chipman, an advocate for Pacific Beach residents, said during an interview with Channel 6 that aired Feb. 11.

determination: mostly true

https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/liquor-license-free-for-all-fact-check/

Analysis: State alcohol licensing regulators recently approved an expansion of the Pacific Beach Shore Club, a popular oceanfront restaurant and bar.

Liquor License Free-For-All: Fact Check

February 28, 2012

['None']

pomt-09835

There's no rationing in any of these bills.

false

/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/25/howard-dean/rationing-health-care-reform/

It is perhaps the most polarizing word in the health care debate: rationing. Countless conservative opponents of the Democrat-backed health care reform plans have used the word. Their argument goes like this: You get government more involved in running health care, you set a goal of reducing costs, and it will inevitably mean rationing of medical services. It's not a long road from there to images of Grandma being denied a life-saving operation as a cost-saving measure. Everyone from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to Sen. Chuck Grassley has warned that people have reason to worry about rationing, while Democratic proponents of the plan have dismissed the claims as uninformed fearmongering. The term rationing has become so ubiquitous in the health care debate, we could've chosen to fact-check statements from any number of politicians as a way to talk about this issue. In a separate item, we looked at a claim about rationing from House Republican Leader John Boehner. In this item, we opted for one from Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, if only because he was so definitive about a subject with a lot of gray. "Let me just say, A, there's no rationing in any of these bills, so we don't have to worry about that," Dean said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Aug. 9. Before we examine his specific claim, let's look at the criticisms that have led to charges of rationing. The critics have often focused on two areas of the health plan to back up their accusations. The first is a proposal to expand comparative effectiveness research. That's a bureaucratic way of saying the government would do studies to find out which medical treatments and medications work better than others, and which are most cost-effective. The idea is that this would help doctors and patients make better informed decisions about the most effective treatment strategies. It's also expected to save money over time. Some opponents, however, claim the government would use findings from this research to ration care. We looked into this issue in detail and concluded that claim is False . Other opponents of the plan have pointed to the Obama administration's proposal for an Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC). The board would make annual recommendations for changing federal payments for various services covered by Medicare, as well as recommendations on ways to reform the Medicare delivery system. Michael Cannon, a health policy expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that price controls recommended by IMAC's unelected board amount to implicit rationing. Judith A. Stein, director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a group that helps seniors get care under the federal program, doesn't agree. Stein is no fan of IMAC, but she said its goal is not to "ration" care but to seek out ways to improve the efficiency of Medicare services, not necessarily cut them. We note that while IMAC has been recommended by the Obama administration, it was not included in any of the House bills so far. It has been discussed as an option by the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Still, we think it's a little premature to suggest this is part of the health care reform plan. And we think claims that IMAC might lead to wholesale rationing are alarmist. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office looked at the IMAC proposal and concluded it would save the government $2 billion from 2016–2019. That doesn't sound to us like the CBO expects any kind of dramatic cuts in service. In fact, we think much of the rhetoric from opponents about how the Democrats' health plan would lead to wholesale rationing has been wildly distorted, fanning the flames of public fear that the health care plan would have the government setting dollar limits on how much could be spent in a year to care for a patient, or deciding that some groups of people — older or disabled people, for example — should not get care because it's too expensive for the common good. And so it's understandable that Dean would want to knock down these wild claims. But we think Dean goes too far when he says the bills have "no rationing," because it ignores a hard reality of health care — there is rationing now and there would be rationing in the Democrats' plan too. "This whole notion of rationing as it applies to a public option, I think, is really ridiculous," Stein said. "It is what insurance is. Right now, Congress and any health care plan 'rations.' No health insurance I know pays for 'whatever it costs.'" "Everyone hates the word rationing," said Katherine Baicker, a health economics professor at Harvard University. "From an economics perspective, there's no way around rationing. Some care is being rationed now. Everyone isn't getting everything." And you can bet people who can't get health insurance due to a pre-existing condition feel like there's already rationing. Ditto for those who can't afford health insurance. Proponents of the health reform plan — which seeks to provide basic coverage to everyone, regardless of whether they have a pre-existing condition — argue that it would clearly reduce that form of rationing. You could spend an unlimited amount on health care that would have some chance of helping people, Baicker said. But we have a limited amount of public resources. And so decisions have to be made about how to prioritize to allocate those resources. The idea, she said, is to provide adequate, basic health care in a public plan. Above that threshold, she said, people with more money could buy extra care. John Holahan, the director of the Urban Institute Health Policy Research Center, said he has not seen anything in any of the plans that will result in explicit rationing, but "if you define rationing as 'people can't get everything they want,' it's true. But it's also true today." Interestingly, he said that Medicare is much less likely to deny a health service than a private insurer. "That's the argument you hear people making (that the reform bills would lead to government rationing)," Holahan said. "But I think they have it backwards." Even Obama acknowledged the reality of health care rationing in a town hall on health care on Aug. 16: "When we talk about reform, you hear some opponents of reform saying that somehow we are trying to ration care, or restrict the doctors that you can see, or you name it," Obama said. "Well, that's what's going on right now. It's just that the decisions are being made by the insurance companies. "Now, in fairness, we probably could not construct a system in which you could see any doctor anywhere in the world any time, regardless of expense. That would be a hard system to set up. So if you live in Maine, you know, we're going to fly you into California, put you up. I mean, you can see — and I'm not trying to make light of it — you can just see the difficulty. "So any system we design, there are going to have to be some choices that have to be made in terms of where you go to see your doctor, what's going on, et cetera. That's being done currently in the private marketplace. All we're trying to do is to make sure that those decisions that are being made in the private marketplace aren't discriminating against people because they're already sick; that they are making sure that people get a good deal from the health care dollars that they are spending." In other words, rationing is just a fact of life in a world with limited resources. Or as Cato's Cannon puts it: "Asking if there will be rationing under the Obama plan is like asking if there will be gravity. It is ubiquitous and unavoidable." We realize some may read our ruling and conclude that we believe the Obama plan will mean more drastic rationing. But we think it's more accurate to say the bill seeks a more rational way to ration. Whether it can succeed is a topic for legitimate debate. The Democrats' health care plan calls for a health care exchange that will be a vigorous marketplace of companies offering different plans that will compete for customers by offering more or less coverage. But each of those choices about coverage — a lower or higher cap on out-of-pocket expenses, perhaps, or more or less generous coverage for doctor visits — are rationing. And the same goes for three-fourths of Americans who would probably keep their current employer-sponsored health insurance. Those plans too have limits and caps — and rationing. We rule Dean's statement False.

Howard Dean

2009-08-25T14:36:15

2009-08-09

['None']

clck-00010

the real atmosphere is less sensitive to CO2 than what has been forecast by climate models

incorrect

https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/prof-john-christy-incorrectly-claims-to-show-climate-models-are-too-sensitive-to-carbon-dioxide/

Prof. John Christy incorrectly claims to show climate models are too sensitive to carbon dioxide

[' The Daily Caller, 29 Nov. 2017 \xa0 ']

['None']

farg-00366

A meme quotes Rep. Nancy Pelosi as saying: "I am disgusted with ‘President’ Trump allowing people to keep more of the money they earn."

false

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/10/fake-pelosi-tweet-pops-up-again/

fake-news

FactCheck.org

Saranac Hale Spencer

['Memes']

Fake Pelosi Tweet Pops Up Again

October 3, 2018

2018-10-03 18:13:46 UTC

['Nancy_Pelosi']

pomt-02259

A North Carolina study proves that "probably over a million people voted twice in (the 2012) election."

false

/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/10/dick-morris/dick-morris-theres-proof-over-1-million-people-vot/

The pursuit of voter fraud is a running theme among Republicans and the latest numbers out of North Carolina made the conservative websites pop with alarming headlines. "Oh My: Audit Finds Evidence of Widespread Voter Fraud in North Carolina," wrote Townhall.com. The National Review had "N.C. State Board Finds More than 35K Incidents of ‘Double Voting’ in 2012." The North Carolina news certainly fired up Dick Morris, a Fox News commentator and former political adviser to President Bill Clinton (who has largely turned against the Clintons these days). "It's most important data I've read in a year," Morris said on Fox News’ Hannity. "The elections commissioner there, Kim Strach, did a study of those who voted in North Carolina who also voted in another state in 2012 and she found 35,500 people voted in North Carolina and voted in some other state. "And only 27 states pool that data. Texas, California, New York and Florida did not pool their data. So you're talking about probably over a million people that voted twice in this election. This is the first concrete evidence we've ever had of massive voter fraud. We’ve talked about it ad nauseam. This proves it." Morris amplified on this claim in an op-ed that came out two days later. For this fact-check, we examine whether the report from the North Carolina Board of Elections proves that probably a million people voted twice in 2012. Let’s begin with the report, which wasn’t so much a report as one small piece of a longer slide show for lawmakers sitting on the state’s Elections Oversight Committee (see slides 34 and 35 in the presentation). Strach, executive director of the State Board of Elections, was giving the initial results from the state’s participation in a project run by the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office, Interstate Crosscheck. That project has grown from four states in 2005 to 28 in 2013. The list includes Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Those states send voter information to Kansas where the record of each of their voters is run against the records in all the other participating states. They are matched on first name, last name, date of birth and Social Security number. According to the Associated Press, Strach reported that this produced 765 voters in North Carolina who matched on each category with someone who voted elsewhere during the 2012 general election. "Could it be voter fraud? Sure, it could be voter fraud," Strach told lawmakers. "Could it be an error on the part of a precinct person choosing the wrong person's name in the first place? It could be. We're looking at each of these individual cases." Stracht said an additional 35,570 North Carolina voters matched on first and last name and date of birth, but not Social Security number. She emphasized the need for more investigation. Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission who is a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that 765 voters matched down to the last four digits of a Social Security number suggests that North Carolina has the goods. "It is highly unlikely with all of these matching, that these were different individuals," Spakovsky said. Spakovsky said the larger group, based on name and birth date, was also fruitful ground to root out abuse. "It is probable that many of these are the same individuals, but there is also going to be certain percentage of folks who may share the same name and birthdate but are not the same individual. What that proportion will be I don’t know – but they all need to be investigated," he said. These numbers are large. In fact, Spakovsky said that in itself is part of the problem. It takes an enormous effort to get to the bottom of each case and election officials rarely have the resources. However, if the past is any guide, there is reason to doubt that the problem of double voting and voting fraud is as large as these figures suggest. The track record of the Interstate Crosscheck program itself shows how quickly the scale can drop from massive to miniscule. Kansas created the project nearly a decade ago, which is enough time to assess its performance. In a September 2013 presentation, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said more than 84 million records had been fed into his office’s database. At that time, 22 states were in the pool. Kansas found over 120,000 potential duplicate voters based on first and last name and date of birth. The emphasis is on potential. Kobach’s presentation included the number of cases referred for prosecution. The total was 14. All of the referrals dated back to at least 2010. That year, over 850,000 people voted. There is no indication that any convictions emerged. That might be due to the workload and priorities of prosecutors but the point remains the same: The Interstate Crosscheck process starts very big and ends very small. Kobach also noted that four people were indicted in Colorado on charges of having also voted in Arizona. While an indictment is more serious than a referral, again, it is not a conviction. We reached out to the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office but the staff did not respond before our deadline. We will update this article if we learn anything new. The question is, why do the numbers drop off so radically? Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University, says there are many reasons. In his research, McDonald has spent a lot of time with voting records. They are not tidy. "You find missing data, or worse, a missing data code," McDonald explained. "They might plug in ‘9999’ when they don’t have a Social Security number and people are getting matched on that missing data code." In particular, clerical errors make voting records highly unreliable, McDonald said. "Someone might mark that a person voted when they didn’t, or they confuse fathers and sons who have the same name," he said. Interestingly, the Interstate Crosscheck staff acknowledge this. In their 2014 participation guide for states, they warn that "a significant number of apparent double votes are false positives and not double votes. Many are the result of errors -- voters sign the wrong line in the poll book, election clerks scan the wrong line with a barcode scanner." PunditFact looked at how North Carolina keeps its records. A bit over half of the counties, 53 of them, use a manual entry paper poll book. Mistakes are simply part of record keeping. In a different arena, medical records, one review found that at least 23 percent of names were misspelled. If database systems and human error aren’t enough to explain the huge number of matches, basic statistics make it even tougher to say this process picks out the same person in two states. McDonald co-authored a 2007 article that ran the numbers on New Jersey’s 2004 voter registry. More than 3.5 million people were listed as having voted that year. There was an allegation that over 4,000 people had voted twice. After scrubbing the list of 4,000 for clerical errors, about 800 matches remained. But statistically, researchers calculated that you would expect about 400 people out of the original 3.5 million to have the same names and birth dates. "The bigger the number of people, the more likely you will find these sorts of matches," McDonald said. "But they aren’t the same person." The latest round of the Interstate Crosscheck involved over 100 million records. Outside of the Interstate Crosscheck system, the number of people who vote twice seems low. PolitiFact Texas found that of 616 allegations of voting violations over 10 years in Texas, one conviction emerged for double-voting. So we know it’s unlikely that 35,000-or-more North Carolinians voted twice in 2012. How did Morris stretch it all the way to 1 million? In his op-ed, he offers some basic, but incorrect, math. The population of North Carolina is around 9.7 million, or about 3 percent of the overall U.S. population. If 35,000-or-more people voted twice in North Carolina, and if that trend continued all over the country, that would mean about 1.1 million people will have voted twice across the country, Morris figures. The problem with that calculation, however, is that if the same person votes once in North Carolina and once in Kansas, they will appear as having wrongly voted in both Kansas and North Carolina (2 hits in Morris’ calculation) -- but it would actually only be one offense. Morris seems to recognize this mistake. In his op-ed, he shifted to talking about "double-votes". So not only is the point Morris made on television flawed, his math appears to be inflated by 100 percent. Our ruling Morris said that the large number of North Carolina voters matched with records in other states was proof that over 1 million people voted twice in the 2012 election. While Morris admittedly was extrapolating from the North Carolina data, his conclusion is flawed on several fronts. The head of North Carolina’s board of elections did not claim that even the closest matches on name, birth date and Social Security numbers was conclusive evidence. She said more investigation was needed. The track record of the Interstate Crosscheck project shows that a tiny fraction of all potential matches represents any kind of voting fraud. In Kansas, out of more than 850,000 votes cast, only 14 names were recommended for prosecution and the Kansas Secretary of State reported no convictions. In other states, database quirks, human error and the statistics of large numbers have been shown to trim the initial reports of widespread fraud down to the barest sliver of actual cases. We rate the claim False.

Dick Morris

2014-04-10T13:50:29

2014-04-07

['None']

pomt-10491

John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

true

/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/08/moveon/mccain-changed-position-on-mlk-day/

The left-leaning advocacy group MoveOn.org has created an e-mail warning voters against Sen. John McCain, listing 10 things it says people might not know about him. "Please check out the list below, and then forward it to your friends, family, and coworkers," the e-mail says. "We can't rely on the media to tell folks about the real John McCain — but if we all pass this along, we can reach as many people as CNN Headline News does on a good night." Item No. 1 is about Martin Luther King Jr. "John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Now he says his position has 'evolved,' yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws," the e-mail states. It's true that as a congressman in 1983, McCain voted against making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. He was on the losing end of a 338 to 90 vote in the House of Representatives. McCain no longer stands by that vote. On April 4, 2008 — the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's death — McCain said the vote was wrong in a speech he gave in Memphis, the city where King died. "We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I myself made long ago when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of Dr. King. I was wrong," he said, to loud reaction from the crowd. "I was wrong, and eventually realized it in time to give full support — full support — for a state holiday in my home state of Arizona. I'd remind you that we can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans." So McCain did oppose the national holiday, even though he later supported the state holiday. As for opposing key civil rights laws, McCain scores very low from two groups that rate Congress on issues involving civil rights law. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights rates congressmen on their voting records. For the most recent 110th Congress, it rated senators on an array of votes on such things such as immigration, voting rights, education and the judiciary. McCain scored 22 percent on his votes, voting in favor of the conference's positions twice, on immigration issues. (Sen. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, scored 92 percent, while Sen. Barack Obama scored 100 percent. These percentages omit missed votes.) The American Civil Liberties Union also rates McCain poorly, giving him a 17 percent rating for the 110th Congress and a 22 percent lifetime rating. Some news stories have given a more nuanced account of McCain's history on civil rights and the black community. (See Politico's April 8, 2008, story on John McCain and Arizona's black community .) But MoveOn gets its facts right on McCain, MLK Day and the senator's voting record, so we rate this statement True.

MoveOn.org

2008-04-08T00:00:00

2008-04-05

['John_McCain']

pomt-11375

Pennsylvania (is) the only state in the country not to tax drillers.

half-true

/pennsylvania/statements/2018/mar/30/tom-wolf/wolfs-half-truth-subject-shale-taxes/

Almost four years after taking office and in the midst of his first re-election bid, Gov. Tom Wolf continues to push for a severance tax on natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania, arguing that drillers haven’t paid their fair share while raking in huge sums of cash from the Marcellus Shale boom. It’s a theme that carried over from his first campaign and through his first years in office, and it’s present in his latest round of campaign advertising. In a campaign video released March 23 titled "Here they come," Wolf says oil and gas lobbyists — the "they" in this scenario — "spent $60 million to block a tax on oil and gas extraction..." in Pennsylvania. (The $60 million figure is based on campaign finance data for the seven year period between 2010 and 2017, but MarcellusMoney.org says this total includes lobbying against other regulations and clean energy incentives, not just a severance tax.) The ad includes an animated clip showing black limousines labeled "LOBBYI$T" pulling up to the Capitol where bank bags of cash are tossed atop the steps. In the same breath, Wolf says this lobbying blitz has left Pennsylvania "the only state in the country not to tax drillers." Is that true? A tax by any other name While Pennsylvania remains the largest natural gas-producing state without a severance tax, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, it is not the "only state" without one. A handful of states with relatively low levels of natural gas production or no natural gas production, like Iowa, lack such a measure. Pennsylvania shale drillers argue that even without a severance tax here, they’re far from being free of levies. In 2012, Wolf’s predecessor, Gov. Tom Corbett, signed into law an updated version of Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Act. It included the imposition of a so-called impact fee assessed on new wells, with the resulting revenue distributed to local and state governments to help municipalities "offset impacts associated with natural gas drilling." In June 2017, the Pennsylvania Utility Commission said it had collected and distributed "more than $1.2 billion in impact fees to communities across Pennsylvania" over six years. Reached by email, Erica Wright, vice president of communications and membership with the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade association and lobbying group, pointed back to a previously released statement. It reads, in part, "since 2012, Pennsylvania’s natural gas impact tax has generated $1.5 billion (and counting) in new revenue. These revenues, which total approximately $200 million annually, directly support communities in every county, as well as key statewide environmental and conservation programs." Groups like Marcellus Shale Coalition argue of the impact fee that if it looks like a tax and acts like a tax, it’s a tax. (Wright’s use of the phrase "impact tax" in referring to the state’s impact fee is no coincidence. It’s also reflective of the industry’s overall position on this subject.) The Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association, another industry advocate, also argues that gas drillers pay "the same taxes as other businesses, PLUS the impact ‘fee’ that NO OTHER businesses pay." Asked if the Wolf campaign video overlooked these taxes or the impact fee in calling Pennsylvania "the only state in the country not to tax drillers," Wolf campaign spokesman Jeff Sheridan said the line is "clearly" a reference to the lack of a severance tax here. (The words "severance tax" do not appear in the ad.) He then went on to disagree with those who say the impact fee is a practical equivalent to a severance tax. The point of the ad, Sheridan added by email, is that "Governor Wolf has taken on lobbyists and special interests to fight for a commonsense severance tax to stop letting oil and gas companies off the hook so they pay their fair share in Pennsylvania." Sheridan continued, "It’s long past time — Pennsylvania is the only major gas producing state that does not impose a severance tax on oil and gas. States like Texas, West Virginia, and Oklahoma all charge a severance tax, and their natural gas industries continue to thrive." What’s the difference? For starters, the verbiage — one is a "fee" and one is a "tax." Generally speaking, taxes are meant to raise money that can be used to defray the general costs of government — Wolf has said he wants a severance tax to help fund public education, for example — while a fee is typically meant to pay for the costs of a specific government program or service. But beyond that, the applications of the impact fee and severance tax differ as well. According to StateImpact.org: "Impact fees are levied on a per-well basis, so each time drillers punch a hole in the ground, they pay. A ‘severance tax’ is applied when resources are severed from the earth, so it would be a tax on the amount of gas produced." The Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania said in a 2015 report that the yield for the state would be larger with a severance tax, adding, "were the severance tax in place for the most recent year, extraction companies would have paid an effective tax rate more than three times the rate they were charged under the impact fee." In February 2015, Wolf said he expected the severance tax to create $1 billion in new revenue for Pennsylvania, Philly.com reported at the time. That projection has fallen in the years since, alongside a slowdown in natural gas production. Actual impact fee collections have fallen for the same reason. But is the impact fee actually a tax? In September, the Pennsylvania State House Energy and Environmental Resources Committee approved an amendment rebranding the existing "impact fee" as a "severance tax." Critics called it an act of "legislative deception" and an exercise in semantics. Supporters called it an overdue clarification. The conservative Commonwealth Foundation, meanwhile, added that because impact fee revenue was restricted to certain uses under Act 13, and because the fee is a flat rate per unconventional well, these limits make the proposal "truly a fee, rather than a tax in disguise." Our ruling Wolf is accurate in saying Pennsylvania does not have a severance tax on drilling. He's also accurate in saying lobbyists are a large part of the reason for that. He's wrong in implying those same lobbyists spent $60 million in direct opposition to severance tax proposals. He's wrong about Pennsylvania being the only state without a severance tax, though it's the only "major gas-producing state" without one. It's also misleading to imply that nothing has been done to tap drilling activity for municipal or state gain in Pennsylvania. The result of all this is a lack of context being passed on to viewers and voters. For those reasons, we rate the claim Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com

Tom Wolf

2018-03-30T10:13:25

2018-03-23

['None']

pomt-13988

Since 1978, college "tuition nationwide has gone up something like four times the rate of inflation."

true

/wisconsin/statements/2016/jun/09/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-college-tuition-has-risen-four-t/

Gov. Scott Walker has put caps on tuition increases, even amid budget cuts, saying he wants to be sure there is "affordable" tuition for the University of Wisconsin System. He caught our attention May 16, 2016 when he said, on conservative talker Charlie Sykes radio show on WTMJ-AM, that rising tuition costs are far from unique. "This is not just picking on the University of Wisconsin System," Walker said. "This is a nationwide trend. Since ‘78, I think, tuition nationwide has gone up something like four times the rate of inflation." We have checked many claims about the cost of college tuition. In 2014, for instance, PolitiFact National examined this claim: "In 1978, a student who worked a minimum-wage summer job could afford to pay a year’s full tuition at the 4-year public university of their choice." Based on national averages, a person could pay in-state tuition at most public universities with their summer earnings, but not for any school, such as one out of state. The claim was rated Mostly True. We decided to check out Walker’s claim, too. Behind the numbers When asked for backup, Walker’s team sent us to a Chart of the Day published by Bloomberg in 2012. The article said college tuition since 1978 has increased four times faster than inflation, but didn’t cite a source for the statistic. We turned to the National Center for Education Statistics, the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing education data. The center, part of the U.S. Department of Education, provided data on undergraduate tuition going back to 1978. The numbers come from its annual surveys of colleges. In 1978, tuition and required fees at all institutions averaged $1,073. By 2014, it increased more than 1,000 percent, topping $11,000. That’s a big jump in cost. But Walker’s claim compared the increasing price of tuition to inflation. The Consumer Price Index is one measure of inflation, or how over time the value of money decreases. The CPI measures the change in cost over time for a representative basket of goods, such as food, housing, transportation and education. From 1978 to 2014, the index increased about 246 percent. So, clearly, the rate of increase for tuition has surpassed inflation. And the percent increase in tuition is more than four times the increase in inflation, as Walker claimed. Since Walker talked in the context of Wisconsin’s public four-year college system, we took a look at tuition prices for those schools. Tuition at those institutions shot up from around $600 to more than $8,000 by 2014. That’s more than a 1,000 percent increase. What about the total cost of an education? Tuition is just a portion of the cost of a college degree and the costs for room and board have increased much slower than tuition. If tuition is combined with room and board, the price increase is about three times inflation since 1978, according to the same education and inflation data. Some experts say the out-of-pocket costs for tuition should be examined, rather than the published rates. Typically, few students pay the full amount, since many also get scholarships, grants and other financial aid. The College Board reports data on the net tuition paid by students, but that data doesn’t begin until the 1990s. Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and co-author of the Board’s Trends in College Pricing and Trends in Student Aid reports, said the growth of actual prices is smaller than published prices, though still substantial. For example, from 1990 until 2014, net tuition paid by in-state students at public four-year schools across the country doubled. In contrast, published tuition prices more than tripled during the same time period. Our rating Walker said since 1978, college "tuition nationwide has gone up something like four times the rate of inflation." Average tuition prices from the National Center for Education Statistics and inflation rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics back up his point. We rate the claim True.

Scott Walker

2016-06-09T05:00:00

2016-05-16

['None']

pomt-03241

Of the roughly 15 percent of Americans who don’t have health insurance, "half of them made more than $50,000 a year."

false

/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/15/rand-paul/rand-paul-says-half-uninsured-americans-make-least/

During a recent appearance on The Daily Show, guest host John Oliver and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., engaged in a lively exchange on health insurance and why people buy it or not. Paul, an eye surgeon, is strongly opposed to President Barack Obama’s health care law. During the interview, Oliver pressed him on how to get more Americans signed up for insurance. Paul indicated that the biggest issue is affordability, particularly for young, healthy and relatively affluent people. According to the most recent statistics, he said, "85 percent of people had insurance, so 15 percent didn't. So what you need to do is look at who are the 15 percent, and why don't they have insurance? Of the 15 percent who didn't have insurance, half of them made more than $50,000 a year. Why didn't they buy insurance? Because of the expense. They were young healthy people." In this fact-check, we’ll check his claim that half of the uninsured made more than $50,000 a year. In a separate report, we’ll look at whether the cost of insurance is the biggest barrier to uninsured Americans. We’ll start by noting that Paul is very close to the mark when he says 15 percent of Americans don’t have insurance. The most recent Census Bureau statistics for 2011 show that 15.7 percent of Americans are uninsured. What about the income breakdown for that 15 percent? There are a few different ways to slice the data, but none produces a number for $50,000-plus earners that reaches the 50 percent level Paul offered on The Daily Show. In a September 2012 paper, the Employee Benefits Research Institute looked at 2011 census data on health coverage. It found that 28 percent of the uninsured earned at least $50,000. That’s quite a bit lower than what Paul had indicated. The highest plausible percentage cited by our experts -- who included both liberals and conservatives -- used census data for households rather than for individuals. Using this method, 37.5 percent of the uninsured live in a household with an income above $50,000. Why the variation between household and individual data? Uninsured young adults who are roommates might live in a household where all roommates collectively make more than $50,000, even if each roommate individually earns much less. This type of living arrangement tends to boost the count of uninsured adults who "earn" more than $50,000, even if they really don’t make that much individually. This difference in counting methods matters in this sort of statistical comparison because people without health insurance "are more likely to be living in less-common housing arrangements -- more in multi-generation families, more living with people who aren't related to them," said Hanns Kuttner, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. When we showed our calculations to Paul’s office, communications director Moira Bagley said there’s significant uncertainty in the Census data due to "inexact data collection" that "under-reports the numbers of people who actually have health insurance." This refers to an argument made by some critics of Obamacare that the Census Bureau undercounts Medicaid recipients compared to the total cited by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Subtracting these uncounted Medicaid recipients leaves the pool of uninsured Americans relatively better off. However, each of the seven ideologically diverse health policy experts we talked to for this story used the census numbers when we asked them to evaluate Paul's claim, and none expressed concerns about the ability of the census data to fairly evaluate the question. Our ruling Paul said that of the roughly 15 percent of Americans who don’t have health insurance, "half of them made more than $50,000 a year." In reality, if you measure what individuals make, Census data shows that 28 percent of uninsured Americans earn $50,000. By another measure, using household income, almost 38 percent of uninsured Americans earn at least $50,000. Both of these figures are pretty far from the 50 percent Paul cited in the interview. We rate his claim False.

Rand Paul

2013-08-15T15:11:14

2013-08-12

['United_States']

pomt-08367

Darryl Hicks had seven ethics violations and didn't pay most of the fines.

half-true

/georgia/statements/2010/oct/26/mark-butler/candidates-spar-over-ethics-claims/

With double-digit unemployment and the economy as uncertain as the outcome of this weekend's matchup between the Georgia Bulldogs and the Florida Gators, the two leading candidates for state labor commissioner are spending a good bit of time talking about ethics. At issue: Who is more unethical? Case in point, the Oct. 17 Atlanta Press Club debate. The fireworks began with Democrat Darryl Hicks grilling Republican Mark Butler, a state representative, about whether he attempted to "strong-arm" a state university to rehire a lobbyist whom he dated. "I never threatened nor strong-armed anybody to hire anybody back," Butler said. Butler countered by asking Hicks about some information the representative spotted on the State Ethics Commission's website. "I'd like for you to tell the people of Georgia about your seven ethics violations and your seven ethics fines, most of which you have not paid, dating all the way back to 2006," Butler said, referring to Hicks' failed 2006 bid for secretary of state. "Now, Mark," Hicks said. "C'mon, folks can look that up and see that is not true." "Look it up," Butler could be heard saying in the background. We wanted to look into Butler's claim about Hicks, since it seemed more concrete than whether Butler inappropriately tried to help a lobbyist. You've either had ethics fines or not. Butler led us to the website's late/nonfiler's reports. Hicks' name was there. Hicks was late in turning in his campaign contribution disclosure report, according to the site. The disclosure reports outline who gives a candidate money and how each candidate spent the funds. "It's right there," Butler said. Hicks, the former chief of staff to the chairman of the Fulton County Commission, lost the Aug. 8, 2006, Democratic Party runoff for secretary of state to Gail Buckner. He was late in filing disclosure reports from that campaign that were due on Sept. 30, 2006, and Oct. 25, 2006. We checked the Ethics Commission's website and Butler's name didn't appear. Butler's campaign disclosure reports show he filed them by the deadline. Hicks told us he didn't realize he had to file disclosure reports with the state for the Sept. 30, 2006, and Oct. 25, 2006, due dates since he had lost. State records show some fines were paid in 2009, when Hicks said he received invoices from the state that he had not paid the late fees. Hicks paid $150 in fines last week to clear up other late disclosure reports. Candidates are typically required to send disclosure reports to the state five times during the year of their campaign. The standard dates are March 31, June 30, Sept. 30, Oct. 25 and Dec. 31. Candidates have a grace period of five business days to deliver the reports to the state. Candidates who miss the deadline are required to pay "an additional filing fee" of $25, according to page 24 of the state Ethics in Government Act. The candidate must also pay a $50 "filing fee" if he or she is more than 15 days late, according to the state act. The penalties and language are much tougher on lobbyists found guilty of improper actions. The ethics act says they can be hit with a $2,000 penalty for each "violation." Ethics was a major topic during this year's legislative session as lawmakers passed a bill that broadens the authority of the Ethics Commission, tightens reporting requirements for lobbyists and legislators, increases the fines for violations, makes it a crime to use a state agency to attack someone and prohibits sexual harassment. State lawmakers were influenced by embarrassing headlines that surrounded the resignation of former House Speaker Glenn Richardson, who resigned last year after his ex-wife accused him of having an affair with a female lobbyist. Some lawmakers wanted the legislation, Senate Bill 17, to go further by restricting gifts from lobbyists. We spoke with Hicks campaign spokeswoman Phyllis Fraley, who sent us a letter from her candidate to the commission. Hicks wrote that there were "clerical errors in the amount assessed" on the state's website and he thought the matter had been resolved. State Ethics Commission executive secretary Stacey Kalberman told us that all the fines have been paid. Fraley accused Butler of blowing the matter out of proportion. "It's interesting that while Mark is busy being dishonest by attacking Darryl's ethics over the most minor clerical error, Mark has managed to further expose his own serious moral and ethical lapses while he held office," she said. Butler believes the issue is important. He told us he wouldn't have brought up the matter if Hicks had been late once or twice, but seven times is disturbing. Butler also said Hicks should have known he missed those deadlines in 2006. "He's a habitual violator," Butler said. Butler accused Hicks of misleading those who watched the Atlanta Press Club debate by saying it wasn't true he had ethics violations. "He called me a liar over that fact," Butler said. We discussed this with Common Cause Georgia executive director Bill Bozarth, one of the state's leading government ethics watchdogs. Bozarth said when he thinks of ethics violations, he considers something like a candidate who uses a contribution for inappropriate purposes or accepts a donation from a questionable source. Bozarth said he has seen some cases in which candidates who lost their race missed the deadline to hand in their disclosure reports, although the state's ethics laws do not give them a pass for being late because they lost. So does this constitute an ethics violation? "Technically, it is a violation, but in my opinion, not as serious as those flouting the law and using the [campaign] funds for inappropriate purposes," Bozarth told us. We posed the same question to Kalberman, without mentioning the dispute between the two candidates about this issue. "Technically, any time you don't file on time, it's an ethics violation," Kalberman said. "I would not consider it a serious violation of the ethics code." Butler is technically correct that Hicks violated the ethics act. But his statement leaves out important details and context that could give voters a different impression. The ethics act is much tougher on other acts of improper conduct. We believe Butler's statement could give viewers the impression that Hicks committed ethical lapses along the lines of what was included in SB 17. Also, most of the fines were paid before last week. We rate Butler's claim against Hicks as Half True.

Mark Butler

2010-10-26T06:00:00

2010-10-17

['None']

snes-02879

A man died in a meth lab explosion after attempting to light his own flatulence.

false

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/meth-lab-explosion-gas/

Junk News

Dan Evon

Did a Man Die in a Meth Lab Explosion After Lighting His Farts on Fire?

16 February 2016

['None']

pomt-07931

Recommendations for a major tax overhaul for Georgia are an "overall tax hike."

mostly false

/georgia/statements/2011/jan/28/americans-tax-reform/anti-tax-group-says-georgia-overhaul-hike/

A proposal to overhaul Georgia’s tangled tax system recently earned the worst slur in the fiscal conservative book: "tax hike." Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes all tax increases, called out new Gov. Nathan Deal, House Speaker David Ralston and Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers by name. If they back the reforms, ATR said, they’re breaking a promise they made when they signed the group’s anti-tax pledge. The proposal "is akin to shards of glass in a delicious creme brulee," Grover Norquist, leader of the Washington-based group, said in a written statement Jan. 10. "It is a bit of desirable tax reform ruined by an overall tax hike." Are there really shards of tax-hike glass in an otherwise yummy overhaul? In June, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue created the Special Council on Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians to recommend a rewrite of the state’s tax code. Critics think change is overdue. They argue that the code is outdated and riddled with exemptions for special interests. They also want the state’s income to rely on revenue sources that aren’t so vulnerable to economic downturns. On Jan. 7, the council came back with more than a dozen recommendations. They included lowering the 6 percent personal and corporate income tax over three years to a rate that "does not exceed" 4 percent, re-establishing a tax on groceries and eliminating many exemptions. Council members recommended lowering income tax rates to levels they think will zero out any potential revenue increases, said Christine Ries, an economics professor at Georgia Tech and a member of the council. State legislators now must decide how to incorporate the recommendations into a bill. Three days later, ATR called the recommendations an "overall tax hike." ATR used data from the council’s report and its own estimates to determine cuts would total $3.375 billion over three years but hikes would total far more -- between $4.77 billion and $5.75 billion. Since the proposal would increase state revenue, it counts as a tax increase, its officials told PolitiFact Georgia. ATR’s focus is on the recommendation’s overall effect on revenue and not whether certain individuals would pay more taxes. We will therefore focus on revenue, as well. We took our own look at the council’s report and found that while it’s possible the changes would increase tax revenue, it might not. Under the council’s proposal, a grocery tax would start right away, but reductions in personal and corporate taxes that would offset that hike would phase in over three years. Therefore, in the first year taxes could rise. Our rough calculations put that jump between some $250 million and $1.4 billion. The report, however, lacks revenue estimates for major pieces. It has none for two years of the three-year cut in personal and corporate income taxes. Estimates for other initiatives, such as eliminating the tax on energy used in manufacturing, are missing as well. News accounts place the cost of this tax anywhere from $80 million a year to $420 million. More complete estimates are in the works. When you tally what numbers are available, it’s not clear whether tax numbers would rise or fall. PolitiFact Georgia was able to cobble together reasonable scenarios in which they increased and dropped. For instance, if you follow ATR’s assumptions and take the high revenue estimates for taxing groceries, increasing cigarettes taxes and taxing person-to-person auto sales, revenue would jump by an average of more than $1 billion a year (about 6 percent of the state budget). If you use low revenue estimates and ignore ATR’s assumptions, they would sink by nearly $119 million (roughly 1 percent). Another problem is that ATR boost its revenue estimate by about $1.23 billion over three years by assuming state-level reform would enable Georgia to collect sales taxes from out-of-state Internet retailers. But state changes can’t create this windfall. This is largely a federal issue, and the constitutionality of collecting this money is in dispute. Other states, the U.S. Congress and courts will likely have to act before this money comes in. It’s not clear when or if this will happen. ATR opposes taxing e-commerce, but "that said, we are merely using the numbers we were provided," Joshua Culling, the group’s state affairs manager, said in an e-mail. "Most of what has been discussed about this plan has been guesswork to this point," Cullig added. "ATR’s scoring of the plan is as comprehensive as anything out there." We talked to other experts and found they were hesitant to label the proposal a "tax increase." Kelly McCutchen, who is president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a Libertarian-influenced think tank, cautioned that even valid revenue estimates can vary widely. For instance, the foundation’s estimate for the revenue from taxing food was more than $175 million higher than one by the Georgia State University Fiscal Research Center. Whether the proposal would constitute a tax increase is up for grabs, McCutchen said. Kail Padgitt, a staff economist for the fiscally conservative Tax Foundation in Washington, noted that taxes may jump initially because of the timing of income tax cuts. Still, the group currently favors the proposal because its language would allow legislators to solve this problem by slashing income taxes more quickly and deeply than recommended. Another issue is ATR’s "tax hike" definition. Tax revenue is currently unusually low because of the foundering economy. It’s fair to ask whether "revenue-neutral" means the proposal maintains current revenue levels or returns us to pre-recession figures, said Sarah Beth Gehl, deputy director of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. To sum up: ATR concluded the reform recommendations were an "overall tax hike" before it had enough evidence. PolitiFact Georgia’s own analysis found that the tax overhaul could increase or cut taxes. ATR also included a $1.23 billion boost in e-commerce revenue that recommendations cannot bring about on their own. Calling the recommendation an "overall tax hike" is therefore akin to telling Georgians there are shards of glass in their creme brulee before it reaches the table. ATR’s assessment contains some element of truth, but it is premature and ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. It therefore meets our definition of Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.

Americans For Tax Reform

2011-01-28T06:00:00

2011-01-10

['None']

wast-00194

The policies put into place by Rudy ultimately brought down crime by 76 percent and murder by 84 percent.

3 pinnochios

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/19/trumps-claim-attributing-the-20-year-new-york-city-crime-decline-to-giulianis-policies/

Donald Trump

Michelle Ye Hee Lee

Trump's claim attributing the 20-year New York City crime decline to Giuliani's policies

August 19, 2016

['None']

pomt-08828

We know that tax cuts are remarkably un-stimulative when you compare them with different kinds of government spending.

half-true

/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/aug/12/rachel-maddow/maddow-claims-spending-more-stimulative-tax-cuts/

Tax cuts are popular with Republicans, but they don't boost the economy as much as other types of government spending, Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC talk show host, said on her show Aug. 6, 2010. Talking to Ezra Klein, a Washington Post columnist and an MSNBC contributor, about the economy and the upcoming November elections, Maddow took a stab at one of the cornerstones of the GOP platform. "Is there anything that would make a real impact on job numbers that Republicans are willing to support? Obviously, we know they‘re willing to support tax cuts. We know that tax cuts are remarkably un-stimulative when you compare them with different kinds of government spending, different allocations of resources. Is there anything? They keep saying jobs are their priority. Have they shown a willingness to embrace anything that would make a dent on jobs?" Maddow's use of the phrase "we know" got us thinking -- do economists really agree that cutting taxes is less effective than increasing government spending? We decided to look into it. First, however, a crash course on "Keynesian economics." The name comes from John Maynard Keynes, a 20th century British economist. (For a musical lesson of the economic debate, check out the Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem.) As Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor, explains in a summer 2010 edition of National Affairs magazine, Keynes believed that "extreme and sustained unemployment during a recession" is fundamentally the result of "a decline in overall (or aggregate) demand in the economy." The government can "help restore normalcy" by increasing demand through spending, writes Mankiw. "And because the influx of government spending drives businesses to hire and consumers to spend, its impact is multiplied." According to classic Keynesian theory, government spending increases have a higher "multiplier" than tax cuts, because individuals might choose to save the money from tax cuts, rather than spend it. Is there data to back up Keynes' -- and, by extension, Rachel Maddow's -- argument? Yes, but there's also data that certain types of tax cuts can have a similar impact. To start out, we turned to testimony by Mark Zandi before the Senate Finance Committee on April 14, 2010. Zandi is the chief economist for Moody's Economy.com and a former adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign. Page 5 of the testimony contains a table that summarizes Zandi's calculated "bang for the buck" for various fiscal stimulus programs. Spending $1 on unemployment insurance benefits, for example, increases the GDP -- the value of goods and services that the economy produces -- by $1.61 a year later, according to Zandi. (We found some counter-arguments in a previous Truth-O-Meter item checking New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's use of Zandi's data.) A temporary increase in food stamps has the biggest stimulative effect. For each dollar spent, GDP grows by $1.74 one year later. For spending increases as a whole, the "bang for the buck" ranges from $1.13 for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program to $1.74 for food stamps. The former economist for the GOP presidential candidate also looked at the stimulative effect of tax cuts. Making the Bush income tax cuts permanent has a multiplier of 0.32, which means that for every dollar the government cuts in taxes, GDP grows by $0.32. Cutting the corporate tax rate also has a multiplier of $0.32. According to the chart, the most stimulative tax cut initiative would be a job tax credit, which has a multiplier of $1.30. So based on Zandi's research, Maddow is on solid ground. All but one of the spending programs that Zandi analyzed have a multiplier significantly higher than one. The highest multiplier for tax cuts is $1.30. Christina Romer, who heads President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers until she steps down Sept. 3, 2010, also addressed the question of fiscal multipliers in a speech at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business on Feb. 27, 2009. She began by acknowledging that "estimating these multipliers is difficult and that there is surely substantial uncertainty around any estimate." She then went on to argue, however, that based on her analysis with Jared Bernstein (an economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden) of the stimulus package that President Obama signed in February 2009, "a tax cut has a multiplier of roughly 1.0 after about a year and a half, and spending has a multiplier of about 1.6." In other words, government spending is more effective than cutting taxes. Likewise, in 2009, Matthew Shapiro and Joel Slemrod, economics professors at the University of Michigan, found the 2008 federal tax rebates did not provide a big boost for consumer spending. "Because of the low spending propensity, the rebates in 2008 provided low 'bang for the buck' as economic stimulus. Putting cash into the hands of the consumers who use it to save or pay off debt boosts their well-being, but it does not necessarily make them spend. In particular, low-income individuals were particularly likely to use the rebate to pay off debt." Still, it is a long-running joke that if you ask 10 economists a question, you get 10 different answers, and the size of fiscal multipliers is no exception. There are plenty of economists who have found that tax cuts -- particularly cuts that encourage investment -- can have a strong stimulative effect. We spoke with Valerie Ramey, an economics professor at the University of California-San Diego, who has done much research on estimating fiscal multipliers. She told us that "income tax rebates are not very stimulative" but that "other types of tax cuts appear to have much bigger effects." Ramey specifically cited the positive effects of investment tax credits, which she said are not captured by the "simple textbook Keynesian model." "Thus, based on the research, I would argue that the most stimulative types of policies are tax cuts that directly affect the incentives to invest and hire workers," she wrote us in an e-mail. We also looked at a paper that Christina Romer co-authored in June 2010 with her husband, David Romer. Using narrative evidence to control for other factors that influenced output during the post World War II period, the two economists found that a tax cut of $1 raises the GDP by roughly $3 over the following three years. Romer did not attempt to quantify spending effects in the paper, but Mankiw wrote in his National Affairs essay that her results suggest that the maximum potential impact of cutting taxes may actually be up to three times bigger than Obama's advisors assumed it was during their policy simulations. Then there is Ramey's own research. Using news sources to identify expected changes in government spending that are due to military events from 1939 to 2008, Ramey found that the government spending multiplier is anywhere from $0.60 to $1.20, "depending on the time period and how the multipliers are calculated." We asked Ramey to help us understand how her findings compare with Romers' 2010 results. She told us that the spending increases she looked at lasted on average for 4 years. In contrast, "it is unclear what the average duration of Romers' tax changes are," she said. Still, based on her review of Romers' data, she told us that "I don't think that one can argue that my spending multipliers are bigger than the Romers' tax multipliers." Finally, economic researchers Andrew Mountford from the University of London and Harald Uhlig from the University of Chicago wrote in a July 2005 paper that "the best fiscal policy to stimulate the economy is a deficit-financed tax cut." There are more papers than we have time or space for here, but we think you get the picture. Economists have been arguing for decades about various approaches to economic stimulus and there is plenty of research and literature for both sides. Going back to the original claim: Maddow said that "we know that tax cuts are remarkably un-stimulative when you compare them with different kinds of government spending." During the course of our research, we found several papers and studies that support her argument. But we also found evidence to the contrary. When it comes to macroeconomics, just about everything is still a matter for debate. We rate her claim Half True.

Rachel Maddow

2010-08-12T17:54:22

2010-08-06

['None']

pomt-12102

Austin is the safest big city in Texas.

half-true

/texas/statements/2017/aug/24/steve-adler/steve-adler-calls-austin-safest-big-city-Texas-cri/

Austin Mayor Steve Adler, urging transgender members of the military threatened by President Donald Trump to come to work for the Texas capital’s law enforcement agencies, ran out several tweets including a July 26, 2017, post stating: "Austin is the safest big city in Texas partly because we know our differences make us a stronger community." A reader asked us to check: Is Austin the state’s safest big city? Mayor cites Texas Monthly We asked Adler how he reached his conclusion. By email, Adler spokesman Jason Stanford advised that Adler relied on a Texas Monthly "Daily Post" story on FBI crime statistics published the day that Adler tweeted. The story includes a headline declaring Austin the state’s safest city. In the main, the story says that according to data compiled by the FBI covering 2015 and part of 2016, Odessa by far had the state’s highest violent crime rate, 1,070.1 violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents, up 25 percent from 2014. The FBI classifies as violent crimes murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. "It’s long been noted that Austin is something of a fairytale land where violence is rare, and at least compared to the rest of the state, that tends to bear out," the story says, going on: "Although Austin’s violent crime rate of 287.7 per 100,000 is slightly up from 2013, it’s grown at a much slower rate than any comparably safe city over the past couple of years, putting Austin in the top spot for safe Texas cities." FBI says don’t compare jurisdictions We noticed, though, the story didn’t mention a consistent FBI advisory against employing its statistics to compare jurisdictions. Since at least 2011, the FBI has said it "strongly discourages" using FBI Unified Crime Reporting statistics to compare communities. That note said: "Rankings ignore the uniqueness of each locale." The FBI admonished in May 2017: "Data users should not rank locales because there are many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place." When we asked FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer to evaluate Adler’s claim, Fischer replied by email: "Since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, the FBI discourages ranking the agencies and using the data as a measurement of law enforcement effectiveness." Fischer passed along elaboration from FBI analyst Loretta Simmons: "Comparisons lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents. Valid assessments are possible only with careful study and analysis of the range of unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction." Austin, big city? Another consideration is whether Austin fairly ranks as a big city in comparison to, say, Houston, Dallas or San Antonio. This year, before rating Half True U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s description of his hometown as the nation’s safest city, we noted that CQ Press--which annually reports on crime rates using FBI statistics--enables adjustments based on population density--and if you impose a density of at least 2,720 residents per square mile, Austin and El Paso fall out of its big-city crime rate rankings. That density squeeze, we found, left San Antonio with the No. 6 lowest crime rate nationally, Dallas at No. 12 and Houston at No. 17. Austin region’s violent crime rate Another wrinkle: The crime rates cited by Texas Monthly were not city-specific, instead taking into account metropolitan statistical areas. This means the touted Austin figures reflected crimes tallied through Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop and Caldwell counties. That said, the Austin area in 2015 had a lower violent-crime rate than any of the state’s other regions, we confirmed in our own break-out of what’s posted by the FBI. Austin’s rate of 287.7 violent crimes per 100,000 residents greatly trailed the Odessa area’s No. 1 state rate of 1070.1 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. Meantime, the Austin region’s murder/nonnegligent manslaughter rate of 2.2 per 100,000 residents ranked third behind the rates for less-populous Wichita Falls (1.3 per 100,000 residents) and Brownsville (1.6 per 100,000 residents); the Longview area had the state’s highest rate (10.1 per 100,000 inhabitants). LOWEST VIOLENT CRIME RATES, TEXAS METRO AREAS, 2015 REGION VIOLENT CRIME RATE Austin-Round Rock 287.7 per 100,000 residents Tyler 295.7 College Station-Bryan 315.5 McAllen-Edinburg-Mission 298.1 Brownsville-Harlingen 299.8 Midland 322.3 Sherman-Denison 327.1 San Angelo 329.3 Dallas-Plano-Irving 330.6 Wichita Falls 334.5 SOURCE: Chart showing crime rates in Texas Metropolitan Statistical Areas, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-6 (PolitiFact Texas compilation, August 2017) More recent FBI data Our own look into FBI crime reports further showed that in January 2017, the agency released its preliminary report tabulating crimes in each U.S. city of 100,000 population or greater in the first half of 2016. From those figures, we roughed out the violent crime rate for each of 35 Texas cities (not metro areas) listed in the report. Our finding: Austin (population about 948,000 as of July 2016) ranked 21st in the state with a violent-crime rate of 209 incidents per 100,000 residents--trailing cities including El Paso (population about 683,000) with 195 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants); Laredo (192 violent crimes per 100,000 residents); Midland (186 violent crimes per 100,000 people); and the capital’s northern suburb, Round Rock (73 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants). See our chart here. When we alerted Stanford to what we found, he replied by email that Adler compares Austin solely to the state’s biggest cities, specifying Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Fort Worth. El Paso safer? Separately, our web search turned up an April 2017 ranking of Texas cities for public safety by Pittsburgh-based Niche, a self-described "blend of data scientists, engineers, parents, and ‘yinzers’ who are passionate about helping you discover the schools and neighborhoods that are right for you." Starting from FBI statistics, Niche says, it based the public-safety grades on each city’s assault and robbery rates and, to lesser degrees, local rates of murder, burglary, vehicle theft and larceny plus resident responses to questions about local crime and safety. Niche ranked Austin No. 22 nationally among "best cities to live in America" though the city landed a public-safety grade of C+ -- like El Paso, Brownsville, Midland, Laredo, Wichita Falls and Tyler. Faring better, Plano, Richardson, College Station, and McAllen each had a public-safety grade of B-minus, per Niche, with Round Rock ranking fifth nationally thanks to its public-safety grade of B. Criminologist: Comparisons ‘chancy’ We also queried Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox about Adler’s claim. By email, Fox said he’s determined that per FBI figures, Austin in 2015 had the lowest homicide rate among 51 U.S. cities with at least 300,000 residents and at least 20 homicides; Austin’s rate was 2.5 for every 100,000 residents, narrowly besting San Diego’s 2.6 rate, according to a table Fox provided. Among Texas cities Fox evaluated, Houston had the highest homicide rate, 13.3 per 100,000 residents. Does that arguably make Austin the safest big city in Texas? Fox said by phone that such judgments are hard to cement because cities differ in many ways including, for instance, how suburban they happen to be. "There are a whole bunch of reasons cities differ that have nothing to do with safety," Fox said, "that have nothing to do with police and how they’re doing their job. That’s why it’s chancy to make those kinds of comparisons." Our ruling Adler called Austin the safest big city in Texas. As we’ve said before — and as experts keep stressing — using crime data to declare one city "safer" than another is fraught with peril. That said, FBI statistics suggest the five-county Austin region in 2015 had a lower violent-crime rate than other Texas regions. But El Paso had a lower violent-crime rate than Austin in the first half of 2016. Adler’s claim adds up to a statement that’s partly accurate while lacking important context. We rate it Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com

Steve Adler

2017-08-24T14:03:10

2017-07-26

['Texas', 'Austin,_Texas']

pomt-13482

Says President Barack Obama "has taken less vacation days than any other president in a generation," while Congress "has taken more vacation days than any other Congress in history."

pants on fire!

/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/09/occupy-democrats/facts-take-vacation-occupy-democrats-claim-about-p/

When President Barack Obama was vacationing on Martha's Vineyard and his critics were chastising him for not visiting flood victims in Louisiana, the liberal group Occupy Democrats created a message on their Facebook page trying to contrast Obama's work record against the Republican Congress. Below a photograph of Obama are the words, "Has taken less vacation days than any other president in a generation." Below an image of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan are the words, "Have taken more vacation days than any other Congress in history." The introduction to the Aug. 20 image insists, "The numbers don't lie." It had been shared 45,470 times by Sept. 6, 2016. Bad grammar aside (it should be "fewer" vacation days, not "less"), we wanted to know if the data checked out. We repeatedly contacted the group but didn't hear back. Presidential vacations First, it's important to realize that if you're only going back a generation (20 years), you're only comparing Obama to two other presidents — Bill Clinton who took office in 1993 and George W. Bush, who was inaugurated in 2001. We turned to Mark Knoller, White House correspondent at CBS News, the zen master of data on all things presidential such as vacations, trips, news conferences and even teleprompter use. He told us via email that Obama has been on 28 vacations (including long weekends) spanning all or part of 217 days. The president has just over four months left in his term. His predecessor, Bush, made 77 visits to his Texas ranch spanning all or part of 490 days. There were also 11 visits to his parent's home in Kennebunkport, Maine, spanning all or part of 43 days. Total: 533. But by Knoller's count, Clinton took the fewest — 174 days of summer vacations on Martha’s Vineyard and at Jackson Hole, Wyo. So the first part of the Occupy Democrats post is wrong. (It's also worth noting, as Knoller does, that a president never really goes on vacation. The job goes with him.) Congressional vacations We didn't have to go very far back in time to discover that this part of the Occupy Democrats meme is wrong as well. Defining vacation days for Congress is harder than for a president. After all, when members don't have to be in Washington for a vote, they may be in their districts, meeting with voters, or attending to official duties. And let's be real here — they might also be treating it like a vacation. As of Sept. 6, 2016, the House had been in session 94 days. The Senate had been in session 114 days. We decided to start by looking at House calendars. This year, the House is scheduled to be in session for another 32 days. That means House members will have been officially working in Washington for a total of about 126 days. That’s more days on the calendar than in 2008, when House members met for 119 calendar days, and in 2006, when they met for 104 days. The House looks even less lazy if you look at 2015, the first year of the current Congress. That year, the House met for 157 calendar days, more than in 2014 (137 days), 2012 (153 days), 2010 (128 days), 2008 (119 days) and 2006 (104 days). Alternatively, we looked at the data in two-year blocks, which would be full sessions of Congress. The current House (the 114th session, 2015-16) has met or is scheduled to meet for 283 days. But in the 109th session (2005-06) it met for 247 days, which is 36 days fewer. In fact, the current session is slated to have more days than the 105th, 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses as well. We found the same pattern in the Senate, which has met, or is scheduled to meet, for 156 days this year. It didn't matter whether we looked at projected days this year or actual days last year. Since 2000, there were at least six years the Senate met fewer times. And when we combined House and Senate tallies, the current 114th Congress is on track to have officially worked in Washington more days than the 113th, 109th, 108th, 107th and 106th Congresses. Our ruling Occupy Democrats says Obama "has taken less vacation days than any other president in a generation," while Congress "has taken more vacation days than any other Congress in history." The post is wrong for Obama. It is ridiculously wrong for Congress. We rate it Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com

Occupy Democrats

2016-09-09T10:06:32

2016-08-20

['United_States_Congress', 'Barack_Obama']

hoer-00029

809 Area Code Scam Warning Email

bogus warning

https://www.hoax-slayer.com/area-code-809-scam.html

Brett M. Christensen

809 Area Code Scam Warning Email

April 4, 2014

['None']