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faan-00065 | “Mr. Harper promised solemnly to Canadians that he would never name an appointed senator. He has gone on to appoint … them.” | factscan score: true | http://factscan.ca/tom-mulcair-appointed-senator/ | Stephen Harper promised to only appoint people to the Senate who were first elected. He broke the promise by repeatedly appointing unelected senators. | null | Tom Mulcair | null | null | null | 2015-08-22 | ugust 6, 2015 | ['Canada', 'Stephen_Harper'] |
pomt-03432 | Says a "rape kit" can be used to "clean out" women, "basically like" dilation and curettage. | pants on fire! | /texas/statements/2013/jun/24/jodie-laubenberg/jodie-laubenberg-says-texas-rape-kit-dilation-and-/ | The lead House sponsor of legislation pitched by advocates as improving the safety of abortion clinics and restricting certain late-term abortions described kits used after sexual assaults as akin to a procedure that scrapes out tissue lining the uterus. In floor debate that would extend hours past midnight June 23, 2013, Rep. Jodie Laubenberg, R-Parker, mentioned "rape kits" after Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, presented an amendment to Senate Bill 5 to exempt victims of rape and incest from limits on abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. A day later, the GOP-majority House advanced the measure to the Senate for possible action before a 30-day special session was to end June 25. Laubenberg, responding to questions from Democratic Reps. Joseph Moody of El Paso and Dawnna Dukes of Austin, framed her refusal to accept Thompson’s amendment by implying that rape kits used in hospitals can prevent unwanted pregnancy. Laubenberg said that currently, in "the emergency rooms they have what’s called rape kits, that the woman can get cleaned out, basically like a D and C" -- dilation and curettage surgery, often performed after miscarriages. We looked into whether the representative was correct that a rape kit is akin to dilation and curettage surgery, ultimately finding no common ground or any factual basis for this claim. Dilation and curettage, according to a fact sheet on the website of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is a surgical procedure that removes tissue from the lining of the uterus; it is often performed after a miscarriage. A woman’s cervix is dilated, or widened, to permit the use of instruments such as a curette, a thin metal tool with a scoop or ring on one end that is used to scrape the interior of the uterus. The doctors’ group put us in touch with Dr. Bonnie Dattel, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School, who said by phone that a D&C is sometimes performed after a miscarriage to remove material left from the pregnancy that could cause infection or excessive bleeding if left in place. In contrast, a rape kit typically consists of tools, storage containers and paperwork related to collecting evidence in the first days after a possible sexual assault, according to Texas experts we reached and information posted online by the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, which calls itself the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization. The network says: "Following a sexual assault, the victim has the option to go to the hospital to have a forensic examination by a trained professional. During a forensic medical exam, a sexual assault evidence collection kit may or may not be used. The evidence kit affords the opportunity to collect any DNA that may have been left by the suspect." The network’s web page makes no mention of surgical procedures, instead saying a kit may contain instructions, bags and sheets for evidence collection, swabs, a comb, envelopes, blood collection devices and documentation forms. An exam using the kit "will most likely begin with the examiner obtaining a complete and thorough medical history from the victim. The medical forensic exam also involves a head-to-toe physical examination, which includes the genital area," the network says. The exam may also involve the collection of blood, urine, hair and other body secretion samples; photo documentation; the collection of the victim’s clothing, especially undergarments; and the collection of any possible physical evidence that may have transferred onto the victim from the rape scene, the network says. "Once the examination is completed and all specimens are collected," the network says, "they are carefully packaged and stored to assure that they are not contaminated." In interviews, representatives of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, which says it’s committed to ending sexual violence in Texas, and the Collin County-based Turning Point Rape Crisis Center, which counsels rape survivors, elaborated on what a rape kit is and isn’t. TAASA spokesman Rick Gipprich said by telephone that certified sexual assault nurse examiners typically use the kits to gather information and collect relevant samples. Sometimes a pregnancy test is administered, Gipprich said, but that is solely to see if a survivor might have been pregnant before the assault. Also, he said, the pregnancy test is not part of the kit. In addition, Gipprich said, a survivor may be offered high-dose antibiotics to ward off sexually transmitted diseases as well as a "morning after" pill to prevent impregnation, though such drugs and those offers are not part of the kit, he said. Jennifer Spugnardi, director of the Turning Point center, said by telephone that a rape kit is "really papers and envelopes," reflecting the nurse examiner’s responsibility to document an incident. Spugnardi said the kits are sometimes called "Sirchie kits," referring to a forensics supplies company that sells the kits. Online, we found a photo of a $15 Sirchie kit designed to meet criteria for a kit as spelled out in a publication from the Texas attorney general’s office. Sirchie describes the kit as containing legal and medical forms, oral swabs and hair combs and containers to separately hold clothing or biological samples. Like Gipprich, Spugnardi said any prescribed medicines are not part of a rape kit. She also pointed out that a kit can be used for a female or male victim. Regardless, she said, a kit is not equivalent to the D and C surgery or related to it. Spugnardi called the legislator’s statement "a very poor choice of words." By email and telephone, we asked Laubenberg how she reached her conclusion. She didn’t immediately respond. After this article posted, however, Laubenberg said by telephone that she knows a rape kit does not include the D and C procedure and that a kit does not cause abortions. In the floor debate, Laubenberg said, she also was trying to say that a rape survivor who goes to a hospital might be offered the morning-after pill to ward off pregnancy, though she said that she is aware that the pill is not part of a rape kit. In the debate, Laubenberg said, her point may have been muddled. "You’re trying to get your thoughts out as fast as you can," she said. Our ruling Laubenberg said a rape kit is equivalent to dilation and curettage surgery. A rape kit consists of items a medical specialist employs to gather evidence related to a possible sexual assault. It is not the same as the D and C procedure, which removes the lining of the uterus. We find this unsupported claim incorrect and ridiculous. Pants on Fire. UPDATE, 10:20 a.m., June 25, 2013: After this article posted, we heard back from Laubenberg. We amended the story to include her comments about her statement. The Truth-O-Meter rating was not affected. | null | Jodie Laubenberg | null | null | null | 2013-06-24T15:48:51 | 2013-06-23 | ['None'] |
pose-00276 | As president, "will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws." | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/292/urge-states-to-treat-same-sex-couples-with-full-eq/ | null | obameter | Barack Obama | null | null | Urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws | 2010-01-07T13:26:54 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00157 | Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton Did Split, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/gwen-stefani-blake-shelton-split-not-true/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton Did NOT Split, Despite Report | 10:22 am, October 10, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-10393 | John McCain says he never supported the privatization of Social Security, even though video shows he did. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/13/democratic-national-committee/privatization-gets-personal/ | Democrats jumped on a comment that Sen. John McCain made at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on June 12, 2008. "I am not for quote 'privatization of Social Security.' I never have been, never will be," McCain said in answer to a voter question. The Democratic National Committee quickly spliced that video onto file video of McCain on C-Span. "Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly over time make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits," he said in 2004. The 26-second spot wraps up with a photo of McCain and George W. Bush, and audio of a crowd shouting "Four more years!" Seems like an obvious flip-flop, right? Not so fast. The DNC ad truncates McCain's remarks at the 2008 town hall. The Nashua (N.H.) Telegram reported the following exchange: "Amherst Democratic activist John Mendolusky engaged McCain in a sharp but respectful exchange over Social Security reform. 'You stated you are in favor of private accounts which really is privatization of Social Security,' Mendolusky began. 'Why would you have workers risk their nest eggs on the roulette wheels of Wall Street?' 'I am not for quote "privatization" of Social Security. I never have been, never will be. That is a great buzzword for an attack,' McCain shot back. 'Workers should have the right to put their own taxes, their own money into an account. If they don't want to, don't do it.'" McCain's rejection of the word privatization goes back to President George W. Bush's 2005 push to allow workers to divert a portion of the program's payroll taxes to personal investment accounts. The thinking was that private accounts would give younger workers the ability to manage their retirement nest eggs without government interference and it would keep the system solvent. McCain supported Bush's plan, going so far as to accompany the president on a series of town hall meetings in March 2005. It was around this time that Bush and his party decided that most people didn't like the idea of "privatizing" Social Security. Pollsters found that if you didn't call Bush's plan "privatization" but instead called it "personal accounts," you could increase support for the plan significantly — even though it was the same plan. So Bush and his supporters stopped referring to the plan as privatization and started calling it "personal accounts." Bush complained that privatization was a "trick word" designed to "scare people." Hence the 2004 video of McCain talking about "privatization" contrasted with 2008 video rejecting the term. Not that the new terminology worked. Personal accounts didn't get very far legislatively, and the initiative went down as one of Bush's biggest defeats in domestic policy. So what is McCain proposing for Social Security if he's elected? We looked at this question previously and found that McCain has offered only a broad outline for the program. His Web site says he wants to supplement the current system with personal accounts but adds the accounts will not be a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept. It also notes McCain wants to work with Democrats on a Social Security plan but is prepared to go it alone if they don't want to play. The full context of McCain's comment at the town hall meeting, which the DNC was happy to leave on the cutting room floor, shows McCain thinks that voluntary personal accounts do not amount to privatization of Social Security. He reiterated that position on the campaign trail the day after the New Hampshire town hall meeting. "I will not privatize Social Security, and it's not true when I'm accused of that," McCain said. "But I would like for younger workers, younger workers only, to have an opportunity to take a few of their tax dollars, and maybe put it into an account with their name on it. That's their money. ... And we will make sure that present-day retirees, I will commit, have the benefits that they have earned." This makes answering the Democrats' implicit claim that McCain favored privatization a little tricky. On a certain level, the video speaks for itself. If by privatization you mean George Bush's plan, then McCain clearly did favor it. But Bush himself didn't like the term privatization and felt that it was misleading. McCain clearly believes he can offer personal accounts while keeping the rest of Social Security intact and rejects the privatization label. For all of these reasons, we find the DNC's claim to be Half True. | null | Democratic National Committee | null | null | null | 2008-06-13T00:00:00 | 2008-06-13 | ['John_McCain'] |
pomt-12278 | Says Scott Walker recently said "he got his bald spot from hitting his head on a cabinet, and it's not a joke, he actually said that his bald spot came because he hit his head on a cabinet." | mostly true | /wisconsin/statements/2017/jul/03/mark-pocan/hairy-situation-testing-mark-pocan-claim-about-sco/ | Just when you thought it was safe to move on from the 2016 presidential campaign, a topic that grabbed a brief turn in the spotlight has again come to, well, a head: Gov. Scott Walker’s explanation for his bald spot. How did it resurface? Credit -- or blame -- U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, who began by ripping into Walker’s plan to make Wisconsin the first state in the nation to require needy but able-bodied adults to work and submit to drug tests to get Medicaid coverage. On June 6, 2017, Walker’s administration asked the federal government for permission to require the tests, which would apply to people seeking coverage through the state’s BadgerCare program. "Unemployment is low, and the percentage of people working in Wisconsin is among the best in the nation," Walker said in a statement at the time. "This application is a step in the right direction, and we’re continuing to build on Wisconsin’s legacy as a leader in welfare reform." A few days later, on June 8, 2017, Pocan slammed the proposal as unoriginal during a radio interview on "The Thom Hartmann Program." He was responding to a caller -- Dave from Hoffman Estates, Ill. "This is one we’ve seen in other states," Pocan said. "It just costs money. It hasn’t been proven to find people who are using drugs who are getting the money. It’s one of these demonizing tools of the poor again." Then his policy rip, turned into this riff: "Trust me, Scott Walker has not had an original thought in his head for a long, long time," Pocan said. "The most original thing he said recently is that he got his bald spot from hitting his head on a cabinet, and it’s not a joke. He actually said his bald spot came because he hit his head on a cabinet." To be sure, Pocan has less hair than Walker. But is Pocan right? When asked for backup, Pocan spokesman David Kolovson cited a statement from a Oct. 18, 2014, Wisconsin State Journal article: "The bald spot, (Walker) said, was the result of a repair incident in the kitchen when he banged his head on an open kitchen cabinet door while making repairs requested by his wife, Tonette." Kolovson also cited a June 15, 2015, Washington Post article that quoted Walker: "And I wish I could grow a little bit more hair on my scar up there," he said, mentioning his bald spot, which he says is the result of having bumped his head while fixing a sink years ago and not natural aging. A similar statement showed up in a Sept. 4, 2015, article on BBCNews.com. Carolyn Jacob, a board certified dermatologist, said Walker’s explanation is not outside the realm of the possible. "It really depends on if he actually cut his scalp on the cabinet," said Jacob, a medical doctor and director of Chicago Cosmetic Surgery and Dermatology. "A scar would form and would not grow hair." "However," Jacob continued, "if he suddenly developed a circular spot in the same area, it may be unrelated but coincidental. We often see alopecia areata (circle/patches of hair loss) on patients, and no one knows why anyone gets it." Another expert, Ronda Farah, a medical doctor and assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Minnesota, also spoke in general terms and not directly about Walker. She said an injury or trauma to the head could cause a bald spot. "If you have trauma to the head that leaves a scar, you could definitely get a bald spot." Farah said. "In general, I have seen hair loss at areas of trauma and scarring on the body and scalp." A spokesman for Walker’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Our rating Pocan claimed Walker recently said "he got his bald spot from hitting his head on a cabinet, and it's not a joke, he actually said that his bald spot came because he hit his head on a cabinet." Walker did make that claim, but it surfaced two years ago, during the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign. So it was not as recent as Pocan indicated. Nor was it as farfetched as he suggested, at least according to two experts on hair loss. We rate Pocan’s claim Mostly True. | null | Mark Pocan | null | null | null | 2017-07-03T05:00:00 | 2017-06-08 | ['None'] |
pomt-02367 | Says President Abraham Lincoln enforced the Fugitive Slave Act until the Civil War ended. | mostly false | /punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18/andrew-napolitano/napolitano-lincoln-enforced-fugitive-slave-act/ | Andrew Napolitano’s contrarian view of the Civil War is that it did not need to be fought. In their Daily Show debate, host Jon Stewart rejected that conclusion in the strongest terms. "If there is ever any use of federal power that is justified, would it not be to end the most horrific, abhorrent practice in the history of mankind?" Stewart asked. "After it had tried everything else," Napolitano replied. "Like abolishing the Fugitive Slave Act, which Lincoln enforced and his judges enforced and his federal marshals enforced until the Civil War was over and Lincoln was nearly dead." We are fact-checking several claims from the Civil War debate between Napolitano, a libertarian pundit and former judge, and Stewart. Here we’re looking at Napolitano’s claim that Lincoln enforced something called the Fugitive Slave Act until the Civil War was over. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it easier for slave owners to use the federal government to get back the people who had escaped bondage. If a person found refuge in a free state, the act expanded the number of federal officials who could order their rendition back into slavery. The act also simplified the legal steps required by the owner to prove his claim and required the state to bear any costs involved. The law was part of a package of changes designed to ease tensions over slavery known as the Compromise of 1850. It’s clear that federal officials enforced the Fugitive Slave Act before the war, but Napolitano said it continued during the war and that enforcement took place under Lincoln himself. That specific claim is oversimplified. (Napolitano did not respond to our request for comment.) The picture is a bit complicated because federal policy changed over time as Congress and Lincoln navigated through the challenges of undermining the Confederacy, keeping peace within Union border states and ending slavery. By the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven states had seceded but war had not yet broken out. That came a month later. Lincoln’s first inaugural address offered the slave states, a group that included states still within the Union, full enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln said that so long as the law was on the books, he would follow it. In a further effort to stave off war, he said "there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere." It would be difficult to overstate the importance Lincoln placed on the rule of law. In many of his writings, he expresses a keen tension between his personal values and the laws of Congress and the Constitution. When the war started, two policies emerged, one for the South and one for the North. By August 1861, Congress had passed the First Confiscation Act, which authorized Union forces to seize any slaves used by Confederate forces. Military commanders in the field, however, had different policies. Even though the Secretary of War at the time ordered officers to provide protection to slaves, some refused them sanctuary. At about the same time, escaped slaves from Maryland (a border state) and unionists living in Virginia (a Southern state) were coming into the District of Columbia. Historian Edna Greene Medford wrote that Lincoln advised local authorities to allow Virginia owners to reclaim their slaves. The marshal for the district, Ward Lamon, a close friend and Lincoln appointee, supported the policy, arguing that the Fugitive Slave Act required it. University of Massachusetts historian Manisha Sinha, who appeared alongside Stewart and Napolitano on The Daily Show, told us that Lincoln balanced a desire to end slavery with his desire to win the war. "In the first two years of the war he was willing to respect the rights of slaveholders in the border slave states simply to prevent them from seceding," Sinha said. In July 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which was a broader statute and allowed Union forces to shelter escaped slaves from owners in any of the Confederate states. That still left slaves in Union states at legal risk if they got away from their owners. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in the Confederate states in January 1863, but it wasn’t until passage of the 13th Amendment in January 1865 that the United States abolished slavery everywhere within its borders. In June 1864, Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Act. The Civil War ended a year later, in spring 1865. Our ruling Napolitano said Lincoln, his marshals and his judges enforced the Fugitive Slave Act until the war was over. The record is much more complicated. Lincoln and other federal officials did enforce the law in some instances in the Union states in the early part of the war but not in every state and not consistently. The policy was quite different for the Confederate states. In that same period, Lincoln’s military and Congress moved to protect slaves who escaped from Confederate owners. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation mid-way through the war, freeing all slaves in Confederate states. Napolitano repeated the word "enforced" three times for emphasis. The record is much more mixed and certainly, Napolitano gets his dates wrong. Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1864, a year before the war ended. The judge’s words have a sliver of accuracy but overall, we rate his claim Mostly False. | null | Andrew Napolitano | null | null | null | 2014-03-18T17:19:22 | 2014-03-11 | ['None'] |
goop-01998 | Tom Cruise Dating In Disguise? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/tom-cruise-dating-disguise/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Tom Cruise Dating In Disguise? | 10:27 am, December 20, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06509 | Says he "came to the Republican Party sooner in age" than Ronald Reagan. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/11/rick-perry/perry-switched-gop-younger-age-reagan/ | Texas Gov. Rick Perry wasn’t always a Republican. His opponents like to remind him of that, as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann did in a Republican presidential primary debate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. And Perry likes to respond that another notable Republican once had a "D" behind his name too. "I, like most people in the state of Texas and those southern states, grew up a Democrat. Michael Reagan and I were talking just the other day, Charlie, that I came to the Republican Party sooner in age than his dad, Ronald Reagan, did," Perry told debate moderator Charlie Rose on Oct. 11, 2011. Perry said something similar to conservative commentator Sean Hannity during a radio appearance in August 2011. His words then, also repeated from a conversation with the former president’s son: "I became a Republican sooner in my life than your dad did." PolitiFact Texas checked it out. According to biographer Edward Yager, Reagan, who was born Feb. 6, 1911, "was registered Democrat from the time that he voted for (Democrat Franklin Roosevelt) in 1932, when he was 21." Yager said that he hadn’t seen copies of Reagan’s voter registration cards but that "virtually all the sources that refer to" Reagan’s party affiliation indicate that he was registered as a Democrat. He remained a Democrat even as he supported Republican presidential candidates, according to Melissa Giller, director of communications and programs at Reagan’s presidential library. The library’s website says Reagan made the switch and registered Republican in the fall of 1962, when he was 51. As for Perry, born March 4, 1950, he won his first three political races for a Texas House seat as a Democrat, then switched parties in 1989 to challenge a Democratic agricultural commissioner. A Texas Tribune storysays Perry announced he was changing parties on Sept. 29 of that year in a press conference outside the Texas Capitol. On the day of the press conference, Perry was 39 years old, 12 years younger than Reagan when he made his switch. We rate Perry’s statement True. | null | Rick Perry | null | null | null | 2011-10-11T23:58:52 | 2011-10-11 | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Ronald_Reagan'] |
pomt-03729 | Under Republican Chris Christie, New Jersey had the highest increase in unemployment in the country last year. Nearly 1 in 10 jobless. The worst unemployment in the region. Near the bottom in economic growth, yet Christie protected a tax cut for millionaires but vetoed a minimum wage hike. | mostly true | /new-jersey/statements/2013/apr/14/one-new-jersey/new-anti-chris-christie-ad-democratic-group-mostly/ | New Jersey’s just about gone to economic hell under Chris Christie’s leadership, a Democratic group suggests in a new TV ad. Things are so bad here that the state ranks at the top nationwide for unemployment, at the bottom for economic growth and isn’t doing a thing to help the middle class, the ad claims. "Under Republican Chris Christie, New Jersey had the highest increase in unemployment in the country last year," a narrator states in the ad by One New Jersey. "Nearly 1 in 10 jobless. The worst unemployment in the region. Near the bottom in economic growth, yet Christie protected a tax cut for millionaires but vetoed a minimum wage hike." The ad, which is also running on NJ.com, the online home of The Star-Ledger, is largely accurate. Let's review each claim. New Jersey having the ‘worst increase in unemployment’ is based on the period from December 2011 to December 2012. Let’s note that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment data by unemployment rates and the number of unemployed. For that period, New Jersey and New Hampshire had the highest rate increase, at 0.3 percent. New Jersey’s rate ticked upward to 9.5 percent from 9.2 percent. New Jersey wasn’t the worst, though, when looking at the number of unemployed, said Joseph J. Seneca, an economics professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Pennsylvania had 24,761 unemployed. New Jersey had 21,932. New Jersey’s unemployment rate increase was the 10th highest nationwide for the period from February 2012 to this past February, Seneca said. And with New Jersey’s unemployment rate hovering above 9 percent since June 2009 – the end of the recession – it’s accurate to claim the state has nearly 1 in 10 people jobless. The state, however, has added more than 120,000 private-sector jobs, according to BLS data, Seneca and the state Republican Party. Next, did we have the ‘worst unemployment in the region?’ One New Jersey didn’t define region specifically so we compared New Jersey with New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Connecticut. New Jersey’s unemployment rate was the highest among the five states from December 2011 to December 2012, according to BLS data. The ad also claims New Jersey is near the bottom for economic growth. We previously checked a similar claim by Assemblyman Lou Greenwald (D-Camden). From 2010 to 2011, New Jersey’s real gross domestic product – an inflation-adjusted measure of a state’s economy -- dropped by a half percent, placing us 47th among all states, according to data from The Bureau of Economic Analysis. So we were near the bottom, but economic experts told us for the Greenwald claim that national and regional economic conditions – not just Christie -- were factors. Now let’s look at whether Christie protected a tax cut for millionaires and vetoed a minimum wage increase. Democrats approved a bill in May 2010 renewing a one-year tax rate increase of 10.75 percent for those with taxable income above $1 million. The rate had expired before Christie became governor.. Christie, who campaigned that he wouldn’t raise taxes, vetoed the surcharge -- protecting the rich, some claim -- and Democrats couldn’t override it. As for the minimum wage claim, Christie in January vetoed a Democratic proposal raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 an hour, with future increases tied to inflation. He instead proposed phasing in a $1 increase over three years and eliminating automatic hikes. "The sad truth is New Jersey is falling further behind, and no amount of hype can hide the reality that the middle-class and working families are hurting," One New Jersey spokesman Joshua Henne said in an e-mail. "The facts clearly show New Jersey has consistently trailed the rest of America when it comes to jobs and the economy." NJGOP spokesman Ben Sparks pointed to the state's private-sector job growth under Christie. "Despite the predictably misleading claims from Barbara Buono's campaign operatives, New Jersey has created over 120,000 private-sector jobs since Governor Christie took office, which stands in stark contrast to the failed two years Barbara Buono spent as Jon Corzine's budget chair, when our state lost 240,000 private-sector jobs," Sparks said in an e-mail. Buono, (D-Middlesex), is challenging Christie in the November gubernatorial election. Our ruling One New Jersey’s new ad claims, "Under Republican Chris Christie, New Jersey had the highest increase in unemployment in the country last year. Nearly 1 in 10 jobless. The worst unemployment in the region. Near the bottom in economic growth, yet Christie protected a tax cut for millionaires but vetoed a minimum wage hike." Each claim had varying degrees of accuracy. New Jersey and New Hampshire tied for the highest increase in unemployment last year. Nearly 1 in 10 New Jerseyans are jobless, and our state’s unemployment rate is the worst in a five-state region. The state has been near the bottom in economic growth, even though experts have said that’s not entirely Christie’s fault, and the governor vetoed a minimum wage hike. Christie technically didn’t cut the millionaire’s tax since it expired before he took office, but opinions vary wildly on that claim. We rate the ad Mostly True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com. | null | One New Jersey | null | null | null | 2013-04-14T07:30:00 | 2013-04-09 | ['Chris_Christie', 'New_Jersey', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)'] |
snes-03698 | A video shows Hillary Clinton laughing as the words "under God" were removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-laughs-as-under-god-removed-from-pledge/ | null | Politicians | null | Dan Evon | null | Hillary Laughs As ‘Under God’ Removed from Pledge? | 26 October 2016 | null | ['God', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton'] |
snes-02803 | President Obama was evicted from a Washington, D.C., mansion for damaging the building. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-evicted-mansion/ | null | Junk News | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Obama Evicted from His DC Mansion for Breaking One Major Clause in His Lease? | 10 March 2017 | null | ['Washington,_D.C.', 'Barack_Obama'] |
pomt-05489 | George Allen "voted for 40,000 earmarks." | mostly true | /virginia/statements/2012/apr/18/jamie-radtke/jamie-radtke-claims-george-allen-voted-40000-earma/ | Jamie Radtke wants to tag George Allen, the frontrunner in the June 12 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, as a big spender. In a recent web video, Radtke’s campaign claims that Allen "voted for 40,000 earmarks" during his previous term as a senator from 2001 to 2007. Earmarks are money sent to constituents for pet projects by members of Congress. Last year, we ruled that Radtke’s claim that Allen "had 40,000 earmarks" was False. Her campaign sought to clarify her words, saying Radtke’s statement merely meant Allen had voted for that many earmarks. We did not accept their explanation and pointed out several other claims by Radtke that suggested Allen personally requested all that pork. This time around, Radtke has altered her verb and given us a new claim to check. Did Allen really vote for 40,000 earmarks during his Senate term? Chuck Hansen, a spokesman for the campaign, said the number is based on a calculation by the Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit group that tracks earmarks and releases annual reports of "pork projects." Allen, as a senator, voted on the budgets from fiscal years 2002 to 2006. The 2007 budget did not pass until late January of that year, a few weeks after Allen left the Senate. He was defeated the previous fall by Democrat Jim Webb. The five budgets Allen voted on included 52,319 earmarks valued at $121.8 billion, according to the Citizens Against Government Waste. Hansen said that Radtke’s campaign, seeking to be conservative in its claim, chopped off about 25 percent the Citizens’ numbers and estimated Allen voted for 40,000 earmarks valued at $90 billion. But there’s an important fact that Radtke omits: Allen did not vote on each earmark individually. They were attached to about four dozen major appropriations bills that Allen supported during his time in the Senate. Those bills authorized a total of about $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending programs -- including defense, education and justice -- and the earmarks added up to less three percent of that total. Even the watchdog groups that have criticized earmarks as wasteful don’t totally blame Allen for supporting appropriations bills that kept government operating. "If anyone against earmarks voted against appropriations bills, we wouldn’t get anything done," said Leslie Paige, media director for Citizens Against Government Waste. "We don’t think that’s very telling. We would really rather look at what the member of Congress requested in earmarks and what bills they introduced on their own." Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Allen didn’t necessarily support "each and every earmark." He cited the $225 million "Bridge to Nowhere," connecting the city of Ketchikan, Alaska, with the Island of Gravina, which has 50 residents. Allen voted for a $286.5 billion highway and transportation bill in 2005 that funded the bridge. Later that year, he got a chance vote specifically on the earmark, when a measure came up to move funding from the Alaska project to a bridge damaged by Hurricane Katrina on I-10 in New Orleans. Allen was one of 15 supporters of the unsuccessful amendment. Ellis, however, does not not give Allen a free pass on earmarks. He noted a few lawmakers -- including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- who voted against spending bills because they objected to earmarks. Allen "was part of the system and certainly got earmarks when he was in office as well," Ellis said. "You don’t get a total mulligan because the earmarks were part of much larger bills, but it does need that context." We don’t know how many of those earmarks Allen actually sponsored or requested. Members of Congress weren’t required to disclose whether they requested a particular line item until the year after he left office in 2008. During Allen’s term, Virginia received 1,135 earmarks, valued at about $1.2 billion, which could have been requested by any of Virginia’s 13-member delegation. Allen clearly sought pork for Virginia. "Every single earmark I’ve gotten, I’m proud of," he told a town hall meeting in Chesterfield County on March 20, 2006, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch article. Allen said then that legislators who attach earmarks to appropriations bills should be identified. A few months later, Allen and other members of Virginia's congressional delegation refused cooperate with a Times-Dispatch reporter’s request to identify the earmarks they requested during fiscal 2006. In this year’s campaign, Allen is calling for a ban on earmarks until the federal budget is balanced. Afterwards, earmarks would require a two-thirds majority. Our ruling: Radtke claims that Allen, during his term in the Senate, voted for 40,000 earmarks. We have one quibble. Allen did not vote on the earmarks individually. The items were attached to massive appropriations bills supported by Allen that kept the federal government operating. The earmarks amounted to less than 3 percent of the spending contained in those laws. But unlike a few lawmakers, Allen never protested the secretive earmark process by voting against an appropriations bill. He went along with the system and said he was "proud" of the earmarks he got for Virginia. The appropriations bills Allen backed had 52,319 earmarks, according to the Citizens Against Government Waste. Radtke attaches a smaller number to Allen, but we won’t penalize her for understating her case. So Radtke’s statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True. | null | Jamie Radtke | null | null | null | 2012-04-18T12:18:19 | 2012-03-28 | ['None'] |
pose-00349 | Immediately following a catastrophe, Barack Obama will appoint a Federal Coordinating Officer to direct reconstruction efforts. The job of the FCO and his or her staff will be to cut through bureaucratic obstacles, get federal agencies to work together and to coordinate efforts with local officials. Obama and Biden will ensure bipartisan staffing to ensure that politics do not override the real needs of the recovering community. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/368/direct-rebuilding-efforts-from-the-white-house-aft/ | null | obameter | Barack Obama | null | null | Direct rebuilding efforts from the White House after a catastrophe | 2010-01-07T13:26:56 | null | ['Barack_Obama', 'Joe_Biden', 'Foreign_and_Commonwealth_Office'] |
goop-01716 | Justin Timberlake Did Say Vaccination Schedules Are “Un-American,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-timberlake-vaccinations-fake-news/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Justin Timberlake Did NOT Say Vaccination Schedules Are “Un-American,” Despite Report | 2:15 pm, January 26, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03224 | Application of Vicks VapoRub to the soles of children's feet effectively counters nighttime cough. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/foot-note/ | null | Medical | null | Snopes Staff | null | Should You Apply Vicks VapoRub to Children’s Feet? | 20 March 2007 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-11626 | I have consistently opposed shutdowns. | pants on fire! | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jan/22/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-hes-opposed-shutdowns-he-hasnt-alway/ | With an end to the federal government shutdown in sight, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tried to argue that, contrary to popular belief, he was not the driving force behind the previous government shutdown in 2013. Back in 2013, Cruz -- then a junior member of the Senate’s minority party -- had tried to end funding for the Affordable Care Act. He pushed for language to defund Obamacare in spending bills, which would have forced then-President Barack Obama to choose between keeping the government open and crippling his signature legislative achievement. As the high-stakes legislative game played out, Obama and his fellow Democrats refused to agree to gut the law, and the Republicans, as a minority party, didn’t have the numbers to force their will. Following a 16-day shutdown, lawmakers voted to fund both the government and the Affordable Care Act. Cruz was widely identified at the time as the leader of the defunding effort. Most famously, Cruz spoke about defunding Obamacare on the Senate floor during a 21-hour speech, punctuated by Green Eggs and Ham as a bedtime story for his children. Many in Cruz’s own party, even those sympathetic with his goals, blamed him for a tactical blunder. During the spending impasse, his Republican colleagues launched "a barrage of hostile questions" at a GOP-only lunch, questioning whether Cruz had thought through the endgame. By the time Cruz was running for president in 2016, some Republicans were willing to criticize his approach publicly. Grover Norquist, an influential anti-tax activist, told the Washington Post in 2016 that Cruz’s shutdown plan was like a plotline in TV’s South Park in which a group of gnomes comes up with a nonsense plot to become rich. Josh Holmes, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told the Post that Cruz’s approach was "like a toddler’s version of legislating." Leading up to the 2018 shutdown, Cruz’s role in the 2013 budget impasse received fresh media coverage, since he was now in the Senate majority. Would he be able to reconcile his past tactics with his current urgings not to shut down the government? This came to a head during a Senate hallway exchange between Cruz and reporter Kasie Hunt that aired on MSNBC on Jan. 22, 2018: Cruz: "We should not be shutting the government down. I have consistently opposed shutdowns. In 2013, I said we shouldn't shut the government down. Indeed, I went to the Senate floor repeatedly asking unanimous consent to reopen the government." Hunt: "Sir, you stood in the way of that." Cruz: "That's factually incorrect. It's a wonderful media narrative, but only one thing causes a shutdown: when you have senators vote to deny cloture on a funding bill. And when that bill comes up, you have a vote. A yes means fund the government, a no means don't fund the government. In 2013, virtually every single Republican voted to fund the government, including me multiple times. In fact, every single Democrat I believe in 2013 voted to shut the government down. The same thing is true here. Virtually every single Republican voted this week to fund the government. Virtually every single Democrat voted to shut it down." Hunt: "Sir, that's simply not the case. This was about Obamacare funding…" Cruz: "Those facts are incorrect. ... I get that you want to debate me, but you don't actually have any facts." Cruz’s argument that he didn’t cause a shutdown is one he and his camp has made in the past. In his 2015 book, A Time for Truth, Cruz wrote that neither he nor his ally, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, "nor the House Republicans even once voted to shut down the government. To the contrary, over and over again we voted to fund the government." And in the 2016 Post article, then-Cruz campaign spokesman Rick Tyler said the senator "didn’t pursue a government shutdown strategy. That’s not even sane. That would be a good thing to go out and campaign on? That wasn’t what he did. He led the fight to defund Obamacare." This echoes the framing Cruz offered Hunt -- namely, that his motivation was not to keep the government from being funded, but rather to defund Obamacare, and that the only reason people believe this is because of the biased media. However, even if, for the sake of argument, you accept Cruz’s line of thinking, his hallway comments offered a very specific definition of determining whether a lawmaker had "consistently opposed shutdowns." Specifically, Cruz said that "only one thing causes a shutdown: when you have senators vote to deny cloture on a funding bill." Cloture refers to a Senate vote to cut off debate and proceed to a bill; it’s a prerequisite for considering a bill, and these days, it typically takes 60 votes. So did Cruz ever "vote to deny cloture on a funding bill"? He did. It came on the legislation to end the 16-day shutdown -- a bill that didn’t include the Obamacare defunding language that he had been seeking. If this spending bill didn’t pass, the government wouldn’t be funded and would have to remain closed. As it happened, the bill passed by a large bipartisan majority, but Cruz was one of 16 senators to vote against cloture. He was also one of 18 to vote against the bill itself. By doing the "one thing" that he himself said defines causing a shutdown, Cruz didn't "consistently oppose shutdowns." "When he knew everyone else would vote to end the shutdown, he voted against funding the government," said Josh Ryan, a political scientist at Utah State University and author of the forthcoming book The Lawmaking End Game: Bargaining and Resolution in Congress. Cruz campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told PolitiFact that his "goal was to defund Obamacare, not shut down the government, and that is the point he was making today. He voted several times and fought in the face of (Democratic) opposition to fund vital government services -- including the military, veterans benefits, the National Guard, and National Health Institute -- while working to defund Obamacare before it went into effect, at which point he knew it would be markedly more difficult to undo. Sen. Cruz voted against cloture on the final bill because it still funded Obamacare, and he was committed to continuing the debate to defund it, while supporting bills to fund the other functions of government not impacted by Obamacare." Our ruling Cruz said, "I have consistently opposed shutdowns." Debunking this assertion doesn’t even require leveraging the many Republican statements criticizing Cruz’s legislative tactics for prompting the 2013 government shutdown. It only requires using the standard Cruz laid out in the same interview -- that "only one thing causes a shutdown: when you have senators vote to deny cloture on a funding bill." Cruz did that very thing in 2013, when he was one of 16 senators to vote against cloture for the spending bill that would go on to end the shutdown. He was also one of 18 senators to vote against the bill itself. We rate his statement Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Ted Cruz | null | null | null | 2018-01-22T20:38:49 | 2018-01-22 | ['None'] |
pomt-06025 | The proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline is a bipartisan proposal. | mostly true | /oregon/statements/2012/jan/14/rob-cornilles/how-bipartisan-support-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline/ | The major party candidates in the 1st Congressional District are on opposite sides of whether President Barack Obama should approve the building of a massive oil pipeline project from Canada to Texas. Democrat Suzanne Bonamici is opposed; she worries about the environmental impact. Republican Rob Cornilles is supportive; he said in last week’s televised debate, about halfway throughthe program, that the project has bipartisan support. "I do support the Keystone Pipeline. It’s a bipartisan proposal. Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress want this to move forward, because it’s not only a job creator, it’s also a way for us to responsibly manage how that oil is transferred from Canada to Mexico. Does the pipeline have bipartisan support? Much of the really vocal support for this project comes from Republicans. Democrats, not so much, although there are some who want the project. Environmentalists are opposed while labor’s AFL-CIO has decided not to take a formal position. Senate Democrats who like the project are Max Baucus D-Mont., Jon Tester D-Mont., Mary Landrieu D-La., Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Mark Begich, D-Alaska, Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D. We queried our delegation. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley are opposed. Rep. Earl Blumenauer was among 32 House Democrats who sent a letter urging the State Department to reject the route. Schrader is opposed to the expedited process, but not necessarily against — or for — the project. We don’t think the support of one Democrat or one Republican makes a proposal bipartisan, but it’s clear some Democrats are on board with the project. If we had to picture a bipartisan meter, the needle probably would surpass the halfway mark but fall short of 75 percent. We rule the statement Mostly True: Requiring clarification that Democrats who are opposed are really opposed. | null | Rob Cornilles | null | null | null | 2012-01-14T00:00:00 | 2012-01-10 | ['None'] |
pomt-09132 | John McCain "voted against the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, wrongly claiming they helped only the rich." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/15/jd-hayworth/hayworth-says-mccain-voted-against-bush-tax-cuts-b/ | Less than two years after losing the 2008 presidential election, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is embroiled in a tough Republican primary against former Rep. J.D. Hayworth. In one recent ad, Hayworth attacked McCain for his vote on the two major tax cut bills of George W. Bush's presidency. "McCain voted against the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, wrongly claiming they helped only the rich," the ad says. We decided to see if Hayworth's ad correctly characterizes McCain's stance. Hayworth is correct that McCain voted against both the Economic Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. In fact, he was one of just two Republicans to oppose the 2001 bill (along with the late John Chafee of Rhode Island) and one of three Republicans opposing the 2003 bill (along with Chafee and Olympia Snowe of Maine). Before going further, we should add that McCain has since changed his stance on the Bush tax cuts. When they came up for renewal in 2006, he voted in favor of extension, and during the 2008 campaign, he once again advocated for their extension. In fact, during the 2008 presidential campaign, PolitiFact gave McCain a Full Flop for his changed stance on the Bush tax cuts. But that's irrelevant for checking Hayworth's claim, since the ad only challenges McCain on his views at the time the bills were passed. So, back to the core charge of the ad. Did McCain say, as Hayworth alleges, that the bills "helped only the rich"? The answer is: pretty much. In each case, before officially casting his vote, McCain gave a Senate floor speech to explain how he would be voting, and why. In both cases, he expressed regret that the bill would be targeting a disproportionate share of its benefits on wealthier Americans. In his 2001 speech, McCain said that he decided to vote against the final version of the bill after failing to find "that the progress we made in the Senate bill to scale back the benefits going to the top rate taxpayers to make room for more tax relief to lower income Americans would prevail in the final tax bill. During the debate on the Senate version of the tax reconciliation bill, I had urged my colleagues that substantial tax relief to middle income Americans should be our top priority. ... I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief." Two years later, McCain spent much of his speech discussing his disappointment about the dropping of a provision he had backed that would have effectively reduced the tax burden of members of the armed forces and the foreign service stationed overseas. However, in the speech he also restated his concern about the share of benefits in the bill flowing to richer Americans. "Despite the recent successful war in Iraq, which highlighted the bravery and sacrifice of our military, the conferees provided nothing for them in this so-called growth bill," McCain said. "The only thing growing will be the tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens of this country." Later in the speech, he added, "Mr. President, the case is clear. The conferees should have included the Armed Forces Tax Fairness Act of 2003 in the conference report for this tax relief bill. If they can look into the eyes of all the men and women in our military who have committed themselves to the defense of this country in Iraq and elsewhere around the world, and justify how they spent billions of federal dollars to cut taxes for our nation’s wealthiest at their expense, then the process is clearly broken. And that is a disgrace for which they are solely responsible." So when he had the opportunity to explain his thinking to the Senate and the American public, McCain on both occasions cited the disproportionate benefits for the rich. That gets Hayworth's ad most of the way home. But Hayworth's assertion that McCain "wrongly" claimed that the cuts "helped only the rich" does bring up two additional questions. First, did the tax cuts actually help only the rich? While the bills' benefits were concentrated among those with the highest incomes, taxpayers in all income levels did get some benefit. The Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the centrist-to-liberal Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, looked at all of the Bush-backed tax cuts enacted between 2001 and 2008 (which included, but was not limited to, the 2001 and 2003 bills) and found that the richest one-fifth of the population saw its after-tax income rise by 5.4 percent. The second one-fifth saw income rise by 3.5 percent, while the third one-fifth saw income rise by 2.6 percent and the fourth one-fifth saw income rise by 2.5 percent. The lowest one-fifth clearly fared the poorest, with an income boost of 0.7 percent. So it's certainly fair for Hayworth to knock the notion that the only people to benefit from the tax cuts were the wealthy. But is that what McCain said in his speeches? The answer is mixed. In 2001, McCain said that "so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us" -- which is not the same as saying that "all of the benefits" would go to the rich. However, two years later, McCain did suggest something closer to what the ad charges -- that "the only thing growing" as a result of the 2003 bill "will be the tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens of this country." So let's sum up. McCain voted against the tax cuts, as the ad indicated, and he cited the idea that the bills were tilted toward the rich as a major reason for his votes. When discussing one of the bills, McCain did suggest that only the rich would benefit, while for the other bill, he didn't. Because the ad was partly wrong on this final point, we'll mark it down a notch. But in general, the ad is quite accurate. We rate it Mostly True. | null | J.D. Hayworth | null | null | null | 2010-06-15T11:04:26 | 2010-06-04 | ['None'] |
snes-01034 | A judge cut fifteen years off the sentence of a man convicted of lewd acts with a 3-year-old girl because the perpetrator claimed the child had 'asked to be raped.' | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sentenced-reduced-3-year-old-asked/ | null | Junk News | null | David Mikkelson | null | Did a Judge Cut a Pedophile’s Prison Term Because He Claimed a 3-Year-Old ‘Asked’ to Be Raped? | 12 February 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-02552 | What is and isn't a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2014/feb/04/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-its-congress-change-how-feds-cla/ | The buck may stop at the president, but does the blunt stop at Congress? For the second time in recent weeks, President Barack Obama was asked to publicly weigh in on the debate over decriminalization and legalization of marijuana. During an interview aired Jan. 31, 2014, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Obama whether he would consider changing marijuana’s status as a Schedule I narcotic, a distinction that bans the substance from sale or use for medicinal or recreational purposes. "Well, first of all," Obama contended, "what is and isn't a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress." "I think it's the (Drug Enforcement Administration) that decides," Tapper offered. "It's not something by ourselves that we start changing," Obama replied. "No, there are laws undergirding those determinations." The back and forth was emblematic of the confusion surrounding the federal government's position on cannabis, particularly in Washington and Colorado, where new state laws legalizing marijuana technically run afoul of federal bans. But in this particular case, who is right, Tapper or Obama? Congress, the White House and controlled substances As usual, Obama has chosen his words carefully. He says that determining the classification of marijuana is "a job for Congress," not "the job of Congress." That could mean Obama philosophically believes that Congress should ultimately decide the fate of marijuana, even if his administration has some control over it. And to be clear, it does. But it’s complicated and not without roadblocks. First, a quick history lesson. Congress passed the Controlled Substance Act in 1970, and it was signed by President Richard Nixon later that year. The law set up guidelines to regulate and enforce the usage, production, sale and importation of various drugs and substances. In the law, Congress created five schedules to classify drugs and narcotics by medical use and potential to incite substance abuse. At one end of the scale is Schedule V drugs, which include substances like cough medicines with small amounts of the narcotic codeine. On the other end of the spectrum are Schedule I substances. These drugs have no accepted medical use and "are considered the most dangerous class of drugs with a high potential for abuse and potentially severe psychological and/or physical dependence," according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Distribution, manufacturing or possession of a Schedule I substance is a federal offense. When Congress passed the Controlled Substance Act, lawmakers singled out several dozen drugs that fall under this category. Among opiates, like heroin, and amphetamines, Congress included marijuana. Congress could amend the law to reschedule marijuana or exempt the substance altogether, as it did for alcohol and tobacco products. But there is another way to lawfully reclassify marijuana and it does involve the executive branch. According to the Controlled Substance Act, the attorney general, through the Drug Enforcement Administration, has the power to change the classification of a substance or remove it entirely, but only if the drug meets certain criteria. First, the attorney general reviews eight factors to determine what schedule to assign a substance, according to the law. The drug's actual or relative potential for abuse Scientific evidence of its pharmacological effect, if known The state of current scientific knowledge regarding the drug Its history and current pattern of abuse The scope, duration, and significance of abuse What, if any, risk there is to the public health The drug's psychic or physiological dependence liability Whether the drug is an immediate precursor of a substance already controlled under the Controlled Substances Act. If the DEA feels a substance should be reclassified, the agency can request a scientific and medical evaluation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to determine if there are safe medical uses for the drug in question. Anyone from a drug company to a local government or even an individual citizen can also petition for review of a drug. Whatever conclusion HHS determines "shall be binding on the attorney general as to such scientific and medical matters," according to the law. That means the DEA cannot change the classification of a drug unless HHS says there are medical uses and it’s safe for consumption. The Food and Drug Administration, the agency under Health and Human Services that handles these reviews, has continually reaffirmed that "the scientific evidence to date is not sufficient for the marijuana plant to gain FDA approval." While research continues, the FDA said because marijuana can be addictive and clinical testing on the benefits of marijuana are not conclusive, it won’t give the DEA the go-ahead to reclassify the drug. In 2001 and 2011 the DEA, citing FDA research, turned down petitions to reclassify marijuana, and in 2006, the FDA upheld that "smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States." Guidelines updated as recently as 2012 reflected that opinion. Many scientists have debated the merits of the FDA’s ruling, but in an email to PolitiFact, the White House reiterated that the agency’s findings serve as the basis for any action from the Justice Department. So basically, there is a mechanism for the executive branch to change the schedules. But it’s an arduous process and not something Obama can change by decree. And while the FDA is an executive agency that includes presidential appointees, the FDA’s recommendations are supposed be based on science, not politics. But Obama has found other ways to get around the FDA’s unwillingness to concede the medical benefits of marijuana to appease states that have gone a different direction. Schedule I substances cannot legally be used for medical purposes; however, 20 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws legalizing medical marijuana. In 2009, the Obama administration told federal law enforcement agencies to stop targeting medical marijuana dispensaries, signaling a change from the approach of President George W. Bush. Similarly, last year the Department of Justice said it would not target new laws in Colorado and Washington legalizing recreational marijuana. So even though marijuana remains a Schedule 1 substance, the current administration, through various memorandums, has not always treated it as one under the law. Our ruling Obama said "what is and isn't a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress." While Obama may feel that way philosophically, there is a process by which the executive branch can reclassify marijuana to allow for its medical use or completely remove it from the list of controlled substances. It’s not an easy process, but it’s there. And Obama’s Justice Department has often given tacit approval, or at least turned a blind eye, when states have taken steps to ignore the federal government’s classification. We rate his statement Half True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2014-02-04T18:20:37 | 2014-01-31 | ['United_States_Congress'] |
pomt-07994 | This kind of snowstorm happens every 10 or 15 years. | true | /georgia/statements/2011/jan/17/john-eaves/was-snowstorm-rare/ | Now that metro Atlantans have freed themselves from the unyielding grip of ice and snow that descended upon the region last week, we thought it was time for some perspective about the magnitude of this mess. The miserable road conditions put several elected officials on the defensive. Fulton County Commission Chairman John Eaves explained why he felt it wouldn’t make sense to invest in snowplows or more spreader trucks. "You’ve got to weigh the cost versus the need," he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "The reality is, this kind of snowstorm happens every 10 or 15 years." Is Eaves correct? Was this a "perfect storm" that comes along only every decade or so? Didn’t we just have a "white Christmas" that shut down schools and caused the airlines to cancel hundreds of flights at the airport? PolitiFact Georgia contacted the National Weather Service’s local offices, headquartered in Peachtree City. Meteorologist Matt Sena noted that 3.7 inches of snow fell at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Jan. 9. By contrast, there were 4.2 inches of snow recorded at the airport on March 1, 2009. There! These types of snowstorms are more frequent than once a decade. But it’s not that simple, Sena told us. What made the last week’s storm different -- very different -- is the dangerous combination of snow, followed by sleet and freezing rain, followed by Arctic temperatures that turned much of metro Atlanta into a skating rink for much of the week, he said. So have there been similar combinations of subfreezing temperatures and precipitation that have lasted for days? If so, how often do they occur? Over the past 80 years, there have been 11 snowstorms of 4 inches or more in the city of Atlanta. The highest total was on Jan. 23, 1940, when 8.3 inches of the white stuff fell on Atlanta. The March 2009 snowfall was the most recent case for more than 4 inches. It closed some school districts for a day, about 12,000 metro Atlanta residents lost power and Delta canceled about 300 round-trip flights. Two days later, most of the roads had dried off, and flights were back on schedule. Channel 2 Action News meteorologist David Chandley noted the March 2009 snowstorm and some others didn’t have the lingering impact because they didn’t have the Arctic air blast afterward that turned the snow into ice. Many say the last comparable weather event to the past week took place when Atlanta was expecting lots of company: in January 2000, the week before it hosted the Super Bowl. An ice storm left more than 300,000 homes and businesses without power for days. More than a quarter-inch-thick ice hung from every surface. On the weekend of the big game, a second wave of ice tackled the region. There was a 47-vehicle crash on I-20, west of the city. The St. Louis Rams won the game in a thrilling finish, but many visitors remember the weekend for the wicked weather. Atlanta hasn’t hosted a Super Bowl since. A snowstorm in March 1960 blanketed Atlanta and much of North Georgia with as much as 10 inches. A little more than a decade later, in January 1973, a cold rain turned into an icy nightmare. The ice froze power lines, causing many of them to crash, creating a light show that could compete with the Independence Day fireworks display at Lenox Square. For three days, more than 200,000 people were without power. Nearly ten years later, on Jan. 12, 1982, there was "Snowjam." Seven inches of snow fell across Atlanta over three days. All of the city’s 1,425 miles of surface streets and 200 miles of interstate highways were immobilized. The snowstorm scared Atlantans so much that the AJC reported many fled the city before an anticipated snowfall in 1983 "like extras in a disaster movie." In March 1993, metro Atlanta was pounded by a blizzard that exceeded predictions. Winds reached 50 mph, as much as 1 foot of snow reportedly fell and the temperature plummeted into the teens. Some call it the "Super Storm of 1993." Sena contends snowstorms like this in 1993 and the most recent storm are rare. "Temperatures were cool beforehand … and we stayed below freezing days afterward," he said. Indeed, the thermometer rarely poked above the freezing point most of the week, causing ice to coat roads throughout the region. Chandley, who has been at Channel 2 Action News since November 1988 and lived in the area before that, said the worst storm he has seen was Snowjam because it took the region by surprise. This month’s storm is unusual, he said, because of the low temperatures that froze the snow for several days afterward. Because of the cold air that followed this storm, Chandley called it a "once-in-a-generation type of thing." Eaves seems to have a point about the frequency of this type of weather. We occasionally get snow and we occasionally get ice. But we rarely get the snow-ice-Arctic-conditions metro Atlanta lived through last week. We may not like how state and local officials responded to the snow and ice, but history shows this perfect storm of winter weather is rare. Eaves’ estimate of this type of thing occurring only every 10 to 15 years might actually be a bit conservative. We rate his statement as True. | null | John Eaves | null | null | null | 2011-01-17T06:00:00 | 2011-01-12 | ['None'] |
pomt-15373 | The Supreme Court’s views "are radically out of step with public opinion" regarding its decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/01/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-out-/ | The Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide isn’t what the American people wanted, says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Cruz, who is running for president, is an outspoken critic of the court’s 5-4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that overturned the country’s remaining same-sex marriage bans. In an interview on Morning Edition June 29, NPR’s Steve Inskeep talked with Cruz about how he and other Republicans will respond. "The concern of conservatives seems to be that the court was following public opinion," Inskeep said. "Same-sex marriage, for example, is much more popular than it used to be." Cruz responded, "Well, Steve, let me actually disagree with your premise. The court doesn't follow public opinion. The court’s views are radically out of step with public opinion." "If the values had changed so much, there would be no need for the court to act because people would have acted democratically to change their marriage laws," Cruz added. "That hadn't happened, which is why the court stepped in and (threw) out the laws that the people did adopt." Given the swelling support for same-sex marriage in recent years, we wanted to dig into Cruz’s claim that "the court’s views are radically out of step with public opinion." To be clear: The claim could be interpreted as speaking about the court’s decisions generally. But given the context of the statement and our interaction with Cruz’s campaign, it seems he was talking about same-sex marriage specifically, so that’s what we’ll focus on. There’s a couple of different ways to look at this, but Cruz’s characterization is an exaggeration. A look at the polls On whether the American public supports same-sex marriage, there is no question. Numerous 2015 polls have found that a majority of the country -- around 60 percent -- favors same-sex marriage. The majority holds in most demographic groups. Support for same-sex marriage has risen dramatically in the past few years, as demonstrated by this Gallup chart, spanning 20 years: But there’s another question that doesn’t have a clear answer -- whether Americans think the decision to legalize same-sex marriage should have been left to the states, rather than having a decision made at the national level. This is essentially the question presented to the Supreme Court. Cruz spokesman Brian Phillips said "it is incontrovertible that a majority of Americans believe that the decision should be left to the states," pointing to a February 2015 CBS News poll that found 56 percent of Americans hold this position. However, other polls show the opposite: that a majority of Americans think same-sex marriage should be decided nationally. A June 2015 poll by CBS News and the New York Times found that just 41 percent of Americans think this is a state issue, while 54 percent think there should be a single federal law. Looking through a collection of the latest polls on gay rights, neither side stands out as the obvious position of the American public. Given the mix of polling results on this question, "it's not the case that the court's ruling was, as Cruz claimed, ‘radically out of step with public opinion.’ Rather, Americans were less definitive on this aspect of the gay marriage issue than others," said New York University professor Patrick Egan, who studies public opinion and gay rights issues. Phillips noted that a majority of states had laws banning same-sex marriage prior to this year’s Supreme Court and earlier lower court decisions -- more than 30 state bans in 2013, before the rulings started to roll out. Because state legislatures or the voters directly passed these laws, Phillips said they "reflected the popular will of the people in those states." But timing is important here. These same-sex marriage bans might have reflected popular opinion at the time they were passed -- nearly all came about before 2010 -- but public opinion on gay marriage has changed significantly since then. "If public opinion is changing -- and the data show it was -- it is possible for both the original legislative decisions and the subsequent court decisions to be consistent with public opinion," said Peter Enns, a professor of government at Cornell University who studies public opinion and government response. By 2014, at least 50 percent of residents in 32 states supported same-sex marriage -- including quite a few states that had gay marriage bans prior to court decisions, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. A majority opposed same-sex marriage in only eight states. Additionally, most political scientists would say public opinion is best measured via representative surveys, not by the laws currently in place, Egan noted. So it’s not always fair to say that an existing same-sex marriage ban shows that the people of that state are currently opposed to same-sex marriage legalization. Our ruling Cruz said the Supreme Court’s views "are radically out of step with public opinion" regarding its decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. Most polls say around 60 percent favor same-sex marriage -- a high point. At the state level, the majority holds in most cases. Cruz’s staff said that Americans think legalizing same-sex marriage should be a state responsibility rather than something decided at the federal level. But different polls show different results on that point. There isn’t an obvious majority one way or the other. Certainly there is a good chunk of the population that opposes the Supreme Court’s decision, but it’s definitely not a clear majority. We rate Cruz’s claim Mostly False. | null | Ted Cruz | null | null | null | 2015-07-01T15:00:00 | 2015-06-29 | ['None'] |
pomt-15021 | Planned Parenthood "is an organization that funnels millions of dollars in political contributions to pro-abortion candidates." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/05/carly-fiorina/carly-fiorina-says-planned-parenthood-gives-millio/ | The bitter debate over Planned Parenthood is continuing -- on the presidential campaign trail, in the halls of Congress, and on cable news Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has repeatedly criticized the group after getting wide attention for her comments during the second Republican debate, when she said that an undercover video about Planned Parenthood shows "a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.' " (We rated that Mostly False.) During the Sept. 30, 2015, edition of the Fox News show Hannity, Fiorina said that Planned Parenthood "is an organization that funnels millions of dollars in political contributions to pro-abortion candidates." We wondered if Fiorina was right, so we turned to the campaign-finance data. It turns out she’s on solid ground. Here are the two major categories of Planned Parenthood spending from the 2014 campaign cycle: Source of spending Type of spending Amount spent, 2014 cycle Planned Parenthood Action Fund Inc. Federal PAC Contributions to candidates and parties $528,762 Super PAC and 501(c)4 groups Independent expenditures $6,058,338 Total $6,587,100 Let’s unpack these numbers a bit. The first line, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, refers to the amount spent by the group’s main political action committee. A political action committee is a group that bundles money donated voluntarily, including that from employees and their families, to be spent for political purposes. A PAC is legally distinct from the organization for which it advocates, and it must maintain separate bank accounts. PACs can give directly to candidates. The second line includes dollars spent by Planned Parenthood-related groups that are allowed to raise and spend money more freely, but which are not allowed to give money directly to or coordinate with candidates. These are primarily known as Super PACs and 501(c)4 organizations. So, combining these three categories of expenditures produces roughly $6.6 million in political spending just for the 2014 cycle. That number would go up if other recent election cycles were added in. So Fiorina has a point. It’s important to note that all of the reported expenditures on this list come from entities that are legally allowed to spend money in politics. While the operational, medical clinics of Planned Parenthood cannot spend money in politics, all the affiliates listed in the table are organized in such a way that they are allowed to make campaign donations or spend money in other ways on elections. Also, federal dollars flow only to the operational arms of Planned Parenthood, which by law are not allowed to spend money on politics. Despite the legal distinctions between these groups and what they can, and cannot, do in elections, it’s easy to see why there may be public confusion. That’s because officials with the group haven’t been afraid to use the "Planned Parenthood" brand when choosing names for affiliates that are allowed to engage in election activity. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, some of the group’s biggest affiliated spenders in 2014 were called Planned Parenthood Votes (a Super PAC that spent $4.2 million that cycle) and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund (a 501(c)4 group that spent $930,290 that cycle). Another 19 affiliates with "Planned Parenthood" in their name, mostly regional affiliates, had PACs that spent money on political purposes in 2014 or had employees who gave from their own pockets that cycle. This has the effect of fuzzing the image of what counts as "Planned Parenthood" in the public mind, even if not in legal status. Another point worth mentioning: Not all of this money was spent on "candidates," the word Fiorina used. Some of the money we totaled above went to candidates, but a lot went to party committees or was used for "independent expenditures," such as ads that independently supported a candidate without going through the candidate’s own campaign treasury. In the 2014 campaign cycle, the Center for Responsive Politics found that groups and individuals related to Planned Parenthood spent $679,708 specifically on congressional candidates. And if you broaden that out to the entire 1990 to 2016 period, the number rises to about $3.9 million specifically on congressional candidates. In 2014, the group's biggest recipients among incumbent senators were Ed Markey, D-Mass., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Al Franken, D-Minn., and Mark Udall, D-Colo. The four senators -- each of whom received a 100 percent vote rating from NARAL-Pro-Choice America -- received between $14,000 and $23,000 each. If you include all recent years, Fiorina’s right that the amount spent specifically on candidates (indeed, just the congressional ones) did reach into the "millions." It’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood is hardly the only organization to split itself into separate entities that have different abilities to participate in politics. In addition to being legal, it’s common practice. Indeed, a political affiliate of the Susan B. Anthony List -- an anti-abortion group -- spent $745,756 on independent expenditures in campaigns during the 2014 cycle. And during her unsuccessful 2010 Senate candidacy in California, Fiorina herself benefited from $246,183 in independent expenditures by National Right to Life and $234,774 in independent expenditures from the Susan B. Anthony List. Our ruling Fiorina said Planned Parenthood "is an organization that funnels millions of dollars in political contributions to pro-abortion candidates." Fiorina glossed over the difference between the operational arm of Planned Parenthood, which receives federal funding and cannot take part in electoral activities, and its affiliates, which can legally spend money on politics. Still, she is right that a variety of affiliates of Planned Parenthood -- usually with "Planned Parenthood" in their name -- have legally spent "millions" on politics in recent years, both for candidates specifically and on other electoral activities. The statement is accurate but needs clarification, so we rate Fiorina’s claim Mostly True. | null | Carly Fiorina | null | null | null | 2015-10-05T15:55:01 | 2015-09-30 | ['None'] |
pomt-01870 | When undocumented children are picked up at the border and "told to appear later in court ... 90 percent do not then show up." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jul/10/jeff-flake/sen-jeff-flake-says-90-percent-immigrants-given-co/ | The surge of unaccompanied children at the U.S. border, primarily coming from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, has overwhelmed the ability of the United States to handle their legal cases. A law passed under President George W. Bush and aimed at curbing human trafficking requires that minors from Central America who reach the border must have their cases heard in court before they can be deported. Currently, children wait an average of 578 days before a hearing -- delays that are sure to lengthen if the flow of children continues unabated. A substantial chunk of the $3.7 billion President Barack Obama is requesting in a supplemental spending bill for the border would be for increasing the courts’ ability to handle the caseload of newly arrived children. In this context, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., offered a notable statistic about the judicial treatment of people who arrive at the U.S. border. In a July 8, 2014, interview on the PBS News Hour, Flake outlined the risks of having large numbers of people released in the United States awaiting a hearing -- particularly the risk that they will fail to show up and boost the number of undocumented immigrants in the country. "When these kids are handed off from the Border Patrol, (the government’s) role is to actually place those children in the care of a guardian or a family member," Flake said. "And then what the record shows is that they’re told to appear later in court, where their case will be adjudicated. But 90 percent of them, 90 percent, do not then show up in court later." A reader called our attention to this, citing sharply conflicting data, so we decided to take a look. The reader pointed us to a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center -- a think tank founded by former congressional leaders of both parties -- that cited figures far smaller than 90 percent. The report used figures from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is tasked by the Justice Department with handling immigration court proceedings, appellate reviews and administrative hearings. Between 2003 and 2012, the percentage of all immigrants who failed to appear in court after being released has bounced between 20 percent and 40 percent, settling in at about 30 percent at the end of that time span. (No data for children specifically is available from this long-running data set.) That’s substantially lower than the 90 percent figure Flake cited. Meanwhile, in a July 10 hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee -- which was held two days after Flake’s remarks on PBS -- Juan P. Osuna, the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, told the panel that his department estimates that 46 percent of children currently fail to show up for their date in court. He told lawmakers that any other numbers are "incorrect." We checked with immigration policy experts to see whether the federal statistics or Flake’s estimate seemed more accurate, and they agreed that the federal statistics jibed with their long-term understanding of the issue. "I’m not aware of data that shows a 90 percent no-show rate," said Marc R. Rosenblum, deputy director of the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program. He added that the long-term range of 20 percent to 40 percent matches what the VERA Institute found between 1997 and 2000 when it studied the issue on a federal contract to track individual immigration cases. The Bipartisan Policy Center also expressed skepticism about the 90 percent figure. "Based on the federal data we’ve seen, we know that between 2008 and 2012, about 70 to 80 percent of all immigrants showed up for their court appearance," said Rosemarie Calabro Tully, a spokeswoman for the group. She later passed us the estimate Osuna gave to the Senate committee. When we contacted Flake’s office, they said the senator’s source for the statistic was a comment by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., at a media breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor on June 26. The Monitor didn’t print a direct quote, but here’s an excerpt from the article: "Right now, (Goodlatte) said, the law does not allow minors to be held in a facility, so they are released to relatives or foster care, and then given a court date to reappear. More than 90 percent do not return, he said." So we contacted Goodlatte’s office. Goodlatte’s office said that while visiting the McAllen Border Patrol Station in the Rio Grande Valley in July, Goodlatte heard from Border Patrol agents that only 26 percent of those who were detained failed to show up for removal proceedings. They said officials didn’t give a percentage for those who had been released and failed to appear. They cited an article in Newsmax, a conservative online publication, that cited an anonymous "senior Los Angeles County Sheriff's detective who routinely deals with illegal immigrants" who said a "massive number — 80 to 90 percent" do not show up for deportation hearings. However, Goodlatte’s office acknowledged this was anecdotal evidence. Goodlatte's office also noted that there is already significant pool of immigrants whose final deportation has been ordered but not carried out. At least 858,779 non-detained aliens are deportable but haven’t been deported, many of whom are now off the radar of the authorities, according to calculations by the Center for Immigration Studies based on federal data. This is a related and notable issue, but somewhat different from what Flake or Goodlatte said. Experts we checked with did note a caveat: There’s no way of knowing if the current group of new arrivals will behave differently in regard to court appearances than their predecessors have. Indeed, due the backlog, it is unlikely that many of the minors apprehended in 2013 or 2014 have had their court date come up yet, and until their court appearance is complete, the government won’t know how many end up coming and how many fail to appear. Our ruling Flake said that when undocumented children are picked up at the border and "told to appear later in court ... 90 percent do not then show up." Historically, the rate has ranged between 20 percent to 40 percent, settling in at about 30 percent in 2012, the most recent full year for which data is available. A more recent estimate for children specifically, made by the director of the office responsible for handling such cases, is that the current no-show rate for children is 46 percent. That’s still quite high, but it’s only half what Flake said. We rate the claim False. | null | Jeff Flake | null | null | null | 2014-07-10T18:20:53 | 2014-07-08 | ['None'] |
pomt-14510 | It’s highly unusual to have a Supreme Court confirmation in a presidential election year. The last one was 1940. | half-true | /virginia/statements/2016/feb/22/bob-goodlatte/goodlatte-says-scotus-appointment-presidential-yea/ | Count U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-6th, among the many conservatives saying the replacement of the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court should be left to the next president. "It’s highly unusual to have a Supreme Court confirmation in a presidential election year. The last one was 1940," Goodlatte said in a Feb. 15 interview on the Fox Business Network. Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has criticized President Barack Obama over the years for embracing liberal policies and sometimes stepping around Congress to enact them. He told Fox it’s "highly unlikely" that Obama, who will leave office next January, would appoint a new justice who has anything close to Scalia’s conservative views. Obama is promising to nominate a new justice, and some Senate Republicans are threatening to block the nomination because they want the new president to fill the open seat. Although Goodlatte won’t have a vote in the controversy, we decided to fact-check his full statement that a presidential election-year confirmation of a Supreme Court justice is 1) rare and, 2) hasn’t occurred since 1940. During the 80-year time frame that Goodlatte cites, it’s pretty clear that election-year confirmations indeed have been a rarity. There’s a couple reasons for that. Russell Wheeler, an expert on the courts at the Brookings Institution, told our colleagues at PolitiFact National that justices rarely have died in office in recent decades, and they don’t usually resign during an election year in order to avoid escalating debate over filling their seats. But there has been election-year activity on Supreme Court seats. Let’s start with 1940. That Jan. 4, President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, nominated Frank Murphy to the court. The overwhelmingly Democratic-led Senate approved the choice less than two weeks later. Murphy filled the seat of Justice Pierce Butler, who died in November 1939. In October 1956, Justice Sherman Minton stepped down. With the Senate adjourned, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, used a recess appointment to elevate William Brennan to the seat. Brennan was formally nominated by Eisenhower and confirmed by the Democratic-led Senate early the next year. The next election-year opening occurred in 1968, when Chief Justice Earl Warren announced he wanted to retire. President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat who was not seeking re-election, nominated sitting Justice Abe Fortas to succeed Warren as chief justice. Johnson nominated Homer Thornberry to replace Fortas. But neither of those men, who were nominated in June, got a confirmation vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Republicans and Southern Democrats filibustered Fortas, whom they considered a liberal jurist. In October, Johnson withdrew both Fortas’ and Thornberry’s nominations. Warren remained on the bench until the spring of 1969 when Warren Burger - nominated by President Richard Nixon, a Republican - became chief justice. So although there was action on Supreme Court seats in 1956 and 1968, it’s accurate to say the Senate did not confirm a justice during either election year. But 1988 was a different story. That Feb. 3, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted 97-0 to confirm Anthony Kennedy for a seat on the high court. That was during the last full year of Republican Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Kennedy was Reagan’s third choice to fill a vacancy left by retiring Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. In July 1987, Reagan nominated Robert Bork, but the Senate rejected him in a vote that October. Reagan then announced he would nominate Douglas Ginsburg but backtracked after Ginsburg acknowledged he had smoked marijuana as a college student and early in his teaching career. Finally, on Nov. 30, 1987, Reagan nominated Kennedy. The Senate Judiciary Committee held three days of hearings on Kennedy’s nomination in December 1987 before recommending his confirmation and sending his selection to the full Senate. We asked Goodlatte’s office to back up the congressman’s claim that no Supreme Court justice has been confirmed during an election year since 1940 and got a reply from Michael Woeste, deputy press secretary at the House Judiciary Committee. He stressed that although Kennedy was confirmed in an election year, the original nomination for the seat he filled was made well before then. "The Reagan example is distinguishable because Kennedy was simply a replacement for Douglas Ginsburg, who dropped out, and Ginsburg was the replacement for Bork, who dropped out earlier," Woeste wrote in an email. "So Reagan’s initial appointment for that slot on the Supreme Court occurred before the election year, and the replacements were for the same position." Our ruling Goodlatte said: "It’s highly unusual to have a Supreme Court confirmation in a presidential election year. The last one was 1940." Clearly, such confirmations are rare in modern times; it’s happened only once during the past 18 presidential elections. That doesn’t mean that the Senate has a long tradition of refusing to consider high court nominations when the White House is up for grabs. What it shows mostly is that Supreme Court justices avoid retiring during presidential election years. There’s an obvious flaw, however, in Goodlatte’s contention that 1940 was the last time a justice was confirmed during a presidential election year. Kennedy was unanimously confirmed in February 1988. So on the whole, we rate Goodlatte’s statement Half True. | null | Bob Goodlatte | null | null | null | 2016-02-22T00:00:00 | 2016-02-15 | ['None'] |
pose-00250 | Will "support federal policies to encourage voluntary water banks, wastewater treatment, and other market-based conservation measures" to address the water shortage in western states. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/266/encourage-water-conservation-efforts-in-the-west/ | null | obameter | Barack Obama | null | null | Encourage water-conservation efforts in the West | 2010-01-07T13:26:53 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03476 | Future Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro was once given a tryout by the Washington Senators baseball team. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fidel-castro/ | null | Sports | null | David Mikkelson | null | Fidel Castro, Baseball Star? | 26 November 2016 | null | ['Fidel_Castro', 'Cuba'] |
pomt-06713 | President Barack Obama "has virtually no one in his cabinet with private-sector experience." | pants on fire! | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/01/michele-bachmann/bachmann-says-obama-has-virtually-no-one-his-cabin/ | During a visit to a sandwich shop in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., took a shot at the career backgrounds of the officials who comprise President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. "I want to bring advisers in from labor and from manufacturers and from the service industry and financial services," said Bachmann, who’s running for the Republican presidential nomination. "I want to know what they know, because that's what we've been missing from President Obama. He has virtually no one in his Cabinet with private-sector experience. I want to bring people who know how to create jobs into my administration." A reader suggested that we check whether Bachmann is right that Obama "has virtually no one in his Cabinet with private-sector experience." As it happens, we analyzed a similar claim 21 months ago and found it False. But we are updating and expanding that assessment here, due to subsequent arrivals and departures from Obama’s Cabinet. Our original analysis First, let’s recap what we published in December 2009. It was based on a statement by Glenn Beck, then a Fox News talk show host, on his Nov. 30, 2009, show. "History has proven over and over again — and so has the post office, for that matter — that government is not the answer," Beck said. "You need to unleash the people. The entrepreneurs. And if you are wondering how it is that the government can't see that — how they can be pondering even bigger stimulus packages as they stare the failure of the first one right in the face — I'll show you. Here are the past presidents and the number of appointees in their Cabinets with private sector experience — folks that have done more than write on the chalkboard; they've been out there, in the real world. Let's compare President Nixon — he's over 50 percent — with President Obama: Under 10 percent of his appointees have any experience in the private sector." After some digging, we found that the claim was based on a study by Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer for J.P. Morgan Private Bank. In a Nov. 24, 2009, column titled "Obama's Business Blind Spot" and published on Forbes.com, Cembalest wrote, "In a quest to see what frame of reference the administration might have on this issue, I looked back at the history of the presidential Cabinet. Starting with the creation of the secretary of commerce back in 1900, I compiled the prior private-sector experience of all 432 Cabinet members, focusing on those positions one would expect to participate in this discussion: secretaries of State; Commerce; Treasury; Agriculture; Interior; Labor; Transportation; Energy; and Housing & Urban Development." He continued, "Many of these individuals started a company or ran one, with first-hand experience in hiring and firing, domestic and international competition, red tape, recessions, wars and technological change. Their industries included agribusiness, chemicals, finance, construction, communications, energy, insurance, mining, publishing, pharmaceuticals, railroads and steel; a cross-section of the American experience. (I even gave [one-third] credit to attorneys focused on private-sector issues, although one could argue this is a completely different kettle of fish.) One thing is clear: The current administration, compared with past Democratic and Republican ones, marks a departure from the traditional reliance on a balance of public- and private-sector experiences." In an accompanying chart, Cembalest reported that in the Obama administration, fewer than 10 percent of the Cabinet appointees counted under those rules had private-sector experience. According to the chart, all other administrations going back to Theodore Roosevelt's had rates in at least the high 20s, with the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations approaching 60 percent. The chart — typically reprinted by itself, without Cembalest's accompanying narrative — circulated in the conservative blogosphere for a couple of days before eventually being picked up by Beck. However, we found that at least three of the nine positions that Cembalest and Beck cited — one-third — were occupied by appointees who had significant corporate or business experience. • Shaun Donovan, Obama's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, served as managing director of Prudential Mortgage Capital Co., where he oversaw its investments in affordable housing loans. • Energy Secretary Steven Chu headed the electronics research lab at one of America's storied corporate research-and-development facilities, AT&T Bell Laboratories, where his work won a Nobel Prize for physics. • Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in addition to serving as Colorado attorney general and a U.S. senator, has been a partner in his family's farm for decades and, with his wife, owned and operated a Dairy Queen and radio stations in his home state of Colorado. All three remain in Obama’s Cabinet. Three other Obama Cabinet members worked as lawyers for private-sector law firms, most of them with business clients: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. And Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner once worked for Kissinger Associates, a consulting firm that advises international corporations on political and economic conditions overseas. Of these, Clinton, Vilsack and Geithner remain in the Cabinet. The occupants of the two remaining Cabinet posts cited in Cembalest’s chart did not have significant private-sector experience: Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Both remain in their jobs. When we tracked down Cembalest to ask about his methodology, he expressed regret that his work had been used for political ends, saying that it was not his intention to provide fodder for bloggers and talk show hosts. He acknowledged fault in missing Salazar's business background, though he downplayed the private-sector experiences Chu and Donovan had -- managing scientific research and handling community development lending, respectively -- saying they did not represent the kind of private-sector business experience he was looking for when doing his study. "What I was really trying to get at was some kind of completely, 100 percent subjective assessment of whether or not a person had had enough control of payroll, dealing with shareholders, hiring, firing and risk-taking that they'd be in a position to have had a meaningful seat at the table when the issue being discussed is job creation," Cembalest told us. The Cabinet today Now let’s look at the Cabinet as it is now. To do that, we’ll detail the full list of Cabinet positions, which is broader than the more limited list Cembalest was working with. Department heads and the vice president always belong in the Cabinet, with other senior positions granted Cabinet rank at the president’s discretion. In addition to the vice president, the Cabinet includes the secretaries of 15 executive departments: Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Attorney General. The other positions that hold Cabinet rank under Obama are: White House chief of staff, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, director of the Office of Management & Budget, U.S. Trade Representative, Ambassador to the United Nations, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. We’ve already noted that Donovan, Chu and Salazar have solid private-sector credentials. To that list, we can add three names: • Obama’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, John Bryson. Bryson has served as chairman and CEO of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, a major utility. • White House chief of staff Bill Daley. Daley has served in several top-level positions with JP Morgan Chase, as president of SBC Communications and as president and chief operating officer of Amalgamated Bank of Chicago. • Office of Management and Budget director Jack Lew. Lew, a longtime senior federal manager, has also served as managing director and chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management and later Citi Alternative Investments. We can also add six names to the list of those who have worked as lawyers or consultants for private-sector companies. Though Cembalest treated them as different from other private sector workers, we see no reason to: • Vice President Joe Biden. Biden, something of an entrepreneur, founded his own law firm, Biden and Walsh, early in his career, and it still exists in a later incarnation, Monzack Mersky McLaughlin and Browder, P.A. Biden also supplemented his income by managing real estate properties, including a neighborhood swimming pool. Of course, he later became a long-serving U.S. senator from Delaware. • Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder, a former judge and deputy attorney general, has also worked as a litigation partner at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP. • Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Panetta, a former Member of Congress and Central Intelligence Agency director, worked in private practice as a lawyer for five years. • Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. Napolitano, the former two-term governor of Arizona, also practiced law in Phoenix with the firm Lewis and Roca. • U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, has also worked as a partner in the Texas-based international law firm Vinson & Elkins. • U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. Rice, a veteran of the State Department and foreign-policy think tanks, worked early in her career as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co., which advises corporations on how to run their businesses more effectively. Finally, we can add five names to the list of Cabinet members without any significant private-sector experience: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Council of Economic Advisers nominee Alan Krueger. (We will note, however, that Duncan played pro basketball in Australia from 1987 to 1991, and that Shinseki was otherwise occupied as a career military officer.) Now let’s add the numbers together. If you take the most restrictive definition -- those employed by businesses other than private law and consulting firms -- Obama can count six members of his 22-member Cabinet with private-sector experience, or 27 percent. (We’re counting Bryson, who hasn’t been confirmed yet.) If you take what we consider the more common-sense definition -- which includes those who have worked for private law or consulting firms -- then Obama can count 15 out of 22 with private-sector experience, or 68 percent. That leaves seven of 22 Cabinet members without private-sector experience, or 32 percent. Our ruling Bachmann said that "virtually no one" in Obama’s Cabinet has private-sector experience. But even under the most restrictive definition, 27 percent of Obama’s Cabinet has what we consider pretty clear private-sector experience. And broader definition that includes private-sector law and consulting work -- much of which involved representing businesses -- kicks the percentage up to two-thirds. In addition, Bachmann said she would bring in advisers from manufacturing (Chu could fit that bill), the service industry (which could include Salazar) and financial services (which would include Donovan, Daley and Lew). Conceivably, a Republican president might appoint more business executives to Cabinet posts than a Democratic one would. But Bachmann still overstates her case by saying that "virtually no one" in Obama’s Cabinet has private-sector experience -- repeating a false claim that's been circulating for nearly two years. We rate her statement Pants on Fire. | null | Michele Bachmann | null | null | null | 2011-09-01T17:58:14 | 2011-08-26 | ['None'] |
pomt-15147 | We have 93 million people out of work. They look for jobs, they give up, and all of a sudden, statistically, they're considered employed. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/31/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-us-has-93-milion-people-out-work/ | Two of the nation’s most outspoken politicians appeared on the same show on Aug. 28, 2015, when Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump was a guest on former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s show, On Point with Sarah Palin, which airs on the conservative One America News Network. As her first question, Palin asked Trump about the state of the national economy. "If you really look, Sarah, at the economy, it's been terrible," Trump said. "We have 93 million people out of work. They look for jobs, they give up, and all of a sudden, statistically, they're considered employed." Palin went on to suggest that the government is actively keeping the American people in the dark about how bad the economy is, saying, "I don't think we're getting the truth out of the White House -- the true state of the economy." Trump agreed, saying, "The White House is not truthful." A reader asked us to look at the checkable portion of this exchange -- that "we have 93 million people out of work. They look for jobs, they give up, and all of a sudden, statistically, they're considered employed." So we did. We’ll take the two parts of the claim in turn. ‘We have 93 million people out of work’ We have addressed claims like this one previously and have not rated them favorably. Trump’s press office did not answer an inquiry, but we have a good idea where the number came from. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal government’s official collector of employment data, either 92 million or 93 million members of the civilian, non-institutionalized population who were age 16 and over were not in the labor force in July 2015. (There are slight differences in the figure if you use seasonally adjusted numbers as opposed to non-seasonally adjusted numbers.) But what does this number actually mean? For one, it includes lots of people who likely aren’t looking for work. It includes every American of retirement age -- 65 and older. It includes every high-school student at least 16 years of age. It includes every college and many graduate or professional-school students. It includes every person who has a disability that makes it impossible for them to work. It includes parents who are choosing to stay home to take care of their kids. It includes every adult who’s gone back to school full-time. It even includes trust-fund kids who are living off investments. Put it all together and this is not a trivial group of people. Out of the 93.8 million Americans age 16 and up who are deemed "not in the labor force," 9.7 million of them are between 16 and 19 years of age. Another 5.7 million are between 20 and 24. And 37.8 million are age 65 and over. (In fact, 17.5 million are over 75 years old.) What’s left? This leaves 40.5 million Americans who are not in the labor force and are between the ages of 25 and 64. It’s possible to argue that this number should be a bit higher -- college typically ends at age 22, not everyone goes to college, and healthy seniors today can usually work past 65 if they wish. But right off the top, Trump’s claim significantly overstates the matter. So what’s a better number? The official number of unemployed Americans is 8.3 million -- less than one-tenth of what Trump says. But to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, it’s possible to expand this number using more credible economic thinking. Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, says it’s not unreasonable to include: • The 6.4 million people who haven’t looked for work recently enough to qualify as being "in the labor force," but who say they "currently want a job." • And the 6.5 million people working part-time who would prefer to have a full-time job. This would mean that upwards of 21 million Americans could be described with some justification as "out of work" involuntarily, either fully or partially. But that’s not even one-quarter of the number that Trump offered. Most of Trump’s 93 million "don’t want to work and are not in the job market," said Tara Sinclair, chief economist at Indeed and associate professor at George Washington University. Burtless added that a large chunk of those suffering the plague of being "out of work" can actually be seen as benefiting from their membership in an affluent, technologically advanced society. "The fact that these adults are jobless is not a marker of economic failure -- it is an indicator of a very prosperous society that can afford to permit the old and disabled to retire, that can invest in young adults so they can improve their skills, and that can keep some adults in the home where they can care for children or attend to other non-paying pursuits," he said. ‘They look for jobs, they give up, and all of a sudden, statistically, they're considered employed’ The second half of Trump’s claim is no closer to accurate. Trump seems to suggest that government statisticians are performing something like medieval alchemy, turning lead (unemployment) into gold (employment) with the flick of a wand. But if someone gives up looking for a job, they are counted as either unemployed or not in the labor force -- not as "employed." There actually is an official statistical category for a person in this situation: If someone wants and looks for a job but then gives up, they are called "discouraged workers." Specifically, these people "want and are available for a job and who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months" but are "not currently looking because they believe there are no jobs available or there are none for which they would qualify." However, "discouraged workers" are relatively rare -- in the most recent month, there were 668,000 of them, or less than 1 percent of the 93 million "out of work" Americans Trump referred to. Burtless said that Trump’s statement is "so confusingly wide of the mark" that he may have misspoken. Our ruling Trump said, "We have 93 million people out of work. They look for jobs, they give up, and all of a sudden, statistically, they're considered employed." That figure, boosted by Trump’s description, represents a basic misunderstanding of the labor market. Once you strip out full-time students, senior citizens, the disabled, and those who have chosen not to work to take care of their children, a more reasonable estimate of "out of work" Americans is somewhere in the neighborhood of 21 million, or less than a quarter of Trump’s figure. Meanwhile, he is flat wrong that the government reclassifies discouraged workers as "employed." We rate his claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2015-08-31T17:02:37 | 2015-08-28 | ['None'] |
hoer-00575 | Bonsai Kittens Email Petition | statirical reports | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/bonsai-kittens.html | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Bonsai Kittens Email Petition | 23th November 2009 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14025 | While Rob Portman relies on his super PAC and a handful of billionaires to do his dirty work, we don’t have a super PAC, and quite frankly, we don’t want one that spends millions to spew out lies and distortions. | half-true | /ohio/statements/2016/may/31/ted-strickland/ted-strickland-doesnt-have-super-pac/ | The duel between leading U.S. Senate candidates in Ohio is feisty as ever, with polls showing Democratic former Gov. Ted Strickland and incumbent Republican Sen. Rob Portman neck-in-neck. Strickland’s latest tactic against Portman is to call him out for serving the billionaire class at the expense of Ohio’s regular Joes. A campaign fundraising email from Strickland’s campaign manager portrays Portman in the grips of dark outside spending, while Strickland takes in small donations from voters. "While Rob Portman relies on his super PAC and a handful of billionaires to do his dirty work, we don’t have a super PAC," wrote campaign manager Rebecca Pearcey, "and quite frankly, we don’t want one that spends millions to spew out lies and distortions." We recalled a similar claim by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whose own statement about not having a super PAC was fact-checked in the early months of the Democratic primary. We applied the same test to Strickland’s campaign rhetoric. Portman has an affiliated super PAC, meaning it’s dedicated solely to supporting him and opposing Strickland. Fighting for Ohio (though it’s registered in Alexandria, Va.) has spent more than $1.68 million against Strickland so far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Top contributors to Fighting for Ohio include Kenneth Griffin, founder and CEO of global investment firm Citadel ($250,000); Paul Singer, hedge fund manager of Elliott Management Corporation ($250,000); Edyth Lindner, widow of Carl Lindner, former owner of the Cincinnati Reds and Chiquita Brands ($100,000). Yes, Portman is funded by billionaires. But Strickland’s appeal for cash neglects to mention how he also benefits from outside spending. Senate Majority PAC is an unaffiliated funder that pledges its support to Democrats running for the Senate. The PAC mostly pays for TV and digital attack ads against Republican candidates. In this election season, the PAC has lasered in on four major Senate battlegrounds: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Ohio. Donors to the Senate Majority PAC include George Marcus, real estate broker at Marcus & Millichap ($1 million); Fred Eychaner, Newsweb Corporation founder ($1 million); and actor/director Seth MacFarlane ($500,000). Anyone can register an unaffiliated super PAC with the Federal Election Commission. This means even if the Senate Majority PAC’s love for Strickland was unrequited, there’s not much Strickland can do about it. It’s illegal for a candidate to coordinate with a super PAC, according to the Federal Election Commission rules. But such rules are rarely enforced — since 1999, commissioners have only launched three investigations on candidate-super PAC contact. Unlike Sanders, who filed a cease-and-desist order against a PAC backing him, Strickland hasn't disavowed the $1.75 million that the Senate Majority PAC has spent so far on the race targeting Portman. Strickland for Senate spokesman David Bergstein retweeted the Senate Majority PAC earlier this year. Donations from non-profits and ad buys aren’t reported to the Federal Election Commission, further complicating the question of whose pockets are deeper. "The picture can change in an instant, and we may not know who’s truly ponying up the money on an ad to support a candidate," said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director at the Center for Responsive Politics. "There’s a lot of disingenuousness when candidates are saying, ‘You have more money,’ ‘No, you have more money.’ " Our ruling A Strickland for Senate fundraising email said, "While Rob Portman relies on his super PAC and a handful of billionaires to do his dirty work, we don’t have a super PAC." Strickland doesn’t have a super PAC solely focused on his campaign like the pro-Portman Fighting for Ohio. But big spenders still have Strickland’s back. It isn’t credible to say he’s impervious to the influence of dark money while still enjoying its benefits. The claim is partially accurate but takes things out of context. We rate this claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/9d083367-2a63-48c5-9f3e-dd98d6775c7b | null | Ted Strickland | null | null | null | 2016-05-31T17:04:51 | 2016-05-14 | ['None'] |
snes-03852 | Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said homosexuals are "not as a group able-bodied" and "known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices." | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mike-pence-able-bodied/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Arturo Garcia | null | Mike Pence: Gay People Aren’t ‘Able Bodied’ Enough for Military Service | 7 October 2016 | null | ['Mike_Pence', 'Indiana'] |
vees-00224 | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Website with old story on Pacquiao hospital | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-website-misleads-old-story-pacquiao-ho | null | null | null | null | false news | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Website MISLEADS with old story on Pacquiao hospital | May 04, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
vees-00371 | Uson, threatened with a libel case by Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, who accused her of spreading fake news about his supposed offshore accounts, responded Sept. 12 through a Facebook video. | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-use-alleged-not-defense-against-libel | In general, the literal truth or falsity of a libelous statement is immaterial in libel cases. | null | null | null | Mocha Uson,libel | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Use of ‘alleged’ not a defense against libel | September 19, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-08383 | I am very proud, as governor of Florida, that we signed the first divestment act, as it relates to Iran, divesting any investments in companies that would invest in Iran. | true | /florida/statements/2010/oct/24/charlie-crist/charlie-crist-claims-florida-legislature-was-first/ | While "divestment" isn’t nearly as sexy as "war on terror," that’s how Florida Gov. Charlie Crist chimed in on foreign policy at a U.S. Senate debate on Oct. 24, 2010. As talk turned international, Crist touted Florida’s strong ties with Israel and advocated "keeping an eye" on Iran. Then he pointed to a rare opportunity he had as a domestic leader to take an international stand: "I am very proud, as governor of Florida, that we signed the first divestment act, as it relates to Iran, divesting any investments in companies that would invest in Iran, because we support Israel so strongly here in this state and this country." We wanted to check the record. Was Florida really first? We had to crank the way-back machine to 2007 for this one. In May that year, Crist’s office encouraged other governors to "follow Florida’s lead in Iran and Sudan divestiture." "As demonstrated by the end of apartheid in South Africa, when a light shines to expose oppression and extremism, the days of injustice are numbered," he said. Florida was the only state at that point to have moved Iran divestment legislation through the state House and Senate. In June, Crist signed the "Protecting Florida’s Investments Act." Among other things, it instructed the State Board of Administration to shed holdings with companies that did business in Sudan and Iran. News coverage at the time noted Florida was looking to "lead the charge" and confirmed that the state sought to cut ties with 57 companies doing energy-related work in Sudan and Iran. "At least two other states have also passed laws requiring divestiture of stocks tied to Sudan, but Florida is the first state to target both countries," the St. Petersburg Times reported in September 2007. Bills yanking state pension funds from countries suspected of engaging in genocide or sponsored terror became so popular, the National Conference of State Legislatures kept a list. But it wasn’t until October 2007 that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a related bill, prohibiting the state’s pension funds from investing in companies doing business in Iran. It had already done the same with Sudan in 2006, before Florida — but that wasn’t Crist’s claim. He said Florida signed the first divestment act concerning companies doing business with Iran. Media reports and official pronouncements support Crist’s story. We rate his claim True. | null | Charlie Crist | null | null | null | 2010-10-24T17:16:59 | 2010-10-24 | ['Iran'] |
snes-00861 | A photograph shows President Donald Trump with his wife Melania Trump and his alleged mistress Stormy Daniels. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-melania-trump-stormy-daniels/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Stormy Daniels? | 21 March 2018 | null | ['Donald_Trump', 'Melania_Trump', 'Stormy_Daniels'] |
pomt-01403 | In the 38 Studios deal, "Wall Street investors took a risk, and went bust." | false | /rhode-island/statements/2014/oct/12/allan-fung/allan-fung-claims-wall-street-investors-went-bust-/ | In the drama that's playing out over who should be the next governor of Rhode Island, a key role is being played by a character known as "Wall Street." You can see it in the "Bust" commercial from Republican gubernatorial candidate Allan Fung. It's an attack on his Democratic rival, Gina Raimondo, a venture capitalist who was elected general treasurer four years ago. The underlying issue is 38 Studios, the now-defunct video-game company created by former Boston Red Sox star Curt Schilling. Before the company went bankrupt, the state gave it a loan guarantee of $75 million. Whether the state is obligated to pay off the investors who purchased the bonds continues to be a hot topic in Rhode Island. With interest, the total payment would be $112.6 million over 10 years. "Wall Street investors took a risk, and went bust," Fung's commercial says. "But Gina Raimondo wants to use our money to bail them out. A former Wall Street financier herself, Raimondo's looking out for Wall Street, not Main Street." It's well known that Raimondo thinks the state should pay the holders of the "moral obligation" bonds and Fung thinks Rhode Island should not. For this fact-check, we’re going to focus on whether Wall Street investors really went bust on the 38 Studios deal. But first, a slight diversion. We also had considered checking whether it’s accurate to call Raimondo a "former Wall Street financier," a phrase that implies significant power, influence and -- in the aftermath of the the Great Recession -- questionable dealings. Fung spokesman Robert Coupe said the campaign was referring to the first venture capital firm Raimondo worked for, Village Ventures, which has an office in midtown Manhattan. It may not have had an office directly in New York City's financial district, but the "Wall Street" phrase "refers to the financial services industry in general, not just firms that are physically located on Wall Street or at the southern tip of Manhattan," Coupe said. Raimondo spokeswoman Nicole Kayner said the term doesn't apply because "Wall Street is investment banks, people who trade in stocks and bonds. It's not something Gina ever did." Instead, she said, Raimondo traveled to areas of the country "under-served" by capital to find and help finance entrepreneurs starting companies. We contacted more than a half dozen of the top U.S. business schools looking for experts to provide some guidance on this general question. Only one even wanted to venture an opinion, which was that, unless you're a major player, the accepted definition for "Wall Street financier" is as firm as jelly. The evidence on the second statement -- whether "Wall Street investors . . . went bust" as a result of the 38 Studios deal -- is much clearer. The 38 Studios bonds were sold in three blocks totaling $75 million; buyers were promised interest rates ranging from 6 percent to 7.75 percent annually. After 38 Studios went bankrupt, there was much debate over whether Rhode Island should repay the bonds. Ultimately, in June, the General Assembly and Gov. Lincoln Chafee approved a budget that included the $12.3 million due to 38 Studios bondholders this year. It was the second state payment for the loan. Last year the state made an initial payment of $2.5 million as the bonds became due. In short, the bondholders are getting their money, contrary to what Fung's commercial suggests. Even if the state were to renege someday, the bonds come with insurance from Assured Guaranty Municipal Corporation, a AA-rated bond insurer. If the state stopped payment, the insurance company would be on the hook to pay the investors. In an email, Coupe said that "went bust" is a reference to 38 Studios itself, which went bankrupt. "The graphic on the screen during this line refers specifically to the 38 Studios bankruptcy," he said. But the narrator specifically says, "Wall Street investors took a risk, and went bust." Asked about the insurance, Coupe said, "If the State of Rhode Island does not appropriate the funds to repay investors, then insurance coverage may repay the investors, but that insurance coverage does not operate as a guarantee. "It is accurate, therefore, to say that the investors went bust, although they may at some future point be made whole either by a state guaranty or insurance coverage," he said. "But both of those potential forms of repayment are conditional on other factors." Our ruling We'll leave it up to readers to decide whether Allan Fung is correct in calling Gina Raimondo "a former Wall Street financier." But when Fung's TV commercial says that "Wall Street investors . . . went bust" on the 38 Studios deal, it's clear that those investors are doing just fine. The state is making its payments on schedule. Even if Fung had said that the investors "might" go bust in the future, that seems highly unlikely, thanks to the insurance that came with the sale. We rate his characterization of what happened to the 38 Studio's Wall Street investors as False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) | null | Allan Fung | null | null | null | 2014-10-12T00:01:00 | 2014-09-29 | ['None'] |
pomt-11496 | Under the previous administration it was … $100 to fill a car. American energy has delivered. Now it's $60. That’s $40 you have in your pocket … that you wouldn’t have. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/feb/26/ryan-zinke/ryan-zinke-wrong-gas-prices-are-down-40-under-trum/ | Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke touted the Trump administration’s efforts on reducing gasoline prices and, in the process, beefing up Americans’ disposable income. "As good as the tax bill is, when America pulls up to a pump, and they fill their car up, under the previous administration it was 2 bucks, 4 bucks, 6 bucks, $100 to fill a car," Zinke said at the conservative CPAC conference on Feb. 23. "American energy has delivered. Now it's $60. That’s $40 you have in your pocket — every American that would fill up at a pump station — that you wouldn’t have." (The comment is around the 7:20 mark in this C-SPAN video.) Have gas prices fallen? It’s possible to come up with a 40 percent decline — but the decline came under President Barack Obama, not President Donald Trump. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the peak gasoline price under Obama was $3.96 a gallon in mid May 2011. The low price under Trump was $2.33 — the week he was inaugurated in 2017. That’s a 40 percent decline, but the drop came entirely on Obama’s watch. For the final two and a half years of Obama’s tenure, the average gallon of gas went no higher than $3.50. It hit a low of $1.73 in February 2016, lower than at any point in the Trump presidency. Under Trump, the price at the pump has trended upward. From $2.33 at Trump’s inauguration, it rose to $2.56 in mid February 2018. That’s an increase of almost 10 percent. Here’s the full data for gasoline prices under Obama and Trump: See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Did Trump’s pro-resource development policies make a difference? Probably not on gasoline prices so far, experts say. Most of the ramp-up in oil production that benefited consumer prices occurred during what critics have derided as Obama's "war on fossil fuels," said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He added that Trump policies on drilling may make a difference going forward. "To the extent that looser environmental regulations allow greater oil production in the future, that will increase downward pressure on oil prices, and gasoline prices," Borenstein said. Still, the future price drops from Trump policies may not be massive. "Increased oil production in the United States has put some downward pressure on crude prices, though that is hardly the only factor in the decline of gasoline prices," he said. The Interior Department did not get back to us. Our ruling Zinke said, "Under the previous administration it was … $100 to fill a car. American energy has delivered. Now it's $60. That’s $40 you have in your pocket … that you wouldn’t have." The only 40 percent drop in the recent data occurred on Obama’s watch, meaning that Trump’s policies couldn’t have influenced it. On Trump’s watch, the price of gasoline has actually risen by 10 percent. We rate the statement False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Ryan Zinke | null | null | null | 2018-02-26T17:29:21 | 2018-02-23 | ['United_States'] |
pomt-10848 | Sen. Obama worked on some of the deepest issues we had and was successful in a bipartisan way. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/sep/08/barack-obama/he-worked-with-republicans-in-illinois/ | In a TV ad, Barack Obama is praised by Kirk Dillard, a Republican state senator in Illinois. "Sen. Obama worked on some of the deepest issues we had and was successful in a bipartisan way," Dillard says. We find the claim to be true. Yes, Obama worked with Republican members on some of the thorniest facing the Illinois General Assemby--even when it meant making his Democratic colleagues mad. The legislature had not overhauled state ethics and finance laws for 25 years. Obama worked with a bipartisan group of four legislators, including Dillard, convened by former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon and the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University. "Obama worked very well with the other members of the group," said Mike Lawrence, executive director of what is now known as the Paul Simon Public Policy Center. Lawrence said that Obama favored more sweeping reforms than Republicans and others did, but was willing to compromise. The work resulted in the Gift Ban Act of 1988. Obama worked with other Republicans on such issues as health insurance for kids and the state's death penalty--not an issue normally associated with bipartisan work between a liberal Democrat and Republicans. Viewers may have watched the ad and decided Dillard was supporting Obama for president. But Dillard made the ad, despite saying that as a loyal Republican, he has endorsed Sen. John McCain for his party's presidential nomination--a fact that he did not mention in the ad. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2007-09-08T00:00:00 | 2007-09-11 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
goop-02366 | Kate Middleton “Concerned” About Prince William’s “Dad Bod,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-concerned-prince-william-dad-bod/ | null | null | null | Holly Nicol | null | Kate Middleton NOT “Concerned” About Prince William’s “Dad Bod,” Despite Report | 5:38 am, October 10, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
tron-03388 | The Execution of Christian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani in Iran | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/youcef-nadarkhani-executed/ | null | religious | null | null | null | The Execution of Christian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani in Iran | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14789 | Ted Cruz tried to ban contraception five times. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/02/hillary-clinton/hillary-clintons-exaggerated-claim-ted-cruz-tried-/ | Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called out Republican rival Ted Cruz for a contradiction on contraception after Cruz made a widely aired comment about condoms on his college campus. It started when Cruz mocked a consistent charge from Democrats that Republicans are against birth control during a Nov. 30, 2015, campaign stop in Bettendorf, Iowa. "Last I checked," Cruz said, "we don’t have a rubber shortage in America. Look, when I was in college, we had a machine in the bathroom, you put 50 cents in and voila. So, yes, anyone who wants contraceptives can access them, but it’s an utter made-up nonsense issue." The Clinton campaign didn’t think much of his comment, challenging Cruz with a post on its website headlined, "Ted Cruz says no one's trying to ban contraception. Here are 5 times Ted Cruz tried to ban contraception." It added, "Cruz has personally tried to make it harder for women to get birth control." The post’s fine print includes more nuanced language than the headline lets on -- that Cruz is "trying to limit access to contraception," "tried to make it harder for women to get birth control," and is pursuing policies that "could ban some forms of birth control." The details in the softened (and more accurate) statements are lost in the blaring headline that Cruz "tried to ban contraception" five times." None of the Clinton campaign’s examples supports the idea that Cruz seeks a flat-out ban on contraception. The Clinton campaign took issue with our characterization of the post, saying that they never meant for the headline to say that Cruz tried to ban all contraceptives on five separate occasions. However, we think ours is the most obvious interpretation of the language in question. 1. "The time he supported a so-called personhood amendment, which could criminalize abortion and could ban some forms of birth control." This example offers the most support for Cruz trying to ban contraception, but it still overreaches. Cruz signed a "personhood affirmation" circulated by Georgia Right to Life this summer that commits him to a "human life amendment" to the U.S. Constitution that would define life as beginning at fertilization. As we have noted, the impact of such proposed "personhood" amendments on birth control is in dispute. Opponents, along with some legal scholars and medical organizations, say that giving a fertilized egg all the rights of a person could make several FDA-approved contraceptives illegal. But that would depend on how courts interpret personhood. A "personhood" provision has not yet passed at the federal or state level. Even more complicated is the meaning of "fertilization," according to a 2011 op-ed in the New York Times by Glenn Cohen, co-director of Harvard University’s Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, and Jonathan Will, law professor at Mississippi College. Fertilization, they wrote, could mean at least four different things: "penetration of the egg by a sperm," successful combination of the genetic information from sperm and egg, activation of the genetic information, or implantation of the embryo in the uterus, Cohen and Will wrote. Sperm penetration occurs almost immediately, but implantation can take up to two weeks. "Thus, on some reasonable readings of the amendment, certain forms of birth control ... would seem impermissible, while on other equally reasonable readings they are not." A relatively narrow judicial interpretation could allow the use of the pill and intrauterine devices, or IUDs, while a broader interpretation may not. But even if an enacted personhood amendment was interpreted by judges in the most expansive fashion possible, it would still not limit spermicides and -- notably given Cruz’s comments -- condoms, since these prevent fertilization from taking place at all. So the first of Clinton’s examples holds some plausibility as supporting evidence for her overall claim, but it’s overly broad in suggesting that Cruz would ban all contraception and more speculative than she lets on. 2. "The time he was willing to shut down the government to cut funding from Planned Parenthood." Cruz was indeed willing to shut down the federal government if lawmakers and President Barack Obama maintained federal funding of Planned Parenthood. (Combined, state and federal funding accounts for about 41 percent of Planned Parenthood’s yearly revenue, or about $528 million, according to the group’s most recent annual report.) "It will be a decision of the president's and the president's alone whether he would veto funding for the federal government because of a commitment to ensuring taxpayer dollars continue to flow to what appears to be a national criminal organization," Cruz said in August 2015. But even if this shutdown had happened -- and it didn’t -- the result would have been more indirect than an attempted ban on contraception. At most, it might have hampered the ability of individuals to receive contraceptives from one specific provider, albeit a significant one. 3. "The time he called for the Supreme Court to turn women’s personal health decisions over to their employers by striking down the Obamacare birth control co-pay provision" in the Hobby Lobby ruling. In Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a closely held, private corporation could decline on religious grounds to pay for certain kinds of contraceptives otherwise mandated in employee health coverage by the Affordable Care Act. Hobby Lobby’s Christian owners said they objected to four of 20 Food and Drug Administration-approved forms of contraception that prevent implantation of the embryo. These include two forms of emergency contraception, also known as the morning-after pill, and two forms of intra-uterine devices, or IUDs. (The FDA considers these four methods to be contraception, but the company’s owners consider them to be a form of abortion.) The way the decision was written leaves some question about whether closely held, religious companies can choose to opt out of supporting any of the remaining 16 forms of contraception in their health plans. Already, some companies have been allowed by lower courts to stop paying for a wider range of contraceptives than were at issue in the Hobby Lobby case, though some of those cases are still working their way through the courts. Still, Cruz’s support for the Hobby Lobby decision does not by itself mean that he supports banning all contraceptives. First, the case involved employer co-payments for contraceptives, making it financially harder but not impossible for an individual to obtain contraceptives. And second, that case involved only four of the 20 FDA-approved contraceptives; whether the Supreme Court might some day support a broader interpretation that permits closely held companies to opt out of all contraceptives remains to be seen. 4. "The time he tried to get rid of a law that made it so women couldn’t be fired for their personal reproductive decisions (including birth control)." The Washington, D.C., law in question -- the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act of 2014 -- says employers cannot use their personal beliefs to discriminate against an employee for his or her reproductive health choices. Cruz took issue with the law in his capacity as a member of Congress, which is allowed a 30-day period to object to D.C. laws. (Congressional opponents were unable to derail the law, which would have also required the cooperation of Obama.) The potential to be fired or demoted from a job for using contraception is a heavy penalty. Still, opposing this bill is not the same thing as advocating for a ban on contraception. 5. "And the time he used a medically and scientifically incorrect argument to try to ban emergency contraception." The Clinton campaign cites an article in the liberal publication Salon.com that takes Cruz to task for saying that the federal government wants to make private companies (like those in the Hobby Lobby case) provide "abortifacients" to employees. The article draws a distinction between abortifacients, such as the pill RU-486, and "emergency contraceptives" that may be taken up to three days after unprotected sex. The medical community also draws a distinction between the two methods. The Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, for instance, writes that RU-486 "ends pregnancy" whereas emergency contraception "prevent(s) unintended pregnancy." The group states flatly that "emergency contraception is not the same as medical abortion." A potential gray area -- emphasized by anti-abortion advocates -- is that emergency contraception may take effect after fertilization has already taken place. Regardless of how early that occurs, this is enough for some abortion opponents to classify it as causing a pregnancy to be aborted. Setting aside this difference of opinion, it’s not clear that this example supports Clinton’s overall point that Cruz has sought to "ban contraception." By focusing on "emergency contraception," it addresses Cruz’s position on one type of contraception but not all types. Our ruling The post on Clinton’s website claims "Ted Cruz tried to ban contraception" five times. There’s little doubt that Cruz is a strong opponent of abortion, and as such, he and other anti-abortion advocates find certain types of contraception objectionable. But the Clinton campaign’s examples don’t exactly show Cruz trying to push across-the-board bans on contraception. The strongest conclusion about Cruz’s views that one could draw from these examples is that he might support a ban on certain types of contraception (but not all) through his support for a personhood amendment. The other examples are even more limited and deal with what employers would be required to pay for, for instance, or whether a major birth control provider should continue to receive federal funding. The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False. | null | Hillary Clinton | null | null | null | 2015-12-02T18:14:28 | 2015-12-01 | ['Ted_Cruz'] |
chct-00062 | FACT CHECK: Did Kavanaugh Suggest That Contraceptives Are 'Abortion-Inducing Drugs'? | verdict: unsubstantiated | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/09/10/fact-check-kavanaugh-abortion-inducing-drugs/ | null | null | null | David Sivak | Fact Check Editor | null | null | 3:53 PM 09/10/2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01242 | A photograph shows Oprah Winfrey kissing Harvey Weinstein on the cheek. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/oprah-kissing-weinstein-cheek/ | null | Politics | null | Dan Evon | null | Was Oprah Pictured Kissing Harvey Weinstein on the Cheek? | 9 January 2018 | null | ['Oprah_Winfrey', 'Harvey_Weinstein'] |
pomt-11202 | In 2016, an officer was assaulted in America on an average of every 10 minutes. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may/15/donald-trump/police-officer-assaulted-every-10-minutes/ | President Donald Trump lamented the number of assaults on police officers at a ceremony honoring fallen officers on Capitol Hill. "In 2016, an officer was assaulted in America on an average of every 10 minutes, can you believe that?" Trump said on May 15, 2018. "It's outrageous, and it’s unacceptable. We must end the attacks on our police, and we must end them right now. We believe criminals who kill our police should get the death penalty. Bring it forth." Is that true? Trump’s numbers are based on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But factoring in the growing population of Americans and police shows the rate isn’t as constant as Trump made it sound. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The FBI reported that 57,180 officers were victims of line-of-duty assaults in 2016. With 525,600 minutes in a year, that breaks down to an assault every 9.19 minutes. Adjusting for the 10 percent of agencies that didn’t report any data, that’s an officer assaulted every 10.3 minutes. Some of the actions that legally count as an assault may not have resulted in pain inflicted on the officer, such as a drunk person shoving an officer. A shove carries the same weight as a stabbing by this measure. Of the 57,180 officers who were victims of assault, 28.9 percent (or 16,535 officers) sustained injuries. About three-quarters of the assaults did not involve a weapon other than hands, fists, or feet. Firearms were used in 4.2 percent of incidents and knives in 1.9 percent, according to the FBI. The rate of police deaths is much lower. In 2016, 52 law enforcement officers died in accidents and 66 were deliberately killed, according to the FBI. Those numbers have been decreasing over the past few decades. Trump called out one kind of assault in particular during his speech: "One of the most alarming crimes taking place against our police are ambush attacks. Think of that! Ambush attacks!" But ambush attacks are rare, according to Safiya Jafari Simmons, communications director at the Center for Policing Equity. Ambush attacks were responsible for 270 of the 57,180 officer assaults. Most assaults resulted from officers intervening in disturbances, effectuating arrests, or transporting prisoners. Trump’s use of the rate of assaults per minute, known as the crime clock, isn’t a sound practice, said James Fox, Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern University. The statistic divides the number of minutes, not police officers, by attacks. But as the general and police populations grow, the clock still has the same number of minutes. Also, Trump’s statistic isn’t an average of different regions but an aggregate of national assaults. The frequency of assault, then, would change depending on the area. A single city has fewer total police assaults than the country, but the clock has the same number of minutes; the frequency would be lower even in the cities with most assaults. Dividing assaults by total police officers is more telling, Fox said. By that measure, on average, an officer has a 9.8 percent chance of being assaulted per year. Our ruling Trump said a police officer is assaulted every 10 minutes in 2016. That math works out if you divide the number of minutes in a year by the FBI’s count of line-of-duty assaults. There are a few points to remember about this particular statistic. This count doesn’t just isolate incidents where a wound was inflicted, such as a shooting and stabbing, so incidents such as shoving and kicking are also considered an assault. Also, a criminologist warned that the "crime clock" method does not really tell you that much, because it does not factor in the growing U.S. and police populations. Trump's statement is accurate but requires additional context. We rate it Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2018-05-15T16:25:18 | 2018-05-15 | ['United_States'] |
afck-00179 | “Our tourist arrival numbers for the period January to November 2016 increased to 9 million, an increase of just over 1 million arrivals from 2015. This represents a 13% growth in tourism arrivals.” | correct | https://africacheck.org/reports/facts-alternative-facts-zumas-10th-state-nation-address-checked/ | null | null | null | null | null | Facts or alternative facts? Zuma’s 10th State of the Nation Address checked | 2017-02-10 07:12 | null | ['None'] |
afck-00026 | “The number of Eskom employees increased from 32,000 in 2003 to 47,600 in 2017.” | correct | https://africacheck.org/reports/eskom-and-the-viral-infographic-do-the-numbers-add-up/ | null | null | null | null | null | Eskom and the viral infographic: do the numbers add up? | 2018-07-09 07:54 | null | ['None'] |
goop-02509 | Taylor Swift “Horrified” Over “Backlash,” | 2 | https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-backlash-look-what-you-made-me-do/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Taylor Swift NOT “Horrified” Over “Backlash,” Despite Report | 2:30 pm, September 1, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-02857 | Rhode Island's unemployment insurance system "is the most expensive such system in the country." | false | /rhode-island/statements/2013/nov/17/kenneth-block/ken-block-says-rhode-islands-unemployment-insuranc/ | With every candidate promising more jobs, lower taxes, better education, and an end to fraud and abuse, voters face a daunting task when they try to figure out whether a candidate actually has specific proposals for tackling such problems. When Ken Block, a Republican candidate for governor, was asked about saving money during a Nov. 8, 2013, appearance on Rhode Island Public Radio, he said one potential source of savings was the state's unemployment system, financed by a tax companies pay to cover benefits for workers who lose their jobs. "When we attack our unemployment insurance system, which is the most expensive such system in the country, and we bring those costs into line with how other states run their program and what it costs for those other programs, I believe we should be able to save somewhere between another $50 [million] and $80 million annually year over year over year, which could be another third of a billion over four years," he said. PolitiFact doesn't rate predictions. But Block’s claim that Rhode Island has the most expensive unemployment system in the country -- a claim he has made repeatedly, including in a Nov. 13, 2013, Providence Journal commentary -- is a checkable statement. We emailed his campaign and asked for its evidence. Block’s policy director, Matthew Schweich, sent us a link to the "2014 State Business Tax Climate Index," published by The Tax Foundation, a business-backed tax policy group. It ranks Rhode Island as 46 out of the 50 states, based on a complicated scale that assesses how well a state's tax system enhances or harms the competitiveness of the state’s business environment. In a category that compares unemployment insurance systems, Rhode Island ranks the worst. But Block didn't say the state has the worst system. He said it has the most expensive. The report doesn't have a state-by-state comparison of expense. In fact, Rhode Island was not ranked worst in any of the measures quantified in the report. The state has the sixth-highest minimum tax rate charged to employers and the 10th-highest maximum tax rate. Its taxable wage base -- the income level beyond which employers don't have to pay additional tax -- is higher in 14 other states, according to The Tax Foundation report. When we raised this issue with Block's office, Schweich argued in an email that, "You can’t measure the overall cost of a program by evaluating just a single metric. So, even if Rhode Island isn’t ranked absolute bottom in any individual category, the cumulative effect of being ranked near the bottom across many categories can demonstrate that, overall, RI’s system is the most expensive." He also argued that there are many ways to define "expensive." "Does it mean the cost to the state? The cost to employers? The economic and reputational cost to Rhode Island of being ranked bottom?" he wrote. "The Tax Foundation has produced the most detailed ranking of [unemployment insurance] programs, so we used it as a basis for this statement. We were satisfied with the methodology." Then we called The Tax Foundation and spoke to Joseph Henchman, coauthor of the study. He said a ranking of 50 out of 50 didn't necessarily make Rhode Island's program the most expensive. Other factors are considered as well. "We're measuring both expense and compliance and administrative costs," he said, explaining that the foundation would prefer to characterize Rhode Island's system as the most burdensome or the most complex. For example, one reason Rhode Island scored low in the rankings was because a local business has to be in operation three years before its actual track record for hiring and firing employees is used to set its unemployment insurance tax rate. Until then, the business is simply assigned a rate, which can be unfair to a company with a steady employee base. In most states, a business' experience rating is set after one year. Instead, Henchman sent us a 2011 report he authored that focused solely on state unemployment insurance programs. In a comparison of the average unemployment tax rates, Rhode Island ranked third highest behind Idaho and Oregon for 2010, and in a comparison of the average weekly unemployment insurance benefits, the state ranked fourth highest, behind Hawaii, New Jersey and Massachusetts. And that was before Rhode Island implemented a series of changes, still being phased in, that will decrease the average weekly benefit over time, according to Henchman's study. Finally, we looked at a recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor. The state-by-state ranking of tax rates that employers paid on total wages in the second quarter of 2012 shows Rhode Island ranked as the fifth highest, behind Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho and Oregon, all of which taxed more. In the ranking of the average weekly benefit paid to the unemployed in the second quarter of 2013, Rhode Island came in 10th behind Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wyoming, all of which paid more. Our ruling Ken Block said Rhode Island's unemployment insurance system "is the most expensive such system in the country." If he had said we were AMONG the most expensive, he would be on solid ground. But he has repeatedly insisted that Rhode Island's program is THE most expensive. The only evidence he supplied was a Tax Foundation report that doesn't directly evaluate the expense of the system. And other measures, from the foundation itself and U.S. Department of Labor, say it's not the most expensive. Because Block was unequivocal, we will be as well. We rate his statement as False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) | null | Kenneth Block | null | null | null | 2013-11-17T00:01:00 | 2013-11-08 | ['Rhode_Island'] |
abbc-00160 | An Emissions Reduction Fund is the centrepiece of the Coalition's "direct action plan" to address climate change. | in-the-green | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/emissions-reduction-fund-promise-check/5430108 | null | ['emissions-trading', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia'] | null | null | ['emissions-trading', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia'] | Promise check: Allocate $1.55 billion over first three years to establish an Emissions Reduction Fund | Sun 8 May 2016, 7:37am | null | ['None'] |
tron-03002 | Hugh Galyean Open Letter to James Comey | investigation pending! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/hugh-galyean-open-letter-james-comey/ | null | politics | null | null | ['2016 election', 'criminal justice', 'hillary clinton'] | Hugh Galyean Open Letter to James Comey – Investigation Pending! | Oct 13, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00517 | Says Hillary Clinton "was completely exonerated, when I was in the White House" by an official inquiry on Whitewater. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/23/bill-clinton/bill-clinton-says-hillary-was-completely-exonerate/ | Before the little blue dress and the tearful intern, there were 220 acres of prime Ozarks riverfront and a missing ledger of billing statements. While the Clintons’ Whitewater controversy often takes a backseat to the more notorious and sensational Lewinsky scandal, former President Bill Clinton remembers it well (and probably less wincingly). Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Clinton evoked Whitewater as an earlier instance when the American people were told his wife was untrustworthy, but it was then proven otherwise. "I remember when Hillary was completely exonerated, when I was in the White House, in all that Whitewater business," Clinton said on June 14. "An official federal inquiry said that her billing records, they wished for her sake could have been found earlier, because they completely corroborated everything she'd said." (In a separate report, we looked at Bill Clinton's other comments about media coverage of Whitewater.) The investigations into Whitewater and the tangled web of the pre-Lewinsky scandals dragged on for six years and grew increasingly complicated, tedious, and impenetrable. Roughly $50 million later, none of the investigations found much evidence against the Clintons. Yet friends, foes, and the general public alike agree on one thing: Whitewater was so boring ("by design," writes Ann Coulter) that it became fascinating. So what exactly happened? What were the charges, and was Hillary "completely exonerated" as Bill says? Whitewater refresher "All that Whitewater business" began with a real estate investment made by then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton in 1978. The Clintons along with developer James McDougal borrowed about $200,000 to buy and turn riverfront property into vacation homes. They formed the Whitewater Development Corp. with the initial investment, which was heavily subsidized by McDougal. The homes didn’t sell well, but McDougal and the Clintons kept the business going, and McDougal did occasional political fundraising for Clinton. In 1985, McDougal hired Rose Law Firm (where then-Arkansas First Lady Hillary Clinton was a partner) to do legal work for Madison Guaranty, his savings and loans. Later, when the investigations began, Rose Law Firm’s billing record for the thrift, signed off by Hillary Clinton, could not be found. Madison Guaranty failed in 1989, costing taxpayers an estimated $60 million. McDougal, who had been removed as its president three years earlier, was indicted for fraud for making bad loans. About $134,000 was funneled through Whitewater. The Clintons, who had retained interest in Whitewater throughout, sold their share to McDougal for $1,000 in 1992. During the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Resolution Trust Corp., a temporary federal agency tasked with investigating failed savings and loans, named the Clintons as "potential beneficiaries" of Madison Guaranty's and McDougal’s illegal activities. That summer, Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide, a few months after he filed delinquent tax returns for Whitewater. The charge against the Clintons As the scandal began to snowball, so did the questions (and conspiracies): What happened to Vince Foster? How did the billing records go missing? Did the White House cooperate with investigators or try to thwart them? But the overarching charge was this: Did the Clintons benefit from Whitewater-related fraud or, at the very least, was Hillary Clinton aware of it? The Clintons denied knowledge of and participation in any wrongdoings. In 1994, a special counsel was appointed to look into the Clintons’ involvement in McDougal’s activities (he would later be replaced by the now-famous Kenneth Starr), while the RTC hired law firm Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro to independently investigate. The Senate and House began to hold hearings on the matter in 1995. Overall, Whitewater was the subject of at least four separate but overlapping federal probes encompassing more than 50,000 pages of documents. Out of many reports, one So which inquiry was Bill Clinton referring to? His spokesperson wouldn’t speak on the record, but based on Clinton’s past claims, it is likely the former president is talking about Pillsbury’s supplemental 1995 report. "In mid-December, the complete Whitewater story finally came out, when the RTC inquiry from Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro was released," he wrote in his 2004 autobiography, My Life. "It said, as had the preliminary report in June, that there were no grounds for a civil suit against us in Whitewater, much less any criminal action, and it recommended that the investigation be closed." This description is more specific than Clinton’s 2015 remarks that his wife was "completely exonerated" and, after the discovery of the missing billing records. At the time of the December report’s release, the Clinton administration and Democrats had also lauded it as exoneration. Bruce Ericson, the Pillsbury lawyer who authored the reports, told us even back then he didn't agree with the Clintons’ characterization, given that Pillsbury’s charge was to weigh the pros and cons of a lawsuit. "(The reports) didn’t condemn them, but it wasn’t our place to make that sort of judgment," he said. "We were a bit uneasy about that word. I’m being lawyerly here, but that’s my job. We found a lawsuit against them would not be cost-effective or meritorious." In the preliminary and supplemental reports, which were both authored before the billing records were found, Pillsbury deemed that the RTC had "no cost-effective claims" against the Clintons, as they could not find evidence of the First Couple’s involvement or awareness in Madison Guaranty-related fraud. The law firm wrote (page 2020): "There is no basis to charge the Clintons with any kind of primary liability for fraud or intentional misconduct. This investigation has revealed no evidence to support any such claims. Nor would the record support any secondary or derivative liability for the possible misdeeds of others." Ericson’s sentiments were also echoed in the report, which noted that its conclusion (page 1945) "doesn’t necessarily mean that ... the evidence exonerates anyone, it simply means that no basis has been found to sue anyone." Other reports The mid-December Pillsbury report is one of many Whitewater reports. The law firm itself issued at least half a dozen, including two in late December 1995, just a few weeks after the supplemental report. While one report concluded that Hillary Clinton denied having knowledge of fraud and "the circumstances support her" (page 3307), the other stated that the RTC had grounds to sue Rose Law Firm for failing to disclose conflicts of interest that could have damaged the RTC, though a lawsuit wouldn’t be cost-effective (page 1465). After the missing billing records surfaced, Pillsbury released yet another report in February 1996 stating the discovery of the new evidence didn’t change the December conclusions. But, it noted, the records show that Hillary Clinton "performed more services for Madison Guaranty than previously known" (page 328). The Senate’s special Whitewater committee, which was Republican controlled, issued a more damning report, which dealt largely with the White House’s conduct during the probes rather than the Clintons’ culpability in fraud. (The Starr report similarly began as a liability investigation but turned into a Lewinsky probe that only mentioned Whitewater once in passing.) "Mrs. Clinton has minimized her role in the Rose Law Firm’s representation of Madison," the special committee wrote (page 156), "The billing records ... directly contradict Mrs. Clinton’s claim that her role on the matter was merely to serve as a ‘backstop.’ " Objecting to the "partisanship (that) has colored the Majority’s decisions," Democrats on the special committee also released minority views, stating, "No credible evidence has been put forward to show that Mrs. Clinton engaged in any improper, much less illegal, conduct." Different readings The partisan divide over Hillary Clinton’s innocence extends beyond Capitol Hill. Conservative groups and journalists say the inquiries do the opposite of corroborate Hillary Clinton’s story and they in fact incriminate her ethically, if not legally. Given that Whitewater resulted in Bill Clinton’s impeachment and 16 related convictions, "the idea that Hillary Clinton was ‘completely exonerated’ is not true," said a spokesperson for David Bossie, a former Whitewater investigator and now president of the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. He also pointed us to a May 1996 article in which another Pillsbury lawyer disagreed with the White House’s take on the report. Liberal observers, however, say her legal liability is precisely what matters. "She wasn't found not guilty. She was never charged with anything except by innuendo in the media," said Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons. "It's hard to say somebody was ‘exonerated’ when they were never actually charged. But HRC was certainly accused in the press, and her accusers certainly ignored the report that said she hadn't done anything wrong." (We checked out that claim, too.) "It isn’t up to the Clintons to prove their innocence," added Salon columnist Joe Conason. Our ruling Bill Clinton said his wife "was completely exonerated, when I was in the White House" by an official inquiry on Whitewater. A December 1995 report by the independent law firm Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro report found no evidence of the Clintons’ and particularly Hillary Clinton’s participation in fraud. Pillsbury’s task was to assess whether federal regulators could justify a lawsuit legally and cost-effectively. The report found that they couldn't, but the report and its authors didn’t and still don’t view their findings as exoneration. While some take issue with the word "exoneration," Bill Clinton’s broader point that his wife wasn’t found guilty is accurate. On balance, we rate his statement Mostly True. | null | Bill Clinton | null | null | null | 2015-06-23T13:27:20 | 2015-06-14 | ['White_House', 'Whitewater_controversy'] |
hoer-00232 | Entering '@[4:0]' as a Facebook Comment Displays 'Mark Zuckerberg' But Has Nothing to do With Hacking | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/changes-to-mark-zuckerberg-not-been-hacked.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Entering '@[4:0]' as a Facebook Comment Displays 'Mark Zuckerberg' But Has Nothing to do With Hacking | September 10, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-00742 | Former first daughter Malia Obama founded a website intended to discredit President Donald Trump. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/malia-obama-anti-trump-website/ | null | Politics | null | David Mikkelson | null | Did Malia Obama Found an Anti-Trump Website? | 19 April 2018 | null | ['Donald_Trump'] |
vogo-00497 | Fact Check Update: A Revision | none | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-update-a-revision/ | null | null | null | null | null | Fact Check Update: A Revision | October 27, 2010 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-15304 | ISIS supporter tweeted at 10:34 a.m. Shooting began at 10:45 a.m. in Chattanooga, Tenn. | false | /punditfact/statements/2015/jul/21/pamela-geller/pam-geller-spreads-false-claim-about-isis-linked-t/ | As the public waited for details about the Chattanooga, Tenn., shooting attack that left five servicemen dead, anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller claimed that an ISIS supporter knew about the shooting before it happened. The shooting started at a military recruiting center on July 16, 2015, at 10:45 a.m. local time. Geller said the tweet from an ISIS supporter with #Chattanooga came 11 minutes before the attack at 10:34 a.m. (That supporter’s account has since been suspended.) Geller thought she was on to something, and the story spread to Robert Spencer’s "Jihad Watch" before taking off across other media channels. But the ISIS "warning" tweet wasn’t a warning so much as eerie post-attack commentary. What happened shows what can go wrong when you jump to conclusions about Twitter’s timestamps. The ISIS supporter’s tweet was actually published at 10:34 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, which means it was shared almost three hours after the shooting began. This became clear by Thursday evening, when Bret Baier shared on The O’Reilly Factor that the ISIS tweet was posted after the shooting took place. (The liberal website Media Matters for America published a timeline of the events as they spread on Fox News; the ISIS-tweet narrative lasted several hours.) The ISIS tweet spread like wildfire before people noticed the real timestamp of the pro-ISIS tweet. In an interview with PunditFact, Geller said that at the time she wrote her tweet, she was not aware that "Twitter's time stamping was not uniform." "I updated the post when new information became available," Geller said. We have not been able to find any additional tweets from Geller indicating the incorrect timestamp from her first tweet, which is still still published online. Geller did post an update to one of her website articles about the ISIS tweet and timestamp issue. Another article on her website has not yet been updated. Authorities are still investigating whether there is an ISIS connection. The shooter, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, was killed by police. On her website, Geller points out that the ISIS tweet was posted before the shooter was named or "before we knew that the killer was a devout Muslim waging jihad," which to her is enough proof that the shooting was at least ISIS-inspired. Other news sources have been more careful in describing Abdulazeez’s possible motivations or allegiances. ABC News described Abdulazeez as a "disturbed (and) suicidal" man who wrote about "becoming a martyr." Still, Abdulazeez apparently called ISIS a "stupid group … completely against Islam" during a conversation with a friend, according to CNN. There are also different interpretations of Abdulazeez’s seven-month trip to Jordan. Family members said the trip was intended to "get (Abdulazeez) away from bad influences in the U.S." A government source told CBS that Abdulazeez did not travel outside of Jordan during his visit and there is no proof of him visiting Iraq or Syria. But a close friend of Abdulazeez said he changed after coming back. Our ruling Geller claimed that an ISIS supporter tweeted ahead of the Chattanooga shooting. The claim gained a lot of traction before it became clear that the tweet happened a few hours after the shooting. Geller updated the original post, but it did little to stuff the rumor back into the bag. We rate the claim False. | null | Pamela Geller | null | null | null | 2015-07-21T10:26:37 | 2015-07-16 | ['Chattanooga,_Tennessee', 'Tennessee'] |
pomt-10788 | We spent approximately $20-billion of that money on pork barrel, earmark projects. Maybe if we had done it right, maybe some of that money would have gone to inspect those bridges and other bridges across the country. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/12/john-mccain/right-on-bridge-repairs/ | Responding to the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Sen. John McCain said that if less money had been spent on earmarked projects in highway reauthorization bills, then more money could be spent on bridge repairs. McCain is right. Bridge repair and bridge construction are authorized in the same bill. But of course, members of Congress would prefer to cut ribbons on new projects rather than see money go to less sexy repair projects. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., recently unveiled a new plan to invest $65-billion immediately in replacing or repairing bridges. Rather than redirecting money in the highway bill, Oberstar has proposed establishing a dedicated fund for bridge repair. But raising that $65-billion within the federal budget would be a huge problem. | null | John McCain | null | null | null | 2007-10-12T00:00:00 | 2007-08-04 | ['None'] |
pomt-09187 | The Interior Department has only 30 days to review an exploration plan submitted by an oil company. That leaves no time for the appropriate environmental review. The result is, they are continually waived. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/01/barack-obama/obama-blames-30-day-limit-law-role-oil-spill/ | As anger grows over the massive, uncontained oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the procedure for issuing federal drilling permits for the Gulf Coast has begun to attract intense scrutiny. During a May 27, 2010, press conference, President Barack Obama -- under pressure for the failure to stem the underwater leak -- laid a large portion of the blame on the existing law that governs the permitting process, as well as the regulations to implement that law, which were drawn up by the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department office that oversees oil and gas leases. "What's also been made clear from this disaster is that, for years, the oil and gas industry has leveraged such power that they have effectively been allowed to regulate themselves," Obama said. "One example, under current law, the Interior Department has only 30 days to review an exploration plan submitted by an oil company. That leaves no time for the appropriate environmental review. The result is, they are continually waived. And this is just one example of a law that was tailored by the industry to serve their needs instead of the public's. So Congress needs to address these issues as soon as possible, and my administration will work with them to do so." We wondered whether the president is correct that the law mandates such a short period for an environmental review. The law in question is the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. The law was originally passed in 1953, though the amendments relevant to the Obama's statement were added in 1978. Under the law, a proposal to drill must pass through several stages before it can be approved. First, the Interior Department must choose the locations it will open to leasing. Then, the department puts those areas up for lease. Once a lease is purchased by an energy company, the leaseholder must submit an "exploration plan" to the Interior Secretary before exercising its right to drill. Interior Department regulations specify that the regional supervisor of MMS has 15 working days after receiving a proposed plan to rule a submission packet complete. At that point, a 30-day clock starts ticking. If the secretary finds problems during this period, modifications can be ordered or, if modifications are insufficient to solve the problem, the lease can be canceled. But if the secretary finds the plan acceptable, it must be approved within that same 30-day window. So Obama is correct about the law's 30-day limit. He's also correct that complete waivers of environmental impact reviews are common. The Interior Department says that in recent years, MMS has granted 250 to 400 waivers annually for Gulf of Mexico projects alone. (The department was unable to provide PolitiFact with the number of cases in which a waiver was not granted.) The Deepwater Horizon project had been given a "categorical exclusion" from detailed environmental review more than a year before the disaster occurred -- a decision that is supposed to be granted to projects that are expected to have minimal environmental impact. Meanwhile, on Obama's assertion that 30 days is too short a window to conduct a credible environmental review -- much less a plan to respond to a major malfunction -- many experts we spoke to agreed with the president. In general, then, Obama's statement is on target. But we think it's worth noting that the 30-day limit is not the only factor that explains the failure of MMS to study the environmental impact of Gulf of Mexico projects. The exploration plan Obama referenced is not the only environmental study that is supposed to be conducted during this process. Studies are also required when the lease locations are chosen and when the leases are sold, and they don't have statutory time limits. Critics say that, in their current form, these earlier-stage studies do not include enough detail on the specific drilling locations to qualify as a full-scale environmental assessment. But if MMS -- or Congress, or the industry -- had wanted to beef up these earlier studies as a way of getting around the 30-day limit, they could have done so. But they never did. In their absence, the courts have sometimes stepped in: In 2009, a federal appeals court threw out the initial five-year leasing plan for drilling in Alaska's Chukchi Sea, citing shortcomings in the plan's environmental assessment. Holly Doremus, a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley who has studied the MMS permitting process, called it "a bit disingenuous" for Obama to focus solely on the 30-day limit. "The categorical exclusion has never been formally justified by the short time line, and so far as I know MMS has never -- until after this blow-out -- asked Congress for more time to review exploration plans," she said in an interview. "I think rather that MMS has thought, and acted, as if it didn't need to do detailed environmental review at the exploration plan stage" because it does them at the two earlier stages. "If that review were more thorough, and considered true worst-case scenarios, it might well be the case that 30 days would be enough to look at the environmental impacts of exploration in a particular location," she said. Meanwhile, some say that Congress ought to shoulder a portion of the blame for letting an inadequate permitting process fester for more than 30 years. "If that is too short for a review, then Congress should change it," Gary Wolfram, an economics and public policy professor at Hillsdale College. "My suspicion is that, as with all central planners, Congress doesn’t know the proper amount of time it takes to review a project.'' Belatedly, Congress -- prodded, also belatedly, by the Obama administration -- is looking to change the rules. On May 11, 2010, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar released a legislative package that includes a proposal to eliminate the 30-day deadline. "Changing this 30-day mandatory deadline to a 90-day timeline that can be further extended to complete environmental and safety reviews, as needed, would provide MMS more time to conduct additional environmental analysis on an exploration plan," the department said in its announcement. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, sought to attach the change to a supplemental spending bill before the congressional Memorial Day recess, but the effort was unsuccessful. Supporters vow to push on. "I am not aware of any pending free-standing legislation on this, but I do know that Congress will revisit the topic when it gets back," said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for Bingaman. Ultimately, Obama was correct on everything he said about the law -- the 30-day limit, the difficulties of conducting a full study in that time frame, and the frequent waivers. But we're marking him down slightly for implying that the 30-day limit tied the administration's hands. If the administration had wanted to change MMS procedures short of rewriting the law, it could have done so by proposing more stringent requirements for the other environmental assessments undertaken during the permitting process, which are not time-limited under the law. And it could have pushed earlier to rewrite the law. On balance, we rate his statement Mostly True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2010-06-01T15:59:35 | 2010-05-27 | ['None'] |
pomt-03134 | The amount of interest paid on the federal debt exceeds "total tax revenue." | false | /wisconsin/statements/2013/sep/15/chris-kapanga/interest-payments-us-debt-exceeds-us-tax-revenue-w/ | State Rep. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, has taken some bold positions since he won an open Wisconsin Assembly seat in 2010 as a political newcomer. In 2011, Kapenga said he believed several people were "bought out" by police and fire unions to stop those unions from being included in Act 10. The law advanced by Gov. Scott Walker dramatically curtailed collective bargaining rights for most public workers, but, over the objection of Kapenga and others, it exempted police and firefighters. In 2012, Kapenga joined eight other GOP state lawmakers who pledged to back a bill to arrest any federal officials who try to implement President Barack Obama’s health reform law in Wisconsin. Then in an Aug. 23, 2013 newsletter to constituents, Kapenga, a certified public accountant, made a bold claim about the federal debt -- and dared his readers to check it. "As we approach the $17 trillion debt level, I want to emphasize how dangerous this is for our nation," Kapenga wrote. "An old proverb tells us that the borrower is slave to the lender, and as we continue to spend and build debt, think about who we are getting our money from. The answer is the printing press and China. He added: "When the amount of interest you pay on your debt exceeds your total tax revenue (yes it does -- check it out!), common sense tells us that all other programs are at risk." Whoa -- just the amount of interest we pay on the federal debt is more than all the tax revenue Uncle Sam takes in? Actually, not even close. When we contacted Kapenga, he admitted he had erred, saying a constituent already had pointed out that he was wrong. OK. So, how do interest payments on the debt and total tax revenue compare? Net interest payments totaled $220 billion in 2012, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Net interest payments are what most economists cite when talking about interest on the debt, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Richard Kogan told us. That figure corresponds to the roughly $12 trillion in debt that we owe outside creditors, such as China. Total interest payments -- the $220 billion plus $140 billion in interest paid for intragovernmental borrowing, such as tapping surplus Social Security funds -- was about $360 billion in 2012. That corresponds with the total debt of roughly $17 trillion. Is there reason to worry, as Kapenga indicated in his newsletter? Well, CBO projects that by 2020, net interest payments -- on the debt owed to outside creditors -- will nearly triple from $220 billion per year to $644 billion per year. But even that’s a far cry from the total tax revenue the federal government takes in. Federal tax revenue in 2012 was $2.45 trillion. That’s 11 times higher than the $220 billion in net interest payments on the debt and about seven times higher than the $360 billion in total interest payments. Kapenga said he has drafted this correction for his next newsletter: "Thank you to one of my constituents who noted an error in my Aug. 23 E-Update. In my article about the danger of our U.S. debt, it stated that ‘the interest you pay on your debt exceeds your total tax revenue’ when it should have said ‘total corporate tax revenue.’" The amount of corporate tax revenue the federal government takes in is much closer to the net interest payments on the debt, but it's still higher than those payments, according to CBO. Corporate tax revenue in 2012 was $242 billion, exceeding the $220 billion in net interest payments. For 2013, the difference is projected to be even greater -- $291 billion versus $223 billion. Our rating Kapenga said "the amount of interest" paid on the federal debt exceeds the federal government’s "total tax revenue." In fact, tax revenue is a number of times higher than what the government pays in interest on the debt. We rate Kapenga’s statement False. | null | Chris Kapenga | null | null | null | 2013-09-15T05:00:00 | 2013-08-23 | ['None'] |
pomt-15110 | I'm the only governor in America ... who signed a law that says there needs to be an independent investigation any time there's a death of someone in police custody. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/13/scott-walker/scott-walker-im-only-governor-sign-law-requiring-i/ | Less than two weeks after tying President Barack Obama to the killing of police officers, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker defended his own approach to defusing tensions between law enforcement and the communities they patrol. In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sept. 13, 2015, host Jake Tapper asked Walker to explain why he thought Obama played a role in the recent violence against police. Walker said the president hasn’t spoken out enough on the issue, and that police should be both supported and held accountable. "I’m proud to say I'm the only governor in America, the first one and I believe the only one today, who signed a law that says there needs to be an independent investigation any time there's a death of someone in police custody." The August 2014 police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., sparked calls for just such independent inquiries. We wanted to see if Walker in fact is the only governor to have approved a statewide law. According to a few legal experts, plus our review of state-level legislation, Walker is on solid ground. The Wisconsin law On April 23, 2014, months before the Brown shooting, Walker signed Act 348. The law enjoyed bipartisan support. It required that whenever an officer on or off-duty kills someone, there will be an investigation by at least two investigators, "neither of whom is employed by a law enforcement agency that employs a law enforcement officer involved in the officer-involved death." Once the investigation is complete, the report goes to the district attorney in the county where the death took place for consideration of criminal charges. If no charges are filed, the report is made public. Michael Scott is the director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing and clinical professor in criminology at Arizona State University. Scott told us that analysts for the Wisconsin Legislature in 2014 found no other state required an independent investigation for police-related deaths. Scott said this measure came after a 10-year effort by one family. "The push for this legislation in Wisconsin came from a coalition organized by Mr. Michael Bell, the father of a young man shot and killed by police in Wisconsin," Scott said. "Two state legislators, Sen. Gary Bies and Rep. Chris Taylor, took up his cause and sponsored the legislation that Gov. Walker signed. Gov. Walker can take credit for signing the legislation, but it was not proposed by his office." We found legislators in several states, including Connecticut, California, New York and Missouri, introduced similar measures in 2015, but so far, none have passed. We also learned from the Walker campaign that many local police departments in Wisconsin and around the country already require an independent investigation. However, those policies are not state law. A funding wrinkle There was a brief flap in Wisconsin over the money to pay for these inquiries. PolitiFact Wisconsin reported that Walker’s initial 2015 budget provided no funds. But after the attorney general, a Republican, told House budget writers that this was not a cheap endeavor, and a state report showed the state’s Justice Department had investigated 12 deaths in less than a year since the law took effect, lawmakers agreed to fund four of the five positions that were requested. Walker’s office agreed, and the governor signed a two-year budget that included $635,000 for the work. Our ruling Walker said he was the only governor to sign a bill that required an independent investigation into police-related killings. Walker signed that bill in April 2014. According to experts we reached or whose work we read, and our scan of legislation, no other state has such a law. We rate this claim True. | null | Scott Walker | null | null | null | 2015-09-13T17:56:40 | 2015-09-13 | ['United_States'] |
pomt-05077 | We’re spending $12,000 bucks a kid a year in the school system. | true | /oregon/statements/2012/jul/03/don-mcintire/does-portland-public-schools-spend-12000-year-stud/ | Portlanders will vote on a $35 per person annual tax this November, aimed at helping the arts. Mayor Sam Adams, who orchestrated the plan, was on OPB’s Think Out Loud last week touting the proposal as a way to boost music and arts education for children. On the other side was veteran tax activist Don McIntire. He called the plan "cockamamie" and "frivolous," and one which Adams and the city had no business promoting. "We’re spending $12,000 bucks a kid a year in the school system. If they’re not getting art training that’s the fault of the school system and that needs to be rectified," McIntire said on Think Out Loud. PolitiFact Oregon rang up McIntire for his source. He didn't specify Portland Public Schools on the radio, but he made clear to us that he was talking about the state's largest school district. He said it’s a national average, and he suspects PPS is even higher. In getting back to us with more information, McIntire upped the ante to $15,000 per student. His math is terrifically simple. Follow along. The adopted budget for Portland Public Schools is $678 million for 2012-13. Resources include a beginning balance, food service sales and government funding. The expenditures category includes salaries, materials and debt service. McIntire subtracted about $11 million for fund transfers, which leaves roughly $667 million. Divide that by 47,288 students -- which is current enrollment -- and voila, $14,100 per student. McIntire also said we should add $900 per student for education service district support. That, he said, gets us to $15,000. We asked him if it was fair to include building costs or debt service. Obviously those are not dollars going toward student instruction. McIntire said that it’s entirely fair "if money is taken and derived from the taxpaying public, and it goes into the system somewhere and it’s spent." OK, let’s move on. Next we asked Matt Shelby, spokesman for Portland Public Schools, to ask his people for a figure. He said he’d get back to us. Because PolitiFact Oregon is always on the move, we started looking online and found that the U.S. average in per pupil spending was $10,615 in 2009-10, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So, there’s some context. In Oregon, according to the bureau, the number was lower: $9,624 per pupil (page 8). In Portland Public Schools, however, the number was higher: $10,949 (page 106). The averages included salaries and support services, with a portion for school and general administration. We turned to the Oregon Department of Education, which tracks spending by school district. We zeroed in on a report called operating versus capital expenditures per student. This looked like the report we needed. Hurray! There we found that the actual amount of money spent statewide per student, on average, in 2010-11 was $9,362. In Portland Public Schools, the per student spending was higher at $11,830. That is very close to $12,000. To short-circuit the process, we asked Shelby the spokesman if Portland Public Schools officials were comfortable with that breakdown. He said they were. We will not rule on McIntire’s revised statement that the district spends about $15,000 on each student a year. He and others may think that’s a better estimate of how much money the district has -- and therefore, what it can afford to spend on arts education -- but that’s not what he said publicly. We will rule on the $12,000 per student figure instead. The best historical numbers we have are state figures that show that Portland Public Schools in 2010-11 spent $11,830 per pupil. (The same report shows capital outlay per student was about $400, and $777 statewide.) Now, let’s go back to Portland Public Schools’ 2012-13 adopted budget. If you add together salaries, benefits, materials and services -- in other words, take out debt, capital and contingencies-- you get nearly $542 million. Divide that by the number of students and we end up at $11,459 per student. Again, we think that’s pretty close to $12,000. With debt and capital -- the way McIntire and some others think is more accurate -- the number would be more than $12,000. It would be anywhere from $13,200 (without contingency and ending fund balance) to $14,100 (if those categories are included) to $15,000 (if he is correctly adding education service district costs to the budget). His larger point is that the district, spending roughly $12,000 a student, has enough money to pay for arts and music classes. A higher number just makes his point stronger. Whether any of that is enough for Portland Public Schools to offer art and music instruction without a $35 per-person income tax is not for us to decide. McIntire’s statement is accurate and we rule it True. | null | Don McIntire | null | null | null | 2012-07-03T17:32:39 | 2012-06-26 | ['None'] |
snes-01900 | Did Trump Retweet a Cartoon of a Train Hitting a CNN Reporter? | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-retweet-cartoon-train-hitting-cnn-reporter/ | null | Politics | null | Dan Evon | null | Did Trump Retweet a Cartoon of a Train Hitting a CNN Reporter? | 15 August 2017 | null | ['None'] |
vogo-00184 | Statement: “It’s based on the most recent report that was presented to the committee that said that zero — zero — has been spent on major repair and replacement projects,” San Diego County Taxpayers Association CEO Lani Lutar said during the Sept. 29 debate with school board member Scott Barnett. | determination: misleading | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/is-school-bond-money-going-to-ipads-over-repairs-fact-check/ | Analysis: On Sept. 29, Barnett and Lutar squared off in a debate about Proposition Z, a ballot measure San Diego Unified School District hopes will fund additional school repairs and renovations without hurting its day-to-day budget. (Check out a recent parents’ guide by VOSD’s Will Carless for more details.) | null | null | null | null | Is School Bond Money Going to iPads Over Repairs? Fact Check | October 9, 2012 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-05755 | Says local Texas chambers of commerce were granted exemptions from paying property taxes on their headquarter properties. | true | /texas/statements/2012/mar/01/becky-moeller/becky-moeller-says-local-texas-chambers-commerce-w/ | The president of the Texas AFL-CIO roundly objects to subjecting recipients of unemployment aid to drug tests. In a Feb. 17, 2012, press release, Becky Moeller said "some politicians and interest groups want to attack the unemployment system by subjecting workers who lost their jobs through no fault of their own to insulting and costly drug tests." The release says Moeller was reacting to praise of Congress by Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, for including in its extension of unemployment benefits a provision giving states the right to require drug tests of recipients seeking a job that generally requires a drug test, as CNN reported Feb. 17, 2012.. . Moeller said: "We continue to wait for legislative proposals to require CEOs who accept corporate welfare and promise jobs that they often don’t deliver to take drug tests. Come to think of it, we’re still waiting for heads of local Chambers of Commerce in Texas who were granted sweetheart exemptions from paying all property taxes on their expensive headquarters properties to take drug tests to prove they are ‘ready and available’ to use taxpayer money." Wham, bam, blooey, and at a glance, nothing but opinion. But we focused on a clearly factual claim -- that local chambers of commerce got exemptions from paying property taxes on their headquarter properties. Setting aside her juicy adjectives as opinion -- "sweetheart" and "expensive" -- were local chambers granted exemptions from property taxes? They were, though we were unable to pin how many chambers have taken advantage and to what cost. The Greater Austin Area Chamber of Commerce, which in late 2011 confirmed plans to move from leased space to purchased space in downtown Austin, has applied for an exemption that could save the group about $100,000 in 2012 property taxes, a figure based on taxes levied on the property for 2011, the chamber’s president, Mike Rollins, told us in a telephone interview. Rollins said the Austin chamber did not seek the exemption law but appreciates the result. "Chambers do a lot of work that if they didn’t do it, the public would have to pay for it out of their ad valorem (property) taxes," he said, offering as an example the preparation and distribution of promotional information about the surrounding community. Rollins added that the Austin chamber has taken no position on the drug-testing law singled out in Moeller’s statement and, he suggested, it’s unfair to insinuate that any local chambers are aligned with the TAB leader’s salute to the law. So, how did the tax exemptions come to be? AFL-CIO spokesman Ed Sills, responding to our request for backup information, said the exemptions were authorized by the 2009 Legislature in an amendment to a measure covering other topics. According to legislative records, on May 27, 2009, state Sen. Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, put the exemption provision into House Bill 770, which as originated by Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, had to do with property taxes on a homestead residence rendered uninhabitable by water or mold damage. Jackson also was named chairman of the Senate side of the joint conference committee that reached a compromise version of HB 770. The measure then cleared the Senate with only Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, voting "no" and won House approval 144-0. Gov. Rick Perry let the proposal become law without his signature. The relevant provision, added to the Texas Tax Code, says that to qualify for the property-tax exemption, a nonprofit economic development group largely funded by dues-paying members must primarily be engaged in one or more of these activities: promoting the common economic interests of commercial enterprises; improving the business conditions of one or more types of business; or otherwise providing services to aid in economic development. It says too the group may not have a political action committee. Legislators embraced the provision in the face of a fiscal note stating: ""The bill's requirement for mandatory exemptions for qualifying economic development corporation property would create a cost to cities, counties, school districts and the state through the operation of the school finance formulas." Specifically, the note says, the change would reduce state revenue by nearly $1.2 million in the fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 2011, with the annual reduction increasing to nearly $1.8 million for the year ending Aug. 31, 2014. There’s a state cost, the note says, partly because state law requires the state to ensure that school districts maintain the revenue levels they had in 2006. According to the fiscal note, local cities, counties and school districts would see their combined related revenue drop less than the state’s annual decreases. We were unable to obtain updated cost projections taking into account actions by the 2011 Legislature changing how the school funding formulas affect state spending. In a telephone interview, Jackson told us he sought the exemption provision at the behest of a local chamber leader and after learning that about 25 percent of 500 local chambers in the state then owned their headquarters. A Sept. 2, 2010, Houston Chronicle news article credits the executive director of the Texas City-La Marque Chamber of Commerce with leading the statewide push to authorize the property-tax exemption. Per Moeller’s statement, Jackson said he did not want to give anyone a sweetheart deal but thought that business owners who compose the membership of local chambers already paid property taxes on their properties. Charging property taxes on the chamber HQs, he said, was like double taxation. Also, Jackson said, most chamber headquarters he has seen are "not big Taj Mahals." "The AFL-CIO ought to be all in favor of this," Jackson opined. "This allows these chambers to use that money to help economic development and create more jobs. That would just do more to help labor in general." A House version of the chamber-sought change, House Bill 831, drew favorable testimony from leaders of six local chambers of commerce including individuals from Kerrville, Brownsville, Lewisville and La Marque, according to the Texas Legislative Council, with representatives of a dozen additional local chambers registering in favor. Legislative records show no one testifying against the tax exemption provision. Sills, of the Texas AFL-CIO, said in a telephone interview that behind the scenes the labor group fought the change. He forwarded an email that he said was sent during the session to House members urging opposition to HB 831. The 2009 email says chambers of commerce lobby on many issues, sometimes against the interests of a majority of residents. "If the Legislature wants to allow the public to start subsidizing non-profit organizations that engage in the political process," the email says, "then alternatively we ask you to adopt an amendment that would include labor union organizations in that subsidy. We don’t think it would be great public policy, but it would create a more level playing field. It would be preferable, though, to oppose" the exemption proposal. "We believe that taxpayers do not want to subsidize chambers of commerce and other politicized organizations through tax subsidies." We rate Moeller’s statement True. | null | Becky Moeller | null | null | null | 2012-03-01T14:07:00 | 2012-02-17 | ['Texas'] |
pomt-14574 | Says Pat Toomey visited Joe Sestak and other veterans in 2002 "and then came home and voted against every veterans appropriations bill." | mostly false | /pennsylvania/statements/2016/feb/08/joe-sestak/joe-sestak-says-pat-toomey-voted-against-every-vet/ | Republican Sen. Pat Toomey is defending his voting record after a challenger has repeatedly claimed the incumbent Pennsylvania senator has a pattern of voting against funding for veterans. Senate candidate Joe Sestak, a Democrat and former congressman, said during a recent luncheon at the Pennsylvania Press Club that Toomey visited him on the USS George Washington aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2002, the carrier Sestak was commanding at the time. "I may disagree with Pat Toomey, who voted to send me to war, visited me on the aircraft carrier," Sestak said, adding, "and then came home and voted against every veterans appropriations bill." The Toomey and Sestak campaigns have gone back and forth in email communications to supporters and reporters, criticizing and defending Toomey’s records on veterans affairs, as they spar to represent voters in Pennsylvania, a state with nearly a million veterans. So we decided to put Sestak's claim to the test: Did Toomey truly did vote against every veterans appropriations bill since 2002? Sestak campaign spokesman Jake Sternberger said in the instance of the Press Club appearance in January, the former Navy admiral was referring to Toomey’s voting record when he served in the House from 1999 to 2005, though Sestak didn’t specify that at the time. His campaign also later highlighted Toomey’s time in the Senate, noting that he voted against plans in 2011 and 2015 that would have sent additional funds to programming for veterans. When it comes to his time in the House from 1999 to 2005, Toomey did vote against every major veterans appropriations bill, but he also voted in favor of more than a dozen resolutions that kept funding the same. As a senator, Toomey’s spokesman for re-election Steve Kelly said Toomey was a "strong supporter" of bipartisan Veterans Affairs legislation introduced in 2014, a bill its cosponsor (and current Democratic presidential candidate) Bernie Sanders called "the most comprehensive veterans’ health care legislation in modern history." In 2011 and 2015, Toomey had already voted in favor of stand-alone veterans appropriations bills, but instead of being signed into law, those dollars were later rolled into "omnibus bills," or plans that funded the entire federal government. Veterans appropriations make up about 6 percent of the funding in the large financing plans. Toomey, a fiscal conservative, voted against the omnibus bills in 2011 and this past December that ultimately would have sent more funds to veterans, but he said it wasn’t due to specific line items. "I have usually voted against these giant, thousand-page, trillion-dollar omnibus spending bills because they’re such a grossly irresponsible way to fund the government," Toomey said recently about his vote against the bills, according to his campaign. "They have literally many thousands of individual line items, and I know Congressman Sestak likes to pretend that I must oppose every individual line item because I voted against these grotesque omnibus bills. That’s just ridiculous." Sternberger said it’s "absolutely" fair to criticize Toomey’s record on veterans affairs based on the fact that he twice voted against the omnibus bills. Records show Toomey also voted against the Veterans Jobs Corps Act in 2012 and the Veterans Health and Benefits bill in February 2014, months before the VA scandal led to the resignation of former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki. Toomey later supported bipartisan legislation aimed at improving the VA. Toomey is a member of the Congressional Veterans Jobs Caucus and in 2014 introduced the Protect Veterans Employment and Training Services Act, which aims to provide jobs training services to veterans. The bill died at the end of the congressional session and was not enacted. Our ruling Sestak said that Toomey "voted against every veterans appropriations bill." Toomey did vote against major veterans appropriations bills between 2002 and 2005 while in the House. But as a senator, he repeatedly voted in favor of other bills that benefitted vets. Toomey did vote against veterans appropriations when he voted "no" to the omnibus bills in 2011 and 2015, but he also voted "yes" to stand-alone bills the same year and didn’t support the larger spending plans for reasons beyond the veterans appropriations. Sestak and his campaign mischaracterized Toomey’s record on veterans appropriations by saying Toomey voted against funding veterans programming "every" time. We rule the claim Mostly False. | null | Joe Sestak | null | null | null | 2016-02-08T10:00:00 | 2016-01-25 | ['Joe_Sestak', 'Pat_Toomey'] |
vees-00361 | VERA FILES FACT SHEET: What is malice in libel cases? | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-sheet-what-malice-libel-cases | null | null | null | null | Trillanes,Mocha Uson,libel | VERA FILES FACT SHEET: What is malice in libel cases? | October 02, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00580 | On Common Core. | full flop | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/08/bobby-jindal/bobby-jindal-change-position-common-core/ | Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal isn’t expected to announce his candidacy for president until June 24, but he’s already firing shots at future competitors. In response to Sen. Rand Paul’s comments in late May on the origins of ISIS, Jindal called him "outlandish," "illogical," and "unsuited to be Commander-in-Chief." Paul advisor Doug Stafford shot back at Jindal, saying, "It’s ironic Gov. Jindal would level such a charge when he flip-flops on crucial issues like Common Core and national security, and he has cratered his own state’s economy and budget." This is not the first time critics have accused of Jindal for doing a 180 on Common Core — the state-based educational standards aimed at improving student readiness for college and the workplace. (Read our past fact-checks of claims and flips relating to Common Core.) In light of his upcoming candidacy, we wondered: How does Jindal’s position on Common Core register on our Flip-O-Meter? It’s important to note that we are not making a value judgment about flip-flopping; we're just noting whether a change of position has occurred. Jindal support Common Core was launched in June 2009 as a collaboration between 49 states and territories. Louisiana adopted the standards in 2010 with Jindal’s blessing. In 2012, he handpicked John White, a strong supporter of Common Core, as state superintendent of education. At an event for business leaders in January of that year, Jindal lauded the Common Core standards as a step forward for education in his state that "will raise expectations for every child." Jindal echoed the sentiment early into his second term. Jindal stood by Common Core at a groundbreaking ceremony in 2013, amid an ongoing fight over the standards in his state and even after the Republican National Committee renounced the program. Though he never mentioned the initiative by name, Jindal said that "too many" governors, teachers, students and parents "have fought too hard for too many years to put Louisiana on that map (toward more rigorous education standards). And we're not going backwards." Then, he disowned the initiative. Jindal opposition Jindal himself acknowledges his change of heart, which he says is due to the federal government’s stepping in. His spokesperson Mike Reed told us, "Gov. Jindal supported (Common Core) when he believed it to be a state-led effort. Later, when he discovered it was a centralized federal effort, he opposed it and began working to remove Common Core from Louisiana." We’ve fact-checked several statements that suggest Common Core is a federal program or mandate. It’s not. States can improve their chances of winning federal money if they adopt educational standards; the Obama administration included that as criteria for its "Race to the Top" program. But Common Core itself remains a state-based, voluntary program. Nevertheless, by April 2014, Jindal was clearly in the opposition camp. "I'm from the school that believes education is a matter best left for local control," Jindal wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. "The notion of Washington determining curricula is something most states are simply not interested in. It's a non-starter." A month later, Jindal grew more emphatic in his distaste for Common Core, comparing it to centralized planning in Russia. He also tweeted: We will not be bullied by fed govt. Common Core advocates claim it not a fed takeover, but Sec. Duncan's comments & actions prove otherwise.— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) June 17, 2014 Beyond rhetoric, Jindal has actively tried to rock the schoolhouse standards. He sued the Obama administration over the national implementation of Common Core in 2014 (and he’s been sued for his repudiation). He asked Common Core to withdraw from the state. He broke with his own education head, an "exceptional" and "unusual" move, according to Ashley Jochim, who studies Common Core at the Center for Reinventing Public Education. He proposed an opt-out option for students in early 2015. He issued an executive order to repeal Common Core in Louisiana in 2014 and came up with a legislative plan as well. In late May, Jindal signed off on a compromise between Louisiana legislators that allows state review and revision of the federal standards with public oversight. But, according to his spokesperson, that doesn’t mean Jindal’s done with his efforts to permanently give Common Core the boot in the Bayou. "We support the compromise because it ensures we have local control going forward. The next step will be to elect leaders who are committed to getting rid of Common Core," Reed told us, noting that Jindal’s lawsuit against the Obama administration is moving forward. Experts say there’s no question Jindal reversed his position on Common Core. "Gov. Jindal has clearly flip-flopped on the issue. He went from singing the praises of Common Core to leading the charge for removing the standards in Louisiana. Because of Jindal, the state has made almost a complete U-turn on the standards," said James Shuls, a professor of education and policy at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Jindal’s change of position has also been noted by CNN, the Huffington Post, the Washington Times, the Washington Post’s editorial board and the Times-Picayune. Our rating Jindal was once an ardent supporter of Common Core (and one of the first adopters of the initiative) but has since become one of its staunchest critics, mounting lawsuits and legislation against the initiative. Despite his endorsement of a compromise in his state, Jindal remains an opponent to the core. We rate Jindal’s position on Common Core a Full Flop. | null | Bobby Jindal | null | null | null | 2015-06-08T14:44:47 | 2014-04-23 | ['None'] |
pomt-05458 | Under President Barack Obama’s watch, "oil production on federal lands has decreased 14 percent over the past year." | half-true | /georgia/statements/2012/apr/24/jack-kingston/kingston-says-oil-production-down-last-year-under-/ | Savannah Congressman Jack Kingston is standing in line with other Republicans this presidential election season to hit President Barack Obama on a major talking point. They’re pinning the blame for rising gas prices on Obama. Kingston took his turn April 12 with an op-ed in his hometown paper, the Savannah Morning News. "[W]hile families struggle with rising gas prices the president is only making things worse," the op-ed said. "When he [Obama] claims energy production is increasing on his watch, he is taking credit for production on state and private lands. In fact, oil production on federal lands has decreased 14 percent over the past year." Oil production is down 14 percent on federal lands? We thought this claim was well worth a check. Our colleagues at PolitiFact National and PolitiFact Ohio have looked at similar claims. Both teams cautioned against blaming a president for current oil production levels. Factors such as natural and man-made disasters, changes in technology and presidential policies dating back decades are also at play. "I don't think Obama can claim a lot of credit for production levels now, and I'm not even sure that [George W. Bush] can," Jay Hakes, who directed the independent U.S. Energy Information Administration for seven years during the Clinton administration, told PolitiFact National. Hakes is author of "A Declaration of Energy Independence," which looks at energy policy from President Harry S. Truman to President George W. Bush. "If you're going to go back — who should get the credit — I might be able to find something that Nixon did," Hakes said. PolitiFact Ohio addressed these factors when they looked into a March 26 statement by that state’s U.S. Sen. Rob Portman: "Last year, we produced 14 percent less oil on public lands than we did the year before." They found it was Mostly True. They checked the number against data from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue, which tracks royalties to the government for oil, gas and coal produced on federal lands and waters. They also cross-checked it against information from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which provides the federal government’s official energy statistics. Although the number was accurate, Portman’s statement needed additional clarification or information. At least part of the drop on public lands and waters last fiscal year was due to the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and an apparent shift by oil companies to private lands for "fracking." (Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a method of extracting oil or gas that opens up rock with a pressurized mix of water and chemicals.) About one week after PolitiFact Ohio’s story ran, Crossroads GPS, a conservative group, released a Web ad that tied Obama even more directly than Portman did to a decline in oil production. The group said that oil "production's down where Obama's in charge," and cited the 14 percent figure. PolitiFact National gave Crossroads GPS a Half True. The 14 percent decline took place in a single year -- fiscal year 2011, or Oct. 1, 2010, through Sept. 30, 2011. This time period includes the aftermath of the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil spill of April 20, 2010. The Department of the Interior issued a directive about a month after the disaster that said they would not consider drilling permits for deepwater wells for six months. Changes in federal regulations followed. National also found the data Crossroads GPS used did not tell the whole story. From fiscal year 2009 through 2011, crude oil sales from federal lands and waters did suffer a net decline of less than 1 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration. In 2009, oil production totaled 632 million barrels. In 2011, it was down to 626 million. However, during the first two fiscal years, oil production rose. In 2010, those sales totaled 726 million, a year-over-year increase of 14.9 percent. Furthermore, 2011’s 14 percent drop in production on federal lands and waters took place as onshore production rose slightly. Crude oil sales stood at 108 million barrels in 2010. They rose to 112 million barrels, an increase of 3.7 percent. We found that Kingston’s op-ed piece, which places the blame for gas prices squarely on Obama’s shoulders, shares these accuracy problems. He cited the 14 percent figure, saying Obama is "only making things worse" for families struggling with high gas prices. His spokesman Chris Crawford argued the congressman’s claim deserves a True. The number is accurate, and Obama is saying energy production is up on his watch. "I don't see how you can come to any conclusion but it being the truth," Crawford said in an email. But we’re not rating Obama’s statements. We’re also not taking issue with Kingston’s oil production data. Our issue is context, and that’s where Kingston runs into trouble. He cherry-picked the most unflattering oil production numbers under the Obama administration and ignored the impact of events well outside the president’s control: changes in technology, decades of presidential policy, and most importantly, the Deepwater Horizon spill. Kingston’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. According to PolitiFact’s rules, this earns Kingston a Half True. | null | Jack Kingston | null | null | null | 2012-04-24T06:00:00 | 2012-04-12 | ['None'] |
tron-02935 | President Trump Impeachment Process Has Begun | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/president-trump-impeachment-process-begun/ | null | politics | null | null | ['congress', 'donald trump'] | President Trump Impeachment Process Has Begun | Feb 23, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
tron-00888 | Giraffe Riddle on Facebook | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/facebook-giraffe-riddle/ | null | computers | null | null | null | Giraffe Riddle on Facebook | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-04085 | The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has classified kratom as a Schedule I substance as of 30 September 2016. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kratom-banned-by-the-dea/ | null | Medical | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Kratom Banned by the DEA? | 7 September 2016 | null | ['Drug_Enforcement_Administration'] |
pomt-08098 | Governor-elect Scott Walker’s opposition to high-speed rail "killed 13,000 Wisconsin jobs" | pants on fire! | /wisconsin/statements/2010/dec/14/state-democratic-party-wisconsin/democratic-party-says-scott-walker-killed-13000-jo/ | A barrage of invective hit Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker after the federal government announced it would give nearly all of Wisconsin’s $810 million in high-speed rail funds to other states. Half a dozen local, state and national Democrats issued statements Dec. 9, 2010 condemning the Republican for his staunch opposition to the Milwaukee-to-Madison train, all focusing on the loss of jobs that would result. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin joined in with the highest figure, declaring that Walker had "killed 13,000 Wisconsin jobs." Walker, who takes office Jan. 3, could rightly be credited -- or blamed, depending on your point of view -- with killing the rail line. Indeed, so vehement was his vow to stop its construction that, in our view, he prematurely declared the proposal dead even when it still had some locomotion. There is no doubt that jobs tied to the train will be lost; Walker has acknowledged as much. But what about the 13,000 figure used by the state Democrats? If the scenery on this ride looks familiar, it’s because we’ve been down this track before. We rated as Barely True a November claim by the Sierra Club that refusing the federal rail money would cost Wisconsin nearly 10,000 permanent jobs -- that is, jobs aside from the construction-related ones. The claim relied on an analysis based on a host of assumptions, including the impact of an entirely built network connecting Midwest cities. Given the more recent outcry over the rail money, we decided to start our count anew. The Democratic Party told us it pegged the loss at 13,000 jobs based on a report on the high-speed rail project by the WISPIRG Foundation, which supported the project. WISPIRG is a nonprofit group that says it "works to protect consumers and promote good government." Bruce Speight, WISPIRG’s state director, said WISPIRG used Wisconsin’s federal grant application for the rail money to arrive at the 13,000 jobs. Here are the number of full-time-equivalent jobs the state’s application projected would be created during construction of the Milwaukee-to-Madison line: Year 1: 1,281 Year 2: 4,060 Year 3: 5,535 Year 4: 1,847 Year 5: 621 Year 6: 250 Think about the figures this way: The state projected that in Year 1, the rail line construction itself, plus economic activity generated by the construction, would create 1,281 jobs’ worth of work; in Year 2, there would be 4,060 jobs’ worth of work; and so on. The figures represent "job-years," not actual jobs, said Jon Dyck, a fiscal analyst at the state Legislative Fiscal Bureau. A job-year, he said, is one person being employed for one year as a result of the rail line construction. In a memo Dyck wrote on the project, he cited the number of jobs per year that the state had projected in its grant application. He did not add the figures for the six years together to arrive at a total jobs figure. But that is what the Democratic Party did -- just as WISPIRG did in its report -- to get its total of 13,000 jobs. That approach can lead to double counting. Clearly, some of the people hired in Year 1 will also be working in Year 2. What’s more, the state’s numbers show a rise of employment, as construction peaks, and then a fall as it tails off. In Year 3, for example, the amount of work was projected to produce 5,535 jobs, but that number drops to 1,847 in Year 4. But under the math used to get to 13,000, they’re actually added together, for a total of 7,382 jobs in years 3 and 4. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle was the first to use that approach. After the state filed its grant application in October 2009, Doyle’s office issued a news release saying the rail line would create "nearly 13,000 jobs by 2013." The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel later reported, however, that the only way to reach that figure (12,723) would be to add the jobs from years 1 through 4. If you carried out Doyle’s job counting over the full six years that were covered in the state’s application, you would exceed 13,000 jobs -- the number the Democratic Party seized on. Doyle’s administration defended its method of counting to the newspaper, saying the grant application simply followed a formula requested by the federal government. But Doyle’s job counting led the WISPIRG Foundation to issue a correction of its report, Speight told PolitiFact Wisconsin. Since then, WISPIRG, like some other rail supporters, estimates only that "thousands" of jobs would have been created by the Milwaukee-to-Madison line. Indeed, in the statement Doyle issued after loss of the federal funds, he referred only to "thousands of jobs" that the money could have created in Wisconsin. The Democratic Party, however, stayed with 13,000 -- not only in its news release, but in a billboard it put up in Milwaukee four days later. That brings us to the end of the line. The state Democratic Party claimed that Walker’s opposition to high-speed rail not only cost Wisconsin nearly $810 million in federal funds, but it "killed 13,000 Wisconsin jobs." The party relied on a report by an organization that two months earlier had disavowed the number after it was discredited by the Journal Sentinel. Perhaps thousands of jobs were at stake, but there is no evidence that 13,000 jobs were lost. What’s more, that has been clear for some time -- and most everyone else has stopped using the figure. We rate the party’s claim as Pants on Fire. | null | Democratic Party of Wisconsin | null | null | null | 2010-12-14T09:00:00 | 2010-12-09 | ['Wisconsin'] |
pomt-12538 | With North Korea, "nobody has ever seen such a positive response on our behalf from China." | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/19/donald-trump/trump-china-taking-unprecedented-steps-help-north-/ | North Korea’s nuclear weapons program might be a looming security threat for the United States and its allies, but it has also provided a point of common interest for America and China. In an interview with Fox News, President Donald Trump praised China for working to help with the North Korea problem and he specifically noted that China has begun to reject coal shipments from North Korea, denying it a key source of revenue. "Nobody has ever seen it like that," Trump said April 17. "Nobody has ever seen such a positive response on our behalf from China." There’s a lot to unpack in that statement, not the least of which is whether China is acting on America’s behalf or its own, or both. The fact is, China has taken many steps over the decades to manage North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Some long-time observers think its latest stance represents a new high; others are less convinced. China and North Korea The Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan policy arm of Congress, described China as "North Korea’s closest ally, largest provider of food, fuel, and industrial machinery, and arguably the country most able to wield influence in Pyongyang." China buys over 80 percent of North Korea’s exports. At the same time, North Korea has been a thorn in China’s side for quite a while. A 2007 report from the Council on Foreign Relations said that "Chinese leaders are acutely concerned about a crumbling North Korea that precipitates massive instability in northeastern China." Reflecting a common view, Cheng Li, director of the China Center at the Brookings Institution, a Washington academic organization, told us, that above all, China wants stability. "It’s in China’s interest to have a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula," Li said. A bellicose North Korea might invite a U.S. attack, which would create refugee flows and crisis, or lead South Korea or Japan to reconsider their nuclear options. None of that would help China. China’s growing role China has been involved with North Korea talks since the mid 1990s, when bilateral negotiations between the United States and North Korea produced a pause in the country’s march toward building nuclear warheads. China took a more direct role in 2003. That year, North Korea withdrew from the Nonproliferation Treaty, restarted a previously frozen 5-megawatt nuclear reactor and during talks brokered by China, told the lead American diplomat that it now had nuclear weapons. "China wanted to play a role," Li said. "It wanted to cooperate with the United States. First, it organized the three-party negotiations (China, North Korea and the United States), which then became the six-party negotiations (with Russia, South Korea and Japan). It hosted the six-party talks and had harsh words for North Korea’s leaders." In 2005, those talks produced an agreement that might have led to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. That agreement broke down four years later, but Frank Jannuzi, who spent 15 years as Senate Foreign Relations Committee policy director for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, credits China with pushing to keep diplomacy moving forward. "The United States had long been reluctant to engage in face-to-face official talks with North Korea, without the political cover of a multilateral venue," Jannuzi said. "The Chinese wanted these talks too, but in making them happen, they were doing us a big favor." China gradually ramps up the pressure Through its seat on the U.N. Security Council, China has approved five resolutions against North Korea. The first was in 2006, followed by another in 2009, two in 2013, and the most recent in 2016. Economic sanctions have increased through the later resolutions, although Jannuzi said China would only go so far on that front. "The sanctions would never be effective," he said. "Because the sanctions will always stop short of crippling North Korea’s economy, which China would not want." Jannuzi cautioned against reading too much into China’s latest rejection of North Korean coal. The March 2016 resolution imposed a quota on how much coal China could import. "The trade data suggest that North Korea reached the quota by about the end of February," Jannuzi said. "The coal China turned back went beyond the quota. So it’s good that China stuck with the sanctions, but they supported that when they voted for the resolution." The Brookings Institution’s Li said China is going beyond what it’s done before. He pointed to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit with Trump, and the rhetoric in Chinese media "China’s propaganda machine changed dramatically," Li said. "A few months ago, you began to see more criticism of North Korea’s missile program. Unofficially, commentators have talked about regime change. Previously, you couldn’t write about that." Januzzi said if China is being more vocal and showing its displeasure with North Korea, that’s in line with the past. "It represents a new high point in terms of their overall frustration level with North Korea but they have been ratcheting it up for 15 years," he said. Some analysts, such as Mohan Malik, professor of Asian security at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, see little to cheer in China’s recent moves. "No doubt, China is tightening the noose around Kim Jong-un’s neck, but it is nowhere near choking him," Malik said. "China’s trade with North Korea is significantly up from last year. And more importantly, the transfer of dual-use components from Chinese companies for use in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs continues unabated." Our ruling Trump said with North Korea, no one has ever seen such a such a positive response from China on America’s behalf. In the eyes of the experts we reached, China is doing more. Some were more enthusiastic than others. The record shows that China has gradually moved in this direction over the years. Refusing coal shipments is in line with U.N. economic sanctions that China voted for last year. China has largely maintained its trade ties with North Korea and so far, its actions have been more rhetorical than substantive. It is difficult to quantify a "positive response." Whether the latest moves represent a sea shift that "no one has ever seen," or the logical conclusion of a longer pattern, probably lies in the eye of the beholder. We rate his statement Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2017-04-19T14:57:36 | 2017-04-17 | ['China', 'North_Korea'] |
tron-00668 | Steven Spielberge filming the crusades? | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/spielberg-passion/ | null | celebrities | null | null | null | Steven Spielberge filming the crusades? | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01470 | A Baltimore woman who leaked the imminent indictment of Roger Clinton, Jr. was found murdered. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-grand-juror-clinton-probe-dead/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Was a Grand Juror in a Clinton Probe Found Dead? | 7 November 2017 | null | ['Roger_Clinton,_Jr.', 'Baltimore'] |
pomt-08200 | Regulations are an "endemic weakness in government -- so old that Thomas Jefferson listed this problem among his charges against the King of England in the Declaration of Independence." | half-true | /florida/statements/2010/nov/22/rick-scott/rick-scott-says-thomas-jefferson-called-regulation/ | As part of his push to spur job growth, Gov.-elect Rick Scott has put a target on many government regulations. For example, Scott told business leaders at the Florida Council of 100 on Nov. 18, 2010, that he will freeze all regulations currently being formulated by state agencies so he can evaluate their impact. "Regulations grow and spread like weeds — if we aren’t actively working to cut them back, they choke off every productive effort," he told the group, according to prepared remarks. (The event was closed to the public, so we can’t verify the quote.) He added: "This is an endemic weakness in government — so old that Thomas Jefferson listed this problem among his charges against the King of England in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote, ‘He (King George III) has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.' " Scott quotes Jefferson correctly. But we wondered, what did Jefferson mean when he wrote that line? Did he think regulations are an endemic weakness in government? The "swarms of officers" Jefferson referenced were about 50 officials in the British Customs Service whose job was to stop colonists from smuggling goods to circumvent various taxes imposed by the Crown, including the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767. Colonists were "particularly adroit smugglers," said Stephen Lucas, a University of Wisconsin communications professor. The officials "certainly were harassing to the merchants and the smugglers who were trying to evade the laws." Lucas studies rhetoric and wrote the 1989 article "The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence." Lucas adds: "He uses the term ‘swarms,’ which makes it sound like there are thousands of these officials. The point was to make them sound as onerous as possible." Jefferson was, of course, a politician. And the Declaration of Independence was a revolutionary document used to discredit King George III. "What would you expect a guy to say?" said Peter Onuf, an American history professor and Jefferson scholar at the University of Virginia. Onuf, however, pointed out that the document was a critique of King George -- not of government in general. "It’s designed to depict the government of George III as absolutely illegitimate," he said. "The important thing is that it’s an argument against a particular government." He added: "To take these phrases out of context and suggest they’re eternally valid under all circumstances, it just gets tedious after a while." Lucas said the Declaration’s famous preamble ("We hold these truths to be self-evident...") includes principles that apply to any government. The 28 charges against King George are just that -- specific accusations against the king. "In fact, the colonists tended to see these grievances they had against England as growing out of a conspiracy to choke off the colonies," Lucas said. "They’re not necessarily an inherent part of government." Let’s circle back to modern times. Scott is clearly trying to bolster his anti-regulation argument with the gravitas of the Declaration of Independence. He calls regulation an "endemic weakness in government" and then says Jefferson listed "this problem" in the Declaration. But Jefferson didn’t complain about regulation as an "endemic weakness." He leveled a specific charge against King George that, as Lucas points out, involved just about 50 officials to combat smuggling among the colonial population of 3 million. Scott accurately quoted Jefferson, but he took the line out of context to advance his own argument against government regulation. Jefferson was no big-government liberal (He once lauded the "suppression of unnecessary offices (and) useless establishments and expenses."). But in this case he was more upset about King George than he was about government intervention. We rate Scott’s statement Half True. | null | Rick Scott | null | null | null | 2010-11-22T17:00:47 | 2010-11-18 | ['Thomas_Jefferson', 'England', 'United_States_Declaration_of_Independence'] |
pomt-07460 | The top 1 percent of income-earners pay about 40 percent of all taxes into the federal government. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/18/michele-bachmann/michele-bachmann-says-top-1-percent-pay-40-percent/ | In an April 13, 2011, interview on NBC’s Today show, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., offered a striking statistic describing how much of the tax burden in the United States is borne by the wealthy. In the interview, host Matt Lauer cited a deficit-reduction plan offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and asked why it included a major restructuring of Medicare but protected tax cuts for upper-income Americans. "If that's on the table, then why shouldn't the burden be equally shared?" Lauer asked. "Why shouldn't we put some of that burden on the wealthy and corporations?" Bachmann responded, "Well, remember, again, already the top 1 percent of income earners pay about 40 percent of all taxes into the federal government. So if you want to talk about fairness, the top 1 percent are paying 40 percent of all of the income." We wondered whether she was right that "the top 1 percent of income earners pay about 40 percent of all taxes into the federal government." The most recent hard data on this question comes from the 2007 tax year. It can be found in a Congressional Budget Office report released in 2010. CBO’s report shows what share of the federal tax liability was carried by various income groups. Here’s the rundown of the federal tax burden for the top 1 percent: Federal income taxes: 39.5 percent share Federal payroll taxes: 4.1 percent share Federal corporate taxes: 57.0 percent share Federal excise taxes: 4.7 percent share Total federal tax share for the top 1 percent: 28.1 percent So -- using 2007 numbers at least -- Bachmann is off by quite a bit. She’s even further off if you use an estimate for 2010 by the centrist to liberal Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which pegs the share of all federal taxes for the top 1 percent at 22.7 percent. Bachmann would have been right if she’d said, "the top 1 percent of income earners pay about 40 percent of all income taxes into the federal government." But she didn’t say that -- and even if she had, her decision to focus on income taxes, rather than looking at the whole federal tax picture, would have presented the numbers in such a way that wealthier Americans would look more heavily taxed than they are. As a general rule, the burden of the income tax is tilted heavily toward the upper end of the income spectrum. The payroll tax burden is also tilted toward the upper end, but the payroll tax differential for rich vs. non-rich is not quite as great as it is for the income tax. For instance, the top 20 percent paid 86 percent of the income tax, but 42.9 percent of the payroll tax. Also, the Social Security portion of payroll tax applies only up to $106,800 in income. Meanwhile, the middle 20 percent of earners paid 4.6 percent of federal income taxes in 2007, but 16.6 percent of payroll taxes. So for critics of taxes -- and Bachmann certainly is one -- it packs a greater wallop to cite income tax burdens for the wealthy than it does to cite their overall tax burden. But in this case, she didn’t define the statistic she was using correctly. So we rate her statement False. Update: The original version of this story said, "Also, the payroll tax applies only up to $106,800 in income, with no tax on earnings above that limit." It should have noted that the income limit applies only to Social Security taxes. | null | Michele Bachmann | null | null | null | 2011-04-18T14:45:47 | 2011-04-13 | ['None'] |
tron-03535 | Osama Bin Laden is Alive and Well, Living in Bahamas | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/osama-bin-laden-is-alive-and-well-living-in-bahamas/ | null | terrorism | null | null | null | Osama Bin Laden is Alive and Well, Living in Bahamas | Sep 2, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-00637 | Photographs of Lions Chewing Car Tyres | true messages | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/lions-chewing-tyres.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Photographs of Lions Chewing Car Tyres | April 22, 2013 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-01835 | Latinos now make up the majority population in Texas. | false | /texas/statements/2014/jul/17/roberto-alonzo/latinos-not-yet-majority-texans/ | A Dallas legislator hailed a court ruling about the University of Texas by declaring that most Texans are Latino. In his July 16, 2014, press release, Democratic state Rep. Roberto Alonzo applauded the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for upholding how UT-Austin employs race as an element in choosing students to admit. Alonzo then called it imperative for UT to do all it can to keep pace with the state’s changing demographics. His statement listed among factors "the fact that Latinos now make up the majority population in Texas." That didn’t sound right. Shortly, a spokesman for the U.S. Census Bureau, Robert Bernstein, emailed us that as of July 1, 2013, Hispanics "comprised 38.4% of the total population of Texas." We spotted that Latino percentage estimate on a bureau web page specifying that of the state’s nearly 26.5 million residents at that time, 40 percent were white, 12.4 percent were black or African American and 4.3 percent were Asian. Separately, the state demographer, Lloyd Potter, advised by email the majority of Texas residents will be Hispanic as soon as 2036 (if migration into Texas from 2000 to 2010 continues at the same pace going forward) or as late as 2049 (if population changes are due solely to in-state births and deaths). Hispanic residents already comprise the majority of students in Texas public schools. According to a March 2014 report from the Texas Education Agency, some 2.6 million Hispanic students accounted for 51 percent of the state’s more than 5 million students in 2012-13--and Hispanic students have been the majority in Texas schools since 2010-11, a chart shows. In 2012-13, white students made up 30 percent of public school enrollment, the report said, with African American students making up nearly 13 percent and Asians nearly 4 percent. By telephone, Alonzo conceded his error. Minutes later, a revised release arrived by email, quoting Alonzo as saying: "Considering the fact that Latinos now make up a significant portion (38%) of the population in Texas, coupled with the continuing growth of Latinos in our Texas public schools compared to the low Latino enrollment at UT Austin and the lack of Latinos in professional employment and leadership positions, it is imperative that this flagship institution of higher learning do all it can to improve and keep pace with the changing, diverse demographics." Our ruling Alonzo said Latinos comprise the majority of Texas residents. That’s incorrect. Individuals who identify as Latino are close to surpassing the share of Texans solely identified as white, but no single ethnic group makes up the majority of Texas residents. We rate this since-corrected claim as False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. | null | Roberto Alonzo | null | null | null | 2014-07-17T16:30:53 | 2014-07-16 | ['Texas'] |
snes-05960 | Rep. Michele Bachmann questioned why dinosaur bones aren't dirty if they've been buried for millions of years. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bachmann-dinosaur-bones/ | null | Quotes | null | David Mikkelson | null | Did Michele Bachmann Question Why Dinosaur Bones Aren’t Dirty? | 28 October 2014 | null | ['Michele_Bachmann'] |
snes-00301 | Cans of Bush's Baked Beans are being recalled because the cans may have defective side seams. | outdated | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bushs-baked-beans-recall/ | null | Food | null | David Mikkelson | null | Are Bush’s Baked Beans Being Recalled? | 24 July 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03830 | Russian president Vladimir Putin cancelled a campaign appearance with Donald Trump. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/putin-cancels-campaign-event-with-trump/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Putin Cancels Campaign Event with Trump | 11 October 2016 | null | ['Vladimir_Putin', 'Russia', 'Donald_Trump'] |
pomt-12863 | Obamacare has failed. | mostly false | /wisconsin/statements/2017/feb/01/paul-ryan/paul-ryans-damning-claim-affordable-care-act-obama/ | When U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan describes repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, he gives the signature legislation of President Barack Obama a damning assessment. Here’s a typical version, from his weekly press briefing on Jan. 5, 2017: "We’re going to get this law repealed, we’re going to get this law replaced, and we’re going to have a transition period so that people do not have the rug pulled out from underneath them while we get to a better place. Obamacare has failed, is getting worse, and we have to provide relief. And we will have a transition period so that people don’t get hurt." Ryan earned a Mostly True rating for his November 2016 claim that Obamacare "is not a popular law" -- though it’s worth noting that a January 2017 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading nonprofit research group on health care, found a split, with 49 percent saying Congress should repeal the law and 47 percent saying Congress should not. Our rating was False when the Wisconsin Republican in January 2017 said Obamacare "is in what the actuaries call a death spiral," given that conditions didn’t match the definition of what is an established term. But perhaps no Ryan attack on the law has been as audacious as "Obamacare has failed," a declaration he has made several times. He even went so far as to say on Jan. 27, 2017 that it is "basically a spectacular failure," though three days later he went softer, saying in a tweet: "For many Americans, it has already failed." So, let’s put Ryan’s claim to the test. There are many ways, of course, to evaluate the Affordable Care Act, which became law in 2010 though many changes were phased in later. But two of the major ones are coverage (Do more people have health insurance?) and costs (How much do you pay for insurance and what does it cover?) "There were things that succeeded and there things that didn't go as planned," said Donna Friedsam, health policy programs director at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Said economist Gail Wilensky, a senior health and welfare adviser to Republican President George H.W. Bush: "To say it’s a failure is problematic because it requires a more nuanced answer." This table highlights some of our findings. It’s followed by a more detailed analysis. Coverage Costs 20 million Americans gained health insurance Total health expenditures grew at record low rates in first three years after Obamacare 8.9% of Americans did not have health insurance in 2016, down from 16% in 2010 Employer plans: Family premiums up 99% under George W. Bush, 59% under Barack Obama Millions no longer at risk of being denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions 22% in 2017 in cost of the average mid-level Obamacare plan "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it": 2013 Lie of the Year Cut the typical family's health insurance premium up to $2,500: Promise Broken The coverage More gained coverage: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has estimated that during the first six years of Obamacare, 20 million Americans gained health insurance as a result of the law -- a figure acknowledged by Donald Trump’s administration. Similarly, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected in January 2017 that a 2015 bill that would have repealed key portions of the law would have increased the number of uninsured by 18 million in one year. On a related note, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers credits the law for what it says is a one-third drop nationally since 2010 in the share of Americans reporting that they have forgone medical care due to cost. Fewer are uninsured: As one might expect, far fewer people are uninsured. Defending Obamacare during the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton said a record 90 percent of Americans had health insurance. PolitiFact National rated that True. A month later, in November 2016, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, based on its annual survey, found 8.9 percent of Americans did not have health insurance in 2016. That was down from 16 percent in 2010, the year the ACA was passed. How it’s been done: The 20 million who have gained insurance includes people covered through the law’s expansion of Medicaid, the creation of the Health Insurance Marketplace, where individuals buy policies, and changes in private insurance -- one that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans and one that requires insurers to cover people with pre-existing health conditions. When former GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said in a Milwaukee debate in December 2015 that "Obamacare isn't helping anyone," she earned a Pants on Fire. At the time, 10 million people had been put on Medicaid as a result of Medicaid’s expansion under the law; and 9.5 million were enrolled in policies bought on the marketplace (including 8 million who were receiving subsidies under the law). In addition, the law as it stands now has meant millions of Americans are no longer at risk of being denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions (a Promise Kept for Obama); or are no longer at risk of being kicked off policies for developing expensive medical conditions. Broken promises: It’s worth noting that the gains in coverage have not all gone as planned. Obama and others had said repeatedly about the ACA -- "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it" -- and that became PolitiFact National’s 2013 Lie of the Year. Obamacare rules were strict, so that even if existing plans deviated a little, the plans were not grandfathered in under the law, and by the fall of 2013 insurers canceled coverage for millions of Americans. "Access to a ‘no-frills’ plan is a huge improvement on what low-income people experienced prior to the marketplaces," said a Vox critique of the ACA. "But it's still a far cry from what health wonks envisioned just a few years ago when they saw the health care marketplaces reshaping the industry. Referring to the 20 million, Wilensky, now a senior fellow at Project HOPE, an international health foundation, said of the ACA: "Saying it’s a failure is too harsh because it got that part done." The costs An Obama pledge made during the 2008 campaign to cut the cost of a typical family's health insurance premium by up to $2,500 a year was rated a Promise Broken. As they have for years, health care costs have continued to increase, but there has been some moderating. Premiums rising: Premiums have gone up -- a cumulative 11 percent between 2013 and 2016 for the average full-family, employee-sponsored plan; and 38 percent between 2014 and 2017 for Obamacare plans. But the results are mixed, if you consider how much premiums went up before the ACA: On employer-sponsored plans, family premiums increased by a cumulative 99 percent under the eight years of Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, while under eight years of Obama, the increase was smaller -- 59 percent -- according to Kaiser. Kaiser’s latest annual employers survey found that the average family premium in 2016 for their plans rose just 3 percent from 2015, while the premium for single coverage stayed essentially flat. That’s not to say the premiums aren’t substantial: Workers on average contribute $5,277 annually toward their family premiums. For individual market policies, in the three years before the ACA, premiums rose on average 9.9 percent in 2008, 10.8 percent in 2009 and 11.7 percent in 2010, according to the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund. The higher increases under Obamacare include a projected 22 percent increase nationally in 2017 in the cost of the average mid-level Obamacare plan, which is the most popular choice, though Kaiser says the increase would be as high as 145 percent (for customers in Phoenix). Critics have also pointed out that people who buy insurance on their own in the federal marketplace have fewer choices. Some major insurers, because they suffered losses, have dropped out of the marketplace, leaving nearly one in five Americans who are eligible for Obamacare with only one insurer in 2017, according to research done by the McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform for the New York Times. Big picture-wise, total expenditures on health care nationally grew at record low rates in 2011, 2012 and 2013, the first three years after the ACA was adopted, according to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers -- even if there is debate over a number of factors as to why. Health care costs are rising much more slowly than they did during the past 50 years, two former Obama health care advisers wrote in the Washington Post. But Wilensky said much of the slowdown can be attributed to the global recession, given that increases in health spending were even lower on average in other industrialized nations. Deductibles rising: Ryan and other Republicans have said many people feel they don’t really have health insurance because their deductibles are so high. It’s worth noting that one ACA provision ensures that nearly all Americans with employer coverage have a limit on their annual out-of-pocket spending. But the Kaiser survey of employers found the average deductible for workers covered by an employer plan was $1,221 in 2016, up 13 percent from $1,077 in 2015. And deductibles can run high for Obamacare plans. In a story headlined, "Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless," the New York Times found that in many states, more than half the plans offered through HealthCare.gov had a deductible of $3,000 or more. Our rating Ryan said: "Obamacare has failed." The Affordable Care Act did not meet all its promises, including a big one -- that you could keep your insurance plan if you liked it. But health care costs have risen more slowly since the law took effect and the law has met its major goal of getting more people insured -- an estimated 20 million. That’s not a failure. The biggest problem with Ryan’s statement is that he, and Obamacare critics, take a nuanced situation and turn it into a black-and-white statement. The same problem would face those who say Obamacare is a great success. Our definition of Mostly False is "a statement that contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression." That fits here. Share the Facts Politifact 3 6 Politifact Rating: "Obamacare has failed." Paul Ryan U.S. House speaker, R-Wis. In a press briefing Thursday, January 5, 2017 -01/-05/2017 Read More info | null | Paul Ryan | null | null | null | 2017-02-01T05:00:00 | 2017-01-05 | ['None'] |
pomt-12354 | We have pay equity. When you think about that wage gap, we all know it's 78 cents to the dollar. Well, in New York state it's 90 cents to the dollar. | mostly true | /new-york/statements/2017/jun/09/kathy-hochul/new-york-closer-pay-equity-most-states/ | Women fare better in New York state than in other states when it comes to pay equity, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul said during a speech in late May. "We have pay equity," said Hochul, who claimed women in New York state earn as much as twelve cents more on the dollar than the national average. "When you think about that wage gap, we all know it’s 78 cents to the dollar. Well, in New York state it’s 90 cents to the dollar." While New York state and most other states have laws mandating equal pay for employees, a wage gap between men and women persists. Is Hochul right about how narrow New York state’s gender wage gap is compared to the national average? What the data shows Hochul’s numbers are in the ballpark of what federal data shows. Women in New York state earn 86.9 percent as much as the median pay of men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women earn 81.1 percent as much as men overall in the U.S. The bureau tracked full-time, year-round workers in 2015, the most recent numbers. Only three other states and Washington, D.C., have smaller gaps. Women in Hawaii earn 87.9 percent as much as men, the highest level. Research from the National Women’s Law Center places New York state higher. The center compared data from the U.S. Census Bureau on the median salary of full-time, year-round male and female employees in each state from 2015. The census estimates show women in New York state earn 88.7 percent as much as men — more than any other state — compared with 79.6 percent overall in the U.S. "The data sample sizes are larger using the [Census Bureau] community survey, which is why we and other organizations use it," said Maya Raghu, NWLC Director of Workplace Equality. Why New York state differs New York has exceeded the national average in pay equity since at least 1998, the earliest federal data available online. Some years are better than others. New York state was less than one percentage point above the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ national average in 2005, when women earned 81 percent as much as men in the U.S. Other states consistently rank near the bottom for pay equity. Why? Experts say no single reason explains it. Occupational segregation is one reason. The types of jobs women and men hold vary by state, Raghu said. North Dakota, where high-earning men dominate the oil industry, ranks low for pay equity. New York state’s higher minimum wage also makes a difference. The minimum wage in New York was $8.75 in 2015, above the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Having a higher pay floor reduces the gender wage gap for lower-income workers, experts say. "In places like New York that have a higher minimum wage, you’re going to see a smaller wage gap particularly at the lower end of the distribution," said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Union membership also has an effect, Gould said. New York state ranks higher in union membership than any other state in the country with a 23.6 percent union membership rate. Wyoming, which has the widest gender wage gap in the country, has a 6.3 percent union membership rate. "Your unions may be very strong in New York, including teachers unions and unions that support service workers," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. New York City also drives up the state’s pay equity ranking. Data from the American Association of University Women breaks down the wage gap by congressional district in New York state. Most districts in New York City rank above those upstate. "I think the rural urban divide is definitely part of the story," said Kevin Miller, a senior researcher at AAUW. "Cities tend to have smaller gaps, which is why we see the District of Columbia having a small gap." Education is part of that. More women in New York state hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to census data. "The educational advantage is increasingly shifting toward women away from men, and in a technologically advancing economy that’s going to favor toward women and raise their relative earnings," Sawhill said. The family choices some women make during their careers also explain the wage gap. Women are more likely to take time off work to care for a newborn child or a sick relative. A woman in that scenario may miss a significant chunk in pay during their leave from work. Without supplemental income during that time away from work, women are more likely to report lower pay than their male colleagues, experts say. Our ruling Hochul said the gender wage gap in New York state is "90 cents to the dollar." Hochul is close to what federal data and research groups report as the wage gap in New York state. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says women in New York make close to 87 percent of what men make. Researchers say it is closer to 89 percent. Hochul's numbers are slightly off. The data reveals a gender pay gap, but her point that New York state has a significantly smaller gap compared with the national average is correct. We rate her claim Mostly True. | null | Kathy Hochul | null | null | null | 2017-06-09T16:58:08 | 2017-05-25 | ['New_York_City'] |
vogo-00320 | Statement: “We really are the first CSU, the first college in California, the first one on the West Coast and the second in the nation to offer this major,” Esther Rothblum, a professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University, said in a story the university published Oct. 3 about its new major in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies. | determination: true | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/fact-check-sdsus-groundbreaking-lgbt-major/ | Analysis: The news from San Diego State University two weeks ago thrilled Ardel Thomas. Next spring, the college will start offering a bachelor’s degree in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: SDSU's Groundbreaking LGBT Major | October 17, 2011 | null | ['California', 'San_Diego_State_University', 'West_Coast_of_the_United_States'] |
pomt-05910 | Says U.S. Senate Democrats "have gone without any budget at all" for more than 1,000 days. | mostly true | /wisconsin/statements/2012/feb/02/paul-ryan/democrat-controlled-us-senate-has-gone-nearly-thre/ | The day before President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan took shots at him and other Democrats over federal budget matters. In a Jan. 23, 2012 news release, the Wisconsin Republican repeated one of his favorite complaints. "Tomorrow marks the 1,000th day Senate Democrats have gone without any budget at all," he said. Let’s see what Ryan meant by singling out Senate Democrats and claiming they’ve been without a budget for nearly three years. While we’re at it, let’s examine the implications of operating government without a formal budget. Ryan’s spokesman, Conor Sweeney, said the last time the Senate passed a budget resolution -- a necessary step in adopting the federal budget -- was on April 29, 2009. A PolitiFact Florida item on a claim similar to Ryan’s confirmed the date. That means it was 1,000 days from when the Senate adopted the fiscal 2010 budget to Jan. 24, 2012, the date Ryan referred to in his news release. Of course, since the 2010 budget went through Sept. 30, 2010, the government actually operated without a Senate budget resolution for only 481 days as of Jan. 24, 2012, a point Sweeney acknowledged. So, Ryan is using language that is a little loose in saying the Senate "went without a budget" for 1,000 days. But in interviews, on Twitter, in other statements and in an article he co-authored that was published the same day as his news release, Ryan has been clear that he means 1,000 days passed without the Senate adopting a budget. So, how has the government kept running? Budgets vs spending Excerpts from a June 2010 PolitiFact National item tell how the budget process is supposed to work: The Senate and House are supposed to pass resolutions in the spring that outline the framework for future bills that address spending, taxation and other fiscal policy items. This budget represents a plan for allocating revenues and expenditures for the coming fiscal year, as well as for the next four fiscal years in more general terms. Each chamber is supposed to pass a version of the resolution, and if the two versions differ, then the chambers jointly hammer out a compromise and pass it. If a budget resolution does not pass, the majority can adopt appropriations bills, which actually allocate money for specific purposes. But the inability to pass the budget framework can reflect poorly on the majority's organizational skills and/or the degree of partisan discord in Congress. It also increases the likelihood of a logjam of appropriations bills in the fall and winter, and decreases the chance that controversial tax bills will pass the Senate. Neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate adopted a fiscal 2011 budget resolution, but the Republican-controlled House approved a fiscal 2012 budget resolution. That gave Ryan more fuel for blasting the Senate Democrats for not adopting one. The lack of budget resolutions contributed to delays in appropriations to government agencies, said Steve Ellis, a budget expert with Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that analyzes federal spending. Ellis said no spending bills were approved for fiscal 2011 until after the fiscal year started in October 2010; the remainder weren’t approved until April 2011, halfway into the fiscal year. For fiscal 2012, final spending bills weren’t adopted until just before Christmas 2011, nearly three months into the fiscal year, he said. So, when it lacks a budget for direction, Congress still has the power to spend money and keep government operating, but the process can get mucked up. Implications of no budget Does it matter? It does to some people. Failing to adopt a budget resolution "is not a fiscal calamity," Ellis said, noting there are other methods to set budget levels and even with delayed spending bills the government keeps operating. "But I would like the Senate and the House to do a budget resolution because that is going to get a better result than ad hoc or other mechanisms to get around it." From Ryan’s perspective, as he said in a statement in July 2011, Congress "has a moral — and legal — obligation to propose and pass budgets that tackle our generation’s greatest challenge." He added that "America’s job creators want certainty and confidence in the economy — which requires a credible plan to cut spending, prevent future tax hikes, and reassure our creditors that we’re restoring fiscal discipline." But neither party can claim superiority on budget resolutions. Senate Democrats didn’t pass a fiscal 2011 budget because "Republicans were threatening to hijack the budget process and waste the American people’s time with pointless political votes," a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told PolitiFact Florida. "Faced with this obstruction, we decided it would be a more productive use of the American people’s time to move on and address other issues critical to middle-class families." Our Florida colleagues also foundthat since 1983, the House and Senate have failed to pass a joint budget bill on four occasions. For fiscal year 2003, the Senate, under Democratic control in 2002, failed to pass a budget resolution of any kind. On three other occasions (fiscal years 1999, 2005 and 2007), the House and Senate failed to reconcile their different bills and pass a compromise measure. In these latter three cases, the Republicans were in the majority in both chambers of Congress. Our rating Ryan said "Senate Democrats have gone without any budget at all" for 1,000 days. It hasn’t been quite that long since the last Senate budget resolution expired, but it has been 1,000 days -- and counting -- since the Democrat-controlled Senate adopted a budget. We rate Ryan’s claim Mostly True. | null | Paul Ryan | null | null | null | 2012-02-02T09:00:00 | 2012-01-23 | ['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'United_States'] |
pomt-01037 | The Republican Party has not won a presidential election without either a Bush or a Nixon on the ticket since 1928. | true | /wisconsin/statements/2015/jan/26/tweets/it-true-republicans-havent-won-presidential-race-1/ | As he moves toward formally entering the 2016 presidential race, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is hammering home the notion that Washington needs a "fresh face." It’s a two-edged critique aimed at potential Republican rivals such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and at Hillary Clinton, the former Democratic senator and first lady who is gearing up for 2016. The Clinton-Bush era in the nation’s capital is well known -- from 1980 to 2004, Jeb’s father (George H.W. Bush) or brother (George W. Bush) or Bill Clinton won their party’s nomination for president or vice president. Hillary Clinton, of course, nearly made the top of the Democratic ticket in 2008. But there’s a more sweeping claim making the rounds on social media -- and various websites -- as the 2016 race takes early shape. This is how Washington Post Wonkblog reporter Matt O’Brien put it: Republicans haven’t won a presidential election without a Bush or Nixon on the ticket since 1928. Seems kind of unlikely, doesn’t it? That was our first reaction as we quickly tried to do think back through the roster of GOP presidential and vice-presidential contestants over that 84-year span. It’s right on, though. It’s a testament both to the Bush family legacy and to Nixon’s lengthy, comeback-dotted career. The period in question covers 21 presidential elections starting in 1932. Democrats prevailed 12 times; Republicans 9. The presence of a Bush or Nixon on the ticket turned out to be a boon for Republicans during those eight decades. But it didn’t mean a lock: in two races Republicans fell despite the connection. Here we go: Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952 and 1956 and served as vice president. In 1960, Nixon narrowly lost the presidential contest to John F. Kennedy, but returned to win two terms before resigning amid the Watergate scandal in 1974. George H.W. Bush was Ronald Reagan’s running mate and vice president for two terms, then won the presidency in 1988 before bowing to Bill Clinton in 1992. Finally, Bush’s son George W. Bush was atop the GOP ticket in 2000 and 2004 before Barack Obama reclaimed the White House for Democrats in 2008 and 2012. You have to reach back to the GOP team of Herbert Hoover and Native American U.S. Sen. Charles Curtis in 1928 to break the streak. They won in a landslide over Democrats Al Smith and Joseph Robinson, with Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas getting a smattering of support. Hoover, of course, was ushered out in 1932 as the Great Depression raged, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era began. Our rating No Republican has been elected president since 1928 without a member of the Bush family or Richard M. Nixon on the GOP ticket? You could look it up. But now you don’t have to. True. | null | Tweets | null | null | null | 2015-01-26T10:45:20 | 2015-01-23 | ['Richard_Nixon', 'George_W._Bush', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)'] |
pomt-12724 | Says former president Jimmy Carter said, "Medical marijuana cured my cancer." | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2017/mar/06/blog-posting/bogus-claim-jimmy-carter-credits-marijuana-curing-/ | The Internet is getting a sustained buzz from a fake news story about former President Jimmy Carter saying marijuana cured his cancer, but the years-old hoax can only burn readers. "Jimmy Carter: ‘Medical marijuana cured my cancer,’" reads the headline on a post dated Dec. 8, 2015, from CannaSOS.com. The site says it is a social media platform where "cannabis enthusiasts" can discuss information related to marijuana. The post says Carter had become a cannabis connoisseur since being diagnosed, and credited a medical marijuana purveyor in Oakland, Calif., for helping find a proper strain of the drug. Facebook users flagged the story as being potentially fake, as part of the social media network’s efforts to thin out fake news stories. While the story goes back to 2015, it was shared on Facebook more than 1,000 times in the past seven months. Versions of the same story have appeared in links from other websites, as well. In 2015, Carter was really diagnosed with skin cancer that had spread to his brain, but in December of that year announced the cancer’s growth had been arrested and reversed. Instead of medical marijuana, Carter announced he had been trying a new drug called Keytruda that appeared to help control and reverse the metastatic melanoma. The fake story, meanwhile, appears to have originated from a Dec. 7, 2015, post on a site called SatiraTribune.com. There’s no disclaimer on the site, but their Facebook page notes that SatiraTribune publishes "satirical and futuristic news." The story is full of cliches about smoking marijuana, including Carter being forgetful and having the munchies for peanuts. It also says Carter would be supporting legalization efforts in several states. (Four more states voted to allow recreational marijuana in 2016, while three others approved medical marijuana. That brings the total number of states with some form of legal marijuana to 28, plus the District of Columbia.) Carter’s own record on marijuana is a little hazier than the story makes it out to be. He suggested to Congress in 1977 that possession of up to one ounce of marijuana should be decriminalized, in an effort to keep people out of prisons for smoking the drug. When a CNN anchor asked him in 2012 whether he supported legalization, he said, "I’m in favor of it. I think it’s OK." He recently clarified his position in 2013: "I do not favor legalization," he said at a meeting of state legislators and regulators. "We must do everything we can to discourage marijuana use, as we do now with tobacco and excessive drinking." But perhaps the biggest giveaway is a faked quote from Carter that reads, "I smoke two joints in the morning, I smoke two joints at night, I smoke two joint in the afternoon, and it makes me feel all right." That’s actually the opening line from The Toyes’ 1983 weed anthem "Smoke Two Joints," although many people instead refer to Sublime’s 1992 cover, or even Macy Gray’s 2012 interpretation. We don’t know which version Carter would prefer. At any rate, this is a fake story that sparked a wave of readers being fooled. We rate it Pants On Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Bloggers | null | null | null | 2017-03-06T15:15:37 | 2015-12-08 | ['Jimmy_Carter'] |
snes-05413 | Bill Cosby has received a pardon from President Obama for all "current and future" sexual assault charges. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-pardon-cosby/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | FALSE: President Obama Pardons Bill Cosby | 5 January 2016 | null | ['Barack_Obama', 'Bill_Cosby'] |
snes-04020 | A Florida judge ruled that the government can ban vegetable gardens because they're "ugly." | mostly false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/judge-bans-vegetable-gardens/ | null | Legal | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Judges Rules the Government Can Ban Vegetable Gardens | 16 September 2016 | null | ['None'] |
tron-01063 | Places Not to Go if You Want to Stay Alive | mostly fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/places-not-to-go-if-you-want-to-stay-alive/ | null | crime-police | null | null | null | Places Not to Go if You Want to Stay Alive | Jan 15, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00658 | Eva Longoria Using Victoria Beckham As Trainer, Nutritionist To Lose Pregnancy Weight? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/eva-longoria-victoria-beckham-trainer-nutritionist-lose-weight-pregnancy-baby/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Eva Longoria Using Victoria Beckham As Trainer, Nutritionist To Lose Pregnancy Weight? | 4:14 pm, July 11, 2018 | null | ['Eva_Longoria', 'Victoria_Beckham'] |
snes-03533 | A new analysis of the residue on common American foods showed high levels of the herbicide glyphosate and Monsanto, the EPA, and the FDA are in cahoots to silence word of the chemical’s harmful effects and its high concentration in foods. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cancerous-herbicide-in-food/ | null | Medical | null | Alex Kasprak | null | Is Monsanto Suppressing Evidence of a Cancerous Herbicide in Food? | 16 November 2016 | null | ['United_States', 'Monsanto', 'FDA_(trade_union)', 'United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency'] |
snes-01902 | A "severe diarrhea incident" struck a strip club, affecting dancers and patrons who consumed tainted buffet food. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tainted-buffet-cause-severe-diarrhea-strip-club/ | null | Junk News | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Tainted Buffet at Jackson Strip Club Blamed After Severe Diarrhea Incident on Stage? | 30 May 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-02485 | The prosecution of state Sen. Don Balfour cost less than $100, excluding prosecutors’ salaries. | half-true | /georgia/statements/2014/feb/19/lauren-kane/cost-prosecuting-balfour-put-test/ | What price justice? December’s trial of state Sen. Don Balfour, R-Snellville, cost taxpayers either a pittance or a pile, depending on whom you ask. Balfour, once chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee, stood trial in December on allegations he swindled taxpayers by submitting false state expense reports. He was acquitted after an 18-month investigation and a three-day trial. On the day that the jury verdict came down, Lauren Kane, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Sam Olens, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Attorney General’s Office, as a ballpark figure, spent "less than $100" on the case, not including the salaries of prosecutors. Two readers asked: Is that plausible? We ourselves wondered. At trial, attorney William B. Hill Jr., a member of the Balfour defense team and a former deputy state attorney general, estimated the cost of prosecuting his client at $1.2 million to $1.5 million. We began our research by circling back to Kane with a request for records of all case expenses. Kane said a couple of more bills had come in, pushing the office’s costs for the case to $303.95. But what about staff time? What was the rationale for not counting that? Kane said the office didn’t count the salaries of the four prosecutors who worked on the case because they are "fixed costs" and those employees would have been paid, regardless. We checked in with two former prosecutors, a former investigator and a sitting Superior Court judge to see what they thought. They all said it is fair to consider staff salaries as part of the costs. To say otherwise is "wrong," former DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan said. "They are lawyers, and the fact that they are working on the public dole does not mean their time is not worth anything," Morgan said. "They are public servants who would be serving the public somewhere else if not for that trial." The legal minds we consulted also pointed out that the AG’s Office has spent millions of dollars in recent years hiring outside attorneys because of shortages of staff and expertise in some areas of the law. More than one raised the question: If those staffers had been free to work on other cases, instead of Balfour’s, couldn’t the AG’s Office have been able to cut some of its outside legal costs? Kane said no. None of the work that is farmed out involves criminal cases, she said. The AG’s Office had four prosecutors working on the case against Balfour. Collectively, the four logged 570 hours. The highest-paid of them put in 160 hours, the equivalent of four 40-hour weeks, according to information provided by the AG’s Office. We put the calculator to work. We looked at the annual salaries of the four employees — $106,924, $99,846, $95,000 and $63,936 — and the hours each worked on the case. We put the cost for the staff time they said was dedicated to Balfour’s case at $22,667, or about 10 times the amount the defense said the senator was accused of wrongly pocketing over five years. We decided also to look at the time invested by the GBI, which launched a criminal investigation at the request of the AG and after Balfour admitted to the Senate Ethics Committee that he’d submitted some erroneous expense reports and agreed to pay a $5,000 fine. In response to an open records request, the GBI told us that the special agent in charge of the investigation worked 371 hours on the case and a forensic auditor logged 620 hours. The time investment of the two added up to $19,203, based on salary information provided. That put salary costs associated with the investigation and prosecution at more than $40,000. We went back to Hill to ask about his estimates. He said he based them on cases he’d seen come through in his decade-plus in the AG’s Office, including six years as deputy attorney general. He said he believes his estimate would be in the ballpark, if all costs were calculated, including the time of the judge, court personnel, jurors and the many people interviewed by state investigators and prosecutors. Balfour has said he spent $156,787 defending himself against 18 felony charges. He has asked to get that money back from the state, and that’s an issue still to be settled. After the trial, Olens issued a statement saying Balfour’s expense requests "were too numerous and systematic to be simply isolated mistakes." "If those requests had been submitted by an unelected state employee, they would have been prosecuted," he said, "and a state senator should not be held to a lower standard." The jury foreman said she wasn’t sure how the reports became the subject of a criminal trial. "Personally, when you started looking at the dollar amounts of the charges, it became ‘Are we really here to talk about this?’ " she said in December. So where does that leave us? In an email to an AJC reporter on Dec. 19, Kane said the AG’s Office spent "less than $100" on the case. She said that did not include attorneys’ fees. She later amended the costs to $303.95 to include some subsequent bills. That fits with the original request for "ballpark" estimates of the office’s costs. The numbers provided were on target. But some critical information was excluded. Under our rating system, the statement merits a Half Truth. | null | Lauren Kane | null | null | null | 2014-02-19T00:00:00 | 2013-12-19 | ['None'] |
pomt-02708 | 61 percent of non-tea party Republicans actually agree...there is 'solid evidence the earth is warming,' ...[but] 70 percent of tea partiers, contrarily, say there is 'no solid evidence' the earth is warming. | mostly true | /rhode-island/statements/2013/dec/28/sheldon-whitehouse/us-sen-sheldon-whitehouse-says-most-republicans-ag/ | During his weekly floor speeches on climate change, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been promoting the idea that congressional Republicans who blocked climate change legislation are out of touch with Republicans throughout the United States. On Nov. 25, PolitiFact Rhode Island gave a Mostly True ruling on Whitehouse’s claim that, in a poll, "53 percent of young Republican voters . . . under age 35 said that they would describe a climate [change] denier as 'ignorant,' 'out of touch' or 'crazy.'" Whitehouse repeated his assertion about young Republicans in a slightly different way during his Dec. 17 speech on climate, his 53rd, focusing on the attitudes of the tea party faction of the Republican Party. He cited a poll that looked at all Republicans, not just those under age 35. "Another national survey, this one by the Pew Research Center, found that most -- 61 percent of non-tea party Republicans -- actually agree, actually agree there is 'solid evidence the earth is warming,' with a plurality saying it is 'mostly because of humans,'" Whitehouse said. "But the tea partiers are different," he added. "Seventy percent of tea partiers, contrarily, say there is 'No solid evidence' the earth is warming. And 41 percent of tea partiers assert that warming is 'Just not happening.'" "Unfortunately here in Congress," he said later in the speech, "the dark, heavy hand of the polluters is helping the tea party drive the Republican Party off the cliff." Was Whitehouse correctly characterizing the attitudes of Republicans in general and members of the tea party in particular? We went back to the Pew survey to look at those numbers. Pew conducted the poll of 1,504 adults from Oct. 9-13, 2013; 655 said they were Republicans or leaned Republican, and 304 of them identified with the tea party. Asked whether there is "solid evidence the earth is warming," 61 percent of non-tea party Republicans said yes; just 25 percent of tea party supporters said yes. (The margin of error for tea party numbers is plus or minus 6.5 percentage points and 6.2 percentage points for non-tea party Republicans. So Whitehouse quoted the findings accurately, within the margin of error. Whitehouse was also correct when he said that 70 percent of tea party members responding said there is no solid evidence that Earth is warming, with 41 percent saying it's just not happening. In contrast, a mere 13 percent of other Republicans said it's "just not happening." Yet just because Republicans think there's good evidence that Earth is warming doesn't mean they think human activity is responsible. That's an important point to consider when looking at whether members of the GOP support trying to do something to reverse the trend. Among non-tea party Republicans who thought the planet is warming, nearly 40 percent said it was due to natural patterns. Our ruling Sheldon Whitehouse said that "61 percent of non-tea party Republicans actually agree . . . there is 'solid evidence the earth is warming,' . . . [but] 70 percent of tea partiers, contrarily, say there is 'no solid evidence' the earth is warming." The senator was accurately quoting the results of the October Pew poll. But there's more to the story if you want to understand the ongoing opposition to climate change legislation by supporters of the GOP. While many non-tea party Republicans acknowledge that climate change is occurring, a majority (54 percent) still either deny climate change or think it is part of a natural cycle not caused by human activity. That's an important factor to consider, which Whitehouse omitted. For that reason, we rate his statement Mostly True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) | null | Sheldon Whitehouse | null | null | null | 2013-12-28T00:01:00 | 2013-12-17 | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)'] |
bove-00270 | Plastic Cabbages From China In India? No, It’s Wax Food Display Replicas In Japan | none | https://www.boomlive.in/plastic-cabbage-from-china-in-india-no-its-wax-food-display-replicas-in-japan/ | null | null | null | null | null | Plastic Cabbages From China In India? No, It’s Wax Food Display Replicas In Japan | May 11 2017 8:07 pm, Last Updated: Jun 16 2017 7:32 pm | null | ['Japan', 'India'] |
tron-01755 | Congress Has Passed The American With No Abilities Act | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/american-no-abilities-act/ | null | government | null | null | null | Congress Has Passed The American With No Abiliti es Act | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['United_States_Congress', 'United_States'] |
Subsets and Splits
SQL Console for pszemraj/multi_fc
Filters dataset entries containing 'law' in categories, tags, or reason fields, providing basic topic classification but offering limited analytical insight beyond simple keyword matching.
Healthcare Related Entries
Retrieves sample records containing healthcare-related keywords but doesn't provide meaningful analysis or patterns beyond basic filtering.