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goop-02099 | Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian In “War” Over Entourage? | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-entourage-kourtney/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian In “War” Over Entourage? | 5:43 pm, December 2, 2017 | null | ['Kim_Kardashian', 'Kourtney_Kardashian'] |
snes-01982 | Venomous king cobra snakes were found stashed in snack food containers. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/king-cobras-snack-containers/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Bethania Palma | null | Were King Cobras Shipped to Los Angeles in Snack Containers? | 31 July 2017 | null | ['None'] |
vogo-00011 | Statement: “The nonprofit Save San Diego Neighborhoods has estimated that over 6,000 properties in San Diego have been converted into permanent mini-hotels, which is disruptive to communities and needs to stop. Just ask anyone who lives next to one. Viewed in terms of affordable housing, these 6,000 homes are essentially removed from the rental or home purchasing market, directly contributing to the housing shortage,” Barbara Bry, a candidate for San Diego City Council District 1, wrote in a VOSD op-ed April 13. | determination: false | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/land-use/fact-check-vacation-rentals-making-housing-shortage-worse/ | Analysis: The advent of Airbnb and other home-sharing sites increased tourist access to once out-of-reach communities across San Diego. But not all local residents like their new, temporary neighbors. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: Are Vacation Rentals Making the Housing Shortage Worse? | May 18, 2016 | null | ['San_Diego'] |
pomt-10787 | With one stroke of his pen, President Bush has denied health insurance to 3.8 million kids who were due to get it under this bipartisan expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/15/joe-biden/biden-right-on-schip/ | Supporters of legislation to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program want to insure more children and they say the bill vetoed by President Bush would do just that. Right now, the SCHIP program is budgeted to spend $5 billion each year over the next five years. The legislation President Bush vetoed on Oct. 3, 2007 would add another $35 billion to the pot between the years 2008 and 2012. Families making 200 percent of the federal poverty line would be eligibile, and in some cases states could go beyond that to reach families with even higher incomes. Biden is using the statistic that most Democrats are using about the number of children who would become eligible under the SCHIP expansion. And, it's an estimate with solid backing, the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan research arm of Congress that calculates the cost of legislation. | null | Joe Biden | null | null | null | 2007-10-15T00:00:00 | 2007-10-15 | ['George_W._Bush'] |
vogo-00070 | Statement: “[David Alvarez] held big banks accountable, protecting people’s property values when banks foreclose on neighboring homes,” The San Diego Imperial Counties Labor Council, campaign flyer for David Alvarez for mayor. | determination: misleading | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/city-council/fact-check-is-david-alvarez-protecting-home-values/ | Analysis: This weekend, a young supporter of Councilman David Alvarez showed up at my home. Alvarez, of course, is running for mayor. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: Is David Alvarez Protecting Home Values? | December 17, 2013 | null | ['David_Alvarez_(politician)'] |
pomt-00641 | Georgia is on track for 1,200 traffic fatalities this year, a reversal of nine years of declines. | true | /georgia/statements/2015/may/20/russell-mcmurry/already-deadly-georgia-roads/ | PolitiFact Georgia was revving up for the summer driving season when a statement from the head of the Georgia Department of Transportation caught our attention. The state is on pace to see 1,200 people lose their lives on Georgia roads this year, Commissioner Russell McMurry said in news reports. If that happens, it would be a reversal after nine years of declines. Is that possible, even before the busy season of summer? We set aside our packing – we’ll decide on a bikini or one-piece later – and decided to check. As recently as January, PolitiFact Georgia confirmed that road fatalities appeared to be declining again in Georgia. But by April, when five Georgia Southern nursing students died in a pileup crash outside Savannah, scores of single-car crashes had sent the trend line in the other direction. As of Tuesday morning, 465 people had been killed in vehicle crashes in Georgia, state DOT data show. That’s 69 more deaths, or 17 percent more, than during the same period in 2014. That keeps Georgia with an average of 100 deaths a month, which would result in a year-end total of 1,200 deaths for the first time since 2011. It would also be the first year-to-year increase in nine years, as this chart shows: Year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Totals 1,505 1,298 1,250 1,236 1,199 1,189 1,169 So the GDOT commissioner is right on the overall numbers – a scary enough prospect. But to compare apples to apples, it’s worth calculating the rates of death as well. That is, would the current pace create the first year deaths don’t decline relative to the number of cars on the road, too? Yes, according to data from the state Department of Revenue. The number of vehicles registered annually is: Year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Totals* 8.64 8.57 8.59 8.71 8.92 8.32 8.80 9.12 *In millions, rounded In 2008, there were about 8.6 million registered vehicles in Georgia. That translates into 1.7 deaths for every 10,000 registered car or truck. In 2014, with nearly 8.8 million registered vehicles but fewer fatalities, the rate dropped to .1.3 deaths for every 10,000 vehicles. Should Georgia stay on pace to an even 1,200 deaths – improbable but an exact number to compare against the 9.1 million vehicles registered this year – the rate holds at 1.3 deaths. It’s not an increase, of course. But it’s not the steady decline in rate, as well as overall numbers, that transportation officials had hoped to see continue and that McMurry noted. And, the rate still means that more people are dying in traffic accidents at a time when the state has seen 95 percent compliance in seat belt usage – a large factor in reducing fatalities, said Teri Pope, a spokeswoman for the Northeast DOT region. DOT data shows that 62 percent of people killed in crashes are not wearing the simple safety devices. "A lot of these deaths are preventable, and that’s the heartbreaking part of it," Pope said. In other words, driver behavior is the, well, driver of the spike in roadway deaths. In an effort to counter that, the DOT has partnered with the Governor’s Office on Highway Safety and the state Department of Public Safety to launch the Drive Alert, Arrive Alive campaign. The effort focuses on education efforts about the dangers of driving drowsy or while using mobile phones – both considered distracted driving – and greater enforcement of seat belt usage and safe driving. In other words, PolitiFact Georgia expects to see lots of safety reminder signs and state troopers on the roads. You should, too. Our ruling Georgia DOT Commissioner Russell McMurry said in recent news reports that the state is on pace to see 1,200 people die in traffic accidents this year – all before the start of the busy summer driving season. Transportation numbers back up that claim. That data, and figures about the number of registered vehicles in the state, also confirm that would be the first time in nine years that Georgia has not seen a decline in those deaths. We rate the commissioner’s statement True. | null | Russell McMurry | null | null | null | 2015-05-20T00:00:00 | 2015-05-11 | ['None'] |
pose-01300 | Allow individuals to use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Contributions into HSAs should be tax-free and should be allowed to accumulate. | stalled | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1392/create-health-savings-account/ | null | trumpometer | Donald Trump | null | null | Create a health savings account | 2017-01-17T08:39:03 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-07201 | Says the Ohio Consumers’ Council office employs 74 lawyers and that the funding them is wasteful duplication. | pants on fire! | /ohio/statements/2011/jun/07/bill-batchelder/ohio-house-speaker-william-g-batchelder-says-consu/ | Absent a dramatic reversal, the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel will be classified a budget loser once lawmakers finalize the state’s two-year spending plan in the coming weeks. Republican Gov. John Kasich and Republican lawmakers have taken direct aim at the office, which is charged with protecting Ohio consumers in utility cases. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives supported Kasich’s proposal to cut 51 percent of the agency’s funding and added provisions to muzzle the office on issues related to natural gas markets and to eliminate the counsel’s call center, a repository for consumer complaints. National consumer groups sharply criticized the proposals, claiming they would prevent the office from fulfilling its mission. House Speaker William G. Batchelder, a Republican from Medina, was asked recently about the proposed cuts. Batchelder, echoing similar reasoning from Kasich, said the cuts are justified because the agency is overstaffed and because it plays a role similar to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Supporters of the consumers’ counsel say the office plays a watchdog role separate from the PUCO, which decides whether to approve rate increases the utilities propose. "There are 74, I believe, attorneys in that office," Batchelder said on the Ohio News Network’s "Capitol Square" on May 29. "Is that duplicative? Is it wasteful? And I think since the legislature was busy with an axe on everything else, it makes it pretty hard to sell having the duplication or having 74 lawyers. I don’t know how many the attorney general has." PolitiFact Ohio thought 74 seemed awfully high and decided to check out the speaker’s claim. It didn’t take long to conclude Batchelder was wrong. The agency has a total of 82 employees, according to a staff listing the OCC provided. Of those workers, only 14 are attorneys. Some workers are part-time, meaning the office’s staffing level equates to 72 full-time workers. "We currently have 12 attorneys on staff assigned to case work and two vacancies. In addition to the 12 staff attorneys, the Consumers’ Counsel Janine Migden-Ostrander and the Deputy Consumers’ Counsel Bruce Weston are also attorneys," OCC spokeswoman Beth Gianforcaro wrote in an e-mail. Other departments at the OCC include the analytical department, communications, operations and the call center. Migden-Ostrander has said a 51 percent budget cut – from $8.5 million to $4.1 million, as Kasich and the House proposed – would result in layoffs and the elimination of the call center. But cutting the agency’s budget won’t save the state money. The office is entirely funded from fees levied on the state’s utilities, not tax dollars. Spending less money on the OCC would only put money back in the utilities’ pockets. On May 31, the Senate unveiled its budget proposal, which reduced the OCC’s cut to 34 percent and removed the prohibition on the counsel talking about natural gas markets, which some called a "gag order." A spokesman for Batchelder said the speaker misspoke about the number of attorneys in the office. "He was trying to assert there were 74 employees at the office of the consumers’ counsel and not 74 attorneys," Batchelder spokesman Mike Dittoe said. "We apologize for the slip of the tongue there." We’ll allow that the speaker may have misspoke, rather than purposefully misused the statistics he cited. But he did repeat the inaccuracy, and wondered aloud how that number of lawyers compared with the staff of Attorney General Mike DeWine, Ohio’s top lawyer. And the number itself is so overstated that it ecllipses the total staffing level of the consumers’ counsel office. Furthermore, his complaint about duplication of services and wasteful spending when the state is "busy with an axe on everything" is misleading because funding for the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel doesn’t come from general tax revenues. Rather, it is raised through fees levied on utilities. PolitiFact Ohio has noted before that as speaker, Batchelder is one of the most influential politicians in the state and Ohioans listen to what he says. In this case, he made the claim on a television broadcast on a statewide news network. And in this case his statement is not just inaccurate, but also makes a ridiculous claim. When that happens, the Truth-O-Meter points to one rating: Pants on Fire. | null | William G. Batchelder | null | null | null | 2011-06-07T06:00:00 | 2011-05-29 | ['None'] |
vees-00082 | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Report claiming Ninoy Aquino reason for martial law declaration | false | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-report-claiming-ninoy-aquino-reason-ma | null | null | null | null | false news | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Report claiming Ninoy Aquino reason for martial law declaration FALSE | August 30, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00942 | Brad Pitt Wrote Tell-All Book About Angelina Jolie? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-tell-all-book/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Brad Pitt Wrote Tell-All Book About Angelina Jolie? | 5:35 pm, May 24, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00603 | Thanks to restrictive and anticompetitive ballot laws, candidates in November 2014 ran unopposed in nearly half of Wisconsin’s state representative races but in Michigan and Minnesota nearly all races had challengers. | half-true | /wisconsin/statements/2015/jun/03/andy-craig/ballot-laws-mean-only-half-assembly-races-are-cont/ | When state Assembly seats are on the ballot, Wisconsin voters have far fewer candidates to choose from than residents of neighboring Minnesota and Michigan, a group called Competitive Elections Wisconsin claims. In a May 11, 2015 letter to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), a leader of the group who is also an official with the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin took the claim a step further. "The problem is simple. For all offices in Wisconsin, the number of signatures required for nomination petitions is too high," Andy Craig wrote in the letter, which was released publicly. "These levels are set such that incumbents and candidates with party backing can meet them with ease, but upstart challengers are often scared off from even attempting it." The result, Craig contends, is that nearly half of the candidates elected to the Wisconsin Assembly in November 2014 were alone on the general-election ballot. By contrast, he continued, "just 9 out of 134 Representatives ran unopposed in Minnesota. In Michigan all 110 State Representative elections were contested by both major parties." "It is hard to believe that people in Wisconsin are that much more disinterested in deciding who their legislators are," Craig wrote. Craig’s letter caught our attention. Wisconsin historically has high voter turnout. Can our legislative races be so uncompetitive -- and is it due to unusually high hurdles to candidacy? The evidence When we asked Craig, a 2014 Libertarian candidate for secretary of state, to back up his claim, he pointed to the Ballotpedia and Ballot Access News websites. The websites include tallies of contested races and state-by-state comparisons of candidacy requirements. Regarding the contention that lower ballot access hurdles result in more candidates and fewer uncontested elections, Craig told us, "that seems self-evident, primarily in the comparison to other states that make it easier." He also cited his experiences recruiting and assisting candidate, some of whom missed making the ballot because they couldn't get enough signatures in time. We checked with election experts and compiled our own tallies of contested races from state election websites. Here’s what we found: Michigan and Minnesota did have at least two candidates facing off in the 2014 general elections in virtually all cases cited. And Wisconsin’s Assembly candidates were unopposed in nearly half the races. (It should be noted that in 17 state Senate races, Wisconsin had only two without multiple candidates. But the group’s claim focused on Assembly races, and even when including both senators and representatives there are still far more uncontested races in Wisconsin than in the other two states.) That gap between those states is longstanding, according to research by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. And mirroring a national trend, Wisconsin has seen the number of uncontested Assembly races double since the mid-1970s, Ballotpedia reported. Why is there a gap? Now to the "why" part. Craig points out, correctly, that Michigan and Minnesota allow candidates to pay $100 filing fees to secure a ballot spot if they don’t want to collect signatures from residents. Wisconsin does not allow the filing fee option. Elsewhere in the Midwest, two others states with a lot of uncontested 2014 races -- neighboring Illinois and Iowa -- similarly have no option to forgo signature collection. Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, said he thinks relatively more difficult ballot access rules explain the differences in those states. "Asking strangers for signatures is somewhat like hitch-hiking," Winger said. "It is psychologically difficult for most people to ask for favors from strangers." Winger is a widely quoted expert on ballot access laws and advocates for fairness in allowing minor party candidates on ballots. We heard a more skeptical view from Barry Burden, an expert in election administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As parties, the Democrats and Republicans quality for ballot lines pretty easily in all three states, and there is little doubt that any of them would lose their status as major parties, Burden said. He added that it can be harder for minor party candidates to get on ballots. But the claim rests on what individuals have to do to get on ballots. The fee option might attract more candidates, Burden said, because it is low and, since it can be paid at the last moment, requires little organization or planning. But the signature requirements are also low, he said. That requirement is lower in Wisconsin (200 for Assembly candidates) than Minnesota (500) for major party candidates. In Michigan, the rule is 200 for major party candidates and 600 for independents. "Any candidate who has at least a skeletal organization or a little free time should be able to scoop up a couple hundred signatures without much trouble," Burden said. Burden and others suggest that other factors are at play. For the last two election cycles in Wisconsin, the redrawing of legislative district lines has helped to squelch competition, Burden said. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert reported in "Dividing Lines", that redistricting and the ultra-polarized geography of southeastern Wisconsin mean that "there are practically no competitive seats in the most populous part of this competitive swing state." Burden said party strategy differences can determine whether parties field candidates in "lost causes" areas. In Minnesota, Burden noted, public funding of elections there is more likely to enhance competition by luring in candidates who might otherwise believe they would be unable to compete financially. In Michigan, some have suggested that the state’s term limits enhance competition. Burden disagreed, saying that by creating automatic openings every six to eight years, term limits actually reduce competition in other years. Strong candidates, he said, typically wait to run until the incumbent is forced from office. Our rating Andy Craig of Competitive Elections Wisconsin claimed: "Thanks to restrictive and anticompetitive ballot laws," candidates in November 2014 ran unopposed in nearly half of Wisconsin’s state legislative races but in Michigan and Minnesota were challenged in nearly all races. There’s no dispute that Wisconsin dramatically lags those states in competitive races, and ballot access rule differences are one possible factor in that gap. But it’s clear that other factors are at play as well. We rate his claim Half True. | null | Andy Craig | null | null | null | 2015-06-03T05:00:00 | 2015-05-11 | ['Minnesota', 'Michigan', 'Wisconsin'] |
goop-02648 | Kanye West Did Have “Relationship” With “Transgender Performer” Amanda Lepor | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kanye-west-no-relationship-transgender-performer-amanda-lepore/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kanye West Did NOT Have “Relationship” With “Transgender Performer” Amanda Lepore | 4:15 pm, July 21, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
tron-03022 | Cornell Law Library: Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server Disqualifies Her for Presidency | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/cornell-law-library-hillary-clintons-private-email-server-disqualifies-her-for-presidency/ | null | politics | null | null | ['2016 election', 'dnc', 'hillary clinton'] | Cornell Law Library: Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server Disqualifies Her for Presidency | Sep 2, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pose-01180 | Requiring schools to declare each school's enrollment compared to its capacity will better inform parents and taxpayers. | promise broken | https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/abbott-o-meter/promise/1270/require-school-districts-list-capacity-each-school/ | null | abbott-o-meter | Greg Abbott | null | null | Require school districts to list the capacity of each school compared to its enrollment | 2018-06-18T18:45:11 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01886 | Robert Pattinson, Emma Watson Did “Go Public” As “New Couple” At 2018 Golden Globes, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/robert-pattinson-golden-globes-emma-watson-dating-new-couple/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Robert Pattinson, Emma Watson Did NOT “Go Public” As “New Couple” At 2018 Golden Globes, Despite Report | 10:53 am, January 8, 2018 | null | ['Golden_Globe_Award', 'Robert_Pattinson'] |
hoer-01241 | Brad Pitt is Dead | fake news | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/brad-pitt-is-not-dead-clicking-death-post-opens-scam-websites/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Brad Pitt is NOT Dead Clicking Death Post Opens Scam Websites | September 22, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-04698 | Seven presidents before (Barack Obama) -- Republicans and Democrats -- tried to expand health care to all Americans. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/05/julian-castro/julian-castro-says-seven-presidents-barack-obama-s/ | President Barack Obama’s health care law has been one of the most polarizing aspects of his presidency, with Republicans criticizing it at every turn. But the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, didn’t run from it. He applauded Obama for pursuing expanded health care -- and succeeding where his predecessors had failed. "Seven presidents before him -- Republicans and Democrats -- tried to expand health care to all Americans," Castro said. "President Obama got it done." We wondered whether Castro’s history was correct. So we checked with a variety of public policy and health care historians and found that Castro’s in the ballpark -- but that a lot of caveats are in order. Let’s start with the presidents who almost certainly fit Castro’s definition of having "tried to expand health care to all Americans." • Harry Truman. On Nov. 19, 1945, Truman wrote a message to Congress saying that "the health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility." According to the Truman Library, "the most controversial aspect of the plan was the proposed national health insurance plan." It called for "the creation of a national health insurance fund to be run by the federal government. This fund would be open to all Americans, but would remain optional. Participants would pay monthly fees into the plan, which would cover the cost of any and all medical expenses that arose in a time of need. The government would pay for the cost of services rendered by any doctor who chose to join the program." The American Medical Association attacked the plan, characterizing the bill as "socialized medicine." Truman ultimately abandoned the effort after the outbreak of the Korean War • Richard Nixon. In 1971 and 1974, Nixon offered separate proposals to expand health insurance to all, or nearly all, Americans. Generally speaking, they involved employer mandates to provide health insurance, supplemented by subsidies for poorer Americans. "I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health-insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses," he said in 1974. The 1974 effort gained some traction in Congress but faltered as Nixon became consumed by scandal. "Had it not been for his destruction as a result of the Watergate affair, legislation might well have passed during his presidency," said Princeton University health care historian Paul Starr, the author of Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform. • Bill Clinton. In 1993 and 1994, Clinton -- in a process spearheaded by First Lady Hillary Clinton -- sought to pass a major overhaul of the health care system that would have aimed for universal coverage. Even though the Democrats controlled Congress at the time, the plan did not win enactment. So that’s an easy three. It isn’t much of a stretch to get a fourth: • Lyndon Johnson. Technically, Johnson never sought full universal health care. But it seems churlish to deny inclusion on this list to the man who signed Medicare and Medicaid into law. They aren’t universal care for everybody, but they are universal care for large subsets of the population. You can add a few more if you lower the bar a bit. • John F. Kennedy. Kennedy voiced strong support for legislation that would ultimately become Medicare. On May 20, 1962, he held a televised rally to push the proposal at a packed Madison Square Garden in New York City. (The American Journal of Public Health later noted that hours later, the AMA rented the empty hall to film a rebuttal by its president, without showing the empty seats.) But he died before the legislation could come to fruition.) • Gerald Ford. Ford endorsed Nixon’s second proposal, but it didn’t get far on his brief watch. • Jimmy Carter. Carter proposed "a step-by-step plan to achieve universal coverage," Starr said. "It came relatively late in his first term, and it was too weak to satisfy (Democratic Sen.) Ted Kennedy and many other Democrats." Carter’s efforts were "halfhearted," said Brown University political scientist James Morone, co-author of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office from Roosevelt to Bush. You can actually add a couple more if you bend Castro’s definition even further. • Theodore Roosevelt. He did endorse the idea of expanding health insurance to all, but only as as a presidential candidate for the Bull Moose Party in 1912, not during his earlier term in the White House. • Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his State of the Union address in 1943, Roosevelt called for a social insurance system that would extend "from the cradle to the grave," and he was preparing a program and a speech on national health insurance at the time of his death. In the midst of World War II, Roosevelt never pursued it in earnest, but Truman took up the mantle instead • Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower reacted to Democratic proposals for single-payer health care by proposing an expansion of care within the model of private-sector medicine. Eisenhower’s approach was to make permanent the tax break for employer-sponsored health coverage (which remains today) in order to encourage as many Americans as possible to get covered through their workplace. For those who were not employed, Eisenhower proposed that the government "reinsure" private insurance companies to encourage them to add less profitable populations to their coverage rolls. While Morone calls the Eisenhower plan relatively "timid," it nonetheless sparked the AMA’s opposition, which helped kill it in Congress. The remaining Republican presidents did act to expand health coverage in certain ways, but none of our experts thought they met Castro’s definition of pushing for universal health care. • Ronald Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospitals to serve patients in urgent need, and the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, or COBRA, which allows individuals to keep paying for coverage if they lose their insurance. In addition, with almost no support from his own cabinet, Reagan added catastrophic care to Medicare toward the end of his presidency, though the provision was later repealed. • George H.W. Bush, worried about the Democrats getting traction with health care in a 1991 Senate special election, sent a plan to congress. "Bush didn't like the issue, but he had a really good health team that put together a pretty good republican proposal," Morone said. • George W. Bush pushed for and signed the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drug coverage. Putting it all together, "you could cut the number to five or raise it to eight depending on how strictly you want to interpret Castro’s words," Starr said. Our ruling Castro said that "seven presidents before (Obama) -- Republicans and Democrats -- tried to expand health care to all Americans." It’s a slam dunk getting to three or four presidents, and it’s possible to reach seven presidents, but to do that requires a looser interpretation of expanding coverage "to all Americans." On balance, we rate the statement Mostly True. | null | Julián Castro | null | null | null | 2012-09-05T17:07:30 | 2012-09-04 | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Barack_Obama', 'United_States'] |
goop-00690 | Prince Harry Leaving Royal Family For Meghan Markle? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/prince-harry-meghan-markle-leave-royal-family-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Prince Harry Leaving Royal Family For Meghan Markle? | 12:36 pm, July 5, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-07429 | Salaries for Virginia’s teachers are below the national average. | true | /virginia/statements/2011/apr/25/kitty-boitnott/education-association-president-says-virginia-teac/ | The Virginia Education Association has complained for decades that salaries for state teachers are below the national average. Kitty Boitnott, president of the 60,000-member organization, made the claim during an April 20 interview with WVTF Public Radio in Roanoke about merit pay for educators. "The General Assembly has offered numerous times to get our teachers into the national average, and we’re certainly nowhere near that, and yet now we’re going to offer limited incentives to just a handful of people," Boitnott said. "That doesn’t make sense to me." We examined her claim that state teachers are paid below the national average. Carol Donohue, the assistant director of government relations for the Virginia Education Association, said Boitnott’s information comes from a December 2010 report from the National Education Association. The report shows that the average 2010-2011 salary for classroom teachers in Virginia was $51,559. That’s about 9 percent lower than the average national public teacher salary of $56,069, according to the report. Virginia had plenty of company in paying its teachers below the national average. In addition to the Old Dominion, 34 other states had teacher salaries trailing the average, according to the NEA report. Virginia’s average pay for teachers ranked 23rd-highest among states. The top average state-wide salary was $72,708 in New York, while the lowest was $35,201 in South Dakota. So in raw dollars, Virginia’s average teacher salary ranks near the middle of states. The amount of money it takes to live comfortably in Virginia is going to be different than what it takes in New York or South Dakota. So we looked at where Virginia ranks in cost of living. Virginia was the 26th most expensive state to live in during the last quarter of 2010, according to a report by the Missouri Department of Economic Development. In other words, Virginia ranks in the middle of state both in teacher salaries and cost of living. The VEA has long argued that Virginia is wealthy and can afford to pay teachers better than most states. Higher salaries, it argues, would help Virginia recruit and retain the best instructors. We looked at Virginia’s ability to pay more, turning to data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. In 2010,Virginia’s per capita income was $44,762 -- the seventh highest among the states. So it’s a logical argument that Virginia has greater ability than most states to pay teachers more. Virginians have higher salaries than most Americans. Their cost of living, meanwhile, ranks in the middle of states. But we digress. Boitnott said Virginia pays its teachers below the national average and we owe you a rating on that. Her statement is True. | null | Kitty Boitnott | null | null | null | 2011-04-25T06:00:00 | 2011-04-20 | ['None'] |
snes-06273 | A man was killed by an exploding lava lamp. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lava-lamp-death/ | null | Horrors | null | Snopes Staff | null | Was a Man Killed by an Exploding Lava Lamp? | 12 May 2008 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-13891 | Says Gov. Doug Ducey wants to use "taxpayer dollars to increase the salaries of private prison guards." | mostly true | /arizona/statements/2016/jun/29/arizona-house-democrats/arizonas-house-democrats-claim-governor-wants-incr/ | Arizona House Democrats are questioning the priorities of their Republican counterparts, balking at a Department of Corrections plan to buy a $137 million privately run prison in Kingman. The Democrats say the plan, which was developed by the governor’s office, the corrections department and the Department of Administration, is bad for taxpayers. "Gov. (Doug) Ducey wants to use public, taxpayer dollars to increase the salaries of private prison guards," the Democrats wrote in a June 20 blog post. "Guards employed by a multi-billion dollar company that made nearly $140 million in profits last year." While the state wants to purchase the prison, they want a private company -- GEO Group -- to continue to manage it. Does the sale include a raise for the private corrections workers? Acronym soup The history of the Kingman prison is a bit complicated, and filled with companies with strange names, so we’ll take it slow. The prison was opened in August 2004 as part of a plan by Gov. Janet Napolitano to build more inmate beds using the private sector. As part of the original agreement, the state was scheduled to pay off the construction of the facility over 20 years and then take ownership. Until the state’s debt was paid off, a non-profit, Mohave Prison LLC, was created to own the prison. Management and Training Corporation, a Utah-based private prison operator, was originally contracted to manage Kingman. However, after multiple inmate riots in July 2015, the state fired MTC, and GEO Group assumed their contract. GEO Group is one of the largest private prison operators in the country. The Florida-based company manages more than 60 correctional facilities nationwide. Now Ducey and others in the state want to buy the Kingman prison early as part of what they say is a cost-saving measure. According to the proposal, the state owning the prison would save taxpayers more than $70 million and reduce the per-prisoner cost from $60.10 to $40.37 a day — a savings of more than 30 percent. Buying the prison nine years early would allow the state to refinance and reduce the amount of interest paid on the facility, the state says. The plan was approved by the state Legislature for fiscal year 2017 and is expected to be implemented sometime in the "next few months," according to Department of Corrections spokesman Andrew Wilder. Plan would include raises If the purchase goes through as expected, the state would officially own the prison, but it would still be managed by the GEO Group. As part of the plan, the state would offer $2 million to increase the salaries of the GEO Group workers. Keely Varvel, chief of staff for the Arizona House Democrats, pointed us to page 18 of the proposed purchase plan, which says that $2 million is intended "to increase starting salaries for correctional officers and improve retention." But there’s a big caveat: The $2 million in annual expenses would be offset by the $8 million in annual savings the state would incur for buying the prison. Pablo Paez, a spokesman for the GEO Group, called the Democrats’ claim an "unfair characterization." He said the proposal allows for "significant savings for taxpayers overall," while providing additional resources for staff wages. In essence, Paez said, Democrats are focusing on one side of the ledger -- money spent increasing salaries -- while ignoring the larger cost savings. The average salary for a state correctional officer is $36,800. Under this plan, Kingman correctional officers would see a 13 percent raise, from $29,453 to an average salary of $33,300. That’s still less than the state average and well under the national average of $45,320, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Daniel Scarpinato, a spokesman with Ducey’s office, said the overall plan, besides saving money, allows the state to "invest in ensuring public safety." Our ruling Arizona House Democrats said, "Gov. Ducey wants to use public, taxpayer dollars to increase the salaries of private prison guards." That’s literally accurate. The state contracts with GEO Group to manage the Kingman prison in question, but GEO pays its correctional officers. And if the state purchases Kingman, it would use $2 million for raises for the prison staff. The major caveat is those raises would be more-than-offset by money the state says it will save with the purchase of the Kingman facility. We rate the claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b727fd22-c36b-4f91-ad5f-87aa110b8c1a | null | Arizona House Democrats | null | null | null | 2016-06-29T12:00:00 | 2016-06-20 | ['None'] |
pomt-06150 | Says it cost Massachusetts taxpayers $100,000 when Mitt Romney and his staff purchased computer hard drives. | false | /new-hampshire/statements/2011/dec/19/democratic-national-committee/dnc-says-mitt-romney-and-staff-cost-massachusetts-/ | For some opponents, the issue of electronic records during Mitt Romney’s time as Massachusetts governor has become the $100,000 question. In an advertisement released earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee accused members of the Romney administration of costing taxpayers $100,000 when they purchased their computer hard drives and wiped them clean as they left office in 2006. "When Mitt Romney left the Massachusetts governor's office, e-mails were deleted, servers wiped clean and computer hard drives went out the door with his top aides," the narrator reads in the ad, released December 6, 2011. "His and his staff's efforts cost taxpayers $100,000. All this raises one important question, what is Mitt Romney hiding?" The records issue has been well documented in recent months. Romney acknowledged in November that staff members purchased their computer hard drives as they left office. He maintained his staff did not break the law, and last month PolitiFact checked his claim that if they had turned over their records to the following administration, they would have been first. We rated the claim True. But did the Romney administration’s actions really cost taxpayers $100,000? The computer hard drives themselves didn’t cost nearly that much, according to reports. The Boston Globe, which first broke the records story last month, reported that 11 aides purchased their hard drives at the time, paying $65 dollars each for a total of $715. The $65 figure equaled both the price of a new hard drive and the installation costs, and staff members purchased the hard drives with their own money, according to Terry Dolan, who served as director of administration for six governors, including Romney, between 1985 and 2008. "That was effectively at no cost to the Commonwealth," Dolan said Thursday. "They paid the cost of a replacement hard drive. They didn’t buy the monitor, the speakers, the whole nine yards." The costs don’t end there, however. Around the time Romney aides purchased the hard drives in late 2006, his administration agreed to a new lease with their computer provider, Ontario Investments, Inc., of New York. The governor’s office was 18 months into a three-year, $108,000 lease, the first ever for the governor’s office, which had previously purchased all its computers, Dolan said. But office officials opted out of that agreement in December 2006 in favor of a new three-year, $205,900 contract to upgrade the technology. The new lease covered the same 115 computers as the original agreement, according to the contract, but added new bells and whistles. "They were 18-month old computers that were functional," Dolan said. "We got bigger screens. … I'm not sure (the old computers) had CD drives in them at that time." By a simple comparison, the two different lease documents show that the governor’s office paid about $97,000 more for the second lease than for the original. But, does this mean it cost taxpayers that much? Not so fast, Dolan says. Eighteen months remained on the original lease when administration officials initiated the new, more expensive agreement, according to the lease documents. This means administration officials would have had to renew, renegotiate or search for a new contract by June 2008, resulting in additional costs. To keep calculations even, then, you need to measure the difference between the two agreements through June 2008, when the original was set to expire. The original $108,000 lease, initially expected to run from June 2005 to June 2008, averaged a monthly cost of $3,000, while the second, which ran from December 2006 to December 2009, averaged $5,719 per month. The difference between the two monthly charges is $2,719, and multiplied by the 18 months remaining on the original lease equals a total difference of $48,942 -- about half of the DNC’s $100,000 figure, a figure first reported December 6 by Reuters. One further note: The DNC ad indicates that Romney’s staff scrapped the original computer lease because they no longer contained hard drives, which is not true, according to Dolan, Romney’s director of administration. Administration officials had already been working on the new lease when the staff members bought the hard drives, she said Thursday. "The decision was made to replace all the computers, and then inquiries were made (about buying the hard drives)," Dolan said. "To my recollection, it was something like, ‘Well, as long as the computers are going back … maybe we can keep the hard drives.’" Romney’s campaign staff did not return requests for comment. Our ruling: The total difference between the original lease and the second computer contract signed by the Romney administration was about $97,000, close to the $100,000 mentioned in the DNC ad. But this is not an apples to apples comparison. Rather, the total difference in cost passed on to taxpayers during the term of the first lease was about $49,000 -- not quite half of the DNC total. Further, administration officials had already been looking into a new computer lease when the aides purchased the hard drives, so the lease costs are not a direct result of the sale of the hard drives, as the DNC alleges. We rate the claim False. | null | Democratic National Committee | null | null | null | 2011-12-19T12:43:33 | 2011-12-06 | ['Massachusetts', 'Mitt_Romney'] |
snes-04220 | An 86-year-old woman's severely painful and curved back was cured by her practicing yoga for a month. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/yoga-cured-back-injury/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Bethania Palma | null | Yoga Cured an Elderly Woman’s Curved and Painful Back? | 17 August 2016 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01826 | Robert Pattinson “Crushing On” Margot Robbie, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/robert-pattinson-margot-robbie-crush/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Robert Pattinson NOT “Crushing On” Margot Robbie, Despite Claim | 4:19 pm, January 15, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14240 | Says Hillary Clinton supported and continues to "support fracking." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/13/bernie-sanders/does-hillary-clinton-support-fracking/ | Looking to out-green Hillary Clinton in New York, Bernie Sanders charged that Clinton’s position on fracking was at odds with voters. New Yorkers ended the practice in the state in 2014, and Sanders called for a nationwide ban during an April 11 rally in Binghamton. Clinton, in contrast, remains on the side of the frackers, Sanders said on NBC’s Meet the Press, when he launched a multipart attack on Clinton’s positions on fracking, trade and campaign finance. "Well, when you vote for virtually every trade agreement that has cost the workers of this country millions of jobs, when you support and continue to support fracking, despite the crisis that we have in terms of clean water," he said April 10, "and essentially, when you have a super PAC that is raising tens of millions of dollars from every special interest out there, including $15 million from Wall Street, the American people do not believe that that is the kind of president that we need to make the changes in America to protect the working families of this country." Was Sanders telling the fracking truth? (We examined Clinton’s support for free trade in a separate fact-check.) While Clinton’s past support of fracking is well documented, her current position leaves more wiggle room than Sanders’ statement suggests. Shale promoted 'round the world To refresh, fracking or hydraulic fracturing means producers are blasting pressurized water, sand and chemicals into shale rock miles underground to extract natural gas. The Environmental Protection Agency considers shale gas to be clean energy. Some environmentalists, though, are doubtful that it’s that much better than coal or oil, given reports that fracking can cause methane leaks (a greenhouse gas that’s much more potent than carbon dioxide) and earthquakes and set water ablaze. Clinton clearly supported the practice as secretary of state. Her special envoy for international energy affairs launched the Global Shale Gas Initiative encouraging other countries to explore shale as an energy source. An in-depth investigation by progressive magazine Mother Jones said that Clinton’s support of fracking was "part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel." We found instances of Clinton and the State Department talking up fracking to Latin America, the European Union, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Pakistan, China and India. "The United States will promote the use of shale gas. Now, I know that in some places is controversial. But natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel available for power generation today, and a number of countries in the Americas may have shale gas resources," Clinton said in a 2009 speech to the Inter-American Development Bank. After Clinton left the State Department in 2013, she continued to support fracking but repeatedly called for "smart regulations" in speeches and in her book, Hard Choices. Fracking with nuance in 2016 Compared with Sanders’ unequivocal opposition and the Republicans’ strong support, Clinton has a more complicated answer when it comes to fracking. Essentially, she supports it as long as there’s environmental oversight and no local opposition. Here’s how Clinton detailed her position during the March 6 debate in Flint, Michigan: "I don’t support it when any locality or any state is against it, No. 1. I don’t support it when the release of methane or contamination of water is present. I don’t support it — No. 3 — unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using. So by the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place. And I think that’s the best approach, because right now, there are places where fracking is going on that are not sufficiently regulated." ("My answer is a lot shorter," responded Sanders. "No, I do not support fracking.") Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin referred us to Clinton’s plan "to address the fracking-related risks people are concerned about." "This is particularly important given that the federal government doesn’t get to say where fracking occurs and where it doesn’t, but can put new safeguards in place," Schwerin said. Katie Brown of Energy in Depth, the research and education arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, told PolitiFact that Sanders’ position to ban all fracking is outside the mainstream. "Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, joins Democrats across the county such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, and California Gov. Jerry Brown, and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (just to name a few), who have all touted strong regulations by the states and supported fracking for its environmental and economic benefits," Brown said. Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ policy director, referred us to a Reuters article, in which supporters of fracking cast Clinton’s comments as campaign rhetoric and opponents urged her to cut the caveats and ban it outright. But what exactly would Clinton’s caveats mean for frackers? A portrait of regulated extraction Clinton’s three conditions would uphold existing bans and add new ones to the mix. But they wouldn’t amount to a universal ban. The first condition leaves local and state bans in place, such as those in Vermont, New York and a few dozen cities and counties across America. Her second condition would add dozens of sites that have methane emissions or water contamination. Natural gas is primarily methane, so we’ll assume Clinton is talking about "fugitive emissions" or leaks. Estimates for fugitive emissions, typically expressed as a percentage of the total production, vary widely. A round up of studies by watchdog blog Carbon Brief found estimates ranging from 0.6 to 9 percent (the threshold for being cleaner than coal is 3.2 percent). Various industry and independent research has indicated that a good chunk of leaks come from a small number of "super-emitters" (roughly one in 25 facilities, according to a 2015 Colorado State University study). Clinton could ostensibly shut down these methane spewers, which include, for example, about 50 production sites in northern Texas and four lift wells in the Gulf Coast. Water contamination is not systemic, according to a controversial 2015 EPA study, which nonetheless identified 151 cases of fracking fluid spills in 11 states from 2006 to 2012. Robert Howarth, a noted critic of fracking and biogeochemist at Cornell University, estimates at least 4 percent of production wells pollute water, but contends that the problem is widespread given the sheer number of wells. Under Clinton’s condition, fracking could be banned in, for example, at least 25 counties in Pennsylvania and at least 12 counties in Colorado, if not in all 11 states with noted cases of spills. Frackers are already meeting Clinton’s third condition, to an extent. At least 26 states have some rules on chemical disclosure on the books, though most allow frackers to protect "trade secrets," according to the American Chemical Society. In addition, the Obama administration now requires drillers on federal and tribal lands to report the composition of their fracking fluid to FracFocus, an industry-backed registry of more than 100,000 wells across America. (Here’s an example.) Environmentalists contend that these rules are not nearly enough. Howarth told PolitiFact that chemical additives are "a small part of the problem." "The frack return fluids are full of really nasty materials in addition to the additives, and the precise nature of this toxic brew is seldom known," he said. "Clinton's focus on just the additives is misguided." That being said, Clinton’s condition could ban fracking in Virginia and Missouri, two states with fracking activity but no disclosure rules in place at the time of this report. Here’s a map that shows how Clinton’s conditions could affect fracking in America: Our ruling Sanders said that Clinton supported and continues "to support fracking." As secretary of state, Clinton supported and promoted fracking around the world. As a 2016 candidate, her support comes with conditions such as local choice, stronger environmental regulation and chemicals. Sanders’ claim is accurate but needs additional information. We rate it Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/dd01d743-dd9a-410f-9333-f165f160d951 | null | Bernie Sanders | null | null | null | 2016-04-13T15:01:16 | 2016-04-10 | ['None'] |
tron-01182 | Justice Roberts Signed Off on Obama’s Removal for Treason | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/roberts-sign-off/ | null | crime-police | null | null | null | Justice Roberts Signed Off on Obama’s Removal for Treason | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
tron-00262 | ISIS Fighter Converts to Christianity After Allah Rejected Him | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/isis-fighter-converts-to-christianity-after-allah-rejected-him/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | ISIS Fighter Converts to Christianity After Allah Rejected Him | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pose-00044 | When companies fund their pensions, many do not disclose their investments with the employee's pension dollars. This lack of transparency can make it easier for fund managers to make imprudent or even fraudulent investment decisions. Obama will ensure that all employees who have company pensions receive annual disclosures about their pension fund's investments, including full details about which projects have been invested in, the performance of those investments and appropriate details about probable future investments strategies. | promise broken | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/47/require-full-disclosure-of-company-pension-investm/ | null | obameter | Barack Obama | null | null | Require full disclosure of company pension investments to employees | 2010-01-07T13:26:46 | null | ['Barack_Obama'] |
pomt-04621 | Sen. Bob Menendez voted to enact a new tax on the sale of homes of 3.8%. | pants on fire! | /new-jersey/statements/2012/sep/17/menendez-facts/bloggers-say-bob-menendez-voted-new-38-tax-sale-ho/ | A debunked claim making the rounds on the chain e-mail circuit for years has been revitalized to attack a New Jersey Democrat. A blog called "Menendez Facts" falls far short of the truth in a post claiming U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez "voted to enact a new tax on the sale of homes of 3.8%." "In 2010 Sen. Bob Menendez voted to enact a brand-new tax on the sale of homes. Sen. Bob Menendez voted for this during one of the most horrific housing markets in recent history. When families are struggling to sell their homes, as housing prices plunge Sen. Bob Menendez voted to take even more money from families struggling to sell their homes," the Sept. 4 blog post says. The post includes a chart that lists how much this new tax would cost homeowners. Sell your home for $200,000? The chart claims you would pay $7,600 in taxes. Sell your home for $500,000? That’ll cost you $19,000 in taxes, according to the chart. But that’s simply false. Menendez Facts acknowledged in an e-mail that we were fact-checking this claim and said they would update their blog post this week, but did not say how. Versions of this home sales tax claim have been checked by PolitiFact and other nonpartisan fact-checking groups several times before. The claim has been roundly declared as false and PolitiFact has rated it Pants on Fire. Such claims stem from a provision included in the 2010 national health care overhaul. On March 25, 2010, the Senate passed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which was the second part of the health care bill. Menendez, who is running for re-election in November, voted in favor of that bill, which included a new tax on investment income for wealthy individuals that goes into effect in 2013. The law created a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for individuals who have an adjusted gross income of more than $200,000 or couples with an adjusted gross income of more than $250,000. That investment income could include profits from real estate transactions. PolitiFact National noted in a similar fact-check in July, that those high-income earners represent less than 5 percent of all taxpayers. Individuals or couples who make less than those income thresholds would not be subject to the tax. But even if a couple earned more than those thresholds, the tax only applies to profits from the sale of a home, not the sales price itself, as the blog post claims. Also, if the home being sold is your primary residence, the first $250,000 in profits for an individual, or the first $500,000 in profits for a couple, is excluded from the tax. And for some perspective, the National Association of Realtors reported that the national median existing-home price in July was $187,300. No homeowner could make $250,000 in profit on the sale of that home and, therefore, would not pay the 3.8 percent tax. Paul Brubaker, Menendez’s campaign communications director, said in an e-mail, "Senator Menendez worked on behalf of New Jersey’s middle class families, and all Americans, to help provide them access to quality, affordable health care by helping to make the Affordable Care Act the law of the land. It is sad that, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the law, some falsehoods about the law persist – evidently with the help of the MenendezFacts.com web site." Our ruling A blog called Menendez Facts claimed that "Sen. Bob Menendez voted to enact a new tax on the sale of homes of 3.8%." That’s a distortion of the truth. Menendez voted in favor of a bill tied to the health care law that created a tax on investment income for high-income earners. Though that investment income could include profits from real estate transactions, it is not a tax on the sales price of a home and it would not impact the vast majority of Americans. Wealthy individuals who sell their home for a large profit may be subject to the tax, but the blog does not make that clear and suggests the tax applies to the sales price of homes, regardless of an individual’s income. So again we set this ridiculous claim ablaze: Pants on Fire! To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com. | null | Menendez Facts | null | null | null | 2012-09-17T07:30:00 | 2012-09-04 | ['None'] |
pomt-04572 | College tuition "costs have risen by 25 percent under the Democrats." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/25/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-spanish-language-ad-says-college-costs/ | In a recent Spanish-language television ad, Mitt Romney criticizes President Barack Obama’s record on higher education. A translation provided by the campaign has the narrator saying, "Four years ago, Hispanics hoped Democrats would get an ‘A’ in improving our education. The reality is that more than 75 percent of the population thinks that college is not affordable. Tuition costs have increased 25 percent under Obama and the Democrats, and total student debt has reached a trillion dollars." After a clip of Obama saying he wants to be held accountable on education, the narrator continues in Spanish, "When it comes to education, Obama and the Democrats have failed our kids." We first checked with the Romney campaign, which said the figure came from the College Board, which produces an annual study of college costs. The College Board found that for the school-year 2008-2009, the average published tuition and fees for in-state students at public four-year colleges and universities was $6,585. By the 2011-2012 school year, it stood at $8,244. That’s an increase of slightly over 25 percent. So the claim has a grain of statistical truth. But there are several other issues to consider. The first one has to do with the translation. The exact words the narrator says are, "Los costos han subido 25 por ciento por los Demócratas," while the screen says, "25% costos de universidad," with a large arrow pointing upward. While it’s clear that the ad is saying that "costs have risen by 25 percent under the Democrats," it’s less clear whether the "costs" in question are tuition alone or tuition plus room and board. The distinction makes a difference. Tuition and fees plus room and board rose from $14,333 to $17,131 over the same period. That’s just under a 20 percent increase, short of the 25 percent claimed in the ad. Because of the uncertainty over the translation, we won’t count this as a strike against the ad’s accuracy. But other issues are more problematic: • The tuition figure is only for in-state students at public universities. The College Board also offered data for other types of schools, and each was smaller than 25 percent. Here's how much tuition and fees increased for other situations: * Public, four-year institutions -- up 19 percent. * Public, two-year colleges -- up 23 percent * Private, four-year institutions -- up 13 percent; * For-profit institutions -- up 11 percent. So, the Romney campaign was cherry-picking by using the 25 percent figure. • The 25 percent figure doesn’t adjust for inflation. The College Board data cited in the ad does not adjust for inflation. But Department of Education statistics do. According to the Education Department, inflation-adjusted costs (tuition, room and board) for all institutions were $17,257 in 2008-2009 and $18,133 in 2010-2011. That’s a 5 percent increase over two years or, extrapolating out to 2011-2012, an increase of between 7 percent and 8 percent over the same time period that the ad is talking about. Certain sectors rose faster than others -- public, four-year institutions rose by 12 percent once you extrapolate out to the full period. But even this increase is well below 25 percent. • The ad uses "published" rates, not "net costs." Universities’ published rates are like the sticker prices on cars. They are the prices before they are offset by financial aid. To students and parents, it’s actually the net cost that matters most. Due in part to financial aid programs and tax credits in Obama’s economic stimulus package, the net cost for the average student at a private, four-year institution has actually declined since 2008-2009, from $13,620 to $12,970 -- a drop of 5 percent. At public, four-year institutions, in-state students saw the net price rise from $2,310 to $2,490, an increase of 8 percent -- less than the 25 percent jump cited in the ad. • Who gets the blame for rising college costs? The escalating cost of college is nothing new -- it’s been going on for years. In fact, if you look at the trends in the inflation-adjusted Education Department data for all institutions, the rates of growth under Obama -- 2.2 percent and 2.7 percent in the years where data is available -- are lower than the rates of increase in six of the preceding eight years under President George W. Bush. Of course, the president of the United States doesn’t set college prices. Who does? A combination of the marketplace, private universities and the state-government officials such as governors and legislatures who set state subsidies for public institutions. And with the Republicans controlling a significant majority of governorships and state legislatures since 2010, as well as a sizable minority of governorships and legislatures prior to 2010, the GOP bears some responsibility as well. And as we’ve noted, the one area in which Obama had a degree of control over -- federal aid to students -- his actions have helped bring down the net cost of college. Our ruling The ad claims that "costs have risen by 25 percent under the Democrats." It’s true that the published costs for one type of college and one type of student have risen by 25 percent since Obama took office, but other data shows a smaller rise for tuition and fees, particularly when inflation is taken into account. Even for the college costs that have risen, the Romney campaign does not provide sufficient proof to link that rise to Obama. Governors and legislatures bear far more responsibility for rising prices at public universities, and to the extent Obama has had any effect, it has been to help slow or even decrease the cost burden through federal assistance to students. We rate the claim Mostly False. | null | Mitt Romney | null | null | null | 2012-09-25T16:09:52 | 2012-09-21 | ['None'] |
goop-00984 | Khloe, Kim Kardashian Not Speaking? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kim-kardashian-not-speaking-tristan-thompson/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Khloe, Kim Kardashian Not Speaking? | 10:29 am, May 17, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02911 | All Facebook Posts to Be Made Public? | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-posts-made-public/ | null | Computers | null | David Mikkelson | null | Is Facebook Going to Make All Posts Public? | 4 June 2012 | null | ['None'] |
goop-02487 | Riley Keough Sold Michael Jackson’s Gifts? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/riley-keough-michael-jackson-gifts-sold-stepfather/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Riley Keough Sold Michael Jackson’s Gifts? | 4:41 pm, September 7, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pose-01297 | I am totally in favor of vaccines. But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time to avoid possible links to Autism. | stalled | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1389/change-vaccination-schedule-children/ | null | trumpometer | Donald Trump | null | null | Change the vaccination schedule for children | 2017-01-17T09:03:30 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12686 | A woman working full-time is paid 79 to 80 cents for every dollar a man is paid, and it's even less for women of color, and on average $11,000 per year is lost simply because she isn't a man. | mostly true | /florida/statements/2017/mar/14/patricia-farley/taking-closer-look-florida-democrats-claims-about-/ | Dozens of women rallied Tuesday at the Florida Capitol to fight for equal pay for women and men. Democrats organized the rally to bring attention to SB 410 and HB 319, which have not been scheduled for a hearing. The bills would enact penalties on employers who pay women less than men, allow victims of discrimination to sue for wages, and would extend protections to the transgender workers. An official of the Democratic Women's Club of Florida offered up a quick snapshot of the reality of today’s gender pay gap, which refers to the difference between what men and women earn. "A woman working full-time is paid 79 to 80 cents for every dollar a man is paid, and it's even less for women of color, and on average $11,000 per year is lost simply because she isn't a man," said one of the club’s vice presidents, Patricia Farley. We did not hear back from Farley, but PolitiFact has explored claims about the gender pay gap more than once. Farley is referencing data widely available from the U.S. Census Bureau. ‘A woman working full-time is paid 79 to 80 cents for every dollar a man is paid’ This stat has become a rallying cry for those who seek to eliminate employment discrimination based on gender. And it’s backed by U.S. Census Bureau data. In a report released in September 2016, the Census Bureau wrote that in 2015, the female-to-male earnings ratio of full-time, year-round workers was 0.80. Translated into dollars, that means that in 2015, women working full-time earned 80 cents for every dollar earned by men working full-time. The figure should be used with caution. For instance, former President Barack Obama’s administration released an ad that said women are paid "77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men" in 2012. That’s not accurate. The figure derived from a federal government measure actually refers to the average disparity between what men and women earn, so saying "the same work" is inaccurate. Also, discrimination is not the only explanation for a difference in pay. Other factors include: the degrees women pursue, the jobs women pursue, time taken off to take care of children, and the number of hours worked and experience. For instance, as of 2014, women worked in more minimum wage jobs than men. Excluding all those factors, a study by the American Association of University Women 2013 found a 7 percent wage gap between men and women a year after graduating college. As Farley said, women of color earn even less. A 2014 report from the National Women’s Law Center concluded that black women made 60 cents to the dollar earned by a white man, and Hispanic women made 55 cents, according to the report. Asian-American women actually earn higher wages than black and Hispanic men and women, as well as white women according to Pew Research. Still, Asian-American women lag behind white males for annual earnings. ‘On average $11,000 per year is lost’ Farley’s last point can be calculated by looking at the same 2015 Census data for the median earnings of full-time, year-round workers who are 15 years old and up, regardless of occupation. If you look at those numbers, the median wage in 2015 was $40,742 for women and $51,212 for men. The average difference is $10,470, which is very close to Farley’s $11,000. This pattern holds consistent if you look at data from the last five years. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Other data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks average annual weekly median earnings of full-time salary workers 16-and-older using the Current Population Survey. In 2016, median weekly earnings for women were $749, or $38,948 a year. Men brought in $915 a week, or $47,580 a year. This produces a smaller average annual earnings difference of $8,632. Experts have said, however, that looking at a longer period of time would be more useful to draw conclusions. "I think the average does help, but I'd rather see the lifetime earnings calculated for the mean and median female worker rather than extrapolating from the average for one year," said Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist, told us in 2014. Our ruling Farley said that a "woman working full-time is paid 79 to 80 cents for every dollar a man is paid, and it's even less for people of color, and on average $11,000 per year is loss every year simply because she isn't a man." Farley is citing common talking points that can be backed up by data from the U.S. Census Bureau. While her figures are accurate, a bulletproof number to illustrate the gender gap will always be murky because the difference in pay can be affected by the careers women and men choose and taking time off to take care for children. We rate this Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Patricia Farley | null | null | null | 2017-03-14T18:12:09 | 2017-03-14 | ['None'] |
pomt-07923 | Secure Communities "has a proven track record of enhancing public safety by focusing on violent offenders and those that pose a threat to our communities and our national security." | half-true | /rhode-island/statements/2011/jan/30/peter-kilmartin/kilmartin-says-secure-communities-program-has-prov/ | Just days after he was sworn into office, Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin made news by signing an agreement to implement a federal program called Secure Communities, which the federal government says it created to identify and deport illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes. The decision came less than a week after Governor Chafee rescinded his predecessor’s executive order targeting undocumented immigrants. Among other things, Chafee’s decision ended a cooperative program between the state police and the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to enforce immigration laws. Under the Secure Communities program, fingerprints of arrested suspects are sent to the Department of Homeland Security, which checks them against a database of immigration violators and others. ICE then prioritizes whom it will take action against, based on the severity of the person’s criminal background and the threat he or she poses to communities. ICE plans to implement the program nationwide. It is now in use in 37 states, although it’s only statewide in seven. In a Jan. 11 news release announcing Rhode Island’s intent to join the program, Kilmartin said: "Secure Communities is a proactive method of making neighborhoods safe by dealing with individuals who have committed crimes against us. The program has a proven track record of enhancing public safety by focusing on violent offenders and those that pose a threat to our communities and our national security." Kilmartin’s announcement triggered complaints from opponents of Secure Communities, and a noisy protest in the lobby of the attorney general’s building. Critics, including Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, say the program has led to thousands of deportations of people with no criminal records. They also say it leads to racial profiling and deters victims and witnesses of crimes from coming forward if they or family members are undocumented immigrants. We wondered whether Kilmartin’s assertion -- that the program focuses on "violent offenders" and "threats to our communities and national security" -- was accurate. When we called Kilmartin’s office, his spokeswoman, Amy Kempe, said Kilmartin was relying on information from ICE and directed us to that agency. So we contacted Ross Feinstein, spokesman for ICE in Washington, D.C. He said in an email that in 2010, ICE "set a record for overall removals of illegal aliens, with more than 392,000 removals nationwide." He said more than half of those removed were convicted criminals. Feinstein said the Secure Communities program alone, from its beginning in October 2008, has identified and led to the "removal" of more than 59,300 aliens convicted of crimes. We also found the program has plenty of critics. Three groups that oppose Secure Communities fought ICE in federal court and won a judgment ordering the agency to reveal data about the program. The groups -- the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Day Laborer Organization and the Immigration Justice Clinic at the Cardoza School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City -- are part of a national initiative called "Uncover the Truth." Sarahi Uribe, national coordinator of Uncover the Truth, said the group obtained documents in recent months from ICE that show that the majority of the people picked up in the program are not hardened criminals. "It’s amazing because they continue marketing the program as targeting serious criminals, even though the numbers don’t support it," Uribe said. Among the records obtained are monthly data for Secure Communities from October 2009 through August 2010. The records show that during that period, 41,929 people were identified through Secure Communities for deportation, as so-called "removals and returns." Those people were divided into four categories based on criminal record. A total of 9,667 -- about 23 percent -- were classified as Level 1 offenders: those convicted of "aggravated felonies such as murder, rape or sexual abuse of a minor." Another 16,581 -- about 40 percent -- were labeled as Level 2 offenders: those convicted of any felony, or three or more misdemeanors. A total of 4,621 -- about 11 percent -- were Level 3 offenders: those convicted of crimes punishable by less than one year in prison, typically misdemeanors. And 11,060 people -- about 26 percent -- had no criminal record at all. So ICE’s own data shows that, in the second year of a two-year program, 37 percent of the immigrants deported were either non-criminals or had been convicted of minor crimes. Asked to respond, ICE’s Feinstein said that the agency’s priority is "to initiate enforcement against criminal aliens," but that doesn’t "preclude ICE from initiating action against immigration violators and others subject to removal at the time of encounter. In fact, there are classes of non-criminals that are also ICE priorities." He said the so-called "non-criminal aliens" are "non-U.S. citizens arrested and booked for a crime who have no recorded conviction but have one or more immigration violations and are priorities for ICE to remove due to various reasons, such as: visa overstay, an illegal entry, an illegal reentry after removal, a final order of removal in place, known gang affiliations, ICE fugitives, etc." Kempe, after checking back with ICE officials, said the attorney general believes people convicted of even relatively minor crimes -- selling marijuana, painting graffiti or vandalizing a neighborhood -- are threats to the community. That may be. But we believe that, in the light of the ICE data, Kilmartin went too far when he said Secure Communities "has a proven record" of focusing on "violent offenders" and "threats to communities and our national security." That may be the intent, but the numbers show a mixed result. We rule his statement Half True. | null | Peter Kilmartin | null | null | null | 2011-01-30T00:01:00 | 2011-01-11 | ['None'] |
pomt-09321 | Crist sent his "top policy staffer to the House Committee to testify in support of the proposal," then vetoed the bill. | true | /florida/statements/2010/apr/15/adam-hasner/charlie-crist-SB6-adam-hasner/ | Gov. Charlie Crist's decision to veto a controversial education bill linking teacher raises to student performance created a swift backlash from Republicans who considered the measure a legislative priority. House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, R-Delray Beach, reacted less than 10 minutes after Crist announced his veto of Senate Bill 6 on April 15, 2010. “I'm disappointed that after sending his top policy staffer to the House Committee to testify in support of the proposal, Governor Crist would change his mind and now veto the bill,” Hasner said in a press release. We know Republicans have said Crist supported and would sign the bill -- Republican Party of Florida Chairman and state Sen. John Thrasher went as far as to say Crist promised he would sign the bill -- but did Crist ask a staffer to attend a committee hearing to indicate the governor's support? State records show -- and video evidence confirms -- that a Crist staffer did attend a House committee hearing in support of the education bill. On March 25, 2010, at a hearing of the House PreK-12 Policy Committee, Crist education policy chief Terry Golden said she supported the teacher pay bill on behalf of the Office of the Governor. Here's a copy of the appearance record from the meeting, which was first obtained by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. PolitiFact Florida also watched an archived video of the 3-hour, 40-minute hearing, to see if Golden attended the meeting, and if she indicated she supported the teacher tenure bill. Two hours and 55 minutes into the committee hearing, Golden is recognized to speak. She stands up from her seat and says: "The Office of the Governor waives in support." The comment is typical in committee meetings when a group indicates its position but does not wish to take the time to address the full committee. (If the first video link doesn't work, try this one). A corresponding action packet from the meeting also lists Golden as a "proponent" of the bill. It should be noted that the bill that the governor ultimately vetoed was almost exactly the one that appeared at that March 25 committee meeting. The only change, the Sun-Sentinel reported, was an amendment by Sen. Evelyn Lynn to allow principals to take into account advanced degrees in their performance reviews. On the governor's Web site, Golden is listed as a policy chief in the Education Policy Unit of the Governor's Office of Policy and Budget. Golden also is a registered lobbyist for the governor's office. Previously she worked as a lobbyist for Mixon and Associates, a Tallahassee lobbying group that lists nine school districts among its clients. We tried to call Golden to ask who asked her to attend the hearings on SB 6 and its companion bill, HB 7189, and why she indicated support of the bills. But Golden's office referred our inquiries to the governor's press office. Crist spokesman Sterling Ivey said Golden supported the teacher tenure bill under orders from Kathy Mears – the governor’s director of legislative affairs – and Ken Granger, policy director of the Governor’s Office of Policy and Budget. “I think at the end of March, conceptually the Executive Office of the Governor was in support of the direction of the bill,” Ivey said, noting that Golden works for Crist's top education policy adviser Scott Kittel. Crist, however, told a group of reporters on April 14, 2010, that he didn't know Golden ("I don't even know who that person is -- though I'm sure they're a great person") or why she indicated that she supported the bill on Crist's behalf. "I'm me and they're them," Crist told the reporters in an exchange that was caught on video. "What I've learned ... is that a lot of times people will say that the governor's office feels this way and the governor's office feels that way, and regrettably from time to time, rare though that may be, they may not have actually talked to the governor." That may be true, but the one ultimately responsible for the actions of Crist's administration is Crist. A Crist education policy staffer went to a House committee hearing on March 25 and indicated the governor's support for a controversial teacher pay plan. Three weeks later, Crist vetoed essentially the same bill. We rate Hasner's statement True. Story has been updated with comments from Crist spokesman Sterling Ivey. | null | Adam Hasner | null | null | null | 2010-04-15T16:19:07 | 2010-04-15 | ['None'] |
pomt-03040 | Nobody's addicted to marijuana. | false | /florida/statements/2013/oct/08/john-morgan/john-morgan-says-nobodys-addicted-marijuana/ | High-profile Orlando attorney John Morgan is leading an effort in Florida to legalize medical marijuana, arguing that the drug is safer and cheaper than other painkillers. As a recent guest on Bay News 9’s Political Connections, Morgan also discussed whether marijuana is addictive. "Nobody's addicted to it," Morgan claimed. We decided to fact-check Morgan’s claim based on input from readers. But we didn’t have to dig too far. Morgan told us he was wrong. "It was a huge mistake," said Morgan. "I’m sorry and embarrassed I messed up." Morgan said he was "flat out wrong" about marijuana not being addictive and meant to focus on the use of the drug compared to more potent painkillers. "Some levels of addiction kill you -- marijuana may make you slow, but it will never kill you," said Morgan, a personal injury attorney who is leading the group People United for Medical Marijuana. The group has launched a petition drive to add an amendment to the state’s Constitution to legalize medical marijuana in 2014. Even though Morgan said he made a mistake, we were curious enough to check a few more sources. Aaron Norton, a psychotherapist who specializes in addictive disorders, said that "cannabis dependence is a diagnosable disorder." "Not everyone who uses it becomes addicted," said Norton, but some are more vulnerable, including people with mental disorders, adolescents and young adults. "In the course of my career, I have probably treated hundreds of patients who are cannabis-dependent, and many of them also met the two diagnostic criteria associated with physiological dependence -- tolerance and withdrawal," Norton said. Marijuana abuse is recognized as cannabis-use disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual’s list of symptoms include craving; taking larger doses over a longer period of time than intended; recurrent use that results in failure to fulfill major obligations at work, school or home; and tolerance (needing more to get the desired high). It’s also described as an addictive substance by the government-funded National Institute on Drug Abuse, which writes: "Estimates from research suggest that about 9 percent of users become addicted to marijuana; this number increases among those who start young (to about 17 percent, or 1 in 6) and among daily users (to 25-50 percent)." Psychiatrist Dr. Darren Rothschild, an addiction medicine specialist, says he’s worked with patients who have developed a serious dependence on marijuana and "the impact is substantial." "In order to feel normal, they have to have the drug," Rothschild said. "Not everyone who smokes becomes addicted, but it’s erroneous to say it doesn’t happen." Rothschild said people who smoke marijuana daily over a long period of time are the ones most susceptible to dependence on marijuana versus intermittent smokers who may occasionally smoke pot at a party. "I’d say none of those people are addicted." Dr. Samir Sabbag, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment and Research, said "long-term use of marijuana is indeed addictive," though he noted people can be addicted to a variety of things, including the caffeine in chocolate and coffee. Even groups that support relaxing marijuana laws, such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), concede that Morgan was incorrect to say that marijuana is not potentially addictive. "Can people have an abusive relationship with marijuana? Absolutely," said NORML executive director Allen St. Pierre. But St. Pierre says marijuana is "not addictive in any way shape or form the same way that alcohol, nicotine and other legal and illegal drugs, even caffeine, can cause serious withdrawal." Our ruling Orlando attorney John Morgan said that "nobody’s addicted to" marijuana. Morgan quickly admitted that he was wrong, and experts agreed. We rate the claim False. | null | John Morgan | null | null | null | 2013-10-08T10:21:08 | 2013-09-22 | ['None'] |
goop-01249 | Katie Holmes, Jamie Foxx Ready For Baby? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/katie-holmes-jamie-foxx-baby-pregnant-false/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Katie Holmes, Jamie Foxx Ready For Baby? | 11:41 am, April 4, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
abbc-00329 | The Coalition's workplace relations plan was the second of its formal election policies to be launched, four months before the federal election. | in-between | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-07/no-cuts-to-penalty-rates-promise-check/5695272 | null | ['work', 'community-and-society', 'federal-government', 'small-business', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'liberals', 'australia'] | null | null | ['work', 'community-and-society', 'federal-government', 'small-business', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'liberals', 'australia'] | Promise check: No cuts to penalty rates | Sun 8 May 2016, 8:08am | null | ['Coalition_(Australia)'] |
snes-00391 | In June 2018, a priest in France slapped a baby in the face during a baptism. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/priest-france-slaps-baby-baptism/ | null | Viral Phenomena | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Did a Priest in France Slap a Baby During a Baptism Ceremony? | 1 July 2018 | null | ['France'] |
bove-00014 | Is This A Video Of Indian Soldiers Torturing A Kashmiri?: A FactCheck | none | https://www.boomlive.in/is-this-a-video-of-indian-soldiers-torturing-a-kashmiri-a-factcheck/ | null | null | null | null | null | Is This A Video Of Indian Soldiers Torturing A Kashmiri?: A FactCheck | Sep 24 2018 6:19 pm, Last Updated: Sep 24 2018 11:41 pm | null | ['None'] |
pomt-11978 | Says a photograph shows Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett burning the United States flag. | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2017/sep/29/vets-trump/fake-photo-shows-seattle-seahawks-player-michael-b/ | A photograph plastered on a Facebook page that allegedly supports President Donald Trump purported to show an NFL player burning an American flag in the locker room, but it has very clearly been manipulated. An image posted on the "Vets for Trump" Facebook page on Sept. 28, 2017, showed Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett shirtless and holding a United States flag that has been set ablaze. Teammates, coaches and staff appear to be cheering Bennett on in the background. "#Seattleseahawks - no more NFL," the caption on the post read. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Commenters were outraged by the photo, with one person declaring "burning the Flag that I shed my blood to honor would be just cause to whack you upside your ignorant disrespectful head." Another ironically wrote that he "couldn't even in good conscious photo shop such a picture." The Vets for Trump Facebook page didn’t accept messages or list phone or email information. It listed as contact information the website VeteransForDonaldTrump.com, a domain registered to someone named Vladimir Lemets. Trump targeted the NFL after a handful of players had decided to kneel during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, as a protest against racism in America. Trump demanded on Twitter that NFL players "stop disrespecting our Flag & Country" by kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism in America. Trump had said players should be fired if they refused to stand. More than 200 players across the league chose not to stand the following weekend to show their opposition to Trump’s criticism. Both the Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans chose not to stand on the field for the national anthem during their Sept. 24 game in Nashville (all but one member of the Pittsburgh Steelers chose not stand on the sideline for the song, either). But while the Seahawks banded together in protest, Bennett did not burn a flag in the locker room that day. Looking at the photo more closely, it’s obvious that the flag has been Photoshopped into the image. The lighting is all wrong and even though the flag is ablaze in an enclosed space, it doesn’t appear to be giving off smoke. The real proof that the image is fake is that it is actually close to two years old, at least. It appeared in a tweet from the Seahawks on Jan. 3, 2016, and is credited to Rob Mar on the team’s website. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com For the record, Bennett did speak out on the Trump controversy. He said at a CNN town hall event on Sept. 27 that the protests were "about treating people like human beings." "The changes start with the heart," he said. "This is not a violent protest. This is a peaceful protest. We are challenging people spiritually, not physically, spiritually to change the way you have been doing. Change the culture." Trump’s feud has led to other fake claims beyond this one. We previously checked claims that the NFL fined Steelers players $1 million each and that Fox Sports refused to broadcast games "until players respect the flag." We rated both Pants On Fire! That’s the only thing burning about this claim, too. For taking an old photo and grossly misrepresenting its content, we rate it Pants On Fire! See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com | null | Vets for Trump | null | null | null | 2017-09-29T14:27:31 | 2017-09-28 | ['United_States'] |
pomt-02869 | Under Obama, the national debt "has been reduced every year for the last five years." | false | /punditfact/statements/2013/nov/14/al-sharpton/al-sharpton-attacks-sarah-palin-comparing-slavery-/ | The Rev. Al Sharpton used his MSNBC show PoliticsNation Tuesday to criticize former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for recently likening the national debt to slavery. But in doing so, Sharpton and pundit Goldie Taylor made a common mistake -- confusing the national debt with the deficit. Here’s what Sharpton said: "I mean, first of all, slavery in the American context was based on race. So you can’t talk about slavery in American context without talking about race," said Sharpton, reacting to Palin’s defense that her comparison is not racist. "But second of all … the debt … by the way has been reduced every year for the last five years under this president." Taylor then chimed in, "You know, our national debt is as low as it has been since World War II. And so the notion that our national debt is growing at some astronomical rate really is a misnomer." In this case, Sharpton’s specific claim is wrong. The debt has risen each year in terms of dollar amount and as a share of the economy since 2007. And it will continue to increase this year, said Jason Peuquet, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget research fellow. On Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama took office, the country’s total outstanding debt was $10.6 trillion. It stood at $17.1 trillion as of Nov. 8, 2013, according to the Treasury Department’s "Debt to the Penny" calculator. What Sharpton likely meant to say is that the deficit "has been reduced every year for the last five years." The deficit is the difference between what a government collects in revenues and spends in any one year. The debt is the accumulation of annual deficits minus any annual surpluses. We’re not letting Sharpton off the hook for his words, especially because he should know the difference, but if he had said deficit he’d be closer to the truth. The country started running a deficit instead of a surplus in 2002, at $159 billion. The recent run of deficits peaked in 2009 at $1.4 trillion, Obama’s first year in office. Since then, it’s come down, and there are a couple of ways to count that. One way is in sheer dollars, through historical tables from the White House Office of Management and Budget and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office: 2008: $458.6 billion deficit 2009: $1.413 trillion deficit 2010: $1.294 trillion deficit 2011: $1.299 trillion deficit 2012: $1.087 trillion deficit 2013*: $642 billion deficit * estimated In this view, the deficit fell in 2010, 2012 and 2013, but increases in 2011. By another measure -- the deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product -- the deficit did fall four consecutive years. Not five, as Sharpton tried to indicate. Unlike in the current-dollar method, the deficit as a measure of GDP between 2010 and 2011 because GDP grew faster in that year, said Alan Auerbach, a University of California economics and law professor. The deficit as a percentage of GDP shot up from 3 percent in 2008 to 10.1 percent in 2009. We turn again to data from White House Office of Management and Budget to look at the trend. 2008: 3.2 percent deficit 2009: 10.1 percent deficit 2010: 9 percent deficit 2011: 8.7 percent deficit 2012: 7 percent deficit 2013*: 6 percent deficit *estimated Projections from the Congressional Budget Office show slightly different percentages, but the trend remains the same for those years. CBO, however, estimates the deficit will fall through 2015 but tick up again in 2016 and beyond. "So, the deficit fell between 2009 and 2012," said Harvey Rosen, Princeton University economics professor, by email. "However, both figures are much bigger than anything since the early 70s (and I suspect since the late 1940s.)" Our ruling Sharpton said that the national debt "has been reduced every year for the last five years." Sharpton confused the downward trend in annual deficits with the debt, which is what he said on air and what Palin controversially likened to slavery. We rate his claim False. | null | Al Sharpton | null | null | null | 2013-11-14T08:30:00 | 2013-11-12 | ['None'] |
pomt-11473 | Adolf Hitler confiscated all the weapons — took all the weapons, had a registry of everybody — and then on the night of June 30, 1934, sent out his secret police and murdered all of his political opponents. | false | /florida/statements/2018/mar/06/david-simmons/florida-lawmaker-mangles-nazis-gun-control-history/ | During a key vote in the Florida Senate to reject an assault weapons ban, Republican Sen. David Simmons argued that the original reason for the Second Amendment was so people could protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Simmons invoked the Nazis to drive home his point. "Adolf Hitler confiscated all the weapons -- took all the weapons, had a registry of everybody -- and then on the night of June 30, 1934, sent out his secret police and murdered all of his political opponents," Simmons said March 3. "You think it doesn't happen in a free society? It does." We reached out to Simmons and did not hear back, but Hitler’s gun policies are a familiar talking point among opponents of gun control, and one that we explored during the 2016 presidential campaign. Simmons’ statement misses several historical facts. Hitler was both a giver and a taker By the time Hitler took power in 1933, Germany had been operating under the 1928 Law on Firearms and Ammunition. The measure relaxed strict controls imposed after World War I that banned all gun ownership, and created a system to register and sell firearms. Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt translated a couple of key provisions in the law that exempted "officials of the central government, the states, as well as the German Railways Company" and "community officials to whom the highest government authority has permitted acquisition without an acquisition permit." Dagmar Ellerbrock, an expert on German gun policies at the Dresden Technical University, told us in 2015 that the Nazis introduced a collective gun license for members of Nazi organizations. One of the main beneficiaries was the paramilitary Sturmabteilung, or brownshirts. After the German parliament, the Reichstag, granted Hitler emergency powers in March 1933, he had a free hand. "Under totalitarian rule, it took just a few weeks to drastically increase the number of Germans who held private weapons," Ellerbock said. An armed member of the Sturmabteilung guards Communists arrested in Berlin following a key parliamentary Nazi victory March 5, 1933. (German Federal Archives via Wikicommons) At the same time, the German state confiscated weapons from Jews, Communists, Social Democrats and unions that refused to affiliate with the Nazi Party. Did the 1928 registration law make this easier? Perhaps, but Ellerbock’s research showed many holes in the system. For the most part, it recorded only new sales, while many people had unregistered weapons dating from World War I. When they came to power, the Nazis used whatever gun records they had to seize weapons from their enemies, but Ellerbock told us the files included very few of the firearms in circulation. "In my records, I found many Jews who well into the late 1930s possessed guns," Ellerbock told us. So registration was spotty, confiscation was selective and Nazi allies found it easier, not harder to get weapons. Much later, in 1938, the Nazis passed a new law that liberalized gun ownership in many respects, while simultaneously banning ownership and manufacture by Jews. June 1934 Simmons brought up June 30, 1934, when Hitler "sent out his secret police and murdered all of his political opponents." That was the night of Operation Hummingbird, Hitler’s crackdown on a very specific group – the Sturmabteilung that he had nurtured and encouraged to intimidate any group that stood in his way. The paramilitary group’s leader Ernst Röhm was eager to consolidate his power, and that set him on a collision course with established leaders in the German military and Hitler’s top advisers. They persuaded Hitler that Röhm was planning a coup. Over a span of several days, Röhm and scores of Sturmabteilung leaders were arrested and executed. The Nazis killed at least 85 people, most but not all associated with Röhm. Specific to Simmons’ remark, the incident had more to do with internecine fighting among the Nazi community than with going after disarmed citizens. Quite the opposite, the Nazi leaders knew full well that they were going up against a group that had plenty of weapons. At one tense moment, a truckload of armed brownshirts drove up to the hotel where Röhm was being arrested. According to Hitler’s chauffeur, Hitler himself walked up to the unit’s leader and told him to "drive back to Munich immediately!' The man complied. Our ruling Simmons said that Hitler "took all the weapons" and had a registry of everyone and then, on the night of June 30, 1934, murdered his political opponents. This oversimplifies and mangles the historic facts. While Hitler did take weapons away from Jews, Communists and Social Democrats, he also armed private citizens to better terrorize those same political opponents. To reduce Nazi gun policy to confiscation of weapons is to miss at least half the story. According to a German historian who has gone through the records, Hitler "drastically increased" the number of privately held weapons. On the confiscation side, she noted that the registry was limited and far from comprehensive. Contrary to what Simmons said, Hitler didn’t take everyone’s weapons and the registry at the time was so incomplete that many Jews retained their weapons. Furthermore, Simmons miscasts the connection between Hitler’s gun policies and the events of June 30, 1934. Far from targeting disarmed leaders, it was a strike at the well-armed pro-Nazi Sturmabteilung. Hitler’s real desire to disarm his opponents doesn’t overcome the flaws in this statement. We rate this claim False. Update (March 7): Simmons responds After we published we heard from Simmons. He told us that when he made his remarks, he was referring to the people Hitler subjugated and killed, primarily the Jews. "I do not believe I am in error," Simmons said. "All Jews were denied the ability to have weapons. They had registries of everyone who was Jewish. And they killed 6 million." Simmons said that on the Senate floor, "you only have so much time and you have to condense things." Videotape of Simmons’ remarks shows no mention of the Jews. The claim we checked is complete and omits no context. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | David Simmons | null | null | null | 2018-03-06T11:32:39 | 2018-03-03 | ['Adolf_Hitler'] |
goop-01991 | Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Prenup “Fight” Tru | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/prince-harry-meghan-markle-prenup-fight-not-true/ | null | null | null | Holly Nicol | null | Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Prenup “Fight” NOT True | 7:11 am, December 21, 2017 | null | ['Prince_Harry'] |
tron-00125 | Why the LA Times Stopped Carrying Dixon Diaz Comics | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/why-the-la-times-stopped-carrying-dixon-diaz-comics/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | Why the LA Times Stopped Carrying Dixon Diaz Comics | Feb 5, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-08404 | Since 2000, when he entered politics, Jon Husted has been on the ballot six times for three different political offices. | true | /ohio/statements/2010/oct/22/maryellen-oshaughnessy/maryellen-oshaughnessy-cites-jon-husteds-election-/ | Professional experience in politics, unlike many professions, can be viewed as a negative. Current political ads – whether tapping into voter unrest over the economy or local corruption – are warning voters that supporting experienced candidates will not solve their problems. Maryellen O’Shaughnessy, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, recently felt the sting of being labeled a "professional politician" in a TV commercial paid for by her opponent, Jon Husted. So O’Shaughnessy responded, calling Husted, a Republican, a "perpetual candidate." "Since 2000, when he entered politics, Jon Husted has been on the ballot six times for three different political offices," O'Shaughnessy said in a news release posted on her campaign website in late September. Because Husted decided to make political experience an issue in the race, we decided to check O’Shaughnessy’s counterclaim about his experience. Husted is currently a state senator representing the Dayton area. Before that, he was a state representative for eight years. For four of those years he was Ohio Speaker of the House. He worked for the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce before arriving in Columbus as a state legislator. O’Shaughnessy, by comparison, was a member of Columbus City Council from 1998 to 2008. She was elected Franklin County clerk of courts in 2008. She also ran unsuccessfully for Franklin County commissioner in 1992 and 2002 and for Congress in 2000. The Ohio secretary of state, the job Husted and O’Shaughnessy are seeking, is in charge of elections in Ohio and keeps records of candidates and election results. So we checked the secretary of state’s website to see how many times Husted has been on the ballot. We also asked O’Shaughnessy’s campaign to explain its count of instances Husted appeared on a ballot. The secretary of state’s office confirmed O’Shaughnessy’s claim that Husted has been on the ballot six times. He ran for state representative – and won each time – in 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006. Husted was term-limited after his fourth win, so he ran for state senate, and won, in 2008, according to the secretary of state’s website. In Ohio, state representatives serve two-year terms and senators serve four-year terms. His candidacy this year for secretary of state marks his sixth appearance on the ballot for his third different political office. We find O’Shaughnessy’s statement True. | null | Maryellen O'Shaughnessy | null | null | null | 2010-10-22T06:00:00 | 2010-09-27 | ['Jon_A._Husted'] |
tron-00895 | The United Nations and the Internet | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/un-internet/ | null | computers | null | null | null | The United Nations and the Internet | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['United_Nations'] |
snes-00348 | MAPs (Minor Attracted Persons) created a pride flag | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maps-pride-flag/ | null | Politics | null | Dan Evon | null | Does This Image Represent a ‘MAPs Pride Flag’? | 14 July 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-13159 | We are seeing kids who are healthier. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/28/hillary-clinton/clinton-says-kids-are-healthier/ | When Hillary Clinton holds a rally, it’s usually someone else who introduces her. But at an event in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Oct. 27, it was Clinton who teed up the keynoter, Michelle Obama. It was the first time the current first lady has stumped side-by-side with Clinton, and Clinton was effusive in her praise. She noted Obama’s work on behalf of veterans and young women around the world, and she highlighted Obama’s signature campaign, "Let’s Move." "She has worked for healthier childhood for our kids here at home," Clinton said. "Better nutrition, more exercise and we are seeing the results. We are seeing kids who are healthier." Are America’s kids healthier? We decided to check that out. The first thing to note is that there is no single agreed-upon measure for children’s health. The Clinton campaign pointed us to material on obesity. That’s one yardstick, and while there are some signs of improvement, so far they are limited. The latest government data show that the country has made headway among kids 11 and under, but not among older children. Obesity researcher Ashleley Cockrell Skinner at the Duke University Medical School assessed the data cautiously. "We aren’t seeing significant reductions, but there are not continued increases, especially among young children," Skinner said. The first lady has pushed for healthier eating habits, and there’s encouraging news on that front. The government has the Healthy Eating Index. It measures what people eat against the federal dietary guidelines, as in, are we eating our fruits and vegetables, the right amount of whole grains, and so on. The higher the index, the better. For children 2-17, the index has gone up from 49.5 in 2005-06 to 55.1 in 2011-12. That’s good, but Skinner said that while better diet is important, she’s "not convinced that improving nutrition alone will improve obesity rates." And in any event, Skinner said it would take a long time to see any effect on obesity nationally. By other measures, especially ones that fall outside of Michelle Obama’s work, the trends are negative. We looked at the work of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, a body that dates back to the Clinton administration. The forum posts a number of benchmarks. For adolescent depression, the percentage of youth ages 12–17 who had at least one major depressive episode in the past year rose from 9 percent in 2004 to 11.4 percent in 2014. The fraction of kids 5-17 who had their activities limited due to a chronic condition went from 7 percent in 2000 to 9.3 percent in 2014. Asthma for all children 17 and under increased slightly from 12.3 percent in 2000 to 13.5 percent in 2014, although that could be due to better reporting of the disease. On the other hand, because there is no single measure of children’s health, some researchers see longer term gains. Janet Currie is director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. Currie looks back to how things stood in 1990. "There have been dramatic reductions in mortality rates among all children," Currie said. "The declines are even greater among poor children than among non-poor children, so that inequality in mortality has declined." Currie also noted that drug and alcohol abuse is down, as is the teen pregnancy rate. Our ruling Clinton said that "we are seeing kids who are healthier." She said that in the context of First Lady Obama’s work on nutrition and exercise, and her campaign staff drew our attention to obesity trends. The latest numbers show less obesity for kids 11 and under, but a continued rise for young teens 12 to 17. As for diet, the government’s index for healthy eating has gone up. On the flip side, several measures such as depression, asthma and curtailed activity are moving in the wrong direction. At best, in the areas that lie at the heart of the first lady’s work, the picture is mixed. We rate this claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/55453902-1bd4-4428-97c6-bdeee941a1ba | null | Hillary Clinton | null | null | null | 2016-10-28T13:44:00 | 2016-10-27 | ['None'] |
farg-00065 | “The average American worker today, despite the strong economy, is not getting ahead.” | misleading | https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/sanders-misleading-wage-claim/ | null | the-factcheck-wire | FactCheck.org | Brooks Jackson | ['real wages'] | Sanders’ Misleading Wage Claim | June 11, 2018 | 2018-06-11 21:11:27 UTC | ['United_States'] |
tron-03592 | Supermarket rebuke of an Iraqi woman | unproven! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/supermarket-put-down/ | null | war | null | null | null | Supermarket rebuke of an Iraqi woman | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['Iraq'] |
pomt-14059 | The geography of poverty has changed fundamentally in the last 15 years, with more of it concentrated in fragile and conflict states. | mostly true | /global-news/statements/2016/may/23/david-miliband/refugee-aid-head-worlds-poorest-increasingly-found/ | Global poverty increasingly is becoming concentrated in areas torn apart by conflict and unrest, International Rescue Committee president David Miliband recently told a Washington, D.C., audience. "43 percent of the world's extreme poor now live in conflict and fragile states," Miliband said May 18, 2016, at the Center for Global Development. Speaking with World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, Miliband made the case for the World Bank to increase its economic development operations. "The mandate of the World Bank is to tackle poverty," Miliband said. "So the geography of poverty has changed fundamentally in the last 15 years." We decided to see if the shift Miliband described is truly under way. It is, though the limited data suggests it’s largely thanks to the success of fighting poverty in non-fragile countries. The clearest evidence comes from this chart in a 2013 Brookings Institution report. As you see, the number of people living in poverty in non-fragile states has declined at a much greater rate than those living in fragile states. Gary Milante, who directs the security and development program for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said people should be careful about what they take away from this chart. "Poverty is not becoming concentrated in fragile states because there are more fragile states," Milante said, "rather that fragile states don’t make progress the way the rest of the world does." Be cautious with the data Every expert we reached warned us that while the overall trend is clear, the precise numbers are not. When you think about it, you need two good yardsticks: one for poverty and one for fragility and conflict. And both have to be applied consistently over time. That’s not simple. "The cutoffs for poverty and the methods to estimate household income have shifted over time," said Ben Oppenheim, who co-authored the report that included the 43 percent figure Miliband used. Definitions of a fragile state may have shifted over time as well. Oppenheim and his colleagues used a list from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which relied partly on an index from the widely cited Fund for Peace. Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told us it’s unclear if the Fund for Peace is "measuring the same thing over time." "If Nigeria or Madagascar are added to the list one year, or taken off, you suddenly have spikes or dips of tens of millions of poor, so it would be much more difficult to discern the trends you're talking about," Milante added. The Brookings report, meanwhile, used a fixed list of countries, regardless of whether they moved in and out of state of conflict or fragility. Our ruling Miliband said that the geography of poverty has fundamentally changed in the past 15 years and is increasingly concentrated in conflict and fragile states. Broadly speaking, the numbers back that up -- because non-fragile states are doing a better job of raising people out of poverty. The biggest cautionary note from experts is that we lack consistent measures of fragility and the list can change significantly from year to year. The statement is accurate, but one has to apply it cautiously. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/a82c1824-f518-499c-bfcc-7b61b9691390 | null | David Miliband | null | null | null | 2016-05-23T10:50:18 | 2016-05-17 | ['None'] |
snes-06117 | A video captured an unwitting beachgoer being snatched by a killer whale. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/killer-whale/ | null | Fauxtography | null | David Mikkelson | null | Did a Killer Whale Snatch a Beachgoer? | 29 September 2011 | null | ['None'] |
tron-00927 | A warning about emails that contain photos and songs by Michael Jackson could actually be malicious infections | virus! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/symantec-warning-michael-jackson/ | null | computers | null | null | null | A warning about emails that contain photos and songs by Michael Jackson could actually be malicious infections | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['Michael_Jackson'] |
pomt-07342 | The people of Rhode Island don't want same-sex marriage. | pants on fire! | /rhode-island/statements/2011/may/11/christopher-plante/executive-director-marriage-group-says-most-rhode-/ | Opponents and proponents of same-sex marriage are retooling after Rhode Island House Speaker Gordon Fox announced April 27 that there was not enough support to pass same-sex marriage legislation in 2011. A few days after that announcement, Christopher Plante, executive director of National Organization for Marriage - Rhode Island, which opposes gay marriage, was part of a panel on WPRI's "Newsmakers" program, which aired May 1. "I don't believe Gordon Fox had the votes. Our head count showed pretty clearly that they didn't have the votes and he had to make the decision he did," he said. "Similarly, the people of Rhode Island don't want same-sex marriage." NOM-RI has been quick to cite the polls it has commissioned as part of its campaign to press the governor and General Assembly to put the question of gay marriage to a statewide referendum. So we wondered whether any polls show that Rhode Islanders, in fact, don't want same-sex marriage. We called Plante to see if he had any updated numbers. He didn't. He said he was basing his assertion on the belief that a majority of residents had contacted their legislators to object to same-sex marriage, which is why Fox said there weren't enough votes in the House to pass a bill. People who call their legislators don't necessarily reflect the opinion of the general public, just as legislators don't always vote with the majority of their constituents. (In this case, House spokesman Larry Berman told us that the calls coming in to Fox's office "were fairly evenly divided between those in favor of same-sex marriage and those opposed." ) Even opinion polls aren't perfectly reflective because they usually only survey likely voters. But opinion polls are the best indicator we have, so we reviewed recent polls that addressed the issue. NOM-RI itself has done surveys in Rhode Island. In its most recent, in December 2009, respondents were asked: "As far as you are concerned personally, do you favor or oppose same-sex marriage in Rhode Island? And do you feel strongly about this? A majority of those with an opinion actually endorsed same-sex marriage -- 42.6 percent said they strongly or somewhat favored it. Another 32.2 percent strongly or somewhat opposed it -- clearly not a majority, even among those who responded. Just under 23 percent were undecided and the rest had no opinion. That was up from a poll the group conducted six months earlier, when support for gay marriage was 36 percent and opposition was pegged at 43 percent. (In an example of how you can get a different answer if you word the question differently, NOM-RI turned the question on its head in both surveys by asking respondents whether they supported or opposed this statement: "Only marriage between a man and a woman will be valid or recognized in Rhode Island." (In the December 2009 survey, 44.9 percent expressed support for the statement [and, by implication, opposition to gay marriage], 43.6 percent felt the other way, and 9.7 were undecided. But even that question showed a significant increase in support for gay marriage compared to the poll six months earlier, when 52 percent agreed with the anti-gay-marriage statement and 38 percent expressed opposition to it.) Supporters of gay marriage have done their own polling. In a July 2010 poll commissioned by Rhode Island Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (RI-GLAD), 59 percent of 502 likely voters said they strongly or somewhat favored "allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally." Thirty-one percent were somewhat or strongly opposed. In a 2008 RI_GLAD poll, 49 percent favored same-sex marriage; in 2006, 45 percent approved. However, when we looked closer at the 2010 RI-GLAD survey, we found that it initially primed respondents by telling them in an earlier question that, "Churches, clergy and other religious institutions would NOT be required to perform same-sex marriages." That reassurance might have bumped up the approval rating. The only independent Rhode Island poll we found was released by Brown University in May 2009, before the NOM-RI and RI-GLAD polls. Its survey of 593 registered voters found that 60 percent of registered Rhode Islanders expressed support when asked, "Would you support or oppose a law that would allow same-sex couples to get married?" Thirty one percent said they would oppose it. About half of the opposition was hard core - 17 percent said they would even oppose civil unions for gay couples. We mentioned those results to Plante. "Would I repeat that I believe the majority of Rhode Islanders don't want gay marriage? Yeah, I'll repeat that," he said when we spoke with him. "Can I give you a definitive poll that shows that? No." But he also said that his claim is justified because House Speaker Fox couldn't get enough votes for gay marriage in his own chamber. That, he asserted, is because people were "calling their representatives and saying 'We don't want this.' . . . I wasn't making a statistical claim." We disagree. Of course it’s a statistical claim. When you say "the people of Rhode Island don't want same-sex marriage" you're saying that more than 50 percent would oppose such legislation. The most recent polls from Brown, RI-GLAD and even NOM-RI -- Plante’s organization -- show the opposite. Not only did the trends in the NOM-RI and RI-GLAD polls show opposition to same-sex marriage evaporating, the Brown and RI-GLAD polls showed that the public wants gay couples to have the right to marry, even if you assume that every voter who didn't express an opinion was opposed to gay marriage. Plante's assertion isn't just false. It's ridiculous. We rate it Pants On Fire! (To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on Facebook.) | null | Christopher Plante | null | null | null | 2011-05-11T00:01:00 | 2011-04-29 | ['Rhode_Island'] |
pomt-06707 | Says Florida U.S. Reps. Corrine Brown, Alcee Hastings and Frederica Wilson are Socialists. | pants on fire! | /florida/statements/2011/sep/02/blog-posting/us-reps-corrine-brown-alcee-hastings-and-frederica/ | Word in the blogosphere is that scores of members of Congress are actually unabashed 'S' words. That'd be Socialists. Several bloggers have listed members of Congress by name under headlines like "Why do Americans Keep Electing These Socialist Politicians to Congress??" and "Socialist Party of America Releases The Names of 70 Democrat Members of Congress Who Are Members Of Their Congress." The list -- actually a roster of Congressional Progressive Caucus members (mostly) from Wikipedia -- includes Florida Democrats Corrine Brown, Alcee Hastings and Frederica Wilson. "I'm sure if you asked random people on the street if we had open socialists in the U.S. Congress, they would say – well only Bernie Sanders (Senate). But the right answer is much, much worse," goes an Aug. 12, 2011 post from the website Sovereign Citizens United. On Aug. 17, 2011, citing a different caucus count, Texas radio host Dan Cofall wrote, "The magic number '70' is the number of members of the 111th Congress who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). These are not just politicians who vote left of center; these are card-carrying members of ‘The Democratic Socialists of America’." Our colleagues at PolitiFact Oregon vetted the bloggers' claim in this story, concentrating on Oregonian representatives. They pointed out that Cofall's figure is, for one, out of date because we have entered the 112th Congress. Several out-of-office House members from Florida were listed there. Still, his post targets many existing lawmakers. As our colleagues noted, the posts grabbed our attention for their blunt and far-reaching assertions. At PolitiFact Florida, we wanted to check out the claims that Brown, Hastings and Wilson are Socialists, or if it's a virtual Red Scare. Where did the list come from? Sovereign Citizens United connects the officials to socialism for their membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus (75 members) within the House Democratic caucus. Founded in 1991, the group of lawmakers supports policies that advance economic justice, civil rights and liberties, global peace and environmental protection, among other causes on its website. We reached out to Sovereign Citizens United and heard back from a Montgomery, Penn., woman named Ruth Miller. Miller sent us several e-mails to back up her blog post. "It is documented FACT that Socialist Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America created the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991 to further their socialist agenda in the US," she wrote. "Any member of Congress who has joined this caucus expresses solidarity with socialism." Miller sent us to a KeyWiki page about the caucus, which claims that the DSA has worked closely with the progressives and links to an old DSA Detroit group's web page. "As a national organization, DSA joins with its allies in Congress' Progressive Caucus and in many other progressive organizations, fighting for the interests of the average citizen both in legislative struggles and in other campaigns to educate the public on progressive issues and to secure progressive access to the media." Then Miller directed us to Henry Lamb, 73, who penned an undated commentary that inspired her blog post (she included an excerpt there). Lamb, founder of advocacy group Freedom 21 and retired chairman of Sovereignty International, said he wrote the essay to show "how similar the organizations were at the time." Lamb wrote: "Socialism in America is alive, well, and growing. Aided by such influential Congressmen as John Conyers, Ranking Member of the House Judicial Committee, David Bonior, the pit-bull-dog who successfully whipped Newt, Maxine Waters, the President's outspoken defender in the impeachment debates, and nearly 60 other Representatives, socialism is advancing in America behind the 'Progressive' label." He goes on to pull excerpts from the Democratic Socialists of America website that explain what the group believes. In a hot pink sidebar, Lamb listed 56 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It includes Brown and Hastings but not Wilson, as she was not yet elected to the House. There's also no analysis of the Progressive Caucus. His piece contains no date, and Lamb -- to whom we spoke -- could not find it in his online archives. So are they Socialists? Neither Brown nor Wilson's office responded to calls and e-mails for comment. A spokeswoman for Hastings e-mailed only to say he was not a member of the Progressive Caucus, which is true -- this year. News accounts show he has been a member in the past. Still, all three are serving as Democrats. All three list their political party affiliation as the Florida Democratic Party on their voter registration cards. Brad Bauman, executive director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said none of the group's members are Socialists. "The members of Congress on our caucus are patriots who have chosen to serve," Bauman said, "and to allege that they are not is just simply ridiculous." Even the Democratic Socialists of America does not claim the caucus members. PolitiFact Oregon interviewed the party's past national director of 10 years, Frank Llewellyn, who called the list "completely fraudulent." More from PolitiFact Oregon: There is not one member of Congress who is a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said. In order to join, a person must fill out a form and pay dues. Even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, is not a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said. The last member of Congress who was an actual card-carrying member, he said, was California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums, who served 28 years in the House until leaving in 1998. In a separate interview with PolitiFact Georgia, Llewellyn said the DSA had nothing to do with the creation of the caucus and would "prefer an alternative third party that supports its values." He outlined a couple policy differences with the progressives in Congress. He said his organization wants larger cuts in military spending and federal income tax rates returned to pre-Reagan administration levels, when they were much higher for the rich. But what about Lamb, the man who wrote untold years ago that "socialism is advancing in America behind the "Progressive" label"? He said it isn't wise to generalize. The name-calling reminds him of recent comments from Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., who said some of his tea party colleagues would like to see blacks "hanging from a tree." "I think it would be equally silly for somebody to say that every member of the Progressive Caucus is a Socialist, even though you would have to share similar philosophies with socialist beliefs to sign up," Lamb said. "That doesn't mean necessarily that you are a Socialist." Our ruling You've heard it from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Democratic Socialists of America and the author of the commentary that inspired the blog activity: Just because you are a member of the Progressive Caucus does not mean you are a socialist. And none of the caucus members profess to be Socialists, including our Florida Democrats, Brown, Hastings and Wilson. The bloggers go too far in attacking them as socialists, a repeated label for liberals these days. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. | null | Bloggers | null | null | null | 2011-09-02T13:51:03 | 2011-08-12 | ['United_States', 'Alcee_Hastings'] |
tron-02289 | Gold Star Family Booed by Passengers on Flight | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/gold-star-family-booed-passengers-flight/ | null | military | null | null | ['national security', 'patriotism', 'terrorism'] | Gold Star Family Booed by Passengers on Flight | Nov 21, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
bove-00026 | AP Police Confirm Assault On Forest Official, Deny Political Link | none | https://www.boomlive.in/ap-police-confirm-assault-on-forest-official-deny-political-link/ | null | null | null | null | null | AP Police Confirm Assault On Forest Official, Deny Political Link | Aug 22 2018 7:36 pm, Last Updated: Aug 22 2018 11:12 pm | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14647 | Two million new jobs have been created, in California since 2011. | true | /california/statements/2016/jan/25/jerry-brown/brown-speaks-truth-about-californias-job-growth/ | Near the end of his 2016 State of the State address, Gov. Jerry Brown claimed: "two million new jobs have been created," in California since 2011. That’s a lot of new employment, we thought, especially for a state ranked by some as having the nation’s worst business climate, thanks to high taxes and regulation. Brown has staked his legacy, at least during his second stint in the governor’s office, largely on what he calls the "California comeback." We decided to fact check his claim about job creation, which is a big part of that comeback. From 2007 to 2010, California lost more than a million jobs when the state’s housing and construction sectors collapsed. The loss of tax revenue and past skimpy savings meant multi-billion dollar budget shortfalls for California. It also meant heavy cuts in services for the poor, shuttering state parks and allowing levees, bridges and highways to crumble. In his speech at the state Capitol, Brown took some credit for the financial turnaround, noting that he’s helped pay down huge debts and create the state’s Rainy Day Fund. He didn’t take all the credit for the new jobs. "Two million new jobs have been created and unemployment has dropped in half," since 2011, he said in his record 14th State of the State address. "Of course, the global recovery has a lot to do with that. So, we should applaud, but we can’t control it, too." We’ll leave the global impact on California’s recovery as a question for another day. Our focus is on Brown’s comment that "two million jobs have been created" since 2011, the year he returned to the governor’s office, and more than two decades after his initial stretch as the state’s top executive. Crunching the job numbers Sifting through jobs data can be dizzying. And there are many ways to look at the numbers. For some guidance, we turned to Chapman University economist Esmael Adibi, who tracks state employment. Adibi pointed to "nonfarm payroll jobs" tracked monthly by the state and federal governments. Economists consider that category the most reliable because it eliminates farm employment, which fluctuates considerably. Everyone in the nonfarm category is listed on a payroll and considered an employee. Data from that category show that California had 14,301,300 nonfarm jobs in January 2011, when Brown’s third term started. A report released the day after Brown’s address shows the state had more than 16,320,100 of those jobs in December 2015. That’s a growth of just over two million jobs. Experts we spoke with said this is a ‘net job creation’ total. And because many jobs were also lost during this period, the gross number of positions created would have been well over two million. "I believe the governor is correct," Adibi told us. "The economy actually has done pretty good during his leadership." For some perspective, the two million jobs created in California accounts for about one-sixth of the nation’s net 12.4 million jobs added during the same period, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. It’s also roughly 600,000 more jobs than Texas added during the same period, the federal labor data show. Texas officials, including former Gov. Rick Perry, have made repeated efforts to siphon jobs away from the Golden State. Asked for the source of information for the California governor’s job creation claim, the Brown Administration pointed to the same non-farm payroll data as Adibi. Our ruling In his State of the State address, Gov. Jerry Brown said "two million jobs have been created" in California since 2011. The most reliable data used by both independent economists and the Brown Administration show California had about 14.3 million nonfarm payroll jobs when the governor returned to office in January 2011 and just over 16.3 million jobs last month. That’s a net growth of more than two million jobs. We rate the governor’s claim True. Non-Farm Payroll Job Growth 2011-2015 Create your own infographics | null | Jerry Brown | null | null | null | 2016-01-25T00:00:00 | 2016-01-21 | ['California'] |
snes-02877 | The U.S.'s leading group of pediatricians issued a strong statement condemning tolerance of gender dysphoria in children. | mostly false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/americas-pediatricians-gender-kids/ | null | Politics | null | Kim LaCapria | null | American Pediatricians Issue Statement That Transgenderism Is ‘Child Abuse’? | 20 May 2016 | null | ['United_States'] |
tron-03162 | Senator Tom Daschle saluting the flag with his left hand | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/daschle/ | null | politics | null | null | null | Senator Tom Daschle saluting the flag with his left hand | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['Tom_Daschle'] |
snes-00154 | A woman named Susan posted an angry tirade blaming the cancellation of her wedding on her guests' refusal to contribute $1,500 each towards it. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/susan-bride-wedding/ | null | Viral Phenomena | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Did a Woman Cancel Her Wedding Because Guests Refused to Pay $1,500 Each to Attend? | 28 August 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-04695 | Donald Trump's tax returns were posted online after the IRS database was hacked. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-tax-return-hack/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Anonymous Hacks IRS Database – Publishes Trump’s Tax Returns | 28 May 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-01067 | The state covered a smaller percentage of the cost of K-12 education in 2013 than it did in 2002. | mostly true | /georgia/statements/2015/jan/20/claire-suggs/analyst-target-education-spending/ | Years of state austerity cuts have forced many of the state’s 180 local school districts to furlough or cut employees, increase class sizes and shorten their school years. But they’ve also contributed to a shift in the costs for K-12 education, Claire Suggs, an education policy analyst with the left-leaning Georgia Budget & Policy Institute, said Jan. 9. The state was picking up 56 percent of those costs in Fiscal Year 2002, the year before the austerity cuts began, and only 51 percent in Fiscal 2013, Suggs told reporters at the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education’s Media Symposium. "We are relying much more on local and federal dollars," she said. We decided to fact-check Suggs’ statement, given Gov. Nathan Deal’s announcement last week that he expects a major overhaul of the state’s 30-year school funding formula, the Quality Basic Education (QBE) Act of 1985, to be completed and in place for the 2016-2017 school year. Education funding was one of the hot topics of last year’s governor’s race, largely because of those austerity cuts, which started in 2003 under Gov. Sonny Perdue, continued through the recession and Deal’s first four-year term and have cumulatively amounted to more than $8 billion across all school systems. Jason Carter, the Democratic nominee for governor, said the cuts devastated schools and blamed Deal. Deal’s comeback was that Carter voted for three, back-to-back $1 billion austerity cuts and against the 2015 budget with the smallest cut to education in years. With that background, we delve into the numbers. Records from the state Department of Education shows that K-12 education costs totalling about $10.4 billion in Fiscal 2002 were split three ways: with 56 percent covered by the state, 38 percent by locals and 6 percent by the federal government. Fast forward to the Fiscal 2013, the costs for K-12 education were $14.2 billion, and the split was 51 percent state funds, 41 percent local and 8 percent federal. That means Suggs was on target when she said the state’s share of school funding was down 5 percent to 51 percent in 2013, compared to 56 percent in 2002. We also examined K-12 spending for the years in between and saw plenty of fluctuation. For example, the state’s share fell to 51 percent as early as 2004 and to 43 percent at one point. The budget was propped up for a time by $1 billion in federal stimulus and held steady at 51 percent in Fiscal 2013 and 2014. Data isn’t yet available for Fiscal 2015 to see whether the percentage will change based on the decision by Deal and the General Assembly to reduce the current austerity cut to $749 million. That reduction was celebrated by local school districts, a majority of which qualify for extra state money each year as "low wealth" districts. Joe Martin, a longtime education advocate who helped develop the current funding formula, said that, when state funding declines, locals are usually left, with two options: make up the difference or cut instructional programs. "This isn’t easy for any school system, but the systems with a low tax base per student are left in a terrible predicament," said Martin via email from Macedonia, where he’s currently serving in the Peace Corps. These districts "never had much to begin with, compared with the systems that have much greater resources, but they are simply unable to close the gap," Martin said. Mike Griffin, senior policy analyst with the Education Commission of the States in Denver, said state funding generally decreased for public education nationally during the Great Recession as it did in smaller economic downturns in the 1980s and 1990s. Some states swapped out federal stimulus dollars for state dollars when they became available to fund education, although they shouldn’t have, Griffin said. "When those federal dollars started to fade, some states weren’t in good enough shape to replace them," he said. Our conclusion: Suggs was accurate to say that the percentage of state funding for K-12 education was higher in 2002 than it was in 20013. To her larger point, the federal and local governments also have been paying larger shares through these years. But several factors were at play: the recession, the austerity cuts, the stimulus money. The austerity cut is smaller this year than in several years. That’s needed context. We rate the statement Mostly True. | null | Claire Suggs | null | null | null | 2015-01-20T00:00:00 | 2015-01-09 | ['None'] |
goop-00461 | Are Shiloh Jolie-Pitt And Suri Cruise Friends? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/shiloh-jolie-pitt-suri-cruise-friends/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Are Shiloh Jolie-Pitt And Suri Cruise Friends? | 3:00 am, August 14, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02100 | Cash Back | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cash-back-scam/ | null | Fraud & Scams | null | David Mikkelson | null | Cash Back Scam | 3 December 2004 | null | ['None'] |
bove-00243 | Video Exaggerates 9 Public Sector Banks Could Collapse Because Of Bad Loans: A FactCheck | none | https://www.boomlive.in/video-exaggerates-9-public-sector-banks-could-collapse-because-of-bad-loans-a-factcheck/ | null | null | null | null | null | Video Exaggerates 9 Public Sector Banks Could Collapse Because Of Bad Loans: A FactCheck | Jul 13 2017 4:52 pm, Last Updated: Jul 14 2017 12:38 pm | null | ['None'] |
fani-00007 | CLAIM: “City Deals” by the UK Government are part of the Democratic Unionist Party’s Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Conservative Party. | conclusion: unclear | https://factcheckni.org/facts/were-city-deals-part-of-dups-confidence-and-supply-agreement/ | null | economy | null | null | null | Were “City Deals” part of DUP’s Confidence and Supply Agreement? | null | null | ['None'] |
snes-01309 | New research shows that scientists are manipulating sea level data to inflate predictions of future sea level rise. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientists-caught-tampering-raw-data-exaggerate-sea-level-rise/ | null | Science | null | Alex Kasprak | null | Were Scientists Caught Tampering with Raw Data to Exaggerate Sea Level Rise? | 22 December 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12027 | African Americans in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be stopped and searched by law enforcement officers than caucasians. | half-true | /missouri/statements/2017/sep/18/derrick-johnson/naacp-president-partially-accurate-stops-and-searc/ | The first travel advisory in the history of the NAACP was issued Aug. 2 for the state of Missouri over concerns about the safety of African Americans, and once again tensions between law enforcement officers, state officials and minorities were thrust into the spotlight. The advisory, originally set to expire Aug. 28, was renewed, according to The New York Times. Missouri NAACP President Rod Chapel said it will remain in effect until at least late September. When NAACP Interim President and CEO Derrick Johnson announced the organization’s travel advisory, he cited statistics that depict racial disparities in Missouri. "The numerous racist incidents, and the statistics cited by the Missouri Attorney General in the advisory, namely the fact that African Americans in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be stopped and searched by law enforcement officers than Caucasians, are unconscionable, and are simply unacceptable in a progressive society," Johnson said in the statement. The advisory was issued largely in response to SB 43, which requires employees who claim workplace discrimination prove bias is an explicit reason for being fired, rather than just a contributing factor. It was also in response to a "series of questionable, race-based incidents occurring statewide recently." We wanted to look into Johnson’s statement about racial disparities in Missouri. Are law enforcement officers a full 75 percent more likely to pull over and search an African American? Stops versus searches When we reached out to the NAACP, communications director Malik Russell said Johnson may have gotten some of his numbers mixed up, since he didn’t have the data in front of him. But he emphasized the larger point, saying the difference between the numbers that he might have mixed up is small. Russell didn’t give any additional evidence, but the statement announcing the advisory cited data from the attorney general’s office. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com In 2000, concerns from both Missouri residents and the legislature prompted the passage of a law that requires law enforcement officers collect specific information, including race, for every traffic stop. Each agency must provide this data to the attorney general, who in turn sends it to the governor. A team of researchers has been compiling this information for the attorney general since 2001. The 2016 Vehicle Stops Report Executive Summary from the attorney general’s office breaks down the data related to vehicle stops last year. There were 21 agencies that did not submit the data by the required date and 58 agencies that reported no stops out of 682 law enforcement agencies in the state. Blacks represent 10.9 percent of the driving population and 18 percent of all traffic stops, while whites represent 82.8 percent of the population and 78 percent of stops. Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has been on the research team since 2001. Rosenfeld said the researchers divided stops made by the number of people 16 years and older in the state to come up with a "stop rate." A value of one means there is no disparity, values greater than one mean there is overrepresentation, and values below one mean there is underrepresentation. The disparity index, which is the proportion of stops divided by the proportion of the population, was 1.65 for blacks last year, overrepresenting the black population by 65 percent. Whites, on the other hand, were stopped at a .94 rate, underrepresenting the white population by 6 percent. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Researchers divided 1.65 by .94 to get 1.75, or a 75 percent higher stop rate for blacks than whites. This is the number Johnson used in his statement. But stops and searches are different things. Blacks are 57 percent more likely to be searched than whites. (Formula: 8.77 percent search rate for blacks divided by 5.57 search rate for whites = 1.57.) Our ruling Johnson stated that African Americans in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be stopped and searched by law enforcement officers than caucasians. Blacks in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be stopped by law enforcement officers than whites, which is reflected in the attorney general data. That’s not true about searches. Blacks are 57 percent more likely to be searched than whites. The discrepancy in searches is huge, but it’s not 75 percent. We rate Johnson’s statement Half True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com | null | Derrick Johnson | null | null | null | 2017-09-18T09:59:41 | 2017-08-02 | ['Missouri', 'African_American'] |
vogo-00024 | Statement: “City currently receives about $2.5 million in rent annually from the Chargers,” says a city document provided to Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s Chargers stadium task force. | determination: misleading | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-city-pays-chargers-play-qualcomm-stadium/ | Analysis: In theory, the Chargers have to pay the city of San Diego rent each year to play at Qualcomm Stadium. In reality, it’s the city that pays the Chargers. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: The City Pays the Chargers to Play at Qualcomm Stadium | February 20, 2015 | null | ['San_Diego_Chargers'] |
tron-03178 | Dr. Ben Carson Considering White House Run | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/dr-ben-carson-2016/ | null | politics | null | null | null | Dr. Ben Carson Considering White House Run | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02252 | The Simpsons depicted that President Donald Trump would touch a glowing orb fifteen years before he actually did so during a trip to the Middle East. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/simpsons-predict-trump-orb/ | null | Entertainment | null | Dan Evon | null | Did ‘The Simpsons’ Predict That President Trump Would Touch a Glowing Orb? | 7 June 2017 | null | ['Middle_East', 'Donald_Trump'] |
pomt-00070 | Says Tony Evers wants to give in-state tuition and drivers licenses to "illegal aliens." | mostly true | /wisconsin/statements/2018/nov/02/scott-walker/walker-scores-illegal-aliens-claim-against-evers/ | In a TV ad launched days before the Nov. 6, 2018, election, Republican Gov. Scott Walker went after his Democratic opponent on immigration. The spot — released Oct. 23 — dings Tony Evers on taxes before saying the longtime state schools superintendent "wants to give in-state tuition to illegal aliens … and driver’s licenses, too." The ad includes clips of Evers taken from the Oct. 19, 2018, debate sponsored by the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association. They show Evers saying he would support legislation "that would allow DACA students … to have in-state tuition," and that he supports driver’s licenses "for undocumented folks." Do those clips justify the ad’s summary that Evers supports tuition and licenses for "illegal aliens?" Let’s take a closer look. Defining the terms The truth of this claim hinges on the definition of a few different immigration terms, notably "illegal alien." That’s the preferred verbiage by many on the right for undocumented immigrants. Whatever the term, it refers to people who entered or reside in the country in violation of the law -- such as without visas or passports. Our colleagues at PolitiFact Texas found the term "illegal alien" crops up a few times in federal law, mostly in section headings, but it is never officially defined. Similar terms are used -- and defined -- by the federal government, however. For instance, the IRS defines "undocumented alien" as one "who entered the United States illegally without the proper authorization and documents, or who entered the United States legally and has since violated the terms of his or her visa or overstayed the time limit." Meanwhile, the tuition question focuses specifically on DACA, or Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals, a program that has been in the news since President Donald Trump’s administration took steps to end it a year ago. Federal courts have so far halted that effort. Those protected under DACA are often referred to as "Dreamers." The U.S. Department of Homeland Security program launched DACA in 2012 under President Barack Obama to allow certain people who came to the country illegally as children to request a two-year deferral of immigration action. It also allows them to legally work. DACA status, which is granted at the discretion of prosecutors, is open to people who: Were under age 31 as of June 2012 Came to the U.S. prior to their 16th birthday Have lived in the U.S. continually since at least June 2007 Were in the U.S. in June 2012 and had no lawful status then Are currently in school, have graduated from high school, have obtained a GED or have been honorably discharged from the Armed Forces Have not been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor, or three or more other misdemeanors With that background, let’s look at the two parts of the claim in more detail. Evers on in-state tuition In the debate, Evers was asked whether DACA students should get in-state tuition. Evers’ response: "I would propose or support legislation that would allow DACA students to be a part of, to have in-state tuition." Former Gov. Jim Doyle signed a measure in 2009 allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at public universities if they graduated from high school here, but Walker repealed that in 2011. As noted, those with DACA status have met certain criteria to be recognized by the government and, as such, would not face immediate deportation. But DACA students by definition are those who are in this country without proper documentation, even if they were brought here by their parents as young children. DACA allows the person to defer immigration action but "does not provide lawful status," according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. And that’s not a position unique to the present administration. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, under Obama, defined DACA immigrants as part of the group that should be counted as "unauthorized resident immigrant population." Evers on driver’s licenses This statement is pretty clear cut. From Evers during the debate: "Do I think that we should have permits, driver permits for undocumented folks that are working in the state of Wisconsin? The answer is yes. Undocumented folks are working hard at jobs all across the state of Wisconsin, paying taxes, paying Social Security. They should have the opportunity … to have permits." Evers said an added benefit is that requiring a permit means undocumented residents "have to learn how to drive safely in Wisconsin." Evers uses "undocumented" instead of the "illegal aliens" term the Walker ad invokes, but the terms are substantially similar in common usage. Currently, someone in the country illegally cannot get a driver’s license in Wisconsin, though immigrants who have obtained the DACA designation can, said Davorin Odrcic, a Milwaukee immigration attorney. Our rating Walker claims in a TV ad that Evers supports granting driver’s licenses and in-state tuition for "illegal aliens." Walker is clearly on point on the driver’s license issue. As for in-state tuition for DACA students, Evers backs that, too. There is a wrinkle though, in that those with DACA status have met certain criteria to be recognized by the government and, as such, would not face immediate deportation. That said, by definition they are not in the country legally. Their DACA status delays official action against them, but it doesn’t change the lack of legal status. So the statement is accurate, but it requires some clarification and detail on DACA status. That’s our definition of Mostly True. | null | Scott Walker | null | null | null | 2018-11-02T06:00:00 | 2018-10-23 | ['None'] |
pomt-11069 | There's been a 1,700 percent increase in asylum claims over the last 10 years. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jun/21/donald-trump/1700-percent-increase-asylum-claims/ | President Donald Trump argued that immigrants entering illegally are gaming the American immigration system, citing a remarkable rise in asylum applications. He said some asylum seekers are actually abusing the process with criminal intentions. "There's been a 1,700 percent increase in asylum claims over the last 10 years," Trump said in a June 19 speech. "Think of that. Think of that. We're a great country but you can't do that. Smugglers know how the system works. They game the system; they game it." Has there been a 1,700 percent increase in asylum claims? The numbers stack up. But the claims of gaming the system are less supported. Trump is talking about "credible fear" cases, which is spelled out in the Refugee Act of 1980. It's available for people unable or unwilling to return to their home country "because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." Migrants who are apprehended or unable to enter the country legally can claim "credible fear" in order to get a hearing before an immigration court. The Homeland Security Department tracks cases in which a decision to grant a hearing has been made, which differs only slightly from the number of all claims made. In 2007, 5,171 people claimed credible fear and had their cases reviewed. In 2016, it was 91,786. That represents a 1,675 percent hike, basically as Trump claimed. Between 60 and 80 percent of those cases were approved for further court review. Overall, 20 percent of applicants were ultimately granted asylum in fiscal year 2017, the Homeland Security Department told us. Not necessarily gaming the system But that doesn’t mean asylum seekers are gaming the system. The majority have valid claims of fear in their home countries, experts told us. Louis Desipio, a University of California Irvine political science professor who specializes in immigration, told us that while more people are affirmatively expressing their right to apply for asylum, their claims are not necessarily without merit. "Initially, a lot of migration was single males from Mexico coming for work, and now you’re seeing a shift to Central American families fleeing record levels of violence in the northern triangle" of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, said Joshua Breisblatt, a senior policy analyst at the American Immigration Council. "There is no indication that that’s an increase in fraud, that’s just something that is happening in the United States’ backyard." Asylum requests by citizens of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras made up 72.9 percent of total claims in fiscal year 2016. "Our laws are clear," said Kate Voigt, associate director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "If you express a fear of returning to your home country, you have a right to a credible fear screening. If the asylum officer finds you have a credible fear of persecution in your home country, then you have a right to have an immigration judge hear your case." Under the last several administrations, Customs and Border Protection increased its use of expedited removal, according to Lenni B. Benson, a law professor at New York Law School. Given the only way to stop an expedited removal order is to seek a credible fear review, Benson said this might explain the hike in numbers. As we noted, the overall grant rate for all asylum applications nationwide was 20 percent in fiscal year 2017, a percentage hasn’t changed much since 2012. But Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government who has interviewed hundreds of migrants for immigration research, said the variation in numbers between case approvals and asylum application approvals does not prove fraud, either. In order to get their cases of asylum initially approved, immigrants arriving illegally must fill out a survey to show whether their conditions qualify under the definition of persecution. In order to prove they merit asylum, they must show evidence they often lack before a court. The United States has also narrowed its standards for asylum under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Desipio said, precluding victims of domestic abuse and gang violence from qualifying for asylum. "It’s very complicated for these people," Correa said. "How, if they are in the United States after that very difficult journey, are they going to prove they have been extorted, show that their kids have been recruited by gangs?" Correa said there are definitely cases of fraud by smugglers who attempt to reunite children with their parents. But there are also families fleeing situations of extreme insecurity. Our ruling Trump said, "There's been a 1,700 percent increase in asylum claims over the last 10 years." There was a 1,675 percent increase in asylum claims reviewed by the Homeland Security Department from 2008 to 2017. But that does not evidence fraud, as Trump suggested. Record levels of violence and persecution abroad largely explain the rise in asylum claims, experts told us. While the percentage of individuals whose asylum claims are approved by the Justice Department is relatively low, it might be explained by the much higher bar set by a court appearance than the completion of a survey. We rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2018-06-21T10:05:55 | 2018-06-19 | ['None'] |
pomt-03039 | Because of the 2011 debt ceiling fight, "the stock market lost 2,000 points." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/08/charles-schumer/charles-schumer-says-dow-jones-lost-2000-points-af/ | If the nation hits the debt ceiling later this month without it being raised by Congress, economists predict a wide spread of economic harm: higher interest rates, lower economic growth and plunging consumer confidence in the United States and overseas. One particularly high-profile sign of economic distress would be a plummeting Dow Jones Industrial Average. During an appearance on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., cited that scenario as one of the reasons why Congress should take action soon. Stephanopoulos asked Schumer whether both sides were "posturing" and "playing with fire" on the debt ceiling, which is the legal limit to how much debt the government can shoulder. Schumer said, "You don't negotiate over something like the debt ceiling because --" at which point Stephanopoulos interjected, "Other presidents have done it." Schumer responded, "No. The one time that it was really done in this kind of way, (when it wasn’t just) a deadline and you had to decide (on) abortion or something else, was in 2011. We went right up to the deadline. The stock market lost 2,000 points, $18 billion was lost by the American people." We wondered whether Schumer was right about the stock market losing 2,000 points. So we looked at historical data for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the most popular measure of the stock market. On July 21, 2011, the Dow reached 12,724 -- its high point in the months immediately preceding the debt ceiling fight. For the next 10 days, Congress squabbled over raising the debt ceiling. Then, between July 31 and Aug. 2, the White House and congressional leaders reached and implemented a deal that became known as the Budget Control Act of 2011. By Aug. 2, when the crisis was effectively over, the Dow stood at 11,866, a drop of 858 points. That’s less than the 2,000 points Schumer cited. However, the Dow continued to tumble for another two months, due in large part to repercussions of the debt ceiling debate, particularly the downgrading of the United States’ credit rating by Standard & Poors on Aug. 5. By Oct. 3, the Dow had bottomed out at 10,655 -- a decline of 2,069 points from its pre-debt ceiling peak, and its lowest level in about a year. So if you include the aftershocks of the debt ceiling fight, Schumer is correct that the Dow fell by 2,000 points. (You can see the decline as a line chart here.) That said, it’s also worth noting that the recovery was almost as quick as the decline. It took only until Jan. 25, 2012 -- about three and a half months after the low point -- for all of the pre-debt ceiling losses to be recouped. By Jan. 25, the Dow hit 12,758. And as Schumer was speaking on This Week, the most recent Dow close was 15,072 -- an 18 percent increase over the pre-debt ceiling high, which had been about two years and three months earlier. Matt House, a spokesman for Schumer, said the Dow’s subsequent recovery is irrelevant. "Of course (the Dow) came back, but that is of little comfort to anyone who was at or nearing retirement during those several months," he said. "With 10,000 baby boomers retiring a day, that drop is incredibly important, and not to be trivialized. .... And this is all from a default that didn’t happen." Still, we think it’s important to note that the 2,000 points the Dow lost didn’t stay off for years, or even permanently, as some viewers might assume. Our rating Schumer said that because of the 2011 debt ceiling fight, "the stock market lost 2,000 points." If you count the aftermath of the deal that avoided a debt ceiling breach, which included a historic downgrade of the United States’ creditworthiness rating, then Schumer is right that the Dow fell by 2,000 points. Still, Schumer makes it sound as if the drop happened right away. Actually, it dropped at the time of fight and continued to drop for another two months after the United States' credit rating was downgraded. We rate Schumer’s claim Mostly True. | null | Charles Schumer | null | null | null | 2013-10-08T10:48:55 | 2013-10-06 | ['None'] |
goop-00805 | Angelina Jolie “Melting Down” Over “Stress” From Brad Pitt “Custody War,” | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-meltdown-stress-custody-war-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Angelina Jolie NOT “Melting Down” Over “Stress” From Brad Pitt “Custody War,” Despite Report | 9:48 am, June 18, 2018 | null | ['Angelina_Jolie'] |
pomt-00560 | Says Hillary Clinton's "been very clear where she stands on trade." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/14/john-podesta/hillary-clinton-has-been-very-clear-trade-campaign/ | One might expect that as a former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton would have well-defined views on the ongoing fight over President Barack Obama’s trade agenda. But critics of the Democratic presidential candidate -- even within her own party -- have chastised Clinton for taking a vague position on the debate over the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. Democrats are deeply divided over the deal, primarily over whether Congress should accept legislative procedures that would make it easier to approve a deal amid concerns regarding American workers and the environment. "Surely, a person who was secretary of state understands something about American leadership," said Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Fox News Sunday June 14. "And to refuse to even take a position (on TPP) is just sort of mystifying to me." Clinton’s supporters, meanwhile, say there’s nothing mystifying about Clinton’s position. Here’s how Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta explained it to Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd. "She’s been very clear on where she stands on trade," Podesta said, noting that Clinton has said a trade agreement must protect workers and national security. "But the agreement’s not final, so when it is final, she’ll render a judgement on that. She’s stated her concerns, but she’s got a clear standard that it’s got to be good for American workers or she thinks the United States should walk away from it." We decided to take a look at Clinton’s comments on trade from the campaign so far and see if she has expressed a "very clear" stance -- a sentiment echoed by Clinton campaign hands Robby Mook and Karen Finney, also on the June 14 political talk shows. Recent comments To a certain extent, Clinton has laid out where she stands on trade in general in recent months, but she has avoided saying whether she definitively supports the pending deal and the fast-track trade authority many believe is necessary to make the deal happen. Here’s a selection of her recent comments, starting with the most recent: June 14 at an Iowa rally: Just a few hours after the morning shows, Clinton said Obama should "work with his allies in Congress" to ensure better protection for workers and "to make sure we get the best, strongest deal possible." Even though she urged them to make some changes to the deal, she didn’t specify the exact changes, nor did explicitly express overall support or disapproval. May 22 at a New Hampshire press conference: Clinton said she has some questions about the TPP, regarding the potential for currency manipulation and the controversial investor-settlement-dispute mechanism, as well as health and environmental concerns. "I've been for trade agreements, I've been against trade agreements, voted for some, voted against others, so I want to judge this when I see exactly what exactly is in it and whether or not I think it meets my standards," she said. May 19 at a small business lending roundtable: "I've said over and over again any trade deal that I will support must increase jobs, must increase wages, must give us more economic competitive power around the world to sell our products and must be good for our national security." April 17 statement: A campaign spokesman said Clinton would be watching the TPP "closely" to make sure it meets her standards. He said, "Hillary Clinton believes that any new trade measure has to pass two tests: First, it should put us in a position to protect American workers, raise wages and create more good jobs at home. Second, it must also strengthen our national security. We should be willing to walk away from any outcome that falls short of these tests. The goal is greater prosperity and security for American families, not trade for trade’s sake." So Clinton has said she supports trade under certain conditions, though she hasn’t really said anything that shows how she would vote if she was still a member of the Senate today. Namely, she hasn’t said whether or not she would vote to grant Obama fast-track trade promotion authority, the legislative maneuver that would make it easier to pass a trade deal -- currently the main source of Democrat infighting over trade. Speaking about TPP in a 2014 Council on Foreign Relations interview, Clinton briefly talked about fast track, saying only that she thought it was "not likely" that Congress would grant Obama the authority. But she said that she hoped the administration would be able to convince Congress and the American people that it’s critical for the American economy to address "border barriers to our products" so that the deal could pass even without fast track. Before the campaign Before Clinton’s 2016 campaign officially launched -- and also before the trade fight heated up -- Clinton made statements that showed general support for TPP, even saying that the deal as it stood then satisfied many of her concerns. In her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, Clinton wrote that she didn’t want to definitively give support for the trade deal before the details are all hammered out -- but she still called it the "signature economic pillar of our strategy in Asia." She said the deal lowered "trade barriers while raising standards on labor, the environment, and intellectual property. ... It was also important for American workers, who would benefit from competing on a more level playing field. And it was a strategic initiative that would strengthen the position of the United States in Asia." Speaking in Australia in 2012, she said the "TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment." It’s also interesting to note Clinton’s 2008 campaign position on pending trade deals -- much more defined than her current position on TPP -- and how they changed when she joined the Obama administration. For example, in an April 2008 speech where she discussed a proposed trade agreement with Colombia, she said, "As I have said for months, I oppose the deal. I have spoken out against the deal, I will vote against the deal, and I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement." But as secretary of state in 2010, she said of the same deal: "First, let me underscore President Obama's and my commitment to the Free Trade Agreement. We are going to continue to work to obtain the votes in the Congress to be able to pass it. We think it's strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States." Our ruling Podesta said Hillary Clinton has been "very clear on where she stands on trade." While you can argue that clear is a bit of a subjective term, it’s hard for any neutral person to say Clinton has been clear about trade, particularly in the context of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Clinton has avoided answering whether she supports grants Obama fast-track trade promotion authority, which is seen as the linchpin to cutting a trade deal in Asia. Clinton has said what she would like in an ideal trade deal in terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But she has yet to say definitively whether or not Obama’s pending trade deal meets her standards -- though she has admitted some provisions could use improvement. This is a change from just a couple years ago, when she seemed more supportive than not of the pending trade deal. Does any of this sound "very clear" to you? We’ll concede a little wiggle room based on Podesta’s wording. But that’s about it. We rate this claim Mostly False. | null | John Podesta | null | null | null | 2015-06-14T18:18:59 | 2015-06-14 | ['None'] |
goop-02620 | Gigi Ha Pregnant With Zayn Malik Baby | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/gigi-hadid-pregnant-zayn-malik-baby/ | null | null | null | Holly Nicol | null | Gigi Hadid NOT Pregnant With Zayn Malik Baby, Despite Rumor | 12:47 pm, August 1, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
vees-00449 | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Is Duterte’s popularity rising? | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-dutertes-popularity-rising | While Duterte’s performance and trust ratings have remained high since he became president, his numbers are virtually the same or have dipped slightly, according to recent surveys. | null | null | null | Duterte,Panelo,SWS,Pulse Asia,Survey | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Is Duterte’s popularity rising? | February 28, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06813 | Says GOP recall challenger Kim Simac "was delinquent paying her property taxes eight of the last nine years." | true | /wisconsin/statements/2011/aug/12/greater-wisconsin-political-fund/greater-wisconsin-political-fund-says-recall-candi/ | In July 2011, when allies of state Sen. Jim Holperin (D-Conover) hit his recall challenger, Republican Kim Simac, for failing to pay income taxes, Simac punched back -- metaphorically speaking, of course. Simac accused her foes of believing that struggling small-business owners such as she are "too poor to run for public office." She blamed the troubles of her horse-training business, Great Northern Adventure Co., on the poor economy, and said she had no tax liability to pay. The tax attack on Simac, a party activist and founder of the Northwoods Patriots, continued a few weeks later, when a union-backed group, the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, launched a TV ad. That ad says Simac, who has campaigned for a property tax freeze, had no credibility on the topic of taxes given her personal record. In addition to other taxes, the ad focused on property tax payments on the home Simac co-owns on the 22-acre horse ranch, saying she was "was delinquent paying her property taxes eight of the last nine years." To get to the bottom of the deliquency claim, we first asked the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund and the related Greater Wisconsin Committee to provide their basis for the claim. Greater Wisconsin is funded by labor and Democratic Party groups and wealthy individual donors. The Greater Wisconsin Committee has been running a pro-Holperin ad in the district in northern Wisconsin. The group referred us to a WAOW-TV online story July 28, 2011 that reported a pattern of delinquencies. The story said Simac "paid all outstanding property tax bills in June." After organizing the recall against Holperin, Simac announced her intention to run in early May. Simac campaign spokesman Matt Capristo told us Simac was never behind on her payments under Wisconsin law. Let’s take a look. We turned to the Vilas County treasurer’s office, which has the detail on tax payments on two properties Simac owns: a Town of Lincoln home on the horse ranch, and an undeveloped property in the City of Eagle River. On the home and ranch -- valued at $242,000 and co-owned with her husband, Arthur -- Simac was delinquent in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010, according to records reviewed for us by Deputy Treasurer Peggy Cleveland. She paid on time in 2008. The late payments typically involved missing the January 31 deadline. That’s when, under state law, taxes are due in full or the first of two installments must be made. In most cases, Simac paid up later in the same year. The exception was 2002 and 2003, which Simac didn’t pay until May 2004, Cleveland said. Simac was charged -- and paid -- interest on the delinquent payments. On the second property, the frequency of delinquent payments was exactly the same. In 2006, she paid taxes that were due in 2004 and 2005. In Simac’s defense, Capristo said the cash flow of her tourist-related business made it impossible for her to pay in January. "She pays it when she gets it," he said. As for the timing of her payments, Capristo said property taxes are really not due in full until July 31 -- the legal deadline for the second installment payment. He added that he understood that Simac paid her taxes in time to meet that July 31 date. But according to Vilas County tax officials, the legal deadline to pay all or at least the first installment is Jan. 31. That point is clearly backed up by state statutes and other treasurer’s offices and is stated on homeowners tax bills. Here is a typical warning, this from a City of Milwaukee property tax bill: "WARNING: If the first installment payment is not paid by the due date, the installment option is lost. The total tax becomes delinquent and is subject to interest and penalty charges." Beyond that, the records show it’s not nearly the case Simac that made her payments in every instance by July 31 of the given year, as her aide claimed. On the property containing her home, which is the focus of the TV ad, she was two years late at one point, and made other second installments in August and November, Cleveland said records show. Three times, she made a timely January installment but was late on the second. Five times, she missed January altogether. Records show Simac is all paid up for 2010, though she missed the January deadline on her main property. She paid in full on June 14, 2011. Her bill was $1,992 in taxes and $99 in interest. The bottom line? The Greater Wisconsin Committee went after recall challenger Kim Simac for having delinquent property taxes in eight of the last nine years. Public records backed that claim. Indeed, Simac’s own understanding of the law, as articulated by her campaign, was off. We rate the group’s claim True. | null | Greater Wisconsin Committee | null | null | null | 2011-08-12T09:00:00 | 2011-08-05 | ['None'] |
pomt-06420 | In 2008, when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city. In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65, and rapes … climbed to 229. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/25/joe-biden/update-joe-biden-says-murders-and-rapes-increased/ | Editor’s note: When we first examined this statement from Vice President Joe Biden, we rated his statement Mostly True. We noted in that report, published Oct. 20, 2011, that the numbers he gave for rapes seemed questionable. Shortly afterwards, we explained why our original report was at odds with other independent fact-checkers in a story, "When fact-checkers disagree." We also asked for reaction from readers. Since then, we found more definitive evidence that Biden's numbers on rape are wrong. We have re-reported this item and given it a new rating of Half True. We have also archived our original report with the Mostly True rating. If Congress doesn’t pass President Barack Obama’s jobs plan, crimes like rape and murder will go up as cops are laid off, says Vice President Joe Biden. It’s a stark talking point. But Biden hasn’t backed down in the face of challenges during the past week, citing crime statistics and saying, "Look at the facts." In a confrontation with a conservative blogger on Oct. 19, Biden snapped, "Don’t screw around with me." We were intrigued by comments Biden made in Flint, Mich., on Oct. 12, 2011: "In 2008, when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city. "In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65, and rapes, just to pick two categories, climbed to 229. "In 2011, you now only have 125 shields. God only knows what the numbers will be this year for Flint if we don't rectify it. And God only knows what that number would have been had we not been able to get a little bit of help to you." We looked at Biden’s crime numbers and turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Statistics to confirm them. But the federal numbers aren’t the same as the numbers Biden cited. (Several of our readers did the same thing; we received several requests to check Biden’s numbers.) What’s going on here? We asked Biden’s office, and they said they got the numbers from the city of Flint. For the sake of clarity, we’ll look at the murder numbers first and then turn to the rape numbers. Murders in Flint Our research showed murders are an acknowledged problem in the city of Flint. The Flint Journal reported that murders in the city reached a historic high of 66 in 2010, with homicides happening so often that one officer deemed the city a "killing field." That same year, the city laid off 66 officers, bringing the total number to about 120. In May 2011, Flint voters approved a tax renewal to prevent more layoffs. But they rejected a separate tax increase to fund the city jail. The jail has been shuttered since 2008. When when we looked at the FBI’s crime statistics, we found that Flint reported 32 murders in 2008 and 53 murders in 2010. (The Michigan State Police reported the same numbers.) Biden said 35 and 65 -- not exactly the same, but in the ballpark. After Biden’s remarks garnered attention, the city of Flint released a statement to several news organizations saying that the 2010 data reported to the FBI was incorrect, due to a clerical error, and that the number Biden used was accurate. Rapes in Flint For rapes, though, the numbers seemed seriously off. The FBI showed 103 rapes in 2008 and 92 rapes in 2010 -- a small decline. The numbers Biden cited were 91 rapes in 2008 and 229 in 2010 -- a dramatic increase. At first, we wondered if the differences were the result of the FBI’s more restrictive reporting requirements for what constitutes rape. The FBI definition -- "the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will" -- is particularly restrictive, excluding male victims and other types of sexual assaults. (The New York Times recently published a detailed report on the problems of the rape definition.) However, it now seems clear that numbers the city of Flint gave Biden were wrong, that someone in the city used numbers for rape alone in 2008 but all categories of criminal sexual misconduct in 2010. (Our friends at Factcheck.org noted this discrepancy in several of their ongoing reports on the topic.) We checked numbers for rape with the Michigan State Police. They found that the Flint Police Department reported that rape, using the most restrictive definition, declined from 108 in 2008 to 92 in 2010. The state police also provided us numbers reported by the Flint Police Department for all sexual crimes, and those too declined, from 262 incidents in 2008 to 219 incidents in 2010. We should note that the city of Flint e-mailed us one statement in defense of the numbers Biden used. But the city’s spokesperson has not answered repeated phone calls and e-mails from PolitiFact to further explain discrepancies. Do more police officers mean less crime? So Biden is largely correct on murder in Flint going up, but wrong about the increase in rapes. Still, how would Obama’s jobs bill increase the number of police? It does not directly fund police positions. Rather, it sends additional money to the states, primarily for education. Biden is likely making the assumption that additional money in one area could prevent layoffs in another, as many states are required to balance their budget on an annual or biannual basis. Then there’s the question of whether fewer cops equals more crime. Generally speaking, most of the evidence we reviewed said that the number of police is one factor among several in preventing crime. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said he agreed with Biden’s general point. The primary problem with reducing force strength is that there are fewer officers to staff special units that target a community’s particular problems, such as gangs or sexual assaults, he said. Large-scale reductions like Flint’s are particularly problematic, because rebuilding a force when the economy improves will take time, according to Fox. "It’s not like a light switch you can turn off and on," he said, because it takes so much time to hire and train new officers. "I’m always concerned when police force numbers are cut drastically. In the long run, it’s very problematic." We then turned to the peer-reviewed literature to see if social scientists have been able to isolate the effect of the size of the police force on crime. We found several recent studies concluded more police did reduce crime. But we also found at least one study that questioned the previous research, saying they did not control for other factors, such as public intolerance of crime. Our ruling Biden cited statistics saying that as Flint reduced its police force, the number of murders and rapes increased significantly. We find good evidence that the number of murders increased, but the number of rapes actually declined. Experts we spoke with and research we reviewed suggest that police force size has some bearing on crime but that it is only one of several factors. In ruling on Biden’s statement, we rate his statement Half True. | null | Joe Biden | null | null | null | 2011-10-25T18:43:34 | 2011-10-12 | ['Flint,_Michigan'] |
pomt-02837 | Florida "remains the top travel destination across the world." | mostly false | /florida/statements/2013/nov/21/rick-scott/rick-scott-declares-florida-top-travel-destination/ | Florida Gov. Rick Scott is our salesman-in-chief when it comes to recruiting tourists. His office blasted a press release chock full of statistics about tourism in Florida that made us nod off like a lazy tourist on the beach -- until we came across this phrase: "As we move toward our third consecutive year of record tourism growth, it is clear why the Sunshine State remains the top travel destination across the world," stated the Nov. 15 press release. The "top travel destination across the world"? Is the home state of Mickey Mouse kicking the derriere of tourist hot spots like France? We went on a virtual trip to find out. Florida tourism stats We asked a spokesman for Scott for an explanation as to how he arrived at his claim. John Tupps said Scott was simply expressing a personal opinion that Florida is the best place to visit in the whole world, not making a quantitative statement. "The governor truly believes Florida is the ‘top travel destination’ in the world," Tupps said in an email. "It’s his personal view." We thought Scott’s wording went further than a personal opinion, though, so we decided put his statement on the Truth-O-Meter. We soon found that comparing tourism stats is tricky, because various states and countries use different methodologies to count visitors. Visit Florida, a quasi-state agency, counts out-of-state, overnight visitors. By that measurement, Florida had 91.5 million visitors in 2012. In California in 2012, there were 61 million out-of-state overnight trips. New York had about 62 million overnight out-of-state visitors in 2011, the most recent year available. So in state-to-state competition, Florida wins on the metric that Visit Florida uses. But the picture changes when we look around the world. According to the U.N.’s World Tourism Organization, in 2012, there were 83 million international visitors to France, compared with the United States in second place with 67 million. So on the metric of international visitors, France is clearly leading Florida. "We continue to say our goal is to beat France," said Kathy Torian, a spokeswoman for Visit Florida. Still, the comparison of Florida with France is tricky, because France is a country and Florida is a state. Florida’s 19 million population is about one-third the size of France’s population of about 66 million. Also, many Europeans travel to France just for a weekend, or visitors book a short stay in France, and then move on to other European destinations. So France may not be as dominant as its visitor counts make it appear. Comparing the number of visitors is not the only way to compare tourism rankings. We could also examine the amount of money spent by visitors. And while France is No. 1 in the number of international visitors, it tumbles behind the United States and Spain when you consider spending, the AP reported: "International visitors spent more than double in the U.S. than they did in France in 2012 – $126.2 billion, compared to $53.7 billion, according to the U.N.’s World Tourism Organization. That despite the fact that France welcomed 20 percent more tourists." The U.S. Travel Association reports that travel spending was $71.5 billion in Florida in 2011. That amount lags behind California, at $105 billion in 2011. Both those numbers top France's $53.7 billion in 2012. But to Scott's point, those spending numbers still don't put Florida in the No. 1 position. Our ruling While touting Florida’s tourism numbers, Scott said, "The Sunshine State remains the top travel destination across the world." There isn’t one simple way to declare "the" top travel destination in the world. But Scott’s claim would probably elicit a "mais non!" from Scott’s counterparts in France, who can boast to being the undisputed global leader of international tourists. And if you don't consider France a fair comparison, recent data on travel spending shows that California edges out Florida. Visit Florida is clamoring to achieve that No. 1 ranking, but we didn’t find proof that we are already there. Scott is clearly a cheerleader for his own state, but the data to back up his claim is murky and difficult to substantiate. We rate the claim Mostly False. | null | Rick Scott | null | null | null | 2013-11-21T16:48:57 | 2013-11-15 | ['None'] |
pomt-13456 | Says "Patrick Murphy is the only candidate to have voted against every measure to fund Zika." | false | /florida/statements/2016/sep/14/marco-rubio/patrick-murphy-has-voted-against-every-zika-fundin/ | While the Senate bickers over Zika funding, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign says Democratic challenger U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy has been playing partisan politics over the issue in the House. The same day the Senate failed to approve emergency public health funding to deal with Zika for the third time in three months, Rubio spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said Murphy has been an obstructionist. "Patrick Murphy is the only candidate to have voted against every measure to fund Zika," she said on Sept. 7, 2016. (By "only," she meant the only general election Senate candidate, comparing Murphy to Rubio.) That doesn’t sound like the position a Florida congressman facing a Zika outbreak would take in an election year, so we checked the record. We should note Rubio has supported high-level funding for Zika efforts, even co-sponsoring a bill with Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson. Perez-Cubas was speaking for Rubio, so we are putting Rubio on the Truth-O-Meter. It turns out Murphy has opposed plenty of Republican-backed funding proposals, but "every" is putting it too strong. He still has voted for some measures. Funding malaise President Barack Obama first asked Congress for $1.89 billion in funding in February 2016 to deal with a potential outbreak of Zika. The virus has been linked to cases of infant microcephaly, or babies born with abnormally small heads. There is no treatment or vaccine for the disease, so focus has been on prevention. There are at least 771 cases of Zika in Florida, including several local transmissions in the Miami area. But that count may not always be the most accurate. Murphy has been involved with other Zika-related bills, including acting as a cosponsor for a Democrat-favored measure (HR 5044) that provided the full amount Obama requested. Those bills have not left committees in the House. A deeply partisan Congress, meanwhile, has fought all year over finding the money for mosquito control, vaccine development, diagnosing the disease, public education campaigns and more. There have been several measures introduced to deal with the disease, but the main focus this summer has been on some legislative wrangling over appropriations bills. House Republicans on May 18 passed a measure (HR 5243) that would have provided $622 million for Zika. With Obama threatening to veto the measure, Murphy voted no on that one with other Democrats. It was not taken up in the Senate. The next day, Murphy voted yes for a bill (HR 4974) that would have allowed the White House to repurpose leftover funding to deal with the 2014 Ebola outbreak and use it for Zika. Rubio’s campaign said this bill didn’t count, because there was no specified dollar amount, and didn’t guarantee the money would be used for Zika, only that it could. But that’s splitting hairs, because HR 4974 still would have provided at least one option to fund Zika-related programs. Now it’s time for a civics lesson, because what the House did next wasn’t covered on Schoolhouse Rock. The House then passed another bill (HR 2557) that was originally about funding for transportation and other agencies. Instead, the bill became a vehicle for Zika funding using language from HR 5243, the Republican measure. The House wanted $622 million for Zika, but cut that money from other programs in order to stay budget-neutral, a process known as recission. The House also added provisions restricting contraception services that Democrats opposed. The Senate wanted $1.1 billion in new funding. The bill went to conference in June to iron out differences. The House agreed to $1.1 billion in funding, as long as about $700 million was found through cutting other areas. Murphy voted against final passage of HR 2577, and against adopting the conference report instituting the changes. The Senate is currently battling over the bill. Senate Democrats have so far blocked a vote three times in three months, wanting a "clean" bill with no contraception provisions and the full $1.89 billion originally requested. That’s not the end of the line, however. On June 16, Murphy voted for HR 5293, a bill that would allow the administration to shift money in the Defense Department to help with Zika efforts through that agency. Again, there was no set dollar amount or guarantee that’s how the money would be used, but it was another option in the Zika toolbox. It passed the House but is stuck in the Senate. "Murphy did vote in favor of two efforts to transfer funds in support of Zika efforts and opposed the major effort in hopes of gaining more funding than the Republicans offered," said Steven Smith, a Washington University in St. Louis political science professor. Our ruling Rubio, through a spokeswoman, said, "Patrick Murphy is the only candidate to have voted against every measure to fund Zika." Murphy, like most congressional Democrats, has opposed Republican-led efforts to conditionally fund anti-Zika efforts at less than what Obama has requested. But he has offered other solutions and voted against his party for two bills that would have allowed unspecified amounts of money to be repurposed for Zika programs. So the campaign was wrong to say he voted against "every" measure. We rate Rubio’s statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/d1f5fac7-dfa6-4ea1-ac20-dd29bc1b22ae | null | Marco Rubio | null | null | null | 2016-09-14T16:43:43 | 2016-09-07 | ['None'] |
snes-05092 | A video shows a surfer being towed by a great white shark. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surfer-towed-by-shark/ | null | Critter Country | null | Dan Evon | null | Surfer Towed by Shark? | 9 March 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03302 | A town in Belgium was forced to remove a nativity scene to avoid offending four Muslim residents. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/belgian-town-removes-nativity-scene-appease-four-muslim-residents/ | null | Politics | null | Bethania Palma | null | Belgian Town Removes Nativity Scene to Appease Four Muslim Residents | 20 December 2016 | null | ['Belgium', 'Islam'] |
pomt-06289 | Says the state auditor found that 37 percent of the 428,000 students receiving free and reduced-price lunches are ineligible. | false | /new-jersey/statements/2011/nov/20/michael-doherty/nearly-160000-students-new-jerseys-school-lunch-pr/ | The school board president and two other individuals connected to the Elizabeth school district have been accused of illegally signing up their children for the federal school lunch program, but according to state Sen. Michael Doherty, that’s just the "tip of the iceberg." Standing before members of the East Jersey Tea Party, Doherty suggested the state auditor had determined that nearly 160,000 students across the state were receiving free or reduced-price meals when they shouldn’t be. "We have 428,000 kids in the state of New Jersey signed up for free or reduced-price lunch. Our state auditor checked the records, and you know what he found?" Doherty (R-Warren) said during the Nov. 3 appearance. "He found, out of 428,000, when he checked the records, 37 percent of the students that were signed up were actually ineligible." After checking the auditor’s report, PolitiFact New Jersey found that Doherty's math was a bit overwrought. Here's why. Each year, according to state and federal officials, schools are required by the federal government to audit three percent of the total number of the school lunch applications they receive. They are instructed to focus on the ones that are within $100 of the household income that qualifies children for a free or reduced-cost lunch. The logic, state and federal officials say, is that since there are 428,000 kids in the program across New Jersey, you can't check them all. So concentrate on the ones that seem close to the income limit. In 2010 the state auditor looked at the three percent analyzed by each school and found that 37 percent did not actually qualify for the program, which translated to 2,723 erroneous applications. There was never an attempt to analyze the entire 428,000 so there is no way to know what the real number of improper applications actually is. "I stand by the accuracy of my statement," Doherty told us. But the state auditor, Stephen Eells did consider what the overall number of erroneous applications might be. In his report, Eells projected that 58,000 of the 428,000 students may be ineligible, if the results of the analysis conducted by his office are reflective of all approved applications. Our ruling Doherty claimed the state auditor found that 37 percent of 428,000 students in the school lunch program were ineligible, but the 37 percent does not apply to the 428,000. The 37 percent applies to a limited number of questionable applications subject to verification, which translates to about 2,723 ineligible applications. The students behind those applications were not among the 428,000 students cited by Doherty. We rate his statement False. The abuses in the school lunch program are bad enough as they are without any fuzzy math, senator. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com. | null | Michael Doherty | null | null | null | 2011-11-20T07:30:00 | 2011-11-03 | ['None'] |
snes-01434 | Image depicts Texas church shooting suspect Devin Patrick Kelley at a Bernie Sanders rally. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/image-depict-texas-church-shooter-bernie-sanders-rally/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Does an Image Depict the Texas Church Shooter at a Bernie Sanders Rally? | 15 November 2017 | null | ['Texas', 'Bernie_Sanders'] |
snes-05761 | Under Obamacare, patients 76 and older must be admitted to the hospital by their primary care physicians in order to be covered by Medicare. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medicare-at-age-76/ | null | Medical | null | David Mikkelson | null | Medicare at Age 76 | 15 April 2014 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-01184 | We've had the lowest health care inflation in history because of Obamacare. | mostly false | /wisconsin/statements/2014/dec/05/gwen-moore/gwen-moore-says-obamacare-created-lowest-ever-infl/ | A week after the mid-term elections, in which the GOP gained considerable ground in Congress, U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore was asked if Americans had rejected President Barack Obama’s policies. The Milwaukee Democrat responded, in part, by saying Republicans had take many steps to "discredit" Obama, including voting more than 50 times to repeal his Affordable Care Act. "But the reality," Moore stated Nov. 11, 2014 on Wisconsin Public Radio, "is that Obamacare has lowered health care costs by $36 billion just this year. We've had the lowest health care inflation in history because of Obamacare." The bolder claim about Obamacare -- that health care inflation in the United States is the lowest ever because of the law -- is one we want to check. Inflation vs. spending Health care inflation and health care spending are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are different. Inflation refers to health care prices from one year to the next, while spending is, well, how much is spent on health care. It turns out that growth in both health care inflation and expenditures are at historic lows, at least dating back to when the federal government began tracking them in 1960. Moore’s office cited data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis that shows health care inflation, as of the end of 2013, at about 1 percent per year -- the lowest since the early 1960s. Some economists prefer to consider actual health care expenditures, since that goes to how much health care is being used and how much is being paid for it. The latest estimates from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services put health care spending at $2.8 trillion, or $8,915 per person, in 2012. That marked the fourth straight year, dating back to 2009, that the annual increase was less than 4 percent. Again, those are historic lows dating back to 1960. (A few weeks after Moore made her claim, the 2013 figure was released, showing health expenditures rose 3.6 percent, the lowest annual increase since 1960.) So, Moore is on the right track in terms of the figures. But the thrust of her claim is that the inflation slowdown is due to Obamacare. Moore spokesman Eric Harris argued that Moore didn’t claim Obamacare is the sole cause of the slowdown in health care prices, although she believes it is an important one. But Moore made her statement while defending the law and clearly gave it singular credit for the smaller increases in medical inflation. Obamacare’s role There is not widespread agreement that the Affordable Care Act is the key factor in limiting medical inflation. The inflation rates are lowest since the law took effect in March 2010, though they were trending downward several years earlier and the law has been rolled out only in stages. Even the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, in a November 2013 report, said "the causes of the slowdown are not yet fully understood" -- although it gave some credit to Obamacare, including the law’s reduction in Medicare payments to health care providers. And the council’s chairman wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "many factors, including the recession and one-time developments like blockbuster drugs coming off patent, have contributed to the slowdown," but that Obamacare "has made a meaningful contribution." We sought out some economists, as well. Harvard University’s David Cutler, who served as the senior health care adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign, told us "nobody has the complete answer" for the smaller increases in health care inflation but that Obamacare is "important." Others downplayed the role of the health care reform law. Charles Roehrig, director of the Center for Sustainable Health Spending at the nonprofit Altarum Institute, noted that Obamacare’s main aim is to expand health insurance coverage, not reduce prices. It is a factor in healthcare inflation, but the smaller increases in health prices are "mainly explained by slower overall price inflation," he said. And like other economists, Gail Wilensky, who ran Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush, told us much of the slowing in medical-price inflation is simply due to the "unusually slow recovery from the recession." The Affordable Act, she said, has had perhaps a "small effect." Finally, the Washington Post Fact Checker arrived at a similar conclusion in rating a November 2014 claim by Obama that health care inflation "has gone down every single year" since the Affordable Care Act passed. The president, though he wasn’t as bold as Moore, was given "three pinocchios" for a statement that has "significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions." "There are certainly some cost-controls contained in the law, but it remains unclear whether those measures have really had that much impact, especially because the Great Recession clearly had affected health-care inflation even before the law was implemented," The Fact Checker wrote. "Just as growth in health-care costs have slowed because the 2009 economic crisis, so has economic growth and general price inflation overall." Our rating Moore said: "We've had the lowest health care inflation in history because of Obamacare." There’s an element of truth in her claim, given that the Affordable Care Act is given some credit for the smallest increases in health care inflation on record. But Moore’s claim gave virtually all the credit to Obamacare, when there isn’t evidence it played that large of a role. We rate Moore’s statement Mostly False. | null | Gwen Moore | null | null | null | 2014-12-05T17:52:06 | 2014-11-11 | ['None'] |
afck-00052 | Average water consumption in South Africa is 235 litres per capita per day. | mostly-correct | https://africacheck.org/reports/south-africans-guzzle-235-litres-water-per-day/ | null | null | null | null | null | Does South Africa guzzle 235 litres of water per person daily? | 2018-04-11 09:52 | null | ['South_Africa'] |
pomt-07491 | President Obama has spent over $2 million in legal fees defending lawsuits about his birth certificate. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/12/donald-trump/donald-trump-claims-obama-has-spent-2-million-lega/ | Among those who challenge President Barack Obama's citizenship, one claim is often raised: Why would Obama spend millions of dollars defending against the lawsuits instead of simply producing his original birth certificate? That argument took on renewed life recently when it was cited by potential GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. And the argument is almost always attached to a specific figure: $2 million. In an interview on NBC's Today show, for example, Trump said Obama "spent $2 million in legal fees trying to get away from this issue." He repeated the figure in a CNN interview on April 10, 2011. "I just say very simply why doesn't he show his birth certificate?" Trump asked. "Why has he spent over $2 million in legal fees to keep this quiet and to keep this silent?" (For some background on the underpinnings of the dispute over Obama birth certificate, start here). In a Fox News appearance on April 10, 2011, Palin echoed the figure while praising Trump's efforts. Trump is "paying for researchers to find out why President Obama would have to spend $2 million to not show his birth certificate," Palin said. "So more power to him." It's certainly true that the Obama campaign has spent some amount of money opposing an array of lawsuits brought by people who claim that Obama has failed to produce a legitimate birth certificate and is therefore ineligible to serve as president. But has the president spent $2 million? We contacted Trump's office to find out where he got the number, but we did not receive a response. Others who have used the number have cited a story from WorldNetDaily, a conservative news website that has served as a venue for news and commentary about the birth certificate controversy. In an Oct. 27, 2009, article, WND reported that, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign had paid approximately $1.7 million to the campaign's law firm, Perkins Coie, since Obama was elected. So that's where we started our research. We did our own tally of payments made to Perkins Coie, all of which were reported, as required by law, in quarterly disbursement reports filed to the FEC by his campaign organization, Obama for America. We found that in the last quarter of 2008 -- which is roughly the period after Obama was elected in early November -- and the first three quarters of 2009, which is when WND wrote its story, Obama for America did, in fact, pay Perkins Coie $1.7 million. If you add in the payments made in subsequent months, the fees paid to Perkins Coie between October 2008 and December 2010 rises to $2.6 million. But what does that $2.6 million number mean? Not what Trump and others have assumed. Specifically, the payments by Obama for America to Perkins Coie covered all sorts of legal expenses -- not just expenses related to birth certificate issues. The FEC forms do not specify what each payment specifically went for, since that degree of detail is not required by law. We also couldn't get additional details from Perkins Coie or the Democratic National Committee about how the legal fees were spent. However, DNC National Press Secretary Hari Sevugan told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call in a March 31, 2011, story that "the campaign has incurred ordinary legal expenses related to the wind-down of its operations and other legal services, which all campaigns incur, and which are proportional to the unprecedented size of this campaign." (The Obama campaign raised upwards of $750 million -- a record.) For the sake of comparison, the Roll Call story noted that the campaign for Obama's 2008 Republican opponent John McCain -- which was a smaller operation -- had spent more than $1.3 million on lawyers since the election. In the interview with Roll Call, Sevugan confirmed that some of the legal fees were needed to defend the campaign against what he called "unmeritorious" lawsuits, including one that challenged Obama’s citizenship. And WND reported that Perkins Coie attorney Robert Bauer wrote at least one letter to challenge a plaintiff, retired military officer Gregory S. Hollister, who had filed a suit raising questions about the legitimacy of Obama's right to hold the office of president. WND reported that Bauer -- who later left Perkins Coie to serve as White House counsel -- wrote to Hollister's attorney that "the suit is frivolous and should not be pursued. Should you decline to withdraw this frivolous appeal, please be informed that we intend to pursue sanctions, including costs, expenses and attorneys' fees...." Still, there are clearly lots of other expenses incurred by the Obama campaign's legal team that have nothing to do with the citizenship question. For instance, the Republican National Committee filed a complaint with the FEC claiming that the Obama campaign had accepted donations from foreign nationals, among other alleged campaign finance infractions. All told, Roll Call reported that "the FEC has written 26 letters — totaling more than 1,500 pages — to the Obama campaign questioning its reports and outlining a flurry of compliance concerns." After we looked through court records and spoke to experts in the field, we found insufficient evidence to support the claim that Obama for America spent $2 million solely on birth-certificate-related work. Four campaign-finance experts we interviewed all agreed that after the campaign was over, a law firm in Perkins Coie’s situation would have a full plate of legal work to do that had nothing to do with birth certificate questions. Two of the experts who took this position have represented Republicans -- Trevor Potter, a campaign finance lawyer who worked for the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns of John McCain and the 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush, and Robert Kelner, who has represented the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. A third attorney who agreed, Allison R. Hayward, is the vice president of policy for the Center for Competitive Politics, which filed an amicus brief opposing the Obama administration’s position in the landmark Citizens United Supreme Court case, which ended a broad swath of campaign finance restrictions. "FEC audits and/or enforcement matters can take several years -- most are still open from the 2008 election," said Potter, general counsel to the Campaign Legal Center. "Various criminal investigations of donors may require campaign responses. Lawsuits against the campaign, campaign staff, and/or the candidate take time to defend. Vendor disputes may exist and require settlement." "Law firms representing presidential campaigns typically are very busy in the one to two years following the campaign," said Brett Kappel, a lawyer with the firm Arent Fox LLP who specializes in campaign finance law. "First, there are all the legal issues involved in closing down the campaign –- resolving disputes with vendors, preparation for the FEC audit and so on. Second, the one to two years after the campaign is over are typically when all the FEC complaints that were filed against the campaign are resolved, and that’s certainly been the case with the 2008 Obama campaign." We should note that, since Obama was elected, a number of federal cases related to the birth certificate issue -- including several filed by or with the assistance of California attorney Orly Taitz, a leader among Obama birth certificate questioners -- have been handled by federal attorneys, including those with the U.S. Department of Justice. Several of these cases were dismissed almost immediately. Others were active for up to a year but were ultimately dismissed and then, in some cases, appealed. The case in which Bauer wrote the letter to the plaintiff was dismissed twice by the Supreme Court. We interpret the quotations by Trump and Palin to mean payments made by Obama in a personal capacity, not in cases where he's represented in an official capacity by government lawyers. For one thing, both Trump and Palin used the term "legal fees," which would be irrelevant in a case defended by government lawyers. Federal attorneys are paid a salary by the taxpayers, and they do not charge their "client" -- in this case, the president -- fees for representation. If these attorneys weren't working on birth certificate cases, they'd be working on some other case for the same salary. So that leaves the funds paid to Perkins Coie. Trump's and Palin's claims assume that the vast majority of the money paid to Perkins Coie since the election was used to defend against lawsuits challenging Obama's citizenship. We agree that some amount of money was spent in legal fees related to those lawsuits -- the letter from Bauer to the plaintiff is an example of that. But, while we don't know exactly how much the Obama camp spent on their private lawyers, there were many, many non-birth-certificate duties that a law firm typically handles in the wake of a presidential campaign, which suggests that any birth certificate work was a small percentage of the overall fees paid to Perkins Coie. When fact-checking, we think the onus is on the person making the claim to back up his statement. And the only backing we've seen in this case is that the Obama campaign's legal team spent more than $2 million on legal fees since the election ended. It's clear to us that the WND story has been twisted to wrongly assume that every dollar the Obama campaign spent on legal fees went to fight the release of Obama's birth certificate. The evidence shows that's simply not true. It's a huge, unsubstantiated leap to assume that all, or most, of that was related to lawsuits about Obama's citizenship. We rule Trump's claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/74d49c90-3e18-4dfd-9bd9-2fbde85d90cd | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2011-04-12T16:10:25 | 2011-04-07 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
tron-00332 | Two instant messages warned of the World Trade Center attacks before they happened | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/odigo/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | Two instant messages warned of the World Trade Center attacks before they happened | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
tron-00708 | Wisdom from the Dalai Lama | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/dali/ | null | celebrities | null | null | null | Wisdom from the Dalai Lama | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
tron-01310 | Maxine Waters: Pictures of Tide Prove Climate Change | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/maxine-waters-tide-climate-change/ | null | environment | null | null | ['climate change', 'congress', 'donald trump'] | Maxine Waters: Pictures of Tide Prove Climate Change | Jun 2, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12228 | Says Ted Kennedy met "with the KGB in order to beat Ronald Reagan in 1984." | false | /punditfact/statements/2017/jul/18/greg-gutfeld/fox-news-host-cites-ted-kennedy-kgb-meeting-never-/ | Supporters of President Donald Trump have defended Donald Trump Jr. and his readiness to receive Russian materials on Hillary Clinton by finding examples when Democrats tried to do something similar. Fox News host Greg Gutfeld brought up the case of Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. "Nothing will ever come close to Ted Kennedy meeting with the KGB in order to beat Ronald Reagan in 1984," Gutfeld said on his show July 15. "It was a quid pro quo. You help the Dems. We help the USSR. If it worked, we would still have the USSR." As Gutfeld spoke, a graphic appeared on the screen of a 2009 Forbes magazine article, "Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit." This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a claim like this, and it’s not the first time this Kennedy-KGB story tracked back to that Forbes story. So is it true? Hardly. There’s not much to back up the tale under any circumstances, but Gutfeld went overboard even relative to the Forbes article. He said Kennedy met with the KGB, something the Forbes piece doesn’t even mention. The Forbes article describes a 1983 memo from Viktor Chebrikov, then head of the Soviet spy agency, to Yuri Andropov, the then-general secretary of the Communist Party. Chebrikov wrote that Kennedy’s trusted friend John Tunney, a former senator from California, had passed along Kennedy’s interest in meeting with Andropov. So even if you take the memo from KGB agent as gospel, there was no actual meeting between Kennedy and the KGB. But what about the rest of the details and the memo? Was Kennedy looking to undermine Reagan? That’s murkier than you might expect. Step back to 1983 In early 1983, Reagan’s plan to place medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe generated great concern among voters in the West and also within the leadership of the USSR. The KGB memo detailed a proposal, ostensibly from Kennedy via Tunney, to de-escalate tensions. Those steps included Andropov inviting Kennedy and Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., for a meeting in Moscow. The purpose "would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA." In addition, Kennedy’s middleman suggested that Andropov come to the United States where he could do interviews on the big three broadcast networks and speak to the "peaceful intentions of the USSR." According to the memo, Kennedy’s goal was to "root out the threat of nuclear war, and to improve Soviet-American relations, so that they define the safety of the world." The memo does mention Kennedy’s interest in the presidency, but the idea was for Kennedy to run in 1988. (Kennedy never ran and supported then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.) The memo said, "Because he (Kennedy) formally refused to partake in the election campaign of 1984, his speeches would be taken without prejudice as they are not tied to any campaign promises. Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988." Having served two terms, Reagan would not be on the ballot in 1988. To believe or not believe the memo The memo gained attention when it was the basis of a news report published in the London Times in 1992, after the Soviet Union dissolved. When the report came out, Tunney told the London Times that it was "bull----." We reached Tunney in 2015, and he emphatically repeated that. "The idea that I would be handling contacts with Andropov is preposterous," Tunney said. "This memo is completely false." At the time, Tunney was a private businessman, but his friendship with Kennedy dated back to law school. He said that while he had made many trips to Moscow over the years and knew people in the KGB, the only political topic Kennedy ever asked him to broach with the Soviets was a deal to release dozens of dissidents. In exchange, Kennedy would make a speech at a university in one of the USSR’s republics in Central Asia. That took place several years earlier. Tunney said that some time after the memo emerged, Kennedy asked him if he knew anything about it, and Tunney said, "this is crazy." In 1992, a Boston Herald reporter reached Kennedy spokesman Paul Donovan. Donovan said Kennedy’s office had made other efforts to meet with Andropov, but nothing ever came of it. According to the Herald, Donovan said, "The rest of the memo is KGB fiction." Denials from anyone tied to Kennedy might be expected, but Kennedy does have a sort of character reference in the arena of foreign relations from a Reagan insider, the administration’s disarmament negotiator Max Kampelman. In his memoirs Entering New Worlds, Kampelman wrote that the Soviets liked working with Kennedy as a back-door conduit of information, and Kampelman welcomed the arrangement. "I learned that the senator never acted or received information without informing the appropriate United States agency or official," Kampelman wrote. In 1985, Reagan himself approved using Kennedy this way, and a working relationship grew between Kampelman and Kennedy. While it is possible that the administration never caught wind of any contacts Tunney had with the KGB, it is worth noting that when the archivists at the Reagan Library searched the White House files on Kennedy, no episode involving the USSR in 1983 popped up. Smoke, but no fire? In the Reagan years, Kenneth Adelman served as deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and then director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 2015, we asked Adelman what he made of the KGB memo, and he dismissed it. He had no idea if an overture might have been made, but even it had, Adelman said it didn’t matter. "We knew senators were doing this sort of thing all the time, and we ignored it," Adelman said. "We didn’t think it was important, and it wasn’t. The administration didn’t care about it." Stephen Cohen, a political scientist at Princeton University and New York University, suggested that KGB memos shouldn’t be taken at face value. "As someone who has worked for years in once closed Soviet-era archives, I can tell you that many false documents can be found there," Cohen told PunditFact in 2015. "As the saying goes, rubbish in, rubbish out." Paul Kengor, a political scientist at Grove City College who included the memo in his book about Reagan, The Crudasder, takes the memo seriously. "The memo is absolutely accurate," Kengor said. "No question." It is worth noting that the memo does not say how Tunney conveyed Kennedy's message beyond "through confidential contacts." In other words, the memo's author was relying on someone else and not speaking from his own experience, which introduces another level of uncertainty. Our ruling Gutfeld said that Kennedy met with the KGB in order to defeat Ronald Reagan in 1984. There is certainly evidence that Kennedy attempted to meet with Soviet officials, but it was with the approval of the Reagan White House. The validity of a specific KGB memo saying Kennedy wanted to de-escalate tensions with Moscow over a U.S. plan to install nuclear missiles in Western Europe is widely questioned. But more to the point, Gutfeld reached one conclusion that doesn’t add up. There is no evidence of Kennedy "meeting with the KGB." The evidence Gutfeld used on screen doesn’t support that contention. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Greg Gutfeld | null | null | null | 2017-07-18T13:30:41 | 2017-07-15 | ['Ronald_Reagan', 'KGB', 'Ted_Kennedy'] |
pomt-06438 | We cut property taxes by one-third in the state of Texas while I’ve been governor. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/21/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-they-cut-property-taxes-one-third-/ | On the campaign trail in New Hampshire earlier this month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry repeated what has become a common battle cry in his campaign for the Republican nomination for president. "We cut property taxes by one-third in the state of Texas while I've been governor," he told a crowd Oct. 1, 2011 at a "We the People" forum in Hampton, New Hampshire. Perry has repeated the claim several times during his presidential run, and he also used it during his 2010 re-election campaign in Texas. PolitiFact Texas checked it at the time, coming up with a ruling of Barely True, now known as Mostly False. But has anything changed in the years since? We decided to check it out. As we discovered in early 2010, Perry is referring to House Bill 1, a tax law approved by the Texas Legislature in 2006. In 2005, five years into his tenure as governor, Perry created the bi-partisan Texas Tax Reform Commission, which developed the proposal. And the following year, he signed into law the overhaul, intended to reduce property taxes paid to local school districts. The overhaul did decrease a portion of the state’s school tax rate. It effectively lowered the maintenance and operation segment of the school tax, which makes up most of the school taxes, from $1.50 to $1.00 per $100 of assessed property value. That number met Perry’s claim of a one-third cut. But it didn’t translate to 33 percent lower bills for taxpayers, which is what we think most voters would infer from the claim. In 2007, the first year the tax changes were fully implemented, the total amount of tax dollars paid to local schools, fell about 6.4 percent from levels in 2005, before the tax overhaul, according to the state Comptroller’s office. Yet, when including county, city and school taxes, among others, the total amount of taxes paid increased by about 5 percent from 2005 to 2007, reaching $35.1 billion. Both the school tax levy and total property taxes continued to rise in 2008 and 2009. The amount of total tax dollars paid reached $40 billion in 2009. But the school and total taxes took a nose dive last year. In 2010, the most recent data available, school taxes dropped about 1 percent to $21.6 billion, but that number is 6.8 percent higher than 2005, before the tax overhaul was implemented. Total property tax dollars dropped back to $33.7 billion in 2010, roughly even to the $33.5 billion paid in 2005. Adjusting for inflation, however, the total amount of taxes collected fell by 9 percent, which is a little closer to Perry’s statement. Still, these numbers don’t show the picture of tax relief that Perry paints on the campaign trail. Nor do they tell the full story either, according to Texas policy analysts. Much of the tax increase can be attributed to factors including population growth and rising property values, analysts said. And voters and local school districts have contributed, as well, electing to restore higher local tax rates to better fund schools, according to Dick Lavine, a senior analyst with the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank in Austin, Texas. The 2006 overhaul legislation left room for local school boards for a one-time restoration of up to 4 cents to the operations and maintenance tax without an election. Voters could return up to 17 cents to the tax rate, Lavine said. "The vast majority (added to the rate) almost immediately," he said. "About a quarter are now at $1.17. They’re back in the same situation they were before." From the beginning, these factors have clouded some of the impact the overhaul has had on the state’s taxpayers, other analysts suggest. The tax reform may not have lowered homeowners’ property tax bills, but, in 2007, it did shave $7 billion off what Texans would have paid without the rate cut, according to the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, an Austin-based business group. "That means the average Texan’s total property tax bill in 2007 was 20 percent lower than what it likely would have been had there been no tax relief initiative," the association wrote in its 2008 report "Property Tax Relief: The $7 Billion Reality." The group said that number was a "rough" estimate. "I don't think there's any question, it represented a net tax decrease for the state of Texas." echoed Joshua Trevino, a spokesman for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-leaning free market group. "I don’t think that’s in question." Our ruling Perry was correct if you only look at school tax rate, but his comment referred to all property taxes. If you look at total property tax revenue, Texans paid about the same amount in 2010 as they did in 2005. If you adjust for inflation, he's closer (it's about 9 percent less) but it's still far short of one-third. We find his claim Mostly False. | null | Rick Perry | null | null | null | 2011-10-21T18:00:00 | 2011-10-01 | ['Texas'] |
pomt-08255 | Georgia's high school graduation rate topped 80 percent in 2010. | half-true | /georgia/statements/2010/nov/12/sonny-perdue/perdue-touts-states-rising-graduation-rates/ | With the announcement that Georgia's high school graduation rate topped 80 percent, Gov. Sonny Perdue took a celebratory tour of the state's standout schools. Perdue thanked students and staff at schools across North Georgia and along the South Georgia coast for their hard work. He promised he'd reach the 80 percent mark by 2010. With their help, he kept his word. Or did he? Other measures say Georgia's rate is lower by as much as 15 points. And while the state Department of Education reports it's making great strides, one group said last year that Georgia's graduation rate is so low Georgia's children are in "crisis." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has uncovered multiple problems with how the rate is reported. Is Georgia's graduation rate really 80 percent? We went to the Georgia Department of Education to sort the issue out. Raising the rate to 80 percent by 2010 has been one of Perdue's major education initiatives. In 2005, he signed on to a national effort by the National Governors Association to standardize how states determine the graduation rate and improve the figure's accuracy. Under the new method, which the state will report for the first time this school year,school officials expect the rate to drop. Perdue also created the position of "graduation coach," and he announced at a 2008 national education convention that it helped reduce dropouts by 10 percent in one year. The coaches identify high school and middle school students at risk of dropping out, find them mentors, organize tutoring programs, and help them sign up to retake classes they failed. Now, back to the graduation rate. There are lots of ways to calculate it. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. They can vary greatly. For instance, some count only students who graduate on time. Others count graduates who take longer. Georgia uses what's commonly called the "leaver rate," a method used by 32 other states. The Education Department puts the exact graduation rate at 80.8 percent. It includes students who take more than four years to graduate. The leaver rate is not the actual percentage of students who graduate. Until recently, the state Education Department lacked a record keeping system that could track that. Instead, it's an estimate. To calculate it, you take the number of students who receive regular graduation diplomas and divide it by the following: the number of regular diploma recipients, plus the number of students who receive special education diplomas and certificates of attendance, plus the number of dropouts from grades 9-12. State officials acknowledge the measure is imperfect. The new method will be more accurate. Still, it's a fair accountability measure, they said. Since the state has used the same method to calculate graduation rates since Perdue took office in 2003, a year-to-year comparison is valid. Those numbers show the graduation rate surged from about 63 percent to 80 percent, said Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley. Another advantage of Georgia's leaver rate is it's the most current data around. Graduation rates calculated with other measures have yet to be updated with numbers from two or three years ago. That means they don't measure the impact of the graduation coach program, Brantley said. But AJC PolitiFact Georgia thinks there are other shortcomings with the leaver rate that should be acknowledged, and which cast Georgia's apparent success in a different light. The most perplexing is that the state's calculation misses thousands of students. In 2008, the state Department of Education could not account for nearly 20,000 students they marked as transfers, although it's not clear they went. The state's 2010 graduation numbers raise similar questions. Georgia's Class of 2010 entered high school in 2006 at about 146,000 strong, according to the state's figures. But when the state calculated its 2010 graduation rate, it pegged the combined number of Georgia students who graduated plus those who didn't make it at about 113,300. That means this year's graduation calculation does not include about 33,000 of the Class of 2010's original members. A portion likely went to private school or are being home schooled, but given the department's past problems, it's far from clear that that's where all of them went. Another problem is that while Georgia's leaver rate soared during Perdue's term, other widely used measures did not. Consider the public high school averaged freshman graduation rate, which is collected and published by the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Department of Education's main data clearinghouse, and graduation calculations from Editorial Projects in Education, a nonprofit education research center. The averaged freshman graduation rate uses the number of on-time graduates with regular diplomas and an estimate of the freshman class size four years earlier to come up with its rate. The Editorial Projects in Education rate multiplies together how many students were promoted on time each year to get its rate. According to Editorial Projects in Education, Georgia's graduation rate grew between 2002-2003 and 2006-2007, the most recent school year available, by about 1.4 points to 57.8 percent. During that same time period, the U.S. Department of Education's averaged freshman graduation rate for Georgia grew by 3.3 points to 64.1 percent. In those same years, Georgia reported its graduation rate grew by 9 points to 72.3 percent. These discrepancies may occur because the rates count different things, said state Department of Education spokesman Matt Cardoza. Georgia's leaver rate includes five-year graduates, but the other two measures count only those who finish on schedule. Georgia officials think it's important to count students who take extra time, because it shows schools are committed to students who need more help. "If we keep them [high school students] five years instead of four, and that helps them graduate, we're all for it," Cardoza said. Still, it's difficult to tell which measure is more accurate, said John Robert Warren, a University of Minnesota sociologist. He was part of a major effort by the National Academy of Education that studied how to improve the reliability of graduation rates. "They're all sort of in the ballpark of not being that good," Warren said of the measures. In the case of leaver rates, experts agree they often inflate graduation figures. That's because the formula depends so heavily on a state's dropout rate. Experts agree dropouts are easy to undercount. A typical dropout doesn't bother to tell his school he no longer intends to show up, and schools often don't have the resources or incentive to track down missing students. Another problem is shared by all measures. They're only as accurate as the data used to calculate them. In Georgia, there's evidence that at least some of this data has serious problems. In June 2009, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found the state couldn't locate nearly 20,000 students who local districts said transferred to other Georgia schools during the 2008 school year, but who never re-enrolled. In April, the U.S. Department of Education rebuked the state Department of Education and Clayton County and determined the county's 2006-2007 dropout rates were undercounted. A state Education Department spokesman said they enhanced their procedures, but did not correct older data. In August, another Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that thousands of Atlanta Public Schools students vanished from its rolls during the past eight years, and this may be the primary reason behind the system's rising graduation rates. Many students were marked as transfers, even though there was no evidence they re-enrolled elsewhere. So what does all of this information say about Georgia's graduation rate? If one thing is clear, it's this: No one knows the state's true graduation rate. Although the state Education Department said it has improved its reporting methods, the way the agency calculates the rate and the data's quality still have enough unresolved problems that it's hard to say whether the state actually met Perdue's goal. It's also not clear how much the state graduation rate has improved. Georgia said its rate has soared during Perdue's term, but one measure said it's flat and another said it rose by a few percentage points. Those other rates don't measure the exact same thing. They also use old data, so it's possible that fresh calculations will show a spike in rates. But at this point, it's doubtful they'll register a 17-point change as Georgia's leaver rate did. This means that while the high 2009-2010 graduation rate may be an encouraging sign, it's not quite a cause for celebration. Perdue's statement is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. By PolitiFact's standards, it rates a Half True. | null | Sonny Perdue | null | null | null | 2010-11-12T06:00:00 | 2010-10-26 | ['None'] |
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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
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