claimID stringlengths 10 10 | claim stringlengths 4 8.61k ⌀ | label stringclasses 116 values | claimURL stringlengths 10 303 | reason stringlengths 3 31.1k ⌀ | categories stringclasses 611 values | speaker stringlengths 3 168 ⌀ | checker stringclasses 167 values | tags stringlengths 3 315 ⌀ | article title stringlengths 2 226 ⌀ | publish date stringlengths 1 64 ⌀ | climate stringlengths 5 154 ⌀ | entities stringlengths 6 332 ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
goop-02382 | “Survivor” Recap: Who Was Voted Out Second On “Heroes v. Healers v. Hustlers”? | 10 | https://www.gossipcop.com/survivor-recap-october-4-2017-eliminated-simone-voted-off-heroes-healers-hustlers/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | “Survivor” Recap: Who Was Voted Out Second On “Heroes v. Healers v. Hustlers”? | 8:54 pm, October 4, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
snes-00056 | Did Ann Coulter Tweet That ‘Men Have No Choice But to Rape …’? | correct attribution | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ann-coulter-men-no-choice/ | null | Politics | null | Dan Evon | null | Did Ann Coulter Tweet That ‘Men Have No Choice But to Rape …’? | 21 September 2018 | null | ['None'] |
chct-00045 | FACT CHECK: Have Multiple Allegations Against Kavanaugh Been Corroborated? | verdict: unsubstantiated | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/09/28/fact-check-allegations-kavanaugh-corroborated/ | null | null | null | Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 12:00 AM 09/28/2018 | null | ['None'] |
para-00180 | Government revenues are "up 7 per cent" despite the budget deficit. | true | http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/14/andrew-robb/liberals-say-government-revenues-are-7-cent-despit/index.html | null | ['Budget'] | Andrew Robb | Chris Pash, Peter Fray | null | Liberals say government revenues are 'up 7 per cent' despite the budget deficit | Tuesday, May 14, 2013 at 12:29 p.m. | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09752 | During the Reagan era, while productivity increased, "wages for working people remained frozen." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/07/michael-moore/michael-moore-claims-capitalism-during-reagan-year/ | In his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story , Michael Moore contends the economic policies of President Ronald Reagan were the turning point toward widening the gap between the rich and everyone else. Once Reagan was elected, Moore said, the government was run like a business, and the president's tough stance on unions and his theory of "trickle-down" economics ended up hurting working Americans. In this item, we will look at Moore's claim in the movie that as productivity rose during the Reagan years, "wages for working people remained frozen." We'll get right to the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. People generally look at "output per hour" for workers in the nonfarm business sector to track these kinds of trends. Essentially, it's the amount of value of product produced per hour of work by an employee. Generally, productivity has steadily increased for as long as those kind of statistics have been kept as people and businesses learn to work more efficiently. But by the late 1970s, productivity had begun to slow. During Reagan's time in office (1981 to 1989), however, the numbers grew from 81.7 to 92.8. So it's certainly fair to say productivity increased during the Reagan administration. Now on to wages. There are several ways to look at this. First is the hourly wages paid in current dollars (what workers were actually paid). By that count, average hourly wages increased from $7.44 to $9.80. But these were high inflation years, and so when you look at the hourly wages adjusted for inflation ("real hourly compensation"), wages remained fairly flat. In fact, based on 1982 dollars, real wages dipped slightly from $7.89 in 1981 to $7.75 in 1989. End of story? Not quite. We think a few qualifiers are in order. For one, wages aren't the only way workers are compensated. There's also health benefits and other compensation. When you look at the "real compensation per hour" paid by companies to nonsupervisory employees, the cost went from 90.2 in 1981 to 95.1 in 1989. So compensation to employees, even when adjusted for inflation, grew during the Reagan era. We also think it's worth noting that stagnation of average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, predated Reagan. Historical tables show that hourly wages climbed steadily through the 1960s and into 1970s, and then peaked in 1973. From that point on, "real" hourly wages declined for a few years and then pretty much froze until the late 1990s. But it wasn't until Reagan's presidency that productivity began to quickly outpace wages. Why? Economists have a host of theories. For one, new technology certainly allowed workers to build widgets much better and faster, said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. But the reasons for the widening gap between productivity and wages are more complex and varied. Globalization of the economy, eroding of unions, regressive taxes, the declining value of minimum wage, a rise in the number of immigrants and deregulation of industry all contributed, said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research believes the weakening of unions played a huge role. "I think the bargaining power of workers took a big hit during the Reagan years," Baker said. The most notable example was when the Reagan administration broke the air traffic controllers union. "That changed labor-management relations," Baker said. Moore cited an article by Baker called "The Productivity to Paycheck Gap: What the Data Show" on a part of his film Web site that provides backup for a number of claims in the film. And Baker said a fact-checker employed by Moore called him before the release of the movie to make sure he got it right. "I think his (Moore's) comment was pretty much on the mark," Baker said. One other caveat to Moore's comment. He's talking here about wages for nonsupervisory production workers, which comprise about 80 percent of the work force. But not all. And that's why it's also true, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, that the mean average of real income rose by 15.2 percent from 1980 to 1989, from $33,409 to $38,493, in 1990 dollars. So it all depends on how you define "working people." Still, adjusted for inflation, and when looking at nonsupervisory production workers, it's true that during the Reagan years, productivity rose while wages remained frozen (or even dipped slightly). We dock Moore some points, though, because the decline/stagnation of wages pre- and postdated the Reagan era; and total compensation (including payments for benefits) rose. Moore left out some important qualifiers. Still, while you may not agree with Moore's conclusions, he can back up his claim with legitimate numbers. And so we rate it Mostly True. | null | Michael Moore | null | null | null | 2009-10-07T18:19:31 | 2009-10-02 | ['None'] |
pose-00672 | My plan is to make that one of my first acts as governor, to repeal Governor Carcieri's executive order [on immigration]. The whole thing. It just doesn't work, and it's divisive. If it's not the first decision, it will be one of the first. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/linc-o-meter/promise/702/repeal-governor-carcieris-executive-order-on-ille/ | null | linc-o-meter | Lincoln Chafee | null | null | Repeal Governor Carcieri's executive order on illegal immigration | 2011-01-05T17:34:33 | null | ['None'] |
snes-05555 | Dr. Ben Carson said the "disintegration of the family unit and the welfare state are enslaving African-Americans and ruining their futures" but received help from such programs in his youth. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ben-carson-welfare-meme/ | null | Politics | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Did Ben Carson’s Family Benefit from Welfare? | 29 October 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00445 | Says Kelli Ward "called for restraint in fighting terrorism." | mostly false | /arizona/statements/2018/aug/21/defend-arizona/did-kelli-ward-call-restraint-fighting-terrorism/ | A political ad in Arizona portrays Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kelli Ward as soft in the fight against terrorism. "ISIS killed thousands. Plotted attacks on U.S. soil. They're a real threat. But Kelli Ward called for restraint in fighting terrorism. Restraint against those who want to kill our citizens?" said the narrator in an Aug. 11 ad launched by Defend Arizona, a political action committee that supports conservatives and "leaders who have fought for our country — not just career politicians." Ward is a former Arizona state senator competing for the U.S. Senate seat opening up as Republican Sen. Jeff Flake retires at the end of his term in January 2019. Other Republicans in the race include former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Rep. Martha McSally, who served in the U.S. Air Force. Defend Arizona supports McSally. The primary election is Aug. 28. We found that Defend Arizona’s ad cherry-picked comments Ward made in a 2016 radio interview discussing terrorism. Ward said that the traditional conservative foreign policy of restraint and realism needed to be "brought back into the process," but also said the U.S. should be willing to "decimate," not just curb or control the terrorist group ISIS. Defend Arizona’s ad leaves out key information Defend Arizona’s ad opens with the image of a man wearing a black mask and raising a knife as the narrator says, "ISIS killed thousands." "Plotted attacks on U.S. soil. They're a real threat," the ad continues, including a photo of the perpetrator of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, who claimed to be a soldier of the terrorist group ISIS. "But Kelli Ward called for restraint in fighting terrorism," the narrator said, over an image and video of Ward along with text that read, "Kelli Ward on fighting ISIS ‘...restraint and realism.’ That scene cites as its source the Seth Leibsohn Show, June 28, 2016. Ward in 2016 ran an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate against Sen. John McCain. McCain won the Republican primary and went on to be re-elected in the general election. In a June 2016 radio interview, host Leibsohn said that while the economy is often the factor driving an election, in 2016, national security was the focus. Leibsohn asked Ward how to combat global terrorism and, "What would you say should be our policy towards ISIS?" Ward: "It’s a huge, huge problem. I think that No. 1, we do have to have a president in the oval office, a commander in chief who has a strategy to win. "We can’t continue with this strategy of go in and do nation building, try to spread democracy, and unfortunately we had that policy under George W. Bush as well. It isn’t what traditional conservative foreign policy has been, which is restraint and realism. Those things need to be brought back into the process in the foreign policy arena. I think that we also, we have to be willing to decimate ISIS – not control them, not to curb their activities." Leibsohn: "Not live with them, right?" Ward: "Not live with them, not to empower them, certainly not to empower them, and I think it is going to take that strong commander-in-chief and then conservative reinforcements in both the House and Senate to make it happen." Ward referenced "restraint and realism" as needed for overall foreign policy, but she spoke differently of combating terrorism. Defend Arizona did not respond to PolitiFact’s query by deadline. It’s not the first time Ward’s "restraint" comment is used against her. A pro-McCain ad in July 2016 also highlighted her "restraint and realism" response, with the narrator adding, "When Americans are under attack, restraint won’t destroy ISIS." Ward’s 2016 campaign spokesman Stephen Sebastian told the Arizona Republic in 2016 that Ward "believes in Reagan’s 'Peace Through Strength' as well as 'realism and restraint’." "As a military wife whose husband has served in Iraq, Dr. Ward said she will support military engagement 'only as a last resort when national security is clearly at stake, only when Constitutionally approved by Congress, and only when there is a real strategy for victory, not expensive occupations and endless nation-building," Sebastian then told the newspaper. Our ruling A Defend Arizona ad said Ward, "called for restraint in fighting terrorism." In a 2016 radio interview, Ward said "restraint and realism" needed to be brought back into U.S. foreign policy in the fight against terrorism, but Ward’s comment did not stop there. She also said the U.S. had to be willing to decimate ISIS, not just curb or control its activities. Defend Arizona’s ad contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Defend Arizona | null | null | null | 2018-08-21T14:43:23 | 2018-08-11 | ['None'] |
pomt-09379 | Since that famous day in February where the governor campaigned with Barack Obama on behalf of the stimulus program, 211,000 Floridians have lost their jobs. | true | /florida/statements/2010/mar/28/marco-rubio/rubio-says-florida-has-lost-211000-jobs-crist-camp/ | You knew it wouldn't take long for "the hug" to get some love during Sunday's debate between Republicans Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist. Minutes into the 40-minute "Florida Senate Showdown," Rubio made a case that he'll stand up to President Barack Obama's agenda and Crist won't. "Everyone knows that you won't stand up to the Obama agenda because just a year ago you were campaigning for it," the former House speaker said, referring to Feb. 10, 2009, when Crist embraced the president at a Fort Myers campaign event for the federal stimulus package. We've fact-checked several claims about Crist's support for the stimulus. Indeed, he earned a Pants on Fire rating for saying he didn't endorse it. So it was a Rubio comment later in the program that drew our attention. FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Rubio, "Why is $8 billion and 87,000 jobs bad for a state that has 12 percent unemployment?" "Well ... if it's bad for America, it can't possibly be good for your state," Rubio said. "Let me tell you why the stimulus has failed. The stimulus has failed because since that famous day in February where the governor campaigned with Barack Obama on behalf of the stimulus program, 211,000 Floridians have lost their jobs." 211,000 is a big number, so we wanted to check Rubio's facts. Conveniently, the state's Agency for Workforce Innovation released a report on state employment figures just two days before the debate. In it, Florida's record 12.2 percent unemployment rate is announced, along with many statistics on the state's jobs picture, including year-over-year numbers from February 2009, the month Crist campaigned with Obama. The report shows Florida had 8,356,000 jobs in February 2009 and 8,125,000 in February 2010, the difference being 231,000. These are the seasonally adjusted numbers for the civilian population. However, if you look at seasonally adjusted nonagricultural employment --- a less-inclusive number --- you see the basis for Rubio's claim. There the job loss in a year's time is 211,500. It's the latter number that the Rubio campaign points to. Spokesman Alberto Martinez also shared a report from House Way and Means Republicans that seeks to highlight the stimulus as a job-killer, rather than a job creator, where Florida is said to have lost 240,400 jobs since the stimulus passed. Like any statistics, these are easily sliced and diced to make the key point. But Rubio is very close to the precise number, and in fact, he underestimates it slightly when his point is that Florida has lost a lot of jobs. So we rule this one True. | null | Marco Rubio | null | null | null | 2010-03-28T17:17:14 | 2010-03-28 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
snes-01672 | The Department of Health and Human Services has scheduled web site maintenance for Healthcare.gov on most Sundays during Obamacare open enrollment. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/healthcare-gov-maintenance/ | null | Politics | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Is Healthcare.gov Scheduled for Maintenance During Obamacare Enrollment? | 25 September 2017 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03254 | Climate Scrubbing | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wisconsin-department-natural-resources-removes-references-climate-website/ | null | Politics | null | Alex Kasprak | null | Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Removes References to ‘Climate’ from Web Site | 28 December 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-11116 | The bulk of the problem with the opioid epidemic is the fentanyl and all the synthetic drugs coming across the southern border. | half-true | /florida/statements/2018/jun/07/ron-desantis/ron-desantis-overplays-link-between-opioid-crisis-/ | Republican candidate for Florida governor Ron DeSantis has a plan to solve the opioid epidemic, and it starts with securing the southern border of the United States. That’s where lethal drugs pour into the country, he said during the Westside Republican Club Reagan Day Barbecue in Callahan, Fla., on June 2. "This drug crisis is driven by a lot of the drugs that are pouring across the southern border," DeSantis said. "Yeah, there are problems with prescription medication and things like that, and Florida's done some stuff to rein that in. The bulk of the problem with the opioid epidemic is the fentanyl and all the synthetic drugs coming across the southern border. When you have a weak border like under (former President Barack) Obama — that's a wet kiss to the drug cartels. They love that, because they can move so much product into our country." Here, we’ll fact-check his link between synthetic drugs smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border and the American opioid crisis. What did a "weak border" have to do with it? DeSantis has a point about the rise of synthetic opioids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids surged from 2013 to 2016. Among the more than 64,000 drug overdose deaths estimated in 2016, the sharpest increase occurred among deaths related to fentanyl and synthetic opioids with almost 20,000 overdose deaths. The problem with DeSantis’ claim is linking the supply of fentanyl and synthetic drugs from the southern border to the opioid epidemic killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. These drugs can and do enter from across the southern border, but these drugs also tend to come in through other points of entry. Prescription vs. synthetic opioids The National Institute on Drug Abuse describes opioids as a class of drugs that includes heroin, fentanyl and prescription pain relievers such as oxycodone (including OxyContin), hydrocodone (including Vicodin), codeine, morphine and many others. Fentanyl, which DeSantis mentioned, is a powerful pain reliever that is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent. Fentanyl can be prescribed to treat advanced cancer pain, but can be made and sold on the illegal drug market, often mixed with or sold as heroin. Other synthetic opioids include tramadol and fentanyl analogs, which are drugs designed to mimic the pharmacological effects of the original drug. More than 42,000 people died as a result of opioid-related overdoses in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 16,800 deaths involved a prescription opioid, and more than 19,000 were related to synthetic opioids (the latter category is what DeSantis is talking about). While synthetic drugs accounted for more deaths than prescription opioids, there’s no way to know how exactly how many of those drugs crossed the southern border before they were taken. A southern border link? International gangs based in Mexico "remain the greatest criminal drug threat to the United States," and their most common method of smuggling drugs is vehicles legally coming into the U.S., according to a 2017 Drug Enforcement Administration report. But that’s for all drugs, not just synthetic drugs like DeSantis said. They type of drugs that DeSantis singled out tend to enter the country through other points of entry — including, but not limited to, the southern border. According to a 2017 DEA report, China is a main supplier of fentanyl and fentanyl-related compounds. Some of the fentanyl comes straight to the United States from China through the mail. Other shipments come in from China to Mexico or China to Canada before making its way into the United States. In addition, fentanyl and fentanyl-related compounds are also sold and distributed through illicit drug markets on the dark web, the report said. Between 2013 and 2017, Border Patrol seized 286 pounds of fentanyl, 3218 pounds of heroin, and 23 pounds of morphine, according to the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee from May 2018. We don’t have an exact breakdown of how much fentanyl reaches final users through Chinese labs and how much comes from across the border. That’s because China-sourced fentanyl concealed in mail parcels can be difficult for law enforcement officials to trace back to the original sender. Traffickers forward the package multiple times to different people, according to the DEA report. President Donald Trump’s opioid commission seemed more concerned with shipments from China than couriers from Mexico. "We are miserably losing this fight to prevent fentanyl from entering our country and killing our citizens," the commission reported. "We are losing this fight (predominantly) through China." Trump’s opioid commission says many users order the pill form of fentanyl online and have it shipped discreetly. The commission’s report references a Carnegie Mellon University study that found revenues from online illicit drug sales increased from between $15 million and 17 million in 2012 to $150 million and $180 million in 2015. The fentanyl found at the southern border tends to be less potent than the fentanyl shipped through the mail. "Large volumes of fentanyl are seized at the (southern border), although these seizures are typically low in purity — on average approximately 7 percent," the 2017 DEA report says. "Conversely, the smaller volumes seized after arriving in the mail directly from China can have purities over 90 percent and be worth much more than the fentanyl seized at the (southwest border)." To emphasize this point, DeSantis' spokesperson Brad Herold pointed to previous PolitiFact-checks that show that heroin is mainly smuggled through Mexico. That is accurate, though heroin is not a synthetic drug. "As most experts admit, fentanyl is mixed with heroin and other drugs in Mexico and sent across the border," Herold said. Experts are skeptical that enhancing southern border security (like a wall) can do much to improve the opioid crisis. That’s because traffickers have a history of circumnavigating patrol measures, using catapults, drones, boats and tunnels. In other words, securing the border patrol might change where drugs are trafficked but it might not change the amount. David Herzberg, a professor who studies the history of American prescription drug abuse at the University at Buffalo, took issue with DeSantis’ characterization of what's driving the opioid epidemic. The crisis began with a dramatic uptick in new cases of addiction associated with a rise in the volume of prescribed opioids, and then illicit synthetic ones. The "bulk of the problem," as experts see it now, has to do with the lack of resources for those already struggling with addiction, such as methadone and Naltrexone. "In other words, ‘the problem’ now is not the smuggled opioid supply, it is our failure to deliver an adequate public health response to existing cases of opioid dependence and addiction," Herzberg said. Our ruling DeSantis said, "The bulk of the problem with the opioid epidemic is the fentanyl and all the synthetic drugs coming across the southern border." This claim downplays the fact that synthetic drugs are smuggled into the country from locations outside of the southern border, especially from China. However, exact numbers to sort out how much comes from where were unavailable. Trump’s own commission seemed more concerned with China than Mexico when it comes to synthetic drugs. We rate the statement Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Ron DeSantis | null | null | null | 2018-06-07T09:00:00 | 2018-06-02 | ['None'] |
vogo-00470 | Statement: Downtown sidewalks once had small purple glass squares in them so light could flow into underground tunnels, according to local urban legend. | determination: barely true | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-the-see-through-sidewalk/ | Analysis: Imagine working in a basement where sunlight filled the room. In some of the downtown’s older buildings, it used to be the case. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: The See-Through Sidewalk | December 13, 2010 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03915 | Hillary Clinton once lauded the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which she later opposed) as setting the "gold standard" in trade agreements. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-called-trans-pacific-partnership-the-gold-standard/ | null | Politics | null | David Emery | null | Did Hillary Clinton Call the Trans-Pacific Partnership the ‘Gold Standard’ in Trade Agreements? | 29 September 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-03755 | No one knows who bought the [38 Studios] bonds. And there was some language put in the bond offer that they must remain anonymous. | half-true | /rhode-island/statements/2013/apr/08/jim-taricani/jim-taricani-says-38-studios-bond-offer-promised-a/ | One of the questions swirling around the collapse of 38 Studios is whether the state should be on the hook for the millions of dollars in bond money that it raised on behalf of the now-bankrupt video game developer, headed by former Red Sox star Curt Schilling. During the March 24, 2013, edition of "10 News Conference," co-host Jim Taricani posed that question to two members of the General Assembly, and then, as an aside, said: "No one knows who bought the bonds. And there was some language put in the bond offer that they must remain anonymous." Taricani said Rhode Islanders might feel differently about paying back the moral obligation bonds if the identities of the purchasers were known. The bonds The bonds were sold in November 2010 under the auspices of the Rhode Island Loan Guaranty Fund, after being approved earlier that year by the General Assembly and then-Gov. Donald Carcieri. The bonds were underwritten by Wells Fargo Securities and Barclays Capital, according to information provided at the time by Robert I. Stolzman, lawyer for the Economic Development Corporation. The bonds, according to the EDC, were sold in three blocks totaling $75 million and paid interest ranging from 6 percent to 7.75 percent annually. At the time, the EDC said about a dozen investors privately purchased the bonds. The purchasers included insurers, asset managers and a community bank. No names were given. The bondholders The first part of Taricani’s comment was a bit of hyperbole. Clearly some people know who bought the bonds -- those who sold them and those who purchased them. However, it is true that the identities of the bondholders were never made public. The Journal has been trying for some time to identify them. On May 30, 2012, the paper requested a list of bondholders from the Economic Development Corporation. A month and a half later, Allison Lane, a lawyer for the EDC, responded that the commission "does not have any documents that contain the names and other identifying information of any bondholders or any other information as to who bonds have been sold and or transferred." But when PolitiFact reviewed the bond offer, which runs a whopping 233 pages, it discovered this requirement on Page 40 of the file: "Each purchaser of the 2010 Bonds will be required to execute and deliver an Investor Letter substantially in the form attached hereto as Appendix E upon delivery and acceptance of the 2010 Bonds." The letters were designed to ensure the investors were experienced, knew what they were getting into and were "able to withstand without material injury a complete loss" of their investment. The statement is signed by Keith Stokes, who was economic development director until he was replaced after 38 Studios defaulted. Appendix E indicates that the letters should go to no fewer than 10 entities, including two securities firms, five law firms, 38 Studios and the state (with no department specified). Most importantly, one copy of each letter -- which would indicate who purchased the bonds -- was supposed to go to the EDC. Yet EDC lawyer Allison Lane, in her letter, had said the EDC had no such documents. PolitiFact Rhode Island spent more than a week contacting some of the law firms and the EDC trying to find out about the investor letters. Phone calls and e-mails were not returned by Moses and Afonso Ltd., the company that served as a bond counsel to the EDC; First Southwest Company, which was the financial adviser to the EDC; and Pannone Lopes Devereaux & West, the law firm involved in placement of the bonds. More than a week after seeking information from the EDC's current lawyer, Thomas E. Carlotto, the EDC e-mailed us a one-paragraph statement from him saying it had not received the investor letters "as anticipated." He blamed "the former executive management and former counsel to the RIEDC [which] should have taken measures in November 2010 to ensure receipt of such investor letters" to show that the placement agents, Wells Fargo Securities and Barclays Capital, had followed the requirements. Repeated attempts to subsequently interview Carlotto were unsuccessful. Christine Hunsinger, spokeswoman for Gov. Lincoln Chafee, who became chairman of the EDC when he took office two months after the bonds were sold, said EDC lawyers are now exploring whether those letters can be found. "It's yet another mess in the 38 Studios matter that, unfortunately, this governor has been left to clean up," Hunsinger said. So when Taricani stated, "No one knows who bought the bonds," aside from the sellers and buyers, he was right. Anonymity guaranteed? And what about Taricani's statement that anonymity was guaranteed in the bond offering? We searched that document for references to anonymity, requirements for disclosure or promises to protect a buyer's identity. We came up blank. We contacted Taricani in hopes that he could direct us to the restriction he was talking about. "My info came from two different people who have, in my opinion, knowledge of that bond issue," he told us in an e-mail. "If there is no specific language in that document about anonymity, I then misspoke and sincerely apologize for the misstatement." Our ruling Jim Taricani said, "No one knows who bought the [38 Studios] bonds. And there was some language put in the bond offer that they must remain anonymous." The first half of his statement appears to be correct. Although SOMEONE must have a record of who bought the bonds, the EDC, following inquiries by The Journal about the investment letters, now says it did not receive the documents required under the sale, and it is trying to get them. Regarding the other half of Taricani's statement, we could find no language guaranteeing the purchasers that their names would be kept secret. We rate his statement Half True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) | null | Jim Taricani | null | null | null | 2013-04-08T00:01:00 | 2013-03-24 | ['None'] |
pomt-07033 | Says the 2011-13 state budget eliminates the structural deficit "for the first time in decades." | mostly true | /wisconsin/statements/2011/jul/03/alberta-darling/state-sen-darling-says-2011-13-state-budget-elimin/ | Republicans who control the state Legislature are touting their just-completed work on the 2011-2013 state budget. State Sen. Alberta Darling, a co-chairwoman of the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, has been especially vocal about the virtues of the $66 billion spending plan. As one of nine senators facing recall elections over their actions on the separate collective bargaining bill, she’s also been the target of criticism for her votes. "I think this budget really does put us in the right direction -- phenomenally," Darling said in a June 20, 2011, meeting with Journal Sentinel editors and reporters. "It’s phenomenal what’s been accomplished in terms of debt and deficit reform and restructuring." Darling added: "We’re in the black for the first time in decades." To be clear, the budget has to be "in the black" every year when it is passed. The state constitution says it must be balanced. Darling was talking about the "structural deficit," which is a relatively new way of measuring the state’s future fiscal health. The structural deficit measures the future imbalance between spending and tax revenue as laid out in state law. So you can have a balanced budget, but one built upon assumptions that are projected to result in a deficit later on. We’ve been hearing about that problem for years. Darling, Walker and others argue their predecessors made the state budgets balance by using one-time maneuvers -- such including the state’s share of federal tobacco settlement money, and diversions of funds for transportation and medical malpractice insurance. "All these approaches only delayed the day of fiscal reckoning to make the budget balance, leading to the structural deficit," said Walker, in the message accompanying his budget introduction. So, is Darling right? Did Walker and the Legislature resolve -- for the first time in decades -- the underlying problems, as well as balance spending for the two-year period that begins July 1? The size of the structural deficit is determined by the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, considered by both parties to be a neutral scorekeeper on budget matters. The agency started doing the projections with the 1997-99 budget. The agency takes a look at the budget as proposed, amended and passed, said agency director Robert Lang. He begins his estimates with a baseline -- the second year of the current budget, which is adjusted based on previously approved law changes or legal commitments. The new budget is then factored in. "It takes out speculation," Lang said of the structural deficit estimates. "It puts out a marker based on current revenues and projections." Agency reports show for the past 14 years show the highest structural deficit was $2.8 billion for the 2003-05 budget, and the lowest was $1.49 billion for the 2007-09 budget. A report issued June 13, 2011, said the 2011-13 budget as approved by the Joint Finance Committee would result in a $306 million surplus. The Legislature changed very little of the committee’s work. Lang’s office will evaluate the budget again now that Walker’s vetoes are completed and the budget signed. Here was Lang’s assessment based on the earlier action: "We’ve had structural deficits since I started doing this, and now there’s a structural surplus." So Darling’s right on that account: the budget has a structural surplus and not a deficit. The budget does include the changes in pension and insurance payments state workers -- a law enacted before the budget was considered that did not take effect until after it passed -- that helped reduce the budget gap. Those changes are viewed as permanent, not one-time fixes, Lang said. Lang’s office has only 14 years of records covering a total of nine budgets, including the most recent one. No budget in this time frame showed a surplus, until the current one. In making her statement, Darling said the structural deficit was fixed for the "first time in decades." When we talked to her, she said she misspoke when she said "decades." As aide Bob Delaporte said: "The point was that it’s in the black for the first time in a long time." Fair enough. Since the structural deficit was not measured before 1997-99, we can’t say just when the structural deficits began. What’s the bottom line? In talking about the structural deficit, Darling claimed lawmakers delivered a budget "in the black for the first time in decades." The budget lawmakers sent to Walker is projected to have a $306 million surplus. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau report on structural deficits says there’s not been a budget with a structural surplus dating back to when it started recording such things 14 years ago. Darling may have overstated how far back the problem goes, but no one knows for certain and that does not change the underlying point of her statement. We rate her statement Mostly True. | null | Alberta Darling | null | null | null | 2011-07-03T09:00:00 | 2011-06-20 | ['None'] |
snes-03037 | Transgender Offender | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-transgenders-on-notice/ | null | Junk News | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Does President Donald Trump Plan to Make it Illegal to be Transgender? | 31 January 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09878 | In the health care bill, "The 'Health Choices Commissioner' will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None." | pants on fire! | /truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jul/30/chain-email/health-choices-commissioner-does-not-decide-your-h/ | It may be the longest chain e-mail we've ever received. A page-by-page analysis of the House health care bill argues that reform will end the health care system as we know it: "Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed! ... Page 42: The 'Health Choices Commissioner' will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None. ... Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free health care services." Most of the e-mail's claims are wrong, and you can read our extended analysis to find out why. One of the claims that is just plain wrong says this: "Page 42: The 'Health Choices Commissioner' will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None." To explain this one, we will start with an explanation of the overall bill, which was unveiled July 14, 2009. The bill envisions that everyone will be required to have health insurance. People who get health insurance through work satisfy this requirement right off the bat. People who don't get insurance through work or another group will go to the health care exchange; it's designed to help people who have to go off on their own to buy health insurance, and for small businesses with few employees. The reason for the exchange is that the government wants to regulate insurers to make sure that health plans clearly explain what they offer, can't refuse people for pre-existing conditions, and must offer basic levels of service. "This is designed to protect consumers from plans that have outrageous cost-sharing or really limited benefits," said Jennifer Tolbert, an independent health care analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan foundation that studies health care reform. Tolbert has read and analyzed all the major health proposals, including those of the Republicans, and the foundation provides point-by-point analyses of the plans on its Web site. The exchange is meant to ensure that people are "actually getting coverage and not a junk policy," Tolbert added. A key point here is that employer-provided insurance is already subject to this kind of regulation. Employer-provided insurance has to meet certain requirements to win its tax-exempt status. That's why, if you get insurance through work, you're not asked about pre-existing conditions, and you pay the same rate as all of your co-workers. The bill says that a Health Choices commissioner will run the exchange, and that he or she will make sure that insurers are offering basic benefits and adhering to the regulations. Individuals then choose their own plan from offerings on the exchange. The health commissioner does not "decide health benefits for you." To the extent that insurance plans have to meet basic requirements, those instructions are ultimately coming from Congress. The commissioner executes the rules. The chain e-mail mentions page 42, which is part of Section 142. That section outlines the duties of the Health Choices commissioner and explains that the commissioner should seek insurers to offer different types of insurance, including basic, enhanced and premium. Again, individuals will be able to choose among competing insurers that are regulated via the exchange. The e-mail is adamant that the Health Choices commissioner "will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None." That is not what the bill says. The bill envisions an exchange with several different plans, and people choosing their own plan. We rate this claim Pants on Fire! | null | Chain email | null | null | null | 2009-07-30T10:12:21 | 2009-07-28 | ['None'] |
pomt-15118 | Florida led the nation in job creation while Bush was governor. | half-true | /florida/statements/2015/sep/10/jeb-bush/bush-says-florida-created-more-jobs-any-other-stat/ | GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush implied in a new campaign ad that the jobs boom Florida enjoyed while he was governor can be a reality for the entire country if he’s elected to the Oval Office. "As governor, I cut taxes, cut spending, balanced budgets, and Florida led the nation in job creation," he said in a Sept. 8, 2015, commercial. We wanted to see if Bush’s claim about job creation really put Florida in front of all 50 states. Tallahassee tally The time frame Bush is using here is key, because he is relying on a distinct slice of jobs data. His campaign said they are measuring total job growth for the period between January 2000 and January 2007, or Bush’s last seven years as governor. Let’s look at the way Bush’s people have sampled it: Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data for seasonally adjusted, nonfarm jobs, Florida indeed led the nation in total job creation from 2000-07, with 1.1 million new jobs. Second in that time span was California, with 1 million. Bush took office on Jan. 5, 1999, however, so why leave off 1999? Because then the top two spots switch places. California created 1.48 million new jobs, while Florida made 1.33 million. Just looking at 2000 to 2007 leaves out context, though. First, the economy began to falter a month before Bush left office, and the state started losing positions a couple of months after that. By the end of 2007 Florida had shed 106,000 jobs, many of which were from the construction and real estate industries that had expanded during the housing bubble. The state eventually lost about 1 million, or almost the entire total of job expansion from Bush’s time as governor. And as economists have told PolitiFact Florida time and time and time (and time) again, governors have limited impact on jobs numbers in the first place. Officials often enjoy or suffer from economies beyond their direct control, and Bush was no different, said David Cooper, an analyst for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. And in this case, the end result isn’t something Bush should be too happy about. "Florida’s job losses in the recession were far worse than the national average and far worse than all of its neighbors," Cooper said. "I’m not sure how much credit we should give to the governor for the state’s job growth during that time, and even if we could credit him, I’m not sure he should want it." Also, the jobs during Bush’s time weren’t the greatest in the first place. Even the source Bush cites, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrap-up of Bush’s two terms the Post reprinted, said as much: "But while Florida led the nation in job creation, much of that was in low-paid service industry jobs that left many Floridians without health insurance and scrambling for affordable housing amid a real estate boom that helped fuel business-friendly tax breaks." Former Sun-Sentinel reporter Linda Kleindienst, who now is editor of Tallahassee business magazine 850, told us she had used state numbers from the Office of Economic and Demographic Research. Her point was that while there were more jobs, many of them offered poor pay and often no benefits. And finally, using total job numbers to paint a picture of success isn’t the best method to measure success. Florida is one of the largest states, so of course it would create a lot of jobs. "Comparing totals completely lacks context — it doesn’t really tell you anything unless you’re comparing totals among states of roughly equally sized economies and labor markets," Cooper said. A better way would be to measure Florida’s rate of job growth, as a percentage of total jobs. When we measure that, whether we start in January 1999 or 2000, Florida comes in fifth: State Jan. 1999 - Jan. 2007 Jan. 2000 - Jan. 2007 Nevada 34.6 percent 24.8 percent Arizona 25.9 percent 20.7 percent Wyoming 23.7 percent 20 percent Idaho 22.6 percent 17.9 percent Florida 19.8 percent 15.8 percent Our ruling Bush said "Florida led the nation in job creation" while he was governor. This is true if you parse the numbers the way his campaign did, looking only at total job growth over the last seven years of his eight-year tenure. But there are plenty of caveats to the talking point, including the prevalence of low-paying jobs that Bush policies didn’t necessarily create. Many of those jobs evaporated after the housing bubble burst. A more level way to measure jobs would have been to look at the growth rate, which put Florida fifth in the country while Bush was in office. There are many angles to explore in jobs data, and Bush’s view only tells part of the story. We rate his statement Half True. | null | Jeb Bush | null | null | null | 2015-09-10T16:13:41 | 2015-09-08 | ['George_W._Bush'] |
pomt-02705 | (Jack Kingston) had more earmarks at one time than every member of the Georgia delegation put together. | false | /georgia/statements/2013/dec/30/paul-broun/brouns-attack-kingston-earmarks-too-broad/ | For years, pork was the preferred meat of Congress. Lawmakers pulled money from the federal budget for various projects in their congressional districts without having to compete in the open bidding system of the federal departments. Critics derisively called the process pork. The official term was "earmarks." Congress voted to abstain from pork in 2010, but one candidate is attempting to make it an issue in one of Georgia’s most interesting political races. "(Jack Kingston) had more earmarks at one time than every member of the Georgia delegation put together," U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, an Athens Republican, said of his GOP colleague, who is from Savannah, in an interview. Broun and Kingston are part of a crowded field of Republicans vying for the GOP U.S. Senate nomination, with the primary scheduled for May 2014. The incumbent, Saxby Chambliss, has announced his plans to retire. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Political Insider column reported about Broun’s comments and mused, "If you listen closely, you can hear Politifact hounds baying in the distance." We’re baying. Broun has been a vocal critic of earmarks and, apparently, is hoping to live high on the hog by criticizing Kingston on the issue. Kingston said criticism of the practice prodded him to trim back his own requests, the AJC reported in July 2008. The AJC article reported Kingston’s concerns that other states would get more money for various projects if Georgia lawmakers demurred from seeking earmarks. Broun spokeswoman Christine Hardman said the congressman based his claim by examining several databases created by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. The nonprofit has staffers who’ve worked for Democrats and Republicans. Broun, though, made a mistake in his interview with the Tea Party News Network. "What Congressman Broun should have clarified was that at one point, Congressman Kingston had more earmarks than the entire Republican Georgia delegation combined," Hardman told us via email. PolitiFact Georgia was still curious about where Kingston stood in comparison to his GOP colleagues when it comes to earmarks. The Taxpayers for Common Sense website has databases for the federal fiscal years 2008 through 2010 that allow users to conduct searches to see how much money each member of Congress pulled in through earmarks. The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1 and ends Sept. 30. Our review of the databases shows Kingston had more solo earmarks than his Georgia Republican colleagues in fiscal years 2008 and 2010. In 2008, Kingston had 21 earmarks that totaled about $17 million. His GOP colleagues from Georgia had 19 earmarks that totaled approximately $13 million. In fiscal year 2010, we found 18 solo earmarks for Kingston that totaled $24.3 million. The Republicans from Georgia had 15 earmarks that totaled $7.6 million. In fiscal year 2008, the Democrats from the Georgia congressional delegation recorded 48 individual earmarks that totaled about $26.5 million. In 2010, Democratic lawmakers from Georgia collected 65 earmarks worth a total of $33.5 million. The totals from the Democrats alone were higher than Kingston’s total. PolitiFact Georgia also reviewed the earmarks database of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that follows the money in Washington. The center is funded by foundation grants and individual donations and does not accept money from corporations, labor unions, or trade associations. The center’s totals were slightly different than what we found on the Taxpayers for Common Sense website. One commonality was that Kingston’s solo earmarks total did not exceed the entire Georgia delegation in 2008 or 2010. One difference we found was that Georgia’s GOP delegation had more solo earmarks and brought home more money in fiscal year 2008 than Kingston did. In 2010, we found Kingston had more earmarks and more money from those earmarks than the Republican delegation. So where does this all lead us? Broun meant to say Kingston had more earmarks at one point than the entire Georgia Republican delegation. Broun might have received a True if he had said that in the interview. It appears that Kingston had scored more earmarks than the entire Georgia GOP delegation to Congress in 2010 from our examination of two separate databases. Broun, however, misspoke in the interview, giving anyone who viewed it the wrong impression of Kingston’s record on earmarks. We rate his statement False. | null | Paul Broun | null | null | null | 2013-12-30T06:00:00 | 2013-12-11 | ['None'] |
pomt-11251 | Says George Soros has "unloaded a whopping $1 million to install his liberal puppets in positions of power" in Texas this fall. | half-true | /texas/statements/2018/may/02/greg-abbott/greg-abbott-george-soros-new-york-pouring-mo/ | In 2017, we found no evidence of George Soros, the internationally prominent pro-Democratic financier, investing in races for state office in Texas. More recently, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott warned afresh about Soros in a fundraising letter, opening: "Every weapon in the national Democrat machine’s arsenal is aimed straight at Texas today." Abbott’s April 2, 2018, letter states next: "Left-wing BILLIONAIRE George Soros has already unloaded a whopping $1 million to install his liberal puppets in positions of power this fall." The letter warns that Democrats are preparing an all-out assault and could seize control of the state at the ballot box. "I know," the letter further says, that "left-wing special interests and BILLIONAIRE liberals like George Soros are pouring outrageous sums of money into driving up Democrat turnout." After we didn’t hear back from Abbott about his basis for the "puppets" claim, we decided to check state, local and federal records for indications of Soros unpacking lucre to help Texas Democrats win election in 2018. Soros helped a Bexar County Democrat From the top, we knew that Soros invested significantly in a group that backed a successful challenger to the Bexar County district attorney. Attorney Joe Gonzales bested first-term incumbent Nicholas "Nico" LaHood in Bexar County’s Democratic primary after Soros contributions propelled a pro-Gonzales political committee. Of note: Soros boosted the pro-Gonzales committee a couple of years after Soros put more than $1.4 million into electing Democrat Kim Ogg as the district attorney of Harris County. An October 2016 Houston Chronicle news story pointed out that Soros had similarly put his money into district attorney races in Florida, Illinois, Mississippi and New Mexico, each time through state-specific PACs with variations on the name "Safety and Justice." The story also said Soros had supported criminal justice reforms including reduced racial disparities in sentencing and relaxed marijuana restrictions. In San Antonio, LaHood chalked up his loss to Soros’s spending, the San Antonio Express-News reported. "In my opinion, the voters were unfairly influenced by $1 million worth of lies," LaHood said. "There's no other way to say it." Gonzales has yet to win the DA post; he’s set to face Republican Tylden Shaeffer on this November's ballot. For his part, Gonzales said after his primary win that Soros’ contributions came without strings attached. "There was a clear understanding from the beginning that we would accept their contributions, but we were not going to be told how to run this office," Gonzales said. An Express-News spreadsheet tallies contributions by Soros to Texas Justice & Public Safety, the political committee supportive of Gonzales. According to the sheet, which was based on Gonzales’ campaign finance reports filed with the county elections department on Jan. 17, Feb. 5 and Feb. 26, 2018, the committee made $964,377 worth of in-kind contributions to Gonzales’ campaign from Dec. 18, 2017, through Feb. 23, 2018, mostly in TV ads and voter mailings but also in polling, research and palm cards. Gonzales’ campaign directly fielded no Soros contributions, the filings indicate. Multiple Democratic beneficiaries? Abbott’s fundraising letter warns of Soros spending money to install "puppets." To gauge whether Soros chose multiple Texas Democrats to help, we conducted online searches of candidate and political committee finance reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission and Federal Election Commission. Previously, our 2017 search of campaign finance reports filed with the ethics commission from 2000 into 2017 indicated Soros hadn’t personally donated to candidates for state office--not once. Similarly, our fresh search of state records yielded no indication of Soros spending on races besides the Bexar County battle for the Democratic nomination for district attorney. In pre-primary reports, we found, the pro-Gonzales Texas Justice & Public Safety committee reported fielding $1.04 million in Soros contributions. According to our separate search of campaign reports filed with the FEC, Soros made 49 contributions nationally from February 2017 into March 2018, totaling $4,587,000. But, our search suggests, very little went to Texas Democrats. We identified a single Soros contribution to a Texas candidate. Soros gave $2,700 on Dec. 1, 2017 to Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso congressman. Our ruling Abbott warned in his letter that Soros has spent $1 million to "install his liberal puppets in positions of power" in Texas this fall. We confirmed Soros spending in Texas, but he's yet to put a penny toward Democrats seeking state office. The New Yorker gave a little more than $1 million to a committee that helped a challenger win the Democratic nod for Bexar County district attorney. He gave $2,700 to O’Rourke, who went on to win the Democratic Senate nomination. All told, we rate this claim Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Greg Abbott | null | null | null | 2018-05-02T12:00:00 | 2018-04-02 | ['Texas', 'George_Soros'] |
snes-00748 | In April 2018, Suge Knight was stabbed to death in prison. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/suge-knight-dead/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Suge Knight Death Hoax | 18 April 2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01862 | Katy Perry “Looking For Revenge” On Selena Gomez By Hanging Out With The Weeknd, | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-revenge-selena-gomez-the-weeknd/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Katy Perry NOT “Looking For Revenge” On Selena Gomez By Hanging Out With The Weeknd, Despite Reports | 2:06 pm, November 27, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14296 | Says his free public university tuition program "is paid for … by a tax on Wall Street's speculation." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/04/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-says-wall-street-tax-would-pay-his-/ | One proposal boosting Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ support among college-aged voters is his promise of free tuition at public colleges and universities. In an interview with Sanders, CNN’s Erin Burnett asked about some of the issues Sanders’ critics bring up about the proposal, like the large cost of such a program and persuading states to get on board. But Sanders said he has a way to pay for it: Wall Street. "I think the idea is sound," Sanders said in the March 30 interview. "It is paid for, Erin, by a tax on Wall Street's speculation. When Wall Street's illegal behavior destroyed our economy, the middle class bailed them out. It is now time for them to help the middle class." Sanders’ assertion that the Wall Street speculation tax pays for his college tuition plan is only part of the story. Two-thirds, to be exact. Sanders estimates that his plan to make undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities free would cost about $75 billion annually. Based on his proposed College for All Act, the federal government would fund two-thirds of that cost using a tax on Wall Street trading, but participating states would have to kick in the remaining costs. Sanders’ Wall Street tax proposal primarily taxes the rich in order to provide services to the non-wealthy. It would put a small tax on speculative financial trades, like stocks, bonds and derivatives. The revenue potential for such a tax is huge because the volume of Wall Street trading is so large. One estimate — which Sanders points to — put the yearly revenue from a financial transaction tax at more than $300 billion. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center analyzed Sanders' plan and put the yearly revenue at around $50 billion to $60 billion, much more modest but still enough to cover the approximately $50 billion a year in federal dollars Sanders wants to put in his tuition program. (The difference in revenue estimates largely has to do with how the analysts measured the various taxable trades and the impact of the policy.) Setting aside a disagreement over how much a Wall Street tax would raise, in any case, Sanders’ own proposal is straightforward about the fact that the tax revenue will not fund the free public school tuition 100 percent. And as CNN’s Burnett noted, there is some concern among skeptics of Sanders’ proposal about this piece in particular: What if state governments don’t want to play ball and refuse to kick in the remaining one-third of program costs? For example, many states have resisted federal dollars for expanding Medicaid, the low-income health insurance program, under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would provide at minimum 90 percent of the funds to expand the program. In order to receive federal funding for Sanders' education proposal, states would have to meet other requirements designed to maintain high educational standards, like reducing the number of low-paid adjunct faculty and maintaining state funding for need-based financial aid. This, combined with the fact that state funding for higher education is tight across the country, raises the question of how states — particularly those whose governments are spending-averse — will respond to such a proposal and how that will affect students living in those states. In the CNN interview, Sanders said if a state chooses not to participate, it can expect its students to flock to a state that does. But Sanders is offering a generous deal that might be too good to pass up, said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. He said the amount of federal money Sanders is putting on the table exceeds what states take in with undergraduate tuition, so they shouldn’t have to worry about a shortfall as a result of Sanders’ program. "But it is theoretically possible that some state does not take federal money," Nassirian said, noting that Sanders’ proposal is massive and won’t necessarily be politically feasible to implement. Our ruling Sanders said his free public university tuition program "is paid for… by a tax on Wall Street's speculation." Sanders’ $75 billion proposal is a federal matching program, meaning the Wall Street speculation tax would cover two-thirds of the costs. States would be required to pick up the tab for the remaining one-third. There is some question if some states would participate in the program. Recently, states have refused to be part of Medicaid expansion under a more generous style of cost-sharing. Sanders has a point that his proposed Wall Street tax would cover part of the plan, but he left out the significant state contribution. And it’s not a sure thing that every state would join in. So we rate his claim Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/9fca0f5a-dfcc-425f-bcea-b78d5cd3e25e | null | Bernie Sanders | null | null | null | 2016-04-04T10:49:27 | 2016-03-30 | ['None'] |
goop-01902 | Taylor Swift Banned Lindsay Lohan From Dressing Room At Jingle Ball? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-lindsay-lohan-jingle-ball-banned-dressing-room/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Taylor Swift Banned Lindsay Lohan From Dressing Room At Jingle Ball? | 4:48 pm, January 4, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00063 | On whether he supports tolls on I-77 | full flop | /north-carolina/statements/2018/nov/02/jeff-tarte/sen-tartes-full-flop-tolls/ | Based on information from NCDOT, I am still in favor of tolling I-77 since this option solves the problem sooner rather than much later and will generate additional dollars for local road projects, Tarte wrote in the article. "Simply doing nothing is not an option." - Sen. Jeff Tarte to the Charlotte Observer on July 1, 2014 "I totally support no tolling" -Sen. Jeff Tarte to WSOC-TV on June 14, 2014 Drivers in Charlotte spend an average of 23 hours a week stuck in traffic, according to Inrix, a company that analyzes transportation and traffic data. It’s no wonder there are plans to help alleviate some of this congestion by adding lanes on I-77, an interstate that wraps around the western part of Charlotte. The North Carolina Department of Transportation began in 2007 to seriously look into expanding the stretch of the interstate that runs from Mooresville to Charlotte. These lanes will use tolls to pay for the expansion, which will open near the end of this year. Only two of these lanes will have tolls. Many drivers aren’t happy with the decision to charge tolls, and some don’t think it will help with the congestion. And with election season coming to a close soon, the I-77 tolls have been a popular topic of discussion between state Sen. Jeff Tarte and Democratic challenger Natasha Marcus. They are running to represent North Carolina’s Senate District 41. Tarte wrote an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer in 2014 saying he is "in favor of tolling on I-77 since this option solves the problem sooner rather than later." However, in a recent Charlotte Observer article highlighting the Marcus-Tarte race, Tarte, a Republican from Cornelius, said in an interview with the Observer, "At no point have I been in favor of this specific project." The project Tarte is referencing is the state’s contract with Cintra, a Spanish firm responsible for building the lanes. Tarte told the Observer the governor should cancel the contract. Cintra would also maintain the toll lanes for 50 years. Tarte also said he "totally supports no tolling" to WSOC-TV on June 14, 2018. The North Carolina Democratic Party disagrees, and has a webpage dedicated to saying Tarte gave the project the "green-light before being against them." What’s Tarte said about the tolls? The decision to use tolls to pay for the expansion of I-77 came in 2010 according to NCDOT’s timeline of the project. Tarte was the mayor of Cornelius, a town north of Charlotte, at the time of the decision. He was elected to the state Senate in 2013. April 29, 2009 There are minutes from a meeting in 2009 — when Tarte was mayor of Cornelius — of the Mecklenburg-Union Metropolitan Planning Organization that shows Tarte expressed some support for managed lanes, which means lanes that are operated using some types of restrictions or with tolls. "Mr. Foxx asked Mayor Tarte about constructing I-77 lanes as managed lanes. He replied that he had no concerns with that," according to the minutes. The Mr. Foxx here is Anthony Foxx. He represented Charlotte on the planning organization for Mecklenburg and Union county, and went on to serve as the U.S. secretary of transportation under President Barack Obama. May 24, 2013 During Tarte’s first year as senator, he called the tolls "the least onerous of the alternatives" for expanding I-77, according to the Winston-Salem Journal. Tarte said in a phone interview with PolitiFact in 2018 that he supported tolls prior to 2014 because the state said there were no other ways to finance the project. June 14, 2014 In an email exchange between Tarte and Anthony Tata, the former state transportation secretary, Tata said Tarte supported the project. The email, from Tarte on June 24, 2014, reads: "I am requesting that our State Auditor, and elected officials of the NCGA, selected by President Pro Tem as well as the Speaker, to be allowed to perform a review of the contract between NCDOT and Cintra prior to authorizing the signature of this contract." Tarte got a response from Tata, the same day which tells a different tale: "At the conclusion of the meeting you indicated that you were comfortable that the I-77 project was a ‘good deal for the state.’ As you know NCDOT Director of Technical Services Rodger Rochelle and the team of professionals, some of whom were in the meeting yesterday, have performed detailed due diligence on this project." These emails were noted in an audit released from the office of the state auditor, Beth Wood, in June 2018. July 1, 2014 In the Charlotte Observer, Tarte wrote an op-ed asking for Gov. Pat McCrory to properly vet the contract with Cintra — a consistent message from Tarte. "Based on information from NCDOT, I am still in favor of tolling I-77 since this option solves the problem sooner rather than much later and will generate additional dollars for local road projects," Tarte wrote in the article. "Simply doing nothing is not an option." Tarte says in the article that he takes issue with the contract with Cintra, but not with tolling. July 18, 2014 Tarte supported the idea of high occupancy toll lanes, according to WFAE, an NPR affiliate. This article again says Tarte had questions about the specific contract that would be signed with Cintra. High occupancy tolls means that cars with a high number of passengers would be able to drive on the interstate for free. In the managed lanes being built on I-77, the price of tolls is free to fluctuate based on the number of cars. Any vehicle with three or more passengers won’t have to pay the toll. June 29, 2015 Tarte told the Carolina Journal he had plans to introduce a bill to stop the project because most people are opposed to it, and there are new ways to finance the expansion of I-77 without using tolls. Nov. 13, 2015 Tarte was one of four legislators who wrote a letter to McCrory asking for the project to be stopped, according to the Charlotte Observer. They say the tolls would hurt business in the area and the lanes were being built below standard. Dec. 11, 2015 Tarte was described by the Courier-Tribune as someone who "once supported tolls." At this time, Tarte was asking for NCDOT to look at the entire interstate again to see if there were other ways to fund the construction. June 21, 2016 An effort to stop the project failed in the General Assembly. Tarte expressed his disappointment to the Charlotte Observer. The article says Tarte had plans to introduce a bill in the following session to try to stop the project again. June 24, 2018 During session early this year, state senators passed a bill giving Gov. Roy Cooper until October to either change the contract with Cintra or cancel it entirely. Tarte was the sponsor of this bill. "I totally support no tolling," Tarte said in a phone interview with WSOC-TV. Our ruling: Tarte says he originally supported using tolls to pay for the widening of I-77 because they were not presented with other options. Based on his public statements, he has consistently been against the contract with Cintra and asked for the contract to be vetted. However, that doesn’t change the fact that he went from supporting the tolls to completely opposing them. We rate this a Full Flop. This story was produced by the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project, a partnership of McClatchy Carolinas, the Duke University Reporters’ Lab and PolitiFact. The NC Local News Lab Fund and the International Center for Journalists provide support for the project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. | null | Jeff Tarte | null | null | null | 2018-11-02T14:25:45 | 2018-06-14 | ['None'] |
goop-01531 | Kylie Jenner Splits From Travis Scott, Now A Single Mom? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kylie-jenner-travis-scott-split-single-mom-wrong/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kylie Jenner Splits From Travis Scott, Now A Single Mom? | 12:01 am, February 21, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00684 | Jennifer Aniston Told Courteney Cox She Shouldn’t Have Married Justin Theroux? | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-never-married-justin-theroux-courteney-cox/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Jennifer Aniston Told Courteney Cox She Shouldn’t Have Married Justin Theroux? | 1:26 pm, July 6, 2018 | null | ['Jennifer_Aniston'] |
pomt-05423 | Student loan rates set to double because a Democratic-controlled Congress voted to double them. | mostly false | /ohio/statements/2012/may/01/john-boehner/john-boehner-tweets-dems-voted-double-student-loan/ | The U.S. House of Representatives voted April 27, 2012, on a measure to stop interest rates on student loans from doubling this summer. Speaker John Boehner announced the surprise vote at a hastily called news conference on Wednesday, hours after President Obama named the Ohio Republican as a chief obstacle to the Democrats’ plan to keep the loan benefit from expiring. "This week the president is campaigning and trying to invent a fight where there is none and never has been on this issue of student loans," Boehner said. "We can, and will, fix the problem — without a bunch of campaign-style theatrics." But the speaker himself had weighed in earlier on the issue, with a posting on Twitter that caught the attention of PolitiFact Ohio. "Student loan rates set to double because a Democratic-controlled Congress voted to double them," he tweeted on @speakerboehner, his official account, in Twitter's 140-character shorthand. It ended with a link to the speaker's blog, on his website, which added this: "In 2007, the Democratic majority in Congress enacted legislation to double interest rates on new federal student loans from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent in 2012." Voting to double student loan rates would hit a lot of wallets. We asked Boehner's office how he backed up the charge. They referred us to an Associated Press story linked on his blog. "While Obama blames Republicans for voting against new ways to make college more affordable for middle-class families," the story said, "it was House Democrats who cut interest rates on the school loans in 2007 and included an expiration provision that placed the looming increase in the middle of an election year." That does not describe a vote to double rates, and it did not clarify the issue to our satisfaction. We looked further. The 2007 vote in question was on the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, H.R. 2669. It gradually reduced the interest rate on federally subsidized loans to undergraduate student borrowers from 6.8 percent in July 2006 to 3.4 percent in July 2011. Advanced by a newly Democratic-majority Congress, the law had bipartisan support. Democrats were joined by 77 House Republicans and 35 Senate Republicans. The bill was signed by President George W. Bush. The law was temporary. It expires this July. If no action is taken, the interest rate will return to 6.8 percent. The increase would affect more than 7 million borrowers, and add $1,000 a year to the repayment cost of the average loan, according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Obama's budget proposal for fiscal 2013 included money to extend the rate cut, but only for one year. The Republican budget -- advanced by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, supported by GOP leadership and passed by the House -- returns the interest rate to 6.8 percent. Extending the program for one year would cost $6 billion. Democrats have offered proposals to pay for extending the lower interest rate. One would end a payroll tax exemption given some business owners. Another would end tax subsidies for oil and gas companies. Neither of those proposals was considered likely to draw any Republican support. The GOP measure advanced by Boehner had its own poison pill that made it unlikely to get past, or to, Obama's desk: Boehner said the bill would pay the cost of the loan program with money for preventive health care programs from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Boehner labeled the money a "slush fund," a characterization Republicans have long used for the program. PolitiFact rated the term as a Pants on Fire falsehood when Boehner applied it to the health care act a year ago. But the statement we're reviewing now is this: "Student loan rates [are] set to double because a Democratic-controlled Congress voted to double them." It is accurate in saying that Democrats were in the majority when Congress passed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act in 2007. It is accurate in saying that the loan rate reductions in the measure are scheduled to expire in July, and that the result would double the current rate. But to describe that initial vote five years ago as one in which the Democratic majority "voted to double" rates this year is misleading at best. On the Truth-O-Meter, Boehner's statement rates as Mostly False. | null | John Boehner | null | null | null | 2012-05-01T06:00:00 | 2012-04-24 | ['United_States_Congress', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)'] |
pomt-07410 | President Barack Obama "took exactly none of his own deficit reduction commission’s ideas. Not one." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/28/john-boehner/john-boehner-says-obama-took-exactly-none-his-own-/ | During an interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had a blunt message for President Barack Obama on the deficit: "Grow up." Referring to the deficit commission chaired by former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming and former Democratic White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Boehner said, "While I didn’t agree with everything they did, there was a lot in their proposal that was worthy of consideration. And what did the president do? He took exactly none of his own deficit reduction commission’s ideas. Not one. Come on! It’s time to grow up and get serious about the problems that face our country." A reader asked us to check whether the White House has indeed ignored the recommendations of the very blue-ribbon panel it had established. So we looked at the commission’s final report, which was released in December 2010; the president’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal, which was released in February 2011; and a fact sheet released by the White House following Obama’s budget speech at George Washington University in April 2011. We should begin by noting that the commission’s report offered no shortage of recommendations for the White House to choose from -- more than 70, in fact. Based on our analysis of these three documents, as well as our discussions with independent budget experts, we found many policies now advocated by Obama that had been included in the bipartisan commission’s final report. However, in many cases the White House proposal either differed in some of the details or lacked details entirely. When we contacted Boehner’s office, a spokesman said that the fairest way to compare the proposals is to look at the president’s proposed budget, since that document includes greater detail than the fact sheet that accompanied the George Washington University speech, which is informally known as the "framework." Still, we think the framework has value, so we’ll evaluate them separately. First are two recommendations by the commission that were included in the president’s budget proposal: • Allow the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation to increase premiums. The PBGC is the federal agency that protects traditional defined-benefit pension payments for workers whose companies have failed. Both the commission and the White House agreed that PBGC premiums are lower than those charged by private-sector financial institutions and are too low to allow the agency to remain financially stable. Both proposals would allow the agency to raise premiums in order to shore up its financial position. • Increase government authority and funding to reduce Medicare fraud. The president’s budget does this. So these two items by themselves show Boehner is wrong to say that none of the commission’s recommendations were included. Next, we’ll list six of the commission’s recommendations that were included in the president’s budget with slight differences. • Eliminate "in-school subsidies" for the federal student loan program. Both the commission and the president’s budget agree that this policy should be eliminated, though the president would do it only for graduate and professional student loans. • End the reliance on deficit spending to fund the transportation trust fund. The main difference here is that Obama does not specifically advocate a 15-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax -- a key provision of the commission’s recommendation. • Freeze pay for federal workers and Defense Department civilians. The commission recommended a three-year freeze; the president’s budget would do two years. • Overhaul the medical malpractice system. The commission advocated an "aggressive" set of changes to the medical malpractice system, such as imposing a statute of limitations for suits, creating specialized "health courts," and allowing "safe haven" rules for providers who follow best practices of care. Obama’s budget is much less specific, saying only that the president "encourages Republicans to work constructively with him on medical malpractice as part of an overall effort to restrain health costs." • Reform the corporate tax system. The president’s budget calls for simplification but does not go so far as to endorse the commission’s specific recommendation of a single corporate tax rate between 23 percent and 29 percent and changing how foreign income is taxed. • Increase government efficiency. Both the commission and the president’s budget endorse the idea of reorganizing government to make it more efficient, but neither provides much detail. Finally, the White House "framework" on deficit reduction refers very generally to seven of the commission’s recommendations. In several of these examples, the White House proposal offers less detail than the commission’s. • Cut both security and non-security spending. The commission urged cutting both types of spending by equal percentages. In his fact sheet for the framework, Obama advocates cutting non-security spending to levels consistent with that of the commission, but his cuts to security-related spending are not as large as those proposed by the commission. • Implement structural tax reform. The commission and Obama both agree with the principle of cutting marginal tax rates while eliminating loopholes. But while the commission recommended "a small number of simpler, more targeted provisions that promote work, home ownership, health care, charity and savings," Obama was less specific. • Reform Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate mechanism. Both the commission and Obama agreed that the Sustainable Growth Rate needs to be overhauled, in a way that is fully offset in the budget, but their approaches are somewhat different. • Establish a long-term global budget for federal health care spending. The commission urged a "target of holding growth (of all federal health care spending) to GDP plus 1 percent and requiring action by the president and Congress if growth exceeds the targets." In his framework, Obama proposed a more aggressive standard -- GDP plus 0.5 percent per beneficiary -- but for the more limited target of just Medicare. • Eliminate state "gaming" of Medicaid. The commission recommends preventing states from taxing providers in order to increase their payments, and therefore increase the federal match. The Obama framework backs a limited version. • Reduce agricultural subsidies. The Obama framework supports cuts, but it does not mention the specific programs recommended by the commission. • Create a mechanism to enforce adherence to debt stabilization. Both the commission and the president’s framework agree on this in principle, but they use different mechanisms. The commission recommended that if balanced-budget targets are not met, Congress would need to implement a fast-track legislative procedure to enforce changes in spending and/or taxes. The president would do something similar, but he would specifically carve out Social Security, low-income programs and Medicare, "consistent with prior fiscal enforcement triggers put in place by Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton." We do think it’s fair to say that Obama has stopped short of adopting many of the commission’s recommendations, and he’s been clear that he will not accept the package in its entirety. But even if you look only at his fiscal year 2012 budget plan rather than the less detailed framework, Obama made two proposals -- pension guarantees and Medicare fraud -- that are substantially similar to those offered by the commission, and his budget proposal includes six additional provisions that share significant common ground with recommendations made by the commission. Alice Rivlin, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget for Clinton and a member of the commission, told PolitiFact that the most important idea Obama took from the group wasn’t a policy proposal at all but was instead "the concept of shared sacrifice," which was a centerpiece of the commission’s preamble. If Boehner had offered a more measured assessment, he would have had a fair point about the differences between Obama’s fiscal approach and that outlined by the commission. The president certainly could have gone further in embracing the recommendations of the panel he had commissioned. But he did embrace a wide variety of them, so to say bluntly, as Boehner did, that Obama "took exactly none of his own deficit reduction commission’s ideas" is simply not correct. To one degree or another, the commission’s recommendations are sprinkled throughout Obama’s budget proposals, in recognizable -- if not always in identical -- form. So we rate Boehner’s statement False. | null | John Boehner | null | null | null | 2011-04-28T11:40:07 | 2011-04-25 | ['None'] |
pomt-06006 | PolitiFact Oregon gave Rob Cornilles a Pants on Fire for a claim about taxes and fees. | pants on fire! | /oregon/statements/2012/jan/18/suzanne-bonamici/suzanne-bonamici-says-we-gave-rob-cornilles-pants-/ | This week Suzanne Bonamici’s campaign unleashed a memorandum of complaints regarding opponent Rob Cornilles’ latest television ad. The National Republican Congressional Committee is chipping in for part of the cost of Cornilles’ ad buy. The memo is addressed to members of the Oregon media and lists three "False attacks" within the Cornilles’ ad that the Bonamici folks say have been discredited by independent news analysts. Yours truly, PolitiFact Oregon, is on the list: False Attack #2: AD: "She voted for higher taxes and fees on the middle class and small business." On January 2, 2012, The Oregonian’s PolitiFact found this attack to be so FALSE that it was rated "Pants on Fire." "We can’t accept their explanation that punishing unemployment benefit cheats or allowing the state to go after people who haven’t paid taxes is a new tax or fee." http://www.politifact.com/oregon/statements/2012/jan/10/rob-cornilles/rob-cornilles-claims-suzanne-bonamici-has-voted-60/ We’re astonished with the Bonamici campaign’s interpretation. The quote about punishing unemployment benefit cheats contained in the media release is certainly ours, and the ruling is accurate, but that is not the statement on which we ruled. We ruled on his statement that Bonamici "voted for 60 tax increases." Let’s make this clear: It is 100 percent true that Bonamici has voted for higher taxes and fees while in the Legislature. What Bonamici hadn’t done while in the Oregon Legislature was vote for 60 tax increases. This statement was the subject of an earlier ad by the Cornilles’ campaign, the one we ruled Pants on Fire. We found Bonamici had voted for 14, maybe 16 tax increases, at least 32 fee increases and 14 bills that should in no way have been included as a tax or fee increase, such as legislation to punish unemployment benefit cheats. All of that combined prompted our ruling of Pants on Fire. Carol Butler, Bonamici’s campaign manager, said she found it incredible that we would fact check a press release when there are so many outrageous statements coming from the Cornilles’ campaign. She said she saw no difference between the Cornilles’ campaign’s two statements on tax voting, as they both intend to mislead voters. We see a big difference. Here’s what the Bonamici people didn’t include from our original PolitiFact: "It’s fair to say that Bonamici can’t recall ever voting against a tax increase or fee hike. It’s fair to say that she has one of the most liberal voting records in the Legislature. It’s fair to say that she has voted for big-ticket tax increases that have infuriated conservatives in Oregon. Cornilles could have stuck with that script and his statements would have been True." We note that on Wednesday, the Bonamici campaign launched a new ad that correctly states that we gave Cornilles a Pants on Fire for "more false attacks on Bonamici and taxes.": The Cornilles’ campaign claim that "she voted for higher taxes and fees" is spot on. The Bonamici campaign is twisting a PolitiFact for its own campaign purposes. We rule that a Pants on Fire. Go back to OregonLive to comment. | null | Suzanne Bonamici | null | null | null | 2012-01-18T18:30:48 | 2012-01-17 | ['Oregon', '[23', '13', '"Oregon\\\'s_1st_congressional_district"'] |
farg-00308 | Says exclusively using a private email account and server for government business as secretary of state was "absolutely permitted." | none | https://www.factcheck.org/2016/05/clinton-still-spinning-emails/ | null | the-factcheck-wire | Hillary Clinton | Eugene Kiely | ['Presidential Election 2016', 'Clinton emails'] | Clinton Still Spinning Emails | May 11, 2016 | [' On CBS\' "Face the Nation" – Sunday, May 8, 2016 '] | ['None'] |
pomt-10772 | The Clintons now charge the Secret Service $10,000 monthly rent for the use of (a) Secret Service residence and that rent is just about equal to their mortgage payment. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/20/chain-email/the-clintons-dont-receive-money-from-secret-servic/ | A chain e-mail alleges that Bill and Hillary Clinton are cashing in on a policy in which the Secret Service reimburses the people it protects for space in their homes that is used by agents. (Click here for the full text of the e-mail.) The allegation began after the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, N.Y. during the end of Bill's presidency. About two weeks before they left office, a short item headlined "Another freebie for the Clintons" on the New York Press Web site said the Secret Service was paying rent and that "by an amazing coincidence . . . matches the monthly mortgage payment for the entire property." There were no other details. That allegation was then repeated in a chain e-mail, with the additional detail that the Secret Service was paying $10,000 per month. The e-mail says "an extra residency had to be built within the acreage in order to house the Secret Service agents ... The Clinton's now charge the Secret Service $10,000 monthly rent for the use of said Secret Service residence and that rent is just about equal to their mortgage payment." We checked with the Secret Service, which declined to comment and referred us to Clinton's Senate office. Philippe Reines, Clinton's press spokesman, said in an e-mail message, "They have not and do not receive money" from the Secret Service. That matches a statement from White House spokeswoman Nanda Chitre, who told the New York Post in January 2001 that "They are entitled to charge rent, but they have decided not to do it." So we find the charge to be False. | null | Chain email | null | null | null | 2007-10-20T00:00:00 | 2007-09-17 | ['Bill_Clinton', 'United_States_Secret_Service'] |
chct-00043 | FACT CHECK: Did Young People Only Make Up 13 Percent Of The Vote In 2014? | verdict: true | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/10/01/fact-check-youth-vote-13-percent-2014/ | null | null | null | Shane Devine | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 9:06 AM 10/01/2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00420 | Brad Pitt Angry About Angelina Jolie’s Bodyguard ‘Playing Dad’ With Kids? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-kids-bodyguard/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Brad Pitt Angry About Angelina Jolie’s Bodyguard ‘Playing Dad’ With Kids? | 12:07 pm, August 20, 2018 | null | ['Angelina_Jolie', 'Brad_Pitt'] |
pomt-03666 | Narragansett Bay waters are getting warmer -- 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the winter since the 1960s. | half-true | /rhode-island/statements/2013/apr/28/sheldon-whitehouse/us-sen-sheldon-whitehouse-says-narragansett-bay-ri/ | Want evidence of man-made climate change? U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse says you can feel it in the waters of Narragansett Bay, which covers about 120.5 square miles, from Newport to Providence, in his home state of Rhode Island. "Narragansett Bay waters are getting warmer -- 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the winter since the 1960s," he said April 9 during one of his regular climate speeches on the floor of the Senate. He blamed the warmer temperatures for a drop in the flounder catch from more than 2,500 metric tons in the 1980s to about 150 metric tons in 2009. The reason: Warmer temperatures attract winter flounder predators earlier in the season. We can save the winter flounder factoid for another day. We were interested in whether Bay water has, in fact, gotten 4 degrees warmer since the 1960s, especially when water temperatures can fluctuate naturally from year to year. Whitehouse's office directed us to a 2008 article written by researchers at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography and published in the journal Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science. It says that the surface water of the Bay from December through February "has warmed on average by about 2.2 degrees Celsius since 1960." That would be 4 degrees Fahrenheit. An accompanying chart showing the trend ends at 2006. We wondered whether the increase continued beyond that. Next we contacted Jeremy Collie, a URI oceanographer. "There's clearly a warming signal," he said as he looked at the trend line for data from 1959 through 2010. "If you look at the winter months and take a regression, you get a warming rate of about 0.5 degrees F. per decade." That would be about 2.5 degrees F. since 1960. "So 4 degrees is a little on the high end," he said. He cautioned that there can be a lot of normal variation in the readings from winter to winter. The data, collected off Fox Island, located between North Kingstown and the Jamestown Bridge, can be downloaded from URI's website (search for "fox island 1959-2010"). We double-checked the trend, using Microsoft Excel's ability to create a chart, and found an increase, of 2.4 degrees for December-February from 1959-2010. (It rose to 2.7 degrees if you didn't include the winter of 1959-60, which might not be considered to be in the 1960s.) We also checked the data for another temperature measuring site: Whale Rock, south of the bridge on the same side of the Bay. Using data from December 1960 through February 2010, we again found an increase of 2.7 degrees F. In both locations, temperatures deeper in the water rose a bit more -- about 3 degrees -- but still not by the amount the senator said. It's unclear why the older study reported a surface temperature 1.5 degrees higher than our newer look at the data. The 2008 article appears to be using the same data we did. The additional winters we looked at had some colder-than-normal temperatures but that doesn't seem to be enough to account for the difference. Our ruling When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said "Narragansett Bay waters are getting warmer -- 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the winter since the 1960s," he was citing a URI study that offered the observation after authors examined temperatures through 2006. The latest data for December, January and February -- the months used in the URI study -- extending through 2010 reveal that the increase since the '60s is less extreme. The closest we saw was a 3-degree rise in the deeper waters off Fox Island. The trend is certainly correct, but Whitehouse is too far off for the Truth-O-Meter to register True. It is, to pardon the pun, a matter of degree. Because the temperature rise is a little more than half of what he said, we rate his statement Half True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) | null | Sheldon Whitehouse | null | null | null | 2013-04-28T00:01:00 | 2013-04-09 | ['None'] |
snes-00224 | The animated children's program 'VeggieTales' introduced a cannabis character in August 2018. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/veggietales-cannabis-character/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Did ‘VeggieTales’ Introduce a New Cannabis Character? | 14 August 2018 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-00170 | Another Hotmail Account Closure | bogus warning | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/another-hotmail-hoax.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Another Hotmail Account Closure Hoax Email | November 2006 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12288 | 28.2 million Americans are still waiting under Obamacare and remain uninsured! | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jun/28/sean-spicer/sean-spicer-tweets-misleading-obamacare-statistic/ | After the delay of a vote on the Senate’s controversial health bill, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer took to Twitter to assuage concerns regarding the increase in the uninsured population projected by a Congressional Budget Office report. Spicer tweeted an image that said, "28.2 million Americans are still waiting under Obamacare and remain uninsured!" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com We checked the National Center for Health Statistics and found that 28.2 million people were indeed uninsured as of 2016. We also found, however, that the tweet neglects to show the full picture. The same bullet point Spicer seems to quote points out that we have 20.4 million fewer uninsured people since 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act went into effect. The current 8.8 percent rate of uninsured persons is the lowest since 1972. "Nor did he mention that the Senate bill would result in approximately zero of the 28.2 million currently uninsured becoming insured. Quite the opposite," said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. About 22 million people would be added to the ranks of the uninsured in 2026 under the Senate bill, according to the CBO, while the House-passed American Health Care Act would add 23 million people. The Senate bill would bring the non-elderly uninsured population to 49 million, and the House bill to 51 million by 2026; both numbers are quite higher than the 28.2 million currently uninsured. While there was never the expectation that the ACA would bring the number of uninsured Americans down to zero, there is a viable argument that the ACA did not do enough to expand coverage. But neither bill proposed in Congress now would reverse this trend. "While there are proposals that could reduce the number of uninsured — including expanding Medicaid in more states and providing more generous financial assistance to people buying coverage on the individual market — those are generally policies that the administration and its congressional allies have opposed," said Matt Fiedler, a fellow with the Center for Health Policy in Brookings' Economic Studies Program. Breaking down the uninsured The states that elected not to expand Medicaid coverage account for about 2.6 million of the uninsured population, according to Kaiser Family Foundation Executive Vice President Diane Rowland. That number may increase because the Senate bill cuts federal assistance to Medicaid. States that have opted into the expansion program might begin scaling back coverage. According to the CBO, "despite being eligible for premium tax credits, few low-income people would purchase any plan." The 3 million people who are uninsured because they make too much money for subsidies will not be covered, either, as the poverty level that qualifies people for subsidies is increasing. "It would lower the subsidy levels and it would make them much more costly for older people who are pre-Medicare, so you would expect fewer of them to try to take up coverage and many who have coverage to drop it," Rowland said. The 5.4 million people uninsured because they are undocumented will remain uninsured, too, as the Senate bill doesn’t cover undocumented people. About 4.5 million people now who could get insurance through work go without it. The bill removes the employer penalty, so coverage provided through work would decrease further. "It’s basically prohibiting anyone who has an offer of employer coverage from being able to get a tax credit, so it wouldn’t help any of the people who can’t afford their employer coverage," Rowland said. Finally, the remaining 12 million people who are eligible for coverage but haven’t participated is expected to grow, as the Senate bill eliminates the individual mandate that was designed to lure those people in. Our rating Spicer said that 28.2 million Americans remain uninsured under Obamacare, an accurate claim based on the most recent numbers. However, the talking point is out of context, as it ignores that this is in fact a historic low in the United States. He suggests that repealing the ACA would decrease this figure, but the CBO and health care experts agree that the opposite would happen under the proposed House and Senate versions of the health care bill. We rate this statement Half True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Sean Spicer | null | null | null | 2017-06-28T18:05:50 | 2017-06-28 | ['United_States'] |
goop-01955 | Brad Pitt Has “New Face” From Plastic Surgery? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-new-face-plastic-surgery/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Brad Pitt Has “New Face” From Plastic Surgery? | 4:11 pm, December 27, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03664 | Facebook users can assist Standing Rock protesters by "checking in" at the site to confuse the Morton County Sheriff's Department. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-check-in-at-standing-rock/ | null | Conspiracy Theories | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Facebook Check-In at Standing Rock | 31 October 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-05331 | The animated show Darkwing Duck will return to television in 2018. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/darkwing-duck-returns-hoax/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | ‘Darkwing Duck’ April Fool’s Day Joke Recirculates | 21 January 2016 | null | ['None'] |
tron-03563 | Charles Krauthammer’s Interesting Take on President Trump: He’s a Pragmatist | incorrect attribution! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/charles-krauthammers-interesting-take-on-president-trump/ | null | trump | null | null | ['donald trump', 'fox news', 'political pundits', 'russia'] | Charles Krauthammer’s Interesting Take on President Trump: He’s a Pragmatist | Mar 19, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-03645 | Ohioans want an end to pay-to-play politics. | false | /ohio/statements/2013/may/02/ed-fitzgerald/ed-fitzgerald-accuses-gov-john-kasich-pay-play-pol/ | The 2014 race for governor is off to a punchy start. PolitiFact Ohio told you Wednesday about the early attacks that Republican allies of incumbent John Kasich hope will stick against his likely Democratic challenger, Ed FitzGerald. Essentially, the GOP has seized on FitzGerald’s bystander status in the federal investigation of Cuyahoga County government and wrongly branded the first-term county executive as corrupt. It’s an attack that cuts directly at FitzGerald’s efforts to project a law-and-order image. But FitzGerald is using similar rhetoric in his attempt to draw contrasts with Kasich. "We need a governor who will stand up for middle-class families, for women’s rights and for good paying jobs," FitzGerald wrote last month when inviting supporters to his campaign kickoffs in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. "Ohioans want an end to pay-to-play politics, rampant cronyism and wasteful spending of our tax dollars on corporate donors and political perks." Jon Thompson, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association, pointed to that statement this week as PolitiFact Ohio was evaluating his group’s claim that FitzGerald, the former mayor of Lakewood, represented a "brand of pay-to-play and corruption politics." The he-started-it defense is not acceptable when dealing with dishonesty. The RGA statement earned a Pants On Fire rating on our Truth-O-Meter. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so PolitiFact Ohio today is taking a closer look at FitzGerald’s "pay-to-play" claim. We asked Meredith Tucker, spokeswoman for FitzGerald’s campaign, to clarify what, specifically, FitzGerald meant by talking of pay-to-play politics involving Kasich. She responded with a 12-page memo with a table of contents that offered six examples. None, though, is a case in which the governor himself is accused of seeking or providing a favor in exchange for another. Most of the examples involve Kasich administration officials or political allies. And while a few raise obvious ethics questions, they do not fit the pay-to-play description in the classic sense. One example FitzGerald’s campaign cites is merely a rehash of the controversy surrounding Kasich’s JobsOhio program, which is not subject to any substantiated corruption claims. FitzGerald’s team fills three pages with quotes from newspapers that reported on how three members of Kasich’s inner circle emerged as top Statehouse lobbyists after Kasich took office. The FitzGerald document says the lobbyists "cashed in on their relationship with the governor." This cannot fairly be held as an example of pay-to-play. This the culture of Capitol Square. Lobbyists closely aligned with a particular party do better when that party is in power. The Plain Dealer’s Mark Naymik noted this in April 2007, when he reported that demand had surged for Democratic lobbyists after Democrat Ted Strickland’s election as governor. Naymik reported in 2011 that the GOP sweep the previous fall had ushered in a new wave of Republican lobbyists. Another of FitzGerald’s examples focuses on Jim Leftwich, a former Kasich administration official who lost his development job with the state after it was learned he had a consulting contract with Wright State University. The Dayton Daily News covered the story extensively. Last November the newspaper reported it had obtained public records that showed Leftwich was on the state payroll when he and a WSU official devised a plan to give Leftwich’s firm "a 25 percent ownership stake in start-up companies established based on the WSU-originated research." Leftwich "apparently … did not disclose" this arrangement to his supervisors in state government -- something that state ethics rules would have required him to do, the Daily News reported. After Leftwich signed his WSU contract, Kasich, according to the newspaper, "appointed him to the board for the Third Frontier program," a state program that invests in technology companies. Three weeks later, Leftwich suggested that "WSU could use Third Frontier money to help launch two potential start-up businesses the university was working to create," the Daily News reported. The Kasich administration eventually learned about Leftwich’s dual roles, terminated him last fall and referred the case to the Ohio Ethics Commission. Paul Nick, the agency’s executive director, told PolitiFact Ohio this week that he "cannot comment on an ongoing investigation." While ethically murky, this is a stretch as a pay-to-play example. FitzGerald’s campaign also singles out former Ohio Schools Superintendent Stan Heffner. The state inspector general last year found Heffner acted improperly by testifying in favor of a bill that benefited a private education company he planned to work for, The Plain Dealer reported. The FitzGerald memo blasts Kasich for opposing Heffner’s firing. The governor’s spokesman told The Plain Dealer at the time that Heffner exercised bad judgment but that Kasich believed dismissal "seems too far." Heffner resigned two days later, a move Kasich said was appropriate. Prosecutors in Franklin County and Columbus ruled that Heffner’s actions were not criminal. Conflict of interest involving the state schools chief? Yes. Pay-to-play politics involving the governor? No. The final two examples FitzGerald offers relate to the governor’s control over the Ohio GOP. Last year Andrew Manning, the former chairman of the Portage County Republican Party, accused Kasich allies of offering him influence in the governor’s administration if he agreed not to run for a seat on the party’s State Central Committee. Team Kasich at the time wanted to dump Kevin DeWine as state party chairman and needed a majority of votes on the panel. Manning has said he met with FBI and sent the agency a sworn affidavit backing up his claims. But to date nothing has come of his accusations. Kasich’s allies have denied wrongdoing. This year Kasich endorsed Matt Borges, the state party’s executive director, to move up to the chairman’s post. Borges, who won the post last month, was dogged by a past guilty plea to unauthorized use of a public office. The 2004 misdemeanor involved Borges giving preferential treatment to certain brokers who donated to Ohio Treasurer Joe Deters’ re-election campaign. Borges paid a $1,000 fine and later cleared his record when he was granted an expungement. The Borges case is the only one cited in FitzGerald’s memo that is an actual example of a pay-to-play crime. And in this case Kasich has no connection to the crime, which since has been cleared from Borges’ record. FitzGerald resorts here to guilt by association. FitzGerald, in the invitation to his campaign kickoffs, contrasted himself with Kasich by asserting that Ohioans "want an end to pay-to-play politics." By doing so he characterizes the Kasich administration as corrupt. But he has no strong examples to back up this claim. PolitiFact Ohio applies the same threshold we applied when evaluating the Republican Governors Association’s effort to brand FitzGerald as corrupt. Kasich has never been accused of or charged with a crime, and FitzGerald lacks proof that he is even suspected of one. The GOP’s attack on FitzGerald was especially absurd given the fact that a federal prosecutor has publicly cleared the county executive of wrongdoing. FitzGerald walks a finer line by citing specific cases in which members of Kasich’s administration or political circle were accused of ethics violations and other uses of poor judgment -- but nothing that fits the "pay-to-play" label. As for Borges, had his misdemeanor come during Kasich’s term, FitzGerald might have a better argument. Instead, on the Truth-O-Meter, PolitiFact Ohio finds his statement False. | null | Ed FitzGerald | null | null | null | 2013-05-02T06:00:00 | 2013-04-19 | ['None'] |
goop-00190 | Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston Expecting ‘Miracle Baby,’ | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-miracle-baby-not-true/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston NOT Expecting ‘Miracle Baby,’ Despite Report | 10:23 am, October 3, 2018 | null | ['Brad_Pitt', 'Jennifer_Aniston'] |
pomt-05704 | Says Barack Obama "promised he would cut the deficit in half" but didn’t. | true | /florida/statements/2012/mar/08/lenny-curry/obama-promised-cut-deficit-half-end-his-first-term/ | Lenny Curry, the head of the Republican Party of Florida, said President Barack Obama is going to have a hard time winning Florida, citing gas prices and federal spending as just two reasons. "Obama’s going to come here and spend a lot of money, but President Obama's going to have to run on his record. He's going to have to run on what he promised," said Curry in an interview on Bay News 9’s Political Connections on March 4, 2012. "He promised gasoline I believe at $2.50. When he took office it was about $1.68. We know it's well above $2.50 now. He promised he would cut the deficit in half. We know what's happened there," Curry said. Curry went on to praise Florida Gov. Rick Scott for job creation, saying that Scott showed a clear contrast with the Obama administration. Curry, a businessman from Jacksonville, became head of the state party in September 2011. He was the hand-picked successor of party chairman Dave Bitner, who died after a fight with Lou Gehrig's disease. We wondered if Curry was accurate in describing Obama’s promises to voters, so we decided to check it out. Here at PolitiFact, we take a special interest in the campaign promises of elected officials. We collected Obama’s promises for our Obameter and Scott’s promises for the Scott-O-Meter. Here, we’ll look at whether Obama promised to cut the deficit in half. (In a separate report, we’ll look at whether he promised to keep gasoline prices at $2.50 a gallon.) Our research revealed that Obama did in fact promise to cut the deficit in half. He made the promise not on the campaign trail, but soon after taking office, at a meeting organized by the White House and dubbed the "Fiscal Responsiblity Summit." (The Republican Party of Florida pointed us to this event when we asked them for evidence for Curry’s statement.) Here’s what Obama said at the meeting on Feb. 23, 2009: "Today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office," Obama said. "Now, this will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we've long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay, and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control." The next day, Obama repeated the pledge, this time in an address to a joint session of Congress. "Yesterday I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office," he said. Is Obama keeping that promise? In a word, no. In 2009, the year Obama took office, the annual deficit was $1.4 trillion. (Generally speaking, the deficit is the amount the government takes in minus what it spends.) The deficit was a little smaller in 2010 and 2011, but only modestly so, at about $1.3 trillion for each year, according to numbers from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. For 2012, the budget is projected to be $1.1 trillion. The White House’s budget projections show a deficit of $901 billion in 2013, also short of Obama’s goal, even if his policies are enacted by Congress, which is by no means certain. Obama was specifically asked about the promise in an interview in February 2012 with Atlanta’s WAGA-TV. (His campaign pointed us to those comments when we asked for response.) He said he wasn’t able to keep the promise because the economic downturn was much more severe than was commonly understood in 2009. "Well, we're not there because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized. Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back at what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office, everybody underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3 percent. It turns out it contracted close to 9 percent. … "So, the die had been cast, but a lot of us didn't understand at that point how bad it was going to get. That increases the deficit because less tax revenues come in, and it means that more people are getting unemployment insurance, we're helping states more so they don't lay off teachers, etc. The key, though, is we're setting ourselves on a path where we can get our debt under control. "The most important thing we can do, though, to reduce our debt is to make sure that we continue growing this economy. We’ve seen some recent good news about unemployment numbers coming down, more jobs being created. We’ve got to to maintain that momentum even as we make some tough choices in terms of government spending." Our ruling Back in 2009, shortly after he was inaugurated, Obama did promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. He has not been able to keep that promise, however. Obama said recently the reason for that is the economic downturn was much worse than expected, which in turn drove down tax revenues and drove up spending on things like unemployment and aid to the states. Curry, the head of the Republican Party of Florida, said that Obama "promised he would cut the deficit in half. We know what's happened there." He prefaced it with a simple statement that Obama would have to run on his record. The record supports Curry’s statement, so we rate his statement True. | null | Lenny Curry | null | null | null | 2012-03-08T17:24:24 | 2012-03-04 | ['None'] |
snes-03195 | Bob Denver died in January 2017. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bob-denver-dead-again/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Bob Denver Dead (Again) | 6 January 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pose-01097 | As governor, Gina will: Raise the minimum wage to $10.10 in 2015 and index it to inflation, guaranteeing that workers will have a wage that keeps pace with the changing costs of the goods and services they buy, regardless of which way the political winds are blowing. | compromise | https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/gina-meter/promise/1180/raise-minimum-wage-1010-2015-and-index-it-inflatio/ | null | gina-meter | Gina Raimondo | null | null | Raise the minimum wage to $10.10 in 2015 and index it to inflation | 2014-12-19T07:48:24 | null | ['None'] |
afck-00143 | 3.5 million people get HIV treatment | understated | https://africacheck.org/reports/president-zumas-track-record-7-claims-progress-fact-checked/ | null | null | null | null | null | President Zuma’s track record: 7 claims about #progress fact-checked | 2017-04-21 06:20 | null | ['None'] |
tron-03055 | Donald Trump Called Canadians “Snow Mexicans” | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/donald-trump-called-canadians-snow-mexicans/ | null | politics | null | null | null | Donald Trump Called Canadians “Snow Mexicans” | Jun 22, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06418 | "Since Mayor Kennedy O’Brien took office Sayreville has issued 22,081 building permits! Now O’Brien is holding secret meetings with big developers." | mostly false | /new-jersey/statements/2011/oct/26/new-jersey-democratic-state-committee/sayreville-mayor-kennedy-obrien-blasts-democrats-p/ | Building permits, secret meetings and big developers – oh my! Sayreville voters should keep those concerns in mind, if a political mailer circulating in town – complete with marquee-style lettering and an exclamation point or two -- is to be believed. "Since Mayor O’Brien took office Sayreville has issued 22,081 Building Permits! Now O’Brien is Holding Secret Meetings with Big Developers" reads a large postcard mailed to residents in this small Middlesex County borough. The postcard shows a man attempting to climb a small mountain of paperwork – presumably applications to build in the borough. A large headshot of O’Brien, a Republican, is in the background. The postcard states that it’s paid for and authorized by the New Jersey Democratic State Committee. O'Brien is seeking re-election to a four-year term. His opponent is Democrat Stanley Drwal. Although the ad doesn’t specifically state it, the inference from the ad is there’s a lot of building going on under O’Brien’s watch. And building can be a dirty verb in New Jersey. For some people, it means more children in schools, more government services needed and less open space – all costing more tax dollars. PolitiFact New Jersey checked the claims in the ad and found that the number of building permits issued during O’Brien’s 11-year tenure as mayor is correct – but only about 5 percent of those were to construct homes. As for secret meetings? That depends on who’s asked. "This is a personal attack," O’Brien said about the ad. "It’s personal and it’s misleading. They must think the people of Sayreville are stupid. We only have about 11,000 homes in Sayreville." Actually, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Fact Finder survey for 2010 shows Sayreville has 16,393 housing units. The Census Bureau defines a housing unit as "a house, an apartment, a mobile home or trailer, a group of rooms, or a single room occupied as separate living quarters, or if vacant, intended for occupancy as separate living quarters," spokeswoman Stacey Gimbel Vidal said in an email. An ad doesn’t have to make a specific statement for its intent to be clear, according to Dr. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. "When I look at things I try to look at the whole picture," Madonna said. "What meaning are they trying to convey consciously and subconsciously?" The Democratic State Committee sent an Open Public Records Act request to the borough on Sept. 20, seeking the number of building permits issued in Sayreville from Jan. 1, 2000 to Sept. 20, 2011. O'Brien became mayor in 2000. Kirk Miick, the borough’s construction official and director of code enforcement, said he contacted the organization and asked if a breakdown was wanted of what the permits were for, and was told that just a total number of permits issued was needed. Miick told PolitiFact New Jersey the borough issued 22,081 permits during the requested timeframe but noted that of those, about 1,240 were for new homes – single-family residences, condominiums and townhouses. Another 3,026 were for significant additions or modifications to existing houses, while the rest were permits for demolition work, pools, sheds, fences, warehouses, educational facilities and more. Now, about those "secret" meetings. Jason Springer, communications director for the Democratic State Committee, provided us with copies of news stories and a letter from the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office relating to a February 2010 incident in which O’Brien showed up at a meeting at the Woodbridge Hilton between Deborah Lee and Robert Kaye of the development firm PRC Group. Lee, an alternate on the Planning Board, was at the meeting as president of the Spinnaker Pointe Homeowners Association. When O’Brien showed up -- unexpectedly, according to Lee -- she asked that the discussion not include matters to be brought before the Planning Board. A portion of the meeting recorded on tape was later found to have been deleted. The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office investigated and determined that a crime had been committed – tampering with public records and information -- but had no suspects and closed the investigation without filing criminal charges. The prosecutor’s office then made a number of recommendations about better securing future recordings of public meetings. O’Brien, who owns a sales and marketing agency, said the meeting was not held secretly. O’Brien said he travels frequently for work and often conducts borough business where a meeting is convenient – a practice he has done since he’s been mayor. "If I can meet somebody at a restaurant I’ll meet them at a restaurant, I’ll meet them in a lobby of a hotel on a parkway -- wherever I am and wherever they are, I meet with them, at borough hall and all points in between," he said. O’Brien said Councilwoman Lisa Eicher, a Democrat, filed an ethics complaint against him with the state Department of Community Affairs, regarding the meeting. We checked with the state for the status of the complaint. "For reasons of confidentiality, we can neither confirm nor deny the receipt of an ethics complaint," DCA spokeswoman Lisa Ryan said in an email. "Ethics complaints are only subject to public disclosure 30 days after mailing a notice of dismissal or a notice of violation to the individual named in a complaint and the complainant." We also asked Springer about evidence of other alleged secret meetings that O’Brien supposedly had, since the wording of the mailer indicates more than one, and that such meetings are continuing. "If the Mayor told us he was holding additional secret meetings, they wouldn’t be very secret," Springer responded in an email. "However, one has to assume so, otherwise why would someone go through such great lengths to erase evidence of the first meeting." Springer also questioned the appropriateness of doing borough business outside Sayreville. "Meetings with a developer should take place in Borough Hall, not in a hotel in another town," he said. "The very nature of the meeting, with the surprise appearance of the Mayor was highly inappropriate. And again, if there was nothing to the meeting, why would someone go through such great lengths to erase part of the recording?" Our ruling The Democratic State Committee sent a mailer to Sayreville residents stating more than 22,000 building permits had been issued in the borough during the incumbent mayor’s tenure, and accused him of having secret meetings with big developers. We confirmed that 22,081 permits were issued, but just 5 percent -- 1,240 -- of those were for new home construction. O’Brien says a complaint alleging that an out-of-town meeting he attended in February 2010 was unethical was filed with the state DCA, but the agency will neither confirm nor deny that. A spokesman for the Democrats admits assuming Kennedy is having other "secret" meetings, but there’s no proof of that allegation. Therefore, we rate this claim Mostly False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com. | null | New Jersey Democratic State Committee | null | null | null | 2011-10-26T07:30:00 | 2011-10-17 | ['None'] |
snes-01771 | In September 2017, the United States Treasury announced plans to produce a new $20 bill featuring the face of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/robert-e-lee-20-bill/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Did the United States Treasury Announce Plans to Put Robert E. Lee on the New $20 Bill? | 7 September 2017 | null | ['United_States_Department_of_the_Treasury', 'Robert_E._Lee'] |
pomt-10469 | Barack Obama accepted $200,000 from executives and employees of oil companies. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/17/hillary-clinton/yes-oil-company-employees-have-donated-to-obama/ | As part of a dust-up over which candidate is more likely to stand up to Big Oil, Hillary Clinton knocks Barack Obama for taking money from people who work for oil companies. The ad starts by showing Obama saying, "I don't take money from oil companies." The Clinton ad's narrator chides Obama for boasting about this when corporations are prohibited by law from donating to political candidates. "But Barack Obama accepted $200,000 from executives and employees of oil companies," the narrator ads. Obama would have been correct if he had said he didn't take money from oil company lobbyists or political action committees. (He did make this point in a later ad, which we found to be Mostly True; see it here .) The ad also is correct that Obama accepted $222,309 from executives and employees of oil companies, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. It's worth noting those donations could be from anyone from the CEO to the janitor. People who donate to political candidates are required to list their occupation and employer. It's important to note that this rule is has far from perfect compliance; sometimes people don't fill it in at all. Clinton doesn't mention the fact that she accepted even more money from executives and employees of oil companies — $309,363, according to the center. And she accepted about $442,800 from energy lobbyists, according to the center, though not all of that is from oil and gas alone. Nevertheless, the ad is correct that Obama did accept money from employees of oil companies, and we rate its statement True. | null | Hillary Clinton | null | null | null | 2008-04-17T00:00:00 | 2008-04-15 | ['None'] |
pomt-14999 | Texas has "outstripped the national poverty rate" since "at least 1959." | mostly true | /texas/statements/2015/oct/12/bee-moorhead/bee-moorhead-says-texas-poverty-rate-has-outstripp/ | Texas remains home to a greater share of people in poverty than the nation as a whole, Bee Moorhead wrote in a September 2015, oped article in the Austin American-Statesman. Not news? Well, Moorhead, executive director of the Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy/Texas Impact, also wrote that according to U.S. Census Bureau figures, "Texas once again outstripped the national poverty rate" in 2014, "as we have done since at least 1959." That’s 56 years--a long time to be better at poverty. We wondered. To our inquiry, Moorhead emailed us a spreadsheet, drawing on bureau figures, indicating that in select years, or each decade from 1959 through 2009, more Texans lived below the federal poverty level, by percentage, than Americans as a whole. According to the figures, which we confirmed on the bureau website, the share of Texans in poverty was greatest in 1959 — 31.7 percent, 9 percentage points greater than the 22.1 percent of Americans nationally in poverty. In the selected years, the smallest gap occurred in 1979 when 14.7 percent of Texans lived in poverty compared with 13.1 percent of Americans overall, according to the figures. Moorhead said she separately drew the 2014 Texas poverty rate (16.4 percent) from a chart fetchable from a bureau web page last updated Sept. 16, 2015. Nationally in 2014, the bureau announced, the poverty rate was 14.8 percent, meaning 46.7 million people lived in poverty. Moorhead also pointed out a bureau website enabling comparisons of poverty in a state to the nation each decade from 1960 through 2010, leading us to develop this Texas-U.S. comparison: SOURCE: Web page, "Poverty Rates by County, 1960-2010," U.S. Census Bureau (accessed Oct. 7, 2015) Measuring poverty Through the bureau, the federal government has estimated residents living in poverty for more than 50 years, initially from a U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate of how much income that families under economic stress needed in order to put food on the table. How the government defines poverty has changed a bit over the years, but generally, the bureau says, it "uses a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. If a family's total income is less than the family's threshold, then that family and every individual in it is considered in poverty." The thresholds don’t vary by location, the bureau says, but are updated for inflation. The poverty definition rolls in income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps), the bureau says. Each year’s national poverty estimates derive from the bureau’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, which surveys about 100,000 households a year, asking about income from more than 50 sources, according to the bureau. An expert’s look Moorhead did not delve into poverty rates for every year from 1959 on, so we asked Daniel Dillon of the University of Texas Child and Family Research Partnership for a look. Drawing from CPS data, he put together a chart suggesting the Texas poverty rate exceeded the national rate each year from 1959 through 2014. But Dillon and bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein told us that comparative year-by-year figures start only in 1980. Since 1980, Dillon summed up, the Texas poverty rate "has generally bounced between 15 percent and 17 percent with a few exceptions. The fact that is it so consistent means that the rate of growth in the general population is basically on par with the rate of growth in the poor population. Sometimes they don’t change at the same rate though, like after the recession, where the number of poor shot up but population growth was stable. This caused the poverty rate to increase. So the poverty rate is reflecting the interplay between total population change and poor population change, the latter of which is generally more affected by fluctuations in the economy." Big picture: The 4.4 million Texans in poverty in 2014 was double the 2.2 million residents in poverty in 1980, Dillon noted. In the period, the state’s total population increased 87 percent, escalating from 14.3 million to 26.7 million, he noted. Dillon pointed out there were times the gap between poverty in Texas and the nation narrowed, including 2014. Broadly, he wrote, the gap grew through the 1980s until about 1988, at which point it peaked at a difference of 5 percentage points. Then the gap began to narrow, he wrote, expanding and contracting every few years until 2010 when it began to close. "In 2014, Texas had a poverty rate 1.6 percentage points above the national rate," Dillon said. "That’s the closest we have been to the national rate since 1984, when the gap was 1.3 percentage points." Several factors, Dillon said, explain why Texas has consistently had a bigger chunk of residents in poverty than the nation on average. The state is home to a larger foreign-born population than most states and is one of a few minority-majority states in that non-Hispanic whites make up a minority of the residents, he wrote. "In comparison to their numbers, minority groups in Texas tend to be overrepresented among the poor. Education level is also strongly linked to poverty status, and Texas is the near the bottom when it comes to the percentage of the adult population with a high school degree," Dillon said. "Finally, Texas has a higher percentage of children than most states and child poverty has been on the rise. Today, a quarter of Texas children live below the poverty line." Dillon said the narrowing gap between the Texas and national poverty rates might be explained by the state generally growing faster than most states due both to new births and migration from other places. "As long as the mix of people moving to Texas are more likely to be above the poverty line than below it, this will drive the poverty rate down. Similarly, if births to non-poor families outpace those to poor families, this will also drive the rate down," Dillon wrote. Another indicator We also asked Lori Taylor, a Texas A&M University economist, to evaluate Moorhead’s claim. By phone, Taylor said that while it’s likely the Texas poverty rate has consistently outpaced the national rate, on average, it’s worth mention that the rate has always been calculated by assuming the same income levels put residents in poverty regardless of location. She said this has tended to lead to overstatements of people in poverty in lower cost-of-living parts of the country and understatements of residents in poverty in high-cost areas. Taylor and a colleague pointed out in a December 2014 article that in 2013, per the government's poverty threshold, a family of four with two children and a household income of $23,624 was classified as poor regardless of whether the family lived in rural Arkansas, where a typical two-bedroom apartment rents for less than $600, or in New York, where a two-bedroom apartment rents for more than $1,400. In the past few years, the census bureau has been developing its Supplemental Poverty Measure, which reaches its rates by taking into account regional differences in housing costs. And, Taylor noted, the bureau found in its 2013 surveys that Texas and the U.S. had the same 15.9 percent SPM rate. In contrast, the general 2013 poverty rate for the country was 14.8 percent and the Texas rate was 16.9 percent. By phone, Moorhead agreed that "using a standard measure" of poverty "across the country is insufficient to characterize the complexity of regional economies." But the SPM is a new measure too, she said, and rates haven’t been calculated retroactively to cover nearly all the years included in her Texas-U.S. comparison. Our ruling Moorhead said Texas has "outstripped the national poverty rate" since "at least 1959." Available poverty rates for select years through 1979 and for 1980 through 2014 back up this statement. Yet poverty rates don’t appear to be available for many earlier years. Also, a new supplemental poverty measure makes a case for the same share of Texans and Americans lately living in poverty provided regional differences in housing costs are factored in. We rate this claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. | null | Bee Moorhead | null | null | null | 2015-10-12T00:00:01 | 2015-09-29 | ['None'] |
tron-01039 | Clinton Researcher Victor Thorn Found Dead | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/clinton-researcher-victor-thorn-found-dead/ | null | crime-police | null | null | null | Clinton Researcher Victor Thorn Found Dead | Aug 8, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
clck-00017 | Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid. | incorrect | https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-risk-of-becoming-a-hothouse-like-venus-as-stephen-hawking-claimed-bbc/ | null | null | null | null | null | Earth is not at risk of becoming a hothouse like Venus, as Stephen Hawking claimed | [' BBC, 2 July 2017 \xa0 '] | null | ['Venus'] |
snes-01474 | Did President Trump Impatiently Dump Fish Food in a Japanese Koi Pond? | miscaptioned | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-trump-impatiently-dump-fish-food-in-japanese-koi-pond/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Did President Trump Impatiently Dump Fish Food in a Japanese Koi Pond? | 6 November 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pose-00821 | I will work with the legislature to ensure Texas does its part to make this dream a reality by pursuing an appropriation that will enable Texas to bear its fair share of the project's costs. | promise broken | https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/853/pursue-state-aid-to-pay-share-of-education-center/ | null | perry-o-meter | Rick Perry | null | null | Pursue state aid to pay share of education center at Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington | 2011-01-13T12:33:38 | null | ['Texas'] |
snes-03207 | The American Dental Association said semen cuts plaque and tartar by 77%. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/semen-reduces-plaque-and-tartar/ | null | Medical | null | Alex Kasprak | null | Did the ADA Say Semen Reduces Plaque and Tartar by 77%? | 4 January 2017 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00865 | Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom Signing $335 Million Prenup? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-orlando-bloom-prenup-married/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom Signing $335 Million Prenup? | 10:55 am, June 7, 2018 | null | ['Orlando_Bloom'] |
pomt-14057 | Ohio is "probably top five in the country, sadly, in terms of heroin overdoses. It’s now exceeded car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death in Ohio." | half-true | /ohio/statements/2016/may/23/rob-portman/portman-drug-overdoses-exceeded-car-accidents-no-1/ | Here’s something on which liberals and conservatives can agree: Heroin is bad. The epidemic of drug overdoses has captured media attention on a national scale, and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman is using it to his political advantage. The Republican senator, up for re-election in a tight race, has taken to every platform to push his proposed anecdote, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. The measure, which provides funding for a range of addiction prevention and treatment services, passed in the Senate on March 10. Since then, Portman has spoken about the issue weekly on the Senate floor, on national news networks, and on syndicated radio with pundit Hugh Hewitt. As Hewitt’s guest May 17, Portman said, "We’re probably top five in the country, sadly, in terms of heroin overdoses. It’s now exceeded car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death in Ohio." The epidemic seems like it can’t be overstated. But Portman did just that with the omission of a couple of key words. We checked with the Portman campaign, and they linked us to an Ohio Health Department report, 2014 Ohio Drug Overdose Data: General Findings, which counted 2,531 unintentional drug overdoses in 2014, the highest number on record for Ohio. The report said that opioids (prescribed drugs, heroin and fentanyl) were the driving factor behind unintentional drug overdoses in Ohio. The very first line of the report explores how that stacks up to other injury-related deaths. It reads, "Unintentional drug overdose continued to be the leading cause of injury-related death in Ohio in 2014, ahead of motor vehicle traffic crashes — a trend which began in 2007." According to Melanie Amato, the department’s spokesperson, the categorization of "injury-related" deaths includes incidents such as fatal falls, car accidents, drownings, homicides, and unintentional overdoses. "Injury-related" is an important distinction. There are a lot of ways to die that aren’t classified as injury-related. Portman is missing those two key words. We found data from the Centers for Disease Control that determine actual leading cause of death in Ohio in 2014. We made this chart using the agency’s mortality statistics: (Amato explained that the CDC’s number of drug deaths is higher than the health department’s by 213 deaths because the CDC’s definition of "drug poisoning" doesn’t distinguish between intentional and unintentional overdoses. The Ohio Department of Health counts intentional overdoses separately, as suicides.) Nationally, CDC data shows that Ohio ranks fifth for states with the most heroin overdose deaths, behind West Virginia, New Mexico, New Hampshire and Kentucky. That means Portman was right about the Buckeye State being in the top five. Portman has used the comparison between lethal overdoses and car crashes before. We scoured his press releases and videotaped statements for other references to the statistic, and found it in at least two more places. Portman got it right on April 7, on the Senate floor, when he said, "Since 2007, drug overdoses have killed more people in Ohio than any other cause of accidental death, surpassing car accidents." But another occasion in the Senate, on May 12, he again said, "The No. 1 cause of death now in my home state of Ohio is not car accidents anymore. It is overdoses. It’s overdoses from prescription drugs and heroin." Our ruling Portman said Ohio is "probably top five in the country, sadly, in terms of heroin overdoses. It’s now exceeded car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death in Ohio." He has a point about Ohio having the fifth-most drug overdose deaths in the nation for 2014. But he forgot two key words that make an important distinction about the types of deaths he is counting: "injury related." CDC data shows that when you count long-term health problems such as cancer and heart disease, drug poisoning is eighth on the list of things killing Ohioans. We rate this claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/26d5d9db-60af-4803-8aa0-97e95b4e64ba | null | Rob Portman | null | null | null | 2016-05-23T14:05:24 | 2016-05-17 | ['Ohio'] |
pomt-13338 | Donald Trump would "engage in a risky scheme to privatize Social Security." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/05/tim-kaine/tim-kaine-mostly-false-donald-trumps-social-securi/ | During the vice presidential debate, Tim Kaine deployed a longstanding Democratic talking point against his Republican rivals -- that Republicans can’t wait to privatize Social Security. Kaine said, "Here's what Hillary (Clinton) and I will not do. And I want to make this very plain. We will never, ever engage in a risky scheme to privatize Social Security. Donald Trump wrote a book and he said Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and privatization would be good for all of us." Pence’s response was that "all Donald Trump and I have said about Social Security is we're going to meet our obligations to our seniors. That's it." Kaine countered, "Go read the book." Kaine’s wording was careful, but he left a clear impression that Trump would privatize the retirement program while Kaine and Clinton would protect the existing system. As it turns out, Kaine is on target with the reference to a Ponzi scheme in Trump’s book. But it’s a big stretch for Kaine to use a 16-year-old book as evidence that the Trump-Pence ticket would "engage in a risky scheme to privatize Social Security." A primer on privatization As we’ve noted before, Social Security benefits for today’s recipients come from the proceeds of payroll taxes paid by younger and middle-aged workers. But over the years, some conservatives have pushed for turning Social Security into a system where workers invest at least a portion of their money to provide for retirement. The upside, supporters argue, is retirement nest eggs could be much higher, given that historical rates of return from private investments are higher than those for Social Security. The downside is the possibility of market losses. Even though Social Security funds would likely be invested more conservatively than many private investments, doing so would still carry risk that beneficiaries could lose value or, in a worst-case scenario, see their savings wiped out entirely. Neither outcome is possible under the current Social Security program. The most high-profile proposal along these lines came in 2005, when President George W. Bush floated a plan to allow workers under 55 to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes into "personal retirement accounts." Even though Republicans controlled Congress at the time, the idea never gathered much steam, and it died without even being introduced as legislation. A few years after that, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. -- who would in 2012 become the running mate for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and now serves as House speaker -- offered a similar proposal, allowing workers under 55 to begin investing a portion of their Social Security taxes in a series of funds managed by the government. This idea also went nowhere in Congress. These two failures reinforced the longstanding conventional wisdom that changing the way Social Security operates is the "third rail" of politics (that is, touch it and you die). This opposition to change is particularly strong among older voters, who are both reliant on Social Security and who tend to vote at higher-than-average rates. For this reason, Social Security-themed attack ads have been prevalent over the years, often aired by Democrats, though sometimes by Republicans. Attacks against plans such as Bush’s and Ryan’s have often played up the term "privatization" as a scary concept -- so much so that supporters of this type of proposal have taken pains to distance their plans from that terminology. Trump’s book In Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, he directly compares Social Security to a Ponzi scheme. "The workers of America have been forced to invest a sixth of our wages into a huge Ponzi scheme," Trump writes at one point. "The pyramids are made of papier-mache." He also wrote in the book, according to BuzzFeed, "This is the second year Social Security benefits have been paid. The first recipients of Social Security, even once inflation was factored in, got the equivalent of a 36.5 percent annual interest rate on their initial contributions into the Social Security Trust Fund. For those retiring in 1956, their inflation-adjusted rate of return was still a respectable 12 percent. Julie Kosterlitz, in the National Journal, compares that figure with this: For those who are working now and looking to retire after 2015, their returns will be below 2 percent. And that’s if they ever get paid at all. Does the name Ponzi all of a sudden come to mind?" In his book, Trump proposed allowing "every American to dedicate some portion of their payroll taxes to a personal Social Security account that they could own and invest in stocks and bonds. Federal guidelines could make sure that your money is diversified, that it is invested in sound mutual funds or bond funds, and not in emu ranches." So Kaine has a point that Trump once supported partial privatization of Social Security and called it a Ponzi scheme. But that was 16 years ago, and the Clinton campaign did not provide us with any more recent evidence after the debate concluded. So what about Trump’s position today? Trump's views on Social Security as a candidate As we’ve reported, Trump has been somewhat unusual among major Republicans in flatly rejecting any calls for entitlement reform, including Social Security. He’s also been fairly consistent during the campaign -- a statement we can’t make about other policy issues. In September 2015, he said on CBS’ 60 Minutes, "What I want to do is take money back from other countries that are killing us and I want to save Social Security. And we’re going to save it without increases. We’re not going to raise the age and it will be just fine." He told a crowd in Georgia in February, "We're gonna save your Social Security without making any cuts. Mark my words." He also responded to a June AARP questionnaire on making Social Security solvent in the future by essentially focusing on economic reforms, and didn’t mention any proposals to change the structure of the entitlement program. "If we are able to grow the economy, increase the tax base, bring capital and jobs back to the United States and encourage foreign direct investment, we will shore up our entitlement programs for the time being," he said. Our ruling Kaine said that Trump would "engage in a risky scheme to privatize Social Security." Kaine cited an old stance, but it needs updating. Back in 2000, Trump did support privatization and call Social Security a Ponzi scheme. But now, 16 years later, Trump has offered relatively vague -- but relatively consistent -- statements that support keeping the structure of the program as is, without enacting changes as significant as private accounts. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/f5ba48df-5efa-48ca-aa2d-4104c36b02e3 | null | Tim Kaine | null | null | null | 2016-10-05T00:43:00 | 2016-10-04 | ['None'] |
pose-01317 | I'm going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1409/stop-tpp/ | null | trumpometer | Donald Trump | null | null | Stop TPP | 2017-01-17T08:35:47 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12844 | Not a single Democrat opposed Neil Gorsuch's confirmation in 2006. | true | /florida/statements/2017/feb/03/mitch-mcconnell/democrats-didnt-object-neil-gorsuchs-2006-confirma/ | Republican leaders say Democrats are being hypocritical to come out swinging against Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch when they supported him in his previous judicial confirmation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is one of the Republicans who rushed to support Gorsuch after President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch on Jan. 31. "Not a single Democrat opposed #NeilGorsuch’s confirmation in 2006," McConnell tweeted Feb. 1. "I hope & expect that all senators will again give him fair consideration." McConnell’s general point is correct: the Senate confirmed Gorsuch for a court of appeals seat by unanimous consent in 2006. That means there was no roll call vote, but news articles at the time show no dissent in the Senate. (Our fact-checking friends at Snopes previously looked at similar claims.) Gorsuch in 2006 Gorsuch was nominated by President George W. Bush on May 10, 2006, for a seat on the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 10th Circuit based in Colorado. His nomination drew scant media attention and few comments from senators. On the day his name was announced, the Democratic senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar, didn’t instantly commit to backing him but offered early praise: "I have recently met with Mr. Gorsuch and believe he has impressive credentials." The Denver Post wrote that Gorsuch glided through a 20-minute Senate Judiciary Committee hearing June 21. Salazar and Colorado’s Republican senator, Wayne Allard, "introduced Gorsuch, both giving glowing reviews," the Post wrote. That committee approved Gorsuch by a voice vote on July 13. When Gorsuch moved on to the full Senate July 20, Salazar had more praise for the "intelligent, thoughtful and appreciative" nominee, saying Gorsuch met a "very high test" to join the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, opened his remarks in an earlier hearing by saying Gorsuch's record showed he "appears to be a very conservative nominee." But before the Senate July 20, Leahy was on board with the nomination of Gorsuch and three other nominees: "I am pleased that the Republican leadership has scheduled debate and consideration of these nominations and am glad that the Republican leadership is taking notice of the fact that we can cooperate on swift consideration and confirmation of nominations. Working together, we can confirm four judges today. " A transcript of the July 20 Senate meeting shows no senator objected to Gorsuch and he was confirmed in a voice vote. (When the vote happened, one person is heard saying "aye" and no one objected.) McConnell’s spokesman Don Stewart said that any member could have gone on record with an objection but none did. "The Congressional Record lists no objections," he said. "There was unanimous consent to the vote." Republicans have noted that Democrats in the Senate at the time include some major party heavyweights: Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Harry Reid. However, the majority of current senators were not in the Senate in 2006. And the stakes now are higher, says Sarah Binder, George Washington University political science professor. "Senators may view the prospects of confirming a nominee to the court of appeals differently than they view a nominee for the Supreme Court," she said. "The stakes of confirming someone to the Supreme Court are really just so much higher and more salient to the public. Senators should scrutinize any lifetime appointment to the bench -- but especially those to the Supreme Court." Many judicial nominees have sailed through confirmation by unanimous consent or in a unanimous roll call vote. But the process has become more acrimonious in recent years, and roll call votes became more common under the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Binder said that recorded roll call votes on appellate court nominees were very rare before 1997. "Starting in late 1990s, Republicans in the Senate majority started to call for recorded votes as a way to put senators on record for or against Bill Clinton's judicial nominees," she said. "Since then, recorded votes have been more likely (as have cloture votes on those nominees)." Russell Wheeler, a judicial expert at the Brookings Institution, pulled together data on circuit court nominations during the presidencies of Clinton, Bush and Obama using the U.S. Senate website, the Federal Judicial Center’s Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, Congress’s "Presidential Nominations" website, and Congressional Record reports. During Bush’s tenure when Gorsuch was confirmed, Wheeler’s data shows 12 circuit court nominees confirmed through voice votes and 30 through roll call votes that were unanimous. There were three confirmation votes in which there was only one "no" vote and 14 in which there were multiple "no" votes. Decades ago it was common for nominations to sail through without objections from the opposing party, "but things have gotten more contentious," Wheeler said. Our ruling McConnell said, "Not a single Democrat opposed Neil Gorsuch's confirmation in 2006." Gorsuch was approved by unanimous consent by the Senate for a court of appeals seat during Bush’s presidency. That means no roll call vote was required, but senators could have raised objections but none did. The majority of circuit court confirmations under Bush occurred through unanimous consent or by a roll call vote that was unanimous. We rate this claim True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b26186d1-4e30-4d12-9ff5-063c02ef2de1 | null | Mitch McConnell | null | null | null | 2017-02-03T15:24:25 | 2017-02-01 | ['None'] |
pomt-13654 | Says he saw videotape "of the people taking the money off the plane" to pay ransom to Iran for hostages. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/05/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-he-didnt-see-video-cash-being-tr/ | For two days, Donald Trump told rally audiences a detailed account of seeing video footage of stacks of cash being taken off an airplane, destined to pay Iran for the release of American hostages. Now, even Trump acknowledges that such video footage doesn’t exist. The issue emerged because news reports suggested that a $400 million cash payment from the U.S. government amounted to ransom for hostages held by Iran. Republicans have charged that a quid pro quo ran counter to longstanding U.S. policy not to pay ransom for hostages. The White House has responded that the payments were the conclusion of a decades-old dispute over funds frozen after the fall of the Shah of Iran and were not a ransom. But questions surrounding Trump’s depiction of video footage has distracted from the substantive policy dispute over whether and how such a payment should have been made. Almost from the moment Trump mentioned seeing the video, skeptics wondered whether it actually existed, because none had been publicly released. So what actually happened? What Trump said Trump addressed this topic at two different rallies. The first was an Aug. 3 rally in Daytona Beach, Fla. Here’s what he said: "I got up this morning, and I pick up the papers, and then I turn on the news, and I see $400 million being shipped in cash, they didn’t want dollars, it’s in different currencies, and it's being shipped overnight to Iran -- $400 million. … I look, and I'll never forget the scene this morning. And remember this: Iran -- I don't think you've heard this anywhere, but here -- Iran provided all of that footage, the tape, of taking that money off that airplane, right? $400 million in cash. … And they have a perfect tape done by obviously a government camera and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane, right? That means that in order to embarrass us further, Iran sent us the tapes, right? It's a military tape. It's a tape that was a perfect angle, nice and steady. Nobody getting nervous because they're going to be shot because they're shooting a picture of money pouring off a plane." The next day, he held a rally in Portland, Maine. He said this: "You saw that with the airplane coming in. Nice plane. And the airplane coming in. And the money coming off, I guess. Right? That was given to us, has to be, by the Iranians. You know why the tape was given to us? Because they want to embarrass our country. They want to embarrass our country. And they want to embarrass our president, because we have a president who's incompetent." Trump certainly makes it sound as if there’s video footage of the cash being hustled off a plane, and that he’s seen that footage. The backtrack But before the second rally was even held, his campaign had already backed off that claim. The Washington Post reported that late on Aug. 3 -- which was after the Daytona Beach event but before the Portland event -- Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks responded to an email "that asked if the footage Trump was referencing was actually widely shown video of a private plane landing in Switzerland in January with three American prisoners who had just been released by Iran, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian." According to the Post, Hicks responded in an email, "Yes. Merely the b-roll footage included in every broadcast." (B-roll is a television industry term for pre-recorded videotape spliced into a live report.) Still, Trump went out and made the remarks again. After the second rally, Trump himself tweeted that he was referring to a different piece of video. "The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!" In other words, Trump had seen widely reported video footage of the hostages being released, but described it in some detail -- and incorrectly -- as showing stacks of money being unloaded from a plane. Here’s a still from the footage of the hostage transfer that was aired on U.S. television. A final note On Aug. 5, several hours after Trump’s tweet, conservative websites including the Washington Free Beacon posted footage from what it called an Iranian documentary aired earlier this year in Iran. During a discussion of the hostage transfer, the documentary showed a brief image of a stack of pallets. According to the Free Beacon, "The footage is part of a February documentary published by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The documentary purported to reveal behind-the-scenes details of the negotiations with the United States to free the American hostages. It maintains the negotiations were tied up in efforts to push the Iran nuclear agreement forward as it moved towards implementation." The pallets in the footage are partially obscured, and it is too blurry to tell for sure whether these pallets hold piles of currency. "Iran experts who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon said that it is impossible to verify if the images show the same pallets of cash transferred by the Obama administration," the Free Beacon reported. We checked with the Trump campaign to learn whether this was actually the video he was referring to, even though it didn’t show money "pouring" off a plane and even though it had not aired on U.S. news channels. We did not hear back. For now, we are going by Trump’s own statement, backed up by Hicks’ statement, that he was referring to a different video -- the widely aired footage that shows the hostages being released, without any money being transferred. Our ruling Trump said he had seen videotape "of the people taking the money off the plane" to pay ransom to Iran for hostages. He and his campaign now acknowledge that they were referring to a different video -- of the hostages themselves being freed -- that did not include any transfer of money from a plane. We rate the claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/456f3bc6-22e7-451f-9682-f90df66fadd2 | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2016-08-05T14:59:02 | 2016-08-03 | ['Iran'] |
snes-03842 | A photograph shows a man who was diagnosed with eye cancer due to using his cell phone at night. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/phone-eye-cancer-photo/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Dan Evon | null | Cell Phone Use at Night Causes Eye Cancer | 21 March 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01659 | Michael Hayden said that he stood with Colin Kaepernick and other NFL Players in dispute over protests during the national anthem. | correct attribution | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cia-michael-hayden-put-me-down-with-kaepernick/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Michael Hayden Said of NFL Protest Dispute ‘Put Me Down with Kaepernick’? | 27 September 2017 | null | ['Michael_Hayden_(general)', 'National_Football_League'] |
snes-03463 | Jill Stein was arrested and charged with embezzling money raised for 2016 recount efforts in order to throw a "marijuana dinner party." | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jill-stein-caught-embezzling-recount-funds-for-marijuana-dinner-party/ | null | Junk News | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Jill Stein Caught Embezzling Recount Funds for Marijuana Dinner Party | 28 November 2016 | null | ['None'] |
tron-00978 | Ask for an American when calling for technical support! | grass roots movement! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/ask-for-an-american/ | null | computers | null | null | null | Ask for an American when calling for technical support! | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['United_States'] |
goop-00651 | Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle “Both Pregnant” And “Due The Same Day”? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-meghan-markle-pregnant-same-due-date-untrue/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle “Both Pregnant” And “Due The Same Day”? | 12:49 pm, July 12, 2018 | null | ['Catherine,_Duchess_of_Cambridge'] |
pomt-00017 | This election marks the largest Senate gains for a president's party in a first midterm election since at least President Kennedy's in 1962. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/nov/08/donald-trump/donald-trump-right-history-behind-republicans-sena/ | President Donald Trump, taking stock of the election results during a White House press conference, downplayed Democrats’ retaking of the House and highlighted GOP gains in the Senate. Republicans flipped at least three Senate seats last night, with races in Arizona and Florida still too close to call (Republicans are ahead in the votes counted). Republicans lost a seat it held in Nevada. In Mississippi, a Republican and Democrat are headed to a Nov. 27 runoff, where the Republican is favored. So, as we write this, Republicans have 51 seats in the Senate and are likely to add one more in Mississippi. The number can grow to 54 if the races in Arizona and Florida stay the GOP’s way. Trump, who campaigned vigorously for a handful of Republican candidates in tight races, sought to highlight the historical significance of his party’s Senate wins. "This election marks the largest Senate gains for a president's party in a first midterm election since at least President Kennedy's in 1962," Trump said. Trump’s read of historical election tallies depends on the outcome of the outstanding outcomes in Mississippi, Arizona and Florida. Net gains scarce Few presidents’ first midterm elections in modern American political history have yielded Senate gains for the president’s party. Part of the equation in this particular election was that Democrats’ were disadvantaged by the fact that they were defending more seats than Republicans. That included 10 states Trump won handily in the 2016 presidential election. It’s also not unprecedented that the House and Senate end up split between two parties following a midterm. Still, it’s fairly unusual for a president’s party to notch a net gain in the Senate during a president’s first midterm, as the data from 538.com below shows: YEAR PRESIDENT SENATE NET LOSS/GAIN BY PRESIDENT’S PARTY 2018 Donald Trump (R) +0-3 2010 Barack Obama (D) -6 2002 George W. Bush (R) +2 1994 Bill Clinton (D) -8 1990 George H.W. Bush (R) -1 1982 Ronald Reagan (R) +1 1978 Jimmy Carter (D) -3 1974 Gerald Ford (R) -4 1970 Richard Nixon (R) +1 1966 Lyndon Johnson (D) -3 1962 John F. Kennedy (D) +4 1954 Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) -2 1946 Harry S Truman (D) -11 1934 Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) +9 No matter how things turn out, Trump’s party fared much better in the Senate than Democrats did during President Barack Obama’s first midterm election, which he famously conceded was a "shellacking." But the outstanding elections will determine if Trump’s claim is ultimately correct. President George W. Bush saw Republicans net two Senate seats in 2002, while President Richard Nixon and Republicans gained one seat in 1970, according to 538.com. If the results hold and Republicans win in Mississippi, Florida and Arizona, Trump would be correct that Republicans’ Senate gains in the 2018 midterms (+3) represent the largest first midterm Senate pickup since President John F. Kennedy’s Democratic party gained four seats in 1962. Those races are not yet called, though. While Republicans are in a better position in all three states, Trump is counting gains that are not yet certain. We rate statements based on what's known at the time they were made. So we this claim rates Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2018-11-08T11:38:04 | 2018-11-07 | ['None'] |
pomt-09038 | Says state Rep. Jim Keffer, a GOP lieutenant to House Speaker Joe Straus, "did mail pieces for Democrat Mark Strama to help him defeat" a Republican. | mostly true | /texas/statements/2010/jul/05/david-barton/gops-david-barton-says-republican-legislator-did-a/ | In an open letter distributed June 12 to delegates to the Republican Party of Texas convention, former party vice chairman David Barton of Aledo depicts Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, a San Antonio Republican, as part of a Democrat-friendly cabal that needs to be shaped up or shipped out. Barton’s letter excoriates instances of Republican House members pitching in to help Democrats win re-election. An excerpt: “Straus Republican lieutenant Jim Keffer did mail pieces for Democrat Mark Strama to help him defeat his Republican opponent.” Keffer hails from Eastland, some 160 miles northwest of Austin, whose legislative delegation includes Strama. Did a rural Republican really back the re-election of an urban colleague from the other party? When we asked for elaboration, Barton shared copies of what he said were two political leaflets from a Strama re-election campaign. One of the documents includes pro-Strama quotations from former State Comptroller John Sharp, a Democrat; the Democrat-leaning Austin Chronicle; a resident of Strama’s district and Keffer, who’s quoted saying: “Mark Strama serves his district, not any one political party.” In the other document, Sharp and Keffer are also featured. Keffer is quoted saying Strama “worked with Republicans to cut property taxes and keep our public schools open. We don't always agree on every issue, but we agree on the need to put the interests of Texas ahead of partisan politics.” Responding to our query, Keffer confirmed he’d given Strama a hand, saying: “Whether you’ve got an R or a D behind your name doesn’t mean you are most qualified.” Finally, we contacted Strama, who told us by e-mail that Keffer, who had authored school funding legislaton that Strama co-sponsored, “didn’t ‘do’ mail pieces in the sense of paying for them,” but agreed to be quoted in a mailer “funded by my campaign about my bipartisan approach to the school finance bill.” Though Strama paid for the campaign materials, Keffer willingly helped out his Democratic colleague. Barton’s statement checks out as Mostly True. | null | David Barton | null | null | null | 2010-07-05T12:00:00 | 2010-06-12 | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Joe_Straus', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)'] |
snes-02526 | Ayn Rand said, "The question isn’t who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-quote/ | null | Entertainment | null | Bethania Palma | null | Did Ayn Rand Say ‘The Question Isn’t Who Is Going to Let Me; It’s Who Is Going to Stop Me’? | 28 April 2017 | null | ['Ayn_Rand'] |
pomt-04335 | Says 55 percent of council members have come from area where only 10 percent of Austinites live. | mostly true | /texas/statements/2012/oct/25/gonzalo-barrientos/gonzalo-barrientos-says-55-council-members-come-ar/ | As voters began choosing between two approaches to electing the Austin City Council, Gonzalo Barrientos urged them to look at local history. "Since 1971, City Council members have been elected through a system that encourages unequal representation -- 10 percent of the population lives in an area that receives 55 percent of the representation," he wrote in an opinion piece that ran in the Austin American-Statesman on Oct. 22, 2012, the day early voting started for the Nov. 6 election. Barrientos, who long represented Austin in the Texas House and Senate, asked readers to support the plan offered by Austinites for Geographic Representation, which collected more than 20,000 petition signatures to get it on the ballot where it now faces a competing proposal from Mayor Lee Leffingwell and other council members, according to a Sept. 15, 2012, Statesman news story. The group’s "10-1" proposal would switch the council from seven members elected citywide to 10 members elected within smaller districts and the mayor elected citywide, according to an Oct. 4, 2012, Statesman news story. The competing "8-2-1" proposal would set up eight district representatives and two citywide seats plus the mayor, the story said. Barrientos’ statement could be read as implying that leaders who are elected citywide actually represent only the interests of the area where they live, a contention that we don't find factually checkable. So we looked into his declared percentages. He told us by phone that he relied on information from Peck Young, who according to the Sept. 15 Statesman story leads the Geographic Representation group and has advocated for district representation since the 1970s. Young told us in a phone interview that the group was hungry for data on this topic last year as it researched proposals. The information behind Barrientos’ statement, he said, came from a map and research that appeared Aug. 4, 2011, on an investigative reporting website, The Austin Bulldog. Young’s group spot-checked the data against city records, found it reliable and "ran with it," he said. Separately, Austin city demographer Ryan Robinson told us he also found the research, compiled by Bulldog editor Ken Martin, to be reliable: "He really did his due diligence." From 1971 through 2011, Young said, 55 percent of Austin’s elected officials lived in four ZIP codes -- 78701, 78703, 78731 and 78759. The 10 percent population figure, he said, was derived from the 2010 Census totals for Austin and for those four ZIP codes. The Bulldog’s description of its research said, "This map indicates where every person who served on the Austin City Council from 1971 through 2011 lived at the time they were elected." The Bulldog report said its research started with 1971 because that was the year voters started electing the mayor. Previously, mayors were chosen by council votes. That gave a total of 17 mayors and 100 council members, according to the Bulldog analysis, which argued that Austin power has been too concentrated in select areas. "Forty-nine of those seats were won by people who lived in West and Northwest Austin," the Bulldog said. We spot-checked a dozen addresses shown in the Bulldog’s interactive map and found only minor discrepancies. For instance, former Council Member Brigid Shea told us by telephone that she moved from the French Place neighborhood, which has the 78722 ZIP code, to the 78701 address shown for her by the Bulldog about two years into her council term. The Bulldog website asks that readers send notice of any mistakes they spot; we make the same request. For more detail, Young pointed us to Martin, who founded the Bulldog in 2010 after journalism jobs including editor of the Austin Business Journal and past founder-owner of a City Hall news service, InFact Daily. Martin told us in a phone interview that his starting point was a similar project that city demographer Robinson worked on in the 2000s. He supplemented that information with more city records and candidate financial statements, interviews and historical materials including old Austin phonebooks, Martin said. According to his data, which he called up on his computer and crunched for us during the interview, those four ZIP codes accounted for 58 of the 117 city offices filled in Austin elections (City Council including mayor) from 1971 through 2011. That divides out to 49.6 percent, not 55 percent. We asked Young for help clarifying the discrepancy, and he sent us calculations that he said were made by a volunteer during the group’s research. From that spreadsheet, it appears mayors were double-counted by adding the number of mayors to the number of "council members," a category that in Martin’s data already included mayors. If mayors are double-counted, our math shows a result of 54.9 percent; if the mayors are, properly, counted once, we get 49.6 percent. Young said the double-counting explanation seemed likely to him. "You and Ken may have found out my young person, who was a college student, had made a boo-boo," he said. But, he said, "58 is still half of all city elected officials that have come from these four ZIP codes in 40 years. So our basic point is still true even if our math is faulty." We also wondered whether the cited ZIP codes had been home to 10 percent of Austinites throughout those decades. Geographic Representation group spokeswoman Jessica Ellison said their research was limited to 2010 because they didn’t have Census numbers for all 40 years. Barrientos’ statement could be read as applying to the entire period, though, so we decided to check as best we could. A 2010 U.S. Census Bureau breakdown of the nation’s most populous cities gave Austin’s population as 790,390. So a tenth would be 79,390. Beginning in 2000, the Census Bureau has used ZIP Code Tabulation Areas rather than ZIP codes for its calculations, in order to have clearly defined boundaries that didn’t move as postal delivery logistics changed. An individual ZCTA (which the Census Bureau says you should pronounce ZIK-tah) is roughly equivalent, though not identical, to its corresponding ZIP code. The 2010 counts for ZCTAs corresponding to the four ZIP codes are: 78701 population 6,841; 78703 population 19,690; 78731 population 24,614; and 78759 population 38,891. These add up to 90,036 people, or 11.4 percent of Austin’s 2010 population. Robinson and Census librarian Asheleigh Perry told us the city and the Census Bureau Library don’t have 1970-1990 Austin populations by ZIP code. We did find on the Census website the 2000 ZCTA counts that correspond to the 2010 numbers above. Those totals are: 78701 population 3,855; 78703 population 19,585; 78731 population 24,059; and 78759 population 1,530. That adds up to 49,029; divide by Austin’s 2000 population of 656,562 and you get 7.5 percent -- an even smaller slice of the city than in 2010. Population numbers aside, Robinson told us he believed the overall point is valid: Council members "have indeed come from a concentrated part of the city," he said. "The distribution of mayors over time has been even more concentrated." Our ruling Barrientos wrote, "10 percent of the population lives in an area that receives 55 percent of the representation," citing the system in place since 1971. Young later specified that the area is four ZIP codes. Leaving out the implication that officials only advocate for their home neighborhoods, the 55 percent calculation is slightly off due to a double-counting of mayors. All told, it looks like 50 percent of Austin’s council members (including mayors) have come from those ZIPs over the past four decades. In 2010, the ZIPs were home to 11 percent of the city’s population; in 2000, the ZIPs were home to 7 percent of the city’s population, arguably reinforcing Barrientos’ point. We rate Barrientos’ statement Mostly True. | null | Gonzalo Barrientos | null | null | null | 2012-10-25T15:36:56 | 2012-10-22 | ['None'] |
chct-00061 | FACT CHECK: Rand Paul Says The US Has 800 Troops In Niger | verdict: true | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/09/11/fact-check-800-troops-niger/ | null | null | null | Shane Devine | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 5:39 PM 09/11/2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-02547 | Says President Barack Obama’s health care law is "expected to destroy 2.3 million jobs." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2014/feb/05/john-boehner/john-boehner-says-obamacare-expected-destroy-23-mi/ | Ever since President Barack Obama shepherded the Affordable Care Act to enactment, critics have called the health care law a job killer. Now, many of the critics are saying that a new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office proves their point. The CBO estimated that by 2017, there would be the equivalent of about 2 million fewer workers than there would be in the absence of the law. CBO said that number would grow to about 2.5 million by 2024. Shortly after the report was released on Feb. 4, 2014, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, joined many Republicans and conservatives in highlighting this finding via social media. Boehner tweeted, "Pres. Obama’s #hcr law expected to destroy 2.3 million jobs http://on.wsj.com/1kM33oN via @WSJ." (Wonk alert: #hcr is shorthand for "health care reform.) In short order, Democrats and liberal commentators took issue with such characterizations, saying Obama’s critics were misreading the report. A full-fledged war of facts and spin ensued. We have addressed previous CBO projections of this sort and found reasons to be skeptical of interpretations like Boehner’s. The key problem here is that claims by Boehner -- and other critics -- overlook the difference between workers and jobs, and Boehner was misleading when he used the word "destroyed." He made it sound as if jobs are going away because businesses don’t create them or because they eliminate existing jobs. The CBO report, though, was referring to workers who decide on their own to leave the workforce. The CBO figured that, when presented with new options for purchasing health insurance outside their job, millions of people would decide they don’t need to work as much. "Workers who now have access to less expensive health insurance through Medicaid or with refundable federal tax credits that help them pay for premiums will not want to work such long hours after the ACA becomes fully implemented," said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. The CBO estimated that Obamacare would "reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive." This would equal a "decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024," the report continued. These changes, CBO said, would not result in "an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week)." To be clear, the report predicts that total employment will still rise. It just won’t rise as much as it would if the ACA did not exist. Another key point: The CBO did not specify how many of the 2 million figure would include full-time positions, as compared to cases of an employee keeping their job but working fewer hours, or keeping one job while quitting a separate, part-time job. In some ways, a drop in the number of people who feel the need to work actually could be a boon to the unemployed. As we’ve noted, there are about three job seekers for every job vacancy in today’s economy -- a high ratio by historical standards. Some of these people could pick up the slack once vacancies open up -- and they should be able to, since CBO said it didn’t expect a major change in companies’ demand for workers. In essence, you’d be trading workers unhappy to be working for those who are desperate to be working. "Unemployed workers who really need to find jobs to support their families, rather than to obtain health coverage, will find it easier to get jobs," Burtless said. "After all, they will not face as much competition from the workers who were mainly remaining in the labor force to get a job with health coverage." We see a few problems with Boehner’s phrasing -- that the law is "expected to destroy 2.3 million jobs." (We have no quarrel with the 2.3 million figure; it’s the mid-point between 2.0 million and 2.5 million.) The first problem is the word "destroy." It’s inaccurate because it suggests that CBO says employers will be making 2.3 million layoffs. That's not correct -- the reduction will come primarily from voluntary choices by workers, not by by employers, the CBO said. The second problem is the word "jobs." Using that word glosses over the fact that CBO didn’t cite a number of jobs that will be reduced; it referred to full-time-equivalents of jobs. That may sound like a technical distinction, but it’s important. These job equivalents will be made of a lot of bits and pieces of hours per week that people will choose to drop. Many of these people might be working two or three jobs, in excess of 40 hours a week, and will choose to cut back to a more reasonable one or two jobs. All this said, it’s also worth pointing out a few less positive conclusions of the CBO report. As more people choose to work less, the labor force participation rate should decline, putting a larger burden for supporting the social safety net on those who remain working. Any change in labor force participation comes on top of an already major shift toward retirement driven by the aging of the baby boom. Also, some commentators have expressed concern about having people work less because taxpayer-subsidized insurance is available. Ultimately, it boils down to a tradeoff, said Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist. "Admittedly there are some touchy issues with the government potentially paying or subsidizing the health care costs for people who could work but choose not to," Sinclair said. "But overall I think separating health care from employment, at least making it like any other service where employment may provide the money to pay for it but where we work doesn't determine our choices, is a good thing." Sinclair said Boehner has a reasonable point in terms of the larger economic impact of these changes, but adds that he’s largely wrong in how he framed the labor-market question. "In a macroeconomic sense, this still means fewer people working, even if that is their choice," she said. On the other hand, she added, "it also probably means relatively higher wages and better bargaining power for those who are looking for a job. This is very different than the short-run effects of employers cutting positions, where we would see unemployment rates go up, less bargaining power for workers, and potentially relatively lower wages. So, the description of the source of the cut -- whether it’s from supply or demand -- does matter, but not for the count of ‘jobs.’ " When we checked with Boehner’s office, spokesman Brendan Buck reiterated that the CBO report shows that "there will be that many fewer people working – that many fewer people in jobs. Whether a result of a change in supply or demand for labor, that’s still bad for the economy. If there’s an error, it’s for tweeting in English instead of ‘economist.’" Our ruling In his tweet, Boehner said that Obama’s health care law is "expected to destroy 2.3 million jobs." Boehner’s use of the word "destroy" mischaracterizes what is going on, since the reduction will come from voluntary actions by workers, rather than layoffs by employers. The law would not push up unemployment. In fact, some people at the low end of the wage ladder would find it easier to find work as a result of the predicted shifts in the workforce. In addition, it’s misleading to refer to 2.3 million "jobs," since CBO combined all incremental losses of hours worked into full-time-job equivalents. Under this scenario, we would expect many more than 2.3 million people to be affected, but many of them would cut their hours a few at a time, rather than quitting their jobs entirely. It can be easy to miss the distinction between jobs and workers -- and the CBO report is not all rosy for the nation’s economic future. But Boehner’s statement remains flawed. We rate the claim Mostly False. | null | John Boehner | null | null | null | 2014-02-05T15:06:40 | 2014-02-04 | ['None'] |
pomt-09339 | Says that under a new program jail "time for non-violent, mentally ill offenders has been reduced by 50 percent." | true | /texas/statements/2010/apr/10/karen-sage/karen-sage-says-jail-time-has-been-cut-50-percent-/ | Karen Sage of Austin, facing a Tuesday runoff with Mindy Montford of Austin for the Democratic nod for a judgeship, touts her experience as a prosecutor overseeing a new unit focused on defendants with mental illness. With no Republican opponent in November, the winner of the runoff will likely be a shoo-in for Travis County’s 299th state District Court judgeship. In a mailer sent to voters April 3, Sage celebrates the new program, saying that jail “time for non-violent, mentally ill offenders has been reduced by 50 percent.” We wondered if Sage’s statement—echoed in a TV ad she debuted Wednesday—reflects reality. Sage’s campaign initially referred us to Rosemary Lehmberg, the Travis County district attorney. Lehmberg confirmed that she asked Sage, an assistant district attorney, to helm the felony mental health unit, which was started in January 2009. Claire Dawson-Brown, the DA’s director of strategic prosecutions, said a magistrate started handling a special docket comprised of “mental health” defendants in late April 2009. To be in the program, Dawson-Brown said, defendants must usually be charged with a non-violent crime. They also must be diagnosed with major depression or considered bipolar, schizo-affective or schizophrenic, and seen as unstable in the jail. “It would be someone in a crisis situation,” she said, “or their mental illness is impairing their behavior.” Experts team to address the needs of the mental health inmates, Dawson-Brown said. She said participants get services they need in custody and when they return to the community. Besides Sage, who has a paralegal and a secretary, each defendant has an attorney familiar with mental health issues; she said the magistrate, a jail counselor and officials serving the local mental health and adult probation systems also play roles, with social workers sometimes getting involved. And how has the program affected jail stays? Sage said she reached her 50-percent reduction statement by comparing a baseline estimate that “mental health” inmates facing felony charges were averaging 106 days in jail before the program began to the 42-day average for participants in the program at the time she left the office in mid-December to run for judge. The decrease amounts to 60 percent. Dawson-Brown agreed that as of late 2008 and early 2009, the average Travis County jail stay for all its “mental health” defendants, including violent offenders, was 106 days. We pointed out that the baseline figure sweeps in the longer jail stays of individuals charged with violent crimes who aren’t automatically put in the new program, driving up the pre-program average and potentially skewing before and after comparisons. Dawson-Brown then gave us more detailed jail-stay information enabling an improved review of the change in average jail stays. Based on the new figures, we estimate that defendants who have been through the new program would have averaged 77 days in jail before the program began. The nitty gritty: We multiplied the number of affected defendants categorized by the level of felony they faced--ranging from first-degree felony charges to second- and third-degree felonies to state-jail felony charges--by the days that similarly charged defendants averaged in jail before the program began. Next, we totaled those defendant-days-in-jail and divided the total (19,432) by the number of defendants (253) to reach the pre-program estimate of an average of 77 days in jail. Through February, the magistrate had processed 253 defendants since the program’s start, according to Dawson-Brown, and they averaged 36 days in jail. Best we can tell, the average jail stay for defendants dropped by 41 days, or 53 percent. We rate Sage’s statement as True. | null | Karen Sage | null | null | null | 2010-04-10T17:44:49 | 2010-04-03 | ['None'] |
abbc-00335 | Before the 2013 federal election the Coalition promised to review and reform the child care sector, after mounting pressure from working families about the cost and availability of childcare. | in-between | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-07/promise-check-ensure-child-care-is-more-affordable-accessible/5868118 | null | ['child-care', 'family-and-children', 'community-and-society', 'federal-government', 'government-and-politics', 'liberals', 'australia'] | null | null | ['child-care', 'family-and-children', 'community-and-society', 'federal-government', 'government-and-politics', 'liberals', 'australia'] | Promise check: Ensure child care is more affordable and accessible | Sun 8 May 2016, 8:08am | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00985 | Sheriffs Call For Obama’s Lynching While Leader Meets With GOP Senators | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2015/feb/09/urban-intellectuals/blog-sheriffs-group-cried-obama-be-hanged/ | A group of conservative sheriffs might despair over President Barack Obama’s immigration policies, but did they actually call for him to be lynched? That was the headline that ran on the Urban Intellectuals website in January, but there’s no evidence to back it up. Urban Intellectuals bills itself as a place on the Web to promote meaningful discussion within the black community. On Jan. 15, 2015, the group ran a story with the headline "Sheriffs Call For Obama’s Lynching While Leader Meets With GOP Senators." A reader spotted it and asked us to take a closer look. This wasn’t the only website to carry that headline. We found a similar version at Addictinginfo.org, a website that boasts over 18,000 Twitter followers. Both websites drew heavily from the same source, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization. What the poverty center reported on Jan. 8 was distinctly different from the story conveyed in the Urban Intellectuals headline. Let’s start with the headlines. The poverty center wrote, "As Extremist ‘Constitutional Sheriffs’ Meet With Senators, Their Supporters Call for Obama’s Lynching." Urban Intellectuals shortened that, writing, "Sheriffs Call For Obama’s Lynching While Leader Meets With GOP Senators." The poverty center article described a December meeting in the Russell Senate Building between sheriffs, including members of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, and three lawmakers, Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and David Vitter, R-La., and Rep. Martha Blackburn, R-Tenn. The sheriffs organization claims to speak for hundreds of police, sheriffs and other officials who wish to be part of the "Holy Cause of Liberty." The group urged lawmakers to overturn Obama’s decision to defer deportation action against millions of undocumented immigrants. While the sheriffs' antipathy for Obama’s priorities were clear, the actual call for lynching took place out on the streets. According to the poverty center’s article, "Just down the Capitol Mall that same day, a small group of protesters supporting the sheriffs gathered at the White House and began shouting slogans and demanding the removal of President Obama. Some in the crowd demanded the president be lynched -- ‘Hang the lying Muslim traitor!’ one of them shouted." The article said that an anti-government group called Operation American Freedom organized that protest. A video in advance of the demonstration said, "The sheriffs are going to be here doing their rally, and Operation American Freedom, or O.A.F., are going to be there as well," according to the article. That line strongly suggests that the sheriffs and the protesters were two distinct groups. In fact, the article goes further to attribute the calls for lynching to a single man. One protester in particular—a bearded man toting an American flag—seemed especially intent on seeing Obama hung. "Hang the lying Kenyan traitor terrorist piece of sh-t," he shouted at one point. "He’s a traitor! Hang him!" The same man kept shouting variations of this throughout the protest. While the article describes how the sheriffs group mingled with the protesters after their meeting, it gives no indication that any sheriffs participated in the calls for hanging the president. Other websites more accurately relayed the poverty center article. The liberal site Crooks and Liars wrote, "As Extremist ‘Constitutional Sheriffs’ Meet With Senators, Their Supporters Call for Obama’s Lynching." Our ruling The Urban Intellectuals website said that sheriffs called for Obama’s lynching. The article behind that statement amply describes that there were two separate groups in Washington that day. At no time does the article suggest that any sheriff spoke those words. The headline represents a reckless misreading of a published account. We rate the claim Pants on Fire. | null | Urban Intellectuals | null | null | null | 2015-02-09T15:51:04 | 2015-01-15 | ['None'] |
pomt-07796 | Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s move to limit collective bargaining rights has led to "riots" at the Capitol -- "It's like Cairo has moved to Madison these days." | pants on fire! | /wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/18/paul-ryan/us-rep-paul-ryan-compares-madison-cairo-calls-prot/ | Crowds have built for a week in Madison as public employees and their supporters rally against Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to strip them of most of their collective bargaining rights. Walker supporters have criticized the protests, especially because they included numerous teachers who called in sick, forcing the closure of school districts -- including the Milwaukee Public Schools. Appearing on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" program the morning of Feb. 17, 2011, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., defended Walker’s efforts to force public employees to pay more in pension and health care costs to solve the state’s budget deficit. "It's not asking a lot," said Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the stars of the new GOP House majority. "It's still about half of what private sector pensions do and health care packages do." He added, referring to Walker, "So he's basically saying ‘I want you public workers to pay half of what our private sector counterparts’ and he's getting riots -- it's like Cairo has moved to Madison these days." Now that warrants a news flash: Riots? That conjures images of tear gas, broken windows, cracked heads. Is that really happening? We started with law enforcement. There are numerous agencies handling the protests including the Dane County Sheriff’s Department, Madison police, state Department of Natural Resources and Capitol Police. A handful of arrests have been reported. "For the most part, people have been very respectful and very orderly," said Elise Schaffer, public information officer for the Dane County Sheriff’s Department. "It certainly has been a very peaceful protest." Madison police estimated the Feb. 18, 2011 crowds outside the Capitol at 30,000, while Capitol Police said there were 5,000 inside the building, according to the state Department of Administration. To be sure, emotions are strong and the stakes high. But that does not sound like much of a riot. We also talked to Paul Soglin, the former Madison mayor who led -- and was beaten -- during antiwar protests in the 1960s and ‘70s. Soglin, who has been part of countless other marches and protests, said he was amazed at the crowds. Soglin used terms like "joy and enthusiasm" to describe the energy of the crowds and compared them to the civil rights protests in the 1960. Asked about Ryan’s characterization of the events as riots, Soglin said: "It’s astounding that he would say that. It’s so spectacularly wrong." Soglin pointed to the May 1970 antiwar protests when the National Guard was called out, the first Mifflin Street Block Party in 1969, and the 1967 UW protest against Dow Chemical recruiting on campus. Those events involved the use of tear gas, beatings of students and protesters and property destruction. "Those were out of control riots," Soglin said. Neil Shively, former Madison bureau chief for the Milwaukee Sentinel, covered state government in the early 1970s. He recalled National Guard soldiers with fixed bayonets at Capitol Square. "We had to go through that line every day" to get to work at the Capitol, Shively said. Shively said he had not been to the Capitol this week but had attended a couple of gatherings of retired politicos and journalists in the last couple of days. The protests were Topic A. "Everything I’ve heard is that it’s been very peaceful and orderly," he said. Dick Wheeler, who runs the Wheeler Report news service in the Capitol, recalled covering race and antiwar riots in the 1960s and ‘70s in Ohio for United Press International and the Scripps Howard news service. "A riot has anger and violence, and neither of these has sprung up here," Wheeler said from the Capitol press room, with considerable crowd noise in the background. "It is not a riot." "Folks are being absolutely as civil as possible -- given the circumstances," he said. Wheeler and Soglin heaped praise on law enforcement for their professionalism, and said there was no significant tension between the crowds and cops. Puzzled, we called Ryan’s office and asked what he was referring to in his comments about riots and his comparison of a week of Madison protests with 18 days that led to the resignation of the president of Egypt. Ryan’s response: "It was an inaccurate comparison." To put it mildly. Our response: Pants on Fire. | null | Paul Ryan | null | null | null | 2011-02-18T18:59:33 | 2011-02-17 | ['Wisconsin', 'Cairo', 'Madison,_Wisconsin'] |
pomt-06812 | Says he "helped bring" Uline company to Kenosha area, "creating 800 local jobs." | pants on fire! | /wisconsin/statements/2011/aug/12/bob-wirch/wisconsin-recall-race-dem-state-sen-bob-wirch-clai/ | Bob Wirch, one of the two Democratic state senators in Wisconsin facing a recall election Aug. 16, 2011, tells voters they should keep him in office because of his record on creating jobs in his Kenosha-based district. But can the former factory worker and 19-year lawmaker, who is being challenged by Republican Jonathan Steitz, fairly claim part of the credit for coaxing an Illinois company to bring hundreds of jobs over the border? The claim is made in a flier Wirch’s campaign mailed July 25, 2011 to voters. The flier cites Uline, a national distributor of shipping, industrial and packaging materials, and includes this headline: "Bob Wirch helped bring Uline to our area -- creating 800 local jobs." So, did he? Uline describes itself as a family-owned company that employs 2,600 employees across the country. It was founded in 1980 by Dick and Liz Uihlein; Dick Uihlein is the great-grandson of the founder of the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co., one of Milwaukee’s famed beer makers. The company was headquartered in Waukegan, Ill., just south of the Wisconsin border, when it announced n June 2006 that it would expand in Pleasant Prairie, a Kenosha suburb about 40 miles south of Milwaukee. Both Wirch and Steitz, a lawyer who is making his first run for public office, live in the village. Uline made big news in January 2008, when it announced it would move its headquarters to Pleasant Prairie and build a distribution center there, investing $100 million and employing 1,000 people by 2010. The company also said it would utilize state government incentives that were later calculated to be worth up to $18.6 million over nine years. The Wirch campaign flier led Dick and Liz Uihlein to issue a statement in response on Aug. 3, 2011. "We worked with a variety of state and local officials during the relocation process; however, state Sen. Wirch was not one of them," the couple said in the statement, noting they do not support Wirch’s campaign. That’s a strong rebuttal to Wirch’s claim that he aided in the company’s move. The statement also noted that a bill Wirch sponsored to help Pleasant Prairie with economic development -- which is also mentioned in his campaign flier -- was not introduced until July 2011 -- months after Uline had completed its relocation. The bill was "by no means a determinative factor in our decision to relocate," the company’s statement said. When Wirch’s bill was signed into law in August 2011, Wirch said it would lead to 800 new jobs in Pleasant Prairie being created through a future expansion at Uline and the launching of a new biotechnology business incubator, according to the Kenosha News. But those 800 jobs are only projected, not already created, as the headline in Wirch’s campaign flier stated. Only some of the jobs are expected to come from Uline. And, in any case, they have nothing to do with Wirch’s claim that he helped Uline relocate to Wisconsin. When asked to respond to the statement issued by Uline, Wirch said in an email to the Racine Journal Times that he had toured Uline in 2010 "and discussed with company leadership the importance of a strong workforce and well-trained workforce." But touring Uline after it had relocated hardly equates to helping land the company in the first place. Also responding to Uline’s statement, Wirch campaign spokesman Phil Walzak told the Kenosha News that all references to Uline would be omitted from future campaign materials. "Sen. Wirch is very respectful of Uline’s wishes and he has no intention of misrepresenting them," Walzak was quoted as saying. We asked Gillian Morris, another spokesperson for Wirch’s campaign, for evidence that Wirch helped Uline’s relocation from Illinois. She argued the statement Dick Uihlein issued was "politically motivated" since he had contribute to the anti-tax Club for Growth. That’s not even on point. The statement in question from Wirch is his claim that he "helped bring Uline to our area -- creating 800 local jobs." We found there is no evidence to back the boast. Uline brought roughly that number of jobs to Wirch’s state Senate district by the time it concluded its move from Illinois in 2010. But the company said it didn’t work with Wirch at all on the relocation. And the bill Wirch makes reference to wasn’t signed into law until long after Uline had relocated. Wirch’s claim of helping land a big new employer is not only false but ridiculous -- or, Pants on Fire. Editor’s note: After this item was posted Aug. 12, 2011, Wirch’s campaign provided us additional information -- pointing to a bill other than the one cited in the original flier as evidence Wirch helped bring Uline to the area. That bill, sponsored by Wirch, allowed for business expansion in the area of Pleasant Prairie where Uline moved. However, the bill was introduced Jan. 25, 2008 -- three weeks after Uline had already announced its relocation Uline’s chief financial officer, Frank Unick, would not comment on whether the bill played a role in the relocation. Pleasant Prairie Village Administrator Mike Pollocoff said part of the company’s expansion could not have occurred without the bill, which also affected other companies. But by that point, Uline had already committed to the $100 million relocation. So, we feel it’s a stretch to say the bill "helped bring" the company to Pleasant Prairie. | null | Bob Wirch | null | null | null | 2011-08-12T09:57:19 | 2011-07-25 | ['Kenosha,_Wisconsin'] |
goop-00520 | Kim Kardashian Dumped Hundreds Of Dollars’ Worth Of Baby Clothes? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-baby-clothes-store/ | null | null | null | Alejandro Rosa | null | Kim Kardashian Dumped Hundreds Of Dollars’ Worth Of Baby Clothes? | 3:07 am, August 5, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
vogo-00406 | Statement: “[B]ecause trimming of the city’s 30,000 palm trees has been reduced, pedestrians face more risk of being knocked silly by a falling coconut,” wrote financial journalist Roger Lowenstein, in a Bloomberg Businessweek story about San Diego’s fiscal problems. | determination: false | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-beware-falling-coconuts/ | Analysis: On March 31, Lowenstein wrote a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek about the growing push to eliminate public pensions in cities nationwide. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: Beware Falling Coconuts! | April 12, 2011 | null | ['Bloomberg_Businessweek'] |
pomt-05235 | When Mitt Romney was governor, "the fact is that the average income for a family in Massachusetts went up by $5,500." | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/05/ed-gillespie/gillespie-says-massachusetts-income-grew-5500-unde/ | In the duel over economic records between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, a Romney surrogate this week took the fight straight to our wallets. When Romney was governor, adviser Ed Gillespie said on Fox News Sunday, "the average income for a family in Massachusetts went up by $5,500." High unemployment and stagnant wages are hurting Americans everywhere, so we decided to check whether Massachusetts families fared that much better during Romney’s 2003-07 gubernatorial term. First, the data The Romney campaign cited U.S. Census data when we asked for backup for Gillespie’s statement. Spokesman Ryan Williams pointed us to Massachusetts’ median household incomes from 2002, the last year before Romney became governor, through 2006, the final full year he was in office. Here are the figures: 2002: $49,855 2003: $50,955 2004: $52,019 2005: $56,017 2006: $55,330 So the hard numbers are accurate. The median income in Massachusetts rose $5,475 from 2002 to 2006. Romney’s influence When rating claims such as these, PolitiFact weighs not only whether the claim is numerically correct but also whether it’s appropriate for the speaker to assign credit or blame. Said Fred Bayles, a former reporter who covered Romney’s administration: "Any set of numbers related to the economy is kind of like reporting on the tides and ascribing an individual responsibility to a force of nature." Barry Bluestone, dean of the school of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, said that "governors, in general, have little direct impact on employment or income in the short run. They can set the stage for future growth in jobs and income if they invest heavily in education and in infrastructure, but this did not occur during Romney’s term in office." He also noted that the census income figures are not adjusted for inflation, a point echoed by Andrew Bagley, director of research and public affairs for the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Bagley crunched the numbers for us taking inflation into account. Using data from Moody’s Analytics, the median household income in Massachusetts increased by roughly 2.8 percent annual growth during Romney’s term, Bagley said. The nationwide consumer price index (CPI), which shows how much inflation grew during the same period, was 2.9 percent per year. "So, the answer provided by Gillespie appears accurate. But, if someone said that ‘real’ Massachusetts median household income fell during Gov. Romney’s four years in office from 2002 Q4 to 2006 Q4, that would also be accurate because the average annual growth of 2.8 percent was below the inflation rate of 2.9 percent, so real incomes actually declined," Bagley wrote in an email. When you factor that in with slow job growth -- Massachusetts private-sector employment grew by just 0.79 percent during Romney’s term -- Bluestone said the outcome is not surprising. "There really was nothing that Romney accomplished as governor that would have increased jobs or income," he said. Bluestone has donated $700 to Obama's campaign since 2011. Bayles, who now directs the Boston University Statehouse Program, also added that Massachusetts’ income gains lagged behind the national average, 11 percent compared with 14.2 percent. "Does that mean Romney could be criticized for Massachusetts underperforming the national average? Probably not." He said outside economic forces made the biggest difference. "The Massachusetts economy took a slightly bigger hit when the tech bubble burst and was a bit slower in recovering. There were forces much larger than a four-year term that impacted all these numbers," Bayles said. Jeffrey Berry, a political scientist at Tufts University, summed it up this way: "The macroeconomic changes instituted by the Romney administration were far too modest to be responsible for a change in average income of this magnitude. It's far more likely that most of the change in Massachusetts were a reflection of national policies and trends." Our ruling Gillespie’s statement that median family incomes in Massachusetts grew by $5,500 during Romney’s term is numerically accurate. However, that dollar figure is not adjusted for inflation, and two experts told us that after inflation is taken into account, real incomes in Massachusetts actually declined slightly. What’s more, governors in general have little impact on immediate-term gains in jobs and incomes. Gillespie’s statement leaves out those important details, leaving the inaccurate impression that Massachusetts families were significantly better off under Romney. We rate it Half True. Update: This article has been updated to include Barry Bluestone's political contribution. | null | Ed Gillespie | null | null | null | 2012-06-05T15:48:29 | 2012-06-03 | ['Massachusetts', 'Mitt_Romney'] |
afck-00366 | “In 2013, more than 16-million South Africans receive social grants.” | misleading | https://africacheck.org/reports/does-the-anc-have-a-good-story-to-tell-we-examine-key-election-claims/ | null | null | null | null | null | Does the ANC have a ‘good story to tell’? We examine key election claims | 2014-04-25 05:00 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01455 | An elderly woman trained her 65 cats to steal items, such as jewelry, from her neighbors. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-elderly-woman-train-cats-to-steal/ | null | Junk News | null | Bethania Palma | null | Did an Elderly Woman Train 65 Cats to Steal from Her Neighbors? | 9 November 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12999 | Obama-Led U.N. Has Just Made It Official, U.S. To Immediately Pay Blacks 'Reparations'. | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2016/dec/15/freedom-daily/fake-news-popular-post-claims-obama-led-un-pay-afr/ | A fake news story circulating online falsely says President Barack Obama has used the United Nations to somehow force the United States to pay African-Americans reparations for slavery. The headline from the website Freedom Daily is wrong in every way and should be disregarded. "Obama-Led U.N. Has Just Made It Official, U.S. To Immediately Pay Blacks ‘Reparations’," it read on Dec. 9, 2016. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Freedom Daily, which bills itself as "a forum for discussing meaningful conservative American and world news," quotes a story from a similar website called the Conservative Daily Post. These websites ridicule a report from the United Nations' Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, a Geneva-based panel that had found the United States’ history of slavery had left a lasting impact on American society that justified reparations to African-Americans. They presented their report to the United Nations Human Rights Council in September 2016. The group of global human rights experts concluded from their research that past transgressions had led to current strife in America. "In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent," the report read. "Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching." The panel said progress had been made in America over the decades, but the nation was facing a "human rights crisis" brought on by the lingering racial discord. The "reparatory justice" suggested by the panel includes considering benefits similar to those sought by a Caribbean coalition seeking reparations from European countries that colonized them. Those reparations encompass the possibilities of "a formal apology, health initiatives, educational opportunities, an African knowledge programme, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and financial support, and debt cancellation." Let’s first acknowledge that Obama doesn’t lead the United Nations, though the United States certainly holds sway over U.N. actions. The United States is a charter member of the group, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and a significant financial contributor. But the body is led by South Korean Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who will be succeeded by Portuguese leader Antonio Guterres on Jan. 1, 2017. Furthermore, Obama has publicly said that he does not support the idea of financial reparations for slavery. He has said he’d prefer to focus on expanding access to jobs, health care, education and other programs to address the disadvantages minorities face. Additionally, the panel’s findings are nonbinding. The United Nations isn’t forcing the United States to do anything. The report was an academic exercise to explore the legacy of slavery on modern America. There’s nothing official about the report beyond its U.N.-sanctioned research. There certainly isn’t any plan for the federal government to pay such reparations, immediately or otherwise. Our ruling The website Freedom Daily said in a headline that the "Obama-Led U.N. has just made it official, U.S. to immediately pay blacks ‘reparations’." The posts track back to a U.N.-affiliated panel that concluded America’s history of slavery has stacked the deck against modern African-Americans. The group found that reparations to those citizens are justifiable. Every part of the eye-grabbing headline is wrong: Obama doesn’t lead the United Nations, the report is non-binding and has no official impact on the federal government, and there are no plans for the U.S. to immediately pay reparations. About the only thing accurate thing in the posts are that such a study even exists, but it’s presented in such a misleading way that it’s beyond just inaccurate. It rates Pants On Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b712aee0-f790-4305-93e9-74465069c08c | null | Freedom Daily | null | null | null | 2016-12-15T06:25:56 | 2016-12-09 | ['United_States'] |
pose-00541 | Will "require lobbyists to report all attempts to influence state agency decisions regarding the awarding of state contracts and grants and provide real time disclosure of all contracts and grant awards." | promise broken | https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/564/toughen-reporting-requirements-for-lobbyists/ | null | walk-o-meter | Scott Walker | null | null | Toughen reporting requirements for lobbyists | 2010-12-20T23:16:36 | null | ['None'] |
snes-05622 | An ambush near Boston recently killed 72 National Guard troops. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gun-confiscation-in-boston/ | null | Uncategorized | null | David Mikkelson | null | Were 72 People Killed Resisting Gun Confiscation in Boston? | 5 July 2013 | null | ['Boston', 'National_Guard_of_the_United_States'] |
pomt-09275 | We've got a 1,000 National Guard troop request that's been in front of this president for over a year and no response. | half-true | /texas/statements/2010/apr/28/rick-perry/gov-rick-perry-says-obama-administration-hasnt-res/ | Saying foreign policy is most certainly a governor's business, Texas Gov. Rick Perry blasted the federal government for not doing enough to protect the border Texas shares with Mexico. "We do not have the resources or the manpower to secure the border the way it needs to be," Perry said during an April 15 interview with the online Texas Tribune and Newsweek magazine. "We've got a 1,000 National Guard troop request that's been in front of this president for over a year and no response, so we are forced by Washington's inaction to take action ourselves." Has President Barack Obama been a non-responsive pen pal? We learned from Perry's office that Perry first wrote Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, to request more National Guard troops in February 2009. Napolitano had been in a similar pinch in 2008; as Arizona's governor, she twice called on the Department of Homeland Security to extend the two-year Operation Jump Start mission that stationed more than 6,000 National Guard members on the U.S.-Mexico border of four U.S. states. However, the mission ended as planned in July of that year. Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger told us last week that "so far we've not received official approval or disapproval" of Perry's February 2009 request. Cesinger also e-mailed us Perry's related correspondence with the Obama administration. Perry's Feb. 26, 2009, letter refers to his January 2009 phone conversation with Napolitano about the Texas-Mexico border. His letter states: "As you know, the National Guard can play an important role in securing our border, which benefits not only the border states but the entire nation... as we discussed during our telephone conversation, an additional 1,000 Title 32 National Guard positions are needed..." Title 32 service is primarily state active duty. In an April 2, 2009, letter to Napolitano, Perry asked to discuss his request for 1,000 National Guard troops; the letter also mentions the pair's March 26 phone conversation. On Aug. 21, Perry wrote President Obama, stating: "As violence in northern Mexico continues, it is paramount that our international borders be secured to ensure the safety of our citizens and the security of our homeland. To reiterate my standing request with your administration, I respectfully ask that you authorize the use of 1,000 Title 32 National Guard personnel in support of civilian law enforcement along the Texas-Mexico border." Perry followed up with a Sept. 1 letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates mentioning the "long-standing request." And on March 12, Perry sent a fresh letter to Napolitano — this time asking for a Predator drone, an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft — to be based on the Texas border to support local, state and federal law enforcement. The upshot? The feds wrote back, but made no promises. Cesinger showed us a a June 24, 2009, letter from Napolitano to Perry acknowledging his Feb. 26 and April 2, 2009, letters. "National Guard support is an option that is being seriously considered as part of our overall border strategy," Napolitano's letter states. Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told us "the administration continues to evaluate additional law enforcement options as needed, including the use of the National Guard, along the Southwest border. We continue to work with Congress on comprehensive reform of our immigration system, which would provide lasting and dedicated resources at our borders." Chandler forwarded two more letters from Homeland Security to Perry. A March 1 letter from Juliette Kayyem, assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs, states on the White House's behalf that "the authorization of additional National Guard resources remains an option that we continue to consider seriously as part of our overall strategy." On March 19, Napolitano responded to Perry's drone request, writing that the department was considering expanding drone operations into West Texas. And on April 27, Napolitano told a Senate hearing that Texas would receive a drone, but didn't offer a timeline. Both Napolitano and Obama have also publicly spoken to Perry's request — though not encouragingly. In a March 2009 interview with reporters for regional newspapers including The Dallas Morning News, Obama said plans to deploy troops to the border weren't imminent: "We've got a very big border with Mexico. I'm not interested in militarizing the border." During a subsequent press briefing on U.S.-Mexico border security, a reporter asked Napolitano how Perry could persuade her to deliver the 1,000 National Guard troops. "Why 1,000?" Napolitano answered, according to a transcript of the briefing on the Homeland Security website. "Where did that number come from? Where in Texas? Texas has a huge border with Mexico. What does he anticipate the Guard doing? And those are the kinds of things that I think then I will transmit to the secretary of defense and the president in the ongoing decision about Guard — yes, no, and if so how many and where." Bottom line: The Obama administration has repeatedly acknowledged Perry's request for troops; it just hasn't given him the answer he seeks. We rate Perry's statement as Half True. | null | Rick Perry | null | null | null | 2010-04-28T20:53:15 | 2010-04-15 | ['None'] |
pomt-00550 | Says Hillary Clinton "has donated every cent she's ever earned from speaking fees to charity." | false | /punditfact/statements/2015/jun/16/occupy-democrats/liberal-group-claims-all-hillary-clintons-speaking/ | We’ve seen conservatives go too far criticizing Hillary Clinton’s hefty speaking fees, saying Clinton "makes more per hour at a speaking gig than the average CEO does in a year." (Mostly False) Now a liberal group is bending the Truth-O-Meter in Clinton’s defense. The group, Occupy Democrats, posted a recent Facebook meme that seeks to compare Clinton’s paid speeches to those given by former President George W. Bush. The meme has been shared more than 25,000 times. It reads: "Hilary (sic) has donated every cent she's ever earned from speaking fees to charity. Bush keeps all of his speaking fees." We’ll leave Bush out of this for the moment. As for the claim that Clinton "donated every cent she's ever earned from speaking fees to charity," that’s wrong. No one from the Occupy Democrats group responded to our request for comment, but we believe its claim is based on 2014 comments by Clinton. When students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, asked that Clinton return her $225,000 speaking fee, Clinton noted that "all of the fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work." "So it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation," Clinton told ABC News, with regard to the UNLV speech. The UNLV donation is documented on the Clinton Foundation website. It includes this list of "speeches by President, Secretary, and Chelsea Clinton (that) have helped support the implementation of the Clinton Foundation’s work around the world." The speaking fee from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for instance, is listed as a donation from the UNLV Foundation. So are other speeches at universities and colleges as well as a few speeches organized by private groups such as Citibank, Chicago House and Goldman Sachs. But that’s not all of the speeches for which Clinton has been paid. In May, the New York Times published Clinton’s 2015 financial disclosure form. Covering a period from January 2014 to March 2015, Clinton lists a total of 51 speech fees that have been added to her personal account from a variety of companies. Not including her husband’s fees which also appear on the same disclosure, Clinton’s speech fees end up totaling more than $11 million. Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s presidential campaign declined comment. Our ruling Occupy Democrats claimed Clinton "has donated every cent she's ever earned from speaking fees to charity." That’s a misreading of Clinton’s comments in 2014, when she said speaking fees at colleges and universities were donated to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton’s financial disclosure form includes 51 speeches in which Clinton was compensated directly. This claim rates False. | null | Occupy Democrats | null | null | null | 2015-06-16T14:16:56 | 2015-06-16 | ['None'] |
thet-00047 | Claim that 200,000 people are waiting for affordable housing is Half True | none | https://theferret.scot/200000-people-waiting-list-affordable-housing/ | null | Fact check Housing and homelessness | null | null | null | Claim that 200,000 people are waiting for affordable housing is Half True | September 15, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01132 | Margot Robbie’s Busy Career Threatening Her Marriage? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/margot-robbie-marriage-problems-husband-career/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Margot Robbie’s Busy Career Threatening Her Marriage? | 2:56 pm, April 23, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01387 | A group supporting President Donald Trump is making "robocalls" threatening people who criticize him online. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-threatening-robocalls/ | null | Viral Phenomena | null | Arturo Garcia | null | Are People Getting Threatening ‘Robocalls’ for Criticizing President Trump Online? | 30 November 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-13071 | Says there are "probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million" criminal immigrants in the country illegally. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/15/donald-trump/trump-misleads-number-criminal-immigrants-illegall/ | In his first interview after winning the 2016 election, President-elect Donald Trump had to answer whether he would keep his word on his campaign promises or change in any way. Trump said he wanted to keep a couple provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which he had pledged to repeal, and he said he would be open to a part wall, part fence perimeter along the U.S.-Mexico border instead of a massive concrete structure. "What about the pledge to deport millions and millions of undocumented immigrants?," asked CBS' Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes. "What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we're going to incarcerate," Trump responded. "But we're getting them out of our country, they're here illegally." Also, after securing the border "and after everything gets normalized," the fate of "terrific people" who remain in the country illegally will be decided, Trump said. We wondered about Trump’s reference to 2 million to 3 million immigrants with criminal records in the United States illegally. Trump was referring to a Department of Homeland Security report covering fiscal years 2011-13. That report said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement estimated there were 1.9 million "removable criminal aliens" in the United States at the time -- not 3 million. And the report says the 1.9 million total includes immigrants who are here both legally and illegally. ‘Criminal alien’ doesn’t necessarily mean illegal The term "criminal aliens" is generally used by law enforcement to identify "noncitizens who are residing in the United States legally or illegally and are convicted of a crime." It is misleading to say the 1.9 million outlined in the DHS report are all here illegally -- though they may be "removable." An individual living in the United States legally may be subject to deportation under certain circumstances, including the conviction of crimes such as cocaine possession. The report did not specify how many "criminal aliens" are here illegally. An ICE official said the agency was not able to confirm the percentage or number of immigrants in the country illegally with criminal convictions. Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank favoring stricter immigration policies, said her research shows the majority of the criminal immigrants are here illegally and backed up Trump’s statement. Trump cited her research during his campaign. "Based on my review of various sets of data and records from ICE that includes the exact immigration status of sets of ICE removal cases, I am confident in saying that most of this population of criminal aliens is here illegally," Vaughan said of the 1.9 million in the federal report. "Under the law, criminal aliens who at one time had legal status generally would become disqualified for that legal status upon conviction of certain crimes." Adam Cox, an expert on immigration law and professor at New York University, said a criminal conviction itself does not alter the immigration status of a lawful immigrant, such as a green card holder. "These immigrants are not stripped of their status the moment they are convicted," Cox said. If a convicted green card holder is placed in deportation proceedings, he or she would lose the green card only at the end of immigration proceedings if an immigration judge rules that the criminal conviction makes the person deportable, Cox said. Trump’s claim that "it could be even 3 million" criminal immigrants in the country illegally also surpasses calculations from a group estimating it could be less than 1 million. The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank analyzing the movement of people and policies that affect them, in July 2015 estimated that 43 percent, or 820,000, of the 1.9 million noncitizens convicted of crimes were unauthorized immigrants. The institute analyzed estimates of the unauthorized population and the number of noncitizens lawfully in the country and estimated that both groups commit crimes at similar rates. The precise number of unauthorized immigrants convicted of crimes may be higher or lower, with a margin of error in the low tens of thousands, the institute said. Trump’s plan to deport 2 million to 3 million parallels the number of total immigrants deported under President Barack Obama. More than 2 million people have been deported over the course of Obama’s presidency. Our ruling Trump said there are "probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million" criminal immigrants in the country illegally. Trump’s slightly hedged numbers stem from a federal report that said there are about 1.9 million "removable criminal aliens," but that includes people here legally and illegally. Trump’s claim that it could even be 3 million is based on an assumption. He's in the ballpark but misses important details. We rate Trump’s statement Half True.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/56b11b37-a7db-494b-9ea6-ea4b0b59ef3c | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2016-11-15T17:40:24 | 2016-11-13 | ['None'] |
pomt-12318 | In the Georgia House district that hosted a special election on June 20, "Trump won by 20+ points." | false | /punditfact/statements/2017/jun/21/joy-reid/joy-ann-reid-mistakes-size-trump-victory-georgia-d/ | After Republican Karen Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff in a closely watched special election for a House seat in suburban Atlanta, commentators in both parties began to spin the results furiously. One of them was Joy Reid, the liberal host of the MSNBC show AM Joy. On election night, not long after it became clear that Handel had won a narrow victory, Reid reassured her followers on Twitter, "It’s GEORGIA. A Republican district in Georgia that Trump won by 20+ points. Let’s hang on to some perspective, folks." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Reid is right that the district is historically Republican; Republicans have held it for decades, most recently by Tom Price, whose elevation to Health and Human Services secretary by President Donald Trump prompted the special election in the first place. However, Trump didn’t win the district by more than 20 points — not by a long shot. (Reid did later tweet back to a follower who suggested that Trump won by a point or two, "Ah ok. I could have that one wrong. Thanks!") According to the forthcoming Almanac of American Politics 2018, Trump defeated Clinton in the district by 160,029 votes to 155,087, or a 48 percent to 47 percent margin. That’s roughly a 1 percentage-point margin. (Full disclosure: The author of this article is also the senior author of that book.) Another source of presidential results by congressional district, Daily Kos Elections, had a similar number, putting the Trump margin of victory at 1.5 percentage points. Like a number of other traditionally Republican suburban congressional districts across the country, Georgia’s 6th District moved toward the Democrats in the 2016 presidential election. Political analysts credited Clinton’s gains in such districts to demographic patterns in each of the candidates’ bases of support. Hillary Clinton tended to do better than Trump did among voters with high educational attainment, who are disproportionately numerous in suburban districts like Georgia’s 6th. In some such districts, Clinton won outright over Trump. These included Texas’ 23rd District, held by GOP Rep. Will Hurd, and no fewer than seven Republican-held House districts in California. Georgia’s 6th District didn’t quite give Clinton the victory, but Trump notched only a narrow win in the district. The 2016 presidential result in the district was far worse for the Republicans than in previous elections. In 2012, according to the Almanac of American Politics, Mitt Romney won the district, 61 percent to 37 percent, a 24 percentage-point margin. That margin is more along the lines of what Reid was talking about. But 2016 was a very different election year from 2012 in the district. Georgia’s 6th District had already moved substantially in the Democrats’ direction by last November. Clinton won some 40,000 more votes in the district than President Barack Obama did in 2012, while Trump won almost 27,000 votes fewer than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Worth noting: Even as Trump was faring poorly in the district, Price won his seat by a margin similar to what Reid tweeted. In 2016, Price, a longtime incumbent first elected in 2004, defeated his little-known Democratic opponent, 62 percent to 38 percent, a 24-point margin. Still, Reid was wrong in her initial tweet. (She did not respond to an inquiry by Twitter.) Our ruling Reid's original tweet said that in Georgia’s 6th district, "Trump won by 20+ points." Romney won by that wide a margin margin in 2012, and Price did, too, as recently as last November. But Trump was nowhere near as popular in the district as Reid’s tweet indicates. He won by a point or two -- far worse than Republican candidates have traditionally fared in the 6th. We rate the statement False. EDITOR'S NOTE, June 21, 12:55 p.m.: Shortly after this article was posted, a reader informed us that Reid had replied to a follower on Twitter that she may have gotten the statistic wrong. We have now included that in the article. | null | Joy Reid | null | null | null | 2017-06-21T12:34:12 | 2017-06-20 | ['None'] |
chct-00259 | FACT CHECK: Has The US Spent $7 Trillion On Wars In The Middle East? | verdict: false | http://checkyourfact.com/2017/12/11/fact-check-has-the-us-spent-7-trillion-on-wars-in-the-middle-east/ | null | null | null | Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 9:58 AM 12/11/2017 | null | ['None'] |
snes-05946 | World War I Christmas Truce | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/christmas-truce/ | null | History | null | David Mikkelson | null | World War I Christmas Truce | 24 December 2003 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14555 | In America, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/11/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-has-correct-diagnosis-us-prescripti/ | One theme Sen. Bernie Sanders has repeatedly touched on during his run for the Democratic nomination for president has been the high cost of prescription drugs. His comment during the Feb. 11 Democratic debate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was typical as he rattled off a list of problems with the U.S. health care system: "In America, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs." We asked the Sanders campaign for the source of his claim. We didn't get a response. So we searched on our own. One organization that tracks such things is the International Federation of Health Plans, based in London. Their latest price report, from 2013, lists eight common drugs. Compared with England, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and Canada, U.S. prices were far higher, sometimes dramatically so. Consider Nexium, the medicine widely used to treat acid reflux. A prescription that would cost $60 or less in other countries costs, on average, $215 in the United States. And that's just the average. Prices vary widely in this country: In 5 percent of the cases, the cost was $395. "What Bernie says is true. There's nowhere that pays the same price as America," said Tom Sackville, the federation's CEO. In addition, "there is this huge variation in price across America. Anything above the average is quite unjustified. When you get up to the 95th percentile, you're talking grand robbery." The findings were similar in an April 2013 study published in the journal Health Affairs, which looked at the prices of brand name drugs in the United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, France, Canada and Australia. In each of the three years studied -- 2005, 2007 and 2010 -- U.S. prices were consistently higher. The one exception: Switzerland. In addition, researchers found that, between 2005 and 2010, "the gap between the United States and other countries seemed to widen." And it wasn't just new drugs being embraced first in the United States that was driving up costs. They concluded that "prices for older products rose faster in the United States than in other countries." But Joel Farley of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Eshelman School of Pharmacy cautioned that the rule doesn't always apply to generic drugs. A 2008 comparison of 19 generic drugs found that some U.S. prices were lower than Canadian prices. "In some cases it has to do with availability," he said. In other cases, a country may set the drug price low and in that fixed-price market "there's no incentive to go lower." The Wall Street Journal published an analysis in December that concluded 98 percent of 40 top branded drugs were more expensive in the United States than in England. In Norway, 93 percent of the 40 top branded drugs cost less than in the United States. And in Ontario, a comparison of 30 drugs showed that U.S. prices were also higher for 93 percent of the products. Why are the brand name prices so much lower in other countries, and why is there so much variation in the United States? Big customers can negotiate big discounts. So the countries with socialized medicine have a lot of leverage at the negotiating table, the experts told us. In the United States, hospitals, wholesalers and insurance companies all do their own negotiations. The Veterans Administration can -- and does -- negotiate dramatically lower prices. Under Medicaid, the drug companies are required to provide their medicines at a price that's as low as it is for any of their regular customers. But Medicare has been prohibited by law from negotiating lower prices since 2006, and that's a huge chunk of the U.S. health care industry. (When Barack Obama was first running for president, he promised to repeal that Bush-era restriction, but then backed off in an attempt to get passage of the Affordable Care Act.) The pharmaceutical industry says it needs the extra income to pay for research to keep new, desperately needed drugs coming. But with everyone getting a bargain, Americans are financing that research for the rest of the world, experts told us. Yet there's another way to look at the issue, said Amitava Dasgupta, a clinical toxicologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The tablet that costs a dollar in the United States may only cost 20 cents in India, but that drug is far more expensive to the average person in India because their income is so much lower. "The U.S. subsidizes research for the world," he said. "But I would look at that as philanthropy." Our ruling Sanders said, "In America, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs." When it comes to brand-name drugs, which yield the highest profit for the pharmaceutical industry, studies support Sanders' claim -- although not always on a drug-by-drug basis. In addition, the differences in price can be dramatic because the U.S. health care system is so splintered, and Medicare is prohibited by law from using its market share to bargain for lower prices. We found one study comparing the United States and Canada that found exceptions for generic drugs, where the profit margin is much lower and which make up a much smaller share of prescription drug spending. But on balance, we rate his statement Mostly True. | null | Bernie Sanders | null | null | null | 2016-02-11T21:56:57 | 2016-02-11 | ['United_States'] |
faan-00111 | “I work hard because millions of people on welfare depend on me.” | factscan score: misleading | http://factscan.ca/country-93-3-facebook-photo-i-work-hard-because-millions-of-people-on-welfare-depend-on-me/ | The statement “I work hard because millions of people on welfare depend on me” was shared on Facebook 221,467 times. Canada has slightly under two million people on welfare. | null | Country 93.3 Facebook photo | null | null | null | 2015-02-17 | ember 4, 2014 | ['None'] |
Subsets and Splits
SQL Console for pszemraj/multi_fc
Filters dataset entries containing 'law' in categories, tags, or reason fields, providing basic topic classification but offering limited analytical insight beyond simple keyword matching.
Healthcare Related Entries
Retrieves sample records containing healthcare-related keywords but doesn't provide meaningful analysis or patterns beyond basic filtering.