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pomt-06390 | Says that "we brought CHI Manufacturing, that had business in China, back to" Texas. | mostly false | /texas/statements/2011/oct/31/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-we-brought-chi-manufacturing-had-b/ | After former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney revisited his vow to challenge China for manipulating its currency to advantage in foreign trade, Rick Perry said at the Oct. 11, 2011, Bloomberg/Washington Post Republican debate that one policy or another isn’t vital to getting more Americans back to work. Talking up domestic energy resources, the Texas governor also said the country needs a president committed to "pulling the regulations back, freeing this country to go develop the energy industry that we have in this country. I can promise you that we do that and we'll create an environment in this country where the manufacturing will come back to this country. We did it in Texas. We brought CHI Manufacturing, that had business in China, back to the state of Texas." Among online politicos, Perry’s comment touched off Twitter mentions of Farouk Shami, a Houston hair-care mogul who sought the state’s 2010 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. In his campaign, Shami said in a TV ad that he had just brought 1,200 jobs to Texas "by moving his factories here from China." Half True, we said at the time. Shami’s campaign told us that the jobs were created at a new Houston facility, CHI USA, in July 2009 as a result of moving production from South Korea, not China. Shami’s endeavors appear to be operating under the umbrella of Houston-based Farouk Systems, Inc. Shami’s campaign said at the time that a miscommunication over where the jobs were cut led to incorrect information in the ad, which was changed after our inquiry to say that jobs were only moved from South Korea. Then-Shami spokesman Vince Leibowitz said that some jobs had been created as a result of relocating production from China, but not the ones advertised as part of Shami's campaign. Also at the time, Elizabeth Yong, public relations manager for Houston-based Farouk Systems Group, said CHI USA produces "five to 10" of the company's five dozen hair care tools, including the original flat iron. Yong said bringing all production stateside would take two years, though "more than 1,000" jobs had already been shifted. In July 2010, the company said it hopes to shift 4,000 jobs to Texas by 2012, starting with the move of 1,000 jobs from South Korea and China. For this review, Perry’s campaign referred us to his state office, which reminded us that Perry attended a July 30, 2009, ribbon-cutting in Houston when Farouk Systems announced its plans to shift 1,200 jobs from South Korea and China to Houston. As the Austin American-Statesman noted in a Sept. 4, 2009, news article, Perry that day called Shami someone "who pretty much embodies the American dream." According to a video posted on the governor’s website, Perry also said: "Inspired by the freedoms we enjoy, he was drawn to this state where people are still free to achieve. He's built a life of significance and an organization that is respected around the world. His is the story of Texas." Thanking Shami for his "bold move," Perry said: "We are celebrating a leader who is moving jobs from another country ... to Texas." A press release issued by the governor’s office that day starts by saying that at the plant, Perry "credited Texas’ predictable regulatory climate, low taxes and skilled workforce with attracting jobs and companies from around the world." Shami isn’t shown speaking in the video. He’s also not quoted in the press release. News accounts do not mention any state role in Shami's decision to move jobs from abroad to Houston, nor is he quoted crediting a state action for prompting him to shift jobs from abroad. So why did Perry attend? "It was a major jobs announcement in the state of Texas," Perry spokeswoman Lucy Nashed told us by email. "He was invited." In describing the job moves, Shami has been quoted citing automation at the Houston plant as critical and his desire to get away from counterfeiting of his products in China, among other factors. An Aug. 2, 2009, news article in the Houston Business Journal says Shami decided to move the manufacturing of the CHI and other Farouk Systems products from overseas to Houston for safety and economic reasons. "Our employees are more efficient, and our quality control is superior," Shami said of U.S. workers. "Plus, I’m seeing more people in other countries wanting the American lifestyle and American products. They want to buy products made in the U.S.A." The story further says that while conducting the manufacturing here opposed to overseas would be more expensive, Shami said other benefits would make up for the increased costs. "We won’t have to fly products in, we won’t have to pay duties and we won’t have as many defects," Shami told the publication. "We may be sacrificing some of the profit, but the increase in volume will make up for that loss in profit." An Aug. 6, 2010, USA Today news article quotes Shami as saying his company had spent $500,000 a month battling foreign counterfeiters who put the company's trademark on copies of its products. "Counterfeiting is killing us," Shami said. "To remedy the problem and whittle inventory costs to $50 million from $120 million," the story continues, the company "moved some assembly of its irons and dryers from South Korea and China to a Houston factory that employs 1,000. Manufacturing costs in China are still about 30 percent lower. But (Shami) believes the appliances' ‘Made in the USA’ stamp will increase sales to hair salons." In a recent telephone interview, Farouk Systems spokeswoman Amy Johnson told us the Houston plant has 1,200 jobs with 300 additional jobs to be added soon. Johnson also told us that some limited-edition hair irons are still made in China. In earlier years, she said, 40 percent of the company’s products were made here, 60 percent overseas. Now, she said, the split is 80 percent here, 20 percent overseas. "We’re definitely happy to be a positive example," she said. We asked Johnson for details about how many jobs have shifted from China to Texas and how either the Texas economy or actions by Texas state government encouraged those moves. She replied that Shami wanted to talk to us, but we did not hear from him. Ironing all this out, it seems likely the manufacturer of the CHI hair iron moved some jobs from China to Texas. However, there’s no indication that qualities specific to the Texas economy or actions by state government merit credit for the shift. It could be, too, that most of the moved jobs came from South Korea. In any event, CHI still has products made in China. Ultimately, Perry’s statement overreaches by indicating the company deserted China and by claiming that anyone besides Shami "brought" the jobs from abroad. We rate Perry’s claim Mostly False. | null | Rick Perry | null | null | null | 2011-10-31T11:47:33 | 2011-10-11 | ['China', 'Texas'] |
farg-00258 | “According to federal data, there are at least 2 million, 2 million, think of it, criminal aliens now inside of our country.” | misleading | https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/groundhog-friday-11/ | null | the-factcheck-wire | Donald Trump | D'Angelo Gore | ['Groundhog Friday', 'Illegal immigration'] | Groundhog Friday | September 9, 2016 | [' Speech in Phoenix – Wednesday, August 31, 2016 '] | ['None'] |
pomt-09848 | Preventive care does not save the government money. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/17/david-brooks/brooks-claims-preventive-care-will-cost-government/ | The logic behind preventive care seems simple enough: stopping illnesses before they happen will mean fewer pricey procedures at the hospital and lower health care costs for all. Not so, says columnist David Brooks, who was interviewed on the Aug. 14, 2009, edition of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer . He said President Barack Obama claims that "preventive care saves money," but the reality is "that's not true. ... If you're testing people, say, for an illness, you have to give 100 people a test to get five people — to find five people. Now, preventive care is good for health. Everyone agrees on that. But if you look at the CBO studies and the other research, it doesn't save you money. We should do it. But because you have to test so many people to get the few you're really going to prevent serious illness from, you're really not adding up to a lot of cost saving." Brooks was talking about a core principle of Obama's health care overhaul: That many costly procedures and treatments can be prevented by catching disease earlier or preventing it all together. Operating under that logic, the House health care bill expands access to procedures such as hypertension screening and vaccines. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer sang the praises of preventive care in an Aug. 10 USA Today op-ed. "Reform will also mean higher-quality care by promoting preventive care so health problems can be addressed before they become crises," they wrote. "This, too, will save money. We'll be a much healthier country if all patients can receive regular checkups and tests, such as mammograms and diabetes exams, without paying a dime out-of-pocket." Brooks's critique relied on new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office that indicate that preventive care isn't as cost-effective as Pelosi and Hoyer claim. "The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall," CBO director Douglas Elmendorf wrote in an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, the top Republican on a congressional subcommittee involved in the debate. Elmendorf explained that, while the cost of a simple test might be cheap for each individual, the cumulative cost of many tests could be quite expensive: "But when analyzing the effects of preventive care on total spending for health care, it is important to recognize that doctors do not know beforehand which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case of acute illness, it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway. ... Preventive care can have the largest benefits relative to costs when it is targeted at people who are most likely to suffer from a particular medical problem; however, such targeting can be difficult because preventive services are generally provided to patients who have the potential to contract a given disease but have not yet shown symptoms of having it." In fact, a new government policy to encourage prevention could end up paying for services that people are already receiving, including breast and colon cancer screenings and vaccines, Elmendorf went on. The CBO did not put a price tag on the costs or savings associated with preventive care measures in the House bills because budgeting rules prevent them from doing so. But a few other studies back up the CBO's analysis, including a Feb. 14, 2008, article in the New England Journal of Medicine that was written in response to campaign promises for more preventive care. "Sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention ... are overreaching," according to the paper. "Studies have concluded that preventing illness can in some cases save money but in other cases can add to health care costs." And a study conducted by researchers from the American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society concluded that, while interventions to prevent cardiovascular disease would prevent many strokes and deaths, "as they are currently delivered, most of the prevention activities will substantially increase costs." So, the consensus is that, while preventive care will almost certainly save lives, it's a stretch to say that it will save government spending on health care. As a result, we give Brooks a True. | null | David Brooks | null | null | null | 2009-08-17T18:35:30 | 2009-08-14 | ['None'] |
pomt-10407 | John McCain "has not led on nonproliferation issues when he had the chance in the Senate." | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/02/barack-obama/present-for-votes-but-not-a-player/ | Nuclear proliferation is one of those arcane-but-important issues that tends to get pushed into the shadows during presidential campaigns. But as Sen. John McCain tries to distance himself from Bush administration policies, he's using the topic to help make his case. In a May 27, 2008, speech in Denver, McCain endorsed seeking a new disarmament treaty with Russia and said he was open to re-evaluating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on underground nuclear tests that he voted against in 1999. Additionally, McCain called for eliminating the "bunker buster" that President Bush supports. Experts say the positions put McCain in a more centrist camp than Bush on the question of how to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. They may also reflect a desire by McCain to steal some of his Democratic rival's thunder. Sen. Barack Obama has made nonproliferation something of a specialty during his 3 years in the Senate, partly by virtue of his seat on the Foreign Relations Committee. Responding to McCain's speech, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton charged the veteran Arizona senator was playing catch-up, and asserted that Obama has been the more prominent player on nonproliferation during his brief tenure in the chamber. "By embracing many aspects of Barack Obama's nonproliferation agenda today, John McCain highlighted Obama's leadership on nuclear weapons throughout this campaign, and his bipartisan work with Richard Lugar in the Senate. No speech by John McCain can change the fact that he has not led on nonproliferation issues when he had the chance in the Senate," Burton said. He's got it right. Obama last year teamed with Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to write a nuclear nonproliferation bill that, among other things, called for disarmament talks with Russia and for ratifying a global ban on nuclear testing, and strengthened efforts to halt the transfer of weapons and fissile material. Portions of the bill dealing with terrorist threats were incorporated into a fiscal 2008 Foreign Operations spending bill enacted into law. Obama also collaborated with Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., on enacting a 2007 law allowing the United States to export nuclear fuel, technology and reactors to India for peaceful purposes for the first time in three decades. President Bush praised it for increasing the transparency of India's civilian nuclear program. McCain certainly has been a key player on many thorny and controversial issues during his long Senate career, among them campaign finance reform, tobacco regulation and national security by virtue of his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. But a look at his record on nonproliferation shows he mostly showed up for key votes but didn't influence debates. During a 2004 debate on a fiscal 2005 defense authorization bill, McCain endorsed the continuation of the nuclear bunker buster by voting against a Democratic amendment that would have eliminated money for studying the weapon and for research efforts into low-yield nuclear weapons. The amendment was rejected 42-55. As he noted in the Denver speech, McCain in 1999 voted with a majority of Republicans against the Test Ban Treaty, a pact that garnered attention after nuclear tests in India and Pakistan increased tension between the countries. Conservatives at the time questioned how the ban would affect the long-term prospects of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and thought then-President Bill Clinton's desire to set an example to the global community by ratifying the treaty was misguided. The pact – which the Senate rejected, 48-51 – also required the approval of the 44 nations with nuclear capability; at the time of vote, only 26 had approved it. In 1997, McCain was among 29 of 55 Republicans who joined with 45 Democrats to ratify the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which banned the development, production, sale, use or stockpiling of chemical weapons. And in 1992, he voted with the majority of the Senate in a 93-6 tally to ratify the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which provided for reduction of about one-third in the arsenals of long-range missiles and bombers of the United States and former Soviet Union. "The majority of people following the issue would point out McCain has not taken a leadership role on nonproliferation during his career in the Senate," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. In spite of McCain's moves to the center, and his more fleshed-out positions on nonproliferation, we don't find much in McCain's Senate record to refute the charge of the Obama camp. We say, True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2008-06-02T00:00:00 | 2008-05-27 | ['None'] |
pomt-12385 | You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election. There's no such statute (that makes collusion a crime). | false | /punditfact/statements/2017/may/31/gregg-jarrett/fox-news-hosts-wrong-no-law-forbids-russia-trump-c/ | Fox News host Gregg Jarrett has a distinctive take on the investigation into possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign. Jarrett, a former defense attorney, said that even if the two worked together, it wasn’t illegal. "Collusion is not a crime, only an antitrust law," he said on May 30. "You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election. There's no such statute." Jarrett made the same point in an article on the Fox News website. He wrote that special counsel Robert Mueller had been given the "futile" task of investigating a crime that doesn’t exist. "As special counsel, Mueller can engage in all manner of spectacular jurisprudential gymnastics," Jarrett wrote. "However, it will not change the fact that colluding with Russia is not, under America’s criminal codes, a crime." Really? We thought we’d look into the legal landscape. We wanted to know what election law does or doesn’t say; this is a separate question from what did or did not occur. By way of brief recap, the U.S. Justice Department appointed Mueller to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. His first task was to explore "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump." Jarrett said the only real trouble for the Trump campaign would be if it committed some other crime, such as helping the Russians hack into Democratic emails. He dismissed that as implausible and unsupported by any public evidence. We ran Jarrett’s argument by three election law professors, and they all said that while the word "collusion" might not appear in key statutes (they couldn’t say for sure that it was totally absent), working with the Russians could violate criminal laws. Nathaniel Persily at Stanford University Law School said one relevant statute is the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. "A foreign national spending money to influence a federal election can be a crime," Persily said. "And if a U.S. citizen coordinates, conspires or assists in that spending, then it could be a crime." Persily pointed to a 2011 U.S. District Court ruling based on the 2002 law. The judges said that the law bans foreign nationals "from making expenditures to expressly advocate the election or defeat of a political candidate." Another election law specialist, John Coates at Harvard University Law School, said if Russians aimed to shape the outcome of the presidential election, that would meet the definition of an expenditure. "The related funds could also be viewed as an illegal contribution to any candidate who coordinates (colludes) with the foreign speaker," Coates said. To be sure, no one is saying that coordination took place. What’s in doubt is whether the word "collusion" is as pivotal as Jarrett makes it out to be. Coates said discussions between a campaign and a foreigner could violate the law against fraud. "Under that statute, it is a federal crime to conspire with anyone, including a foreign government, to ‘deprive another of the intangible right of honest services,’ " Coates said. "That would include fixing a fraudulent election, in my view, within the plain meaning of the statute." Josh Douglas at the University of Kentucky Law School offered two other possible relevant statutes. "Collusion in a federal election with a foreign entity could potentially fall under other crimes, such as against public corruption," Douglas said. "There's also a general anti-coercion federal election law." In sum, legal experts mentioned four criminal laws that might have been broken. The key is not whether those statutes use the word collusion, but whether the activities of the Russians and Trump associates went beyond permissible acts. Our ruling Jarrett said that "you can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election," because there’s no law that says collusion is a crime. Three prominent election law scholars said there are at least four laws that would prohibit the sort of activities under investigation, whether those laws mention collusion or not. Jarrett’s focus on a single word fails to reflect the reach of the criminal code. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Gregg Jarrett | null | null | null | 2017-05-31T15:41:31 | 2017-05-30 | ['None'] |
abbc-00098 | The claim: Christopher Pyne says independent public schools are improving student outcomes in Western Australia. | in-the-red | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-06/christopher-pyne-student-outcomes-western-australia/5063342 | The claim: Christopher Pyne says independent public schools are improving student outcomes in Western Australia. | ['education', 'public-schools', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'wa', 'perth-6000', 'vic', 'australia'] | null | null | ['education', 'public-schools', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'wa', 'perth-6000', 'vic', 'australia'] | Christopher Pyne in the red on student outcomes in independent public schools | Thu 14 Nov 2013, 7:34am | null | ['Western_Australia'] |
pomt-13042 | There was "serious voter fraud" in California. | pants on fire! | /california/statements/2016/nov/28/donald-trump/pants-fire-trumps-claim-about-california-voter-fra/ | Grabbing the attention of the Golden State, President-Elect Donald Trump claimed in a recent tweet there was "serious voter fraud" in three states won by Hillary Clinton during the General Election, including California. Here’s his tweet: Trump made this claim on Sunday during a flood of tweets about voter fraud. The president-elect also said he would have won the popular vote if not for "the millions of people who voted illegally." PolitiFact national examined that claim and rated it Pants on Fire. We decided to fact-check Trump’s eye-opening claim about "serious voter fraud" in California. Our research Trump offered no evidence about California voter fraud in his series of tweets. On Monday, Trump spokesman Jason Miller cited a national study done by the Pew Research Center showing that approximately 24 million voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or inaccurate. However, no one from Trump’s office has shown evidence of "serious voter fraud" in California. Trump may be drawing on an unsupported claim that 3 million "illegal aliens" cast votes in this year’s election. That allegation was made on Twitter by Gregg Phillips, who has worked for the Republican Party and has a voter fraud reporting app. PolitiFact reported that Phillips has not released any corroborating evidence and noted that public information undermines his statement. It rated his claim False. On Nov. 8 in California, there were reports of election glitches, such as the wrong names being placed on some absentee ballots and long lines at some polling places. But state and local election officials, along with independent observers, say there have been no reports of widespread voter fraud in the state. "His allegations are completely unfounded," California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in an interview. "I think it’s a big disservice to our country and to our democracy to continue to raise these doubts. If anything, a message back to Mr. Trump is, if you have proof, if you have evidence, please bring it forward. Procedures are in place to investigate any real voter fraud. But as the evidence has shown, the cases of voter fraud across the country are statistically minimal if you go back decades." Padilla’s office could not immediately say how many voter fraud complaints it’s received for this and past general elections. Hillary Clinton held a 3.9 million vote lead over Trump as of Nov. 28, a margin that’s grown substantially as California continues to count the state’s many absentee ballots. 'Broad brush allegations' Dean Logan, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials and the top elections official in Los Angeles County, said in a statement responding to Trump’s tweets, that the state has "a history of accurate and accountable elections." Logan described Trump’s voter fraud claims as "broad brush allegations." Logan added in an email to PolitiFact California that: "Quantifying complaints or allegations of voter fraud is not a specific data set that we track. That alone probably gives you a sense of the frequency, but there is no indication that the rate of concern on this issue was higher in this election cycle than in any other." He added that there are legal avenues for challenging a voter’s eligibility. But none were used before or after the election, he said. "And I think that sort of goes to the point that there’s nothing to back up those allegations," Logan said. Sacramento County’s Assistant Registrar of Voters Alice Jarboe said of the more than 530,000 county voters that turned out on Election Day, none has made a complaint about voter fraud. Jarboe, who’s worked at the department for 18 years, said no complaints are "the norm" for elections in her county. "I’ve never seen anything (related to voter fraud) that would affect the outcome of an election -- ever," she added. Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit voter advocacy group, said she’s not seen evidence of serious voter fraud. "No system is perfect -- people do make mistakes," Alexander said. She added, however, that California’s voter verification laws are among the most robust in the country. Each county, she noted, is automatically required to perform a recount a fraction of its ballots by hand. The state also prohibits paperless electronic voting, a type of voting that makes audits nearly impossible, she said. Trump’s unsupported claim about voter fraud in California may also draw on misinformation about two recent state laws: AB 60, which allows undocumented immigrants to obtain state driver’s licenses; and the New Motor Voter Act, which by mid-2017 will automatically register citizens to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license. The automatic registration only applies to citizens who are already eligible to vote, not to undocumented immigrants. Padilla, California’s secretary of state, has said the new system would require potential voters to show identification such as a birth certificate or passport to reflect their citizenship before they are registered. California voters, in most cases, are not required to show identification at their polling places. Our ruling Donald Trump claimed "serious voter fraud" took place on Election Day in California. He offered no evidence backing up his statement and his press team did not respond specifically to a request about fraud in the state. Elections officials and nonpartisan observers in California said there were no widespread reports of voter fraud. The state has some of the most stringent voter verification laws in the country. Allegations of fraud are so rare that Los Angeles County, the state’s largest county, does not track them. PolitiFact New Hampshire examined Trump’s claim that the Granite State also experienced "serious voter fraud." It described Trump’s statement as "reckless claim with zero evidence," and rated it Pants On Fire after finding there were "no complaints of voter fraud filed in an election in which more than 728,000 ballots were cast." Trump’s claim about California voter fraud is equally reckless and without substantiation. We rate it Pants on Fire. PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/212609ba-7a41-42a0-bb8a-2368e2b5121e | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2016-11-28T16:30:05 | 2016-11-27 | ['California'] |
pomt-13316 | Repeated requests for additional security in Benghazi were routinely denied by Hillary "Clinton’s State Department." | true | /wisconsin/statements/2016/oct/07/paul-ryan/state-department-under-hillary-clinton-refused-sec/ | The Sept. 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, have spurred numerous Republican allegations against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. GOP nominee Donald Trump went so far as to say the Benghazi victims were "left helpless to die" as Clinton, then the secretary of state, "soundly slept in her bed." That earned a False from PolitiFact National. Congressional investigations did not find Clinton was inattentive, much less asleep. Rather, she worked into the night after the attacks occurred. Several days after that fact check was published, the sister of Christopher Stephens, the slain ambassador, said she did not blame Clinton. But Patricia Smith, the mother of one of the other victims, has blamed Clinton. And Clinton, in part because of her "What difference does it make?" remark on the attacks, continues to be a target. House Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted this on Sept. 26, 2016, a couple of weeks after the fourth anniversary of the attacks: "Repeated requests for additional security in #Benghazi were routinely denied by Secretary Clinton's State Dept." In contrast to Trump, the Wisconsin Republican didn’t go quite as personal -- referring to Clinton’s State Department, rather than Clinton herself. That helps his claim. Prior fact check In May 2014, ahead of one of the congressional investigations into the Benghazi attacks, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., claimed the State Department "not only failed to honor repeated requests for additional security, but instead actually reduced security in Libya." Our rating was True. As we noted in that article: "There are disagreements about whether State acted reasonably, but that it didn't honor requests for additional security is established fact," said Georgetown University adjunct assistant professor Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which focuses on foreign policy and national security. The State Department has acknowledged it rejected requests to provide more security personnel in Libya. It also acknowledged rejecting a request to erect guard towers at the Benghazi mission, but notes that a number of physical security upgrades, such as the installation of concrete barriers to block unused gates, were made during 2012. The State Department’s own Accountability Review Board concluded that the number of diplomatic security staff in Benghazi in the months leading up to the attacks was inadequate "despite repeated requests" from the Benghazi mission and the embassy in Tripoli for additional staffing. In addition, PolitiFact National has reported that the numerous requests from officials on the ground in Libya for better security for the Benghazi compound are undeniable and well-documented. It’s worth noting, though, that our colleagues have also pointed out there is no evidence that Clinton herself was aware of the requests, or that she willfully denied them. Our rating Ryan said: "Repeated requests for additional security in Benghazi were routinely denied" by Hillary "Clinton's State Department." Ryan’s claim avoids trouble by focusing on the State Department, then led by Clinton, rather than on Clinton herself. It’s well documented that the department didn’t honor requests for more security prior to the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans. We rate Ryan’s statement True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/2bba7888-3630-46d1-ae74-ca5bc3ef249c | null | Paul Ryan | null | null | null | 2016-10-07T05:00:00 | 2016-09-26 | ['United_States_Department_of_State', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton', 'Bill_Clinton', 'Benghazi'] |
tron-03562 | Joe Biden’s Son, Hunter Biden, Kicked Out of Navy for Failed Drug Test | truth! & outdated! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/joe-bidens-son-hunter-biden-discharged-navy-drug-test-outdated/ | null | trump | null | null | ['donald trump', 'joe biden', 'military', 'presidencies'] | Joe Biden’s Son, Hunter Biden, Kicked Discharged from Navy Over Drug Test | Mar 23, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-11250 | Bill Gates’ Former Doctor Says Billionaire ‘Refused To Vaccinate His Children’ | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2018/may/02/yournewswirecom/Website-falsely-claims-Bill-Gates-refused-to-vacci/ | A hoax website published an unfounded story claiming that a former doctor for Bill Gates said the philanthropist refused to vaccinate his own children. Gates and his wife, Melinda, have invested billions of dollars to research, develop and deliver vaccines around the world to help reduce child mortality. "Bill Gates’ former doctor says billionaire ‘refused to vaccinate his children,’" said the headline on a Feb. 7 post on yournewswire.com. Yournewswire.com’s story does not identify the purported doctor and says the information was divulged privately at a "medical symposium in Seattle," without naming the symposium or a date. The story claimed "the comments caused a stir among physicians at the symposium with claims he was breaking doctor-patient confidentiality, according to reports. However as he was speaking to other physicians, he was not breaking the industry code of conduct." Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social media network’s efforts to combat online hoaxes. (Check out all yournewswire.com’s posts debunked by PunditFact.) Yournewswire.com’s post includes information from a December 2015 CNN report about unvaccinated children in California. But it offers no evidence to support the claim about Gates’ children and their vaccination records. In their 2018 annual letter, the Gateses said they’ve "spent $15.3 billion on vaccines over the past 18 years. And it’s been a terrific investment." (The Gates children are 15, 18 and 22 years old.) Melinda Gates in a Feb. 22 Instagram post wrote: "When my first child, Jenn, was born, over 800,000 children were dying each year of rotavirus — a preventable, curable disease. It broke my heart to imagine watching your child get sick and knowing that medicine could save her — if only you had access to it. That was a clarifying moment for me. No child should die a preventable death. Bill and I have dedicated our lives to reducing the number who do." Without evidence, Yournewswire claimed that a former doctor for Bill Gates said the philanthropist refused to vaccinate his own children. We rate the post Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | YourNewsWire.com | null | null | null | 2018-05-02T15:24:28 | 2018-05-07 | ['None'] |
pose-00974 | As governor, Bob McDonnell will appoint a public school turnaround leader, at the Department of Education, whose sole mission will be to focus on the underperforming schools and set in motion urgent plans to eliminate obstacles to success. | compromise | https://www.politifact.com/virginia/promises/bob-o-meter/promise/1009/appoint-public-school-trunaround-leader/ | null | bob-o-meter | Bob McDonnell | null | null | Appoint public school turnaround leader | 2011-09-09T12:56:22 | null | ['Bob_McDonnell'] |
snes-05900 | Senator Dianne Feinstein said that "All vets are mentally ill and the government should prevent them from owning firearms." | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feinstein-veterans-firearms/ | null | Guns | null | David Mikkelson | null | Did Senator Dianne Feinstein Say ‘All Vets Are Mentally Ill’? | 4 April 2013 | null | ['Dianne_Feinstein'] |
pomt-12836 | ISIS is already using the rhetoric from the Trump administration, the text of this executive order, to incite attacks against us and to recruit more terrorists to their side. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/07/seth-moulton/mostly-false-claim-isis-already-using-trumps-execu/ | A Democratic congressman called out President Donald Trump’s travel ban from seven majority-Muslim countries as counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. ISIS has already used the executive order in its recruitment propaganda, said Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. In a Jan. 31 CNN interview, Moulton disagreed with Trump’s misleading comparison of his executive order to actions taken by President Barack Obama’s administration on Iraqi refugees in 2011. "Improvements to the vetting process are something that you'll find bipartisan support for here in Congress. What Trump has done in contrast is just put this blanket ban that will be used against us and our troops," said Moulton, who served four tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine Corps infantry officer. "In fact, ISIS is already using the rhetoric from the Trump administration, the text of this executive order, to incite attacks against us and to recruit more terrorists to their side." We previously confirmed that Trump was featured in terrorist propaganda videos for comments during the presidential campaign. But is the text of his executive order now being circulated to incite attacks against the United States and for terrorist recruitment? Experts said there have not been official releases from major terrorist groups, though their supporters are talking about it on social media. Trump’s executive order About a week into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order banning immigrants and nonimmigrants from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days. The order also banned refugees for 120 days, and Syrian refugees indefinitely. The order was quickly challenged in courts and as of early Feb. 7, there was a temporary restraining order on Trump’s mandate ruled by a federal judge in Washington. The issue is now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. We had not seen reports of ISIS using the ban for recruitment during that week, so we asked Moulton’s office for support for his claim. They directed us to a Jan. 29 Washington Post article headlined, "Jihadist groups hail Trump’s travel ban as a victory." A comment on a pro-Islamic State channel on a social media platform, Telegram, compared Trump’s executive order to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, "which Islamic militant leaders at the time hailed as a ‘blessed invasion’ that ignited anti-Western fervor across the Islamic world," the Washington Post reported. Other comments described Trump's order as one that would convince American Muslims to align with extremists, the article said. It also includes comments by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the Jan. 29 edition of CBS’ Face the Nation: "The effect will probably in some areas give ISIS some more propaganda." McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R.-S.C., released a similar, forward-looking statement that said: "Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism ... Our most important allies in the fight against ISIL are the vast majority of Muslims who reject its apocalyptic ideology of hatred. This executive order sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country. That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security." Moulton’s team referred us to tweets by Rita Katz, director of SITE Intelligence Group, a group monitoring jihadist websites. Katz’s tweets posted Feb. 3, a few days after Moulton’s comment, said: "First official #AQ response to #Trump presidency calls him"foolish" says "the flame of Jihad has been ignited & reached the East & West" "2) #AQ on #Trump's vow to "eradicate radical Islamic terrorism": "not directed only to the mujahideen...but also to the Muslims in general" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Katz told PolitiFact her Feb. 3 tweets were about a statement by al-Qaida, not ISIS, and that the statement she was referring to only mentioned a botched Yemen raid and Trump’s vow to "eradicate radical Islamic terrorism," not the ban specifically. "At the official level, there have been no direct mentions of the travel ban by ISIS, al-Qaida, or any other major jihadi terrorist organization," Katz said. "Even the sixth issue of ISIS’ monthly Rumiyah magazine, which was released this past Saturday, did not mention it." Katz said silence from such groups is "absolutely noteworthy, and goes against the conventional jihadi propaganda practice to exploit any event—especially high-profile ones like that of the travel ban—by which Muslims are affected." Terrorist groups' supporters, mainly al-Qaida supporters, have discussed the travel ban citing deceased al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki’s statement that the United States will "turn against its Muslim citizens," Katz said. She tweeted about that Jan. 29. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com Pro-ISIS social media channels are largely posting links to articles with very little commentary, Katz added. Moulton’s office also linked us to a tweet from @theosint, identified on its Twitter bio as a contributor to open source and social media investigation group Bellingcat. The tweet, posted Jan. 28, reads: "ISIS doesn't even share its own propaganda anymore. It just shares CNN and NYTimes articles about the @POTUS muslim ban on Telegram." See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times correspondent who reports on ISIS and al-Qaida, asked @theosint to name what channel was sharing New York Times stories, because she had not seeing that happen. @theosint replied to her clarifying that the New York Times article wasn't specifically about the ban. On Jan. 30 Reuters reported that an Islamic State supporter in response to Trump’s order posted on Telegram: "Your decision will do nothing. Attacks will come at you from inside America, from Americans born in America with American parents and grandparents." Several channels on Telegram and on which Islamist militants posted about Trump’s order have been taken down, Reuters noted. Still, some experts are cautious about reading sympathizers’ support as official communication. Terrorist organizations are emboldened by statements or actions from elected officials, "but not always in as visible or simple a way as is often implied," said Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, based in London. "I am in no doubt that Trump's executive order will make the lives of ISIS and its like-minded rivals easier, but I would be wary of drawing too linear a link. So far at least, ISIS has made no official pronouncement on the policy, nor has (al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula)," Winter said via email Feb. 6. "That said, supporters of the former have expressed that Trump is something of a ‘useful idiot’ to their group and official propagandists for the latter have written extensively about why Trump bolsters the salafi-jihadist worldview." Terrorist groups like ISIS use Trump’s "anti-Islam rhetoric to say that the U.S. is waging war on Islam," said William C. Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University College of Law. However, Banks said he was not aware of specific incitements or attacks based on Trump’s executive order. A New York magazine profile story on Callimachi, the New York Times correspondent focused on ISIS and al-Qaida, also notes that ISIS still had not made an official statement, though militants applauded the order. The New York piece published online Feb. 5. J.M. Berger, a fellow at International Centre for Counter Terrorism at The Hague, said that while he hasn’t been tracking Islamic State activity daily since Trump’s inauguration, claims like Moulton’s "often get out ahead of the actuality." But he agrees with concerns that Trump’s order may endanger America. "There are several levels at which the travel ban makes things worse. It furthers the jihadist narrative that America is broadly at war with Islam. It also creates new tensions with countries we should be cooperating with," Berger said. Our ruling Moulton said, "ISIS is already using the rhetoric from the Trump administration, the text of this executive order, to incite attacks against us and to recruit more terrorists to their side." Experts we communicated with said they believe the order plays into terrorist groups’ message that the United States is at war with Islam. Terrorist groups' sympathizers have discussed the ban on social media channels. However, experts said that neither ISIS or other major groups had made official announcements on Trump’s policy. We rate Moulton's statement Mostly False.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/908e9926-88fe-485f-abcd-3d3c6039568b | null | Seth Moulton | null | null | null | 2017-02-07T14:10:31 | 2017-01-31 | ['None'] |
pomt-03192 | We are about halfway to the president’s goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions and "about half of that is because of the substitution of natural gas for coal in the power sector." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/30/ernest-moniz/energy-secretary-moniz-says-us-halfway-greenhouse-/ | When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 if all other major economies pledged to limit their emissions, too. Improvements would be tallied against how much of those gases the United States put into the atmosphere in 2005, the year the global climate change treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to take effect. The White House would have liked it if Congress had passed a cap-and-trade bill that in theory would create strong market pressures to reduce the release of carbon into the air. That never happened, but two major changes gave the president a shot at making serious headway toward his target. Energy consumption cratered when the economy collapsed and, as you would expect, lower energy use means lower emissions. On the more positive side of the ledger, the surge in natural gas production also helped the country move toward Obama’s goal, although not without concern over environmental side effects. In a question-and-answer session on climate change at Columbia University on Aug. 26, 2013, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz highlighted the impact of natural gas on emissions. "In these last years, the natural gas revolution, shall we say, has been a major contributor to reducing carbon emissions," Moniz said. "The president has a goal, as I mentioned, of 17 percent by 2020. We are about halfway there, and about half of that is because of the substitution of natural gas for coal in the power sector, essentially driven by market forces." We pay attention to the president’s promises and track how well he delivers the goods on the Obameter. But we also thought it would be worth digging into Moniz’s claim. Department of Energy’s focus on carbon dioxide The Energy Department, predictably, looks at the way energy use contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and in particular, it tracks the dominant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The department’s Energy Information Administration recently published the numbers for 2012, and the details surprised many people. The update reported that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2012 were the lowest since 1994. Compared to 2005, those emissions had fallen by 11.8 percent. That is much more than halfway toward the president’s goal of 17 percent. The update also said the biggest drop was due to the declining use of coal to produce electricity. "Low natural gas prices led to competition between natural gas — and coal-fired electric power generators," the authors wrote. "Lower natural gas prices resulted in reduced levels of coal generation, and increased natural gas generation." And to produce the same amount of energy, natural gas puts less carbon dioxide into the air than coal does. The most detailed data is only as recent as 2011, but the shift from coal to natural gas is clear. In terms of power generation, between 2005 and 2011, use of coal fell from 50 percent to 42 percent while the use of natural gas rose from 19 percent to 25 percent. This isn't bulletproof evidence of causation, but it strongly suggests that the switch from coal to natural gas has played a role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Greenhouse gases — more than carbon dioxide If the only molecule to worry about were carbon dioxide, Moniz would have been totally right, but many compounds contribute to climate change. Obama pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, not just carbon dioxide. The Environmental Protection Agency’s latest report looks at all the relevant gases, some of which are thousands of times more potent in their climate change impact than carbon dioxide. The EPA’s tally also includes activities other than energy production that put gases into the atmosphere. The agency’s figures show that from 2005 to 2011, emissions fell by 7 percent. Measured against the goal of 17 percent, the country has more than halfway to go. It’s roughly at the 40 percent mark. It is possible that when the 2012 numbers are in, the rate of progress will have shot up. The Department of Energy reported a relatively dramatic decline in the release of carbon dioxide in 2012. The EPA’s next report is planned for April 2014. We should note that a separate report from Moniz’s agency gives cause for concern. The Energy Information Administration projects that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will start to creep up in 2018. By 2020, analysts predict they will show only a 9 percent reduction from 2005 levels. Our ruling Moniz said the country is "about halfway" toward the president’s goal of a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared to 2005 levels. In terms of carbon dioxide, Moniz is correct, but when looking at all greenhouse gases, data from the EPA suggests the country has a little more progress to make. We rate the statement Mostly True. | null | Ernest Moniz | null | null | null | 2013-08-30T13:54:44 | 2013-08-26 | ['None'] |
pomt-09385 | Marco Rubio thinks that government shouldn't be in the health care business at all. | false | /florida/statements/2010/mar/26/kendrick-meek/meek-accuses-rubio-wanting-government-out-health-c/ | The day before the U.S. House of Representatives approved the health care reform bill, Democratic U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, who is running for the U.S. Senate, fired off this accusation about the Republican frontrunner: "Marco Rubio thinks that government shouldn't be in the health care business at all." Meek made that statement on his campaign Web site March 20, 2010 -- the day before the historic vote. Here is the full quote: Rubio's "ideas on health care could jeopardize Medicare and veterans' care, programs which cover more than 5 million Floridians. Marco Rubio thinks that government shouldn't be in the health care business at all. That means these programs could be shut down. Moreover, his obstruction of the current health care bill means we could lose our best chance ever to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions and to close the Medicare prescription drug coverage 'donut hole.' That's what he stands for. If he were in the Senate he would lead the charge to scrap health care reform. If elected, he has sworn to do everything he can to repeal it." Meek has leveled a sweeping claim that Rubio thinks government should get out of the health care business entirely -- in a state where millions of voters depend on government health care such as Medicare and veterans programs. We know that Rubio is against the Democratic-led health care reform plan that the House approved March 21, but is it fair to say he wants government out of health care entirely? Meek's e-mail cites two sources: an article "Scrap Obamacare Today" written by Rubio on March 15, in Human Events, a conservative publication, and a blog item in The Buzz, a St. Petersburg Times politics blog. Both quote Rubio criticizing the health care proposal. "The President’s health care proposal is a deeply flawed plan that should be scrapped entirely in favor of a truly bipartisan approach that pursues step-by-step reforms,'' Rubio wrote in Human Events March 15. Meek's campaign also cited a March 3 press release from Rubio in which he spoke against "government-run health care." "Unfortunately, my opponent [Charlie Crist] disagrees and has said he would not scrap this bill and process. It underscores why, fundamentally, this campaign is about trust. It’s about who Floridians can trust to go to Washington to unapologetically stand on principle against ideas like the stimulus, cap-and-trade and government-run health care," Rubio said in the press release. The Meek campaign's logic is that Rubio's use of "government-run health care" in that paragraph has a broader meaning that indicates he's not just against the Obama reform plan, he's against all government health programs. Meek's campaign also cited Rubio's vote in the Florida House of Representatives April 6, 2006, against a Democratic amendment to an appropriations bill that reduced contract services by $5 million and included funding for a dental program for veterans. The Meek campaign also cited three Rubio votes on the Cover Florida state health care initiative requiring coverage for prenatal care and prostate screening and mammograms. All three amendments, introduced by Democrat Dan Gelber, ultimately failed and Rubio voted against them. Rubio voted in favor of the overall bill. But we find those citations are flimsy evidence for a big, sweeping claim that could alarm Florida voters, particularly senior citizens. In our view it's clear that "government-run health care" was referring to the Obama plan and it doesn't prove that Rubio is against programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Rubio's campaign also provided us with some evidence that he does believe government has a role in health care: * Rubio wrote an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel Dec. 3, 2009, about the proposed health care bill that indicated he was concerned about cuts in Medicare: "The bill also would expand a financially unsustainable Medicaid entitlement program that is already straining state budgets. And it would fundamentally hurt Medicare by taking away access to Medicare Advantage plans and installing a new government bureaucracy to oversee Medicare reimbursements." * In 2000, Rubio was part of a unanimous vote in favor of hearing screening for newborns and a unanimous vote related to expanding Kidcare, a health program for poor children. In 2004, Rubio voted in favor of changes to Kidcare. He also voted for changes to the Kidcare program in 2004 fought by Democrats because of changes to eligibility requirements. Our own search turned up a few other examples that showed that Rubio has supported certain health care programs or proposals. In a Feb. 19 interview on Morning Joe, Rubio said Medicare "needs to be reformed," but did not provide details. Rubio supported expanding Florida's controversial Medicaid reform, which was initiated by former Gov. Jeb Bush in an effort to allow private companies to compete to provide serves for the poor, with the hope that it would slow growth in costs. Rubio was quoted in a March 6, 2008, Miami Herald article about the rising costs of Medicaid and the need to save it: "Florida simply cannot afford to continue doing business like we are currently. In order to save the Medicaid system, continuing reform is vital. Expanding Medicaid Reform into Miami-Dade County is an important step in creating a system that can survive and is a step that we should enact this session." In addition, Rubio supported a budget in 2008 that included an estimated $15.7 billion for Medicaid from federal and state sources, according to Florida's Medicaid expenditure estimating conference. Here is a list that shows Medicaid expenditures over several sessions when Rubio was in the House. Someone who believed government "shouldn't be in the health care business at all" wouldn't be supporting Medicaid. Another piece of evidence: A budget list compiled by the governor's office shows Rubio supported money for Jackson Memorial Hospital, a public hospital. "The budget list also links Rubio to a $20 million special line item for Jackson Memorial Hospital in 2008. Months later, Rubio established a consulting firm with a former aide and scored an $8,000 monthly consulting contract with the hospital,'' the Miami Herald wrote in a March 10 article. The Meek campaign has failed to prove its claim. Rubio clearly has spoken against the federal health care bill, which he has repeatedly referred to as a "government takeover" of health care (a characterization we've repeatedly rated Pants on Fire). But Rubio's votes and his comments indicate he has supported government health programs such as Medicaid. Lambasting a health care reform bill isn't the same as declaring that "government shouldn't be in the health care business at all." We rate Meek's claim False. | null | Kendrick Meek | null | null | null | 2010-03-26T17:16:41 | 2010-03-20 | ['Marco_Rubio'] |
pomt-14064 | A three-cents-per-ounce soda tax in Philadelphia "would result in the loss of 2,000 family-sustaining Teamster Union jobs and countless other jobs in the beverage industry." | false | /pennsylvania/statements/2016/may/20/daniel-grace/teamsters-say-soda-tax-would-cost-thousands-jobs-d/ | Most of organized labor -- nearly all -- is just fine with Jim Kenney’s proposed sugary drinks tax. But the Teamsters have a big problem with it. They’re arguing they’ll lose jobs. Opponents to the tax argue higher prices will lead to decreased sales that will eventually trickle down and cause the soda bottling and delivery industry in Philadelphia to collapse. In fact, the loudest voice against the tax (outside lobbyists for the nation’s largest beverage companies) come from the Teamsters. Literally: They organized a ring of 18-wheelers that circled City Hall, horns blaring, to protest the measure. The first-year mayor wants to tax sugary drinks at three cents per ounce -- an unprecedented tax in America -- and use the revenue to fund pre-K, community schools and the city’s ailing pension fund. In a statement, Teamsters Local 830 secretary Daniel Grace wrote that the implementation of a three-cents-per-ounce sugary drinks tax "would result in the loss of 2,000 family-sustaining Teamster Union jobs and countless other jobs in the beverage industry." But there are about 2,000 people working in the beverage industry in Philadelphia in total. So we decided to look a little deeper into this claim. The American Beverage Association has claimed a soda tax in Philadelphia would result in job loss, but didn’t offer an estimate to PolitiFact and referred us to a local firm handling communications for those opposed to the tax. That firm also didn’t have an estimate on job loss and referred us to Grace, the Teamsters head in Philadelphia who didn’t respond to requests for more information. Instead, his spokesman Frank Keel emailed: "The Kenney administration has no idea about the Teamsters’ various roles in the beverage industry and no right to question the very real job losses we'll suffer if this regressive three-cents-an-ounce sugary drinks tax is passed into law." He again reiterated that "we stand to lose as many as 2,000 regional jobs in the beverage industry." Keel didn’t clarify what was meant by "regional," other than to say "there are several Teamsters locals in the Philadelphia regional jurisdiction." The Kenney administration disputes the figures as a "doomsday scenario" and said any job loss suffered due to the implementation of a soda tax will be offset by jobs created by the programming the tax would fund. "If sugary drink prices go up, then consumers will choose tax-exempt beverages like bottled water and diet drinks instead," Kenney’s spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said. "Small businesses will avoid job loss and maintain their profit margins by selling more tax-exempt drinks; and, accordingly, truck drivers will also be fine because they’ll be delivering more bottled water and diet soda." Without their clarification, it’s hard to discern how the Teamsters arrived at their job loss estimate. But economists and studies suggest it’s an overshoot. Robert P. Inman, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school, called the estimate of 2,000 job losses "off the bounds of realistic." About 2,000 jobs would represent nearly the entire soda bottling and delivering industry in Philadelphia, and Inman said it’s inaccurate to assume that a three-cents-per-ounce tax on soda would cause the entire industry to crumble. He said his studies show the city could see a reduction in sales in the $150 million to $200 million range. But Inman said people won’t stop buying bottled drinks. They’ll either switch to bottled beverages like water that’s also bottled and delivered by large beverage companies, or they’ll switch to smaller sized bottles that also still need to be bottled and delivered in the city. "Wherever they’re getting the number from," he said, "it is so far above anything that strikes me as plausible." The Teamsters say they don’t buy the idea that the sale of water, diet sodas and the like will increase enough to cover the loss suffered as a result of the soda tax. In Grace’s statement, he wrote: "Consumers simply don't react that way." A 2014 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found a 20 percent tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (which correlates with about a two-cents-per-ounce tax) would result in small job gains. The study isn’t neutral -- it was funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research program. But it found that jobs lost as a result of the tax were offset by jobs created due to consumers switching to untaxed drinks like bottled water. A study published this year by Mexico’s Center for Health Systems Research found that after the country instituted a soda tax, there was a bump: Overall sales increased, largely due to higher amounts of bottled water being purchased. But then, after a year, sales fell to where they were before the tax was passed. The estimate is also higher than any other made before. When city officials floated a soda tax in 2011, the soda companies themselves predicted a job loss of 1,200 people. Al Taubenberger, a current city councilman and the former head of the Greater Northeast Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, said at the time it would cost the city 1,000 jobs. After Baltimore instituted a two-cents tax on beverage containers last year, about 75 people lost their jobs. But Inman said any job loss estimate when it comes to a soda tax is dubious. Without statistical data -- as no other place in America has instituted a three-cents-per-ounce soda tax -- it’s nearly impossible to accurately calculate predicted job loss. "There’s been no soda tax, so you don’t have any experience who has actually seen what the effects are," he said. "So you end up trying to guess, and you get into this game of ‘your guess is as good as mine.’" Our Rating The Teamsters claim they stand to lose as many as 2,000 jobs in the region and "countless" others if Philadelphia implements a soda tax. This estimate is higher than any estimate floated before and tops what studies show the impact would be. And, at the end of the day, it’s nearly impossible to predict exact job loss as the result of a tax that hasn’t been implemented anywhere else in this way before. Is it within the realm of possibility that 2,000 beverage industry employees would lose their jobs due to the soda tax? Maybe. Is it likely? Not at all. We rate this claim False. | null | Daniel Grace | null | null | null | 2016-05-20T16:52:43 | 2016-05-17 | ['Philadelphia', 'International_Brotherhood_of_Teamsters'] |
snes-05911 | All of the reindeer that pull Santa's sleigh are female. | legend | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/reindeer-games/ | null | Holidays | null | David Mikkelson | null | Are Santa’s Reindeer All Female? | 20 December 2012 | null | ['None'] |
snes-05803 | A photograph shows an insect spy drone that can take photographs and DNA samples. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/insect-spy-drone/ | null | Technology | null | David Mikkelson | null | Insect Spy Drone | 14 August 2012 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00742 | Says Loretta Lynch’s nomination "has been now sitting there longer than the previous seven attorney general nominees combined." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/20/barack-obama/loretta-lynch-nomination-delayed-attorney-generals/ | Democrats have recently been accusing Senate Republicans of obstructing the nomination of Loretta Lynch to succeed Eric Holder as attorney general. Lynch, currently the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, would become the first African-American woman to head the Justice Department, but she’s been awaiting a confirmation vote by the full Senate for several months. While observers expect Lynch to win confirmation, the Senate’s Republican majority has been withholding a vote as leverage to secure other legislative items. In addition, some Republicans have taken issue with Lynch’s refusal to speak out against President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which some in the GOP have called unconstitutional. Obama himself decried the delay at a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on April 17, 2015. Obama called it a "crazy situation where a woman who everybody agrees is qualified, who has gone after terrorists, who has worked with police officers to get gangs off the streets, who is trusted by the civil rights community and by police unions as being somebody who is fair and effective and a good manager -- nobody suggests otherwise -- who has been confirmed twice before by the United States Senate for one of the biggest law enforcement jobs in the country, has been now sitting there longer than the previous seven attorney general nominees combined." We wondered: Has Lynch’s nomination been "sitting there longer than the previous seven Attorney General nominees combined"? We looked at data from the Senate about the past seven nominees. Here’s a rundown, in reverse chronological order: Nominee President Nomination received by Senate Confirmed by Senate Days Eric Holder Obama Jan. 20, 2009 Feb. 2, 2009 13 Michael Mukasey G.W. Bush Sept. 21, 2007 Nov. 8, 2007 17 Alberto Gonzales G.W. Bush Jan. 4, 2005 Feb. 3, 2005 30 John Ashcroft G.W. Bush Jan. 29, 2001 Feb. 1, 2001 3 Janet Reno Clinton Feb. 26, 1993 Mar. 11, 1993 13 William Barr G.H.W. Bush Oct. 25, 1991 Nov. 20, 1991 26 Richard Thornburgh Reagan July 25, 1988 Aug. 11, 1988 17 TOTAL 119 So the previous seven nominees waited a collective 119 days. How about Lynch? Here it gets a little complicated. Lynch’s nomination was initially received in the Senate on Nov. 13, 2014. The Senate -- then under lame-duck Democratic control -- did not move the nomination forward. One obvious problem, beyond a short calendar interrupted by Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks: Rushing the nomination through might have been seen as thwarting the will of the people, who had just voted for a Republican Senate. Then, the Obama administration resubmitted Lynch’s nomination to the newly Republican-held chamber on Jan. 7, 2015. That’s standard procedure when one Congress ends and another begins. If you count the entire period -- from Nov. 13 to April 17, the day of Obama’s remark -- then Lynch had waited for 155 days (and 158 by this article’s publication date). That’s easily more than the 119 logged by the previous seven nominees. However, if you count only the time after the Republicans took over the Senate -- the period for which Obama’s obstructionism argument is strongest -- the delay was 100 days by the time of Obama’s comments, and 103 by this article’s publication. That’s less than the 119 days waited by the previous seven nominees, though it’s possible the wait could ultimately reach or exceed 119 days if no action is taken by early May. Obama does has a point that the delay for Lynch -- however many days it was -- has been unusually long. Of the hundreds and hundreds of nominations submitted in recent decades, only a few have waited for longer than 100 days, according to the Senate Historical Office. Among the more notable waits: • Richard Cordray, nominated for director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2011-13: 1+ years • Miguel Estrada, nominated for U.S. Circuit Court judgeship, 2003: 240 days • Richard Holbrooke, ambassador to the United Nations, 1999: 176 days • Lewis L. Strauss, nominated for Commerce Secretary, 1959: 152 days • Robert Gates, nominated for CIA Director, 1991: 134 days • Robert Bork, nominated for Supreme Court, 1987: 108 days Of these, the only nominee for an official Cabinet position to wait longer than Lynch was Strauss, and that was more than half a century ago. So Lynch’s case is pretty unusual by historical standards. Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a political scientist at George Washington University, sees the argument for starting the clock with the resubmission of Lynch’s nomination, but she added that focusing on that distinction misses the larger point. "Presidents are typically given the right to field their own team," Binder said. "Given Lynch's previous confirmations and stellar credentials, why force her and the president to wait so long for a confirmation vote?" Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political scientist who has studied the Senate, agreed. "There’s a little sleight of hand" in Obama’s comment, "but the overall message is that there’s been a lot of delay and that it’s historic in length." And it’s not as if Republicans were powerless to resist even if the Democratic-controlled Senate had tried to act, said Steven S. Smith, a political scientist and Senate expert at Washington University in St. Louis. "The Democrats could have moved the nomination quickly at the end of the last Congress if the Republicans were not requiring cloture on everything, even nominations, which created a backlog of must-pass legislation and nominations as the Congress came to a close," Smith said. Our ruling Obama said that Lynch’s nomination "has been now sitting there longer than the previous seven attorney general nominees combined." Mathematically, Obama was correct if you start counting from Lynch’s initial nomination, but short by 19 days if you start counting from the resubmission of her nomination to the newly installed Republican-controlled Senate. Either way, it’s clear that Obama has a point that Lynch’s delay has been long by historical standards, especially for a Cabinet nominee. We rate the claim Mostly True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2015-04-20T15:49:30 | 2015-04-17 | ['None'] |
pomt-05101 | If you're one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/29/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-under-his-health-care-law-those-/ | After the Supreme Court upheld the health care bill he’d signed into law, President Barack Obama applauded the decision in a speech at the White House. In that speech, Obama responded to critics, including Mitt Romney, who say the law could force many Americans off their health care plans. "If you're one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance," Obama said. "This law will only make it more secure and more affordable." This is a variation on a line Obama has used before, and which we have rated in the past. For instance, at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Aug. 11, 2009, Obama said, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." We found that overly optimistic given the bill’s details at the time, so we rated it Half True. Later, Obama spoke more specifically. In a speech to a joint session of Congress in September 2009, Obama said, "If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have." We concluded that nothing in Obama’s proposal proactively forced such changes, and the bills clearly intended to leave much of the current health care system in place. So we rated the claim True. The claim Obama made after the Supreme Court decision on June 28, 2012, was a broader statement, and as a result, it’s less accurate. First, a March 2012 study by the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number-crunching arm of Congress, projected that 3 million to 5 million fewer non-elderly people would obtain coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022 than would have been the case before the law was passed. Including those with individually purchased policies enlarges that decline by an additional 1 million to 3 million Americans. CBO’s estimate is broadly in line with a number of other independent estimates. A study by the Urban Institute projected a decline of about 500,000 people. The Lewin Group predicted a decline of about 3 million people. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services actuary pegged the number at about 1 million fewer people. And the RAND Corp. projected that about 4 million more individuals would be covered by employment-based coverage by 2016. Why are these changes occurring? Some will be made voluntarily by Americans seeking better health care options outside of their employer’s plan, but we think it’s reasonable for Obama to ignore these changes in his calculation. Other switches will be involuntary. As we have previously noted, many Americans already lose their current health plan for reasons that have nothing to do with the new law. Your employer may change insurance carriers, for instance, or your insurance carrier may unilaterally modify the terms of your plan. How common is this? The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that in 2007, just over 14 percent of the entire U.S. population "switched" health insurance. However, this underestimates the rate of switching, because the study included people of all ages (including those covered by Medicare, who rarely switch) and because it doesn’t count a switch from one plan to the other within the same insurance company. The latter scenario is common. Mercer, a private consulting firm, found that in each of the years from 2005 to 2008, roughly a quarter of companies said they made changes to their plans that would result in employees paying a greater share of the cost. In 2009 and 2010, it rose to one-third. The number becomes substantial if you add up the workers who lose coverage entirely; who change jobs (voluntarily or involuntarily); who work for companies that change insurance carriers or adjust plan terms significantly; or whose employer’s insurance carrier is merged or bought out. And knowing that many workers every year are already required to change plans provides a different impression than what Obama is suggesting. Our ruling Obama has a reasonable point: His health care law does take pains to allow Americans to keep their health plan if they want to remain on it. But Obama suggests that keeping the insurance you like is guaranteed. In reality, Americans are not simply able to keep their insurance through thick and thin. Even before the law has taken effect, the rate of forced plan-switching among policyholders every year is substantial, and the CBO figures suggest that the law could increase that rate, at least modestly, even if Americans on balance benefit from the law’s provisions. We rate Obama’s claim Half True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2012-06-29T15:59:27 | 2012-06-28 | ['None'] |
vees-00243 | The transcript of Robredo’s speech uploaded on the Office of the Vice President website reads: | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-robredo-flubs-poverty-and-political-dy | Mendoza’s presentation as resource person in a Feb. 15 Senate committee hearing on anti-political dynasty bills, forwarded to the media by the office of Sen. Francis Pangilinan, chair of the committee on electoral reforms and people’s participation, does not support the claim. | null | null | null | Leni Robredo,poverty,political dynasty | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Robredo flubs poverty and political dynasty data | April 25, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06836 | Says state Sen. Alberta Darling is "allowing mercury to harm our children" because she voted against an electronics recycling bill. | mostly false | /wisconsin/statements/2011/aug/05/wisconsin-sierra-club/wisconsin-sierra-club-says-state-sen-alberta-darli/ | The political arm of the Wisconsin Sierra Club is slamming Republican state Sen. Alberta Darling in direct mail pieces that mince few words about the group’s view of her environmental voting record. She "looks the other way while corporate polluters ravage our lakes, our rivers and our air." She’s a "corporate Darling" whose actions are "damaging Wisconsin’s future." The claim that jumped out at us involved a 2009 vote on a bill banning disposal of computers, TVs and other electronics in landfills or incinerators. The "e-waste" recycling bill put the onus on product manufacturers to collect obsolete goods containing heavy metals and keep them out of the trash. "Alberta Darling’s Gone Too Far," the headline in one mailer reads. "Allowing Mercury to Harm Our Children." Another mailer claims Darling "voted to allow mercury and other harmful toxins into landfills where they can seep into our water supply." With these accusations flooding mailboxes in the weeks before the August 9, 2011, recall election between Darling and state Rep. Sandy Pasch, D-Whitefish Bay, we thought we’d take a look. The ban and recycling program passed 23-10 with little fanfare and some bipartisan support in June 2009 and was signed by Gov. Jim Doyle. Five Republican senators joined the majority. Twenty-five states, including Minnesota, now have such programs. Darling felt the fees and recycling requirements on manufacturers were excessive, said Andrew Davis, her campaign manager. In the end, Darling, as the Sierra Club claims, did vote against the bill. But the main thrust of the claim is that her "allowing mercury to harm our children" vote will "allow mercury and other harmful toxins into landfills where they can seep into our water supply." The political director of the Sierra Club, David Blouin, said the claim is justified because the goal of the bill was to keep mercury and other toxins out of the waste supply. "If it’s going into landfills, which all eventually leak, that threatens our water supplies," Blouin said. "Any increase (in mercury waste) via reduction of regulation allows mercury to harm our kids, or potentially could." That’s a strong statement, but with a couple of big "ifs." Let’s examine the evidence. The nonpartisan U.S. General Accountability Office in 2005 reviewed studies on e-waste and found that, by one account, 100 million computers, monitors, and televisions become obsolete each year and that the level is growing. Research showed two major concerns: the loss of natural resources such as copper, and the potential release of toxic substances in the environment. "EPA has identified lead, mercury, and cadmium (which are typically found in computers or monitors), as priority toxic chemicals for reduction under an agency program, the GAO reported. "According to EPA, these toxic substances do not break down when released into the environment and can be dangerous, even in small quantities." EPA’s website says that some electronics (such as color CRT computer monitors, color CRT TV tubes, and smaller items such as cell phones and other "hand-helds") test "hazardous" under federal law. The GAO report says that the Solid Waste Association of North America found an apparent increase in lead from used electronics showing up in municipal landfills. And "tests conducted at the University of Florida indicate that lead leachate from color computer monitors and televisions with CRTs"... could be considered hazardous waste under federal rules. But GAO added that the Florida researcher cautioned that his findings don’t necessarily mean it would leak from a modern landfill. And GAO noted that the Solid Waste Association declares municipal landfills as safe for managing used electronics "without exceeding toxicity limits." The GAO’s bottom line: "Regarding the issue of toxicity, the research we reviewed is unclear on the extent to which toxic substances may leach from used electronics in landfills." We heard the same kind of terminology about possible risks from other experts: A Congressional Research Service report to lawmakers in 2002 said that "disposal of these products, when they become "e-waste" at the end of their useful lives poses major potential environmental problems." "There is a possibility eventually that metals leach out over time," said Sarah Murray, a Wisconsin DNR employee who heads Wisconsin’s e-cycle program. That’s what drove states to implement the laws. The new program ended an exemption for households and electronics disposal. The new program, Murray said, has boosted recycling through drop-off programs: 30 million pounds of various categories of electronics have been recycled since the law kicked in. "It’s hard to say absolutely that there is less in landfills, but people have used it," Murray said. Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the San Francisco-based Electronics TakeBack Coalition, called e-waste laws common sense preventive measures. In Wisconsin, Kyle said, there was little resistance by manufacturers to the bill. "It could cause harm, and it’s a waste of resources," she said. "Can you prove it ever got into the water stream? No, you can’t prove a link because (electronics) are all crunched up with other garbage." We’ll give the final word to Brad Wolbert, Wisconsin DNR’s chief of recycling and solid waste. Wolbert told us it’s true that landfill liners don’t last forever. And it’s true, he said, that mercury can get into landfill gas and escape. And DNR believes it makes sense to divert electronics from landfills. But it’s a stretch to say that harm has already come, or will come, to anyone from metals in discarded electronics, Wolbert said. "Nobody knows," he said. Let’s dig out. There’s little doubt that disposal of electronic products is a serious environmental issue involving hazardous substances. There is an element of truth in that Darling voted against the bill that aims to prevent harm. The Sierra Club mailers, though, push past what is known and attack Darling for "allowing mercury to harm our children." That day could come -- or not. But nobody claims it has already arrived. The statement earns a Mostly False on the Truth-O-Meter. | null | Wisconsin Sierra Club | null | null | null | 2011-08-05T18:45:29 | 2011-07-23 | ['None'] |
chct-00010 | FACT CHECK: Did Trump Earn An 'Overwhelming Majority' Of The Vote In 2016? | verdict: false | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/10/30/fact-check-trump-overwhelming-majority-2016/ | null | null | null | Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 9:32 AM 10/30/2018 | null | ['None'] |
tron-00053 | Somali Muslims Take Over Small Tennessee Town, Terrify Christians | outdated! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/somali-muslims-small-tennessee-town/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | Somali Muslims Take Over Small Tennessee Town, Terrify Christians | Jul 27, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-11730 | Under Trump’s new tax plan … 99.8% of Americans get "not one nickel" in tax cuts. | pants on fire! | /wisconsin/statements/2017/dec/13/kelda-helen-roys/claim-998-americans-wouldnt-get-tax-cut-under-gop-/ | Kelda Helen Roys picked an unusual way to become the latest of the major Democrats to join the 2018 race for governor of Wisconsin. She announced her candidacy on a private Facebook page. Roys, a former Wisconsin state representative from Madison, undoubtedly will be training her sights on GOP Gov. Scott Walker, who is seeking a third term. But on Dec. 1, 2017, six days before her Facebook announcement, Roys used social media in a different way to criticize tax reform efforts by President Donald Trump and other Republicans. She posted this tweet: Never let the GOP tell you again that they support low taxes. They don’t—unless you’re already a billionaire or a massive corporation. #TaxBill (Attached was the graphic shown above.) Many have criticized the proposed GOP tax cuts as favoring the richest. But 99.8 percent of Americans wouldn’t get any tax cut? That’s not correct. Not close. The estate tax Roys told us she was referring to an April 2017 Facebook post by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. That post blasted Trump’s proposal to repeal the estate tax, and it included the figures about the Waltons, the Koch brothers and Trump’s family that were part of Roys’ tweet. Sanders’ post also said "99.8 percent of Americans would not benefit by one nickel under Trump’s plan to repeal the estate tax." So, Sanders was clearly referring to only one tax reform provision: repeal of the estate tax. We’ve rated True a claim by U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., that what some call the "death tax" was paid by only "two out of every 1,000 people" in 2016. That’s the equivalent of 99.8 percent. The tax applies only if an estate’s value exceeds $5.45 million, or $10.9 million, if there is a surviving spouse, and is paid by only about 5,000 estates per year. But Roys’ tweet was making a general reference to Trump’s tax plan -- with no indication that the numbers referred only to the estate tax. And its bottom-line claim was that "under Trump’s new tax plan … 99.8% of Americans" get "not one nickel" in tax cuts. Roys told us she now realizes that what she posted did not make it clear she was referring only to the estate tax. Indeed, a reader could only assume her claim was about the tax plan generally, with the "#TaxBill" reference she used and the "Trump’s new tax plan" in the headline. As for the House and Senate tax reform plans now in play, with Republicans hoping to finalize a plan for Trump’s signature before the end of 2017, several tax-cut provisions benefit the rich specifically. But the tax cuts would be widespread: Both plans would lower individual income tax rates for the middle class, and most people in lower-income households would see cuts, as well. Our rating Roys said that "under Trump’s new tax plan … 99.8% of Americans" get "not one nickel" in tax cuts. Roys said she was referring to the Republican proposal to repeal the federal estate tax, which would only benefit the wealthiest and does not apply to 99.8 percent of Americans. But her tweet made no reference to the estate tax. It gave the impression she was referring to Trump’s overall tax plan. That plan has its critics, including those who believe it gives too much to the rich. Nevertheless, as has been widely reported, the plan offers widespread tax cuts. We rate Roys’ statement Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Kelda Helen Roys | null | null | null | 2017-12-13T06:00:00 | 2017-12-01 | ['United_States'] |
pomt-14896 | I am the only person in this field who is against amnesty. Every other person in this field wants to allow people who are here illegally to be able to stay here, in one form or another. | false | /iowa/statements/2015/nov/08/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-claims-hes-only-candidate-who-doesnt/ | Presidential candidate Rick Santorum cast himself as the only candidate in the 15-person Republican field who opposes legal status for undocumented immigrants. "I am the only person in this field who is against amnesty," Santorum said during remarks at the Republican Party of Iowa’s Growth and Opportunity Party event on Oct. 31. "Every other person in this field wants to allow people who are here illegally to be able to stay here in one form or another." Of the 15 candidates in a GOP race that has focused heavily on immigration, is Santorum really the only one who’s "against" amnesty? As previous fact checks on similar statements have noted, "amnesty" is a tough word to define, and can mean different things to different people. Santorum offers a pretty succinct definition in his statement, though, by noting that other candidates would "allow people who are here illegally to be able to stay here, in one form or another." In a follow-up email, a campaign staffer said Santorum defines amnesty as "providing legal status to illegal immigrants." Fellow presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made similar statements, which we’ve previously found to be Mostly True. Santorum’s statement differs in important ways, however. In August and again in September, Cruz said "a majority" of GOP candidates have supported amnesty — wording that acknowledges some candidates’ views may have shifted over time. Santorum, by contrast, asserts that every other candidate currently supports an immigration policy that could be defined as amnesty. That’s a much higher standard — and a harder one to support. Let’s review each candidate individually, starting with those who have clearly indicated support for citizenship or legal status that meets Santorum’s definition of amnesty: Jeb Bush: The former Florida governor has made clear that he supports immigration reform that would provide legal status to the millions of undocumented people currently living in the U.S. Marco Rubio: The Florida senator was a member of the so-called Gang of Eight who pursued comprehensive immigration reform that included a path to citizenship. He has since taken more hardline views on immigration but still supports legal status for undocumented people currently living in the U.S. Lindsey Graham: The senator from South Carolina was also a member of the "Gang of Eight" who led efforts to pass immigration reform in 2013, and supports a pathway to citizenship. Carly Fiorina: The former Hewlett-Packard CEO said in June that she was open to legal status for the undocumented. John Kasich: The Ohio governor has said he "doesn’t like the idea of citizenship" but believes it may be necessary. George Pataki: The former New York governor supports legal-resident status for undocumented immigrants who have no criminal history and agree to 200 hours of community service. Jim Gilmore: The former Virginia governor supports legal status allowing undocumented immigrants to work in the United States, but opposes a pathway to citizenship. Other candidates supported citizenship or legal status in the past, but have tempered or reversed their views since entering the presidential race: Rand Paul: In 2013, the Kentucky senator told undocumented immigrants in a speech that "We will find a place for you" and implied (according to the New York Times) that he supported a pathway to citizenship. In more recent presidential campaign materials, though, Paul states that he "opposes amnesty" and believes the U.S.-Mexico border must be "secured" before "issuing any visas or starting the legal immigration process." Mike Huckabee: The former Arkansas governor has indicated support for a pathway to citizenship in the past, but used much tougher rhetoric this year, stating that he opposes "amnesty" and is unwilling discuss legal status until the border is secure. Chris Christie: In 2010, the New Jersey governor plainly said he supported a path to citizenship. Last May, however, he said he opposed a pathway to legal status. Donald Trump: Trump’s views on immigration have evolved over time, but his position now is among the toughest in the GOP field. He reportedly was supportive of the DREAM Act in a 2013 meeting with immigration activists and said just last July that he could support a "merit-based" system for allowing undocumented immigrants to remain in the U.S. Since then, though, he’s advocated for deporting all of the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the country. Finally, in direct contradiction to Santorum’s claim, some candidates have simply never supported amnesty as his campaign defines it. Ben Carson: In a 2014 op-ed in National Review, the retired neurosurgeon proposed a guest-worker program for immigrants, but said all participants would have to apply from outside the United States — meaning undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. would have to leave and apply to re-enter. Bobby Jindal: Despite an op-ed endorsing legal status in 2013, the Louisiana governor has repeatedly refused to take a position on the millions of undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S since becoming a presidential candidate. He argues that the border must be secured before devising a policy to address those already living here. Ted Cruz. He has repeatedly stated that he’s the only candidate in the race who has never supported amnesty – statements that have been found to be Mostly True. Cruz voted against the 2013 Senate immigration bill and opposed a 2014 House proposal to grant more limited legal status to undocumented immigrants. Correspondence with Santorum’s campaign team makes clear his statement was aimed at drawing a contrast with Cruz, who’s lately been gaining momentum in the GOP race. A Santorum aide pointed to a series of amendments Cruz offered to the 2013 reform bill, which laid out additional conditions for granting legal status to those who are undocumented. Among other measures, those amendments removed the bill’s pathway to citizenship and made it more challenging for undocumented residents to receive legal status. Santorum’s campaign says those amendments amount to support for amnesty, but they could just as easily be read as efforts to weaken the bill and undermine the amnesty measures it contained. Our ruling Santorum said, "I am the only person in this field who is against amnesty. Every other person in this field wants to allow people who are here illegally to be able to stay here, in one form or another." While it’s true that seven of 15 GOP candidates currently support policies that meet Santorum’s definition of "amnesty," four candidates who once supported such policies no longer do, and two more have consistent records of opposition. The last, Jindal, hasn’t outlined his position. We rate Santorum’s claim False. | null | Rick Santorum | null | null | null | 2015-11-08T08:06:14 | 2015-10-31 | ['None'] |
pomt-12250 | Tax cuts approved and those proposed in his state budget "will exceed $8 billion by the time the budget is done." | true | /wisconsin/statements/2017/jul/12/scott-walker/walker-tax-cuts-will-exceed-8-billion-if-budget-pr/ | While Wisconsin’s budget remains stalled in the Legislature, Gov. Scott Walker is counting on it to increase the total amount of tax cuts generated during his tenure by at least $3.3 billion. In a recent appearance on Jay Weber’s WISN (1130-AM) talk show, Walker claimed that tax cuts approved and those included in his budget proposal "will exceed $8 billion by the time the budget is done." This isn’t the first time the governor has boasted about tax cuts. As part of his 2014 re-election bid, as well as his unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, Walker pledged to reduce the tax burden on Wisconsinites and Americans. In his January State of the State address, Walker touted that state taxes had been cut by a cumulative $4.7 billion since he took office. In 2015, we fact checked that $4.7 billion tax cut claim and found it to be on the money. Is Walker right about the $8 billion mark? Looking at the numbers In our 2015 item, we noted that the vast majority of the $4.7 billion in tax cuts came from the 2011 manufacturing and industry tax cut and a 2013 income and property tax cut. Walker’s new claim still hinges on those 2011 and 2013 tax cuts and since there is a longer period of time involved, the reduction from them is larger as well. The new number comes from estimates by the Wisconsin State Budget Office. Walker’s office provided a copy of the spreadsheet he used to make his claim. Experts at the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau and the nonprofit Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance both looked over the numbers and consider them accurate. Walker spokesman Tom Evenson said that the governor made a conservative estimate. The budget office’s spreadsheet indicates that tax cuts will amount to $8,826,601,340 through fiscal year 2019, meaning Walker gave himself about $800 million in wiggle room. The total includes proposed tax cuts of $500 million from the pending budget, but the bulk of the total comes from existing, ongoing cuts, specifically those related to manufacturing, agriculture and the income tax. Even if the $500 million in cuts is not passed in the final budget, projections suggest he could still reach the $8 billion figure. Whatever the final budget looks like, and by extension the total of tax cuts generated under Walker, hinge on a couple of caveats. One, the budget is still being negotiated, meaning the amount in additional tax cuts he’s seeking for the next two years could change. Walker originally sought $500 million in tax cuts for the upcoming budget and has said he’s willing to negotiate this amount in light of the impasse. Two, the numbers Walker is using are estimates, not final figures. To be sure, tax cuts make up one part of the budget picture. Walker’s budgets have historically included numerous, controversial cuts to education and other areas. However, the claim at hand strictly relates to tax cuts. Our rating Walker said tax cuts approved and those proposed in his pending state budget "will exceed $8 billion by the time the budget is done." The governor made a similar claim in 2015, which we rated True. His continued claims about the size of tax cuts remain on the money. Regardless of the budget passed, the state is on track to have generated more than $8 billion in tax cuts by the end of fiscal year 2019. We rate his claim True See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Scott Walker | null | null | null | 2017-07-12T05:00:00 | 2017-05-17 | ['None'] |
pomt-09790 | The Obama administration's cap-and-trade plan would create "a $1,761 yearly energy tax." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/18/lamar-alexander/alexander-claims-cap-and-trade-will-cost-consumer-/ | It's hard to keep track of all those estimates about how much a cap-and-trade bill would cost American families. So, the latest prediction, coming from Sen. Lamar Alexander and other Republicans, is just adding to the confusion. In a Sept. 16, 2009, press release, the Tennessean said, "American families can’t afford a new $1,761 yearly energy tax." Similar numbers were widely posted on conservative blogs. A story on the Weekly Standard was headlined, "Obama Admin Concedes: Cap and Trade Will Raise Your Taxes by 15%." Those were new numbers to us, so we decided to look into the claim. But first, a little recap. At its heart, cap-and-trade is a simple concept: To slow climate change, the government would set a cap on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. To comply, companies such as electric utilities must either upgrade to cleaner technologies or buy credits — also known as allowances — to continue polluting. The cap-and-trade bill currently making its way through Congress was written by Reps. Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, Democrats from California and Massachusetts, respectively. Their goal is to lower carbon pollution by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. Under their plan, most pollution permits initially would be given out for free. But eventually, companies would have to buy those permits from the government. It's an issue we've explored several times over . Opponents of cap-and-trade argue that forcing industry to buy pollution credits is nothing more than a tax on consumers and business. Firms will have no choice but to pass the cost of buying those permits on to consumers. There has been much debate about how much those costs could be, and it's been difficult to come up with a reliable number because the bills have been changing as they move through the House and the Senate. Republicans have cited numbers as high as $3,000 per year, a claim that when it was combined with a falsehood on health care, earned our Pants on Fire rating. Republicans often refer to it as a tax, although we have found that is incorrect. Only utilities that exceed their limits would have to pay for the allowances, which does not sound to us like a tax on families. Recent estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency are much lower — between $80 and $340 a year, depending on income. The new numbers spring from some Treasury Department documents recently acquired by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, through a Freedom of Information Act request. Some of the documents are from 2008, shortly after the election, according to the group, and others are undated, though they appear to be from early 2009. Nowhere in the documents does the Treasury Department cite the $1,761 figure. It seems Alexander got that number from a Sept. 15, 2009, story by Declan McCullagh, a blogger who writes the "Taking Liberties" column for CBS News. (Our calls to Alexander's office were not returned.) So it's worth noting that Alexander is relying not on a study by an economist, but on an estimate from a blogger. "The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent," McCullagh wrote. "A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year." We contacted McCullagh via e-mail, and he told us that he came up with $1,761 per household annually by simply dividing the number $200 billion by the number of households in the United States. According to the census, there are about 113.5 million households in the country this year. We reviewed the estimate with people involved in the climate change debate who told us there are significant flaws in McCullagh's methodology. Stephen Seidel, vice president for policy analysis and general counsel for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said the math is too simple and doesn't reflect the true impact of the House bill, which specifies that any revenue from the plan be rebated to consumers to offset higher electrical bills they might have to pay. "What [Treasury] was looking at was a situation where 100 percent of the permits were auctioned, and ignored what would be done with revenue," he said. The Waxman-Markey bill "uses revenue to offset cost to consumers." There also have been changes to the bill since that Treasury document was created. Obama originally envisioned that every polluting permit would be sold, starting when the bill was enacted. But in the spirit of compromise, Waxman and Markey scaled back that plan by giving about 85 percent of the permits for free in the early years of the bill's implementation. Also, under the latest version of the Waxman-Markey bill, which passed the House in June, 30 to 40 percent of the revenue would go back to electric utilities to be passed on to consumers to offset higher rates they would have to pay. The money would be passed to consumers through rebates or expanded efficiency programs, and an additional 15 percent of the revenue would go directly to low-income consumers. "The bottom line is that it goes back to the consumers," Seidel said. Seidel said there's another problem with the blogger's report, as quoted by the senator: the Treasury documents report that $100 billion to $200 billion in revenue raised each year by selling those pollution permits we mentioned earlier. Alexander and McCullagh incorrectly portray them as taxes. There are legitimate questions that can be raised about how much the cost might ultimately be passed on to consumers, but it is not correct to refer to the revenue as a tax. And higher energy costs are not a sure thing. Regional cap-and-trade programs in Europe and in the northeast United States show that auctioning most or all credits have actually decreased the cost of energy, said Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. "What we've seen is that there's a lot of volatility," he said. "It's hard to make those projections and say how these things are going to work as a result. That just underscores the difficulty of attaching numbers to these things that people can live with." Alan Krueger, the Obama administration's assistant treasury secretary for economic policy, sent us this statement via e-mail: "The reporting on the Treasury memo is flat-out wrong," he wrote. "Treasury's summary is consistent with public analyses by the EIA [Energy Information Administration], EPA, and CBO, and the reporting and blogging on this issue ignore the fact that the revenue raised from emission permits would be returned to consumers under both administration and legislative proposals." We spoke with Christopher Horner with the Competitive Enterprise Institute about the documents. He conceded that they don't reflect legislation currently under consideration, but he pointed out that the Senate is planning to start from scratch on the climate issue. "Congress writes legislation for one reason," Horner said. "This [document] sets forth the administration's desire and expectations." In the meantime, McCullagh has been fielding criticism about his column. On Sept. 16 he defended his analysis and wrote that revenue returned to consumers in the form of tax cuts and rebates is uncertain. "The tax revenue might end up being directed at income tax cuts (or rescuing kittens and feeding orphans, for that matter), or it could end up being wasted on boondoggles," he wrote. "If it is returned to American citizens, it's unlikely to be a wash: some people will end up paying much more in taxes, some will pay a little more, and some will see a net benefit." But back to Alexander's original claim. His statement that households will pay $1,761 in new taxes every year is based on a blogger's incorrect assumptions and overly simple math. The estimate does not account for revenue that will be returned to consumers in the form of rebates and other efficiency measures. Furthermore, the number is based on old numbers; the Treasury estimate was written on the premise that all permits would be sold, which, ultimately, is not the form that the Waxman-Markey legislation has taken. Finally, both Alexander and McCullagh portray money raised by selling these permits as a tax. We rate Alexander's claim False. | null | Lamar Alexander | null | null | null | 2009-09-18T16:19:25 | 2009-09-16 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
snes-05599 | According to Thomas Homer-Dixon, wind turbines never recoup the energy it takes to build them. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wind-idiot-power/ | null | Politics | null | Dan Evon | null | Do Windmills Create More Energy to Build Than They Ever Produce? | 17 August 2015 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01732 | Robert Pattinson, Kylie Minogue Dating, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/robert-pattinson-kylie-minogue-dating/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Robert Pattinson, Kylie Minogue NOT Dating, Despite Report | 11:46 am, January 25, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-01150 | 100 iPhones Giveaway on Facebook | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/100-iphones-giveaway-on-facebook-is-a-scam/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | 100 iPhones Giveaway on Facebook is a Scam | April 6, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
ranz-00031 | The prison population has been rising under Labour and National… We’ll be at twice the OECD average by 2027, according to our projections. | fiction | https://www.radionz.co.nz/programmes/election17-fact-or-fiction/story/201859218/fact-or-fiction-how-correct-are-corrections-claims | The Opportunities Party co-deputy leader Geoff Simmons (in a video on the party's Facebook page) The prison population in New Zealand actually dipped slightly between 2011 and 2013. Increases since 2013 can largely be attributed to changes in the Bail Act & Sentencing Act. The Bail Act placed tougher conditions on those seeking bail, while also limiting which offences would qualify for bail. Changes to the Sentencing Act were introduced to ensure all victims were offered restorative justice prior to their sentencing. These changes have meant an overall higher proportion of prisoners are remanded in custody (kept in prison while their case is going through the courts) at any given time, as an overall percentage of the total prisoner population. At the top end of projections, the Ministry of Justice has forecast that prison numbers will likely increase by about 19 percent by the 2025/26 year. Inside Paremoremo PrisonPhoto: RNZ / Claire Eastham-Farrelly New Zealand’s total number of incarcerated persons are the seventh highest per capita in the OECD at a rate of 210 prisoners per 100,000 people, while the OECD average hovers around 140 per 100,000 people. Using the ministry's projections, the imprisonment rate would rise to 232 per 100,000 (accounting for a general population increase) by 2025/26 - about 66 percent higher than the current OECD average but not double. The ministry has not published its projections for the 2027 year. | Elections | Geoff Simmons | null | null | Fact or Fiction: How correct are corrections claims? | 20 September 2017 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01545 | Harrison Ford Called Donald Trump “Brilliant” And “Compassionate”? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/harrison-ford-donald-trump-fake-news/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Harrison Ford Called Donald Trump “Brilliant” And “Compassionate”? | 1:48 pm, February 19, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-10867 | We live in "a time of historically low violent crime rates and historically high gun ownership rates nationally." | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/aug/29/fred-thompson/researchers-split-about-whether-guns-reduce-crime/ | Fred Thompson suggests that gun ownership reduces crime, but his commentary is backed by little more than disputed NRA statistics. In a posting on his Web site on Aug. 21, Thompson provided his take on the controversy with a commentary about New York City and its efforts to sue gun makers. "Ironically, all of this comes at a time of historically low violent crime rates and historically high gun ownership rates nationally," Thompson wrote. He went on to cite National Rifle Association figures. His statistics fall short in several ways. First, gun ownership rates are extremely difficult to calculate. The NRA used 8-year-old federal estimates and then used gun purchase figures to assume there are additional guns in the United States. However, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said it is impossible to estimate how gun ownership has grown because there is no national gun registry. Violent crime had been at historic lows, dropping between 1993 and 2004. However, the FBI reports that the estimated rate of violent crime increased 2.3 percent in 2005 and 1.3 percent in 2006. Advocates on both sides of the issue have used the statistics to argue their own cases. The neutral Congressional Research Service declared in May 2005 that there's not enough evidence on either side: "According to a recent study...none of the existing sources of statistics provide either comprehensive, timely or accurate data with which to definitively assess whether there is a causal connection between firearms and violence." | null | Fred Thompson | null | null | null | 2007-08-29T00:00:00 | 2007-08-21 | ['None'] |
pomt-04330 | 6,400 Ohioans ... lost manufacturing jobs in the month of September. | mostly true | /ohio/statements/2012/oct/26/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-camp-says-6400-ohioans-lost-manufactur/ | The national unemployment rate has ticked down slowly -- much too slowly, says Mitt Romney’s campaign -- and Ohio’s economy has generally grown. Its unemployment rate is even 0.8 percent below the national average. But the unsteadiness of the recovery, even in Ohio, underlined a recent claim by the campaign for Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate. On Oct. 22, the spokesman, Robert Reid, said in an email to reporters: "Vice President Biden may believe there is a ‘renaissance’ in manufacturing happening in the Buckeye state, but don’t tell that to the 6,400 Ohioans who lost manufacturing jobs in the month of September." Could this job loss be true? After all, didn’t the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services announce just a few days earlier that the state’s unemployment rate had gone down yet again, reaching 7.0? The answer to both questions is yes. According to the monthly survey of businesses that state and federal officials use to assess job gains or losses, Ohio’s lost 12,800 non-farm jobs in September. Jobs in manufacturing accounted for 6,400 of those job, or half the loss. This was a preliminary figure and it could be adjusted upward or downward in the coming months as more surveys are turned in. The survey, called Current Employment Statistics, is conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in conjunction with ODJFS. Sure, that seems inconsistent with the reported drop in Ohio’s unemployment, from 7.2 percent to 7.0 percent. But as many Americans have learned this year, the two numbers do not always move in the same direction. Here’s why: The unemployment rate is based on a a different and broader survey. It is not a survey of businesses. Rather, it is a civilian survey, called the Current Population Survey, and it asks people whether they are in the workforce or looking for a job. Each time someone stops looking for work -- whether it’s because he or she has retired, has given up on looking, has become self-employed or has some other reason -- that is one fewer person counted as unemployed. The unemployment rate has other factors, including the number of people who come of age and start looking for jobs. That’s why the opposite trend of what occurred in September sometimes happens: The country can gain jobs yet the unemployment rate might still rise. Economists say that a healthy economy must add enough jobs to at least keep up with adult population growth. As for the Romney spokesman’s comment, an article in The Plain Dealer by business reporter Olivera Perkins made a similar point, sans politics. It said, "Ohio’s unemployment rate down to 7 percent, though state lost jobs." Speaking to the conflicting direction of the trends -- that is, employers who reported they had fewer jobs, yet people in the workforce who nevertheless said they were, in fact, employed -- Hiram College economics professor Ugur Aker told the newspaper that gains in self-employment could explain the difference. "What is happening is that there are wage and salary jobs being eliminated," Aker told The Plain Dealer. "On the other hand, it looks like jobs are increasing because there are more people working for themselves. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? I don't know." Economic research analyst George Zeller, noting that manufacturing "has been driving this recovery," told the newspaper that the losses "are very bad news." The numbers cited by the Romney campaign were confirmed by ODJFS and the BLS. They were reported by other media, too. Romney’s spokesman made the statement in an attempt to lay political blame. Voters in Ohio will have their say on that soon enough. PolitiFact Ohio is only ruling on the accuracy of the claim about job losses in manufacturing. The statement is accurate, but some additional information is needed to provide clarification. Reid, the Romney spokesman, was citing losses from one month -- losses that totaled just shy of 1 percent. To get a better sense of changes in manufacturing employment during President Barack Obama’s term to date, consider these monthly figures provided by ODJFS and BLS. Here is what the numbers and a calculator show: From the start of Obama’s term in January 2009 to the lowest point for manufacturing in Ohio, November 2009, the state lost 9.75 percent of its manufacturing jobs. From the start of Obama’s term through the latest month reported, September, Ohio has lost nearly 2.8 percent of its manufacturing jobs. Why a lower number? Factory jobs started coming back slowly at the very end of 2009, though not robustly enough to make up for the early losses. From the lowest point for manufacturing in Ohio (November 2009) through September, a period of 34 months, Ohio has gained 7.7 percent more manufacturing jobs. What’s this tell you? That many but not all of those factory jobs lost during Obama’s term have come back. In that single sentence you have both parties’ economic messages. Curious to see another trend, we looked back further. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but you probably know this anyway: Ohio was losing manufacturing jobs for a long time. The number fell during both of George W. Bush’s terms, with Ohio losing a third of its manufacturing jobs by the end of the eight years. During Bill Clinton’s first term, the number of those jobs rose by 4.2 percent, but declined by 2.7 percent in his second term. So was the Romney campaign cherry picking its figure, given these broader trends? You might argue that, but as The Plain Dealer reported, the latest monthly jobs report troubled economists, too. It was just one monthly report and more information will be required to know if there is a trend, but it suggested a weaker recovery. And, combined with the latest unemployment number, it raised questions about the trade-offs of self-employment, perhaps at lower wages. On the Truth-O-Meter, the claim rates Mostly True. | null | Mitt Romney | null | null | null | 2012-10-26T06:00:00 | 2012-10-22 | ['Ohio'] |
pomt-10075 | Mr. Warren compared same-sex couples to incest. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/13/barney-frank/warren-gay-marriage-and-incest/ | One of the first controversies faced by freshly elected Barack Obama came with his selection of evangelical Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his Jan. 20 inauguration. Although viewed by some as a moderate, Warren's outspoken support of California's recently passed Proposition 8 — which amended the state constitution to ban gay marriage — angered some in Obama's liberal base, particularly those who support gay marriage. In the days after Obama announced that Warren would deliver the invocation, one of the popular sound bites coming from opponents was an accusation that Warren recently likened gay couples to incest. Leading the charge was U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who is openly gay. "Mr. Warren compared same-sex couples to incest," Frank said in an interview on CNN's Late Edition on Dec. 21, 2008. "I found that deeply offensive and unfair." Frank repeated his objections to Obama's pick during an interview with MSNBC the following day: "I think Rick Warren's comments comparing same-sex relationships to incest is deeply offensive, wildly inaccurate and very socially disruptive." The comments Frank is referring to come from an interview Warren gave in mid December to Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet. Context is the critical thing here, so we'll provide a generous helping of Warren's statements to give you a complete view: Waldman: Do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships? Warren: I don't know if I'd use the term there. But I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don't believe we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles, or whatever stuff like that. So I fully support equal rights. Waldman: What about partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation? Warren: "Not a problem with me ... I'm not opposed to that as much as I'm opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year-old definition of marriage. I'm opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I'm opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I'm opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage." Q: "Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?" A: "Oh, I do. For 5,000 years marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion...as a man and a woman." We'll note here that Warren's statement about the 5,000-year history of marriage seems wrong on its face, given that several cultures and religions have accepted polygamy. But we're not rating that statement here, just the allegation that he compared gay couples to incest. On the one hand, Warren did throw out examples of brothers and sisters marrying (incest) or an adult marrying a child (pedophilia) in the context of explaining his opposition to gay marriage. But they were cited as examples of unions outside his definition of marriage. And he agreed that same-sex couples would be another. Warren did not, however, compare "same-sex relationships to incest" or say they are similar. He only said they all fall outside his definition of marriage. That's an important distinction. In fact, Warren noted that he is okay with partnership benefits for same-sex couples. Later in the interview, Warren noted that he has "many gay friends. I've eaten dinner in gay homes. No church has probably done more for people with AIDS than Saddlebrook Church. Kay (his wife) and I have given millions of dollars out of the Purpose Driven Life helping people who got AIDS through gay relationships. So they can't accuse me of homophobia. I just don't believe in the redefinition of marriage." For his part, Obama opposes gay marriage, though he supports extending "full and equal rights and benefits to same-sex couples under both state and federal law." And Obama opposed Proposition 8, calling it "divisive and discriminatory." While noting that he differs with Warren on some issues, Obama defended Warren's selection, saying, "During the course of the entire inaugural festivities, there are going to be a wide range of viewpoints that are presented. And that's how it should be, because that's what America is about." Frank agreed that "everybody should speak, and there could be a dialogue." But, he said, "giving that kind of mark of approval and honor to someone who has frankly spoken in ways that I and many others have found personally very offensive, I thought that was a mistake for the president-elect to do." You can argue the appropriateness of Obama's choice, and you can argue the appropriateness of Warren citing examples of incest in the context of explaining his opposition to gay marriage, but Frank distorts Warren's words when he says Warren "compared same-sex couples to incest." He didn't. He just cited them as types of relationships that should not be eligible for marriage. We rule his comment Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False. | null | Barney Frank | null | null | null | 2009-01-13T20:07:34 | 2008-12-21 | ['None'] |
snes-05290 | 'Making a Murderer' subject Steven Avery was found unresponsive in his prison cell. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/steven-avery-unresponsive/ | null | Junk News | null | David Mikkelson | null | FALSE: Steven Avery, 53, Found Unresponsive in His Prison Cell | 31 January 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02078 | Did Donald Trump Assault a Marine Then Rip Off His Cover? | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-marines-hat/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Did Donald Trump Assault a Marine Then Rip Off His Cover? | 13 July 2017 | null | ['None'] |
tron-02498 | What I am, an ad in the Washington Post written by a passionate Republican | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/whatiam/ | null | miscellaneous | null | null | null | What I am, an ad in the Washington Post written by a passionate Republican | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['The_Washington_Post'] |
pomt-09031 | You know, when this thing first hit, I signed a declaration of emergency for the six counties that were directly affected, impacted in the Panhandle, then I extended that not long thereafter down into Sarasota County. | mostly true | /florida/statements/2010/jul/06/charlie-crist/charlie-crists-oil-response-evolved-over-time/ | The Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico on the night of April 20, 2010. A week later, on April 29, as the first of many oil-soiled birds were being washed down, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist also made an announcement that day. He was leaving the Republican party to run as an independent for U.S. Senate. In the weeks since waves of oil began seeping into the Gulf of Mexico, Crist has appeared on the nightly news on a near-daily basis to discuss the oil crisis. He regularly tours the Panhandle. He meets with affected business owners. And, he highlights his response to the oil disaster whenever he is in a large, bustling room. "You know, when this thing first hit, I signed a declaration of emergency for the six counties that were directly affected, impacted in the Panhandle," he told a crowd at the Florida Association of Counties conference in Tampa on July 1, 2010. "Then, I extended that not long thereafter down into Sarasota County. And then we started to hear about the loop current -- I mean we've all become sort of mini-experts in the study of this spill -- after hearing about the looper and the possibility that this could get all the way down into Monroe County and even up, you know, to Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, we extended that emergency declaration through Palm Beach County." Crist's message: I've been getting things done. But, we wondered, was Crist's response really that nimble? It wasn't until the day after he announced he was running as an independent that Crist signed a 6-page executive order declaring a state of emergency for six Florida counties: Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, Walton, Bay and Gulf. In that April 30 order, he also tapped the state Department of Environmental Protection to coordinate the response effort. Crist added 13 more counties on May 3, extending the state of emergency south along the Gulf Coast through Sarasota County. The proclamations were good enough for Florida, but Crist still needed to let the federal government know Florida was in crisis if he wanted federal help. That step didn't come until more than two weeks after the rig explosion with a May 6 letter to President Barack Obama requesting a $50 million disaster grant from the federal Department of Labor. He later requested help from the federal Small Business Administration on May 12, which allowed business owners to qualify for federal grants. A month after the explosion, Crist extended the state of emergency further south and back up the Atlantic coast through Palm Beach County. In all, the May 20 executive order brought the number of Florida counties in a declared state of emergency to a total of 26. Crist explained his decision by citing reports that oil from the spill had entered into a loop current that could potentially carry it out to other counties bordering the gulf and the Atlantic seaboard. Crist broke out his special executive order pen one more time on June 18, extending the state of emergency through Aug. 28. "Depending on weather and ocean currents, this ecological disaster poses a potential threat to Florida's entire coastline," read the order. We weren't sure how Crist would define "when this thing first hit." For context, we looked at what the governors did in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the other gulf states immediately threatened by the oil spill. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley also declared a state of emergency on April 30, but his covered the entire state. More recently, Riley reached out for some divine help when he declared Sunday, June 27, a "Day of Prayer," and urged his residents to ask God for a solution. April 30 was also a productive day for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who declared a state of emergency in all areas affected by the oil leak, including, "but not limited to, Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties, the littoral areas of these counties, any state, national or international waters through which state or federal personnel shall traverse or operate in responding to this oil leak." Then there's Jindal, one of the few government leaders whose outspokenness on the oil leak might rival Crist's. Jindal was the first of the four gulf coast governors to declare a state of emergency. His came April 29 and covered the entire state of Louisiana. That same day, Jindal shared his declaration with the federal Small Business Administration, the first step in ensuring small businesses in areas ravaged by the oil spill would be eligible for low-interest loans of up to $2 million to cover basic operating expenses. He also asked that the Small Business Administration temporarily suspend loan repayments for coastal businesses impacted by the spill that had received earlier loans related to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Ike and Gustav. So, that means Crist was mostly in step with his peers when he declared a state of emergency in six Florida counties 10 days after the oil rig explosion. And he did go on to expand the emergency declaration to include 20 more counties within a month. On the other hand, of the four states closest to the oil disaster, Florida is still the only state with a limited emergency area. And, unlike Jindal, Crist did not immediately seek financial help from the federal government. Crist's initial emergency proclamation was timely and he did continue to expand it. But given that he didn't immediately reach out for federal dollars and that other gulf governors beat him to the punch by issuing broad state of emergency proclamations from the beginning -- we give him a Mostly True. | null | Charlie Crist | null | null | null | 2010-07-06T18:49:44 | 2010-07-01 | ['None'] |
pomt-06109 | Says Rick Santorum voted for the Bridge to Nowhere. | mostly true | /texas/statements/2012/jan/02/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-rick-santorum-voted-bridge-nowhere/ | A day before the Iowa caucuses, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential campaign posted online a video that portrays rival candidate Rick Santorum as a supporter of pork-barrel spending during the 16 years he served in Congress. Calling Santorum "a porker's best friend," the video, using on-screen text, gives several examples, including that "Santorum voted to spend millions on the Bridge to Nowhere." Perry’s campaign made the same charge in a radio ad that it released in Iowa on Dec. 29, 2011. Mimicking the format of a game show, Perry's ad kicks off with an announcer asking: "Which Republican running for president voted for the Bridge to Nowhere earmark?" The "correct" answer comes from contestant "Susie from Des Moines," who responds by naming Santorum. (He represented Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate from 1995 to 2007 after serving two terms in the U.S. House.) We wondered whether Perry was right that Santorum had voted for the now-infamous bridge project? Perry's charge takes us back to 2005, when the nearly $400 million plan to connect the Alaskan city of Ketchikan (population about 8,000) with Gravina, an island with a few dozen residents and an airport, became an object of national ridicule and a symbol of federal pork-barrel spending. Critics pointed to the bridge plan as evidence that congressional earmarking — the setting aside of federal money for pet projects — had run amok, and on Nov. 6, 2005, Parade magazine highlighted the project in a cover story with the headline "Are Your Tax Dollars Being Wasted?" The project was again thrust into the spotlight during the 2008 presidential contest. The Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, used the bridge to highlight his record of fighting against pork-barrel spending. And perhaps most memorably, McCain's running mate, then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, said repeatedly during the campaign that she "told Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that Bridge to Nowhere" — a statement rated Half True by the PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter. As backup for Perry's statement that Santorum had voted for the project, the governor's campaign points to a "presidential white paper" about Santorum by the Washington-based anti-tax group The Club for Growth. The assessment of Santorum's record on economic issues in the U.S. Senate concludes that "on the whole," he was "above average." However, the paper says Santorum was weak in some areas, including on spending during the Bush administration. Santorum "voted for the 2005 highway bill that included thousands of wasteful earmarks, including the Bridge to Nowhere," the paper says, referring to a $286.5 billion federal highway and transportation bill that included about $225 million for the Gravina Island bridge project. On July 29, 2005, the U.S. Senate passed the legislation with a vote of 91-4. Santorum was among the backers of the bill. But does that prove correct Perry's statement that Santorum voted for the Bridge to Nowhere? Not quite. In other fact-checks, PolitiFact has dismissed that claim because the Senate wasn't voting yes-or-no just on the Alaska bridge. Funding for the bridge project was less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the spending in the transportation bill. However, the Club for Growth white paper points to another Senate vote related to the bridge project that took place about three months later: "In a separate vote, Santorum had the audacity to vote to continue funding the Bridge to Nowhere rather than send the money to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina." The paper was referring to a vote on an amendment in a later transportation appropriations bill that called for stripping some funding from the Bridge to Nowhere project. The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., sought to redirect part of the funding to a project to rebuild the Twin Spans bridge between New Orleans and Slidell, La., which had been damaged during Hurricane Katrina. The amendment failed 82-15. Santorum was in the majority, voting against killing the funding for the Bridge to Nowhere. After the amendment's defeat, lawmakers hashing out differences between the House and Senate measure of the appropriations bill removed the earmark for the bridge project and instead provided the money directly to Alaska's transportation department to spend on whatever projects it saw fit. That funding still could have gone to the Ketchikan-Gravina Island span, but ultimately the bridge was never built. After Perry's earmark-related attack in Iowa, Santorum defended his record in interviews. Speaking with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on Dec. 29, Santorum said: "If you look at the Constitution, the Constitution gives the power of the purse to the Congress, and the Congress is the one that's supposed to spend the money. And so the idea that earmarks are somehow against the Constitution or something that is illicit that a congressman … shouldn't do is just simply factually incorrect." Santorum also said that since leaving Congress, he has defended his earmarks because he is proud of the money that he set aside "for things that were priorities in my state, instead of having bureaucrats do that." But, Santorum said, he now recognizes that Americans view earmarks as "a pox upon the Congress" and as president, he would oppose them. The same day, Santorum addressed Perry's "Bridge to Nowhere" charge specifically, according to a Des Moines Register news article. The story says Santorum, speaking to reporters while on the campaign trail in Iowa, acknowledged that some earmarks are controversial. "People say that I voted for the Bridge to Nowhere," Santorum said, according to the Register story. "I did. I went with the federalist argument, which is: 'Who am I in Pennsylvania to tell Alaska what their highway priorities should be?' You had a city that was separated from its airport and of course in Alaska, you have to travel by air, and you had to have a ferry. There were times when they couldn’t get across." Our ruling Perry said that as a senator, Santorum voted for the Bridge to Nowhere. Santorum did, a charge that he hasn't disputed. He voted for a giant spending bill that included money for the bridge project and then later voted to maintain federal funding for the project. On the Texas Truth-O-Meter, an accurate statement that could benefit from such clarification or additional material is considered Mostly True. And so it is. | null | Rick Perry | null | null | null | 2012-01-02T17:25:48 | 2012-01-02 | ['Rick_Santorum'] |
hoer-01020 | Yet Another Tesco Free Voucher Survey | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/yet-another-tesco-free-voucher-survey-scam-hitting-facebook/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Yet Another Tesco Free Voucher Survey Scam Hitting Facebook | April 14, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
abbc-00261 | Estimates how much combined government funding each school needs to meet its students' educational needs. | in-between | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-20/fact-check-gonski-reforms-sector-blind/8719386 | Estimates how much combined government funding each school needs to meet its students' educational needs. | ['alp', 'liberals', 'education', 'australia'] | null | null | ['alp', 'liberals', 'education', 'australia'] | Fact check: Can the Gonski 2.0 reforms be described as 'sector-blind'? | Mon 16 Jul 2018, 2:28am | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00991 | There haven't been tax cuts for the rich in Rhode Island. | false | /rhode-island/statements/2015/feb/08/nicholas-mattiello/house-speaker-nicholas-mattiello-says-rhode-island/ | Taxes were one of the topics that WJAR-TV reporter Bill Rappleye raised when he interviewed House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello during the Jan. 18 edition of "10 News Conference." Rappleye referred to a report showing that poor people in Rhode Island pay more taxes per person than in other states. Then he asked Mattiello, " Is there a way to change that?" The speaker said the solution was to, "Lift up the middle class." "Our middle class revenue is just not what it should be," Mattiello said. "Let's lift everybody up and we'll be competitive with other states. So that's my approach for dealing with it, not changing rates and not charging our more successful folks more money. I think the middle class has been squeezed for a long time." "And the tax cuts for the rich don't contribute to that?" Rappleye said. "There haven't been tax cuts for the rich. I'm not sure when folks refer to that, I'm not sure what they're referring to. So if you can point to the tax cuts for the rich, I'll be happy to consider that," Mattiello said. "But, realistically, there's never been tax cuts for the rich." That sparked an immediate request from a few readers to have PolitiFact Rhode Island check his assertion. One reason: in 2010, the General Assembly, when Mattiello was House Majority Leader, lowered the top tax rate for the state's highest earners. That rate was 9.9 percent for income that exceeded $336,550 and in state-by-state rankings, it stood out like stink bomb at a flower show. So the legislature, with the blessing of then-Governor Donald Carcieri, brought the top rate down to 5.99 percent. Thus was born the idea that Rhode Island had given a big tax break for the rich, prompting calls by some legislators to bump the rate up to 7.99 percent for all earnings above $250,000. But, as in all things taxes, it's not that simple. We'll return to the 2010 changes. But first we should travel further back to 2006, a year before Mattiello joined the General Assembly and the year a tax overhaul passed that was designed to increasingly benefit the wealthy Instead of the top tax rate of 9.9 percent, the legislature and then-Governor Donald Carcieri gave taxpayers the option of paying a flat 8.0 percent of their adjusted gross income if they gave up taking credits and deductions. Each subsequent year, that tax cap dropped another 0.5 percentage points. It would have fallen to 5.5 percent if the General Assembly hadn't done its 2010 tax overhaul. When it was proposed, the 2006 change wasn't billed as just a tax cut for the rich. In announcing the plan, then-House Majority Leader Gordon Fox told the conservative Heartland Institute, "This will undoubtedly help the state's highest wage-earners. But I am proud that this tax package also helps low-income wage earners and the middle class." As Larry Berman, Fox's spokesman pointed out to Heartland at the time, the plan was designed to entice the well-to-do. "These are people making $250,000 and above, and when they want to create jobs, they look at Massachusetts and see a 5.3 percent income tax, Connecticut with a 5.0 percent tax, and Rhode Island with a 9.9 percent tax. They make a choice on where to move and create jobs, and that difference in tax rates is a big factor in the choice they make." So this was clearly an effort to entice the rich and bring them to -- or keep them in -- Rhode Island. In each succeeding year, as the percentage fell, more well-off taxpayers took advantage of it. So by the time the 2010 tax law lowering the top rate was passed, many of the rich weren't paying taxes at the 9.9 percent rate anyway. On the other side of the ledger, in 2009 the rich took a hit when the legislature approved another bill, one that taxed capital gains, which is the profit from the sale of stocks and other investments, as regular income. Capital gains had been taxed at a special reduced rate. Now back to the 2010 legislation, and the tax rates now in effect. Those tax changes did more than lower the top rate. It rejiggered the whole tax structure. Instead of the 9.9 percent rate kicking in for income that exceeded $336,550, the new 5.99 percent rate applied to all income above $135,000. Five levels of taxation were transformed into three. The standard deduction went up. So did the personal exemption. The legislation also phased out most credits and itemized deductions as a person's income rose, and shifted some of the tax burden to non-residents. When we asked Mattiello's office about the Speaker's claim, Berman sent us a projection from the state's Office of Revenue Analysis done when the changes were being considered. It used tax data from 2008 and compared what people would pay under the old and new systems. We also looked at a later analysis done at the end of 2010, after passage. Both showed the same pattern. Here are the December 2010 numbers: Adjusted gross income Change in average tax paid Number of returns $1 to $12,500 $13 decrease 109,181 $12,501 to $20,000 $29 decrease 61,217 $20,001 to $30,000 $35 decrease 68,407 $30,001 to $40,000 $21 decrease 55,383 $40,001 to $55,000 $24 decrease 62,776 $55,001 to $75,000 $64 decrease 63,230 $75,001 to $110,000 $91 decrease 70,347 $110,001 to $175,000 $350 decrease 48,206 $175,001 to $250,000 $113 increase 14,322 $250,001 to $500,000 $152 increase 9,791 $500,001 to $1 million $955 increase 3,561 $1 million to $5 million $2,276 increase 2,276 $5 million to $10 million $5,159 increase 269 Over $10 million $9,562 increase 340 So compared to what the average tax bill would have been without the changes, higher-income taxpayers -- those with adjusted gross incomes of over $175,000 -- actually paid more. The average filer in that group (representing about 8 percent of filers) paid $574 extra compared to what they would have paid under the previous system. So the rich did not get a big tax break from this law. Finally, there was a major change in the estate tax that passed in 2014. Under the old system, if an estate was worth $921,655 or less, no estate tax was assessed. But if the value was even a dollar higher, the full value of the estate was taxed. Under the 2014 change, the tax only kicks in when the estate is valued at more than $1.5 million. More importantly, the all-or-nothing provision, sometimes called "the cliff," was eliminated and only the portion in excess of $1.5 million is subject to the tax. In addition, the limit is now tied to inflation. The change translates into a collective tax savings of $64,400 to the heirs of someone whose estate is worth more than $1.5 million. The degree to which this change benefited the rich is a matter of debate. If you believe, to paraphrase Mitt Romney, "Estates are people too," than this was a big tax break for the wealthy, saving them up to $64,400 in taxes per estate. In addition, supporters of the proposal said it was designed to prevent wealthy people from leaving the state before they die. Wealth tends to run in families, and not a lot of poor people were lobbying for this tax break. But just because someone's a millionaire doesn't mean that their heirs are rich, and the heirs are the ones who get extra inheritance, thanks to the new law. "The middle income got the best break because they got rid of the cliff," said John Simmons, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council. "I think the old system was hurting a lot of lower income people," said Patricia Thompson, former chairwoman of the federal and state taxation committee of the Rhode Island Society of Certified Public Accountants. "The wealthy will get a break because the exemption is raised to $1.5 million just as everyone else would, but I wouldn't say it was geared to them at all." Thompson and other people we interviewed suggested that the best source of information on this would come from Paul Dion, chief of the Office of Revenue Analysis for the Rhode Island Department of Revenue. But Gov. Gina Raimondo's office refused to make Dion available for an interview. Our ruling House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello said, "There haven't been tax cuts for the rich" in Rhode Island. He later specified a time frame: Never. The 2010 tax changes -- which dropped the top tax rate by four percentage points -- is often regarded as a tax cut for the rich, but the wealthy actually paid more. They also paid more after the 2009 change, which called for taxing capital gains as ordinary income. But we only had to go back to 2006 to find tax legislation that argues against his point. Although no longer in effect, it imposed an ever-lower cap on state taxes that benefitted more and more rich people as the tax cap dropped lower and lower. And the 2014 change in the estate tax meant that wealthier estates weren't taxed as heavily. Overall, we believe the rich disproportionately benefit from this change even though all heirs, paupers and princes alike, get the same break. On balance, the PolitiFact Rhode Island judges rate his statement False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) (Corrections: Gordon Fox was House Majority Leader when he talked to the Heartland Institute about the 2006 tax changes. The initial version of this item incorrectly said he was House Speaker. Donald Carcieri was the governor when the 2010 tax changes were passed. The initial version said it was Lincoln Chafee.) | null | Nicholas Mattiello | null | null | null | 2015-02-08T00:01:00 | 2015-01-18 | ['Rhode_Island'] |
pomt-06176 | The Obama administration just issued instructions that terrorism training should not involve any reference to Islam. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/14/newt-gingrich/newt-gingrich-says-obama-administration-issued-ins/ | Republicans on the presidential campaign trail regularly suggest that President Barack Obama is soft on terrorism and too tolerant of what they say is an enduring threat from Islamic radicals. Obama batted away such appeasement charges at a Dec. 8, 2011, news conference, but the insinuation arose again during a two-person foreign policy debate on Dec. 12, 2011, between former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. Gingrich said American efforts to combat terrorism under Obama had no coherent theme, unlike the Cold War-era theory of "supporting everybody who is not a communist." In fact, Gingrich said, "The Obama administration just issued instructions that terrorism training should not involve any reference to Islam. Well, that would be like talking about the Cold War and not mentioning communism. How do you describe ‘radical Islamist’ if you're not allowed to say ‘radical Islamist?’ It's a willful denial of reality on a scale that is breathtaking." Could Gingrich be right on this one? His campaign spokesman, R.C. Hammond, referred PolitiFact to several documents Hammond said were germane. Most critically, Hammond cited a speech by Deputy Attorney General James Cole on Oct. 19, 2011, at a "Conference on Post-9/11 Discrimination," which followed revelations by Wired that training material used by the FBI unfairly stereotyped Muslims. One of the documents, for example, referred to the Prophet Mohammad as a "cult leader," and said jihad and "Just War" traditions were part of the "strategic themes and drivers" in Islamic law. "The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream," the document stated. The report of the loaded language about Islam drew criticism from the Arab American Institute and other groups, and Cole’s speech appeared to be a response. Cole warned of "stereotyping" and said, "All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim. As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror." Even more to the point, Cole said, "We also are working comprehensively to ensure that every aspect of the Department’s work reflects sensitivity and respect for all peoples and faiths. As just one example, to that end, I recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security, to make sure they reflect that sensitivity." While the speech did not ban "any reference to Islam," Hammond, Gingrich’s spokesman, also referred to a report on Cole’s speech in the right-leaning The Daily Caller, which said the "Obama administration was pulling back all training materials used for the law enforcement and national security communities, in order to eliminate all references to Islam that some Muslim groups have claimed are offensive." In a phone interview the day after Gingrich made his claim, Justice Department spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said Cole’s speech never did what Gingrich asserted it had. "No one has ever said we are barring the word ‘Islam’ from training materials," she said. And James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, who had raised concerns about the FBI material, also said Gingrich was overstating what had taken place. "There’s been no order, no banning. No decision has been made, other than let’s evaluate and see whether (the training materials) are helping or hurting," said Zogby, who said he discussed the matter with someone in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division after being contacted by PolitiFact. "An evaluation does not constitute a banning." Asked whether he believed a discussion of Islam was appropriate in the counter-terror training, Zogby, a Catholic with a Ph.D. in Islamic studies, said yes, because "it’s a misunderstood religion, we need to know more about it … Should law enforcement be studying the religion? Of course they should, but they should be studying it as it is and not as bigots imagine it." While the Justice Department denial certainly calls into question Gingrich's statement, Hammond, his spokesman, also cited a Talking Points Memo story on the training material controversy that focused on Dwight Holton, the former U.S. attorney in Oregon. Holton, who was in office when Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested in November 2010, after allegedly trying to detonate what he believed was a car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., told TPM, "I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and the Department of Justice stands for." The Gingrich camp highlighted a portion of that story that said the 37-page complaint against Mohamud, a Somali-American, did not state that he was a Muslim. Holton said what was "relevant is the violence," not his religion. Some other evidence to consider: a 12-page document released by the White House in August 2011, "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States," wades into the complicated challenge authorities face in dealing with potential efforts to radicalize Americans. "Groups and individuals supporting al-Qaida's vision are attempting to lure Americans to terrorism in order to create support networks and facilitate attack planning, but this also has potential to create a backlash against Muslim Americans. Such a backlash would feed al-Qaida’s propaganda that our country is anti-Muslim and at war against Islam, handing our enemies a strategic victory by turning our communities against one another; eroding our shared sense of identity as Americans; feeding terrorist recruitment abroad; and threatening our fundamental values of religious freedom and pluralism," the August document stated. Also, a 23-page White House document issued in December 2011, "Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States," mentions Islam only once, though it does refer more often to the threat from al-Qaida. "As President Obama emphasized, when discussing Muslim Americans in the context of al-Qaida's attempts to divide us, 'we don't differentiate between them and us. It's just us,'" the document states. More often, the December plan issued by the White House uses language like "community resilience programming" and the importance of "enhancing engagement with and support to local communities that may be targeted by violent extremists," without explicitly saying that many of those communities are, in fact, Muslim-American. The Ruling There is no question that the Obama administration has tried to address Islam carefully and to avoid blaming a religion with an estimated 1.6 billion adherents for terrorism. But we find Gingrich has greatly exaggerated what the Obama administration has done. Although the Justice Department clearly has yanked some questionable material related to Islam, and the recent White House document refers almost obliquely to Muslim Americans, it has not banned a discussion of al-Qaida or Islam in terrorism training. We rate his statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/4a63a2e7-e660-45ca-baf0-09be0791dec4 | null | Newt Gingrich | null | null | null | 2011-12-14T17:26:22 | 2011-12-12 | ['Islam', 'Barack_Obama'] |
pose-00151 | Enact a program of market incentives and sanctions for Pentagon contractors, just like any other good business client would use, to reward companies that perform well and come in under budget, while punishing firms that fail to perform as originally hired. | compromise | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/163/create-a-system-of-incentives-and-penalties-for-de/ | null | obameter | Barack Obama | null | null | Create a system of incentives and penalties for defense contracts | 2010-01-07T13:26:50 | null | ['The_Pentagon'] |
goop-00571 | Brad Pitt Proposed To Jennifer Aniston Again? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-propose-again-ring/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Brad Pitt Proposed To Jennifer Aniston Again? | 1:04 pm, July 26, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14561 | I'm self-funding my own campaign. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/10/donald-trump/donald-trump-self-funding-his-campaign-sort/ | President Donald Trump wouldn’t be beholden to special interests, he says. Why? Because billionaires aren’t paying for his campaign. "You know a lot of times you see these really dumb deals," he said of current political leaders at an Iowa rally Feb. 1. "And you'll say that's dumb. It doesn't make sense. But then when you think, it does make sense because these politicians are representing interests, whether it's a country or a company, where doing the stupid deals actually makes sense only for that politician and for that company or country." In contrast, Trump said, "I'm self-funding my own campaign. It's my money." Trump talks about self-funding his own campaign almost every day, it seems, so it’s about time we put it on the Truth-O-Meter. The fact is, Trump’s campaign isn’t 100 percent self-funded. He receives a significant amount of individual donations. But he does have a point that he puts up a lot of his own money, especially compared with other candidates (and that big-money donors are largely staying away). Contributions Trump’s campaign brought in about $19.4 million by the end of 2015. Trump contributed nearly $13 million of that himself. Most of the remainder comes from individual contributions, which federal law caps at $2,700 per candidate per election. Trump is contributing much, much more of his personal wealth than any other presidential contender. The only other candidates contributing to their own campaigns are: retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who has so far reported contributing $25,000; former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at $368,147; and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at $388,720. Although a significant portion of his campaign funds, about 34 percent, come from individual contributions, Trump doesn’t appear to be actively soliciting these donations with high-profile fundraising events. The Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for transparency in money in politics, tracks political fundraisers with its Political Party Time tool. It has no record of any events to benefit Trump. In contrast, Political Party Time has recorded more than 280 fundraisers for Clinton and more than 150 for Bush since the start of 2015. There is, though, a "donate" button on Trump’s website. Trump also has minimal political action committee support compared with his opponents. PACs have raised just $1.8 million on Trump’s behalf, which is the lowest among all candidates still in the race, with the exception of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Republican former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, whose PAC fundraising for both candidates remains at $0. Trump seems to be friendly with at least one PAC created in his honor. He attended a New York fundraiser hosted by the Make America Great Again PAC in July and said he’s grateful for their support, reported Politico. The group also received a $100,000 donation from the in-laws of Trump’s daughter Ivanka. The PAC shut down in October following allegations that it coordinated with Trump’s campaign. Big asterisks It’s worth noting a couple more caveats. First, Trump’s self-financing only really picked up in the last three months of 2015. From the start of his campaign in April through October last year, individual contributions made up about 67 percent of total money raised for his campaign. Other media outlets who looked at this claim before the most recent FEC filings concluded that Trump’s claim was inaccurate because, at the time, most of his funding was coming from individual contributions. But in the last quarter, Trump gave his campaign a $10.8 million loan, turning that balance around. That brings us to the second caveat: The vast majority of Trump’s contributions to his own campaign — about $12.6 million — are loans rather than donations. This means he could expect to eventually recoup these funds. Further, of the approximately $12 million Trump’s campaign spent in 2015, about $2.7 million went toward reimbursing Trump-affiliated companies for services provided to the campaign, such as traveling in his own plane and helicopter, according to a New York Times analysis. On whether Trump should describe his campaign as self-funded, given these caveats, it’s "sort of a judgment call," said Viveca Novak, editorial and communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. "To me, it would be more accurate to say he was ‘partially self-funding,’ " Novak added. Trump’s claim is accurate in part, but it needs a big asterisk, said Richard Skinner, a policy analyst at the Sunlight Foundation. He added that all self-funders take at least some individual contributions, noting in particular former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2008 primary run. Romney provided about 44 percent of his campaign’s total funds raised, while about 56 percent came from individual donations. Rick Hasen, an expert in election and campaign finance law at the University of California Irvine, disagrees. "I don't think it is fair to say that a person is self-funding if a significant share of those contributions come from someone other than the candidate," he said. "Nor do I think a candidate who loans money to his campaign, but who expects to be paid back by the campaign, is fairly characterized as self-funding." It’s possible that Trump’s intent to self-fund his campaign could result in a president that feels less indebted to billionaires' special interests, as Trump claims, Skinner noted. But even if he isn’t taking their money, they still might have influence on Trump. "One critique of fundraising, it makes you spend a lot of time around very rich people, and Trump clearly already does that," Skinner said. Our ruling Trump said, "I'm self-funding my own campaign." As of the end of 2015, Trump’s own contributions account for more than half of all money the campaign has taken in. He’s contributed far more of his own money than any other candidate this cycle. However, a significant portion of his money comes from individual contributions. For several months last year, the campaign received far more dollars from potential voters than they did from Trump. Additionally, most of Trump’s contributions have been loans rather than donations, so he may hope to recoup those funds. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2016-02-10T16:00:00 | 2016-02-01 | ['None'] |
pomt-11186 | Thanks to the strong charter school reforms put in place while I was Senate President the online charter school ECOT "was caught and is out of business." | mostly false | /ohio/statements/2018/may/17/keith-faber/ohio-auditor-candidate-misleads-about-his-role-onl/ | Investigations into the now-shuttered Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, called ECOT, have roiled statewide elections in Ohio. The Columbus public online school launched in 2000, founded by software executive William Lager. By the end, nearly two decades later, the school received $1 billion from the state, and Lager, who once had financial problems, became a millionaire. Now politicians on both sides are spinning answers to key questions: Who is to blame for the online school bilking state taxpayers? Who gets credit for the school’s demise? The Ohio Department of Education is seeking to recoup $80 million from the school, while State Auditor Dave Yost referred his findings to state and federal prosecutors for potential criminal prosecution. State Rep. Keith Faber, the Republican candidate for state auditor, took some credit for the school shutting down. "Thanks to the strong charter school reforms put in place while I was Senate President and the diligent work of Auditor Yost and his staff, ECOT was caught and is out of business," he said in a May 11 statement to the press. Democrats pounced on Faber for taking credit. Faber’s Democratic opponent Zack Space tweeted: "Keith Faber’s complicity in this — perhaps the largest political scandal in Ohio history — should disqualify him from serving as Auditor, the top taxpayer watchdog in the State." Time for PolitiFact to weigh in: Is Faber accurate in claiming credit for ECOT shutting down? We found that when Faber was Senate president, the Legislature voted for a bill that included attendance rules for online schools in 2015. But the main reason the school shut down was a change in the type of student participation data that the state education department sought. And the department began seeking the data before the 2015 legislation passed. Faber points to House Bill 2 Faber’s spokeswoman Allison Dumski pointed to his role as Senate president in passing HB 2, a charter schools bill. The final version passed the Senate unanimously and the House overwhelmingly in October 2015. A provision added in the Senate required online schools to keep "an accurate record of each individual student's participation in learning opportunities each day." The bill said that the records must be kept in a manner that could easily be submitted to state officials. "ECOT was unable to provide these attendance records or comply with Ohio Department of Education's student count, requiring them to repay the state, which ultimately put them in financial distress and caused them to close," Dumski said. The passage of the bill drew praise from newspaper editorial boards and education advocates. But the bill essentially codified what the education department had already started. The wheels were already in motion for the state to seek millions from the school. Online school faced problems from the beginning For years, news reports showed the online charter school had problems with poor record keeping, high student turnover, suspicious attendance reports, poor performance outcomes and graduation rates, and inflated enrollment. State audits showed problems as early as 2001. While the school racked up troubling headlines, Lager (the school's founder) gave campaign donations, largely to Republicans. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Lager and other executives made $2.1 million in donations. The FBI is examining whether the company reimbursed employees for donations, the Dispatch found. (Faber announced in May that he would donate the approximately $36,000 he received to other schools.) By 2015, the state began to suspect that some schools were inflating their participation numbers. So it began to request actual log-in data for students. For ECOT, that meant trouble. The department found that for the 2015-16 school year, the online school could only account for 6,300 of its 15,300 claimed students. That eventually led the state to demand that the school repay $60 million, and later an additional $20 million for the next school year. The school argued that the department illegally changed its rules for counting students. But the courts have sided with the state. The school continues to appeal. In 2017, the state started withholding $2.5 million per month from the school. In January, the school’s sponsor, The Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West, cut off ties. Charter schools must have a sponsor to operate. About 12,000 students had to find new schools. Our ruling Faber said, "Thanks to the strong charter school reforms put in place while I was Senate President" the online charter school ECOT "was caught and is out of business." Faber was referring to House Bill 2, which passed in 2015 and required online schools to keep accurate and accessible attendance records. But Faber is overstating credit by hanging the demise of the school on that bill. The key change that led to the school shutting down was when the education department decided to require e-schools to provide student log-in data. This showed that that the school couldn’t account for many of its supposed students, leading the state to conclude the school owed $80 million. Faber doesn’t get credit for that. The only kernel of truth here is that the bill that passed under his leadership was another affirmation by the state that e-schools had to provide attendance data. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Keith Faber | null | null | null | 2018-05-17T16:18:04 | 2018-05-11 | ['None'] |
tron-02287 | 13,000 Marines Apply for White House Detail After President Trump’s Election | unproven! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/13000-marines-apply-white-house-detail/ | null | military | null | null | ['barack obama', 'donald trump', 'patriotism', 'presidencies', 'white house'] | 13,000 Marines Apply for White House Detail After Trump’s Election | Feb 24, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-13594 | On the Iran nuclear deal | half flip | /florida/statements/2016/aug/17/tim-canova/did-debbie-wasserman-schultzs-opponent-tim-canova-/ | The Iran nuclear deal has been a hot topic in the Democratic primary battle between U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and challenger Tim Canova. The South Florida district is heavily Jewish, and Israel has been skeptical of the deal. In a mailer, Canova sided with three Jewish members of Congress who voted against the deal. "In challenging times Israel needs true friends in Congress. When called on to protect Israel, some legislators step up," states the mailer, showing photos of U.S. Reps. Ted Deutch and Lois Frankel of Palm Beach County and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. "Others don’t. Debbie Wasserman Schultz waffled back and forth before voting for the Iran nuclear deal, choosing party and personal political ambition over principle." But how would Canova have voted on the deal? His answers haven’t been clear. In a debate on CBS4, host Jim DeFede asked Canova to clarify his position. We decided to look at Canova’s statements about the Iran deal and put them on our Flip-O-Meter, which examines a candidate’s record on a topic without casting a value judgment on any changes. We found that Canova hasn’t really changed position, but he hasn’t always provided full answers, either. (Canova isn’t Jewish, but his stepfather is Jewish, and Canova said he has spent time in Israel including living on a kibbutz, a communal living area. Wasserman Schultz was the first Jewish woman from Florida elected to Congress.) Canova’s statements about Iran nuclear deal In 2015, Iran and five other world powers reached a deal. The agreement aims to extend the time it would take for Iran to make a nuclear bomb, subjects some of Iran’s major nuclear facilities to constant monitoring and creates conditions for lifting economic sanctions against Iran. Wasserman Schultz announced she would support the deal, saying that it wasn’t perfect but that it "promotes the national security interests of the United States and our allies and merits." On his website, Canova doesn’t say how he would have voted; however, he says that he would not support scrapping it. "While I have criticized several deficiencies in the Iran nuclear deal (no international agreement is ever perfect), now that it has been entered into, I support its full implementation," he wrote. Canova has repeatedly outlined his criticisms of the deal, including that Iran "can simply mothball rather than destroy the centrifuges, thereby allowing them to restart a nuclear program for military use in the future." He also criticizes the inspection protocols and the relief of sanctions. Canova’s most complete statements about his position on the Iran deal stem came in an interview with the Sun Sentinel editorial board in August 2016. "I expressed reservations and criticism about the Iran agreement," Canova said. "Now that it has been adopted, I am for strict implementation." When interviewed by Sentinel reporter Anthony Man, Canova acknowledged that he had made some conflicting statements. Man: "You earlier this year said that you would have voted for it." Canova: "Oh, I’ve been quoted both ways." Man: "You told me you would have voted for it. Is that accurate?" Canova: "I’m not so sure that’s accurate. Look, I’m not going to sort of play that game. I don’t know exactly how I would have voted because I wasn’t sitting in the seat, but I do know I criticized some aspects of it." Man: "In January, you said the deal wasn’t perfect, but you would have voted for it under the circumstances. You don’t believe that anymore?" Canova: "I don’t know if I would have voted for it. ... In a conversation when you called me at home you caught me off guard, I was a candidate for about a week. Did I say that? Maybe. I honestly don’t know how I would have voted for it." Editorial page editor Rosemary O’Hara asked Canova, if the deal was on the table today, how he would have voted. Canova: "I don’t know. ... I’m not a member of Congress, I didn’t have any kind of briefings the way Debbie Wasserman Schultz did, so I don’t think it's fair for me to say I would have voted for it, (or) I would have voted against it. I don’t know." In a debate on CBS4’s Facing South Florida on Aug. 14, host Jim DeFede asked Canova if he would have voted for or against the agreement. "When the question is asked as a hypothetical -- would I have seen classified information -- that’s when I have said who knows," Canova said. "But quite frankly I can say right here that was not a good agreement for a couple reasons. First of all, Iran is the biggest funder of Hezbollah and Hamas, (and) to release $100 billion in assets (to Iran) right away without doing it incrementally is what I found to be dangerous and unsettling. And quite frankly, my position is the same as dozens of other Democrats who voted against the agreement." We looked for other statements Canova made about his own position on the Iran deal. "She voted for the Iran deal, and I’m against the agreement," he told The Forward in July. Richard Bell, Canova’s campaign manager, told PolitiFact Florida that The Forward doesn’t fully explain his position. On Aug. 1, according to the Times of Israel, Canova told the Sunny Isles Beach Democratic Club: "I was critical of the Iran agreement. How would I have voted? I can’t tell you, I wasn’t a member of Congress." Bell told PolitiFact Florida that Canova’s position on the Iran nuclear agreement has been consistent. "He is critical of specific aspects of the Iran deal," Bell said. "Now that it’s been adopted, he is for its full and strict implementation." We agree that Canova has been consistent in his criticisms and in bashing Wasserman Schultz for supporting the deal. Our ruling Canova has acknowledged that he has "been quoted both ways" on how he would have voted the Iran deal. He said in January that he would have voted for it, but later in the campaign said multiple times that he didn’t know how he would have voted. He sent a mailer that didn’t say how he would have voted but sided with opponents. He has been consistent in criticizing the specifics of the deal and in criticizing Wasserman Schultz for her support for it. Because Canova’s position on the Iran deal has been unclear at different times, we give him a Half Flip. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/2064790e-a998-485a-b7a8-3c25ab8b2d22 | null | Tim Canova | null | null | null | 2016-08-17T10:00:00 | 2016-08-11 | ['Iran'] |
pomt-10853 | I would love to see us have in this country what I helped lead in Arkansas...Amendment 65 (which) says that we believe life begins at conception, and that we ought to do everything in the world possible to protect it until its natural conclusion. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/sep/06/mike-huckabee/he-exaggerates-effects-of-constitutional-amendment/ | Arkansas does indeed have an amendment to its state constitution concerning human life, but Huckabee overstates the impact of the amendment. Here's what it says: "The policy of Arkansas is to protect the life of every unborn child from conception until birth, to the extent permitted by the federal Constitution." Huckabee's statement that the amendment says "everything in the world possible" must be done to protect the unborn is pretty sharply limited by the phrase "to the extent permitted by the federal Constitution." At the moment, the Roe v. Wade decision means the federal Constitution permits abortion. It also is a slight overstatement to say the Arkansas amendment declares a belief that life begins at conception, though that certainly is implied. We also would note that he got the amendment number wrong. It is Amendment 68 that deals with abortion. Amendment 65 deals with revenue bonds. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False. | null | Mike Huckabee | null | null | null | 2007-09-06T00:00:00 | 2007-09-05 | ['Arkansas'] |
goop-00751 | Kardashians “Want Nothing To Do” With Khloe? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-sisters-nothing-to-do-shut-out-kim-kourtney-kendall/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kardashians “Want Nothing To Do” With Khloe? | 9:59 am, June 26, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09167 | We now actually import more oil than we did before 9/11. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/07/john-kerry/kerry-says-us-imports-more-oil-now-911/ | During a June 6, 2010, appearance on ABC's This Week, Sen. John Kerry -- who is sponsoring a comprehensive energy bill -- discussed the nation's energy future against the backdrop of the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. During an interview with host Jake Tapper, Kerry said, "Here's what's important -- not to be throwing the blame around, but to put America on the course to true energy independence and self-reliance and to begin to wean ourselves from our addiction to oil. ... The United States is losing a major economic transformational moment. Until we begin to do something -- you know, since 9/11, we now actually import more oil than we did before 9/11. It's insulting to common sense." We decided to check whether Kerry was correct about whether the United States imports more oil today than it did before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The answer is complicated, because there are at least three possible ways to measure it. • The number of barrels of crude oil imported. The U.S. imported 3.32 billion barrels of crude oil in 2000 and 3.40 billion barrels in 2001. Both figures were higher than the number imported in 2009 -- 3.31 billion barrels. By this measure, Kerry is incorrect, although just slightly. • Imported crude oil compared to domestic production. We wondered whether imported crude oil was still increasing as a percentage of all oil in the U.S., even as it dropped in absolute amounts. In fact, that's exactly what happened. In 2000, oil imports accounted for 61 percent of the total of imports and domestic production, and in 2001, imports accounted for 62 percent. In 2009, the percentage of imports was 63 percent -- slightly higher than it was in either of those years. The underlying cause was that domestic oil production declined between the start of the decade and the end. By this measure, Kerry is correct, though once again, the difference is modest. • Imported crude oil plus imported unfinished oils. William Brown, who analyzes energy data for the federal government's Energy Information Administration, told PolitiFact that in recent years, there's been a rise in imports of unfinished oils, which are partially refined, taking the place of pure crude oil imports. So he sent us data that combined those two sets of imports. In 2000, the combination of crude oil and unfinished oils accounted for 9.54 million barrels per day, and in 2001, they accounted for 9.71 million barrels per day. In 2009, that figure was 9.86 million barrels per day. Adding in unfinished oils to the previous measure of crude oil turns an incorrect statement into a correct one. Bottom line: There are three ways to analyze the question, and with two of them, Kerry is right that imports have grown. Using the other statistic, he's wrong -- imports have declined. So we rate Kerry's statement Mostly True. | null | John Kerry | null | null | null | 2010-06-07T15:00:50 | 2010-06-06 | ['None'] |
pomt-10980 | The servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC are "missing." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/16/donald-trump/missing-servers-donald-trump-vladimir-putin/ | Standing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump answered reporters' questions about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and if he believed Putin’s denials over his own intelligence community’s findings. Instead of answering the question directly, Trump began discussing servers. "You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server -- haven't they taken the server. Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that, I've been asking that for months and months and I've been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying? "With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server." Moments later, Trump added, "What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They're missing; where are they?" Trump's rhetorical question gets the details wrong. You could take Trump's words to mean a DNC server has gone missing, but that's not true. And as for the "Pakistani gentleman," Trump is referring to a House IT staffer who did not work for the DNC and who government investigators concluded did not steal or leak computer data. The DNC server On July 13, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hillary Clinton campaign staffers. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment confirms previous findings from the U.S. intelligence community. In April 2016, Russian intelligence officials installed spying software on the computer network of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The hack in turn allowed them access to 33 Democratic National Committee computers. The emails obtained through the hack were pushed out on social media beginning in June 2016, and Wikileaks soon joined that effort. At some point, the FBI and DNC started working together to fight the hack and investigate how it happened, but DNC was slow to react to the FBI’s initial warning that their server had been compromised. During former FBI director James Comey’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Comey was asked whether the FBI had ever received the DNC’s hacked hardware. He said they did not, but obtained access from a review of the system performed by CrowdStrike, a third-party cybersecurity firm. "We got the forensics from the pros that they hired which -- again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this, my folks tell me, was an appropriate substitute," Comey said. DNC spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told PolitiFact that the DNC cooperated with the FBI’s requests, which resulted in the DNC providing a copy of their server. "An image of a server is the best thing to use in an investigation so that your exploration of the server does not change the evidence (just like you don’t want investigators leaving their own DNA around a physical crime scene) and so that the bad actors cannot make changes to the evidence while you are looking at it," Watson said. "Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect." We found no indication that the FBI had renewed their request to gain access to the actual server, or that investigating the server copy would have prevented the FBI from tracking down the culprits. (The FBI declined to comment.) Imran Awan Trump said, "What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC?" Trump was likely referring to Imran Awan who worked in information technology for dozens of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, including U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee. Trump previously referred to Awan as the "Pakistani mystery man." Trump is wrong, though, that Awan "worked on the DNC." The national committee is a separate group from the House members. Awan’s lawyer Christopher Gowen, as well as the DNC spokeswoman, told PolitiFact that Awan never worked for the DNC. Awan, who emigrated from Pakistan as a youth, has been a U.S. citizen since 2004. "The government that Donald Trump is the president of has had the server from the very, very beginning of the investigation," Gowen said, referring to the server maintained by Awan and accessed by House Democrats, and a server all together different than the one hacked into atthe DNC. Gowen said the server was a portal that Democratic members could access when working remotely. He said it has been in possession of the FBI and the Capitol Police since the first allegations were made in the case and has nothing to do with the DNC. Awan was arrested for bank fraud in July after he identified on a home loan application that a property was a primary residence when in fact it was a rental property. Trump was parroting news reports led by the Daily Caller about Awan. Conservative media accounts suggested that Awan might have played a role in the election hacking of the DNC, although the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations. Ultimately, Awan was charged with a minor offense unrelated to his job. In a July 3 plea agreement, Awan agreed to plead guilty to making a false statement on a loan application. The government engaged in a "thorough investigation" that included taking custody of the House Democratic server and found no evidence of wrongdoing related to his House IT job, the government stated in the plea agreement signed by U.S Attorney’s Office. "The government has found no evidence that your client illegally removed House data from the House network or from House Members' offices, stole the House Democratic Caucus Server, stole or destroyed House information technology equipment, or improperly accessed or transferred government information, including classified or sensitive information," said the plea agreement signed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Awan will be sentenced Aug. 21. Sentencing guidelines call for zero to six months in jail, but prosecutors agreed not to oppose a sentence of only probation. Our ruling Trump said, "The servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC" are "missing." The DNC servers were never missing. The DNC provided the FBI with a copy of their server, rather than the original hardware, but Comey testified that the evidence was an appropriate substitute. Awan, the "Pakistani gentleman" in the news, never worked for the DNC. Conservative news outlets suggested he had stolen a House Democratic server, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office found no evidence of such theft. We rate this statement False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2018-07-16T18:30:21 | 2018-07-16 | ['Pakistan', 'Democratic_National_Committee'] |
pomt-14943 | German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, which allowed the Nazis to "carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/26/ben-carson/fact-checking-ben-carson-nazi-guns/ | Republican Ben Carson has been criticized for suggesting that gun control enabled the rise of the Nazis and led to the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. But does he have a point? In his book, A More Perfect Union, Carson wrote that "German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler's regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and numerous others whom they considered inferior. "Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance," he wrote. Carson reiterated that argument at least twice -- in an Oct. 8, 2015, interview with CNN host Wolf Blitzer, and then again in a speech at the National Press Club. "You know, mid- to late-30s, they started a program to disarm the people and by mid- to late 40's, look what had happened," he said at the Press Club. PolitiFact decided to analyze Carson’s claim on its Truth-O-Meter. German gun laws As the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, it inherited a 1928 gun registration law that had replaced a total ban on gun ownership imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I. The 1928 law created a permit system to own and sell firearms and ammunition. "But this order was followed quite rarely, so that largely, only newly bought weapons became registered," said Dagmar Ellerbrock, an expert on German gun policies at the Dresden Technical University. "At that time, most men, and many women, still owned the weapons they acquired before or during the first World War." When they came to power, the Nazis used whatever gun records they had to seize weapons from their enemies, but Ellerbock told us the files included very few of the firearms in circulation. "In my records, I found many Jews who well into the late 1930s possessed guns," Ellerbock told us. The Nazis adopted a new gun law in 1938. According to an analysis by Bernard Harcourt, a professor at Columbia University School of Law, it loosened gun ownership rules in several ways. It deregulated the buying and selling of rifles, shotguns and ammunition. It made handguns easier to own by allowing anyone with a hunting license to buy, sell or carry one at any time. (You didn’t need to be hunting.) It also extended the permit period from one year to three and gave local officials more discretion in letting people under 18 get a gun. The regulations to implement this law, rather than the law itself, did impose new limits on one group: Jews. On Nov. 11, 1938, the German minister of the interior issued "Regulations Against Jews Possession of Weapons." Not only were Jews forbidden to own guns and ammunition, they couldn’t own "truncheons or stabbing weapons." In addition to the restrictions, Ellerbrock said the Nazis had already been raiding Jewish homes and seizing weapons. "The gun policy of the Nazis can hardly be compared to the democratic procedures of gun regulations by law," Ellerbrock told us. "It was a kind of special administrative practice (Sonderrecht), which treated people in different ways according to their political opinion or according to ‘racial identity’ in Nazi terms." The power of a police state In short, Nazi-era Germany imposed greater gun restrictions for Jews (and other perceived enemies) at the same time it loosened gun restrictions for other groups. But that’s not what Carson said. He made a more sweeping claim about Nazis disarming German citizens. Carson then goes on to say that the lack of guns allowed the Nazis to "carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance." But a key turning point in the Nazi path to power illustrates that the availability of guns was not a pivotal issue. Paramilitary organizations were part of the Nazi operation from its earliest days in the mid 1920s. The Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, was a founding Nazi street fighting organization. Another outfit, the Schutzstaffel, or SS, provided protection to Nazi officials as they moved about the country. After Hitler won office, the SS under Heinrich Himmler became part of Hitler's inner circle, and Himmler felt the Sturmabteilung was too difficult to control. He and his collaborators concocted a rumor that the Sturmabteilung was plotting a coup. In 1934, in a span of three days, Himmler’s SS units killed between 85 and 200 Sturmabteilung leaders and other perceived enemies. Hitler himself oversaw the arrest of one of his oldest comrades, Ernst Roehm, the head of the Sturmabteilung. In the middle of that arrest, a truckload of armed Sturmabteilung troops rolled up, but not a shot was fired. Roehm was executed days later. The staff at the German Historical Institute wrote that with this operation, Hitler had managed to "legitimize outright murder on a large scale – without any legal proceedings whatsoever – and that the country largely accepted the Nazi propaganda that presented this strike as necessary." Our ruling Carson said that under the Nazis, "German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s," which allowed the Nazis to "carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance." This is a misreading of history on two levels. First, German citizens as a whole were not disarmed by the Nazis. Jews and other supposed enemies of the state were subject to having their weapons seized. But for most German citizens, the Nazi period was one in which gun regulations were loosened, not tightened. Second, a lack of guns was not the issue. If the majority of Germans had wanted to use these guns to fight the Nazis, they could have. But they didn’t. Carson ignores that the Nazis enjoyed significant popular support, or at least, broad acquiescence. We rate this claim False. | null | Ben Carson | null | null | null | 2015-10-26T12:39:42 | 2015-10-09 | ['Germany'] |
pomt-09299 | Says he said last year there's "absolutely no reason" for Texas to secede. | mostly true | /texas/statements/2010/apr/22/rick-perry/gov-rick-perry-recaps-his-comment-texas-seceding-u/ | Last week marked the anniversary of Gov. Rick Perry’s oft-quoted Texas-can-secede comments after a tea-party rally outside Austin’s city hall. Coincidentally, the Texas Tribune and Newsweek interviewed Perry in his Capitol office on April 15 and the opening back and forth between editor Evan Smith and Perry touched on what the governor said about secession the year before. "I always like to try to clear that up," Perry tells Smith. "It was asked as a, you know, what do you think about the people who shout out the word 'secede.' And I say that we live in an incredibly wonderful country and I see absolutely no reason for that to ever happen…" We wondered if Perry accurately recaptured his 2009 remarks. Perry's office didn't respond to our inquiry. Next, we turned to the original exchange as recorded by Kelley Shannon, Austin correspondent for the Associated Press. She spoke to him shortly after Perry spoke at the rally. (The audio and a transcript are fetchable from the "About this statement" section of this article, to the right.) According to the recording, Shannon initially asked if he thought the gathering reflected a national movement. Perry answered that it could be and that people feel strangled by spending and taxation; they want help. Shannon then asked Perry about some associating him with the idea of secession or sovereignty for Texas. Perry gave a 40-second reply, which we transcribed and provide here. "Oh, I think there’s a lot of different scenarios," Perry said. "Texas is a unique place. When we came in the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that. "You know, my hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that? So. But Texas is a very unique place and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot." Perry next fielded a question from someone else about whether Texas might now be considered a natural terorrist state — no, Perry said — and the less than three-minute question-and-answer period ended. At the time, Perry’s comments were widely interpreted as indicating the Republican governor believed secession could legally occur; he subsequently did not back down from that conclusion. However, a constitutional expert advised at the time that the Civil War long ago vanquished secession as a legal option. Sanford Levinson, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said within the Texas Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the Joint Resolution Annexing Texas to the United States of 1845, there is no explicit right for the state to return to its days as a Republic. Levinson said there is "no possibility whatsoever that the United States or any court would recognize a 'right' to secede." Levinson noted that the 1845 resolution allows for Texas to break into five new states, and it doesn’t specify whether that would require congressional approval. But, he said, that's distinct from secession. In looking back at his 2009 comments, Perry told Smith that at the time he was focusing on economics -- "people’s concern and anger about what this administration is doing from an economic standpoint in particular and the long-term debt that was being created for not only them but for future generations." All in all, does Perry accurately revisit his original comments on secession that day? For the most part, yes. However Perry doesn't get to his assertion that Texas has the right to secede or his speculation about "who knows what may come" from people angry about actions in Washington. We rate Perry’s statement as Mostly True. | null | Rick Perry | null | null | null | 2010-04-22T11:36:12 | 2010-04-15 | ['Texas'] |
pomt-11316 | Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California. Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as they’ve been in nearly 50 years (and 85 percent of the apprehensions occurred outside of California). | true | /california/statements/2018/apr/13/jerry-brown/jerry-brown-says-theres-no-massive-wave-migrants-p/ | Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown recently agreed to President Donald Trump’s request to deploy California National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, though with several caveats. Brown, for example, said state troops "will not be enforcing federal immigration laws," but will instead support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs and human traffickers. The governor said he’ll accept federal money for 400 troops, some of which would be sent to the border. Trump made the request as part of his stated effort to "seal up" the border and prevent illegal crossings. "I will not rest until we have secured our borders and restored the rule of law!" the president tweeted on April 9, 2018. White House officials have called recent border crossing figures "alarming." But in a letter to the Trump administration two days later, Brown attempted to set the record straight about what he says is really happening along California’s border with Mexico. "Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California. Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as they’ve been in nearly 50 years (and 85 percent of the apprehensions occurred outside of California)." With claims about border crossings boomeranging from Sacramento to Washington D.C., we decided to scrutinize the governor’s statement in a fact check. In this Sept. 15, 2015, file photo, a farmer passes along a borer fence that divides his property, Tuesday, in Mission, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay) Our research To support it, the governor’s spokesman cited U.S. Border Patrol figures for apprehensions across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The data is from 1960 through 2017. For 2017, they show 303,916 arrests across the entire Southern border. The previous low was 263,991 in 1971, 46 years ago. So, Brown’s claim that apprehensions in 2017 were "as low as they’ve been in nearly 50 years" is on the mark. He’s also right that 85 percent of these took place "outside California." About 68 percent of the arrests took place in Texas and New Mexico, while Arizona accounted for 17 percent and California about 15 percent, according to a review of the border patrol figures. "He is absolutely correct," said Ev Meade, director of the Trans Border Institute at the University of San Diego. "Even as we’re at an historic low borderwide, it’s particularly low in California. We’re not receiving large numbers of migrants. Those migrants who are coming are largely crossing the Rio Grande and are apprehended at border patrol stations in Texas." Meade said the overall trend on the Southern border shows a dramatic decrease in apprehensions. "In the year 2000, the border patrol apprehended 1.6 million people (borderwide). For 2017, it was down to 300,000. It’s a tiny fraction," he said. Just along California’s border, nearly 390,000 people were arrested in 2000. By 2017, that number had dropped to less than 45,000, border patrol figures show. SOURCE: Trans Border Institute, University of San Diego Wave of migrants? While the governor’s numbers are right, do they prove the first part of his claim: "There is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California?" Given the context of the letter, Brown is clearly referring to migrants crossing into the state across the border with Mexico. But what about the other ways people enter the state? Joseph Hayes, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, pointed out that border arrests aren’t necessarily the best metric to evaluate migration to California. Much of the nation’s and state’s undocumented population results from individuals overstaying visas. In a 2017 report, the Center For Migration Studies found that two-thirds of those who arrived in the United States in 2014 and later would be counted as undocumented were admitted on temporary visas "and then overstayed their period of admission or otherwise violated the terms of their visas." Still, Hayes said, the overall number of people living illegally in California has declined since before the Great Recession. The state was home to approximately 3 million undocumented residents in 2007, a figure that’s dropped to as low as 2.35 million, according to estimates reviewed by PPIC. The decline in the state’s undocumented population reinforces Brown’s contention there’s "no massive wave of migrants pouring into California." Historically, Meade added, thousands of seasonal migrant farmworkers have come to California through the border with Mexico. He said that seasonal migration has largely "dried up" in recent years and many undocumented farmworkers now stay in the state year-round, rather than crossing back into Mexico. "International migration has become more difficult," he said, citing greater border enforcement. 2018 spike in crossings Brown cited figures from 2017. But what about the 200 percent spike in apprehensions borderwide in March 2018 compared with the same month a year ago, as cited this week by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen? Meade, of the Trans Border Institute, said the 2018 increase should be considered in context. It follows the historically low number of 2017 arrests, which has been attributed, in part, to fewer people trying to illegally cross the border due to Trump’s election and hard-line immigration stance. Immigration experts have also cited the Obama administration’s aggressive deportation efforts and greater economic opportunities in Mexico for recent declines in border crossings. Meade also noted the 2018 increase took place during spring, the high-point of migration season. He said it doesn’t represent a long-term trend. Nor does it show California is experiencing a disproportionate share of the 2018 increase, he said. "Unless this were to continue for months and months and months and break the seasonal pattern, I don’t think there’s any real way to claim (the early part of 2018) is a crisis." Our ruling Gov. Jerry Brown claimed in a recent letter to the Trump administration: "there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California. Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as they’ve been in nearly 50 years (and 85 percent of the apprehensions occurred outside of California)." U.S. Border Patrol data show Brown got his arrest figures right. Researchers point out that illegal border crossings account for only one portion of the migrants that arrive in California. Others come to the state legally on visas which they later overstay. But given the context of Brown’s letter, it’s clear the governor was referring to the lack of a wave of migrants coming illegally across the Southern border. That part of the claim is also backed up by the border patrol data and two immigration experts. We rate Brown’s claim True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Jerry Brown | null | null | null | 2018-04-13T13:27:06 | 2018-04-11 | ['California'] |
pomt-15247 | Caution: Kissing and cuddling chickens can be hazardous to your health. | true | /georgia/statements/2015/aug/04/centers-disease-control/cdc-kissing-and-cuddling-backyard-chickens-linked-/ | Raising backyard chickens has been satisfying some foodies’ affection for the uber-local egg and lower-fat meat in urban areas, including metro Atlanta, for about a decade. Now the Centers for Disease Control is warning of a downside to the popular trend: salmonella outbreaks traced to some backyard owners kissing and cuddling their flocks. The CDC findings drew some media attention last month, and a PolitiFact reader who heard the health alert on NPR’s "Morning Edition" on July 16 asked us to dig deeper. We went directly to the source, the CDC, which is headquartered in Atlanta and has been investigating four recent Salmonella outbreaks that, as of July 29, had infected 218 people in 41 states. Five of them were in Georgia, 19 were in Alabama, 5 were in North Carolina, 11 were in South Carolina and 6 were in Tennessee. Fifty of the 218 people have required hospitalization for Salmonella, the major symptoms of which are usually diarrhea, fever and abdominal pain. No deaths have been reported, CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said. So how exactly do CDC officials know that some of these cases are due to backyard breeders kissing and cuddling live poultry? Dr. Megin Nichols, a veterinarian with the CDC, told PolitiFact the agency has been tracking upward trends in both the number of outbreaks and people infected in the past five years and has been working to trace their causes. "We’ve been trying to interview these people to find out how they are getting sick," Nichols said. "We are finding a certain proportion that are due to very close contact -- something that surprised us here at the CDC." Salmonella is a germ that lives naturally in the intestine of chickens, ducks and many other animals. It doesn’t typically make the birds sick, but they can transmit the germs in their droppings and on their feet, feathers and beaks, even when they look clean and healthy, the CDC says. The germs also can get on their cages, coops, feed, water dishes, hay, plants and the area where they live and roam. In addition, the bacteria can rest on the hands, shoes and clothes of those who work around the birds or play with them. And Nichols told us that among the people who became ill between 2008 and 2014 due to baby poultry exposure, 49 percent, or 196 out of 400, reported snuggling and holding baby birds. Another 13 percent, or about 53, reported kissing baby birds, she said. Those people, many of whom were young children, became sick through fecal oral contact, Nichols said. Those same interviews also showed that about 46 percent of backyard breeders are keeping live poultry in their homes, she said. Epidemiologic, laboratory, and traceback findings have linked the most recent four outbreaks of human Salmonella infections to contact with chicks, ducklings, and other live poultry from multiple hatcheries. Interviews have been conducted with 140 of those who were recently ill and, 117, or 84 percent, reported contact with live poultry in the week before their illness began, according to the CDC website. Additional interviews to determine whether that contact included snuggling and kissing have yet to be conducted, Nichols said. An increasing number of people around the country are choosing to keep live poultry - mostly chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese as part of a greener, healthier lifestyle. Local governments, including several in metro Atlanta, have changed their zoning ordinances in recent years to accommodate the trend, and groups of backyard poultry buffs meet regularly in the region to talk chicken. Backyard owners have told reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the benefits include fresh eggs and meat, a built-in source of fertilizer for their gardens and ready-made bug-killers. Some say they give their chickens names, the freedom to roam the house and yard and cuddle and coddle them like family pets. The larger problem According to the CDC, salmonella, named for an American scientist who discovered the bacteria, is estimated to cause a million illnesses in the United States a year, with 19,000 hospitalizations and 380 deaths. Most people develop diarrhea and the other conditions within 12 to 72 hour after infection and recover without treatment in four to seven days. It has the potential to turn deadly if it spreads from the intestines to the bloodstream, and then to other body sites. Prompt treatment with antibiotics is critical, and the elderly, infants, and people with impaired immune systems are more likely to have a severe illness. In the largest recent outbreak, which occurred between March 2013 and July 2014, more than 600 people in 29 states and Puerto Rico were infected with seven outbreak strains. The outbreak was associated with one brand of chicken, which led to a company recall of more than 40,000 pounds of chicken products, according to the CDC. To prevent salmonella infections related to backyard farming, the CDC’s Nichols encourages several common-sense rules. These include thorough handwashing after contact with the chicken, keeping live poultry out of the home, and avoiding snuggling, close contact with the birds’ beaks or other close exposure that would allow ingestion of bacteria. She will be one of the experts featured in a webinar on the topic of practicing backyard bird biosecurity at 7p.m. Thursday. Our conclusion The CDC has issued a warning against kissing or snuggling backyard chickens. It follows four recent Salmonella outbreaks that, as of July 29, had infected 218 people in 41 states. Five of them were in Georgia. Interviews have been conducted with 140 of the ill and 117, or 84 percent, reported contact with live poultry in the week before their illness began, according to the CDC website. The CDC also has evidence from outbreaks between 2008 to 2014. In that period, they found that of the people who became infected with salmonella due to baby poultry exposure, 49 percent, or 196 out of 400 people, reported snuggling and holding baby birds. Another 13 percent, or about 53, reported kissing baby birds.. That’s cause to sound the alarm. We rate the CDC warning True. | null | Centers for Disease Control | null | null | null | 2015-08-04T00:00:00 | 2015-07-16 | ['None'] |
goop-02778 | Kris Jenner Writing “Revenge Memoir” About Caitlyn Jenner, | 3 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kris-jenner-revenge-memoir-caitlyn-book/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kris Jenner NOT Writing “Revenge Memoir” About Caitlyn Jenner, Despite Report | 1:22 pm, May 25, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01675 | Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez “Headed For A Split,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-selena-gomez-split-breakup-wrong/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez NOT “Headed For A Split,” Despite Reports | 9:49 am, February 1, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09542 | Some Republicans who voted against the stimulus "have been all too happy to claim credit for Recovery Act projects and the jobs those projects have produced. They come to the ribbon cuttings." | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/05/barack-obama/obama-criticizes-republicans-who-opposed-stimulus-/ | Twice recently, President Barack Obama has slammed congressional Republicans for voting against his economic stimulus bill in February 2009 but later touting provisions of the bill that benefited their own constituents. During his Jan. 29, 2010, question-and-answer session with House Republican lawmakers in Baltimore, Obama brought up the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as the stimulus is officially known: "There was an interesting headline in CNN today: 'Americans disapprove of stimulus, but like every policy in it.' And there was a poll that showed that if you broke it down into its component parts, 80 percent approved of the tax cuts, 80 percent approved of the infrastructure, 80 percent approved of the assistance to the unemployed. Well, that's what the Recovery Act was. And let's face it, some of you have been at the ribbon-cuttings for some of these important projects in your communities." Then, on Feb. 2, 2010, Obama riffed on the same theme during a town hall event in New Hampshire: "I have to point out, though, that some of the very same folks in Congress who opposed the Recovery Act -- and claim that it hasn’t worked -- have been all too happy to claim credit for Recovery Act projects and the jobs those projects have produced. (Applause.) They come to the ribbon-cuttings and ... (laughter). They found a way to have their cake and vote against it, too. (Laughter.)" We decided that a claim that bold, repeated in two high-profile events within a week's time, was worth a fact-check. As it turns out, we found several cases in which lawmakers voted against the measure but later claimed credit for provisions or projects stemming from the stimulus bill. -- Rep. Don Young of Alaska. Young, who has served in Congress since 1973, sent out two press releases on Feb. 13, 2009, the day the House passed the final version of the stimulus bill. One was headlined, "Rep. Young Votes NO On Democrats’ Massive Spending Bill." It quotes Young saying, "This bill was not a stimulus bill, it was a vehicle for pet projects, and that’s wrong." Young's second release of the day was headlined, "Rep. Young Wins Victory For Alaska Small Business." It explains how Young, after lobbying by the Alaska Federation of Natives, targeted a provision from the stimulus bill that would have required competitive bidding for stimulus grants and contracts. The Alaska Natives group said the provision could have hurt its members' ability to benefit from Small Business Administration programs. Young, the release said, "worked with Members on the other side of the aisle to make the case for these programs, and was able to get the provision pulled from the bill." In the release, Young said that “no matter if I supported this bill or not, I would make sure [Alaska Natives] were not hurt by it." -- Rep. Geoff Davis of Kentucky. Davis, a three-term congressman, issued a news release on Jan. 28, 2009, the day of the first House vote on the stimulus, in which he was quoted saying that "this so-called ‘stimulus’ legislation is full of pet spending projects that will do very little to restore confidence in our economy or create jobs." But 11 months later, on Dec. 16, 2009, Davis sent out a release announcing the awarding of a $1 million-plus grant for the Carroll County School District. "Congressman Geoff Davis is pleased to announce that the Carroll County School District has been awarded $1,044,140 in funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) Early Head Start Expansion Program," the release stated. It goes on to say, "In these difficult economic times, it is critical to ensure that vulnerable populations in Kentucky have access to important support services like those provided by the Early Head Start program. This important grant will allow Carroll County School District to expand their ability to provide needed assistance to local low-income families and children. I am very proud of the work that the Carroll County School District is doing to strengthen their community, and I am pleased that our office was able to assist them in obtaining these funds.” As it happened, on the very same day, Davis sent out a separate release in which he referred to the "failed trillion-dollar 'stimulus' bill." -- Rep. Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania. Shuster, elected in 2001, is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. During the stimulus debate, he advocated for targeting the measure more directly toward infrastructure spending. A Jan. 28, 2009, news release from his office said that "President Obama told the American people that he would stimulate our economy by rejuvenating our infrastructure. As a longtime advocate of improving our nation’s infrastructure, Shuster was encouraged by this announcement. Unfortunately, the Democrats in Congress, led by Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi, squandered this historic opportunity to create jobs and strengthen the backbone of our economy in order to fund 40 years of pent-up liberal pet projects." In November, the Blairsville (Pa.) Dispatch reported that Shuster attended a ceremonial groundbreaking for a new facility at a sewage treatment plant in Blairsville. According to the newspaper, the $12.1 million project was funded in part by federal stimulus money. -- Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia. In a Feb. 13, 2009, news release, Gingrey, a four-term congressman, explained his vote by saying that "this ‘stimulus’ bill only perpetuates the dangerous myth that government spending will fix this economy. ... The truth is government spending will only bury future generations in more debt." In October, a photograph in the Cedartown (Ga.) Standard showed Gingrey handing over a giant, ceremonial check for $625,000 in stimulus money to municipal leaders. The money was to pay for "new sidewalks, landscaping and other improvements to the downtown area," according to the newspaper. A Gingrey spokeswoman told the Standard that because the project qualified for federal stimulus funds as "shovel-ready," Gingrey "presented the proposal at the federal level." City commissioner Scott Tillery described Gingrey to the newspaper as "our point man when we need action from the federal government. His staff is always interested and involved in local concerns, and the congressman will use his influence to make a case for his constituents." -- Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina. Burr voted against the stimulus yet appeared in person to present a $2 million-plus stimulus grant to help build a fire station to house the Bethlehem Community Volunteer Fire Department. "This is a great thing for this county," Burr said, according to the Hickory (N.C.) Daily Record. "We're not accustomed to federal dollars in that magnitude finding their way to North Carolina." A spokesman for Burr told the Associated Press in October that he wasn't taking credit for the money. "Sen. Burr was invited to the grant presentation by the Alexander County commissioners and was happy to be there to recognize the community and the fire department for their work in securing this highly competitive grant,'' the spokesman said. In an interview with Politico, Burr added, “Just because I voted against the stimulus doesn’t mean I shouldn’t recognize the merit achievement of an entity.” None of the four House members cited above responded to a query from PolitiFact. But the spokesman for one senior Republican lawmaker -- House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia -- did return our call. He argued that the Democratic criticism is overblown. Cantor, a leading stimulus opponent, has taken heat from Democrats for organizing a job fair whose participating employers benefited from stimulus funding, as well as for helping local officials lobby for stimulus money to support a high-speed rail link between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Va. Brad Dayspring, Cantor's spokesman, defended both efforts, saying that, in the first case, the congressman was simply trying to help his unemployed constituents get back to work, and, in the second case, he was continuing his longstanding efforts to boost high-speed rail. Cantor's advocacy on the rail issue dates back a decade, to his tenure in the Virginia legislature. On the broader question of why Cantor opted not to support the bill, Dayspring said that the congressman made his decision based on his opposition to the vast majority of the bill's provisions. "The bill was so flawed, he voted against it despite his overwhelming support" for the rail provision, Dayspring said. "If you support 1 percent of a bill and oppose 99 percent, are you expected to vote for it?" Let's return to Obama's claim. The president said that Republicans who voted against the stimulus "have been all too happy to claim credit for Recovery Act projects and the jobs those projects have produced." We found at least two lawmakers -- Young and Davis -- who aggressively criticized the stimulus bill yet sent out a news release touting their own role in helping constituents benefit from the bill. In the meantime, Obama also said that some opponents of the stimulus have "come to the ribbon cuttings" for projects funded by the bill. Shuster, Gingrey and Burr clearly attended such ceremonies. To us, five clear cases are enough to validate the president's assertion that some stimulus opponents have "found a way to have their cake and vote against it, too." We rate Obama's statement True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2010-02-05T17:17:37 | 2010-02-02 | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)'] |
tron-00126 | Bernie Sanders Wants a 90% Income Tax Rate | truth! & fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/bernie-sanders-proposes-90-income-tax-rate/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | Bernie Sanders Wants a 90% Income Tax Rate | Feb 4, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01414 | Glen Eagles hospital issued an urgent warning because seven women have died after sniffing perfume samples received in the mail. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charnel-no-5/ | null | September 11th | null | David Mikkelson | null | Women Killed by Poisoned Perfume Samples? | 3 November 2001 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06998 | By the end of his first term, President Obama will have added as much debt as all the prior 43 presidents combined. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jul/10/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-barack-obama-will-add-more-debt-4/ | At a roundtable of small business leaders in Salem, N.H., former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was asked what he would do about the corporate tax rate, whether he would cut government spending or raise taxes and whether it was possible to do both. Romney said he had a plan to lower the corporate tax rate but noted the nation's huge debt. "What I would like to do is bring the tax rate down and eliminate some of the special breaks that go to the big businesses that have found ways to take advantage of loopholes," Romney said. "So, I’d take that corporate tax rate down at least from 35 down to 25 percent. Then we can talk about where we can go from there. I’d like to get it a lot lower, but what I don’t want to do is add to the deficit. I don’t want to come back with a tax rate so low that we end up seeing our deficit go shooting up, because what we don’t want to have happen is the circumstance where we have larger and larger deficits. "I mean, this president is on track to have added so much debt to this country, that by the end of his first term, he will have added as much debt as all the prior presidents of this country combined. Think of that. I don’t want to do what he’s done, but I do believe we need to bring the corporate tax rate down, close special deals and loopholes to help finance that and encourage investment and growth by virtue of doing so." Really? More debt than all 43 presidents before President Obama? First we had to determine which "debt" Romney was referring to in his statement. There are actually two main ways of tabulating the debt. One is public debt, which includes all debt borrowed by the federal government and held by investors through Treasury notes and other securities. The other is gross federal debt, which includes public debt plus debt held by the government. The most notable forms of debt held by the government are the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare, money which is owed to beneficiaries in the future. Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said the candidate was referring to debt held by the public. We then needed to determine the start and end points for calculating how much of the debt can be categorized as falling within Obama’s first term. Obama took office on January 20, 2009, but who "owns" the debt recorded for fiscal year 2009 is unclear. Obama signed off on the budget that year, but it was assembled during Bush’s term, and it does not really bear Obama’s imprint. Similarly, it’s possible to say that either the fiscal year 2012 budget or the fiscal year 2013 budget is Obama’s last from his first term. So we decided to analyze Romney’s claim by using three possible date ranges for our calculations. -- October 1, 2008 (the start of fiscal 2009) to Oct. 1, 2012 (the end of fiscal 2012) -- January 20, 2009 (the day of Obama’s inauguration) to Oct. 1, 2013 (the end of fiscal 2013) -- October 1, 2009 (the start of fiscal 2010, Obama's first full budget year) to Oct. 1, 2013 (the end of fiscal 2013) We’re offering several options because each of these measurements have shortcomings for the purpose of measuring the debt accumulated under Obama. We’re able to calculate the debt figures for the earlier dates using the U.S. Department of Treasury’s "Debt to the Penny" calculator. The future debt amounts come from Office of Management and Budget projections. Because they are projections, they’re subject to change as economic circumstances change, but they are are widely cited among experts. (OMB doesn’t project future debt to specific dates, only to the end of future fiscal years, so that’s why our ending dates are only at the end of fiscal years.) Here are the debt totals accumulated during the three periods we listed above: * End of fiscal year 2008, when the accrued debt under the 43 presidents was $5.851 trillion, to the end of fiscal 2012, when the debt is projected to reach $11.881 trillion. Yes, more than the previous 43 presidents. * Obama inauguration, when the accrued debt was $6.307 trillion, to the end of fiscal year 2013, when the debt is projected to reach $12.784 trillion. Yes, more than the previous 43 presidents. * End of fiscal year 2009, when the accrued debt was $7.506 trillion, to end of fiscal year 2013, when the debt is projected to reach $12.784 trillion. No, not as much as the previous 43 presidents. Over the first two scenarios above, the debt more than doubled from the starting point (which reflects the debt under the prior 43 presidents) to the ending point. So in these two scenarios, Romney is right -- Obama accumulated more debt than the previous 43 presidents combined. But for the third scenario, the debt didn't double, so Romney would be wrong. This exercise is a testament to the fact that small changes in assumptions can produce big differences in outcomes. Of course, there’s no guarantee that Obama’s administration will actually preside over as much publicly held debt as predicted, since new budgets and projections will change debt outcomes every year. And the current negotiations over raising the debt ceiling could significantly change the forecasts. Still, this is what we can conclude given the data when Romney made his statement. Now let’s throw in a further complication. In an interview, Romney’s staff backed up the candidate’s statement in part by citing a prior ruling by PolitiFact. Williams, Romney’s spokesman, cited PolitiFact "True" ruling on a claim by Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. In a letter to the editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in October 2010, Cantor wrote that "the budget submitted by Obama will add more to the debt than the outstanding debt of the previous 43 presidents combined." PolitiFact rated the statement True, and that was good enough for Romney’s campaign. "We actually pulled it right off the (Politifact) website," Williams said in an interview. "We’re making the same contention that (Cantor) made." But when the topic came up in Romney's claim, we re-checked our work and realized that in the Cantor fact-check we had only used the first option (the end of fiscal 2008 to the end of fiscal 2012) rather than the other two. Based on all three measurements, Romney is right by two but off by the other one. So we find his claim Mostly True. | null | Mitt Romney | null | null | null | 2011-07-10T06:00:00 | 2011-06-27 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
snes-01118 | Mississippi House Bill 1100 would force public school teachers to recite the Ten Commandments at the start of each school day. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ten-commandments-mississippi/ | null | Politics | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Did a Mississippi Democrat Propose a Law to Force Teachers to Recite the Ten Commandments? | 25 January 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-03612 | Says "The idea of one casino per tribe is a false one." | half-true | /oregon/statements/2013/may/09/ken-tanner/idea-one-casino-tribe-false-one/ | The Coquille Indian Tribe wants to turn a bowling alley in Medford into a casino with 600 video gambling machines, adding to another casino it operates in North Bend. Coquille Tribal Chief Ken Tanner told a reporter that the tribe has the right to build a second casino. "The idea of one casino per tribe is a false one. Evidence of that is that the governor signed our compact which allows us a second casino," he said in a radio report that aired April 24, 2013, on Oregon Public Broadcasting. Tanner’s claim was news to PolitiFact Oregon. Is the "one casino per tribe" idea a false one, not grounded in reality? We always thought the policy was the norm in Oregon. Federal law calls for a tribe and state to negotiate a compact agreement before a casino can be sited. The compact spells out location, security and size. There is no federal or state law that limits tribes to one casino each. It is a policy of Gov. John Kitzhaber, who served two four-year terms from 1995 to 2003 and was elected to a third term that began in 2011. Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who served in-between, also adhered to this policy. Each of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes has a current compact with the state that identifies one casino location: The Grand Ronde has Spirit Mountain Casinoand the Siletz has Chinook Winds Casino. The Warm Springs opened Indian Head Casino in 2012, and in doing so, closed its casino at Kah-Nee-Ta Resort and Spa. Coquille We spoke with Ray Doering, spokesman for the Coquille Economic Development Corporation, which operates the Mill Casino in North Bend. (Tanner later followed up with an e-mail to PolitiFact Oregon, saying that he stood by his statement.) Doering made two points: One, the proposed venture is a different type of casino, one that does not need to go through the compact process. Two, he said, the tribe never agreed to Kitzhaber’s policy, even if it signed a compact in 2000 for the Mill Casino. Doering said it doesn’t matter what other tribes say they agreed to because the Coquille did not. "There was no agreement to keep it at one facility. What it says in this contract, we agreed to not seek an additional compact for a period of five years and that (provision) ended eight years ago," Doering said. Indeed, the 52-page agreement signed in 2000 specifies that the Coquille waives any right for a period of five years to even think about negotiating an agreement for another casino unless another tribe is allowed to operate more than one casino. Doering points to the compact language as evidence that the tribe could negotiate for a second casino after five years. Kitzhaber’s legal counsel says the language does not entitle the tribe to a second casino. The Burns Paiute, Klamath, Siletz and Umatilla tribes have similar five-year language in their compacts, said a spokesman for the governor. The compacts for Cow Creek, Warm Springs and Grand Ronde are more explicit, and the tribes waive any rights they may have to pursue a second casino, regardless of time frame. Governor, others The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, which operates the Seven Feathers Casino Resort in Canyonville, is at risk of losing money to a 600-machine casino in Medford and opposes the proposed second casino. Cow Creek leaders say Kitzhaber’s one casino, one tribe policy was agreed to by Oregon’s tribes and preserves the balance of casino gambling in the state. "We see it as an agreement made in good faith. The governor’s office calls it a policy; we would call it an agreement," said Susan Ferris, spokeswoman for Cow Creek. There’s another aspect we need to address: Types of casinos. The governor has authority to negotiate compacts for the large-scale tribal casinos currently in Oregon, called Class III. He has no authority over Class II casinos, which the National Indian Gaming Commission defines as casinos offering bingo and "when played in the same location as bingo - pull tabs, lotto, punch boards, tip jars, instant bingo, other games similar to bingo." The proposed casino would fall into this category. The ruling: Tanner is correct that the idea of one casino per tribe is a malleable one. This is Kitzhaber’s policy, and one that might fail in a legal challenge. Also, a future governor could decide on no limits at all. And the governor has no authority over any proliferation of bingo-oriented casinos. But it’s not entirely accurate to say that the idea of one casino per tribe is "a false one," or that the idea is non-existent. Kitzhaber, in a letter this week urging the Bureau of Indian Affairs to reject the Coquille proposal, wrote, "My ‘one casino per tribe’ policy direction and the gaming compacts entered into between the State and the tribes provide support for the notion that, as a State, we have consistently attempted to strike a balance between tribal pursuit of economic enterprise and a check on the expansion of gambling in our State." In the eyes of Coquille leaders, the policy does not apply because they did not agree to it. But a policy does exist, in the governor’s stated words and in the compacts of other tribes in Oregon. The Warm Springs closed one casino in order to open another. The Cow Creek believe it to be an agreement made by the tribes. The statement is Half True -- partially accurate but missing important details. | null | Ken Tanner | null | null | null | 2013-05-09T03:00:00 | 2013-04-24 | ['None'] |
pomt-14042 | The Nordic countries are some of the few countries that meet development aid goals. | mostly true | /global-news/statements/2016/may/26/barack-obama/us-v-nordic-block-how-they-compare-foreign-aid/ | President Barack Obama recently hosted a meeting with the leaders of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. The president had nothing but good things to say about his visitors from the Nordic block, remarking that, "There have been times where I’ve said, ‘Why don’t we just put all these small countries in charge for a while, and they could clean things up.’ " Small but potent was a recurring theme. "They are, individually, not large countries in terms of population, but in terms of effectiveness, contributions, ideas, energy, they are enormously important players on the international stage," Obama said as they wrapped up their meeting on May 13, 2016. "The Nordic countries are some of the few countries -- and, by the way, the United States doesn’t fall into this category -- of meeting the goals that had been set with respect to foreign aid and humanitarian assistance." Obama was specifically thinking about a United Nations benchmark that says that 0.7 percent of a country’s Gross National Income should go to official development assistance. It’s an aspirational target that dates back to 1970 and is entirely voluntary. (Gross National Income is a slightly less common way to measure the size of country’s economy.) The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development keeps track of that spending. The money has to go to developing countries and military aid doesn’t count. Since about 1980, four countries have met or shot well beyond the 0.7 percent mark. They are Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. You will notice that Finland and Iceland are missing from that group. Finland has come close, approaching 0.6 percent since 2010, and once -- in 1991 -- hitting 0.8 percent. But that’s not 0.7 percent. Iceland’s high-water mark was .47 in 2008, but its banks bet heavily on risky housing securities and the nation’s economy crashed hard in the Great Recession. Today, it puts .24 percent toward foreign development aid. Here’s how the 29 member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee stack up. (The United States is listed in orange; Nordic countries are in blue.) The United States is in the middle of the pack with 0.17 percent of GNI. That is just one way of measuring aid, however. The American economy is huge, so in terms of raw dollars, its spending stands way above all others. In 2015, the total was nearly $31 billion, or about a fifth of all the development aid tracked by the OECD. Of note: Great Britain and Luxembourg have been doing a good job of hitting the 0.7 percent target. In a purely technical sense and for just a couple of years, so has the United Arab Emirates. In 2014 and 2015, it gave more than 1 percent of its GNI in aid. But virtually all of that went to Egypt to support the military after it toppled the government led by parties aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. Our ruling Obama said that the Nordic countries are among the few that have met foreign development aid goals. He was referring to the voluntary target of 0.7 percent of Gross National Income that wealthier nations agreed to in 1970. For the largest Nordic nations of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Obama is correct. All of them have met or exceeded the 0.7 percent mark for many years. But if you put Finland and Iceland into the mix, the statement’s accuracy slips. Finland is close but not quite at the mark, and Iceland lies further from it. We’ll say the statement is three-fifths correct. That rates Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/6a084bb1-9be1-41b7-b78f-a97ec48df5a3 | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2016-05-26T16:27:29 | 2016-05-13 | ['None'] |
tron-00690 | ABC bleeps “Jesus” from the delayed broadcast of a TV Show | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/abc-jesus/ | null | celebrities | null | null | null | ABC bleeps “Jesus” from the delayed broadcast of a TV Show | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['Jesus', 'American_Broadcasting_Company'] |
vogo-00657 | Statement: “So let’s talk about the Chargers. They want a new football stadium. They’ve agreed to partner with us to explore sites. And it’s no secret that they could leave San Diego for another city, virtually any time they choose,” San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders said Jan. 13 in his annual State of the City address. | determination: mostly true | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/charging-out-of-town/ | Analysis: The Chargers by contract have one of, if not the, easiest way out of their town of any team in the NFL. That led the Los Angeles Times to declare this fall the Chargers were the team most likely to move to a proposed stadium in Los Angeles. | null | null | null | null | Charging Out of Town | January 20, 2010 | null | ['San_Diego', 'San_Diego_Chargers'] |
pomt-10356 | If you have an investment for your child's education or own a mutual fund or a stock in a retirement plan, (Obama) is going to raise your taxes. | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jul/09/john-mccain/mccains-argument-tangential-at-best/ | As political attacks go, this one is about as well-worn as they get. I, the Republican, will cut your taxes. He, the Democrat, will raise your taxes. Such was the gist of a speech Sen. John McCain made in a town hall meeting in Denver on July 7. "If you have an investment for your child's education or own a mutual fund or a stock in a retirement plan, he (Obama) is going to raise your taxes." This statement is based on Obama's plan to raise the long-term capital gains tax from the current rate of 15 percent to as high as 28 percent (Obama has not been specific about the rate he'll seek). It's part of Obama's strategy to shift more of the tax burden to wealthy people. But according to the McCain campaign, Obama's plan would hit the middle class. What's interesting about McCain's statement is that it's so specific; retirement plans, investments for education. For most people, those investments are made in tax sheltered plans, such as 401Ks or 529 plans for college funds. The McCain explanation is that Obama's tax plan would have a broad effect on investing, essentially taxing everything. "Obama has pledged to raise capital taxes - on capital gains and dividends - potentially impacting tens of millions of Americans," said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign. "All investors would face the impact of higher capital taxes on the valuation of their investments. While those in non-tax preferred accounts may not immediately be affected by capital gains and dividend tax hikes, funds ultimately withdrawn from tax-deferred accounts are subject to taxation as ordinary income -- on which Senator Obama has also pledged to raise the top marginal rate." To support the argument, the McCain campaign points to some statistics: That 52% of American adults own stocks, and that in 2006, 8.5 million of them paid a capital gains tax. McCain's campaign also notes an Investment Company Institute survey that concluded 88 million people invested in the stock market through mutual funds. Lastly, they point to a report from the Joint Committee On Taxation that found in 2005, about 20 percent of the taxpayers who were expected to report capital gains income - and 24 percent of those expected to report dividend income - earned less than $50,000 annually. These statistics ignore a very important caveat Obama has included in his tax plan, his unequivocal pledge that he will not raise capital gains taxes (or any other taxes) for families making less than $250,000 a year. "A lot of what (McCain campaign people) are saying is noise," said Eric Toder, a tax policy expert with the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. Those statistics on the large percentages of Americans who hold stocks and pay capital gains taxes are accurate, Toder said, they just aren't relevant to the argument. Yes, he said, there are 88 million people who have invested money in the stock market but "not too many of them are making $250,000 a year." So the higher rates in Obama's plan wouldn't apply to them. "I would say this stuff is, at best, misleading," Toder said. Toder also said that if McCain is talking about traditional college savings plans, like a 529, then he's "just wrong." The Obama campaign argues that not only is McCain wrong, they say that Obama is proposing some tax relief on those very fronts. Obama's plan calls for a fully refundable $4,000 college tax credit; and a 50% match of the first $1,000 of retirement savings you do each year. There is another school of thought on this issue, in support of the McCain campaign's argument, that raising capital gains and dividend tax rates will harm the value of stocks in general, and discourage investing in the long term. That may not translate to a direct tax on an individual, said Patrick Fleenor, chief economist for the Tax Foundation, a business-backed tax policy group, but the effect is the same. Any stock portfolio, whether it's earmarked for a child's education expenses or retirement, or anything, is going to suffer, he said. "The underlying value of the fund would be lower," Fleenor said. "To economists, there's no difference." Even if you agree with this argument, that's not what McCain said. He said if you have an investment for your child's education, or own a mutual fund or stock in a retirement plan "he (Obama) is going to raise your taxes." The fact is the capital gains tax would have absolutely no direct effect on savings in a traditional college savings plan. As for retirement savings through stocks or a mutual funds, people who cash out would not face higher tax rates unless you make more than $250,000. That doesn't apply to most Americans. We rate McCain's statement False. | null | John McCain | null | null | null | 2008-07-09T00:00:00 | 2008-07-07 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
pose-00765 | Will "protect their retirement pensions from a return to Barnes-style investments that would put their financial security at risk." | not yet rated | https://www.politifact.com/georgia/promises/deal-o-meter/promise/795/will-protect-teacher-pensions/ | null | deal-o-meter | Nathan Deal | null | null | Will protect teacher pensions | 2011-01-06T16:27:46 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-00989 | Family Trip to Lapland | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/family-trip-lapland-facebook-like-farming-scam/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Family Trip to Lapland Facebook Like-farming Scam | October 1, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
snes-00018 | At least 260 members of the U.S. Congress have settled sexual assault charges. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/congress-sexual-assault-charges/ | null | null | null | Dan Evon | null | Have 260 Out of 535 Members of Congress Settled Sexual Assault Charges? | 3 October 2018 | null | ['United_States_Congress', 'United_States'] |
pomt-08752 | (I) helped to invent a system that saved over a billion dollars on welfare. | true | /rhode-island/statements/2010/aug/29/kenneth-block/block-says-system-he-helped-create-detect-welfare-/ | In a television commercial, Kenneth Block, the Moderate Party candidate for governor, tries to appeal to voters by suggesting that he is business savvy, concerned about the environment, and knows how to save taxpayer money. "I built a successful high-tech business, created green jobs, and helped to invent a system that saved over a billion dollars on welfare," he says in the commercial, which is also available on his website. We decided to focus on the welfare claim and the savings Block says he helped to generate. First, Block isn't talking about Rhode Island. He said he is talking about software he helped develop for Texas, which in 1995 adopted a statewide debit card system for food stamp and welfare recipients. It computerized every transaction, eliminating, for example, the need for paper food stamps, which can be stolen or misused. He's been more specific on his website blog: "As a small business owner, Ken helped to invent a system that saved Texas over a billion dollars on welfare. He did this by eliminating waste and fraud in the system . . . " Second, the $1 billion savings estimate comes from food stamps, not from welfare, which people often lump together because both are forms of public assistance. Block's campaign encouraged us to focus on the food stamp program because, they said, it would be easier to quantify the savings. How did Block's efforts help save this money? He said one technique is "data mining," in which large amounts of information are analyzed to look for improprieties, such as a small grocery that reports the food sales numbers of a huge supermarket. He said sham storefronts were paying food stamp recipients 50 cents on the dollar for their stamps and then billing the state for the full amount when no food was actually sold. Such information helped direct investigators to crooked vendors and recipients, he said. So there are two key questions: Did Block help create the fraud detection system and did it save $1 billion? Geoffrey Wool, a spokesman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, said Block was an employee of GTECH when Texas contracted with the Rhode Island gambling company in the early 1990s to develop the EBT system. Wool said the Texas commission currently gets services from Simpatico Software Systems, the company Block started after he left GTECH. Block also referred us to Curtis Ermer, one of his GTECH colleagues on the EBT project. "Ken's role was large in terms of the design. Ken could sit down in a short period of time and optimize that code," said Ermer, who has since left GTECH. He said an anti-fraud component "was a purpose of the whole EBT system. The counterfeiting of stamps, the multiple addresses people would use, was supposed to be reduced." Thus, it appears Block played a significant role in establishing the EBT system, so his "helped to invent" claim is True. What about the second key question: Did that system save more than $1 billion? We were unable to locate any official report showing how much waste or fraud was eliminated by adoption of the EBT program. Block's campaign then directed us to several news reports from 1998 suggesting that the savings were large, although they widely disagreed on the amount saved: * In an opinion piece in The Houston Chronicle, Joe Williams, president of the Gulf Coast Retailers Association, said the number of Texas households receiving food stamps and welfare benefits plummeted from 1.4 million in 1994 to 850,000 in 1998 due to the EBT card system, saving taxpayers more than $1.2 billion a year. * A Dallas Morning News story quoted then-Texas Comptroller John Sharp as saying there had been a 250,000-person decline in food stamp rolls. At the time, a typical recipient was receiving about $70 in food stamps per month, according to a federal report we located independently. That would translate to a savings of $206 million per year. *A San Antonio Express-News story quoted Sharp's office as reporting that the decline in food stamp enrollment saved $67.3 million a month. That would total more than $800 million in just one year. The Block campaign also directed us to a March 1996 state newsletter, quoting Sharp as saying that when EBT went on-line in Houston in February 1995, 30,000 recipients immediately dropped off the food stamp rolls, including some who had been receiving food stamps at two or three different addresses. It also reported that "between January and October 1995, Texas' food stamp rolls shrank by nearly 200,000 recipients." At $70 per month per person, the statewide savings would surpass $1 billion after six years and one month -- sooner if you factor in inflation. All of this suggests that the EBT system indeed saved a lot of money in Texas. But there were some dissenting voices. We talked to Celia Hagert, a senior policy analyst for the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based nonprofit think tank devoted to improving the economic and social conditions of low- and moderate-income Texans. She agreed that the card system eliminated fraud on the part of retailers, but said enrollment was declining before the card system went into effect and "there weren't hordes and hordes of people fraudulently receiving food stamps." And two officials at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission insisted that GTECH, Block and his company have had no direct role in fraud detection. "There is no fraud detection mechanism in the product GTECH delivered," said Wool, the commission's spokesman. Instead, Wool said, the system simply sends data to Texas' Office of Inspector General, which developed its own fraud detection software. Block responded by showing us two emails from Douglas B. Walker, of Austin, who was a system analyst for the Texas Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system, retiring in 2007. The messages asked Block to look into some cases of suspected fraud. So we asked Wool to put us in touch with someone higher. He arranged an interview with Michael Garbarino, director of policy and outreach affairs for the inspector general's office, who expressed surprise at the Walker emails, saying he had talked to others to confirm that making such checks was not an assigned function. "None of these contracts, none of the vendors, nor any of the subcontractors ever had within the scope of the contract fraud detection responsibilities," he said. "The automation that runs that data through algorithms to arrive at questionable transactions was entirely created by state staff and never was in the scope of any vendor contract." In the end, Block did help develop the EBT system and the system likely saved -- directly or indirectly -- more than $1 billion in waste and fraud since its implementation 15 years ago. We rate his claim as True. The candidate, in interviews and on his blog, insists that he played a key role in fraud detection. He maintains that he continues helping with that task today. But Block is now aware, through our contacts with his office, that two Texas officials consistently and adamantly dispute that. | null | Kenneth Block | null | null | null | 2010-08-29T00:01:00 | 2010-06-19 | ['None'] |
snes-03529 | A photograph of a nude young man pictures Judge William Pryor, a potential Supreme Court nominee. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/william-pryor-nude/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Judge William Pryor Posed Nude for a Gay Magazine? | 17 November 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-04001 | The discovery of a vaccine for the autoimmune disease diabetes has been announced. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/diabetes-vaccine/ | null | Junk News | null | Bethania Palma | null | Diabetes Vaccine Announced? | 19 September 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pose-00810 | Perry said he would "absolutely" serve his full term if elected, provided he lives that long. | in the works | https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/842/serve-full-four-year-term-as-governor/ | null | perry-o-meter | Rick Perry | null | null | Serve full four-year term as governor | 2012-12-06T11:54:37 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01927 | Singer Lana Del Rey banned the American flag from her concerts because she can't stand to see it with President Trump in office. | mostly false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-singer-lana-del-rey-ban-american-flags-at-her-concerts/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Bethania Palma | null | Did Singer Lana Del Rey Ban American Flags at Her Concerts? | 10 August 2017 | null | ['United_States'] |
pomt-02860 | Under President (George W.) Bush, prosecution of gun crimes was 30 percent higher than it is under President Obama. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2013/nov/15/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-gun-prosecutions-down-under-obama/ | After leading the charge for a government shutdown to defund President Barack Obama’s health care law, freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, hasn’t shied away from the spotlight. On Nov. 8, 2013, Cruz was a guest on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Long before he got to the obligatory joke about reading Green Eggs & Ham during a lengthy Senate speech, he addressed gun policy. "Do you target violent criminals, or do you try to take away the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens?" Cruz said. After the senator criticized Obama for focusing on the latter at the expense of the former, he praised predecessor George W. Bush’s efforts. "Under President Bush, prosecution of gun crimes was 30 percent higher than it is under President Obama," Cruz said. "They’re not targeting bad guys." We decided to see how the numbers differed under the two presidents. Ways to read the data Let’s break down the number of federal prosecutions by year. We’ll start with fiscal year 2002, since that represents Bush’s first full year in office. Fiscal year 2012 is the most recent year we have data for. There are two different sets of statistics we can look at. Cruz’s spokeswoman referred us to the Transitional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University data-gathering organization. This data tracks federal gun prosecutions by the lead, or most serious, charge. On the other hand, the Department of Justice’s United States Attorney’s Office tracks all charges, a more inclusive category of prosecutions. Their data set includes everyone who was charged with a gun crime. The lead charge category only includes people whose most serious offense was gun-related, a distinction that omits thousands of charges each year. Lead charges All charges 2002 7,948 10,634 2003 10,432 13,037 2004 11,015 12,962 2005 10,219 13,062 2006 9,652 12,479 2007 8,919 12,087 2008 8,484 11,974 2009 8,188 11,722 2010 7,614 11,421 2011 7,465 11,811 2012 7,774 11,728 Cruz’s spokeswoman also told us that Cruz’s claim didn’t take into account numbers for Bush’s entire term: He used 2004, the high-water mark for lead gun prosecutions during the time period, as his starting point. We’re left with four ways to calculate the percent change: • Lead charges from 2002 to 2012, which gives us a 2.2 percent decrease • Lead charges from 2004 to 2012, which gives us a 29.4 percent decrease • All charges from 2002 to 2012, which gives us a 10.3 percent increase • All charges from 2005 (the high-water mark of this data set) to 2012, which gives us a 10.2 percent decrease This makes clear how Cruz got his 30 percent decrease. However, that’s not the only, or necessarily the best, approach. None other than TRAC’s co-director, Susan Long, told PolitiFact that her organization’s use of lead charges isn’t as comprehensive as using all charges. She also called Cruz’s 2004 start date misleading, since it amounts to cherry-picking. The most reliable number may be the 10.3 percent increase in gun prosecutions between fiscal years 2002 and 2012. This rate actually indicates the trend moving in the opposite direction from what Cruz asserted. Who’s responsible? In addition to highlighting a numerical difference in federal gun crime prosecutions, Cruz specifically suggested that Obama’s policies are responsible for the decrease. But how much influence does the president really have on the issue? Experts say: not much. "The Bush administration was all over the map," Long said. "Those trends really are being driven by something other than presidential policy," since the peaks and valleys don’t coincide with presidential terms, she said. As we’ve noted in a previous fact check, the president, as the head of the executive branch, can order changes to prosecutorial priorities. For instance, following the Newtown, Conn. school shooting in December 2012, Obama did call for the need to "maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime." We don’t yet have data that reflects prosecutions in the aftermath of Newtown. But it’s important to note that Obama’s priorities are not the only factors at play in these decisions. Any presidential shift in policy must filter down to the attorney general, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives field offices, and front-line attorneys, said Ronald Frandsen, grants administrator for the Regional Justice Information Service. U.S. attorneys can decline to prosecute gun cases for a variety of reasons, as outlined by TRAC. So Obama is responsible for setting the broad policy approach to gun prosecutions, but he isn’t micromanaging individual cases. Much of the decision-making occurs at a lower level. Our ruling Cruz said prosecution of gun crimes under the Bush administration was 30 percent higher than it is under Obama. It’s possible to get a decline that big by cherry-picking the data, but the most inclusive method actually produces an increase. Cruz also overstates the role of the president in determining prosecution rates. We rate Cruz’s claim Mostly False. | null | Ted Cruz | null | null | null | 2013-11-15T16:09:11 | 2013-11-08 | ['Barack_Obama', 'George_W._Bush'] |
goop-02652 | Lady Gaga And Christian Carino Planning Wedding? | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/lady-gaga-two-weddings-christian-carino-engaged/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Lady Gaga And Christian Carino Planning Wedding? | 2:10 pm, July 20, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-05829 | Says in his years as a Texas legislator, "we passed three pay increases for teachers and provided them with health insurance." | mostly true | /texas/statements/2012/feb/17/paul-sadler/paul-sadler-says-he-and-others-gave-texas-teachers/ | Facebook was but a gleam in a Harvard student’s eye the last time Paul Sadler held public office. But the former Democratic state legislator embraced the social networking site’s political potential after he declared his candidacy to succeed the retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison late last year. And on Jan. 27, 2012, Sadler posted this Facebook update: "In the time I worked on education issues, we passed 3 pay increases for teachers and provided them with health insurance." Teachers got all that in Sadler’s legislative era? We wondered. Sadler, a lawyer who works with the Wind Coalition energy advocacy group, won election to the Texas House on Nov. 6, 1990. For 12 years, he represented the East Texas district around Henderson, and for eight years he chaired the House Public Education Committee. Also, in 1997 and 2001, he headed committees on taxes and public school financing. During his legislative tenure, he also served on and chaired committees on health insurance for teachers and other education subcommittees. In response to our inquiry, Sadler campaign spokesman Jeff Rotkoff told us that in 1995, Sadler helped lead an overhaul of state education laws that tied teacher pay hikes to increases in state education aid, which brought raises in 1997 and 1998. And in 1999, Rotkoff said, Sadler sponsored a $3,000-a-year pay raise for teachers. In 2001, Rotkoff said, Sadler wrote a proposal that created a health insurance program for school employees. Separately, we confirmed that: Sadler sponsored the House version of Senate Bill 1 in 1995. The proposal, authored by Sen. Bill Ratliff, R-Mount Pleasant, revised the state’s public education laws across the board; it was approved by the Senate in March 1995 and the House about two months later and then signed into law May 30, 1995. Brock Gregg, governmental relations director for the Association of Texas Professional Educators told us in an interview that the overhaul changed the schedule of teacher pay raises; as a result, he said, most teachers saw pay increases in 1995-96. Gregg said lawmakers also added a salary "escalator" to the state’s education code. That provision said that whenever state funding to a school district increased, the district’s salary schedule must also increase. After the 1997 Legislature wrote a budget drawing on a revenue surplus, Gregg said, all Texas teachers fielded pay raises thanks to the established escalator clause. He said one raise of 5.5 percent occurred in 1997-98 and another, of 1 percent, kicked in during 1998-99. These figures match those sent to us by the Texas Education Agency. In a telephone interview, Sadler said that the "escalator" sprang from an idea he floated and Ratliff fleshed out, which then became law. Gregg said that although the original "escalator" was scrapped in 1999, lawmakers later made other efforts to ensure teachers got pay raises when districts fielded additional state aid. Another raise arose after the 1999 Legislature advanced Senate Bill 4, which was authored by Sen. Teel Bivins, R-Amarillo, carried in the House by Sadler and took effect Sept. 1, 1999. The Austin American-Statesman reported May 31, 1999, that the measure gave Texas teachers "their biggest pay raise ever" as part of the "largest public school spending increase in state history." From a total $2.1 billion for public schools, $1.7 billion went to pay raises, the story said, with teachers getting at least $3,000 more that year. So, multiple raises accounted for. And what about Sadler’s claim about "providing" teacher health insurance? In 2001, Sadler authored House Bill 3343, the "Texas School Employees Uniform Group Health Coverage Act" (that’s TSEUGHCA, if you speak Gaelic), which was signed into law June 15, 2001. It created the TRS-ActiveCare program, a state-managed insurance pool. At the time, most districts offered insurance plans to their employees, including teachers, according to an August 2000 TRS study. Texas Education Agency data show teachers made up about half of school employees in 2000. The TRS study says, though, that only 38 percent of about 535,000 Texas public school employees had coverage comparable to that of state employees. Some 50 percent had insurance that did not compare favorably to state coverage, and 12 percent of employees did not sign up for district-offered coverage, the study says. Only 350 employees in 17 of the state’s 1,000-plus districts were offered no coverage at all, the study says. Sadler told us his 2001 proposal was intended both to extend coverage to all school employees and to raise the quality of coverage so that all employees had access to comparable insurance. According to a 2001 report by the nonpartisan House Research Organization, the 1991 Legislature had directed school districts to give employees coverage equivalent to that of state workers, but the law lacked enforcement provisions. Gregg told us in interviews that the 2001 TRS-ActiveCare program was created to acquire and administer group insurance from a third party, and the law also gave all teachers $1,000 per year toward its cost. Association of Texas Professional Educators lobbyist Josh Sanderson told us via email that the $1,000 stipend was intended to be an annual payment but was cut to $500 in 2003 for full-time teachers and then, in a 2006 special session, rolled into a $2,500 raise in educators’ pay. According to a May 2002 guide to the law produced by the Legislative Budget Board, after the first sign-up deadline of Sept. 30, 2001, small districts and other entities employing a total 147,000 people had joined TRS-ActiveCare. Larger districts were added later, though not all chose to participate. Currently, Texas State Teachers Association spokesman Clay Robison told us by email, all Texas teachers have access to insurance comparable to state employees’. ActiveCare covers more than 445,000 employees and dependents, he said, and 89 percent of eligible districts and similar education entities participate in the program. Austin and Houston are examples of large districts that have their own health plans, he said. Sadler said that although nearly 40 percent of school employees had comparable coverage before 2001, he believes such accounting doesn’t give an accurate picture of the 2001 law’s impact. He said he didn’t remember the 1991 mandate that districts offer comparable coverage, but it obviously had little effect. Of his work on teacher pay raises and insurance, Sadler said, "I know it changed the landscape." Teacher lobby groups have hailed Sadler’s advocacy. In a Dec. 2, 2001, Statesman news story, TSTA director of governmental relations Jay Levin credits Sadler with helping to bring about the 1999 raise of $3,000 and the health insurance program for teachers. Robison told us it’s fair for Sadler to claim credit for the pay raises and insurance initiative because he chaired the public education panel through those years. Gregg likewise said Sadler merits a goodly share of the credit. "Sadler was the leading proponent for pay increases and later health insurance for educators," Gregg said. Our ruling Sadler played a pivotal role in ensuring several teacher pay raises and also was key to lawmakers giving school workers including teachers access to insurance benefits equal to those accorded state employees. However, contrary to Sadler’s Facebook wording, the latter development did not provide teachers with insurance. Nearly every Texas teacher had access to some kind of coverage before the 2001 action. Still, the Sadler-authored change gave every school employee access to insurance equivalent to state workers’ coverage. We rate Sadler’s claim Mostly True. | null | Paul Sadler | null | null | null | 2012-02-17T11:16:18 | 2012-01-27 | ['Texas'] |
hoer-00665 | Easter Island Statues Have Bodies | true messages | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/easter-island-statues-bodies.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Easter Island Statues Have Bodies | 28 June, 2012 | null | ['None'] |
abbc-00038 | The claim: The chief executive of the Brewers Association, Denita Wawn, says there is no or very little link between alcohol advertising and alcohol misuse, including underage drinking. | in-the-red | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-02/fact-check-alcohol-advertising-and-misuse-children/6729232 | The claim: The chief executive of the Brewers Association, Denita Wawn, says there is no or very little link between alcohol advertising and alcohol misuse, including underage drinking. | ['health', 'adolescent-health', 'child-health-and-behaviour', 'australia'] | null | null | ['health', 'adolescent-health', 'child-health-and-behaviour', 'australia'] | Fact check: Is there 'no or very little' link between alcohol advertising and underage drinking? | Mon 12 Oct 2015, 1:44am | null | ['None'] |
snes-01079 | Did Nikki Haley 'Accidentally Confess' to an Affair with Donald Trump? | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nikki-haley-affair-accidentally/ | null | Politics | null | David Mikkelson | null | Did Nikki Haley ‘Accidentally Confess’ to an Affair with Donald Trump? | 1 February 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01754 | On 11 September 2017, Florida Governor Rick Scott was taken to hospital after being injured during a Hurricane Irma cleanup operation. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rick-scott-critical-condition/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Florida Governor Rick Scott Critically Injured During Hurricane Irma Cleanup? | 11 September 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-03006 | The federal government "has $3 trillion in cash flow, so we can pay our bills" and won’t default. | half-true | /texas/statements/2013/oct/16/roger-williams/roger-willliams-correct-government-could-cover-pro/ | In an interview, first-term U.S. Rep. Roger Williams vowed not to vote for raising the federal debt ceiling. "I just won’t do it," the Austin Republican was quoted as saying in an Oct. 11, 2013, Austin American-Statesman news story. Besides, Williams said, even if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, "we are not going to default. We have $3 trillion in cash flow, so we can pay our bills." We wondered about that, mindful that the U.S. Treasury secretary has speculated about the risks of the government not having enough cash on hand. Treasury secretary's warning The debt ceiling, now nearly $16.7 trillion, constrains how much the government can borrow to meet obligations. And in October 2013, the Treasury secretary, Jack Lew, told a Senate panel that unless Congress raised the ceiling, "extraordinary measures" taken since the spring would be exhausted no later than Oct. 17 "at which point the federal government will have run out of borrowing authority. At that point, we will be left to meet our country’s commitments with only the cash on hand and any incoming revenues, placing our economy in a dangerous position. "If we have insufficient cash on hand," Lew said, "it would be impossible for the United States of America to meet all of its obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, payments to our military and veterans and contracts with private suppliers for the first time in our history. At the same time," he said, "we’re relying on investors from all over the world to continue to hold U.S. bonds. Every week we roll over approximately $100 billion in U.S. (Treasury) bills. If U.S. bond-holders decided that they wanted to be repaid rather than continuing to roll over their investments, we could unexpectedly dissipate our entire cash balance." Williams' backup cites projected interest costs We asked Williams how he reached his conclusion. By email, Williams’ spokeswoman Haley Graves provided a transcript of the Statesman’s question to Williams, who has long owned automobile dealerships, and his response. Statesman: "Do you think the warnings about what a failure to enact a debt ceiling increase, the effect on the economy, is overblown or is that real?" Williams: "We’re not going to default because we do have $3 trillion of cash flow coming in to America. Alright? Now the cash flow doesn’t flow evenly – it’s like your business. You have receivable, this and that, but you do have $3 trillion in cash. That’s more cash flow than we’ve ever had coming in to the government than ever. And so we can pay our bills. We can pay our debt service. We can pay our military. We’re not going to default." Graves said Williams based his $3 trillion reference on a May 2013 projection by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that the government would collect $3.042 trillion in revenues through the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2013. Asked if Williams was referring to the government paying all its bills, Graves said Williams has said "all along" that the government will not default because its cash flow would be enough to pay bond holders and to fulfill interest payments. What's default? Observers of the debt-ceiling debate diverge on how to define a government default, though they agree it’s not happened before. By telephone, economist Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, a limited-government think tank, said Williams’ main point is supported by the CBO’s projection of $237 billion in net interest costs through the same fiscal year. Everyone agrees not paying such interest would hurt financial markets, Edwards said, but his sense is that if interest costs are paid on time, the government can avoid default, though that course could prove "ugly," he said, because the Treasury would need to pick and choose which other obligations--ranging from Social Security checks to Pentagon contracts--to pay in full and on time. "It would make people very mad," Edwards said, "but it wouldn’t be a default." Edwards also noted an Oct. 2, 2013, Yahoo Finance interview with David Stockman. Stockman, who headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, said that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the government could easily tap incoming revenue to make its interest payments while also covering regular payments to Social Security retirees, the armed services and Medicare reimbursements. "It is a complete red herring to say there will be a default," Stockman said. "There will never be a time in which there is not enough cash to pay the interest." Then again, Edwards told us, a counter-argument he attributed to liberals and Democrats is that it would be very hard for the Treasury to make the described alternative spending choices. A Brookings Institution economist, Gary Burtless, said by email that it’s conceivable the Treasury could prevent default on government-backed securities by keeping up with interest payments, though he said he lacked the expertise to judge whether the Treasury could legally implement a choose-the-bill-to-pay strategy. Realistically, Burtless said, if the government runs short of the revenue required to pay non-interest costs, that would seem like a default to any affected creditors. "If a business makes timely payments on its secured and unsecured bank debt but does not make promised payment to its suppliers (for supplies already delivered), workers (for hours of work already supplied), and pensioners (for pensions promised under the company pension plan)," he said, "most observers would say the company has defaulted on its obligations to some of its creditors. Suppliers, workers, and pensioners are creditors of the company just as certainly as banks that have extended the company a loan." Also responding to our inquiry, economist Jared Bernstein of the liberal-leaning Center on Budget Policy Priorities pointed out by email that the CBO-projected $3 trillion in revenue stands to be outpaced by predicted expenditures of $3.6 trillion in the fiscal year. This leads to a key question, Bernstein said, as to whether there will be days when cash flow undershoots what must be paid. Bernstein noted that a September 2013 report by the Bipartisan Policy Center said this will occur with, for instance, revenue a few weeks after mid-October 2013 running behind spending demands by more than $100 billion. The report also said that if the government exhausted its ability to pay all its bills by Oct. 18, 2013, the Treasury would run about $106 billion short of meeting obligations over the next 20 business days. "Approximately 32% of the funds owed for the period would go unpaid," the report said, with the reality proving "chaotic." Uncertainty at Treasury We did not find any indication that the Treasury has aired a strategy to pick and choose which bills it pays in the event of cash-flow slowing. A Sept. 19, 2013, report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service floated opposite speculations. In 2012, the report said, a Treasury official said the agency lacked congressional guidance on prioritization and hence only had a system to pay bills as they came in, one after the other. In contrast, according to the report, the Government Accountability Office said in a 1985 letter to the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Bob Packwood, that the Treasury was "free to liquidate obligations in any order it finds will best serve the interests of the United States." Burtless said that his understanding is the Treasury cannot prioritize its payments to contractors, Social Security pensioners, Medicare payees (doctors and hospitals that have provided services to the Medicare-insured population), non-furloughed civilian workers, members of the uniformed military, etc. If a supplier, a pensioner, a non-furloughed worker, military serviceperson, doctor or hospital does not receive timely payment, does that constitute a ‘default’?" An Oct. 13, 2013, PolitiFact story listing questions and answers about the debt ceiling said that if the ceiling is not raised, the government isn’t expected to have sufficient cash to meet all obligations in a timely manner past the beginning of November 2013, at latest. "So what happens then?" PolitiFact wrote. "The most obvious solution (beyond simply doing nothing) is to prioritize payments. Bondholders would likely be paid off first, since a missed or delayed payment on a financial instrument would entail the most severe peril for the government. Outraging senior citizens by delaying or missing a Social Security check is bad enough, the thinking goes, but if investors decide en masse to abandon U.S. bonds in the future, it would put the entire stability of the federal government’s finances (and ultimately, the U.S. economy) at risk. And according to experts, prioritization has problems. "For one thing, the federal government’s computer systems are not set up to do this, meaning it might not be a practical option (and could result in costly errors)," PolitiFact said. "In addition, the Treasury says it’s not clear it would have the legal authority to make those sorts of decisions. And it could cost more, since the law requires the government to pay interest on top of any payments that are delayed. It’s also not clear whether prioritizing bondholder payments would keep the United States from a ‘default.’ "It all depends on how you define the word ‘default.’ Some lawmakers who downplay the consequences of hitting the debt ceiling argue that a default only happens if interest on securities isn’t paid. A missed payment to a federal contractor or a Social Security recipient, according to this argument, doesn’t trigger a default." The story noted that the CRS has "acknowledged that there’s no clear answer to this question, but it does note that Black’s Law Dictionary defines the term ‘default’ as ‘the failure to make a payment when due’ — a definition that does not restrict a default to a missed interest payment. Ultimately, CRS notes, ‘financial markets’ perceptions of what constitutes a default, or a real threat of default, may be more relevant when assessing the potential impacts of not raising the debt limit.’" Our ruling Williams said the government "has $3 trillion in cash flow, so we can pay our bills" and won’t default. In the 12 months through September 2014, the government is projected to raise $3 trillion in revenue, far more than enough to cover some $237 billion in its projected interest costs. In this way, perhaps, default could be avoided. Still, Williams made a broader reference to paying "our bills," and on that front, there’s debate over whether the government could meet all its obligations or have the authority to pick and choose what to pay. These are important details. We rate this partly accurate claim as Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. | null | Roger Williams | null | null | null | 2013-10-16T12:28:40 | 2013-10-11 | ['None'] |
snes-03952 | Image depicts police in Danville, Virginia, purposely obstructing dash cams by lifting the hoods of their vehicles. | mostly false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-pop-hoods/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Police Allowed to ‘Pop Hoods’ to Block Dash Cams | 26 September 2016 | null | ['Virginia', 'Danville,_Virginia'] |
snes-06445 | Photograph shows a C-130 transport dropping anti-missile flares. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/c-130/ | null | Uncategorized | null | David Mikkelson | null | C-130 Flares | 15 July 2003 | null | ['None'] |
abbc-00176 | During the election campaign, the Coalition said it wanted its relations with Aboriginal people to be "one of the hallmarks of an incoming Coalition government". | in-the-green | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-22/indigenous-affairs-prime-minister-cabinet-promise-check/5601000 | null | ['indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander', 'indigenous-policy', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'abbott-tony', 'australia'] | null | null | ['indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander', 'indigenous-policy', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'abbott-tony', 'australia'] | Promise check: Move Indigenous Affairs into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet | Sun 8 May 2016, 7:37am | null | ['Coalition_(Australia)'] |
goop-02835 | Meghan Markle “Caught In Nazi And Satanism Scandal,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/meghan-markl-nazi-satanism-scandal/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Meghan Markle NOT “Caught In Nazi And Satanism Scandal,” Despite Report | 3:20 pm, April 27, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-01249 | Amendment 2 on medical marijuana won a higher percentage of the vote than the last six Florida governors, including Jeb Bush’s 2002 landslide. | mostly true | /florida/statements/2014/nov/13/united-care/medical-marijuana-amendment-was-more-popular-winni/ | Floridians turned down a state constitutional amendment for medical marijuana, but it’s clear a majority of voters were all for the idea. Amendment 2, which would have changed the state’s Constitution to allow the sale of cannabis for "certain medical conditions" such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease, rang up 57.6 percent of the vote. Unfortunately for the measure’s supporters, amendments require at least 60 percent of the vote to pass. That close margin means that medical marijuana will continue to be debated, and not just in Florida. Two dozen states have medical marijuana laws, and Oregon and the District of Columbia voted to decriminalize recreational pot in the same general election. Ben Pollara, the campaign manager for the group behind the amendment, United for Care, tweeted two days after the election that the drug proved more popular than Florida’s governors. The tweet read: "#YesOn2 got a higher % of the vote than the last 6 #flgov including @JebBush in his 2002 landslide #tallyorbust #2016." We know the last couple of elections Gov. Rick Scott hasn’t even had to break 50 percent of the total votes in order to win, but is Pollara right about the last six Florida governors not garnering as much as 57.6 percent? The voting rolls The Twitter shorthand "#flgov" generally refers to the gubernatorial campaign, but has been used interchangeably to denote any tweet about a governor, too. We reached out to Pollara to ask him to clarify whether he meant the last six governors or the last six gubernatorial elections, because there’s a difference. Pollara told us he meant the last six gubernatorial elections, going back to Lawton Chiles’ victory over Jeb Bush in 1994. But because of the tweet’s wording, we looked at the last six governors elected, some of whom served two terms, going back to the 1978 campaign. Keep in mind, we’re looking for governors who won 57.6 percent of the vote or higher. Election year Governor Winning votes Total votes Percentage 1978 Bob Graham 1,406,580 2,530,468 55.6% 1982 Bob Graham 1,739,553 2,688,566 64.7% 1986 Bob Martinez 1,847,525 3,386,171 54.6% 1990 Lawton Chiles 1,995,206 3,530,871 56.5% 1994 Lawton Chiles 2,135,008 4,206,659 50.8% 1998 Jeb Bush 2,191,105 3,964,441 55.3% 2002 Jeb Bush 2,856,845 5,100,581 56.0% 2006 Charlie Crist 2,519,845 4,829,270 52.2% 2010 Rick Scott 2,619,335 5,359,735 48.9% 2014 Rick Scott 2,865,075 5,950,867 48.2% Source: Florida Department of State, Division of Elections If we were to look only at the last six elections, Pollara could be correct, because the highest margin of victory going back to 1994 was Bush’s 56 percent in 2002 against Bill McBride. As Pollara noted when we contacted him, if you’re counting that way, it could be the last eight elections. But if we’re going by individuals elected governor, there’s one obvious outlier: Graham, who was immensely popular and beat Republican state legislator Skip Bafalis with 64.7 percent of the vote in 1982. For comparison, Amendment 2 garnered 3,370,323 out of 5,849,118 votes cast for the measure to get that 57.6 percent. That’s more individual votes than any winning candidate has ever received. Our ruling Pollara said Amendment 2 won a higher percentage of the vote than the last six Florida governors, including Bush’s 2002 landslide. He’s right about the 2002 contest, and when you look back at the last six elections (eight, really) as Pollara intended, that’s true, too. But there’s a glaring outlier when you look at the last six people elected governor -- Graham’s 1982 win, when he garnered 64.7 percent of the vote. We rate this statement Mostly True. | null | United for Care | null | null | null | 2014-11-13T17:23:37 | 2014-11-06 | ['None'] |
snes-05903 | Singer Bobby Shmurda was stabbed to death at Rikers Island by his cellmate. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bobby-shmurda-death/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Was Bobby Shmurda Stabbed to Death in Rikers Island Jail by His Cell Mate? | 27 December 2014 | null | ['Rikers_Island'] |
pomt-05111 | Over the last few decades, the income of the top 1 percent grew by more than 275 percent -- to an average of $1.3 million a year. | mostly true | /ohio/statements/2012/jun/28/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-income-top-earners-275-percent-1/ | While campaigning this month in Cleveland, President Barack Obama reframed his general election fight with Mitt Romney as a battle between the haves and the have-nots. Casting himself as a champion for the latter, Obama argued that his Republican opponent embraced fiscal policies that helped steer the country into recession. The election, he said, will be "a make-or-break moment for America’s middle class." The address at Cuyahoga Community College followed remarks that same afternoon from Romney in Cincinnati. Combined, the events offered a preview of how each will spend the coming months positioning himself as the candidate who can steer an economic recovery. The dueling speeches were considered far and wide to represent a key moment, given that it was the first time Obama and Romney had campaigned in the same state on the same day. Leaving aside the rhetoric, PolitiFact Ohio decided to look closer at the numbers the president used to make his case. In particular, two figures Obama shared at Tri-C caught our attention. "Over the last few decades," Obama said early in his 53-minute speech, "the income of the top 1 percent grew by more than 275 percent -- to an average of $1.3 million a year." The president had painted a picture of inequality. But was it an accurate one? Let’s start with the first half of the statement. Data released last October by the independent Congressional Budget Office shows that, on average, those Americans among the richest 1 percent saw their after-tax household income rise 275 percent between 1979 and 2007. Those not quite as prosperous but nonetheless among the top 20 percent saw income grow by 65 percent over that period. Middle-class incomes grew roughly 40 percent. And among the bottom 20 percent, income was about 18 percent higher in 2007 than in 1979. So while income increased across the board, the top 1 percent easily outpaced the pack. "As a result of that uneven income growth, the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979," the CBO reported. "In fact, between 2005 and 2007, the after-tax income received by the 20 percent of the population with the highest income exceeded the after-tax income of the remaining 80 percent." The second half of Obama’s statement can be traced to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 34 developed countries that sets international standards on a wide range of topics. The report, released in December and titled "Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising," found that, on average, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earned $1.3 million a year after taxes. Though Obama didn’t mention it in his speech, that figure dwarfs the average $17,700 made by the poorest 20 percent, according to the OECD. Before we get to the Truth-O-Meter, there are three points worth raising. First, while Obama said that growth for the richest 1 percent was more than 275 percent, the CBO study adds no such quantifier. The president indulged in some hyperbole, but not so much that it created a false impression that the disparity is measurably larger than it is. Second, Obama time-pegged his assertion to "the last few decades." Obama’s speech focused singularly on the policies of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. Also in the White House during those decades were two Democrats: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The third point comes via the Washington Post. When fact-checking Obama’s Tri-C speech, the Post’s Glenn Kessler noted that while it’s accurate that the average income among the top 1 percent is $1.3 million, describing top earners that way is "an interesting sleight of hand." According to the CBO, you’re in the top 1 percent if your household income exceeds $352,000. "By using an average," Kessler wrote, "Obama is able to cite a much higher figure." But it’s also important to stress that the numbers Obama used come from agencies respected for independence. These three points, while helpful in painting a fuller picture, do not diminish the accuracy of the numbers or the context in which the president delivered them. Knowing them, though, provides some clarification. As such, we rate Obama’s statement Mostly True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2012-06-28T06:00:00 | 2012-06-14 | ['None'] |
hoer-00212 | First Aid Advice Message - Eggs For Treatment of Burns | misleading recommendations | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/eggs-burn-treatment.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Spurious First Aid Advice Message - Eggs For Treatment of Burns | August 9, 2012 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-08364 | Says "Scott Walker wants to make abortion illegal, even in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother." | true | /wisconsin/statements/2010/oct/26/tom-barrett/tom-barrett-says-scott-walker-wants-ban-abortion-e/ | In a gubernatorial campaign largely centered on jobs and the job performance of the candidates, Democrat Tom Barrett has injected abortion into the debate, using a stark TV ad to take aim at his opponent, Republican Scott Walker. A couple identified as Lana and Mike appear on the screen. Mike says their teenage daughter was brutally raped. "You can’t imagine what she went through," he says. "That’s why politicians like Scott Walker make me so mad." The screen goes black. Then as Mike continues, the words he says also appear on the screen: "Scott Walker wants to make abortion illegal, even in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother." Mike concludes: "Who is Scott Walker to play God with our family?" and -- repeating a common theme from Barrett and the Democratic side -- says he feels Walker is "too extreme for Wisconsin." As voters weigh their choices in the Nov. 2, 2010, election, there is no dispute that Barrett is pro-choice and Walker is pro-life. But Barrett’s claim, which may be new to many viewers of the ad, is that Walker wants to outlaw abortion under any circumstances. It is worth noting that many voters who consider themselves pro-life support make an exception for abortion being available in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother. A May 2009 Gallup poll, however, found that 23 percent of Americans -- up from 17 percent a year earlier -- said abortion should be illegal under all circumstances. For his part, Walker has said repeatedly he opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. He declares himself "100 percent pro-life." And to Pro-Life Wisconsin, an organization that opposes abortion without exception, Walker pledged to seek a complete abortion ban. We asked Jill Bader, Walker’s campaign spokeswoman, about Barrett’s ad and she said it accurately states Walker’s position. (We would note that as a member of the state Assembly, Walker backed an effort to bar government employees from performing abortions and a bill outlawing "partial-birth abortion"; both measures included an exception for when the life of the mother is at stake.) This is one item we can assess quickly. In the race for governor, Democrat Tom Barrett said his opponent, Republican Scott Walker, "wants to make abortion illegal, even in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother." Walker acknowledges that is his position. We rate Barrett’s claim True. | null | Tom Barrett | null | null | null | 2010-10-26T09:00:00 | 2010-10-21 | ['None'] |
tron-01106 | The tourist who woke up with no kidneys | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/kidneys/ | null | crime-police | null | null | null | The tourist who woke up with no kidneys | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-01787 | Says Rick Scott cut "Bright Futures scholarships in half." | half-true | /florida/statements/2014/jul/25/charlie-crist/charlie-crist-says-rick-scott-cut-bright-futures-h/ | Former Gov. Charlie Crist continued his attacks on Gov. Rick Scott’s education funding record in a TV ad set at St. Petersburg High School, Crist’s alma mater. "This isn’t just a doorway to a school. It was my doorway as a public school kid to opportunity. And I want to make sure every child has that same chance for a better life," Crist says in the ad. "But Rick Scott's education cuts are closing that door on Florida's kids, spending almost $200 less per student than when I was governor and cutting Bright Futures scholarships in half." Here we will fact-check whether Scott cut Bright Futures scholarships in half. Bright Futures funding and scholarships Launched in 1997, Bright Futures is the higher education scholarship program funded by the Lottery and designed to keep high-achieving students at Florida schools. The program’s costs spiraled up from an initial price tag of $70 million in 1997 to $437 million in 2011. Those rising costs led the Legislature to rein in the program. In 2010, Crist’s last year as governor, the Legislature reduced Bright Futures scholarships by $1 dollar for every credit hour. The law also raised SAT/ACT requirements incrementally over a few years, which was expected to lead to a drop in the number of students who would qualify. For example, the Legislature raised the minimum SAT requirement for Florida Medallion Scholars -- one subset of Bright Futures -- from 970 in 2010-11 to 1050 in 2013-14. So that means that the Legislature and Crist reduced the number of eligible students in the future, after Scott took over as governor. When Scott took over, he and the Legislature continued on that same path -- but made it even harder for students to qualify. In 2011, Scott’s first year as governor, the Legislature decided to further raise test scores for 2013-14 graduates. For example, those Medallion Scholars would now have to score 1170 on their SAT by 2013-14. When Crist says that under Scott the scholarships were cut in "half," it’s possible for viewers to mistakenly believe that refers to total dollars spent, or the amount of individual scholarships. Instead, what the ad is referring to is the number of scholarships distributed. The text on the screen shows that it refers to a May 2014 Sun-Sentinel editorial criticizing Bright Futures cuts, and this is what the Crist campaign pointed us to regarding the ad. As the requirements rose, not surprisingly the number of students who obtained the scholarship has dropped. Due to the tougher standards, "the number of new Bright Futures scholarship students will be cut almost in half – from 41,107 last fall to 21,340 this fall," the editorial board wrote. That number for this fall is based on an estimate from the state regarding how many students will qualify. After schools verify that scholarship recipients enrolled in eligible courses, the schools submit for reimbursement to the state -- and that’s when we learn the actual number of scholarships that were used. Here are recent years’ numbers on Bright Futures. The spending picture is not settled for the current and future fiscal years, so we have included an estimate for 2013-14 and 2014-15. Budget Year Initial students disbursed Total number of students served Amount of money disbursed Average award per student 2007-08 50,499 159,170 $379.8 million $2,387 2008-09 52,497 169,366 $429 million $2,533 2009-10 53,520 177,612 $423.5 million $2,385 2010-11 53,800 179,076 $423.3 million $2,364 2011-12 51,751 174,047 $333.8 million $1,918 2012-13 44,846 162,980 $312.1 million $1,915 2013-14 estimated 41,107 154,160 $309.4 million $2,007 2014-15 estimated 21,340 127,573 $266.2 million $2,087 Source: Florida Department of Education We think there are three main issues with the accuracy of the ad: • The ad could create the false impression that the amount of money per scholarship (or total money) was cut in half, when it’s actually referring to the number of scholarships. • The number of scholarships dropping by a half is based on the state’s estimate of how many will qualify this fall. But we don’t yet know the final number. • Though the ad points the finger at Scott, Crist also oversaw changes to Bright Futures that reduced the number of eligible students during Scott’s administration. Our ruling A Crist TV ad says Scott cut Bright Futures scholarships "in half." Viewers could mistakenly think that Scott cut the dollar amount of scholarships in half -- but he didn’t. Instead, Crist’s campaign zeroed in on the number of scholarships that were distributed last year compared to an estimate for the upcoming school year. While the ad blames Scott, under Crist the Legislature also raised the standards to reduce the number of scholarships awarded. Scott and the Legislature later raised the standards again, which is projected to reduce the number more. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True. | null | Charlie Crist | null | null | null | 2014-07-25T11:38:44 | 2014-07-23 | ['None'] |
pomt-06870 | Says U.S. Rep. Ron Kind’s "stimulus cost taxpayers $278,000 per job." | false | /wisconsin/statements/2011/aug/01/national-republican-congressional-committee/stimulus-jobs-cost-taxpayers-gop-committee-says-in/ | Finding a Republican who likes President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan might be harder than finding a hair comb-over that’s truly convincing. There almost certainly are no stimulus fans at the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is devoted to electing Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. In January 2009, the NRCC criticized the stimulus allotment of $335 million for sexually transmitted disease prevention programs. Our colleagues at PolitiFact National rated that claim Mostly True. In an October 2010 claim against then-U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen, D-Wis., the NRCC said the stimulus cost Wisconsin "77,000 jobs lost." We rated that one Pants on Fire. And the attacks have continued. In a July 5, 2011, news release, the committee singled out U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., saying "Kind’s stimulus cost taxpayers $278,000 per job." Although the stimulus wasn’t his plan, Kind voted for it. Eleven House Democrats and all House Republicans voted against it. As we noted in our NRCC item about Kagen, critics say the $830 billion cost of the stimulus has bought too few jobs, and unemployment has grown generally worse since Obama signed the measure into law in February 2009. But the claim that the stimulus spent $278,000 for every job it created is striking. Our colleagues at PolitiFact Ohio and PolitiFact Texas already have examined it. PolitiFact Ohio found that the statistic originated in a blog posting on the website of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. The posting by Jeffrey H. Anderson attributes the $278,000-per-job cost to "Obama’s economists." But to come up with that amount, Anderson did his own math with figures from a status report on the stimulus by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Citing the report, Anderson said the stimulus had added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs at a cost to date of $666 billion. He divided the $666 billion by 2.4 million jobs to come up with a rounded-up figure of $278,000 per job. Here’s how our colleagues sized up two reiterations of the claim: House Speaker John Boehner PolitiFact Ohio weighed in after Boehner, an Ohio Republican, tweeted about the blog post. Our colleagues rated Boehner’s echoing of the $278,000 cost as False, pointing out that it lumps all of the various types of stimulus spending together. Stimulus spending, as the Associated Press noted in a fact check of a similar GOP claim, pays not only for the worker but for material, supplies and that worker's output -- a portion of a road paved, for example. Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst Dewhurst, a Republican, also tweeted about the blog posting. PolitiFact Texas found that of the $666 billion stimulus spending to date, 43 percent was spent on tax cuts for individuals and businesses; 19 percent went to state governments, primarily for education and Medicaid; 13 percent paid for government benefits to individuals such as unemployment and food stamps; and the remaining roughly 24 percent was spent on projects such as infrastructure improvement. That underscores how stimulus money was spent on many things in addition to creating jobs. Our Texas colleagues rated Dewhurst’s claim False. That’s two False ratings on the same claim. We asked the NRCC if it had any evidence beyond the blog post cited by Boehner and Dewhurst to back up its version of the statement -- that "Kind’s stimulus cost taxpayers $278,000 per job." Spokeswoman Andrea Bozek cited various reports critical of the stimulus, but nothing to establish that the $278,000 figure is correct. To review: The National Republican Congressional Committee, like Boehner and Dewhurst, claimed that the federal stimulus cost $278,000 per job. The NRCC called it "Kind’s stimulus" because U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., voted for it. Our PolitiFact colleagues have twice ruled the claim False and the NRCC offered us no new evidence to consider. We rate its claim False, as well. | null | National Republican Congressional Committee | null | null | null | 2011-08-01T09:00:00 | 2011-07-05 | ['United_States', 'Ron_Kind'] |
goop-02569 | Brad Pitt Found “Replacement Son” In Tye Sheridan? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-replacement-son-tye-sheridan-protege/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Brad Pitt Found “Replacement Son” In Tye Sheridan? | 11:23 am, August 17, 2017 | null | ['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.